A Pentagon official says an alien mothership hidden in our solar system could be watching us with microscopic probes

ADefense Department official ispromoting the idea of​​an alien mothership orbiting our solar system.

Isthere an alien mothership orbiting the solar system sending out tiny probes to explore the planets? According to a Harvard scientist and a Pentagon official, itis possible.

In a draft of the document,thecouple said it is possiblethat an alienspacecraftis in our galactic neighborhoodandis exploring the region using”dandelionseeds,”a small spacecraft capableofinformationgathering and transfer, justlikehumans humans send spacecraft to planetaryexploration.

Avi Loeb (opens in a new tab), Harvard University astronomer, and Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), established by the Department of Defense (DoD) in July 2022 for detection and investigation Objects of Interest – published a project on March 7th entitled “Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”

It is not an official Pentagon document, but was developed in cooperation with the Department of Defense. It was not tested until.Loeb is known for his research on Oumuamua, an interstellar visitor from outside the solar system.

Astronomers first spotted the cigar-shaped object in 2017 and initially thought it was a comet. However, its elongated shape, lack of a coma (the cloud of gas that surrounds the comet), and the fact that it was moving away from the Sun raised questions about comet theory. Instead, Loeb suggested that “Oumuamua was an alien spacecraft.”Six months before Oumuamua approached Earth, a small interstellar meteor about 3 feet (1 meter) wide struck Earth. This meteor, IM2, had nothing to do with Oumuamua, but it gave Loeb food for thought.

The coincidence ofinspired him to “consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a mother ship that ejects many small probes as it flies past Earth, a workable construct not much like a NASA.” mission looks like,” he said. Loeb on Live Science. . . E-mail. “These ‘dandelion seeds’… can be separated from the mothership by gravity or by the tidal maneuvers of the sun.

“In a draft of the paper, Loeb and Kirkpatrick examined unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, the government’s preferred term for UFOs) constrained by known physics. The authors suggest the dandelion seed probes could reach Earth for exploration without astronomers spotting them, as they would likely be too small to reflect enough sunlight to be spotted by survey telescopes.

“Equipped with a high surface area-to-weight ratio parachute, the technological ‘dandelion seeds’ in Earth’s atmosphere can slow down to avoid burning up and then track their targets wherever they land,” they wrote.

Aliens would likely want to explore rocky planets with an atmosphere in the solar system, the authors propose. From a distance, Venus, Earth and Mars would all look appealing, with Earth being of greatest interest once aliens found signatures of liquid water. The alien civilization that created the probes would not need to be on the mothership. It would be unlikely that it could even communicate with the probes.

The alien civilization may not even exist anymore. Most stars in the galaxy formed billions of years before the sun. A habitable planet with intelligent life could have been sending out probes long before Earth formed. Searching for “resembles checking our mailbox for any packages that may have accumulated over time there, even if the senders are not alive anymore,” Loeb said.

Since first suggesting ‘Oumuamua was an alien spaceship, Loeb has faced criticism from the scientific community. One Perspective article (opens in new tab) published in Nature Astronomy in 2019 said the idea ‘Oumuamua was sent to Earth on purpose was “provocative” and “baseless.”

In 2021, a letter published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (opens in new tab) dismissed the idea on logistical impracticalities of interstellar travel: “Given the likely cosmological timescales required to traverse between stars, we conclude that it is unlikely that ‘Oumuamua has been sent by an extraterrestrial civilisation and more likely that it is just an unusually shaped rock, which has happened to wander into the solar system.”

Another study, published on March 22, 2023, explains ‘Oumuamua’s strange movements as the likely result of hydrogen offgassing — again refuting the alien spacecraft theory.

Still, the Pentagon has taken a renewed interest in studying unidentified objects over U.S. airspace in the previous year. Since the AARO’s founding last summer, the office has opened more than 360 new investigations into alleged UAP encounters reported by U.S. military personnel. About half of these have been explained as “balloons or balloon-like entities,” while the other half lack sufficient data to conclusively resolve.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Mar. 27 to correct a typo. A previous version of the story said most stars in the solar system are older than the sun; the text now reads “most stars in the galaxy.” The sun is the only star in our solar system.

Hannah Osborne is the planet Earth and animals editor at Live Science. Prior to Live Science, she worked for several years at Newsweek as the science editor. Before this she was science editor at International Business Times U.K. Hannah holds a master’s in journalism from Goldsmith’s, University of London.