Ongoing UFO Censorship and Cover-Ups: Part Two

From nearly day one of the modern UFO era, the subject has been associated and clouded with all sorts of conspiracy theories – official censorship and deliberate cover-ups of information and releases of disinformation (red herrings). Roswell (1947) is often citied as an example, but since I’ve dealt with Roswell before, I’ll focus elsewhere. Still, Roswell was part of the beginning, and in the beginning there were definitely national security and defence issues associated that required security classifications. But once started, censorship and cover-ups, well it’s a slippery slope that’s hard to climb out of.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

2) The Official UFO Cover-Up: It might be somewhat possible for one country’s government to keep one or a few UFO incidents (crashes, etc.) that by chance fell into their laps first under wraps and hence keep their citizens in the dark as to the reality of ETI. And the motive, as hinted above, is with respect to the utilization of acquired alien technology. However, in the broader context, it staggers the imagination to suggest or believe that every government, and subsequent change of government, elected or otherwise, including every knowledgeable government official over 60 years, in every country in the world, would or could conspire collectively to do the same. The odds that every nation would pursue that same policy independently are so greatly against as to also stretch credibility.

Since it all boils down to individuals. Over the years one would have to believe that thousands to tens of thousands of those in-the-know wouldn’t blow the biggest story of the millennium, especially when on their death beds via death-bed confessions.  If just one current (or ex) prime minister/president/premier/king, etc. in just one country changed sides and spilled the beans…

In any event, no individual, no government, no country has any control over that ETI may, or may not, do. If Roswell had been Central Park in New York City in broad daylight, who could cover it up? If UFOs choose to hover over major inhabited locations, ala “Independence Day”, what official, government or country could prevent their citizens from knowing about it?

There are several solutions to the cover-up scenario. Firstly, there are no ETI; therefore no cover-ups were ever necessary. Secondly, ETI might be here, but there have been no UFO incidents, no acquired alien technology that have required the perceived need for an official cover-up. Thirdly, there have been UFO incidents, but so few and far between that a long term cover-up was possible. Lastly, there is a global conspiracy policy, a co-operation carried out by every nation in the world since day one to prevent the great unwashed from learning about the existence of ETI (for whatever reason – prevent panic, etc.), and there have been no deviations from that policy ever and no rouge individuals bucking the system for fame or fortune or because it was the right thing to do.

While one of the first two alternatives seems most probable, I think there is enough evidence to make the third alternative the most credible. Certainly the last one is so far out in left field that in fact it’s right out of the ball park.

Regarding the question of censorship and cover-ups over things alien in nature, as noted above, things like Martian microbes are too inconsequential to try to hide; ‘ancient astronauts’ are too old for a government to worry about; SETI aliens (if SETI succeeds) are too far away to worry about; but UFOs are a different kettle of fish. The possibility that highly advanced aliens with unknown motives might be present here and now – well can you imagine any government admitting to the great unwashed that they really have no control over their airspace! Any government that had, by accident, obtained alien technology would certainly not share that information with anyone, including allies, and thus wouldn’t admit same to their citizens.  Of course not all countries and their respective governments may even have the appropriate data which to cover-up. You can’t hide what you don’t know about in the first place.  

3) Freedom of Information (FOI): Why is it, if UFOs are total pseudoscience nonsense, that so many individuals have had to resort to Freedom of Information Act actions (in the United States in particular) in order to get official UFO related government documents, many of which, if released, have large portions and chunks blacked out? Further, not all FOI requests succeed. Why indeed if UFOs are just ‘silly season’ fodder claimed by the sceptics? 

4) Case History: Area 51, etc: If a government, any government of any country, had possession of alien technology, say the remains of a crashed flying saucer, there is little doubt that the powers-that-be would try to 1) figure it all out and b) keep it secret from other foreign powers-that-be. That would be the case as well if say the Americans were to obtain terrestrial technology with military applications from captured Russian or Chinese or for that matter even Australian hardware. Thus, it would come as no real surprise that such a government would have one or more top secret sites where such back engineering would be done, and secrets kept. However, even if no government had any alien technology, they still would have top secret sites for producing, testing, and etc. terrestrial technology vital to national security. Thus, the existence of Area 51 (also known as Dreamland for some reason) does not of necessity prove that the United States (in this example) has alien technology in its possession. But, if you accept Roswell (and/or other tales of captured alien technology), then Area 51 (or akin) follows of necessity.

Take Area 51 (Groom Lake, Nevada). Even assuming that the location has bugger-all to do with UFOs doesn’t negate secrecy going on. There’s no denying the place exists. That’s on the public record. Satellite and ground photographs exist. There’s no getting around the fact that signs are posted around the site that there will be ‘no trespassing’ and that if you do, ‘use of deadly force is authorised’ to keep you out. [That includes SETI scientists!] That too is on the public record, filmed and documented. Translated, there are things going on at Area 51 the American government doesn’t want anyone to know about. Pine Gap in Central Australia is another such location. Many more exist throughout the world. You want cover-ups, censorship and related – call it what you will. Well, something that immediately comes to mind was the Manhattan Project. Then there’s that U-2 spy plane (and a whole range of stealth military aircraft that remained top secret while in development). Likewise, the Project Mogul package designed to detect foreign nuclear weapons testing, launched to high altitudes by balloon, as beloved as an explanation for Roswell. (I’m sure Project Mogul existed, whether it really explains Roswell is quite another matter.)

To be continued...

Are Black Holes Really So Weird? Part Two

Black Holes have a certain aura about them. They are associated, in the minds of the general populace, with a certain mystique or ultra-mystery about them – terrifying objects that gobble up everything within range – the ultimate devourer, doomsday machine, berserker and weapon of mass destruction (if you could figure out how to manipulate one of course) all rolled into one. But Black Holes have other aspects about them that are equally fascinating, and not really all that weird, though some bits are weirder than others. But you don’t have to be a geek to come to terms with these concepts. 

Now the common perception about Black Holes is that nothing gets out past the event horizon once it finds itself beneath it. That’s not quite the case. In theory, as discovered by cosmologist/physicist Stephen Hawking, radiation can escape – sort of – and this radiation is now called Hawking radiation. Macro objects, objects we associate with classical physics, can not get from inside an event horizon to outside an event horizon without traveling faster than the speed of light, which unfortunately, should you find yourself below and event horizon, is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. There’s no ‘get out of jail’ card. Traveling faster than light speed is not allowed.

But, any elementary particles, in the micro size realm and subject to quantum phenomena, can escape – again in theory; this hasn’t be verified by direct observation (which is currently in the too hard basket). It you are a fundamental particle, just below the event horizon, you might, just might, due to quantum fluctuations or jitters / the vacuum energy / the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, quantum tunnel your way, the tiniest fraction of a distance imaginable, past the mathematical event horizon boundary, to outside and potential freedom. Of course most particles might get sucked right back in again, but a tiny fraction gets away, carrying with it energy (thus the Black Hole has a temperature) and therefore mass, so the Black Hole loses a bit of mass and shrinks a bit. This quantum tunneling, crossing an energy barrier without having in theory sufficient energy to do so, is sort of like how a radioactive atom goes ‘poof’ and decays to a more stable state. Something in the nucleus, not having enough energy to break out, nevertheless quantum tunnels its way out – ‘poof’.   

Very much like a human being, from the very moment a Black Hole is born, say out of the gravitational collapse of a super-massive star that’s run out of nuclear fuel and stellar puff, it will start to die, to evaporate via Hawking radiation. However, in a Universe still very much dominated by matter and energy (including the all pervasive cosmic microwave background radiation), way more stuff finds its way into a Black Hole than gets out – by many orders of magnitude. For every bit (particle) that escapes, millions of bits (particles) get trapped inside. But (and here I assume an ever expanding Universe that never results in a Big Crunch), what happens when all the available matter and energy (all those particle bits) has been consumed and Black Holes can’t grow anymore (and here I assume that individual Black Holes are so far apart and expanding away from each other that they don’t consume each other). Then, evaporation – Hawking radiation output – exceeds input, and slowly, ever so slowly, and I do mean extremely slowly (as in measured over trillions of years), Black Holes get smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left. But our now ever more vastly expanded and immensely larger than it currently is Universe is filled (albeit to a much rarified extent) with just particles – particles adrift in the eternal cold of near absolute zero temperature (zero degrees Kelvin, the absolute theoretical minimum temperature possible).

However, the ultimate death of Black Holes has posed a significant problem to some physicists, causing quite a bit of controversy in the process.

What happens to the information content that a Black Hole can gobble up? Say you toss a book, or a CD, or a fully loaded human brain into a Black Hole. Is the information contained in that book (or whatever) lost to the Universe forever? [Perhaps given the state of information overload we suffer from that might be a blessing!]

You can not have macro stuff spew out of a Black Hole without violating basic physics. Macro stuff, say in the form of a book or a CD or a human, stuff full of information, falls in – that identical macro stuff, stuff full of information, does not, can not, come back out again. It is not only an improbable event, but an impossible one and a violation of the law of physics. But we have seen that in theory at least, Hawking radiation can get back out, because radiation isn’t macro, its micro, or in the realm of the quantum.

Note that it wasn’t Hawking radiation that was tossed into the Black Hole in the first place, but a book or CD or a human being or a whatever macro object, so escaping Hawking radiation isn’t that book or that CD or that whatever, but a bit of this and a bit of that and there’s no way of distinguishing the this from the that. Though there is apparently no way to reassemble the bits into all its separate meaningful messages; one-on-one, all the bits are nevertheless there.

If you were somehow able to reassemble bits of Hawking radiation emitted from all the bits and pieces which the Black Hole swallowed – which can escape – into a meaningful message(s), how would you know that message was something part and parcel of some information that went down the Black Hole gurgler in the first place? You’re more likely to have assembled one letter from one book, another letter from another book, yet a third letter from a third book, etc. The information (say sentence) you have assembled never entered the Black Hole in that form at all!

Still, a Black Hole, in theory, eventually spews out all the information it absorbed over its existence, ultimately via Hawking radiation. Some scientists insist there is, there must be, a way to reassemble the bits into all its separate meaningful messages; one-on-one.

So therein lies the controversy – macro stuff does go in; macro stuff does come out. Macro stuff ultimately escapes as micro stuff – Hawking radiation. Some scientists will say you can’t in theory reassemble and separate out the signal from the noise; others say you can, in fact it must be possible.

As indicated above, some physicists make a big deal over the loss of information via a Black Hole relative to any other way – probably because of the non-reversibility factor already described. Methinks personally it’s a non-event. Why? The fundamental question this all boils down to be that information – in any form – is a composite of elementary particles. A book, or a CD, or Morse code ink drops, or a human brain is a composite of particles. An electron, all on its own, isn’t telling you very much (for that matter, either is any individual letter in a book – by itself). Loss of information seems to be another example of dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes; only it’s a more fundamental case of elementary particles to elementary particles. It’s how the Universe began and its how the Universe will end up if the current observational astronomical trends continue into the indefinite future.

There’s one other solution to the ‘is information lost forever or is it not’ paradox. It’s considered a possibility that a Black Hole, because is so distorts time and space – in the extreme - ultimately buds off from our Universe and starts or enters another universe, or a baby universe (part of a Multiverse). In such a case, any information is budded off with it and lost to our Universe forever. Of course our loss is the other universe’s gain; maybe a Black Hole(s) in some other universe has dumped its information load (or overload) onto our Universe! 

There’s one further spin-off from the Black Holes make baby universes idea. In a Multiverse, different universes may have different laws of physics. There’s no reason why the laws of physics in our Universe need be identical in another universe. Thus, there might be some universes where the local physics favor the formation of Black Holes, and some universes where local physics can’t make Black Holes. Those universes that can easily make Black Holes will ‘breed’ and produce baby universes. Those universes that can’t readily make Black Holes will ‘breed’ less. Those universes that can’t produce Black Holes will be sterile. Do you see the connection with Darwinian ideas? Some universes are more ‘fit’ to reproduce than others!

Now that’s weird!  There’s one other bit of weirdness I like about Black Holes, and that is that what’s inside them may well be a new form of matter. Ordinary matter goes into a Black Hole, but the conditions inside them are so extreme that there’s some sort of phase transition (like when ice goes to water goes to steam or vice-versa) and while it’s still matter, it’s matter but not as we know it. The theoretical evidence for that idea is that if you have a matter star, and an antimatter star, and you introduce them to each other, what you get is one almighty Ka-Boom! But, if your matter star compresses into a Black Hole, and your antimatter star compresses into a Black Hole, and you combine the two, what you get is just a larger Black Hole!

Some more weirdness: It’s suggested that information going into a Black Hole is actually ‘stored’ in the event horizon, that two dimensional ‘surface’ marking the point of no return that surrounds the Black Hole’s singularity – whatever that actually is. The event horizon concept isn’t difficult to envision – Earth’s crust and oceans are a two dimensional surface surrounding the spherical three dimensional planet.

Now as more and more stuff enters a Black Hole, the event horizon expands accordingly – obviously - just like our crust (area) would get bigger if Earth’s volume increased. The event horizon is also the area where Hawking radiation is emitted from.

Now say you are inside a Black Hole’s event horizon – that’s the wrong side to be on, but this is just a thought experiment and I’ll assume you haven’t been crushed into a tiny pinprick of stuff, stuff that could equally be rusted automobiles or stuff formally made from gold, silver and diamonds. There’s lots of trapped radiation (photons) in there with you because light can enter a Black Hole. Those photons can struggle up, losing energy with each unit of distance gained, to reach the event horizon, but no farther. Their energy has exhausted itself. I gather they can just barely touch and ‘reflect’ off the underside of the event horizon and come back down again (in a direction towards the singularity), picking up the energy again that they expended in their futile gesture of escape. So, you, being also beneath the event horizon can see the event horizon from the inside via these trapped photons. You can also see beyond the event horizon via new photons entering the Black Hole from outside the event horizon – photons that will join their trapped or prisoner kin. It’s like a half-way mirror. If you are inside a Black Hole, you can see out, because light can pass through the Black Hole’s event horizon to you, but people on the good side or outside of the event horizon can’t see you because light reflecting off you can’t make it past that event horizon barrier.

One further question, could we actually be living within a Black Hole, or translated, is our Universe actually a Black Hole? Now one could (and people have) suggested that one could consider the entire Universe as being the inside of a Black Hole – after all, nothing can escape from the Universe. Well, if you can’t escape from inside a Black Hole, and assuming there’s no escape from our Universe (you are trapped in this Universe, like it or lump it), then a rose by any other name…

However, our Universe doesn’t exactly mirror a real Black Hole unless there is an outside to our Universe – a beyond the boundary or horizon that allows stuff to get into our Universe, our Universe ultimately trapping it.

So, Black Holes residing inside a Black Hole Universe, which maybe residing inside…

Russian dolls within Russian dolls within Russian dolls within Russian dolls.

Saving the best for last, could you become a Black Hole? Well, the short answer is presumably, ‘yes’. The reasoning goes as follows. If you travel at ever increasing velocities, under special relativity, your mass gets correspondingly greater and greater, and your length gets shorter and shorter. Translated, your density gets greater and greater; your own gravity gets higher and higher. At light speed (impossible to achieve), your mass would be infinite; your volume zero; your density and gravity infinite. Well, that’s not on. But, before even approaching that limit, your mass would be theoretically great enough; your volume low enough, your density and gravity great enough, that you’d warp space-time sufficiently enough to turn into a Black Hole! As noted above, what actually comprises a Black Hole is irrelevant. Any stuff will do – gold, silver and diamonds; rusted automobiles; or flesh-and-blood (i.e. – you).

Here are a few further recommended readings:

Begelman, Mitchell & Rees, Martin; Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe;  [2^nd Edition]; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 2010:

Susskind, Leonard; The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics; Back Bay Books, New York; 2008:

Thorne, Kip S.; Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy; W.W. Norton & Company, New York; 1994:

UFOs: Bits and Pieces: Freedom of Information Act

With both the existence of pure theory and applied evidence supporting the plausibility of the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) – where the UFO remains a UFO after appropriate expert analysis has failed to find a more terrestrial explanation – lets look at a few snippets of the phenomena, this time why, if there’s nothing to the UFO phenomena, why do UFO documents often have to be obtained via the FOIA?

Why is it, if UFOs are total pseudoscience or paranormal nonsense, that so many individuals have had to resort to Freedom of Information Act actions (in the United States in particular) in order to get official (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) UFO related government documents, many of which, if released, have large portions/chunks blacked out? Further, not all FOI requests succeed. Why indeed if UFOs are just ‘silly season’ fodder as claimed by the sceptics?  Rather strange don’t you think?