Craig Murphy

A quick summary of why all these UFOs are popping up now. Call it Science Sunday… or Superbowl Science Sunday. In spatial science (in this case radar/satellite data), we use techniques to filter out noise so we can identify objects in space (the abstract space, not outer space). Think of it like trying to find a tennis ball on the beach using a 3d scan of the beach read as lines of text. You know how big the tennis ball is, so you take all the data from the beach and tell the computer to find a round object that is the approximate size of a tennis ball. It would take a lot longer to find the tennis ball if every small object on the beach had to be reviewed one-by-one. So we tell the computer to ignore everything that doesn’t look like a tennis ball. Same goes with detecting aircraft. We know the range of sizes aircraft typically are, and we know they move across space, so we filter out tiny objects that aren't large enough to be typical aircraft and/or are stationary so we can readily find objects that fit the parameters we set for things like war/spy planes/drones/etc. When the balloon thing happened, NORAD reduced the filter sensitivity to allow smaller objects to pass through. Now, we're picking up these small, slow-moving objects that had been filtered out before. Back to the beach analogy: we essentially turned off the filter and now we’re picking up sea shells, coins and lost rings. What the objects are and what nation/entity they're from has not been announced. They are simply unidentified flying objects (UFOs) at this point. These weren’t necessarily launched or sent recently, we just never looked for them. Now we are. And we’re finding there are quite a few of them there.