The Science of UFOs

by William R. Alschuler

Overview

What if UFOs are real?
Where could they be from, and how could they have traveled here? What advanced technology must they possess to execute the fantastic maneuvers they are routinely reported to make?
Astronomer William R. Alshuler takes a fascinating look at the reported attributes of UFOs through the lens of known science and physics and explains how they might be doing the weird and incredible things they are known to do.
Along the way, he examines the possibilities and problems of traveling faster than light, interdimensionally, and via teleportation, as well as the veracity of UFO reports, insights into potential alien motives, and alien biochemistry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429970198
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	04/16/2025
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

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 a science or technology content. He has recently served as a 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.

Read an Excerpt

The Science of UFOs

What if They're Real?

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By William R. Alschuler, Howard Zimmerman

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2001 Byron Preiss Visual Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7019-8

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CHAPTER 1

EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE

In 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 a suburban 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 Flying Objects) 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 of the normal background. This is a case of a category 2 sighting with additional physical evidence.

In some abduction accounts, the abductees report that aliens have inserted an implant of some sort into them, their purpose not always known. In at least one of these cases, the "alien implant" was surgically removed and sent to a lab for analysis. The results were inconclusive. This is a category three case, but with a physical trace.

How should we treat these varied phenomena? To answer this question, it is useful to look at earlier examples of how we have thought about categories of unexplained phenomena observed in the natural world.

THE SKY IS FALLING: HOW WE HAVE TREATED UNEXPLAINED NATURAL PHENOMENA

Many tons of stony and metallic dust fall continuously into Earth's atmosphere every day. It is the debris of comets and the leftovers of asteroid collisions out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. We are unaware of this cosmic rain, except on annual "meteor shower" nights when it is particularly intense because the Earth is passing through a concentration of debris, much of which is only as large as grains of sand. If it is clear on such nights, we see a lot of "shooting stars." From ancient times up until the 1830s, most astronomers and philosophers thought meteors originated in Earth's atmosphere, along with comets. Western scientists didn't know they actually fell to the surface of the planet. It was only with the spectacular Leonid meteor shower of 1833 that scientists reached consensus that meteors originate from material orbiting the Sun.

You might think that we see inbound meteors more clearly now than in years past, given all our advances in technology. That is not entirely true. Though we now can observe meteors with many new instruments at wavelengths beyond human vision, the ancients' view of meteors and the sky as a whole was a good deal clearer than ours. That's because they had no bright haze from electric city lights, and they had much less air pollution than we have. It is likely that a higher percentage of people in pre-industrial times saw the meteor showers with better clarity than we do and were familiar with their appearance and range of behaviors. Furthermore, the known showers are slowly dying off with time, as their cometary sources continue to evaporate with each solar passage. The falling material also gets used up in the showers here and slowly disperses along its orbital path. Eventually these showers will die away. Even though these factors suggest that reports of impacts by meteorites would have been more common two thousand years ago than now, there really is little evidence in the historical record. The explanation for this is that such events are truly rare, and overall the population density was much lower than it is now, so the chance of seeing a meteor strike the ground was probably lower. However, a large meteor collected from Greenland by the American Museum of Natural History was known to the natives there before the arrival of Europeans, and the rock known as the Ka' bah in Mecca is a multi-ton meteorite deemed sacred by Muhammed 1400 years ago.

For a chunk of meteorite to strike a person when it crashes to Earth is (fortunately) a rare event that definitely would make the evening news. Yet, rare as this is, we believe meteorites do fall and that a few have even struck people. Why? Because we have, in at least some cases, a continuous chain of evidence about the event and also a model for how it happened. In other cases, we have partial accounts and find fragments in locations consistent with the observed trajectory, speed, and mass of the pieces. In just a handful of cases, the eyewitness was the target, and the damage done was visible on her or his body, as well as (in some cases) to the house, car, or even the bed they were in when it happened. In a number of these events, the remains of the meteorite were placed in the possession of museums and universities where they were analyzed. In many cases, pieces were lent out on demand to others for further examination, and some were eventually put on public display.

Even though the events are rare, there is verifiable evidence, including material evidence, and consistency with our ideas of how the world works.

Other rare events occur that seem consistent with the known world but have no simple explanation. Take the disaster of TWA Flight 800 several years ago. There were sketchy eyewitness accounts from people on the ground who said the plane exploded over Long Island Sound a few minutes after takeoff. A few people thought they saw a luminous streak cross the sky that intersected with the plane just before the explosion. This was never confirmed, and no one was able to prove that any missile-launching aircraft were nearby. The "black box" recorders which held records of the last seconds of the flight, most of the pieces of the wreckage, and bodies were recovered from the plane and carefully examined. The consensus at the FAA is that an electrical spark in a mostly empty fuel tank set off the explosion, but there is no hard evidence to prove it. This is the hypothesis left, consistent with most of the facts, after several others (such as a bomb on board or an impact by an air-to-air missile or meteor) were shown to be wrong.

There are of course also natural phenomena that are not well understood, but they do not seem to violate any known laws of physics. Consider the following example: Ball lightning has been seen by people in many different circumstances. It has the appearance of a luminous blue-white fuzzy sphere that travels along electrical conductors and often generates a spitting-buzzing sound, and it can cause static on nearby radios. From the above circumstances it seems clear that it is electrical in nature. It is probably a selfcontained low-temperature plasma — electrically charged gas — which has an internal magnetic field that helps it to be relatively stable. However, it is not clear how it starts or how it maintains itself. More than one reported UFO sighting has turned out to be an incident of ball lightning.

For another example, consider the seasonal migrations of birds, butterflies, or whales. They travel thousands of miles to return to their breeding grounds with great reliability. How do they do it? In some cases, there is evidence that magnetic particles in their brains work as a compass. In others it seems that star patterns allow a sort of celestial navigation. In the case of the whales, perhaps the patterns of currents and of temperature variations provide the clues. But how do the whales remember these in the required detail? We don't know. These phenomena may be hard to explain but seem unlikely to violate known laws of physics.

All of the cases of unexplained natural phenomena cited above fit into the first category of UFO/ET phenomena. That's because for years they were (or still are) unexplained, and physical evidence was often lacking. They did not obviously violate known physical laws (some UFOs do, however), and later some were explained and fit into the known laws of physics. Perhaps someday UFOs will enter the ranks of the understood.

SCIENCE OVERTHROWN: NEW PARADIGMS

This is not, however, the end of the story. If it were, science would be a dead discipline. At some point, repeatable observations differ from the predictions of theory, and then science advances, often by a great leap. At the end of the last century, two observations were made that seemed completely unconnected at the time, though both violated the then-current physical theory. First was the discovery of the change in orientation of the orbit of the planet Mercury. Its orbit is elliptical, like the rest of the planets in our solar system. But this orbit was observed in the 1700s and 1800s to be slowly changing its orientation in space.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Science of UFOs by William R. Alschuler, Howard Zimmerman. Copyright © 2001 Byron Preiss Visual Productions, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
PREFACE,
1: EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE,
2: GIVE ME A LEVER LONG ENOUGH AND I WILL MOVE THE EARTH,
3: TRAVELS WITH ISAAC AND ALBERT,
4: LEAVING ALBERT BEHIND,
5: "BEAM ME UP SCOTTY",
6: YOUR UNIVERSE OR MINE?,
7: UFOs AND ABDUCTIONS,
8: I'M JUST A MATERIAL GUY,
9: ALIENS IN THE FAMILY,
REFERENCES, RECOMMENDED READINGS, AND USEFUL RESOURCES,
INDEX,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
Copyright Page,