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Most reported UFO sightings are likely the result of foreign spying or airborne trash, governmental officials said, according to The New York Times.

An intelligence report last year revealed that the U.S. government had encountered more than 140 unidentified aerial phenomena, commonly known as UFOs, since 2004 and could not confidently explain most of those incidents.

The report led to a flurry of interest in UFOs and was followed by the first congressional hearing on the issue in more than 50 years.

However, U.S. officials have solved many of these supposed mysteries, the Times reported on Friday. Most of the recent unidentified aerial phenomena can be attributed to trash in the sky or foreign surveillance activity, such as by drones believed to be connected to China, officials told the outlet.

The Pentagon has kept most of its conclusions on foreign surveillance classified, so as not to reveal to China and other countries that it is aware of their activities, the officials said, according to the Times. They told the outlet that Congress has been briefed on some of the conclusions.

Some older incidents also remain officially unexplained simply because there is not enough data to make a final conclusion, the Times also noted.

NASA has selected 16 individuals to participate in its independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena are categorized as UAPs.

The independent study will begin on Monday, Oct. 24. Over the course of nine months, the independent study team will lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs for NASA and other organizations. To do this, the team will identify how data gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources can potentially be analyzed to shed light on UAPs. It will then recommend a roadmap for potential UAP data analysis by the agency going forward.

The study will focus solely on unclassified data. A full report containing the team’s findings will be released to the public in mid-2023.

“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.”

Unidentified aerial phenomena are of interest for both national security and air safety and the study aligns with one of NASA’s goals to ensure the safety of aircraft. Without access to an extensive set of data, it is nearly impossible to verify or explain any observation, thus the focus of the study is to inform NASA what possible data could be collected in the future to scientifically discern the nature of UAP.

The NASA official responsible for orchestrating the study is Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. As previously announced, the independent study team is chaired by David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation.

“NASA has brought together some of the world's leading scientists, data and artificial intelligence practitioners, aerospace safety experts, all with a specific charge, which is to tell us how to apply the full focus of science and data to UAP,” said Evans. “The findings will be released to the public in conjunction with NASA’s principles of transparency, openness, and scientific integrity.”

The members of NASA’s independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena are:

David Spergel was selected to chair NASA’s independent study on unidentified aerial phenomena. He is the president of the Simons Foundation where he was the founding director of its Flatiron Institute for Computational Astrophysics. His interests range from the search for planets and nearby stars to the shape of the universe. He has measured the age, shape and composition of the universe and played a key role in establishing the standard model of cosmology. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, Spergel has been cited in publications more than 100,000 times.

Anamaria Berea is an associate professor of Computational and Data Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is a research affiliate with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and a research investigator with Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle. Her research is focused on the emergence of communication in complex living systems and on data science applications in astrobiology, for the science of both biosignatures and technosignatures. She uses a wide range of computational methods to uncover fundamental patterns in the data. ​​

Federica Bianco is a joint professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration and a Senior Scientist at the Multi-city Urban Observatory. She is a cross-disciplinary scientist with a focus on using data-science to study the universe and find solutions to urban-based problems on earth. She is Deputy Project Scientist for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory which in 2023 will start the Legacy Survey of Space and Time to study the night sky in the southern hemisphere and discover new galaxies and stars. She has been published in more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and received that Department of Energy’s “Innovative Development in Energy-Related Applied Science” grant.

Paula Bontempi has been a biological oceanographer for more than 25 years. She is the sixth dean and the second woman to lead the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island (URI). She is also a professor of oceanography at URI. She spent eighteen years at NASA and was appointed acting deputy director of NASA’s Earth Science Division for the Science Mission Directorate. She also led NASA’s research on ocean biology, biogeochemistry, the carbon cycle and ecosystems, as well as many NASA Earth observing satellite missions in marine science. She is a fellow of The Oceanography Society.

Reggie Brothers is the operating partner at AE Industrial Partners in Boca Raton, Florida. He previously served as CEO and board member of BigBear.ai in Columbia, Maryland. Brothers also was the executive vice president and chief technology officer of Peraton, as well as a principal with the Chertoff Group. Prior to his time in the private sector, he served as the undersecretary for Science and Technology at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research at the Department of Defense. Brothers is also a Distinguished Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and he is a member of the Visiting Committee for Sponsored Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jen Buss is the CEO of the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia. Before she became CEO, Buss worked extensively with NASA to explore policy issues and strategic planning processes for astronaut medical care and cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. She is nationally recognized as an authority in her field for science and technology trends analysis and policy solutions.

Nadia Drake is a freelance science journalist and contributing writer at National Geographic. She also regularly writes for Scientific American, and specializes in covering astronomy, astrophysics, planetary sciences, and jungles. She has won journalism awards for her work in National Geographic including the David N. Schramm Award from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society and the Jonathan Eberhart award from the AAS Division of Planetary Sciences. Drake holds a doctorate in genetics from Cornell University.

Mike Gold is the executive vice president of Civil Space and External Affairs at Redwire in Jacksonville, Florida. Prior to Redwire, Gold held multiple leadership roles at NASA, including associate administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships, acting associate administrator for the Office of International and Interagency Relations and senior advisor to the Administrator for International and Legal Affairs. He led for NASA, jointly with the Department of State, the creation and execution of the Artemis Accords, which established the norms of behavior in space. He also led the negotiation and adoption of binding international agreements for the lunar Gateway, the creation of new planetary protocols and the first purchase by NASA of a lunar resource. Gold was awarded NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal for his work in 2020.Additionally, Gold was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to serve as Chair of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee from 2012 until he joined NASA in 2019.

David Grinspoon is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Arizona, and serves as a frequent advisor to NASA on space exploration. He is on science teams for several interplanetary spacecraft missions including the DAVINCI mission to Venus. He is the former inaugural Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology. His research focuses on comparative planetology especially regarding climate evolution and the implications of habitability on earth-like planets. He was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal by the American Astronomical Society and he is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also an adjunct professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, as well as Georgetown University in Washington.

Scott Kelly is a former NASA astronaut, test pilot, fighter pilot, and retired U.S. Navy captain. He commanded the International Space Station Expeditions 26, 45, and 46. He was also the pilot of Space Shuttle Discovery for the third Hubble Servicing Mission. He was selected for a year-long mission to the space station where he set the record at the time for the total accumulated number of days spent in space. Prior to NASA, Kelly was the first pilot to fly the F-14 with a new digital flight control system. He flew the F-14 Tomcat in fighter squadron VF-143 aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. He is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and was recognized by Time magazine in 2015 as one of the most influential people in the world.

Matt Mountain is the president of The Association of Universities for Research and Astronomy, known as AURA. At AURA, Mountain oversees a consortium of 44 universities nationwide and four international affiliates who help NASA and the National Science Foundation build and operate observatories including NASA’s Hubble Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope. He also serves as a telescope scientist for Webb and is a member of its Science Working Group. He is the former director of The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and the International Gemini Observatory in Hilo, Hawaii.

Warren Randolph is the deputy executive director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Accident Investigation and Prevention for Aviation Safety department. He has an extensive background in aviation safety at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and is currently responsible for setting and implementing safety management system principles and using data to inform the assessment of future hazards and emerging safety risks. Prior to the FAA, Randolph served as an aerodynamicist for the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Air Force for multiple flight simulations.

Walter Scott is the executive vice president and chief technology officer of Maxar in Westminster, Colorado, a space technology company that specializes in earth intelligence and space infrastructure. In 1992, he founded DigitalGlobe which became part of Maxar in 2017. He has held leadership positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California and was the president of Scott Consulting. In 2021, he was inducted into the David W. Thompson Lecture in Space Commerce by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Joshua Semeter is a professor of electrical and computer engineering as well as the director of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University. At Boston University, he researches interactions between Earth’s ionosphere and the space environment. Activities in Semeter’s lab include the development of optical and magnetic sensor technologies, radar experiment design and signal processing, and the application of tomographic and other inversion techniques to the analysis of distributed, multi-mode measurements of the space environment.

Karlin Toner is the acting executive director of the FAA’s Office of Aviation Policy and Plans. Previously, she served as the director of the FAA’s global strategy where she led the FAA’s international strategy and managed threats to international civil aviation. Prior to the FAA, Toner served at NASA in multiple leadership positions including director of the Airspace Systems Program at NASA Headquarters. She is a NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal recipient and is an associate fellow for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Shelley Wright is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Studies. She specializes in galaxies, supermassive black holes and building optical and infrared instruments for telescopes using adaptive optics such as integral field spectrographs. She is a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher and instrumentalist. She is also the principal investigator for the UC San Diego Optical Infrared Laboratory. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute.

Here is an idea that likely never crossed the mind of most space enthusiasts – a gas emitted from broccoli (and other plants) is one of the most indicative signs of the existence of life on a planet.

At least according to a new study from researchers at the University of California Riverside.

That gas, methyl bromide, has long been associated with life on Earth. It occurs naturally from the process of plants defending themselves.

Methylation, as the defense process is known, allows plants to expel foreign contaminants, such as bromide, by attaching a series of carbon and hydrogen atoms to it, thereby gasifying it and allowing it to escape into the air.

Methyl bromide, in particular, is interesting from an astrobiological perspective. It was used as a pesticide until the early 2000s and has several important advantages over other potential biosignatures if it shows up in an exoplanet's atmosphere.

First, it has a relatively short lifespan in a planet's atmosphere. This is particularly important for exoplanet searches, as it means whatever process produces the gas is most likely still active. Its presence isn't simply a result of a geological event that happened eons ago.

A second advantage is one that all astrobiologists love to see – there are very few non-biological processes that produce the gas, and even those processes aren't typically natural.

Despite now being considered a hazardous chemical, methyl bromide was produced in large quantities for use as a pesticide before being regulated due to its deleterious health effects.

A third advantage is the spectroscopic wavelength it shares with a 'cousin' gas that is also a biosignature – methyl chloride, which also results from the methylation process.

Their combined signature would make them much easier to detect from far away, and both are indicative of the existence of a biological process, though being able to distinguish between methyl chloride and methyl bromide, as methyl chloride has already been seen around some stars, which was likely caused by an inorganic process.

Not quite an advantage, but an interesting quirk about the ability to detect methyl bromide, is that it would be relatively difficult to detect in Earth's atmosphere from far away.

Its concentration levels are high enough, but the UV light from the Sun causes water molecules in the atmosphere to split into compounds that eliminate methyl bromide, so it does not exist for very long in Earth's atmosphere.

UV light is only a problem for Sun-like stars, though. Around stars like M-dwarfs, which are 10 times more common in the galaxy than sun-like stars, there would be less UV radiation that would potentially break up the methyl-bromide molecule.

Since those M-dwarfs will be some of the first places astrobiologists look, they might be a chance to see a build-up of methyl bromide in their atmospheres.

Any such discovery might have to wait a little while, though. Even the JWST isn't set up to detect trace elements in an exoplanet's atmosphere.

However, in the next few years, some ground-based telescopes will be up to the task. Hopeful astrobiologists will have to wait until after those come online before they can truly look for this highly interesting biosignature.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/ufo-expert-bombarded-requests-explain-28211406

https://www.weareiowa.com/article/news/nation-world/ancient-mars-underground-microbes/507-82ab6f52-90a5-4914-bcbd-89e04b6a7002

SETI pioneer Frank Drake, of 'Drake Equation' fame, dies at 92

By Mike Wall published 3 days ago

Frank Drake blazed the SETI trail and helped bring the broader hunt for alien life into the mainstream.

Astronomer Frank Drake, who pioneered the modern search for intelligent life in the universe, passed away Friday (Sept. 2) at the age of 92.

Drake is best known for the equation that bears his name, a formula that estimates how many detectable alien societies may exist in our Milky Way galaxy. Drake devised his famous equation in 1961, a year after he initiated Project Ozma, which used a radio telescope to hunt for possible signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

Project Ozma was a milestone, bringing new technology and a new way of thinking to the previously haphazard search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And that approach has stood the test of time.

Related: The father of SETI: Q&A with astronomer Frank Drake

"His strategy is still enthusiastically deployed six decades after his pioneering SETI experiment. This is a truly remarkable circumstance, and nearly unprecedented in exploration," radio astronomer Seth Shostak wrote in a 2020 tribute to Drake, for many years a colleague of his at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

In that tribute, Shostak stressed how tough it was for Drake to blaze his trail. Drake had to battle through the giggle factor, which discouraged pretty much every other scientist from even voicing an interest in SETI.

"It was a taboo subject in astronomy," Drake told Shostak. "Nobody else was doing a search, because they were all afraid. I was too dumb to be afraid."

The giggle factor has been melting away recently, thanks in part to Drake and the people he inspired — several generations of astronomers, whose ranks include Shostak and Jill Tarter. Scientific discoveries have also helped pull SETI off the fringes and into the mainstream, chief among them the finds of the ongoing exoplanet revolution.

Thanks to observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope and other instruments, scientists now know that Earth-like worlds are common throughout the universe. A recent study, for example, suggests that more than half of all sunlike stars in the Milky Way may harbor a rocky planet in their "habitable zone," the range of orbital distances in which liquid water could exist on a world's surface.

Given all that potentially habitable real estate and the immense age of the universe — about 13.8 billion years — it's not crazy to surmise that civilizations may have risen beyond Earth. This realization has been percolating through academia and into the broader culture. For instance, the U.S. military has shown an increased interest in unidentified flying objects (UFOs), setting up several organizations over the past few years to investigate puzzling sky sights.

The Pentagon is not hunting for alien life, of course; it's chiefly interested in the potential national security threat posed by UFOs. But the relatively open dialogue around the issue these days is a big change, one that Drake helped sparkFrank Drake was born on May 28, 1930 in Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University and a master's and a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard.

Drake was an astronomy professor at Cornell from 1964 to 1984, then held a similar post at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1984 to 1996. He stayed on as an emeritus professor at UCSC after that. Drake also directed the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe and chaired the institute's board of trustees. Among many other distinctions and responsibilities, he was a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and he chaired the U.S. National Research Council's Board of Physics and Astronomy from 1989 to 1992.

Drake stayed active in the scientific community pretty much until the end of his life. I crossed paths with him at several conferences in California's Bay Area not long ago, for example. I was struck each time by his enthusiasm, his warmth and his friendliness. Drake certainly didn't carry himself with the air of someone who had pioneered a field of scientific study — and that's a big part of his legacy as well.

"My Papa D was beloved by many, and for many reasons, but above all, today I celebrate his humanity, his tenderness, his gentle spirit," science journalist Nadia Drake wrote today in a eulogy for her father

on her personal website. "A titan in life, Dad leaves a titanic absence. He was special to many of you, so on behalf of everyone whose lives he touched: We love you, Dad. You loved us, you taught us, you guided us. Ad astra, my sweet Papa D. The stars are lucky."

A group of scientists dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, popularly known as SETI, announced a new campaign to establish a global approach to intergalactic relations.

Based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, their work includes impact assessments and coordination with world leaders to draw up treatises, as well as guidelines for “responsible” science communication in the social media era, according to a university press release.

“Science fiction is awash with explorations of the impact on human society following discovery of, and even encounters with, life or intelligence elsewhere,” said Dr. John Elliott, a computer scientist and coordinator of the school’s SETI Post-Detection Hub.

“But we need to go beyond thinking about the impact on humanity.”

For decades, experts and philosophers have pondered how our first conversation with extraterrestrial life will unfold, with the focus generally on how they will respond to us. But the Post-Detection Hub, hosted by the university’s centers for exoplanet science and global law and governance, warns that more thought should be paid to how we — as a human race — should appropriately respond to them.

The campaign comes as NASA’s Mars rover searches for signs of microscopic organisms, both living and fossilized. In August, the Perseverance rover successfully collected its first Martian rock sample after several failed attempts; whether the portion of regolith will make the journey to Earth has yet to be tested.

“Responsible” communication of extraterrestrial findings will be a major area of focus for the Post-Detection Hub at St Andrews.

Per the Hub’s website: “The potential discovery of microbial life will likely raise different types of concern that would follow the discovery of intelligent life — we are as yet entirely unprepared as a species for the latter. The time is thus right for consideration of humanity’s response — and responsibility — following the detection of both life and intelligence in the Cosmos.”

Current “contact” protocols within the SETI community were first created in 1989 and revised in 2010, but experts have said they fall short of a complete and thorough global approach — particularly in terms of the ever-evolving social media landscape.

Some of the first conversations about the concept of social media in the wake of alien arrival transpired at the Royal Society’s 2010 Scientific Discussion Meeting on the matter. Perhaps fortuitously, news surrounding the event would come to spawn the fictitious title of “alien ambassador,” misattributed to the then-director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Mazlan Othman.

Othman would go on to debunk the viral false media narrative — thus proving how quickly misinformation can spread online and why we need to create a plan before news of alien contact reaches the public.

The work of analyzing radio signals and decoding an alien language “is an elaborate and time-consuming process” which the Hub hopes to get ahead of, Elliott explained.

“Will we ever get a message from E.T.? We don’t know,” he continued. “We also don’t know when this is going to happen. But we do know that we cannot afford to be ill-prepared — scientifically, socially and politically rudderless — for an event that could turn into reality as early as tomorrow and which we cannot afford to mismanage.”