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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 27 2017, @07:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the little-green-men dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:01PM (3 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 27 2017, @09:01PM (#614870) Journal

    You're assuming that there isn't some unknown part of physics that allows you to travel faster-than-light.

    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?

    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.

    Do you know how big a wormhole is, and what the tidal forces are like? Very small and very large respectively.

    You're like a Medieval serf claiming that smartphones are impossible.

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:01PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:01PM (#614887)

    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)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday December 28 2017, @02:32AM (#614963) Journal

    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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