Experts Cast Doubt on 'Alien Alloys' in the New York Times' UFO Story (scientificamerican.com)

What to make of a Las Vegas building full of unidentified alloys? The New York Times published a stunning story last week revealing that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had, between 2007 and 2012, funded a $22 million program for investigating UFOs (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source). The story included three revelations that were tailored to blow readers' minds: 1. Many high-ranking people in the federal government believe aliens have visited planet Earth. 2. Military pilots have recorded videos of UFOs with capabilities that seem to outstrip all known human aircraft, changing direction and accelerating in ways no fighter jet or helicopter could ever accomplish. 3. In a group of buildings in Las Vegas, the government stockpiles alloys and other materials believed to be associated with UFOs. From a Scientific American report: Points one and two are weird, but not all that compelling on their own: The world already knew that plenty of smart folks believe in alien visitors, and that pilots sometimes encounter strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere. Point No. 3, though -- those buildings full of alloys and other materials -- that's a little harder to hand wave away. Is there really a DOD cache full of materials from out of this world? Here's the thing, though: The chemists and metallurgists Live Science spoke to -- experts in identifying unusual alloys -- don't buy it. "I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science. "My opinion? That's quite impossible." Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common -- in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are -- and very well understood.

Comments

Alloys and wonderf materials

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not see any contradiction in those statemenst. As an example IF I analyze graphene with an AAS (a techniques for knowing the element of your sample) or with an XPS or with secondary scatter emission or with XRD (powder not monocrystal) I would find that graphene is made of C and this is correct. That won't explain ANY of its unusual and wonder properties.
So you can have an alloy with known element with unknown properties. If you gave graphene or even a metamaterial to a scientist to analyse to a scientist 20 years ago he would have probably said "these are unknown materials". it does mean:"we do probably know how they look and what are their elements but we do not know how they made it or what are their properties".
So some people seem to read and understand only what want to see and understand...

Re: Alloys and wonderf materials

[pollarda]

You are right on point. A friend of mine designs reactors for a company that figured out a way to make carbon nanotubes en mass. (Many tons / month). Apparently if you mix them into iron (in a vacuum), you get a steel with some pretty magical properties. If someone had looked at this steel only 10 years ago, theyâ(TM)d really have been confused. Even today, I bet most metallurgists probably donâ(TM)t know about it let alone how to make it. Iâ(TM)d bet there are plenty of metals that are similar Perhaps the elements are identifiable but how it is made would be a totally different matter. Or just think what someone would think of a modern CPU given to a physicist from the Manhatten project. Itâ(TM)s just a piece of silicone after all.

If these aliens are so advanced

[mark_reh]

that they can make unidentifiable alloys, how come they can't keep pieces of their space ships from falling off? How come so much of the stuff falls off that it takes "a group of buildings" in Vegas to hold all of it?

I'd expect this sort of BS from Fox News "science" reporting (like the mystery planet that was supposed to crash into earth about a month ago), but NYT?

Re:If these aliens are so advanced

[sinij]

Imagine you are a tour bus driver that shuttles tourists to amazon forest to look at gorillas. You take steps to minimize disruptions to gorillas as you want to be able to come back, and you very obviously appreciate that they could be dangerous. However, making sure that no garbage ever gets thrown away is just not a priority for you.

Re:Wanna bet?

[lgw]

: âoeAll that compelling" or not, the military-grade data files that were released looked like pretty damn realistic fighter-plane-meets-UFO videos to me. Whatâ(TM)s MORE compelling then?

If you're old enough, you remember Project Blue Book . It stands out as the government's best, and perhaps only, long term conspiracy to hide information from the public that actually worked.

The SR-71 was a very important weapon in the cold war, and its secrecy was paramount during development. After all, what's the point of a super-secret spy plane that the opponent already knows about? But building such a difficult plane with so much new technology would require constant test flights and people would see the secret spy plane throughout development. Credible people, like airline pilots and military pilots would see experimental planes that outperformed anything they'd imagined and word was sure to leak. What to do? How to keep the secret?

The answer was amazingly clever. America was UFO-crazy anyway, so the government starting projects to investigate UFO sightings. Those projects themselves were "secret", but leaked to make sure every conspiracy theorists knew about them and took them seriously. Then, any time someone credible saw the testbeds and eventually actual prototypes of the SR-71 doing what no plane was thought to be capable of, they were interviewed about theur UFO sighting.

Thus, the one conspiracy that worked. By treating every sighting of our secret spy plane in development as "secret UFO evidence", when the Russians inevitably heard about all the sightings of a plane that flew higher and faster than should be possible, they were all dismissed as American UFO nonsense. Fooled the public too - it's only recently that the people involved have started talking as a lot of it is 50 years old now.