How would someone report a sighting?

It’s a great question. The panel spent a lot of time investigating how things were reported, and the truth is, there isn’t really a functioning reporting mechanism within U.S. government agencies. One of our leading recommendations was to fix this and to have better inter-agency communication. The difficult thing with reporting is that it’s often anecdotal, and there’s little-to-no data to assess.

The panel explored the use of cell phones and metadata on cell phones. If someone did record something, what metadata would be associated with it? For instance, in what direction was the phone pointing? What were the conditions? Was the data manipulated? The panel also looked at earth-observing satellites and the type of data we have today and will have in the future for scientific investigations. Proper reporting in all these cases is important since we want to access the right scientific data for follow-up investigation.

Do you think in our lifetime we will find something that looks like a sign of extraterrestrial life?

In the context of UAPs, I think it would be really surprising if we ever found a marker that alien life was here on planet Earth. Simply because of the energy resources needed to travel between stars, the time it would take — it really is unfathomably large. You get humbled by it, being an astronomer.

But I do think that in our lifetime we will find something. Maybe a biosignature in a distant planet’s atmosphere. It could even be what we call an “artificial signal” in another atmosphere that showed the presence of some technology. Maybe it’s a direct signal, but that’s an even rarer possibility. 

Truthfully though, we don’t know the answer to this question. And what shocks me most is that we barely try to answer it. That’s why I’m interested in this field. I do SETI research because we should be looking for the answer.