Random thought on the glittering "Christmas lights" often seen on UFOs

[AdamI]

This might have been suggested by others, but I've often wondered if the bright lights surrounded by rings of "silly looking Christmas lights" often seen on UFOs could be the propulsion system.

A likely propulsion system for such a craft, at least at low speeds, might be something like an ion drive. Here's one for reference:


Now imagine a smaller higher-efficiency version of that able to switch on an off rapidly. If you wanted to keep a vehicle in the air and allow it to be maneuverable and to hover, you'd want one or a few central thrusters like that to provide lift and forward motion and a larger number of small thrusters for maneuvering and attitude control.

If you were hovering in the atmosphere, you'd probably have one running for lift and the smaller thrusters would be flickering on an off to provide constant adjustments for stability. Think of a quieter higher-tech ion drive version of this little guy:


Note that even in a controlled test environment, lots of little bursts are required to provide stable hovering flight.

Now picture that, except instead of rockets you have ion drives emitting eerie colored lights and no sound. Sounds exactly like a lot of UFO sightings...

Just an interesting thought. It could be a non-human technology like this, or it might be something of our own that's kept in secret.

 

[skunkape]

I've seen an object up fairly close with witnesses, that had the "Christmas lights." If they are part of the propulsion system, it is a different type of propulsion. The lights were spherical, not ejections, and there was no sound.
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[AdamI]

skunkape:

Interesting... though it would be more accurate to say that they looked spherical. Of course, they could also be an entirely different method of propulsion altogether, though one that still generates light as a byproduct.

I had another thought after posting that. A disc-shaped craft with a single central levitation/maneuvering thruster and a gyroscope for stability would tend to wobble a bit. In that case, the corrective action of the stabilizing thrusters would consist to some extent of the thrusters firing in a circular pattern around the craft. Voila! You have the classical cliche image of the 1950s UFO, complete with a ring of lights circling it in cheezy Hollywood fashion!

This is all speculation of course, but I had another thought too...

I think one of the things I'm getting at here is that we can't apply our preconceived notions of "silliness" to what could be an alien artifact of technology. Just as Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, we might add a corollary: that technologies not understood tend often appear silly or mysterious.

What would you think of someone talking through a Bluetooth cell phone headset if you knew nothing of the technology? Why, there's a crazy person walking around with a glowing blue thing in his ear talking to people who aren't there! Maybe the blue thing is making him crazy... get it out! get it out!

Means of locomotion are often very silly in appearance. You ever really look at a small single engine airplane with its silly air inlet "smile?" How about a helicopter... now there's a silly contraption! Tractor trailers are even a bit silly looking.

I would be surprised if a piece of alien transportation technology didn't look either comical, magical, or both. If we really are looking at alien tech (or even super-secret super-experimental human tech) then that which appears silly may actually be quite rational... as in the case of the whirly contraptions all over a helicopter.

 

[Trajanus]

I've seen an object up fairly close with witnesses, that had the "Christmas lights." If they are part of the propulsion system, it is a different type of propulsion. The lights were spherical, not ejections, and there was no sound.
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For quite some time, there have been suggestions that UFOs fly by overcoming gravity, by generating some field of their own. IMO we should expect that their propulsion system is unlike ours i.e. no reaction mass or associated sound.

 

[Xylo]

For quite some time, there have been suggestions that UFOs fly by overcoming gravity, by generating some field of their own. IMO we should expect that their propulsion system is unlike ours i.e. no reaction mass or associated sound.

Perhaps they have found a way to use photons as the method of propulsion.

 

[Trajanus]

Perhaps they have found a way to use photons as the method of propulsion.

I assume they use antimatter. Maybe lights can be a way of dumping excess energy.

 

[Stagger]

Now imagine a smaller higher-efficiency version of that able to switch on an off rapidly. If you wanted to keep a vehicle in the air and allow it to be maneuverable and to hover, you'd want one or a few central thrusters like that to provide lift and forward motion and a larger number of small thrusters for maneuvering and attitude control.

If you were hovering in the atmosphere, you'd probably have one running for lift and the smaller thrusters would be flickering on an off to provide constant adjustments for stability. Think of a quieter higher-tech ion drive version of this little guy:

..

Just an interesting thought. It could be a non-human technology like this, or it might be something of our own that's kept in secret.

Thanks for sharing, Adam. I think it's interesting, at least for sightings where an actual physical craft is involved. Especially "Terran" crafts, more likely to be using reaction engines.

That said, I'd be surprised if the observed visual characteristics were caused by some sort of ion drive: IIRC ion drives have high specific-impulse but pretty low thrust, so they'd be more suitable for slowly accelerating in interplanetary space rather than operating in a steep gravity well environment such as the the Earth's atmosphere.
I read VASIMR should be capable of "relatively high thrust", how relatively high? I don't have a clue.

Also of potential interest: there's a chapter in Friedman's "Flying Saucers and Science" in which magneto aerodynamic propulsion is discussed along with its possible correlation to observed changes in UFO lights color. (I believe I'd started a thread about that topic, *ages ago*).

Cheers,
L

 

[AdamI]

Perhaps they have found a way to use photons as the method of propulsion.

I personally think that relativistic ion drive is pretty likely.

Relativistic ion drive means that the emitted particles-- usually protons-- are traveling at near-light-speed. We cannot build such a thing now, since we lack the technology to efficiently accelerate particles to such speeds. We can do it in accelerators, but those are huge and less than 1% efficient.

The reason relativistic ion drives are interesting has to do with relativity and the relationship between velocity and mass. Unless my understanding of physics is totally off, the idea is that as you accelerate a particle to near light speed, its mass increases dramatically. Force equals mass times acceleration (F=ma), so by relativistic acceleration of the particles you increase "m" enabling you to get far more oomph from each particle. I've heard this called Einsteinian-Newtonian propulsion... it's still Newtonian in that it uses reaction mass, but the reaction mass goes a very very long way. Tiny amounts of propellant could provide very large thrust. The closer you can get to "c," the more thrust you get for each particle... as I understand it this curve would be exponential, so if you got to 99.9% "c" it would start to behave almost as if it was a non-Newtonian propulsion system... you'd be using so little reaction mass that you could more or less forget about it.

BUT, again unless my physics is totally off, we currently do not know if this is possible. The reason is that we do not know whether the effect of increased relative mass due to relativity would affect the F=ma relationship in this way. As I understand it, this is one of the scientific questions that can be answered with the large hadron collider, since the LHC is easily capable of generating enough relativistic-velocity particles to permit measurements of their "equal and opposite reaction."

If the answer comes back "yes" to this question, expect a lot of interest in relativistic ion drives.

So... I wonder if someone else already got there. Relativistic ion drives would solve a lot of the propellant carrying problems of accelerating ships to near light speed, and would make a great propulsion system for a small shuttle craft as well. Assuming you also had a compact means of generating a lot of energy, it could allow you to fly around within a planet's gravitational well and launch to orbit without having to carry much propellant.

It would also explain something else about some close UFO encounters: radiation and crazy EMF-related phenomena. Something like that would probably throw off a lot of EMF, and the streams of relativistically accelerated particles themselves would be very dangerous. It would basically be like getting hit with a stream of concentrated cosmic rays.... not very good for you.

Another thing this might explain is the stories of UFOs hovering on beams of light. If my understanding is correct, as the particles exited the drive and came into contact with the atmosphere they would cause something like Cerenkov radiation, which is the phenomenon that makes nuclear reactors glow. Since they would be traveling so fast they wouldn't have much time to spread out much before they hit something... so hovering using such a propulsion system might look as if you were sitting atop a flashlight beam.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

I think the fact that UFOs are observed breaking all the rules of physics we know of are a pretty clear indicator that all these ideas of propulsion are too based in our current level of knowledge. It's still using the idea that you propel by ejecting matter. But yet we never see any form of propulsion, and that wouldn't account for the seeming lack of mass as they are "moving" and "stopping" on a dime with no acceleration or deceleration. No sonic booms. No sound when moving or standing still. No apparent friction effects when moving at crazy fast speeds, and let's not forget just "blinking out."

I'd bet anything that these devices have no moving parts, and pretty much lack any form of "engine". They are solid matter when they need to be, and something else at other times.

I think the lights are for effect. If we see a UFO, it was intentional. The lights make it hard not to see them. From a recent personal experience with a friend, it was clear this object knew we were looking at it, even though we were in a truck on a busy highway. It was aware that I saw it, and influenced me into thinking I had no batteries in my camera.

That goes way beyond worrying about them using some kind of particle based propulsion system!

We are clueless as far as what they are, never mind how they work. Is it a "spacecraft"? Maybe. Maybe not. I think it's a lot more exotic than that.

 

[Trajanus]

I think the fact that UFOs are observed breaking all the rules of physics we know of are a pretty clear indicator that all these ideas of propulsion are too based in our current level of knowledge.

What are we to make of Julien's ideas in The Science of Extraterretrials?

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

What are we to make of Julien's ideas in The Science of Extraterretrials?

I haven't read it, but my first reaction is that anyone who thinks they have the answers for any of this, especially based on our current level of understanding of reality is delusional. But I like quantum physics. It kind of demonstrates that reality is not what it seems to be. It's all very illusionary. Just stuff vibrating, and that stuff doesn't always exist. It just has a probability of existing. Kind of like UFOs, or even Bigfoot. Here one minute, gone the next!

Having said that, a review at Amazon says:

He calls the ETs "Extra-Temporal," meaning that they exist outside our usual perception of time, in what is called the fourth dimension, from which all that we perceive as "supernatural" flows.

That I can agree with, IF this is an inter-dimensional phenomenon. You probably only need to be shifted ahead in time a small amount to not be perceivable here. Because it hasn't happened yet. Then when we get to that "frame" of reference, it's still hasn't happened yet.

But something along the lines of what he seems to be talking about would give a glimpse into some of the issues with missing time, and with missing time can also be missing space. Photons for example do not experience time dilation, so space and time don't exist from that perspective, From our perspective it might take a million years for light to get here from a distant object, but from the light's perspective it takes no time at all. One idea is if there was nothing to perceive the photon, it wouldn't have "traveled" at all. Time is useful to judge distances though. So it's part of this reality.

So what if you could make yourself more like light? Of course you kind of are, just not at the same vibrational frequency. People even emit photons. Lately I have been thinking about all the mention of light in old religious texts. Things like "God said let there be light", you are "enlightened" and you "see the light." The "light of God," and how about "God is light and in him is no darkness at all." Then we have inner light, and that light at the end of the tunnel in NDE. I've seen light shining on my closed eyelids in a dark room. So why not christmas tree lights on a UFO? Why is light so important?

Now I'm not a religious person, but if you keep seeing the same references over and over it makes you wonder what they were trying to say before it got so twisted and distorted.

It also brings us to the idea that we are all part of some kind of "experience" of some greater consciousness. So once again, using the old terminology, we are all the "eyes of God". If there was nothing here to "see" things (interact with photons?), then maybe nothing would exist? So light would be important. People used to worship the sun. That makes sense if it's purpose it to produce light (assuming anything has a purpose) which then brings things into existance. So the Universe is populated with light producing objects. And dark objects too. Of course it can be argued that we developed sight because there is light, but I've always been fascinated how the eyes of living things on this planet all look very similar.

"Seeing is believing" Science doesn't like things you can't see, or measure. But there's probably a whole lot of stuff we can't perceive at all.

So first we need to figure out what this UFO thing is, and then we can try and understand how it works. Or not. But we don't know what it is. It might be visitors from another world, and it might be something else masquerading as ET. It might even be the projections of some consciousness of beings that no longer have a physical form in this reality. Maybe they think them selves into existence here from some vast distance or some other dimension not that far away at all. Maybe a few centimeters. Remember, distance is time. So nuts and bolts UFOs might just be an idea. If you have observed the UFO you have brought it into existence. An interesting thing is how you can have multiple witnesses to some sightings, and they sometimes describe different things. Or what they captured in some kind of photo is not what they saw. Or objects that change form, often into things that don't quite make sense. It's hard to get a nuts and bolts object to do that based on our ideas of reality. But what do we know?

OK, I only had three hours sleep, so this stuff is too hard to write about, and I'm rambling, but that's some of the ideas I have been thinking about lately. That book looks interesting though. I'll have to add it to the pile I haven't gotten to yet.

 

[Trajanus]

I haven't read it, but my first reaction is that anyone who thinks they have the answers for any of this, especially based on our current level of understanding

IIRC Julien's ideas were derived from meetings with actual "extratemporals." But there was a comprehensive criticism of his book, I hear.