Are UFOs Really Extraterrestrial?

Term: UAP: unidentified anomalous phenomena, the term the U.S. government now uses in place of UFO.

Term: Extraterrestrial hypothesis: the idea that some UFOs are craft from other planets or star systems.

Term: Speed-of-light barrier: the limit set by Einstein’s special relativity, under which no object with mass can reach the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second.

Are UFOs Really Extraterrestrial?

Probably not. The strongest scientific objection is distance. The stars are too far away, and nothing known to physics can cross that distance fast enough to make visits from other star systems plausible. The alien-visitor idea depends on physics no one has ever observed.

The distance problem

The nearest star system to ours is Alpha Centauri. Its closest member, Proxima Centauri, sits about 4.24 light-years away. That is roughly 25 trillion miles.

The fastest spacecraft we have sent out of the solar system is Voyager 1. It travels about 38,000 miles per hour. At that speed, the trip to Proxima Centauri would take about 75,000 years.

Proxima is the nearest neighbor. The Milky Way spans roughly 100,000 light-years. Any craft that reached Earth from a star with a habitable planet would have crossed a far greater distance than 4.24 light-years.

The speed-of-light barrier

Einstein’s special relativity, published in 1905, says no object with mass can reach the speed of light. The closer an object gets, the more energy it needs, and the energy required grows without limit.

Here is a rough example. Take a craft with a mass of 10,000 kilograms, about 11 tons. To reach 90 percent of the speed of light, it needs about 1.2 × 10²¹ joules of kinetic energy. That is roughly twice the energy all of humanity uses in a year. The figure ignores fuel, waste heat, and every inefficiency in the engine. Even at that speed, the trip to Proxima Centauri takes about 4.7 years by Earth’s clock, and the craft has crossed only the nearest gap.

What about more advanced civilizations?

Some physicists have proposed ways around the barrier. The best known is the Alcubierre drive, described in 1994. It is a mathematical solution that would need exotic matter with negative energy. No one has shown that such matter exists in usable form, and no one has shown how to build a drive from it.

The barrier does not prove that no intelligence anywhere could ever cross space. It does show that the extraterrestrial explanation must assume physics we have never observed. That is an assumption without evidence behind it so far.

The reports raise a second problem. Researcher Jacques Vallée has argued since the 1960s that the way UFOs behave does not match the pattern of visitors from other stars.

So what are they?

If the visitors did not come from other stars, the next question is what they are and where they come from. The record includes government programs, military encounters, whistleblowers, physical evidence, and historical accounts that reach back centuries. That record points somewhere most people have never looked.

I lay out the full case, with sources, in my book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials. It is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.