Over the last week we have read a stream of information about the possibility that a “mother ship” was sending small probes to explore the solar system and the Earth with it. The truth is that for now there is no proof, not even indications, that this is true. What we do have is a number of aerial phenomena for which the authorities continue to seek an explanation and a striking hypothesis.
History of a draft. All the fuss has been preceded by a draft that was published in the Harvard University repository. The document, which indicates that it is a work still under review, speculates on the possibility that the so-called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) may respond to small alien probes.
The authors start from the orbits that two interstellar objects, IM2 and Oumuamua, took as they passed through the solar system. These two asteroids are two of the four interstellar objects that we have detected to date either swarming through our solar system or crashing into our planet.
A thought experiment. “Are there any functional alien probes near Earth? We don’t know,” the authors explain in the draft. The draft speculates on the possibility that these objects could have an extraterrestrial origin but be something more like space junk than functional probes.
Even so, they explain that their orbit “inspires” them to derive their theory about a possible origin of the UAPs. From there they conduct a kind of mental experiment to understand what conditions such ships would have to have.
A hypothetical mission. In their experiment, the authors imagine an object similar to these rocks, coming from another planetary system. It would be a scout ship that, as it passed through our star, would release a myriad of small ships (similar to cubesats, which would have to be a maximum of about 10 centimeters to not be detected).
The text indicates that the intentions of such a ship would necessarily be exploratory. Since its propulsion would not imply speeds greater than that of light, it would have to have been sent long before the appearance of intelligent life on our planet.
“It is irrational to ensure that the intention of a probe like this, launched in the distant past, had something to do with the human species,” its authors say in the draft.
A director of the Pentagon and an old acquaintance. Part of the commotion comes from the signatories: Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist and an old man known for not being his first controversy related to extraterrestrials; and Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Department of Defense’s All Domains Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The US federal authorities have become serious in recent months with what is happening in their skies and it is to be expected that even more so after the controversy that occurred with the latest events in this area. The AARO was launched just a year ago to manage these investigations.
Its function, according to the Pentagon itself, is to “synchronize efforts throughout the Department of Defense, and other US federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify, and attribute objects of interest at or near military installations, (…) and other areas of interest; and, if necessary, mitigate any threats to the security of national security operations.”
This includes UAPs. It is perfectly normal, taking into account this renewed attention, that both the detection of strange phenomena and the appearance of hypotheses that try to explain them proliferate. It is therefore more important than ever to distinguish between facts and theories, between the confirmed and the speculative.
In Xataka | Annihilation or irrelevance: the great debate about what will happen when we meet aliens
Imagen | European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser
