Getting closer to what’s out there

We may be closer to discovering “what’s out there” than ever before.
Or at least we’re heading in that direction, after decades of inaction, cancellation of research projects, and just general disbelief and despair that we’ll find anything at all.
Of particular note, the House of Representatives recently recommended that NASA spend $10 million per year for the next two years on the search for what House members called “technosignatures,” more commonly known as radio signals. It was the first time in years that government money has been recommended for the search for ET.
Also, in May, the House Appropriations Committee held a public hearing — the first such hearing in half a century — on what the U.S. military is now calling “unexplained aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, instead of what used to be called UFOs, unidentified flying objects.
The House hearing came after Navy pilots reported as many as 400 sightings of unexplained objects that, the highly trained aviators said, performed maneuvers that contradicted accepted knowledge of propulsion, flight control and even physics.

A retired Navy lieutenant commander, Alex Dietrich, who said she has little interest in ET or anything like it, found herself in the media glare when, two years ago, she reported that during a routine training mission, she noticed an unusual “churning” of the ocean surface before she saw what she described as a smooth, white, oblong object that looked like a large Tic Tac flying at extraordinarily high speeds.
Dietrich said she tried to engage with the object, but was unsuccessful. “It appeared to respond in a way that we didn’t recognize,” she said. “It seemed to lack any visible flight control or means of propulsion.” Dietrich was interviewed by several news organizations.
The U.S. Navy didn’t quite say “bunk.” It did, however, say it had no confirmation of alien space ships. But, it added, unexplained events continue to happen.
How seriously is this to be taken? According to a number of scientists and lawmakers, very seriously. Ronald S. Moultrie, the Defense Department’s top intelligence official, testified at the Appropriations Committee hearing in May. He said he was a science-fiction fan, but also a realist.
“We want to know what’s out there just like you want to know what’s out there,” he told committee members.
While many in the science and space community are thrilled that funding to study UAPs is at least being discussed, the search for ET has over the years been filled with stop and starts. In the late 1940s, the Air Force launched Project Blue Book to study UFOs. The project was terminated in 1969, after some 12,618 sightings were reported. Of those, 701 remained “unidentified.” But University of Colorado scientists involved with the project reported that none of the sightings represented “a threat to our national security.”
Then, in 1992, American astronomers began a project using two telescopes, one in Puerto Rico and the other in California, to scout the night sky for potential signs of intelligent life deep in space. A year later, the project was over. Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada introduced an amendment that ended NASA’s funding for the search for ET, and he even mocked the effort.
“The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end,” Bryan said. “As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said, ‘Take me to your leader,’ and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.”
Bryan may have gotten laughs on the Senate floor, but not from the scientific community — and particularly not from Jill Tarter, a project scientist in the 1992 effort and one of the country’s premier proponents of the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. For those who saw the 1997 film version of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel “Contact,” Tarter was portrayed by Jody Foster.
The $10 million recommended by the House this year is minimal compared with what is needed to find what we want to know. Several private organizations and individuals, including Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen, have donated money to keep the search going.
And Tarter, for one, is convinced that someone or something is out there. “So far, we’ve examined in detail one glass of water out of the ocean,” she said in a recent interview. “If your question was, ‘Are there fish in the ocean?’ and you scooped up a glass and you looked in it and you didn’t find a fish, I don’t think you’d conclude that there are no fish in the ocean.”

James Bernstein is the editor of the Long Beach Herald. Comments? JBernstein@liherald.com.