UFOs: Are they real?
By Quamrul Haider
Seventy years ago, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a businessman from Boise, Idaho, while flying his plane to Yakima, Washington, reported seeing nine dazzling, disk-shaped objects skimming the top of the Cascade Mountains at speeds estimated to be about 2,500 kilometres per hour. Two weeks later, on July 7, a rancher reported finding unidentifiable debrisnear Roswell, New Mexico.
Although Arnolds sighting was the first to gain nationwide attention, it was far from being the first unidentified flying object (UFO) seen by the earthlings. In fact, a UFO scare in the 1890s, after the publication of HG Wells The War of the Worlds, produced a wave of reports of strange objects seen sailing through the skies from coast-to-coast in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Interest in UFOs increased greatly during World War II, when American fighter pilots used the term foo fighters to refer to unexplained sights in the sky.
The sighting of UFOs have been reported throughout recorded history, thereby raising questions about life on other planets and whether extraterrestrials have visited our planet. Ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Aboriginals all had writings, inscriptions and pictographs on walls of flying machines and extraterrestrial beings in space suit.
In the decades since Arnolds sightings, there have been thousands of reports of various encounters of one sort or other with mysterious objects and entities from the heavens. The UFOlogists, as they are called, have eagerly embraced the UFOs as spacecrafts piloted by aliens from other planets in our solar system or planets belonging to other star systems. They believe that the aliens are visiting the Earth for a variety of purposes ranging from the performance of scientific and medical experiments on human beings, plants and animals to helping us prepare for entry into the age of interstellar voyage.
Each year in July, thousands of UFOlogists flock to the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell to mark the 1947 Roswell incident, as well as celebrate all things they deem to be extraterrestrial.
All the hyperbole about UFO sightings begs the question: Are UFOs real? Of course, we wont know whether UFOs are real until the aliens get in touch with us or we find evidence of their existence. However, if they are real, then their high speed, sharp-angle turns and supersonic flight through the Earths atmosphere without a sonic boom violate some of the basic laws of physics.
If we assume that UFOs are real, then calculations based on known propulsion system indicate that it would take thousands of years for an alien spaceship to travel the distance from even the nearest star Alpha Centauri A, which is 4.4 light years (41.6 trillion kilometres) away. The travel time could be cut down to few tens of years if their spaceships can move at speeds comparable to the speed of light.
Although travelling at near-light speed is theoretically possible, in reality it is not possible yet, at least for humans because it is beyond our current technology. After all, it has been only two years since the first man-made vehicle even crossed the edge of the solar system, a distance of 7.5 billion kilometres covered in nine years. Thats why the scientific community greets the existence of super high-speed UFOs with the highest degree of skepticism.
Most of the reported UFO sightings can be attributed to known natural phenomena. Some of them are bright stars, meteors, and asteroids with orbits close to the Earth, a weather phenomenon known as St Elmos fire in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge from a sharp or pointed object in a strong electric field in the atmosphere, or another natural weather phenomenon known as sprites flashes high in the atmosphere triggered by thunderstorms. They could also be human artifacts such as aircrafts, artificial satellites and high-altitude weather balloons. Venus is also often mistaken as an UFO, because when it appears low on the horizon, its bright light is strongly refracted by the Earths atmosphere, making it appear to rapidly change colour and position.
As for Arnolds sightings, a plausible explanation is that it was a fireball - a meteor breaking up upon entry into the Earths atmosphere. The pieces of meteor would travel in a chain like the one Arnold saw, would shine very brightly and would travel at thousands of kilometres per hour. The debris in Roswell, according to the US military, are the remnants of high-altitude balloons carrying acoustical equipment to monitor Soviet nuclear tests in the years following World War II. Foo fighters were possibly St Elmos fire, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals.
We live in an age filled with many wonders. But along with the truly genuine wonders, there also exist many which are counterfeit, some manifestly so, some more subtly so. For all its faults and limitations, science has proved itself to be, at least for the present, the best means by which rational beings can distinguish between what is genuine from what is not. The marvels of our age and its technology lead us to conclude that UFOs are not real. Simply put, they are fantasies of a stressed out society.
The writer is a Professor of Physics at Fordham University, New York.
Photos: Google Images
