Harvard Astronomer Professor Avi Loeb has published his own scientific paper dissecting a previous study published by Ukrainian astronomers who detail mass sightings of so-called Phantom UFOs.
UFOs are everywhere, apparently. Millions of people around the world claim to have seen a UFO at least once in their lifetime. Some even claim to have had contact, and there are stories, like this, for example, where people even claim to have had close contact” with what they say were beings not from Earth. The UFO phenomenon has shifted from conspiracy and fringe science to a subject worthy of the most rigorous scientific study. This is actually what Professor Loevb is doing with the Galileo Project. By employing scientific methods, he aims to analyze the UFO phenomenon in a new and refreshing way.
Earlier this year, we published an interesting article about a study presented by Ukrainian astronomers. I don’t mean busy in a good way when I say that Ukraine’s airspace has been busy during the war. Aside from the fighter jets and helicopters that crowd the sky, there are other objects that seem to have passed by. These objects are probably unlike anything we see here on Earth. That is at least to scientists from Ukraine, who explain their observations in a preprint paper published by Kyiv’s Main Astronomical Observatory in cooperation with the National Academy of Science.
The paper describes what scientists in the country observed repeatedly, and it was not something they did expect: An inordinate number of UFOs. It is noteworthy that there is no mention of the war in the paper, nor does anything related to war appear. As explained in the Ukrainian scientific paper, scientists say that “we see them everywhere,” referring to the many, obviously unexplained objects flying above the Ukrainian skies.
This paper reports observations of aerial phenomena made at the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Astronomical Center of Ukraine in Kyiv and a village south of Kyiv called Vinarivka. According to the study, phantom UFOs are completely black objects which contain no radiation and absorb all radiation that falls upon them. Additionally, the researchers pointed out that the UFOs are so fast that it is difficult to take a photo of them. There is no way that our eyes can recognize events that last less than four-tenths of a second, according to this paper. We cannot fixate on phenomena that last less than a tenth of a second with our eyes. In addition, ordinary photo or video recordings cannot capture [unidentified aerial phenomena]. UAP detection requires fine-tuning of shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range.
The paper certainly raised a lot of questions and eyebrows among expert ufologists but also in the scientific community. Now that UFOs have become such a hotly-debated subject, it is no surprise that everyone wants to study them, try and record them, and get to the bottom of what they really are. Havard Professor Avi Loeb has been anything but shy when it comes to speaking out about potential technosignatures of aliens and the UFO subject in general. His scientific approach has greatly contributed to the way people in general, but also the scientific community, think about the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
In his latest article on Medium, Professor Loeb analyses the study published by Ukrainian researchers and goes on to publish his own view —a study— about what may have been observed over the Ukrainian skies. But before he dives into his view of the allegedly observed objects, he mentions an important, obvious thing; the ongoing war. “I am not sure what to make of the report. Ukraine is in a military conflict with a lot of human-made activity in the sky.”
This must introduce a lot of noise for any search for objects that are not human-made. In science, we aim to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio, and so Ukraine would be the last place on Earth where I would initiate UAP studies,” Professor Loeb explains in his article. He continues to explain in his article that the Ukrainian paper mentions two types of objects: luminous and dark. A dark object without any visible emission was called a “phantom.” Sized between 3 and 12 meters, they could reach speeds up to 15 kilometers per second over distances between 10 and 12 kilometers. The capabilities of such objects exceed those of human-made aircraft or rockets if these objects are indeed real.
A bright fireball displaying easily detectable optical luminosity would have been produced by the bow shock of these dark objects in the Earth’s atmosphere if their distance had not been incorrectly overestimated by an order of magnitude, according to Professor Loeb. According to the Ukrainian report, objects traveling at comparable speeds can reach 15 kilometers per second. Professor Loeb notes in his paper that optical emission must accompany any supersonic motion of such devices through the Earth’s atmosphere.
In a further explanation offered by the Harvard astronomer, he states that an object with a 10 square meter frontal cross-section and traveling at a speed of 10 kilometers per second will generate a bow shock in the atmosphere and dissipate a mechanical power of 1.5 terra-watts. The objects, therefore, witnessed and recorded by Ukrainian astronomers were probably something else and not evidence of probable extraterrestrial technology. Furthermore, Professor Loeb explains that meteor data suggests that about ten percent of the kinetic power is radiated into the optical band. This suggests that phantom objects above Ukraine would produce fireballs with visible luminosity greater than 150 gigawatts based on their reported properties.
“I concluded that the reported speeds and sizes of the “phantom” objects would have generated fireballs of detectable optical luminosity at their suggested distances, and so these objects could not have appeared dark,” Professor Loeb explains. “For a path length of 10 kilometers, the emission would last at least a second and cannot be missed,” Professor Loeb added. In addition to the so-called Phantom UFO, the Ukrainian astronomers observed and detailed in their study, they also came across another type of object. In two separate observations, they observed a luminous UFO and variable object at an altitude of 1,170 kilometers above Ukraine. This object is likely a satellite, concludes Professor Loeb.
You can read Professor Loeb’s piece titled “Down To Earth” Limits on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in Ukraine” by clicking here.
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