[imagesource: David Becker / Getty Images]

Last year saw a couple of breakthrough moments for UFOs.

It began with the Pentagon’s highly anticipated UFO report being released, shedding light on more than 140 instances of unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs).

The landmark government report prompted everyone from senators, to a former president, to the Pentagon to take the possibility of extraterrestrial life in our universe and beyond more seriously.

So this year could be the year that we look up to see that we aren’t actually all that alone.

In fact, The Guardian reported that experts reckon 2022 could be far more profound as UFO disclosure and discovery becomes more commonplace and new scientific projects reveal more about life outside Earth.

For a long time, UFO sightings have been chalked up to conspiracy theories from dubious folk on the fringes of society, but when testimonies from navy pilots came out alongside leaked military footage documenting seemingly otherworldly happenings in the sky, the subject was destigmatised.

Suffice to say, the people who have long been championing the cause are very excited:

“I’m confident that 2022 is going to be a seismic year for UFOs,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British ministry of defence.

In Congress, where a bipartisan group of senators has been pushing for years for the government to release more information on UFOs, and from the US defense department and intelligence community, Pope said he senses “a genuine desire to grip the issue”.

“I think we’ll see congressional hearings on UFOs,” Pope said. “I also think we’ll see the release of more US military photos and videos of UFOs, and associated documents. Some of this may come via whistleblowers, but much of it may be released by the government itself, either proactively, or in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Pope also senses that more “high-calibre witnesses” with more experience with the subject will come out of the woods, including commercial airline pilots, military aircrew, radar operators, and intelligence officers.

It was, after all, US Navy personnel who steered the conversation in the right direction, to begin with, and the US government’s UFO report released in June 2021 fuelled further interest.

In addition, scientists are coming to the party.

Avi Loeb, a professor of science at Harvard University, is the head of the Galileo Project, which hopes that a network of sophisticated telescopes scanning the skies for UAPs 24/7 will come up with something big:

The privately funded project, which involves more than 100 scientists, is building its first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard college observatory, and it will begin operating this summer.

Loeb plans to make the projects’ findings publicly available.

While Loeb admits that there is probably so much that has not yet been discovered yet, he acknowledges that there is still some stigma for researchers diving into UFO existence:

“I really want the next generation to be free to discuss it, and for it to become part of the mainstream,” Loeb said.

“My hope is that by getting a high resolution image of something unusual, or finding evidence for it, which is quite possible in the coming year or two, we will change it.”

Loeb uses the metaphor of a fisherman to explain, saying that if the fisherman looks at the sea and thinks that there are no fish but doesn’t use a fishing net, it is the same thing as looking up and convincing ourselves that nothing is out there.

Collaboration will be important to bring more to the fore.

The Galileo Project will thus work alongside Planet Labs, which looks both up and down using a matrix of tiny satellites to capture the entire Earth on camera once a day.

There’s also NASA’s largest and most powerful set of eyes, the James Webb space telescope, which will enable astronomers to scan the skies in much more detail.

Leonard David, author of Moon Rush: The New Space Race, has called 2022 “a banner year” as something is definitely coming:

“You can’t have that many people doing that much research and come up dry,” he said.

Finding extraterrestrials could trigger a serious existential crisis for humans, so we better start preparing for the possibility.

What a time to be alive!

[source:guardian]