I have had a lot of time to think in the last couple of days and feel compelled to share my reflections.

Each day, I realize the depth of how stigma, the categorization of “UFO” or UAP as a dumping category, and the subsequent methodologies to study the phenomenon go together. Many UFO/UAP organizations do excellent and admirable work by collecting UFO/UAP reports and searching for underlying explanations (meteorological phenomena, birds, balloons, etc.). The remaining category, the one they cannot explain, will be called a “UFO” or “UAP,” and when this has been done, one can ask serious experts from different disciplines to have a look. We can, of course, also do the same thing by using telescope surveys and various sensors to watch the sky and learn a great deal about what flies in our skies. However, when we collect witness reports and break down the observations into categories, we do not learn the nature of the object, but rather how good or bad people are at identifying an object in our skies — and that is not where we want to go.

By choosing the name UAP/UFO, our methodology to study the phenomenon mirrors the definition and makes the said “UAP” severely difficult to understand in detail. Adding experts from many disciplines is unlikely to help in dealing with the huge amount of false positives and negatives. Once the failure to bring serious results comes, the stigma grows larger roots and makes it even more difficult to study the phenomenon.

To break this cycle, we need to focus on clear hypotheses for what we believe we are studying, no matter how crazy or stigmatized such ideas appear to be. We need to drop the discussion about “UAP” and “UFO” and talk about clear concepts e.g. flying saucers or glowing orbs. We should not be afraid to talk about extraterrestrial artifacts or non-human spaceships and how to test if such can be found. A flying saucer or a glowing orb has clear distinctive physical features that can be looked for in a survey. The term “flying saucers” gives us a clear hypothesis and something concrete to look for. Such experiments are more carefully designed and more efficient, and can save us from wasting time on false positives (especially those that bring national security concerns). Another strategy is by basing the hypothesis on the five observables, even though also these observables were influenced by the background terminology.

I recognize that it is hard to change terminology, as our entire wiring is built around it. At this point, I would break down the issue into a few testable problems where the terminology is either clear or of secondary concern:

1. Can we find signatures of NHI/ET artifacts or spaceships outside Earth’s atmosphere? Can we find signatures of flying saucers or mysterious orbs inside the atmosphere?
2. Is there any correlation between aircraft accidents or disappearances and “UFO sightings” or hotspots? How about boat accidents or disappearances and USO sightings? (Here, the categorization is of secondary concern as the goal is not to understand the nature of the objects, but the level of threat they pose.) The level of threat can be clearly tested this way.
3. Are there any physical objects with anomalous properties or materials left behind at locations where a flying saucer either landed or crashed?

Maybe it was the most brilliant manipulation in history to stigmatize the term “flying saucer” and reshape the problem into a dumping category as “UFO” and “UAP”, as this truly affects our thinking and capability of solving this issue that has bugged our society for 70 years. But if we keep talking about UAP and UFO, we can almost guarantee that no solution will come in the next hundred years either.