Analyzing the unidentified

Some of you may have seen the piece done on 60 Minutes a few days ago about UAPs -- unidentified aerial phenomena -- which most of us call UFOs.

It was brought to my attention by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link where I could watch the entire segment (it's about fifteen minutes long, and well worth the watch).  What stood out to me was that now that the government has gotten seriously interested in these reports, we're finding out that they're (1) common, and (2) bizarre enough that even a skeptic would have trouble coming up with a sensible scientific explanation.

One particularly compelling example is from the commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz, David Fravor.  Fravor and three others saw a bizarre UAP in 2004 that included "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" performing maneuvers including descending 25,000 meters in less than a second.  Best of all, the sightings were backed up by radar tracking.  It started when they noticed an area of roiling whitewater in an otherwise calm sea, and went in to investigate.  Fravor says:

So as we're looking at this, her [referring to Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who was in another plane flying at Fravor's wing] back-seater says, "Hey, Skipper, do you..."  And about when that got out, I said, "Dude, do you, do you see that thing down there?"  And we saw this little white Tic Tac-looking object.  And it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area...  The Tic Tac's still pointing north-south, it goes, click, and just turns abruptly.  And starts mirroring me.  So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up...  It was aware we were there...  I want to see how close I can get... vAnd it's climbing still. vAnd when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears.

Seconds later, the object (or one like it) was caught on radar tracking -- by the USS Princeton, which was sixty miles away!

If this was just one isolated report, it'd be curious enough, but former Navy pilot Ryan Graves says this kind of thing happens every day.  Pilots have been reluctant to speak up about it because of the chance of facing disbelief and ridicule.  But thanks to people like Luis Elizondo, formerly of AATIP (the Pentagon's now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), who has worked to get video and audio evidence of UAPs declassified, the phenomena have come to the attention of the powers-that-be (and not just via such dubious conduits as The History Channel).

It worked.  Senator Marco Rubio, at the time head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked for a complete (and unclassified) report to be given to the Senate on these sightings by next month.  He said, "I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously.  I want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in.  That there be a place where this is catalogued and constantly analyzed, until we get some answers.  Maybe it has a very simple answer.  Maybe it doesn't...  Anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat."

People who are dubious about these reports having an extraterrestrial origin naturally lean toward it being evidence of advanced technology from rival governments, especially Russia and China.  While I am certainly not ready to leap at "aliens" as the answer either, the idea that the sort of thing Fravor and Dietrich report is Russian or Chinese surveillance technology just doesn't make sense to me.  I grant you there are undoubtedly tech programs over there that we here in the United States don't know about, but we're not talking about technology that's ten years ahead of us; what these reports detail (and Fravor and Dietrich's story is just one of hundreds) comes right out of Star Trek.

I find the whole thing fascinating.  I am reminded, of course, of the line from astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  It stands for 'unidentified.'  Well, if it's 'unidentified,' that's where the conversation stops.  You don't say something is 'unidentified' and then go on to say that it 'must be' anything."

But it leaves us with a mystery.  I don't agree with Tyson's opinion that the conversation should stop here.  Surely such an apparently common phenomenon warrants serious inquiry.  I'm also not ready to jump to Marco Rubio's stance that what we're seeing is a threat; if these things -- whatever they are -- have the capabilities they appear to, they're technologically advanced enough that if they'd have meant us harm, they'd already have done it.  I more tend to agree with investigative journalist Leslie Kean, who said, "Most sightings that people have – Oh, I see something in the sky! – those kinds of sightings can usually be explained: the planet Venus, airplanes, comets, shooting stars, birds.  Let’s say five to ten percent are the cases that any conventional explanation can be ruled out; those are the cases that are of interest.  Those are worth investigating."

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Unalloyed truth

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had an article about claims of a decades-long investigation by the Pentagon of the UFO phenomenon.  While I don't doubt that such a program exists, the article claims that there are warehouses full of "alien alloys" that have been declared unanalyzable.

The conclusion, of course, can only be that they came from outer space.

The article's authors, Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, write:

Under [NASA employee Robert] Bigelow’s direction, [Bigelow Aerospace Company] modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that [military intelligence expert Luis] Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.  Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes...  

“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program.  “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff.  He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”

I have two responses to this.

First, we are way beyond da Vinci in our understanding of the universe and in the development of technology to study it; this is a serious false analogy.  Second, once you claim that there are actual artifacts to study, you've moved beyond the realm of anecdote into something that's scientifically verifiable.  At that point, you better have the goods -- and be willing to admit it if it turns out that the answer isn't what you hoped it would be.

The week after the article went public, Scientific American's Rafi Letzter wrote a response to it, saying much the same thing (although in far greater detail).  Letzter writes:

"I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science.  "My opinion? That's quite impossible." 

Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals.  They're very common - in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are - and very well understood.  Brass is an alloy.  So is steel.  Even most naturally occurring gold on Earth is an alloy made up of elemental gold mixed with other metals, like silver or copper... 

"There are databases of all known phases [of metal], including alloys," May Nyman, a professor in the Oregon State University Department of Chemistry, told Live Science.  Those databases include straightforward techniques for identifying metal alloys.  If an unknown alloy appeared, Nyman said it would be relatively simple to figure out what it was made of.

Well, as we've seen over and over, the woo-woos are nothing if not persistent.  Just a couple of days ago, a response to the response appeared over at Mysterious Universe.  The gist of the article is "there are too alien artifacts and UFOs," but there was one bit of it that stood out from the rest.  The author of the article, Brett Tingley, writes:

While I’m sure that's true enough of everything we’ve found on our planet, I just have to wonder: given the vastness of the universe, is it actually impossible for unknown elements or alloys to exist?  Seven new elements have been discovered here on Earth in the last thirty years, while the majority have been discovered in the last four hundred.  On a long enough timeline, who knows what tomorrow’s science will uncover?

This is a roundabout example of the Argument from Ignorance: we don't know, so the explanation must be _________ (fill in the blank with your favorite loopy claim, paranormal phenomenon, or deity).  Normally, the Argument from Ignorance is hard to counter except to point out that our ignorance of something isn't indicative of anything but our ignorance; you can't use it to prove anything.  But wound up in here is an interesting bit that we can analyze from a scientific perspective; the claim that there could be undiscovered elements in "the vastness of the universe."

Here's the problem.  Mendeleev constructed the first periodic table of the elements by noticing some odd patterns -- that there were groups of elements that had similar chemical properties.  After some years of messing about to figure out what was going on, he was able to construct a grid that placed these elements into columns and rows.  And, most interestingly, there were holes -- places in the grid that there should be an element, but none had thus far been discovered.

And one by one, those holes were filled.  Then advances in nuclear physics allowed the creation of the transuranic elements -- the ones beyond uranium, atomic number 92, which are short-lived radioactive substances that do not occur naturally (any of them created by the supernovae that gave rise to the elements in the Solar System would long ago have decayed away).  We're now up to element 118, oganesson.

So Tingley is right that there have been new elements discovered in the last thirty years.  The problem is that most of them have extremely short half-lives and are highly radioactive, so the idea that UFO debris could be made of any of these newly discovered (newly created, really) elements is ridiculous.  But how about the other piece of his claim, that there could be other stable elements we haven't discovered yet?

Sorry, but that doesn't work, either; the periodic table has no holes left to fill, as you can see on the above illustration.  We can be extremely confident that we've got 'em all, and the only additions will be at the unstable and short-lived upper end.  So despite Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation constantly blathering on about how the phaser beams can't damage the alien ship because it's made out of an alloy of the elements gorblimeyum and gobsmackite, this isn't really possible.

Thus our labeling of Star Trek as "fiction."

I'm pretty certain that if the metallurgists and chemists were to examine the warehouse full of debris, they'd find any metal fragments to be composed of plain old ordinary metallic elements.  Now, there could be some piece of alien technology in there -- Puthoff's "garage door opener" -- but my guess is that if there was such incontrovertible evidence of alien visitations, the scientists would know about it.

Sorry for raining on your parade, if you're a UFO enthusiast.  I get your angst.  I would like nothing better than to have proof of extraterrestrial intelligence (or, even better, extraterrestrial visits, because that would mean that the aliens had figured out how to manage travel across interstellar space).  But until we have more than talk about "mysterious alien alloys," I think we need to once again table this entire discussion.

St. Paul's Letter to the Klingons

In an investigation of wasteful government spending, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) has publicized the fact that the Pentagon sponsored a seminar (at the cost of $100,000) called "Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too?"

I wish I was making this up, but if you don't believe me, here's the source.  All of this rather undercuts Governor Romney's contention that we can't cut military spending without jeopardizing American national security, doesn't it?  Especially given that the folks at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that sponsored the event hired noted astrophysicists LeVar "Geordi LaForge" Burton and Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols as keynote speakers, and had a gala "Come As Your Favorite Alien" dinner party afterwards.  One speaker, an unnamed philosophy professor who was called upon to address the topic brought up in the title of the event, concluded that Jesus only died for humans; the Klingons are on their own, sin-forgiveness-wise, not that they probably care.  I suspect that any priest who was brave enough to tell Gowron he had to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers because he'd told a fib last week would soon be missing important body parts, so it's probably just as well.

It is not the overall silliness of the workshop that I want to address here, nor the bloat in the Pentagon's budget.  What I'd like to look at is the central contention of the workshop -- which is what would happen to organized religion if intelligent life were found elsewhere in the universe.

It's probably facile to say, "Nothing.  There being life elsewhere wouldn't change belief in a deity here on Earth."  But think about it; almost every major discovery that science has made in the past thousand years has had the effect of moving humanity further out of the center of the universe.  From Copernicus (the Earth isn't at the center), to Kepler (the planets don't move in idealized perfect circles), to Darwin (humans evolve just like everything else), to Mendeleev (everything is made of the same set of elements), to Watson, Crick et al. (all organisms, including humans, encode genetic material the same way), everything we've found has led to the view that we're not really very special at all.  Humans are just one more animal species, made of the same stuff and behaving the same way as other animals do, on a little spinning ball of rock around a quite ordinary star in a quite ordinary galaxy.  The recent discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets, some of them fairly earthlike in characteristics, makes it seem like even what we have here on Earth may not be all that unusual.

Now, myself, I think all of this is wicked cool.  I love it that our systems work the same way as other animals; not only does it explain so much about our behavior, it also means we're inextricably connected to the natural world.  I think any blow to our species' ego is far outweighed by the fact that these discoveries are just downright fascinating.

But think about how antithetical that view is to the basic view of Christianity and the other major religions.  The mainstream religious view -- and I realize that there are individual people, and probably sects of religions, who do not believe this -- sees humanity as something special, something unique in the history of the universe.  In fact, Christianity's central tenet is that humanity is so special that the all-powerful, omniscient deity incarnated his son as one of us. 

So, what would happen if we were to discover intelligent alien life?  My sense is that a lot of folks with a strictly religious worldview would have a hard time incorporating it.  If you remember the wonderful movie Contact, which looks at just such a situation, recall that the ultrareligious wingnut who had been harassing the main character did have exactly that reaction -- to the point that he sacrificed his own life (taking out a great many other people with him) to protect the purity of the religious message.  While this movie is (of course) fiction, I don't think that such a thing is outside of the realm of possibility.  The discovery of intelligent alien life would be, in a way, the ultimate pulling-out-of-center for the human race, and one that I think some worldviews couldn't handle.

On the whole, I think the question is an interesting one to consider.  So even if DARPA probably shouldn't have spent 100 grand to throw their big Star Trek-themed party, it's an idea worth investigating.  I would, however,  be more interested to hear what Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku have to say on the matter than LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols.