There is a particular kind of week this subject produces, and last week was one of them. On 30 September a professor of global law published a short commentary asking whether it is lawful to shoot down an unidentified object. On 1 October a reporter claimed the President of the United States had already authorised exactly that over a New Mexico missile range, and the White House asked for a deadline to respond and then let it pass.
The two documents were written in complete ignorance of each other. Read together they are the whole problem in miniature: one side of the Atlantic working out what the rules are, the other side reportedly getting on with it.
The commentary is worth your time, and almost none of the coverage it received described what it says.
The man making the argument is not a blogger
This matters, because the field is thick with people whose only credential is confidence. Michael Bohlander holds the Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at Durham University, a post he reached after joining the law school as a full professor in 2004 and, before that, fourteen years as a life-tenured member of the German judiciary.
He is not a retired academic with a hobby. Since 2015 he has been International Co-Investigating Judge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the tribunal trying the surviving Khmer Rouge leadership, and from 2017 to 2022 he sat as an international judge at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. He has published north of 270 books, chapters and articles, most on criminal and comparative law and none about aliens.
Since 2020 that has changed. His 2023 monograph Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Law works through the applicability of the rules of war and human rights law to a contact scenario, and he convened a symposium at Durham Law School in April 2025 — “Grounding the SETI and UAP Debate” — that produced a declaration on research standards in the field.
So when he publishes on whether you may fire on an unidentified object, he is doing the thing he is paid to do. His commentary, “Should we Shoot Down UFOs?”, went up on the Global Policy Journal blog on 30 September.
What he actually argued
The spine of it is unglamorous, which is why it got mangled. Bohlander does not start from aliens. He starts from the existing body of law governing civil and military aircraft, and asks what those rules imply when the object in your airspace cannot be classified as either.
His conclusion is a default rather than a prohibition. In the absence of evidence of hostile intent, he argues, an unidentified object should be treated as non-aggressive, and where its nature and intentions cannot be established the default should be protection rather than destruction. The legal basis for attacking such an object, on his reading, is hard to establish — not impossible, hard.
That is a lawyer’s answer, and a narrower claim than it sounds. It does not say you may never fire. It says the burden sits with whoever wants to, and that “we didn’t know what it was” is an argument for restraint rather than a licence.
The passage the headlines ran with
There is a second strand, and it is the one that travelled. Bohlander raises the possibility that a sufficiently advanced object might not absorb an attack politely. In the lines the coverage quoted, he notes there is “no guarantee” UAP would remain restrained if attacked, that some “may carry weapon systems equally advanced as their overall technology”, and asks whether humanity should be testing that without good reason and a “colourable case” that we would come out on top.
Within a day this had become Shooting Down UFOs Could Risk Conflict With Extraterrestrials and, elsewhere, an unwinnable interstellar war. You can see how the trip was made. It is still a misrepresentation, because the retaliation point is conditional reasoning inside an argument whose load-bearing section is about aviation law, and because Bohlander is explicit that he is not claiming extraterrestrial craft have been shown to exist.
He has been here before. In April this year he wrote to the Guardian complaining about exactly this — superficial and biased reporting of SETI and UAP research — and pointed to peer-reviewed publication in generalist journals as evidence the field is no longer fringe. Six months later a commentary of his was converted into a tabloid war scare. There is a dry lesson in that about which half of the problem is the harder one to fix.
The useful part needs no aliens at all
Here is why the piece is worth taking seriously even if you think the non-human hypothesis is nonsense.
International aviation law already contains an unusually flat rule on this. Article 3 bis of the Chicago Convention, bolted on in 1984 after the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, obliges states to refrain from using weapons against civil aircraft in flight, and requires that any interception not endanger the lives of those aboard. The permitted move is to compel a landing, not to destroy.
The question Bohlander is really pressing is a classification question. Article 3 bis protects civil aircraft. An unidentified object is, by definition, not yet established as anything. If you fire on it before you have classified it, you have not established that the protection doesn’t apply — you have simply declined to find out, with a missile.
If you cannot say what it is, you cannot say the rule protecting it doesn’t cover it.
That argument stands whether the thing turns out to be a Chinese surveillance platform, a hobbyist’s party balloon, or something nobody has a word for. It is the opposite of a story about aliens.
The last time America shot at things it could not identify
We are not speculating about how this goes, because it has already been run as an experiment. In the eleven days after the Chinese surveillance balloon was downed off South Carolina in February 2023, US and Canadian fighters shot down three more objects over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron. The Yukon engagement was the first time in NORAD’s then 64-year history that the command had destroyed an aerial object.
The Lake Huron shot is the one worth remembering. An F-16C of the Minnesota Air National Guard fired an AIM-9X Sidewinder at an octagonal object with strings hanging off it, cruising at around 20,000 feet. The missile missed and went into the lake. The second one worked. Flyaway cost for that type of round runs to roughly $450,000 apiece, so the United States spent close to a million dollars on an object it then could not recover, identify or explain.
Four days after that, President Biden told the country the three objects were not part of the Chinese programme and were most likely tied to benign purposes — commercial or research balloons. Nobody has ever produced the wreckage to settle it.
This is Bohlander’s point arriving from the practical direction. The shootdowns did not resolve a single one of the three objects. They destroyed the evidence that would have.
Loeb gets to the same place from a different door
Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who chairs the White House’s UAP Science Advisory Council, published his own take on the question — “To Shoot or Not to Shoot a UAP” — and lands close to Bohlander without the legal apparatus.
Loeb’s position is a split one. If the orbs are Chinese drones over American territory, shoot them down. If they are someone else’s technology, be careful, for ethical and straightforwardly self-interested reasons. Either way his recommended first move is passive: work out intent and capability by collecting data, which is the one thing a Sidewinder cannot do.
An international judge reasoning from the Chicago Convention and an astrophysicist reasoning from instrument design both arrive at identify it first. That convergence is more interesting than either argument alone.
Where we think the argument is weakest
Two objections, and the first is serious.
The premise does a lot of unacknowledged work. A framework built around the risk of provoking a technologically superior actor requires that such an actor be on the table, and the official record does not put it there. NASA’s independent study found no evidence that UAP are extraterrestrial, and AARO has consistently said the same. Reason carefully from an unevidenced premise and you still have an unevidenced conclusion, however good the reasoning. Bohlander’s own caveat concedes this; his argument is a contingency plan, not a finding, and it should be read as one.
Second, there is a cost to a presumption of protection that the commentary rather glides over. The live problem over American installations is not a mystery craft, it is cheap drones, and in that context “default to protection” is a policy with casualties. Our own reporting on the authority gap over American air bases describes a system already so tangled about who may act that hundreds of incursions a year go unattributed. A new legal presumption against engagement, applied without care, makes a bad situation worse rather than better.
The resolution is the one Germany demonstrated. When an explosive drone failed to detonate at Leipzig/Halle, investigators got an airframe, a forensic trail and a named suspect within days — the attribution chain the American file never gets. Attribution is a physical process, and it needs the object intact. That is an argument for not shooting which has nothing to do with retaliation and everything to do with wanting an answer.
The UAP Times take
The commentary is real, the author is a credentialed international judge publishing in his own field, and the primary document is online under his name — so this earns a Credible rating, four out of five on our scale. We are rating the existence and seriousness of the legal argument, not the premise it reasons from. Nothing here is evidence that anything non-human is flying anywhere.
What survives the hype is the part nobody clipped. You cannot shoot your way to an identification, and firing on an object you have not classified forfeits the protection the law might have extended to it, destroys the only evidence that would have answered the question, and on the 2023 record costs about half a million dollars a go for the privilege of not knowing.
The useful version of Bohlander’s argument needs no aliens in it at all. Which, given what the headlines did to him, is probably the version he wishes had run.
Further reading: the claim that the President authorised shooting at orbs over White Sands and why it isn’t anybody’s job to find out what’s flying over America’s air bases.
Source: Michael Bohlander, 'Should we Shoot Down UFOs?', Global Policy Journal, 30 September 2026
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