UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Whatever occurred at 2:45 a.m. on the morning of July 24, 1948 in the skies over southwest Alabama not only shocked and stymied the witnesses. It jolted the U.S. government into a top-secret investigation—the results of which were ultimately destroyed.

The skies were mostly clear and the moon was bright in the pre-dawn hours as pilot Clarence S. Chiles and co-pilot John B. Whitted flew their Eastern Air Lines DC-3, a twin-engine propeller plane, at 5,000 feet, en route from Houston to Atlanta. The aircraft had 20 passengers on board, 19 of them asleep at that hour. It was a routine domestic flight, one of many in the skies that early morning.

Until suddenly, it wasn’t. What the two pilots and their wide-awake passenger saw in the skies about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, did more than startle them. It would reportedly become the catalyst for a highly classified Air Force document suggesting that some unidentified flying objects were spaceships from other worlds—a tipping point in UFO history.

Chiles described what he saw in an official statement about a week later: “It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power, shooting flame from the rear some 50 feet. There were two rows of windows, which indicated an upper and lower deck, [and] from inside these windows a very bright light was glowing. Underneath the ship there was a blue glow of light.” He estimated that he’d watched the ship for about 10 seconds before it disappeared into some light clouds and was lost from view.

Whitted offered a similar description in his official statement: “The object was cigar shaped and seemed to be about a hundred feet in length. The fuselage appeared to be about three times the circumference of a B-29 fuselage. It had two rows of windows, an upper and a lower. The windows were very large and seemed square. They were white with light which seemed to be caused by some type of combustion…. I asked Capt. Chiles what we had just seen and he said that he didn’t know.”

The passenger who was awake at the time, Clarence L. McKelvie of Columbus, Ohio, corroborated the pilots’ account that an unusually bright object had streaked past his window, but he wasn’t able to describe it beyond that.

Chiles’ interpretation of what he saw on the night of July 24, 1948.

(Credit: The Project Blue Book Archive)

Both pilots also made drawings of the craft they believed they had seen and provided further details in newspaper and radio interviews, some just hours after the sighting. The Atlanta Constitution headlined its July 25 account, “Atlanta Pilots Report Wingless Sky Monster.” In that article, Chiles described what sounded like an uncomfortably close encounter, as the object appeared to be coming at them. “We veered to the left and it veered to its left, and passed us about 700 feet to our right and about 700 feet above us. Then, as if the pilot had seen us and wanted to avoid us, it pulled up with a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear and zoomed up into the clouds.”

Chiles and Whitted weren’t the only ones baffled by what they’d seen.

Asked for comment, William M. Allen, the president of Boeing Aircraft told the United Press he was “pretty sure” it was “not one of our planes,” adding that he knew of nothing being built in the U.S. that matched the description. General George C. Kenney, the chief of the Strategic Air Command, which was responsible for most of America’s nuclear strike forces during the Cold War, told the Associated Press: “The Army hasn’t anything like that. I wish we did.”

Whatever Chiles and Whitted witnessed, theirs was far from an isolated incident. There had been scores of reported UFO sightings in the years just previous. But Air Force investigators took this one more seriously than most. For one thing, both men were highly regarded pilots who had served as Air Force officers during World War II. (McKelvie was also a solid citizen and an Air Force veteran, as well.) For another, the pilots had gotten what seemed to be an unusually close look at the strange object they described.

For all of those reasons, the Chiles-Whitted encounter, as it came to be known, reportedly caused the Air Technical Intelligence Center to draft a top-secret document with the deceptively bland title “Estimate of the Situation.” Edward J. Ruppelt, an Air Force officer and the first head of its famous Project Blue Book study of UFO phenomena, claimed to have seen a copy. “The ‘situation’ was the UFOs,” he wrote, “the ‘estimate’ was that they were interplanetary!”

According to Ruppelt, the report traveled up the Air Force chain of command all the way to General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the chief of staff. “The general wouldn’t buy interplanetary vehicles,” Ruppelt wrote. “A group from ATIC went to the Pentagon to bolster their position but had no luck, the Chief of Staff couldn’t be convinced.”

Ruppelt continued, “The estimate died a quick death. Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator.”

Whitted’s interpretation of what he saw on the night of July 24, 1948.

(Credit: The Project Blue Book Archive)

One reason for Vandenberg’s skepticism, apparently, was that another faction within the Air Force had a competing theory: UFOs weren’t interplanetary at all, but the handiwork of America’s Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. In another top-secret report dated December 1948, the Air Force suggested a variety of reasons the Soviets might be behind such a scheme, including photographic reconnaissance, testing U.S. air defenses and undermining U.S. and European ally confidence in the atom bomb as the ultimate weapon. The Soviets wouldn’t have their own atom bomb until late August 1949.

The suppression of the “Estimate of the Situation” and the rejection of any extraterrestrial explanation was the start of “a long period of unfortunate, amateurish public relations” on the part of the Air Force, astronomer J. Allen Hynek claimed in his 1972 book, The UFO Experience. Hynek, who had worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory tracking space satellites and later became a professor at Northwestern University, was the official astronomical consultant to Project Blue Book as well as the man who developed the UFO-sighting classification system that originated the phrase “Close Encounters of Third Kind.”

“The insistence on official secrecy and frequent ‘classification’ of documents was hardly needed since the Pentagon had declared that the problem really didn’t exist,” Hynek wrote.

Ruppelt maintained that bureaucratic bungling rather than deliberate deception was the Air Force’s main problem. “But had the Air Force tried to throw up a screen of confusion, they couldn’t have done a better job,” he added.

In part because of this lack of transparency, the Chiles-Whitted incident remains one of the most controversial UFO sightings—and a favorite of conspiracy theorists even now.

So, what did Chiles and Whitted actually see? Some suggested a weather balloon, others a mirage. Hynek believed it was a fireball, or very bright meteor, an opinion that eventually became the official Air Force verdict. As to the lighted windows both pilots claim to have seen, some experts suggest that might have been a phenomenon called the “airship effect,” where observers who see a group of unrelated lights in the sky are fooled into thinking they’re part of the same object.

But Chiles and Whitted stuck to their story. James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona physicist and UFO expert, said he interviewed them in 1968, some 20 years after the event. The two were now jet pilots for Eastern Air Lines, and they continued to believe that what they had seen was some sort of airborne vehicle, McDonald reported.

What’s more, Whitted added a new and puzzling detail to the story. Although reports at the time said the object had disappeared into the clouds or simply out of their view, he supposedly told McDonald that wasn’t what really happened. Instead, the object had vanished instantaneously, right before their eyes.

No wonder the Chiles-Whitted case continues to baffle and intrigue, even 70 years later.

Hubble Sees Elegant Spiral Hiding a Hungry Monster

What would it feel like to fall into a black hole? This fanciful question has pit real physicists against each other for decades — and new research from Ohio State has opened up some old wounds.

“There’s a lot of people writing a lot of stuff about black holes and black hole information,” string theorist Nicholas Warner, Ph.D., a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California, tells Inverse. (Warner was not involved with the new study, by the way.)

“Some of it’s brilliant and wonderful and some of it is crap.”

If you go by the theory of general relativity, nothing escapes a black hole. Not even light travels fast enough to free itself from a black hole’s gravitational pull. It’s in the freaking name: A black hole is a spherical maw, floating in the void of space. It is a borg-like agglomeration of matter so dense that it assimilates everything that passes through its event horizon.

Unfortunately, none of this makes any sense from a quantum mechanical perspective. According to the rules, information simply can’t be destroyed, and yet that’s what black holes seem to do. This paradox has birthed a long-simmering intellectual war and, with the publication of the new study in the Journal of High Energy Physics, Ohio State physicists have recently turned up the heat.

“There was no simple fix in physics for this.”

The math at the core of quantum mechanics states that information cannot be obliterated, only converted into new forms: matter consumed into energy, energy forging new combinations of matter, and so on. But every time a complex, information-rich object is crushed into the uniform, impossibly compacted space of a black hole, all of its defining characteristics are lost — either flattened out or stretched into an infinitesimal spaghetti, depending on which theoretical model you choose. But no matter how you wish to think about it, the defining information encoded in that matter would appear to be totally obliterated.

For about a decade and change, Samir Mathur, Ph.D., a professor of physics at Ohio State, has been attempting to apply the higher-order, more multidimensional physical equations of string theory to this, the black hole information problem.

“In 2009, Samir Mathur proved a result about the black hole information paradox that showed it was much worse than we thought,” Warner recalls. “There was no simple fix in physics for this. It was going to require a large-scale rethinking of the physics of the event horizon.”

Mathur is an author on the new paper, an attempt to clarify his team’s string theory-based “fuzzball” resolution to the paradox. The only new problem is that it does so by throwing the controversial rival “firewall” theory under the bus.

In the wake of Mathur’s earlier research, four physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara posited in 2012 that the seeming loss of information around an event horizon (as it does when, say, a genetically unique tree is burned into uniform gray ash) must come with the release of an incredible amount of energy. They proposed that, just underneath the surface of a black hole’s event horizon, there is a spherical “firewall” of energy ready to annihilate anything that dares to enter.

While it provided a working hypothesis for what might happen to all that supposedly lost information inside a black hole, more than a few scientists were unconvinced.

“I can tell you right now: the firewall idea is and always has been preposterous,” Chris Adami, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology, molecular genetics, physics, and astronomy at Michigan State University, tells Inverse.

Adami has been involved in this debate for a while. With a grant from the Army Research Office in 2003, he made an ambitious attempt to resolve the black hole information problem by testing it against some of the emerging principles of quantum communication theory.

Donald Marolf, Ph.D., one of the physicists that first proposed the firewall, waves off the criticisms. He does not believe that Adami’s research is even applicable to the debate because he thinks it misses the real issue at the heart of the black hole paradox: how to account for the “spontaneous emissions” proposed by none other than Stephen Hawking.

“Adami’s work discussed ‘stimulated emission’ by black holes,” Marolf tells Inverse. “But — despite common misconceptions — this has essentially nothing to do with the black hole info problem, which instead concerns the growth of [quantum] entanglement due to ‘spontaneous emission.’”

“I can tell you right now: the firewall idea is and always has been preposterous.”

Stephen Hawking, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, lecturing at an event honoring NASA's 50th Anniversary in 2008.

The paradox at the heart of the black hole information problem stems from Hawking radiation, an alleged spontaneous emission from black holes that Hawking justified theoretically in 1974.

The realization that a black hole would eventually die out after all these emissions, and the seemingly information-free quality of the Hawking radiation emissions, first indicated how fiercely black holes would bring relativity and quantum mechanics into conflict. Inside Hawking’s version of a black hole, it really looked like information was being destroyed.

Adami’s solution to the paradox addresses stimulated emissions — which contain more information than spontaneous emissions — but if you ask Marolf, that’s not enough to account for the information required to resolve the paradox. Word is still out, however, on Mathur’s theory.

In the classic interpretation of a black hole put forward by general relativity (top diagram), all of the black hole matter is constrained to a hyper-dense singularity at the center. In Mathur's string theory version, complex multidimensional geometries, the 'fuzzball,' emerge throughout the full volume of the black hole and approach tightly underneath the event horizon (bottom diagram).

There wasn’t always beef between these scientists.

In fact, for a while, Mathur’s fuzzball argument was wholly compatible with the firewall theory. He had shown through string theory that the interior of a black hole was not one, incredibly small, hyper-dense singularity surrounded by a powerful sucking void between it and the event horizon, but rather a volume filled with wiggling, multidimensional strings and branes — a “fuzzball” of information-rich materials vibrating out in dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions, and time, that we experience as humans.

To string theorists like Mathur and Warner, the firewall theory addressed only the parts of the fuzzball that are very hot — in other words, it was not all-encompassing or mathematically rigorous, but it also wasn’t wrong.

“I would not say that the firewall argument was completely preposterous,” Mathur tells Inverse, “but the press did not report it accurately, so people were confused.”

Mathur’s new paper, however, takes a less accommodating approach to the firewall argument. At least, it’s no longer compatible with the idea that a person falling into a black hole would get burnt up in some kind of firewall, if it exists. Their explanation — due to some unique features of string theory — um, well, it’s deeply weird.

“This is the crucial part of the new physics,” Mathur says, “In the fuzzball theory, the inside of the black hole is not empty space; it is actually filled with a tangle of strings, branes, et cetera. When something falls into the hole, the hole gets bigger.”

“The question is: when exactly does it expand to its new size? We showed that new strings begin to form when the infalling object is still some distance from the surface of the original fuzzball. So, the infalling object never gets close enough to the original fuzzball surface to feel its heat — the newly formed strings change his infall behavior.”

Think of it as a hand approaching a mirror. Just as your hand can never touch a part of the mirror that isn’t a reflection of it, Mathur says, “similarly, the fuzzball surface moves up to meet the infaller, rather than wait for the infaller to reach near the surface and get burnt.”

Rather than feeling a burning sensation, or a shattering or crushing sensation, Mathur predicts that an ‘infaller’ would feel as though they were falling through a form of gently curved spacetime called “anti-de Sitter space.”

“This is the idea of ‘complementarity’,” Mathur says, “which the firewall people were trying to shoot down.” Understanding this is key to answering the inevitable question: What happens when you get sucked into a black hole?

fuzzballs black holes

Multiple images of the 'real monster black hole' at the heart of the colliding galaxies Arp 299. At top, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has recorded X-ray data projected out by the system. At middle, the NuSTAR high-energy X-ray data has been overlaid on a visible-light image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The bottom panel shows Hubble's visible-light image alone.

The answer relies on the assumption that, in quantum mechanics, everything can be described by a set of frequencies. “If two systems have the same frequencies, then we cannot tell them apart. For example, if a piano and a keyboard emitted the same frequencies, you could not hear them and tell that they were really very different internally.”

Likewise, a person can be described by a set of frequencies. If that person falls into a black hole, Mathur explains, “he hits the fuzzball and sets the fuzzball into vibrations. But suppose the fuzzball vibrates with the same frequencies. Then the infaller has been absorbed, but in a sense he continues to live on in terms of the vibrations of the fuzzball. Thus he will not feel that he has been absorbed.”

(For a rough, maybe irresponsible, approximation, feel free to just imagine a person going through a black hole and then entering some psychedelic interstellar phantasia from an old Jack Kirby Marvel comic. Let’s say Doctor Strange..ubble's visible-light image alone

Though Mathur’s explanation is satisfying (albeit complicated), it’s unclear whether it will put an end to the black hole paradox problem anytime soon. Neither Adami nor Marolf felt comfortable commenting on the new research from Mathur and his team, each for his own reasons. Warner would not either, but admits he feels very confident that Mathur is on the right track by applying string theory to the internal dynamics of black holes.

String theory has been notoriously airy and abstracted. It has been accused of being non-falsifiable, its adherents like religious zealots in their commitment to a series of mathematical equations that have, thus far, strongly suggested the existence of many dimensions outside the four we all deal with regularly — without a single physical experiment to confirm them.

But if we want to solve the black hole paradox once and for all, we may very well have to take their giant leap of faith.

“If I had to bet one the place where you might get some indication of string theory in the next decade or two,” Warner says, “it might just be in black hole physics.”