The head of the Pentagon Research Bureau for Unidentified Air Phenomena believes it is possible that extraterrestrial motherships and probes are visiting Earth.
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 a draft paper he co-authored with Loeb on physical limitations on UFOs and published on March 7th. The military researcher, who stints at the CIA, heads the US 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 through reports in the specialist magazine “Military Times” , in science gazettes, and in the 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, explains 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.
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.
According to a preliminary assessment of UFO data collected by US intelligence agencies published in 2021a small number of objects sighted reportedly exhibited acceleration or other capabilities that were not easily explained in the context of known technologies. Loeb and Kirkpatrick argue here that calculations leading to objects exceeding the transonic 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.
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