(ORDO NEWS) — Recently, the US Congress held hearings on US government information regarding “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAEs/UFOs).
The last investigation of its kind was more than 50 years ago as part of a US Air Force investigation called Project Blue Book that examined reports of sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
The current hearing is the result of a condition attached to the COVID Relief Bill -19 of 2020, which required U.S. intelligence agencies to produce a UFO report within 180 days.This report appeared last
June.But why would governments be interested in UFOs?
One of the interesting ideas is that NVU/UFOs are alien spaceships visiting Earth. It’s a concept that’s garnering a lot of attention, thanks to decades of sci-fi movies, opinions about what’s going on in Area 51, and alleged sightings from the public.
A much more prosaic line of thought is that governments are interested in unexplained aerial phenomena – especially those in their own sovereign airspace – because they may represent adversary-developed technologies.
Indeed, much of the discussion in recent hearings has revolved around potential threats from submarines, on the grounds that they are such man-made technologies.
None of the public appearances were intended to support the conclusion that alien spacecraft had crashed on or visited Earth. The hearings included closed secret sessions that supposedly dealt with more sensitive security information.
Undoubtedly, inexplicable phenomena have been observed, for example, in the footage received by naval pilots, fast-moving air objects are visible. But in order to conclude the existence of aliens, much more substantial and direct evidence is needed – incredible evidence that can be widely studied with the tools of science.
After all, the existence of life elsewhere in the universe is a fascinating question for science and society. Therefore, the search for extraterrestrial life is a legitimate pursuit, subject to the same burden of proof as all of science.
A drop in the ocean
Over the past ten years, I have periodically used radio telescopes to conduct large-scale experiments to search for technosignatures – signs of the existence of technological civilizations on planets in other parts of our galaxy (the Milky Way). But after decades of work by many teams of experts using powerful telescopes, we still have not covered a significant area.
If we consider the Milky Way to be the equivalent of Earth’s oceans, then the result of our decades of searching is like taking a random piece of water from the ocean to look for a shark.
Moreover, we are not even sure that sharks exist, and if they exist, what they look like and how they behave. While I believe that life almost certainly exists among the trillions of planets in the universe, the vast scale of the universe presents a problem.
What do you need to do to make contact?
The vast volume of the universe makes it very difficult to travel interstellar, receive signals, or communicate with any potential distant life forms (at least according to the laws of physics as we know them).
Speed is limited by the speed of light, which is about 300,000 km per second. It’s pretty fast. But even at that speed, it would take about four years for the signal to travel between Earth and the nearest star in our galaxy, which is four light-years away.
But Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that in practice the speed of a physical object like a spaceship will be slower than the speed of light.
In addition, due to the inverse quadratic law of radiation, the signals become weaker in proportion to the square of the distance they have traveled. At interstellar distances, this is simply deadly.
Therefore, for planets that are hundreds or thousands of light years away from us, the signal transit time can be calculated in thousands of years. And any signals from civilizations on these planets are incredibly weak and hard to detect.
Cover?
Could it be that aliens have crash-landed on Earth and the US government is simply covering it up, as Republican Congressman Tim Burchett claimed in his reaction to the hearings?
For airlines that are members of the International Air Transport Association, the chance of a plane crash is about one in a million. This raises the question: do we think that an alien spacecraft that can travel for thousands of years, overcoming interstellar distances, is more reliable and better designed than our aircraft?
Let’s say it’s a hundred times better. This means that the chance of an accident is one in a hundred million. Thus, in order for Area 51 to have alien debris, we would need one hundred million visits by alien spacecraft. That’s 2,739 alien visits a day, every day, for the last 100 years!
So where are they? Near-Earth space should be constantly teeming with aliens.
With radar constantly scanning space, billions of mobile phone cameras, and hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers taking pictures of the sky (as well as professional astronomers with powerful telescopes), there should be a lot of really good evidence in the hands of the general public and scientists – not just governments.
It is much more likely that the UAPs presented as evidence are homemade or caused by natural phenomena that we do not yet understand.
In science, Occam’s razor is still a great starting point; the best explanation is the simplest explanation consistent with the known facts. Until there is much more – and much, much better evidence – let’s conclude that aliens haven’t visited us yet.
While I can’t lie, I hope to see the time when such evidence emerges. Until then, I will continue to search the skies to do my bit.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.