Could A Massive Public UFO Database Eventually Help Explain Mysterious Sightings?

The U.S. government effort may be a step in the right direction to help UFOs be taken more seriously, some researchers say.

oon after clicking around America’s new online database containing hundreds of thousands of historical UFO records, you may begin to wonder why the government has spent a lot of time and taxpayer dollars collecting data on a phenomenon that it doesn’t seem to believe in.

As a casual observer taking a quick look at the database—an ongoing project of the National Archives, the government’s repository of historical documents—you’ll see many images of fake-looking flying saucers. You’ll hear recordings of military personnel talking at length about various sightings, concluding that there was no credible evidence that what was observed was a UFO. You’ll find a ton of grainy images and films of bright dots in the sky, as well as black-and-white 20th-century newsreel footage.

But if you dig around the somewhat clunky database, you might also discover some intriguing records. For example, a 2013 blog post mentioning a Popular Mechanics news brief that same year about an Air Force project to build a flying saucer. Surely, that would pique your interest.

“The Air Force, especially, has spent a significant amount of time trying to say ‘there is nothing here,’” and yet it and other government agencies have continued to investigate UAP reports, says Robert Powell, an engineer and author of UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don’t Know).

“Why would you collect all that information if you did not believe there was something to at least a portion of it? … You’ll see some really interesting reports there in that data that indicate there’s something to the whole UAP subject, but you have to look for it,” says Powell, who is also co-founder of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), a nonprofit that includes scientists and researchers who apply scientific methods to the analysis of UFO sightings.

LAST FEBRUARY, AT THE DIRECTION OF CONGRESS, the Archives launched the giant database, which will eventually collect records from across all federal agencies of sightings related to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the government’s term for UFOs. At present, however, it only contains some of the UAP records—including photographs, moving images, and microfilm—that the Archives already has on hand that have at this point been digitized.

More records are slated to be added as the agency continues the process of digitizing its own files, and more still will be added once the Air Force, NASA, and other U.S. government agencies start to digitize copies of their own records for transfer to the Archives and eventual online public disclosure.

“It’s important for the scientific community to have open access to information,” says Powell. He points to the huge amount of data now on the hub and says it’s of immense value to have it all gathered into one place and online.

While many scientists and researchers over the years have found that the vast majority of reports of sightings are misidentifications of known objects, they agree that there remain some reports “that cannot be reasonably explained as terrestrial or astronomical objects,” Powell says, adding that military and government leaders have also acknowledged this over the decades.

Unlike the long-running sci-fi television classic The X-Files, in which FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder tries to expose what he believes is a massive government UFO cover-up, the endgame for the database is improving transparency for the public. At least, sort of.

To some extent, Mulder may have been right, as evidenced by ongoing calls from Washington lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle for the Executive Branch to declassify government UAP records.

“Congress recognizes that these records, if they exist, were likely concealed under the good faith goal of protecting national security. However, hiding that information from both Congress and the public at large is simply unacceptable,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said in a statement last year. The senators made the statement as they introduced an initial version of a bill that was amended and eventually adopted into the law calling for the creation of a UAP collection hub.

Under law, the government may postpone public release of certain records for 25 years from the date they were first created. The president must certify that a postponement is necessary due to a risk of harming military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations, or that there is an identifiable harm so grave that it outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.

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