Science Guide

Christopher Columbus was the first to record a UFO sighting. In 1492, he entered in the logbook of the Sta. Maria in mid Atlantic that he observed a "distant glimmering light that disappeared and reappeared several times during the night." Since then, thousands of sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects have been reported.

The Roswell incident in 1947 stirred the greatest interest. The Roswell Army Air Field had recovered some crashed debris from grounds near Roswell, New Mexico. The US Air Force explained that it was a weather balloon. However, years later, some witnesses came out saying that it was actually an alien spacecraft, that the weather balloon story was a cover-up. A retired mortician even claimed that aliens were recovered from the wreckage and autopsied at the Roswell air base.

Public fancy on E.T. and UFOs was stimulated further by the novels, movies, and broadcast media hype that followed.

From 1947 to 1969, the US Air Force investigated UFO reports and sightings under a program called Project Blue Book. After going through 12,618 UFO claims, Project Blue Book declared that there was no evidence that the sightings were extraterrestrial vehicles. Nonetheless, some scientists maintained that the few UFO sightings which the investigators could not clearly explain were proof that the earth was being visited by aliens.

Are UFOs Fact or Fiction?

If there are extraterrestrials, there must be E.T. spaceships. If we have our exploratory Voyagers, extraterrestrials with more advanced technologies must have much faster and longer-ranged explorers. Could it be that some of those UFOs were really alien crafts?

Intergalactic space, which is a barrier to communication with the E.T., is an even more formidable barrier to spacecrafts travelling much slower than laser transmissions. No crafts from another galaxy can possibly reach earth. How about interstellar space within our Milky Way?

[caption id="attachment_53" align="alignleft" width="124" caption="Helios 1 and 2 were developed by the Federal Republic of Germany in cooperation with NASA"][/caption]

Helios 2, the fastest man-made flying machine, attained the top speed of Mach 227.3 as it orbited near the sun. Even assuming that a technologically advanced E.T. spacecraft can travel at Mach 1000, or one thousand times faster than the speed of sound, it would still take 9,000 years to cross a distance of 10.4 light-years. This is the distance from planet Epsilon Eridani to earth. Epsilon Eridani is the nearest planet outside our solar system. The second nearest extrasolar planet, orbiting around star Gliese 876, is 15 light-years away. It is still impossible for any spacecraft from other solar systems to reach earth.

Because of insurmountable distances, no UFO can come over from alien worlds.