U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is?
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Hey, Mr. Spaceman,
Won’t you please take me along?
I won’t do anything wrong.
Hey, Mr. Spaceman,
Won’t you please take me along for a ride?
So sang the Byrds in
1966, after strange radio bursts from distant galaxies called quasars
had excited people about the possibility of extraterrestrial
intelligence.
I recalled those words recently when reading the account of
a pair of Navy pilots who were outmaneuvered and outrun by a U.F.O. off
the coast of San Diego back in 2004. Cmdr. David Fravor said later that
he had no idea what he had seen.
“But,” he added, “I want to fly one.”
His story was part of a bundle of material released recently about a supersecret $22 million Pentagon project
called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, aimed at
investigating U.F.O.s. The project was officially killed in 2012, but
now it’s being resurrected as a nonprofit organization.
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Disgruntled
that the government wasn’t taking the possibility of alien visitors
seriously, a group of former defense officials, aerospace engineers and
other space fans have set up their own group, To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science.
One of its founders is Tom DeLonge, a former punk musician, record
producer and entrepreneur, who is also the head of the group’s
entertainment division.
For
a minimum of $200, you can join and help finance their research into
how U.F.O.s do whatever it is they do, as well as telepathy and “a
point-to-point transportation craft that will erase the current travel
limits of distance and time” by using a drive that “alters the
space-time metric” — that is, a warp drive going faster than the speed
of light, Einstein’s old cosmic speed limit.
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“We
believe there are transformative discoveries within our reach that will
revolutionize the human experience, but they can only be accomplished
through the unrestricted support of breakthrough research, discovery and
innovation,” says the group’s website.
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I’m
not holding my breath waiting for progress on telepathy or warp drive,
but I agree with at least one thing that one official with the group
said. That was Steve Justice, a former engineer at Lockheed Martin’s
famous Skunk Works, where advanced aircraft like the SR-71 high-altitude
super-fast spy plane were designed.
“How dare we think that the physics we have today is all that there is,” he said in an interview published recently in HuffPost.
I
could hardly agree more, having spent my professional life in the
company of physicists and astronomers trying to poke out of the cocoon
of present knowledge into the unknown, to overturn Einstein and what
passes for contemporary science. Lately, they haven’t gotten anywhere.
The
last time physicists had to deal with faster-than-light travel was six
years ago, when a group of Italy-based physicists announced that they
had seen the subatomic particles known as neutrinos going faster than light. It turned out they had wired up their equipment wrong.
So
far Einstein is still the champ. But surely there is so much more to
learn. A lot of surprises lie ahead, but many of the most popular ideas
on how to transcend Einstein and his peers are on the verge of being ruled out. Transforming science is harder than it looks.
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While
there is a lot we don’t know, there is also a lot we do know. We know
how to turn on our computers and let gadgets in our pocket navigate the
world. We know that when physical objects zig and zag through a medium
like air, as U.F.O.s are said to do, they produce turbulence and shock
waves. NASA engineers predicted to the minute when the Cassini spacecraft would dwindle to a wisp of smoke in Saturn’s atmosphere last fall.
In
moments like this, I take comfort in what the great Russian physicist
and cosmologist Yakov Zeldovich, one of the fathers of the Soviet
hydrogen bomb, once told me. “What science has already taken, it will
not give back,” he said.
Scientists are not the killjoys in all this.
In
the astronomical world, the border between science fact and science
fiction can be very permeable, perhaps because many scientists grew up
reading science fiction. And astronomers forever have their noses
pressed up against the window of the unknown. They want to believe more
than anybody, and I count myself among them.
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But
they are also trained to look at nature with ruthless rigor and
skepticism. For astronomers, the biggest problem with E.T. is not the
occasional claim of a mysterious light in the sky, but the fact that we
are not constantly overwhelmed with them.
Half
a century ago, the legendary physicist Enrico Fermi concluded from a
simple back-of-the-envelope calculation that even without warp drive, a
single civilization could visit and colonize all the planets in the
galaxy in a fraction of the 10-billion-year age of the Milky Way.
Proponents
of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have been
debating ever since. One answer I like is the “zoo hypothesis,”
according to which we have been placed off-limits, a cosmic wildlife
refuge.
Another answer came from Jill Tarter,
formerly the director of research at the SETI Institute in Mountain
View, Calif. “We haven’t looked hard enough,” she said when I asked her
recently.
If
there was an iPhone sitting under a rock on the Moon or Mars, for
example, we would not have found it yet. Our own latest ideas for
interstellar exploration involve launching probes the size of postage stamps to Alpha Centauri.
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In
the next generation, they might be the size of mosquitoes. By contrast,
the dreams of some U.F.O. enthusiasts are stuck in 1950s technology.
Still, we keep trying.
Last fall when a strange object — an interstellar asteroid now
named Oumuamua — was found cruising through the solar system,
astronomers’ thoughts raced to the Arthur C. Clarke novel “Rendezvous
With Rama,” in which the object was an alien spaceship. Two groups have
been monitoring Oumuamua for alien radio signals, so far to no avail.
Meanwhile, some astronomers have speculated that the erratic dimming of a star known as “Boyajian’s star” or “Tabby’s star,”
after the astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, could be caused by some gigantic
construction project orbiting the star. So far that has not worked out,
but none of the other explanations — dust or a fleet of comets — have,
either.
A pair of Harvard astronomers suggested last spring that mysterious sporadic flashes of energy known as fast radio bursts coming
from far far away are alien transmitters powering interstellar
spacecraft carrying light sails. “Science isn’t a matter of belief, it’s
a matter of evidence,” the astronomer Avi Loeb said in a news release from Harvard.
“Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It’s
worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”
U.F.O. investigations are nothing new. The most famous was the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1970 and examined more than 12,000 sightings.
Most
U.F.O. sightings turn out to be swamp gas and other atmospheric
anomalies, Venus, weird reflections or just plain hoaxes. But there is a
stubborn residue, a few percent that resist easy explication, including
now Commander Fravor’s story. But that’s a far cry from proving they
are alien or interstellar.
I
don’t know what to think about these stories, often told by sober,
respected and professional observers — police officers, pilots, military
officials — in indelible detail. I always wish I could have been there
to see it for myself.
Then I wonder how much good it would do to see it anyway.
Recently I ran into my friend Mark Mitton, a professional magician,
in a restaurant. He came over to the table and started doing tricks. At
one point he fanned the card deck, asked my daughter to pick one, and
then asked her to shuffle the deck, which she did expertly.
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Mr.
Mitton grabbed the deck and sprayed the cards in the air. There was my
daughter’s card stuck to a mirror about five feet away. How did it get
there? Not by any new physics. Seeing didn’t really help.
As modern psychology and neuroscience have established, the senses are an unreliable portal to reality, whatever that is.
Something might be happening, but we don’t know what it is. E.T., if you’re reading this, I’m still waiting to take my ride.
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