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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
Ok, I thought you where conflating time dilation with latency.
I was wondering – would someone who takes a “slow” interstellar flight at 10 – 20% of light speed, notice the time dilation effects on their own bodies?
I don’t have much physics, but e = mc squared has that squared term. C is measured in distanceper unit of Time. So you have a non linear time piece of that equation. Seems to imply that change in time as velocity changes is going to be non linear and increasing as v gets bigger. No?
Probably not in their bodies, but definitely on their wristwatches. Time dilation at 0.2c is about 2%. If the flight in question is 20 years, the crew would age about 5 months less than expected. But keep in mind that 0.2c is about 13 million MPH. So you have to be going crazy fast for a really long time for relativity to matter to human senses.
Occam’s Razor suggests the object is an X-47 or an improvement thereof.
Or something like it testing/deployed by the other services or agencies.
Once again, why was the imagery released by the DoD?
No, because we only perceive time within our own frame of reference. Even if you are moving at 0.9C, you will not notice anything at all different about yourself or your craft, or your wristwatch – they will all appear to be absolutely normal. Those observing you from a fixed (or much slower-moving perspective) would see you as not moving or aging at all because their time frame of reference is its own. This is all spelled out in both Special and General Relativity.
Incorrect, as I describe above. Even if you are going at 0.999c, you and your wristwatch would both appear totally normal to yourself.
time dilation factor = 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
So, yes, non-linear.
That’s true, but I don’t think it’s what OCDN was getting at. I think he was wondering if the difference would be great enough to notice the effects of time dilation, not if they would actually observe time dilation. That’s why I answered as I did. If there are clocks where they left, on-board, and where they arrive, they’ll notice, but the difference will be too small to notice by comparing yourself to somebody that was the same age as you when you left and is now 5 months older when you arrive. Contrast that with a 10 year trip (as percieved by the crew) at .99c. Somebody who was the same age as you when you left would now be 60 years older. That would be pretty noticeable.
I think the confusion here comes from the way the question was phrased: will they experience it with their bodies? If you’re traveling for 20 years, you will experience 20 years passing and your body will age 20 years. You won’t have any feelings that you just don’t seem to be aging fast enough, because for you it was 20 years. But when you get home your wife will have aged, say, 700 years, won’t be nearly as hot as she was when you left, and you will sure as hell experience it then.
Right, this is the point that I was originally making. The hypothetical aliens who visit earth, loose everyone they left behind in order to make the trip.
Unless they have hyperdrive. ;-)
Thats was also the point I was originally making – we live in a relativistic universe. Meaning that Faster than light travel is not possible. Meaning that even if an alien culture develops space travel, they’ll most likely stay in their own solar system.
Faster than light travel is not possible according to what we currently know. But we don’t know everything. 100 years ago, we didn’t know about relativity.
There’s a problem with your theory: if that were the case, the IR would be picking up heat from the jet exhaust. This thing is warm, but it isn’t using hot air to propel itself.
Also, the X-47 is designed to be as stealthy as possible – I imagine it has the same radar cross section as a hummingbird from most points of view – so why would it show up on shipboard radar as a 40′ long object? Why would it perform such radical maneuvers? Is it even rated for 80,000′?
At any rate, the FLIR system obviously got a recording of the object as it was being approached by the F/A-18s, but we don’t have the rest of the encounter video. According to what Commander says, the object sped away to their original rally point at incredible speed and displaying incredible acceleration. The radar tracks from the naval vessels would be interesting to get ahold of if that’s not classified.
Such as the five mass extinctions that had to wipe out the bulk of life on Earth multiple times before humanity arrived? That’s a lot of ecological niches that had to be cleared out so homo sapiens could compete. Perhaps that is a common feature on life bearing planets but it certainly seems an extraordinary amount of slaughter has to occur before intelligent life has its chance at bat.
If not for the random happenstance of an asteroid/comet paying Mexico a visit there is no reason the dinosaurs would not still be around instead of us.
The video is dated 2004 and the first flight of the X-47 occurred in 2011, so we’ve moved from space aliens to time traveling.
So, I’ve been thinking about this too.
When I was a kid back in the early 90’s I remember when there were 9 planets in our solar system and no others which we could detect. Anywhere.
Now, we’ve detected a gazillion exoplanets using relatively primitive methods. That’s coming a long way in just 20 years.
Now imagine how good we’ll be at it in 50 or 100 years. How about 1,000? The point is that we’re being limited by our imaginations here in terms of what future technology will be able to accomplish. So, if we’re thinking about civilizations that are potentially thousands of years old, that have been scanning around the heavens with thousands of years better technology than we currently possess to find different interesting places to check out… it’s a good bet that anybody in this side of our spiral arm who’s looking knows this is a potential planet in the Goldilocks zone.
That also discounts the idea that the ETs haven’t figured out exotic means of traveling vast distances like wormholes or some such nonsense. Or perhaps their biology doesn’t work like ours and they’ve engineered themselves to hibernate for vast periods of time or never grow old via nano-robots that continuously repair their telomeres.
The odd thing about this situation is that unless you unleash your imagination just a bit it becomes easy to shave stuff off that “can’t be” according to a set of rules that we understand.
Their rules are probably very different.
Actually what I suggested wasn’t even a theory, just conjecture. I’m confused: it was seen in the FLIR, so that is consistent with jet exhaust, yes? But other parts of the target would not be seen. Was the size in IR consistent with the radar? How fast is fast and how many g’s?
I would say that it was consistent with the fact that blackbody objects glow in the infrared with power as defined by the Steffan-Boltzmann equation – and this is the principle upon which IR cameras work.
Here’s a false color infrared image of an F/A-18 on takeoff:
Notice how you can see the jet’s exhaust as incredibly hot.
There’s no such exhaust trail evident in the grayscale IR imagery of the object.
Now, according to the story, the objects had been sighted via radar appearing at 80,000′ and dropping rapidly to 20,000′ No mention is made of how quickly this was happening. Presumably, falling 60,000′ unpowered would take a while but what was getting their attention was not the fact that it was happening so much as the objects were stopping and sometimes disappearing or going back up to their original elevation.
Supposedly this was going on for weeks.
At any rate, Cmdr Fravor says that after they made visual contact with the object, it quickly circled around behind them before shooting off to their original destination point for their training exercise which was some 60 miles away… in about a minute.
I don’t need to tell you that an object that can accelerate to 6,000 FPS and then come to a rest again within a minute is undergoing some pretty extreme acceleration. It also doesn’t match anything we’ve got in the arsenal.
Quite a conundrum.
Sure it does. You’re describing Sabot tank munitions, although they have to hit something to stop that quickly. :)
That’s right! We describe such acceleration as “explosive” for a reason, but even those munitions don’t achieve hypersonic speeds, do they? 6,000 FPS is around 6 times the speed of sound at standard temperature and pressure.
The point is: somebody is showing off.
If memory servers me correctly, yes. They clock in at over a mile per second – at the muzzle anyway.
Considering that they are presumably zipping around the cosmos at the speed of light, I would imagine that the gulf between their technological capability and ours would be huge.
Maybe they’re so smart that it wouldn’t take them any time at all to realize that, even if we are (from their perspective) laughably primitive and sort of funny-looking, we are nonetheless morally significant beings who experience pain and therefore it would be immoral to just rip our legs off, or harvest our organs for experimentation. You know. The way we recognize the moral significance of human fetuses.
Well, if the G forces are so extreme as to be deadly to a biological being on board, then we should probably assume that this is a drone, or more precisely a probe, under its own artificial intelligence control – aware when it’s being observed, intelligent enough to engage in evasive action, intelligent enough consider possible attack from multiple sources at the same time with clearly more advanced visual capability than any current aircraft or land- or sea-based or space-based tracking system, then we could also infer that the craft or crafts are capable of either long programmed voyages perhaps within the Milky Way and then capable to investigate new star systems on their own…or they’re being monitored and perhaps directed by a nearby mothership that does have biological beings aboard (which I don’t think is necessary).
I believe it was recently stated that it would take a spacecraft, with or without human passengers, 44 years to travel to Alpha Centauri at 10% the speed of light. Is it really that inconceivable that a programmed fleet of exploratory probes created by a very advanced civilization couldn’t have been deployed from some other part of the galaxy thousands of years ago and have been making observations of Earth in the last hundred or so years?
On a human level, we think of viable human life duration at about 80 to 90 years but even on earth there are animals that live in excess of that; and trees like Redwoods thousands of years. Given the particular conditions that gave rise on Earth to invertebrate life forms then to vertebrates from fish to reptiles to mammals to humans and the mass extinction events that occurred along the way, then it should be obvious that life, given the right chemical and molecular conditions would have evolved very differently on other life-capable planets in the galaxy and one could imagine an eventual, evolved race of beings that perhaps live for thousands of years rather than a mere 80 or 90.
If my logic is unsound, please show me where I’ve made an error.
While I’m riffing here…when the conclusion is that a biological being couldn’t handle the G forces evident in the rapid acceleration and equally rapid stops that the craft as purportedly witnessed (the visual record of which we still don’t have), we have to appreciate that this is based on our own parochial view of mammalian biology and more specifically, human anatomy. However, if we can imagine, I think logically, that life on other worlds evolved quite differently, then we should also assume that there may be vast differences in anatomy and physiology of potential intelligent life forms. For example, an alien being’s cellular structures could be more akin to plants and trees or something with skin that is more leathery and dense than human skin and the brain of such a being could be distributed differently and perhaps be comprised of several or hundreds of “smaller brain modules” that are all interconnected but also redundant if one module is damaged, or self-repairing, and perhaps all protected by heartier cell walls (like the cells in a tree) thus an organ very unlike the human brain. A distributed and protected network of brain modules might quite effectively handle extreme G forces very well. In this scenario there may also have to be multiple hearts or that whatever the liquid is that provides the life sustaining chemicals is available to keep the vital organs alive. This blood/liquid might also be in a gelatinous form rather than a network of vessels.
That said, I think the more probable explanation is that if these are extraterrestrial vehicles, then they are drones with on-board artificial intelligence to act independently and even make determinations on their own on how and what to explore…and what to avoid…like physical contact.
The only thing that might down one these “smart” probes would be an unanticipated bolt of lightning.
Or that their technology allows them to deal with the G-forces in one of several ways. An inertia-less drive, or gravity control would allow them to accelerate without feeling the force.
As long as we’re speculating.
I’m not qualified to comment on what would be necessary to control gravity and the necessary force required to do that. That may start to wade into Quantum theory.
People have been trying to do that for generations. Their formulation is always wrong.
Not to hijack the post further, but this is a problem for the young earthers, which is why I am not one. Well, it’s partly why.