The reagents of the feedstock are never produced by processes as on the early Earth. Production requires substantial energy and controlled industrial procedures

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But what if instead of keyboards, the familiar monkeys were drawing Scrabble tiles?

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As you might have noticed, the critics of intelligent design I’m discussing here aren’t atheists or materialists.

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It is surprising to me that the authors of these studies did not consider it more of a priority to understand the mechanics of robustness.

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Growing news coverage of UFOs is influencing people’s views about extraterrestrial life, particularly among younger Americans, according to a new survey. 

According to the survey’s findings, more than a third of respondents—and particularly younger adults—say recent reporting on unexplained aerial phenomena has strengthened their belief that aliens exist.

Connecting data from over 2,000 Americans, the survey found that 37% say recent news coverage about UFOs has increased their belief in extraterrestrial life (ET). Meanwhile, 54% say their views have not changed, and just 10% report that the coverage has made them less likely to believe in ET. The survey was conducted by Talker Research between July 1 and July 6, 2026. 

Gen Z Data 

According to the survey’s findings, more than half of Gen Z respondents—54%—said recent UAP news has increased their belief in ET. That figure drops to 45% among millennials, 36% among Gen X, and 23% among baby boomers.

These results arrive amid an increasingly mainstream conversation surrounding government hearings, military UAP reports, whistleblowers, broadcast and online news coverage, and podcasts. Such exposure may be helping shape how Gen Z views what is possible and whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the cosmos.

Looking at the results through a gender lens, 34% of men say UFO news coverage has made them more likely to accept that we are not alone in the universe, compared with 33% of women.

Media and Entertainment Culture Feedback Loops 

Historically, widely publicized UFO reports have helped shape the language and imagery Western society uses to describe unexplained aerial phenomena. One famous example occurred in 1947, when pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported seeing unusual objects flying near Mount Rainier, an incident that received widespread media coverage.

The idea behind such a cultural feedback loop is relatively straightforward: someone sees something outside their normal understanding of reality and reports it. Media and entertainment then pick up the concept and expand upon it, creating their own interpretations of what extraterrestrial beings or UFOs might look like. Audiences absorb those representations, which may subsequently influence how some people perceive, remember, or describe their own unusual experiences. Those accounts can then return to popular culture, potentially reinforcing the cycle.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that what a person saw wasn’t anomalous. Instead, it suggests that media and entertainment may influence how people interpret or describe what they experience.

A 2025 paper in Evolutionary Human Sciences deconstructs a “two-way feedback loop between behavior and beliefs.” The framework suggests that existing beliefs influence behavior; people then observe that behavior, and the observed behavior influences what people believe others think/do. Finally, those beliefs influence subsequent behavior.

The new survey also considered the potential influence of popular culture. More than half of respondents (54%) believed alien movies and television make Americans more likely to believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life; 27% saw no connection between entertainment and belief, while 8% believed such programming actually makes people less likely to believe.

UFOs as a Belief System and Common Misconceptions 

An additional consideration when reading this survey is whether UFOs themselves should be characterized as a belief system. The subject is also an area of study examined by researchers from a range of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, physics, anthropology, neuroscience, and others.

Many academics would argue that categorizing UFOs solely as a belief system risks pigeonholing the subject as a form of religion rather than recognizing it as an area of study. A belief system, by contrast, is a framework of ideas through which people interpret reality according to a particular set of assumptions or principles.

Jeffrey Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University’s Department of Religion, addressed related questions in his March 2026 keynote, “Mind-Manifesting Shock: Comparing Psychedelic and Abduction Experiences, Religion and Psychedelics: Critical Cross-Cultural, Cross-Disciplinary Approaches,” at the Center for the Study of Religion at Ohio State University.

“We are often ‘believing backwards,’ taking comfort in someone else’s altered states, or in the present ‘explanations’ of this or that neuroscience or physics,” Kripal said at the time.

In other words, when people experience something anomalous and ask why it happened or what the experience might mean, they may immediately reach backward for an existing framework through which to interpret it.

In an email to The Debrief, Kripal adds, “I think the existing frameworks of religion and science ‘explain’ to people what happens, though they do not.”

The Debrief also reached out to Matthew Halsted, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Executive Team/Registrar at Eternity College, and asked how he would classify UAP—as an area of belief or a subject of study—and why.

“When it comes to ‘UAP,’ we have to see it as a two-sided coin,” Halsted told The Debrief. “On one side, we have the phenomenon itself (the actual sighting of the thing in the sky); on the other side of the coin, we have the public narrative (how we as people, and our respective governments, talk about reported sightings).”

Halsted adds, “The UAP topic (the ‘coin’) creates a lot of questions for the public, which inevitably gives rise to some sort of belief system. Some walk away believing it’s all nonsense, while others believe there’s something real about this whole thing.”

Halsted’s view, therefore, appears more nuanced than simply classifying UAP as a belief system: the topic can generate belief systems and competing interpretations around reported phenomena, but the subject itself extends beyond a simple question of belief versus nonbelief.

National Security Considerations

When asked how they would react if extraterrestrial life were definitively confirmed, 38% of Americans said their first response would be curiosity, more than twice the 17% who said they would be fearful. Men were also more likely than women to say they would be excited by such a discovery, at 20% compared with 11%.

Perhaps more strikingly, 60% of participants believed that governments know more about UFOs than they have disclosed to date.

The bigger question is whether participants believe society is prepared to accept confirmation that extraterrestrial life exists. Forty-five percent believe society would be prepared if governments confirmed the existence of alien life, while 55% say society would not be adequately prepared to comprehend the implications.

“It’s clear that the public—across age groups—is clamoring for greater UAP transparency,” said Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and current Chairman of the Board with the Disclosure Foundation, which also conducted a recent survey on the subject in June. According to Mellon, the survey found that “more than 84% of Americans want greater transparency, regardless of whether they consider themselves believers, skeptics, or unsure. And a recent Talker Research poll found that 54% of Gen Z say recent news stories have increased their belief in UAP.”

An era of misinformation and disinformation? 

The survey’s findings are compelling, but they leave another important factor largely unaddressed: not simply how information is perceived, but how easily misinformation and disinformation can proliferate in an era of online news, podcasts with inconsistent fact-checking standards, questionable or compromised sources, and clickbait headlines engineered to capture attention.

The issue, then, is not merely what a generation believes, but how people decide what is real and what is not. Within today’s fragmented information environment, audiences increasingly face the difficult task of distinguishing credible evidence from speculation, honest mistakes from misinformation, and legitimate reporting from deliberate deception.

None of this means that the broader UFO enigma can simply be dismissed. Rather, it underscores an additional challenge surrounding the subject: misleading or demonstrably false claims can now reach large audiences very quickly.

Addressing that problem will require better media literacy, stronger sourcing and fact-checking standards, and greater attention to the often-blurred distinction between evidence and interpretation. Ultimately, younger generations coming of age amid an unprecedented volume of digital information will have to navigate those distinctions for themselves. How successfully they learn to do so may have consequences extending far beyond what they believe about UFOs—shaping how they understand science, institutions, current events, and reality itself.

This is why it’s critically important that we understand UAP as accurately as possible. Whether information is being communicated between family members, friends, researchers, journalists, or policymakers, distinguishing established facts from interpretations and unverified claims gives people a better foundation for understanding the world around them and making informed decisions.

This survey suggests that UFOs are no longer confined to a subculture or counterculture; the topic has entered the mainstream. The question now is what that shift will mean for the future.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

An analysis of dozens of strange objects captured in official U.S. government videos has revealed new insights—and challenges—involving the study ofunidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Since May 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of War has released more than 100 videos that reportedly capture evidence of unknown objects in U.S. airspace and near American military operations around the world.

Now, a preprint paper by researchers Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space and Ravi Kopparapu of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center examined 112 videos released this year under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).

The researchers, both of whom serve on the UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S. government, say their study highlights significant limitations on analysis of the purported UAP videos due to missing or redacted sensor data, which prevents civilian researchers from having enough of the tools necessary to determine whether seemingly fast-moving objects in the videos actually display anomalous velocities.

Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra’s new study, which has not yet undergone peer review, highlights a fundamental problem that has impeded analytical efforts involving UAP videos collected by U.S. military personnel: that the apparent speed of an object suggested by its movement across a camera’s field of view is not necessarily an accurate indication of its real physical velocity.

In an email to The Debrief, Haqq-Misra explained that while the new study is among the first to explore the limitations on what can be discerned about these objects based on analysis of the current batch of PURSUE releases, the underlying problem is not a new one for researchers tackling the UAP problem.

“I think our conclusion will come as no surprise to people in the aviation, aerospace, and intelligence communities who have already been closely following UAP disclosure,” Haqq-Misra told The Debrief, though expressing that the conclusions he and Kopparapu present “may not be fully appreciated in the broader public discussion.”

“I get lots of questions from friends, family, and other scientists about my opinion of the government ‘UAP disclosure’ data,” Haqq-Misra said. “A lot of people haven’t even looked at the data and may assume that there is more available than we really are getting.”

In terms of what data has been made available to the public since May, Haqq-Misra says the limitations are obvious.

“Most of the useful quantities are redacted,” he said. “It is also not immediately obvious that what appears to be a fast-moving object in an infrared sensor video might be a mundane object (like a bird) much closer to the camera.”

Analyzing the DOW’s ‘PURSUE’ UAP Videos

The videos Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu analyzed, all of which are currently available at the U.S. Department of War website, were acquired by targeting pods and other turret-mounted camera systems aboard military aircraft or similar government platforms. The collection includes infrared and electro-optical imagery, much of it showing unidentified objects either crossing the camera’s field of view or being actively tracked by the sensor.

Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu reviewed all 112 videos to determine what kinematic information could be extracted from them. At its simplest, analysts can measure how quickly an object moves across a video in pixels per frame. However, the problem arises when it comes to converting that apparent motion into an actual velocity—a process that requires several additional pieces of information.

In an email to The Debrief, Kopparapu, who expressed that his views are based on his own independent analysis and do not reflect those of NASA, said there was one primary form of data that, if it were to accompany future video releases, could make them far more useful to scientists working to understand the performance characteristics of the objects they convey.

“Based on our preliminary mathematical analysis, perhaps the single most important missing quantity is the range; the distance between the object and the observing platform, ideally measured over time,” Kopparapu told The Debrief. “Without range, something moving rapidly across the image could be a small nearby object moving relatively slowly or a much larger, distant object moving extremely fast.”

Additional information Kopparapu says would be very useful would include details about the camera’s field of view, as well as “the motion of the observing platform and viewing geometry.”

In their recent paper, Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra detail the specific measurements that would be required to determine an object’s velocity. However, Kopparapu expressed to The Debrief that “Some apparent anomalies could even arise from sensor or imaging effects,” adding that without the additional data outlined above, “there is simply not much more that can be concluded scientifically.”

Haqq-Misra told The Debrief that one of the goals of the UAP Science Advisory Council is to make recommendations about what kinds of data future PURSUE releases might be able to include that would enable independent scientists to conduct more accurate and meaningful kinematic analyses. 

“We are hopeful that our recommendations based on analyses of sensor videos like these will lead to additional release of data that may even help us resolve some cases,” Haqq-Misra told The Debrief, echoing Kopparapu’s sentiments about the importance of having access to information about the object’s range from the camera system at the time the video was captured.

“Knowing the distance from the camera to the object is essential,” Haqq-Misra said. “This information might be under the redacted black boxes of some of the videos, so unredacted videos would be best.”

UAP Transparency vs National Security

The question of whether information currently redacted from government UAP videos can be safely released to scientists without compromising U.S. national security—as well as how much of that data should be released—remains a sticking point between Pentagon officials and the broader scientific community.

For researchers like Haqq-Misra, one solution might involve having some form of verifiable U.S. government record that certifies certain portions of the redacted information, without necessarily conveying that in the videos themselves in ways that could compromise sensitive information about the systems used to obtain the footage.

“Even just telling us the distance on an official government document would help!” Haqq-Misra told The Debrief.

“The flight trajectory of the aircraft with the observing camera is another important piece of data,” Haqq-Misra added. “In some cases, this data may simply be lost, but if flight logs exist for any of these cases, that would also help.

Although Haqq-Misra adds that technical information about the specific cameras used to capture a given video would “make the data even more useful,” the U.S. Department of War regulates much of this technical data under strict security classification, export control, and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) policies. Such restrictions are imposed to protect critical capabilities like sensor resolution, focal lengths, tracking algorithms, and other capabilities or technical properties that might potentially be exploited by foreign adversaries if they were revealed publicly.

While U.S. military concerns over the release of such information is often warranted, without access to it, the nature of how some military systems operate can make it difficult—if not impossible—to make meaningful determinations about the objects detected.

One example includes objects that are being actively tracked while they are filmed. By its design, a targeting system can move its camera to keep an object near the center of the frame, making the subject’s apparent movement approach zero, even if it is traveling rapidly through the environment. The resulting imagery can create the illusion of a stationary object and becomes unhelpful without access to additional information about the object’s movement.

GOFAST: A Case Study in Transparency?

Another example where the appearance of an object’s movement on video can differ significantly from its actual speed appears in the well-known Navy “GOFAST” video. Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu note that this footage was once widely interpreted as evidence of an object moving at extraordinary speed near the ocean surface. However, subsequent analysis using available telemetry showed that much of its apparent motion resulted from parallax generated by the observing aircraft, with its calculated motion ultimately being consistent with wind-borne drift—in other words, the object was most likely a balloon.

The important difference between the GOFAST video and those included in recent PURSUE releases, the researchers note, comes down to the amount of additional information that was available.

“In the GOFAST case, sufficient information was available to constrain the object’s motion relative to the observer and assess it in relation to reported wind conditions,” Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu write in their recent study. Notably, following its initial unauthorized release in 2017 along with two other historical U.S. Navy videos of alleged UAP, the Pentagon eventually determined that GOFAST did not reveal any sensitive information that compromised U.S. national security.

“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena,” an April 2020 Pentagon statement read. Seemingly, this case would appear to demonstrate that in at least some cases, enough additional information could remain unredacted in future UAP video releases to allow similar technical determinations to be made.

DOW-UAP-PR113: Anomalous Appearance, but Limited Information

Another example Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra look at in their paper involves a video in the recent PURSUE releases designated DOW-UAP-PR113, which features an infrared video reportedly recorded over the western United States in 1996.

The footage depicts what appears to be a compact dark object (or possibly two moving in very close proximity) rapidly crossing the camera’s field of view. Based on Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra’s measurements, the object travels approximately 142 pixels per frame, equivalent to roughly 2.2 frame widths per second, and remains directly visible for only about one-tenth of a second.

One thing that makes the video unique among the PURSUE releases is the presence of markings in the imagery, which the researchers say allows them at least a limited ability to reconstruct an approximate angular scale and horizontal field of view. However, like in other cases, too little information is present to be able to make a complete determination about the object’s motion and capabilities.

For Kopparapu, circumstances like these demonstrate why he advises against drawing conclusions based on what can often appear to be remarkable speed or other capabilities in the PURSUE videos, yet without ruling them out necessarily as being mundane.

“With such limited data, I would urge people to avoid both extraordinary conclusions and outright dismissal,” Kopparapu told The Debrief. “Something can look extremely anomalous when we are seeing only a small part of the information needed to understand it.”

What the PURSUE Videos Can—and Cannot—Tell Scientists

Fundamentally, Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu believe that the videos currently made available under the PURSUE initiative cannot demonstrate—nor can they necessarily be used to exclude—the presence of anomalous kinematics displayed by the alleged UAP they contain.

This issue extends beyond just the PURSUE releases, however, since similar limitations can arise even with imagery captured by conventional cameras, whose technical capabilities are easily discernible. For instance, a single camera primarily measures angles, meaning some aspects of an object’s three-dimensional motion simply cannot be reconstructed based on that imagery alone.

To overcome such problems, Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu point to the use of multi-sensor approaches by independent research efforts.

In terms of what kinds of scientific observations might constitute a “genuine” UAP in future detections, Haqq-Misra says he and his colleagues with the UAP Science Advisory Council are already providing recommendations for the kinds of sensor platforms that could be leveraged to capture better UAP imagery and other data in the future.

“We have already provided recommendations for sensors that could be deployed to collect better quality data for understanding these objects,” Haqq-Misra told The Debrief. “An ideal observatory would be a multi-modal and multi-site observatory, leveraging video observations from infrared to visible and including other modalities such as radio, radar, and audio data collection.”

“The Galileo Project at Harvard is an example of a privately funded effort following this experimental design,” he adds.

Overall, the researchers say that while based on their analysis “the PURSUE sensor videos in their present form cannot fully resolve unidentified cases or conclusively indicate anomalous velocities,” the new research presents a meaningful early step toward identifying future strategies that may help researchers obtain better, more useful data.

“Reality takes time,” Kopparapu told The Debrief, “but fallacy does not.”

“Careful scientific investigation, accompanied by access to the underlying data, is the only reliable way to make progress on these cases,” he adds.

Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra’s recent paper, “Limits on Velocity Recovery from the PURSUE Sensor Videos,” appeared on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.