Dark Energy: The Ultimate Free Lunch

Science is full of surprising discoveries. One that recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics was the discovery that the Universe is not just expanding, but that expansion rate is accelerating. The cause is a mysterious and unexplained ‘dark energy’ which is ever increasing right along with the accelerating Universe. But if the Universe contains all that is and ever will be, where is this extra ‘dark energy’ coming from and is this creation out of nothing a gross violation of the basic laws and principles of physics? If yes, perhaps there’s an even more surprising alternative.

  

If you toss a ball into the air, there are two basic forces at work acting on the ball (ignoring atmospheric friction or drag of course but one can pretend there’s no atmosphere). There’s the oomph (kinetic) energy you give the ball in the upwards direction; there’s the gravitational force that pulls on the ball in the opposite direction. There are two outcomes. 

If you toss a ball up into the air, you expect just one thing to happen – the ball will go up; the ball will slow down; the ball will stop; the ball will fall back to the ground. Why? Earth‘s gravity, that’s why.

If your name is Hercules and you really toss that ball up into the air, maybe, just maybe, the ball won’t fall back down to the ground. You have given the ball enough oomph energy to overcome, though not avoid, Earth’s gravitational pull. But, even if it doesn’t fall back to ground level, even if it keeps on going up, up and away for all time, it will still be forever slowing down. Why? Earth’s gravity, that’s why.

In both scenarios the oomph you give the ball can never be enough to enable the ball to escape Earth’s gravity entirely. The ball must slow down. That’s because the gravitational pull of the Earth on the ball (and also the ball on the Earth) extends to infinity. At no point does gravity cut out. You can’t escape gravity though your energy oomph can be enough to prevent its domination – the ball doesn’t have to fall back to Earth.

Now, the absolutely one scenario you would never expect, is that if you toss the ball into the air, even if the ball didn’t fall back down to ground level if it was given really lots and lots of oomph, that the ball would somehow not only fail to slow down but would in fact speed up. If you witnessed that you’d suspect that your mind or vision was faulty. The only way the ball could accelerate away from you is if it had some sort of additional, internal energy supply (like a rocket). Since it doesn’t, it can’t.

Now apply that logic to the Universe as a whole. In the beginning the Big Bang (the explosive event of the creation) gave a certain finite amount of oomph to all the bits and pieces that make up the Universe. And thus the Universe is expanding – a standard scenario when you have an explosion. When a bomb explodes, the result is an expansion of bomb-stuff. Now all those bits and pieces have a certain finite amount of gravity. The Universe as a whole therefore has a certain finite amount of gravity.

And so we have a similar contest as per the ball’s oomph and Earth’s gravity. Now, either the combined universal gravity of all those bits and pieces will be enough to overcome the finite amount of oomph provided by the Big Bang, and the Universe, like the ball, will slow down, stop and reverse direction (becoming a contracting Universe) or the oomph will prove greater than all those combined bits and pieces gravity and the Universe will expand forever, though that expansion rate will slow down over time. The expansion rate may never reach zero, but the gravity of the bits and pieces must drag forever and ever on the overall initial oomph. The Universal expansion will slow down, albeit never to zero. Okay, like the ball and the Earth, it’s pretty much one or the other. You, as per the ball and the Earth, wouldn’t expect the expansion rate of the overall Universe to increase. That defies logic, everyday experience and basic physics.

For the Universe to accelerate, it would have to be supplied with extra energy from outside, but the Universe is everything and contains everything, there is no outside, so where can additional energy come from? It can’t, not without violating one of the most basic of all basic fundamental physical principles – you can change one form of energy into another form, but you can’t create energy from nothing. Wouldn’t it be nice to just snap your fingers; wave a magic wand, and presto, your empty gas tank is now full or your cold house is now snug and warm! You don’t get something from nothing! The common phrase is that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch!”

So the fundamental question cosmologists (astronomers who study the Universe as a whole) were interested in finding out was whether the Universe’s expansion rate was slowing down enough to cause the Universe to grind to a halt and then reverse; or not. There was never any question that the expansion rate was slowing down. It was just a question to what order of magnitude and was it enough to ultimately cause a Big Crunch.

And so it came to pass that two competing teams of astronomers embarked on a study to crunch the deceleration rate numbers; answer that question of whether the Universe will eventually cease expanding and undergo a contraction (like that ball falling back down to Earth) or not (like the ball that Hercules tossed). Nobody on either team would have bet a nickel, far less the family farm, that the answer would be none of the above. Somehow or other, the bits and pieces that make up the Universe gave the middle finger to gravity. The unthinkable became thinkable, in fact, it became fact. The Universe’s expansion rate was accelerating; therefore energy must be being created out of nothing to provide that extra gravity-defying oomph; there was such a thing as a free lunch after all! The mysterious and unknown energy source behind this unexpected phenomenon was termed ‘dark energy’.

There’s little to dispute in terms of observational evidence for the existence of ‘dark energy’, or rather the fact that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating. Evidence has gone from strength to strength.

This discovery was so great, and so totally unexpected, that the team leaders were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (2011) for it. But, it must be pointed out that the recognition was for the discovery, not for the explanation. There is no explanation. You can’t adequately explain a free lunch! You need extra energy oomph to power up the acceleration rate of the Universe just like you need an extra surge of gasoline to accelerate your car. Where does that extra energy come from and keep on keeping on coming on from? Just calling that addition source ‘dark energy’ provides no explanation for the free lunch it is. There is a fundamental problem here.

How so a free lunch? Well if I have my facts right, the way ‘dark energy’ works is this. Dark energy is an intrinsic property of space that exerts a pressure that causes that space to expand, which in turn creates new space which has ‘dark energy’ as an intrinsic property which results in that space expanding thus creating more space and thus more ‘dark energy’ and so on and so on. More space means more ‘dark energy’ which means more space, etc. It’s creation out of nothing, or, it’s a free lunch. Now this notion of an expanding space alone puts me at odds with the establishment of modern cosmology. We part company here since I remain convinced the Universe is expanding through existing space. But that still leaves the acceleration rate to the expanding Universe, even if through existing space, as an anomaly.

From the Oxford Companion to Cosmology (2008) we have this snippet: “The simplest dark energy model is the cosmological constant*, which maintains a fixed density as the Universe expands. … Thus far the cosmological constant has proven capable of explaining all relevant observational data, and thus is the chosen ingredient of the standard cosmological model.”

What’s wrong with this statement? It postulates a free lunch, that’s what.

Let’s drop down a notch in scale and look at something more familiar.

To illustrate, take a pure ice cube which has a density slightly less than the pure fresh water from which it came (which is why ice cubes float in water). Say the ice cube is one inch by one inch by one inch or one cubic inch in volume. Now double the dimensions to two inches by two inches by two inches. The ice cube is now eight cubic inches in volume. The ice cube has expanded in volume -so far so good. The density of the ice cube hasn’t changed, so you have to account for the creation of the extra seven cubic inches of ice. If you can’t account for the additional seven cubic inches then something is amiss. The alternative is that the original ice cube has expanded, but no additional ice has been added, so the density of the ice cube has decreased – same amount of ice but spread over a greater volume. But that’s equally screwy. You can’t change the density of ice and still have ice. Density is a fixed parameter of the substance we call ice.

Now change the ice to water vapour and you can alter the parameters. One cubic inch of water vapour can expand to eight cubic inches of water vapour. If you don’t add extra water vapour then the density of your original cubic inch of water vapour obviously decreases in the expansion. You have less water molecules per unit of volume than you had originally. Now the Universe is like water vapour. The Universe is not one solid lump like our ice cube; rather it’s zillions of bits and pieces (like water molecules) that occupy and spread throughout an ever expanding volume. The same amount of stuff expanded into a greater volume means of necessity less density. Any high school student knows that.

You cannot have the concept of density without also talking about the density of a something (like the cosmological constant). It’s meaningless to talk about the density of nothing. That something could be matter, energy or more likely a mixture of both since it’s hard to conceive of energy-less matter or matter in an energy-less state. In fact it’s physically impossible.

But note the Oxford phrase above: “the cosmological constant, which maintains a fixed density as the Universe expands” - something’s screwy somewhere.

If we can’t accept creation of this mysterious cosmological constant ‘dark energy’ out of nothing, whatever is driving the accelerating expansion of the Universe (call it ‘dark energy’ if you must) must also be getting thinner and thinner on the ground, but that would be like easing your foot off the accelerator pedal of your car. You car would cease to accelerate and ease back to a constant velocity (in Universe terms a steady expansion rate) or a deceleration (which is what our two teams of cosmologists were trying to measure in the first place). So it’s a Catch-22. We can’t have creation out of nothing (a free lunch) – that is just not acceptable - but without it you can’t have an expanding and ever accelerating Universe which has been experimentally observed.

I used to think that ‘dark energy’ must be a variation on the theme of the vacuum energy, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a free lunch out of the vacuum energy. For the perplexed, the vacuum energy just means that even when you seemingly have nothing, a vacuum, you still have some energy present. Translated, you can’t have an absolute state of nothingness which would be a theoretical temperature of absolute zero. At the micro or quantum scale, since energy and mass are equivalent (Einstein’s famous equation), energy can be converted to mass  – usually a pair of matter-antimatter particles, which annihilate each other quick-smart returning the energy back to the environment that created them in the first place. Mass can be converted to energy. There’s no free lunch. Conservation laws and principles rule the vacuum energy roost.

Has the Universe always been expanding at an ever accelerating rate? No. There are two competing forces at work. Gravity, a pull force, and this ‘dark energy’, a kind of antigravity or push force. Over time, so the story goes, the amount of ‘dark energy’ increases as space expands. But gravity doesn’t increase. The amount of gravity the Universe has now is the amount the Universe had way back when. At the start gravity was king of the hill because there wasn’t that much space, therefore that much ‘dark energy’. However, with every passing second the amount of ‘dark energy’ increased until it finally overran gravity which was standing still or constant. At that point of intersection the acceleration began in earnest. Apparently that was some five or so billion years ago. Prior to that, the Universe was expanding but at a decelerating rate.

There are two related offshoots to this ‘dark energy’ puzzlement. One is the Big Bang itself. Now the standard cosmological model has it that the Big Bang took place in a small space; a very, very, very small space. In fact the space available was something atomic sized. You couldn’t even see our Universe with the unaided eye a micro-second prior to the Big Bang Ka-Boom it was that tiny, yet anything and everything that exists today, existed then in that tiny volume. Now the problem is that when you try to figure out the state of play with the mass of the Universe (gravity) crushed down to the size of an atom, (the realm of the quantum), the equations break down. You have no idea what the state of play was. In a broader context, the physics of gravity (general relativity) cannot be reconciled with the physics of the quantum. Thousand have tried over many decades. They were just banging their heads against a brick wall. To this day, nobody can fit the hand of gravity into the glove of quantum physics. The way I like to put it is that you apparently have two different and incompatible sets of physics software running the cosmos. That’s nuts! That too needs an explanation.

The other – well there’s an awful lot of Universe for just little old us, and an awful lot more was created (that accelerating Universe) in the time it took you to read that. It’s like having a flea housed in Buckingham Palace that’s adding additional rooms on at a rapid rate of knots. For the flea, it’s a lot of wasted space. There’s an awful lot of just about empty space between the planets; between the stars; between the galaxies; between clusters of galaxies, etc. Why do we, and any other extraterrestrial life forms that may exist, need with so much empty space and pretty much worthless real estate, nearly all of which we can’t even reach? That’s nuts. That needs an explanation, like maybe most of the Universe is just visual holographic wallpaper and has no more reality than the images on your bedroom wallpaper. Is the Universe in fact just a simulation; a virtual reality?   

The way to befuddle an artificially (simulated) intelligent ‘life’ form is to give it an unsolvable problem like dividing a number by zero; calculating the square root of a negative number; coming up with the definitive final value of Pi; or solving an unsolvable paradox like something that both is and is not at the same time; how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; or create a spherical cube. The possibilities are numerous and it’s been used many a time in sci-fi plots to demonstrate the superiority of wetware (brains) over software (silicon chips).

But what if we weren’t wetware (any more than the characters in your dreams are), but in reality software – say a simulated being – an artificial intelligence being given unsolvable puzzles to solve like quantum gravity; why is there so much Universe; why are all electrons identical; why ghosts; and how come crop circles; how can dragons and griffins be real creatures without any fossil remains; and how can a viable breeding herd of lake ‘monsters’ exist in Loch Ness for so long without absolute verification, along with other anomalies that make no apparent sense, like why the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating.

Conclusion: There’s no disputing the observations that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating. While that appears to be wildly improbable, a violation of natural law, that is creation from nothing – a free lunch in other words – it’s not difficult to do as a simulation. So, do we live in a simulated Universe as virtual beings?

*The cosmological constant was a concept invented by Einstein. He knew that the Universe should be contracting under its mutual gravity yet he and nearly everyone else knew (or assumed) that the Universe was static. So he needed a constant outward pressure (the cosmological constant) to balance gravity just-so to enable the Universe to be static – unchanging. So, when Einstein learned, along with the rest of the world later on down the track that the Universe wasn’t static but expanding, he called his ad hoc cosmological constant mechanism the greatest blunder of his career in science. However, the concept, though dormant post-Einstein, has never been too far from the minds of those who could resurrect it in a flash if it served their purpose, like explaining the accelerating expansion rate.

Impossible, Improbable & Imaginary Extraterrestrial Geographies

Far away places with strange sounding names. Sometimes they exist; sometimes they exist but not quite in the way at times suspected or expected; sometimes they don’t exist at all. It’s the latter two categories I examine here.

Impossible, improbable or imaginary geographies are often located, as things turned out, off planet. Here are a few examples of those impossible, improbable & imaginary extraterrestrial geographies.

Vulcan: We all know that Mercury is the closest planetary object to the Sun. But that’s not celestial physics set in stone. There could be objects even closer in, though difficult to see in the intense glare of our parent star, just as many of us haven’t ever seen Mercury being too close to the Sun to be seen with the unaided eye unless conditions are absolutely spot-on. So, way back when, when astronomical instrumentation and technology wasn’t as good as today, coupled with expectations and the thrill of the chase, well it’s not too surprising that astronomers ‘found’ that there was a planet even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Such a planet would be hot property indeed, and so when looking for mythological names that were ‘hot’ with which to christen it, well Vulcan fit the bill. And so it came to pass that Vulcan was the planet closest to the Sun; Mercury relegated to next in line. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Wishful thinking trumped less than ideal observations and so Vulcan was created in the mind as opposed to being actually verifiable. Mercury was restored to first rock from the Sun status – Vulcan became imaginary real estate. But, as Star Trek fans all know, the name lives on as the (non-solar) home of Mr. Spock and kin. 

Neith: Venus, the Goddess of Love, should have a lover – a companion. Venus, the planet, should too have a companion. After all, Venus is the near twin of Earth in terms of size and proximity to the Sun (Venus is second rock out), and Earth has a natural satellite so it stood to reason that Venus should have one too. Alas, it was not to be, but not for lack of trying. Take Neith – companion (but in mythology not lover) to Venus the planet. As with the case of Vulcan, wishful thinking, plus perhaps less than ideal telescopes (relative to modern scopes) led to a flurry of sightings of that expected satellite of Venus, named Neith, so confident were the discoverers that this was no illusion but a physical object. Now there’s a slight problem here. Venus isn’t that close in proximity to the Sun that solar glare should have caused problems. It wasn’t just one professional astronomer who sighted Neith, but many. And while the optical equipment of the day wasn’t 2012 state-of-the-art, it was more than adequate, or should have been more than adequate, to see a reasonable sized satellite in orbit around Venus. So, one could argue that Neith was indeed an actual bit of celestial real estate that went walkabout. Natural satellites don’t have a habit of going walkabout and disappearing. Unnatural satellites on the other hand… Now, might our own Moon be such an unnatural satellite?

Spaceship Moon: Once upon a time there was no real scientifically satisfactorily explanation for the Moon, or rather how the Moon came to be our Moon. One idea that the Moon was an independent body in an irregular and rogue orbit that somehow in a just-so kind of way happen to get gravitationally captured by the Earth was really too implausible. The Moon could have formed jointly with the Earth out of the same cosmic interstellar dust cloud that gave rise to the rest of the solar system. Some bits of that cosmic dust clumped together to form the planets around the parent star, the Sun, and in like fashion other bits of that dust came together around the planets to form natural satellites. Alas, post Apollo, chemical analysis of Moon bits compared to Earth bits ruled that out. For a similar reason, as well as problems in celestial physics, the Moon wasn’t born of a rapidly spinning proto-Earth leaving behind the Pacific basin as its scar, in the same way water droplets would be flung off a globe that was rapidly spinning.

Enter stage left the far-out-star-scout alternative idea that the Moon had nothing to do with the proto-Sun and proto-solar system and proto-Earth. The Moon wasn’t a rogue object captured by the Earth’s gravity, but it was a rouge object that was deliberately steered into an Earth orbit. The Moon was actually a hollow artificially constructed spaceship, covered with lots of dust and rock debris as a natural shield against cosmic radiation and other cosmic bits that would now and again slam into this spaceship – hazards of an interstellar voyage. Anomalies like Transient Lunar Phenomena (strange glowing lights seen on an irregular basis on the lunar surface) are explained as artificial. The Moon’s aliens are the source of the UFO phenomenon. The reason for the aliens steering the artificial Moon into Earth orbit in the first place is that Earth provided all the close at hand next door resources the aliens could ever want.

Of course to spoil that good artificial hollow Moon theory, some bright scientist comes up with yet another natural lunar origin explanation that now fitted all of the facts – a rogue near Mars-sized planet slammed, albeit just a glancing blow, into the proto-Earth, and the resulting mixture of thrown off debris from the proto-Earth and the near totally destroyed smaller rouge planet came together under gravity in near Earth proximity to become, the Moon. So, alas, the artificial hollow Moon proved to be another bit of implausible geography.

Face on Mars: The ‘is there or isn’t there life on Mars’ game was set afoot when the American Viking space probes arrived in the Martian arena in 1976. On the scale of micro-organisms, that question still hasn’t been resolved. There are those who are convinced the Viking craft that landed on the Martian surface hit biological pay dirt. Most others say it was only chemical, not biochemical pay dirt. The fence is being sat on by others to this day. However, the other Viking craft that orbited Mars boldly detected not microbial life, but intelligent life on Mars. One photographed the ‘face on Mars’, and by Jove, that’s exactly what it looked like – one huge monolithic massive stone structure on the Martian surface that resembled down to exacting details, a human face. Well, appearances can be, and often are, deceiving. All of us, at one time or another has seen geometry and recognizable shapes, including faces, in the clouds or in rock formations or on toasted cheese sandwiches. Images of ‘Jesus’ appearing on all manner of things are regular fodder for the tabloids.  Anyway, the whole ‘face on Mars’ issue spawned an entire mini publishing boom, though sceptics were 99 & 44/100’s % convinced that it was all just an illusion. And so it came to pass that NASA went back to Mars post-Viking, and, under pressure, had a new orbiting probe take another look under differing lighting conditions. The score – sceptics one; ‘face on Mars’ advocates zero. It really was all just an illusion, a trick of those lighting conditions that when coupled with some wishful thinking produced another example of imaginary geography.     

Hollow Moons of Mars: But wait, we’re not quite through with Mars yet. Mars has two relatively tiny satellites discovered in 1877 and both named after offspring of Ares/Mars – the god of war - that orbit around it. The one farther out and smaller of the two is called Deimos (about 4 miles radius and over 12,400 miles altitude) and the other larger and closer moon is Phobos (about 7 miles radius; altitude 3700 miles from the Martian surface). Actually it would be more accurate to say that neither is a perfect sphere; potato-shaped is a more spot-on description.

Now it came to pass that some scientists monitoring the relative orbits of Deimos and Phobos noticed that they were shrinking much, much, faster that they should have been. The moons were spiralling in towards the planet, eventually destined to have a close encounter of the Ka-Boom impact kind. The very tenuous Martian atmosphere isn’t much of a drag to what must be solid rock moons. The only alterative explanation is that these satellites were hollow; much less dense than solid rock, and therefore, wait for it, artificial, probably relics of a long extinct Martian civilization. Well actually, there was another alternative explanation – the observations of the shrinking orbits were at the limits of resolution technology and were erroneous. Space probes that have since passed up-close-and-personal to and photographed these satellites, and show exactly what you’d expect – not gleaming metallic hollow space stations or the image of a Star Wars type of Death Star configuration, but irregular, potato-shaped, cratered hunks of rock.

Heaven: If you accept the literal truth of Biblical passages, you can draw no other conclusion other than that Heaven is a physical place not of this Earth since there are lots of passages relating beings ascending and descending twixt the two. Therefore Heaven must be located somewhere up there or out there and as the Bible points out, home to an assorted range of supernatural deities (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and staff, presumably angels (or extraterrestrial officers and crew depending on point of view). Unfortunately, despite Heaven being physical geography, it ain’t been seen by man, telescope or space probe. Heaven would have to be fairly conspicuous – deities and staff don’t reside on a quarter acre block. Try something more like the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or Angkor Wat all cubed.

Of course perhaps Heaven is located light-years away among the stars, but that would hinder rapid interventions by the Heavenly residents here on Terra Firma. Prayers can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and like radio broadcasts, rapidly fade according to the inverse-square law – twice the distance, one-quarter the strength; thrice the distance, one-ninth the strength, etc. So, Heaven, if it makes any sense at all, should be nearby, in cosmic terms. Maybe Heaven resides and is hidden within the cloud bands of Jupiter, though that’s hardly a tranquil or ideal location as is in fact most of the solar system’s real estate. Of course if Heaven were a spaceship, a large spaceship – think Buckingham Palace cubed again – well perhaps that explains Neith. It just moved from the Venus environs to a less conspicuous location like in the asteroid belt or within the rings of Saturn - hidden in plain sight as it were. The upshot is, until proven otherwise, Heaven must be considered a mythical place.

Perhaps we all should be satisfied with the geography we got for real, keeping in mind that the geography we know is but a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny (repeat several hundred more times) of the geography yet to be discovered and explored – the vast cosmos beckons.

Abducted by Aliens? A Possible Case History

From right around the world, from people from all races, creeds, cultures, ages and occupations, come their tales of alleged abductions, not by terrestrial kidnappers looking for a quick megabuck, but extraterrestrials looking for – well it isn’t cash. While no two abduction accounts are absolutely identical, there are such close similarities that the subject has to be taken seriously. Some accounts detail the experience; some just the possibility. This falls into the latter category.

What follows are the threads of evidence that individually are relatively commonplace, but when taken together are highly suggestive that something extraordinary, even an out-of-this-world experience, has happened to an ordinary person – Mr. Joe Blow Average Citizen (who has related the following to me in confidence). If you’re looking for proof positive, even a smoking gun or just plain (where there’s) smoke (there’s fire) that UFO/alien abductions are reality and not something illusory or delusional, then look elsewhere for I’m not providing it here. Instead, consider this just one more chink in an extremely long chain of UFO/alien abduction chinks that collectively add up to a facet of society that needs to be taken as seriously by the skeptics as it’s taken by the victims and their families and friends. 

Mr. Joe Blow Average Citizen is exactly that, apart from the fact that Mr. Joe Blow Average Citizen believes that the alien ‘grays’ have taken an interest in him – not that that makes him anything other than Mr. Joe Blow Average Citizen. Mr. Joe Blow Average Citizen has lots of apparent company.

What sorts of evidence leads this person to think they may have had at least one, possibly several, UFO/alien abduction experiences? Experiences they have no obvious conscious self-awareness of, but would surely have some degree of subconscious recollection of, which will play out a bit further on down the track.

Firstly, and the one piece of physical evidence that remains, is a long roughly 3 inch linear scar on the slightly right side of the abdomen. It’s not a trivial scar, the sort of one you might get and not notice or pay any real attention to. Yet, given the scenario that the receipt of any such a wound that would leave behind such a scar would have been obvious to the person concerned is not apparently the case. How very odd.

Secondly, the person concerned recalls many superficial wounds of the lower left leg noticed on one occasion as if the leg had been dragged through a thicket of brambles. The mystery is the person concerned doesn’t wear shorts; always just full length shoe-top jeans, and any such routine excursion through any sort of brambles or other sharp vegetation wouldn’t have reached the leg in question. Alas, all evidence of that has by now healed up leaving no trace. As with the abominable scar, the person concerned hasn’t a clue how these superficial ‘bramble’ wounds happened since there no such bushes on the property in any case.

Thirdly, if you pull, tear, wrench or otherwise seriously injure your musculature, it’s highly unlikely you can’t recall the event by which it happened, like say lifting a heavy object or undergoing a sudden but unnatural movement in a sports event. We’ve all experienced that sort of happening. But what about when it happens and you cannot recall the event that’s now causing your discomfort, even intense pain? The person concerned has experienced several bouts of back-wrenching discomfort without knowing the cause; in one case experienced intense and ongoing for lengthy periods right shoulder pain, as if one had a torn rotator-cuff experience, but equally being unable to associate the cause with the effect.  That sort of shoulder injury is common in baseball pitchers, but unfortunately, the person has long since retired from active baseball playing. All of these sorts of wrenching muscle injuries are suggestive of one violently resisting being dragged kicking and screaming against-their-will to their fate, like being abducted.

Another common UFO/alien abduction experience is nosebleeds, and the person concerned has experienced those. The alleged association is that aliens have implanted some sort of tiny [tracking?] device up through and behind one nasal cavity. You might argue that nosebleeds are pretty commonplace, and you would be right. However, there are three unusual facets. Firstly, they happened exclusively in one and only one nostril. Secondly, they normally happened shortly after awakening. Thirdly, if the person concerned were prone to nosebleeds, they should still be happening, but for some strange (even if welcomed reason), they’ve stopped happening, as if according to the alien ‘grays’ “that’s it – we’re now through with you – many thanks and see ya”. And it’s stating the obvious that the person concerned cannot account for them, like being punched in the nose or banging into a door, etc. 

Moving away from the purely medical, the person concerned relates how they experience at quite irregular intervals, extremely restless nights without logical explanation. Okay, we all have those off nights when sleep is elusive and we toss and turn, but usually there is some reason(s) we can assign that accounts for it – a stressful day; a dread of tomorrow; a mild case of evening meal food poisoning; an unusually experimental highly spicy meal or one you had much later than normal; mixing your drinks that you don’t ordinarily do; perhaps it’s an ultra hot-and-humid night, etc. But what if none of the above apply – you have an extremely bad night, the sheets/blankets/covers are all helter-skelter in the morning, yet the day and evening before was absolutely no different than multi-dozens of others where sleep was restful and peaceful and there was hardly a wrinkle in the sheets come morning. Translated, you cannot explain why you had a bad and extremely restless night. Well, if a collision at sea can ruin your day, a UFO/alien abduction can ruin your night’s sleep, and if you have no conscious recollection of the ‘grays’ having their wicked way with you, well then you’re stumped for a reason.   

But the clincher that pushed our alleged victim over the edge in terms of thinking quite seriously about a possible relationship with the UFO alien ‘grays’ happened without warning.

The person concerned is a regular Red Cross blood donor with over 120 whole blood donations under the belt, and as anyone who donates blood is aware, you are subjected to a pre-donation interview and medical check to make sure 1) you are fit and well and can withstand the rigors and dangers of blood donation (small, but not zero), and 2) to weed out to the greatest extent possible any possibility of a medical lawsuit against the Red Cross by someone who has received your tainted blood. In fact you have to sign a legal document that you have told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about your state of health – otherwise you could end up in the poo too.

Now part of that pre-donation medical check involves checking your weight; checking your hemoglobin levels; checking your blood pressure; and lastly measuring your heartbeat or pulse rate. It was with respect to the latter that things came to a head.

The person concerned, expecting yet another very routine pre-blood donation Q&A and medical checkup at the hands of the Red Cross inquisition, was stunned to be told that their heartbeat/pulse rate was way above normal – way, way too much above normal to be acceptable for donation purposes. Fortunately, some relaxation/meditation suggestions from the staff, like heavy controlled deep breathing, eventually reduced the pulse rate to just under the maximum allowed. The Red Cross isn’t about to give up a good blood donation without pulling out all the stops. Still, it was a quite an awaking for the person concerned.

Off to the quack, sorry the medical general practitioner – no explanation found. The pulse rate tended to be in any other set of circumstances to be within the normal range, at least normal for an old fart who’s not a superbly trained 20-something athlete. 

In the following blood donation after the initial discovery of the high pulse rate the person concerned wasn’t notified that the pulse rate was equally as high. Rather the person concerned actually had to ask. Now the point here is that it is highly likely that the person concerned had experienced very high pulse rates at blood donation interviews well prior to the one where it was first revealed. If it had been going on for quite some considerable time before that revelation then that might be a point in favor of some ongoing issue the donor was unaware of. 

The issue was the subconscious abduction experience(s) coming to the fore because the blood donation scenario was a bit too similar to the UFO/alien abduction medical procedures apparently or allegedly practiced – procedures that involve large needles. If one is terrified during a UFO/alien abduction experience, and just about all of us would be, then that stress would reflect itself by an extremely rapid pulse rate – panic stations. Placed in a situation that has strong resemblances to that (i.e. – blood donation), well it might not be too unusual to have that heartbeat rise to those sort of abnormal levels, despite being an old hand at giving blood and thus, you’d think, being always cool, calm and collected when fronting up and centre for the blood donation via the big needle experience.

I would maintain that the above bits and pieces of evidence are suggestive of, or at least compatible with, the typical UFO/alien abduction scenario.

There are however a trilogy of anomalies that need explaining.

Firstly, why hasn’t any external observer(s) witnessed, recorded, or at least reported the abduction-in-progress? The numbers of case histories where an abduction event happened and was observed by external disinterested parties (ones not part and parcel to being a participant) are extremely few and far between – too few being the facts of the matter.

Secondly, how do the aliens get in and out of the abode of their victim, with their victim, through locked doors and windows? It must be super-science of some kind or other.

Thirdly, why is there apparently no reaction from animal companions? You’d expect dogs to bark like mad; cats to hide in terror, not sleep soundly through it all. Animals tend to react as when having strange beings enter their abode. Lack of reaction is an anomaly in itself.

And that’s what makes the abduction area so frustrating. You have myriads of extremely sincere people insisting their alien abductions really happened yet the logic and the supporting evidence is lacking, as in there being any external verifications. 

There’s also the anomaly that older farts are less likely to be chosen as victims by the ‘grays’, though in this case, the pulse rate surges could be the psychological remnants of abductions many moons prior. 

One final drawback is that the person concerned happens to be independently highly knowledgeable about all things extraterrestrial, including things relating to the area of UFO/alien abductions. That alone would make any personal experiences claimed by that person in that area to be highly suspect. Being someone already saturated with that sort of knowledge, and claiming to also have firsthand experiences, is sort of bordering on a conflict-of-interest. That’s at least what sceptics would argue, and the person concerned has related that they acknowledge that.