A look into the interest groups keeping the search for extraterrestrial life alive

In the fall of 1954, five-year-old Pete Davenport was at a drive-in movie theater on the outskirts of the St. Louis Airport when he said all hell broke loose. 

“People were running in front of our car, yelling and shouting. They were pointing to the right of our car, and I looked out the side window of the ‘53 Studebaker, and there was a disc-shaped object – blood red and so bright you didn’t want to look at,” Davenport said. “It just hovered motionless and suddenly accelerated, went behind the screen, went straight up in the sky and down again, and disappeared.” 

That was Davenport’s first alleged encounter with a UFO, but not his last. After several other UFO sightings over the years off the coast of California and in the state of Washington, Davenport received a call from the National UFO Reporting Center’s founder, Bob Gribble. In 1994, Gribble asked him to take over the organization’s hotline. Davenport obliged and has been running the NUFORC hotline ever since. 

Although the presence of aliens or UFOs has never officially been confirmed by the U.S. Government, there has been a renewed push for transparency when it comes to investigating reported UFOs. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office was created in 2022 after the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee voted to make UFO information available to the public. 

NUFORC is one of several volunteer organizations dedicated to tracking UFOs – now officially called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Since its founding in 1974, NUFORC has logged over 165,000 UAP sightings and encourages anyone who’s seen something unexplainable in the sky to file a report on its website. 

NUFORC compiles all its reports into a searchable database and map, with new cases showing up on the map in green. One such sighting published recently on NUFORC’s database happened on a flight from Las Vegas to Toronto, just south of Minneapolis. The four-person flight crew reported white orbs flying erratically – higher than commercial aircraft. 

“There were up to four objects. They were flying around: up, down, around one another. They formed a triangle at one point,” according to the report. “They chased each other at times. We used a star ahead of us as a marker for the activity. The star obviously didn’t move, but the objects were moving and flying around. We thought it could be satellites but there was no predictable pattern to their movement.” 

While NUFORC only catalogs cases of UAPs, another volunteer organization, Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), goes a step further and investigates reports made to their site. MUFON investigates UAPs worldwide by sending out field investigators. They also support people who have reported being abducted by aliens through their Experiencer Resource Team, which is composed of psychologists and licensed social workers. 

NUFORC and MUFON operate independently and don’t share case data or reports. However, both have similar standards for handling cases, with reports from pilots or military personnel holding more merit than reports from the average Joe. 

Bob Spearing is the director of international investigations for MUFON. He previously worked as a railroad crash investigator before transitioning to his role with MUFON in 2013. Like Davenport, Spearing also allegedly had experiences with UAPs, which motivated him to join MUFON. 

“We don’t investigate UFOs. We investigate UFO reports because, by the time the witness submits a report to us, the UFO, the entity, or the abduction is long gone or long over. So it’s very hard to investigate on the spot,” Spearing said. 

When someone reports a sighting or abduction to MUFON, it’s categorized on a scale of 1-3, with three being the most important and usually requiring field investigators to meet with the witness at the event’s location. 

“If trace evidence exists – and trace evidence could be in many forms – we try to get a sample,” Spearing said. “We have a lab in Australia and a lab in Missouri where we can send material to be tested, like dirt inside a crop circle. Then we’ll have a control sample 50 yards away outside the crop circle so that you can make a comparison.” 

MUFON also swabs skin for residue if someone claims that they were abducted or left with a residue on their body. They’ll ask the reporter to swab it with a Q-tip so they can look at it under ultraviolet light. Spearing stressed that they take safety very seriously. 

“We don’t touch people. We keep everything anonymous,” Spearing said. 

According to Spearing, approximately 80-90% of cases reported to MUFON are explainable phenomena like Starlink satellites, military aircraft, or weather events. However, the 10% of cases they cannot explain border on the unfathomable. 

“I have hundreds of drawings of triangles. The problem with triangles, though, is that people have been seeing them as far back as the 1890s, so I doubt it was United States technology that advanced in 1899,”  Spearing said. 

While NUFORC and MUFON focus on conducting after-the-fact interviews with witnesses and abductees of these reported sightings, another organization turns its attention to the stars. 

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life Institute (SETI) is a non-profit research organization dedicated to uncovering signs of extraterrestrial life. Andrew Siemion, an astrophysicist, heads it. 

Siemion explained that SETI maintains programs at various radio telescopes to look for technosignatures or other anomalous signs of life. 

“That term, [technosignatures] is kind of a recent term, but it’s devised to be kind of analogous to a biosignature, some remotely detectable sign of basic forms of life,” Siemion said. “The primary remote sensing modality that we have available as observational astronomers is electromagnetic radiation.”

Electromagnetic energy travels in waves and spans from long radio waves that modern technology uses to short gamma rays. Humans can see visible light, just one part of the EM spectrum.

“Artificial sources can compress energy in ways that the natural world can’t, so we use that as a sort of a filter,” said Siemon. “We take a telescope, collect a whole bunch of light, then look to see if it has any structure on the scales that we know to only arise from technology.”

Scientists discover exoplanets and the chemical composition of faraway galaxies using a similar method: transit spectroscopy. This method observes the dips in light from stars when a planet crosses before them. 

Although SETI hasn’t found any official sign of life in the Universe, they will continue searching. They think that maybe they haven’t surveyed enough stars yet, or perhaps extra-terrestrial life doesn’t use technology identifiable on the EM spectrum. Whatever the case, SETI maintains on their website that they will continue to assume “that the trillion or so planets in the Milky Way house some transmitting societies, but our experiments have to continue, and continue to improve, to succeed in picking up a signal.”

Siemion said SETI was close once, but the signal observed was “earth-based interference” and could not be replicated.  

“It was a good candidate. I think it was the farthest along that we’ve gone in the process. And it was exciting, and we improved our capabilities through it,” Siemion said. 

As Siemion sees it, the idea that other intelligent life could visit Earth is “not a crazy idea.” Still, until he sees empirical evidence, he’ll continue to direct his attention to the stars.