How scientists use math to help explain UFO videos

When NASA asked Boston University space physicist Joshua Semeter to help them understand unexplained UFOs, now called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), he didn’t hesitate to answer the call.

“I was very excited to be able to, perhaps, have access to some data that was really interesting and really challenging to interpret,” he said “And we did encounter that in our work, this extraordinary kind of data.”

Semeter was part of an independent 16-person panel NASA convened in 2022 to study data related to UAPs. That same year, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), whose mission is to, in part, collect and analyze data from UAP videos around national security areas.

PBS News' Casey Kuhn spoke to Semeter about how he used math to explain why one widely-seen UAP video called "GO FAST" was an optical illusion.

“The type of math we apply is not graduate school level math, but it's also probably a little beyond high school math,” Semeter said, explaining the process he took when looking at the “GO FAST” video.

Semeter took a look at the data displayed in the video that the military jet captured along with the mysterious object. By taking those numbers and putting them into a trigonometric equation, he came up with an answer to show why the object looked like it was moving so fast.

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