Pentagon expert believes alien motherships are possible

Reports of UFO sightings in the United States have increased in recent years. Many are satellites or foreign spy balloons, but US intelligence agencies can’t explain them all. This is one of the reasons why the US government is officially investigating so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).

Now the head of the Pentagon Office of Investigation into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, Sean Kirkpatrick, along with Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, has published a scientific study that does not rule out possible UFO sightings. The paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but it’s already making headlines.

In the study, the two researchers develop a scenario in which unusual objects passing through the solar system could be a kind of alien mothership for probes. “An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a mothership, releasing many small probes during its brief passage to Earth,” Kirkpatrick and Loeb write.

The asteroid “Oumuamua” is given as an example (the word comes from Hawaii and means “leader” or “scout” in German). An elongated object 400 meters in diameter captured by telescopes in 2017 as it flew between the Earth and the Sun.

“Oumuamua” showed unusual peculiarities: the object had no tail like a comet and its trajectory was not like that of an asteroid. In addition, the object reflected sunlight exceptionally well. However, astronomers recently classified it as an asteroid from another solar system. Even then, Loeb described it as a possible man-made object and caused a stir.

However, the researchers in the new paper are also critical of other UFO sightings. Physical laws can be used to show which observations can be excluded. For example, many of the UFO reports would lack the usual responses to rapid course changes in the sky. The flying objects “defy the laws of physics,” the paper says. According to Loeb and Kirkpatrick, it can be concluded from this that the observations can be judged as measurement errors.

Apparently, optical illusions or the limitations of certain devices play a role here: U.S. Department of Defense officials testified at congressional hearings last year that their night vision goggles can make a drone appear like a more fascinating triangular object.

The US government announced in June 2021 that it had no explanation for about 140 celestial phenomena of the past two decades. In 2021, under pressure from the US Congress, the US secret services began to summarize sightings of unusual flying objects in a report. It wasn’t just about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. The background to this is the fear that foreign secret services could use new aircraft technology to spy on the US.

However, Loeb does not want to limit himself to anecdotal evidence: “As much as the military reports are fascinating and motivate my work at the moment, I want my tools to tell me what is really happening,” he told the American broadcaster. NBC news.

Loeb and Kirkpatrick summarize in their report that all previous sensor data on UFOs is too inaccurate. Much higher resolution recordings are necessary. Sharp photos also did not come from “Oumuamua”. Loeb, who is known for his extraterrestrial theory, launched the so-called Galileo project at the renowned Harvard University. It aims to scientifically evaluate hundreds of UAP observations.

(t-online, aj)