UFO story persists – but without evidence

Last week’s UFO story resurfaced, as David Grusch, a retired Air Force officer, doubled down on his claims. Not only that, but a popular YouTube influencer presented a chilling possibility that the entire human race has become a target for a cold-hearted (or maybe no-hearted) civilization bent on enslaving humanity and exploiting the resources of Earth. Nevertheless, evidence for any of these claims, including corroboration of Mr. Grusch’ statements, is utterly lacking. Moreover the astronomical phenomena, upon which so many influencers so breathlessly seize, is perfectly explicable as wild-type events – or, in one case, as a leftover from the most violent event in the history of the Earth, the one event deserving of the name cataclysm.

Again, what is a UFO?

The letterword UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. Tellingly, the military today prefers a new letterword: UAP, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. As CNAV said last week, astronauts have not reported seeing any objects in space beyond the densely populated orbits of the Earth. Which means anything in the least strange that they have seen, is probably space junk, or reflections from same. We know that the Earth now has so much space junk in orbit around it, that one fine day, unless someone designs a garbage scow big enough to clean it out, one collision too many will start a Kessler syndrome that will bring down every commercial satellite in low Earth orbit. Faced with that, only the most fanciful listener would believe that any astronaut actually saw an extraterrestrial scoutcraft in that range of orbits. That’s the equivalent of expecting to meet a foreign ambassador in an automotive junkyard.

Yet this retired intelligence officer in the Air Force claims to have seen reports of the wrecks of extraterrestrial scoutcraft. In fact he goes so far as to assert that the Air Force has recovered the remains of their crews. He made more such statements last night in an hour-long interview with the outlet News Nation.

But he has only reports. That, is hearsay. He does not even claim to be a direct witness – and no one has produced any physical evidence.

Investigations

The Guardian and Vox both published analyses of the Grusch story, and seemed to urge healthy skepticism. But The Guardian also had to admit that the House of Representatives will hold a hearing on the issue. Whistleblower stories come under the purview of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Accountability. Accordinjgly, Re. James Comer (R-Ky.) announced his intention to schedule such a hearing.

The most salient problem with believing Mr. Grusch’s story is where it originally appeared: The Debrief. That site tends to publish stories of seemingly fanciful scientific developments – and investigations. Among the events they covered was a weekend meeting of the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference, on June 10. That conference covered things like artificial gravity – not from giant centrifuges, but from esoteric fields. Total gravity manipulation – enabling flat spaceship decks and single-stage-to-orbit landing craft – is the dream of the flight sciences. APEC also covered equally esoteric spaceship drives, some of which would violate Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. (Even the late Robert Duncan-Enzmann didn’t explore these techniques, and neither do the curators of his archive.) They even devoted some time to the current UFO story.

Nevertheless, Congress is taking Mr. Grusch’ claims seriously, as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said:

This is definitely new, because Congress has never investigated UFO stories before.

The Angry Astronaut speaks again on the UFO story

Jordan “The Angry Astronaut” Wright also released a new video yesterday, as he had promised to do last week.

In it he disclosed one other claim Grusch made. Citing an unnamed French publication, Wright quoted Grusch as having seen a report of a sighting of an ET ship in flight “the size of a football field.” (American football or international football, i.e. soccer, would give roughly the same dimensions.) Wright admits that Grusch has no tangible evidence, but also advises that, if he’s lying, he is criminally liable.

Having made those disclaimers, Wright proceeds to lay out a scenario to explain the possible origin of these craft. Remarkably, the story says nothing about faster-than-light travel, but assumes that someone has built an interstellar empire at sublight speeds. Relativistic speeds, to be sure, but still sublight. Nevertheless, the scenario he lays out, should frighten anyone – unless one can explain the observations he uses.

Observations

Wright begins with the discovery of the double star TOI 1338A/B, or KIC 8462852, or Boyajian’s Star or “Tabby’s Star.” (The second name derives from Dr. Boyajian’s first name, Tabitha, according to National Geographic.) The most remarkable thing about this star is that it dims about 28 percent in regular cycles. Yet the dimming is uneven, and no two observations are alike. In fact, astronomers already think they know the cause: a disintegrating exomoon creating a dust cloud, according to Science Alert. (National Geographic has said the same.)

Wright discounts this explanation, saying one would expect the dust cloud to “glow in the infrared,” which this does not. He insists that the source is an alien megastructure – but not a total shade, but a filter. This filter is a set of “nanomachines” collecting only certain “colors” of the star’s spectrum. Light in these “colors” carries energy at the precise frequency the builders use. Green plants on Earth set the precedent for this. The famous Engelmann experiment proved definitively that chloroplasts – the light-to-energy converters in plant cells – use only red or blue light, never green. Which is why such plants appear green; plants reflect that color while absorbing other colors.

So it is with these “nanomachines” that Wright proposes.

But that’s not all, says Wright. Tabby’s Star is one of fifteen similar stars that show similar dimming. All are G or F-type stars – as large as our Sun, or slightly larger. One of these is only 400 light years distant.

A lot of power – to launch starships

So Wright proposes that each of these stars has a megastructure that exists to collect a large part of the star’s power output. With that much power, a launch authority could send out magneto-plasma driven ships, that generate their own magnetic fields. The megastructures essentially are giant solar wind “fans.” They work to drive these ships to relativistic speeds. They then could easily slow down at any destination as they catch the charged particles there. And once arrived, the ships could use their drives to steer toward any planet at destination.

Result: a large ship crosses the interstellar gulf, at relativistic speeds, and comes to our solar system. Why? Even from 400 light years away, they’d be looking at the Renaissance, or perhaps Cromwell’s War in England. (And from Tabby’s Star, they’d be looking at the Byzantine Empire and feudal Britain and Europe.) So they were not interested in contacting human civilization. They have come to exploit Earth’s resources – and that could include enslaving the entire human race.

But behold! Once this large ship – or more likely a fleet – arrived, they found a civilization far more advanced than the Renaissance! What, then, must the commodore, or admiral, or “Supreme Commander” have decided? The obvious thing that any expeditionary commander does, is: reconnaissance. And to accomplish that, he must have sent orders to a nearby resource.

Comet Oumuamua as a special UFO

Once again, Wright turns for inspiration to Comet Oumuamua – which, he insists, is no comet, but a light sail craft. In fact, he says, Oumuamua, before it dived into our system (and flew suspiciously close to Earth), was traveling at the Galactic Standard of Rest, or GSR. GSR is a frame of reference at “rest” relative to the center of the Galaxy. An object at GSR would be a good navigational buoy. So according to his theory, Oumuamua was a GSR buoy – but one loaded with reconnaissance probes. Thus, following a program, Oumuamua dived into our system, dropped its probes, then returned to station.

In other words, Oumuamua temporarily behaved like the Imperial class Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), deploying several probes with built-in AI, each with a mission to reconnoiter an even marginally habitable world. Or our commodore, finding a civilization far more advanced than his mission brief predicted, ordered Oumuamua to drop some probes.

And what are those probes? They could be Von Neumann machines, designed to self-replicate. In fact, suppose the “commodore” were not flesh-and-blood, but a computer? Suppose those Von Neumann machines carry alien DNA to “clone” their “people”? Now we’re talking about Nigel Kneale’s Martians in Quatermass and the Pit. (Or, as American distributors retitled it, Five Million Years to Earth.)

Good or evil?

Wright seems unable to decide whether this ET expedition (flesh-and-blood or cybernetic) intends good or evil. If evil, he has suggested that it would already possess the power to force humanity’s surrender. The commodore could blot out the sun, using the same technique used to launch his (its?) ships. And if the civilization is not mechanical, but biological, then if they are not Nigel Kneale’s Martians, then they are Larry Cohen’s Invaders, or Kenneth Johnston’s Visitors. Or worse, Damon Knight’s Kanamits, whom the world saw in “To Serve Man” (The Twilight Zone, S03E24).

Mr. Chambers! Don’t get on that ship! The rest of that book, To Serve Man, it’s… it’s a cookbook! Actress Susan Cummings, as Patty, in “To Serve Man” (The Twilight Zone, S03E24)

But, says Wright, if the intent of the expedition were malign, then they would have made their move already. Even he acknowledges that people have reported visitation for decades. (Actually, CNAV has discovered archives indicating visits much earlier in Earth history.)

So what else has happened? Perhaps the expedition is trying to make friendly contact – but hesitates. They, or the fleet’s computers during the voyage, would have had an opportunity to observe Earth history playing out. Even four hundred years of history beginning, say, in 1462 (to allow time for the report of a wrecked “coracle” and dead pilot from 1862) would have allowed time to observe four hundred years of warfare. It would have culminated with the Napoleonic Wars, and the War Between the States. An ET commodore would be understandably reluctant to attempt contact. Or would he?

Again, lack of UFO evidence – and better explanations

Once again, a few reminders are in order. Not once has any astronaut seen anything in space that couldn’t be junk. More to the point, if we could see Comet Oumuamua, why can’t we find that ET fleet? Even Jordan Wright does not postulate esoteric stealth technology that could defeat radar, IR, or visible light! And as many rocket probes as various governments have sent to the outer solar system (Voyager I and II, Cassini-Huygens, New Horizons, etc.), surely one of them would have spotted that fleet! But we haven’t. (And if those ships are that stealthy, why wasn’t Oumuamua equally stealthy?)

Also, to repeat: Oumuamua is a comet – a long-period comet that formed from ejecta from the Global Flood. That event happened 5300 years ago, give or take a century. No one even heard of Oumuamua until astronomers at the Haleakalâ Observatory in Hawaii spotted it five years ago. If it was ever at GSR, then that happened when it was at aphelion. That would have been 2,650 years ago, again give or take a century.

So we have reports of strange objects in the air and on the ground, never in space. So perhaps those objects everyone is seeing (or thinks he’s seeing) are of this Earth. They don’t have to be of human origin – they could for instance be Nephil devices. But they are of this Earth – and did not come from a comet.

Real objects – or projections?

How do we even know that these UFOs are real objects? Especially if people report them while they are flying, or appear to be flying?

In 1994, Serge Monast published his manifesto on Project Blue Beam, an alleged NASA project involving holographic projection of three-dimensional images onto the atmosphere. Or rather, onto the microscopic particles that routinely fill the atmosphere, not merely after environmental activists have set hundreds of fires in a neighboring country.

No one in authority has ever admitted to anything like Blue Beam, nor should we expect that. Remember: Deep State. Suppose, then, that Project Blue Beam is far more modest than Serge Monast supposed? But suppose it is still powerful enough to project images sophisticated enough to fool airline, air mobility, and combat pilots?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! The Great Oz has spoken! Actor Frank Morgan, as Prof. Marvel/”Oz, the Great and Powerful,” in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

In short, we have a well-orchestrated drama, with tropes from no fewer than six dramatic projects. The motive of its producers is simple: to scare the world’s people into accepting a one-world government. The producers sell such government as humanity’s only hope to resist the hypothetical slavers, cannibals, whatever. As CNAV said last week, the real story we need to consider is the Chicken Little story. “The sky is falling!” Chicken Little says – and a wolf with a thick German accent says, “Ve vill show you a shortcut.”

But Congress is investigating – and House Oversight is probably the best Committee to do it. Letting them get involved could be the producers’ fatal mistake.