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Scientists shouldn鈥檛 be afraid to talk about, or even study, those mysterious objects flying in the sky鈥攎aybe just don鈥檛 call them UFOs.

That was one of the conclusions of a panel discussion this weekend at , an annual gathering of hundreds of science journalists and communicators from around the country and abroad. CU Boulder and the CU Anschutz Medical Campus hosted this year鈥檚 events.

On Saturday morning, the talk was all about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs鈥攁 relatively new name for the strange blips that zoom across the instruments of fighter jets or flashing听lights amid the stars. During a session called 鈥淟ook! Up in the sky! It鈥檚 not a UFO 鈥� it鈥檚 a UAP,鈥� a panel of journalists and scientists tackled a tricky question: How should serious scientists approach a topic that has, for decades, been the butt of so many jokes?听

CU Boulder鈥檚 Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives听and professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, took part in the panel.

The group got the most obvious topic out of the way early: 鈥淯FOs are almost certainly not alien visitors,鈥� said writer and UFO investigator Mick West, who joined the session remotely. Other panelists included moderator Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor for Scientific American; Nadia Drake, physics editor for Quanta magazine; and Thomas Zurbuchen, director of ETH Zurich Space and former associate administrator for science听at NASA.

But that doesn鈥檛 mean researchers shouldn鈥檛 investigate them more closely, the speakers agreed.听

鈥淏ehind all of this, there鈥檚 a really important contribution to be made from the scientific community and the scientific communications community,鈥� Boyd said.

In 2022, NASA convened an independent study team to begin the process of exploring UAPs from a scientific perspective. The group鈥檚 report, , lays out a path for the research community to collect more data about unknown and strange things high above Earth.听

Getting to the bottom of these sightings鈥攏o matter their causes鈥攃ould help governments keep military or commercial aircraft safe, the panelists said. UAPs could also lead scientists toward discovering new natural phenomena they hadn鈥檛 known about before.

As Drake, an author of the NASA report, put it: 鈥淲hen something is stigmatized, it really hampers data collection, so you don't get the types of observations that are going to be useful.鈥�

The (alien) elephant in the room

And there are good reasons for collecting data on UAPs, Boyd said.

In part, that鈥檚 because there are a lot of human-made objects flying around in the skies at any moment in time, and governments don鈥檛 always know what they are. They include听drones, high-altitude balloons and more. He pointed to the case of a Chinese balloon that floated over Alaska and much of the United States in early 2023 before it was ultimately shot down by the U.S. Air Force.

鈥淚n a time of enhanced tensions internationally, leadership has to make difficult decisions,鈥� Boyd said. 鈥淒o we shoot this thing down? Do we let it fly over the U.S.?鈥�

Military pilots have to make even quicker and potentially more听dangerous choices if they encounter something eerie in their paths, Boyd said.

The panelists noted that, for decades, scientists have shied away from exploring UAPs鈥攊n part because of their popular association with little green men and听flying saucers. But Zurbuchen, at least, hopes that researrchers can begin to shed that stigma.听

鈥淭here are a number of things that used to be UAPs that are now well-recognized science phenomenon because somebody actually said, 鈥榃ow, these clouds really look weird. What happened there?鈥欌�� Zurbuchen said.

True science

In many cases, researchers have struggled to study such phenomena because they can鈥檛 get their hands on high-quality observations, Drake said.听

In their NASA report, she and her colleagues noted that researchers may already have access to a treasure trove of top-notch data. Scientists, for example, could use the many scientific satellites circling the planet to search for unexplained events in the atmosphere: They just need to better define what they鈥檙e looking for. 听

鈥淲e also suggested some sort of citizen science campaign,鈥� Drake said. 鈥淪o really harnessing the power of all of these people with all of these smartphones to come up with a way to make reports, put them into a system, and include metadata that can be really useful for figuring out what something is.鈥�

Boyd, in turn, said he would like to see more comprehensive and easy-to-access catalogues of UAP sightings. That way, if a bystander captures video of strange lights high above Earth, researchers can quickly tell if those lights seem like a new phenomenon or can be easily explained. He also urged the assembled science writers not to give into the sensationalism around UFOs.

鈥淭hat is critical for your community to make sure when there are stories that have a science element to them, that the true science is being recorded,鈥� Boyd said.