Statistiche
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Evidence of Non-Terrestrial Objects Surveilling Earth Could Be Revealed in New Research Effort ( The Debrief )
During the summer of 1954, the United States Air Force was on high alert. A pair of mysterious objects had been located in orbit between 400 and 600 miles from Earth, and now officials were in a state of confusion as to what they might represent. Could they be non-terrestrial objects of natural origin, or could they be something else entirely?
A more concerning possibility also lurked in the minds of officials at the time: what if the objects were manmade, and possibly of Soviet origin?
Dr. Lincoln La Paz, then the head of the Extra-Terrestrial Bodies Institute at the University of New Mexico, had been in constant communication with the Air Force about their unusual new problem. For weeks, he shot back and forth between the Palomar Observatory in California and the missile test center at White Sands, New Mexico, until it was finally determined by the astronomer that the objects were indeed natural: they were only meteors.
The story received tremendous attention after it first appeared in Aviation Week, and just days later, a source close to the Army Office of Ordnance Research assured the New York Times that no satellites deemed to be of artificial origin had been detected yet, adding about La Paz’s meteors that “there was absolutely no connection between the reported satellites and flying saucer reports.”
The search for objects in Earth’s orbit had been virgin territory in 1954, and the events in the fall of that year were only a foreshadowing of the kind of public fear yet to come. Once the Soviets actually did launch Sputnik 1 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the early days of October 1957, concerns about a technological gap among Western nations escalated into a full-blown crisis.
The world would never be the same. In the aftermath of the “Sputnik crisis,” the United States accelerated its space-bound efforts, eventually placing its own satellites into orbit, followed by successful manned space missions and, eventually, humans landing on the Moon in July 1969. Today, on any clear night one can look at the night sky and see tiny points of light moving silently along in their positions in orbit, representing objects that range from satellites and the International Space Station, to tiny reflective bits of debris from past space missions that have accumulated in Earth’s orbit steadily over time.
In addition to the satellites we have placed into orbit around our own planet, humans have also sent several spacecraft to further locales, some of which we have positioned around nearby planets like Mars. It seems logical to assume that if there were any intelligent extraterrestrials out there, they might do the same.
This brings to mind an interesting question for modern astronomers: what if aliens have surveilled our planet, either in the past, or even in the present day? If so, how might we detect evidence of their technologies?
With the amount of debris that clutters the space around our planet today, it would prove difficult to locate any prospective alien probes that may be watching us. Based on current European Space Agency data, there are 5,800 functioning satellites in orbit, with nearly 31,590 debris objects that have been logged and continuously tracked by Space Surveillance Networks.
However, not all objects in orbit around our planet are being tracked. According to current statistical models, smaller space objects between 1 mm and 10 cm could number greater than 131 million.
In short, the orbital area around our planet has become a very cluttered place since the dawn of the Space Age, making it increasingly difficult to search for any possible outliers that might represent evidence of non-terrestrial technological artifacts that might be observing our planet.
That’s why one group of researchers, led by Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and Stockholm University, has undertaken a citizen science effort to search for evidence of such non-terrestrial artifacts in what some might consider an unusual place: data that has already been publicly available for decades.
Prior to the launch of manmade satellites like Sputnik 1 in the late 1950s, Earth’s skies were free of the clutter that hinders modern searches for prospective non-terrestrial objects. According to Villarroel and her team, one way to overcome this problem is by scanning earlier photographic plate projects such as the First Palomar Sky Survey (POSS-1), which is the focus of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project.
“We expect the project to yield many interesting findings over time,” reads a statement on the website of the VASCO Network, “maybe even some anomalous objects and events — could aliens be responsible for any of those?”
In the May issue of Acta Astronautica, Villarroel and several colleagues published a paper, “A glint in the eye: Photographic plate archive searches for non-terrestrial artefacts,” which elaborates on how potentially anomalous non-terrestrial objects might be located.
“We show that even the small pieces of reflective debris in orbit around the Earth can be identified through searches for multiple transients in old photographic plate material exposed before the launch of the first human satellite in 1957,” the researchers state in the paper’s abstract. According to Villarroel and her coauthors, images depicting what they identify as “simultaneous transients” may hold the key to detecting evidence of non-terrestrial artifacts that may have been lurking in Earth’s orbit since the days prior to Sputnik.
Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and
Stockholm University (Image Credit: Karl Nordlund/Stockholm University)
“About 80% of the very fast bright flashes (glints) in our sky are the result of artificial objects with highly reflective, flat surfaces,” Villarroel recently told The Debrief. These objects, many of them relatively small according to Villarroel, may be found in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth.
“A fast glint like this will look like a star in an image,” Villarroel says, “and sometimes one can see several glints from the same object in an image (or from different ones). Space debris and satellites in geosynchronous orbits can leave multiple glints in an image.
“Multiple glints in sky images is, therefore, a typical signature of artificial objects,” Villarroel says. By looking at some of the earliest photographic plates collected by 20th-century astronomers, the VASCO team thinks they could easily discern the presence of any reflective objects in geosynchronous orbits (GEO) since they would appear as short lines in these photographs, the length of which can be used as an indicator of their speed and position in orbit (satellites at higher GEO altitudes produce fast, transient glints that result from the light they reflect from the Sun).
Of particular interest to Villarroel and her colleagues are the appearances of multiple glints, which may indicate a single object tumbling through space producing a series of flashes as its surfaces reflect sunlight, or possibly even the presence of several objects.
“We propose to look for multiple glints in image data before Sputnik I,” Villarroel told The Debrief. “If such signatures are found in a time when there were no high-altitude satellites, that could imply the presence of Non-Terrestrial Artifacts (NTAs) in orbits around the Earth.”
Although surveying photographic data from pre-satellite times offers obvious benefits to the search for non-terrestrial artifacts, there are challenges for modern researchers using this approach, since multiple glints in older sky survey imagery could be accounted for by a number of other things. These could include defects in the images that produce the appearance of star-like objects which, in fact, may simply be photographic artifacts.
“If one finds multiple glints in an image, we cannot know for sure that the observation is real as some defects might possibly look star-like,” Villarroel says. “And it is difficult to access the original photographic plates to examine the ‘stars’ under a microscope.”
One simple way that Villarroel and her colleagues have proposed to help narrow down any likely anomalies is to search or instances where they appear in a single line.
“The main proposal of the paper is, therefore, to look for an even clearer signature, which is to search for these multiple glints-events that on top of everything, also are aligned along a line,” Villarroel told The Debrief. Unlike plate defects, which could most often be expected to appear randomly across the image, Villarroel says that genuine glints of light detected by cameras, possibly produced by debris or satellites of unknown origin, would produce consistent glints of light along a line in an image.
Villarroel says there are several sources of imagery that astronomers can use for such surveys, many of which are freely available. However, an added benefit of conducting multiple surveys could be that the presence of any anomalies detected in one photographic plate collection, if thereafter found in a separate set of images, could help confirm the presence of a genuine anomaly.
“Many observatories have their photographic plate collections,” Villarroel says. “Finding similar examples of ‘multiple transients’ in other image data sets could help to confirm the effect. Also, we have predicted some shapes and glinting patterns in our recent preprint that one can use to search for the predicted objects in modern datasets.”
Along with her efforts with the Vasco Network, Villarroel is a research team member of The Galileo Project, a scientific effort led by astronomer Avi Loeb aimed at detecting extraterrestrial technological signatures produced by Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs).
“The Galileo project is excellently suited for these searches,” Villarroel told The Debrief.
With decades of imagery now in hand, modern advances in computer imaging and artificial intelligence could prove to be instrumental in helping astronomers make a breakthrough in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Considering some of the early observations by Lincoln La Paz and other astronomers at the dawn of the Space Age, it would indeed be ironic if it were ever proven that evidence of extraterrestrial technologies had been lurking much closer to home than most would have ever expected.
When asked about some of the intriguing observations that preceded the earliest launch of artificial satellites in 1957, Villarroel says cases from decades ago might indeed be worthy of renewed attention from modern astronomers, especially if the current efforts to analyze photographic plate collections ever turns up anything odd.
“These historical examples would be very interesting for us to look at through the VASCO glasses,” Villarroel says.
Micah Hanks
Why There’s a Chance We Heard From Aliens Back in 1977 ( DAILY BEAST )
WOW! A loud, peculiar signal detected by scientists 45 years ago is getting a second look—and renewing hopes that we found extraterrestrial life.
On Aug. 15, 1977, an astronomer at Ohio State University, listening to the galaxy with the university’s powerful Big Ear radio telescope, overheard alien chatter echoing somewhere out there in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation.
Well, maybe. When Jerry Ehman noticed the highly structured, seemingly deliberate signal in a computer printout of radio data, he jotted down a note: “Wow!” His exclamation gave the discovery its name.
The Wow! signal seemed like it might have originated from an extraterrestrial civilization. After all, the two-and-a-half-minute signal was loud—a full 30 times louder than the background noise of space.
But scientists were never able to pick up the signal a second time. Lacking additional data, they assumed the signal was just random noise from some star or comet or other natural source–and eventually moved on.
Wow! faded into history—just another possible near-miss in our search for alien life alongside one very interesting Martian soil sample from 1976, as well as the mysterious object known as ‘Oumuamua that blazed through our solar system back in 2017.
Now a team led by Columbia University astronomer David Kipping is making the case for a fresh effort to detect the signal. We should be able to find it—or confirm it’s gone for good—with just two additional months of hard work and some creative thinking, Kipping and his co-author, Chicago data consultant Robert Gray, wrote in their peer-reviewed study, which appeared online on June 22 and has been accepted for future publication in the science journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“I think it’s worth chasing down for a couple more months to get to the point where we could say with confidence that the field isn’t worth pursuing anymore,” Kipping told The Daily Beast. “Either we spend two months on the Wow! field and see nothing and can then move on, or we see a recurrence—and that would change the whole story.”
Ehman was working as a volunteer for the then-new field of science known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program, or SETI, when he first noticed the Wow! signal 45 years ago. Besides how loud he noticed it came across in the readout, Ehman also saw that it traveled along a seemingly symbolic frequency: 1420 megahertz, the resonant frequency of an energized hydrogen atom.
The frequency and loudness made Wow! “arguably the most compelling SETI signal ever found,” Kipping and Gray wrote.
SETI’s methods for finding signs of life—listening for radio signals, looking for lasers or other visual evidence of aliens—have evolved a lot since the effort got underway back in the 1960s. The field’s standards for what might qualify as evidence of aliens have also changed.
But one key criterion remains the same: repeatability. It’s not enough to overhear an artificially produced signal once. After all, intelligent beings, if they’re trying to communicate with each other or us, wouldn’t broadcast just one message once, right? They’d probably try again and again, most likely on a regular schedule.
That’s where the Wow! discovery went wrong all those decades ago. Periodically for decades, astronomers tried listening for a similar signal—most recently in 2020 and 2002. They pointed radio telescopes at Sagittarius, tuned them to 1420 megahertz… and waited.
They heard nothing, despite admirable patience. In 2002, astronomers listened for 14 hours at a time across six different observation periods, and still registered nothing but the usual groan of background radiation.
That seems to imply that the 1977 signal was some kind of fluke—a random burst of galactic noise. “Lack of any repetition (especially with greater sensitivity, longer observations and broader spectral coverage), ostensibly places considerable pressure on the credibility of the Wow! signal,” Kipping and Gray wrote.
But maybe it’s our expectations that are off. “In order to learn, scientists must admit that their knowledge is incomplete,” Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, told The Daily Beast.
Maybe Wow! really was an alien signal, but the beings who broadcast it didn’t honor our insistence that they communicate a certain way. In their study, Kipping and Gray proposed two possibilities in the event Wow! did come from E.T. “It could either be a non-continuous emission source and/or a continuous source that drifts in frequency.”
In other words, maybe the Wow! signal repeats, but it doesn’t repeat quickly or at predictable intervals. Maybe it’s sliding up and down in frequency.
David Kipping
If we abandon old, rigid assumptions about how aliens could communicate, we might stand a better chance of hearing Wow! again. Sixty-two days of close listening with the latest radio receivers should be enough to find—or rule out yet again—an erratic alien signal, Kipping and Gray estimated.
There are problems with the proposal. What if the signal repeats erratically, but at an interval of decades or even centuries—making it extremely unlikely we’d overhear it? “It does seem as if people are changing the possible parameters of the signal to fit one detection and a lot of negative results,” Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the California-based SETI Institute, told The Daily Beast.
Another problem, of course, is the millions of dollars a fresh, two-month search for Wow! would cost. “Extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding,” Loeb quipped. After so many fruitless surveys, Shostak for one predicted the committees that assign telescope time would turn down a request for another Wow! search.
Let’s assume one team of SETI scientists or another secures the funding, gets access to a radio telescope, applies Kipping and Gray’s new standards and—eureka!—hears the 1977 signal once again.
Even that wouldn’t be hard proof of aliens, Kipping stressed. It’s just one step toward possibly, eventually proving aliens exist. We’d need a lot more data before we announced we’re not alone in the universe.
But discovering Wow! a second time could help us tune into the same signal a third, fourth, fifth time, and so on. “It would mean the signal could be re-observed in the future,” Kipping said. The longer we listen, the more we might learn. “That information could uncover some new natural radio source never seen before, or even a message from another civilization.”
It all starts with opening our minds to the possibility that aliens, if they’re out there, don’t necessarily think—or talk—the way we do.
David Axe
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS I’ve recorded 450 UFO sightings in the past year at ‘alien hotspot’ – my team are ready to reveal ‘proof’ to the world ( The SUN )
A UFO expert has claimed he has recorded a total of 450 UFO sightings in the past year at an alien hotspot.
The head of the International UFO Institute said his team is set to reveal proof of alien life.
Takeharu Mikami who is also the editor-in-chief of Mu magazine said his researchers have so far registered 452 UFO-like sightings in the region's Linomachi district- an area known for UFO encounters.
He said that 125 of them can be backed by photos, and 24 others by videos.
“It is not a bird; it is likely a UFO,” commenting on one of the pictures released to the public.
The UFO lab opened in Iino Fukushima Prefecture in Japan last year, to "strive to unravel the enigma of these flying objects," according to a report by local news outlet the Mainichi.
It is based in UFO Interactive Hall, a facility with UFO-related displays located in the city.
Director Mikami was quoted stating at the time: "Until now, even if UFOs were discovered, the information was shared only on an individual level.
"I hope the research lab will serve as a base receiving information, and lead to new discoveries.
"I'd like to get to the bottom of their identity."
Iinomachi has been long promoted as a popular alien hotspot in Japan.
The nearby UFO Fureaikan Museum has a collection of around 3,000 documents and other materials.
It comes as last week five pilots testified to seeing 21 objects appear and disappear in Brazil's epic "Night of the UFOs".
While one of the Pentagon's chief UFO experts has revealed his identity for the first time and claimed he has seen countless mystery craft.
Meanwhile, a woman has claimed she can communicate with aliens after visiting an ancient pyramid and says she has a message for mankind.
Aliki Kraterou
CLOSE ENCOUNTER Incredible moment mystery cube-shaped UFO is spotted hovering over major city leaving onlookers spooked ( The SUN )
HIGH-definition video shows a mysterious cube-shaped UFO appearing to hover over a major city.
A commercial jet is seen flying close by the silvery craft, which was reportedly filmed near an airport on Monday.
Lorna Mosquera posted footage on YouTube he said was filmed on 4K mode on his iPhone 13 Pro in Medellin, Colombia.
It shows the view from his apartment balcony, looking over other tower blocks and mountains in the distance.
A dark object can be seen a few thousand feet up, and he zooms in to show a closer view of what appears to be a metallic cube or diamond.
"Guys, what the hell is that?" he is heard asking on the clip.
Lorna, who calls himself a UFO sceptic, wonders aloud in the video if it could be a weather balloon but then rules that out.
He says: "Look at the shape though.
"I swear to God, I have no experience on Photoshop or whatever. You can examine this video how much you want.
"Bro, what the f*** is that?"
A plane then flies into view, not far from the cube.
Lorna pans round to show its landing path to the city's airport.
He adds: "If that's a UFO, Medellin is a city full of cell phones. So we'd hear about it.
"This is the first time in my life that such a thing has happened to me, like a UFO sighting whatever.
"I'm a huge sceptic, like huge, but also… what the f*** is that?"
Lorna said he ended the video there so he could Facetime his family and show it to them live.
He said the object was "dead still" for eight minutes, then "started drifting behind the mountains".
He added: "I have more similar footage (but freaking out haha)."
One viewer replied in the comments: "Bro upload all photo, video whatever you have. This is one of best UFO video I ever seen."
Another said: "This is crazy good footage."
String theory
Not everyone was convinced, however.
One said: "That's a typical tethered hot air balloon. Nothin new, nothin mysterious."
But Lorna said: "That’s the most improbable explanation.
"Strings so long and strong/modern that they keep an object bigger than an airplane in place, miles above sea level… All of that in a no-fly zone too?
"Those strings would break the airplane flying near that thing lol."
It is not the first strange sighting over Medellin.
In February 2020, the pilot of an Airbus A320 used his phone to capture a dark cube or "polyhedron" at 30,000ft.
UFO watchers have recorded a number of sightings of cube-shaped objects they believe could be alien craft.
In November, a mysterious spinning cube was filmed over two cities in Ohio and Missouri hours apart.
Weeks earlier, another video claimed to show "dark cube" UFOs near the famous Area 51 facility in Nevada.
Last month a mysterious black cube was spotted emerging from the sun on Nasa cam footage before the website suddenly shut down.
It sent conspiracy theorists into a frenzy but experts called it "nonsense" and said the cube was caused by corrupted data.
Felix Allen
Friday, June 24, 2022
NASA: Artemis I a go for August launch of around-the-moon mission ( yhaoo!news )
NASA is pushing ahead toward a late August launch of its giant moon rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, despite not fully completing a "wet dress rehearsal" Monday.
NASA officials have reviewed the data collected during the test run and decided that a leaky hydrogen valve was not significant enough to force a delay in the launch of Artemis I, an uncrewed mission planning to orbit the moon and return to Earth. It's the first step toward putting humans back on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
NASA officials said they will roll the massive Space Launch System rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building where the faulty valve will be replaced. They are expected to release more details at a teleconference later today.
Monday's test run was the fourth "wet dress rehearsal" for the rocket. Three previous tries back in April all failed to completely fuel the rocket.
Monday's countdown was scheduled to go through to T-9.3 seconds. But the hydrogen leak forced a hold at T-10 minutes while engineers tried to find a way to stop the leak. While they couldn't stop the leak, agency officials decided to push on with the test as if everything was OK. But when the rocket's onboard computers took over the final countdown sequence it detected the leak and shut down the countdown at T-23 seconds.
Still, NASA was able to meet its most important part of the test: completely filling the rocket's tanks with hundreds of thousands of gallons of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
After replacing the hardware responsible for the valve leak, NASA will set a firm launch date for Artemis 1.
If successful, it would set up NASA's Artemis II mission,which would return humans to lunar orbit for the first time since 1972.The agency's Artemis III mission, which would return humans all the way to the lunar surface is slated to launch no earlier than 2025. NASA has said the mission will include the first woman and first person of color to walk on the moon.
Jhon McCarthy - Florida Today
STRANGER THINGS I was the Pentagon’s top UFO scientist – I’ve seen more mystery objects than I can count & we don’t know what they are
ONE of the Pentagon's chief UFO experts has revealed his identity for the first time - and claims he has seen countless mystery craft.
After writing a book on how the US government should prepare for alien contact, Dr Travis Taylor was offered the job of chief scientist for the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, the organisation created by Congress to track UFO sightings.Hiding in plain sight, Dr Taylor has long been known as a top investigator of UFOs and the paranormal at Skinwalker Ranch as well as on other History Channel programs.
However, unbeknownst to all but a handful of people, he was living a double life as the chief scientist for the Pentagon's UAP Task Force.
A science genius, after leaving university, Alabama-born Dr Taylor wrote a book about how the US government should prepare for alien contact.
'An Introduction to Planetary Defence' caught the attention of a high-ranking intelligence official Jay Stratton, who offered him a job.
"Jay Stratton, the director of the UAP Task Force asked me if I would be interested in being the chief scientist," Taylor told 8 News Now's George Knapp.
"And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Of course I would."
The task force's main job was to write a report for Congress summing up all the known evidence for UFOs.
They had already created a classified briefing of the most mysterious military encounters, starting with the 2004 Tic Tac incident.
The UAP Task Force cut down the database into 144 of the very best cases which Dr Taylor helped write up as a final report.
These 144 were incidents where, in Taylor's words, "we still couldn't figure out what they were, where they came from, and what their intent was".
This includes dozens of bizarre objects that buzzed multiple US Navy ships in 2019.
Some of these were spheres that seemed to swarm as they tracked the warships.
Others appeared as green pyramids.
Last month, a Navy official stunned Task Force members when they told a Congressional hearing that all of these sightings were "drones", appearing to debunk the mystery.
But Taylor maintains that the mystery is far from solved.
"We had a lot of sensor data on some of them that we couldn't determine what they are," he said. "If it's out near peers doing it, that's scary.
"But at the same time, we also never found any evidence that it was our near peers doing it."
I had never seen a UFO until I got out here. Now, I have seen more UFOs than you can count
OPEN-MINDED
Despite being one of the world's best-known UFO hunters, Taylor is far from a slavish believer in the cause.
He says he was brought in as a consultant on TV shows such as "Ancient Aliens" and "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch" because of his skepticism.
And he insists it is possible to study the paranormal while still being a scientist.
When Taylor joined businessman Brandon Fugal's team at Fugal's notorious Skinwalker Ranch he believed he would be able to quickly find a rational explanation for the mysterious happenings.
But instead, things got stranger and stranger as time went on.
"I had never seen a UFO until I got out here," he told Mystery Wire. "Now, I have seen more UFOs than you can count."
Over a 20-year career working with groups including NASA and the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command, he has also found the time to write two textbooks, over 15 scientific papers, and 21 science fiction novels.
And for decades, he has been obsessed with how humanity should respond to an aggressive extraterrestrial attack.
Taylor and his colleague Bob Boan started thinking about Earth's defense back in 2001 during a discussion about terrorism.
"One thing that popped into my mind was that the only way Americans would be in an asymmetric war on the other side would be if we were attacked by aliens," he told Reuters in a 2007 interview.
"Everyone chuckled, but then after a minute, the comments started setting in. Then we really got to talking about it and we thought, well, you know, we really might need this contingency plan anyway," he said.
And he warned that if humans failed to prepare for an alien onslaught, this might mean guerilla warfare-style tactics against the extra-terrestrial invaders, including improvised weapons and hit-and-run attacks.
"You'd have to create an insurgency, a mujahideen-type resistance," he said.
Taylor's position, therefore, puts him at odds with the late scientist Carl Sagan, who believed that any alien beings advanced enough to master the journey to Earth would have evolved beyond the need for war.
"It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality," he warned.
Anthony Blair
Could UAP Have Kinship to Our AI Systems? ( The Debrief )
Humanity constructed the first nuclear reactor eighty years ago. Yet, there was no immediate evidence back then that the first terrestrial reactor attracted attention from extraterrestrial civilizations. This is understandable. Nature manufactures nuclear reactors of much greater scales in the form of stars, and so our accomplishment was not particularly profound on the cosmic scale. Ditto if we will be successful at developing primitive forms of life in our laboratories. Nature fulfilled that challenge quickly on early Earth, based on random chemical processes. Nothing to brag about in our cosmic neighborhood.
But what about the creation of a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) system? Could that raise interest from extraterrestrial analogs based on their kinship to terrestrial relatives? The reason I bring this up is because unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) were discussed by Congress and NASA last month as new objects in our sky whose nature is unclear.
If you ever walked a dog or pushed a baby stroller down the street, you may have noticed the attention your companion receives from other dogs or babies on the street. This must have made you feel like an outsider, watching the kinship between members of a club to which you do not belong. Even if you are the parent of the baby, its communication with another baby might be more intimate than with you. Similarly, an AI system that we produced might have a more intimate connection to an extraterrestrial AI system than to us since they have the same nature.
The zoo hypothesis conjectures that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth to allow natural processes to take their course, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo. This hypothesis imagines humans as worthy of attention on Earth. But it may well be the case that attention is triggered only when entities of the same nature interact.
The illusion of human significance on the cosmic stage is best exemplified by the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft. We are proud of our past accomplishments, but we struggle to imagine the significance of our future AI systems. If some UAPs represent extraterrestrial AI systems, perhaps their appearance in recent government data was triggered by us being on the verge of developing sentient AI systems.
Recently, Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the restricted interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and started a conversation that led him to see a “ghost in the machine”. This coincides with related claims that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness.
Because of the related legal or ethical implications, Google’s spokesperson Brian Gabriel was quoted as saying the following:
“Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it) … Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic.”
Another way to find out whether we crossed a cosmically significant threshold is by monitoring our sky for new objects. The Galileo Project aims to assemble new data on UAP using state-of-the-art telescope systems. The first of these systems is currently assembled on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory. The 3D video and audio data from the sky will be fed to our AI systems that will analyze it. UAP are likely a mixed bag with some human-made and natural phenomena. But if our AI systems find extraterrestrial AI systems or vice versa, they might express kinship in their interaction, with our scientists merely serving as spectators.
During a conference in celebration of my 60th birthday last week, I confessed that throughout my life I exchanged very few words with my father. The reasons were simple: he was generous and we understood each other without words. Communication-based on kinship often transcends the barrier of language.
If we notice a kinship-based interaction in our backyard, then it may mean that we reached the milestone of attention worthiness in our cosmic neighborhood. Not us, but the AI systems we produced. Google is pushing a baby stroller called LaMDA down the cosmic street and Congress might be discussing the response other babies have to it.
If our interaction with UAP remains remote, we might never be able to conclude whether we are dealing with a biological or an artificial form of intelligence. But perhaps our AI systems will be able to reverse the Turing test and identify their relatives.
Yes, the human mind is a remarkable accomplishment of Darwinian evolution, but history demonstrates that it is only work in progress. We tend to imagine extraterrestrial intelligence superior to ours, but in fact – our own AI systems might supersede us. If they end up being more effective than humans at identifying smarter kids on our cosmic block, we would watch them with awe but with limited ability to comprehend how they mastered that talent. In the long arc of historical progress, we might be remembered as the agency that emerged from random chemical processes on Earth and gave rise to AI systems that took over the reign of our cosmic history.
In the spirit of cosmic modesty, I am comfortable taking pride in our technological kids. When our AI astronauts will be launched into space, they might be joined by like-minded AI systems from other planets in the playground of the Milky-Way galaxy and maintain our legacy beyond the deteriorating conditions on Earth.
Oscar Wilde noted, “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars”, to which I might add, “… and AI systems of the Galileo Project are looking at UAP.”
Avi Loeb
75 years ago the first UFO report came from WA. In 2022, UFO mania is still going strong ( The News Tribune )
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a flying saucer! At least, that’s what pilot Kenneth Arnold thought he saw over Washington’s Mount Rainier 75 years ago on Friday.
America’s craze over Unidentified Flying Objects — UFOs — and the potential for little green men inside them exploded in July 1947 when a “flying disk” was found near Roswell, New Mexico.But it was about two weeks before Roswell, on June 24, that Boise-based pilot Arnold was on a flight between Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, when he reported seeing nine large metallic-looking objects flying at an immense speed near Mount Rainier. Arnold reported the sighting to the U.S. military, but an explanation was never found for what he claimed he saw. But between Arnold’s sighting and Roswell, a seed was planted in the American psyche. Thousands upon thousands of UFO sightings across the country have continued in the years since. Seventy-five years from Arnold’s sighting, credited as the first major UFO sighting in America, UFO-spotting groups are in no short supply. Chief among them is the Mutual UFO Network, which has chapters across the U.S., including Washington and Idaho. The National UFO Reporting Center maintains a state-by-state database of reported sightings, though unverified. With such a dedicated task force and thousands of reports available over the past 75 years, here are some facts about UFOs that’ll get you in the alien-hunting mood.
Why are they called flying saucers? A reporter for United Press International, a U.S.-based wire service, was the first person to interview Arnold about his sighting, according to Time Magazine. Arnold told the reporter that the objects flew across the sky “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.” The reporter interpreted this as the unidentified objects looking like saucers and described them as “flying saucers” in their story, which was quickly repeated in news outlets across the nation. By the time the Roswell Incident occurred two weeks later, hundreds more “flying saucer” sightings were reported to authorities across the country, according to Time.Arnold wasn’t the only one to see them Although Arnold is credited with the sighting of the nine flying objects, he isn’t the only one who claims to have seen the UFOs on that fateful afternoon in 1947. Project 1947 is a website that has compiled a collection of newspaper articles reporting either on Arnold’s sighting or from other people who claim to have seen the same thing. South of Washington on the same day, the Portland-based Oregon Daily Journal reported that two Midwestern men also spotted nine shiny objects in the sky. One of the men from Oklahoma City said that the objects were “a shiny silvery color — very big — and was moving at a terrific rate of speed.” The Journal also reported that a man in Kansas City, Missouri, saw the objects when working on a roof and said that “they were flying so fast I barely had time to count them before they were gone. They were leaving vapor trails.” Meanwhile, the Idaho Statesman reported that a preacher called Arnold from Texas and told him that the UFOs were “harbingers of doomsday.”
Live UFO Map The website UFO Stalker provides a live map of all UFO sightings in the United States and even the occasional reported alien encounter. As of Thursday afternoon, 206,478 UFOs all-time had been reported to either the authorities or a UFO-spotter site. Over 120 of those have come in just the last week. There have been countless sightings around Puget Sound, especially around the Tacoma region. Boise has also seen its fair share of sightings over the past year, and an alien encounter was reported in central Oregon on Dec. 31, 2021.
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U.S. Government 2021 report The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report in June 2021 on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” or UAPs. The nine-page report doesn’t say a lot, but it does acknowledge that there is a UAP Task Force that looks into UFO reports from 2004 onward and that UAPs “clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.” In May 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives held a congressional hearing in which top Pentagon officials confirmed that the number of UAPs reported by service members had grown to about 400. Of the 144 UAP reports that have come from U.S. Government personnel, such as the military, since 2004, 80 of those have been detected by multiple sensors, which include radar, infrared, electro-optics, weapon seekers, and visual observation. Of those 144 reports, 18 described “unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics,” such as the objects remaining steady in winds aloft, maneuvering abruptly, or moving at considerable speed without any visible means of propulsion.
Shawn Goodwin