And now, for something completely different: A UFO organization claims to have advanced materials from a UFO. Color me skeptical. Excerpts, with my comments:
Former Blink 182 frontman and current UFOlogist Tom DeLonge says that his UFO research organization has acquired “potentially exotic materials featuring properties not from any known existing military or commercial application.” It has not yet provided any proof to back up this claim.
Because there are no exotic materials.
For 70 years, the UFO community has been engaged in active debate regarding physical debris from unidentified flying objects, but the general public got a true taste of that in 2017 when the New York Times ran an article about a secret Pentagon UFO program. The article tantalizingly noted that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, whose interest in UFOs is no secret, modified buildings to house “metal alloys and other materials…that [allegedly] had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”
And yet, strangely, no actual evidence of those alloys has been released for independent confirmation. Because there aren’t any.
These “alien alloys” quickly became the topic of great intrigue. DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, a UFO research outfit that may or may not be broke, said that it has recently acquired some metamaterials, though it’s not clear whether they are the same ones referenced in the NY Times article.
They aren’t. Because there aren’t any.
In an interview with Motherboard, Dr. Chris Cogswell, who hosts the Mad Scientist Podcast and who holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering, explained that we need to be incredibly cautious before jumping to conclusions. He expressed that layered magnesium and bismuth alloys are pretty common and are certainly easily explainable by science.
“Micrometer thick layers are made by mistake in metallurgy facilities all the time. The purification of lead by removing bismuth using magnesium is a perfectly reasonable explanation,” he said.
In other words, there aren’t any alien materials: There are much more reasonable, Earthly explanations for any “exotic” materials.
Any claims of actual evidence related to UFOs should be taken skeptically, of course, but To the Stars has in the past been the first to publish video of military pilots seeing UFOs, so its claims cannot be dismissed immediately out of hand. It’s also worth noting that there are, of course, many materials scientists working on new alloys and composites all the time.
These claims can be dismissed immediately out of hand. No military pilots have seen UFOs, if you define UFOs as “alien spacecraft visiting Earth.” There have been unexplained sightings that might be other aircraft, or atmospheric artifacts, or just plain imagination.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If alien spacecraft have visited Earth, they would have come from a civilization that is thousands, maybe millions of years more advanced than us. There would be no reason for them to be stealthy. They wouldn’t bother to hide from us. Their presence would almost certainly be obvious and probably wouldn’t end too well for us.
UFOs are as one with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster: They just plain don’t exist.
