UFOs Are Now Officially Real--But What, Exactly, Are They ?

For decades, the US government has dismissed reports of Unidentified Flying Objects, known more familiarly as “flying saucers.”  Pilots learned that, reporting what they saw, could end their careers.  Their very sanity could be called into question.

 

That policy actually created a threat to national security.  Military pilots who were intimidated from reporting what they thought were extraordinary airborne objects, could just as easily have been discouraged from reporting actual enemy threats from communist or terrorist nations. 

 

With the advent of advanced radar and optics, and with millions of people carrying video-capable cell phones, the danger to national security has given way to the far lesser danger of embarrassment to the government.  It may be only a matter of time before coordinated sightings by radar, pilots, and civilian witnesses on the ground, become so widespread that official denials will be seen as ludicrous.

 

Moreover, when the government tells thousands of its citizens that, “You did not see what you saw,” the trust in government will erode dangerously.

 

Now that we have admitted that there is a problem—the first step toward solving it—there arises the question, just what the heck is it that so many of our friends are seeing?

 

The first answer that pops into the minds of many people is—space aliens, intelligent life from technologically advanced planets far, far away.

 

While this answer is not entirely implausible, there are very good reasons to doubt it.  I call this answer the “Superman” theory.  “Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane,” it’s an intelligently piloted spacecraft.

 

Birds and planes are so familiar to us that when we see strange objects in the sky, we tend to classify those objects as something within our experience:  birds, planes, stars, meteors, perhaps even “swamp gas.”  Flying saucers may not be in our actual daily experience, but most people have some concept of what they might be.  If you ask them, they will likely answer, “manned” space vehicles.

 

More recently, drones are becoming ubiquitous.  Because of them, we now can add to our list of possibilities as to what UFOs are.  If they are unmanned drones, then we must ask, are they coming from Iran, or from other planets?

 

Astronomers and other scientists have, for years now, been searching for signs of technological civilizations on other planets.  The discovery that exo-planets are a common feature of the galaxy makes that search seem worthwhile.  So far, however, the search has been fruitless.  We have made the same mistake:  to expect the unknown to conform to our experience of the known.  Because our technology broadcasts (unintentionally) radio waves into space, we somehow expect that alien technologies will do the same.  If so, we should detect their transmissions.  Why haven’t we?  It is because, they might transmit, for three or four hundred years, but that is a tiny slice of time, compared to the estimated age of the galaxy.  We are not finding such signals.  We may never.   Any advanced aliens out there have likely moved far beyond that stage.

 

Experiments in our own laboratories suggest that emerging technologies may soon render electro-magnetic spectrum communications inefficient and obsolete.  Such topics as quantum entanglement are at present considered “far-out” physics, but they are in fact, based in solid science.

 

Even putting all that aside, there is one glaring inconsistency in most UFO sighting reports:  we can see them.  That should not be possible.  If the space aliens possess technology so advanced that they can cross trillions of miles of interstellar space, with all its hazards, then surely, they possess stealth technology that can make them invisible to all our detection methods.  Even here on earth, we are capable of amazing stealth, not only in radar, but even in the visible light spectrum.

 

The inconsistency is that UFOs behave as if they wish to avoid detection, and yet at the same time, they seem clumsy in those efforts.  We see them.  They “run away.”  None of that makes sense.

 

Finally, there is the question:  if there are space aliens in our atmosphere, are they hostile?  If they are, then we are helpless against them.  Science fiction movies glamorize heroic battles to defeat the aliens, but we cannot even defend the planet against a potential swarm of giant meteors.  Any advanced aliens could easily redirect a few thousand asteroids to crash into our planet with devastating effect, while keeping themselves at a safe distance. 

 

By the way, what would the space aliens want from us?  Surely, they can synthesize anything they could wish for, and do so from the most common element in the universe:  hydrogen.  Who knows what they could manufacture from dark matter, the unknown material that comprises 80 percent of the matter in the universe?  Who knows, they might even have four-D-printers!

 

After all that, we must ask, what are the UFOs, and why are they here?  The bottom-line answer:  they are something we cannot begin to imagine.  Their reasons, if any, are hopelessly inscrutable.

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Why CAN we detect UFOs?

UFOs try to hide, but they're not very good at it. If they are the products of a highly advanced technological civilization, their efforts to hide should be foolproof. But they do get seen, detected on radar, and even photographed. So--- what gives?

One set of possibilities that rarely gets considered is that UFOs may be leftovers from extinct civilizations. They may even be experiments gone awry from surviving exo-civilizations. Or they may be automated machines that have somehow gone rogue, either through defects, damage, or unforeseen consequences of their built-in artificial intelligence features.

If anything like this is the case, then it becomes easier to explain why UFOs seem to behave irrationally. Simply put, the UFOs that we do see are indeed irrational. They are programmed to avoid detection, to avoid capture, to avoid crashing, but otherwise, they sometimes act in ways that cannot be explained in logical terms.

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Another possible explanation for some "alien encounters" is that the
supposed space aliens are experimental half-human half-animal
hybrids from secret laboratories on earth.  This is perhaps the
last and final frontier of "forbidden science."

Going back at least as far as the 1920s, suggestions were made that such
half-human creatures could combine the basic intelligence of humans with
the strength and obedience characteristics of certain animals, most notably apes.

In the 1930s, succesful experiments proved that under certain conditions,
human egg/sperm could be combined with animal egg/sperm in a test tube,
and made to grow to a certain extent.

When news of this leaked out, there was a public outcry, including from the
Pope.  The experiments were supposedly halted, but in all likelihood, continued in secret.

One hypothesis is that some form of anti-gravity or artificial-inertia has been
developed that can endow aircraft with extraordinary flight and maneuver
capabilities--- but that the force field produced by such propulsion is fatal after
only a few hours of exposure to it.

Enter the expendable half-human, which has no legal protections.

Such creatures could be intelligent enough to be trained to fly and maneuver
over simple courses.  But between their own limitations, and the limitations of
experimental aircraft, the occasional mishap is to be expected, accounting
for some of the sightings and crashes.

With the recent developments of drones and computerized artificial
intelligence, the need for these "biological" pilots will rapidly decrease,
except in the case of bio-computers which use brain tissue to form processors.

All of this is, of course, pure speculation.

Please excuse me now, there is a knock at my door.
My oh my, why are both those men at the door dressed in black suits?
Hey! Where are you taking me? Let go! AAAAAHHHH!!!!

---Robert
from an undisclosed location

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Are UFOs Using Laws of Nature We Don't Know About?

 

It is unlikely that human scientists have discovered every fundamental law of nature.  Maybe scientists elsewhere in the galaxy are using laws of nature we do not know about.  If the universe is populated by exo-civilizations with advanced science, it is likely that many of them are very ancient.  If so, they have a very large head start on us.  Given the exponential increase in scientific advance, even a hundred year head start could be vastly enormous.

 

The reason for mentioning this is something called, the Fermi Paradox.  Enrico Fermi, the vaunted nuclear physicist, is said to have once asked—concerning exo-civilizations—where is everybody? He pointed to calculations that showed that, even without faster-than-light travel, planet earth should by now have been visited by at least one, and possibly many, of the supposed exo-civilizations that populate the galaxy.  One way or another, we should by now be overrun by them.

 

Various solutions to the Fermi paradox are proposed.  One of them is that we are the one and only technologically advanced civilization in the galaxy.  Another is that civilizations, once they reach a “bottleneck” stage of technology, self-destruct.

 

A more interesting proposal is that technological civilizations eventually advance beyond a singularity of development.  In that stage, they utilize laws of nature that enable them to transcend the known limitations of physics.  Some variations on this theme propose that alien civilizations no longer need physical bodies as we know them, but rather, can take on forms that we might consider to be unknown forms of energy.

 

Such creatures might not need space-ships to travel vast distances.  Or, if they do, these ships might have propulsion systems that incorporate something like quantum entanglement, which suggests the possibility of instantaneous travel across the universe.  Such space-ships would not be constrained by the laws of nature which we know about, and could perform in ways that we consider impossible.

 

Psychic means of communication and travel would enable such creatures to explore the universe without physically leaving home.

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US Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs

US Navy:  UFOs are Worthy of Respectful Study

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/us_navy_drafting_new_guidelines_for_reporting_ufos.html

These days, few educated people are dismissive of the idea that, elsewhere in the galaxy, there may be advanced technological civilizations capable of space travel.  We have no actual evidence for believing that there are, but the notion seems eminently plausible nonetheless.

When the United States Navy and Air Force affirm that eye witness reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) can no longer be ignored, it is worthwhile for the rest of us to take notice.  For decades, pilots both civilian and military, have been aware that, pilots who reported having seen UFOs, were often labeled as mentally unstable.  For a professional pilot, such a label can end one’s career.  Therefore, when pilots saw unknown aircraft performing maneuvers of which no known aircraft are capable, they often made no report of the sighting.

Now, the cat is out of the bag.  The reports are being officially acknowledged as worthy of respectful investigation.  The downside to this is that, the “I told you so” enthusiasts will predictably come to the fore, vying with each other to produce the most spectacular accounts; little green men will become fashionable once again.  At the other extreme, skeptics will struggle to find a “normal” explanation for the abnormal sightings, such as optical illusions, or even hoaxes. 

Is there a middle ground?

The temptation is to speculate that some of the sightings are those of space-craft from faraway planets.  Even Oumuamua, the asteroid that streaked through our solar system from another star system, was closely evaluated by astronomers for any indication that it was intelligently manufactured or directed.

Throughout history, mysteries of the unknown were explained in terms of the known (or believed).  In the 1800s, UFOs were reported to be flying ships, ships of the wooden sailing vessel variety.  In medieval times, there were reports of witches flying on brooms.  In modern times, supposed alien spaceships are assumed to be piloted by alien pilots, because our own aircraft are manned by pilots.

The reality, if and when it becomes known, may turn out to be something entirely different from what our experience leads us to extrapolate.

For the Navy and Air Force, there is no practical concern that the UFOs might be extraterrestrial space craft.  Even if they are, our technology would be utterly incapable of dealing with them, despite science fiction movies to the contrary.  The actual concern of the government is that our earthly adversaries, can we call them enemies, might be developing advanced technology that poses an existential threat to our nation.

This fear is not entirely without precedent.  During World War 2, the Nazis developed the V-2 rocket, against which there was no defense.  Had the war continued a few more years, such rockets could conceivably have reached the United States.

I do not lay awake at night worrying that Russia or China has made a spectacular, secret break-through in physics, but neither can we ignore the likelihood that they are doing their best to do so, and to weaponize it.

Our best path forward is to study the aerial phenomena that we observe, to explore all avenues of conjecture, even the seemingly silly ones, and to apply discipline and rigor to draw useful conclusions.

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Why Aren't There More Earth-Like Planets ?

According to some theories, the galaxy should be overrun by technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.  The fact that no evidence of this has been found, is often referred to as the Fermi Paradox, which famously asks, "Where is everybody?"

In my view, this paradox is intensified by the fact that so far, very few earth-like planets have been discovered by astronomers, and even these seem to be very poor candidates for life.  They are unlikely to contain technological civilizations.

It is not surprising that few earth-like planets would have formed by natural means--however, if there were alien civilizations, even a very few of them, they likely would have been able to modify the planets they found, so as to make them suitable for life.

This theoretical process is called, "terraforming," the altering of a planet so as to make it possess an atmosphere, water, and regulated temperatures, among other features of planet earth.  Such planets would be expected to have stable orbits around stable stars.

Of course, if the aliens come from a planet unlike earth, and if they were capable of terraforming, they would be expected to prefer planets like their own.  They would transform planets to meet their own standards and needs.  If they did so, we would expect to see a class of planets that exist in large numbers, that closely resemble each other.

So far, this does not seem to be the case.  We do not even find a large number of planets that meet the needs of any technological civilization.

Perhaps the closest we have come to finding evidence of alien technology is to observe "Tabby's star,"  a star which might be surrounded by an encircling cosmic structure being built.  Reasonable conjectures have been made that the strange behavior of light from Tabby's star could be due to a project in process, a partially completed structure, designed to capture and use all the energy from the star.

Suppose that one or more stars became completely encircled by such hypothesized structures.  Would they appear to us as very large, red giant stars?

In any case, we must consider that alien techno-civilizations might be very different from what we expect.  Even if they began as we did, they might have followed a completely different path, especially once they made discoveries about the laws of nature that we cannot imagine, and applied them to technologies that not only far surpass our own, but are a different breed apart.

In our search for hypothesized alien civilizations, we should be searching not only for radio signals, but for "Tabby-like" stars, and planetary systems that seem to be customized.  If we do not find them, then we must consider two alternative theories:  either we are utterly alone, or else, the aliens are so far beyond us in advancement that we would not recognize them as such if we saw them.
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