Top US military officials have said recent UFO sightings could be alien space probes sent to earth from a giant ‘mothership’.
A Pentagon official, Sean Kirkpatrick, in charge of the secretive military unit tasked with studying unidentified flying objects (UFOs) made the claims in a recent paper.
Mr Kirkpatrick heads up the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) set up to study reported UFO sightings.
The office was only established last summer but has already received hundreds of reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) - the new government name for UFOs - including from the US Air Force.
In the draft paper, co-authored by Harvard professor Avi Loeb, the pair claim that in recently-reported sightings of UFOs, the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be “probes” from an extra-terrestrial “parent craft”.
Interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped “Oumuamua” that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 “could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth,” the researchers claim.
These gigantic interstellar vehicles could shed probes as they travel through star systems like “dandelion seeds”, the report said, using the sun’s gravity to detach the probes as the mothership flew past.
The probes could use starlight to “charge their batteries” and the Earth’s water as fuel.
“Habitable planets would be particularly appealing to extra-terrestrial trans-medium probes, capable of moving between space, air and water,” the authors write in the paper dated March 7.
“From a large distance, Venus, Earth or Mars would be equally attractive for probes. But upon closer inspection, Earth would show spectral signatures of liquid water and vegetation.”
The paper, which has not yet been peer viewed, seen by the Politico website, shows that even the top echelons of government are worried about the UFO sightings, a significant shift from their traditional policy of denying sightings as the ravings of cranks.
Sean Kirkpatrick is a respected scientist who has worked with US Space Command and the Department of Defence. Hi co-author Professor Loeb heads-up The Galileo Project, a privately funded academic organisation searching for UFOs.
In their paper the pair say aliens might want to visit us to colonise earth or simply study us.
“What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders,” the authors write.
“As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet’s surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration.”
AARO works with other federal agencies to detect objects of interest near military installations or other areas of interest and is required to report regularly to Congress.
Recent events in US airspace, including the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon and three further unidentified flying objects by the US air force, means interest in UFOs is currently at an all-time high.
David Jewitt, a professor of astronomy at the University of California Los Angeles, however, said some of the claims in the paper are “highly questionable” and called the fact that Mr Kirkpatrick is a co-author “odd”.
“The Air Force is very good at bombing things, but as far as their research on UFOs, I think I’d trust them about as far as I can throw them,” Mr Jewitt told the website.
“It’s not clear that the Air Force and military capabilities are best suited to the study of aliens.”
