The Truth About UAPs with Jon Kosloski

Paul, finally got to the bottom of the UAPs.

Yes, which is, we don’t know anything.

But it’s so fascinating.

So we know a couple of things.

We do.

So they go from UAP to IAP.

Identified anomalies.

That’s right.

They’re slices of pie and balloons sent up by little kids.

So I feel good.

Coming up on Star Talk.

Welcome to Star Talk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, you’re a personal astrophysicist.

And today I have as my cohost.

What’s up?

Hello, Mr.

Mecurio.

Good to see you, buddy.

All right.

What you doing, man?

You know, just running around, trying to be funny.

And not annoying my wife.

And I got a dog to stare at.

As a professional comedian, you can’t just try to be funny.

You have to be funny.

Well, it depends.

There is no try.

It depends on the fee.

It’s all, it’s all, it’s all, it’s a sliding scale.

So you’re a writer and performer for The Late Show.

I perform on The Late Show.

The Late Show.

And you were on a while back, awesome, with Mr.

Shatner, one of the best shows we ever did.

Excellent.

And you got a Broadway show.

I do, because I’m a big shot.

Yeah, yeah, permission to speak.

Yeah, directed by Frank Oz.

What I like about that is it takes the improv dimension of a crowd interaction and makes it, it formalizes it into a show.

It does, and it’s more, it’s not like just crowd work insult stuff.

It’s really like just getting people’s stories, people who have incredible stories.

And I find that they like it because it’s no judgment, say whatever you want, it’s loose, and it’s really fun.

And now it’s online on YouTube and Patreon.

All right, paulmecurio.com, it is.

Yes, so today’s topic, we have with us the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

I think I said that right?

You did.

The AARO, please join me in welcoming Jon Kosloski, did I say your name right?

You did, you did, thank you.

Welcome to StarTalk.

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Nice to have you.

Oh my gosh, there is no one in the world, perhaps no one in the universe, that isn’t interested in this topic.

It’s a great topic.

Totally a great topic.

Yeah, fun job.

We even get burned out when you go out and somebody wants to talk to you about it, you’re just trying to have a beer.

It hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it’s been a year and a half.

Oh, so I’m gonna tell everybody to do it.

Where do you live?

Just give us your address.

Post it on your web page.

Yes, exactly.

So you’re trained in electrical engineering, love that, and you did research in quantum optics, I think.

Is that a good way to classify that?

Yep.

And you were formerly with the NSA in their research directorate.

Yeah.

NSA.

People have a love-hate relationship with the NSA.

They do?

In case you didn’t know that, I just thought I’d…

Be careful what you say.

I still technically work for them.

I’m just on a diversity assignment for a couple years with AARO, so I do have to go back.

I could tell you worked for the NSA.

You seem very calm.

You’re controlling your heartbeat right now, aren’t you?

That’s right.

That’s the training.

That’s the training.

So, our audience is not unfamiliar with UAPs.

We’ve done a whole show where we had one of my colleagues, David Spurgle, who was head of the…

This was a civilian commission to look at the reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena.

But you’re the first one we have who’s from on the inside.

Oh, wonderful.

On this.

So, we’re delighted to have you.

And we have a zillion questions.

Bring them.

So, let me just start off.

Tell us, why were UFOs rebranded as UAP?

That’s the only way I can think about what you guys did.

We all know what UFOs are, unidentified flying objects.

And now you’re still using the U, unidentified, an anomalous, that’s extra, I don’t know what it is.

And then P is phenomenon.

So, what led to this need to rebrand it?

Yeah, essentially, the public took over the term UFO and made it synonymous with extraterrestrials.

And for us in the government, that becomes problematic because the definition is sort of supposed to be in the name, unidentified and anomalous.

We don’t know what it is, we need to approach it with out bias, could be any number of things, but if we just assume it’s extraterrestrial, that’s gonna guide our investigation.

Got it.

So, it put a little distance between you and that assumption that people make.

Yes.

So, you were working in this with broader sense while UFO existed, and you would get annoyed, you’d be in the office and start screaming at the TV when somebody’s saying what?

Not me personally, but some of my predecessors.

I heard it was you, I really heard it you when, or now.

Okay, so, an anomalous phenomenon, how would one commonly be detected?

So, the most common detection is just the human eyeballs.

Most of our reports are coming in from people, but that lends itself to think that cameras are also gonna be a great way of detecting them.

You think, right?

Yep, your doorbell cam is gonna pick up every weird flying object, most of those are probably grasshoppers or gnats, but it’s probably gonna be coming in from cameras, we’re also gonna be using radars and other types of sensors, anything that can pick up a physical object, and then looking at electromagnetics as well.

Okay, so you have a background in quantum optics.

I do.

Do you get to use some of that research background from your PhD in this effort?

I hope so, I think that if we’re thinking about it.

Tell us what quantum optics is.

It’s just thinking of light as photons rather than as waves, is that all it is?

For the most part, that’s what it is, yeah, it’s looking at the unique nature of light once you get down to the really small phenomenon.

But it has a wave property, it has phase, there’s interesting things that can be done with optics at certain levels.

Can it explain light emissions from UAPs?

Because I know there’s sort of unusual light emissions at times, right?

Don’t know, don’t know.

We don’t have good enough scientific data and that’s really the heart of the problem right now.

So the whole notion of detection of some kind of electromagnetic energy, you’re uniquely positioned as an expert, a research expert in that field.

Yep, that’s what we’re going for.

We have enough fuzzy pictures of Bigfoot.

We have to put out some more standard sensors and then once we have an understanding of what the phenomenon could be, then we’ll look at upgrading the sensors.

But we have to go from just eyeballs to sensors, so it’s a huge step right now.

And there are many more eyeballs that are just regular people walking around the world than you could ever duplicate in your own government capacity.

Yeah, there’s no substituting for that kind of volume of sensors.

And listen, I think that’s great, but we’re human beings.

My neighbor, I don’t want to go off of his eyeballs.

He’s nuts.

Anybody watching, you know, four people in your life, would you trust that?

So don’t you get a little…

How do you vet these in all seriousness, you know, unless the guy shows up with like foil on his head, Neil, how do you vet some of that?

That’s a great question.

So we believe that everyone coming to us is sincere and we accept everything that they’re saying.

And then we look to corroborate that.

So it’s not any one narrative that we’re going off of.

It’s the collection of narratives.

Very important.

You don’t prejudge what they’re saying.

You receive it as some form of data, however flawed it might be.

Absolutely.

And so now what distinguishes what you do and your interest in collecting data from what I know my colleague was interested in, David Spergel, who was head of, there was a civilian panel that was brought on during the hearings to report on what might these objects be, how might NASA participate, how might we crowdsource data.

So they came out with a suggestion that maybe there’s an app that someone develops, that if you see something, invoke the app and the app will gather all the right information from your smartphone, because everybody’s got a smartphone, and then feed a central clearing house so that you can have as best information as you can gather.

That’s what he was talking about.

So what might you know or what do you have access to that would be different from what he was trying to solve?

And is that a matter of what’s classified versus what’s not classified?

Not so much classified versus unclassified, but maybe resources and the ability to reach out a little wider audience and partnerships.

So we read the study from the NASA, so we had folks participate in that.

A lot of great recommendations and we’re following a number of them.

Yeah, I thought it was very, very sensible and level-headed and honest and yeah.

One of the issues we have, though, is if we’re collecting data with cell phones, it’s a very small aperture camera.

And if we’re taking pictures of something rather far away, similar to with telescopes, small aperture telescope, you’re only going to get certain resolution.

And so we’re looking at larger sensors, more widely distributed.

And so we’re going to be tying in with a variety of sensors from other US government organizations.

And that’s really the benefit that our office brings, that ability to partner across the whole federal government, as well as with the private citizens and academia.

And you’re a branch of the Pentagon.

We are.

So what is an example of what would become classified information relative to non-classified?

Yeah, so there’s nothing inherently classified about the anomalous phenomenon.

It tends to be…

Because we can all see it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And we don’t know what it is.

So you can’t say that it’s classified if you don’t know what it is.

We classify your ignorance.

I tell them that all the time with mine.

But the issue is the platform it’s collected on.

So if we’re collecting data, say, from a specific type of fighter and it has really high fidelity sensors on it, we don’t want to let the adversary know the capabilities of those sensors.

So that data is classified until we can decrease the resolution, perhaps, or remove the anomalous data from the sensitive part, not give away any of the capabilities, and then just focus on the scientific data.

Because I think most people who think of something that would be classified, they’re never thinking that maybe we classify how well we can observe something, or what the specs are of this new device that came out of some new lab that the adversaries doesn’t know we can measure with that precisely, or don’t even know we have such a device.

And so, because people usually think it’s classified because we found an entire flying saucer, that’s classified, right?

But most of what’s classified is not that.

No, it’s the quality of the sensor.

The quality of the data.

Where we fly the platforms.

You know, if we’re flying in an area where we don’t want the public necessarily to know about, we’ll have to scrub that data a little bit before we share it with the public.

So we’re talking about adversaries and foreign adversaries.

How do you?

Foreign or domestic?

Get the speech right here.

Foreign or domestic.

How do you get a sense if you’re looking at something that’s potentially UAP is in fact some advanced technology from a foreign adversary and then do they sort of leverage off of us not knowing and get into a disinformation campaign?

Great question.

Yeah, great question.

Thank you, I’m done.

Can I leave now?

Yeah, yeah.

You’ve earned your donation on Patreon.

So, any unknown phenomenon is an opportunity for an adversary to be operating.

And that’s really one of the reasons that our office is inside of the Pentagon.

It provides us access to all the information about our programs, which we would call blue programs, as well as what we know about potential adversary programs and where our sensors are.

You said blue programs?

Blue.

So, US government blue as in the US.

Air Force, yeah.

So let’s get into some nitty gritty here.

So you want to collect data.

We do.

On objects where we don’t otherwise know what it is.

You have a clearing house for this data, what do you do with it?

Do you pour over it?

What do you do?

What do you?

And to tag that is do you have standardized protocols?

Because if you’re getting data from all different sources, how do you get some sort of standard measurement so that you can relate it to each other?

Lots of good questions.

So the office is a little…

That’s your second good question today.

Thank you.

That’s your quota.

Can I get a raise?

Full star?

You’re getting paid for this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Look, I got two bottles of water for it.

So, the data right now is primarily coming in from Department of Defense channels.

So that’s pilots, ground crews.

We’re also getting some from the FAA and from some law enforcement.

We are going to be opening up to the public soon and have a public reporting mechanism.

How soon?

Hopefully by the end of this fiscal year.

So before October.

The government fiscal year.

So in 2025.

Yes, before October.

It’ll be based on a website and we can circle back to that in a minute.

But the data comes into our office.

Right now, it’s primarily narrative data.

We’re going to be tying into more sensors as we talked about.

So that’ll be slightly different.

And by the way, if people are encouraged to use their smartphone or use some other detection device, then there’ll be less narrative data that you’ll be cued into.

Absolutely.

And so in this website, they’ll be able to upload certain types of media, pictures and video up to a certain volume.

You know, you’re going to get a lot of weird pictures, like guys at their birthday party, stuff like that, just whatever.

We’re prepared for that.

But inside of that large haystack, hopefully there’ll be some really nice needles that we can use.

And so potentially a lot of data.

Right now we have a little over 1800 cases.

And so we’re going to be investing heavily in automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, that we’ll be able to triage, use natural language processing, look for correlations across that data, and feed into investigations.

What will you do, which we’re already contending with, when people introduce fake data created by AI.?

Do you have safeguards against being fooled by that?

We’re working on it.

But I don’t know that there is a work-every-time solution.

I think that there’s always going to be advancements in that technology.

They’re coming out weekly.

And it’s just going to be an arms race, essentially, and how well we can detect that.

It’ll be one of the offshoots.

You know, it’s also true.

If someone claims there’s a flying saucer in front of the place, and then they produce a photo of it, AI-generated photo, and no one else has any other photo, yet there are other people in the street.

Because when you have multiple photos, you have different, you can triangulate on what’s going on.

You’re like Columbo.

You’re like, you’re like amazing.

You figure out if there’s five people, and one gives and the other doesn’t, then that’s it.

No, what I’m saying, it’s very hard, even for AI, because AI doesn’t think this way, to properly reproduce every angle that everyone has on that object, and what that object would look like from every side.

And most people who would want to pull such a prank wouldn’t know enough to even give the right instructions to make that happen, is all I’m saying.

So that’s part of your checks and balances on the data that you receive.

It is, but similar to the narrative data, we’re not gonna go off just any one report.

It’s all about feeding into the scientific method.

It’ll add.

Scientific method?

Oh, wait a minute.

What’s that?

What?

What?

What?

You’re going too fast now.

Whoa, Mr.

Big Shot, I work for the DOD.

Real quick on AI, there’s theories that AI in and of itself has its issues because it’s designed in a way to give you the answer you want.

It’s a product that they want you to keep using.

So in a way, you have to also sort through that.

We do.

Because I type in Paul Mecurio’s handsome, yes you are, yes you are, and it just keeps coming back.

No, in all seriousness, that’s an issue.

You’ve done this?

It sounds like you’ve done this.

No, but in all seriousness, that can be an issue too, right?

It can be an issue.

So much in and of itself, inherently based on what it is right now.

Yes, and there’s also that possibility of hallucinations within AI.

Tell me about it.

It’s going to be essential for us to be using different types of systems and a variety of filters.

But all of that is not to do automated analysis.

It’s to help do triaging.

Prioritize what gets put in front of a human and not remove the human from the world.

You’re supporting the more substantial evidence of that.

Do you try to get information on the person reporting?

The reason why I ask is many people who saw the Navy video, of course, with the monochromatic tic-tac, and you hear the excitement in the Navy pilots, were those F-18s, I guess, where they were flying?

In restricted airspace, of course.

But you hear that excitement, and then you say to yourself, these are Navy pilots.

They wouldn’t be trying to fool us.

So, there’s an assumption that a person’s pedigree makes their data better or their reactions better than someone else without pedigree.

And my view on this is, are you human?

Then you have susceptibilities.

Period.

I don’t care how many stars and bars you have on your uniform.

That being said, the community of amateur astronomers in the world, it’s a world community, we look up all the time.

We look up more than Navy pilots do, okay?

You don’t get an increased number of sightings of things they don’t understand because we know what the hell we’re looking at.

We know what Venus looks like in the twilight-stuck sky.

We know what…

I’m on a roll here.

We know what satellites look like when they’re crossing the sky.

And when they’re lit and then they disappear, how did that happen?

They went into Earth’s shadow because we know this.

So, do you take into account what might be the profession of the person reporting?

Because it can go both ways, is all I’m saying.

Yeah, we’re not looking for conclusions.

So if somebody reports something, we want to know what they experienced, what they saw, not what they think they saw.

Yeah, but of course you’re gonna get what they think they saw.

I have correspondence from an old lady in Brooklyn who wrote to me saying, not she didn’t know me, I was just director of the Planetarium, so that’s what I was.

You’re just that guy.

I’m just that guy, right?

She writes to me and says, there’s a hovering light in the sky, and so I wrote back and I said, what direction are you looking?

Well, I’m looking towards Manhattan.

So, okay, so E, she’s looking west, okay.

So I know that Venus was visible after sunset at that time, and I say, well, how high above, how high in the sky?

Well, it’s about a few inches above Marty’s deli.

Okay, this is how.

This is what you’re gonna get.

This is what you’re gonna get.

And then I said, oh, okay, you’re very likely seeing planet Venus.

It is very bright, and it’s not hovering, it’s just there, and it’s gonna set like everything.

And she said, wow, and she had a kind of an older voice, so she hasn’t been there a while.

And I said, because I’m thinking, this is not the first time this has happened with Venus.

So how come you’ve never noticed this before?

Oh, there used to be a building blocking my view, and they tore it down, and now I can see the sky.

I just wanna be in her apartment.

Irving, I’m telling you, it’s not a streetlight.

It’s not a streetlight, Irving.

See, I told you.

Look, it’s there again.

It’s coming for us.

It’s coming for us.

So she is speaking truth as her perceptive ability enables her.

And no, she’s not interpreting it.

She’s not saying, I see aliens flying in the sky.

So there was that accuracy, but to tell me it’s a few inches above Marty’s deli is not helpful, right?

It requires a lot more work on our part after the fact, and we do get a lot of that.

But we find that most people do report, like you were saying, what they’re seeing, and it’s fairly accurate.

Now, the context is a little off from our perspective, but when we talk to folks, we’re not looking to look at their pedigree like you were saying.

We just want to understand the context.

Were you stressed?

Were you looking up?

Were you looking down?

What was going on with you?

The way you have multiple safety nets regarding getting just narrative information from people, from the average person.

So you start to sift through that using those.

But you standardize it as best you can, as you said, at this point.

Yeah, there will be a standard, for the public reporting, which isn’t out yet, there will be a standard form that will ask certain questions, and then people will be able to add additional context in the e-mail to fill it out.

And so how many people are in your office?

Several dozen.

It’s a little fluid.

People are coming and going.

So that feels like the right number, at least initially.

If it comes a big thing, sure.

Yeah, and it’s not the size of our office that’s really critical.

It’s the partnerships that we have across the US government and that we’re building with the federally funded research and development centers.

So many of those people are establishing that connectivity.

Exactly.

So you know what would be cool?

If you guys developed a kit, people would buy this kit, you know, that has different tools of measurement and then basically you’re deputizing everyone to become a scientist.

Yeah.

So there are some UFO groups that have designed kits, observatories essentially.

You need a badge.

Unless you have a badge.

Once you get me one, then we can start handing them out to other people.

I wouldn’t mind that pin, by the way, if you want to throw it my way.

Anyway, go ahead.

Okay.

You have one?

Here you go.

Oh my God.

What?

I just got a free pin, everybody.

What?

This is going on eBay in an hour.

They better bring a lot.

But you’re absolutely right.

I think getting more sensors out into the country, getting more data.

And these are sensors that have a uniform calibration, because you’re supplying them.

I think that’s a good idea.

Now, whether or not we, the US government, can sell sensors, probably not.

But what we can do is procure sensors, we can deploy sensors and potentially provide that data back out to the public, like through data.gov.

NASA does this already.

Oh, good.

Other groups have done…

I forgot there’s a data.gov.

Yeah, they push data out.

And so I think that, similar to the way that the folks have helped NASA observe things coming in through the analysis of their data, we should be able to push our data out and help them find the unusual things.

Just because the amateur astronomy community has more eyes on the sky than professional astrophysicists.

So they will discover things and then alert the professional community, and then we can turn our big telescopes on it and get a better view.

We’re thinking the same thing.

Yeah.

So you also have to be conscious in the location and the type of sensor affecting geographical bias, and do you run the risk of…

What’s geographical bias?

One of the biases that you have to face, right?

And then you have hot spots that aren’t truly hot spots.

What’s a geographical bias?

There’s a presumption that UAPs have been seen in one area, and so people start to think that they’ve seen more in that area.

A sociological effect, essentially.

So, yeah, there’s a couple issues that we’re contending with.

One, there could be a geographic bias just imposed by the natural environment.

If there’s more ambient light from cities, maybe they’re going to be less likely to see the venuses and less likely to report, or less likely to see the actual phenomenon.

I like this future prospect of getting everyone to be your eyes, your eyes on the aliens, or your eyes on the anomalies.

Yeah, if it’s a true anomaly, and it’s as rare as we think it is, right now for all the cases coming in, it seems to be less than 2% of those cases from good DOD reports.

Less than 2% after a careful analysis seem to be anomalous.

We’re going to need an awful lot of help.

Well, let me unpack that.

So, of all the reports, what you’re saying is 98% are explainable, apparently not by the person who made the report, because otherwise they wouldn’t have reported it.

After careful analysis.

Like my fellow astronomers.

We know what weather phenomena does.

We know a lot of things.

Clouds, you know.

So, I’ve seen things like, wow, if I didn’t have the background that I do in meteorology and in night sky phenomena, I would be totally calling that in to the government, to whatever level of the government would take interest.

So now, given that, you say about 2% remain unexplained after all of your analysis.

Yeah, so we’ve closed about 40% of the cases, about 57%.

We don’t have enough good data, scientific quality data to do a careful analysis.

But they’re still open.

They’re still open.

We are always looking for additional data.

That’s when he said not closed, that means open.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, not closed means.

It’s a great point though, because some people think that we just close a case when we don’t have the data.

We’re always looking for more data.

Breakthrough technology, right?

Is that a catch-22 in a way?

Because if you’re looking at something and trying to determine if it’s so advanced that it’s technically meets the definition of breakthrough technology, but if you don’t know what it is, how do you get to that it’s a breakthrough and…

That’s easy, because it behaves in ways that no known laws of physics would allow.

And so that takes you outside of your zone of awareness.

I think I asked him.

So we actually…

We’re not quite as picky, so we’re not requiring breaking the known laws of physics.

We’re just going well past the bounds of our engineering.

So, for example, we’re not assuming that it can travel faster than the speed of light.

We’re just saying if it’s in the lower atmosphere and it’s going Mach 35, that’s very interesting to us.

Maybe physically possible, but the engineering would really be outlandish.

But if it’s doing something that you don’t understand it’s doing, it technically could be breakthrough technology, because it’s doing something that we don’t know.

And I would want, depending on, to know what that is.

And that’s what I’d want it to do.

Oh, by the way, I’ve read the full…

I don’t know if it’s still the one used.

It’s the quoted description of what a UAP is and the government’s response to it.

It’s something like, a UAP is anything that’s unidentified and anomalous that could pose a threat to our military bases or operations.

And I thought, no, that could pose a threat to any of us.

I mean, I care about you, yes, but you’re the frickin military.

You’re supposed to protect us.

And you’ve got guns, we don’t.

We have a fighting chance.

No, what I guess, right.

No, it’s America, everybody’s got guns.

They have missiles, okay?

That’s true.

Get your arsenal straight here.

America.

So, tell me again, your ongoing statistics on these reports.

Where are you now, percentage-wise?

Yeah, we have closed about 40% of our cases.

Case closed.

Yep, we understand what they are.

Great.

About 57% are unresolved.

And so those are in our active archive, always looking for that enriching data.

And about 2% are unresolved.

Unresolved.

And unresolved means…

Continuing analysis.

They are mysterious, you can’t explain them.

You are waiting for some better data or some deeper understanding of what’s going on that you might not have yourself.

Right.

And we are using those to guide our hypotheses that will help us decide how to tune our sensors when we put them in the field, tell us what to look for as we jump back into that scientific method.

And how long will you keep a case like that open?

We’re never gonna close it until we resolve it.

Really?

Yeah.

And by the way, I wanna emphasize what you just said.

When we explore the universe, if we’re just exploring not knowing anything, you throw in some sensors, just tell me what you got.

Once it makes a detection of some kind, however mysterious, the next round, we’re gonna focus on that.

We’re gonna say, now we have this, it’s over here, it’s got this spectral type, let’s put in a special spectral analyzer for just that, and that way you can hone in.

More sophisticated sensors.

Exactly, on what would otherwise be just a survey of what could be out there.

Exactly, yep.

As an example of a couple of those cases that merit further analysis that are helping us refine our hypotheses, there are a few triangles that have been seen by local law enforcement.

These are glowing triangles in the sky.

In this case, very black triangle, triangular prism.

So it looks like a pie slice hovering about the size of a Prius, about 40 to 60 meters away.

So as the officer was driving up to investigate underneath a glowing orb, which I’ll get to those in a second.

I am so afraid right now.

I’m on a bunker.

Can I get a bunker for Christmas?

I’m worried enough about the damn triangle.

Now he’s saying it’s below a door.

Okay, all right, now I’m a little scared.

Okay, go.

He slammed on his brakes, and this thing the size of a Prius, blacker than black, reared up 45 degrees, and then shot up into the sky faster than anything he’d ever seen.

And as it was leaving his sight, it shot out red and blue fireworks, flares, so bright it lit up the inside of his vehicle.

He didn’t see any propulsion, no wind, didn’t hear anything over the sound of his own vehicle.

And you have more than one of these sightings?

We have a few others, one from local law enforcement, some from the US.

He was not able to get a picture of him.

No dash cam, unfortunately.

How unfortunate.

They’ve got chest cams, you know.

You gotta give all of law enforcement UAP cams.

Right, very disappointed here.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow, I am getting it.

You’re on it, yeah, yeah.

You’re on a roll.

We gotta equip folks, you’re absolutely right.

I am so disappointed here.

Yeah, so there have been cases, triangles, there have been cases of large orbs seen hovering a few hundred feet.

Why didn’t the officer turn on their forward dash cam?

In this case, he slammed on his brakes, it happened almost instantaneously, and he was terrified.

He didn’t know what was happening.

He knew enough to notice it and respond by putting on his brakes.

He couldn’t just get the, pull over please.

He couldn’t do that?

He can’t do that?

I throw a gum wrapper out and I get that.

I’m just saying he had enough time to think about it, put on his brakes.

If I see a triangle in prison, I’m photographing it.

I know, but it’s out of fear maybe.

Like people are skeptical because they don’t want to confront something they don’t understand.

In this case, I don’t think he was skeptical.

He was terrified for his life.

And so he was just getting back to a safe position.

That’s what that was.

Did he go in reverse?

He did.

100 miles an hour backwards.

While on the phone with his sergeant the whole time.

On the phone, going backwards.

Yeah.

He can’t stop and take a picture?

I don’t think that’s what your training tells you.

Give me this guy’s name and badge number.

I want his badge number right now.

I’m not sure that will go well for you.

Wait, there was a floating orb thing.

Blowing floating orbs.

In that same region of the country, a couple of law enforcement officers had seen glowing orbs, a few hundred feet above the ground, a few miles away.

In one of these instances…

Wait, if it was a few miles away, how do they know it was a few hundred feet above the ground?

It was estimating based on height above trees.

This is four inches above Marty’s deli.

That’s what this sounds like.

That’s exactly right.

What part of the country was this?

We’d rather not say.

As we’re conducting our investigations, we don’t want to bias the data.

I am taking a vacation.

You gotta tell me where, because I am not going there.

So how precisely do you intersect either law enforcement or the public as a supplier of resources to them?

Yeah, right now we’re…

Because you’re not giving out kits yet, okay?

Right.

We’re in the mode where we’re gonna be providing a few kits to primarily federal law enforcement so that as they’re conducting their normal job, if they come across the UAP, they’ll be able to gather quality data for us.

So this would be like a little black box, you know, break, seal, an emergency for the alien.

Well, we’re hoping that they’re gonna use it more often, maybe for their law enforcement responsibility, so that they’re well practiced and well versed in it.

We don’t want them just to use it once.

And the primary role for us, though, is the analysis of the data.

So they’ll be able to provide whatever data they have.

We will then go through a long checklist of other places we can get data, like FAA radars, for example, other sources of imagery.

By the way, how do you define a hotspot?

How many things have to happen?

What pattern of life has to happen?

What frequency of something where you say, that’s a hotspot?

So we’ve been hesitant to define hotspots at this point now, because we don’t know that we can get past the bias that we have, our collection bias.

And so we’re going to be working with some statisticians as we’re moving more sensors out and getting data from the public to assess the noise in that data.

And then we’ll look at defining hotspots.

So collection bias, fascinating term, I love it.

It seems to me one of those would be a person’s expectation to see something once they heard that other people have seen it.

And then they will interpret something that might have otherwise been have a simple explanation, but they’re shocked into joining the crowd.

Is that like a form of confirmation bias in a way?

Yeah, I would imagine so.

No, because there was some fascinating case where there was a zoo where a leopard had escaped and they put everyone on alert for the leopard and they got like dozens of sightings across the city and then they finally found that the leopard was asleep behind a door and never left the zoo.

So people’s expectations of something.

The leopard was a placebo, basically.

But an interesting psychology experiment that would become.

You work for the Pentagon.

So, I don’t care what the thing is that you don’t know what it is.

I care about your assessment of whether or not you think it’s a threat.

And so, where’s the line between, this is just some sky phenomenon, even if we don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it.

And this could be a threat, it could be an adversary, or foreign or domestic.

And that’s your job, to protect us.

How do you find the line and how do you draw it?

Great question.

When it’s unidentified, we try to look at, is it demonstrating any anomalous characteristics?

And is it doing anything that would demonstrate that it’s potentially an advanced technology?

If it is, for example, a blurry blob floating at the speed of the wind at some normal altitude, we would probably assess that’s not a threat if it is far away from…

That would be a cloud.

Cloud, a balloon, yeah.

Things that the DOD doesn’t usually worry about.

I don’t know that cloud.

But that’s exactly right.

Cloud looks menacing in more ways than one.

It might rain.

It might rain.

You gotta come on the road with me.

The two of you are funny.

Yeah, you got a thing.

So it’s a threat assessment, ultimately, that you’d want to make.

And so we have too many cases to be able to do a month-long, multi-month-long analysis of every one case, and so we have to triage them.

And we do that based on how much of a threat it might be, how anomalous it seems to be, how urgent the case would be, and then the quality of the data we have available.

You also have to look at all the various biases as well, right?

I mean, it’s like confirmation biases.

There’s the stigma.

Is that still an issue where?

It shouldn’t be.

It’s all in the news, mainstream media.

It shouldn’t be, but it is.

We see it across different pockets.

Some of our partners aren’t comfortable reporting, but it’s gotten a lot better.

No, no.

You tell them, Neil deGrasse Tyson said, okay?

I’ll get a note from dad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You report, okay?

You know what?

I think you should be the psychologist on the staff.

No, I’m just saying.

But you’re right.

I’m watching people testify in Congress, and they’re testifying that this is real, and they will show us your evidence in the back.

No, because that could put me at risk.

You’re already out there talking about it.

But it’s also the stigma of like, people don’t want to report it because they think people are gonna think that they’re nuts or crazy.

We have congressional hearings on this, okay?

I got you on this show, all right?

If I thought it was crazy, you would have not walked through the front door.

All right, so what I have on my notes here, there are a few cases that might have been mysterious initially, and then they were like, case solved with the rubber stamp.

So I have one here, Go Fast.

So what is that, what was Go Fast?

It’s a classic case from 2015.

It was popularized in 2017, where an F-18 Super Hornet was flying off the coast of Florida.

That is an airplane.

Airplane, yes.

So this is the one that got probably the most press attention of any of them.

That’s what I guess I was reciting earlier, that has the pilot track where you can hear them speak.

Close to the surface of the water, though.

It appears to be close to the surface of the water, and that’s what the pilot saw.

It looks like that object is just zipping along really quickly near the surface of the water, but after careful analysis of all the numbers on the heads-up display there and doing the geometry and looking at the track of the airplane as it was flying, we were able to assess that the object actually had to be at about 13,000 feet, not close to the water, and the plane was about 25,000 feet.

And there’s actually an optical phenomenon called motion parallax, which I’m familiar with from astronomy, that makes it appear that the object is moving much faster relative to the background that it actually is.

There’s no rotor wash, there’s no jet wash, there’s nothing, though.

That’s what’s fascinating about this.

There’s nothing, but with the parallax, we can assess that the object is moving actually at wind speed.

So we don’t know what that object is, but we know that it’s moving…

It’s called a bird.

It’s consistent with a bird or a balloon.

We don’t know what it is, though.

Or Superman.

But wouldn’t a balloon have…

It’s a bird, it’s a plane.

But wouldn’t a balloon sort of been more erratic?

No, it would go with the wind.

A balloon can’t go where the wind won’t take it.

But what if the wind shifts quickly?

Then it would, but that’s not what happened here.

Yeah, at those altitudes, it’s more like a stream, so it’s like a leaf in the stream just going with it.

It sounds like he knows a lot about go fast, you should interview him.

We’re gonna bring in my staff later.

So there’s a case here, it might be anecdotal, but it could very much happen.

And this happened in New Jersey, I was told.

There was a squad car that was tracking a UFO in the sky, and the UFO, of course it’s happening in Twilight Dust.

And the UFO was in the shape of a croissant.

It was darting back and forth, left and right, across the road, okay?

It was this glowing light hovering, darting back and forth.

And he’s calling this in, and you can hear it.

And then, so what is it?

And then they found out, and this is a little bit of your motion parallax problem, it was the road was turning.

And he was so transfixed on the object that he did not realize he was following the road.

Please tell me he’s not a cop.

What’s his badge number?

This is what I mean in all seriousness, going back to what we talked about.

Getting data from God bless people like the average person, like you’re gonna have a hard job.

Yeah, a lot of analysis is required for these anomalies.

Absolutely.

That’s code for a lot of idiots.

That’s the polite way.

Not my show, try to be diplomatic.

So I got a couple more, just so we can comment on it.

What do we call here?

Oh, Mount Etna.

So what do we have here?

So in this case, we had a platform that was flying through the Mediterranean.

What is a platform?

A drone or an airplane with a camera on it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Not everyone is military fluent.

I’m working on it.

When I think of platforms, I think of stages where bands perform.

The band Kansas was floating across the sky.

That’s right.

So in this case, they’re flying through the Mediterranean and they’re getting video of Mount Etna as it’s exploding.

So they’re going to, while they’re watching this plume, see an object that appears to come towards the plume and then go through the plume.

Superheated ash and gas.

And it looks to go through unfazed.

And those temperatures are between 900 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.

And so that would seem to be very anomalous.

We sent this off to a number of our science and technology partners, as well as other agencies within the intelligence community, had them do an independent analysis and then brought them together.

They came to four separate conclusions on what it should be.

Very important so that they don’t influence each other in their own analysis.

So that keeps the independence of the perspectives.

And then we brought them together and asked them to hash it out.

Turns out several of the groups invented new methodologies.

Several of them looked into the type of thermal turbulence that you would get from a volcano and how that would affect the imagery.

Bringing all that together, the new techniques, they were able to create a model that would predict where that anomalous object would be floating through the video.

And even after they lose sight of the object later in the video, that model predicts where it shows up at the end.

And even though the human eye can’t see it just in the video, with their careful analysis, they’re able to pull it out.

And so that validates the model.

So what was it?

Long story short, we don’t know exactly what it is.

But what?

What?

What did I have you here?

You are killing me.

Oh my God, what did, who, I thought he knew something.

That’s what my mom says every day.

It’s a flying toaster everybody.

It’s a flying toaster.

Okay, finish then.

What we can say is that it was about 170 kilometers away from the volcano, 30 kilometers away from the platform, so much closer to the platform than it was to the volcano, nowhere near the superheated ash, and it was flying at speeds consistent with the wind again.

We don’t know if it was a balloon or a bird, probably a balloon.

A lot of sky trash up there.

Okay.

Environmental factors are huge factors in your work, right?

They are, yeah.

Like Starlink is also another issue where it’s sort of pilot seeing things off of Starlink, turns out the light’s bouncing off in a certain way.

So all of that stuff.

So just to emphasize, even though you don’t know what it is, the fact that it was not in the volcano, A, the fact that it was moving in the prevailing wind speed helped you to determine that it was not a threat.

Yeah, not anomalous.

Neither anomalous nor a threat.

Right.

And so for our assessments, if it’s not both unidentified and anomalous, then it’s no longer within our purview.

We’ll hand it off to the appropriate authorities to deal with it.

Since it’s not a threat.

The lackey’s over in the…

As long as it’s not that cop that couldn’t figure out he was on a road.

So remind me, a mountain, Etna, is that Italy?

Yes, that’s Italy.

That’s Italy, okay.

Italy’s got that, it’s got Vesuvius.

Man, Italy’s got…

I’m Italian, we’re hot people.

Is Active Volcano.

It is, yeah.

Just erupted recently, yeah.

Okay, yeah.

And I got another one here, the Puerto Rico object.

Again, you need some better branding here.

Yeah, maybe not my strong suit.

I didn’t name these.

So in this case, this is a Customs and Border Protection platform, and they’re looking through a mid-wave infrared camera, and they pick up an object or a pair of objects, and those objects are going to appear to come together and fuse into one and then separate a couple of times throughout this video.

And later, it will appear that that object flies over the water, and it will appear to dip into the water, creating what we would say is a transmedium effect, where it goes from one domain to the other, and then come back out.

It’s a flying dolphin.

Could you tell me, do you have a sense, were you able, through the analysis, to figure out the size of that object?

We were.

So in this case, the platform, the Customs and Border Protection Platform, was flying around the airport, and by analyzing its trajectory, as well as the direction that the camera was pointing, we could assess that the object was actually flying over the airport, more appropriately floating over the airport, slowly descending.

And it just appears that the object dips into the water because the water is in the background, and it’s an infrared camera, and we get something called thermal crossover, where the temperature of the water equals the temperature of the object.

And you can’t distinguish them at that point.

Exactly, so it looks like it merges in, and we can assess it was about a one meter size object.

In the remake of the Thomas Crown Affair, where there’s a heist of art, what they do is they heat up the room.

They kill the air conditioner, and it’s a very hot day, and so the temperature begins to rise until it’s the same as the body temperature of the thieves, so that the infrared cameras can’t distinguish just the air, which is radiating infrared, with the skin temperature of the people.

Turns out there would be a way to do it, but a given is Hollywood, so that’s fine, because gas has a different density of the radiation than a solid object would, so you would be able to find a border between the two, but one wouldn’t pop the way it would otherwise be.

So yeah, if you don’t know that, then you don’t know that, right?

Yeah, so in this case, we assess that it was likely either a balloon or a pair of sky lanterns, or a pair of balloons, rather, or a pair of sky lanterns that are just changing an orientation with the wind, that wind thing that you wanted to happen with the balloons, that happening.

What is a sky lantern?

So sky lantern would be like a Chinese lantern where you have a light.

Oh, okay.

And some cultures, they pop those up, and it’s buoyant by heated air?

That’s exactly right.

And as it’s losing fuel, it’s going to descend, and this is near some resorts in Puerto Rico where they tend to launch those sky lanterns for weddings.

So it’s consistent with that, but we don’t know for sure if it’s sky lanterns or balloons.

Got it.

One thing, just as we try to land this plane, what’s your relationship with conspiracy theorists?

So we’re not looking to debunk anything.

We’re not the belief police.

And so…

Yeah, but you have street cred from the NSA, and nobody trusts the NSA, except when we want them, and then they’re our friend, right?

It’s a love-hate relationship, or at least that movies have with the NSA.

So why should anyone believe anything you ever say?

I don’t know.

I’m not going to make an argument that they should, but would have said that differently.

I probably could have.

Okay, take two.

Oh, yeah?

Who says?

You and what army?

So what methods, efforts do you invest to gain the trust of people who are reporting to you?

I think that the only method that we have is absolute transparency.

And so it’s difficult from within the Department of Defense with the different data sources that we have, but we’re working towards releasing more videos, releasing them faster, releasing more of the narratives, shining a lot more light onto the data that’s coming in and the cases as we’re resolving them.

And I think it’s just through that transparency that we’re going to build trust.

Well, also the transparency, to me, it would help educate us to know what to and not look at.

So it’s that fine line that there’s security issues, private data.

By the way, I know you’re NSA and you’re doing this, you get your hands on a lot of sensors.

Please tell me you’re not going to check my Google searches and find out that I’m a Buzz Lightyear fan group, because it’s very embarrassing.

They’ve already done that.

It’s too late.

I did my homework coming in.

But is that transparency and sort of educates us to be able to help you?

It does.

So in addition to showing the raw information that’s coming in and our final product, additionally, as we discover these phenomenon, which are being misidentified, such as the starling flaring that you mentioned, we are building educational materials that we’re releasing through papers, through videos, and we want to get that out to the public, not just to affect the conspiracy theories, but just so that the public understands when they look up in the sky in New Jersey or elsewhere, what are they seeing?

Makes your life easier because they can start ruling things out.

It does.

Yeah, it’ll be a smaller haste.

Especially New Jersey.

I love New Jersey.

So thanks for your time.

That’s been my pleasure.

You came up from Washington for this.

Fascinating stuff.

We very much appreciate that.

Thank you.

Obviously, the subtext of most people’s interest in this is whether we’re being visited by aliens.

Whether or not you have the more antiseptic view, is it a threat, or is it not, or is it a balloon, people are saying, is it an alien?

I get that.

Hollywood stokes it within us.

More than a billion high-resolution photos are uploaded to the internet every day that people obtain with their smartphones around the world.

So it seems to me, if there were aliens visiting us, it would be crowdsourced without your prompting.

We’d have pictures of flying saucers, and there wouldn’t be a fuzzy dot in an infrared camera in a restricted area.

We would be flooded with data.

And so do you have any insights or a sense of people’s urge to want to be visited by aliens?

I don’t have any brilliant insights.

I’m just a lowly engineer.

I think that it’s an exciting prospect.

It’s the possibility of the unknown.

It’s the possibility that there could be something coming next that we don’t have access to now.

You know, people want to look forward to something.

Maybe that’s what it is.

But in regards to the data, you know, a cell phone is an awfully small camera.

And so if extraterrestrials were coming here, the chances that they’re going to be within 50 feet of that camera are pretty small.

So whether or not we’ll be able to get that.

Most of the Earth is not inhabited.

But one thing we are missing are the alien abduction stories in the era of the smartphone.

I have one.

Stop, stop, stop.

Because they used to be.

It happened in a cornfield.

Stop, stop.

So it used to be common even for a person to retell a story of getting abducted and getting their orifices probed.

And today you could just film that and post it and it would go viral instantly.

I mean cat videos go viral for less.

So there’s none of that.

And so I’m disappointed that we haven’t been visited.

I’m all for the aliens and all my people are for aliens too.

Don’t get us wrong.

Every night I’m out there with my telescope, looking up alone in the stark silence of the night.

I’m just waiting for a beam of light to come and just take you away.

Oh yeah.

And you’d go.

It looks like I wouldn’t have a choice if that’s what was going on.

No, it might be an option.

It depends on what plan you bought to go.

So take us out.

What should we look forward to going forward?

The public reporting mechanism should be coming out, as I mentioned, before the end of this fiscal year.

And we look forward to not only receiving those reports but then sharing more information.

We’re going to be building more on our transparency.

Do you work with other countries as well?

We’re working towards that.

Okay.

Yeah, working towards that.

We’re going to have a scientific journal coming out in FY26, fiscal year 26, and we’re going to have some…

Does that have some name that is completely forgettable because you don’t have English majors helping you name things?

Picture book.

What’s the journal going to be called?

We’ll get back to you on that.

I don’t want to be judged in the moment.

You gave me a pin.

Let us name it.

Yeah, call me.

You’re part of the club.

Neil and I will name it.

I’ll let you tag it.

I’m good at this.

Call me.

All right.

I’ll let you write the first article.

But that journal is going to be coming out.

We’re going to have a variety of workshops, work on engaging with the citizen scientists as well as more academics.

I look forward to that.

Well, again, thanks for making the trip.

Thank you.

I appreciate this.

All right.

And good luck going forward.

Thank you.

Great having you on.

All right.

Dude, thanks for being here.

Yeah, it was so much fun.

All right.

All right.

I really understand more now, which is great.

This has been StarTalk, devoted entirely to UAPs.

What was that?

Okay, sorry.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you, especially now, to keep looking up.