What is a UFO? Its own initials define it: Unidentified Flying Object. Possibly the UFO phenomenon is, among all the myths that populate the world of Alternative Reality (which is neither real nor alternative), the most famous. About 4% of the world population admits to having seen a UFO (Gámez 1997). How is it possible that with over 200 million known sightings many people still refuse to accept the evidence of the UFO phenomenon? By the very nature of this phenomenon; Let’s explain again what UFO means: Unidentified Flying Object; This definition can include ANYTHING that appears in the skies, and cannot be identified.
And here we come to the second great definition of the subject that we are dealing with: unidentified, which is very different from unidentifiable; In fact, most UFO phenomena have a simple explanation: atmospheric phenomena, meteors, airplanes, planets (can anyone confuse a planet with a UFO? Yes: Gámez (1997) recounts how in 1985 the Basque police, the Aid Association en Carretera and the Red Cross chased the planet Jupiter overnight, mistaking it for an alien ship). The fact is that in 52 years there has not been a single irrefutable proof that UFOs are ships manned by non-human entities (the theory most accepted by ufologists, although there are others).
The purpose of this paper is to enumerate and briefly comment on all the legs that make up the chair of current ufology and see why and where it limps. I am not going to discover anything new; whoever wants more information can find magnificent examples in the mentioned bibliography.
The Origins (of the phenomenon)
As everyone knows, UFOs “officially” arose in 1947, when aviator Kenneth Arnold saw, while flying his plane, a series of lights that came and went “like dessert plates being thrown into water” (in USA do people throw dishes into ponds?). This affirmation had the double “value” of starting the ufological fever and defining its main protagonists in the way most people know them today: flying saucers. For possible explanations of what Arnold actually saw and a superb essay on the UFO cover-up see Ares (1997).
The fact is that flying saucers became part of the iconography of a world (and especially of the USA) that had not yet recovered from World War II and the consequences it had brought: the dominance of the atom and its terrible destructive power, and the incipient Cold War. It was for this reason that the US army quickly became interested in the subject. Why could they be alien ships? No, because they could be Soviet weapons. As soon as the army verified that behind the UFO phenomenon there were only rumors and unreliable reports, it stopped investigating it, although for ufologists this is not true, and what is the best proof to prove it? Well, the army doesn’t seem interested. Anyway…
But it didn’t matter, the damage was already done. In 1950 two books were published that were destined to light the fuse of the ufological phenomenon; one of them was The flying saucers are real, by Major (retired) Donald Keyhoe, at the time founder of NICAP, at the time the most important UFO association in the USA, and the other Behind the flying saucers, by Frank Scully, columnist for Variety; both books had an impact for the first time on the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs and on the concealment by the US government of reports, and even of crashed alien ships, recovered and kept secret in military installations. Scully’s book is of special value since it tells the story told to that columnist by two alleged technicians who were hired by the US government to analyze a crashed saucer. The two “techies” were later found to be two small-time con men who had tricked Scully by telling her a completely fabricated story, as the con men themselves admitted. How does a story that is later recognized as false by its authors become the cornerstone of the UFO phenomenon? Who knows.
And the origins (Planetary)
An extremely curious fact is the origin of UFOs, that is, where did they come from? With space exploration and advances in knowledge in the last 50 years, the origin of these objects has been moving away.
Let us remember that in principle UFOs were “something” of which their origin and even their own nature were unknown. When the extraterrestrial origin was established, the objectives were clear: Mars, Venus and the Moon. For example, George Adamski (Gómez, 1997), one of the most famous contactees, claimed to have traveled in flying saucers and to have seen rivers, cities and other nonsense on Mars, the Moon, Saturn and Venus. Despite the fact that space probes have disproved all his claims, they continue to be highly respected in UFO circles (Sheaffer 1994).
When space missions showed that no other planet harbored intelligent life (and it’s scarce on ours, from what we’re seeing) in our Solar System, UFOs had to move their base of operations beyond Pluto. Thus, we know aliens from worlds so many light years away that it is impossible for them, with the laws of physics, to reach Earth in a reasonable time. And, in the event that aliens left your world, say, 50,000 years ago, why do they come here? What is it that attracts them? From the outside, our planet is just like any other, and radio transmissions, the first thing that would have made you look at our planet, have only been able to travel a few tens of light-years since they were first broadcast. Without a “lighthouse” to look at, such as radio transmissions, a civilization 200 light-years away would have around 200,000 suns to explore before reaching our world, which is an enormous amount of time from when a civilization begins to explore space until it finds us, possibly more than a million years ago (Sagan, 1992). In some cases, aliens come from worlds that simply cannot exist, such as those who contacted Eduard Meier, who claimed to come from a planet located in the Pleiades, which are too young (50 mya) to have planetary bodies (Gámez 1997). ). which is an enormous amount of time from when a civilization begins to explore space until it finds us, possibly more than a million years (Sagan, 1992). In some cases, aliens come from worlds that simply cannot exist, such as those who contacted Eduard Meier, who claimed to come from a planet located in the Pleiades, which are too young (50 mya) to have planetary bodies (Gámez 1997). ). which is an enormous amount of time from when a civilization begins to explore space until it finds us, possibly more than a million years (Sagan, 1992). In some cases, aliens come from worlds that simply cannot exist, such as those who contacted Eduard Meier, who claimed to come from a planet located in the Pleiades, which are too young (50 mya) to have planetary bodies (Gámez 1997). ).
But the extrasolar origin is not the only one for the elusive flying objects: other theories postulate that they belong to a race that lives under the Earth, which is hollow, or on the Moon, equally hollow, or from a planet that orbits just the other. extreme of Earth’s orbit, making it invisible, or from other dimensions. Let’s look at some of these theories.
The hollow Earth? Is our world the closest thing to a lamp globe? Do the crew members of the UFOs live where not even Metro line 6 reaches? That is what the school of Ray Palmer thinks, another prominent ufologist, who one day saw a composition of satellite images (ESSA-7) and discovered that there was a huge hole hundreds of kilometers in diameter at the North Pole; Furthermore, Palmer’s people believe that the interior of the Earth is hollow and that it is illuminated by the central sun. Unfortunately, Palmer did not realize that the composition was just that, a composition and not a single image, and that it had been made during the six-month polar night, so the area was never illuminated during the taking of images. Furthermore, if we accept the story of the hole and the sun and, by reductio ad absurdum, shouldn’t there be a gigantic beam of light visible in much of the Northern Hemisphere (and in the ESSA-7 image), coming from the light of the central sun coming through the hole? What’s more, shouldn’t the oceans fall through the hole inside the Earth, evaporating when they get close to the sun and causing a gigantic geyser? Although, who knows, maybe Robert Peary had a few beers in the bar next door and then he told us the milonga that he had reached the North Pole.
But we continue with the same question. Is the Earth hollow? Man, thanks to the development of seismic we know the interior of our planet quite well, and we know that it is fundamentally solid -except for the outer core, which is molten- (Anguita, 1991). Furthermore, plate tectonics, which includes multiple levels of convection occasionally reaching the core and sinking lithospheric fragments, is in contradiction with the existence of a hollow planet, so the Hollow Earth theory should explain all such phenomena. . And what’s more, Shouldn’t the value of the gravitational pull be different from what it is if the Earth were hollow? Shouldn’t its moment of inertia be other than what it is? How is a hollow planet formed? A new hypothesis for the generation of astronomical bodies would have to be developed to explain how a series of planetesimals “agree” to merge with each other, leaving a central void. The same can be said of the presumed hollowness of the Moon, the satellites of Mars and the like.
And the “Anti-Earth”? Some “contactees” believe that the UFOs come from Clarion, a planet located exactly at the other end of the Earth’s orbit, which would prevent us from detecting it…would it? No; What is certain is that celestial mechanics tells us that only three months after the presumed formation of this planet, it would be detectable through the disturbances it would cause to the orbit of Venus; furthermore, in just thirty years it would be directly visible from Earth during total solar eclipses (Condon 1969). If Clarion existed, it would be as familiar to us as Venus.
Another good candidate is the hypothetical planet that orbited between Mars and Jupiter. According to some contactees, UFOs are ships manned by the survivors of a civilization that destroyed their planet in a nuclear conflagration and who come to warn us not to do the same. Unfortunately, the asteroid belt does not appear to originate from a destroyed planet, for several reasons; One is that many of the meteorites, most of which come from the asteroid belt, have not differentiated, because they have not suffered enough heat to melt, which would be almost unthinkable if they were made up of planetary debris, in which case we would have differentiation, metamorphism and other processes that planetary materials undergo at the temperature and pressure conditions of the interior of the planets (Anguita, 1988). Another proof against this theory is that the average age of the meteorites is the same as that of the Solar System, which forces us to think that either the meteorites are remnants of the primordial nebula, or that 4,550 ma ago formed a planet on which, in a few million years, and in the midst of the hell that the Great Meteor Bombardment supposed, life appeared, evolved into forms of intelligence that developed technology sufficient to literally destroy a planet, the planet was in fact destroyed and the survivors have thrown more than 4,500 ma wandering through space and occasionally approaching our world. And, by the way, what nuclear explosion would be capable of destroying a world? Let’s give some examples: the Hiroshima atomic bomb had a power of 20 kilotons, the equivalent of 20. 000 tons of TNT (Asimov, 1992). Now let’s look at a large amount of energy applied to one point: a meteorite impact similar to the one that possibly caused the Terminal Cretaceous extinction; Morrison and Chapman (1995) calculate that such an impact causes an explosion of the order of 108 megatons, that is, five billion (5,000,000,000) times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, all concentrated at a single point. This cataclysm caused a crater 300 km in diameter, that is, the impact directly affected an area of just under 71,000 km2. If we consider that the Earth’s surface is approximately 523,889,474 km2, we can estimate the percentage of area directly affected: 0.01% of the Earth’s surface.
despite the fact that millions of children believe in all of them with unshakable faith; In the same way, no matter how hard I try, I can’t materialize thousand-dollar bills in my pocket, rather they dematerialize.
