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UFOS AND THE NEW PHYSICS

By Kim Burrafato

in conversation with
Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D.

UFOs are a controversial and compelling enigma. We remain uncertain of what these objects are, or whether they even exist. Conventional wisdom is that most UFOs are likely erroneous observations, along with a bit of mass hysteria and some outright charlatanism. Was there really a UFO crash at Roswell in 1947? But what if we were to assume -- purely as an exercise -- that UFOs are actually products of a starfaring civilization?

The rational mind rebels at the idea. UFOs allegedly exhibit outlandish behavior. Witnesses report incredible things like instant accelerations, right angle turns at enormous velocities, and instant stops. These objects are also reported to change their shapes and colors, and simply disappear like phantoms instantly leaping from one universe to another. UFOs violate the laws of physics. No terrestrial spacecraft are capable of such magical feats of reality engineering.

It's no wonder that most scientists consider the subject of UFOs patently absurd and not worthy of serious discussion. Can modern physics ever hope explain the UFO phenomenon to fit within the current world view? Or is an entirely new physics required? This article will address the question "If UFOs are real, then how do they work?"

Clear Intent, by Larry Fawcett and Barry Greenwood, presents evidence of Air Force observations of these phenomena. Included in the book were published Department of Defense documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, that report repeated UFO penetrations of high security ICBM bases and nuclear weapons storage areas back in the 1970s. One major mission of the American intelligence community is to anticipate technology that might disrupt our defense systems. Judging from the documents Fawcett and Greenwood published, the Department of Defense and Air Force are not on top of the situation, with regard to UFOs buzzing some of our most sensitive defense areas.

Recent newspaper and magazine articles have also reported that the Air Force is testing some new kind of "black project" aircraft, code named "Aurora." According to the news accounts, this ultra-secret, high altitude hypersonic aircraft creates powerful vertical, earthquake-like jolts, felt by thousands of Southern California residents, as it passes high overhead at over four thousand miles per hour.

Anything that burns a propellant in a reaction chamber, and then directs the exhaust products of that reaction out of a nozzle can be described as a rocket. Aurora's propulsion system is obviously rocket-like. It makes a lot of noise. It follows, then, that any rocket capable of the tremendous speed and maneuvering attributed to UFOs would be impossible not to notice.

But the majority of UFO witnesses report hearing nothing like the continuous, low frequency rumbling sounds that would normally accompany fuel combustion propulsion based rockets; nor do they report seeing the kind of exhaust products one would expect to see with rockets. If not reporting objects that seem to be entirely silent, some witnesses have reported hearing loud, but brief bang-like sounds as UFOs take off, as well as both low and high frequency humming sounds.

We're forced to conclude, then, that UFOs don't operate on terrestrial rocket science principles. In a single stroke, we can eliminate not only all present solid and chemical fuel based rockets, but even future exotic propulsion schemes like nuclear-electric ion rockets, interstellar hydrogen fusion ramjets, and that favorite of science fiction writers and scientists alike, antimatter-matter annihilation rockets, as viable candidates for possible UFO propulsion.

The major problem with applying conventional rocket science to interstellar travel is the Einstein barrier: the exhaust speed of the propellant relative to a rocket is limited to three hundred thousand kilometers per second, the speed of light in a vacuum. At present, this barrier prevents practical interstellar travel because a physically unreasonable quantity of conventional fuel is required to get reasonably close to the speed of light in a rocket. Any starship built on proven or even highly speculative principles of rocket propulsion, such as the very efficient anti-matter drive popularized in Star Trek, would still need to generate much more energy than is generated on Earth every year. The manufacturing costs would be many times the gross national products of America, all of Europe and Japan combined. So, we're faced with both a physical and an economic absurdity. The starship Enterprise still remains a playful notion at best.

Cheap and practical interstellar flight is possible only if Einstein's barrier can be overcome. If UFOs are indeed from other star systems, then they have obviously broken that barrier.

Like conventional rockets and jets, UFOs seem to generate their own internal propulsion. As far as we can tell, they are not pushed along by an external energy source, like a laser or particle beam, or the solar wind. They evidently operate on distinctly "alien" propulsion principles than those we're accustomed to. Could we ever expect to understand such principles?

Theoretical subtleties inherent within Einstein's general theory of relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics may hold the answer. If it is possible to physically alter or deform four-dimensional space-time, then a kind of space-time tunnel, or time travel gate, can be constructed. In current physics, such theoretical tunnels are known as traversable wormholes.

Cal Tech physicists Kip Thorne and Michael Morris, along with Igor Novikov of Moscow State University and others, have published a number of papers in the prestigious Physical Review on the physics of time travel and traversable wormholes. A traversable wormhole is literally a shortcut through both space and time.

An advanced extraterrestrial civilization , capable of cosmic-scale engineering, could conceivably fabricate traversable wormhole time travel gates, where their starships would enter a wormhole in one region of space- time, and pop out in another extremely distant region of space-time.

According to the equations of general relativity, one of the mouths of the wormhole has to accelerate away from the other mouth to a very high speed close to that of light and then return. If you step into the mouth that accelerates and returns, you will step out the other end into the relative past of when you entered. If you step into the unaccelerated mouth and leave through the accelerated one, you will jump into the relative future. That is, if you had an identical twin who did not go through the wormhole, your twin would be older than you.

How do you create a traversable wormhole time machine? Theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti, has also been working on that question. A self-described "rogue scholar," Sarfatti has had a long association with fringe science. He and Michael Murphy organized and led the first Physics of Consciousness Seminars at the Esalen Institute back in 1974, sponsored by former human potential movement superstar turned pariah, Werner Erhard. Those Esalen seminars spawned an entirely new genre of pop science literature, known as "The New Physics" -- of which the recent best seller by Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing, is but one example.

Sarfatti's unorthodox theories on faster-than-light (superluminal) communication continue to raise hackles among the more conservative physics mainstream. When it comes to traversable wormhole time machines, Sarfatti speculates that so-called dark matter, which may comprise over 90% of the mass of the universe, could provide an answer.

This elusive matter has so far remained unobservable directly by conventional methods employing photons of electromagnetic radiation. Yet, its gravitational effects on ordinary matter are observed indirectly. "If dark matter moves around in the imaginary time of quantum gravity, then it would be difficult for it to emit any photons, even if it wasn't electrically neutral. So, we wouldn't expect to see it through optical telescopes," Sarfatti explains.

The distinction between imaginary time and real time is important to clarify here. The late Nobel laureate, physicist Richard Feynman, was attempting to unify the quantum theory with gravity -- for some time a kind of Holy Grail to physicists. His intuitive genius led him to reformulate the quantum theory as "a sum over histories." According to Feynman, a particle doesn't just have a single history, as it would in classical Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. Instead, it is supposed to follow every possible path in spacetime.

There are two numbers that are associated with these histories, one for the size of the wave, and the other for its position, or phase, in the cycle. The probability that a particle can be found at any particular point is then found by adding up the waves associated with every possible history that passes through that point.

The problem is that when you actually perform this summing of all possible histories, severe technical problems arise. "To avoid the technical difficulties with Feynman's sum over histories," says physicist Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time,

"one must use imaginary time... That is to say, for the purposes of calculation, one must measure time using imaginary numbers, rather than real ones. This has an interesting effect on spacetime: The distinction between time and space disappears completely... we may regard our use of Euclidean spacetime as merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real spacetime."

Despite the fact that imaginary time is only a calculational device, history has time and again that real physics can and does emerge from such abstract mathematical constructs of the mind. Nevertheless, all theories must still be verified by experiment for them to be meaningful. That is the nature of physics and the scientific method.

Sarfatti employs this same "trick" of imaginary time in his calculations on the possible nature of dark matter.

"I've been investigating a new kind of causality violating quantum field theory, which reveals that the projection of imaginary time motion into real time can be both slower and faster than light. If that's true, it means that the energy density of this hypothetical neutral dark matter would get smaller as its speed increased, which would make it the perfect stuff to construct traversable wormholes with."

He believes it might also make a super-efficient starship fuel. Remember the exhaust speed limitation of rocketry discussed earlier?

"In theory, dark matter can produce a faster-than-light exhaust velocity, which means it could be used to overcome the Einstein barrier. Since its density would theoretically decrease as its exhaust velocity increased, that means a small amount of dark matter fuel could easily propel a massive payload to the stars,"

says Sarfatti.

"And, if dark matter is as uniformly distributed throughout the universe, as it seems to be, you'd never run out of fuel. Even though dark matter comprises 90% of the mass of the universe, its average density is still too small for us to detect directly in an easy way. But I think that situation will change in the near future."

Sarfatti admits that a number of important questions about dark matter remain unanswered.

"How do we find and use such matter if it only exists in imaginary time? How does curvature in imaginary time influence curvature in real time? Can it be both attractive and exotic? Can dark matter carry electric charge? Does it have a magnetic moment? If it does, then it could be electromagnetically manipulated. And finally, is it even possible to scoop up and clump together enough dark matter with the accuracy and precision required to fabricate a traversable wormhole or power a starship?"

Combine an inexhaustible fuel with a potential faster-than-light exhaust speed, like the hypothesized dark matter, with a super-technology capable of manipulating space-time geometry, and you have all the physical requisites for a starfaring society. If UFOs are interstellar in origin, then, they could be using traversable wormholes, or, they have developed an efficient interstellar propulsion system (like Sarfatti's proposed dark matter model), which allows them to travel very close to the speed of light. Traversable wormholes are preferable, since they would enable the extraterrestrials to tunnel across vast interstellar distances, and then tunnel back to where and when they came from.

Since the first version of this article, Alcubierre has shown how exotic matter permits an effectively faster-than-light warp drive. The "ufo", or starship, freely floats along a gravitational shock without time dilation. John Von Neumann, the mathematical genius and father of the programmable computer, hypothesized that sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would be capable of constructing artificially intelligent robot probes to scour the universe. These intelligent Von Neumann probes would also be capable of universal replication. They would be programmed to utilize whatever elements they encountered in their travels to fabricate endless copies of themselves. After a long enough period of time had elapsed, the galaxies would be teeming with them. Von Neumann's hypothesis is often used as an argument against the existence of starfaring extraterrestrial societies, since we'd have likely already encountered their intelligent probes if any such advanced civilizations were out there.

If UFOs are not artificially intelligent Von Neumann robot probes, and if they are not using traversable wormholes, then, they're probably migrating as completely self-contained interstellar colonies. Since they would be traveling extreme distances close to the speed of light, they would find a much changed world from the one they left if they eventually returned.

According to the equations of special relativity, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more space-time contracts for you -- what's known in relativistic physics as space-time dilation. The clocks aboard your starship run much slower than your friends' clocks back home. The result of all this is that your friends age and die much faster than you. Assuming an extraterrestrial psychology and society even vaguely similar to human society, with family and social ties as important as they are in human society, then the lack of time travel technology seems to necessitate the interstellar migratory colony mode of travel. For intergalactic gypsies, home is where you are.

A strong case has been made that after over 30 years of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), we just have not observed the kind of infra-red and electromagnetic signals that a number of prominent scientists believe would be characteristic of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization capable of cosmic scale engineering and interstellar expansion. So, at this point in the evolution of the universe, humanity may truly be alone. That fact weakens the case for UFOs being purely extraterrestrial in origin from advanced alien civilizations much older than our own. If UFOs are not extraterrestrial, then what are they? Sarfatti suspects

"They could be terrestrial time ships, originating from our own future. In which case, their motivation might be to interfere in their own past in order to assure their own coming into being in a globally and logically self-consistent way."

British cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle calls such acausal, circular connections loops in time. A number of papers have been published in respected physics journals that implicitly lend new credibility to this scenario, e.g., "Quantum mechanics near closed time-like lines," Physical Review D, November 15, 1991 by Oxford's David Deutsch, and "Wormholes in space-time and their use for interstellar travel," American Journal of Physics, May 1988, by Cal Tech's Michael Morris and Kip Thorne.

NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite recently revealed small ripples of one part in one hundred thousand in the angular distribution of the cosmic background microwave thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang. These observed ripples, possibly the remnants of ultra-microscopic quantum fluctuations when the universe was even smaller than a single electron, might provide the mechanism for galaxy formation. This important new observation gives us a picture of the universe as it was only about three hundred thousand years after the initial moment of creation of real time out of imaginary time.

Sarfatti conjectures that the quantum ripples observed by the COBE satellite may have been created from the far future, in a cosmic scale loop in time by an ultra-advanced intelligence, quite possibly evolved from us. A quantum optics experiment he had published a few years ago in Physics Essays could actually test that idea in the laboratory.

"If it works as the equations predict, it would be possible to build a kind of quantum telescope that probes the future just as a classical telescope probes the past. The power of prophecy would no longer be the exclusive domain of mystics, psychics, and avatars. It would be technology."

But how do we go from hypothetical extraterrestrial or future-terrestrial super-technology, to present-day terrestrial engineering? In order to even begin to answer that question, we have to embark on a short trip through relativity theory and quantum mechanics.

Physics can be simplified by thinking in what's called inertial frames. In an inertial frame, the gravitational force is canceled out, and free particles move in straight lines with constant velocity. Obviously, the surface of the earth is not an inertial frame, because we feel gravity. In contrast, a freely floating non-rotating space shuttle orbiting the earth is an inertial frame.

The intuitive basis of the general relativity theory of gravity is something known as the equivalence principle. One version of this equivalence principle says that a small non-inertial frame, like a rocket or a UFO that is uniformly accelerating in empty, flat space-time, far away from all large masses, is equivalent to a non-inertial frame at rest, like an observer on earth. Whenever speaking of physical equivalence, it is assumed that the observers agree not to look outside their laboratory window or porthole of their spacecraft. If they closed their eyes, or only looked at their gravitometers, then, they could not decide which frame they were in. They would be in locally equivalent frames.

Einstein showed that mass curves spacetime, and that those non-spinning, local inertial frames, in which you are weightless, follow special geodesic world lines. A geodesic is simply the straightest path possible in a curved four-dimensional space-time. A skydiver in freefall is riding along a geodesic world line. You age more on a geodesic than on a non-geodesic. Conversely, one must apply non-gravitational forces (like muscles and motors) to move along a world line that is not a geodesic.

We now come to Jack Sarfatti's new key idea in understanding the physics of hypothetical UFO maneuvers. The geodesic is highly curved in three-dimensional space and corresponds to what a non-inertial observer on the earth sees as accelerated motion. However, observers living on the geodesic, like those in a UFO, experience a comfortable free float weightless condition throughout their apparent high-speed, high-acceleration curved-motion. That leads to a second version of the equivalence principle: a small enough free floating or free falling local inertial frame in geodesic motion near a large mass, is equivalent to an inertial frame in flat space-time that is far away from any large mass. That means, if we see a UFO make a sharp right angle turn at very high speed, we can't jump to the conclusion that the inhabitants are feeling enormous g forces, if they have technology capable of controlling their local space-time curvature.

Imagine you are an astronaut in the space shuttle orbiting the earth. Gravity is canceled out. You are weightless. Again, you are simply following the straightest possible path, or geodesic, in curved four- dimensional space-time. Your frame of reference is locally inertial. As far as you can tell you are not accelerating. You feel no forces. You are in free float. Give a short gentle push to an object floating in the shuttle, and it moves at constant speed in a straight line.

In contrast, relative to a non-inertial, gravity bound observer down at Mission Control, Houston, you are rapidly accelerating towards the center of mass of the earth. It is only your conserved orbital angular momentum that prevents you from crashing into the earth. That is essentially the explanation given by Newtonian classical mechanics. However, in Einstein's classical theory of general relativity, you are moving locally on a geodesic, in the straightest path possible in curved four-dimensional space-time. The curvature is primarily caused by the mass of the earth.

We can now begin to see how what looks like a right angle turn at enormous acceleration to a non-inertial observer on the surface of the earth, might feel like nothing special to the freely floating inertial passengers aboard the UFO. That's because the UFO isn't being propelled in the familiar sense. It's simply freely floating in a locally bent space-time geodesic in its immediate neighborhood.

"If UFOs are really spacecraft, then somehow they're controlling their local space-time curvature, maybe in angstrom thin boundary layers fitting the outside surface of the UFO like a skin,"

speculates Sarfatti.

"And if that's true, they're probably doing it using loops in time. It's just a hunch." Then he added, "You know, when these things are really pumping up their local curvature engines, let's say during a high speed, right angle turn, standard Fourier signal analysis says that they're going to be generating significant broad band gravitational radiation. It happens that John Clauser at UC Berkeley is building a new type of ultra-sensitive atomic beam gravitometer that should be able detect just such radiation. Maybe his device could be used as the first bona fide UFO detector."

A prerequisite for UFO propulsion may be the principle of global self-consistency, or logical consistency, used by Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov in their traversable wormhole-time travel papers. This same key principle was independently discovered by Sarfatti and published in Physics Essays, Vol. 4, No.3, Sept. 1991, in a paper provocatively titled, "Design for a Superluminal Communication Device." Sarfatti's gedankenexperiment, which he no longer believes will work without a significant coupling between mind and matter, attempted to use the quantum spin correlation between special types of photon pairs, as a communications channel. This spin correlation is non-local, that is, faster-than-light.

Correlation, according to the equations of quantum mechanics, means that each photon in every pair is permanently entangled with its photon twin. Interfere with one photon, and its twin is always affected. The correlation persists regardless of the distance between the photon pair. This spooky, telepathic-like effect, known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, has actually been observed in a number of different atomic physics and quantum optics experiments.

Since an earlier version of this article was published in UFO Magazine, Henry Pierce Stapp, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, published a remarkable paper in the prestigious Physical Review A (July, 1994, PP 18-24). Stapp cites an experiment by Helmut Schmidt involving psychokinetic distortion of the statistical prediction of orthodox quantum mechanics that works precognitively backwards in time on radioactive nuclear decays! A theorem by Stapp's Berkeley colleague, Philippe Eberhard, shows that Sarfatti's prediction cannot work with an ordinary inanimate physical device that obeys the statistical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics. Nobel Prize physicist, Brian Josephson has suggested that only living matter can violate the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics and, thereby, use the nonlocal quantum connection as a practical communication channel the way Sarfatti claims to "remote view". Sarfatti now agrees with Josephson because of Stapp's July 94 paper.

What does all this quantum weirdness have to do with UFO propulsion? A young Canadian physicist- engineer, Lyle Fuller, had an important insight after reading Sarfatti's Physics Essays paper. In a series of letters to Sarfatti, Fuller mathematically argued that any attempt to create a time travel paradox with Sarfatti's proposed electro-optical device, or any other type of superluminal signaling device, would cohere the normally random and hidden, but infinite zero-point quantum vacuum energy into coherent space-time curvature. The hypothetical release of that energy would then change the geometry of space-time in such a way that the possibility of paradox will always be prevented.

When we speak of the quantum vacuum, we don't mean a vacuum in the ordinary sense of an empty void, but rather the opposite -- an infinite reservoir of virtual particles and energy. It is known that vacuum zero point energy exists, but at present there is no feasible way of utilizing it. The basic idea of the connection between zero-point energy fluctuations and gravity was first recognized by the Russian Nobel physics laureate and political activist, the late Andre Sakharov. Roger Penrose argues against this view in Shadows of the Mind. On the other hand Hal Puthoff is working on Sakharov's theory.

Extrapolating from Fuller's argument, Sarfatti speculates that UFOs could be employing some kind of "paradox engine," or "curvature generator." By continually generating paradoxes, this engine would force nature to avoid paradox by releasing inexhaustible quantities of zero point vacuum energy, physically altering the geometry of spacetime -- a starship fueled by paradox. Obviously, the demonstration of such a device would dramatically prove that the preservation of global, or logical consistency is a fundamental and immutable law of nature. It would also probably fill our planet's energy needs forever. In other words, energy may be mutable, but logic is not. Nature abhors a paradox.

Sarfatti considers a paper by David Deutsch published in the November 25, 1991 Physical Review D to be a milestone.

"Deutsch explicitly shows that influences from the future constrain initial conditions on the classical level, and yield a globally self-consistent pattern of probabilities at the quantum level,"

he explained.

"That's why the thermal radiation ripples observed by the COBE satellite could be an intelligently created artifact from the future. But here on the laboratory scale, any of our clever attempts to create time travel paradoxes will likely cause one of the following three things to happen: Either laboratory equipment or people will malfunction with certainty -- in which case free will is an illusion, isn't it? Or, zero point energy will be released, physically changing space-time curvature in such a way as to always avoid paradox. Or, as David Deutsch suggests, the universe will simply split."

Verification of any of these admittedly speculative hypotheses in the laboratory would make the debate over UFOs moot -- we could make our own starships.

UFOS AND THE NEW PHYSICS

By Kim Burrafato

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