such progressive knowledge above American soil. Otherwise they would not only have run the risk of the sophisticated technology falling into the hands of their opponents, but also, quite incidentally, of a Third World War being triggered. Therefore, Luis Elizondo as well as former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe have both stated in several interviews that in their opinion Russia and China cannot be made responsible for all these UFO sightings, especially not the early ones.20
It can also be ruled out that the Americans used secret test aircraft to panic the crews of their own nuclear launch facilities and provoke an atomic war (now confirmed by the Pentagon: »The report also found the vast majority of incidents documented over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology …«21). At least in one case of such a UFO sighting, an atomic launch sequence was even set in motion temporarily. Renowned UFO researcher Robert Hastings details these incidents in his book UFOs and Nukes, for which he researched for decades including interviews with over one hundred and fifty witnesses. But also the UFO researcher and author Raymond Fowler reported already in 1990 about the special interest of UFOs in nuclear weapons and the concern of the U.S. military about the appearance of unknown flying objects over neuralgic facilities like the Los Alamos Atomic Energy Commission Project.22 Fowler quotes from a document formerly classified as secret dated 2 January 1952, addressed to the Director of Air Force Intelligence, Major General Samford.23 The document mentions »persistent reports of unusual flying objects over parts of the United States, particularly the east and west coast and in the vicinity of atomic energy production and testing facilities«.24 In the same year, General Samford held a press conference at the Pentagon on UFO sightings, extracts of which are available on YouTube.25 Raymond Fowler also reports that employees of the Minuteman nuclear missile program informed him in 1966 on the disruption of launch control equipment during UFO sightings over the missile sites on Strategic Command Bases.26 Robert Hastings describes similar cases in his 2008 book.
THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL HYPOTHESIS
This only leaves the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis, which is also preferred by the authors of the famous COMETA Report from 1999 (»strong presumptions exist in its favor«).27 The authors of this investigation report on UFOs and the witnesses cited therein include, among others:
— Denis Blancher, Chief Inspector of the Gendarmerie in the Ministry of the Interior
— Edmond Campagnac, former Technical Director of Air France
— Joseph Domange, General of the French Air Force
— Professor André Lebeau, former Head of the French National Space Agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales)
— Bruno Le Moine, former General of the French Air Force
— Denis Letty, retired Major General of the French Air Force
— Christian Marchal, Chief Engineer in the Corps des Mines and Research Director at the French National Space Research Institute ONERA
— Bernard Norlain, four-star general, former commander of the tactical air force of France and former head of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale (IHEDN)
— Jean-Jacques Vélasco, head of the French investigation group on unidentified airspace phenomena SEPRA (now GEIPAN), part of the French space agency CNES.
Even though COMETA is not a governmental research group, an investigation report that has been drafted by such heavyweights as the former head of the French space agency CNES, Professor André Lebeau, as well as General Letty and General Norlain, must be taken seriously. Why only very few media reported about it remains a mystery. The extraterrestrial hypothesis cited in the COMETA Report states that the UFO phenomenon is the result of alien intelligence. Specifically, it suggests that the objects observed must be spacecraft of extraterrestrial beings, wherever they come from.
When you talk about the existence of extraterrestrial beings, a psychological observation is very interesting. Most people (including scientists) nowadays probably have no objections to the assumption that there is other intelligent life out there somewhere. The unimaginable dimensions of our universe already speak for it. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years and is home to about one hundred to four hundred billion stars and more than one hundred billion planets.28 Until now it had been assumed that our universe, which is about 13.8 billion years old, contains about one hundred to two hundred billion galaxies. Recent analysis of so-called deep-field images of the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that this number must be corrected significantly upwards. It is said now that there are at least two trillion galaxies.29 On a large scale, these galaxies form huge patterns in the form of so-called clusters and superclusters that span the entire universe through filamentous structures. All these galaxies, in turn, contain hundreds of billions of stars. And what is even more important: Almost every day new planets are discovered around these stars. At the beginning of 2016, the number of these exoplanets was already at two thousand.30 In February 2017 it was reported that the star Trappist-1, forty light years away, is orbited by seven earth-like planets.31 Thus, the number of exoplanets increases steadily. As of 12 February 2021, there have been detected 4,680 planets in 3,457 solar systems.32
Due to such discoveries, it is considered more and more likely that the immeasurable vastness of our cosmos harbors other life-forms.
Things are quite different – from a psychological point of view – if one takes an all too earthly perspective on the question of extraterrestrial life. Too disturbing is the thought that an alien intelligence might already have visited »our« Earth or that even an interaction is taking place. Without the protective distance to such technically and intellectually superior beings, our beloved everyday life would be in massive danger. This fear of the ideological, social and religious consequences of direct contact makes many people resort to childlike protective mechanisms. Irrespective of all facts and evidence, what simply must not be is defiantly denied.
A popular objection to the extraterrestrial hypothesis are the huge distances to other stars and the speed of light as a speed barrier for massive objects. It is important to know that our nearest neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri, is already 4.24 light years away from us (one light year corresponds to about 9.5 trillion kilometers or 5.88 trillion miles; one light second is the distance light travels in one second, i.e. about three hundred thousand kilometers or 186,282 miles). Albert Einstein stated in his Special Theory of Relativity of 1905 that no object with mass can reach the speed of light or even move faster than light.
Especially for many physicists it is therefore completely impossible that an alien civilization could have ever visited us or will be able to do so.
However, it seems somewhat naive, if not arrogant, to explain interstellar journeys as impossible on the basis of our current physical knowledge. Even if our current technology gives the impression to the layman that we have already understood everything in physical terms, this is clearly not the case. For example, we still cannot decide whether gravity must be explained by space-time curvature according to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity or by quantum mechanics using hypothetical particles (gravitons). We know nothing about the nature of the dark matter that makes up much of our universe. Neither can we say anything about the negative energy that expands our universe at an accelerated rate. We have no idea what is actually behind quantum mechanics, what the true nature of elementary particles is, whether there is a need for numerous other dimensions – as string theory demands – and whether there is perhaps an infinite number of parallel universes.
All
