It's frustrating.

Now, since Friday, we have the Pentagon's first preliminary public report on UFO sightings over the past few years.

And yet we are not that much smarter.

There are five categories of UFO or UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) sightings - basically known objects, atmospheric phenomena, American or foreign military technologies and "others", whereby the latter category would include the aliens not mentioned in the report, but publicly desired.

The classification of specific sightings in these five categories is difficult, however. "Limited data leave most UAP unexplained," says the beginning of the report. Something we all know by now: empirical science is only as good as the data it can work with. The Pentagon is on the problem. So, for the time being, you have to be patient and wait for better observations.

It is therefore a good thing that the astronomers Lisa Kaltenegger and Jackie Faherty published a new study in Nature almost at the same time, which could provide clues to clarification from other sources. On the basis of the Gaia star catalog, the two have determined which distant solar systems have had the chance over the past 5000 years to observe the earth as it passes in front of our sun from their point of view. In this way, potential distant observers could have discovered “us” quite easily using the transit method - that's how we do it with alien planets, too. From 1715, no further than 326 light-years distant star systems, potential aliens could have tracked down the traces of human civilizations,319 will be added in the next 5000 years - 194 of the 2034 stars are similar to our sun.

75 alien solar systems are so close that they could have already received radio waves from Earth, so that they should infer the existence of a technologically advanced civilization. Of course, we still do not know whether there is any chance of life anywhere there. Just as it shouldn't work physically to bridge the gigantic distances from there to us. But

if

aliens did visit us, then we should at least assume that they would probably come from one of these 1715 solar systems.