re: NY Times: Pentagon’s UFO Program - aerospace/esoteric/quantum mechanics/future

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Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena

Jacques F. Vallee and Eric W. Davis *

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The Challenge of High Strangeness

The rational study of reported cases of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), including religious apparitions such as the so-called “miracles of Fatima” and other Marial events is currently at an impasse. This situation has as much to do with the incomplete state of our models of physical reality as it does with the complexity of the data. A primary objection to the reality of UAP events among scientists is that witnesses consistently report objects whose seemingly absurd behavior “cannot possibly” be related to actual phenomena, even under extreme conditions. In that respect the similarity is striking between contemporary events reported as UFO close encounters and the more traditional observations of entities described as “angels,” elves and fairies, or deities. Skeptics insist that superior beings, celestial ambas- sadors or intelligent extraterrestrial (ETI) visitors simply would not perpetrate such antics as are reported in the literature. This argument can be criticized as an anthropocentric, self-selected observation resulting from our own limited viewpoint as 21st century Homo Sapiens trying to draw conclusions about the nature of the universe. Nonetheless, the high strangeness of many reports and the absurdity attending religious miracles must be acknowledged.


Advocates of UAP reality, on the other hand, generally claim that the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) centered on interstellar travelers from extrasolar systems visiting the Earth remains the most likely explanation for the objects and the entities associated with them. Accordingly, they would re-interpret Biblical stories and religious apparitions in the framework of visits from space aliens. This argument, too, can be challenged on the basis of the witnesses’ own testimony: Ufologists have consistently ignored or minimized reports of seemingly absurd behaviors that contradict the ETH, by selectively extracting data that best fits their agenda or version of the theory. Thus the ETH, just like the skeptical argument, is based on anthro- pocentric self-selection (Vallee, 1990). Here we are witnessing an interesting overlap between the SETI and UAP paradigms: each excludes consideration of the other when laying claim to the legitimate search for and contact with potential non-human intelligence.

In the view of the authors, current hypotheses are not strange enough to explain the facts of the phenomenon, and the debate suffers from a lack of scientific information. Indeed, from the viewpoint of modern physics, our Cosmic Neighborhood could encompass other (parallel) universes, extra spatial dimensions and other time-like dimensions beyond the common 4-dimensional spacetime we recognize, and such aspects could lead to rational explanations for apparently “incomprehensible” behaviors on the part of entities emerging into our perceived continuum. As it attempts to reconcile theory with observed properties of elementary particles and with discoveries at the frontiers of cosmology, modern physics suggests that mankind has not yet discovered all of the universe’s facets, and we must propose new theories and experiments in order to explore these undis- covered facets. This is why continuing study of reported anomalous events is important: It may provide us with an existence theorem for new models of physical reality.

Much of the recent progress in cosmological concepts is directly appli- cable to the problem: Traversable wormholes (3-dimensional hypersurface tunnels) have now been derived from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (Morris and Thorne, 1988; Visser, 1995). In particular, it has been shown that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity does not in any way constrain spacetime topology, which allows for wormholes to provide traversable connections between regions within two separate universes or between remote regions and/or times within the same universe. Mathematically it can also be shown that higher-dimensional wormholes can provide hypersurface connections between multidimensional spaces (Rucker, 1984; Kaku, 1995). Recent quantum gravity programs have explored this property in superstring theory, along with proposals to theoretically and experimentally examine macroscopic-scale extra-dimensional spaces (Schwarzschild, 2000). Thus it is now widely acknowledged that the nature of our universe is far more complex than observations based on anthropocentric self-selection portend. In this respect, ufologists and SETI researchers appear to be fighting a rear- -guard battle. Both suffer from identical limitations in the worldview they bring to their own domains, and to their antagonism.

Anthropocentric Bias in the SETI and UAP Paradigms

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‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects

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By Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean
May 26, 2019 8

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching. “Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

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Videos filmed by Navy pilots show two encounters with flying objects. One was captured by a plane’s camera off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 20, 2015. That footage, published previously but with little context, shows an object tilting like a spinning top moving against the wind. A pilot refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released. The second video was taken a few weeks later.
CreditCreditU.S. Department of Defense

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Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents. [Sign up for the weekly At War newsletter to receive stories about the military, conflict and consequence.] “There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

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Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

Lieutenant Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, he and Lt. Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf. Lieutenants Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to The Times about the objects. Three other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but declined to be named.

Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” to air beginning Friday. The Times conducted separate interviews with key participants.

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The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks. “People have seen strange stuff in military aircraft for decades,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We’re doing this very complex mission, to go from 30,000 feet, diving down. It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there.”

But he said the objects persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, even sea level. They could accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds. Lieutenant Accoin said he interacted twice with the objects. The first time, after picking up the object on his radar, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there.

A few days later, Lieutenant Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.” At this point the pilots said they speculated that the objects were part of some classified and extremely advanced drone program.

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But then pilots began seeing the objects. In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.”

He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.

The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

The incident so spooked the squadron that an aviation flight safety report was filed, Lieutenant Graves said.

The near miss, he and other pilots interviewed said, angered the squadron, and convinced them that the objects were not part of a classified drone program. Government officials would know fighter pilots were training in the area, they reasoned, and would not send drones to get in the way.

“It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue,” Lieutenant Graves said. “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a midair” collision.

What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

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Asked what they thought the objects were, the pilots refused to speculate. “We have helicopters that can hover,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.” But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.”

Lieutenant Accoin said only that “we’re here to do a job, with excellence, not make up myths.”

In March 2015 the Roosevelt left the coast of Florida and headed to the Persian Gulf as part of the American-led mission fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The same pilots who were interacting with the strange objects off the East Coast were soon doing bombing missions over Iraq and Syria. The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said.

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Multiple F/A-18 Pilots Disclose Recent UFOs Encounters, New Radar Tech Key In Detection
A major upgrade in fighter jet radar tech seems to have been key in detecting and tracking bizarre objects flying in military training airspace.
BY TYLER ROGOWAYMAY 27, 2019

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In a major breakthrough in what could be the most fascinating story of our time, five U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet crewmen have recounted a number of incredibly strange encounters with unidentified flying objects off the East Coast of the United States. Two of the pilots went on the record. The surreal craft they encountered had performance that defies known propulsion and aerodynamic capabilities, and are described as looking like something akin to special effects you would have seen in a sci-fi movie circa the late 1980s. The pilots' accounts also point to a major sensor upgrade on their aircraft that made the presence of these craft even detectable at all.

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Before the mid-2000s, Navy tactical fighter aircraft were equipped with mechanically scanned array (MSA) pulse doppler radar systems of varying capabilities and power outputs. So-called 'legacy' F/A-18AC/D Hornets were largely equipped with the AN/APG-73 radar. This was a very capable MSA fire control radar with multiple air-to-air, air-to-ground, and synthetic aperture ground mapping modes. Still, it was developed based on 1980s technology, as the vast majority of the fighter radars in service with U.S. military aircraft were at the time.

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The AN/APG-79, and other AESA radars like it on fighter aircraft, offer a huge leap in capability in virtually every respect. This included a massive improvement in reliability as a steerable radar dish is no longer needed with electronically scanned arrays. Mechanically scanned arrays have to quickly sweep in all directions physically and even under heavy G forces and buffeting, and they have to survive crashing down on a carrier deck after missions over and over. So, migrating to a system with few moving parts was a massive coup in terms of reliability for Navy fighters.

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But then pilots began seeing the objects. In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.” He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves. The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

The last part is somewhat mind-blowing. Basically, he describes a geometric cube with a translucent sphere of some sort around it. Like I said in the opening of this piece, this sounds like some special effects object from season one of Star Trek The Next Generation, not a craft being reported in detail from a highly-trained Navy fighter pilot that flew right by it. Apparently, others appeared to be spinning in mid-air like tops and were captured by the Super Hornet's AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod. The now famous 'gimbal video' was supposedly recorded on one of the Red Rippers' training missions:

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We examined this peculiar move by the Navy and the odd timing of it in great detail in my last article on the subject, and this series of events likely had something to do with it. Regardless, with all this in mind, what can we take away from these new on the record revelations? First off, they are a huge deal. We are talking about two more Navy fighter pilots on the record and another three talking to The New York Times on background. And this was not some account that occurred a decade or more in the past, this was just a couple years ago. Yet what strikes me the most is that once again, this series of encounters occurred in tightly sanitized airspace over the ocean where the military does its most advanced and complex training and testing, just like the Nimitz's Tic Tac incident many years earlier on the west coast. In that case, the gear and personnel involved were also preparing for a major deployment. Yet what the New York Times doesn't seem to firmly drill down on enough is that we are now getting first-hand accounts that describe a major upgrade in radar technology as being a catalyst for actually detecting and tracking these mysterious objects. Much of my last piece was dedicated to the little known fact that back in 2004, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was executing very complex and highly integrated training prior to deployment with Cooperative Engagement Capability technology installed on its ships and aircraft. This was the first time this game-changing suite of sensor fusion and data-link technologies was ever integrated into an operational Carrier Strike Group. As a result, multiple accounts definitively state that its unique, 'fused' sensor data was confiscated after the Tic Tac incident culminated in a number of close encounters. Taking the recent information about the radar upgrade on the Super Hornets into account, it adds a new facet of plausibility to the Nimitz/Tic Tac events. The higher fidelity radar telemetry data Cooperative Engagement Capability provided, like the introduction of AESA fire control radars on Navy fighters not long after, may have allowed for the detection and documentation of these objects like never before. Whether that was by design or by chance remains unknown. These two facts—the encounters occurring in secure military airspace off the continental U.S. coastline and the presence of advanced, highly capable radar systems in both series of incidents—is compelling, to say the least. As we stated in our last piece on the subject, these areas and the gear present in them during the encounters would make for very attractive testing conditions for undisclosed aerial capabilities. When it comes to the object's strange appearance, making something as alien looking as possible is probably a good thing for deniability and unconventional camouflage purposes. Even the testing of sensors under real-world conditions against such a craft using various guises could be beneficial.

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The UFO phenomenon is paranormal. It exceeds rational understanding. The irrational way of knowing must be included in our opus if we are to grasp the wholeness these craft from interdimensional realms (from out of a 5th dimension) bring. It is an alien symbolic language they herald.

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UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact
Author: Daniel W. Drezner | Opinion clock Updated: 12 hours ago calendar Published 23 hours ago

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Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

The term “UFO” automatically triggers derision in most quarters of polite society. One of Christopher Buckley’s better satires, “Little Green Men,” is premised on a George F. Will-type pundit thinking that he has been abducted by aliens, with amusing results. UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas like Big Foot or conspiracy theories involving crop circles.

The obvious reason for this is that the term “UFO” is usually assumed to be a synonym for “extraterrestrial life.” If you think about it, this is odd. UFO literally stands for “unidentified flying object.” A UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet. It is simply a flying object that cannot be explained away through conventional means. Because UFOs are usually brought up only to crack jokes, however, they have been dismissed for decades.

One of the gutsiest working paper presentations I have witnessed was Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall presenting a draft version of “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In that paper, eventually published in the journal Political Theory, Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms: “UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility,” they wrote. “The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.”

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In recent years, however, there has been a subtle shift that poses some interesting questions for their argument. For one thing, discussion of actual UFOs have been the topic of some serious mainstream media coverage. There was the December 2017 New York Times story by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was tasked with cataloguing UFOs recorded by military pilots. DoD officials confirmed its existence. Though this story generated some justified skepticism, it represented the first time the U.S. government acknowledged the existence of such a program.

Then, there were the reports last November about Oumuamua, “a mysterious, cigar-shaped interstellar object [that] fell through our solar system at an extraordinary speed,” according to New York’s Eric Levits. Oumuamua’s shape and trajectory were unusual enough for some genuine astrophysicists to publish a paper suggesting the possibility that it was an artificial construction relying on a solar sail. Again, this prompted skeptical reactions, but even those skeptics could not completely rule out the possibility that extraterrestrial activity was involved.

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The Times reporters broke new ground by getting pilots on record. What is interesting about this latest news cycle, however, is that DoD officials are not behaving as Wendt and Duvall would predict. Indeed, Politico’s Bryan Bender reported last month that, “The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.” My Post colleague Deanna Paul followed up by reporting that “Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it ‘the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.’ ” What appears to be happening is that official organs of the state are now acknowledging that UFOs exist, even if they are not literally using the acronym. They are doing so because enough pilots are reporting UFOs and near-air collisions so as to warrant better record-keeping. They are not saying that these UFOs are extraterrestrials, but they are trying to destigmatize the reporting of a UFO. Still, the very fact that this step has been taken somewhat weakens the Wendt and Duvall thesis.

This was always a two-step process: (a) Acknowledge that UFOs exist; and (b) Consider that the UFOs might be ETs.

In recent years, the U.S. national security bureaucracy has met the first criterion. What happens to our understanding of the universe if great powers meet that second one?

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TOM DELONGE: AMERICA HAS BEEN INVESTIGATING UFOS FOR YEARS. TIME FOR THE REST OF US TO CATCH UP | OPINION
TOM DELONGE
ON 5/30/19 AT 5:10 AM EDT

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About 25 years ago, I read a non-fiction book about UFOs while on tour with Blink-182 that blew my mind. This was a time before smartphones, so being on a tour bus for weeks on end meant we were forced to keep ourselves occupied if we were bored. I chose to read. Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret detailed a historical chronology of UFO events in conjunction with domestic and foreign space programs and militaries. It wasn't just a solitary event, but a chain of occurrences. I remember repeating as I was reading, “Oh my god, this is massive.” I probably annoyed the hell out of my bandmates.

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Before reading that book, I thought the idea of E.T. and unknown flying vehicles were confined to the realm of science-fiction, which I’d always loved as a kid. But I had no idea these crafts were real and in fact interacting with nuclear missiles, NASA missions and facilities, astronauts, and even civilians.

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I followed many paths of discovery in the field—some peculiar, but all exciting. Back then, I was young and naive, and had trouble separating fact from fiction. As any serious researcher will tell you, UAP and its attendant fields are filled with truly crazy misinformation from countless unreliable characters. As a result, I undertook the project of seeking out legitimate sources, and learned that for most of history, people thought it was crazy to even think about the possibility of UAP. Things briefly started to change after 1947, when numerous people, both pedestrian and high-level military and government personnel, started witnessing unidentified objects in the sky; military pilots, U.S. presidents, scientists, doctors, lawyers, farmers, politicians, teachers, and children.

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During World War II, unknown at first to most of the public, UFOs appeared over our battlefields, nuclear weapons facilities, and even the U.S. Capitol. The highest levels of the U.S. government eventually spoke plainly and publicly about “flying saucers.” For 17 years, the U.S. Air Force’s secret government sector Project Blue Book compiled reports of tens of thousands of UFO sightings, roughly 10 percent of which could not be explained by science. After some dismissive conclusions at the dismantling of the project, disbelief returned, and lasted for decades. Once again, UFOs were thought to be a preoccupation of the truly crazy.

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For the past few years, I’ve been in regular communication with people at the highest levels of our intelligence agencies and military branches. It’s unreal company to keep, and has empowered me to become a steward of the information I have and to treat it with respect and humility. The ideas and my new cohorts encouraged me create To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA).

I envisioned a model that educates (through exciting entertainment), investigates (through scientific research) and innovates (through aerospace engineering). Our team is made up of some of the most experienced, connected, and passionately curious minds from the U.S. intelligence community that have been operating under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades. The team members all share a common thread of frustration and determination to disrupt the status quo and ultimately, to protect the American people by making them aware of what we need to know about our skies.

This quest to reveal the truth, and desire to share what we know about UAP with the masses propelled us to partner with HISTORY, one of the most unbiased and authentic brands in television, to produce “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation TM.” This six part, non-fiction series premiering on Friday, May 31 st will give the public an opportunity to see newly authenticated evidence and footage; learn the common characteristics of how these UAP move and operate; and perhaps, most significantly, see interviews from eyewitnesses and former military personnel who have never spoken out before.

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Ultimately, acknowledging and studying the existence of UAP will help us better understand what else is out there and how we fit in. It impacts not only our perception of who we are as human beings but also our understanding of where we’re going and how we treat each other. And that might be the greatest change of all.

Tom DeLonge is co-founder of To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science and Executive Producer of “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” premiering May 31 at 10pm on HISTORY.

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