Airline pilots capture video of ‘extremely bright UFO’ during flight in Pakistan (VIDEOS)
The pilots stopped the object (inset) during a flight from Karachi to Lahore. © Thomas Sbampato/ Global Look Press
Two Pakistan International Airlines pilots have captured intriguing video footage of an “extremely bright UFO” during a domestic flight. The video has gone viral in Pakistan.
It emerged Wednesday that the pilots saw the strange object during a flight from Karachi to Lahore at around 4pm on January 23. The plane was travelling at an altitude of 35,000 feet when the sighting occurred.
“The UFO was extremely bright despite the presence of sunlight,” the pilot said, speaking to Pakistan’s Geo News.
One of the flight team began recording the white circular object and the footage subsequently went viral in Pakistan. Several of the country’s news networks reported on the mysterious encounter.
A spokesperson for Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) said the pilots immediately reported the unidentified object to the control room when they came across it near the Punjabi city of Rahim Yar Khan.
“According to the pilots they witnessed a ‘flying saucer’ at an altitude of 35,000 feet in the sky,” the national carrier’s spokesperson said.
"It is too early to say what that object was. In fact, we might not be able to tell what the object was at all,” the spokesperson added. “However, something was spotted and it was reported in accordance with the required protocol.”
https://www.rt.com/news/513822-pilots-u ... tan-video/
UFO / Alien
Aliens Must Be Out There
Why aren’t we looking for them?
The sun is not special. I know that’s a churlish thing to say about everyone’s favorite celestial body, our planet’s blazing engine and eternal clock, giver of light, life and spectacular Instagram backdrops. Awesome as it is, though, the sun is still a pretty ordinary star, one of an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And the Milky Way is itself just one galaxy among hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions in the observable universe.
Then there’s Earth, a lovely place to raise a species but, as planets go, perhaps as unusual as a Starbucks in a strip mall. Billions of the Milky Way’s stars could be orbited by planets with similarly ideal conditions to support life. Across all of space, there may be quintillions or a sextillion potentially habitable planets — which is more than the estimated grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches.
So isn’t it hubris to assume that we’re the only life around? Since Nicolaus Copernicus posited nearly 500 years ago that Earth is not at the center of the universe, much of what humanity has learned about the cosmos has confirmed our insignificant ordinariness. We live aboard Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In all the vastness of space and time, then, doesn’t it seem likely, maybe even obvious, that there exist other ordinary beings on other insignificant motes?
You might respond with the physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If life is so common, why haven’t we seen it?
Now, in a dazzling new book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” the astrophysicist Avi Loeb offers a forceful rejoinder to Fermi. Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. What if the reason we haven’t come across life beyond Earth is the same reason I can never find my keys when I’m in a hurry — not because they don’t exist but because I did a slapdash job looking for them?
“The search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,” Loeb writes. To “them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and at worst, outright derision.”
That attitude may be changing. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search.
Still, Loeb argues, we are not looking hard enough. Other areas of physics, especially abstruse mathematical concepts like supersymmetry, are showered with funding and academic respect, while one of the most profound questions humanity has ever pondered — Are we alone? — lingers largely on the sidelines.
Loeb is a former chair of Harvard’s department of astronomy, and the director of its Black Hole Initiative and its Institute for Theory and Computation. He’s spent much of his career studying the early universe and black holes, but in the past few years he has become best known for his eccentric analysis of a cosmic mystery that unfolded over 11 days in 2017.
That October, a telescope in Maui captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. Unusual though it was, the astronomical community quickly arrived at a consensus: The object — named Oumuamua, which translates roughly to the Hawaiian for “scout” — was some kind of comet, asteroid or other body of natural origin.
ImageAvi Loeb.
Avi Loeb.Credit...Olivia Falcigno
Loeb disagrees. The “simplest explanation,” he writes, is that Oumuamua “was created by an intelligent civilization not of this earth.” The object’s size, shape, luminosity and in particular its unexpected trajectory around the sun suggested something like a lightsail — a large, thin reflective object that might propel a vehicle using starlight in the way a sailboat is pushed by the wind.
Loeb would know; before Oumuamua was discovered, he worked on a plan to use a laser-powered lightsail to send a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, a star system about four light-years from our sun. Reaching speeds up to 100 million miles an hour, Loeb’s proposed lightsail would reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years.
I’m far from qualified to determine which side has the upper hand in the debate over Oumuamua (The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific piece sorting through the evidence). But in some ways the origin of Oumuamua is not the deepest mystery in Loeb’s book; a bigger puzzle is the closed-mindedness of the scientific establishment, its grumbling reluctance even to entertain the idea that an unusual object might be of alien origin.
What accounts for the reflexive skepticism? Much of it is a matter of optics — looking for alien life just sounds kind of zany. In 1992, NASA spent $12 million on a project to listen for radio signals from other planets; the next year, Congress cut the funding, with one senator joking that “we have yet to bag a single little green fellow.” The joke illustrates a persistent problem for scientists who want to look for alien intelligence — the “giggle factor,” a sense that there’s something unserious and whimsical about the entire endeavor. These perceptions tend to stick; for almost three decades after the 1992 funding, there was essentially no NASA support for the search for extraterrestrial life.
The drought finally ended last year, when the space agency funded an effort by Loeb and several colleagues to look for “technosignatures” of life on other planets — for instance, the presence of industrial pollutants or a concentration of bright light similar to what we see in our densest cities.
Scientific and technological advances have also encouraged new interest in the search for life. The first confirmed exoplanet — a planet beyond our solar system — was found in 1995, but it was the 2009 launch of the Kepler space telescope that supercharged the search. Researchers have cataloged nearly 4,700 exoplanets, and astronomers are eager for the launch this year of NASA’s James Webb space telescope, which promises to provide much closer views of distant worlds.
Besides a lack of resources, Loeb says the search for aliens has been hampered by risk aversion and groupthink. Young scientists rarely push boundaries because doing so risks making mistakes, and mistakes don’t advance careers.
That attitude feeds on itself, fostering sameness and insularity. Loeb points out that many of the most fashionable research topics in physics — other than supersymmetry, ideas like extra-spatial dimensions, string theory, multiverses — lack much experimental backing. But there is compelling evidence to suspect that life exists elsewhere — life exists on Earth, and there’s little reason other than Homo sapiens privilege to think we’re special.
There is much we could do to keep an eye out for beings elsewhere — at the least, as Loeb suggests, surrounding the planet with a network of orbiting high-definition cameras so that the next time an Oumuamua-like object comes hurtling by, we can get a closer glimpse of it. He calls for allocating more scientific resources, like access to telescopes, to high-risk projects. He proposes the creation of a cross-disciplinary science, “astro-archeology,” dedicated to detecting and analyzing relics in other worlds.
I found myself cheering for Loeb’s proposals. Aliens are almost certainly out there, and finding even circumstantial evidence of other beings — even long-dead civilizations — would alter humanity in deep ways, almost certainly for the better. We might gain perspective on our most intractable problems, we might discover novel technologies, and we might learn of unseen dangers in our future.
All we have to do is open our eyes and look.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opin ... iversified
Why aren’t we looking for them?
The sun is not special. I know that’s a churlish thing to say about everyone’s favorite celestial body, our planet’s blazing engine and eternal clock, giver of light, life and spectacular Instagram backdrops. Awesome as it is, though, the sun is still a pretty ordinary star, one of an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And the Milky Way is itself just one galaxy among hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions in the observable universe.
Then there’s Earth, a lovely place to raise a species but, as planets go, perhaps as unusual as a Starbucks in a strip mall. Billions of the Milky Way’s stars could be orbited by planets with similarly ideal conditions to support life. Across all of space, there may be quintillions or a sextillion potentially habitable planets — which is more than the estimated grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches.
So isn’t it hubris to assume that we’re the only life around? Since Nicolaus Copernicus posited nearly 500 years ago that Earth is not at the center of the universe, much of what humanity has learned about the cosmos has confirmed our insignificant ordinariness. We live aboard Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In all the vastness of space and time, then, doesn’t it seem likely, maybe even obvious, that there exist other ordinary beings on other insignificant motes?
You might respond with the physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If life is so common, why haven’t we seen it?
Now, in a dazzling new book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” the astrophysicist Avi Loeb offers a forceful rejoinder to Fermi. Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. What if the reason we haven’t come across life beyond Earth is the same reason I can never find my keys when I’m in a hurry — not because they don’t exist but because I did a slapdash job looking for them?
“The search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,” Loeb writes. To “them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and at worst, outright derision.”
That attitude may be changing. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search.
Still, Loeb argues, we are not looking hard enough. Other areas of physics, especially abstruse mathematical concepts like supersymmetry, are showered with funding and academic respect, while one of the most profound questions humanity has ever pondered — Are we alone? — lingers largely on the sidelines.
Loeb is a former chair of Harvard’s department of astronomy, and the director of its Black Hole Initiative and its Institute for Theory and Computation. He’s spent much of his career studying the early universe and black holes, but in the past few years he has become best known for his eccentric analysis of a cosmic mystery that unfolded over 11 days in 2017.
That October, a telescope in Maui captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. Unusual though it was, the astronomical community quickly arrived at a consensus: The object — named Oumuamua, which translates roughly to the Hawaiian for “scout” — was some kind of comet, asteroid or other body of natural origin.
ImageAvi Loeb.
Avi Loeb.Credit...Olivia Falcigno
Loeb disagrees. The “simplest explanation,” he writes, is that Oumuamua “was created by an intelligent civilization not of this earth.” The object’s size, shape, luminosity and in particular its unexpected trajectory around the sun suggested something like a lightsail — a large, thin reflective object that might propel a vehicle using starlight in the way a sailboat is pushed by the wind.
Loeb would know; before Oumuamua was discovered, he worked on a plan to use a laser-powered lightsail to send a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, a star system about four light-years from our sun. Reaching speeds up to 100 million miles an hour, Loeb’s proposed lightsail would reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years.
I’m far from qualified to determine which side has the upper hand in the debate over Oumuamua (The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific piece sorting through the evidence). But in some ways the origin of Oumuamua is not the deepest mystery in Loeb’s book; a bigger puzzle is the closed-mindedness of the scientific establishment, its grumbling reluctance even to entertain the idea that an unusual object might be of alien origin.
What accounts for the reflexive skepticism? Much of it is a matter of optics — looking for alien life just sounds kind of zany. In 1992, NASA spent $12 million on a project to listen for radio signals from other planets; the next year, Congress cut the funding, with one senator joking that “we have yet to bag a single little green fellow.” The joke illustrates a persistent problem for scientists who want to look for alien intelligence — the “giggle factor,” a sense that there’s something unserious and whimsical about the entire endeavor. These perceptions tend to stick; for almost three decades after the 1992 funding, there was essentially no NASA support for the search for extraterrestrial life.
The drought finally ended last year, when the space agency funded an effort by Loeb and several colleagues to look for “technosignatures” of life on other planets — for instance, the presence of industrial pollutants or a concentration of bright light similar to what we see in our densest cities.
Scientific and technological advances have also encouraged new interest in the search for life. The first confirmed exoplanet — a planet beyond our solar system — was found in 1995, but it was the 2009 launch of the Kepler space telescope that supercharged the search. Researchers have cataloged nearly 4,700 exoplanets, and astronomers are eager for the launch this year of NASA’s James Webb space telescope, which promises to provide much closer views of distant worlds.
Besides a lack of resources, Loeb says the search for aliens has been hampered by risk aversion and groupthink. Young scientists rarely push boundaries because doing so risks making mistakes, and mistakes don’t advance careers.
That attitude feeds on itself, fostering sameness and insularity. Loeb points out that many of the most fashionable research topics in physics — other than supersymmetry, ideas like extra-spatial dimensions, string theory, multiverses — lack much experimental backing. But there is compelling evidence to suspect that life exists elsewhere — life exists on Earth, and there’s little reason other than Homo sapiens privilege to think we’re special.
There is much we could do to keep an eye out for beings elsewhere — at the least, as Loeb suggests, surrounding the planet with a network of orbiting high-definition cameras so that the next time an Oumuamua-like object comes hurtling by, we can get a closer glimpse of it. He calls for allocating more scientific resources, like access to telescopes, to high-risk projects. He proposes the creation of a cross-disciplinary science, “astro-archeology,” dedicated to detecting and analyzing relics in other worlds.
I found myself cheering for Loeb’s proposals. Aliens are almost certainly out there, and finding even circumstantial evidence of other beings — even long-dead civilizations — would alter humanity in deep ways, almost certainly for the better. We might gain perspective on our most intractable problems, we might discover novel technologies, and we might learn of unseen dangers in our future.
All we have to do is open our eyes and look.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opin ... iversified
They Are Not Alone: U.F.O. Reports Surged in the Pandemic
With skies lacking light pollution and most nights free, New Yorkers reported nearly twice as many mysterious sightings last year.
In the years since she says extraterrestrial beings took her from her suburban yard outside Rochester, N.Y., Virginia Stringfellow has kept her story mostly within a close-knit community of people who say they have also encountered U.F.O.s.
But over the past year, that pool has grown: Each of her monthly locals-only U.F.O. meet-ups average about five new people who believe they have seen a mysterious object in the sky — not including about 50 out-of-towners who have tried to join.
“I have to turn away people,” said Ms. Stringfellow, 75.
Sightings of unidentified objects in 2020 nearly doubled in New York from the previous year, to about 300, according to data compiled by the National U.F.O. Reporting Center. They also rose by about 1,000 nationwide, to more than 7,200 sightings.
But according to ufologists (pronounced “yoof-ologists”), as those who study the phenomena call themselves, the trend is not necessarily the result of an alien invasion. Rather, it was likely caused in part by another invader: the coronavirus.
Pushed to stay home by lockdown restrictions, many found themselves with more time to look up. In New York, droves of urbanites fleeing the virus took up residence in places like the Catskills and the Adirondacks, where skies are largely free from light pollution. About a quarter of the reports nationally came in March and April of last year, when lockdowns were at their most strict. Glimmers wobbling across the sky have gone viral on TikTok, racking up millions of views.
Longtime U.F.O. enthusiasts say the pandemic clearly has more people scanning the night skies. But there is another reason that the public might be newly receptive to the idea that the flicker on the horizon is worth reporting: The Pentagon revealed over the summer that it would soon convene a new task force to investigate so-called “unidentified aerial phenomena” observed from military aircraft. Last year, it declassified three videos of such sightings.
In addition, the $2.3 trillion appropriations package signed by former President Donald J. Trump late last year includes a provision that the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence collaborate on a U.F.O. report and release it to the public.
“It’s encouraging to many of us in the field of ufology that the government is willing to confirm that they are aware of these circumstances, that they are conceding that people are reporting these events,” said Peter Davenport, the director of the U.F.O. reporting center, known as NUFORC.
Previously, he said, the government appeared to have believed “that people like me are just crazy — and we’re not.”
Mr. Davenport and his peers are quick to point out that any uptick in sightings does not mean a spike in flying saucers. Unidentified flying objects are just that — airborne phenomena that have not yet been identified. The vast majority of sightings called in to the reporting center are swiftly determined to be things like birds, bats, satellites, planes and drones, he said.
A number of sightings in Northern Idaho last year were quickly identified as satellites launched by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space company, which launched a large number of small internet satellites that were temporarily visible from the ground after they reached orbit. One viral TikTok video of an object hovering in New Jersey last year turned out to be a Goodyear blimp.
“A skilled U.F.O. investigator is one of the most skeptical people around,” Mr. Davenport said.
Only a small fraction of reports scrutinized by NUFORC, which is based in Washington State, are truly not identifiable. That proportion has not changed even as more calls have poured in, according to the director.
Ufologists are frequently prickly when it comes to the subject of apparent increases in U.F.O. sightings, warning that bumps occur with regularity over the years, and are a favorite subject of news reports. The coverage itself may also drive up so-called sightings, they warn.
In New York, as city dwellers have tried to escape the virus by relocating to the countryside, they have driven up rural sightings, said Chris DePerno, the assistant director of the New York State branch of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, a nonprofit organization that uses civilian investigators to study reports of U.F.O.s.
Absent urban light pollution, he said, the transplants are taking new notice of the night sky and whatever may be in it.
“They come up toward the Hudson Valley, it’s beautiful up there, you get clear skies and then all of a sudden you see this thing zipping through the sky, that stopped on a dime, goes straight up, takes off again, stops, comes back — we’re talking incredible speeds,” said Mr. DePerno, a retired police detective.
“With the Covid thing, more people are looking up,” he said.
The seeming uptick in reports has come as a relief to some who say they’ve seen mysterious floating craft, but feared they were alone.
“Because of the Pentagon being outed, there is more news now, there is more reporting now,” said Ms. Stringfellow, who goes by Cookie. “People aren’t so afraid to say, ‘Oh, jeez, I was in the woods now, or I was by the lake, and this thing came down.’”
But for a 65-year-old retired New York State Park Police officer from Granville, along the state border with Vermont — who asked not to be named because he worried about going public with his belief in U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial life — full acceptance still feels a ways off. The lingering fear of ridicule may be suppressing the true numbers of U.F.O. sightings, he suggested; there might in fact be more out there.
He urged city folks to stay calm should they see a U.F.O., just as he did one evening about 30 years ago, when, he said, he spotted a football-fields-long object floating beside the Taconic State Parkway as he finished a patrol shift. And most importantly, he said, people should not let fear of being mocked prevent them from reporting what they see.
If enough people report U.F.O.s when they see them, the retired officer added, the world will believe they are telling the truth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
With skies lacking light pollution and most nights free, New Yorkers reported nearly twice as many mysterious sightings last year.
In the years since she says extraterrestrial beings took her from her suburban yard outside Rochester, N.Y., Virginia Stringfellow has kept her story mostly within a close-knit community of people who say they have also encountered U.F.O.s.
But over the past year, that pool has grown: Each of her monthly locals-only U.F.O. meet-ups average about five new people who believe they have seen a mysterious object in the sky — not including about 50 out-of-towners who have tried to join.
“I have to turn away people,” said Ms. Stringfellow, 75.
Sightings of unidentified objects in 2020 nearly doubled in New York from the previous year, to about 300, according to data compiled by the National U.F.O. Reporting Center. They also rose by about 1,000 nationwide, to more than 7,200 sightings.
But according to ufologists (pronounced “yoof-ologists”), as those who study the phenomena call themselves, the trend is not necessarily the result of an alien invasion. Rather, it was likely caused in part by another invader: the coronavirus.
Pushed to stay home by lockdown restrictions, many found themselves with more time to look up. In New York, droves of urbanites fleeing the virus took up residence in places like the Catskills and the Adirondacks, where skies are largely free from light pollution. About a quarter of the reports nationally came in March and April of last year, when lockdowns were at their most strict. Glimmers wobbling across the sky have gone viral on TikTok, racking up millions of views.
Longtime U.F.O. enthusiasts say the pandemic clearly has more people scanning the night skies. But there is another reason that the public might be newly receptive to the idea that the flicker on the horizon is worth reporting: The Pentagon revealed over the summer that it would soon convene a new task force to investigate so-called “unidentified aerial phenomena” observed from military aircraft. Last year, it declassified three videos of such sightings.
In addition, the $2.3 trillion appropriations package signed by former President Donald J. Trump late last year includes a provision that the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence collaborate on a U.F.O. report and release it to the public.
“It’s encouraging to many of us in the field of ufology that the government is willing to confirm that they are aware of these circumstances, that they are conceding that people are reporting these events,” said Peter Davenport, the director of the U.F.O. reporting center, known as NUFORC.
Previously, he said, the government appeared to have believed “that people like me are just crazy — and we’re not.”
Mr. Davenport and his peers are quick to point out that any uptick in sightings does not mean a spike in flying saucers. Unidentified flying objects are just that — airborne phenomena that have not yet been identified. The vast majority of sightings called in to the reporting center are swiftly determined to be things like birds, bats, satellites, planes and drones, he said.
A number of sightings in Northern Idaho last year were quickly identified as satellites launched by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space company, which launched a large number of small internet satellites that were temporarily visible from the ground after they reached orbit. One viral TikTok video of an object hovering in New Jersey last year turned out to be a Goodyear blimp.
“A skilled U.F.O. investigator is one of the most skeptical people around,” Mr. Davenport said.
Only a small fraction of reports scrutinized by NUFORC, which is based in Washington State, are truly not identifiable. That proportion has not changed even as more calls have poured in, according to the director.
Ufologists are frequently prickly when it comes to the subject of apparent increases in U.F.O. sightings, warning that bumps occur with regularity over the years, and are a favorite subject of news reports. The coverage itself may also drive up so-called sightings, they warn.
In New York, as city dwellers have tried to escape the virus by relocating to the countryside, they have driven up rural sightings, said Chris DePerno, the assistant director of the New York State branch of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, a nonprofit organization that uses civilian investigators to study reports of U.F.O.s.
Absent urban light pollution, he said, the transplants are taking new notice of the night sky and whatever may be in it.
“They come up toward the Hudson Valley, it’s beautiful up there, you get clear skies and then all of a sudden you see this thing zipping through the sky, that stopped on a dime, goes straight up, takes off again, stops, comes back — we’re talking incredible speeds,” said Mr. DePerno, a retired police detective.
“With the Covid thing, more people are looking up,” he said.
The seeming uptick in reports has come as a relief to some who say they’ve seen mysterious floating craft, but feared they were alone.
“Because of the Pentagon being outed, there is more news now, there is more reporting now,” said Ms. Stringfellow, who goes by Cookie. “People aren’t so afraid to say, ‘Oh, jeez, I was in the woods now, or I was by the lake, and this thing came down.’”
But for a 65-year-old retired New York State Park Police officer from Granville, along the state border with Vermont — who asked not to be named because he worried about going public with his belief in U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial life — full acceptance still feels a ways off. The lingering fear of ridicule may be suppressing the true numbers of U.F.O. sightings, he suggested; there might in fact be more out there.
He urged city folks to stay calm should they see a U.F.O., just as he did one evening about 30 years ago, when, he said, he spotted a football-fields-long object floating beside the Taconic State Parkway as he finished a patrol shift. And most importantly, he said, people should not let fear of being mocked prevent them from reporting what they see.
If enough people report U.F.O.s when they see them, the retired officer added, the world will believe they are telling the truth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
I’m a Physicist Who Searches for Aliens. U.F.O.s Don’t Impress Me.
This month the TV news program “60 Minutes” ran a segment on recent sightings by Navy pilots of unidentified flying objects. The pilots’ accounts were bolstered by videos recorded by cameras onboard their planes that captured what the government now calls “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
In the wake of these enigmatic encounters, people are asking me what I think about U.F.O.s and aliens. They’re asking because I’m an astrophysicist who is involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. My colleagues and I were recently awarded one of the first NASA grants to look for signs of advanced technology on planets outside our solar system. (I’ve argued in these pages that the 10 billion trillion habitable planets that we now believe exist in the universe make extraterrestrial civilizations far more likely.)
I understand that U.F.O. sightings, which date back at least to 1947, are synonymous in the popular imagination with evidence of extraterrestrials. But scientifically speaking, there is little to warrant that connection. There are excellent reasons to search for extraterrestrial life, but there are equally excellent reasons not to conclude that we have found evidence of it with U.F.O. sightings.
Let’s start with the Navy cases. Some of the pilots have told of seeing flying objects shaped like Tic Tacs or other unusual forms. The recordings from the planes’ cameras show amorphous shapes moving in surprising ways, including appearing to skim the ocean’s surface and then disappear beneath it. This might appear to be evidence of extraterrestrial technology that can defy the laws of physics as we understand them — but in reality it doesn’t amount to much.
For one thing, first-person accounts, which are notoriously inaccurate to begin with, don’t provide enough information for an empirical investigation. Scientists can’t accurately gauge distances or velocity from a pilot’s testimony: “It looked close” or “It was moving really fast” is too vague. What a scientist needs are precise measurements from multiple viewpoints provided by devices that register various wavelengths (visual, infrared, radar). That kind of data might tell us if an object’s motion required engines or materials that we Earthlings don’t possess.
Perhaps the videos offer that kind of data? Sadly, no. While some researchers have used the footage to make simple estimates of the accelerations and other flight characteristics of the U.F.O.s, the results have been mixed at best. Skeptics have already shown that some of the motions seen in the videos (like the ocean skimming) may be artifacts of the cameras’ optics and tracking systems.
There are also common-sense objections. If we are being frequently visited by aliens, why don’t they just land on the White House lawn and announce themselves? There is a recurring narrative, perhaps best exemplified by the TV show “The X-Files,” that these creatures have some mysterious reason to remain hidden from us. But if the mission of these aliens calls for stealth, they seem surprisingly incompetent. You would think that creatures technologically capable of traversing the mind-boggling distances between the stars would also know how to turn off their high beams at night and to elude our primitive infrared cameras.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ll read with great interest the U.S. intelligence report about U.F.O.s that is scheduled to be delivered to Congress in June; I believe that U.F.O. phenomena should be investigated using the best tools of science and with complete transparency.
But there may be more prosaic explanations. For example, it’s possible that U.F.O.s are drones deployed by rivals like Russia and China to examine our defenses — luring our pilots into turning on their radar and other detectors, thus revealing our electronic intelligence capacities. (The United States once used a similar strategy to test the sensitivities of Soviet radar systems.) This hypothesis might sound far-fetched, but it is less extreme than positing a visit from extraterrestrials.
What’s most frustrating about the U.F.O.s story is that it obscures the fact that scientists like me and my colleagues are on the threshold of gathering data that may be relevant to the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. But this evidence involves subtle findings about phenomena far away in the galaxy — not sensational findings just a few miles away in our own atmosphere.
Powerful telescopes that will soon be operational may be capable of detecting city lights on the night side of planets that orbit distant stars or the telltale mark of reflected light from planet-wide solar-collecting arrays or the distinctive sign of industrial chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere. All of these “technosignatures,” should we find evidence of them, will be small effects. If we do detect such things, you better believe that my colleagues and I will go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of error and every possible alternative explanation. This will take time and careful effort.
The work of science, though ultimately exciting, is mostly painstakingly methodical and boring. But that is the price we pay because we don’t just want to believe. We want to know.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
This month the TV news program “60 Minutes” ran a segment on recent sightings by Navy pilots of unidentified flying objects. The pilots’ accounts were bolstered by videos recorded by cameras onboard their planes that captured what the government now calls “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
In the wake of these enigmatic encounters, people are asking me what I think about U.F.O.s and aliens. They’re asking because I’m an astrophysicist who is involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. My colleagues and I were recently awarded one of the first NASA grants to look for signs of advanced technology on planets outside our solar system. (I’ve argued in these pages that the 10 billion trillion habitable planets that we now believe exist in the universe make extraterrestrial civilizations far more likely.)
I understand that U.F.O. sightings, which date back at least to 1947, are synonymous in the popular imagination with evidence of extraterrestrials. But scientifically speaking, there is little to warrant that connection. There are excellent reasons to search for extraterrestrial life, but there are equally excellent reasons not to conclude that we have found evidence of it with U.F.O. sightings.
Let’s start with the Navy cases. Some of the pilots have told of seeing flying objects shaped like Tic Tacs or other unusual forms. The recordings from the planes’ cameras show amorphous shapes moving in surprising ways, including appearing to skim the ocean’s surface and then disappear beneath it. This might appear to be evidence of extraterrestrial technology that can defy the laws of physics as we understand them — but in reality it doesn’t amount to much.
For one thing, first-person accounts, which are notoriously inaccurate to begin with, don’t provide enough information for an empirical investigation. Scientists can’t accurately gauge distances or velocity from a pilot’s testimony: “It looked close” or “It was moving really fast” is too vague. What a scientist needs are precise measurements from multiple viewpoints provided by devices that register various wavelengths (visual, infrared, radar). That kind of data might tell us if an object’s motion required engines or materials that we Earthlings don’t possess.
Perhaps the videos offer that kind of data? Sadly, no. While some researchers have used the footage to make simple estimates of the accelerations and other flight characteristics of the U.F.O.s, the results have been mixed at best. Skeptics have already shown that some of the motions seen in the videos (like the ocean skimming) may be artifacts of the cameras’ optics and tracking systems.
There are also common-sense objections. If we are being frequently visited by aliens, why don’t they just land on the White House lawn and announce themselves? There is a recurring narrative, perhaps best exemplified by the TV show “The X-Files,” that these creatures have some mysterious reason to remain hidden from us. But if the mission of these aliens calls for stealth, they seem surprisingly incompetent. You would think that creatures technologically capable of traversing the mind-boggling distances between the stars would also know how to turn off their high beams at night and to elude our primitive infrared cameras.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ll read with great interest the U.S. intelligence report about U.F.O.s that is scheduled to be delivered to Congress in June; I believe that U.F.O. phenomena should be investigated using the best tools of science and with complete transparency.
But there may be more prosaic explanations. For example, it’s possible that U.F.O.s are drones deployed by rivals like Russia and China to examine our defenses — luring our pilots into turning on their radar and other detectors, thus revealing our electronic intelligence capacities. (The United States once used a similar strategy to test the sensitivities of Soviet radar systems.) This hypothesis might sound far-fetched, but it is less extreme than positing a visit from extraterrestrials.
What’s most frustrating about the U.F.O.s story is that it obscures the fact that scientists like me and my colleagues are on the threshold of gathering data that may be relevant to the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. But this evidence involves subtle findings about phenomena far away in the galaxy — not sensational findings just a few miles away in our own atmosphere.
Powerful telescopes that will soon be operational may be capable of detecting city lights on the night side of planets that orbit distant stars or the telltale mark of reflected light from planet-wide solar-collecting arrays or the distinctive sign of industrial chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere. All of these “technosignatures,” should we find evidence of them, will be small effects. If we do detect such things, you better believe that my colleagues and I will go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of error and every possible alternative explanation. This will take time and careful effort.
The work of science, though ultimately exciting, is mostly painstakingly methodical and boring. But that is the price we pay because we don’t just want to believe. We want to know.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
No, but really. Should We Contact The Aliens
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
With the U.S. government puzzling over U.F.O.s, and potentially habitable exoplanets in our telescopes, earthlings are closer than ever to finding other intelligent life in the universe. So the existential question is: Should we try to communicate with whatever we think might be out there?
That’s the argument this week between Douglas Vakoch and Michio Kaku. Vakoch, the president of the research and educational nonprofit METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, has dedicated his life’s work to intentionally broadcasting messages beyond our solar system.
Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and a co-founder of string field theory, thinks reaching out to unknown aliens is a catastrophically bad idea and “would be the biggest mistake in human history.”
Together, they join Jane Coaston to debate the question of making first contact and our place in the cosmos.
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
With the U.S. government puzzling over U.F.O.s, and potentially habitable exoplanets in our telescopes, earthlings are closer than ever to finding other intelligent life in the universe. So the existential question is: Should we try to communicate with whatever we think might be out there?
That’s the argument this week between Douglas Vakoch and Michio Kaku. Vakoch, the president of the research and educational nonprofit METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, has dedicated his life’s work to intentionally broadcasting messages beyond our solar system.
Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and a co-founder of string field theory, thinks reaching out to unknown aliens is a catastrophically bad idea and “would be the biggest mistake in human history.”
Together, they join Jane Coaston to debate the question of making first contact and our place in the cosmos.
A Chinese Telescope Did Not Find an Alien Signal. The Search Continues.
China’s astronomers have been initiated into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the kind of false alarm that others in the field have experienced for decades.
An aerial view of the FAST telescope in China’s Guizhou province. Astronomers there recently detected a signal that was mistaken for extraterrestrial intelligence.Credit...National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
By Dennis Overbye
June 18, 2022
It was a project that launched a thousand interstellar dreams.
Fifty years ago, NASA published a fat, 253-page book titled, “Project Cyclops.” It summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. What was needed, the assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists concluded, was Cyclops, a vast array of radio telescopes with as many as a thousand 100-meter-diameter antennas. At the time, the project would have cost $10 billion. It could, the astronomers said, detect alien signals from as far away as 1,000 light-years.
The report kicked off with a quotation from the astronomer Frank Drake, now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz:
At this very minute, with almost absolute certainty, radio waves sent forth by other intelligent civilizations are falling on the earth. A telescope can be built that, pointed in the right place and tuned to the right frequency, could discover these waves. Someday, from somewhere out among the stars, will come the answers to many of the oldest, most important and most exciting questions mankind has asked.
The Cyclops report, long out of print but available online, would become a bible for a generation of astronomers drawn to the dream that science could answer existential questions.
“For the very first time, we had technology where we could do an experiment instead of asking priests and philosophers,” Jill Tarter, who read the report when she was a graduate student and who has devoted her life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, said in an interview a decade ago.
“Project Cyclops” summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations.
Credit...NASA
I was reminded of Cyclops and the work it inspired this week when word flashed around the world that Chinese astronomers had detected a radio signal that had the characteristics of being from an extraterrestrial civilization — namely, it had a very narrow bandwidth at a frequency of 140.604 MHz, a precision nature doesn’t usually achieve on its own.
They made the detection using a giant new telescope called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST. The telescope was pointed in the direction of an exoplanet named Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth that orbits in the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf star hundreds of light years from here, in the constellation Lyra. It has an estimated surface temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate to harbor life.
Just as quickly, however, an article in the state-run newspaper “Science and Technology Daily” reporting the discovery vanished. And Chinese astronomers were pouring cold water on the result.
Zhang Tong-jie, the chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, was quoted by Andrew Jones, a journalist who tracks Chinese space and astronomy developments, as saying, “The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed or ruled out. This may be a long process.”
Dan Werthimer, of the University of California, Berkeley, who is among the authors of a scientific paper on the signal, was more blunt.
Frank Drake with his eponymous equation, which predicts the number of observable civilizations in our galaxy.Credit...Dr. Seth Shostak/Science Source
“These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T.,” he wrote in an email.
This has become a familiar story. For half a century, SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been a game of whack-a-mole, finding promising signals before tracking them down to orbiting satellites, microwave ovens and other earthly sources. Dr. Drake himself pointed a radio telescope at a pair of stars in 1960 and soon thought he had struck gold, only to find out the signal was a stray radar.
More recently, a signal that appeared to be coming from the direction of the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, was tracked down to radio interference in Australia.
Just as NASA’s announcement last week that it would make a modest investment in the scientific study of unidentified flying objects was intended to bring rigor and practicality to what many criticized as wishful thinking, so, too, was the agency’s Cyclops workshop held at Stanford over three months in 1971. The conference was organized by John Billingham, an astrobiologist, and Bernard Oliver, who was the head of research for Hewlett-Packard. The men also edited the conference’s report.
In the introduction, Dr. Oliver wrote that if anything came of Cyclops he would consider this the most important year of his life.
“Cyclops was, indeed, a milestone, largely in pulling together a coherent SETI strategy, and the clear calculations and engineering design that followed,” said Paul Horowitz, an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard who went on to design and start his own listening campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society. The movie director Steven Spielberg (“E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) attended the official opening in 1985 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Agassiz Station in Harvard, Mass.
“SETI was for real!” Dr. Horowitz added.
But what Dr. Oliver initially received was only a “Golden Fleece” award from Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, who crusaded against what he considered government waste.
“In my view, this project should be postponed for a few million light years,” he said.
On Columbus Day in 1992, NASA did initiate a limited search; a year later, Congress canceled it at the behest of Senator Richard Bryan, Democrat of Nevada. Denied federal support ever since, the SETI endeavor has limped along, supported by donations to a nonprofit organization, the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, Calif. Recently, through a $100 million grant, the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner set up a new effort called Breakthrough Listen. Dr. Horowitz and others have expanded the search to what they call “Optical SETI,” monitoring the sky for laser flashes from distant civilizations.
Cyclops was never built, which is just as well, Dr. Horowitz said, “because, by today’s standards, it would have been an expensive hulking monster.” Technological developments like radio receivers that can listen to billions of radio frequencies at once have changed the game.
A staff member conducts maintenance of the reflector panels of the FAST telescope, which was built in 2016 with SETI in mind.Credit...Xinhua News Agency / Contributor
China’s big new FAST telescope, also nicknamed “Sky Eye,” was built in 2016 partly with SETI in mind. Its antenna occupies a sinkhole in Guizhou in Southwest China. The size of the antenna eclipses what was the iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which collapsed ignominiously in December 2020.
Now FAST and its observers have experienced their own trial by false alarm. There will be many more, SETI astronomers say.
The generation of astronomers who were inspired by the Cyclops report is getting old. Dr. Billingham died in 2013. Dr. Oliver died in 1995. Dr. Tarter retired from the SETI Institute in 2012, proud that she had never sounded a false alarm.
Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They’ve always been in the search for the long run, they say.
“The Great Silence is hardly unexpected,” said Dr. Horowitz, including because only a fraction of a percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been surveyed. Nobody ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy.
“It might not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen,” Dr. Werthimer said.
“All of the signals detected by SETI researchers so far are made by our own civilization, not another civilization,” Dr. Werthimer grumbled in a series of emails and telephone conversations. Earthlings, he said, might have to build a telescope on the backside of the moon to escape the growing radio pollution on Earth and the interference from constellations of satellites in orbit.
The present time, he said, might be a unique window in which to pursue SETI from Earth.
“One hundred years ago, the sky was clear, but we didn’t know what to do,” he said. “One hundred years from now, there will be no sky left.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/scie ... iversified
An aerial view of the FAST telescope in China’s Guizhou province. Astronomers there recently detected a signal that was mistaken for extraterrestrial intelligence.Credit...National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
By Dennis Overbye
June 18, 2022
It was a project that launched a thousand interstellar dreams.
Fifty years ago, NASA published a fat, 253-page book titled, “Project Cyclops.” It summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. What was needed, the assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists concluded, was Cyclops, a vast array of radio telescopes with as many as a thousand 100-meter-diameter antennas. At the time, the project would have cost $10 billion. It could, the astronomers said, detect alien signals from as far away as 1,000 light-years.
The report kicked off with a quotation from the astronomer Frank Drake, now an emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz:
At this very minute, with almost absolute certainty, radio waves sent forth by other intelligent civilizations are falling on the earth. A telescope can be built that, pointed in the right place and tuned to the right frequency, could discover these waves. Someday, from somewhere out among the stars, will come the answers to many of the oldest, most important and most exciting questions mankind has asked.
The Cyclops report, long out of print but available online, would become a bible for a generation of astronomers drawn to the dream that science could answer existential questions.
“For the very first time, we had technology where we could do an experiment instead of asking priests and philosophers,” Jill Tarter, who read the report when she was a graduate student and who has devoted her life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, said in an interview a decade ago.
“Project Cyclops” summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations.
Credit...NASA
I was reminded of Cyclops and the work it inspired this week when word flashed around the world that Chinese astronomers had detected a radio signal that had the characteristics of being from an extraterrestrial civilization — namely, it had a very narrow bandwidth at a frequency of 140.604 MHz, a precision nature doesn’t usually achieve on its own.
They made the detection using a giant new telescope called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST. The telescope was pointed in the direction of an exoplanet named Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth that orbits in the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf star hundreds of light years from here, in the constellation Lyra. It has an estimated surface temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate to harbor life.
Just as quickly, however, an article in the state-run newspaper “Science and Technology Daily” reporting the discovery vanished. And Chinese astronomers were pouring cold water on the result.
Zhang Tong-jie, the chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, was quoted by Andrew Jones, a journalist who tracks Chinese space and astronomy developments, as saying, “The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed or ruled out. This may be a long process.”
Dan Werthimer, of the University of California, Berkeley, who is among the authors of a scientific paper on the signal, was more blunt.
Frank Drake with his eponymous equation, which predicts the number of observable civilizations in our galaxy.Credit...Dr. Seth Shostak/Science Source
“These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T.,” he wrote in an email.
This has become a familiar story. For half a century, SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been a game of whack-a-mole, finding promising signals before tracking them down to orbiting satellites, microwave ovens and other earthly sources. Dr. Drake himself pointed a radio telescope at a pair of stars in 1960 and soon thought he had struck gold, only to find out the signal was a stray radar.
More recently, a signal that appeared to be coming from the direction of the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, was tracked down to radio interference in Australia.
Just as NASA’s announcement last week that it would make a modest investment in the scientific study of unidentified flying objects was intended to bring rigor and practicality to what many criticized as wishful thinking, so, too, was the agency’s Cyclops workshop held at Stanford over three months in 1971. The conference was organized by John Billingham, an astrobiologist, and Bernard Oliver, who was the head of research for Hewlett-Packard. The men also edited the conference’s report.
In the introduction, Dr. Oliver wrote that if anything came of Cyclops he would consider this the most important year of his life.
“Cyclops was, indeed, a milestone, largely in pulling together a coherent SETI strategy, and the clear calculations and engineering design that followed,” said Paul Horowitz, an emeritus professor of physics at Harvard who went on to design and start his own listening campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society. The movie director Steven Spielberg (“E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) attended the official opening in 1985 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Agassiz Station in Harvard, Mass.
“SETI was for real!” Dr. Horowitz added.
But what Dr. Oliver initially received was only a “Golden Fleece” award from Senator William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, who crusaded against what he considered government waste.
“In my view, this project should be postponed for a few million light years,” he said.
On Columbus Day in 1992, NASA did initiate a limited search; a year later, Congress canceled it at the behest of Senator Richard Bryan, Democrat of Nevada. Denied federal support ever since, the SETI endeavor has limped along, supported by donations to a nonprofit organization, the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, Calif. Recently, through a $100 million grant, the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner set up a new effort called Breakthrough Listen. Dr. Horowitz and others have expanded the search to what they call “Optical SETI,” monitoring the sky for laser flashes from distant civilizations.
Cyclops was never built, which is just as well, Dr. Horowitz said, “because, by today’s standards, it would have been an expensive hulking monster.” Technological developments like radio receivers that can listen to billions of radio frequencies at once have changed the game.
A staff member conducts maintenance of the reflector panels of the FAST telescope, which was built in 2016 with SETI in mind.Credit...Xinhua News Agency / Contributor
China’s big new FAST telescope, also nicknamed “Sky Eye,” was built in 2016 partly with SETI in mind. Its antenna occupies a sinkhole in Guizhou in Southwest China. The size of the antenna eclipses what was the iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which collapsed ignominiously in December 2020.
Now FAST and its observers have experienced their own trial by false alarm. There will be many more, SETI astronomers say.
The generation of astronomers who were inspired by the Cyclops report is getting old. Dr. Billingham died in 2013. Dr. Oliver died in 1995. Dr. Tarter retired from the SETI Institute in 2012, proud that she had never sounded a false alarm.
Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They’ve always been in the search for the long run, they say.
“The Great Silence is hardly unexpected,” said Dr. Horowitz, including because only a fraction of a percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been surveyed. Nobody ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy.
“It might not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen,” Dr. Werthimer said.
“All of the signals detected by SETI researchers so far are made by our own civilization, not another civilization,” Dr. Werthimer grumbled in a series of emails and telephone conversations. Earthlings, he said, might have to build a telescope on the backside of the moon to escape the growing radio pollution on Earth and the interference from constellations of satellites in orbit.
The present time, he said, might be a unique window in which to pursue SETI from Earth.
“One hundred years ago, the sky was clear, but we didn’t know what to do,” he said. “One hundred years from now, there will be no sky left.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/scie ... iversified
-
alameenkmerali
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2022 3:08 pm
- Location: PPF Street, AGM Area. Next to Don Kassim Residence. Arusha, Tanzania
- Contact:
Re: UFO / Alien
I believe that these so called "Aliens" are actually Fallen Angels having both eternal and physical qualities for the following reasons:shiraz.virani wrote: ↑Tue Feb 08, 2011 6:00 pm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql1PPkZiHl8
On 7th August 1996,NASA (1) scientists made an announcement that made front page headlines throughout the world.Within a Martian meteorite,they had found evidence of a microscopic lifeform that may have existed on Mars more than three billion years ago. (2) Although other studies were later published which challenged this conclusion, (3) numerous recent discoveries,for example,the discovery by the Galileo spacecraft, (4) in February 1997,of a possible red-coloured sea under the ice crust of Jupiter's moon,Europa, (5) are raising hopes that we may soon be able to get an answer to one of the oldest and most interesting questions asked by humans-"Is anyone out there,or are we alone in the universe?"
However,it may be that none of us may live to see the day when scientists will give us a definitive answer to this question.For Muslims,that should not be a problem.We already have the answer.Although many Muslims are unaware of the fact,the Quran (6) explicitly mentions the existence of extraterrestrial life.
The existence of creatures of a spiritual nature,such as angels,in the universe,is accepted as a fact by all Muslims,as well as people of other religions, such as Christians.The point that generates excitement among the public,and scientists is the question of whether material lifeforms like ourselves,which can be found by science,do actually exist outside the earth. (7) The objective of this article is to present evidence from the Quran for the existence in the universe,of MATERIAL lifeforms ("Life as we know it").
"Dabbatun"
In Sura 42,Verse 29 (42:29) of the Quran,we are told, "Among His (God's) signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth,and the living creatures that He has scattered through them :and He has power to gather them together when He wills." (8) Before proceeding further,a point or two must be noted.The word "sama",translated "heavens",is also the Arabic for "sky".One may object that the verse refers to creatures in the sky (which would be birds),not in the heavens.However,birds are mentioned seperately from creatures of the heavens in 24:41, "Seest thou not that it is God Whose praise all beings in the heavens and on earth do celebrate,and the birds (of the air) with wings outspread?..." (9) In a note to 42;29,Muhammad Asad states,"In the Quran,the expression "the heavens and earth" invariably denotes the universe in its entireity." (10) The Quran mentions that inanimate objects also worship God:"Do they not look at God's creation, (even) among (inanimate) things- how their (very) shadows turn round,from right to left,prostrating themselves to God..."(16:48). (11) Therefore,may not the creatures spoken of in 42:29 in the heavens,be inanimate creatures of God.No.The next verse,16:49 goes, "And to God doth obeisance all that is in the heavens and earth,whether moving (living) creatures or the angels...". (12) The word translated "living creatures" here is the same as that in 42:29- "Dabbatun".Comments Asad,"The word dabbah denotes any sentient,corporeal being capable of spontaneous movement and is contrasted here with the non-corporeal,spiritual beings designated as "angels" ". (13) In other words,42:29 is referring to precisely the type of lifeforms that science is searching for,not some metaphysical entities.Yusuf Ali says,"Dabbatun:beasts,living,crawling creatures of all kind." (14) This is the same word used in 2:164,"...in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth...are signs for a people that are wise," (15) and in 24:45,"And God has created every animal from waterf them are some that creep on their bellies;some that walk on two legs;and some that walk on four. God creates what he wills..." (16) Commenting on 42:29,Allama Shabbir Ahmad Usmani says,"From the verse it appears that like on the earth,there are some kinds of animals- living creatures- in the heavens also." (17) On the same verse,Yusuf Ali comments, "Life is not confined to our one little Planet.It is a very old speculation to imagine some life like human life on the planet Mars...it is reasonable to suppose that Life in some form or other is scattered through some of the millions of heavenly bodies scattered through space." (18) From such remarks,the reader will realize that Muslim scholars are well aware of the fact that 42:29 clearly mentions the existence of aliens.
Is there any alien intelligent life ?
Although the discovery of any form of life outside the earth would be dramatic,humankind is especially interested in knowing whether there is any alien intelligent life in the universe.NASA previously had a program on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).Although now scrapped due to budget cuts, private SETI organizations (19) have now been made which continue the search.The Planetary Society, (20) a private organization,in which the film director Steven Speilberg (21) is a member of the Board of Directors,has the largest SETI program in the world.So far, no sign of alien intelligent life has turned up.Can the Quran provide an answer?
Sura 27:65 commands,"Say:None in the heavens or on earth, except God,knows what is hidden:nor can they perceive when they shall be raised up (for Judgement)." (22) This shows that,like humans,there are other creatures in the universe that will also be raised from the dead.We are told in 19:93-96,"Not one of the beings in the heavens and the earth but must come to (God) Most Gracious as a servant.He does take an account of them (all),and hath numbered them (all) exactly.And everyone of them will come to Him singly on the Day of Judgement.On those who believe and work deeds of righteousness, will (God) Most Gracious bestow love." (23) From these verses we learn that there are alien lifeforms that,like us,will also be judged according to the works that they do during their lives.Among them are the believers.Therefore,naturally,there will also be those aliens who are unbelievers.The believers will be rewarded.The lifeforms being descibed in the above verses can hardly be expected to be microorganisms.The Quran is referring to creatures of a level of development that makes them morally accountable beings.They must be organisms possessing qualities which we would ascribe to intelligent lifeforms.
In Sura 72:14-15,jinn (a type of spiritual lifeform,which the Quran mention as living on the earth) say,"Amongst us are some that submit their wills (to God),and some that swerve from justice.Now those who submit their wills- they have sought out (the path) of right conduct:But those who swerve- they are (but) fuel for Hell-fire." (24) The Quran mentions that good jinn will be rewarded with Paradise.Summing up from all the above verses,it is clear that Judgement Day is for creatures in the whole universe (Sura 39:68-"The Trumpet will (just) be sounded when all that are in the heavens and on earth will swoon, except such as it will please God (to exempt).Then will a second one be sounded,when,behold,they will be standing and looking on!") (25) and like jinn,aliens will also be sharing Paradise and Hell with humans.In fact,the Quran mentions that Paradise is of a size like that of our present universe- 57:21,"Therefore (vie) with one another for the pardon of your Lord,and for a Paradise as vast as heaven and earh, prepared for those who believe in Allah and His apostles." (26) Therefore, it is not surprising that when we are sharing this universe with aliens,we should share Paradise and Hell with them too.The Quran shows us,therefore,that not only do aliens exist,but among them are also intelligent beings.
1. Scientists confirmed that these UFOs are faster than the speed of light and that they actually go against the laws of physics and the only thing that we know can do this is an eternal being.
2. These UFO's can breach dimensions. Again, the only thing that can do this is an eternal being.
These beings having those eternal qualities and physical qualities such a body and such proves that they're actually fallen angels. I'll make a further explanation on this later in another forum post where it talks about Christianity.
Re: UFO / Alien
Home World News
Pentagon clarifies position on aliens.
There’s currently no evidence of extraterrestrials landing or crashing on our planet, the undersecretary of defense says
Pentagon clarifies position on aliens
A new body set up by the Pentagon to look into reported sightings of UFOs has so far not found any evidence of alien life, the US Department of Defense has said.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was established this July to track unidentified objects in the sky, space, and underwater, and to assess any security threat these may pose, has received "several hundreds" of additional reports of unexplained phenomena, the head of the body, Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, told journalists on Friday.
However, according to undersecretary of defense for intelligence Ronald Moultrie, AARO experts "haven’t seen anything that would lead us to believe any of the objects we have seen are of alien origin."
"I haven’t seen anything... to suggest there has been an alien visitation or alien crash," Moultrie added.
The undersecretary also said that the US considers any "unauthorized system" in its airspace to be "a threat to safety."
Both Kirkpatrick and Moultrie declined to reveal how many of the approximately 400 cases under investigation have already been identified. More detailed information is promised, to be released in a dedicated report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Kirkpatrick also said that AARO has been working on expanding its ability to identify UFOs, including re-calibrating sensors, and coordinating with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to get the signatures of American technology to de-conflict observations.
UFOs have been a hot topic in Washington in recent months, after the US Congress held its first hearing on the issue in more than half a century. The lawmakers expressed concerns that the unidentified objects could be aliens or some new technology operated by China, Russia or another potential adversary.
https://www.rt.com/news/568428-ufo-visit-us-pentagon/
Pentagon clarifies position on aliens.
There’s currently no evidence of extraterrestrials landing or crashing on our planet, the undersecretary of defense says
Pentagon clarifies position on aliens
A new body set up by the Pentagon to look into reported sightings of UFOs has so far not found any evidence of alien life, the US Department of Defense has said.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was established this July to track unidentified objects in the sky, space, and underwater, and to assess any security threat these may pose, has received "several hundreds" of additional reports of unexplained phenomena, the head of the body, Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, told journalists on Friday.
However, according to undersecretary of defense for intelligence Ronald Moultrie, AARO experts "haven’t seen anything that would lead us to believe any of the objects we have seen are of alien origin."
"I haven’t seen anything... to suggest there has been an alien visitation or alien crash," Moultrie added.
The undersecretary also said that the US considers any "unauthorized system" in its airspace to be "a threat to safety."
Both Kirkpatrick and Moultrie declined to reveal how many of the approximately 400 cases under investigation have already been identified. More detailed information is promised, to be released in a dedicated report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Kirkpatrick also said that AARO has been working on expanding its ability to identify UFOs, including re-calibrating sensors, and coordinating with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to get the signatures of American technology to de-conflict observations.
UFOs have been a hot topic in Washington in recent months, after the US Congress held its first hearing on the issue in more than half a century. The lawmakers expressed concerns that the unidentified objects could be aliens or some new technology operated by China, Russia or another potential adversary.
https://www.rt.com/news/568428-ufo-visit-us-pentagon/
NASA Introduces New U.F.O. Research Director
The role was created in response to the recommendations of a report that found the agency could do more to collect and interpret data on unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Watch video at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Pledging a new, transparent, scientifically rigorous look at U.F.O.s, NASA on Thursday said it had appointed a director of research on the topic — and then kept the name of the director a secret for about seven hours.
The new position is part of NASA’s response to recommendations made by an independent study team that the agency had convened. The panel looked at how to better gather and study information about “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or U.A.P. — the modern term for U.F.O.s.
The panel’s report, released on Thursday, did not attempt to provide a definitive answer to whether galaxy-trotting extraterrestrials are zipping through Earth’s skies. But it does propose a bigger role for NASA in tackling the question.
“NASA will do this transparently,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference on Thursday morning at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., discussing the report.
During the news conference, Mr. Nelson first talked about NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, which is collecting rock samples that might contain hints of life that lived there several billion years ago. He then turned to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is studying planets around distant stars for clues that they may be habitable or even inhabited by life.
The U.A.P. work, he said, follows a similar yearning for learning about the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe. “This is the first time that NASA has taken concrete action to seriously look into U.A.P.,” Mr. Nelson said.
Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said the person serving as the new director of U.A.P. research had been in that role “for a while now,” but declined to identify him. ”We will not give his name out,” she said.
On Thursday evening, the agency identified the director as Mark McInerney in an updated news release. He previously served as NASA’s liaison with the Defense Department for U.A.P. issues. In the news release, NASA said he had also worked in various positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Hurricane Center.
In a post on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Fox wrote, “As we continue to digest the study team’s report and findings, please treat him with respect in this pivotal role to help us better scientifically understand U.A.P.”
NASA officials said that part of the reason for initially keeping Mr. McInerney’s identity secret was the harassment experienced during the period of the study by some of the 16 members of the independent panel, who included university professors, space industry officials and a science journalist.
“Some of them actually rose to actual threats,” said Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research in NASA’s science mission directorate. “And yes, that’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free.”
The federal government’s knowledge of U.A.P.s has recently been the subject of proposed federal legislation. In a House oversight subcommittee hearing in July, lawmakers quizzed a former intelligence official who claimed knowledge of a government cover-up of extraterrestrial technology.
U.A.P.s often turn out to be innocuous objects, like weather balloons. Most experts consider alien spacecraft to be an unlikely explanation for any of the events. But it is possible that some of what has been observed could be as-yet-undiscovered atmospheric phenomena or tests of advanced weapon systems.
“One of the main goals of what we’re trying to do here today is to move conjecture and conspiracy towards science and sanity,” Dr. Evans said. “And you do that with data.”
Image
Several members of NASA's unidentified anomalous phenomena independent study team sit at a long table on a stage at NASA headquarters with a large screen behind them that reads "The US Department of Defense & the UAP Mission."
Sean Kirkpatrick, left, director of All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Department of Defense, gave a presentation during a meeting of NASA’s unidentified anomalous phenomena independent study team in May.Credit...Joel Kowsky/NASA
The panel recommends that NASA use its Earth-observing instruments to collect environmental data coinciding with U.A.P. reports and enlist members of the public to send in a broader swath of observations, perhaps through a smartphone app.
“It always comes back to the data you feed into your analysis,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist who is president of the Simons Foundation and served as the chair of the U.A.P. panel. “If you don’t have good data, you’re not going to learn things.”
Smartphones can take sharp images, note precise locations, magnetic fields and record sounds. “There’s a wealth of data that a cellphone takes,” Dr. Spergel said. “If you see something you don’t understand, collect data. We aggregate the data and we learn from it.”
Broader collection of data could also reduce the stigma and ridicule that many people fear if they talk about something they saw. “Stigma has limited reporting by pilots, both civilian and military,” Dr. Spergel said.
The panel also suggested using sophisticated computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to look for subtle patterns in U.A.P. reports that may help identify the underlying phenomena.
Some of the questioning veered toward the odd and surreal. One journalist asked about the ufologist who on Tuesday displayed before Mexico’s Congress what he described as two corpses of aliens.
“Has NASA been in touch with the Mexican authorities about the rather sensational revelations earlier this week of two allegedly nonhuman corpses?” the journalist said. “And what, if any, importance do you attach to these discoveries?”
Dr. Spergel replied, “This is something that I know I’ve only seen on Twitter.”
He gave the analogy of the moon rocks that NASA collected during the Apollo moon landings 50 years ago, which are available for study to scientists around the world.
“If you have something strange, make samples available to the world scientific community and we’ll see what’s there,” Dr. Spergel said.
The U.A.P. study was announced in June last year by Thomas Zurbuchen, then the associate administrator of the science mission directorate.
Dr. Zurbuchen said examining U.F.O. reports could be “high-risk, high-impact kind of research,” possibly uncovering some entirely new scientific phenomenon, or possibly coming up with nothing new or interesting at all.
During a public hearing in May, the panel tried to explain some of the material that has fascinated the public. It used some (slightly tricky) high school geometry to explain how the object in one video taken by a Navy plane in 2015, known as “GOFAST,” was not moving quickly but at just 40 miles per hour by illustrating how the vantage point on an object could be a visual trick.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Watch video at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Pledging a new, transparent, scientifically rigorous look at U.F.O.s, NASA on Thursday said it had appointed a director of research on the topic — and then kept the name of the director a secret for about seven hours.
The new position is part of NASA’s response to recommendations made by an independent study team that the agency had convened. The panel looked at how to better gather and study information about “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or U.A.P. — the modern term for U.F.O.s.
The panel’s report, released on Thursday, did not attempt to provide a definitive answer to whether galaxy-trotting extraterrestrials are zipping through Earth’s skies. But it does propose a bigger role for NASA in tackling the question.
“NASA will do this transparently,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference on Thursday morning at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., discussing the report.
During the news conference, Mr. Nelson first talked about NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, which is collecting rock samples that might contain hints of life that lived there several billion years ago. He then turned to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is studying planets around distant stars for clues that they may be habitable or even inhabited by life.
The U.A.P. work, he said, follows a similar yearning for learning about the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe. “This is the first time that NASA has taken concrete action to seriously look into U.A.P.,” Mr. Nelson said.
Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said the person serving as the new director of U.A.P. research had been in that role “for a while now,” but declined to identify him. ”We will not give his name out,” she said.
On Thursday evening, the agency identified the director as Mark McInerney in an updated news release. He previously served as NASA’s liaison with the Defense Department for U.A.P. issues. In the news release, NASA said he had also worked in various positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Hurricane Center.
In a post on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Fox wrote, “As we continue to digest the study team’s report and findings, please treat him with respect in this pivotal role to help us better scientifically understand U.A.P.”
NASA officials said that part of the reason for initially keeping Mr. McInerney’s identity secret was the harassment experienced during the period of the study by some of the 16 members of the independent panel, who included university professors, space industry officials and a science journalist.
“Some of them actually rose to actual threats,” said Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research in NASA’s science mission directorate. “And yes, that’s in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free.”
The federal government’s knowledge of U.A.P.s has recently been the subject of proposed federal legislation. In a House oversight subcommittee hearing in July, lawmakers quizzed a former intelligence official who claimed knowledge of a government cover-up of extraterrestrial technology.
U.A.P.s often turn out to be innocuous objects, like weather balloons. Most experts consider alien spacecraft to be an unlikely explanation for any of the events. But it is possible that some of what has been observed could be as-yet-undiscovered atmospheric phenomena or tests of advanced weapon systems.
“One of the main goals of what we’re trying to do here today is to move conjecture and conspiracy towards science and sanity,” Dr. Evans said. “And you do that with data.”
Image
Several members of NASA's unidentified anomalous phenomena independent study team sit at a long table on a stage at NASA headquarters with a large screen behind them that reads "The US Department of Defense & the UAP Mission."
Sean Kirkpatrick, left, director of All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Department of Defense, gave a presentation during a meeting of NASA’s unidentified anomalous phenomena independent study team in May.Credit...Joel Kowsky/NASA
The panel recommends that NASA use its Earth-observing instruments to collect environmental data coinciding with U.A.P. reports and enlist members of the public to send in a broader swath of observations, perhaps through a smartphone app.
“It always comes back to the data you feed into your analysis,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist who is president of the Simons Foundation and served as the chair of the U.A.P. panel. “If you don’t have good data, you’re not going to learn things.”
Smartphones can take sharp images, note precise locations, magnetic fields and record sounds. “There’s a wealth of data that a cellphone takes,” Dr. Spergel said. “If you see something you don’t understand, collect data. We aggregate the data and we learn from it.”
Broader collection of data could also reduce the stigma and ridicule that many people fear if they talk about something they saw. “Stigma has limited reporting by pilots, both civilian and military,” Dr. Spergel said.
The panel also suggested using sophisticated computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to look for subtle patterns in U.A.P. reports that may help identify the underlying phenomena.
Some of the questioning veered toward the odd and surreal. One journalist asked about the ufologist who on Tuesday displayed before Mexico’s Congress what he described as two corpses of aliens.
“Has NASA been in touch with the Mexican authorities about the rather sensational revelations earlier this week of two allegedly nonhuman corpses?” the journalist said. “And what, if any, importance do you attach to these discoveries?”
Dr. Spergel replied, “This is something that I know I’ve only seen on Twitter.”
He gave the analogy of the moon rocks that NASA collected during the Apollo moon landings 50 years ago, which are available for study to scientists around the world.
“If you have something strange, make samples available to the world scientific community and we’ll see what’s there,” Dr. Spergel said.
The U.A.P. study was announced in June last year by Thomas Zurbuchen, then the associate administrator of the science mission directorate.
Dr. Zurbuchen said examining U.F.O. reports could be “high-risk, high-impact kind of research,” possibly uncovering some entirely new scientific phenomenon, or possibly coming up with nothing new or interesting at all.
During a public hearing in May, the panel tried to explain some of the material that has fascinated the public. It used some (slightly tricky) high school geometry to explain how the object in one video taken by a Navy plane in 2015, known as “GOFAST,” was not moving quickly but at just 40 miles per hour by illustrating how the vantage point on an object could be a visual trick.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3
Aliens Have Never Been More Alluring
Why pop culture now flirts with extraterrestrials as much as it fears them.
Keith Haring’s “Untitled” (1982).Credit...© Keith Haring Foundation, courtesy of the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection
Every generation gets the extraterrestrial invasion its times demand. In 1938, conflicts simmering in Europe meant that a radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” became a panic-inducing news event in America. In the McCarthy era, manufactured paranoia about Communists led to movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) and “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” (1958). The terrors of the Cold War coincided with the skittering xenomorph of “Alien” (1979), a conscienceless creature willing to destroy humanity to ensure its own survival.
Then, in 1982, just a few years before perestroika, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” introduced a different kind of alien — an adorable, empathic being in need of human assistance. This presaged a new attitude — open-minded, quasi-scientific — on shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-94) and “The X-Files” (which first ran from 1993 to 2002), leading to comedy, the ultimate dismissal of alien exceptionalism. Sci-fi sitcoms like “3rd Rock From the Sun” (1996-2001) and “The Neighbors” (2012-14) treated visitors from other worlds not unlike the Beverly Hillbillies: just more fish out of water.
Image
From left: Jane Curtin, Harriet Sansom Harris, Ben Kingsley and Jade Quon in the 2023 film “Jules,” directed by Marc Turtletaub.Credit...Linda Kallerus/Bleecker Street
Nowadays, though, a news topic that was once the exclusive province of tabloids has entered mainstream media. This past summer, a congressional subcommittee heard testimony about the discovery of nonhuman “biologics” at U.F.O. crash sites. In “The Little Book of Aliens” (2023), the astrophysicist Adam Frank argues that we’re closer than ever to being able to look for possible signs of civilization in outer space — just in time for a population that feels alienated from life on Earth.
The new generation of alien-focused pop culture reflects that shift, in which suspicion and fear have been replaced by something closer to affinity. In Marc Turtletaub’s 2023 film, “Jules,” Milton (Ben Kingsley) feels a sort of kinship with the alien (Jade Quon) whose craft crashes in his backyard. The new arrival ends up being more protective of 70-something Milton and his buddies than local cops ever have been so, when the feds show up, the seniors side with the alien.
Image
A painting of a house shown outside through a window, underneath a blue-and-pink sky and a geometric alien-like symbol.
Cable Griffith’s “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy II” (2023).Credit...© Cable Griffith, courtesy of the artist and J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle
There’s been a parallel relaxing in attitudes toward those who claim to have had contact with extraterrestrials, such as David Huggins, the subject of Brad Abrahams’s 2017 documentary, “Love & Saucers,” who’s depicted his decades of supposed encounters — sexual and otherwise — with aliens in a series of unabashed paintings. More recently, the isolation of the pandemic left many of us seeking connection in places we’d never considered before. For Courtney Gilbert, the curator of “Sightings” — a recent show exploring the human experience of the extraterrestrial at the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Ketchum, Idaho — that openness provides one possible explanation for the uptick in sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena that has occurred since lockdown. The other, she says, is that “we were all outside more, looking up.”
In one work from the show, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy II” (2023) by Cable Griffith, an abstract alien object, sketched by his 7-year-old son, floats above a neighbor’s house. The effect is disarming — the vast unknown juxtaposed with the achingly mundane surroundings of suburbia. And in “Domestic Visitation I, II, and III” (2023), a dyed-fabric canvas onto which Griffith heat transferred images of famous alleged U.F.O. sightings along with other spacecraft generated by A.I., it’s almost as if aliens were artistic collaborators. “It was important to me that they weren’t my own imaginings,” says Griffith. “The images were everybody’s and nobody’s.” One of the last things we humans have in common, after all, is the lure of the nonhuman: hope from above.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/t-ma ... 778d3e6de3
Keith Haring’s “Untitled” (1982).Credit...© Keith Haring Foundation, courtesy of the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection
Every generation gets the extraterrestrial invasion its times demand. In 1938, conflicts simmering in Europe meant that a radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” became a panic-inducing news event in America. In the McCarthy era, manufactured paranoia about Communists led to movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) and “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” (1958). The terrors of the Cold War coincided with the skittering xenomorph of “Alien” (1979), a conscienceless creature willing to destroy humanity to ensure its own survival.
Then, in 1982, just a few years before perestroika, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” introduced a different kind of alien — an adorable, empathic being in need of human assistance. This presaged a new attitude — open-minded, quasi-scientific — on shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-94) and “The X-Files” (which first ran from 1993 to 2002), leading to comedy, the ultimate dismissal of alien exceptionalism. Sci-fi sitcoms like “3rd Rock From the Sun” (1996-2001) and “The Neighbors” (2012-14) treated visitors from other worlds not unlike the Beverly Hillbillies: just more fish out of water.
Image
From left: Jane Curtin, Harriet Sansom Harris, Ben Kingsley and Jade Quon in the 2023 film “Jules,” directed by Marc Turtletaub.Credit...Linda Kallerus/Bleecker Street
Nowadays, though, a news topic that was once the exclusive province of tabloids has entered mainstream media. This past summer, a congressional subcommittee heard testimony about the discovery of nonhuman “biologics” at U.F.O. crash sites. In “The Little Book of Aliens” (2023), the astrophysicist Adam Frank argues that we’re closer than ever to being able to look for possible signs of civilization in outer space — just in time for a population that feels alienated from life on Earth.
The new generation of alien-focused pop culture reflects that shift, in which suspicion and fear have been replaced by something closer to affinity. In Marc Turtletaub’s 2023 film, “Jules,” Milton (Ben Kingsley) feels a sort of kinship with the alien (Jade Quon) whose craft crashes in his backyard. The new arrival ends up being more protective of 70-something Milton and his buddies than local cops ever have been so, when the feds show up, the seniors side with the alien.
Image
A painting of a house shown outside through a window, underneath a blue-and-pink sky and a geometric alien-like symbol.
Cable Griffith’s “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy II” (2023).Credit...© Cable Griffith, courtesy of the artist and J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle
There’s been a parallel relaxing in attitudes toward those who claim to have had contact with extraterrestrials, such as David Huggins, the subject of Brad Abrahams’s 2017 documentary, “Love & Saucers,” who’s depicted his decades of supposed encounters — sexual and otherwise — with aliens in a series of unabashed paintings. More recently, the isolation of the pandemic left many of us seeking connection in places we’d never considered before. For Courtney Gilbert, the curator of “Sightings” — a recent show exploring the human experience of the extraterrestrial at the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Ketchum, Idaho — that openness provides one possible explanation for the uptick in sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena that has occurred since lockdown. The other, she says, is that “we were all outside more, looking up.”
In one work from the show, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy II” (2023) by Cable Griffith, an abstract alien object, sketched by his 7-year-old son, floats above a neighbor’s house. The effect is disarming — the vast unknown juxtaposed with the achingly mundane surroundings of suburbia. And in “Domestic Visitation I, II, and III” (2023), a dyed-fabric canvas onto which Griffith heat transferred images of famous alleged U.F.O. sightings along with other spacecraft generated by A.I., it’s almost as if aliens were artistic collaborators. “It was important to me that they weren’t my own imaginings,” says Griffith. “The images were everybody’s and nobody’s.” One of the last things we humans have in common, after all, is the lure of the nonhuman: hope from above.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/t-ma ... 778d3e6de3