AATIP Reveals Compelling Videos of UFOs

Some weeks ago, as my class was discovering notions of relativity, a student asked what I thought of the bizarre videos that were making its rounds on the internet - they reveal what appears to be some kind of unusual aerial vehicle.  I watched these black and white videos with curiosity.  In the background, you can hear some excited voices expressing genuine confusion about what they are witnessing.  With final exams looming and little free time, I did not pursue this rabbit hole any further.  Then weeks later, a friend we'll call 'Phil', asked what I thought about the UFOs.

Tom is a staunch believer in the scientific method and a skeptic when it comes to conspiracies and the like.  But he found these videos to be very compelling.  He informed me about Luis Elizondo and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and suggested I watch his recent interviews.  I did.  I also came across a clip of Barack Obama giving credence to the notion that the highest levels of American intelligence have come across aerial vehicles whose origins confound them.  It appears that AATIP is indeed a genuine Pentagon program and they will issue an official response to the aforementioned videos.

I impressed upon Phil that I am typically not drawn into stories of this nature due to the extreme unlikelihood of alien visitation.  However, if these videos were real artifacts, free of manipulations, they reveal technology that is far beyond current human capability.  The aerial vehicle in the videos:

1. Has no visible means of propulsion and whatever does propel it shows no sign of interacting with the environment.

2. Transfers from air to water without disturbing the water.

3. Banks extremely sharp turns at impossibly high speeds.

Let us, for instance, analyze point 3.  The vehicle is tracked at speeds in excess of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound in air, so about 1,650 m/s).  In order to not experience violent accelerations in excess of 5g (about 50 m/s/s), the minimum radius that its circular path would require is 36 km!  Points 1 and 2 are even more bewildering.

If these videos are authentic, how did the vehicles get here undetected by our radio astronomers?  Elizondo theorizes they emerged from the deep ocean.  Phil asked me where we should purchase our aluminum hats.

Passing on the hats for the moment, I went to the library later that day, and returned home with They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why we See Saucers, by Sarah Scoles.  The book is a historical account of the human obsession with UFOs and the possibility of alien intelligence, from Roswell and Area 51 to AATIP.  The title to the book is misleading: the author confides on the last pages that she remains unconvinced that any interplanetary intelligence has ever visited Earth, and that the plethora of reported human encounters with aliens are either honest mistakes or fabrications.

I am interested in honest mistakes, as they force us to apply the scientific method within this thought-provoking context.  These range from explainable celestial events, to high-tech military operations, and a wide range of optical illusions.  I also understand and do not fault claims of UFOs that are entirely psychological, whether they be drug-induced or convincing dreams.   

On the other hand, fabrications offend me.  They are an affront to my senses.  They degrade the entire process of discovery.  Muddying the evidence, manipulating the data, unfalsifiable claims masked as truths... These acts of dishonesty, whatever their motivation, highlight the fly in the ointment, which is human corruption.  Such acts of deceit serve only to spoil the earnest endeavor of identifying UFOs.  One key take-away from Scoles' book is that distinguishing genuine science from hoaxes is half the battle in the search for alien intelligence.

When it comes to the matter of extra-terrestrials, we must be extra skeptical of information emanating from sources who have a vested interest in making the first human contact with them.  One such player is Robert Bigelow, a wealthy American who has initiated numerous 'scientific teams' whose primary outputs have been UFO fabrications.  When I discovered that Bigelow has a connection to AATIP, I began to doubt the authenticity of the internet videos.

It is improbable that we have been or will ever be visited by interplanetary beings during our species' tenure on this pale blue dot.  The chances that intelligent life exists in our neighborhood of this galaxy during the small window of time comprising human existence are very low.  But not zero.  And that is what distinguishes the topic of aliens from other human obsessions, like paranormal activity.  The former is entirely conceivable according to our current understanding of nature.  

Evidence that confirms the existence of aliens would cause a dramatic shift in our understanding of the universe and our place in it.  That is why this conversation is so alluring.

I await the Pentagon's response to the videos that have captured the attention of so many.  If their  assessment does not support the alien intelligence theory (and I highly doubt that it will), conspiracy-theorists will be unmoved.  Government history does include cover-ups, which merely confirms the general prevalence of human weakness.  This history of dishonesty injects doubt into the UFO conversation.  

I will not be buying an Aluminum hat just yet.

The Day That Newton Met the Aliens

I always enjoy the sixth week of the semester in Mechanics class.  It usually includes the story of Isaac Newton; though in recent years, I have been offering two alternative stories, and asking the students which one is more likely to be the correct one.

Story 1: The Traditional Version

As many literary accounts attest, Isaac Newton was a very bright young fellow from England, who, in his mid-twenties, in the late seventeenth century, had an interest in many areas of science, most notably astronomy.  It was not so much the taking of the astronomical data that he was interested in, but rather, the analysis of the data.

It is important to realize that at this point in human history, science did not really concern itself with the explaining of phenomena.  Science was about observation: experimentation and perhaps noting patterns in the data - science did not seek to establish a framework, a model, ie, a code that seems to govern all matter and interactions in the universe (this is what science has become today).  The young Newton was fascinated with the data, and, encouraged by other prominent scientists of the time, tried to explain the data.

The data as recorded by numerous astronomers stated that planets seemed to orbit the Sun in elliptical orbits.  This upset the religious hard-liners of the time (like, um, just about everyone), as many felt that God would prefer circles over ellipses (not the first or last time humanity felt the need to suggest to God what universe was best).  It may have even upset Newton himself, because he too was religious.  Still, Newton could not and would not place his personal beliefs above the evidence that was before him, and so began the most famous foray into science in human history.

All Newton really had to work with was the fact that orbits had elliptical shapes.  He also had, like all of us do, the ability to interact with his environment, and to observe how rain, snow, and, yes, apples, fall.  Here is where the story gets weird, perhaps even disturbing...

Newton proposes the Law of Universal Gravitation as well as certain laws of motion.  Some might call this 'playing God' - I suspect that some at the time actually did.  He then needed to check if these laws, as proposed, were consistent with the elliptical paths that orbiting bodies exhibited.  In other words, he needed to see if his theoretical framework matched the experimental data.  He ran into a problem: the only way to do this required a new branch of mathematics (Mathematicians of the day were extremely adept at geometry, but not much else).  So, he took it upon himself to invent Calculus.

Yes.  Some guy in his twenties ran into a problem in his pursuit of science, so instead of raising his arms and accepting this dead end, he invented arguably the most important branch of mathematics we currently know of.  And then, he used this new math to address the advanced ordinary differential vector equation that results when you combine Universal Gravitation with Newton's Second Law of Motion.  Orbital Mechanics experts today refer to this particular analysis as "The Two-Body Problem."

I recall being in Professor Misra's Orbital Mechanics course at McGill University.  During class #2, he showed the class the Two-Body Problem, and proceeded to solve it.  At that point in my young career, I had been exposed to Calculus and Linear Algebra for six years and had taken at least ten math courses that covered these branches of the discipline.  I recall thinking that it was a very tough problem to solve.  I still find it to be a tough problem today.

Apparently, Newton did manage to solve it, and all of his ground-breaking work in this area is described in a book as sacred as most any religious text: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (published in 1687; an original copy is surely stored today somewhere behind glass).

Gravitation, laws for motion, mass, inertial frames, momentum - all of these concepts that are central to most any scientific pursuit were established by this one guy in a handful of years.  Today, any scientific analysis that does not involve the very small (microscopic), the very fast (>10% light speed), or the very dense (black holes), utilizes the framework described by Newton to the letter.

The End.

But there is another possibility...

Story 2: The Alternate Version (The Aliens Theory)

Isaac Newton was a very bright young fellow from England, who, in his mid-twenties, in the late seventeenth century, had an interest in many areas of science, most notably astronomy.  One night, he wished upon a star that he could be a famous scientist.

The next day, Newton was visited by aliens.  These aliens visited him quietly every night for the next several years.  They taught him Calculus and Mechanics, and eventually helped him write his famous Principia.  The aliens said, "Call it The Coolest Book by the Coolest Dude," but Newton insisted it get a different very long name.

The aliens were annoyed with Newton and his fancy book title, so they stopped visiting him once the book was published.

The End.

The way I see it, both stories are unbelievable.  The more I think about both stories, the less comfortable I feel in asserting that one story is more likely than the other.  I suppose all of the historical accounts point to Story 1, but I ask this question in all seriousness: How could a person have accomplished that without outside help? 

I am bewildered not only by the creativity of thought it took to propose those laws and the genius required to develop the math that it takes to assess them; I am equally stunned by the instinct Newton had to even suggest that mathematical equations could be used to describe the world and to predict what happens next.  Scientists today accept this to be true, but a universe could just as easily, at least in theory, have zero mathematical framework.  That Newton did all of this despite the reservations of the Church, as well as his own, is just icing on the cake.

Many historians today would describe Isaac Newton as one of, if not the most important and influential figures in human history.  And, I think that such a designation is warranted regardless of which of the two stories is actually the true one.

The Search for Intelligent Life

The title of this article does not mean to imply that humans are not intelligent.  It refers to the ongoing search in the Universe for intelligent life other than human beings, and some other animals here on Earth.  I should point out that humans have proven themselves to be unintelligent on many occasions.  One of the best comic strips I have ever seen has two aliens discussing the homo-sapiens they recently discovered on this planet called Earth.  One says to the other: “The Earthlings have placed weapons of mass destruction in orbit around their planet”.  To which the second alien asks, “An emerging intelligence?”  The first alien responds, “They have the weapons ... pointed at ... themselves.”  The two aliens then stare at each other in a very confused state.  Frankly, given the frequency with which our species attacks itself, it is amazing we’ve made it this far; but that is the subject for another article.

As of late, there have been an increased number of UFO sightings.  I am skeptical of these for many reasons.  From my point of view, these light shows in the sky have been planted by groups of people as a hoax, similar to the teams of attention-seekers who have been making crop circles in the backyards of defenseless farmers for decades.  With improved technology, these folks have taken their shows to the skies.