The extraterrestrial hypothesis: a case for scientific openness to an interstellar explanation for unidentified anomalous phenomena

Interstellar Travel

Even if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, the scientific consensus is that it would still be exceedingly difficult for them to travel to Earth - hence being responsible for UAP - given the vast size of the universe. However, recent advances in science and technology are making scholars revisit these assumptions. Let's use our nearest stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, 4.35 light years away, as an example. Our current fastest means of travel is Gravity Assist, which uses the relative movement and gravity of planets to alter a craft's path and speed, this being the method by which Voyager 1 used Saturn and Jupiter for gravitational slingshots to attain its current velocity of 60,000 km/hr. At this rate, it would take 76,000 years (over 2,500 generations) to reach these stars (Williams, 2016). However, these calculations are only based on current technological capacities and knowledge, which will likely be radically revised in future. Indeed, even now at the frontiers of science are proposals for exponentially faster methods, some of which have already begun to receive experimental testing. For example, an aerospace company (Pulsar Fusion) has begun construction of a nuclear fusion rocket engine - due for completion in 2027 - predicted to create exhaust speeds of over 500,000 MPH (Sampson, 2023). Moreover, even faster methods are being developed. For example, NASA suggests a “laser sail” - ultrathin mirrors driven by focused energy beams - measuring 965 km in diameter could accelerate to half the speed of light in less than a decade. Work on this idea is already underway, including Project Starshot, which plans to use it to send a small sensory package to Alpha Centauri at 1/5 the speed of light (Parkin, 2018).

Moreover, these are just endeavours of which information is known publicly. There have long been suspicions that authorities have been secretly working on far faster methods, possibly - though this is of course unproven - through reverse engineering UAP, as alleged by Grusch. Scientists have wondered, for example, about the viability of breakthrough technologies such as an Alcubierre warp drive that could allow faster-than-light travel by effectively “stretching the fabric of spacetime” (Williams, 2017, paragraph 5). As Lue Elizondo, an intelligence veteran with close connections to the UAP topic, explains, “a significant amount of mass or energy warps space-time... It's a scientific fact, not fiction. The question now is how we can manipulate this physics for technological advancement. Potentially, we could warp space-time in a way that allows us to travel from point A to point B more quickly” (Verma, 2023). Strikingly, scientists are allegedly already working on such craft, with numerous rumours surrounding Salvatore Pais for instance, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. Leaked documents disclosed by The War Zone (Tingley, 2020) suggested he has not only obtained numerous patents for highly advanced forms of technology - including a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft” (Pais, 2019) that would apparently be capable of “altering the fabric of time and space” - but the Navy had actually conducted experiments on some of these.

Needless to say, this work remains highly secretive. However, what little is publicly available is very intriguing. Ross Coulthart's (2021) book, In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science, for example, devotes an entire chapter to “Dr. Salvator Pais's Puzzling Patents.” It begins by noting the momentous detection of gravitational waves in 2015, a discovery - almost a century after these had been predicted by Einstein as part of his theory of relativity in 1916 - that earned the scientists involved a Nobel Prize in 2017. He notes that “within just eight weeks of the announcement of this momentous breakthrough, in April 2016, an unknown US Navy aerospace engineer named Dr Salvatore Pais filed a patent for a revolutionary spacecraft driven by gravity waves that was straight out of Star Trek.” Moreover, he notes that “Oddly, he still got his patent, largely because the Navy vouched for his discovery,” and that “most incredibly of all, his navy boss alleged that the gravity wave propulsion system in Pais's invention would soon become a reality” (italics in original). Indeed, although rather elusive, Pais has given several interviews, including one in which he explained the thorough process required to receive his patents (Pais, 2022). Thus, even with the secrecy surrounding his work, it appears that cutting edge research is at least suggestive of the feasibility of interstellar travel.

Furthermore, even if such technologies are currently beyond our capacity, they may not be beyond more advanced NHI civilizations. After all, we have reached the point of such possibilities being in our grasp after mere centuries of scientific development. Imagine what a civilization could achieve after several thousand years of scientific progress, let alone longer. Indeed, such possibilities may exceed even the extraordinary ideas above, including exploiting “traversable wormholes” - speculative structures, predicted by the theory of general relativity, that link disparate points in spacetime - to take a “short-cut” through spacetime (Frolov et al., 2023). Moreover, even if an interstellar voyage did take thousands of years, while impossible for biological organisms as we understand them, it would most certainly be feasible if craft were piloted instead by AI. To that point, Avi Loeb - director of the Galileo Project, which is systematically searching for “extraterrestrial technological artifacts” - suggests this would be the most likely scenario if some UAP really were extraterrestrial (Loeb & Kirkpatrick, 2023). A related idea also gaining currency is the possibility of UAP being piloted by “biological robots” that are wholly or partially synthetic, as suggested for example by Garry Nolan, who argued that such entities might be designed to act as an “intermediary” between their creators and humans (Verma, 2023a).

This is why, he speculated, reports of alien encounters usually involve entities with surprisingly similar physiognomy to humans, which one might not necessarily expect given the myriad of evolutionary pathways that intelligent life might take in the cosmos. Indeed, Grusch (2023) made a similar point, suggesting that an NHI could be “engineering beings to look like us for ease of contact.” On a similar note, philosopher Bernard Kastrup (2023) argued it was “plausible that a more technologically advanced alien civilisation would have vast control of their own genotypes and phenotypes, thereby designing themselves” for their various purposes, including space travel, “which could benefit greatly from DNA manipulation.” Indeed, it has been pointed out - for example by investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen (2016, 2019) - that we have already made progress along these lines, with organizations like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) having created numerous “biohybrids” that are functional combinations of “animal and machine.”

Intriguingly, allegations along the lines of Nolan's and Grusch's ideas surfaced recently on social media, causing a stir among UAP commentators, when an anonymous Reddit user called “EBOscientistA” (2023) filed an incredibly detailed post claiming that from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s he/she “worked as a molecular biologist for a national security contractor in a program to study Exo-Biospheric-Organisms (EBO)” at the Battelle National Biodefense Institute. The post claimed the institute actually possessed four EBO bodies (with other EBO entities held elsewhere), and that the program aimed to “elucidate the genome and proteome basis of these organisms.” Most relevantly here, their account aligned with Nolan's suppositions: “we've discovered that the EBO genome is a chimera of genomes from our biosphere and from an unknown one. They are artificial, ephemeral and disposable organisms created for a purpose that still partially eludes us.” There is no way to know the validity of these claims at present of course.

However, most commentators leaned towards these at least being plausible and worth investigating, including Nolan (2023) himself, who wrote, “This is a challenge to the [UAP] community to determine if they can come together and analyze this logically.” Moreover, their plausibility was lent further credibility by the UAP Disclosure Act, which specifically refers to the possibility that authorities actually have EBOs in their possession, referring to “biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence” (p.6). Furthermore, in terms of the suggestion of synthetic biological entities, it may be significant that in Grusch's testimony to the Congressional UAP hearing he used the specific and unusual term “biologics” to refer to EBOs in the government's possession. In subsequent speculation as to the precise meaning of this term, some commentators pointed to Pasulka's (2018) chapter on “The spectrum of human techno-hybridity,” where she writes that “Biologics is a category of bioengineered living tissue” (p.182).

Moreover, aside from dramatic claims about secret UAP “crash retrievals,” even in the public domain are tentative indications that some UAP may be extraterrestrial in origin. Avi Loeb for instance has studied two such potential artifacts. One is an object dubbed Oumuamua - a Hawaiian term meaning “scout” - that passed through our galaxy in 2017 (Bialy & Loeb, 2018). This seemed to have various properties that “defied easy natural explanation” (Billings, 2021), including being shaped like a 100-meter-long cigar, being at least 10 times more reflective than typical space rocks and, after passing by the sun, accelerating faster than could be explained by the star's waning gravitational grip alone. To Loeb, the most likely hypothesis is that this was a laser sail, perhaps “a derelict from some long-expired galactic culture,” although others have disputed his conclusions (Wright et al., 2023). Moreover, Loeb made headlines recently regarding a second potential interstellar artifact, with his Galileo Project embarking on an expedition to recover the remains of an unusual meteor which fell into the Pacific Ocean in 2014. Based on its speed and other apparent properties (e.g., toughness), it was formally recognized as having an interstellar origin at “the 99.999% confidence [level] in an official letter from the US Space Command under DoD to NASA” (Loeb, 2023c). Their search was seemingly successful (Loeb et al., 2023), retrieving more than 700 “sphericals” from the object's apparent crash-landing path. As summarized by Loeb (2023d), his team are confident that some of these sphericles have a “composition pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before,” specifically being “heavily enriched by factors of hundreds in Beryllium (Be), Lanthanum (La), and Uranium (U), relative to the solar-system standard composition of CI chondrites.” Somewhat similarly, Garry Nolan has analysed pieces of “molten metal” that appear to have been “dropped off” by UAP, and has concluded that these appear to be technological creations (as shown in Yes Theory, 2023); for example, one had “magnesium ratios that were so far off Earth normal [that] the only way you could interpret them, frankly, is that they were engineered, or they were part of an industrial process.”

As to the origin of the sphericles retrieved by Loeb, there are various hypotheses. One is they came from a “highly differentiated crust of an exoplanet with an iron core.” Another more “exotic possibility” is that they “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin” - produced by an extraterrestrial civilization - though establishing this would require finding the intact object itself (rather than the sphericles, which are thought to be molten droplets from its surface), which he hopes to recover in a future mission. If they are indeed technological artefacts, Loeb has offered various suggestions for their engagement with Earth, from probes being deliberately sent here (e.g., piloted by AI), to discarded “space trash” from other civilizations. Regarding the first theory, Loeb recently wrote a paper - significantly coauthored with Dr Kirkpatrick, director of AARO - that aimed to articulate a set of “physical constraints” based on “standard physics and known forms of matter and radiation” that would help in identifying genuinely anomalous UAP (Loeb & Kirkpatrick, 2023, p.1). Kirkpatrick's mere involvement in this paper is itself significant: given he is leading the UAP investigation for the US government, the very fact he hypothesizing extraterrestrial origins for UAP is an extraordinary development. Specifically, they suggest that Oumuamua - or any large artificial interstellar object - might function as a “parent craft that releases small probes during its close passage to Earth” akin to “dandelion seeds.” Although the entity recovered by Loeb in 2023 preceded Oumuamua, six months prior to the latter's closest approach to Earth, a meter-sized object also recognized as interstellar collided with Earth, which Loeb and Kirkpatrick suggested could be one such “seed.”

Another idea proposed by Loeb (2023a) is that such artefacts may constitute “space trash”: “Over the past ten billion years, other technological civilizations could have littered the volume of the Milky Way disk with numerous dysfunctional devices. This trash may have accumulated in interstellar space like plastics in the ocean.” On that note, returning to the statistical likelihood of intelligent civilizations elsewhere, Loeb suggested that while “many scientists regard an encounter with a relic from another technological civilization as extraordinarily unlikely,” he regards it as “common sense to search for space trash of the type that we produce since there are billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky-Way” (my italics). On that note, Freitas Jr. (1983) has argued for a systematic Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts - SETA, modelled after SETI - and has proposed various likely candidate regions in our solar system for such a search. In any case, while scholars may not necessarily endorse all Loeb's or Nolan's findings and conclusions, it is nevertheless significant to see figures of their stature talking openly about interstellar travel.

A final point to note regarding potential UAP “crash retrievals” is the observation - made by skeptics like DeGrasse Tyson (1996) - that it seems implausible for an NHI to be capable of interstellar travel only to “bungle their arrival by crash-landing on Earth.” On first glance, this is a reasonable question. However, some commentators suggest that one potential explanation involves our use of nuclear weapons; indeed, there has been a close connection between UAP and nuclear activity and installations over the decades (Hastings, 2015) - as for example shown in documents recently released by the Department of Energy about UAP incidents near their facilities between 2018 and 2021 (Hanks, 2023) - with strong indications that UAP have a particular “interest” in our use of this technology. This interest could extend to the possibility that such weapons may have the ability to interfere with UAP themselves, especially in the way a detonation can create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) - a brief but extremely powerful magnetic field - that could somehow destabilise a UAP, as discussed by the likes of NASA Mission Specialist Bob Oechsler (2014), and more recently DeLonge (2017), Elizondo (2021a), and Coulthart (2023). Thus, even if an NHI and their technology were exponentially further advanced than us human beings, we could still cause them trouble with our more primitive capabilities, just as a pre-historic caveman could bring down an aeroplane by throwing a rock into its engine.

Attention has focused for example on a series of high-altitude nuclear tests conducted over the Pacific in 1962, known as the “Fishbowl” series (Department of Energy, 2000). The first weapon was “Bluegill,” a sub-megaton nuclear warhead with an estimated nuclear yield of 400 kilotons, which had four attempts: Bluegill (June 2), Bluegill Prime (July 26), Bluegill Double Prime (October 16), and Bluegill Triple Prime (October 26). Of these, the fourth was successful, detonating at just over 48 kilometres. Most relevantly, footage of this test seems to show an object tumbling out of the nuclear fireball, as analysed on the Reddit r/ UFOB forum (e.g., by Harry_is_white_hot, 2023), which some observers have suggested is a UAP. Likewise, there are rumours that something similar happened with the more powerful Starfish Prime test on July 9, 1962, a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead that detonated roughly 240 miles above the Pacific (Plait, 2012). Elizondo (2021a) for example was asked about Starfish Prime, and said, “there may be some truth that an electromagnetic pulse of energy can interfere with whatever this technology is and its propulsion. Like a bubble. And if it interferes with it, you [have] ... a very interesting scenario where whatever is keeping these things up in the sky no longer does that.” Moreover, Oechsler, DeLonge, and Coulthart have suggested this may not simply have been an accident, but could have been a reason for these tests. As Coulthart put it, “I'm increasingly led to the view by sources that the United States has been involved in targeted kinetic engagements with UAPs using EMP weaponry to try and bring them down, and they've done so successfully.”

While we of course cannot know the veracity of such allegations and explanations, they do give one pause in immediately dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrial UAP based on objections around the apparent unlikelihood of such craft “crashing.” Moreover, this is not the only viable interpretation of any such crashes, with various other potentials discussed for example by Jesse Mischel (2023), creator and host of the American Alchemy podcast (who over the summer was granted an exclusive interview by David Grusch). One idea, raised by the likes of Vallee, is that retrieved UAP could be some kind of “gift” from a NHI, perhaps because they want us to develop technologically and prosper. Another option could simply be that UAP are expendable, in the same way humans fly drones into volcanoes. Ultimately though, any motives and actions of such NHI are likely to be fundamentally inscrutable: such might be the cognitive chasm between us and them that Mischel likens us to “an ant colony ... wondering why humans do certain things, we're just so epistemologically limited.” Nevertheless, such speculations at least open several avenues of plausibility for how authorities may potentially have come to acquire interstellar UAP.

unidentified anomalous phenomena

Conclusion

The starting point for this paper was the observation that although UAP have been a topic of public interest and concern for over 75 years, authorities have tended to downplay their significance, at least in public. However, recent developments have meant some institutions - notably military, intelligence, and political communities - have begun to take the topic more seriously, including being open to an ETH. Significantly though, this openness has generally not yet permeated the scientific community, which till tends to dismiss extraterrestrial explanations for UAP as “paranormal.” However, this paper has argued for taking such hypotheses seriously, particularly given work around, (a) the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations existing per se, and (b) the viability of interstellar travel. As such, hopefully we shall see greater scientific engagement with this important and mysterious topic over the years ahead. Indeed, we may find that scientists will be called on soon to help with this task.

When Grusch (2023b) was asked in July what would happen next in relation to his allegations, he replied that first “some intel officers and other people in and out of government . are about to file complaints similar to what I did,” including people who actually worked on crash retrieval programs themselves (“literally the dudes touching the stuff”). Then, he said, by “February of 2024 we should have a presidential panel on UAP disclosure, looking at the crash retrieval issue and everything. And then within 300 days of the enactment of the [Disclosure] Act, we're going to get some kind of, I think, government statement next year on this topic. The tsunami wave is building, and I don't think we're going to totally backpedal anymore. I think 2024 is going to be, knock on wood, potentially wild, in a good way.” Of course, these events and consequences may yet still not come to pass.

Reporting by the likes of Sharp (2023a) and Shellenberger et al. (2023) suggest some powerful senior officials within the intelligence and military communities are actively working to prevent or at least stall this kind of “disclosure,” possibly because some also have conflicts of interests in their connections to private aerospace companies. However, if Grusch's predictions are even remotely accurate, the scientific community will soon need to play its part in helping to explore this existentially important topic, which may include the revelation that humans are - as many people have long wondered, feared, hoped, or believed - not alone in the universe.

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