Sunday Story: The UAP Series Part 4 - What if it’s not human ingenuity?

Welcome back to our UAP series! In this special Sunday Story feature, we’re doing a deep dive into one of the major disruptors we’ve been tracking alongside Artificial Intelligence, the housing crisis, and economic uncertainty. Each of these major issues introduces complex factors in the economic, cultural, and political world (amongst others) which means there’s a knock-on effect to so many aspects of your leadership. In part 1, we talked about how we came to be studying UFOs seriously - alongside a laundry list of other serious people. In Part 2, we talked about how likely it was that this whole issue was nonsense (our position is that this is not very likely, and if this does end up being true, it’s still a big problem). In Part 3 we shared a bit about how this issue could be technologically (and thus culturally and economically) disruptive with no flying saucers needed. And in this part, we’re going to talk about how the most out-there explanation (no pun intended) could actually be the correct one. It’s fitting that I’m starting to write this as I sit on a plane en-route to San Francisco for the second-annual Sol Symposium. This conference is an academic and policy conference, bringing together the foremost scientists, military experts, intelligence professionals, academics, and political leaders in the world, and we’re looking forward to sharing what we learn to help you lead through disruption.

If you remember back to Part 1, we talked about bit about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox - in essence, both of these ideas are the basis for why, at least scientifically, most people don’t believe that craft from another civilization can be visiting earth. To refresh your memory, the paradox is essentially this: “Statistically speaking, the universe is so massive that it logically must be full of life - so where is everyone? It must be impossible to traverse the universe to meet other civilizations, otherwise we’d see them all the time.”

Except Mr. Fermi made a fundamental mistake: he assumed we’d be able to see them or detect them in some other way. It is now clear based on the many confirmed run-ins that the US military has had with UAP that these things can move fast - so fast that, biologically, we would not actually be able to see them with the naked eye. And, Fermi came up with his paradox in the context of the 1950s - our sensors have gotten exponentially better than that time, and apparently these sensors are now picking up UAP. If the stories about top secret UFO crash retrieval programs is true - and increasingly, that seems to be the case - then it further underscores that Fermi’s instinct was correct - that the universe should be full of life, and we should see it everywhere, so the question is, where is it? It turns out that maybe the answer is “flying around really fast and, when that doesn’t work out, the wreckage gets picked up and hidden from humanity.”

So in a way, the Fermi paradox is solved.

Thanks for reading, tune in next week where we’ll solve the pigeon hole problem and present the solution to the grandfather paradox vis a vis time travel.

Okay we’re kidding - there’s obviously more to say here so we’re not actually done. Fermi is one of the smartest people to have ever lived that we know of - that’s why his paradox is so powerful. Fermi’s position was that life SHOULD be everywhere. And it turns out - maybe he was right after all. Of course, the question is how is any of this possible? As Colonel Karl Nell recently articulated during the Global Disclosure Day on October 20th, it comes down to first principles.

First, like Fermi said, the universe is massive. There are billions of stars just like ours, and out of those billions of stars, a whole bunch of them have planets like earth. And, a whole bunch of those stars are way older than the sun - sometimes billions of years old. When you consider how little time it took humanity to go from single-celled organisms in the primordial soup to the modern (mostly) intelligent ape - it was only a couple of billion years - and remember a good chunk of that time was spent on dinosaurs before mammals came along. Indeed, anatomically modern humans evolved from tiny rodents over the last 65 million years - in a universe that’s at least 14 billion years old, that’s plenty of time for life like ours to evolve on planets elsewhere. Big numbers are hard to conceptualize, but to get a sense of how many 65 million year processes would fit into a timeline of over 13 billion years, check out our piece that deals with this exact problem.

And to further underscore the point that life evolved here really fast, recent scholarship suggests that life evolved in the Hadeon period, which was before the earth’s crust even cooled down from the formation of the planet and solar system. That’s really fast!

Indeed, as Mr. Nell said, there is such a strong probability that humanity isn’t the sole intelligent species in the galaxy that it’s actually the opposite stance that sounds far fetched - out of the billions of stars and tens of billions of planets, to argue that this is the only one that can support life is ignoring the scholarship that says the opposite is most likely true. But, they’d still have to get here - so how can they do that?

This get’s a bit technical but we’ll make it as simple as we can: Back in the day, Albert Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity and a whole bunch of really important physics stuff. It helped humanity understand the atom and unlock incredible scientific progress, but the nature of his work suggested that there was a universal speed limit - the speed of light - and that it would be impossible to go faster than that. The closer we get to the Speed of Light, the more energy is consumed. As we get closer and closer to the speed of light, the energy required increases more and more, so that you hit a need for more energy in the universe before you go faster than the speed of light. Plus, while the math makes sense for this universal speed limit, and it helps us explain all sorts of things that are essential for our existence - like gravity, the rays of the sun, and more - once you go past the speed limit, the math totally breaks down and so does our entire model of physics.

Short version: Going faster than light speed takes more energy than exists in the universe, and once you do it, the universe stops working.

At least, that was true up until about 1994, when a man named Miguel Albucerre did some mathey-science (technical term) and came up with a solution to this universal speed limit. He showed that if we are able to use negative energy in Einstein’s equations, we are able to achieve speeds that are much, much faster than the speed of light. Then, in 1998, another bunch of mathey-science types demonstrated that the effect Albucerre was speaking of is real and measurable (the Casimir effect). This was a proof of concept - we do not have the schematics for an actual faster than light engine that we could go and build today, so as Nell says, this is not an engineering solution. But, this has been robustly debated in the world of physics, and the fact is that this theoretical solution is not in dispute by most scientists.

So if we can theoretically figure this out….couldn’t other species, especially when they’ve had so much more time than we have? Consider how far humanity has come in just 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age - we’ve gone from hunter-gatherer societies to civilizations, global empires, moon landings, and more. Imagine if we had 40,000,000 years of history to draw on instead?

“Hogwash” you say. “These UAP are probably advanced drones or similar American technology of some kind”

Maybe. If this had all started in 2017, then we’d say “most likely drones” as that technology was fairly mature by then. But its important to remember the timelines of this issue. The videos released in 2017 dated back to an incident in 2004 - over 20 years old now - and they aren’t the only historical examples of these things being seen. There’s a long, storied history of these UAP flying around, and a glance at the historical record illustrates this really well. In the year 2001, there was an event at the Press Gallery in Washington featuring a whole bunch of first hand witnesses, including folks like Robert Salas who told a verified story of UAP shutting down American ICBMs in the 1960s. In the 1990s in the UK, the Rendlesham Forest incident is one of the most well documented encounters. Also in the 1990s, Belgium experienced the “Belgian Wave” where for weeks, large UAP were seen flying over the country - not just by citizens, but trained observers like police as well.

Of course, these are sightings, and people make mistakes right? If aliens were real, wouldn’t it be easier to just come and buzz the Whitehouse?

Yes, and in 1952, a bunch of UAP buzzed the Whitehouse.

Yes, seriously. It caused a massive response as the US Air Force scrambled fighter jets to intercept these strange objects, and the largest press conference since WWII was called to explain this to an increasingly panicked public. The public tracked their panic back to the late 1940s, first when a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw a fleet of UFOs during a flight past Mount Washington. This made headlines globally and coined the term “flying saucer”. A few years before that, there’s the ever-famous case of Roswell; an entire series could be spent just on that one crash, but the main takeaway is this: in 1947, a rancher claimed that a UFO crashed on his land. The US Military responded, and the next day, the Air Force had a press release claiming to have retrieved a flying saucer - it was on the front page of the news. The day after that, the story changed to weather balloon which was then published in major papers worldwide. Since that time, we’ve had 4 “official” stories of what happened at Roswell - as one UFOlogist said, “Try giving 4 ‘official’ explanations to your partner after you stay out at night drinking and see how that goes for you”.

Let’s keep rewinding the clock - you’’re probably familiar with rocker Dave Grohl - he was recently in the news for not great reasons, but in case you are unaware he’s the front man to the Foo Fighters. He wasn’t alive in the 1940s, but I’m bringing him up because a series of incidents in the 40s were the inspiration of this band’s name. During WWII, aviators over Europe reported being tracked by UAPs - orbs, discs, and other shapes - which came to be known as “The Foo Fighters”, hence inspiring Dave Grohl’s band name.

And it goes back even further still. In the 1890s, American newspapers were full of stories about a “Wave of strange airships” - strange indeed in the 1890s, remember this is before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, so aviation in general was a pretty foreign concept.

That’s the limit of “modern” journalism on this issue, but it certainly is not the limit of stories and sightings. For example, here’s a painting from the 16th century depicting “The Battle of Nuremberg”, a celestial event that was seen and recorded over the German city and ultimately painted by Hans Glaser. Obviously, without a time machine, it’s impossible to really verify what these historical issues were. But, it’s also impossible to ignore the similarities that these historical stories have to modern-day encounters.

Discs, triangles, and orbs. They can hover, accelerate rapidly, and defy our understanding of physics. This is true in 2024 according to the US Government, and it was apparently true in the 1890s, 1930s, 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s too - except back then, UFOs were nonsense.

The situation has changed. Now, presidents, senators, and high ranking military officials are saying this is a serious matter to be taken seriously. At Authentik, we’re taking it incredibly seriously - because as we said in our previous entry, the UAP issue represents a potential solution to so many challenges that we face as a species, but it requires good leadership to get there.

And, as this post shows - the idea that it would be impossible for non-human intelligence to reach earth is just wrong. In fact, the reports suggest that we’ve been interacting with them for a long time.

After spending a few days in San Francisco, the Sol Symposium has come to an end with just enough time for me to edit and post this Sunday Story. I have spent the last couple of days learning alongside parliamentarians from Japan, academics from Harvard and Stanford, business leaders from around the world, and members of our intelligence and military community. We have a shared responsibility to find answers to this mystery - perhaps the greatest one in human history - and a bunch of dedicated people are doing our level-best to get those answers for you. We promise to keep you updated on the UAP issue, and tune in next Sunday for the next part of this UAP series.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.