So, in 1950 Enrico Fermi is having lunch with a few of his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They had engaged in a lively conversation about extraterrestrial civilizations, UFOs, travel at or faster than the speed of light, you know, the usual. He blurts out something like ‘where are they?’ Enrico is asking a big question. If they exist, where are these star travelers? Why have we no evidence for their existence? They all had a good laugh.
Enrico’s question, when considered along with the 1961 Drake Equation (an exercise to stimulate thought about intelligent life in our universe) and even more so with current estimates of habitable planets, produces a formidable paradox. The paradox (also called Fermi’s paradox): Probabilities versus lack of evidence. With billions, probably trillions of planets out there, it would appear likely that intelligent life exists somewhere other than Earth. Yet, where are they?
They just might be all around us. Or they just might not be.
In case you missed it, our US legislature directed the Office of National Intelligence to prepare a report on UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), formerly known as UFOs. UFOs have been around as long as humans have been looking at the sky, so why not formally investigate them? This not a Scooby Doo UFO hunt by some TV crew with cell phones and Geiger counters. This is the US government. Standards had to be established for collection, cataloging, analyzing, and reporting, and that’s a good thing. It means a lot of “legacy” UFO images and video won’t be analyzed. It means only UAP reports with high quality data will be considered. In March 2019 the Navy published a standard, subsequently adopted by the Air Force in 2020
Military and other government agency UAP reports from the years 2004 to March 2021 were selected for scrutiny. The challenge however was the lack of a standard for reports prior to March 2019, so they had to be the focus of extra study. In the months prior to the reports release, media outlets were going bonkers, and speculation was rampant.
On June 25, 2021, congress, intelligence agencies, and the military received the first report. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
144 reports made it through the process. Only one (1) has been identified – as a large, deflating balloon. The remaining are a mixed bag of visual descriptions and aircraft sensor data.
80 of the UAP reported appear to be physical objects, detected by multiple fighter jet sensors, although they could represent malfunctions or anomalies. Big question is if they are real what are they? Maybe someone knows and isn’t saying? Well, it’s a start.
Enrico asked where are they? I say if they are advanced enough to star travel, they are advanced enough to escape detection by us…maybe until now. LOL
What’s in the Sky?
July 24; before dawn; southwest: The Moon, just past full is directly below Saturn.