‘DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE’ is a well-worn phrase throughout society, and one that has become equally identifiable with recent releases of self-styled “UFO footage” on various social media platforms. In recent weeks, we have seen pictures and video purporting to show entities standing on doorsteps, orbs keeping tabs on residents and lights in the sky. When even a cursory inspection has been carried out, the consensus is that the footage simply either did not show what it was claimed to depict, or at best was so vague that it could literally have been anything. None of these have set the world’s media in a frenzy to show them on the main evening bulletins. 

The release on 7th October 2021 of the so-called “Rubber Duck” FLIR camera footage taken in the US is another case in point. I’m not going to use this article to examine the footage itself, the trolling that allegedly occurred prior to its release or the on-line exchanges that occurred after people finally saw it. However, lost amidst some of the vitriol that appeared across social media that evening was that the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) had already examined the video. To date, they have yet to make a comment on it.

In the intense world of Ufology, the word of the former Director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) Luis “Lue” Elizondo, counts for a lot. Asked for his opinion on the “Rubber Duck” footage, he offered the following:

“Unfortunately I am unable to comment further than it appears to me at the superficial level to be a small cluster of party balloons tied together at the base with one balloon having a slightly longer string than the others and so it keeps separating from the rest. However, that is only my initial perspective and that is why we are developing good AI [Artificial Intelligence] – to be 100% sure in cases like this.”

Lue made clear the emphasis on his initial perspective. He was not stating this to be fact, only what it appeared to look like at first glance,  without any actual analysis being done. You see this right across social media when new imagery, whether it be static or moving, is released. Even those who maintain open minds on much of what we deal with have an initial impression of what is portrayed. The same happened when the 2019 USS Omaha video and the “Batman balloon” photo were released. Call it a snap judgement, first impression, intuition, “gut feeling” – we seem to be programmed to make that kind of decision without help from other sources. It’s also a hard one to shake once you’ve made it in the first place, especially in light of no extra evidence or corroboration.

Look back over the eighty-year history of “modern” Ufology – from the Foo Fighters of World War 2 right up to the present day, and you’ll see incalculable examples of people jumping to conclusions on extremely limited information, telling us “they” are aliens or seagulls. It’s not just the public doing this either. I found examples of this in my research into wartime investigations of strange activity, and we also have official statements about jet pilots "chasing Venus” show how the Establishment could make pronouncements based on hardly any information at all. This kind of knee-jerk reaction isn’t really going to get us anyway, apart from perpetuating the guessing game. At times, hand-in-hand with this was an official denial of everything that was happening –  Project Blue Book being a prime example. Purporting to be an official investigation into the UFO phenomenon, together with scientific back-up from astronomer Doctor J. Allen Hynek, on the surface the project appeared to be a genuine attempt to look into the issue, collect evidence and come up with valid conclusions. Of course, with hindsight we now know this wasn’t the case, and Hynek was simply being used as a patsy for an Air Force denial that there was actually any UFO issue to confront, cloaked in the guise of a public-facing programme that sought to allay public fears and interest.

Things have changed since then, although kicking something off in the early 2000s still involved a fair degree of secrecy. As early as 2008, the need for a more scientific investigation into a growing issue of incursions into sensitive US airspace resulted in the formation of the aforementioned AATIP. The story of its birth is well-known but suffice to say the program itself was buried away for nearly a decade before details of it were released in the now infamous December 2017 New York Times article. For five years, the Pentagon had a programme that looked at UFOs – or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), as they were now referred to as. It was also an internal project. There was no field investigation of sightings or reports made by members of the public. All of its work centred on military cases, where AATIP had at least some influence in terms of obtaining data, reports and witness statements.

Maybe no-one wanted to fall into the trap of AATIP  becoming the new “Men in Black”. 

Seriously, though, a thorough, painstaking look at the UAP issue, using data collected at source and applying scientific-level scrutiny and analysis to arrive at informed conclusions was sorely needed. The results were never going to be made public, despite clamouring from UFO enthusiasts and others once details of the programme were published in 2017. The reason boils down to a fairly mundane one: the military don’t want to give away how they collect information or the capabilities of the platforms they use to gather it in the first place, whether it be human intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), electronic intelligence (ELINT) or measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT). The way in which data is obtained is often a closely guarded secret – no-one wants a potential aggressor to learn the “how, when and where”. 

It is probably safe to say that the US military – and others around the world – have a fair amount of data on the UAP issue, amassed via a wide variety of platforms and sources. They may well have done an equally large amount of analysis, and possibly ended up with one or more conclusions. Given the Pentagon’s continuing reluctance to comment on such matters, it is unlikely that details on what has been discovered to date will be released – at least publicly. Short of an Edward Snowden character suddenly appearing with a “smoking gun” in the form of a slew of emails proving that the US military not only investigated UAP but also came to the view that x, y and z happened, there’s not going to be any major progress on that front any time soon. It’s unlikely that such an obvious “paper trail” exists, for one thing. So where does this leave you and I, mere mortals living outside that secretive world?

We have allies who are possibly capable of the same level of scientific analysis that AATIP had access to when it formally existed. The aforementioned SCU was established to provide such capacity. Its mission statement reads as follows:

“We conduct, promote and encourage the rigorous scientific examination of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (UAP), commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  We utilize scientific principles, methodologies and practices in the study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena observed and reported around the globe. 

We provide scientific case analysis to support witness cases, other scientific organizations, and government entities who are looking for the certitude of facts for this phenomenon.”

Looking at those associated with SCU, the group appears to be well-equipped to provide intensive study and investigation  of individual cases, applying a wide variety of analysis from isotopes through to acoustic signatures. Members of SCU have already spoken on a variety of podcasts and other media platforms to herald the work they are doing and have even appeared on shows to challenge people such as Mick West on his assertions regarding the US Navy FLIR videos. But are there ways in which advancements in technology can be used to further our understanding of the UAP issue?

From recent announcements and statements, we can certainly see a movement towards the use of both AI and machine learning in the analysis of both footage and reporting of UAP events. Possibly the first evidence of this came courtesy of Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy (TTSA), which released a statement in August 2019 claiming that the organisation was releasing something called The Virtual Analytics UAP Learning Tool, or VAULT for short. Billed as “the World’s Most Comprehensive UAP Intelligence Tool”, it was hailed as the best method of collecting, analysing and reporting UAP.

According to the blurb contained in the TTSA release, VAULT could pretty much accept whatever kind of UAP information one threw at it, being capable of ingesting “various formats, languages and data sources ranging from civilian, industry, academia, law enforcement, the United States Government, and other sovereign entities.” This also included details from aviation authorities, plus organisations that monitored climate and underwater activity. In short, VAULT seemed to be a “one-stop shop” for all kinds of information that could potentially lead to solving pieces of the UAP puzzle.

VAULT wasn’t the only item in the TTSA goodie-bag. They were also offering the public the chance to download an application known as the Signature Collection of UAPs Tracker, or SCOUT. Convoluted acronyms aside, this was heralded as an “interactive public interface that will facilitate real-time uploads, downloads, alerts and analysis”. With a global reach in mind, it was clearly hoped that many people would download the app and contribute to it, with data being transferred to VAULT.

A year before the press release for VAULT and SCOUT, TTSA had announced something called the ADAM Research Project, which was created to document, register and analyse materials retrieved from UAP landing and crash sites around the world. A contract had been drawn up with EarthTech International Inc., a Texan think-tank, and Doctor Harold E. Puthoff was set to lead the initial efforts in evaluating the properties of submitted materials. 

We are now over two years down the line from VAULT and SCOUT, and three from ADAM. One may have thought by now that some initial findings from ADAM may have been released, or that everyone with an interest in UAP would have had SCOUT downloaded onto their smartphone. I’m sure many people would have leapt at the chance to contribute in a significant and meaningful way to the sum of knowledge on the UAP subject, if only by submitting a tiny fraction of the overall information subset. However, at the time of writing in October 2021, ADAM, VAULT and SCOUT appear to be stillborn. I reached out to Dan Zetterstrom, one of my UAP Media UK colleagues who has taken a keen interest in TTSA’s activities since 2017. He responded with the following comment:

“After being stymied by factors such as COVID, To The Stars Inc. seemingly scaled back on the science and zeroed in on entertainment. Their recent September 1-SA SEC filing makes no mention of VAULT, SCOUT or ADAM at all.”

Looking at these projects from the outside, it is impossible to say what level of AI and machine learning may have been used, but it is a fair bet to say that it would have been considerable, at least in terms of VAULT and SCOUT – if not simply to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of reporting. That TTSA abandoned these lofty goals in pursuit of more entertainment-driven content is disappointing to say the least, but it is not the end of the story as far as advanced analysis techniques are concerned.

In 2010, Dr. Paul Davies and Robert Wagner from Arizona State University proposed that conditions on the Moon were ideal for the preservation of possible “relics” on its surface. They suggested that photographic mapping carried out by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched in June 2009, could be used to detect possible traces of such items – “ancient aliens”, if you like. In selenological terms, the inert conditions are ideal for preserving artefacts over the long-term, although eventually  regolith (Moon soil) thrown up by meteor impacts may obscure, bury or destroy them. If such information could be obtained by the LRO, then similar data could also be available via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005 and orbiting the Red Planet since March 2006, and even the BepiColombo mission to Mercury, which will begin sending back useful imagery from December 2025. There is also Europa Clipper, a NASA mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, scheduled for launch in October 2024. All could be used to detect signs of – well, who knows what?

Fast forward to 2020 and a paper published by three academics based in the US and Europe revealed that unsupervised machine learning used in the analysis of a testing dataset of Moon surface imagery obtained by the LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera found the descent stage of the Apollo 15 Lunar Module lander. The work done in developing search facilities meant that lunar techno-signature detection was finally a realistic proposition. Whilst the paper listed a whole raft of non-UAP related applications for such technology, it was clear that looking for evidence of “ancient aliens” could be added. Could similar AI and machine learning be applied to the eighty-year history of modern Ufology?

Cast your mind back to Christopher Mellon’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience in May 2021. He mentioned several projects that were responsible for collecting information on activity in the skies and space above the United States, and also in the seas surrounding it. Filters were applied so minimise the sheer volume of data being received did not overload the systems, especially when they were employed to look for specific things, such as the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). Chris talked about how such data could be mined:

“…and they want to reduce clutter, so the other stuff is not displayed to the operator. People in the ops centre don’t even see it, but it’s in the database. There’s a lot of databases like that where if we just pulled the data, and had some contractors run it, we might find some really interesting signatures and patterns, which would then help us get a handle on the phenomenon and where we ought to be looking going forwards.”

Christopher Mellon also referred to the Global Acoustic Monitoring System (the International Monitoring System, or IMS), which was designed to pick up low frequency vibrations in the atmosphere, or more specifically, detect nuclear weapons tests around the planet. However, IMS is also apparently able to “see” meteors and bullet, and he hinted at rumours of other things that the operators simply couldn’t explain. Even just these couple of examples suggest that there is information out there just waiting to be tapped into by a relatively unsophisticated AI and machine learning process.

When I was finishing writing my book “UFOs Before Roswell” back in May 2021, I reached out to Lue Elizondo to ask him about his thoughts on possible similarities between reports dating back to World War Two and the recent US Navy encounters. In part of his reply, which I quoted in my book, he mentioned AI and machine learning, suggesting it could be applied to older cases:

“…I believe as we apply Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to the problem, we will see patterns emerge from the historical record.”

It was therefore interesting to see that the Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena which was released on 25th June 2021 contained reference to AI and machine learning applications, mentioning the role of the UAP Task Force:

“… the UAPTF’s long-term goal is to widen the scope of its work to include additional UAP events documented by a broader swath of USG personnel and technical systems in its analysis. As the dataset increases, the UAPTF’s ability to employ data analytics to detect trends will also improve. The initial focus will be to employ artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms to cluster and recognize similarities and patterns in features of the data points. As the database accumulates information from known aerial objects such as weather balloons, high-altitude or super-pressure balloons, and wildlife, machine learning can add efficiency by pre-assessing UAP reports to see if those records match similar events already in the database.”

It is clear that such applications are intended to be applied to information gathered from future UAP events, but given that the Preliminary Assessment dealt with solely military cases, how much, if any of this analysis will end up being seen by the public?

Thankfully, there appears to be a whole range of private initiatives underway or in the planning stages that have AI and machine learning applications at the heart of the data they have to collect. Dan Zetterstrom painted a hopeful if not totally optimistic view of what could occur in the next few years:

“Our planet is surrounded with amazingly capable sensor systems that are themselves surrounded by red tape. It is for that reason I look with hope towards the ground-breaking efforts of Skyfort, Avi Loeb’s Project Galileo, UAPx, UAPdata and others to capture and filter the available data, and, importantly, share their findings with the public. We are in the age of connectivity and the technology to shed light on this issue is more accessible than ever. With AI, databases and well-crafted tools like apps, we can lift the veil.”

For a sneak peek of what may well be in store for us, Lue Elizondo will be giving a short demonstration of a new AI system when he talks to UAP Media UK’s very own Vinnie Adams on 13th October 2021. Whilst this will not be ready yet for rolling out, it is a start, and a big step on the way to achieving the kind of intensive data collection  and rigorous analysis that is craved by right-minded individuals.

Ufology has moved from being a fringe pursuit to a topic that has occupied prime-time news bulletins, discussed openly by former Pentagon and Capitol Hill staff, former US Navy aircrew and a whole host of entertainment celebrities. Evidence of the phenomenon has moved away from simple reports of “lights in the sky” to hard data, obtained via military-grade sensors and recording apparatus. There is anecdotal evidence of much more information buried away in databases around the planet, collected but unseen and not yet subjected to rigorous analysis. What developments in the understanding of UAP could result from the use of AI and machine learning applications when looking at such data, and is there scope to retrospectively apply this technology against reports from the eighty-year-long history of modern sightings? We cannot wait for elected governments to open their collection systems for public scrutiny to provide such details, but we can hope that private initiatives pick up the cudgel and run with it. We await news of future developments with interest.