Is It Aliens? A Science Writer On UFOs and Her Visit to Area 51

I sat down for a chat with Sarah Scoles. She's a science writer and the author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. Sarah's written for many publications like Scientific American, The Verge, Vice, Science, and Outside. Not only has she written about UFOs and the people who are fascinated by them, but she's also visited, Area 51, a highly classified US Air Force base in Nevada that lies at the center of many a UFO conspiracy theory.

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So just a few weeks ago, the Pentagon released—or I should say rereleased—three videos of what they call "unidentified aerial phenomena." These were videos taken by military pilots of strange things in the sky. What are we looking at? Are we looking at aliens?

I would say there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that we're looking at aliens, but the bottom line is that we don't know what we're looking at. It's possible someone somewhere in some government agency knows what we're looking at, but we definitely don't.

And as far as we know, the department of defense classifies these things as unidentified.

I presume for your book you've read thousands of pages of unclassified government documents on UFOs. If these videos aren't evidence for UFOs, is there anything else to suggest we've found evidence?

I think what's intriguing about government studies of UFOs is that they've had investigations programs off and on for decades.

Most of the [UFO sighting] reports you can solve have been solved. But in every study, there has been some portion that remains unidentified.

And most of the [UFO sighting] reports you can solve have been solved. They are things like Venus, or spy planes, or atmospheric phenomena. But in every study, there has been some portion that remains unidentified. And that is not evidence of aliens. It's partly evidenced that for a lot of these settings, we don't have enough data to determine what they actually are or are not. So it's possible they have an explanation that's super normal and we just don't have enough data to know what that is.

You touched on this in the book. It does make sense that people remain suspicious of what the government may or may not be telling us because [our government does have] these official programs, as you just mentioned, to study unidentified aerial phenomena. Which makes sense! Of course, the military would be interested in these things. And so it does seem like there's a disconnect between ...

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