What do we make of a Las Vegas building loaded with unknown alloys? Between 2007 and 2012, the US Department of Defense (DOD) financed a $22 million initiative to examine UFOs, according to a bombshell story published by The New York Times on Saturday (Dec. 16). Three key disclosures in the tale were created to astound readers:
1. Many high-ranking government officials believe that aliens have visited Earth.
2. Military pilots have acquired film of UFOs that seem to surpass all known human aircraft, accelerating and changing direction in ways that no fighter jet or helicopter could ever equal.
3. In a cluster of sites in Las Vegas, the government holds metals and other elements suspected to be tied to UFOs.
The first and second points are odd, but not extremely compelling on their own: Many educated individuals believe in extraterrestrial visitation, and pilots sometimes see strange happenings in the upper atmosphere that may be explained by items other than space aliens, such as weather balloons, rocket launches, or even solar eruptions.
However, it’s a bit more difficult to disregard argument No. 3 – constructions made out of alloys and other materials. Is there a Department of Defense stockpile of alien materials?
“They have, as we reported in the paper, some material from these objects that is being studied so that scientists can find what accounts for their amazing properties, this technology of these objects, whatever they are,” one of the Times report’s authors, Ralph Blumenthal, said of the alloys on MSNBC. “I’m not sure what the components were,” Blumenthal stated. “They are completely unaware. They’re looking into it, but the material is unknown to them.”
But here’s the thing: the scientists and metallurgists who talked with Live Science who are specialists in identifying unusual alloys don’t believe it.
“I don’t believe there are any alloys that we can’t identify,” said retired scientist Richard Sachleben, who is a member of the American Chemical Society’s expert committee. “What’s my take on it? That’s just not going to happen.”
Alloys are metal alloys made up of different elements. They’re abundant – in fact, according to Sachleben, they’re more common on Earth than pure elemental metals – and well-understood. Brass is an alloy of metals. Steel is also a metal. Even the most common gold on the planet is an alloy made up of elemental gold and other metals like silver or copper. [Eight Essential Elements You May Have Never Heard Of]
May Nyman, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Oregon State University, told Live Science, “There are databases of all known phases [of metal], including alloys.” These databases provide straightforward ways for identifying metal alloys.
Nyman anticipated that if an unknown alloy developed, identifying its composition would be straightforward. According to Nyman, researchers use an X-ray diffraction method to analyze crystalline alloys, which are those in which the atom combination forms an ordered structure.
“”When X-rays enter a well-ordered material, they diffract [change shape and intensity] because the wavelength of an X-ray is about the same size as the distance between the atoms [of crystalline alloys] – and from that diffraction [pattern], you can get information that tells you the distance between the atoms, what the atoms are, and how well-ordered the atoms are.” It tells you all you need to know about your atoms’ arrangement.”
For noncrystalline, amorphous alloys, the process alters significantly, although only marginally.
“All of these are quite common activities in research laboratories,” Nyman said. “If we possessed such enigmatic metals, we could take them to any research institute and find out what elements they are and anything about the crystalline phase in a matter of hours.”
Sachleben agreed with him.
“We don’t have any alloys in storage that we don’t know what they are. In actuality, it’s a simple task that any competent metallurgical graduate student can do for you “He said himself.
According to Nyman, forensics tests would quickly answer many questions about a strange plane if metals did fall from it. [Unidentified Flying Object Sightings: These Cases Have Never Been Solved]
“How has the hunk of metal changed?” According to Nyman. “If I were a scientist, that’s the type of question I’d pose. Maybe there’s some analysis that can lead you to where the metal was mined, or what country uses that specific alloy, or anything like that, if it’s about international politics and we want to know where the metal comes from.”
According to Nyman, if the aircraft came from space, it would have left telltale signs in the metal, such as space debris and ionization (changes in the electrical charges of the atoms).
Nyman and Sachleben agreed that if a previously undiscovered piece of alloy did fall to Earth from space, it wouldn’t necessarily have come from an extraterrestrial ship. According to Sachleben, space-traveling alloys such as those seen in ordinary nickel-iron meteorites crash the earth on a regular basis, leaving behind unmistakable evidence. The rare-Earth elements left behind by the dinosaur-killing meteor were even used to identify the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
While Blumenthal did go on TV news and proclaim the alloys to be unexplained mysteries, fuelling speculation, this is not what his study concluded. The following is the full quotation from Saturday’s article:
“The company [doing DOD research] remodeled facilities in Las Vegas to house metal alloys and other materials that… Contractors for the project claimed to have recovered from unexplained aerial events. Researchers also looked for any physiological changes in persons who claimed to have experienced physical affects as a consequence of their interactions with the artifacts. Researchers also talked with military members who had seen unusual aircraft sightings.”
This remark makes no mention of the alloys themselves being unique. All the Times reported was that DOD researchers tasked with unearthing weird UFO things collected some metal, questioned some people who claimed to have had strange contacts with it, and came to the conclusion that it was UFO-related.
In an email to Live Science, Blumenthal said of these metal alloys, “We printed as much information as we could. It’s as simple as that.”
To the topic of whether there is an explanation, at least for the metals themselves, Sachleben replied: “Science does not contain as many mysteries as many people imagine. We don’t know everything; in fact, we don’t know anything. However, we know enough to know what we don’t know for the most part.”
