Around 60 US spy satellites whizz overhead, some of which are capable of making out pieces of debris measuring tens of inches. Radar stations and other receivers help track upwards of 200,000 aircraft at any moment. Despite such feats of remote sensing, on June 25 the US government confirmed in a hotly anticipated “UFO report” that it has amassed more than 100 cases of aerial events, such as the seemingly-impossible maneuvers of objects captured on camera by Navy pilots, that it cannot identify.
While some accounts seem puzzling when taken at face value, airspace researchers insist that just because you can’t identify an object in the air doesn’t mean that the object is otherworldly. The sky is a big and diverse place, full of birds, locusts swarms, thunderclouds, drones, fighter jets, plastic bags, and much, much more. Surveillance systems exist, but they tend to be expensive and tailored to meet specific, well-defined needs—none of which is to single out every last flying object. Simply put, considering how patchy our sky monitoring systems are, perhaps it’s more surprising that the government has noticed only a hundred or so UFOs.
There isn’t one magical surveillance system that sees every plane, says Andrew Weinert, a member of the Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. “It’s not like we have this master perspective” of the sky, he notes—which means our airspace is full of mysterious but mundane objects.
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