This time, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the extra terrestrial…and exploring UFOs.
In this episode
The history of UFOs
Adam Allsuch-Boardman
Hot off the heels of last week’s story on NASAs press conference, and with a ‘military whistleblower’ claiming governments have been hiding alien tech for decades, unexplained aerial phenomena have been thrust back into the media limelight. But how far back does our interest in UFOs go?
<Sci-fi warbling. Lots of theremin>
Will - Okay. Okay. That's enough of that.
UFOs or unidentified flying objects are a phenomenon firmly embedded in many of the world's cultures. The first encounter with A UFO, if you will, was in 1947, in which pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny objects flying past Mount Rainier very, very quickly. Since then, objects of all shapes and sizes have been documented around the world. But how has our own culture shifted the discussion behind UFOs since then? Are they even called that anymore? I spoke to Illustrator and author of 'An illustrated history of UFOs' - Adam Allsuch-Boardman.
Adam - As UFOs become more synonymous with flying saucers, when you say UFO to someone, most often they'll immediately think of something from outer space. An alien for instance, The Pentagon has introduced a new term - UAP - unidentified aerial phenomenon, to make it even more clinical to try and distance itself from the sort of popular culture image. And over time our idea of a UFO has changed quite a lot from the late 40's and the 50's. We have these kinds of silver minimalist discs reflective of that sort of retro futuristic style. And over time they've seem to have become more mechanical. And nowadays we've come back round to the minimalist look with the flying white tic tac.
Will - But even with all the rebranding, it's very important to note that UFO or UAP does not mean alien life. Just because it's a flying saucer, it does not mean it is of extraterrestrial origin, it is just unidentified.
Adam - That's quite right. The majority of the time these things can be explained as something quite prosaic. Alan Hynek, who worked for the USAF in the 50's and 60's, came up with a lot of imaginative explanations for UFOs, including the reflective bellies of pelicans and swamp guests, quite famously,
Will - With the advent of smartphones and the high quality cameras that are now in pretty much everyone's pockets, surely that would mean that unidentified aerial phenomenon would see an increase in documentation. So is that the case?
Adam - Sightings kind of fluctuate over the years. For example, there was a sort of long period of excitement from the late 40's after the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947, and then Roswell after that. It was a sort of flying saucer mania and a lot of historians have decided that was sort of caused by the Cold War paranoia mixed with the reportage in newspapers and then shortly thereafter, lots of motion pictures that make people very excited about the topic.
Will - Perhaps not the expected increase in sightings then. But do these sightings have a geographical bias? Are certain places more prone to UFO tourism?
Adam - Sometimes it seems as though there is a sort of laser focus on the Northern American continent. If they are aliens, they have a great interest in North America. They do happen all over the world. It's perhaps a bias of reportage, let's say the English speaking press, being able to jump on these things as they happen and it becomes a sort of mini hysteria or some ufologists call it a flap of reportage when lots of similar sightings happen at the same time in a sort of similar area.
Will - So if UFOs do have favorite places to see, what are they doing there?
Adam - It depends if you want to look at it from a Fox Mulder perspective or a Dana Scully perspective, I suppose. If you are leaning towards that they are aliens and they have an interest in certain parts of the world, usually nuclear powers, that could be an explanation. Or the other explanation, the kind of skeptic prosaic explanation would be that there's an abundance of recording equipment and that picks them up. Or an interest in certain Hollywood films and TV shows. Perhaps. You know, I know there was an increase in membership to certain civilian UFO societies when the X-files was airing, and then it sort of dipped off when it finished.
Will - And interestingly, whilst UFOs have had an undeniable impact on our culture and certain aesthetics that might go both ways.
Adam - A lot of ufologists have pointed out a link between the kind of popular culture and what's reported in the literature or by witnesses. For instance, in the late seventies, there were a lot of UFOs that seemed to resemble what appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Stephen Spielberg, or the black triangles featured in the X-files in the nineties seem to appear around Belgium even. I think there's an interesting aesthetic link between what we represent in our films and what people see, what they expect to see even.
Will - So are people being influenced by popular culture or are UFOs stealing our fashion sense? Who's to say.
Adam - It's quite possible aliens are updating their own fashion through the years. The 50's silvery disk, their own version of a Volkswagen Beetle perhaps, and the 90's sports type, very streamlined disks. Their sort of Lamborghinis perhaps, you know, maybe aliens update their fashions. Maybe they are inspired by us, or I guess the most conspiratorial people would say that we reverse engineer technology from recovered craft. Who knows?
Will -
On the subject of individual psychology, it's important not to just play off every sighting as someone making it up.
Adam - I think people do believe what they see. Most of the time people are seeing lights in the sky at night at quite a distance, and that's not too out there, really. But do I believe it personally? I don't know, I definitely lean towards Dana Scully.
Will - Another mark for the skeptics' side. Then perhaps UFOs are less of an unknowable extraterrestrial force and more a modern day folklore. Either way, the truth is out there.
07:37 - Could aliens travel through wormholes?
Could aliens travel through wormholes?
Toby Wiseman, Imperial College London
One thing that’s certain about aliens, if they exist and are visiting us, is that they must have access to technology that enables them to traverse vast distances across space, presumably, by resorting to various tricks, at very high - possibly faster than light - speeds. If so, how? Theoretical physicist from Imperial College London, Toby Wiseman...
Toby - Well, the conventional way might be some kind of super fast rocket that they have developed with their brilliant civilisation technology. They might have also come across the idea of a warp drive, and made that a reality. And perhaps even more strangely, they’re able to slingshot themselves around the universe using black holes. Possibly even wormholes that they can just pass through to traverse huge distances. So those would be the exotic ideas.
Chris - The first of those - a really powerful rocket - that’s technology or physics that Isaac Newton gave us hundreds of years ago but we know that works and we know that’s plausible. But is it really going to cut it? Because the sorts of distances we’re talking about here across the universe, what sorts of distance would the minimum distance be? If there is life that is not in our immediate vicinity in the cosmos, what’s the minimum distance that Mr or Mrs alien has got to traverse to get here?
Toby - Well, if they're coming from inside our galaxy, we're talking probably tens of thousands of light years. But if we're talking outside our galaxy, it might be millions, even billions of light years that they would have to travel to get to us.
Chris - So that just would not be possible with a rocket, presumably.
Toby - I'm not sure that's true. If we're able to just go by the laws of physics. One of the things that Einstein told us is you can't travel faster than the speed of light. And I believe him, I don't think you can, but he did also say that if you can travel very close to the speed of light, the way you perceive time and space is changed. And so in fact, if you can travel very fast close to the speed of light, you are able, in principle, to travel vast distances in an arbitrarily short time.
Chris - What that means then is that if they're going very, very fast, that for them time continues to tick at the rate my clock ticks at. But for everybody else, their clock goes incredibly far into the future. So basically if you were traveling close to the speed of light, time would carry on at the normal rate for you. But I would age far faster than you is what you're saying. And so therefore you would get places without much time passing for you, but huge amounts of time for everyone else.
Toby - That's exactly right. So for example, our nearest star is roughly four light years away. If you could travel very, very close to the speed of light in some clever rocket and I was watching you from Earth, I would see it take about four years for you to get there and another four years for you to get back. I'd have aged eight years in that time. But for you, if you could get very close to the speed of light, you could do it in a few hours.
Chris - Gosh, that's quite mind bending stuff. The other thing you mentioned is wormholes. Now these crop up in science fiction quite a bit and the analogy that's given about this is they say, well, instead of going along a whole sheet of paper, if you roll the paper up so the two ends meet, then you can jump from one end of the paper to the other over a very short distance. Now is that bending the rules of physics for artistic license purposes or is there some kernel of truth in that?
Toby - So the sort of scientific history of wormholes and explorations goes back a way. Einstein's theory of space and time is pretty weird to be honest, and it is in principle possible for space time to be bent and curved in this sort of way you describe. So like with the piece of paper, there can be the conventional route along the piece of paper between two points, but there might be some new shortcut route that doesn't lie in the paper, a sort of tunnel joining two points. That in principle is possible in Einstein's equations. And indeed solutions like that have been mathematically written down. But the sort of matter that we think would have to be required to support a solution like that we don't think exists so that it could really be a shortcut. What we think is that wormholes might be possible, it might be possible to join two points in space time through some strange little wormhole tunnel, an alternate route between those points. But it seems like that route will always be longer than the conventional route. So it is not very useful as a way to travel large distances.
Chris - It sounds like the London underground because when I go on the underground, I always lose touch with reality on the surface and I discover that what's a long journey on the underground, I could have just left the station and walked one street <laugh> and I'd have been where I wanted to go.
Toby - It's exactly like that. So with the London Underground, of course you've got points A and B, you can walk on the surface. Most people don't think to do it. But actually the distances are not that great, certainly in Central London. If you go down into the underground, you've got a completely new route. And if you couldn't take a train and you had to walk that route would actually be longer than typically you could do on the surface. So it wouldn't be a very good way to get around. Perhaps people will invent wormholes with some fabulous rocket that travels through them, and use them that way. But as far as we understand so far, wormholes are possible, but they're not going to be a shortcut. It's going to take you longer to go through the wormhole. It's also unclear how you could create the wormhole. So if they're preexisting, perhaps you could use them in some useful way, but we don't know how you could create two wormholes, or a wormhole with ends at very far separated points.
Chris - You're not making a compelling case for aliens being able to do this in a practical way that they'd have to really, really want to do if they were going to do it. Which I guess leads me to my next point, which is why would they want to come here in the first place? Surely if they can do all that and achieve all that, would they not already have the ability to reach out and learn everything about us without actually having the bother and the faff of coming here?
Toby - I think you're right. What probably modern physics tells us is that whilst in principle people could travel vast distances, it would require super enormous amounts of energy. Maybe vast amounts of anti-matter sort of to make a rocket. And that sort of technology is so far beyond anything we have. They would be a tremendously advanced civilization. They're not going to look anything like us in terms of their capabilities. And so why they might want to come here and look at us now, of all times, is a very good question, I think.
15:39 - Could you be levitated with a tractor beam?
Could you be levitated with a tractor beam?
Azier Marzo, The Public University of Navarra
Is there any scientific backing at all behind being levitated up through air so aliens can abduct you? Well incredibly, there just might be. The Public University of Navarra’s Asier Marzo...
Asier - A tractor beam, it's a source of energy. And this energy could be, lasers, could be sound, could be electrons, some kind of radiation. But the important thing is that it can attract objects towards the source.
Will - How might we be able to do that then? It's very easy to push stuff away, but pulling stuff towards you is much more difficult.
Asier - With optics, it's a bit simpler: you focus a laser and at the focal point of that laser, a very small particle, and I mean like one micrometre, less than one micrometre - so cells or tiny pieces of ash - it'll be trapped in the focal point. So if you move the focal point of that laser, if you make it focus closer and closer, that particle will move with it. When we use sound, it's a bit more tricky because you need to create something that is called a hollow trap, some kind of sound that has a silent core and the object gets trapped in that silent core. And again, you do something with the wave so that that silent core moves towards the source.
Will - So what's going on in that focal point or that silent core that is essentially attracting what you want to levitate to move towards you.
Asier - If you think of a sound field that has high amplitude - it's quite loud everywhere, but there is a point that is silent and you drop an object there, it will remain there because it will be trapped there. There is vibration all around the object and it'll be pushed towards that silent core. If it moves a bit to the left, the vibration will push it back. So in theory, it gets trapped in that silent core. And if you can modify the position of that silent core, the object will move with it.
Will - It's almost as if the object you want to move is stuck in the middle of a huge crowd of people and you can't move in any direction because it'll always push you back into the centre.
Asier - Exactly like that. Maybe it's not a solid crowd that will not allow you to pass, but these people are moving and pushing in random directions, but not in that silent core.
Will - What sort of sound or what sort of noise do you use to try and levitate things?
Asier - In general we try to use ultrasound for two reasons. First of all, it carries more power. The higher the frequency, the more energy these waves are going to have so the harder they will push the objects. And the other reason that it's more comfortable, when we work at 40 kilohertz we cannot hear it and it's easier to focus. So it's not such an annoying experiment as when we use audible sound.
Will - So what are the current limits of this then? How large an object can you move with this sort of acoustic levitation?
Asier - There are two limits. One is how dense the object can be and that depends on the power that you put on the sound. Maybe you can levitate something that is as dense as water - one gram per centimetre cubed - and then with the same device, you may not be able to levitate iron, which is around seven grams per centimetre cubed. But if you put more power into the levitator or tractor beam, you will be able to levitate those objects. But there is a more fundamental limit and that limit depends on the wavelength of the sound that you use. And basically, objects cannot be larger than half of the wavelength. To give an example, when we do levitation in air, we like to use 40 kilohertz, 40,000 hertz. So the sound vibrates 40,000 times per second, and that gives a wavelength of 8.6 millimetres. Therefore, objects that are larger than four millimetres cannot be trapped because they don't fit in the wave.
Will - Purely hypothetically, if we wanted to levitate a human, what conditions would have to change? Presumably they'd have to be a massive shift in what we can currently do to get to that point.
Asier - Indeed, we should first lower the frequency so that we can trap larger objects. If we use 40 kilohertz, you may be able to trap a small bee, so we will need to reduce the frequency probably down to, depends on how big the person is, and maybe if the human is rolled in a ball, but for sure you will need to go down below 400 hertz. And the problem with that is that it becomes audible, it becomes very noisy and also you lose a lot of power because less frequency, less power in the waves. So you will need to increase the volume a lot. You will need a lot of decibels. In fact, you will need so many decibels that it's maybe not physically possible to create that amount of decibels in the air.
Will - Presumably you'd get to a point where you'd create so many decibels that the person you're trying to lift would just explode?
Asier - Indeed. First of all, you will of course go deaf. And then you will heat up and I think at that level you may have difficulties breathing, your eyes may increase the pressure. So for sure it will not be a pleasant experience in the case that it was possible.
Will - So this is not a very practical means of abducting humans then?
Asier Not at all, at least not with sound. And I think people usually get disappointed because they say, can you levitate a car? Can you levitate a human? And you cannot even levitate an apple. Acoustic levitation using sound, it is much, much more useful for small things.
21:10 - The rational explanations for UFO sightings
The rational explanations for UFO sightings
David Clarke, Sheffield Hallam University
If the science behind alien craft isn’t really panning out, what explanations are there for people that have seen UFOs? The University of Sheffield Hallam’s David Clarke investigated the Rendlesham Forest Incident of 1980, one of the UKs most infamous UFO ‘sightings’...
David - There are so many things that people see and report as UFOs. It's impossible when you go through them to sort of say 'right when you've eliminated all those things and I'll just give you a few of those balloons, plastic bags, drones.' I mean there are just so many things. How is it possible when you've cleared all those out of the way to say, ah, right, yes, we've got rid of all them. So there is now this thing called the UFO and there's nothing else that we can say about that other than the fact that because we can't explain it, it must therefore be some exotic thing from another galaxy that's come to visit us. That makes no scientific sense at all. Just because you can't explain something doesn't mean you have to then jump to the most exotic, far out explanation for that thing. And you can't say that 2% that's unexplained or 1%, whatever you want to call it, has got to be aliens. It's simply insufficient information. Or when you actually look at a lot of those cases in that residue, it's often the case that these are the cases that someone has come forward 30 years after the event and said, 'oh, I was involved in some case where the military tracked something on radar. duh-de-duh.' And when they try to find the actual paperwork, because it's so long after the event, most of the people involved either can't be contacted, are dead, there's no documentation. So it's an interesting story. We can't obviously explain it, but because it happened so long ago, we're just going to have to leave it on file.
Will - And before the advent of high definition cameras and all these images that we're getting nowadays, we relied on asking people that had claimed they'd seen it. And with that comes perhaps, shall we say, the fallibility of memory.
David - Absolutely. What we are dealing with here are people's accounts of things they've seen in the sky. And they're often, vast majority cases, one person, the number of cases where you've got a large number of people who don't know each other, who all saw something in the sky at the same time that can be triangulated, is vanishingly small. And you've got the UFO mythology, which pervades all aspects of human society. You cannot find anyone anywhere on this planet who hasn't heard of UFOs. All of that feeds into this, and there is this will to believe that you can't escape from.
Will - And what about this story that's come out in the last few days, this military whistleblower who's claiming that the US military has these technological crafts that are non-human and we've had them for decades. I mean, how do you reconcile that? Does he believe what he's seen?
David - I'm not saying he's making this up, but when you actually pair down what he said, he's saying that he worked high up in military intelligence in the USA and basically they've got all these, I think, 12 or 13 crashed alien craft. And all this has been kept from congress and it's been kept from the UAP task force, which the Pentagon are pouring millions of dollars into at the moment. It's being kept from NASA. Nobody in either of those organisations knows anything about this. So it's some huge high level cover up. And how useful would it be, you know, to sort of imply to your future adversaries such as Russia and China that you have got captured technology from aliens that you back engineered, don't mess with us. So you can see how the intelligence services for them, it's a relatively easy task to sort of prime journalists and drop stories into the media that are just repeated uncritically because there's this general will to believe in them. And no one sort of stops and looks back in history and says, 'hold on a minute. Haven't we heard this story before? Didn't it come to nothing back in 1950? Didn't it come to nothing back in 1997?' Because at the end of the day, there's only so long you can keep saying the government has got a crash flying saucer. Well, we're talking about scientific evidence. Where is this stuff?
Will - Are there also physical explanations that could feed into what people experience? Are there exceedingly fast technological aircraft that people may mistake for these unexplained phenomena?
David - Absolutely. There are obviously things that the military are testing. Prototype aircraft, drones, all kinds of things. I mean, you saw what was going on in North America back in February with the Chinese spy balloon, for instance. Where did that come from? You know, suddenly it was all over the media. And then we learned that there'd been two or three similar events that had happened during when Donald Trump was president that had never even been mentioned. But I would say that those types of let's call them secret projects and that form a tiny percentage that can't be explained. The vast majority of sightings are of ordinary things seen in extraordinary circumstances. And I've seen, when I've been out, for instance, late at night in the peak district, I've seen lights and I've thought, what the hell is that? And it's an ordinary aircraft coming into Manchester. It's just because of where I am in my altitude, the atmospheric conditions. And even someone who is knowledgeable about this subject, it's easy to be fooled. And also if you don't resolve what you see at the time, you see it, as soon as that moment's gone to explain it and to find a logical explanation, you then go on to tell your friends in the pub, 'oh, I saw some strange lights in the sky.' And it becomes a UFO story. And every single case has got that kind of background. If you had enough time and energy and resources to pour into this subject, you could find some conventional explanation. But it is like, to a lot of people, it's magic. And people don't want that magic taken away. They want something to believe in. And as a folklorist, I just think, 'well, do I want to take it away from them. If people want to believe in this stuff, it's harmless.' If it makes people feel that there's something else out there in the universe that's keeping an eye on us and is coming here to rescuers or something, this is part of the UFO belief system, then fair enough. But if we want to look at it scientifically, it does resolve itself into a lot of ordinary things.
Comments
Add a comment