Why UFOs Suddenly Big Deal? Something to do with “ET Phone Home”?

Kids probably get it, even if we don’t.

Honey, I Shrunk the (Kids, Whoops) Universe!

This is a previous post that I introduce just to show how a (my) warped sense of cosmological history works, the better to understand the very complicated tale I weave below.

Telescopes such as the James Webb, the European Euclid scope and even more forthcoming Rube Goldberg machines such as PLATO, ESA, 2026; Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), NASA, 2026-2027; Spektr-UV (WSO-UV), Roscosmos, 2030; LiteBIRD, JAXA, 2032. So, these days plenty of ways to phone home if ET really wants to.

We are upping the ante big time. What does it all mean, including for that hardy perennial called SETI?

Probably the most recent object of major attention was the military sighting and video of an oblong-shaped object (the so-called “tic tac” shape) taken in 2004 from a US Navy fighter based on the USS Nimitz. The video is certified and accredited by the chain of command associated with the video. We don’t know anything more than this except that the object was real, because the fighter aircraft definitely picked it up on its radar sensors.

Is the human epic of space conquest just the biggest fraud of all?

Another of my faux-imaginative pieces to warn people against accepting too much of the commingled strings of true space exploration and science fiction as it is being invented in the field.

The US and probably the other major powers have collectively spent billions on UFOs/UAVs or whatever they are called. But of all the multitude observed, we are again none the wiser. Is there anything more we can glean concerning whether these things are observed by the various citizens involved.  I have a hunch, which is certainly not better than anyone else’s but might not be so much worse. It’s another angle if you like.

Did you ever hear of the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico? From its construction in 1973 until  recently it was busily scanning the stars until one day in 2020 it summarily collapsed. There’s nothing suspicious about it; just a bad case of poor engineering and incompetent maintenance.  But this had been a celebrated piece of technology that had an auspicious future of astronomical research ahead of it.

Ghosted by Aliens

What was that future going to be? Who knows, but it was the discoverer of the first fast radio burst (FRB), a class of cosmological phenomena that possibly holds the promise of breakthroughs in cosmic exploration. Maybe these bursts are actually caused or moderated by extraterrestrials. In fact, at its inception Arecibo sent a message to any ETs who might actually be watching out for uppity ETs like us. A message was duly sent in 1974 but no response was ever received. But another message was received at Arecibo in 1977by one Dr. Jerry R. Ehman at the Ohio State radio-telescope that has since been seen as a possible alien reply (the “WoW” message at Arecibo. But it’s now just an unsolved mystery. So much for that.

But of course, the fact that Arecibo was no more didn’t mean that the message was never received by something extra-terrestrial, or could not have been, even now, or even in our future, maybe even in a far-off future. The message is still out there but we will nave know if it was or will be received. So much for that too, I hear you all say. With some justice indeed.

But there’s an angle here that might be worth mentioning. That angle, for readers of science fiction, is the Chinese novel authored by Liu Cixin titled “The Three Body Problem” and published in 2008, first in Chinese and then in English. Liu Cixin is now recognized as the preeminent author of science fiction in China. If you’re a sci-fi buff (which I am not but still enjoy) the novel is well worth reading. That’s because it paints a visionary and even shocking picture of how the cosmos could be developing via its putatively conscious inhabitants including us, of course, but also of the ETs who are also possibly or even definitely shaping this universe we all live in.

We Need a Rescue!

So what? Well, here’s where it starts to get interesting (albeit sorry a bit of concentration is needed). The three-body problem (TTBP) spends a lot of time and attention on a (real) radio-telescope in China (in the southern province of Guizhou). This is known as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) and has been operating since January 2020. It is the largest such telescope in the world. But now a second phase will add 24 new moveable radio telescopes, each with a diameter of 131 feet (40 meters).

The plot thickens. On closer reading readers will find that FAST seems to be the depiction of the fictional radio telescope in TTBP including down to details of its local geography called the Red Coast radar facility, a radar weapon to attack and detect enemy (that’s us of course) threats. And – yep there’s more – that many of the Chinese scientists involved in the construction of the radio telescope in the original Red Coast Chinese radio-astronomy telescope have similar Chinese names to later Chinese scientists involved in the construction of FAST. (i.e. the original scientists, who were of course also revolutionaries) were real and persist as real people and scientists to this day).

So where is this all going? Dr. Jerry R. Ehman is an American astronomer who first detected the strong narrowband radio signal known as the Wow! signal of August 15, 1977, while working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope of Ohio State University. Amongst some buffs and scientists this was interpreted as a signal from aliens emanating from the original signal from Arecibo early in its own operation life.

The Chinese Were There First!

In TTBP the original Chinese scientists were attributed in the novel to have used their (primitive) Red Coast radio telescope to respond to the aliens which had contacted them for help either with the three-body problem itself or for other help of a political but unspecified nature. Dr. Jerry Ehman was seen as the person who found and translated the “WOW message from Trisolaris, the location of the actual 3-body problem, and remains perhaps the most promising SETI candidate ever received of a potential radio transmission from an extraterrestrial species. The most recent work suggests that the Wow! signal might have come from the vicinity of a sun-like star situated 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It's also been speculated that the signal came from a hydrogen cloud accompanying one of two comets, 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs), which were passing through that exact section of the sky in 1977 when the Wow! signal was noticed.

“Wow! Purports to be a real message from intelligent aliens beyond Earth. In TTBP a Chinese astrophysicist in Inner Mongolia responds to the translated signal by inviting the aliens to visit Earth — to humanity's detriment, as we later learn and later expanded on in TTBP.

As you can see the fictional and nonfictional elements get hopelessly confused with each other. I leave it to the hapless reader to deconstruct what actually happened.

In summary, the fictional Chinese radio telescope Red Coast that was used to contact/respond to  aliens has a real counterpart in China right now, that has since 2020 being dramatically expanded to a huge and the most powerful radio telescope on Earth, with the power to contact remote galaxies which have beings that are capable of responding to us. They would have been able to contact Arecibo except we stupid Earthlings let it collapse from poor maintenance. But the new and vastly more powerful FAST Chinese telescope has that the power right now to talk to these beings (if they exist of course).

We Need ET Back as Proof!

If the Chinese are talking to them anyway, they certainly won’t let us know. But if they can talk to them and their knowledge of these beings could have been found out in the first place by the American Arecibo telescope, except we messed up. But TTBP interprets the Red Coast facility as having done the job before Arecibo did.

Should we thank the Chinese for saving the day by building the new telescope, or will they screw up like the Red Coat telescope did by inviting a cosmic Trojan Horse into the terrestrial radio networks which are now acting as a 5^th column to undermine the security of Earthlings?

This is a convoluted tale. But some takeaways:

• We’re all connected, potentially. Especially with the proliferation of new-radio telescopes such as FAST and the Allen Telescope Array Overview (founded by Paul Allen formerly of Microsoft)
• We might already be connected, originally by accident via Arecibo until we let it break, but that possibility has ended.
• But the Chinese might have – unwittingly or otherwise – renewed the conversation with ET/Trisolaris Federation) but building a vastly more powerful telescope which is capable of contact with vastly more remote ETs via the new super-FAST instrument.
• The explosion in UFOs could be at least partly due to the logical extension of cosmic ET communications initiated (maybe minimally in part) by the Red Coast telescope, the FAST telescope and the numerous other radio telescopes hanging around and upon the Earth.
• The Chinese will not allow it but we (Westerners) shd ask if we could be allowed to use the FAST facilities.
• Those UFOs out there are looking for ET; it’s a love story for the cosmic masses and ages and it would be a great pity for humanity to turn its back on them (assuming that they are friendly, which of course we cannot assume, as the Trisolarans found out to their cost).

We should all be looking to figure out how to make it easier for “ET Phone Home!

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