|
核武基地附近經常看到UFO – M. Von Rennenkampff
|
瀏覽581 ｜回應3｜推薦1 |
|
|
|
The shocking history of UFOs and nuclear weapons
Marik Von Rennenkampff, 04/15/24
UFOs are no laughing matter on Capitol Hill. Beyond alleging the existence of surreptitious government programs to retrieve and reverse-engineer exotic craft of “non-human” origin, Congress mandated that the Department of Defense document and report any UFO incidents “associated with military nuclear assets, including strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships.”
Lawmakers are right to focus on the nexus between UFOs and nuclear technology. Many of the best-known and most credible unexplained sightings occurred in alarming proximity to our most sensitive nuclear assets and facilities.
In 2004 and 2015, for example, U.S. Navy fighter jets flying off nuclear-powered aircraft carriers recorded the three UFO videos that catalyzed significant public and congressional interest in the phenomena.
But interactions between UFOs and ultra-sensitive U.S. nuclear assets date back nearly eight decades. New Mexico, ground zero for America’s nuclear weapons development programs, is the site of a remarkable number of baffling, unsolved UFO incidents.
In late 1948, for example, dozens of pilots, defense personnel and scientists associated with the famed Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons programs began seeing mysterious “green fireballs” in the sky. Such objects were frequently observed flying on a perfectly horizontal trajectory, often moving directly toward nearby aircraft. In 1949, two major Los Alamos conferences on the incidents, which drew the likes of famed nuclear weapons physicist Edward Teller, failed to identify the source of the phenomena.
Lincoln LaPaz, then one of the world’s leading authorities on meteorites, observed the “fireballs” personally and, in partnership with the Air Force, conducted a thorough study of the mysterious phenomena. As Time and Life magazines reported contemporaneously, LaPaz “blasted” the notion that the objects were meteorites, bolides or other naturally occurring phenomena.
The bizarre incidents, along with their apparent connection to nuclear weapons research, remain unexplained.
Nearly a decade after the first “green fireball” sightings, an extraordinary UFO incident was reported at Kirtland Air Force Base, a key nuclear weapons testing and storage facility in New Mexico.
On Nov. 4, 1957, two control tower operators with more than 20 years of combined experience said they watched from a remarkably close range as an elongated wingless and engineless object descended slowly over the runway and hovered over the base’s nuclear weapons storage area. The craft then shot off at a remarkable speed. Radar confirmed the presence of the unknown object, which was ultimately lost from scopes as it shadowed a departing cargo plane at an uncomfortably close distance of half a mile.
A few years later, on April 24, 1964, Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora reported observing a similarly strange, elongated UFO, this time on the ground. Upon seeing Zamora’s approaching cruiser, he said, two small human-looking beings beside the UFO entered the craft, which then rapidly departed. Amid a national media frenzy, authorities mounted a sweeping investigation of the incident.
Army and Air Force officers, FBI agents and meteorite expert LaPaz all vouched for Zamora’s credibility and reliability. Moreover, a passing motorist corroborated his account, stating that he had briefly observed the craft, along with Zamora’s vehicle. A fellow Socorro police officer, arriving moments after the UFO would have departed, discovered a visibly shaken Zamora as well as smoldering vegetation where the craft would have been standing.
Importantly, this extraordinary encounter took place in the vicinity of the Trinity Site, where the first nuclear weapon was detonated in July 1945.
While credible observers reported countless other confounding UFO incidents in the vicinity of key New Mexico nuclear facilities, the UFO connection to nukes is not limited to the American Southwest.
One of the most perplexing reported UFO incidents, involving a multitude of simultaneous radar and visua observations, occurred in the skies over two of the largest nuclear weapons storage facilities outside of the U.S.
During the Cold War, British air bases RAF Lakenheath and Bentwaters hosted U.S. forces and nuclear weapons.
Over several hours on the night of Aug. 13, 1956, radar stations at Lakenheath and Bentwaters tracked multiple unidentified objects conducting extraordinary maneuvers, often at astounding speeds, in the skies above these two key nuclear-equipped bases.
The bizarre radar tracks were corroborated visually by witnesses on the ground and via radar and visually by pilots in at least two aircraft. Perhaps most remarkably — and disturbingly — radar operators watched in shock as the mysterious object outmaneuvered and subsequently chased the first of two British fighter jets scrambled to intercept it.
Twenty-four years later, it happened again. In a series of startling incidents in December 1980, the deputy base commander of RAF Bentwaters and several Air Force personnel reported observing mysterious objects at close range in a forested area just south of the base. According to the deputy commander, the UFOs were also observed via radar.
In an affidavit, the commander, who initially intended to debunk UFO rumors swirling around the base, stated that at least one of the mysterious objects projected “beams of light” around the nuclear weapons storage area at RAF Bentwaters. Audio recorded during the incident seems to corroborate such observations. According to the commander, other UFOs “moved in sharp angular patterns as though they were doing a grid search.”
In 1979, just one year before the events in eastern England, the New York Times and the Washington Post had reported on a series of alarming incidents at key nuclear weapons facilities in the United States.
The Post, citing then-recently released Defense Department documents, reported that “a string of the nation’s supersensitive nuclear missile launch sites and bomber bases were visited by unidentified, low-flying and elusive objects” in the fall of 1975. The incidents involved “unknown entities and brightly lighted, fast-moving vehicles that hovered over nuclear weapons storage areas and evaded all pursuit efforts.”
“Numerous daily updates,” the Times reported, “kept the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed of these incursions.”
The unnerving events have notable parallels to allegations by former Air Force missile officers, that UFOs had rendered nuclear weapons inoperable at Minot Air Force Base in 1966 and Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force’s long-time scientific consultant on UFOs, described how an unknown object high above Minot’s nuclear silos interfered with a missile command station’s communications equipment in August 1966. A local Minot, N.D., newspaper reported the extraordinary incident shortly after Hynek talked about it.
Hynek also described how a Border Patrol officer observed a metallic, disk-shaped object at remarkably close range just days before and not far from the Minot incident.
According to the officer, the silvery disk “was on its edge floating down [the] side of [a] hill wobbling from side to side about 10 feet from the ground.” The craft then “flattened out” and hovered briefly, exposing a “dome on top,” before tilting “back on edge” and disappearing “rapidly into the clouds.”
This incident was reported in the middle of a large field of Minot nuclear missile silos, the closest being only a mile and a half away. And the Border Patrol officer also reported that his radio stopped working as the metallic disk moved closer to him.
Hynek interviewed the officer and was left “personally satisfied that he is above reproach.” Moreover, according to government records, the officer “was not seeking publicity” and stated that if his sighting was publicized he would deny any knowledge of the occurrence.”
In recent years, a weeks-long series of bizarre “drone” incidents observed by dozens of individuals in rural Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming left federal and state officials stumped. Notably, some of the strange sightings were “clustered in an area that has quite a few [nuclear missile] sites.”
The nearby Air Force base denied any involvement in the perplexing incursions. Following an exhaustive, multi-agency investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded “with high confidence” that the odd incidents were “not covert military activities,” which only deepens the mystery.
In one instance, a Nebraska deputy sheriff reported “observing 30 to 50 [objects] flying independently of each other with a larger ‘mothership’ hovering for hours.”
At the same time, multiple reports described the objects as flying “in a grid pattern,” seemingly reminiscent of the “grid search” movements observed during the 1980 UFO incidents over the Bentwaters air base in England.
Some witnesses and media outlets undoubtedly observed planes and hobbyist drones during the 2019-20 incidents. But one of the objects passed just 200 feet above a Kansas Highway Patrol officer, who said that the brightly lit craft “made absolutely no sound at all, even though the wind was calm.”
Another witness, a retired meteorologist, also reported there was no sound as one of the objects “hovered over a [nuclear] missile command station within sight of his farm.”
In an astounding historical parallel, over the course of three nights in 1965, more than 140 Air Force personnel stationed at the same nuclear missile silos in Wyoming and Nebraska had reported nearly 150 mysterious craft exhibiting the same characteristics — “flashing lights,” “no sound” and only flying at night — as the unknown objects during the 2019-2020 incidents.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation. He was also an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
星雲文明何以難形成 -- Adam Frank
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
這篇文章屬於「科學小品」類，有別於「科學報導」或「科學假說/理論」。可以與本欄上一篇合看。
Galactic civilizations may be impossible. Here’s why.
The problem for galactic-scale civilizations comes down to two numbers.
Adam Frank, 12/11/24
Credit: knowhowfootage / Adobe Stock 請至原網頁觀看照片
Key Takeaways
* For galactic-scale civilizations to exist in our Universe, they would have to overcome two major hurdles related to physics and biology.
* One is the sheer distance between each society. The other is biological life span.
* Astronomer Adam Frank outlines the difficulties with each problem.
表單的底部
My new guilty pleasure is the video game “Star Wars Outlaws” (guilty only because so many gamers seemed to hate it — they are wrong). Like all “Star Wars” stories, it’s set in a galaxy far, far away that hosts a vast interstellar civilization. And, like all civilizations, it’s a hotbed of politics and commerce, diplomacy and war, art and culture. Science fiction is full of these kinds of galactic-scale societies. Star Trek, Dune, and Asimov’s Foundation series — they all play out against the backdrop of star-spanning civilizations.
But are such things possible? Do the laws of physics and the dynamics of social arrangements (even alien ones) allow for galactic societies? As much as I love them (how else could I become a Space Pirate?), I fear the answer may be “no.”
Two challenges for galactic-scale civilizations
The problem for galactic-scale civilizations comes down to two numbers. The first is the time it takes to cross between the stars (we will call this the “crossing time”: Tc). Considering Tc forces us to deal with another number, which is a fundamental constant of nature: the speed of light (represented by the letter “c”). As Einstein taught us, the speed of light represents the upper limit for velocities in the Universe. Nothing can travel faster than c, which is about 700 million miles per hour. While this may seem pretty fast (it is), the distances between the stars are so great that it still takes centuries to hundreds of millennia for light to reach us from all but the nearest stars. That means the time for a ship to reach across reasonable fractions of the galaxy must also be measured in centuries to hundreds of millennia. If your ship travels slower than light speed (which is what we will be stuck with for a while), then your crossing time (Tc) is even longer.
The second timescale we need to consider is how long an individual in a species lives. Let’s call this the “generational time” Tg. This is the timescale where politics and culture play out. While there may be longer trends that occur across civilizations, societies are made of individuals who are the agents driving the immediate dynamics.
So where is the problem? Well, it’s physics that sets the limits of Tc and biology that sets the limits on Tg. On Earth, there are no vertebrates that live longer than a few centuries (the Greenland shark being the longest-living example, potentially living up to nearly 500 years). That means a high-tech civilization made of Greenland sharks would still face the problem that interstellar travel times are way longer than life spans (i.e. Tg << Tc). Let’s consider for a moment what that means for the possibility of galactic civilization and that most fundamental activity: trade.
Let’s say you want to sign a contract, deliver goods, and collect your credits across an interstellar trading route spanning 500 light-years. Every step of the negotiations requires cooperation across multiple generations. You send out an offer and then must wait 1,000 years for a reply. Well, actually, it’s your great-great-great grandkid who gets the reply, who then counter-offers and waits another 1,000 years to see whether the offer is accepted. After a few more rounds of this, you finally send out your trading ship which, even if it travels at almost the speed of light, takes 1,000 years to make the round trip.
You see my point by now. All things that make a society a single structured whole become impossible on galactic length scales unless the members of that society are remarkably long-lived (and there even may be biophysical reasons why this is impossible for “thinking” creatures). The distances between the stars are so vast that only collections of very nearby stars might possibly form loose cultural alliances, i.e. societies. And even these will have their problems because of relativistic time dilation, which occurs when individuals traveling at light speed experience the flow of time differently from those on their destination planets.
Now, I am not saying that galactic empires are impossible. Maybe there is a way around the light-speed limit (though relativistic time dilation might be a factor in warp drive/worm-hole travel too). Or maybe all intelligent life becomes post-biological and “lives” for timescales that dwarf interstellar crossings. You must be open-minded when you think about these things. But you can’t be too open-minded or your brain will fall out. If you really want to think hard about the possibilities for life beyond Earth, you can’t just wave your hands at the physics and the physics that limits biological processes.
So, are there galactic civilizations? I am stuck right now thinking “no” but still hoping “yes.” I’m clinging to that hope because I really want to be a space pirate (the good kind). And now back to “Star Wars Outlaws”!
Featured Videos
* Michio Kaku: Quantum computing is the next revolution 請至原網頁觀看視頻
* 請至原網頁觀看其它視頻
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
四下無(外星)人之大濾網假說 - Paul Sutter
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
解釋何以我們在宇宙中感到孤獨的假說。
How the 'Great Filter' could explain why we haven't found intelligent aliens
But seriously, where is everybody?
Paul Sutter, 12/11/24
Credit: Yuga Kurita/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
"Where is everybody?" That famous phrase, uttered over lunch by eminent physicist Enrico Fermi, perfectly encapsulated what has since become known as the Fermi paradox: If life happened here on Earth and the universe tends to not do things only once, then life should also occur elsewhere. In fact, the universe should be teeming with advanced spacefaring civilizations.
Even when you account for every technological hurdle — limits in rocket technology, speed and life spans, as well as disease, warfare and anything else that could slow progress — the argument stays the same. Our galaxy is over 13 billion years old, which is more than enough time for spacefaring civilizations to spread throughout the Milky Way.
Indeed, we should see advanced civilizations everywhere — Dyson spheres, stellar engineering, artifacts littered across the solar system. But we don't. So where is everybody? Hence the paradox: Something in this line of reasoning has to give. We've gotten one, if not many or all, of these statements wrong. Which one?
first detailed in 1996 by economist Robin Hanson. The most distilled essence of the Great Filter argument is simple: Very few, if any, civilizations in the universe make it to the advanced spacefaring stage.
That's it. Fermi's paradox is broken in its assumption that intelligent spacefaring civilizations are common.
Considering that humanity is on the cusp of achieving regular spacefaring status, the Great Filter might seem a little ominous. But it doesn't have to be. The issue is that we don't know exactly when or where the filter actually happens. There are a lot of steps between "random planet with the right ingredients for life" and "vast interstellar empire."
Hanson broke it down into nine separate jumps that life requires to go from the little to the big leagues: the right star system, reproductive molecules, prokaryotic life, eukaryotic life, sexual reproduction, multicellular life, some vague category of intelligence (like using tools), advanced civilization with the potential for colonization and, finally, once all the pieces are in place, a gigantic galaxy-spanning explosion of life.
So where's the bottleneck? Is it at the beginning, with life-ready systems hard to come by? Is it somewhere in the middle, where life never gets a start or just spends billions of years swimming around in oceans? Or is it toward the latter stages?
From what we can observe, the ingredients for life are incredibly common in the universe, so it's unlikely that the filter is there. As for the appearance of simple life, we have only one example to go on — but we do know that as soon as the conditions for life were possible on Earth, life appeared. This suggests life may be more common than we think.
As for the appearance of intelligence, we know that our kind of intelligence emerged only once in the history of life on Earth and that it took billions of years to show up. So again, from this one solitary data point, it seems that simple life may be common, but intelligence is rare. So maybe that's the filter: It's hard to evolve intelligent beings.
But if intelligence is common, then we have a lot to worry about. That means it's easy for intelligent species to arise on a planet, but something stops them from going galactic. That could be either the universe doing the job — say, a giant asteroid wiping them out — or, more likely, the species destroying itself. That's because any species that can travel into space must be able to harness incredible amounts of energy — energy that could very easily be turned to destructive purposes before that species has learned to live on other worlds.
The Great Filter is not the only potential solution to the Fermi paradox, and even within the context of the Great Filter, humanity's fate is not sealed. Perhaps galactic colonization is harder than we think or is boring for reasons we haven't realized yet. Maybe progress isn't linear, and our future technological development will focus us inward. Or perhaps we're already on the other side of the filter, we are one of the few species to make it to this stage, and the galaxy is essentially our cosmic playground.
But seriously, where is everybody?
RELATED STORIES:
—Are we alone? Intelligent aliens may be rare, new study suggests
—Why haven't we found intelligent alien civilizations? There may be a 'universal limit to technological development'
—Why haven't aliens contacted Earth? New Fermi Paradox analysis suggests we're not that interesting yet
本文於 修改第 2 次
|
|
《核武基地附近經常看到UFO 》讀後
|
|
|
推薦1 |
|
|
|
瑞訥坎福先生先後服務於美國國防部與國務院，想來他不是一位「空想家」。該文列舉許多人在核武基地附近觀察到UFO的案例；可惜的是，他沒有對這個現象提出「解釋」或「推論」。
我對UFO毫無研究，也就沒有任何值得提上檯面的意見。不過，過去一年多來，UFO議題相當火紅；擺擺龍門陣來湊個熱鬧，應該無傷大雅。
如果瑞訥坎福先生所述被證實，一個合邏輯的推論是：地球的核武試爆以及廣島/長崎轟炸驚動了外星文化；於是派出斥候前來觀察和了解。
如果這個推論站得住腳，我自然而然想到兩個問題：
1) 外星文化為什麼沒有攻擊地球？
2) 外星文化為什麼沒有來地球殖民？
答案應該很簡單：
a) 外星文化當家者分析蒐集到的相關資料後，認為地球的核武太原始、太低級；不值得搞星際遠征。三不五時來瞜他一瞜即可。
b) 外星文化已經建立出地球文化所嚮往的烏托邦或世外桃源；她/他們早就過著地球文化所憧憬的神仙生活。對地球這種「落後地區」不屑一顧。
如果這兩個答案還算得上八、九不離十，它們也自然而然的導出下面兩個結論：
A. 地球文化如果繼續「進步」下去，說不定會帶來被毀滅的結果。
B. 地球文化如果繼續「進步」下去，說不定有一天真的能夠移民到實實在在的烏托邦或世外桃源。
No guts, no glory！其此之謂乎？
本文於 修改第 4 次
|
|
|
本城市首頁
看回應文章
等級：8
