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

You may have heard stories recently about a former military pilot who’s pretty sure he saw something in the sky that he can’t explain. Therefore, it must be aliens.

Well, I have my own former military pilot who’s pretty sure he saw something in the sky he couldn’t explain. He even thought it was aliens.

Turns out, it was Venus.

Which helps explain why I’m so confident that when it comes to UFOs, the answer is never aliens. The answer is always that the observer misunderstood what was seen, or remembers it wrong.

Steve Lundquist of Bow – he’s my former Air Force pilot – puts it more colorfully. When it comes to analyzing unexpected observations, he says: “Our brains are crap.”

I contacted Lundquist, who is now a program manager for a defense contractor and who serves on the board at the Discovery Center, in the wake of reports that the Pentagon has spent tens of millions of dollars studying reports of inexplicable flying things. Those reports produced accompanying stories of military pilots who saw lights in the sky going faster than possible or otherwise breaking the laws of physics, with strong implication that alien technology is the only answer.

Both Lundquist and I think it’s perfectly fine for the military to spend our tax dollars studying these reports, even though we’re quite sure that they won’t uncover beings from other solar systems.

“It’s about threat assessment,” Lundquist said. “It’s reasonable to look into unusual aerial sightings, to make sure that it doesn’t present a threat.”

The problem comes, he said, “When it turns into: ‘We don’t know what it is, therefore it’s little green men.’ ”

In New Hampshire, we have plenty of precedent for the military to study UFO reports, as well as plenty of people who conclude that they’re due to little green men.

A website called NHUFOresearch.com, for example, includes reports that the Pease Air Force Base had an official “UFO Investigating Officer” in 1967, a truly awesome job title that was presumably created in the wake of the Incident at Exeter, a 1965 UFO sighting along New Hampshire’s Seacoast that still gets adherents very excited.

Then there’s New Hampshire’s most famous UFO connection: Betty and Barney Hill’s insistence that in 1961 they were taken into a spaceship near Lancaster and probed. I don’t know that the military ever studied the Hills’ tale, but it certainly resonated in the civilian world, launching the whole alien-abduction craze and forming the basis for at least one feature film.

Of course it’s not totally impossible that alien civilizations are playing peek-a-boo among the clouds, just as it’s not totally impossible that the Tooth Fairy exists or that I will wake up tomorrow speaking fluent Spanish after years of being confused by Sábado Gigante.

But it is so staggeringly, incredibly unlikely that space invaders might as well be impossible. It seems to me that people who are not concerned about national defense should act as if UFOs are impossible and get on with more useful things in life.

Not so fast, you cry: What about the many reports that have come in over the decades from pilots, both civilian and military, about lights in the sky that are traveling at impossible speeds or with impossible acceleration at impossible angles covering impossible distances? Isn’t that evidence of alien technology?

No – it’s evidence that people are worse observers than we think we are. This gets us, finally, to Lundquist’s alien-sighting story.

I first heard his tale in 2012 at SkeptiCamp, a free-wheeling conference for skeptics, and he confirmed it last week.

It seems Lundquist was flying over the Middle East on a military flight when he saw a strange light moving way up ahead of him, flying at impossible speeds and elevations, “doing things that no aircraft can do.” This is your classic pilot-sees-UFO scenario.

Lundquist was stupefied and alarmed and came this close to radioing in a report before he realized that he was looking at the planet Venus. All that apparent motion was an optical illusion.

He’s thankful that he came to his senses in time instead of embarrassing himself over the military airwaves.

“I know a few instances where pilots did radio in, or filled out paperwork, and then later figured out what was happening. But no one remembers that they did eventually figure it out, and only remember the call or the paperwork,” he noted.

Lundquist’s error is particularly surprising because he is a longtime skeptic of UFOs and he knew, even then, that Venus is frequently mistaken for an alien craft. How could he be so misled to think that this bright, unmoving object was traveling in fantastic ways?

Blame natural selection.

“We evolved to see things on the plains of Africa from eyes about 5 feet off the ground,” Lundquist said. Shifting this evolved skill to tens of thousands of feet in the air, moving at hundreds of miles an hour, is asking for trouble, he said: “Our brains are going to try to make sense of the data, using a frame of reference we are familiar with.”

Which means that as often as not, we’re going to fool ourselves.

So the assumption you and I and everybody else should bring to reports of an extraordinary sighting – UFO, Bigfoot, Nessie, ghosts, Elvis, whatever – is that the person’s central nervous system tricked itself. They will insist “I know what I saw,” but that really means “I know what I think I saw,” and what they think is wrong.

Without lots of evidence, and evidence stronger more than a blurry video or photo or sound recording that’s open to interpretation, they can be safely ignored.

(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)

NASA has selected two ambitious finalists for its New Frontiers robotic mission program: a flying lander to soar over the surface of Saturn's big, potentially habitable moon Titan and a mission to bring back samples from a comet's icy nucleus.

Both missions, chosen from 12 proposals submitted in April, will receive funding to continue developing their concepts. In 2019, one of them will be selected to fly; it will lift off before the end of 2025. Whichever mission is chosen will follow in the footsteps of three impressive New Frontiers selections, all of which are currently operational: the New Horizons mission to Pluto; the Juno probe now orbiting Jupiter; and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission currently on its way to the asteroid Bennu.

Both of the finalist missions aim to return to locations in the solar system that have already been mapped thoroughly, but will reveal much more than previous missions ever could, the missions' principal investigators said during a news conference today (Dec. 20). [After Cassini: 14 Epic Planetary Science Missions to Get Excited About]

Dragonfly on Titan

The Dragonfly mission would send a flying, eight-rotored lander to explore Titan's hazy, hydrocarbon atmosphere and examine its surface, which is covered in methane and ethane seas and rivers. The exotic moon is very different from Earth, but its complex chemistry makes it a fascinating target to search for the development of life. The moon was previously mapped in detail by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew by several times, and that mission's Huygens lander, which descended to Titan's surface in 2005.

With Dragonfly's detailed measurements of the moon's composition, "we can evaluate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed in an environment we know has the ingredients for life — for water-based life, or potentially even hydrocarbon-based life," Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland and principal investigator for Dragonfly, said during the news conference.

"Dragonfly would spend most of its time on the ground, but by being a rotorcraft, we're able to fly to multiple sites tens to hundreds of kilometers apart to be able to make these measurements in different geologic settings," she added.

The lander would draw power from a compact nuclear generator called an MMRTG, like the one that powers NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Its spacecraft would be built by APL in partnership with Penn State University, whose lab has already built models that have gone on test flights, Turtle said.

After a launch in 2025, the mission would arrive at Titan in 2034 and explore for a few years. The mission wouldn't be limited by power or a dangerous environment, Turtle said.

A comet's icy prize

While Dragonfly would beam data home to Earth, the second mission, called Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return (CAESAR), would send icy material here: The mission would travel to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, previously scoped out by Europe's Rosetta mission, and bring back at least 100 grams of sample from the comet's nucleus for analysis.

The Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return, or CEASAR, mission would collect a sample from the comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko and return it to Earth in a re-entry capsule. The mission concept is one of two finalists for NASA's next New Frontiers mission to launch in the mid-2020s.

Credit: NASA

"Comets are among the most scientifically important objects in the solar system, but they're also among the most poorly understood," Steve Squyres, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and principal investigator for CAESAR, said at the conference. "They're the most primitive building blocks of planets; they contain materials that date from the very earliest moments of solar system formation and even before. Comets were a source of water for the Earth's oceans, and critically they were a source of organic molecules that contributed to the origin of life."

CAESAR's samples, the first ever taken of a comet nucleus, would include the volatile ices from its surface that are comets' signature feature. The spacecraft would separate its sample into different compartments for volatile and nonvolatile components, and its return to Earth would involve ditching its heat shield as it landed, after entering the atmosphere, to avoid overheating the sample.

The sample capsule would be designed by JAXA, Japan's space agency, and would be based on its Hayabusa asteroid mission. The spacecraft would come from Orbital ATK and use solar-electric propulsion to make its way to the comet.

Rosetta's exploration of the comet makes the mission much less risky than visiting any other comet, said Squyres, who's also the principal investigator of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, which landed the golf-cart-size robots Spirit and Opportunity on the Red Planet in 2004: "We're able to say to our engineers, OK, here's the size-frequency distribution of the particles on the surface, here's how strong the surface is; we can design for specific conditions that we know to exist."

"That dramatically improves the chances for success for a very difficult activity, which is grabbing a piece of a comet," he added.

The mission would return to Earth on Nov. 20, 2038, unprecedented samples in tow.