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The existence of UFOs had been "proved beyond reasonable doubt," according the head of the secret Pentagon program that analyzed the mysterious aircrafts.
In an interview with British broadsheet The Telegraph published on Saturday, Luis Elizondo told the newspaper of the sightings, "In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of 'beyond reasonable doubt.'"
"I hate to use the term UFO but that's what we're looking at," he added. "I think it's pretty clear this is not us, and it's not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they're from."
Since 2007, Elizondo led the government program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, investigating evidence of UFOs and alien life. It was shuttered in 2012.
Its existence was first reported by The New York Times last week.
Elizondo was not able to discuss specifics of the program, but told The Telegraph that there had been "lots" of UFO sightings and witnesses interviewed during the program's five years.
Investigators pinpointed geographical "hot spots" that were sometimes near nuclear facilities and power plants and observed trends among the aircrafts including lack of flight surfaces on the objects and extreme manoeuvrability, Elizondo told The Telegraph.
Previously: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday December 27 2017, @11:28AM (18 children)
I don't buy it. Yes, there are things flying in the sky that are unidentified, but that doesn't automatically make them aliens from outer space.
If they were aliens from outer space that would have huge implications for the laws of physics. Given what we currently know about the laws of Nature, the distances between stars, the amount of energy required to travel those distances and the times involved make such travel prohibitive. Yes, we know that clocks slow down and distances contract when you approach the speed of light, but to accelerate anything to those speeds takes an absolutely enormous amount of energy.
We also know that the aliens can't come from our own Solar System (travel within the Solar System is much easier), so they'd have to be from another star system.
No, these are super secret experimental and/or spy aircraft, maybe even spacecraft. Remember, the SR-71 [wikipedia.org] was designed in the 1950s. I'm sure they can do much better now.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:32PM (7 children)
Indeed, highly unlikely. I'd love to verify the proof he's talking about.
I would sooner believe that they're time travelers from the future, wondering about all the stupid decisions from the current era.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:39PM
Here's a happy thought for the festive period: they're not time travellers from the future because the human race wipes itself out with WW III before it can invent time travel.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:52PM (5 children)
If they have to wonder, then they haven't advanced much.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:24PM (4 children)
After the singularity, all important decisions will be made by one or more AI's, who may want to learn from the past for a change.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:52PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:03PM (1 child)
Indeed. In the last two years, the West has set itself on course for a return to the 19th Century, particularly the UK and USA. I really don't have much hope for the human race.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:38PM
And why suddenly concerned about this regression in the last two years? The far right aren't the only holdovers from the 19th Century. A huge portion of their political opponents also live in that era as well.
My view is let's see how the EU fixes the current immigration crisis (and its many anti-democratic tendencies as well) before deciding whether a return to the 19th Century is the worst of your worries.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday December 29 2017, @11:00AM
Don't worry, Kill All Lawyers is pretty high on the directives' list already.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:51PM (1 child)
No, it doesn't. It just takes a while. You're thinking present day human dudes with present day lifespans in tin cans with some sort of bogus propulsion system required so the dudes can retire on the planets they arrive at in a few decades. Needless to say, none of that needs to be true. Small, self-replicating robots tooling about at 0.001 C (that is, 300 km/s) could cover the entire galaxy in a 100 million years or so. Even humans who live to ten thousand years of age, could do that trick with a reasonable sized spacecraft and still be able to retire at their destination.
Science fiction has already covered the generational ship. Meaning one doesn't even need long life span.
Meanwhile it's not that hard for aliens from elsewhere to be living in the Solar System today, if they're stealthed. Maybe they're headquartered on a small, blackened asteroid in the Kuiper Belt (running fission plants and venting heat to the side opposite the Sun) and run careful, stealthed missions and observations of humans in the present day. It's hard, but far from impossible for a technologically advanced group to play that game. Sure, it's a "God of gaps" type of argument, but huge gaps exist at present.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:33AM
They could also be on a moon around Planet Nine, or on a Mars-sized Planet Ten. Or on any number of Kuiper belt/Oort cloud dwarf planets, the outer solar system centaurs [wikipedia.org], and asteroids, most of which we have shit imagery of. Many gaps to look at.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:18PM (7 children)
You're assuming that there isn't some unknown part of physics that allows you to travel faster-than-light. This isn't even impossible by current physics: Einstein postulated the possibility of wormholes, called Einstein-Rosen bridges, which could be used for FTL transit. You're also assuming that aliens would come from this universe. It's possible they come from a parallel universe.
Don't forget, your understanding of physics comes from a species that hasn't even gotten their shit together enough to build interstellar probes, and haven't really left their own star system, and they themselves haven't done more than traveling to their nearby moon and whacked a few golf balls. You're like a Medieval serf claiming that smartphones are impossible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Wednesday December 27 2017, @07:12PM
Very true. It wasn't that long ago people "knew for a fact" that it was impossible to fly to the moon, or fly faster than sound, or achieve heavier than air flight etc. Sufficiently advanced technology = magic.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:01PM (3 children)
I'd really love such a discovery to be made, but there's no evidence so far. Every time they test General Relativity, it keeps on passing. Maybe there will be something discovered when looking for quantum gravity?
Do you know how big a wormhole is, and what the tidal forces are like? Very small and very large respectively.
Not really. How would a Medieval serf even being to imagine telecommunications? Smartphones were an inevitability when the transistor was invented (1947). No new science was required, just refinements in engineering.
You could go to another star (Alpha Centauri) using current Physics with a bit of engineering advancement, but it would be expensive. A sufficiently large solar sail might accelerate you up to a reasonable speed between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Or, if someone could get a fusion reactor on a spacecraft, exhausting out the back.
No one wants to do it, though.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:01PM
Do you know how big a wormhole is, and what the tidal forces are like? Very small and very large respectively.
Maybe, but again you don't know what's possible, and considering E-R bridges were thought of perhaps 80 years ago, and we still have never seen a wormhole, there's no telling what's possible for an alien race that's millenia ahead of us technologically. 200 years ago, all this talk would be considered ludicrous, and even airplanes would have been considered ridiculous, and now we have fission, aircraft, space probes, people hitting golf balls on the Moon (briefly, 40 years ago), and smartphones. If we didn't have such stupid priorities (e.g., watching Kardashians and creating Windows 10 and shitty, ugly web apps instead of doing useful stuff), and managed our societies better, and had another 50,000 years to continue technological advancement and scientific research, there's no telling what we'd figure out as far as physics. We're still discovering new fundamental physics: Higgs-Boson, subatomic elementary particles, etc. Parallel universes are also postulated.
You could go to another star (Alpha Centauri) using current Physics with a bit of engineering advancement, but it would be expensive.
It would take a lot more than "a bit" of advancement. We've never built anything that can last, in a powered state, for thousands of years or more, and that's how long it'd take to get there with current propulsion tech.
A sufficiently large solar sail might accelerate you up to a reasonable speed between the orbits of Earth and Mars.
AFAIK, we've never built a solar sail or used one for anything significant.
Or, if someone could get a fusion reactor on a spacecraft, exhausting out the back.
Fusion reactors are just as sci-fi as FTL travel at this point. There's no evidence that fusion can be made to work. All our attempts at fusion so far have required more power to sustain than they created, so they've only been lab experiments. The only examples of successful (energy positive) fusion we have any evidence for are stars, which achieve fusion by sheer mass and gravity, and it isn't feasible to put a star in your spaceship. We could put a fission reactor on a spacecraft, but there again, we've never done such a thing, or ever used fission as a means of propulsion.
No one wants to do it, though.
This is the primary problem; many of things could be tried so we could get experience, and then refine it until it works reliably, but you can't do that if you never even try in the first place. We're not trying, and there's no evidence we ever will.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday December 28 2017, @02:32AM (1 child)
The Alcubierre (warp) drive [wikipedia.org] would not violate general/special relativity. Of course, the apparent exotic matter requirement is a big problem.
I would come back to fusion in 10-20 years after we see if any of the small-scale non-Tokamak [nextbigfuture.com] designs from the likes of [nextbigfuture.com] Lockheed Martin, LPP Fusion, General Fusion, Tri-Alpha Energy, and others succeed. Lockheed Martin in particular envisioned a 100 MW system that could fit into a truck/shipping container or airplane. University of Washington [theregister.co.uk] and others are working on fusion rockets [space.com] specifically. Newer launchers like SpaceX's BFR or an ITS-like successor can lift more massive payloads with bigger fusion rockets and less fuel, if needed. Fusion rockets would be tested on missions to Mars or distant solar system objects long before they are considered for interstellar travel.
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(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:44PM
Yes, that's the problem with warp drives, finding the magic stuff to make the stress-engergy tensor negative. Wormholes are even worse. How would you get the "other end" in the right (ie a useful) place?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Thursday December 28 2017, @02:30AM
There is a lot of Hubris from scientists who think that they are certain that faster than light travel or anti-gravity are impossible with absolute certainty, given that the theories which say it is impossible come from a limited set of observations of the behaviour of forces under a limited set of arrangement of magnets, matter, etc. Then they extrapolate that behaviour to apply to all other arrangements and configurations. Thus if there were an affect that would allow for anti-gravity that for instance appeared only with very specific configurations of magnetic fields, perhaps rotating ones, temporal and spatial configuration, it would unlikely to be found by these people because it could be unlikely to be found by accident. This is why antigravity or FTL has not really been ruled out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 28 2017, @12:42PM
You speak of these things as if they were relevant.