Sunday Story: The UAP Series Part 3 - Human Ingenuity

Welcome back to our UAP series. In Part 1, we told you how we came to this topic because a number of incredibly serious and professional people - former presidents, admirals, etc. - have said “there are things flying around we cannot explain”. In Part 2, we explored the possibility that all of these serious and professional people are totally wrong or lying, and why that doesn’t seem very likely. Suffice it to say, our conclusion is that it’s more likely than not that there are real objects flying around that we can’t explain, and this is further substantiated this week with the release of a new report by the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the US Government’s designated office responsible for handling this issue, as well as some comments from their brand-new director. In multiple reports now we have seen confirmation that some UAP are unexplainable, so we’re pretty confident that this is actually the case.

But it doesn’t mean little green men. Remember in part 1 we invoked the Drake equation and Fermi paradox which are probably the reason for most people’s skepticism that these objects are non-human intelligences. We’re going to get there and unpack that more in a future part, but for this part, let’s focus on two things: First, what these objects could be if we eliminate entirely the “alien” narrative, and why you absolutely should still care about this, and we're going to briefly talk about the man holding the flying saucer in the photo below because he's awfully relevant to the "no aliens needed" story we're telling you today.

Last week, we made the point that if this was all a big hoax, you should care about it from the perspective of it being a massive, multi-generational hoax that is probably illegal, and it makes the Watergate scandal look like someone filed a lunch expense receipt the wrong way. We all have a vested interest in functioning democracies, so we should all be concerned about what this might mean for our structures of government and stability of those systems. But, going off the accepted conclusion that there are indeed real objects flying around in ways that defy our current understanding of technology, that means you should care about this so much more than simply worrying about democracy. It means you should care about this because it can change the nature of capitalism and the human experience.

Let’s set aside anything and everything that has to do with little green men and flying saucers, and let’s introduce the first hypothesis on what these things are: The American Government has cooked up secret technology in a lab somewhere, and these objects that are moving in ways that we cannot publicly explain are the result of a technological breakthrough. That’s not only very reasonable, it’s actually happened many times before - the Manhattan project, the internet, and GPS are all examples of technology the US Government cooked up in a lab in secret, and in the case of the F-117 Stealth Fighter, they even leaned into the UFO narrative to hide what they were doing when testing the craft. Let’s assume that this is just that kind of a thing again for the sake of the rest of this post. Even if that’s true, this is still incredibly disruptive to human society, and the reason is actually quite simple: Energy.

Given the existence of these objects is not in dispute, the way they move gives us some clues about them. First and foremost the way these objects move - based on speed alone - requires energy. And not just a little bit of energy - a absolutely massive amount of it. If we assume these objects weigh about the same as an F-18 fighter jet, then the amount of energy it would take these objects to do what they are doing even one time is more energy than the entire annual nuclear energy output of the United States.

Our species currently relies almost entirely on fossil fuels. It’s expensive, it’s a finite resource, and the use of it is messing up our climate. We can do a lot of cool stuff with fossil fuels - like have a rocket take off and land again on its own - but it is currently a massive bottleneck for all of us. Economically, when there’s a hiccup in OPEC, the rest of us feel it all over the world. Politically, nations have been invaded because of oil, with millions of unneeded deaths. So many of our issues track back to the fact that the best energy source we have right now is actually not that great.

Let’s put it into real terms: It’s now November, but I bet if you go to your local grocery store here in Canada, you’ll see tons of fresh fruit and vegetables. Spoiler alert - vegetables and fruits don’t really grow super well in Canada in November. Every single one of those nutritious snacks was brought here on a plane or a boat - one that ran on oil. The lights on the ceiling that illuminate your Granny Smiths are running on electricity, which often goes back to fossil fuels. And if they are being powered by hydro, then I can guarantee you the employees who maintain the lines and power plans or the factories that produce and deliver the transformers are reliant on fossil fuels. The checkout clerk got to work that morning on a bus that runs on fossil fuels. And every single one of these costs - shipping the fruit, paying to keep the store open, the wages that help the clerk buy the bus pass, and more - all track back to one single thing: The price of energy. When it goes up, every other thing gets more expensive and harder. Energy is currently the key to human development - or suffering, as we can see when energy scarcity makes leaders of nations think invading others is a good plan, or by the millions of soon-to-be climate migrants who are being impacted by human-caused climate change. Energy is everything to modern human society.

And, there are only two ways to explain how these objects move with our current understanding of physics, both of which suggest that whoever built these things have figured out a new way of using energy that is orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we publicly understand today. Put simply, either these UAP have a really big engine that can help them move really fast - an engine so powerful that we have no idea how to make something even remotely like it - or they have figured out a way of making heavy things incredibly lightweight by apparently controlling mass. Both of these things require energy the likes of which we cannot even comprehend - remember, orders of magnitude more energy than the total nuclear output of America for an entire year.

So why does energy matter? Because literally every single problem on earth can theoretically be explained by the way human beings react to scarcity. When resources are finite, we will tend to fight over them, and we’re incredibly mean when we’re angry so these fights can be quite traumatic. We also know that trauma of our grandparents impacts how we behave in modernity; trauma has an epigenetic element that can be expressed across generations, and “intergenerational trauma” is a demonstrated fact of life for humans around the world. Even income disparity, where billionaires sit on hoards of gold like Tolkien’s Dragons could be theoretically explained by scarcity - the irrational accumulation of mass wealth could well be a trauma response to scarcity of forebears in generations past.

We could argue a long time about whether or not scarcity is actually the root of human problems as we’re suggesting, or if there’s something else at play - but we’ve never known what human society is like in an environment without scarcity - at Authentik, we believe that when humans aren’t required to spend 8 hours a day polishing widgets to make a living, that they are free to make a life instead, and that seems like the kind of future we want to live in.

The UAP issue represents a possible solution to scarcity. The UAP issue represents a possible path to this future. Remember - it all comes back to energy.

First of all - just the engines. Imagine a cargo train powered by a UAP engine instead of a diesel one could either modify the weight of the mile-long cargo train or have enough energy to move that massive weight with ease from coast to coast. Imagine one of these craft being plugged into the grid - it wouldn’t take very many craft to totally replace all of our coal, oil, and natural gas usage around the world. This tech would mean that we’re moving from using finite resources for energy to using a source of energy that is orders of magnitude greater and is functionally infinite relative to how we use energy today.

Second of all - remember earlier I mentioned the feat of catching the rocket that went to space? That’s the best we’re able to do, and it’s still incredibly expensive and hard to do. And once we get a rocket up there, it takes forever for it to to get anywhere. But these things are fast. Like, really fast - fast enough to make a trip between Earth and the Asteroid Belt feel like a run to the local shop for a bag of milk (We’re Canadian remember, up here milk sometimes comes in bags). While resources like cobalt, gold, and platinum - all critical elements in electric cars, smart phones, and the device you are reading this on right now - are fairly rare on earth, they are available in abundance in our own solar system and beyond, and with the speed of these craft as well as our own progress in robotics and AI, these resources are potentially accessible to us.

And we don’t need to explain this with space aliens. Turns out, we might have figured out this technology about 50 years ago in secret. It’s time to tell you about a man named Thomas Townsend Brown - now, whether he was the man who invented antigravity that has now been developed into these objects, or whether it was something else, we don’t know - but we will tell you a little bit about Doc Brown (Yes, that’s who the Back to the Future character is named after) so you can see how its at least plausible that humanity has developed this technology ourselves.

Thomas Townsend Brown was an American inventor and researcher known for his work on electrogravitics - how electricity can influence the force of gravity. Brown's most notable concept, the "Biefeld-Brown Effect," suggested that applying a high voltage to certain types of capacitors could create a force that could be used to propel an object, which he believed could lead to advanced propulsion systems, potentially without the need for conventional fuel. This idea attracted attention from researchers and government agencies, and ultimately Mr. Brown ended up working in the US Defense Industry for the Navy and, later, Lockheed-Martin. He was also heavily connected to the UFO phenomenon - and this is where an interesting Canadian connection comes in.

In Canada, the Government actually commissioned a UFO study in 1950 (more on this next week) and the person who wrote the paper is a man named Wilbert Smith. This was called Project Magnet, and while it wasn’t the only example of Canadian government interest in the UFO topic, it is notable in it’s conclusion: UFOs were a real phenomenon that we needed to take seriously. In 1950!

Anyway, the connection to Canada here is in correspondence between T. Townsend Brown and Wilbert Smith where the former apparently asked the latter to join a US-based UFO task force to study the phenomena more fully. It is at the very least interesting that the American luminary on antigravity propulsion was chatting to the the Canadian luminary on UFOs and asking him to join an American UFO study - but we'll save this for next week.

So let’s string these data points together into a plausible story about how these objects could be human-made and still highly disruptive: it’s the 1950s, and the post-war Nuclear era was inspiring science and research into many avenues. Some of the best and brightest scientists in the world were getting concentrated into the United States - first via their own war efforts they found a lot of home-grown talent. Second, they recruited a lot of international talent - like Fermi and Einstein - who were fleeing the political situation in Europe before the war. And finally, the US Government recruited some of the best and brightest that the Nazis had working for them and got them working for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory via Operation Paperclip.

Folks tend to do a double take with this information so I’ll give the most obvious example: Werner Von Braun is regarded as the father of modern rocketry and the reason why the Americans were able to reach the moon, since he was NASA’s Director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre in the 1960s. 20 years earlier, he was a full card carrying Nazi and was responsible for the creation of the V2 rocket, used extensively by Hitler's military against civilians in Western Europe. Von Braun also oversaw the construction of these rockets using slave labour from a concentration camp. There were as many as 1500 other Nazi scientists brought over under Operation Paperclip - these are not, in our opinion, good people, but there was good reason for their expertise being sought after from the Allied side, as the Germans had made a number of major technological breakthroughs during the war that were seen as detrimental to the west if they fell into Russian hands (like the first jet fighter).

But the fact is, this is what was done in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, with a heavy focus on developing new tools and weapons to take on the Soviets. The amount of technological information that was being researched at this time was immense, and along with other luminaries in physics, like Einstein and Fermi and Condon, T. Townsend Brown was busy trying to figure out how to manipulate materials to create a new form of propulsion system that was based on anti-gravity.

We have always assumed these attempts were unsuccessful, and that Doc Brown sort of retired into moderate obscurity with his antigravity theories being pushed to the fringes of pseudo science - and that may well still be the case. To his credit, his theories did end up resulting in the Ionic Breeze from the Sharper Image catalog, which uses some of the electrogravitic effects Brown discovered to move air around the place, so we know he wasn't totally unsuccessful, but creating a fan for a mail order catalog is not the same as creating a UAP that can pull 5000g's and defy our current understanding of physics.

But what if they were successful in truly making this technology work back in the 1950s? We know for sure the US Government was working on this technology in a big way, and we know for sure that they had some early theoretical promise to it. What if instead of being a dead end field, they actually made some progress, but decided to keep it quiet?

The easy parallel here is atomic weapons - the Manhattan project was one of the best-kept secrets in human history, as the general sense was that the risk of developing this massively powerful weapon is if it fell into enemy hands; the war with Japan meant that the US Government decided to deploy atomic weapons, but one wonders if they had not - would we know such weapons exist, or would the Manhattan project secrecy have continued? And if the secrecy continued, would we have nuclear power - a direct result of Manhattan’s work being so devastatingly made public in 1945?

This same logic applies to Doc Brown’s work. If he and his cohort were successful in the 1950s, who’s to say the tech would be public, and if it were not, its possible that a massive scientific discovery that could lead to a massive technological shift has already been made about 70 years ago. That would mean about 5 decades of time to improve on that discovery, which is plenty of time to go from “proof of concept” to “engineered craft flying around at high speeds”.

There you have it - a perfectly down-to-earth, no aliens required explanation for how these UAPs could be explained entirely by human ingenuity. There's so much more to say about this era in American history - we'll touch on some if it next week, but if you want to learn more about T. Townsend Brown and this issue, we recommend checking out the work of Paul Schatzkin (where much of this post's information comes from) or the great American Alchemy mini-documentary on this topic.

We recognize that this is a lot of "what ifs" and "maybes" in the scenario above, but the goal here was to try to explain these objects flying around without resorting to what you may feel is fantastical - and the fact is, there are objects flying around, and given they are regularly violating protected airspace, it behooves us to figure out what they are. This hypothesis requires no little green men - just good old fashioned human ingenuity. But if this explanation is true, then it’s still massively disruptive - remember, it’s still using energy in ways we cannot explain, and that would absolutely upend human society.

But why hasn’t the technology come out yet? It could be really dangerous, and if the Americans are the only state who has cracked the tech, they may not want the information falling into the hands of their adversaries. Nuclear weapons are a great example of this - there are still areas of physics and discoveries related to nuclear weapons that are technically classified, because we don’t want to be giving dangerous secrets away willy-nilly.

That doesn’t change the disruptive potential of this news, and that’s what this series is about - it truly doesn’t matter what the explanation for UAP ends up being. We’ve gone through the two most prosaic - that this is all a hoax, or that it’s purely a discovery cooked up in the basement of Lockheed Martin and their friends - and both of these scenarios mean either a devastating blow to the stability of democracy, or the likely invention of a new form of energy that can end scarcity for human society. I’m hopeful that these two points together can highlight how disruptive this issue is likely to be - and we haven’t even gotten to the actual alien theories yet. Which, we were surprised to find, were actually more likely than the ones we’ve presented so far, but that’s for next week.

The big takeaway for you this week - your homework, if you will - is to really try to think about what an “end to scarcity” actually means. It doesn’t mean the end of trade - humans will still have the ultimate currency that is “time on earth” and we will certainly trade our time for other things that we value. We may even streamline that trade with currency, skim a bit off the top to fund social services, etc. - so that part isn’t super different from today. However, in a post-scarcity world, folks won’t necessarily need to trade their precious time for the bare necessities of life the way we do today, which is a huge adjustment for every single system we interact with.

There are a lot of steps that need to happen for us to get to the future I’ve described above, but I genuinely believe it’s possible. In fact, it’s not only possible - there are two paths to get there. As we illustrated in our White Paper - Leading in a Time of New Intelligence - once AI progresses to the state of iterative self-improvement, we can simply ask it to solve a problem for us, and for as long as it has electricity it will work on that problem until it’s solved (or until it determines its unsolvable - but like Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru, I don’t think no-win scenarios exist).

At Authentik, we’ve always been drawn to try to solve the ‘primary problem’ - don’t focus only on the problem in front of us, but chase the reason that problem exists (usually a different problem). Then chase the reason for that problem, and rinse-and-repeat until you find the “primary problem”.

Energy is the primary problem.

UAP are indisputably real.

UAP represent a solution to the primary problem.

This is why the UAP issue has incredible disruptive potential, and why we’re writing about it.

It goes without saying that it also has incredible transformative potential - as we’ve been saying for years now, the only difference between disruption and transformation is often leadership. We’re optimistic that with readers like you in positions of leadership, we’re going to come out the other side of this disruption better off than we are today. This won’t be our reality if we let this disruption happen to us - we’ll have to earn it. And if you are willing to earn it, there’s a few simple things you can do:

1) Talk to each other about this issue. We have our briefing note and some blog posts on this topic that can inform and equip you to have these conversations with people you love and trust. The sooner our communities start thinking about the implications of this issue, the more likely we are to embrace this disruption and transform it instead.

2) Join with other folks wanting to make a difference. For example, there’s a global movement with a rapidly growing body of volunteers who are organizing to engage in advocacy on this issue. We don’t know what it is, but we do know we want the truth, and one thing is absolutely certain: There’s no limit to what we can accomplish if we work on it together as a society.

3) Contact your elected representatives. For our American friends, the UAP Caucus has some amazing resources that makes it easy for you to contact your local representatives and demand that they take this issue seriously. In Canada, you can find your local MP’s contact information here, and it’s easy to send the a letter to demand that leaders start preparing for this shift.

The thing is, the above principles apply whether this is Doc Brown’s breakthrough, or actual non-human intelligence. And, after our research onto this topic, that NHI hypothesis may not be as far fetched as you may have initially thought it would be.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.