When exactly did the U.S. Government first become aware of interstellar space trash?
Did it really all start with the Roswell incident? Could this also be why 'Oumuamua has seemingly spooked the spooks?
Disclosure
I should have made this clear in my first series of posts about the recent UFO/UAP media noise — I am biased. I’ve been obsessed with SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) since I was a kid. I like to think I have an objective yet-open scientific mind but I must confess: I want to believe. But I want to believe the truth and do not want to become lost in fantasy. I am not a “UFOlogist.” I’ve never been all that interested in popular UFO lore about flying saucers and abductions by little grey aliens with big black eyes nor secret Area 51 alien autopsies etc. I never previously researched the Roswell incident. I assumed most of the related content was nonsense created by wide-eyed earnest fanatics, amateur sci-fi writers, as well as potential disinformation agents. I preferred to follow the more legitimate scientific approaches to answering the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. This led me to closely study the progress of radio telescope SETI, Dysonian SETI, and more recently what I refer to as Loebian SETI. Anyway, that’s enough about me.
Breakthrough Starshot
Before we jump too far back in time lets first familiarize ourselves with a little bit of recent history. In April 2016, billionaire Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Starshot project. He was accompanied on stage by some heavy-weight notable scientific minds including Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson and Avi Loeb. I’ll paraphrase my understanding of the back-story but it goes something like this: At some point Mr. Milner approached Professor Loeb with interest in visiting the Proxima Centauri system in an effort to collect data on its planets. Ideally, this effort would be conducted within both of their lifetimes. If Professor Loeb could devise a reasonable method to accomplish it Mr. Milner would help to cover the tab.
The Proxima Centauri system is currently ~4 light-years away. Using chemical rocket propulsion it would take thousands of years to get there. To satisfy Mr. Milner’s constraint, Professor Loeb would have to come up with a fundamentally different approach. The system he devised is truly remarkable (although at present still limited by the current state of technology/engineering.)
The substance of the idea is to use a massive multi-kilometer phased laser array to blast super thin and durable light sails which pull very small gram-sized probes capable of recording and transmitting data back to Earth. The plan would be to send hundreds of the inexpensive probes in the hopes that at least a few of them survive the journey. With this method the probes no longer have to carry their own fuel and could theoretically achieve speeds in the ballpark of 20% of the speed of light — reducing the transit time to roughly 20 years. With an additional ~4 years to receive the resulting data it’s possible that Mr. Milner (currently 61 years of age) lives to see it.
You could also maybe imagine how, in addition to exploring a nearby star system, this sort of technology could be used to exhaustively explore our own as well in a fraction of the time it took Voyager to complete its mission. We could cruise by every asteroid, every planet, from multiple angles collecting a variety of data — both for educational and commercial purposes. You could then also imagine that these probes would continue on whatever course they were initially set upon almost indefinitely. It would be cheaper than returning them to Earth. And perhaps in a few hundred or thousand or million or so years they would find themselves crashing into any one of the billions of other Earth-like planets out there. And in turn, maybe some of these Earth-like planets are home to intelligent beings that decide to do something similar — or have already done so.
Roswell
In June 1947, something came to rest on W.W. "Mac" Brazel’s ranch outside of Roswell, N.M. The debris, as he called it, included something he and several others described as being like aluminum or lead foil but not quite. At least that’s about the extent of the information that I’m reasonably convinced of concerning the incident. It’s very difficult to find primary source material about the incident. What little exists and seems at least somewhat verifiable comes from the military. It happened so long ago and the story has been so polluted with nonsense throughout the decades that trying to find signals among the noise is exhausting. But in light of recent events I’ve decided to try to wade into the swamp in an attempt to mine anything useful from it.
The incident would occur in the middle of a flying saucer hysteria which is probably why this event was initially framed as a crashed flying saucer. I don’t want to digress down that rabbit hole here, but I suspect the hysteria was driven by military activity due to increased aeronautical engineering efforts associated with WW2 and the subsequent Cold War vs. little green men flying saucers around. After the initial sensational headline, the Air Force would quickly follow it up with a story claiming the debris was nothing more than a weather balloon.
In the late ‘70s a retired Major Jesse Marcel allegedly relayed details to UFOlogist Stanton Friedman that he believed the debris was extraterrestrial. His son’s late wife would also relay a similar story. Friedman’s subsequent stories would rile people up for the next decade or so. So much so that New Mexico Rep. Steven Schiff requested an audit of government records about the incident from the Air Force’s General Accounting Office (GAO.) In September 1994 it would release an alleged tell-all report (PDF warning).
The substance of the report included some first-hand testimony of witnesses to the debris and events as well as a revelation of the existence of a Project MOGUL. This alleged top-secret project was an effort to monitor Soviet nuclear tests using an array of high-altitude balloons and microphones. These balloons are what the 1994 report suspects were recovered on Mr. Brazel’s ranch.
The above article goes on to say that at the time, the Air Force described the wreckage as a weather balloon and characterized it as a “white lie” to hide the more top-secret project — although the actual GAO report itself isn’t clear on if the officer speaking to the media genuinely thought it was a weather balloon and was perhaps even unaware of the details of Project MOGUL when commenting to the press.
Some notable excerpts from the official GAO report:
There are several other accounts and alleged signed affidavits of testimony from various people floating around on the internet and not included in the GAO report. I haven’t run down the primary source material for these. For some, it’s not possible because they were allegedly taken from unrecorded in-person interviews and telephone calls. The general meme regarding the “foil” is that it was strange, durable, shiny on one side and when crumpled and released would instantly return to its previous configuration uncreased. It was described as not metal exactly but not plastic either. It was also said to weigh almost nothing. In multiple unconfirmed testimonies it’s described as “air foil” or “memory foil.” In others, it was claimed to have been shot with a rifle or burned with an acetylene torch and was not damaged.
‘Oumuamua
If you’ve read my first series of UFO/UAP posts you’re probably somewhat filled in on ‘Oumuamua. Brief recap: In October 2017 scientists detected the first known interstellar object. There is still intense debate over the nature of the object. It is not obviously a comet nor an asteroid.
One particularly interesting property of the object was that it experienced an acceleration when approaching the Sun which was not attributable solely to the Sun’s gravity. This is normal for comets because as they heat up they outgas. This outgassing causes a rocket-like effect which accelerates the comet like a rocket away from the Sun. In this case though, no cometary tail was seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope. By deduction, this led Professor Loeb to conclude the acceleration must’ve instead been caused by solar radiation pressure on the object. This would imply the object is extremely thin (on the order of a millimeter.) There is no known natural process which creates large millimeter thin asteroids.
Another interesting property of ‘Oumuamua is that’s probably best described as a large flat pancake. This is contrary to the cigar-like shape as depicted all over the media. This was determined due to further analysis of its light-curve.
These two properties caused Professor Loeb to speculate that perhaps the object was a derelict light sail. He admits that due to his work on Breakthrough Starshot the concept had been on his mind but it also seems to be a potential good fit to the data.
So was Roswell hit with an interstellar probe towed by a light sail?
I tend to doubt it but I suppose there is a non-zero possibility.
The general impression I’m left with is that something perhaps similar to Mylar (which is used in solar sail construction) was probably found on the ranch. Everyday people of the time understandably thought it was unusual as Mylar wasn’t produced commercially until 1952 by the DuPont corporation. A relevant patent (PDF warning) would be filed in May 1948 — just under a year after this incident. Neither Mylar nor its predecessor polyethylene (which the Air Force contends was used for Project MOGUL’s balloons) were commonly used for weather balloons of the era. They were typically constructed with latex. So if the photo of Major Marcel in the previous section were staged I would’ve expected them to use an actual weather balloon. The featured material looks like some form of a more common foil-like material to me.
At first glance, it doesn’t make much sense for the Air Force to launch balloons to investigate Soviet nuclear tests from New Mexico but it could make sense if the balloons were launched in order to test the equipment first. The GAO report does claim the Air Force found references to Project MOGUL tests launching from the White Sands range nearby.
While some of the unconfirmed testimonies about the foil debris are very interesting, the two most compelling that I highlight from the GAO report don’t seem compelling enough to claim it’s especially exotic. I’m not sure how to interpret that the material “wouldn’t crush or burn.” That could mean a lot of things.
Now having said that, it’s still possible the military is covering it up and the origin of the debris is more exotic. Who knows, maybe the more interesting unverified descriptions of the foil are accurate and it’s actually made of a mix between something like Mylar and this crazy stuff:
Perhaps it was made from this unknown-to-exist exotic material because it could function as a solar sail like Mylar yet maintain rigidity in space when encountering cosmic dust. And perhaps it was super heat-resistant because it needed to withstand being blasted with a laser and hit with on the order of 100s of gigawatts of power to start it moving. But the testimonies I’ve read fall short of convincing me the material was this interesting.
Nuclear arms race
Even if the explanation of the Roswell debris is prosaic, this general post-war/early Cold War era is, IMO, a reasonable candidate for when the USG could’ve first became aware of artificial interstellar objects.
During the resulting nuclear arms race there was an intense focus on detecting and identifying objects and explosions in the sky and their source. If believed, Project MOGUL, the likely cause of the Roswell incident, was one such more primitive early effort. Another innovation in this area was the 1948 invention of the bhangmeter — which eventually would be used along with satellite technology to discover this interesting event. It’s not clear to me why the USG would tip its hand here but it probably had to do with politics and/or to serve as a deterrent.
In 1958 the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were created. The early focus of DARPA would be total surveillance and awareness of nuclear weapons activity on, under and above Earth. It would collaborate with NASA in this effort. As CNEOS and Professor Loeb’s work shows, this capability can also be used to detect meteors — even interstellar ones.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for the summary and substack. I've always skipped reading about UFOs as the universe is so vast and the chances of contact is so near zero. But if spooks are controlling the info around UFOs I'm interested to know the reason.