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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.
Clearly these so called "experts" haven't ran their little tests on Twinkies or Mountain Dew... there's nothing in either of those that can be identified.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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...
I was first introduced to the idea of 'consensus reality' through an old science fiction story (that I can't recall through mind or googling at the moment). Later on I came across it again with the Mage RPG.
It's a fun idea because it fits the superficial understanding of history and science that most of us have very, very well.
Look at the uses for high-temperature alloys like Inconel and Hastelloy. Everything from cryogenic conditions to rocket engine parts and nuclear reactors. Just the things you would want from a UFO
https://www.hpalloy.com/Alloys...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But rocket motors are already beyond alloys. They also require ceramics and other materials based on silica
https://www.extremetech.com/ex...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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?
Or their metallurgy surpasses ours and they really have figured out useful alloys that we haven't discovered yet. But AFAIK simple spectroscopic analysis will tell you what's in an alloy.
But simple spectroscopic analysis won't necessarily tell you how it behaves or what its properties are.
Alien alloys and materials would have to be the best kept secret since, ever though. And that seems quite unlikely.
FTA:
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.
Just because you know the composition of something doesn't mean you know how to make it. Nobody knows how to make real Damascus steel anymore. There are still discoveries being made about new crystal structures, compounds and alloys. That is before you get into the many different ways to temper or treat metals in the process of creating a particular alloy. Even if you can find one way to create a particular alloy, does the process scale to industrial levels? Creating a few molecules in a lab with special equipment and processes is a very different thing than creating it by the ton in high speed processes. Even using the same recipe with different equipment can potentially produce different outcomes.
Consider FOGBANK
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Humanity knew properties of graphite, but graphene (which should be same thing) turned to be very different.
...points to the materials being non-terrestrial. I am way out of my league here, but this seems like a plausible reality that may be connected to the story. Of course this does not mean they are "alien" unless they are truly alloys (which I suppose would require intelligence to fashion) made of non-terrestrial materials. I am just trying to connect the dots between reality and what gets reported in the NYT.
I've worked as a research scientist in research groups that belonged to the absolute top of the field for over 15 years and I never saw any influence of aliens into our field. I worked for many years in nanotechnology, a field in which if the story about those alloys is true you would expect aliens to meddle. I am very sure that every high-tech thing on this planet is conceived and built by people, whether in the past (pyramids, the tomb of Tutanchamon) or now.
-- Cheers!
Yes. Yes. It's difficult to stay abreast of all the enhancement technologies. Even those of us who are not fans of silicone enhancement will agree that analysis would find it different from NaCl-infused H2O enhancement, but this would be very confusing to analysts of yore.
Yore with me on this, right?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Twinkies have been thoroughly deconstructed and analyzed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I totally support this idea; it'll come to fruition sooner or lacer, we'll simply have to take the plunge. Our cup will truly runneth over. When historians discuss among themselves of when metallurgy went all soft and rounded, they will naturally cleave to our age, +5 insightful, politely asking each other, "a nipple for your thoughts, good sir?" It is virtually certain that some will make some excellent points, erecting fine impressions upon the cloth of history.
I have to go take my meds now, sorry.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Aliens have superior technology, obviously. So why would they cast doubt when 3-D printing doubt would be much more effective?
Alien alloys and materials would have to be the best kept secret since, ever though.
If that were correct, this discussion wouldn't be taking place.
19th century was the one we developed new alloys.
20th century we found new elements.
21th century looks to be the age of the layered metamaterials - computer chips, radar reflecting, hydrophobic sprays, that kind of thing.
I would expect aliens tech to be composed of elements we understand in peculiar manners.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The tilt only moves it towards the south, and gives it a shorter, lower track through the sky
OK, you complete retarded fucking idiot. The sun is "yellower" when it is lower in the sky precisely because it has to traverse more atmosphere. The atmosphere scatters the higher frequencies (blue light) and only the lower frequencies (redder/yellower) make it to you stupid fucking eyeball. That's why the sun gets yellower, then redder as the sun sets dipshit. You are a fucking piece of shit because you know this and want to spread misinformation like the dickless, child molester you are. Yes, that's right. I know for a fact that you are a child molester because only a child molester like you would spout off all this nonsense. Child Molester! Child Molester!
I remember the conniptions it took to get a 10 Meg hard drive in the 70's.
If somebody had handed me one 10 Gig usb stick then, it would have been near impossible to reverse engineer it without breaking it.
If I break it then I no longer have the only one.
Now think about if you were handed the flash drive in the 60, 50's, 40's, etc.
Now think if you knew the thing was flash drive with useful information from essentially, the future?
Think what it would be like to have pieces from a whole spacecraft capable of getting here.
The material technology would only be a small part of it.
Aside from staying together, how does it move, get energy, navigate, communicate, support life, and who knows what else?
What would be on it's hard drives?
The delemma as to how much to break and learn now versus save would be interesting to say the least.
From a tin foil hat standpoint, this whole thought path seems unlikely.
What are the odds that something like this would not have leaked out?
Sort of off topic, but there never seems to be accompanying reports of sonic booms when objects like this are spotted moving at impossible speeds and demonstrate "...capabilities that seem to outstrip all known human aircraft..." Either these objects are an illusion of earthly origin or they are real and do not displace air when moving. Assuming the second option is the correct one what interesting hypothesis can be dreamed up about how these objects might be propelled?
"It's fun to obey the machine" - Ralph Wiggum
The idea of flying saucers being interstellar spacecraft I would argue, for a thousand and one reasons, actually might be plausible. But I would argue this now as an extension of a rather interesting physics idea. But in summary a gyroscope inside a Bose-Einstein condensate is the technology in order to induce frame dragging within the fabric of spacetime surrounding the crafts immediate region. For a while now I've been saying that the one thing I want to see is what happens when a gyroscope rotates near absolute zero. I found this paper this week only adding to my conviction. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.227... But in order to communicate I guess the cosmological argument I am trying to develop I have done this write up. To be honest, I am not too happy with my own right up but I am at the start of developing my idea and doing lots of homework. But there is a sense of urgency in wanting to communicate my idea and myself trying exactly what I need to say.... the next argument is mathematical in trying to describe a series of mechanics that explain why spacetime is spacetime. i.e. Why is straight actually straight, why is there 3D spatial dimensions and 1D time? Here the link to my line of reasoning, which ties up the anomalies in the CMB. http://www.blackomega.co.uk/so... One good way of saying my idea is it to reframe the idea to consider it is we who travel at the speed of light and light is stationary. By cooling things down with direction and alignment a craft aligns itself to put on the brake and travel through spacetime.
> 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".
Philip Russel Wallace published a thorough analysis of the properties of graphene in 1947. Others discussed it as early as 1856. In 1948 Ruess and Vogt published electron microscopy images of proto-graphene a few molecules thick. What was new 15 years ago was an efficient method of producing it (the scotch tape method).
Someone analyzing graphene 20 years ago would be able to very easily identify it as an extremely thin, one molecule thin, piece of graphite, and they could refer to the P.R. Wallace papers to learn about it's properties. They'd then ask "how did you slice it so thin?!"
Graphene 20 years ago was roughly like an ant today - we can't make an ant, we do understand them.
I bet some of it is a "diverted" shipment from the naquadah mines on P3X-4C3.
When director Robert Wise test screened his classic movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, he was mortified when the audience laughed at certain scenes. Then he realized what they were laughing at: the futility of the military sending tanks to confront something so obviously beyond them. It was the dawn of what people were calling "the Atomic Age", and it didn't feel like a pinnacle in human history. More like standing for the first time on the shore of an ocean you hadn't realized existed.
Now let's imagine a civilization capable of interstellar travel visited the Earth. What reason would the have to be secretive about it? In fact it's presumptuous to assume they'd have any interest in us at all. To them we'd seem hardly different from animals. Chimps, after all, make twig-tools for fishing out termites. And the attitude that local populations and ecosystems need to be treated with respect is largely a product of our new awareness of Earth finite nature. When the planet seemed unbounded to us (as the cosmos would be for a spacefaring civilization) we had no compunctions about our impact on local fauna.
But rare visits by a civilization that had no particular interest in us could produce the appearance of more frequent but secretive visits. They wouldn't be hiding from us, so people would see them, but they wouldn't be visiting places like New York or Washington DC. Not visiting major centers of human power suggests to our parochial view that they're hiding from us, when it's just as possible that they're just picking random (to us) places, which on average will tend to be much more sparsely populated compared to a major metropolis.
Then what about the marvelous artifacts that supposedly exist? Why would they leave such precious things behind? Well, precious is in the eye of the beholder. Imagine you are exploring the home territory of an uncontacted people with stone age technology, if you dropped a gum wrapper the thing would be marvelous to them. Now as an enlightened modern person the notion would be mortifying; you'd pick up after yourself to avoid contaminating their culture. But if you had a more... Victorian attitude, you wouldn't give a flying fuck if the natives worked themselves up over a bit of tinfoil.
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Furthermore, if they discovered some graphene 20 years ago (from an acquired Russian object, meteor) it could easily sit in a secure location for decades before proper research results go public and it could sit decades afterwards as a forgotten item.
They could also just sit on the item for historical purposes because of related secrets still being kept. Some old Russian spy plane bits which no longer hold meaning, for example. Government over classifies and many times it is just to cover up possible mistakes. Some general could order something stored for any reason (being well educated is not a job requirement) and to remove a secure item MUST require more than 1 expert to sign off on it's removal simply for security purposes.
NYT might get somebody in government to inventory and clean house. It is not likely we will hear about it unless they need to downplay the importance of such a place.
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It's not just the elements you combine which matters. The amount of each element you add can change the final alloy's characteristics. For example, steel (alloy of iron and carbon) becomes stronger as you add carbon. The carbon atoms wedge themselves in between the crystalline iron grains, making it harder for them to slide around (sliding is what gives metals their malleability), thus making the steel stronger (less bendy) than iron. But if you add too much carbon, you reduce the malleability so much that it becomes brittle. The microscopic structure continues to become stronger (the iron atoms don't slide against each other making it almost diamond-like in toughness), but the macroscopic structure now fractures - the crystalline metal grains which used to absorb energy by sliding around now absorb it by separating. And the combined result is weaker than iron in practical applications. Where the steel falls along this spectrum depends on the amount of carbon you add.
If it were just a simple combination of elements, then there would be a limited number of alloys, and an "unidentifiable" alloy would imply an unknown/undiscovered element. But because the amount of each element matters, there are literally an infinite number of possible alloys. And some of them may have a "sweet spot" in their desirable characteristics (like carbon does with iron to create strong steel). Not enough or too much of the alloying material and you've completely missed the sweet spot. (And there may even be multiple sweet spots - it all depends on how the half dozen elements you're alloying together interact with each other.)
So of course the DoD is going to be running experiments combining all sorts of different materials in different combinations and concentrations in search of possible alloys we've overlooked or haven't stumbled upon yet. And if they're smart they'd be cataloging their findings and storing the resulting alloys in a warehouse in case it's ever needed for future testing (so they don't have to create it again). And if they've got a particular combination and concentration of elements nobody has tried before, that would make it an "unkonwn" or "unidentified" alloy. Unknown until they make it and test it, that is.
Well, if you want to be pedantic, once you'd figured out what makes it unknown it's not "unknown" anymore, is it?
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"UFOs are real, the Air Force doesn't exist." Alfred E. Newman. Also from the 60s
I thought this was going to be an article about how easy it is to break all those Harbor Freight tools made out of Chineseum.
Have gnu, will travel.
Two words:
Dark Matter.
(Drops mic)
Hey, pick that mic back up and put it on the damn stand! dark matter is well accepted, if poorly understood. Now, dark energy... (Drops mic).
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Consider these are journalist and not scientists. In fact journalists are about as far as you can get from scientists. Consider how they hype 'global warming' and 'climate change' and then blame hurricanes on them (even though NOAA will say the two are not related every time there is a bad one). They use doomesday language like the world has 3 years to reverse course before total annihilation. So, as a researcher, you try leaking info to your friend at the times, how are you going to describe the research you are trying to do. Imagine some material you are looking at that can change shape based on some sort of electric signal or something... Maybe its an 'alloy' or a compound like graphine. OR, maybe its some form of nanotech and nobody has yet to understand how this thing can restructure itself. Maybe its a superconductor and yet trying to make the same thing out of its base elements fails to yield the same results. How do you convey this to a journalist, someone more in tune with language and grammar, than the scientific method, logic, and reasoning? You use layman terms and explain it the way you might have to explain it to your 12-year-old. Then said journalist goes and puts what they annotated into their OWN WORDS. Viola! You get 'mysterious alloys'. When really its more likely a mysterious 'material' whose properties have yet to be unlocked.
For the record I am not some 'believer' who wants to just believe in spite of evidence to the contrary. But at the same time, I know how these dingleberries who write for main stream media think, and logic often has its own definition in their minds. Remember these are the people that think if you pass a law making something illegal (ie guns), nobody would ever be able to kill someone ever again. Murder has been illegal in this country for 250 years now, and yet it happens almost every day in one form or another. Laws don't mean shit to someone who has no regard for them. Its amazing what you can accomplish when you have a complete disregard to law, order, regulation, and due process.
So what about the foo fighters reported by airmen as far back as 1941 in both the Pacific and Europe?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
or zero point energy
If you gave someone a modern processor chip in 1950's. I expect that they would see it as an alloy of silicon and a bunch of other strange elements, embedded in plastic. I can well believe that a more advanced civilization could build devices atom by atom, and we would just see those devices as a alloy.
I call bullshit on storing alien parts. Around 95% of all contemporary spacecraft are built around a General Products hull, and they don't fall apart. Puppeteers don't build bullshit
If we actually had the technology to take any 'unknown' substance of any kind and tell exactly what it's physical properties were, then we'd be living in a very different world. The only way I'd start believing that someone had something of extra-terrestrial origin, is if the analysis of it indicated elements that don't occur in nature, and that our species does not have the technology to synthesize. Even then I'd sooner believe in there being a 'mad scientist' somewhere on this planet who'd found a way to create the aforementioned 'unnatural' element. Otherwise it's just all media hype and superstition.
Of course it's impossible that there's an unidentifiable alloy. Any alloy we can't identify will be given a new name, like X2, identifying it.
Spoken like an anonymous coward!
If the other organizations news is wrong more often it is because they cover much more than Trump's ego and make an occasional error. Fox regurgitates Trump's lies as if they were the only thing that matters anywhere in the world, except when they are inventing new lies to inject into and manipulate his child-like brain.
I don't need any news organization to tell me that Trump lies when the videos of the bullshit coming straight from his mouth are everywhere to be seen.
But maybe that's all just clever CGI and he never said any of those things. It's all a vast left-wing conspiracy!
The US is both the most generous country in the world in terms of official foreign aid giving, and it also has the most generous private NGO givings. What Russia does with all that money behind closed curtain is to breed tonnes and tonnes of Anthrax so that even they have trouble handling the Anthrax properly.
It helps to have the correct perspective so we don't ask stupid questions.
I once had a signature.
The lack of caring in this one is great. No, really.... i mean great as in: beyond your wildest dreams.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Why do you think airmen have magic eyes? OMG, things with no good point of refererecne look out of place!!! oh noes!!!
This shit been debunked so many god damn times, can people just move on already?
here, I'll give you the umbrella reason why we do know know of any alien, or extraterrestrial being, items, or visitations:
Money.
If the military new about alien, especially in the 40's and 50's, they would announce it. T\You thing the red scare cost us money and advanced are military? nothing compared to 'aliens are attacking us' would be to ramp up all space programs. How much money do you think NASA and the military would be able to get?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"They wanted to see which wonder material could evade radar detection "
because that don't have radars of there own?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can't even talk about talking about the truth without being censored.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
To be honest, I doubt there's any such warehouse; so the whole question is bogus. But if there were, it does seem possible that we might not be able to identify the secret sauce, or reproduce the alloy.
I have a vague recollection (which could be totally wrong) that if a scientist from the 1930s were somehow given a transistor, they could not distinguish the P-doped and N-doped regions, because the doping levels were below the sensitivity of their tests. Nor, even if they were told about doping, could they re-create a transistor, because they couldn't produce sufficiently pure samples of silicon or germanium to start with. I suppose s.t. analogous to this could be true for alien alloys--they could have some crucial property which, for one reason or another, we could not detect and/or reproduce. Not necessarily a component that we could not detect, but maybe a configuration of a component that we could not detect. (By "configuration", I mean s.t. like the difference among graphene, diamond, and soot.)
It's also possible that the word "alloy" in this report means something other than blend of metals.
i'm late to the story so maybe nobody will read this but here goes anyways:
yeah, these supposed artifacts could be metamaterials or any of ~1 bazillion things we don't have a clue about. that part didn't bother me. the part that bothered me was how the materials have some kind of strange effects upon nearby humans. whether or not the stuff exists in Nevada, that sounds more like an excuse to not show the public (and to discourage snooping) than anything else.
I'm going to be mad if this story evaporates because i blew my free NYT article reads on it.
Fact: There is a calculated 0% chance that Earth is the only place in the whole entire Universe where there is life!