With three words, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer challenged President Donald Trump to open a potential Pandora’s Box of scientific news: “Now do UFOs,” the leading Democrat posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, referring to unidentified flying objects.
While it remains to be seen whether Schumer’s suggestion was serious or merely an attempt to embarrass a Republican president, experts agree that he raised a provocative question. Since Trump has already ordered the declassification of documents pertaining to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he could, in theory, spill the government’s secrets about UFOs, formerly called UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena).
Indeed, as military pilots continue to report UAP sightings, the government has convened exploratory panels into the issue. As of 2023, experts admitted to receiving dozens of UFO sighting reports each month, although only 2% to 4% of those require further investigation.
For these reasons, experts who spoke to Salon said they support Schumer’s call for declassifying UFO documents, although they urged the public to temper their expectations.
“Keep in mind that declassification doesn’t necessarily come with explanations,” Haley Morris, co-founder of the military pilot-led nonprofit Americans for Safe Aerospace, the world's largest UAP advocacy organization, told Salon. She added that the “best case is that with transparency, people can see the UAP mystery for themselves and hard data is made available for the scientific community to try and get some answers.”
"There are thousands of classified UAP records across government agencies that would be subject to declassification by executive order."
Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb told Salon that it is always a good thing for scientists to have as much information as possible about their “cosmic neighborhood,” even if it involved institutions coming rather late to the party. It took the Vatican until 1992 to admit that astronomer Galileo Galilei was right almost four centuries earlier about the Sun being the center of our solar system. Even though scientists overall had already accepted that Galileo was correct, it still mattered for institutional reasons that the Vatican acknowledged its error.
“We would never reach Mars if we thought that it orbits the Earth,” Loeb said. “The time is ripe for us to know whether we are at the intellectual center of the universe.”
He added, “The worst case scenario, from my perspective as a curious scientist, is that all of these objects are human-made. This would be rather boring, as far as I am concerned.”
Regardless of whether UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin or not, Morris points out that it would benefit ordinary citizens to better understand them as a matter of public safety.
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“Today we already know that unidentified objects and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in our airspace with advanced performance characteristics represent a national security and aviation safety threat and disclosing these records would call attention to the domain awareness gap that has existed for years,” Morris said. The American security establishment remains in a “Cold War mentality” where it focuses on tracking ballistic missiles and fast jets instead of emergent threats like drones and these objects.
“There are thousands of classified UAP records across government agencies that would be subject to declassification by executive order and include high definition video, sensor data, official reports, and compelling testimony regarding unidentified objects with anomalous characteristics and the (secret) government programs that studied them, and there are still other records that could be exempt for national security reasons,” Morris said.
Yet as Loeb observed, even if one of these objects is not human-made, the declassification would be revolutionary.
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“Even if one in a million objects is from an extraterrestrial origin, it could inform us that we are not alone and be the biggest scientific discovery in human history,” Loeb said. “As a scientist, I would love to have access to any data that indicates a nonhuman origin of technological objects.” He added that, as a professional astronomer, he spends every day engaged in precisely these kinds of research projects.
“My day job is studying what lies outside the solar system,” Loeb said. “I lead the Galileo Project at Harvard University, which is constructing three new observatories that are expected to track more than a million objects in the sky this year.”
Harry Reid, the late Senator and Democratic Majority Leader who made waves in 2021 by calling for the declassification of UFO documents, articulated at the time a non-scientist’s perspective on the subject.
“I believe it’s crucial to lead with the science when studying UFOs,” Reid wrote at the time. “Focusing on little green men or conspiracy theories won’t get us far.” Acknowledging that millions of people will believe in conspiracy theories no matter what, he added that “ultimately, the U.F.O. debate can be broken down into a sincere belief in science versus a sincere belief in extraterrestrials. I side with science.”
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