DO YOU BELIEVE IN FLYING SAUCERS? WHAT ABOUT UAPs?

Today, I'll re-look at a subject largely discredited in higher academic circles:  flying saucers.  The more common term is UFO, or unidentified flying object, coined by the Air Force in 1952.  However, a new one has just surfaced, unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, generally linked to the Navy-led UAP Task Force established by the Pentagon in 2020.  Adam Goldsack already in 2021 wrote a book with this term.  Read this article to catch up on all the recent hoo ha delving into early sightings and what Congress is doing today.

Although I don't believe in the type of flying saucers the media now and then tosses out at you, I've nevertheless looked into this subject, and here are some of my past postings:

• 
  ALIENS and FLYING SAUCERS (2018)....there were many more earlier articles.
• WHY THIS SUDDEN UPSURGE OF INTEREST IN UFOs? (2021).  This was Part 1, and there were three parts.
• Part 2
• Part 3
• ON THE MATTER OF KNOWN AND UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS (2023)

But first, gaze up into the sky, for you will see a blue supermoon this month.

The first supermoon will be seen Tuesday evening as it rises from the southeast, appearing slightly bigger and brighter than normal. At the end of the month, the second supermoon will be even closer.  We won't see two supermoons in one month again until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi. 

A supermoon happens three or four times/year when the moon is closer to being 226,000 miles away, than the other extreme of 251,000 miles, the apogee.  So you actually do see the moon when closer that looks 14% larger and 30% brighter.  But you won't see a bluer color.  The "blue moon" term has to do with this only happening every so ofter, or not regularly.  So, therefore, the only blue supermoon will be the second one on August 30.

People in the USA are rather religious and tend to believe more about other supernatural phenomena than most advanced countries. 

•  Americans pray more often, are more likely to attend weekly religious services and ascribe higher importance to faith in their lives than adults in other wealthy, Western democracies, such as Canada, Australia and most European states, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

  
  For instance, more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared with 25% in Canada, 18% in Australia and 6% in Great Britain. (The average European country stands at 22%.) Actually, when it comes to their prayer habits, Americans are more like people in many poorer, developing nations – including South Africa (52%), Bangladesh (57%) and Bolivia (56%) – than people in richer countries.

• Considering our advanced educational requirements, the following graphic is almost freakish. We are an outlier anomaly.

• Take flying saucers, for example:  41% have seen alien spacecraft.
• 34% believe they are alien ships.
• 57% believe in aliens, compared to 31% for Bigfoot and 26% for the Loch Ness Monster.

Conversely, in there seems to be a general belief that flying saucers from some remote civilization will not be possible because of it would take too much energy to travel such long distances.  Furthermore, should there be such an encounter with Planet Earth, almost surely the intelligent life would be some form of artificial intelligence.

Yet, James Deardoff had a thought in 1985.  Click on that link to read his summary.  Essentially, he argues that if a civilization somewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy could find a way to travel at only 1% the speed of light, the odds are high that we would have been reached by now.

I long ago worked for NASA's Ames Research Center, and all those astrophysicists involved with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program I was in almost totally divorced themselves from flying saucers and those myths.  I suspect this remains true today.  However, I interacted with someone  from Stanford, Ron Bracewell, who believed that humanity came to be through contact with extraterrestrials, and the Ames people nodded in general approval.  The proximity of his office and scholarly eminence made the difference.  When I worked at Ames that summer, I lived on the Stanford campus.

The July 2023 issue of Stanford Magazine has an article, First Contact, featuring one of their faculty, Garry Nolan, who is the man you call when there is no Earthly explanation.

• He has published 300 papers over a 30-year career as an immunologist in the Sanford School of Medicine, who spent his post-doc under Nobel laureate David Baltimore of MIT.
• What drove him into extraterrestrials is that in his youth he said he had two alien encounters.
• One might surmise that a scientist would pay a reputational cost for embracing what was once largely seen as tabloid fodder. Nolan recalls a senior figure from the National Cancer Institute taking him aside in a bar around 2014 to warn him he was ruining his career.
• 
  However, he was brave enough to publish last year in Progress in Aerospace Sciences, for few academics of any stripe would actually do so, the possibility of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects).
• This paper revisited that luminous red mass--around 50 pounds of molten iron--reported to have fallen on Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1977.
• His team concluded that this blob came from an advanced aerial vehicle, the first time any peer reviewed article in the mainstream dared to so exclaim.
• 1977 was a particularly fertile year for UFO sightings, for several officials in Mississippi encountered a metallic blue object that looked life a spinning top, 15-18 feet off the ground, and were told to keep quiet about it.
• Recently, Nolan has said that aliens are "100%" living among us.
• 
  Back to that article, earlier, in the 1970's, Peter Sturrock, another Stanford faculty member, now a professor emeritus of applied physics, hired a French scientist, Jacques Vallée, who in 1969 had helped the U.S. Air Force declare that flying saucers were bunk, to interact.  Vallée subsequently inspired Steven Spielbergs 1977 movie, Close Encounter of the Third Kind.  Nothing came of this alliance.
• Since 2007 the Pentagon has apparently been running a cover UFO program, and annually reports to Congress.

Thus far, though, anyone waiting for confirmation of UFOs from the government is still waiting. The Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” the head of the office recently told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.

• In conclusion, Nolan said:

“I don’t have something that I could put on the kitchen table that will float with anti-gravity that I can point my friends to,” he says. “I agree with you that the hard data is not in your hands yet, but don’t stop me from getting it.”

I spent so much time above to get to what happened last week in Congress, from Time.

• 
  Jimmy Carter, in 1969 when he was a private citizen, said he saw a flying saucer.  It was probably the planet Venus.  But maybe not.
• The House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security held a day-long meeting with multiple witnesses.

• 
  Most conspicuous was Air Force Major David Grusch, who led a government task force on UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the new term replacing UFO.
• U.S. military forces  have reported 650 instances of flying objects no existing technology can manage.
• In 2020, the Pentagon released videos of three Navy UAP sightings.
• But:

Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough in a statement to TIME, the Department of Defense (DoD) “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. The Department is fully committed to openness and accountability to the American people…DoD is also committed to timely and thorough reporting to Congress." 

What about the reality of what is happening?

...science is where things get awfully tricky—especially when it comes to how and why E.T. would be coming to our particular spot in the universe. There are up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way—virtually every one of which is circled by at least one planet, and many by multiple planets like our own solar system. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across; a single light year is just shy of 9 trillion km (6 trillion mi.). Unless Einstein is wrong—and he hasn’t been yet—nothing can exceed light speed, and merely approaching it would take an astonishing degree of technological achievement. 

Now take all of those figures and multiply them by two trillion—or the number of galaxies that observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have estimated are in the universe. That makes for an awful lot of planets and an awful lot of cosmic real estate for a visiting spacecraft to cover just to come to our little world.

Time magazine showed ten historic photos of unidentified aircraft going back to 1950.  Here is the 1990 Calvine photo taken in 1990.

Here is another by Sergio Loaiza in 1971 over Costa Rica.

That photo is discredited in a TV program that ran for three seasons, one show and another.  Want more?  Here is a two-hour video of UFOs.

So we have 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars out there, or 8 times 10 to the 24th power, or at least ten septillion planets, and probably a lot more.

In other words, beginning with Gugliemo Marconi, we have been beaming radio signals out into space since 1895 (or maybe 1894 or 1897), and they travel at the speed of light, meaning that in 2023, our presence has been announced to extraterrestrial intelligence up to 128 light years away.  That is only about one-tenth of one percent the two-dimensional size of our Milky Way Galaxy.  Actually half of that, for the latest data shows that our galaxy is 200,000 light years across.

As billionaires spend their bucks in the romance of outer space, the general public equally gabbles about mysterious space mysteries and love conspiracy tales.  Although I have a sense that there is other intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe, it is also possible that we are it.  No matter, an advanced version of us from out there in space, if they suddenly appeared, most probably would be in some form of artificial intelligence, non-human-like and certainly not organic.  If not them, I think it is possible that humanity will evolve into an ultimate form of AI and expand our presence throughout our galaxy, and in time all of space.  After all, we are young, less than 14 billion years old, with around 100 trillion years left to accomplish all that.

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WHY THIS SUDDEN UPSURGE OF INTEREST IN UFOs?

             From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14      4142    15512        1151       189     712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

          25       2414    10578       1582        119      144

Mar     2        1989      9490        1726       110      194

          31       1115     12301        3950       458       58

April   6          906     11787         4211       631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786       59 

         26         607     12348         2399     3842     101

June    1         287    10637        2346      3205       95

          30         249      8505        2127        991     383

 July    7          251      8440        1595        817     411

         14          374      8721        1574        580      453

         21          414      8638        1388        510      516

         28          483    10136        1366        641      520

Aug    4           656    10120        1118        532      423 

         10           657    10078        1183       468      189        

Summary:

• The U.S. had 101,254 new cases yesterday.  #2 was Iran with 39,139, #3 India 36,316 and #4 Brazil 35,245.
• Several other countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan are also looking bad.  
• China was reported in the news to be on the upswing, but they only had 143 new cases and no new deaths yesterday.
• How will the USA do for the rest of the year?  I have huge fears, for we have decided that remote learning is not ideal, most K-12 students are returning to school, and no one from ages 0-11 has yet been vaccinated.  Of course there will be more and more COVID-19 cases, for the Delta variant is dangerously contagious, and younger children will return home and infect the rest of the family and friends.  What kind of planning is this?

I only rarely write about flying saucers and other forms of unidentified flying objects (UFO).   The reason is simple.  I don't believe they are real.  Reminds me of God and ghosts.  All of them stretch the fabric of credibility.  But many people do believe, and I want to better understand why.  Who knows, they could ultimately be right.  

To them, logic or reality takes a secondary role to faith and other psychological or cultural factors.  The anti-vax protesters, for example, mostly have sincere personal reasons to avoid being vaccinated or having their children so inoculated.  It could have something to do with freedom of choice or a wide array of other feelings.  Misinformation feeds itself, and many spend time following or reading only about their beliefs, thus reinforcing an attitude.  Same thing happens in politics and UFOs.

Almost three years ago I posted on ALIENS AND FLYING SAUCERS.  In it I mentioned that I once worked for NASA on a SETI project, and experts in the field were reasonably accommodating about the potential of intelligent life out there in space, but kicked you out of their club if you showed any soft spot for flying saucers.  UFOs were loosely okay, because that is just a term for what can't today be explained by science.  Here is an excerpt:

You can find those articles if you wish to read the details, but I thought I'd at least summarize the editorial by Kendrick Frazier--Aliens and UFOs:  What They Tell Us about Ourselves:

• Topic is perennially fascinating.
• But it's one of those subjects where hope, wishful thinking, and unfetterred speculation seems to overwhelm reason, facts and evidence.
• Frazier did not say this, but to many, much of this might sound like religion.

Tomorrow I'll report on the unclassified nine-page report released in June to Congress by the Defense of Defense surveying 144 observations dating back to 2004. According to the New York Times:  U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can't Rule It Out, Either.  Huh?  

It was this publication that catalyzed the recent flurry of media interest in UFOs.  A previous government investigation called Project Blue Book, which ended in 1969, also stimulated public interest in the field in those days.  I might also add that I'm currently viewing a  relatively new six-part Netflix series entitled Top Secret UFO Projects Declassified, which Rotten Tomatoes lists, but has not bothered to rate.  After a couple of episodes, my suspicions will be validated.

The Dow Jones Industrials will again break it's all time high today.

I'll end with a performance of John Williams and orchestra playing 50 years of Oscar songs.

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ON THE MATTER OF KNOWN AND UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS

An Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) is exactly that, an object not yet identified.  The object can range from something we'll never identify to weather balloons to alien flying saucers to whatever.  I had a three part series in August of 2021.  Feel free to glance at them, beginning with the first one.  Then Part 2 dealt with that confusing "official" government report that maybe went too far in giving credence to the subject, ending with Part 3 on best films and documentaries.

To begin, two-thirds of Americans believe in extraterrestrial intelligence life.

Of interest here is that around half of our population senses that some of those UFOs, like flying saucers, are linked to some intelligent life in our universe.  Here is a breakdown of who believes.

I searched for a while and could not find any poll of scientists.  I do know that when I worked on NASA's search for extraterrestrial intelligence program at the Ames Research Center, zero percent believed in flying saucers, the kind you see in movies.  In fact, it was lower than that, for to bring the subject up was almost verboten.  About technical people in general, there is a feeling that any initial physical contact will not be face to face, but more their AIrobots and us.

What I'm leading to are those objects in the sky, four which have been shot down by our fighters.  More and more, there seems to be a feeling that these balloon-like objects are all over the place, and most of them are benign, with many scientifically and commercially important.

• Most in the past were to monitor the weather.
• 2000 serious "balloons" are launched into the sky daily.  
• Google, for example, sends up hundreds of self-navigating objects the size of tennis courts to beam internet to rural and remote areas.

• Simply, balloons are far cheaper to use than satellites, with higher resolution because of closer distance to the earth's surface.
• Each Sidewinder air-to-air missile that was used to bring down those Chinese and other objects cost $400,000.
• A few graphics.

The first shot down was of Chinese origin.  Some background.

• Wu Zhe graduated from the Harbin Institute of Technology, which in 2020 was sanctioned by the U.S. for military activities.  
• In 2002, at the age of 28, Wu was involved in the incorporation of Deluxe Family, a key company in this sky system.  Wu was the largest shareholder.
• In 2007, nearly 16 years ago, Wu, an aircraft design expert at Beihang University, a military institution in Beijing, gave a lecture about the military value of balloons.
• In 2015, Wu and Wang Dong formed Beijing Nanjiang Aerospace Technology to produce near-space vehicles, and after this initial shoot-down, this firm and five others have been sanction by the U.S.  Wu is linked to four of these organizations.

• 
  In 2019 an airship developed by Wu circumnavigated the globe at an elevation of 65,000 feet, about the same height as the one first shot down.
• There are obvious military applications for these balloons, but one promising economic future is to establish a much cheaper network of them for your mobile phone and streaming network.
• A key question is what exactly is eminent domain in space?  Satellites regularly cross country borders.  Can they be shot down?  I guess so, as there isn't any international space law.

The USA has been using these high altitude balloons since 1947, and one of these fell in Roswell, New Mexico, initiating much of the flying saucer craze.

Then there are the ubiquitous Known Flying Objects (KFO), like communications satellites.  In 2019 a Google originated project, Loon, was launched to create a fleet of stations in the stratosphere.  These balloons need to stay up for a long time, and Loon reached 312 days.  However, both this and Facebook's Aquila seemed to have bitten the dust.

Helium is used to buoy those balloons because hydrogen, while cheaper, can explode and more easily escape the enclosure.  Helium is 1/8 the density of air, while hydrogen is 1/16.  Helium is inert.

In any case, for now, KFOs in the form of space satellites have won the competition against balloons at lower altitudes to control communications.

Amazon announced a $10 billion plan to launch 3000 satellites to 370-390 miles up there through Project Kuiper.  In case you are wondering about space pollution, 8100 satellites have been sent out by 40 countries, and many have dropped back to Earth.  Thus there are today approximately 4900 satellites in orbit, 1900 operational, and the rest have become space debris.

Says Elon Musk, all that stuff above is not noticed by anyone, but he too has Starlink, another satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, to expand coverage to 48 countries, plus perhaps next year a global mobile phone service.   To follow, his Starshield project will have 12,000 KFOs, maybe expanding to 42,000.  Whatever he says about the invisibility of KFOs, astronomers are petrified.  For public support, he is helping Ukraine, absorbing the $20 million/month cost of free internet.  Also, will help guide future artillery and rockets.  Musk has already been called by Russia a war criminal.

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