The thesis put forward by US astrophysicist Avi Loeb in 2021 that the first interstellar comet ʻOumuamua (“Scout”) discovered in 2017 was not of natural origin receives official support. The head of the Pentagon Research Office for Unidentified Air Phenomena, Sean Kirkpatrick, now assumes “that an artificial interstellar object could possibly be a mother ship that releases many small probes during its close flyby of Earth”. This is an operational construct “that is not too dissimilar to NASA missions”. The ejected “dandelions” could be separated from the mother ship by the sun’s tidal gravity or by maneuverability.
Interstellar comet as “mother ship”
This is what Kirkpatrick writes in one Draft essay on physical limitations for UFOs, which he co-authored with Loeb and published on March 7. The military researcher who was with the CIA in between, heads the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The paper, in which a government representative takes an unusually clear position on UFO sightings, became public knowledge Reports in the specialist magazine “Military Times”in science gazettes and in Online-Portal “Politico”. Harvard professor Loeb, who is searching for extraterrestrial life with the Galileo project, assured that he received no money from the Pentagon and no access to confidential information.
The two authors use “correspondence between some orbital parameters of ‘Oumuamua” and a meter-sized interstellar meteor (IM2) as the reason for their explanations. The latter collided with Earth on March 9, 2017, six months before ‘Oumuamua’s closest approach to the blue planet. “Surprisingly, at large distances, IM2 had an identical velocity relative to the Sun and an identical semi-major heliocentric axis” as the comet, explain the duo. “But the tilt of IM2’s orbital plane around the Sun was completely different than that of ‘Oumuamua, meaning the two objects are unrelated.” Nevertheless, the researchers develop their probe speculation based on the coincidences. According to them, astronomers could not notice the spray from the mini-flying objects “because they do not reflect enough sunlight” to be noticed by local telescopes.
alien probes
The draft goes on to say, “Equipped with a high surface area-to-mass ratio of a parachute, the technological ‘dandelion seeds’ could decelerate in Earth’s atmosphere to avoid burning up, then track their targets wherever they land.” In the vicinity of a star, such extraterrestrial probes would be able to use starlight to charge their batteries and liquid water as fuel. This would explain why they target the habitable region around stars, where liquid water might exist on the surface of rocky planets with an atmosphere like Earth. One aim of such missions might be that the “seeds” pass on the blueprints of their senders. As with organic seeds, the raw materials on the planet’s surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply for scientific exploration.
According to a preliminary assessment of UFO data collected by US intelligence agencies, published in 2021, a small number of sighted objects allegedly showed acceleration or other capabilities that could not be easily explained in the context of known technologies. Loeb and Kirkpatrick argue here that calculations leading to objects exceeding the transsonic and supersonic range should be checked against known physical phenomena such as ionization. Accordingly, objects that move through the earth’s atmosphere at such speeds have a certain luminosity. The well-known physics of temperature, sound, radar reflection and other phenomena should also be taken into account. Alejandro Rojas of the Science Coalition for UFO Studies warned that the Pentagon appears to support some ideas previously considered unfounded.
(tiw)
