UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don't Know)

by Robert Powell

Overview

Robert Powell, a founding Board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, has studied the UFO subject for 17 years. His work is encapsulated in UF's: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don’t Know) which provides a scientific rationale for the reality of non-terrestrial craft that are intelligently controlled.

Powell begins his book by familiarizing the reader with the history of UF's and he identifies the more enigmatic and interesting UFO sightings. He examines the characteristics of these sightings that argue against a prosaic explanation: extreme acceleration, electromagnetic interference, bending light, no obvious propulsion mechanisms, and a lack of interaction with the atmosphere. Powell discusses the recent events that have caused our government to change the term from UFO to UAP. Included is information never before released indicating the government possesses not just two videos but five videos from 2015 of UF's operating in the vicinity of the USS Roosevelt nuclear aircraft carrier.

Powell’s later chapters in the book discuss the extraterrestrial hypothesis considering the thousands of exoplanets that have been discovered in the last twenty years. Powell challenges the reader to consider all the implications that must be considered if intelligent life discovers us first. He looks at how we as individuals and as a society react to UF's. He documents actions taken by our military that include instances when we have fired on UF's.

Powell argues that it is time for a change in the study of UF's. The phenomenon has been with us for 75 years and we have learned very little as the decades have passed. The author makes the case for what needs to be done going forward. The solution he proposes will require a paradigm shift in our thinking and his book provides the information needed to understand that paradigm shift.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538173589
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Robert Powell has 28 years of engineering experience in the semiconductor industry. He helped Advanced Micro Devices develop its first flash memory technology that is used in today’s flash cards for cameras, PCs, video cameras, and other products. His experience includes managing a state-of-the-art chemistry laboratory and managing a Research and Development group that worked on nanotechnology using atomic force microscopes, near-field optical microscopy, and other techniques. Robert is also a co-holder of four patents related to nanotechnology.

Robert Powell is a founding Board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). He was the Director of Research at MUFON from 2007-2017 and created MUFON's Science Review Board in 2012. Robert is one of two authors of the detailed radar/witness report on the “Stephenville Lights” as well as the SCU report "UAP: 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico". He is also the primary author on the recently published paper, “A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven’s Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle” and a secondary author of a paper published in the journal Entropy entitled, “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles.” Robert is a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the UFODATA project, and the National Space Society.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from part of Chapter 10: The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

DOES ET KNOW WE’RE HERE?

What are the steps needed for a civilization to search for other worlds via interstellar space travel? The very first step is to identify potential planets orbiting distant stars. Humanity has already taken this step. We are very early in the process, but our abilities are advancing rapidly. As previously discussed, we have discovered over 6,000 exoplanets. This number will balloon into tens of thousands of planets and more as we develop techniques that allow us to see Earth-size planets orbiting at Earth-like distances from their star. Today, we could not detect our Earth if it was ten light-years distant from us. It is too small and too far from the sun to detect with our current detection methods. Soon that will change as our technologies advance. A more advanced civilization would already have that ability and Earth would be among its catalog of planets.

The second step is to look for planets that have signs of intelligent life. ET would begin by looking for the building blocks for life, assuming they were carbon-based like us. They would examine a planet’s reflected light to look for oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, methane, and other chemicals to determine if a carbon-based life could exist. (Humanity is just now taking its first baby steps in this area.) Like us, an extraterrestrial race would be examining planets in their catalog that not only have the right chemical ingredients but that also have signs of intelligent life. These planets would be the ones that ET would carefully observe with their advanced telescopes and spectrometers. ET would look for changes to a planet’s atmosphere that might be caused by an advanced intelligent life. They would look for emissions in the various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that indicate a civilization was expending large amounts of energy.

Let’s use our planet as an example of how our atmosphere indicates that an intelligent civilization exists here. What would ET see if they turned their powerful telescopes toward Earth? About 200 years ago ET would have noticed large amounts of hydrocarbons were being emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere. This was driven by the coal burning of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. Some ET scientists might begin studying Earth as one of the more likely planets to harbor advanced intelligent life. ET would see the complexity of the emitted hydrocarbons increase in the twentieth century as we burned oils, plastics, and garbage that we released into the atmosphere. ET scientists would know that the more complex the hydrocarbons are, the more likely that they were produced by an intelligence on Earth rather than simple vegetative fires. By the 1950s and 1960s our atmosphere contained isotopes of uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive compounds. These were created from our detonation of nuclear bombs on land and in the atmosphere. The ET scientists studying Earth might have been excited when the first detected those chemicals. There is nothing natural about those isotopes. Any civilization that analyzed our atmosphere with a high-quality spectroscope would know that intelligent life exists here.

Earth’s EM emissions would also tell ET that intelligence exists on this planet. Our planet began emitting visible light into the cosmos beginning in the early 1930s, when our largest cities began to install nighttime lighting. ET would shield their telescopes from our sun’s glare with a coronagraph and would detect our cities’ emissions of incandescent light from the dark side of Earth. They would suspect the light was not natural because of the unique frequency emitted by incandescent lights. This would pique their interest and perhaps they would dedicate a telescope to the observation of our planet. Soon ET would detect electromagnetic frequencies emitted by radio, television, and radar from Earth in the 1930s and 1940s. ET would note that our planet had revolved around its sun only a few more times before something else interesting occurred. Nuclear fission explosions had begun on this now very interesting planet. This was 1945, and ET would continue to monitor nuclear explosions on this planet for another twenty revolutions around its sun. There would no longer be any doubt that an advanced civilization was developing on the planet Earth. The only doubt remaining with ET was whether this new civilization would destroy itself or use nuclear power peacefully.

The final step in the search for extraterrestrial life is interstellar travel. Even if ET knew we were here, could they reach the Earth? Toward the end of the twentieth century no one thought interstellar travel was feasible. Most scientists didn’t think it would ever be possible. The closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, was four light-years away. It would take our fastest spacecraft over 17,000 years to reach a planet in that star’s system. Such a trip would be meaningless. Consequently, most scientists believed that if we could not even contemplate interstellar travel, then no one else could either. This view rapidly changed in the twenty-first century.

Editorial Reviews

Robert Powell is one of the luminaries of the UFO world, an accomplished scientist who brings rational, objective analysis to a complex subject where the evidence is all too often peremptorily dismissed by dedicated skeptics or naively accepted without proper analysis by true believers. Even-handed, methodical, and insightful, Robert’s new book will help the educated reader to understand and interpret the best current evidence regarding one of the world’s greatest and most portentous mysteries.

Chris Mellon

Robert Powell clearly explains the role that science must play in furthering universal understanding about UF's. Scientists must claim this investigation as their own, and balance the national security narrative that has become so dominant. What facts do scientists already know about this phenomenon and how can they go about studying it in the future? I found the information in UF's to be educational, though-provoking and inspiring.

Leslie Kean

The first comprehensive stock-taking of the UFO problem, both scientific and big picture, since the Pentagon’s about-face in 2021 confirming the existence of “UAP” and their potential threat to national security. Sober, reliable, and refreshingly free of conspiracies, Powell’s book is in the great tradition of Sturrock’s The UFO Enigma (1999) and Hynek’s The UFO Experience (1972). Clear prose and a logical structure make it an outstanding introduction to the field.

Alexander Wendt