UFO experts admit alien ‘motherships’ could be flying through our solar system and visit Earth

The head of the government’s UFO office says alien ‘motherships’ could be flying through our solar system and sending probes to Earth in a new science paper.

The draft paper, published last week DailyMail.com has learned, has also sparked a row with the UFO chief’s predecessor over the physics of strange craft seen in our skies.

The six-page article, titled ‘Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’, was co-written by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon‘s UFO unit called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and former Harvard Astronomy Department Chair, Professor Avi Loeb.

Loeb is also the founder of the Galileo Project, which aims to use high-resolution telescopes and artificial intelligence algorithms to spot and photograph UFOs around Earth.

He gained national attention for his theory that an interstellar comet that passed through our solar system in 2017, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, could in fact be an alien probe, and has written books on the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

His new paper with Kirkpatrick was published on Loeb’s website on March 1.

In the article, the scientist and the top intelligence official hypothesized that aliens may have long ago sent a ‘mothership’ craft across the galaxy, with the ability to launch its own smaller probes to visit interesting planets it passes – including Earth.

‘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 and Kirkpatrick wrote.

They wrote that current sky-scanning telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope would miss such small objects, whereas ‘our deep space radars and space fence’ could pick up meter-long incoming UFOs up to 36,000 km in the air – and we therefore should keep an eye out for them.

‘Such objects could also become optically detectable as they get close to Earth, especially if they create a fireball as a result of their friction with air,’ they wrote.

In an exclusive interview, Loeb told DailyMail.com that his team at Harvard, where he now serves as Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation, is currently using a large campus telescope to scan the skies for such probes or other UFOs, and are planning to set up a second telescope in the coming months as part of his Galileo Project.

‘We are just hypothetically raising possibilities,’ he said. ‘NASA is now designing things that will land on Mars with a parachute shape. These are things that we are planning, and we should consider them as possibilities for other civilizations.

‘Our planet is not unique. There are billions of planets like the Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. So why would we think that this is unusual?

‘I have not seen data that supports any of these. It’s just a possibility. But with the Galileo Project we are starting to collect data now and we will analyze it, but it’s too early to say anything.’

Loeb and Kirkpatrick’s draft paper also discusses ‘physics-based constraints’ for the kind of signs we should look for from UFOs – or as the government prefers to call them, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

The two men argue that it is impossible for an object to travel faster than the speed of sound in Earth’s atmosphere without creating a sonic boom, and that very fast moving objects always create a ‘fireball’ or a fiery tail in the air as friction with air molecules causes them to burn up.

They say that as a result, any footage that appears to show objects traveling at supersonic speeds without such characteristics, must be a misidentification – and is likely showing a smaller, slower object closer to the camera, or some other explanation.

‘If you’re claiming very fast moving objects, you’d better verify you can calculate the distance, so that you are sure about it,’ Loeb told DailyMail.com.

‘If indeed it’s moving so fast, it should have left an imprint. You can’t just say an object moves fast while at the same time you don’t see any of these signatures.

‘Someone who has crappy data, fuzzy images, or something without triangulation: you can’t claim ‘new physics’ without actually proving beyond any reasonable doubt that you measured the distances correctly.

‘If you’re seeing them [UFOs], it means they interact with light, it means they interact with electric and magnetic fields, because that’s what light is. And it means they must interact with the atoms and molecules of air, because air molecules interact with the electric and magnetic forces.’

Kirkpatrick and Loeb’s stance is at odds with the famous descriptions given by some Navy pilots of ‘tic tac’-shaped objects videoed off the West Coast in 2004, described as flying over the ocean with no visible means of propulsion, then zipping 40 miles in less than a minute – at least three times the speed of sound – with no sonic boom or fiery trail.

The ‘tic tac’ and another object encountered by Navy pilots in 2015 were videoed on their F-18 jets’ infrared camera, called ‘FLIR’, and the videos leaked to the New York Times in 2017, sending shockwaves around the world and reigniting popular interest in the UFO topic.

But the UFO office chief Kirkpatrick and Loeb appeared to pour cold water on cases of strange objects caught on FLIR, suggesting that alleged supersonic craft may in fact be slower moving objects closer to the camera.

‘One of the most common sets of data within the military holdings comes from FLIR (forward looking infrared) pods,’ the authors wrote.

‘These sensors provide an accurate resolved image of relative thermal measurements across the scene. Typical UAP sightings are too far away to get a highly resolved image of the object and determination of the object’s motion is limited by the lack of range data.

‘The range is usually estimated using the flight dynamics of the platform and some fixed points in the scene – if either are available. The error in estimating the range gives rise to a significant variation in the calculated velocity and is subject to human bias and error.’

The comments in the paper drew a fiery reaction from Dr. Travis Taylor, a physicist who in 2019 served as the chief scientist for the government’s UFO office.

‘That is so uncreative and typical of a Harvard physicist. That’s so ridiculous,’ Taylor told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview this weekend. ‘Two equations does not a science paper make.

‘Clearly he has not read Chris Van Den Broeck’s [1999] paper or another paper called A View from the Bridge.

Taylor was referring to a theory that some UFOs seen flying in extraordinary ways are using a kind of ‘warp drive’ that bends space-time around the alleged craft, freeing it from the effects of gravity and allowing it to travel at extreme speeds without interacting with air or water molecules around it.

‘There’s some sort of physics there that we don’t understand,’ Taylor said.

‘It’s either magically frictionless – which would be an amazing technology – or it’s in sort of a pocket universe, which fits with the Chris Van Der Broeck paper, being a warp bubble that doesn’t interact with the things in this universe.’

Taylor made his comments in an interview with DailyMail.com at AlienCon, a UFO conference in Los Angeles, California this weekend where he was a guest speaker.

The combative comments show a widening divide between the ex heads of the UFO office, formerly called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and the current leadership under Kirkpatrick, on how to characterize weird objects seen in the sky, space and under water.

Loeb also revealed that he will be going on an expedition in May to salvage a roughly three-foot comet that crashed to Earth on March 9, 2017 – hoping to recover pieces of the ‘first interstellar material’ on our planet.

He told DailyMail.com he wants to retrieve pieces of the comet from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea, and look at its material for signs it was artificially made rather than natural.

‘Six months before ‘Oumuamua’s closest approach to Earth, a meter-size interstellar meteor (IM2) collided with Earth,’ Kirkpatrick and Loeb’s paper said.

‘The coincidences between some orbital parameters of ‘Oumuamua and IM2 inspires us 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.’

‘I will be going in a couple of months to find the fragments of the first interstellar material,’ Loeb told DailyMail.com in his interview this weekend. ‘The task is to see what the composition was. Is it natural like a rock, or was it artificial in origin, like stainless steel or some alloy?

‘It’s not a cheap expedition, it will cost $1.5million. We have the boat and an exceptional team with the best people in the expedition game. We will do our best. And I will be on the boat.’