A Harvard scientist and the head of the Pentagon’s UFO office have drafted a paper that explores the possibility of an alien mothership hovering around the solar system, sending out tiny probes to explore planets.
Yes, you read that right.
They use the example of 'dandelion seeds' which are pipped out of the parent aircraft and are spread around earth to keep an eye on us - similar to the way humans send out spacecraft to explore planets.
Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, and Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), released the draft paper, called Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, on 7 March.
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The paper is yet to be peer reviewed.
Loeb is best known for flagging an unusual Near Earth Object (NEO) with the Pan-STARRS telescopes back in October 2017.
The interstellar object was named ‘Oumuamua and 'unlike Solar system asteroids or comets, ‘Oumuamua appeared to have an extreme flat shape and was pushed away from the Sun 'without showing a cometary tail of gas and dust'.
This raised the possibility that it was 'thin and artificial in origin'.
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Six months prior to the finding, a small meteor - IM2 - smashed into Earth and it got Loeb thinking.
It inspired him 'to consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions'.
Loeb told Live Science: "These 'dandelion seeds'... could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the sun or by a maneuvering capability."
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The pair then decided to look more into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs - the government's preferred term for UFOs).
"Equipped with a large surface-to-mass ratio of a parachute, technological 'dandelion seeds' could slow down in the Earth's atmosphere to avoid burnup and then pursue their objectives wherever they land," the experts explained in the paper.
Does this mean that there's actual aliens watching over us? Well, not quite.
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Loeb said that searching for 'resembles checking our mailbox for any packages that may have accumulated over time there, even if the senders are not alive anymore'.
Despite the discovery of ‘Oumuamua, it seems that not everyone in the field is convinced, as a letter published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics from 2021, read: "Given the likely cosmological timescales required to traverse between stars, we conclude that it is unlikely that ‘Oumuamua has been sent by an extraterrestrial civilisation and more likely that it is just an unusually shaped rock, which has happened to wander into the solar system.”
Anish Vij