When NASA asked Boston University space physicist Joshua Semeter to help them understand unexplained unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, he didn’t hesitate to answer the call.
“I was very excited to be able to, perhaps, have access to some data that was really interesting and really challenging to interpret,” he said “And we did encounter that in our work, this extraordinary kind of data.”
Semeter was part of an independent 16-person panel NASA convened in 2022 to study data related to UAPs. That same year, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), whose mission is to, in part, collect and analyze data from UAP videos around national security areas.
Jon Kosloski heads the department and spoke to Congress in 2024 about some widely-seen UAP videos. He said reports of potential UAP sightings “must be treated seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the U.S. government.”
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“AARO has taken meaningful steps to improve data collection… and reduce the stigma of reporting UAP events,” Kosloski said at the hearing.
Semeter helped analyze one particular video called “GO FAST,” where an object seen and captured up by a U.S. military jet camera is moving at seemingly impossible speeds. In the Congressional hearing, Kosloski also showed how data analysis helped debunk this UAP video, explaining how they used trigonometry to “assess with high confidence” why the video seemed extraordinary.
“A trick of the eye called parallax makes it look like the object is moving much faster. And so we’ve written a detailed paper on parallax released on our website so that the public can literally check our math on this analysis,” Kosloski said.
Math, citizen science and the scientific method are all tools researchers use to investigate evidence of unidentified phenomena and reveal they may just have a down-to-earth explanation.
Doing the math
“The type of math we apply is not graduate school level math, but it’s also probably a little beyond high school math,” Semeter said, explaining the process he took when looking at the “GO FAST” video.
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Semeter took a look at the data displayed in the video that the military jet captured along with the mysterious object. By taking those numbers and putting them into a trigonometric equation, he came up with an answer to show why the object looked like it was moving so fast.
“You can’t just simply guess or qualitatively ascribe a rapid motion to the object,” he said. “So, you have to go to the math to get the right answe.r”
He said the aircraft’s speed, the distance to the object and the angle from the aircraft to the object can be used to triangulate the object, and establish the velocity. Semeter said those calculations show the object is likely moving around 30-40 mph.
“If that is an unmanned aerial vehicle flying around the ocean at 40 mph, that might be significant,” for national security intelligence, he said. “But it’s also worth pointing out that that velocity is consistent with the speed of the winds at the altitude of that object.”
How citizen science helps data analysis
Kosloski said gathering information from people is crucial to the program’s mission of analyzing UAP data.
“We welcome any former or current government, civilian contractor or military service member with relevant information to reach out to us,” he said in the November 2024 hearing.
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Semeter agrees that more data, no matter the source, is an important part of understanding UAPs – and, doing good, solid math.
“Citizen scientists offer an amazing opportunity for UAP investigations for a few reasons,” he said.
“It’s very difficult to fake observations of an object observed from different locations and different angles by dozens of people,” Semeter said. Those angles and locations can then lead to similar triangulation math like Semeter did for the “GO FAST” video.
The scientific method
Semeter said that when something extraordinary is captured on tape, like the “GO FAST” video, scientists and mathematicians play a role in parsing out what it looks like, and then what it really is.
“You can’t use your brain’s natural intuition to understand it,” he said.
Sometimes, he said, the way to understand an unexplainable video or visual is to apply the scientific method. That would include gathering data, analyzing the evidence and finding connections to prove what the outcome could be.
Semeter suggests to use the scientific method when “you’re thinking, my God, what is that thing?”
“I hope I can convince people that [it] is worth doing, because then when we finally get to the point where there is something absolutely extraordinary, we can be confident in our assessment of it,” he said.
While some UAP videos have yet to be fully explained, Semeter hasn’t come across anything resembling alien intelligence in his own evidence gathering and analysis – yet.
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