It seemed for a while as we forged bravely into the 21st century that we were pretty smart. We thought we were figuring out the mysteries of the universe, one after another. Recently, however, there’s been a series of reports that all challenge our model of the universe, which we thought was pretty well figured out. First we find out that the sun is a lot stranger than we think it is, then we find out that the universe is more than a billion years younger than it should be. These both suggest the same thing: we’re not nearly as smart as we think we are.  This is nothing new, of course. The story of humanity is in essence the surfing of the constant realization that we’re pretty dumb all the way to the stars. Which is a neat little trick.

Now there’s a third in the series of assumption defying realizations. The Hubble constant is an astrophysical value that represents the expansion rate of the universe. It was named for Edwin Hubble who, in 1924, discovered that the farther away from Earth a galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be continuing its outward trajectory. In the early 1990’s, a team led by astrophysicist Wendy Freedman calculated the Hubble Constant within 10% of it’s true value, and scientists have been trying to refine that calculation ever since.

The Hubble Space Telescope, also named for Edwin Hubble, was used to calculate the Hubble constant.

And there seems to be a pretty big problem. Wendy Freedman recently recalculated the Hubble Constant using red giant stars as mileposts—red giants are useful because they reach the same brightness late in their evolution and thus make pretty good distance markers. With her new calculation, rently accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal, Wendy Freedman came to an entirely different result than she and her team calculated in the 1990’s. What might this mean? Well, this is just the latest in a series of discoveries related to the age and expansion of the universe that have found serious discrepancies, discrepancies that open up the possibility that something is well and truly broken with physics.

“Alright, I admit it. I don’t understand!”

Wendy Freedman’s red giant method of calculating the Hubble constant was supposed to be a “tie-breaker” between two other competing calculation. Instead it’s a different result entirely. According to Freedman:

“The Hubble constant is the cosmological parameter that sets the absolute scale, size and age of the universe; it is one of the most direct ways we have of quantifying how the universe evolves. The discrepancy that we saw before has not gone away, but this new evidence suggests that the jury is still out on whether there is an immediate and compelling reason to believe that there is something fundamentally flawed in our current model of the universe.”

“Naturally, questions arise as to whether the discrepancy is coming from some aspect that astronomers don’t yet understand about the stars we’re measuring, or whether our cosmological model of the universe is still incomplete. Or maybe both need to be improved upon.”

NASA is launching a brand-new telescope at some point in the mid-2020’s called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). This telescope will provide the same resolution as the now-defunct Hubble Space Telescope with 100 times the field of view. Astronomers hope that this new super telescope will show them where the discrepancy lies without making us re-do physics. More likely, it will probably keep showing us just how dumb we are.

Imagine a world where magic existed. In such a world, one might be able to wear a cloak that, once it covered our bodies, rendered us invisible; the likes of things we read about or see in films that include Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Such things will never really exist, at least not from magical means. However, that’s not to say that science won’t eventually be able to achieve similar things. One day, with the use of unique and, at times, almost unearthly composite materials–the likes of which are never found in nature–humans may indeed be able to bring such things as invisibility cloaks into real existence.

In 2018, PhysOrg reported on computer algorithms that were being used to help with the creation of metamaterials; synthetic composite substances that are engineered artificially, and in ways that aren’t typically found in nature. One of the examples they used at that time was already familiar to us:

To achieve invisibility, a metamaterial needs to possess certain optical properties. Specifically, scientists would have to design the material so that they could control how light moves around an object without being reflected or absorbed. This design is possible, but it would take just the right material with just the right structure.

The aforementioned algorithm, created by Yongmin Liu, a professor at Northeastern University, and his team found that using a computer algorithm to create such unnatural composite materials was “much faster and more accurate than previous approaches, paving the way for engineers to design next-generation materials.”

By introducing the algorithm to some 30,000 different sample data sets, it was able to not only learn those relationships, but to expand on them and predict new varieties based on the data.

Fast forward to 2019, where new developments in this burgeoning field are pushing boundaries even further into tomorrow: a multidisciplinary team with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have now formalized a system “that allows researchers to choose materials and design photonic structures arbitrarily by using deep learning.”

In layman’s terms, this means they are using artificial intelligence to aid in the creation of new kinds of metamaterials, capable of functions that include invisibility.

“The resulting metamaterials can be utilized in display, security, and military technologies. In this regard, introduction of AI to the design method is expected to make important contributions to the technological development of metamaterials,” PhysOrgreported.

Of the three areas listed above, perhaps the mention of “military technologies” is the most interesting and impactful. It also reminds us of the kinds of “innovations of tomorrow” that were being foreshadowed decades ago, albeit in relation to more speculative lines of thought.

A good example might include an article that appeared in Britain’s Sunday Dispatch in October 1954. In it, a quote from a spokesman with the British War Office stated that “(UFOs) are invisible to the human eye,” and that radar operators frequently detected “fleets” of unidentified—and invisible—objects passing overhead in the mid-afternoon. Any attempts at establishing visible line-of-sight confirmation proved unsuccessful.

“Every time, they have followed the same pattern, always around mid-day. All our radar sets in the area have picked them up,” the article stated. 

This may sound like a description of some rather exotic technology; however, early camouflage techniques were already being developed by around the time of World War I that would allow aircraft to become functionally “invisible” when viewed against the sky at a distance. One 1917 patent application attributed to Mary “Mitty” Taylor Brush proposed a pattern that would be “able to produce a machine which is practically invisible when in the air.” Such techniques, later put into use during wartime, were derived from techniques used in fine art already for centuries.

Modern stealth technology is, of course, far more advanced than this, and although these modern aircraft are generally only “invisible” to radar systems, their incredible speed, sophistication, and maneuverability allows them to often function in ways that almost exceeds any necessity for possessing actual invisibility. 

Nonetheless, if current innovations in metamaterials (helped along by artificial intelligence) are any indication, the aircraft of tomorrow may indeed take such technologies into new and unforeseen places… or for that matter, perhaps into the unseen, period.

The strange story of the alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 – and the recovery of a number of dead “little men” at the site – is a real hotbed of lies, disinformation, and shady characters. Most of those same characters were best avoided by those with dollars to spare. The tale was made infamous in the pages of Frank Scully’s 1950 blockbuster, Behind the Flying Saucers; it was a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Today, the Aztec affair is seen by some ufologists as Roswell’s “little brother.” As its “skeleton in the cupboard” might be a far more apt description, however. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon dismiss the Aztec incident as nothing but a hoax; one which was perpetrated by a shady businessman/conman named Silas Newton. His less-than-shining FBI file can be accessed at the FBI’s website, The Vault.

When it came to stories of aliens from faraway worlds, making money was always the goal for Newton. And the only goal. Along for the ride with Newton was Leo Gebauer. He was the Igor to Newton’s ego-driven Dr. Frankenstein. There is, though, a very interesting and extremely odd aspect to the Newton/Aztec story. It serves to demonstrate how the UFO phenomenon was becoming the tool of manipulative disinformation specialists in the intelligence community. And not just of the Soviet Union. The United States was getting into the strange game, too.

Back in 1998, the late Karl Pflock, ufologist and CIA employee (sometimes at the same time…), was approached by a still-anonymous source who had something very interesting to say about the Aztec caper, and about Newton too. It was a decidedly weird series of revelations that Pflock surely never anticipated receiving. To his dying day, Pflock refused to reveal the name of his informant in the shadows – rumors, however, were that the person may have been a nephew of Silas Newton – but, Pflock did say that all of the lunchtime meetings with his source occurred between July 11 and September 24, 1998 and took place in a restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico.

So the story goes, Pflock’s informant had in their hands twenty-seven pages taken, or rather torn, from an old and faded, lined journal. No prizes for guessing who that journal had belonged to. That’s right, sly, old Silas Newton. Pflock was told that Newton had kept multiple journals and diaries not just for years, but for decades. They were jammed with entertaining tales of sexual conquests, of Hollywood starlets, of the fleecing of the rich and the gullible, and of wild adventures across the United States. The outcome of all this? Newton decided, around the turn of the 1970s, that it was right about time for him to write-up his version of the Aztec controversy. It would surely have been a definitive page-turner. Death, however, inconveniently intervened in 1972, when Newton passed away in his mid-eighties. What happened to all of those journals is anyone’s guess.

As for those few pages that Pflock was allowed to see – and to transcribe word for word – they tell a tale of undeniable weirdness. By his own admittance, and a couple of years after the Aztec story surfaced in Frank Scully’s book, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as Pflock carefully and tactfully described it. Those same representatives of the government told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete and bald-faced lie. Utter bullshit, in fact. Incredibly, though, they wanted Newton to keep telling the taleto just about anyone and everyone who would listen. This caused Pflock to ponder on an amazing possibility: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?”

Far more intriguing, though, , is the next question that Pflock posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?” With the Newton revelations in hand, Pflock, no later than 1999, came to believe that back in the early fifties someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military of the United States – and maybe even a swirling combination of all three – wanted the Aztec story further circulated. The purpose: as a means to try and convince the Russians that the U.S. military had acquired, or captured, alien technology. When, in reality, it had no such thing in its possession at all.

For the record, in 2002, when Pflock and I were corresponding regularly on the matter of these particularly curious revelations, he told me that he had been able to confirm who the two men that approached Newton worked for and specifically when their meeting with Newton occurred. The time-frame was late March 1950 and the pair of spooks came from a small group within the CIA. Slightly more than a year later, Pflock learned, that very same group was absorbed into the Psychological Strategy Board. The PSB was…”established by Presidential Directive on April 4, 1951 ‘to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.’ An abbreviated version of the Presidential Directive was released to the public on June 20, 1951.”

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Having digested the words above, it can be said with a high degree of certainty that those predecessors to the PSB, which Newton was confronted by, would have been the perfect people to have enlisted Newton into their operation mind-fuck. Not only that, in November 1998 Pflock secured a copy of Newton’s will. Having earlier seen Newton’s “scrawling, sprawling” writing up close at that Bernalillo restaurant, Pflock said: “The will unquestionably is in Newton’s hand, and while I’m certainly not a handwriting expert, the comparison left no doubt in my mind that he wrote the journal, too.”

I know just how fascinated Pflock was when it came to the Aztec crash and the claims of Newton and that “highly secret U.S. Government entity.” Pflock and I had been corresponding as far back as the late 1990s, but, I didn’t meet him in person until 2003 – at a UFO gig in the city of Aztec itself. For a number of years, the conference was an annual event. But, no more. When Pflock and I finally met, he near-immediately suggested that we should write an Aztec-themed book. Pflock’s reasoning was that he knew the story very well, and, via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I had uncovered hundreds upon hundreds of pages of material – chiefly from the FBI – on the Aztec controversy and the players within it. He thought that we would make a good team. Particularly so now that I lived in the U.S. – and specifically in Dallas, Texas, which (in terms of the road-trips that I regularly undertake) is not at all far from New Mexico, where Pflock resided and where the 1948 crash supposedly happened.

As I listened, Pflock told me that his idea was, essentially, to make the book a biography on Newton, but with the Aztec affair being the main thrust of it all. I thought it was a very good idea. Pflock suggested that he prepare a synopsis for his literary agent (this was around a year before I first met my longstanding agent, Lisa Hagan), which is exactly what he did. The book was going to be called Silas the Magnificent: A True Tale of Greed, Credulity, and (Maybe) Government Chicanery and Cover-up in 1950s America. Sadly, the idea collapsed when Pflock fell seriously ill with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He unfortunately died from the effects of ALS on June 5, 2006, at the age of just sixty-three.

Pflock is gone, but the printed synopsis still exists, as do several printed chapters, including one on the matter of the Psychological Strategy Board aspect of all this. It would have made a good book. And, very possibly, it just might have revealed more of the fabricated story of how – and with the help of Silas Newton – American intelligence led the Russians on a wild goose chase and had them believing that U.S. scientists were secretly studying a recovered UFO and its advanced technologies and weapons-systems. If such a plot successfully terrified Soviet intelligence, for the U.S. government it was a job well done.

There’s one more thing that needs to be highlighted on this controversy-saturated saga of a crashed UFO and Silas Newton. On June 24, 1964, Frank Scully, whose 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, placed the alleged incident firmly under the spotlight, passed away. As the New York Times noted in its obituary on Scully, one day later: “Mr. Scully was labeled a Communist by Congressman Martin Dies, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee. After a stormy two-hour session with the Committee, Mr. Scully was cleared of the charge.”

Yes, Scully was exonerated. It is a fact, though, that sometimes – to use a U.K. term – “mud sticks.” For at least some, including those in the intelligence community, Scully was still seen as a closet communist, regardless of the fact that he had been completely absolved of any kind of guilt. Maybe, those spooks and spies who paid Silas Newton a visit in 1950 were concerned by the possibility that Scully was in cahoots with the Russians. This is, admittedly, speculation and nothing more. But, as I note in my new book, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin, we see flying saucer enthusiasts, communism, and secret government activity rolled into one.