The underlying paper is really odd. It says nothing good about King's College London or the International Astronomical Union that they publish stuff like this.

The underlying paper is really odd. It says nothing good about King's College London or the International Astronomical Union that they publish stuff like this. The author Tony Milligan doesn't do any research, the paper is really just a blog post arguing that the solution to belief in aliens is ... <drumroll> ... for scientists to research the claims! The author even invents an acronym for his new idea: the Scientific Research Program (SRP). He then helpfully outlines that SRPs should be built on "robust argument structures", should use Ockham's Razor, should "avoid sensationalism" or anything "beyond the pale" and that whilst it's OK to feed "unhelpful background noise" at the start it should stop doing so later (??). That's the end of the paper. Weirdly, he also argues that as long as scientists believe any alien ships encountered are derelict or look natural, this is rational and doesn't "step outside the normal bounds of science" (last paragraph page 4). But believing that alien crews could survive or that an alien ship would look artificial presumably does. The obvious problem with this plan is that most claims of UFO visitations include a government coverup of the evidence, so there's not much available for scientists to research. When evidence does emerge it's usually better investigated by people with an engineering background like Mick West, who can work out explanations to do with camera mechanics and the like. The guy's bio is perhaps explanatory: "Current research, as part of the KCL (China) team and the University of Manchester (Russia) team within the Cosmological Visionaries project, takes in the ethical aspects of dialogue building between local scientists, indigenous peoples and national minorities in Russia and China in the face of climate change. The key theme uniting my broader areas of research is otherness and our shared future. This works its way into various publications on Space (other places), philosophy of love (other people), and animals (other creatures). Tony is also an Affiliate of the Lau China Institute." This "everything ideologically fascinating is connected to everything else" claim crops up all over the place in academia in recent years and always seems to yield low quality scholarship.