The Pentagon and a Harvard astronomer — who is also an outspoken believer in the possibility alien probes have visited our solar system — have teamed up to call for a more rigorous approach to evaluating unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, sightings.

Yes, this is the new term for what we once called UFOs or flying saucers.

Harvard’s Avi Loeb and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) co-authored and shared a draft of a scientific paper still undergoing peer review. The paper attempts to use physics to rule out a number of UAP sightings that appear to be “highly maneuverable” objects.

In a nutshell, Loeb and Kirkpatrick find that if some of the UAP really were moving in the seemingly impossible directions and speeds that they appear to be, the friction involved should generate a visible fireball and a corresponding radio signature visible via radar.

“The lack of all these signatures could imply inaccurate distance measurements (and hence derived velocity) for single site sensors,” the paper concludes.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 12: Theoretical Physicist Avi Loeb speaks during the New Space Exploration Initiative "Breakthrough Starshot" Announcement at One World Observatory on April 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images) Getty Images

In other words, a number of UAP sightings might be able to be explained away by optical illusions or the limitations of certain equipment. Indeed, in Congressional hearings last year Defense officials demonstrated how night vision googles used with camera lenses could make an out-of-focus drone appear as a more intriguing blurry triangular object.

“As much as the reports from military personnel are intriguing and motivate my work right now, I want my instruments to tell me what is really happening,” Loeb told NBC News this week.

Loeb started the Galileo Project at Harvard, which aims to use systematic scientific methods to evaluate the hundreds of UAP observations that have recently come into the public dialogue.

But Loeb is arguably more of a believer than a debunker.

In his 2021 book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” he makes the argument that the first interstellar object detected in our solar system was likely an artificial probe of some sort sent by an extraterrestrial intelligence from elsewhere in the cosmos.

He’s also argued that some meteorites that have struck the Earth appear to be interstellar. The Galileo Project is mounting an effort to retrieve one such object from the sea floor in the near future.

In essence, Loeb believes two things can be true at the same time: that aliens are out there, but most of the weird things we see in our skies most of the time aren’t them.