Dailymail.co.uk: Contributed by Kevin Knuth, Assistant Professor in Physics and Computer Science, State University of New York at Albany, Editor-in-Chief of the science journal Entropy. With over 100 scientific publications and 20 years of experience in developing data analysis algorithms applied to the physical sciences, Kevin worked for 4 years at NASA.
Are we alone in the universe? There are many answers to this question, but unfortunately none of these answers look good. Being the only thinking race in the entire vast universe is a rather sad prospect. But if we're not alone at all? What if besides us there is someone else, stronger, more developed and not friendly at all? In this case, the collision of people with him will be terrible.
As a NASA Staff Scientist, I attended the 2002 Contact Conference, which focused on serious thinking about aliens. And at the end of the conference, after many hours of academic debate and discussion, one NASA official who was silent all the time and listening to us suddenly said in the most ominous tone:
“Idiots. You have absolutely no idea what is there!"
And after this statement, there was a deathly silence in the conference room.
People are afraid of aliens who, sooner or later, may visit Earth. Perhaps, and fortunately for us, the distances between the stars are prohibitive. But what if interstellar travel is technologically achievable for someone?
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In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I discussed the recent UFO-related cattle massacre by farmers. An elderly professor from the physics department came up to us and said he had a couple of colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. And according to them, due to UFO intervention, the military there in the 1960s had problems with launching and maintaining ballistic missiles on alert there.
At the time, I thought this professor was just retelling gossip and had no friends at the Air Force base. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a secret recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force members who served at Malmstrom Air Force Base in the 1960s. And they exactly repeated what the professor told us about.
Nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought-provoking questions. In 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi calculated that there are about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of which are billions of years older than the Sun, with a large percentage of them likely to have habitable planets. And then he asked:
- Well, where are they all?
Even if Fermi was wrong and intelligent life evolved on a very, very small percentage of planets, then there must be a number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy. Fermi spoke of tens of thousands, but let there be only a few tens, up to a hundred. If they did not make any super high-tech leaps forward, but simply developed at a slow pace, starting with the launch of primitive rockets into orbit, they will need only 5, maximum 50 million years to colonize OUR GALAXY.
People as a species have existed for some hundred thousand years, while there is a huge mass around old stars and planets. Theoretically, the Galaxy should simply be teeming with aliens, as the laws of biology and statistics indicate. But at the same time, there are no aliens, which is another Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan, the preeminent astronomer and father of modern exobiology, responded to this paradox as follows: "Answers to extraordinary questions require extraordinary evidence." But what proof can we have if there is no official documented UFO sighting anywhere in the world !? Officially, UFOs don't seem to exist.
Governments around the world carefully hide all information about UFO contacts. While the general public has been observing UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists, and the media have essentially stated that all UFO sightings are the result of weather or human activity. Basically, we are told that this topic is meaningless.
I believe that the skepticism of the authorities in relation to UFOs is something like a religion that dogmatically excludes the existence of aliens and, as "scientific evidence", brings theological hypotheses about "unexplored optical phenomena", "mass hallucinations" and other delusions. Naturally, public opinion in response only strengthens in the veracity of the version of a global conspiracy.
By doing so, official skeptics are definitely damaging science by providing a bad example of how scientific research should be done. Yes, sometimes we mistake optical effects or other obscure phenomena in the atmosphere for UFOs. But often people see and photograph something that does not fit into any generally accepted official explanation.
In 1977, Peter Sturrock, an astrophysicist at Stanford University, sent out questionnaires on UFO sightings to 2,611 members of the American Astronomical Society. In response, Peter received 1,356 completed questionnaires with answers, in which 62 astronomers (4.6 percent) reported seeing some completely inexplicable light or atmospheric phenomena with their own eyes. And surprisingly, this figure (4.6 percent) is similar to the statistical 5 percent of UFO sightings, which are inexplicable in principle.
As a result of his small sociological research, Peter Sturrock discovered that, firstly, some of the astronomers witnessed the manifestations of UFOs. Secondly, for 80% of these 62 astronomers, the fact of seeing a UFO completely turned their worldview, turning them into fanatical ufologists. Third, Peter Sturrock confirmed the well-known thesis about the bone structure of human thinking. So, 20% of the astronomers who saw UFOs were not able to explain what they saw in ANY WAY, nevertheless, they claimed that there was no UFO. And all these skeptics were older astronomers, while younger astronomers easily reconstructed the university dogmas that they had put into their heads about the loneliness of people in the Universe.
UFOs are regularly observed through telescopes. I personally know one astronomer who has observed a guitar-like object moving through a telescope's field of view, but you can dig deeper. There is a book of the century before last "Wonders in the Sky", that is, "Miracles in the sky", in which the authors collected evidence of unexplained astronomical phenomena described in scientific journals for the period 1700-1900.
And in recent years, more and more messages began to come, including from government officials. In particular, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and Great Britain have been gradually declassifying their UFO files since 2008. And many retired high-ranking military personnel, senior officials, even congressmen and senators create various committees, whose task is to require governments to fully disclose all information about UFOs.
No less interesting information comes from other countries. For example, Iran has long been very concerned about spherical UFOs observed near its nuclear facilities. Tehran claims they are "CIA unmanned aerial vehicles." However, these "CIA drones" fly at Mach 10, turn at right angles at that speed, and can easily leave the atmosphere.
Sometimes the Pentagon also surprises. In 2017, the US Department of Defense released three videos of encounters with UFOs of F-18 fighters for public viewing.
However, despite all such disclosures and facts, world governments are silent about all this. John Alexander, a retired US Air Force Colonel, told me that the Pentagon has a kind of headquarters within headquarters, a kind of conspiracy of those who know that UFOs are real and are in favor of making all information public. They even have contact with Russian generals who know and think the same thing. "Well, when, finally, the country's top officials come forward and say to everyone the same thing that UFOs are real and we have been observing them for many years !?" - John Alexander is indignant.
Today, the US military has a million proofs that at least 5% of UFO sightings are unidentified structured ships, demonstrating flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. There are testimonies from reliable witnesses, there are radar observations, there is photographic data. Therefore, if someone's spaceships are flying over the planet, the military wants to know who is sitting in them and what their intentions are. For the military public around the world, this is a basic axiom.
However, for some reason, governments of ALL COUNTRIES are in no hurry to enlighten their generals in this matter. And this fact not only already prompts generals.
July 2 will be the so-called World UFO Day. It is very unlikely that the US government will use this day for disclosure and explanation. But the world academic community can do it completely. Maybe it’s already enough to lead unnecessary disputes, to admit an obvious fact and to start a thorough investigation of it by common efforts? Everything indicates that guests come to us from very far away. But no one can say: what are they doing here and what are the intentions of those who have flown here?