'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get specific terms of art wrong, and nitpickers nitpick and clarify. I know this because I made a career of such nitpicking and clarifying once.
My point here is that nothing put forward in this article means that there's not a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how. It just means that said materials are not properly "alloys" and the journos got that word wrong, as journos often do when they're way outside their area of expertise.
That said, I would still buy that there are probably almost no materials that we couldn't at least get a handle on. If they were truly incomprehensible it would likely be because they were the result of manipulating properties that we don't even know exist yet (higher dimensionality, etc, whatever other sci-fi shit), and I feel like something that sensational and world changing would be incredibly hard to cover up.
I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.
An integrated circuit is a fine grained combination of several different kinds of metal and other materials, but they're meticulously arranged and sandwiched together, not just melted together into an alloy.
At what point do you draw the line between nanotechnology and alloy, when you have the technology to 3d-print each and every atom?
Edit: And even when he died in the 1954, electron microscopes werent that advanced... we still needed to invent new techniques, improve our lens manufacturing, etc. There were a lot of shortcomings with it back then that limited its usage. So even in his later years, I wonder how much detail he could actually see on a modern CPU.
There's no mention of what properties these materials are supposed to have, much less that the materials seem so exotic as to be beyond comprehension or a more accurate description. The original New York Times article merely mentions the "storage of metal alloys and other materials..."
"Alloys" may literally just mean "alloys."
A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.
It'd kind of beautiful, actually.
https://vitalvegas.com/excavators-hit-mother-lode-wtf-las-ve...
It makes me wonder what it will look like when they tear down the building storing old Star Trek: The Experience junk. The UFO conspiracy theorists are going to have a great time with those photo.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interviewed would have been co-opted into joining said lab. Undergraduate education in Physics and Chemistry in the US would be grinding to a halt, NIST grants and DARPA grants would be zero for any other topic, publication and patent rates would be falling precipitously.
Why? Because such a find would be "all bets are off" everything would be up for grabs, not only would every scientist be scrambling to be involved - all the others would be encased in dark depression knowing that what they were up to was essentially worthless.
There would be questions in the UN, threats of violence against the US, allies would be sending worried missions and publicly begging for inclusion (unless they were included in which case they would be mouth shut deferential and smug in company..)
You would do it as a laughable joke over a long period of time.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
SA used to have a series, I think it was called something like the "Citizen Scientist" or maybe the "Amateur Scientist". This article is a new type of journalism I've noticed taking off in the last decade or two that I'll call the "Asshole Scientist". It consists of self-righteous and assine authors taking pot-shots (some warranted, some not) at whatever cultural item is in the current zeitgeist.
It's great for gathering clicks. Nothing like a bunch of folks sitting in their living room with a smug smile on their face, scrolling through a short journalistic snack-food, feeling like they're in with the cool kids. But it doesn't do much in the way of showing people how to have reasonable public conversations. Or even how to read charitably.
Note that I'm not upset with the content of the article, just the tone. A bit of tweaking and it'd be fine. But that would defeat the purpose. This kind of article is all about tone.
Unless something is interfering with the efforts to identify a given substance, there aren't a whole lot of options left besides it being something "new" (which is to say hitherto unknown).
There are other thermal, gravitational, and energetic environments in the universe that we probably haven't even begun to understand.
We are still learning how the universe appears to work.
What kind of scientist can draw a conclusion without having conducted any sort of observation? That kind of closed-mindedness is totally damning to human understanding.
The alternative possibility is that there are places in the universe where fundamental physics works totally differently from here, yet materials formed there can exist here in an apparently stable state - an entire second physical system, never so much as hinted at in any of our own investigations. That would be considerably more surprising than a reporter through ignorance and haste having mischaracterized the content of a story! Reporters do that all the time.
The entire story hinges on the credibility of the Pentagon officials and pilots interviewed. If they are credible with regards to the narrative around just how many resources were used to generate alternative explanations, then the media should stop building up strawmen that these specific cases were due to pilots being fooled by their visual system.
And the video itself doesn't show anything of the claimed behavior. No hovering over the ocean, no super fast motion, just a blob or smudge superimposed over a cloudy background as video pans around.
The articles I read seemed to indicate this “office” at the pentagon was basically a one man show and was rediculed by his peers, probably receiving little if any analytical support.
Fortunately, the one man show had a red-headed skeptic sidekick.
Not pilots, a pilot. All that project came up with was one pilot (Fravor) describing unusual event and none of the other three pilots involved or ship crewmen backing his story up.
Single person can see almost anything even if the observer is trained and trustworthy. As long as no other pilots collaborate the same event, there is little credibility.
Three senators earmarked millions into UFO research. Pentagon had to spend that money but they never took it seriously. Person running the project for pentagon seems untrustworthy. Now the process continues with organization whose mission includes inspirational storytelling, telepathy and electrogravitic propulsion.
Also, why do you say, "none of the other three pilots involved or ship crewmen backing his story up." That's not true.
If I wake up in the morning and there's an unexpected beer can in my yard that I did not place there, then that would be an object that arrived from an unknown origin. It doesn't make the object itself particularly mysterious, but you could have a lot of fun imagining how it got there or why it was placed there. And you can imagine that getting reported in an interesting way. Did a squirrel carry it into the yard? Did a neighbor drink a beer and toss the can into the yard? Did beer drinking aliens drop it from a space ship into the yard? Well, the latter is a fun story.
Of course it's infinitely more interesting to have a genuinely mysterious alloy or element that is inexplicable or just new and fascinating for whatever reason. I'm sure a lot of people felt that way about vanadium oxide, for example.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/vanadium-oxides/8838...
These alloys could very well be mysterious not so much for their composition, but for their condition, or their use at all in aircraft.
But this is probably nothing.
This is the same sort of thinking as flat earthers, except that they happen to have the status quo on their side. Science and truth aren't based on opinion or emotion, but on test results.
Las Vegas, like the article states. KLAS showed a picture of the warehouse last night. Shouldn't be hard to track down.
The point is that there is no claim. It is very very straight forward to identify an unknown material (figuring out how it was made, what it's for, etc., is the difficult task). If you want to claim there's an 'unknown' material, show us your XRD patterns, your EELS/XPS/NMR/EDX/PL/SIMS spectra, your AFM surfaces, your electron micrographs, atom probe tomography, any number of a hundred other characterization techniques ... then you'd actually have a claim we could have an intelligent conversation about.
At this point, there isn't even a claim that needs an expert opinion to respond to, it's all just BS.
[0] To be charitable, I have no doubt that there exist substances in the universe we can't currently characterize. But if you restrict it to objects that you can physically store in a warehouse (that is, they're stable under ambient conditions), I have little doubt we can figure out what they are without much trouble.
> I have little doubt we can figure out what they are without much trouble.
How can you be so sure of that? Have we learned pretty much all there is to know about material science and physics at this point? Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic? Do you think we could figure out a material designed by a being a million years in advance of us? The physics as we understand it in 200 years is certainly going to be magic and "impossible" by today's standards, let alone alien tech.
Of course the materials could not actually exist, or not be of alien origin. But given the premise that they are of alien origin, it's not absurd at all to think that we can't figure out the nature of the materials.
It's a fair question, but I'm pretty sure we could. We have constraints: we know the object can be stored in a warehouse, we presumably can infer it can be touched, and can be seen.
Even if it were of alien origin, wondrously advanced, made of some kind of matter that fits outside our standard model of the universe, we would at least know it interacts with light, with the electromagnetic force. We understand that force very well, so we could still characterize it. And that's if it's something deeply weird; deeply strange. (And if it were really that bizarre, it'd be the discovery of the century and obscene to keep it locked up in a warehouse somewhere.)
Far more likely, it's just made up of atoms (which is what we'd expect, given its temperature and density are within the realm of 'objects that can exist on earth in a warehouse'), and then we can use all our normal techniques just fine and it's not a problem.
> Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic?
Again, to emphasize, this is a valid question -- but we've already gone past that threshold. We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further to go when it comes to the question of what things are made of, at least to a rough approximation.
However, the next question would be "can we make it?" and the answer to that is very different. If someone gave us some electronics from the future, we could still find out what it's made from quite easily. Understanding how it works and how to re-create it would be vastly more difficult, and possibly beyond us. But this is true of the past too; there were ways of making steel and concrete in the distant past that we've long lost the knowledge of how to make.
That may be true but also seems like a strong assumption and doesn't fit with our current trajectory of understanding. A paradigm shift in physics which replaces fundamental notions, such as the nature of fields, could make the current understanding become seem a rough approximation just like relativity did to Newtonian mechanics.
> that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works.
Absolutely, there may be materials were we don't have the slightest idea how they are made or how some property arises. But my point is, that the analysis techniques are at a level were it is pretty much guaranteed that an expression like "unknown alloy" is pretty much just clickbait, we know a great deal of anything that is made out of atoms a few days after a sample showed up in a laboratory.
How is that not guaranteed?
I don't think a lump of such material is in a warehouse in Nevada, but maybe it exists somewhere in the universe.
The suggestion that all these alleged weird alien materials are “alloys” is just a placeholder for “looks and acts metallic, therefore made of metals.”
But if we happened to be dealing with real alien tech, that’s a naive and unscientific assumption. We already have people thinking about how to build programmable matter with variable properties, and it’s a fair bet we’ll have working examples within 50-100 years.
And there is no possibility that conventional x-ray diffraction will reveal how that kind of matter works.
Why would this be in a warehouse of a $22 million (i.e. super small potatoes) government project? It would be the biggest budget and highest secrecy project on the books.
Also people posting on hacke
If so, you're logically entangling an arbitrary funding number reported in the article, with the idea that perhaps some new material (or alternative particle physics) could exist.
Yes, and everything we know about them suggests that they either:
Decay almost immediately when encountered in the wild
Immediately clump together with other particles to form larger units
Do not interact with normal matter
Etc.
IOW, there's little or no reason to think that any kind of stable material, anything that you could store in a warehouse as a clump of "stuff", is made without atoms.
If it is possible, as far as I know, that would be deep into "entirely new physics that violates a lot of central tenets of our current thinking". So yeah, that could happen, but you have to ask "is it likely"?
That's not the point, though, is it? This article said "experts say that creating materials we don't understand is impossible." Not unlikely - impossible.
An alien race with the capability to visit earth would have a grasp of physics that we obviously do not, otherwise we would be visiting habitable planets right now. That's the whole point. The argument this article puts forth is just as silly as the young-earth creationist argument that "abiogenesis is incredibly unlikely, so it must be God". Or in this case "we don't understand it, so it must be impossible".
Some metals don't mix. They mix as liquids but as they cool they crystallize differently, sometimes separating from each other. So an "alien alloy" could be a mix that was formed by some advanced tech (zero-g fabrication, strong magnetic fields etc) that we cannot replicate. Try getting a perfect crystalline mix of steel and neon. Maybe it is a miracle substance. But we don't know because we cannot fabricate such structures. If that showed up in a lab it would be "alien".
A few years ago any jet engine would contain "alien alloys" in the sense that nobody could have replicated the single-crystal structures now common in blades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog...
But it would need to be based on a different structure than atoms, so not some new element or alloy but something completely different. Say some hard matter based on some condensed unknown field.
This sounds highly unprobable. But if true, this would have implications about all of physics, not just some new material science.
Is it in the alloy database? yes : no
Is its isotopic ratio terrestrial? yes : no
Does it appear manufactured or natural in elemental distribution? yes : no
If the answer is yes to the first two, then yes, the alloy is indeed "mysterious". Simple as that. This article didn't debunk anything. It just corrected a wording technicality.
There seems to be an easily-composable fire retardant substance that can be made from household materials and that's been discovered several times by tinkerers over the years.
For example (and it's just an example for the sake of discussion), many here couple probably analyze the skin of a stealth bomber and identify what it's made of. But that still leaves how it was made.
It seems reasonable to think we have things - which could be non ET - that we can't quite figure out and don't want anyone else to know either.
Obviously not a popular idea for HN but certainly not impossible.
I once worked in a hydraulics R&D facility which had a scanning electron microscope. Parts which failed were examined to find out why. Their screen usually showed broken edges of something under high magnification.
We have ways to very reliably identify the elemental composition of any material you can imagine. That doesn't tell us how to manufacture that material, but it does tell us what it's made out of. These are extremely robust techniques (x-ray diffraction and x-ray fluorescence) that work on anything made out of atoms.
The claim, any claim, of an "unidentifiable alloy" is simply not credible without presenting x-ray fluorescence and x-ray diffraction data to back that up.
It is infinitely more likely that no one examining these materials had such instruments available to them, so they just sort of shrugged and said "I dunno what it is" which then got telephone-gamed into "unidentifiable alloys!" along the way. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is an extraordinary claim with no evidence. So it is not a credible claim.
It's a common trope that there exists a "God of the gaps" where we fill in our lack of understanding with God, ghosts, or aliens. If a door slams in your house, it's seen as a ghost, rather than pressure equalizing between rooms. This feels like an case where we attach our uncertainty to an explanation before we have enough data to form a viable hypothesis.
[1] https://www.lenntech.com/periodic-chart-elements/discovery-y...
It should still be relatively simple to identify each of the elements in it by it's atomic number. Our periodic table is complete to the 7:th row, and any unknown (un-named) element with a higher atomic number would be very likely to have a very short half life.
Not even that, it just goes babbling “impossible! Impossible!” - no trch nor science involved, they basically asked two random scientists if they believed in aliens, the answer was as predictable as pointless
I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as well. But I guess they genuinely don't understand how the layering was achieved.
What they say they don't know is how to manufacture it.
Regardless, this explanation is now head-canon, regardless of whatever facts or otherwise may present themselves.
Have some imagination. Think about nano-layering and quasicrystals, to say nothing of stable-island heavy nuclei and other exotic forms of matter not ruled out by physics as we know it. Come lecture me about impossibilities when you've finished solving solid-state physics, mkay?
Those aren't technically "alloys"? Fine, but that's a useless nitpick in the face of the actual question under consideration. Reading through the mistakes of science-illiterate journalists and politicians should be a reflex by now; you don't get any points for proving you have a better technical vocabulary than they do.
Just to belabor the point some more, we didn't know until recently that damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes (probably derived from plant material). Was an XRF machine ever going to pick that up? Not in any detail, I'm guessing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
And this is all without using any imagination. If you're dealing with the question of alien technology, that's silly.
The issue of being able to reproduce an alloy or material is an entirely separate one from being able to identify what it's made out of. Nobody calls Damascus steel an "unidentifiable alloy". We know what it is, a type of steel, we know what it's made out of. Whether or not we can manufacture something with identical properties is irrelevant to whether or not we can identify it.
This whole "unidentifiable alloys" thing is a lot of meaningless speculation that hinges on a throwaway phrase with zero evidence backing it up. Show me the XRF data then we'll have a discussion. Until then it's just a bunch of hot air.
If you sent a sample of carbon nanotubes to the 1950’s, they’d say “this is carbon”. That doesn’t mean the sample wasn’t exotic to them and hard for them to reproduce or understand.
An “alien material” or “alien alloy” would be one where we just didn’t understand how it’s made, even if we can see perfectly how it’s structured and what it consists of.
Then you'd get the "so how do we make them long enough to use and have a reliable process that costs in" discussion, and I think that you'd be there for about 70 years. Sadly, maybe longer...
(This is purely scifi musing from my behalf, I don't believe in some kind of cover-up at this scale.)
Simply writing "we don't believe them when they say this" doesn't carry as much weight as "we don't believe them because x, y, and z."
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread976484/pg44
Electromagnetism, UFOs, and the Weaponization of Alien Technology(page 44)
Harry Reid was able to get the program funded, and directed most of the $22M in spending to one of his closest backers, Robert Bigelow so he could build a fancy warehouse. If that fancy warehouse wasn't storing super valuable alien artifacts it just looks like Reid filling the pockets of a close friend with government monies, and people might think Bigelow might be laundering that money to pay back to Reid after his retirement.
Since both of these upstanding citizens are known to have such high ethics that can't be possible, clearly the warehouse was full of priceless alien stuff. We can scientifically examine these alloys right now, except Reid agreed to cancel the program, because of deficits? or Harry's retirement accounts were fully funded.
But we also have an esteemed government director who can corroborate all of this, Luis Elizondo. He has no reason to make up sensationalistic stories, he's too busy helping Tom Delonge convince backers to fund the "To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science" to research alien stuff, and which supposedly is contractually obligated to pay Tom $100,000 a year once funded. What it's going to pay Luis is no-ones business.
Yep, completely on the level. Can't understand why these scientists are so skeptical.
Especially for a sum as small as $22 million. Even county-level politicians can make that amount of money disappear without a trace and without leaving behind a warehouse and a paper trail.
To play the other side: What we have in the linked article is a couple of people who have never seen the objects in question stating categorically that they don't exist, or are ordinary. I'd believe the skeptics more if they'd at least seen the objects. But it's just a couple of guys several thousand miles away second-guessing some other guys with actual access to the objects.
Thanks, for the clickbait, SI. Next...
Or do you have an actual argument as to why these materials couldn't be readily identified and studied by competent physicists using well known technology?
Edit: /s for clarity
Structure is the basis for 'invisibility cloaks', materials with small-scale structures which confer optical properties not found in the same unstructured bulk materials. [1]
Another example of where structure confers strange properties on elements (not alloys) is light emission from indirect-gap materials like silicon. Make silicon particles small enough and you can get light emission that you can't from bulk silicon. See quantum dots [2] and other similar structures.
Structure can really change things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_cloaking [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot
So your standard for proof is that someone said A but provided no proof, yet those who are skeptical about A's truth aren't to be trusted because they... Weren't provided proof to refute?!
Or you're probably thinking of Scrooge McDuck
Most of the guys I know could take first class everywhere and not even notice but nope - economy all the way, and UberX to the airport. Not all rich guys blow hundreds of thousands on private jets. I get the feeling that the more you struggled to earn it, the more you watch every penny.
And the richest guy I know (capital-B) is far more concerned with upholding and preserving his family legacy than with ostentatious displays of wealth. It really weighs on him. Sure, he's not hurting, and life is pretty good, but a baller he ain't. Shows up at the office at 9am just like all us other schmucks. Hell, he shares an office!
Those guys you see living large on instagram and what not aren't universal or, as far as I know, even typical.
Does it make sense to make your most SHADY kickback deal based on Aliens??? Something that will get TONS of press coverage even with nothing fraudulent going on.
If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republican Steve Wynn). His decisions could massively benefit them, and sitting as an honorary member of their board could be profitable.
When you go to rob the bank you drive the easiest to forget, most common looking, plain colored mid-sized sedan. You don't drive an Ice Cream Truck blasting death metal.
Are honorary board members paid?
Slot machines are highly regulated in Nevada, I seriously doubt that's a realistic scenario.
Oh I can just see it now.
"Don't tell a soul, it's off the books. This is..." The Senator looked around nervously and began to whisper, "top secret alien technology we're dealing with here."
A junior developer's salary to a guy who's sold millions of records. There's a lot to criticize here but I don't think that's one of them
Some of people involved with Tom are legitimate.
Sadly spreading these claims is how these programs self propegate. Luckily they don't do much real damage other than misleading the public and wasting government funding.
For x-ray diffraction in particular, we assume all materials are made from atoms. However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don't think it's possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom part?
This sounds like pure sci-fi to me. AFAIK, everything we know about physics suggests that there are no stable substances made up of sub-atomic particles in a way that "skips the atom part". If that were possible, it would be in the realm of "entirely new physics".
Not to say that it's not possible of course... you don't know what you don't know and all that. But the Standard Model seems to be pretty firmly grounded and I haven't seen anything to suggest that it allows for such a thing. Personally, my bayesian prior on this being possible would be awfully close to 0 right now.
Then again, maybe it's Dwarf Star Alloy.[1]
[1]: tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dwarf_star_alloy
Quarks combine via the strong force into baryons, the most common of which are particles that form the nucleus of atoms and anti-atoms, and mesons, which are unstable and immediately decay into electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc.
Of the baryons, protons are stable, neutrons less-so, and the rest decay immediately. Perhaps there is a configuration of non-nucleon quarks that bond together into a kind of stable matter that we have yet to discover, but it seems more likely to me that if (and that's a big "if") there were exotic matter in a warehouse in Las Vegas, it would consist of novel alloys or other such materials.
Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear physicist.
That is awesome; I did not realize we were so perfect, so smart, to have it all figured out, and that science is done learning more.
The best solution would be to rename the account, but we don't have that implemented yet.
Well, no shit.
I totally believe that we could identify any normal alloy, but what about more far-out kinds of materials? Humans have already experimented with metamaterials, weird composites made of many different kinds of constituents layered or interposed in various ways, materials with embedded electronic or even "smart" computational capabilities, etc.
Now imagine what a more advanced civilization might be capable of producing. I'm imagining a composite with embedded "smart" programmable behaviors that is 3d printed at the atomic scale. Every single atom is positioned intentionally to yield "smart matter" with incredible strength or other really exotic capabilities.
I can imagine it being difficult to identify or characterize such a thing without destructive testing, and if we did have such a sample we'd probably be very reluctant to do that.