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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
I think you are both wrong. And that’s just because I want it to be so. I also happen to be an evangelical Christian, and I cannot believe God created all of this just for us to look at.
You are forgetting about the Monolith.
One question to ask is: why did the DoD release this footage?
Answer: I don’t know.
I also know that sometimes the left hand knows not what the right does. And sometimes is even unaware there is a right hand.
Nope. Swamp gas. Clearly swamp gas.
Several years ago I listened to an interview with an anthropologist who also studies these sorts of stories. This person noted some other interesting points:
The anthropologist concluded that people’s minds were just drawing on what they were already familiar with, and mapping it onto either unfamiliar phenomenon or their own hallucinations as a sort of mental gap filling.
I must admit this story intrigues me, perhaps because it is nearly the complete converse of the typical UFO sighting.
The evidence seems to specific, traceable, and broadly-sourced to be a complete fabrication. Yet I have a hard time believing this was an alien sighting, if for no other reason than the notion that the aliens were smart enough to hide from everyone except the Navy for two weeks strikes me as somewhat preposterous. So I’m leaning toward something man-made.
What doesn’t pass the sniff test is the apparent handling of this sighting by the Navy. If they really had repeated evidence from radars, infrared sensors, and multiple professional pilots about aircraft with unheard-of aerodynamic capabilities hanging out at the edge of their usual training area, they wouldn’t simply shrug their shoulders and hand the mystery off to a crackpot crony of a crackpot Senator.
No, they would put all of their available efforts into researching the matter in more depth. The fact that they obviously didn’t suggests that they may have a more trivial explanation or good reason to doubt the veracity of one or more of the sources, but didn’t reveal as much to the NYT for whatever nefarious or humorous reason.
I have no earthly idea what the object in the video could be – but that doesnt instantly make it unearthly. My personal theory that its a turbine powered drone of some type – possibly with multiple thrust channels – so that the vehicle could rapidly change direction simply by opening a new thrust channel. But thats a completely uneducated guess.
There are a few problems with alien visitation. While the universe is vast and should be teaming with life. The vastness of space maybe an insurmountable obstacle. Everything we know about the universe says we live in a relativistic universe – making faster than light travel impossible. Without faster than light travel, interstellar flights to even the closest stars would take decades – if not centuries – making the trip one way, for any creature with a reasonably limited lifespan. If we’re being visited by aliens from dozens or hundreds of light years away, this would mean that everything we fundamentally believe about the universe is wrong.
My other problems with the alien conspiracies is the behavior of the aliens. If they had crossed the galaxy to make contact with a civilization, why wouldnt they do that? You know land on the white house lawn – or at the UN and say “Hello” or “Surrender or Perish”. Landing in Armpit, Co to peg some locals, mutilate a few cattle, and disappear just doesnt make sense. Why do they care to conceal their existence and why limit their scientific study?
Also, to get back to Helicopters and test flights in the 1940s – I believe that the program would have been conducted at White Sands. Which was home to the Goddard research group until July 1941, when it got moved to Maryland. Also the helicopters where flying almost as quickly as air planes. In the early days they where called AutoGyros, they’ve been flying since the early 1920.
AutoGyro on Wikipedia
I really don’t know. I know something about optics in general, and I can comment on the halo effect from experience using IR sights, but I really don’t know about the detectors in IR systems like these.
If you don’t mind a little speculation, my assumption is that they’re photodetectors, similar to a consumer digital camera, but optimized for far infrared wavelengths. If that’s the case, and the halo is caused by the excitation of nearby photosites, then we should see a similar effect in visible light digital cameras. We don’t. However, photodetector sensitivity in consumer products is greatly compromised by relatively high thermal noise. So it’s possible this effect occurs in consumer cameras and we just don’t see it because it’s lost in the sensor’s noise floor. It’s common to lower the noise floor in applications where high sensitivity is needed, such as photo astronomy, by cooling the sensor. So if the phenomenon is caused by exciting nearby photosites, then perhaps some of our astronomy buffs have encountered it?
Please remember the absurdities with regard to relativity: the person making the trip doesn’t age at the same rate as people at home observing the takeoff. If the acceleration rate is high enough then the ship could travel at some large fraction of the speed of light and then (after decelerating) still be young enough to do some colonizing or exploring.
As an adolescent child I said something to my grandfather akin to, if X is true, then the book of Genesis is wrong, and God must not exist. I don’t recall what X was, but my grandfather’s response sticks with me. He said that God treats us as a caring parent treats a child. He tells us what we need to know in a way that we can understand. Like a parent explaining something to a child that tests the limits of the child’s understanding, what God tells us is true, even though it may be incomplete or less than 100% accurate.
It wasn’t a very satisfying answer to an arrogant, iconoclastic kid trying to make sense of the world (and fools of adults) with pure logic, but I had to concede the point.
I’m a physicist by trade and I really don’t have a good speculation as to what this thing is, based on the limited data provided by the imagery. How fast was it going?
RF: generation? Zeroth-order response is that the F-18 would have experienced a lot of RF interference. Also the rigid-body like rotation is problematic.
Swamp gas? Persistence, confinement, and rigid-body like behavior is problematic.
Conclusion: I don’t know – need to see more imagery and data.
Why speculate about imagery when there are alleged artifacts being stored in ‘modified buildings’ in Las Vegas. Let’s demand to see the stuff … whatever it is. If there is stuff – real physical things – I want to see ‘em.
Yes, but those you leave behind would age, any family or friends left behind would be gone by the time the crew returns. I have to believe that any society that develops this level of technology would be a highly co-operative society, with strong inter-personal bonds.
This is a topic that often upsets me about sci-fi, where there are high technology societies that also have slavery – like the Klingons. To my mind, slavery is antithetical to technology, a society that has slavery would barely have electric lights and running water – let alone interstellar travel.
Is time dilation linear? I am thinking that an early voyage that maybe averages 10 or 20% of the speed of light, would the time dilation be that pronounced to stop aging? I wouldnt think so.
Or one per planet that sustains life and has the same evolutionary pressures?
My impression from reading the NYT articles was that the artifacts in the warehouse in Vegas are not related to the specific case of the UFOs intercepted by the FA-18s off of California. It sounded like those artifacts were from more “run-of-the-mill” UFO sightings/crashes by civilians.
If I understood him correctly, @richardeaston made the point that even on GPS satellites they have to adjust for relativity just based on the speed that they are moving in order to get an accurate location.
Fine with me. I’ll take run of the mill. It sure beats the 100% speculation we have now. Let’s see whatever it is and whatever analysis there is.
Yes, I had known of this as well, but that’s because they’re measuring time in micro-seconds. I dont believe that time dilation during a spaceflight has ever been noticed or experienced by a human scenes.
Not necessarily. We can’t presume anything about their society or moral precepts, but if they’re smart enough to get here, they’re smart enough to recognize a society that is technologically advance – even if it’s way below their own capabilities. It would seem odd if they thought “look at these savage simpletons, using radio wavs to communicate with their interplanetary research vehicles.”
We’ve also never even approached 1% of the speed of light, let alone 10 or 20%. Light from the moon takes less than 2 seconds, Apollo took what, 3 days?
Crap, now I have to call myself out for being wrong again. The halo is a contrasting color from the object. If the phenomenon is as I speculated, photons from the high-intensity region would “bleed” into the adjacent low-intensity region making it appear of higher intensity than it really is. That’s not what’s happening in the video. The halo around the object represents a region of even lower intensity than the background. It seems like that could happen in a sensor with a shared substrate, like a CCD, but if this effect is caused by oversaturating the substrate then I can’t explain it. The worst grade of my college career was in solid-state physics. What little I learned is long forgotten. All I can say is that I have oversaturated small regions of a CCD in visible light cameras (badly overexposed images of LEDs against dark backgrounds) and have never noticed this.
Here’s a hypothesis that’s fanciful, but still fits the facts as well as any other: The object on the video looks like a balloon (to me, anyways). The video does not show the object moving very quickly, or making the “impossible” maneuvers that were reported by the radar crews. Therefore, perhaps it was a balloon carrying equipment that fakes radar information.
Balloons? That’s what the skeptics always say. ;-)
The first proof of time dilation effects was done with 2 synchronized atomic clocks. One was kept on the ground, one was put on an airplane and flown around for a few days. When the plane landed, the flown clock was measurably behind the ground clock (well, measurable by atomic clock standards anyway).
No you’re missing the point. We’re discussing time dilation as a feature of high velocity travel. So far humans have only experienced a few microseconds to milliseconds of it. Would a crew of a sub-light vessel traveling at a fair fraction experience enough time dilation to stop aging, or does the vessel have to travel at a high fraction of light speed, in order to stop aging?
Apollo flew at the speed and trajectory for safety reasons. Its called a ‘free return trajectory’ should something go wrong the spacecraft will return to earth. This is why most Mars missions use a 6 month trajectory to Mars – if something goes wrong and the spacecraft doesnt enter Mars orbit – the spacecraft will eventually return to earth. Those who advocate a 40 day trip to Mars are advocating an extremely reckless adventure. Because such a spacecraft that doesnt enter into Mars orbit at this velocity would end up eventually leaving the solar system.
Speaking of this fellow, @ejhill put me up to this…
Indeed!
And I think you’re missing mine (and also Skip’s); they have already experienced time dilation, just not enough to satisfy your requirement that they experience/notice it with their human senses. I don’t know if the effect is purely linear or perhaps logarithmic, but it starts immediately. It does not wait until you’ve reached a significant portion of the speed of light before the effect manifests.
Technically, they don’t stop aging. But time, for the hi velocity crew, runs more slowly than for the low velocity planet bound observers.