All the UFO News That’s Fit to Print

Those writers who cover UFO sightings and those readers who believe some unidentified flying objects are not conventional human-made aircraft have resigned themselves to the fact that these encounters get covered by tabloids, paranormal websites and minor or obscure news services. That’s no longer the case. On the weekend of the biggest military holiday in the U.S. —  Memorial Day — The New York Times (“All the News That’s Fit to Print”) published a detailed article whose title says it all: “‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects.”

“We have helicopters that can hover. We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.” But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.”

The article doesn’t just describe the encounters between pilots and UFOs, it names names and includes pictures – allowing these eyewitnesses to come out of the military and self-imposed shadows, censorship, enforced suppression and threat of discharge to tell their stories. Lt. Ryan Graves, a 10-year veteran and F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, told the Times that he and his fellow pilots know these are not conventional aircraft they’re watching because “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Despite what certain people in high office imply, The New York Times does its journalistic job and interviews science and physics experts who explain how and why these encounters can be of the non-alien kind. Here’s Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

“[An extraterrestrial cause] is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations. There are so man other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

Of course, military pilots have heard all of this before. What’s new – and exciting to those in UFO research – is that they’re fighting both tradition and their current commanding officers to reveal these encounters to the general public and in publications like The New York Times where they’re exposed to tough journalistic scrutiny.

“I almost hit one of those things.”

The last thing pilots want is midair collisions and they know their fellow military members would not intentionally put their own in danger with new or unconventional test aircraft or drones. However, the Times could not pin down Lt. Graves or any of the other witnesses interviewed for the article on what they had encountered numerous times in close and even dangerous proximity with their own high-speed sophisticated jets. Do they still fear reprisals or ridicule? This coverage by The New York Times truly lets the UFO cat out of the secrecy bag. It’s only a matter of time before other whistleblowers come forth in this age of whistleblowers coming forth.

This is big.

Despite the fact that humans have never, as far as we know or the powers-that-be are willing to admit, ventured past the Moon, there’s plenty of talk recently about establishing a permanent colony on Mars. Those conversations cover topics such as transportation, living quarters and profit potential, but they leave out two questions that most humans living on Mars and on Earth will want answered … will there be reunions between the new Martians and old Earthlings, and can they renew old acquaintances in the manner of the time-honored tradition of high school reunions and old flames … with sex? There may be a good reason why these discussions about what may happen under the Martian covers is being kept under the covers … it will probably be fatal to the new Martians.

“What’s interesting to me as an evolutionary biologist is thinking about, what if we’re actually successful?” he asked the site. “I don’t think there has been nearly as much discussion about what would become of the people that are living in these colonies generations later.”

One person has been speaking about the unspeakable – Scott Solomon, an evolutionary biologist, professor at Rice University in Houston and author of “Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution.” He recently spoke with Inverse concerning his cautionary TEDx talk in January 2018 warning about sex with human Martians that has had surprisingly few views. His conclusion may be one reason:

“With no immune system, sex between Martian humans and Earthlings would be lethal.”

Wait … what?

“If a mutation pops up for people living on Mars, and it gives them a 50-percent survival advantage, that’s a huge advantage, right? And that means that those individuals are going to be passing those genes on at a much higher rate than they otherwise would have.”

That condom may not be enough protection.

Solomon points out that all babies on Earth are born with 60 new mutations on average, but most don’t get passed on to the next generations because there’s no need for them. That wouldn’t be the case on Mars where humans will need to quickly evolve to develop radiation-resistant skin, bodies that can survive on less oxygen and bones that can survive less gravity. However, the most critical mutation would be the result of living in a pristine, climate-controlled environment – the need for a tough immune system would be eliminated. Without that, assuming their diminished lung capacity can endure the heavy breathing, Solomon says their total lack of immunity would not survive the inevitable sexual exchange of bodily fluids.

“That could impose an artificial limit on how the two populations will be able to interact and co-mingle. The inability to form families or send offspring back and forth between the two planets could drive the two groups even further apart.”

Is there any hope for future family and high school reunions? Solomon offers one potential solution – CRISPR editing of Earthlings to give them the mutations their Mars relatives and friends have developed to survive.

Martian high school reunions will definitely need name-tags.

Solomon even suggests that we could use CRISPR to more purposefully design these helpful mutations.

“Why wait around for this mutation to occur if you can just go in and make them yourself.”

Of course, that means the artificial mutants couldn’t come back to Earth either. Perhaps he’s hinting at the inevitable – that Earth will someday become uninhabitable to normal humans and we’ll either have to move to another planet where we will quickly become a new species … or CRISPR-ly create the mutations for survival and stick around.

Speeding up evolution to accommodate space colonization and apocalyptic survival … sci-fi or our next reality?

It appears as though a  is presently underneath Sputnik Planitia on the dwarf planet Pluto. It was believed that the temperate needed for an ocean to remain in liquid format on Pluto would have been too high because the thick ice would have melted. However, Japanese astronomers claim there is a layer of gas located underneath the ice and above the liquid which works as a type of insulation between the two.

Pluto in all of its phases

This is very exciting news for scientists as they previously believed that all the water on Pluto would have been in a frozen state. The research, which was published in Nature Geoscience, read in part, “To maintain an ocean, Pluto needs to retain heat inside. On the other hand, to maintain large variations in its thickness, Pluto’s ice shell needs to be cold.” Additionally, they wrote, “Here we show… that the presence of a thin layer of clathrate hydrates (gas hydrates) at the base of the ice shell can explain both the long-term survival of the ocean and the maintenance of shell thickness contrasts.” They better explained how the clathrate hydrates work by writing, “Clathrate hydrates act as a thermal insulator, preventing the ocean from completely freezing while keeping the ice shell cold and immobile.”

As for the type of gas, they explained that “The most likely clathrate guest gas is methane, derived from precursor bodies and/or cracking of organic materials in the hot rocky core. Nitrogen molecules initially contained and/or produced later in the core would probably not be trapped as clathrate hydrates, instead supplying the nitrogen-rich surface and atmosphere.”

Pluto’s size compared to Earth

Researchers created a simulation of Pluto’s evolution, with and without a gas hydrate layer between the ice and the ocean in order to calculate how long it would take for the subsurface oceans to freeze over. They calculated that without the gas hydrate layer, the ocean would have been totally frozen around 800 million years ago. However, with the gas hydrate layer, the ocean hardly froze at all. In conclusion, without a gas hydrate layer, it would have taken the subsurface ocean approximately 100 million years to freeze over, but with the gas layer, it would take more than a billion years.

The simulation based on observations conducted by New Horizons not only shows the real possibility of a liquid ocean on Pluto, but it also gives a plausible explanation as to how the most iciest planets can still contain water in liquid format.

What’s better than finding aliens? Finding dead aliens. Why? Because it might be the only thing that gets humanity to straighten up and fly right. At least, that’s according to Harvard University professor Avi Loeb who said as much at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington D.C., in a talk which I assume was titled “Scared Straight in Space.”

Professor Loeb appears to believe, like many people do, that humanity is at a crossroads and our shortsightedness and technological progress combined may be a lethal mixture. At the summit, Loeb argued that we may be such wayward children that we might need to see the direct consequences of horsing around with nuclear weapons and all of the other potential big bungles we’ve got cooking up. He says that a propensity for planetary suicide might be more common than we think, and might be one of the solutions to the famous Fermi paradox, which basically states that there’s a whole bunch of reasons why we should have found aliens by now, but we haven’t. So what gives? Loeb says:

“One possibility is that these civilizations, based on the way we behave, are short-lived. They think short term, and they produce self-inflicted wounds that eventually kill them.”

“I don’t know what happened here, but let’s try not to do it.”

According to Loeb, finding evidence of an alien civilizationthat almost made it to the stars would serve as a wake-up call to humanity, and thus why what he calls “space archaeology” is of vital importance to the future. He says along with looking for living alien civilizations, we should widen our search to include the wreckage of alien civilizations that got a little too rambunctious for their own good: scorched planets, radioactive fallout, broken tech half buried in grey alien sands. Loeb says:

“The idea is we may learn something in the process. We may learn to better behave with each other, not to initiate a nuclear war, or to monitor our planet and make sure that it’s habitable for as long as we can make it habitable.”

But for Loeb, there are more reasons to explore the stars than just the space version of that movie you’re required to watch in driver’s ed. While his views seem to suggest a pessimistic view of the universe, there’s a sense of whiplash when he muses on what might happen if we find a living alien civilization:

“Our technology is only a century old, but if another civilization had a billion years to develop space travel, they may teach us how to do it,”

“Let’s not do this either.”

No, they would eat us. But Avi Loeb, who is the chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department and sits on the board of Breakthrough Starshot, also happens to have co-authored the recent paper suggesting that the interstellar object Oumuamua might be an alien spaceship. So it’s clear he’s got the gift of sensationalism, which might be necessary to drum up public support for space exploration. And he may be right, it’s not that crazy to think that humanity might need some evidence of a larger game to bring us all together.

But maybe we wouldn’t get scared straight. Chances are if we found the ruins of an alien civilization, nuked to oblivion, we’d look at it and say “get a load of these idiots, we’d never be that dumb.”