The Science of UFOs: What If They're Real? - Softcover

William R. Alschuler

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312300719 ISBN 13: 9780312300715

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002

Synopsis

The Scientific Investigation of the greatest challenge facing humanity: What if UFOs are real?

Reports of UFO sightings and strange visitors from the sky go back as far as recorded human history. But it was only in the twentieth century that technological innovation made them impossible to ignore. We see reports on the evening news, accompanied by videotapes of strange objects in the sky taken by eyewitnesses, sometimes in broad daylight.

Astronomer and lecturer William R. Alschuler sift through thousands of reports and identifies commonalties: specific shapes of objects that have reportedly been observed around the world; odd maneuvering in the atmosphere; impossible shifts of altitude and acceleration.

Assuming that UFOs represent actual alien technology, Alschuler investigates how they may be able to achieve some of the more astounding feats that have been reported. His exploration takes readers through the possibilities of alternative types of travel: fourth dimension, wormholes and black holes, teleportation, antigravity, and faster-than-light drives.

Alschuler also explores some of the historical sightings from human antiquity, the phenomenon of alien abductions, and the possible biochemistry of visiting aliens.

It's a fascinating tour through the wonderland of UFO sightings and mythos, based on state-of-the-art understanding of the laws of physics-Newtonian, Einsteinian, and quantum - and written in an accessible style for UFO fans and those interested in exploring frontiers of science.

About this title

About the Author

William R. Alschuler has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and extensive college teaching experience in the sciences, holography, Lippmann photography, energy conservation, and solar building design. He is founder and principal of Future Museums, a consulting firm specializing in the design of exhibits and museums with science or technology content. He has recently served as consultant to the California Science Center and the Getty Education Institute for curriculum development that combines art and science. He has been author or editor on the following: The Microverse, UFOs and Aliens, First Contact, The Ultimate Dinosaur, and, most recently, Are We Alone in the Cosmos? He is currently a science professor at California Institute of the Arts and lives with his family in San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Science of UFOs
1EXAMINING THE EVIDENCEIn early December 1998 thousands of people in Jalisco and Aguascalliente States, about 275 miles west of Mexico City, saw "a very bright white light"fly over the Sierra Madre mountains at about 7P.M.On November 18, 1998 a man in Crosslanes, West Virginia was going into his garage when he happened to look up and spotted a 727 flying overhead: "It was high up enough it left a very clear contrail. Suddenly, at very close range above the plane, a silver-gray disc appeared. It flew directly over the top of the plane and was making a side-to-side swaying motion, almost like a leaf falling. As it moved the Sun glinted off it, and it shone very brightly. Suddenly from the east, a jet (delta shape) came screaming toward the UFO. At that point it had stopped, and the passenger plane had already moved away."The UFO glowed very brightly and then shot straight up and was out of sight in seconds. I have an Air Force Intelligence background and what I saw is nothing I am familiar with."(Reported in UFO Magazine, March/April, 1999.)In Zanesville, Ohio, a small town not far from the infamous Wright-Patterson Air Force Base of Roswell crash fame, on November 13, 1966, Ralph Ditter took two photographs of a UFO. They show asuburban scene with a house and driveway, several parked cars, a bare tree in the foreground and woods behind. It seems to have been a bright day as there are strong shadows. In each photo there is a mechanical looking object hovering over the landscape. Its shape is like that of a top hat whose top has been cut off about a third of the way up. It glints in the sunlight. It casts no shadow. The craft matches descriptions of a number of 1998 sightings made around Zanesville, of which at least two were made by law enforcement officers. The photos have no negatives as they were made with a Polaroid camera. The ships are seen in silhouette against a bright cloudless sky so there is no easy way to estimate their size or distance. They remain unexplained to this day.(Reported in Popular Mechanics, July 1998)COSMIC PRECIOUS GEMS SCATTERED ON THE ROAD: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE EVIDENCE OF UNUSUAL EVENTS?Many of the people whose memories of being kidnapped by aliens are recounted in the book Abduction, by Harvard psychologist John Mack, report being taken aboard alien ships and examined with metal instruments in rooms lit from all surfaces. They also recall aliens of varied descriptions, as if of distinct species. Certain details of these accounts are remarkably similar to each other, and the aliens' reported behavior makes these experiences sometimes shockingly invasive of the abductees' personal space, physical bodies, and sense of sanity. 
The above examples of extraordinary events fall into three major categories of what might be called "alien contact." The first are accounts of lights or colors or indistinct shapes in the sky that travel at unbelievable speeds, accelerate at unbelievable rates, appear and disappear while standing still, and generally show behavior not achievable by human aircraft or rocket craft. In some cases their performance seems to violate known laws of physics. These sightings often take place at night, and most of the objects are reported to be self-luminous. These phenomena are called UFOs (Unidentified FlyingObjects) precisely because their nature is unknown until and unless someone comes along to identify or explain them. The Mexico and West Virginia sightings mentioned above fall into this category.The Zanesville sightings and photos are in a second category: the observers see, describe, and sometimes make photos or videos of a definite shape, one that could be classified as a spacecraft or at least a manufactured object. These, too, behave in ways that human technology cannot achieve, and they are most often daytime sightings. (Of course there are exceptions. In some cases lighting onboard or on the ground allows observers to see details of the craft even at night.)The stories of interactions with aliens, the details of the insides of their spacecraft, and the tools for physical exams of abductees represent a third level of involvement of the witnesses. Often these events take place at night, perhaps because the abduction experiences frequently start while abductees are in a dream state, asleep.These categories apply reasonably well to reports of strange sightings and interactions from all over the world. The modern era of such reports dates back to World War II, when stories of what we now call UFOs began to trickle in. Allied pilots described seeing "foo-fighters," luminous spheres that darted around Allied aircraft while on bombing missions, sometimes keeping station with the bombers and often undergoing extraordinary changes of course and speed. (We will explore this phenomenon in Chapter 7.)The number of all types of alien phenomena reports grew rapidly after the widely publicized Kenneth Arnold sighting of UFOs in 1947--the sighting from which the term "flying saucers" was coined. The number of reports continues to grow and is now large enough that significant numbers of people have had an experience in one or another of the above categories.Common elements of UFO sightings include, for example, certain shapes (cigars, saucers, wedges), certain attributes (silent running, for one) and out-of-this-world movements. Many UFOs move but reveal no details of shape or surface texture. Because they are seen by a wide variety of people and mostly for short periods of time in unforeseen circumstances, they may as a group contain a lower incidence of deliberate fraud than the second category--the sightings of what are claimed to be alien spacecraft.The photos of alien ships produced in this second category are examined critically by specialists inside the UFO community, and are rejected publicly if found wanting (see, for example, UFO Magazine April/May 1999 or almost any recent issue). It is common for the images of spacecraft to be seen against a blank sky. The craft also generally fit into a few common categories of shape.Because the third category, interaction with aliens, usually is freighted by heavy psychological baggage, the abduction reports may contain a high percentage of honest reporting, though the reality reported may be greatly at odds with common experience.We will explore each of these three categories, but we will focus most intently on the first two. The reason is that, except for the reports of people passing directly through walls unscathed or of bloodless and incisionless operations (both of which are interesting as physical puzzles--see Chapter 6), the third category of reports generally omits behavior and technology that requires or defies physical explanation (although it may well require psychological explanation). We will mainly delve into the reports of UFO sightings(category 1) and alien spacecraft (category 2), looking carefully at what the accounts imply or say about what happened, trying to show where conventional science leaves off, and then suggesting what kinds of new physics--alien technology if you will--might explain them.These three categories are not exhaustive, and within them there is much variation as well as commonalities. Sometimes high-tech equipment is involved in the sightings. For example, on August 13, 1956, British radar operators at Bentwaters, England, observed a set of blips with intensities similar to that of an ordinary jet aircraft (before the age of stealth!). The blips were tracked as traveling at speeds of up to 9,000 mph, way above the capability of any maneuvering craft of human origin, then or now. This fits in the category of UFOs, but it wasn't a visual sighting.In other cases of radar sightings, fighters have sometimes been scrambled to give chase to blips, and the fighter pilots have reported being unable to keep up with the turns and accelerations of the bogies that sometimes were directly visible to them.The mass nighttime UFO sighting in Mexico described earlier has been repeated elsewhere. A similar one occurred in Arizona a few years ago. One unusual mass daytime sighting took place in downtown Mexico City and was viewed by thousands. A craft was seen to hover and move slowly above the buildings. I recently saw a video of the event, and the ship looks something like a blimp with hard edges and odd projections, and it appears to glide slowly behind several skyscrapers.Occasionally, physical evidence is presented along with eyewitness accounts. A few cases of scorched earth have been put forward, in which plants died in patterns and locations coincident with shapes of UFOs, and where they were reported to land or hover. At some of those landing sites, indentations in the ground were seen, as if something heavy had rested there.A second incident at Bentwaters represents a case with even more unusual physical evidence. Late in December 1980, security guards at a nowclosed U.S. Air Force base saw unusual lights in Rendelsham Woods, just beyond the security perimeter. On the second night of activity, guards entered the forest with flood lights, geiger counters, and two-way radios. There they saw a craft they estimated to be 20 feet wide by 30 feet high. As the craft approached them their counters started to register counts faster than normal and their radios intermittently failed. A return to the site in daylight showed broken tree limbs and 7 one-inch-diameter, 1.5 inch-deep circular depressions. (A recent photo shows that the "dead patch" originally found in the center of the site is now green and the surroundings are brown. This is a curious turn of events for which no solid explanation is currently proposed.) A later British Ministry of Defense memo stated that soil samples taken from the site at the time showed levels of radioactivity 25 times that...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312300719
• ISBN 13: 9780312300715
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224