The Pentagon released its long-awaited report on UFOs last Friday, but the contents left many people — including astrophysicist and “Cosmos” host Neil deGrasse Tyson — wanting more.
In essence, the report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on June 25 summarized years of alien research that was previously unavailable to the public. It examined 143 reports of “unexplained aerial phenomena” (or UAP) since 2004, but no causes were ultimately determined for any of those reports.
So basically, after all that research, the government still has no idea what those encounters were, or if we have actually interacted with aliens — and it blames that ignorance on a so-called “lack of high-quality reporting” when incidents do happen.
In a veritable tweetstorm on Monday, Tyson made his thoughts on the report (and on aliens in general) known. In particular, Tyson was suspicious that we don’t have better images of UFOs, since there are billions of people worldwide with smart devices capable of capturing possible alien activity.
“The search for Aliens on Earth has been crowdsourced to three-billion internet-connected smartphones around the World. If our best evidence for visitors from another planet is monochromatic low-resolution, fuzzy video taken by the US Navy, then there’s more work to be done here,” Tyson said, adding a photo of an unidentified craft captured by Navy systems.
One especially alarming statistic from the Pentagon report was that there are at least 21 reports of encounters that very well might be technology from another world. These 21 reports “possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations,” the government noted.
Over the past couple days, Tyson has been on a roll posting a string of thoughts on UFOs — “alien tweets from the vault,” as he calls them — and offering up takes on how aliens might view our species. He noted that he thinks China will be the first country to hear from aliens, since it created the world’s largest telescope in 2018.
He also urged would-be alien abductees to take a souvenir home to prove they were actually taken aboard a ship, thereby avoiding any “Contact”-inspired situations where the person abducted can’t convince the general public they actually went anywhere.
Check out more of Tyson’s takes on extraterrestrials (and his dad jokes about aliens) below.