Files which UFO hunters believe could prove that an alien craft landed in Suffolk in 1980 are to be published by the incident.
UFO hunters have campaigned for the release of 18 files about UFO sightings in the UK ,backed by Lord Black of Brentwood, who was assured in a Parliamentary question that they would be published in March next year.
The files cover alien ‘visits’ such as the Rendlesham Forest Incident in 1983, U.S. Army personnel stationed near Rendlesham in Suffolk saw a strange, metallic triangle which was ‘dripping molten metal’ - and witnessed a light like a ‘huge red eye’.
Unlike most UFO sightings, it was documented in voice recordings from senior American soldiers, who also drew disturbing pictures of the object they saw.
One witness claimed to have telepathically ‘received’ a binary code, which has never been deciphered.
Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, said, ‘Its great that these files will be released but I’m reliably informed that some contain duplicates of documents already made available to the public. It seems very unlikely they will not contain anything like the type of evidence UFO supporters yearn for, like crashed saucers or interviews with aliens.
‘Up to now literally thousands of UK government UFO have been released. In 2005, after years of denial, the government admitted it conducted a thorough scientific study of UFOs, which concluded that unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, do exist, but not flying saucers.
‘An unnamed security contractor carried out the study on behalf of the Defence Intelligence Staff, section DI55, based in Whitehall, London. Codenamed Project Condign, the study was started in December 1996 and completed four years later in March 2000. The findings were published in a four-volume, 460-page report, titled "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the U.K. Air Defence Region."
‘Only 11 copies of the report were produced, and they were circulated to a restricted number of high-ranking Royal Air Force and defence ministry officials. It was so secret that not even the Ministry of Defence's UFO department or the government ministers in charge of the defence ministry were made aware of it.
‘It concluded some sightings were possibly of rare atmospheric phenomena -- pockets of electrically charged plasmas forming in the atmosphere. The plasmas would appear as bright, fast-moving UFOs to observers, but be invisible to radar.
‘At least 10,000 UFO reports collected by the US, Project Blue Book, have been put online and many other governments have released their UFO files. So we have an embarrassment of riches yet these have been largely ignored by UFO researchers, yet they could provide lots of information about types of sightings and their patterns over time and place. The problem is alien saucers and body parts remain as elusive now as they always have been, and it frustrates the hell out of conspiracy mongers and ufologists.
When will we know we have found extraterrestrial life?
When will we know we have found extraterrestrial life?
This is the "South Pillar" region of the star-forming region called the Carina Nebula. Like cracking open a watermelon and finding its seeds, the infrared telescope "busted open" this murky cloud to reveal star embryos tucked inside finger-like pillars of thick dust.
Credit: NASA
(Phys.org)—As we become more advanced in astronomy, continuously searching and finding lots of potentially habitable extrasolar planets that could harbor alien life, it seems that it's not a matter of if but when we will find extraterrestrial organisms. However, the real tough problem here is: How we could determine if the alien life has really been found? "The question is not so much 'when will we find extraterrestrial life?' But 'when will we know we have found extraterrestrial life?'" Terence Kee, the President of the Astrobiology Society of Britain told Phys.org. "My feeling is that we may indeed find signs of life in a few decades, but whether we will be unambiguously able to identify it as 'extraterrestrial life' - as opposed to terrestrial contamination or abiotic far-from-equilibrium processes - in such a short time-frame, I'm not so sure."
Kee noted that we are able in any realistic sense to detect only life forms that have a terrestrial-based biochemistry, so we would probably bet on bodies that have liquid water and some form of geological free energy source. He puts his hopes on space probes looking at out-of-equilibrium gas distributions in exo-planetary atmospheres. However, any potential findings revealed by these probes would be only an indication, without the capability to definitively determine the existence of alien lifeforms.
We could also turn to meteorites in the ongoing search for E.T. and hope that these rocks came from a parent body that may have harbored life. If we're lucky, relics of life are contained within that sample and have not been destroyed. Kee surprisingly admits that luck is really the key condition here.
"As most of these relics are likely to have been fossilized in some way, we would need to cash in on some more luck so that we can demonstrate sufficient differences between such relics and potential abiotic mechanisms of formation on earth—chemical compositional differences, isotopic ratio's mineral morphologies or, most valuable perhaps, presence of specific molecules which could only be produced by biogenic processes, etcetera," he said.
The biggest challenge is to clearly identify if the life forms existed on the studied meteorites a long time prior to re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Before that is established, any new finding would be just a potential signature of extraterrestrial life. For example, in 2011, Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, claimed he had found the remains of living organisms from a parent celestial body in a rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites.
"The complex filaments found embedded in the CI1 carbonaceous meteorites represent the remains of indigenous microfossils of cyanobacteria," Hoover claimed.
His team used Environmental (ESEM) and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) to analyze the meteorite samples, studying internal surfaces. For comparison, Hoover compared the samples to those of terrestrial minerals and biological materials.
Hoover's claims sparked controversy and NASA distanced from his conclusions, pointing out his lack of expert peer reviews. The findings were soon debunked after publication.
More recently, two scientists suggested that the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is studied by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, hosts microbial alien life. The University of Buckingham's Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleague, Max Wallis of the University of Cardiff, insist that the characteristic features on the comet, including a black, carbon-containing crust and underlying ice; large, smooth 'seas'; flat-bottomed craters and a surface peppered with mega-boulders, might only be explained by the presence of life.
But the last week's claims also sparked skepticism among other scientists specializing in the search for extraterrestrial life, debunking the newly presented hypothesis. The researchers rejecting the new findings emphasize that complex organics are generated in many places in the solar system through photochemistry and this is evidence for anything other than abiotic chemistry.
So far, we haven't found any convincing proof of alien life embedded in meteorites. However, Kee, undeterred by the long-lasting search and continuous skepticism, is looking to the future with hope.
"In order to receive Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket of Astrobiology, we would need to be ready to search as many meteorites as we can get hold of, which we already do. Overall, I reckon we would need to be lucky. But hey, many people have won the lottery. The trick is to keep buying the tickets," Kee concluded.
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NASA scientist finds 'alien life' fossils
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