Looking up at the midnight sky, it’s not uncommon to feel small and humbled amidst its vastness. Much is unknown about the universe; we are yet to theorise, conspire, hold certain beliefs about it, and research things that are unaccounted for with our available means. Recently, Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, released a report of almost 400 sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) by military personnel.

While the term UFO has been closely associated with aliens and extraterrestrial life, it’s important to highlight that the word unidentified cannot result in a confirmation of alien civilisation, nor does the report mention it. With not much data to support plausible explanations for these sightings, and with an understanding that these unidentified and unauthorised objects could be a potential threat, Pentagon holds a few hypotheses for research, classifying them as airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, systems from a foreign adversary and a miscellaneous category, ‘other’. Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya, head scientist at the Indian Astrobiologist Research Foundation (IARF), a not-for-profit that he founded in 2006 with friends, looks into the possibilities that the report presents. Intrigued? Sign up for Vaidya’s interactive talk titled Paranormal Encounters: Scientific Investigation of UFOs to commemorate World UFO Day on July 2.