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Post by swamprat on Jul 1, 2018 2:33:34 GMT
Ex-NASA scientist says aliens exist but encounters are covered up by governments Tom Herbert
Saturday 30 Jun 2018
A former NASA research scientist believes aliens really are out there and that ‘many governments’ have covered up extraterrestrial encounters. Kevin Knuth, who is now a professor of physics at the University of Albany, claims there is ‘plenty of evidence’ to support the existence of UFOs in our universe. He says humanity needs to ‘face the possibility’ that UFO sightings may be ‘visitors from afar’ and insists more research needs to be done on the topic as it would benefit mankind.
Writing for The Conversation he said: ‘I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.’ Knuth believes talking about UFOs is taboo, which has prevented any proper scientific study into the topic and blames governments and the media for the skeptisim that surrounds extraterrestial study. He adds: ‘Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.’
Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Sweden, Russia and the UK have been declassifying UFO files for the past decade, and Knuth says UFO sightings from government officials lends legtimacy to the claims. He points towards the Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (CEFAA), formed by the Chilean government, and the French Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (CEFAA), made up of scientists and military officials, as organisations that provide evidence towards the existence of aliens. Knuth also discusses the ‘Fermi Paradox’ – the question of why we have never heard anything from other civilisations despite the vastness of space almost guaranteeing the existence of extraterrestrial life.
He said it is highly likely aliens are real and that a large number of the 300 billion stars in our galaxy are able to host hospitable planets. ‘The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun,’ he said. ‘The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered up and classified information about such encounters.’ He argues that scientific, evidence-based knowledge of the topic would ‘greatly benefit’ mankind as it could develop technology and knowledge and help us understand our place in the universe.
metro.co.uk/2018/06/30/ex-nasa-scientist-says-aliens-exist-encounters-covered-governments-7672163/
Kevin Knuth is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Physics and Informatics at the University at Albany. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Entropy. He is a former NASA research scientist having worked for four years at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division. He has 20 years of experience in applying Bayesian and maximum entropy methods to the design of machine learning algorithms for data analysis applied to the physical sciences. His current research interests include the foundations of physics, inference and inquiry, autonomous robotics, and the search for and characterization of extrasolar planets. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has been invited to give over 80 presentations in 13 countries.
theconversation.com/profiles/kevin-knuth-504540
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Post by HAL on Jul 1, 2018 23:02:59 GMT
So nothing new there.
HAL
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Post by swamprat on Jul 1, 2018 23:55:23 GMT
But indeed refreshing to see a man of science with that attitude.
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Post by HAL on Jul 2, 2018 21:35:57 GMT
Yes, it is.
From the ufology point of view though, it won't help.
..He says humanity needs to ‘face the possibility’ that UFO sightings may be ‘visitors from afar’ and insists more research needs to be done on the topic as it would benefit mankind..
Should it turn out to be true, who is going to be informed ?
It is the dilemma of governments that they dare not admit to there being powers that can do things they can't. Nor do anything about.
He would be sworn to secrecy and would spend the rest of his life expecting to be 'retired' if the word ever got out.
HAL.
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Post by swamprat on Jul 5, 2018 15:22:06 GMT
Kevin Knuth even got EarthSky's attention! Also, Nyx already posted an article from TechTimes here: theufocasebook.freeforums.net/thread/250/nasa-scientists-claims-information-covered
It's beginning to happen, folks! The next thing you can expect is that the deniers and debunkers will rise up. Be prepared; it'll probably get ugly!
 Have aliens visited Earth? Question worthy of study, says physicist
By EarthSky Voices in HUMAN WORLD | SPACE | July 5, 2018
About 5 percent of all UFO sightings cannot be easily explained by weather or human technology. A physicist argues that there’s compelling evidence to justify serious scientific study and that the skeptics should step aside – for the sake of humanity.
By Kevin Knuth, University at Albany, State University of New York
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “You have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former U.S. Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought-provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered up and classified information about such encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately five percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope’s field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book “Wonders in the Sky,” in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
Declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil. Image via Arquivo Nacional Collection.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that five percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call “CIA drones” which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
1948 Top Secret USAF UFO extraterrestrial document. Image via United States Air Force.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward-looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from retired Army Colonel John Alexander:
Disclosure has happened … I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
earthsky.org/space/are-we-alone-UFOS-scientific-study-says-physicist
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Post by swamprat on Jul 19, 2018 23:29:29 GMT
For you folks in the New York area:The Altamont Enterprise
Letter to the Editor
UAlbany astrophysicist to talk on extraterrestrial life
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Dr. Kevin Knuth, an astrophysicist with the University at Albany, will be giving a talk this coming Friday, July 20, at the Carey Institute in Rensselaerville on the ongoing search for exoplanets around other stars in the galaxy and the involvement that he and his research team have had in developing sophisticated detection technology for exoplanet searches.
Dr. Knuth will also discuss the prospects for finding life on some of the newly discovered Earth-like worlds, including the discovery of potential bio-tracers in the planets’ atmospheres.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is a decades-long program that scans selective stars in the galaxy with the hope of the detecting signals that may be sent out by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
Dr. Knuth will discuss this outreach effort, as well as explaining the “Drake Equation” as formulated by Dr. Frank Drake, an early pioneer in the beginning of the SETI program, which seeks to answer the question of the potential existence of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.
Finally, Dr. Knuth will touch on the question of whether or not, we may have been visited by an advanced alien civilization in the past, or if even today the UFO phenomena might be evidence or not for the possibility of ongoing visitation.
Dr. Knuth recently published an article entitled “Are We Alone? The Question is Worthy of Serious Scientific Inquiry,” which has received a lot of attention, and he has gone on world-wide media to both ponder and discuss this most intriguing question.
Dr. Knuth will begin his presentation with a tribute to prolific science and science-fiction author, Isaac Asimov, and his long-time involvement with the former Rensselaerville Institute on Man and Science, forerunner to the Carey Institute.
Dr. Knuth’s free-talk will be given starting at 8 p.m. on July 20 in the Guggenheim Theater of the Carey Institute. Following Dr. Knuth’s talk, a public reception will be held at the Carriage-House Restaurant on the grounds of the Carey Institute.
A $10 donation will go towards the support of the Helderberg Earth & Sky Observatory, which is sponsoring the event.
An Astronomy-related gift will be given to each person who attends.
Beside the food and drinks, served on the large outdoor patio, Helderberg Earth & Sky Science Center members will have several large telescopes set-up for viewing of the moon, planets (Mars is close to the Earth), and deep-sky objects in the dark Rensselaerville area skies.
This promises to be one of the most intriguing science-related public events scheduled for the area this season.
Ron Barnell
President
Helderberg Earth & Sky
Observatory Association
altamontenterprise.com/07192018/ualbany-astrophysicist-talk-extraterrestrial-life
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Post by HAL on Jul 20, 2018 19:24:39 GMT
Hope he brings that to the UK.
I'd travel to hear it. (but not to New York).
HAL
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Post by swamprat on Nov 26, 2018 20:36:02 GMT
Dr. Michio Kaku @michiokaku
I often get asked: where are the aliens from space? My guess is that they exist. But if they can reach us from the stars, they are a Type II or III civilization and are thousands of years ahead of us. So we have nothing to offer them.
6:07 PM - 22 Nov 2018
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Post by HAL on Nov 27, 2018 17:49:08 GMT
So you have to ask 'Then why would they bother coming ?'.
HAL
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Post by Admin on Dec 3, 2018 23:36:49 GMT
So you have to ask 'Then why would they bother coming ?'. HAL Who knows? Most of the possible scenarios have been covered in movies, etc. |
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Post by swamprat on Dec 4, 2018 1:12:40 GMT
NASA scientist says Earth may have been visited by aliens
By Chris Ciaccia | Fox News, Dec. 3, 2018
NASA was set up in part to find traces of extraterrestrial life in the universe. While the government space agency has yet to find any definitive evidence that extraterrestrials exist, one NASA scientist believes we may have already been visited by them here on Earth.
In a new research paper, Silvano P. Colombano, who in addition to being a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, is also a professor, theorizes that intelligent life may not be what we are used to and may not necessarily use the traditional building blocks of that humanity is accustomed to, such as carbon.
"I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all be produced by carbon based organisms like us," Colombano wrote in the paper.
So if extraterrestrials are not carbon-based, what does that do to our assumptions about what to look for? Well, a lot, Colombano noted.
"Our typical life-spans would no longer be a limitation (although even these could be dealt with multi-generational missions or suspended animation), and the size of the 'explorer' might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity," Colombano added in the paper.
Colombano also suggests that extraterrestrials may have figured out technology that humans can not comprehend yet, making tasks such as interstellar travel possible. "If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find, some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry," he suggested.
Still, the scientist concedes that interstellar travel could be "an unbreakable barrier, over spans of thousands of years," though he added that interstellar journey could be possible depending on what we assume about various forms of life.
"Considering further that technological development in our civilization started only about 10K years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years, we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 Million times that amount!" he explained.
Colombano, who holds a doctorate in biophysical sciences according to his LinkedIn page, also said that not every UFO sighting can be "explained or denied" and asked people to look through the "very large of amount of 'noise' when it comes to reporting on the subject.
www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-scientist-says-earth-may-have-been-visited-by-aliens?intcmp=ob_article_footer_text&intcmp=obnetwork
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Post by swamprat on Dec 6, 2018 16:37:00 GMT
Uh oh! Not so fast, says Colombano!
Here's the Truth Behind a NASA Document on Aliens Visiting EarthBy Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | December 5, 2018
Fox News published a startling article Monday (Dec. 3) with the headline "NASA scientist says Earth may have been visited by aliens." Unsurprisingly, that news rocketed around the web, with similar articles soon turning up in the New York Post, Russia Today and The Daily Wire. (Fox appears to have been the first major U.S. news source to run with the story.)
These articles are based on a document on NASA's website by Silvano Colombano, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. It really does argue that scientists should at least take seriously the notion that aliens may have visited planet Earth. But Colombano told Live Science that the coverage on Fox News and elsewhere misrepresented what he was trying to say when he wrote it.
"It is not accurately represented," he said. "My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study, even if the chance of identification of some alien technology is very small."
There's some nuance here. Colombano really does believe, as Fox News wrote, that aliens "may" have visited planet Earth. As in, it's theoretically possible that this has happened, not entirely impossible, and worth looking for evidence that it has. But that's not the same as expecting to actually find any such evidence, or believing that there's a good chance aliens are scuttling around under our noses — an impression you might get if you read Fox News's article.
Though Colombano's name and email address appear right on top of the document, he said Fox News did not contact him before publishing their story. (Live Science has reached out to Fox News to confirm this, but has not yet heard back.) Fox described the document as a "new research paper" — a term usually used to describe formal articles intended for publication in research journals and making conclusions based on evidence and the scientific method.
But that's not what this document is.
"The context was a presentation delivered last spring at a meeting of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute," he said.
SETI is an organization devoted to the hunt for alien life, mostly by scanning radio signals from space for evidence of biological origin.
"The meeting was to get feedback from scientists as to future directions for the Institute's research program," Colombano said.
The document accompanied a talk he gave in which he suggested that perhaps the notion of aliens visiting Earth isn't quite as ridiculous as most scientists believe, and that SETI might devote some resources to systematically hunting through UFO reports and other data for evidence that this has happened — to hunt for a faint, unlikely signal in a lot of messy noise.
In other words, it was a speculative piece of writing intended to persuade other scientists to spend their resources on a long-shot project — not an argument about whether or not aliens have actually visited Earth. Colombano's position is that it's possible, but not necessarily likely.
www.livescience.com/64237-nasa-aliens-fox-news.html
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Post by HAL on Dec 6, 2018 21:05:29 GMT
So he was just being honest and speculating on the possibility. Nothing wrong with that.
It would be nice if these news outlets were to give the whole story once in a while.
HAL.
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