UFO: I have seen one

The term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAP, is preferred to Unidentified Flying Objects, UFO, because they may be optical illusions like of the Sun and the sky or camera tricks, after all.

In that case, they may not all be objects nor flying.

Even with that, many questions remain: For those proven to be real, what is their source and what is the purpose?

NASA’s director, Bill Nelson, gave credence to the theory that we are not alone in October, 2021, when he said he personally believes UAP can possibly be from alien intelligence because the Universe is so vast.

Some prominent people who say they have seen UAP include singers Alicia Keys, Kesha, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, Post Malone, Lupe Fiasco, Kacey Musgrave and Nick Jonas.

The others are actors: Russell Crowe, Khloé Kardashian and Kendall Jenner, Fran Drescher, Tom DeLonge and January Jones.

Sports stars include Shaquille O’neal, Aaron Rodgers and Pilot Kurt Russell.

The Pentagon in 2020, declassified three video clips from US Navy pilots on UAP as observed by them.

One video was taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015.

Some other witnesses, considered credible, including a former navy pilot, said he had seen unidentified aerial phenomena – the government’s preferred term – “every day for at least a couple of years.”

US Presidents, it is said, have been briefed on them.

A former Pentagon director, Lue Elizondo, even claims the US government has “exotic material” evidence from a UAP.

One of the UAP, he went on, was undetectable by radar and must have cruised at up to 13,000 miles/hour, pulling up to six to 700 G forces.

The Congress demanded a report from the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI.

The report examined 144 incidents from 2004 to 2021 and determined that one case was a large deflating balloon.

On the other 143, it says, there is insufficient data to either determine whether they are from extra-terrestrial intelligence or are major technological advancements by an adversary country.

UAP are a threat to flight safety, the report said, but it is not known if they pose a threat to national security.

The report described 18 of the incidents as having “unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics” which may be as a result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer mis-perception and need more rigorous analysis.

Eleven others were described as near misses with military planes.

In the end, a non-standardised system for reporting UAP was blamed for the lack of adequate data for analysis rather than depending on anecdotal observations by military planes as was largely, the case.

The de-classified US Defence Department’s official report on mysterious aerial sightings was presented to Congress on 25 June, 2021.

Interest in UAP grew further with former President Barack Obama saying that “footage and records” of them exist.

“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,” Obama said.

Former President Obama spoke on 18 May, 2021.

President Joe Biden avoided any comment on UAPs, even when asked to comment on what former President Obama said about them.

He smiled and merely said: “I would ask him again.”

Former President Jimmy Carter in 1969 when Governor of Georgia, before becoming President in 1977, reported an unidentified sighting.

It was as big as the Moon and changed colour as it moved before vanishing.

This was investigated and found to be the planet Mars in a position that it was visible to the unaided eye.

The US navy has cleared what Khloé Kardashian and Kendall Jenner saw over the skies of Los Angeles as mysterious light as actually flashes from a missile test.

The Black Knight satellite, that has been a source of concern to many, as its owners are unknown, has been cleared by NASA to be a de-orbited junk still in space. Astronaut Jerry Ross said it is a thermal blanket that broke loose as his team tried to attach an American module to a Russian module on the ISS.

But to some people, it is a 13,000-year-old, artificially made satellite from an unknown intelligence.

This curious image of a woman in Mars from a NASA file is not evidence of life on the red planet, but just a fractured Martian rock.

This picture of what appears to be a door, taken by NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover on 7 May, 2022, is an eroded boulder from “normal geological processes.”

Could the door, just 12 inches (30 cm) tall and 16 inches (40 cm) wide, be a “Dog door?”

Pareidolia is when human beings make sense of seen patterns in their brain from experience.

The ‘Moon hut’ spotted by Chinese lunar explorer, Yutu-2 rover, was identified by Chinese scientists in December, 2021, as ‘rabbit-shaped’ rock.

It was considered a mystery hut on the far side of the Moon from some ancient civilisation for a while.

Who balanced this rock in Mars?

This is a true picture of a rock, the size of a bowling ball, precariously balanced on a slightly bent boulder in Mars.

The picture was taken by NASA’s Perseverance Rover and published by NASA on 16 June, 2022.

If it is proof of an alien handwork, then the 49 feet high Golden Boulder in Myanmar is precariously suspended by a strand of Buddha’s hair for 2,500 years!

What held the 300-tonnes Stone of Davasko in Argentina for thousands of years before it rolled-off on 29 February, 1912, and was replaced with a lighter plastic version?

The “flying saucer” that crashed in a farm in Roswell, New Mexico, US, in July, 1947, after a thunderstorm, has been explained by the military to be a high-altitude weather balloon.

In 1994, the US Air Force said the wreckage was actually from a secret project called Mogul that flew microphones on high-altitude balloons between 1947 and 1949 to detect sound waves from Soviet atomic bomb tests. That even worsened the conspiracy theory of a government cover-up of an alien invasion.

The history of UFO sightings started on 24 June, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, an amateur pilot, said he saw nine objects like flying saucers over water at about 1,200 miles per hour (1,930 kilometres per hour) near Mount Rainier in Washington State.

The US Air Force and military said in 1947 that none of their craft or equipment can attain that speed.

Interest grew and Ufology became an intriguing area of study.

Several other pilots have come up with video evidence, backed by radar evidence, but as always, the pictures are never clear.

The images tend to show something that glows, travelling at incredible speeds, thereby giving an impression of an advanced technology or intelligence at work.

However, such glowing aura is common in thermal cameras and such quick acceleration in video coincides with sudden camera movements.

One of the video evidence de-classified by the US navy was the incident of 14 November, 2004, in California.

The video was in infra-red, showing a Tic Tac object, in white colour, about the size of a fighter jet, moving fast above water.

Images form easily over water due to water’s refractive abilities and this may need further investigations.

In UK, reports of UAP sightings doubled in 2020.

The authorities are considering re-opening a UFO desk in its ministry of defence that was scrapped in 2009.

Any UAP sighting in UK has to be reported to the local police.

Are we alone in the Universe?

There is even a report of an Air Force fighter officer who opened fire on a UAP, on command, after giving it a chase in Colombia – the only such case in the world.

A celebrated encounter was that of an alien kidnap of 19-year-old Calvin Parker and 42-year-old Charles Hickson on 11 October, 1973, by River Pascagoula, Mississippi, which they reported to the police.

They alleged that some bulky looking creatures about five feet tall, that were levitating, forced them into an alien spacecraft by the river as they went fishing at night.

They said they were placed on a platform and physically examined, up to the external genitalia, by one of the aliens, who appeared feminine.

This was for about 30 minutes before returning them to the ground.

Both men took lie detector tests and passed.

Hypnotists were called in and they concluded that the two men actually experienced something traumatic.

The two were even sent to Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi to test if they have any radioactive contamination. The result turned negative.

Charles Hickson wrote a book on his encounter before he died in 2011.

In 2018, Parker published his experience in a book, “The Closest Encounter,” and still stands by their abduction story, 48 years after.

Mississippi has placed a historical marker on the sight by River Pascagoula in commemorative gesture of the purported kidnapping.

In the summer of 1961, Betty and Barney Hill on a road trip from New Hampshire in US to the Canadian border noticed that the next morning, they had no recollection of two hours of the drive. Their case was reported to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.

The entire story was captured in John Fuller’s 1966 book, “The Interrupted Journey,” that they might have been abducted by aliens.

There was also a story, though uncorroborated, of another alien kidnap of a man who was released after an hour and his beard became much longer.

Another source of worry are Fast Radio Bursts, FRBs, hitting the Earth from unknown sources.

About 1,000 FRBs have been detected since the first in 2001.

They appear and disappear in an instant without trace and are difficult to track.

Only 15 of them have been tracked to specific galaxies.

Scientists using the Hubble telescope were able to pinpoint five FRBs to their host galaxies, as well as the kind of locations they originated from.

Their conclusion in April, 2020, was that FRBs come from young magnetars, a type of neutron star, with very strong magnetic fields.

The galaxies they come from are between 400 million and nine billion light years from the Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope that can “see” further into the Universe can help shed more light on this phenomenon.

The debate on the other issues however, continues.

 

 

 

 

picture courtesy: nasa, cbs, espn, freepik, mirror, greatcoursesdaily