The research around Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which are really just UFOs by another name, is often wrapped up in the feasibility of intelligent life visiting Earth. But in a new draft paper (that has yet to peer reviewed), Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and Harvard University’s Avi Loeb, stripped away the more philosophical questions about life on other planets and instead focused on the physics of “highly maneuverable” UAPs specifically.
While designing “physical constraints” in order to analyze these UFOs, Kirkpatrick and Loeb determined that the recent UAP observations do defy the laws of physics, stating that “the friction of UAP with the surrounding air or water is expected to generate a bright optical fireball, ionization shell and tail—implying radio signatures.” However, many of the UAPs studied show no signs of these signatures.
Despite what seems like a clear sign that something alien is going on, the paper stresses that such anomalies could be explained by more mundane means, i.e. that our human-instruments just aren’t sensitive enough to understand what’s going on. The authors write:
“The lack of all these signatures could imply inaccurate distance measurements (and hence derived velocity) for single site sensors without a range gate capability. Typical UAP sightings are too far away to get a highly resolved image of the object and determination of the object’s motion is limited by the lack of range data.”
In other words, these UFOs could be nothing more than sensor-induced optical illusions. This is a noteworthy explanation as Loeb has been described as more of a UFO “believer” than his colleagues. Loeb created some controversy in 2017 when suggesting the cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua (meaning “messenger from afar arriving first”), one of only two interstellar objects to ever enter the solar system, could be an artificially made object.
Read the rest of the story in Popular Mechanics
