Despite doing my utmost to keep up with news from the World of the Weird, sometimes I miss one.
Apparently, earlier this year, UFO enthusiasts were leaping about making excited little squeaking noises over something called the "Buga Sphere." This is a metal sphere with strange markings that (allegedly) was first seen flying around in March, and then landed near the village of Buga, in western Colombia.
Anyhow, I can buy that some organic traces on the surface -- dirt, for example -- might have given a radiocarbon date of 12,560 years, but how that's relevant to the object's date of manufacture is beyond me.
It doesn't stop there. People report that the object is always cold to the touch, regardless how hot the ambient temperature is. Some who have touched it say they experienced vomiting and diarrhea afterward. Others say they "temporarily lost their fingerprints." Get your phone near it, and the phone will spontaneously shut off. Supposedly, it was x-rayed, and was found to be made of three concentric spheres separated by "microspheres." Another analysis found not only "microspheres," but fiber optics strands connected to a central rectangular object -- which, not coincidentally, matches the pattern etched onto its surface. (This latter link is to a YouTube video that evidently used auto-generated captioning, and the captions amused me no end by referring to the object throughout as the "booger sphere." Proving that despite my advanced degree, I still have the sense of humor of a fifth grader.)
The Buga Sphere even generated a "scientific paper." I put that phrase in quotes because it was posted to SSRN, a non-peer-reviewed paper preprint aggregator that is really little more than public online file storage. But the paper -- "A Unified Framework for the Buga Sphere: Quantitative Validation of a Negative-Mass Model Governed by Topo-Temporal Physics" -- is a doozy. Here's just one excerpt:
The Buga Sphere is a physical artifact whose constellation of observed properties-a drastic 8.1 kg apparent mass change, non-ejective propulsion, and a sustained endothermic signature-cannot be reconciled within the framework of standard physics. This paper presents a unified theoretical model that quantitatively explains all of these anomalies. We demonstrate that the Sphere's behavior is consistent with an internal network of engineered inclusions generating a negative-mass effect of 8.1 kg. The operation of this network is governed by the principles of the Axiom of Topo-Temporal Reality, a framework in which interactions with a fractal spacetime manifold permit novel physical phenomena. Our model correctly derives the system's 81% inertial shielding factor, its non-ejective propulsive force of F ≈ 3.2 × 10-11 N, and, crucially, predicts the observed 100 W endothermic cooling as a direct consequence of topological energy dissipation. The ability of a single, self-consistent theory to account for the Sphere's gravitational, kinematic, and thermal properties provides strong support for the model and suggests the Buga Sphere may be the first physical artifact of a post-standard-model physics.Needless to say -- well, honestly, apparently I do need to say it -- if even one of these claims were real, the physicists would be trampling each other to death to get to it first. It's a common layperson's misunderstanding of scientists; that they somehow are so wedded to the current models that they would willfully ignore, or even suppress, evidence to the contrary even if it was right in front of their eyes.
That science's primary concern is upholding the status quo.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, scientists are reluctant to publish groundbreaking results -- until they have sufficient evidence amassed. They're not hidebound, they're (justifiably) cautious. But if we really did have an object that could somehow swallow energy, change its inertial mass at will, and create a propulsive force seemingly from nothing?
They'd be all over that mofo before you could say "I Want To Believe." That they haven't leads me to the conclusion that none of those claims has ever been substantiated.
But the real issue here is that "we don't know who made the Buga Sphere or why" is not synonymous with "... so it must be alien technology." The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a hoax of human manufacture, and -- "Axiom of Topo-Temporal Reality" notwithstanding -- all of the wild stuff it's alleged to do is simply untrue. But -- hell, I've never studied this thing myself, much less had my fingerprints stolen by it. As Hank Green says, in a wonderful video on the scientific process called "Why It's Never Aliens" that you definitely need to watch:
Scientists want to discover extraordinary things. They want to turn everything on its head. That's how you win a Nobel Prize. And that can happen. It does happen. But when it comes to extraordinary claims, both the bias of wanting to discover something amazing and the lack of skill and experience we have with that discovery means that more scrutiny must be applied to the claim and the evidence. And if the evidence, wins out, then, amazing...But in the absence of amazing evidence, ignorance is the default state. Not knowing what's going on is super common and normal. Sometimes people will show me a video and say, "How do you explain this?" and my answer will be, "I don't know what's going on there, I don't have an explanation" and that will be seen by many as an admission that it is aliens, or something supernatural. But unexplained stuff is normal. For 99.999% of human history, we had no idea what lightning was. The sky would just explode during storms. We still don't precisely know how lightning works. When America was founded, everyone knew that if you held your breath long enough, you would die -- and no one, no one on Earth, had any idea why... Accepting an explanation for a mystery without any evidence is totally understandable, but it does not usually lead you anywhere even close to the truth.When you open up any science news story -- just open up any science news -- what you will see is people providing explanations for things that were unknown and unexplained yesterday. So it's just not surprising that people show around things that, for now, no one has a good explanation for.
This can be summed up by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy dictum, "We should not go from an abject state of ignorance to an abject state of certainty in one step."
So what, exactly, is the Buga Sphere? I don't know. My default, in the absence of evidence from a reliable source (i.e. from a peer-reviewed journal) is that it's very likely to be an artifact of terrestrial manufacture -- in other words, a hoax. Could I be wrong? Sure. But what I've seen thus far doesn't even inch me toward "it must be an alien probe."
Look, no one would be happier than me if it did turn out to be of extraterrestrial manufacture. It would mean we weren't the only intelligent, technological species in the universe, which would be tremendously exciting. It would give me something positive to focus on besides the ongoing train wreck that's currently happening in my country. I mean, let's face it; I want it to be aliens.
But that very fact means I have to watch out for accepting weak, shoddy, or (worse) manufactured evidence supporting that claim, precisely because I -- with my pro-alien bias -- would be that much more likely to fall for it.
I'll end with a justly-famous quote from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."
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