261026 – Analysis of UFO Reality

by | Oct 29, 2026 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Could UFOs Be Real? The Physics and the Evidence

· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Where I stand

On October 23, 2026, the Department of War released its seventh tranche of UFO files. It included a sworn statement from the Roswell base’s 1947 public information officer describing an egg-shaped craft and small bodies under a tarp, and a contractor’s report on more than two dozen witnesses to strange creatures at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. Readers have asked me the obvious questions: could any of this be real, and what is the actual evidence?

I stand on the side that some unidentified objects are real, physical things whose performance we cannot presently account for, and that a nonhuman origin for some of them is a legitimate scientific hypothesis that the laws of physics do not forbid. That is my thesis. The areas of uncertainty are real too: much of the evidence is testimony, the best sensor data remains classified or unpublished, and no physical artifact has been placed before independent scientists. I will lay out both, in proportion.

This is a physics site, so I will treat this as a physics question. First, what would it mean for UFOs to be “real”? Second, what does the evidence actually show? Third, how could a craft do what witnesses describe without breaking the laws we know?

Three different claims

“UFOs are real” bundles three claims that need separate evidence. Most public arguments go wrong by treating proof of the first as proof of the third.

  1. There are physical objects in our airspace that trained observers and military sensors cannot identify. This is no longer seriously disputed. The U.S. government says so in writing.
  2. Some of those objects perform beyond any known aircraft — accelerations, speeds, and transitions between air and water that no human technology is known to achieve. This is supported by a small number of multi-sensor cases, but the raw data that would settle it has not been published.
  3. Some of those objects are made or controlled by a nonhuman intelligence, whether from another star, another dimension, or a hidden presence on Earth. This is the claim people care about. It rests mainly on testimony, and it is the claim the government officially denies.

The evidence gets thinner as we go down the list. That does not make the third claim false. It means the honest position is a strong yes on the first, a qualified yes on the second, and “plausible, unproven” on the third.

The evidence, strongest first

1. The government’s own admission (2021)

In June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a nine-page preliminary assessment. It reviewed 144 reports from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021, 80 of them involving observation with multiple sensors. It could identify only one with high confidence, a deflating balloon. In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported objects that held stationary against high winds, moved against the wind, maneuvered abruptly, or moved at considerable speed with no discernible propulsion. The report added that these could reflect sensor errors, spoofing, or misperception and required further analysis.

That is claim one, stated by the intelligence community: multi-sensor detections most likely represent physical objects, and most remain unexplained.

2. The Nimitz encounter (2004)

The strongest single case is still the November 2004 encounter off southern California. For about two weeks the cruiser USS Princeton’s radar tracked objects descending from very high altitude toward the sea. Two F/A-18 crews, including Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, were vectored to one and saw a white, wingless object roughly 40 feet long, shaped like a Tic Tac, that matched their maneuvers and then left faster than they could follow. A second aircraft later recorded it on infrared. Four aviators saw it with their own eyes, in daylight, while radar and infrared tracked it.

Physicist Kevin Knuth of the University at Albany and colleagues estimated the flight characteristics from the reported radar tracks in a 2019 peer-reviewed paper in Entropy. They reported drops from about 28,000 feet to near sea level in under a second, implying accelerations on the order of thousands of g, with no reported sonic boom, air disturbance, or heat. Their own abstract states the alternatives plainly: either the observations are fabricated or seriously in error, or the craft show technology far beyond ours. They argue the quality of witnesses and equipment favors the second.

The qualifier is important. Those estimates rest on witness accounts of radar data, not on published raw radar files. The Navy has never released the Princeton’s full sensor record.

3. The numbers since (2022–2025)

Congress created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate. Its annual reports show the same pattern every year: most cases dissolve into ordinary objects, a residue does not.

Report Period Reports received Outcome
AARO FY2025 (released July 2026) Jun 2024 – May 2025 319 114 resolved, 205 unresolved; 9 flagged for further scientific analysis
AARO FY2024 May 2023 – Jun 2024 757 Resolved cases mostly balloons, drones, birds, satellites; 21 needing further investigation
ODNI Preliminary Assessment 2004 – 2021 144 1 identified; 18 incidents with unusual flight characteristics

In FY2025, about nine in ten resolved new cases were balloons or satellites. Most unresolved cases are unresolved because the data is too poor, not because the data is extraordinary. AARO says none of its resolved cases revealed a breakthrough technology, and it rejects claims that the government holds recovered nonhuman material. Yet AARO’s director said in 2024 that some cases are not understood by him or by anyone he knows, despite his physics and engineering background.

4. The 2026 file releases

In February 2026 the President directed agencies to release their UFO records. The resulting archive, PURSUE, opened on May 8 with 162 files and has grown in tranches since. The Pentagon has said it made no redactions concerning the nature or existence of any encounter, only to protect witnesses and facility locations.

The seventh tranche, released October 23, drew the most attention. Two items need careful weighing.

The Roswell affidavit. Walter Haut, the base’s public information officer in 1947, signed a statement in 2002, sealed until his death in 2005 and published in 2007. In it he describes handling foil-like debris that could not be torn, seeing an egg-shaped metallic object 12 to 15 feet long in Hangar 84, and glimpsing small bodies with large heads under a tarp. He was a firsthand participant, and the government did change its story in 1947, from “flying disc” to “weather balloon.” Against this: the affidavit was not new — it has been in print for nearly two decades. It was signed 55 years after the events, when Haut was about 80. It was drafted with researchers from their interviews. His earlier recorded interviews did not include the bodies. The Air Force’s 1994 and 1997 reports attribute the debris to Project Mogul, a classified balloon array for detecting Soviet nuclear tests. That explanation itself concedes the original weather-balloon story was a cover. So Roswell proves the government concealed something in 1947; it does not prove what.

The Skinwalker Ranch report. In 2010, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a government contractor, interviewed more than 25 local witnesses about balls of light, a bipedal dog-like creature, a small hairy “troll,” and other phenomena, and took soil, plant, and sensor measurements. The report is valuable as evidence that the government funded serious inquiry into the paranormal end of the subject. But it is testimony, and its one physical test points the other way: fur found on the ranch matched domestic dogs.

The pattern across the releases is the same as across AARO’s reports. Credible people describe things we cannot explain, and the physical evidence released so far does not settle what they saw.

5. Sworn testimony of a hidden program (2023)

In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath to a House subcommittee that the U.S. runs a decades-old program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crashed craft of nonhuman origin, including what he called “non-human biologics.” His claims came from interviews with others, not from personal observation, and he could not give specifics in open session. AARO’s 2024 historical review found no verifiable evidence for such a program. This is the most consequential claim in the field and the least verified. It should be weighed as a sworn allegation, neither dismissed nor accepted on its face.

How could they be real? The physics

The usual objection is that physics rules out visitors. It does not. It sets conditions. Here are the four hardest problems, and what a solution would have to look like.

Distance is not the barrier it seems

The nearest star is 4.2 light-years away, and nothing with mass reaches the speed of light. But two facts change the picture.

First, time. Our galaxy is about 13 billion years old and roughly 100,000 light-years across. A probe traveling at just 1% of light speed crosses it in about 10 million years — less than a tenth of a percent of the galaxy’s age. A civilization even slightly older than ours, sending self-copying probes, could reach every star system long before humans existed. The surprise would be finding no one, which is the old Fermi paradox.

Second, relativity works in the traveler’s favor. A ship that accelerates continuously to the midpoint and then decelerates experiences less time than clocks at home. Its proper time for a trip of distance d at constant acceleration a is:

\tau = \frac{2c}{a}\,\cosh^{-1}\!\left(1 + \frac{a\,d}{2c^{2}}\right)

At a comfortable 1 g, the trip to Alpha Centauri takes about 3.6 years aboard. At 100 g it takes about six weeks aboard, while about 4.4 years pass on Earth. This is Knuth’s point: if the accelerations reported over the Nimitz could be sustained in space, interstellar distances become a matter of days to weeks for the traveler.

The acceleration problem

Thousands of g would liquefy a human pilot and tear apart any airframe we know how to build. A craft that does this has one of three properties. It carries no biological crew, so it is a drone or probe. Or it is built of materials and structures far beyond ours. Or — the more radical option — it does not push against its own inertia at all. If a craft could reduce its effective inertial mass, or move the space around it rather than moving through space, its occupants would feel nothing. We have no working theory of inertia control. But inertia is also one of physics’ least understood properties. Mach’s principle, still unresolved, suggests inertia arises from a body’s relation to the rest of the universe. That’s where new physics could live.

The silence problem

An object moving through air at thousands of miles per hour should produce a sonic boom, a shock wave, and intense heating. Witnesses describe none of these. This is the strongest technical reason for caution, because it suggests either the measurements are wrong or the object is not a solid body shoving air aside in the ordinary way. Physically, silence would be consistent with a craft that carries a field altering the air around it, a craft that moves the surrounding space along with it, or a phenomenon that is partly optical or electromagnetic rather than wholly solid. Each of these is speculative. But the absence of a boom is not evidence of nothing; it is a constraint any real explanation must meet.

Spacetime engineering

In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed that Einstein’s equations of general relativity permit a “warp bubble”: a region of flat space that is carried along by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Nothing inside moves faster than light locally, and the occupants feel no acceleration. The catch is that the original design requires negative energy density — exotic matter that may not exist in usable form — in enormous amounts. Later refinements have reduced the requirement by many orders of magnitude, and recent papers have explored versions using only ordinary positive energy at sub-light speeds. None of this is engineering. It shows that the field equations themselves do not forbid a craft that moves without inertial stress, without a shock wave, and without a local speed limit violation.

The other explanations

An honest physicist keeps every live hypothesis on the table:

  • Secret human technology — U.S. or foreign. This explains some cases, but it struggles with sightings that predate such technology by decades, and with the fact that no nation fights wars as if it had it.
  • Sensor artifacts and misperception — radar ghosts, infrared glare, parallax. These account for much of what AARO resolves, and they are the reason raw data matters.
  • Natural phenomena not yet understood — plasma formations, ball lightning, atmospheric effects. These could explain some “orbs,” though not structured craft tracked on radar for days.
  • Nonhuman intelligence — from another star, or present on Earth all along, or not material in the ordinary sense. The physics above shows this is not excluded.

Why the possibility remains plausible

The official verdict is “no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.” I do not think that verdict closes the question, for five reasons.

The residue does not go away. Every serious study since Project Blue Book in the 1950s and 60s has resolved most cases and been left with a stubborn remainder. Better sensors and analysis have shrunk the remainder, not eliminated it. If every report were a balloon or a satellite, better tools should eventually drive the unexplained count toward zero.

The best witnesses are the hardest to dismiss. Navy fighter pilots are trained observers who spend their careers identifying objects in the sky. When several of them, with radar and infrared, report the same object, the misperception explanation becomes strained.

The locations are not random. Reports cluster around military training ranges and nuclear facilities. Part of that is reporting bias — that is where the sensors are. But it is also exactly the pattern one would expect from something interested in our most capable technology.

Governments have concealed before. The 1947 weather-balloon story was false, by the Air Force’s own later admission. The Pentagon ran a UFO study program, AATIP, for years before the public learned of it in 2017. Institutions with secrets to keep, and budgets to protect, have motives to say less than they know. That does not prove they hold alien craft; it means their silence is weak evidence that none exist.

The cosmic odds favor company. We now know most stars have planets, and many have planets in the zone where liquid water can exist. In a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, billions of years older than our species, it would be strange if intelligence arose only once. And as the physics above shows, distance is not the obstacle it first appears to be for anyone with a head start.

None of this proves visitation. Together, it is why I hold the hypothesis open and take it seriously, rather than treating it as fringe.

What would settle it

The question is answerable, and the answer is data, not more testimony. Any one of these would move the third claim from plausible to established, or close it:

  • Raw, calibrated sensor records from a multi-sensor case such as the Nimitz — radar returns with timestamps, infrared video with metadata — released for independent analysis.
  • A physical artifact with an isotopic or material composition no human process produces, examined by independent laboratories.
  • Purpose-built scientific observation. Civilian efforts such as Harvard’s Galileo Project now run dedicated, calibrated camera and radar arrays. A clean detection from a system designed for the purpose would carry more weight than any number of chance sightings.
  • Direct testimony from named custodians of any retrieval program, under oath, with documents.

Until then, my position stands: some of these objects are real and unexplained, the physics leaves room for a nonhuman explanation, and the question deserves the same serious, open inquiry we give any other unsolved problem in nature.

Sources

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