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Pentagon Official Floats a Theory For Unexplained Sightings: Alien Motherships (politico.com) 118

Posted by BeauHD from the open-to-speculative-ideas dept.
The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth. Politico reports: In a draft paper dated March 7 (PDF), Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be "probes" from an extraterrestrial "parent craft." It's unusual for government officials, especially those involved in the nascent effort to collect intelligence on recent sightings, to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, although top agency officials don't rule it out when asked. After Loeb posted it online, the paper gained notoriety from a post on Military Times and has also circulated among science-focused news outlets.

More than half of the five-page paper is devoted to discussing the possibility that the unexplained objects DoD is studying could be the "probes" in the mothership scenario, including most of the page-long introduction. One section is titled: "The Extraterrestrial Possibility" and another "Propulsion Methods." Kirkpatrick's involvement in the academic paper demonstrates that the Pentagon is open to scientific debate of the origins of UFOs, an important signal to send to the academic world, experts said. But they add that his decision to attach his name to a theory considered in most academic circles to be highly unsubstantiated also raises questions about AARO's credibility.

The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth." The paper goes on to compare the probes to "dandelion seeds" that could be separated from the parent craft by the sun's gravitational force. It examines the physics of how the smaller craft could move through the Earth's atmosphere to reach the surface, where they could be spotted by humans. The paper notes that the "probes" could use starlight to "charge their batteries" and the Earth's water as fuel. It also speculates on the motive for aliens to send exploratory probes to Earth. "What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders," the authors write. "As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet's surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration."
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Pentagon Official Floats a Theory For Unexplained Sightings: Alien Motherships More

Pentagon Official Floats a Theory For Unexplained Sightings: Alien Motherships

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  • You can't think "aliens" without thinking "probes".

  • When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @02:09AM (#63451258)

    my first reaction is to wonder what embarrasing issue they're trying to divert attention away from.

    • Re:When government agencies spew outrageous shit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @03:40AM (#63451312) Homepage

      My first thought was "Why hasn't he been kicked out of his job and replaced with a non-idiot?"

      • Because the groups this 'info' is targeted at is unhinged nutcases, and people who are trying to keep food on the table and have no time for this.

          I think it's just the government (either the US or foreign) screwing around and the US gov't is spewing "aliens" because they don't want to cause a panic.

        Also, how do they know for sure a ship flying through Earth's atmosphere is a "mothership"? More like talking out of their asses and putting holes in their own stories.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That is a very good observation. Probably true. The abysmally embarrassing Ukrainian leak that massively helps Putin?

      • Or maybe Kirkpatrick is just as big of an idiot as Loeb. Never underestimate the sheer ingenuity and intelligence of the committed idiot. They can bubble up to the upper echelons of any organization.

        A job title (or a last name) is no guarantee that there's not raging nonsense and mush between those ears.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. I have run into some stellar examples of this effect as well. Fortunately managed to never have any of those as my boss so far.

    • my first reaction is to wonder what embarrasing issue they're trying to divert attention away from.

      How about instead, this is one of the first steps to prepare humans for the realization we are not alone in the universe. Over time, drip out these tidbits, increasing the specificiity of what is being said until the groundwork has been laid to reveal they've known these are craft from other worlds but didn't want to panic the public.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sims 2 ( 994794 )

      Are we invading iran again?
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • We have been in a Cold War with China for 40 years, and we lost. The war began with Nixon in the mid-70s. By the mid-80s the Chinese government had a plan in place to take over the world economy. Misdirection of the peasants became an important part of the plan in the mid-90s and continues today.
    • Chinese balloons.
  • Charles Fort - the American writer and researcher for whom âoeForteanâ, as in the magazine âoeFortean Timesâ, is named - fought for years with academics about the boundaries of âoeacceptableâ science. His point was, sometimes we see things so weird and unusual, that they donâ(TM)t fit our model of the World, and we must therefore go looking for new models. In his time, a famous example was reports of raining fish and frogs. Common consensus amongst scientists is that this

  • Sure. Also,the sun is the heat lamp for our local petri dish. In other news,under the surface dust, the moon may really be made of cheese.

    Are they really this dumb, or do they have some reason to feed conspiracy theories?

    • Re:The solar system is a petri dish (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @03:59AM (#63451324)

      "Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders."

      --George Carlin

      • American schools, [...] If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders."

        Who controls education? Oh yeah, the leaders.

      • The Robert Redford film 'The Candidate' gives a depressing dissection of how a principled individual is shaped by his campaign manager into what wins elections. And the public keep voting for these creations. So they're not the 'best' - they're the ones who have been shaped to win and who fool the public.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Are they really this dumb, or do they have some reason to feed conspiracy theories?

      Somebody clearly has that reason. PsyOps preparing a coup?

    • The sun is probably more like a shotgun that continually fires.

      As for being this dumb, can you blame them when you consider the audience?

      https://twitter.com/qikipedia/... [twitter.com]

  • I see what you did there.

  • Idiots and dilusional simpleton are everywhere ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jopet ( 538074 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @02:48AM (#63451280) Journal

    but to see them in a high position in the US military like here is scary.

  • Now to convince everyone they are 'aliens'.

    • Hey! Ok, I admit, I haven't been the best guy in the past couple millennia, but stop blaming every shit that happens on me! You're grown up now, you can make your own mistakes without me meddling all the time.

      Cheese-us, talk about megalomania. You think I have nothing better to do than to tell you to kill each other? Most of you get that bright idea on their own, no prodding needed.

    • Now to convince everyone they are 'aliens'.

      Actually, Satanists seem to be pretty nice bunch of people: https://thesatanictemple.com/ [thesatanictemple.com]

    • That's the old crazy talk. The new crazy talk is they are more advanced than we know in genetic manipulation, cloning and various other things and have created an "alien" which they now need a good entrance story for. Mothership out in space where it can't be verified is just about perfect.

  • Gosh, they almost wrote a whole sentence before they had to stick some nonsense.

    Kudos to the editors for filing this under "entertainment".

  • It could be worse (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @03:14AM (#63451298)
    He didn't suggest ghosts or angels.

    Even if this isn't an improvement on "swamp gas", at least it's a change, so it's worth something.

    Authoritarian types have a real problem admitting they don't know what's going on, so that could be a part of it as well.

    • They can't suggest "weather balloon" anymore, because now that requires a fighter jet scramble and a couple million dollars worth of Sidewinders.

      They're finally in a position where the lies are more costly than the truth: Aliens. Ancient ones. I'm glad we have citizens like Tom DeLonge who relentlessly pressured our government for the Truth.

  • hypothesis.

    If it was a theory, then the hypothesis would have already been tested and accepted.

    • It's not even a hypothesis, if anything, I'd compare it to the effects of digestion problems.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        A hypothesis of this type is more properly called "pseudo profound bullshit", with "bullshit" meaning "quite obviously very likely not true but not proven so"

  • Avi Loeb (Score:3)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @03:48AM (#63451318) Homepage

    An good example of how there is a very fine line between genius and madness. This is the guy who thinks Oumuamua was an alien craft despite standard physics being able to explain its "unexplained" acceleration.

    • There is no fine line. There is genius, and there is madness. This guy is decidedly in the latter camp, no genius in sight whatsoever.

      • Maybe the fine line is between "cracked record" and "cracked pot".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        "no genius in sight whatsoever"

        I suggest you check out the real science he's done and papers published in the past before he lost the plot.

        • Past records don't necessarily mean anything for current events. I mean, take your favorite billionaire. Had a huge hit once but now steps from blunder to blunder. Whether you take Musk, Zuckerberg or anyone else. Just because you had a spark of genius at some point in time doesn't mean you are one.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        The thin line is not about the ideas on either side being produced being close. The line is thin with regards to how easy it is to cross it. All it requires is to degrade your own fact-checking ability enough or to stop using it. While I personally find that very hard to do, for most people fact-checking is a tenuous thing and often viewed as optional.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It might also be an example of dementia. Or perhaps it's just somebody who go overly excited about a chunk of rock and is playing the "well, it *could* be" game.

      Or maybe he just wants to sell books.

  • We used to explain things we couldn't understand with gods, now it's aliens or "we live in a simulation". Nothing new, more appealing than boring complex physics explanations especially for famous tech bros who tends to live on the stupidity mountain of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yes, pretty much. I know that many/most people are desperate afraid of things being unknown and hence make up, or more often adopt, some fantasy how it has to be and then desperately believe them. I do not get why they do that though. While I construct fantasies about as much as the next smart person, I always know they are just fantasies and used to simulate and try out more complex ideas. I have absolutely no problem with classifying something as unknown and to wait and see what happens.

      So what is the iss

  • When it's not eleased via a leak (Score:4, Funny)

    by Teun ( 17872 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @04:23AM (#63451358)
    How can we trust such a paper when it's not released via a leak...

  • Far easier that way. And a pool of people this gullible and easily manipulated may come in handy some day.

  • Play can’t tell the difference between (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They can’t tell the difference between men and women. What makes you think they can tell the difference between terrestrial and extraterrestrial.

  • The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth."

    What a fabulous thing to say.
    Is he just looking for a budget to subsidize new space toys? "There is a tremenous chinese.. err.. Alien., erh,. Yes, that's right!,. A Chinese -Alien- threat. We need more things!.. In space... We need more Space Things. .. And fast, goddamnit!"

    Or has he been Loebed up by Avi?

  • We must look like a bunch of baboons (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:06AM (#63451474)

    destroying the earth with our pettiness.

  • "Avi Loeb". A known unscientist.
  • It has a bunch of basic physics calcs showing that its not impossible for Oumuamua to have been an alien spacecraft and other small objects to have been proves, but it gives no evidence whatsoever that is what they were. Also the correlation he makes between Oumuamua and IM2, an interstellar meteor that arrived 6 months earlier in a different orbit, but similar speed is not at all convincing. Both speeds were comparable to the motion of the sun through the average material nearby in the galaxy
    br A large

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      It's quite a like method...if you accept panspermia
      Which isn't impossible, if a bit unlikely.

      • In that model what is the function of the big asteroid. Why not just send the small ones that will impact?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Well, in most versions of panspermia, the distribution happens by accident. So asking about the function is irrelevant. That's just the size of chunk that happened to break off. (Say there'd been life on Earth the The1a hit, and the moon was just the largest fragment. There'd have been lots of other fragments of all sorts of sizes.

          In the versions which are directed panspermia I guess the large body would be a radiation shield, but directed panspermia has always seemed exceedingly unlikely to me, so I n

    • Correct, lots of "journalists" completely mis-interpreted this paper all over the internet. Nobody's saying these are probes from an alien mothership, just that the trajectories they followed are potentially consistent with being probes.

  • Start somewhere else (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Like commenter above, I have been appropriately skeptical of Alex Jones maniacally raging about lizard people, etc. Obvious attempts to captivate people with boogie man stories. We're such simpletons, it always works, no matter how ridiculous a story is, someone is going to buy in.

    HOWEVER

    During the pandemic, since I was stuck indoors for so long, I watched a few episodes of "Ancient Aliens"... and while it's kind of corny, it raises some valid questions. For serendipitous reasons, I recently began applying

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      See if you can find "The four faced visitors of Ezekiel" from Astounding Science Fiction (or possibly it was already Analog).

      FWIW, I have a friend who insists that the stones of the pyramids were ancient cement, cast in place. And it's been fairly well established that the folks who build them were "reasonably for the time" paid craftsmen.

    • OK fair questions, but there are some answers. I believe archeologists have estimated it took 10s of thousands of workers ~20 years to build the largest pyramid. The work was likely done during the Nile flood season when there was a lot of available labor. There is evidence of a large population, including the foundations of the buildings where the workers lived (I've seen those myself). There were also grain storage areas and other indications of a large population. Its also worth noting that the earl

    • Try harder to be brief.

  • The Heaven's Gate folks were right?
  • Maybe they just want to try our exotic cannabis strains. "Our reports say they have Rick's Pupil #12, Skywalker, and Headband strains. Commander what do we do?" "Make contact and pick me up some California Kush." "Affirmative."

  • If you wanted to apply a slow burn paranoia experiment on the population of a country, you could do worse than what we've seen happening over the last few decades.
    An increasing tilt toward "there could be aliens amongst us" by the US military.

    Keep it gently bubbling on the back burner, gently feed into the well saturated cultural fiction of aliens, in novels, comics and movies that the population have been steeped in for generations.

    Eventually, you'll have the opportunity, should it arise, to point citizens

    • I concur, if it only was aliens, that would be a great boon to humanity, especially if we can correctly infer nefarious purposes from their side. Maybe then humanity could unite instead of this constant fear mongering and we against them think. (When we and them are actually the same).

      But the truth is so much worse, that even if it was aliens, they are probably shaking their heads in exasperation over our never ending stupidity, and some -- let's not say who, since we all know -- would claim that they are h

  • More proof the govt needs weekly drug tests for its employees.

    • On the contrary, make drugs mandatory for all higher-ups in federal agencies. Keep them churning out these hilarious, batshit reports instead of planning coups in Central America or SWAT-ing a dude's family for being baited into a firearms-related technicality.

  • Or some chatbot did.
  • He's considered a loon for his Oumuamua babbles.

  • With nonsense like this, because the truth would get people scared, angry, and even more distrustful of the government.

    The truth which does not involve space men.

  • What i don't understand is that the vast majority of scientific community agree that we're probably not alone in the universe and were actively searching for evidence through SETI and the like, yet as soon as someone mentiones that there is a phenomenon that we do not understand and let's consider aliens as a hypothesis - everyone ridicules them. Lets look at the data, and disprove or provide an alternative viable explanation for it. For a lot of the evidence theres more than just grainy images - theres vis

    • The people who have a better science education background understand that FTL isn't happening and that getting from one planetary system to another takes a LOT of energy and time and almost certainly has an incredibly high potential for failure... and the ROI just isn't there.

      It's incredibly unlikely anyone "out there" has sent an autonomous ship that's launching atmospheric probes to study us, simply because between that and pointing a bunch of telescopes at us it just isn't worth it in terms of time, effo

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