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We Should Talk About the UFO Story in the New York Times
Around these parts, I’m known as something of a skeptic. When it comes to various claims made by people with regard to supernatural phenomena, I am not shy about picking apart those claims with an especial eye towards a) providing plausible natural explanations for such occurrences, or b) ferreting out the human component of such claims when it comes to the desire to see those claims believed for a variety of all-too-human reasons.
But on Sunday, there was a front-page story at the New York Times which defied belief and the power of skepticism on a variety of fronts.
Guys, I found the alien…
It seems that back in 2007, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ordered (in partnership with the late Senators Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens) the Pentagon to set up a secret program called the “Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program” using black-budget money to study encounters with … Unidentified Flying Objects. Over the next five years, this program actually uncovered some stunning information, at the neat cost of $22 million.
My particular incredulity is tripartite. First, there is the curious case of Senator Harry Reid himself. Composed as he is of equal parts “corruption,” “disingenuousness,” and “spite,” Reid would never be mistaken for Mr. Congeniality in any beauty contest, so his motives for abusing this power in a near unilateral fashion ought to be obvious. Nonetheless, his ability to instigate such an expensive investigation outside of the prying eyes of taxpayer watchdog groups is hair-raising all on its own. Do I think that Reid was paying back political favors with taxpayer money? Who would dream of such a thing? This is my shocked face, by the way.
Second, is the fact that on the front page of the New York Times is a serious discussion of a subject which is normally relegated to the same laugh-out-loud status as “Bigfoot erotica” (h/t @jonahgoldberg).
Third, as if the previous two weren’t enough to wet your whistle for the weird, there’s the actual content of the story, which I have to admit is fairly captivating.
A brief discussion of the general parameters of skepticism is probably worthwhile before we dive headlong into this mess, however. Suffice to say that within the realm of the natural sciences, the statement “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence,” as coined by Carl Sagan, is the currency of the realm.
This fish is extinct
For instance, you’re free to say that you’ve discovered a species of fish previously thought extinct, but unless you have pictures of the critter or the body of this living fossil, nobody is under any obligation to take you seriously. Ditto, the various claims made by religious people and other sorts of encounters with the paranormal like the Loch Ness Monster. What laymen need to understand is that the skeptic’s attitude is nothing personal; it’s just business.
I’m feeling better!
So it is with the phenomena which generally fall into the category/cultural milieu known as UFOs. The reason why the established scientific and skeptical community look askance at the various tales told by people who claim to have been kidnapped and probed by aliens is not that the claims themselves are absurd (ok … they’re pretty weird) but that those who are claiming such experiences lack utterly any sort of corroborating evidence. There are no dead alien bodies, no crashed spacecraft, and no relics of their technology.
If the claims these people make about aliens are true, these visitors have remarkable civilizational hygiene. They never leave so much as a footprint behind, let alone a galactic spanner or space bolt. I mean, when you’re on the ship you can’t snatch an alien toothbrush or whatever? Combine all of this with the fact that 320 million Americans now carry around with them a super-computer which doubles as a camera and internet portal. You’d think somebody would manage to snap an up-close shot of one of these critters or their sweet ride. Yet despite this incredible proliferation of evidence-gathering technology both remain notoriously camera-shy.
This is why for many reasons, the evidence presented in the New York Times article is so compelling.
The situation is as follows: it seems that in 2004, a pair of F/A-18 Hornets were on a routine training mission over the Pacific near San Diego when their control tower ordered them to investigate a radar return they had noticed. The objects in question started out at 80,000′, before rapidly descending to about 20,000′ and disappearing. That’s not even the weird part.
Upon arriving at the location of the purported radar return, the pilots encountered what they described as an oblong, strangely glowing object that was hovering over the ocean above some manner of disturbance in the water. The object rapidly took up position behind the fighters before accelerating to a point some 60 miles from their current spot in about a minute before stopping again. The pilots even managed to get gun-camera footage of the object:
There are several fantastic elements to this story. First, you have the relatively unimpeachable credentials of the pilots who witnessed the phenomenon firsthand. Not only do the individuals in question have no apparent motive for making up such a tale (David Fravor is a retired Navy Commander with thousands of hours of flight time) but there is solid, photographic evidence documenting the encounter with an object which is clearly acting in a fashion outside of the normal understanding of aerodynamics. Then there’s the radar return data, documenting the object’s erratic, violent acceleration and incredible rates of speed.
It is literally true that these pilots encountered an “unidentified flying object.” Note that this term is not synonymous with “alien spacecraft” but the question then remains: what in the heck was it?
Several potential answers present themselves. Unfortunately, I find none of them to be especially comforting.
From my position as a skeptic and a naturalist, my first inclination is to attribute this encounter to a previously undocumented natural phenomenon. Perhaps the pilots were witnessing a release of methane hydrate from the ocean floor — a thing which has been known to occur in areas prone to seismic activity, whereby trapped methane gas is suddenly released from ocean floor sediments by the shaking of a tremor. The trouble with this theory is those pesky radar returns. A release of gas — even that of different density than air — probably wouldn’t be painted by air traffic radar. Also, methane gas is less dense than air and would have the tendency to rise in the atmosphere — not descend at supersonic speeds some five miles then stop on a dime. There’s also the issue of the gun camera footage itself. The weird, glowing halo around the object (which appears in the infrared to be hot) nonetheless seems to be surrounding something solid.
On this basis, we can probably rule out purely natural phenomena on the basis of how the object acted and the documentary evidence itself. That leaves us, almost by process of elimination with the logical requirement that this is some form of technology. The question then becomes: Whose technology is it?
This is also the truly disturbing part of the discussion. If this is technology, this craft demonstrated capabilities well beyond those which we currently possess in any unclassified program — and probably in the classified ones as well. If it is of a terrestrial nature, that means somebody on this planet possesses an aircraft capable of easily outrunning our fighters and in many cases, even our missiles. And they were screwing around with our jets just because they could.
A nation-state in possession of this technology would seem to have the capability of delivering payloads of almost anything to all of this country’s coastal cities (that includes things like “bombs”) in very short order, which makes it a serious contender for its claim as a national security threat worth examination.
If these pilots just happened to have stumbled across technology owned and operated by the United States of America, somebody also has a lot of explaining to do for obvious reasons: how could the development of something so radical and advanced have taken place without a whisper of its existence having leaked out over the past few decades? Even the most highly classified airplane in history — the SR-71 or Project “Oxcart” — only remained classified from the point of its inception in the late ’50s until 1964 when President Johnson himself publicly admitted to the plane’s existence. It had been sighted by commercial aircraft crews and other industry observers prior to that admission, as well.
This thing being American would be weird, but not impossible. Especially in comparison to the last and, in my opinion, least likely explanation: that the object these pilots encountered was a craft of extraterrestrial origin.
This is a point on which everybody in any position of importance is basically mum. Careers have likely been ruined by people claiming to have seen a UFO, and the social stigma of making such a claim is so strong that it is the last explanation most serious people are likely to point to when encountering some otherwise inexplicable phenomenon.
Nonetheless, history is dotted with such weird reports throughout the era of human flight. Take this report from Japan Airlines Flight 1628 in 1986. While en route from Paris to Japan, the 747 cargo jet was reportedly pursued and harassed by several objects displaying similar flight characteristics to those on display in the 2004 incident as it flew over Alaskan airspace. The pilot in question, Captain Tenju Terauchi, filed his report with the FAA and stuck to his story despite being grounded by JAL for having discussed the matter with the press.
Incidents like these also create a lot of awkward questions for those involved, along with some strangely perverse incentives. Think about it: Which Air Force General or Navy Admiral wants to be the one to go to Congress and tell elected officials (who allocate nearly a trillion dollars annually to Defense) that there are objects with practically indescribable flight characteristics which routinely violate our airspace … and we don’t know what they are or how to stop them? None. And so it’s been.
With that sort of incentive structure in place, the very people most likely to provide these sorts of reports also turn out to be the least likely to provide them given the potential consequences of such an admission.
What is certain is that the Times and other so-called mainstream news outlets experienced an outpouring of interest at their having committed a random act of journalism. Let us hope they’ll take that signal as evidence that more reporting into these sorts of secrets can be both enlightening to the public and productive.
Published in Journalism
You’re absolutely right Ryan. I don’t know enough to pass judgement on the collective evidence, but the video linked to by Majestyk in the article above is bogus.
Aliens are so picky.
The way these FLIR cameras work is that they lock onto an object and rotate to track the object, so there’s very little apparent motion from the camera’s perspective.
Also, there’s no lens flare in the IR spectrum as far as I know, as lens flare is an artefact of light in the visible spectrum getting scattered.
And sneaky. I’ve seen flying objects I couldn’t identify before, but if they were alien, it sure wasn’t obvious.
All right.
A couple of things first, about me.
I’m a bit of a skeptic, too. I want to see proof that you saw bigfoot. Or the loch ness monster, or whatever.
Even so, with as huge as the universe is, I find it highly unlikely that we are the only intelligent life in it. Now that of course doesn’t mean that aliens came and built the pyramids. It just means that I have an open mind to the idea of intelligent life outside this solar system. But…I still want proof.
Finally, keep in mind that I have a pretty good idea for aircraft recognition, owing to my military training and general interest in the subject.
I tell you that so you know I’m not given to sensationalism on the subject of UFOs and extra-terrestrial life. I think there is life out there, and when we do find it, I want to know that we found it. For 100% sure.
So here’s my story: I was outside my mother in law’s place late in the day one summer. I was having a fat cigar, as is my wont on a lazy summer afternoon. It was pretty late in the day, but not quite dusk. The sun was low in the west. My mother in law’s (God rest her soul) place sat right on the Puget Sound, just across the road from the water. Behind the house and to the south are a bunch of mature evergreen trees. I heard the UFO before I saw it. It made a low, throbbing noise. It seemed to come from the south east. After a few moments I saw the thing, flying low (as it seemed to me) over the trees. It was hard to get the sense of scale. It looked like three large barrels (or maybe jet engines?), all in row, but attached to each other. I watched it fly out over the water, and eventually it was too small for me to see. It seemed to fly fairly slow. And I found it odd that it had no visible means of lift. The things between the barrels could have been wings I guess. But I saw no elevators, no tail, no rudder. It did have at least one white flashing like, similar to most aircraft.
Now, what was it? I don’t know. I’ve googled it more than a few times over the years to see if anyone else has ever seen it. And while there a lot of bizarre looking aircraft, I’ve never seen what I saw that day. That doesn’t mean it was an alien spacecraft, of course. It just means it was an object, flying, which I failed to identify.
I found the explanation.
You’re thinking of chromatic aberration. Flare is an artifact of internal reflections and can occur at any wavelength if there’s high energy source away from the focal plane. That said, you’re correct that the halo around the UFO in the video isn’t lens flare. I’ve seen it many times through thermal sights when there’s a high contrast (temperature difference) between object and background. My experience is mostly ground vehicle engine compartments in snow, but it stands to reason that fast-moving aircraft at high altitudes would have the same effect and an even greater temperature differential.
I have to eat my words though. I thought the tracking in the video was too good to be real. My most recent experience with military targeting systems was in the mid ’90’s and they were not this good then. I looked at some other videos tonight though, and it turns out that they are this good now. As for 2004, I can’t say, but I’m no longer convinced it’s fake.
I’m pretty sure we’re the only current intelligent life of any merit in this galaxy, which is all that really matters in terms of contact. I’d be more than happy to be wrong about this.
One man’s opinion: The odds of more than one form of intelligent life developing in a galaxy, while existing and at a level of technology where they both can interact with another intelligent species simultaneously are so high that they are indistinguishable from only one form of intelligent life existing in a galaxy at any given time.
Now there are over 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, so if this premise is accepted then the universe is teeming with intelligent life and that we will never, ever encounter any of it.
The one pilot said there were a lot of these objects and to “look at your SA” – The Hornet has Synthetic Aperture Radar — do any of our flyboys know if that is what is meant by SA?
SA would probably be on a different display than this tracked view in the video. The SA feed might be highly classified and they aren’t about to let that “evidence” out even if they wanted to.
Where are our military pilots when we need them?
My theory is a man-made remotely generated aurora/cloud of plasma created using high frequency RF generation like the HAARP array in Alaska . Clouds of atmospheric plasma are highly reflective to radar signals because they are conductive, they also glow in the IR as the internal temperatures are extremely high. The reason why the plasma could be generated so far away from the transmitter and apparently move very fast is due to reflections from the ionosphere that steer and focus the RF energy at different altitudes and positions as the ionosphere undergoes natural fluctuations. (Think about how short wave radios can sometimes reach the other side of the world through ionospheric reflections.) This also might be why the pilots observed a number of them moving as if in formation.
SA would likely stand for Synthetic Aperture Radar, which allows imaging in the radar domain. The image resolution can be quite good 6″ at distances of several km, but if my theory is right you would see a plasma cloud on IR, SAR, and visually at night just like one can see aurora.
We should talk about Graham Hancock’s book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (which I highly recommend) wherein his investigation into the paranormal might be pertinent here. He shows how the folk stories about fairies and the aliens come together:
When I was in 4th grade in 1960 I first read of grays and blues and the magazines I read them in were creepy and enthralling. A friend of mine’s dad had a stash of these magazines.
Final thing to mention: my wife’s grandmother was from northern Scotland (around Inverness) and her family and culture often threatened children with leaving them outside for the fairies to come and get them.
So, what you are saying is that we are being played with like I do with my cat using my laser pointer? Do I have this right?
Basically. It might even just be an unintentional natural reflection of some crazy Russian or Chinese radar experiment rather the purposefully confounding.
There are two pertinent variables about alien life, if it exists: What they are like, and what they can do. Perhaps they aren’t interested in exploring. Perhaps they are keen on exploring and have the means to do so, but prefer to observe. It seems unwise to make any presumptions about their intentions or capabilities.
Maybe they’re smart enough to not advertise their presence. We, on the other hand, give them diagrams of what we look like and DNA sequences so they can analyse whether we’ll be delicious.
Well hear me out Lileks.
Consider Earth, the only lab experiment which we can observe. So out of all the amazing countless ways species can evolve for survival one, only one went with grasping tools and building. Just one, made swords and radios and airplanes. The porcupine did not find that a necessary precursor to survive, nor did the cheetah or countless others.
So what are the odds on a galaxy-wide scale? Looking at it plainly from this point of view, they seem not so great to me. One per galaxy, at best.
Whoa Nellie. What’s this quote from the NYT article ?
“Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Buildings in Las Vegas modified for storage of metal alloys and other materials? Recovered from? What??!?!?!
Recovered metal alloys aren’t ball lightning or lens flares. Talk about burying the lede …. possible alien artifacts stored in a ‘modified’ building in Las Vegas!!!???!!!??? I want addresses. Pictures. Analysis reports. What kinds of modifications to which buildings? Who’s seen these things?
Enquiring minds want to know!
Are we talking an underground parking garage modified into a lead lined storage bunker? Are we talking a luxury condo modified with a wine cellar and hot tub? Two entirely different things.
Other thoughts …. compare and contrast these photos of the Northrop Grumman X-47 (unmanned aerial combat vehicle designed for naval carrier operations) with the image in the video…
Certainly an unmanned craft would be capable of maneuvers a piloted vehicle couldn’t withstand.
Sure. Not having a biological pilot means that the vehicle can perform high-g maneuvers.
I don’t think there’s an undocumented hovering ability on these units or that they have supersonic capability either.
Yeah… This was even more weird. If I recall, the people who came into contact with the materials had to be evaluated for “psychological changes”?
Peculiar stuff.
You sound like a knowledgeable fellow, so we can talk technical for a second.
In this case, the detector is looking at a relatively narrow band of wavelengths in the infrared spectrum. As a result, an object shining very brightly in IR might saturate the detector which, when translated to false-color or grayscale images would appear like flare or a just as a white blob. That isn’t really what we’re looking at, though.
Obviously, there’s enough contrast for the FLIR to pick up subtle gradations of temperature and the fact that it’s emitting heat in an unusual fashion, yet without the normal plumes of heat you’d expect from a jet exhaust.
Deadspin had an amusing reaction to the alloys bit. Apparently R> won’t let me share it… I can PM it to people if need be.
Warning: non-CoC language.
It is interesting to note that the authors of this piece aren’t alums of the Weekly World News. They’ve won Pulitzer prizes for their work. I’m not saying this makes them utterly unimpeachable, but at the same time, one would presume that these people are fairly hard-bitten and considering the subject, wanting to ensure that the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.
I find this subject utterly fascinating, always have. Brings up some uncomfortable questions when you consider the Bible, if an alien craft landed on the south lawn of the White House this morning, what level of chaos might ensue?
Huh, this question is worthy of a member feed post.
The X47 has been deployed already. Maybe there is an upgrade in the works?
There is a simple, rational explanation for this particular UFO phenomenon: It’s just lingering reactions from the Philadelphia Experiment, plus a weather balloon.
Did you know that the ship – the Eldridge – still exists? Last I recall it had been sold off and was still in service with the Greek(?) navy.
They didn’t even so much as sign your yearbook?
No no no. There are WAY more variables than that. Such as “what can they do to us.” If an alien space ship is flapping around in our atmosphere, the aliens who built it are so far beyond us technologically that we will look (at best) like aborigines looked to the Europeans…which didn’t work out so well for the aborigines. Or even like naked mole rats. We should hope that nothing about Earth or us interests them in the slightest, lest we all end up in their labs being shot full of viruses or having mascara wands poked into our eyes.