For decades, UFOs sat on the fringes of serious inquiry. People came forward claiming they had been abducted, had seen flying saucers in the sky, or that Area 51 is really a military base facilitating the study of UFOs and storing the bodies of extraterrestrial beings.

On the latter, Bob Lazar is top of mind. An alleged conspiracy theorist, Lazar became famous in the late 1980s for claiming that he worked on reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft for the U.S. government. He has appeared on multiple podcasts recently to promote his documentary, S4: The Bob Lazar Story.

My colleague Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars, tells me the subject has been plagued by “a lot of delusion and projection” since the 1950s, when UFOs became intertwined with Cold War paranoia, fears of American technological inferiority, and, eventually, fraudsters and conspiracy theorists.

Still, Turner tells me, sightings of unidentified objects in the sky “are real.” And they are real enough that some effort has gone into rebranding the subject. “UFO,” for example, has largely given way to “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, a term that does not assume every flying saucer is piloted by a little green man. In August 2020, the Department of Defense established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, formally adopting the UAP terminology.

And the government’s interest in UAPs has become much more public since.

Last September, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection.” During it, Rep. Eric Burlison played a “never-before-seen” video showing a U.S. military Hellfire “We Come in Peace” missile™ striking a bright object off the coast of Yemen on Oct. 30, 2024. The Hellfire missile strikes the object, sending debris flying from the point of impact. But the debris continues moving alongside the main object, almost as though the pieces remain part of the same formation.

Brandi Vincent, who covered the hearing for DefenseScoop, reported that the hearing also marked the first time an active-duty Navy official testified publicly before Congress about a UAP incident.

That official was Senior Chief Petty Officer Alexandro Wiggins, who described a February 2023 encounter aboard the USS Jackson in Whiskey 291, a restricted military training area off the coast of Southern California. Wiggins said he observed a “self-luminous,” “Tic Tac-shaped” object that did not resemble a conventional aircraft or drone, and the ship’s systems recorded the encounter on multiple sensors. The object appeared to emerge from the ocean, join three similar objects, and then disappear with “near-instantaneous acceleration.” Wiggins said there was no sonic boom or conventional propulsion signature.

Whiskey 291 is the same general training area associated with the now famous 2004 “Tic Tac” incident, footage of which was recorded by Lieutenant Chad Underwood. NBC has a rather good segment on the encounter and other reported Tic Tac sightings.

Whatever these objects are, higher education has found a reason to be interested.

The University at Albany (UAlbany), for example, recently received a major gift to advance scientific research on UAPs. UAlbany physics professor Matthew Szydagis was among the authors of a June 2025 article, “Initial Results from the First Field Expedition of UAPx to Study Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” published in Progress in Aerospace Sciences. According to the abstract, the article details a week-long expedition to Catalina Island, where Szydagis and other researchers deployed cameras and a range of sensors to collect data on possible UAPs.

“The study of UAP is slowly moving from the fringe to the mainstream of scientific study,” Szydagis said in a university press release about the newly published research. I have not read the entire article myself, but I have reached out to Szydagis hoping to talk with him about his findings.

There is also Harvard’s Galileo Project, which aims to move the search for extraterrestrial technology from “accidental or anecdotal observations and legends” into systematic scientific research. The project webpage says it will “examine the possibility of extraterrestrial origin” for UAPs and seek to “understand the origins of interstellar objects.” The project is led by Avi Loeb, who, interestingly enough, has had some public spats with Elon Musk over the existence of aliens.

Apparently, Musk has said he has seen no evidence of aliens, prompting Loeb to write that Musk commenting on the universe based on his experience in the inner solar system is like “an ant making a statement about the planets in the Solar system after exploring an area as big as the head of a pin.” Loeb added, “It must be a rather presumptuous ant.”

What makes that comment particularly humorous is that Harvard recently disclosed a $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, making Musk’s aerospace company the “largest holding in Harvard Management Company’s publicly reported stock portfolio.” So, if Loeb is right, Harvard has a lot riding on a rather presumptuous ant.

Of course, none of this tells us what researchers will actually find. Turner’s view is probably the safest one for now: “There’s something there.” What that something is remains another question.

Will universities find aliens? Some doubt it. Turner takes the Fermi paradox seriously: If advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are common, where are they? Despite decades spent scanning the skies, Turner notes, no one has produced the proverbial alien body or spacecraft wreckage.

What do I think? Well, I am not ready to add this one to my collection of doubts just yet. Aliens may be out there.

My tinfoil hat is at the ready.

Follow Jared Gould on X.

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