NASA’s Ames Research Center

The UFO Community Still Believes — and Science is Starting to Listen

April 7, 2019
ExoNews Editor

by Chabeli Herrera March 19, 2019 (orlandosentinel.com)

• Over the past two years, scientists, politicians and professionals have increasingly been willing to touch the taboo subject of UFOs and perhaps lend a little credence to those who still believe.

• In December 2017, the New York Times reported that the U.S. had funded a secret, $22 million project to study UFO claims from 2007 to 2012. Declassified video taken in 2004 by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets off the coast of San Diego showed a craft with no apparent propulsion moving at alarmingly fast speeds. Navy pilot Commander David Fravor who witnessed the Tic Tac-shaped craft told the Washington Post that it was “something not from Earth.”

• Harvard’s astronomy department chair, Avi Loeb, along with colleague Shmuel Bialy, wrote in a publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters that an interstellar object seen passing through our solar system called Oumuamua “is a lightsail, flowing in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment.” Loeb theorized that, “Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

• NASA’s Ames Research Center scientist Silvano Colombano went on record recently to suggest that NASA and the scientific community should be more open-minded in its approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. NASA is preoccupied with finding biosignatures through its Center for Life Detection Science than interested in analyzing alleged UFO sightings.

• MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) does analyze UFO sightings. It has 3,500 members in 42 countries. Barbara Stusse, 80, has been coming to MUFON meetings for three years. She says that her mother saw a UFO in 1947. In 1965, she read about Betty and Barney Hill and “believed it”.

• Kathleen Marden is MUFON’s director of experiencer research. She was 13 years old in September 1961 when her Aunt Betty Hill and her Uncle Barney Hill saw a UFO in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. There were two hours they couldn’t account for, and Barney was sure he’d seen eight to eleven figures dressed in black shiny uniforms that were “somehow not human”. Under hypnosis, the Hills related how they were abducted and physically examined inside the UFO. “They examined their hands, they took their shoes off, they examined their feet, they did tests on them that appear to be testing their nervous systems, as well,” says Marden. She has written about the government’s ‘tampering’ with the Hill case. But lately Marden has seen a recent shift in the credence that people give to the UFO phenomenon, with the 2017 New York Times article being the turning point.

• Trish Bishop of Kissimmee, Florida, relates her story of March 2013 at dusk when she saw a tall, muscular man wearing a formfitting tan colored uniform, boots and gloves was lingering in her backyard at the edge of a forest. But his face wasn’t human. His eyes bulged far out of their sockets. His jaw was over-sized. And his skin was white as chalk. Paralyzed with fear, she pretended not to watch the man while she called for help on her phone. Then man appeared to be climbing invisible steps. When he was about 10 feet off the ground, he turned his back to her and pulled himself up “into a UFO?” she thought — and he was gone. After four years, she got the nerve to report the incident to MUFON.

• The challenge with UFO and alien sightings has always been the lack of evidence. Bishop said she was too scared to take a photo of her alien. Little to no consequential evidence exists in other cases. University of Central Florida psychology professor Alvin Wang thinks that people project their predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories, and seek out others who reaffirm that belief. “[T]hey get …confirmation support, when they are members of UFO believers community,” said Wang.

He appeared as if a hologram at first — then solid — suddenly there and clear as you or I, at the edge of the forest behind Trish Bishop’s home in Kissimmee.

It was a Thursday in March 2013, the glow of the afternoon tucking in for the day behind the trees. He stood tall, at least 6-foot-3, perhaps 220 pounds and certainly muscular, wearing a formfitting tan colored uniform, boots and gloves. He lingered by the crape myrtle tree in the middle of the backyard.

When he turned around, it was his face, she remembers, that stopped her.

Bulging eyes jutting so far out of the sockets that Bishop wondered whether he could close them. Skin white as chalk.
And a jaw so large, it dispelled any notions the government worker had of the visitor being human.

“If you compare a human jawbone to his, we would be a chihuahua to a pit bull,” Bishop said.

Paralyzed with fear, she watched as what she believed to be an alien appeared to climb invisible steps, stopping often to snatch glances at her from where she sat on her back porch, fumbling with her phone to appear as though she couldn’t see him.

Her finger was pressed on the number “9” to dial for help.

When he was about 10 feet off the ground, he turned his back to her and pulled himself up — “into a UFO?” she thought — and was gone.

Bishop sat stunned. “I’ve got a freaking alien in my backyard,” she thought.

It would be four years before she told anyone her story, before she’d discover the Mutual Unidentified Flying Objects Network, a nationwide organization 50 years old, and file her report under case number 84886 with the local Florida chapter.

But she worried: Who would believe her?

These days, more people than you’d think.

Across restaurants and meeting rooms in the United States, MUFON groups still gather every month to discuss cases like Bishop’s with the enthusiasm that once gripped the nation during the Cold War, when UFO sightings still made a splash on the front page.

The Space Coast group, made up of some former NASA employees and engineers, has 118 members, the largest in the state. Across the U.S. they number 3,500, with additional offices in 42 countries.

For many years, they were alone entertaining UFO theories. No more.

In the past two years, scientists, politicians and professionals have increasingly been willing to touch the taboo subject and perhaps lend a little credence to those who still believe.

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NASA, Harvard, and the Pentagon Are All Taking UFOs Seriously Now

December 23, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Alex Hollings December 12, 2018 (thenewsrep.com)

• The idea of alien life is continuing to gain acceptance among the world’s preeminent scientists and experts.

• NASA – Silvano Colombano, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center, made international headlines with his assertion that our planet may have been visited by extraterrestrial life, just not in a form we readily comprehend. Colombano later explained that the intent of his analysis was to get people to take the concept of aliens visiting earth a bit more seriously than our culture permits. “My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study,” he said.

• The Pentagon – A year ago, the New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon earmarking some $22 million for the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was devoted specifically to investigating UFO sightings made by U.S. military personnel. Among the sightings the Pentagon had investigated was the now infamous “Nimitz incident,” which saw U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets scrambled on multiple occasions to intercept UFOs in the airspace around the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group.

• Harvard – This has also been a time of impressive scientific discoveries pertaining to exoplanets, some that Harvard scientists believe could potentially harbor life with technology so advanced, we humans struggle to comprehend what it could even be. A series of repeating Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) that have been recorded from a specific distant galaxy has led to a debate between scientists who simply can’t come up with a plausible explanation for the immense amount of energy being released with each burst.

• A more recent Harvard paper contends that a cigar-shaped object called ‘Oumuamua that entered into our solar system from deep space last year may have actually been artificial. “‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” a Harvard paper asserted, citing the celestial body’s apparent acceleration as it departed our solar system as evidence. It propelled itself forward more so than gravitational assistance and the release of gasses or water vapor would allow.

This past Monday, a paper written by Silvano Colombano, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center, made international headlines thanks to the paper’s assertion that our planet may have been visited by extraterrestrial life. The ensuing media frenzy, Colombano admits, lost sight of his actual points in favor of exaggerated headlines and click-bait assertions… but the deeper premise remains: the idea of alien life is continuing to gain acceptance among the world’s preeminent scientists and experts.

The paper asserts that alien life may not come in forms we readily comprehend — in fact — it almost certainly would need to be vastly different from life we’ve seen thus far in order to survive the rigors of extended space travel. In keeping with that assertion about the nature of alien life, Colombano extended his line of thinking to the technology they may need to employ in order to traverse deep space.

“Considering further that technological development in our civilization started only about 10K years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years, we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 Million times that amount,” Colombano wrote about the type of technology an alien civilization may utilize.

Since his paper made the global rounds, he has attempted to set the record straight about his analysis; explaining that his real intent was to get people to take the concept of aliens visiting earth a bit more seriously than culture permits at present.

“My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study, even if the chance of identification of some alien technology is very small,” he explained.

Within the pockets of the internet devoted to UFO’s, alien life, and the government conspiracies that always seem to accompany them, none of Colombano’s assertions were all that new or original. The ideas that alien life may not be carbon based, would need to possess technology too great for us to imagine, and could be visiting us here on planet earth, are all old tropes for their community. To be honest, even having that signal boosted by a prominent NASA researcher and professor may not have been enough to really ruffle many feathers, but it’s the timing of Colombano’s work that’s helped garner attention.

His paper, titled, “New Assumptions to Guide SETI Research,” came after a series of notable stories once again catapulted UFOs, or UAPs, as they’re now frequently called (short for Unexplained Aerial Phenomena), back into the cultural lexicon. The first was the New York Times breaking a story about the Pentagon earmarking some $22 million for the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was devoted specifically to investigating UFO sightings made by U.S. military personnel. Among the sightings the Pentagon had investigated was the now infamous “Nimitz incident,” which saw U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets scrambled on multiple occasions to intercept UFOs in the airspace around the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group.

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NASA Scientist Admits There May Be Some UFO Sightings That Cannot Be ‘Explained or Denied’

December 8, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Jasper Hamill December 3, 2018 (metro.co.uk)

• Silvano P. Colombano, of NASA’s Ames Research Center, says that some UFO sightings deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed out of hand. Colombano also insists that our species needs to be more ‘aggressive’ in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence and try to think about how alien technology might develop over millions of years.

• Colombano suggests that scanning deep space for radio waves could be a waste, as ET technology would be far different than our own. Instead, scientists should broaden their investigation into alien life by considering how technology might evolve over millions of years and what sort of society extraterrestrials would form.

• Colombano says that humanity needs to abandon its preconceptions of extraterrestrial beings as little green men. What if ET is actually a civilization of tiny hyper-intelligent robots, for instance? ‘If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find… we could start some serious inquiry,’ Colombano writes.

• Colombano admits that his fellow NASA researchers will often avoid studying UFOs simply because they believe interstellar travel is impossible, and therefore most UFO sightings are ‘hoaxes, mistaken perceptions or even psychotic events’.

• Colombano is still not prepared to say that we have already been visited by extraterrestrials. But he’ll accede that there may be “signals” to indicate that some UFOs cannot be explained or denied. Colombano thinks that humanity simply may not be able to grasp the truth about extraterrestrial civilizations at our relatively primitive stage of technological development.

• “[W]e are quickly becoming symbiotic with computer power,” says Colombano. “Our form of… intelligence may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to ours and no longer based on carbon ‘machinery’”.

• [Editor’s Note] There are numerous secret space programs in existence. The US Air Force, the US Navy, even NASA itself all have a secret space program that is kept hidden from the public. All of these secret space programs have been interacting with many types of extraterrestrial beings for decades. In the interests of continuing with their subterfuge, NASA has chosen a spokesman who is also unaware of what is really going on, or at least he pretends to be.

In a piece of research produced earlier this year, S. P. Colombano from the Nasa Ames Research Center called for an investigation into UFOs and said that some of the sightings could deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed out of hand.

He insisted that our species needed to be more ‘aggressive’ in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence and try to think about how alien technology might develop over millions of years.

‘In the very large amount of “noise” in UFO reporting there may be “signals” however small, that indicate some phenomena that cannot be explained or denied,’ the scientist wrote.

Although Colombano stressed that ‘we have not been, and are not being visited’ by aliens, he went on to say that we simply may not be able to grasp the truth about extraterrestrial civilisations at our relatively primitive stage of technological development.

He said that humanity needs to abandon its preconceptions about the nature of extraterrestrial beings – which may not be little green men but tiny, hyper-intelligent robots.

Colombano also claimed fellow researchers often avoid studying UFOs because they believe interstellar travel is impossible and fear most sightings are driven by ‘hoaxes, mistaken perceptions or even psychotic events’.

‘If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find, some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry,’ he wrote.

‘The intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all be produced by carbon-based organisms like us,’ he continued.

‘How might that change the above assumptions about interstellar travel?

‘Our typical life-spans would no longer be a limitation (although even these could be dealt with multi-generational missions or suspended animation), and the size of the “explorer” might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity.’

The Nasa researcher added: ‘Our form of life and intelligence, may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to ours and no longer based on carbon “machinery”.

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Tag: NASA’s Ames Research Center

The UFO Community Still Believes — and Science is Starting to Listen

NASA, Harvard, and the Pentagon Are All Taking UFOs Seriously Now

NASA Scientist Admits There May Be Some UFO Sightings That Cannot Be ‘Explained or Denied’