- Well, we can’t prove that there ISN’T an alien ship out there, at the very least.
We suppose there’s no point trying to hide it, so let us be clear. There is an alien mothership somewhere in our solar system and it’s bombing Earth with probes — probably for some nefarious reason.
Or at least that’s what a recent draft paper from the Pentagon would have you believe.
Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, and Sean M. Kirkpatrick, the director of Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), posit in the paper that an alien ship’s presence in our galactic neighborhood is “energetically viable.” They also suggest that the ship could be sending out smaller objects into space to chart it, like a dandelion’s seeds leaving the stem.
The authors claim these “dandelion seeds” could potentially make it to Earth. To support their theory, the duo points to two separate incidents.
Do you remember Oumuamua that visited our solar system in 2017? It was a bizarre cigar-shaped asteroid that exhibited strange movement patterns and other unusual phenomena.
Not only that, six months later after Oumuamua passed, a small meteor about three feet wide crashed into Earth. Coincidence?
Loeb doesn’t think so. He and Kirkpatrick suggest that the aliens could be sending similar objects out into space from the mothership to somehow probe interesting planets.
Just Seeds in the Wind
Now, in all fairness, they don’t seem to think that Oumuamua and the rock that fell to Earth were necessarily alien probes. But Loeb says that the two stellar objects got him thinking.
The close proximity of the encounters made him “consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions,” Loeb told LiveScience.
“These ‘dandelion seeds’ could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the Sun or by a maneuvering capability.”
In their paper, Loeb and Kirkpatrick dive into the theory deeper. They suggest that the probes could be using starlight and liquid water as their fuel.
They also state that they could explore Earth without us noticing them as they are potentially too small to register on our telescopes.
“Equipped with a large surface-to-mass ratio of a parachute, technological ‘dandelion seeds’ could slow down in the Earth’s atmosphere to avoid burnup and then pursue their objectives wherever they land,” the paper reads.
Once down on the ground, the probes could use whatever raw materials they find to make copies of themselves or just send data back to their alien masters. Yet, we may not have to worry about Earth’s secrets getting into extraterrestrial hands.
Loeb and Kirkpatrick state that it’s possible the probes’ builders are long gone. Intergalactic travel is so slow that the aliens could’ve gone extinct thousands of years ago.
But the probe wouldn’t know that, now would it?
Finding a Grain in a Sand Stack
That’s a wild theory, that’s for sure. But Loeb believes he may be able to prove it.
After all, he thinks he knows where one of the probes might be.
In 2014, a roughly 1.5-foot meteor from outside of our solar system — titled CNEOS1 2014-01-08 — plummeted into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Space science people detected that the meteor consisted of extremely hard rock — or possibly even metal.
Loeb thinks it may have been a probe. And he intends to find it.
The astronomer is mounting a $1.5-million expedition to comb the ocean floor and discover the meteor’s remnants. And when we say comb, we mean it.
Loeb’s team — with the assistance of U.S. military — have managed to narrow the object’s crash site into an area smaller than a square mile. Whatever’s left of it lies on the bottom of the ocean at a depth of a bit over a mile.
But knowing where the thing is won’t make finding it any easier. The meteor broke into tiny, tiny fragments during its flight and impact.
So, Loeb’s team is basically trying to find weird grains of sand among normal grains of sand. And you thought finding a needle in a haystack was hard.
Yet, Loeb feels positive about the expedition. If he manages to find anything resembling technology… Well, he has his evidence for alien life.
And even if the meteor indeed turns out to be a chunk of rock, Loeb thinks studying it will nonetheless be a victory for science.
“We will learn something new,” Loeb summarized for The Daily Beast.
Let no one say Dr. Loeb doesn’t at least have the right attitude for such a wild goose chase.
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