The unexplained phenomena of the UFO report

Cutting through the thicket of bureaucratic language and cautious qualifications, readers of the report are left with basically two options: that some of the U.A.P.s could actually be advanced drones or drone swarms, one of the more compelling explanations for at least some fraction of these encounters; and, unavoidably, “Other.” When it came to the “Other” category, some of the observed behaviors were so dramatically exotic that they required not only additional study and additional analysis but perhaps additional physics: “Although most of the UAP described in our dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize some of them. We would group such objects in this category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them. The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management.” The fact that there are eighteen cases in recent memory that apparently require unspecified “scientific advances” to comprehend seems to suggest that “Other” might not, after all, be a negligible bin. On the other hand, the report does note upfront that “these observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.” The debunker Mick West, who has offered a range of mundane explanations for what pass as purported U.F.O.s, tweeted that this line was a “key part of the report,” and that it was intended to invalidate “the claims of the more enthusiastic promoters of the ETH,” or the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Believers reminded him, often politely, that “could be” did not mean “were,” and that one would be hard-pressed to read such boilerplate disclaimers as a dispositive statement about anything. The report, in its caginess, lent itself to the kind of motivated reasoning that propels both sides of this long-standing, occasionally rancorous, and invariably delightful debate. The mystery remained. Further study was needed.
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