The Chinese military is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to monitor unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Recent years have seen an overwhelming number of UFO sightings reported by both military personnel and civilians in China, overwhelming human analysts, as per Chen Li of the Air Force Early Warning Academy, cited by the South China Morning Post.
Chen highlighted in a 2019 report to scientists in Beijing the significant challenges these frequent unexplained aerial occurrences pose to the nation’s air defense security. He pointed out that the organization is increasingly depending on artificial intelligence due to its ability to “think outside the box,” enabling the correlation of data across different times and locations in ways that surpass human cognitive abilities, as reported.
The People’s Liberation Army in China gathers extensive raw data from various sources including military radar, air force pilots, police stations, and observatories. This data is then processed by regional military units before being forwarded to a national database for analysis, looking at aspects like behavior, design, materials, radioactivity, among others.
AI systems are employed to cross-reference this data against factors such as the timing of political or military events, weather satellite data, or natural occurrences to better assess the potential origins of these unidentified objects.
The sole official confirmation of a UFO sighting by China occurred in 1998, when two military jets encountered a low-flying object resembling a “short-legged mushroom” with two beams of light emanating from its center, which sped away to exceed 20,000 meters before vanishing mysteriously.
While China probes the possibility of extraterrestrial vehicles, the United States is also preparing a report on its investigation of peculiar objects observed by Navy pilots.
NASA’s chief administrator, Bill Nelson, has mentioned that the agency is examining videos released by the US Department of Defense, showcasing pilots tracking a swiftly moving object across the sea.
“I have talked to those Navy pilots, and they are sure that they saw something real. And of course, we’ve seen their video from their jets. What is it? We don’t know”, Mr Nelson said. “So now that I’m here at Nasa, I’ve turned to our scientists and I’ve said: ‘Would you, looking at it from a scientific standpoint, see if you can determine, so that we can have a better idea?’ “We don’t know if it’s extra-terrestrial, we don’t know if it’s an enemy, we don’t know if it’s an optical phenomenon. We don’t think so, because of the characteristics that those Navy jet pilots described as they saw it move around”, Mr Nelson continued, adding: “The bottom line is we want to know, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”