To motivate the public to take part in the Contact Initiative search and to download the app, prizes can awarded for UFO Alerts! that lead to detections of UAPs, staggered by evidence weight:
more important: 4. reception of radio emissions, 5. verifiable conversation with ETI (CETI), 6. physical alien artifact, 7. actual landing of UAP with ETI.
NFT’s for verified UAP sighting pictures or video? Alternative to cash prizes, credits may be given (that’s at the discussion stage), they could be collectible non-fungible tokens (NFT’s) linked to the detection record and/or the verified UAP pictures,. Their value is based on their historical value, rarity and desirability.
The whole endeavor (and prize money) will be funded by private enterprise through the “Alien Marketplace” advertising space.
This marketplace is accessed through the Contact app. To filter out fakes and false identifications AI algorithms and volunteers evaluate the results. The volunteers may be paid cash or NFT tokens that can be traded on the Alien Marketplace.
The app and the Contact Project Organization itself may be financed by advertisements in the APP, which sell on the ALIEN MARKETPLACE.
A ‘jackpot’ cash prize will go to the first person to report an UFO/UAP that makes contact. Lesser prizes are for genuine UFO reports, verified unidentified flying objects without explanation.
A credit system of some sort or a cash prize should be instituted to motivate the participants. False reports are penalized by subtracting from the prospective “jackpot” money of the participant.
Examples for advertisements on the ALIEN MARKETPLACE are any products of interest to UFO, SCI-FI and Fantasy fans, as well as the general population.
Realtime data feed about in progress UAP sightings
Creation of Adam / Earth Rise Michelangelo / NASA
With the app named “UFO Alert!” (or “Contact Project App”) the Contact Initiative wants to engage with others who also think that they aren’t alone in the universe.
That includes not just our neighbors on planet Earth, should they exist. By that I mean neighbors on other planets.
We, the Contact Initiative, believe that there is a non-zero chance that UFOs/UAPs have an extraterrestrial origin. In other words and more precisely: we believe that UAP may be of extraterrestrial origin.
But we can’t be 100% certain.
In the past we may have seen something unexplained in the sky and wondered what it was… We never found out about it because no one told us and we didn’t have the tool to tell us.
We are the casual UFO/UAP witness. We are 46 million people in the USA alone. We wanna know what’s going on!
The UFO Alert! app
An tool to identify the identifiable and investigate the unknown.
click image to enlarge
Currently the flowchart of the app is not hewn in stone. No godly instructions were received on a mountain to create this.
This is a project in the brainstorming stage. To make it a reality compromises may have to be made.
That is possible because the app has a modular design. The app is composed of modules. Each module is desirable, but not essential to create the app.
For instance. the “Identified Flying Object Databanks” can be left out. They can be added at a later stage, or never. Omitting them would make the app programming much easier and faster.
How much can be realized at the first try?
That depends on a) funding or b) the selfless support from the open source community.
UFO Alert! is an open source UFO/UAP real time reporting tool. Every user who downloads the app is a “Search partner”. Users CAN register to use the app. During the registration users CAN enter their profession, such as pilots, air traffic controllers, military personnel, and age and hobbies.
Search partners can be anyone with a smartphone, radio operators, videographers, gigapixel camera operators, Unistellar telescope operators and (passive) radar operators, which are a subset of radio HAM enthusiasts and people that are close enough to have visual or audible contact with an UAP/UFO.
UAPs are a very transitory phenomenon. Often a sighting lasts less than a minute. Speed is of the essence to reacquire the target. Because it is in the reacquisition phase that the “UFO Alert!” app gathers most of its data.
The Contact Project
The “UFO ALERT!” app has two modes of operation: ALERT and CONTACT.
App users that report a sighting shall be called Alerters.
HAM radio and other operators that are sent the coordinates of the UFO shall be called Contacters.
What happens when an UFO is spotted? The user who sees the object/phenomenon presses the “UFO sighting in progress” or “Alert!” button of the CONTACT app:
The app immediately uploads the timestamp and GPS coordinates of the sighting:
The user can also try to take snapshots or video of the UFO sighting with their smartphone. This provides real time additional data: the smartphone’s gravity sensors record the elevation and its magnetic compass records the azimuth:
The data are then sent to an “Identified Flying Object server”. Here GPS and time data are parsed (and available elevation and azimuth). An astronomical real-time database, the NORAD database and air traffic databases are used to identify known flying objects near the UAP location, such as planets, planes and satellites. (To categorically exclude ship traffic, such as may have been filmed in Kumburgaz, Turkey, in 2007-2009, a marine AIS database should be included). Secret military projects are excluded via NORAD TLEs:
If the object is not identified, it becomes a “prospective UAP” (PUAP):
GPS coordinates and other data of prospective UFOs/UAPs are forwarded as an ALERT to close-by Contacters using the same Contact app, to be investigated in more detail:
Contacters are selected based on their vicinity to the GPS coordinates of the sighting and their hardware/qualifications/experience. The contacters may beHAM radio operators and others (search partners with CB / HD camera / HD video / telescope / radar):
Should the same PUAP be reported multiple times at different locations a trajectory can be computed and search partners will be notified in advance of a possible PUAP arrival.
Users that spot the PUAP can fill out a standard UFO sighting questionnaire and/or supply more detailed reports that will be attached to the alert.
The presence of a not identified flying object has now been broadcast to users of the CONTACT app in the vicinity of the sighting via multiple routes (SMS, EMAIL, POP-UP APP NOTIFICATION).
Alerted by this notification:
HAM RADIO OPERATORS will be listening for incoming broadcasts from the sighting using multiband radio frequency scanners. Should the sighting be a remote controlled drone it would now be identified via the unique drone radio frequency signature.
If the PUAP is a viable UFO and not a drone → then HAM operators will attempt to make contact using a variety of radio bands. A pre-recorded message or data burst transmission may be broadcast towards the UFO.
TELESCOPE AND CAMERA OPERATORS Other search partners may try to use the information to get radar or visual confirmation via HD cameras or automatic telescopes (for instance UNISTELLAR / VAONIS STELLINA).
(PASSIVE) RADAR OPERATORS A special field of amateur HAM radio is the analysis of passive radar data, often to observe meteor tracks. Sometimes unexplained tracks are recorded, showing flight maneuvers of objects at right angles. In case of these anomalous sightings an ALERT can be triggered with the aim of visual confirmation and radio contact.
VISUAL OBSERVERS Any search partner who can verify the sighting by eye sight using the CONTACT APP provides real time data to the sighting in progress.
The CONTACT INITIATIVE effort may be coordinated via the members of SETI Institute / SETI LEAGUE / MUFON / HAM and other organized networks.
All who download the app can make UFO reports. A sighting by a single person is less convincing than an event that many witnesses report from a distance to each other.
An AI algorithm will analyze live reports coming in in real time to determine if multiple witnesses are reporting on the same thing. This takes into account the position and possible flightpath of an object.
To motivate the public to take part in this search, prizes can be given for successful detections of UAPs, staggered by evidence weight:
more important: 4. reception of radio emissions, 5. verifiable conversation with ETI (CETI), 6. physical alien artifact, 7. actual landing of UAP with ETI.
Alternative to cash prizes, credits may be given, they could be collectible non-fungible tokens (NFT’s), whose value is based on their desirability.
The whole endeavor (and prize money) will be funded by private enterprise through the “Alien Marketplace” advertising space. This marketplace is accessed through the Contact app. To filter out fakes and false identifications AI algorithms and volunteers evaluate the results. The volunteers may be paid cash or NFT tokens that can be traded on the Alien Marketplace.
Reconstruction by author, MUFON #82139, Ireland, 1986
Based on personal experience the author of “The Contact Initiative” estimates the chance to spot an UFO/UAP in any one day to be approx. 1:10.000.
UAP photographs on 35mm negative film, frame 7 of 2. MUFON #111680, UK, 1995, The UAP was grayish without markings as seen here. Photograph by author.
You may have a chance to take pictures or video of an UFO once every 50 years, as I did in 1995.
More impartial data than personal experience about the frequency of sightings comes from surveys. There are not a lot of surveys on the subject of UFO/UAP. More surveys should be carried out.
But there is one:
STUDY ON PUBLIC UAPSIGHTINGS One available survey comes from Century Fox Home Entertainment. They did a poll for a promotional campaign of the Ridley Scott movie “Phoenix Forgotten“.
Reconstruction of “Phoenix Lights” by eye witness Tim Ley, USA TODAY, 1997
The “Phoenix Forgotten” plot was inspired by the “Phoenix Lights” UFO phenomenon from 1997. (Ref.: 1, Ref.: 2)
Over 1700 Americans were asked if they had ever seen an UFO: 16.74% responded positively (Ref.: 3).
If that percentage is any guideline, then we can say that 16.74% of 258.3 million adults (Ref.: 4), about 43 million Americans, had a UFO sighting.
MISIDENTIFICATION OF UFOs According to author Leslie Kean, “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained”. (Ref.: 5)
The chief investigator of CUFOS in 1979, astronomer Allan Hendry, concluded from 1307 cases that 91.4% had a clear and simple prosaic explanation. 8.6% were classed as “UFOs” and 1.5% of those cases had no possible plausible explanation. (Ref.: 6)
This leaves us with 645,000 unexplained sightings from 43 million. This covers a time-span of 38.4 years, it being the median age of the US population (Ref.: 7).
If there are 645,000 completely unexplained UAP sightings in 38.4 years, we get 16,796 (sixteen thousand seven hundred ninety six) sightings per year. That’s 46 UAP cases without possible plausible explanation daily in the USA.
I believe this to be a fairly high number.
The Contact Initiative doesn’t want to wait around to get results. To maximize the chances of spotting UAP/UFO a large number of volunteer UFO/UAP spotters are needed.
And the method of spotting and forwarding a report of a sighting must be as simple as taking a photo or video.
The “CONTACT APP” (name may be changed) will be designed for this purpose, to be as simple as possible. But it will be the most powerful civilian use flying object identification program on the market.
One of its appeals will be that it provides near instantaneous identification of objects and phenomena commonly mistaken as UFOs: celestial objects, meteors, planes, blimps, military training exercises, satellites. The app gives feedback to the UFO spotter if what he/she saw is a known phenomenon.
The app records with high accuracy the position and time of the sightings and the number of users who see the same thing.
POSSIBLE UAP/UFO YIELD PER MILLION APP DOWNLOADS If the Contact app is downloaded one million times (corrected), then the chances are that we will see 65 UAP cases without possible plausible explanation in a year.
That amounts to a bit more than one really, really, puzzling UFO case per week. This should be enough to engage and keep the attention of the public. Because, what good would be an UFO app that doesn’t spot UFOs?
PEACE OF MIND On the other hand, incorrect identifications of common or explicable phenomena as UFOs should become less with the Contact App. This way the great majority of witnesses would feel less stress.
EDUCATIONAL VALUE A large number of participants serves to raise the awareness of the possibility of Extraterrestrial Contact. What does it mean to be a part of a greater community of diverse intelligences in the Cosmos?
GOAL OF THE CONTACT INITIATIVE (CONTACT PROJECT) The goal is to prepare for and meet a technological superior non-human species. That we’re not the most advanced technological species in the Universe is logical:
THE SAGAN The Universe is billions and billions of years old. In it there are billions and billions of habitable planets. Modern human technology only exists since a few hundred years and we left the stone age just about 5000 years ago.
The development of life and intelligence is most likely not a one-time miracle confined to an infinitesimal speck of the Cosmos, the Earth.
BENEFITS OF FRIENDS The potential benefits of contact to an advanced intelligent extraterrestrial species are incalculable to the future and destiny of the human race.
It may be that we don’t have much in common with each other except curiosity. But that alone would be a driving force of human determination and progress, geared at finding out more about the other.
DON’T BE AN OSTRICH Should it turn out that UAP/UFOs are otherworldly emissaries of non-friendly intent, then it would also be important to find out. It could be fatal to stick our collective heads into the sand.
ULTIMA R̶A̶T̶I̶O̶ RADIO These are the reasons why the Contact Initiative proposes to contact “UFO sightings in progress” by radio waves.
References: 1.: Kurt Russell claims he saw — and reported — the ‘Phoenix Lights’, https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2017/06/14/kurt-russell-claims-reported-phoenix-lights-ufos/394749001/
2.: Ex Arizona Governor saw a UFO during the 1997 Phoenix Lights, https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Former_Arizona_Governor_says_he_saw_a_UFO_during_the_1997_Phoenix_Lights
3.: New survey shows nearly half of Americans believe in aliens, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-survey-shows-nearly-half-of-americans-believe-in_b_59824c11e4b03d0624b0abe4
4.: U.S. Adult Population https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-adult-population-grew-faster-than-nations-total-population-from-2010-to-2020.html
5.: UFOs, UAPs and CRAPs https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ufos-uaps-and-craps/
6.: Identification studies of UFOs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_studies_of_UFOs
7.: US MEDIAN AGE https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/65-older-population-grows.html
Would ETI use radio waves moving at the speed of light to seek contact… if there was an alternative?
“Natural communication” between species using conventional radio is almost impossible over interstellar distances.
As ‘natural communication’ I describe an exchange of ideas where the sender can expect a reply before he/she has died from old age…
Using radio waves for communication is like sending mail with the Pony Express. Radio is bound to the “slow” speed of light, at about 1 billion km/h.
That may seem fast, except it isn’t, considering interstellar distances. Extraterrestrial species live so far from us that at best it will take us 8.7 years to send and receive a return message.
That is the time it takes for radio waves to pass to and from our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.
Clearly, the speed of horses or light is not sufficient to speak to ET. Unfortunately, we can’t make horses or light go any faster. Is it possible to develop something faster than light to send a message (or people) to far-off lands?
Something faster than light?
Can the Alcubierre/Lentz drive move objects at hyperspeed? Is there any hint that extraterrestrial intelligence ever used “spacecraft unknown to humanity” to visit Earth, maybe to seek contact?
Are UAPs/UFOs spacecraft in the traditional sense, with occupants, or do they just contain a message that can be unlocked, for instance by transmitting a radio key sequence?
UFO sightings are understood by the Contact Initiative as possible signs of extraterrestrial technology. These sightings are fairly abundant.
SETI, by contrast, has not found any techno signatures of verified alien origin despite over 50 years of searching. Has SETI not been successful because it has looked for technosignatures in the wrong direction?
The Contact Initiative believes that there is a reasonably good chance for an UFO/ET connection to exist. This, I believe, is sufficient grounds to include UFOs/UAPs in searches for techno-signatures of alien civilizations
Superluminal spacecraft are the easiest way to contact civilizations that have not developed faster than light communication technology, such as Earth.
It makes sense to attempt listening for radio signatures from UAPs.
Robert Fish wrote in an Email to John Podesta that
“there was a specific electronic signature (frequency) emanating from them (UFOs/UAPs) when they were going into or coming out of the water, so they were easy to track.”
The SETI Institute is concerned with the effects of contacting ETIs on distant planets that are not aware of our existence. SETI Institute doesn’t want to alert potentially hostile Aliens to our presence.
On the other hand, we have been aware of UAP/UFO for decades, if not millenia. And, unless they are blind, so have UAP/UFO.
Therefore the (First) Contact protocol is not applicable.
KITTY HAWK, N.C. — The Wright Brothers conduct the first flight by man with a motor driven, heavier-than-air machine on Dec. 17, 1903. (U.S. Air Force file photo)
It’s only been 118 years since “first flight” in 1903, when we launched the engine powered “Flyer 1” near Kitty Hawk.
Supersonic aircraft Bell X1, October 14, 1947
1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.
Apollo 11 Launch, July 16, 1969
In 1969 we landed on our nearest cosmic neighbor, a moon which we fittingly named “Moon”.
Artist’s concept of Voyager 1 in flight, launched September 5, 1977
In 1977 Voyager 1 was launched, Earth’s first interstellar space probe.
Dr. Erik Lentz solved Warp equations for positive energy, March 12, 2021
What appears like a cool headline for sci-fi nerds actually has far-reaching implications: the logical equivalence principle means that anything that humans are able to think of can also be discovered by extraterrestrial civilizations.
I know, I know, ET civilizations have not been officially discovered yet. But it’s only a matter of time until this happens. And will the mode of contact be via interstellar radio messages that take decades to arrive and respond to, or via faster than light spaceships?
We as humans are just at the beginning of our exploration into flight. We’ve been flying just for over 100 years. “Faster than light flight” is just a variant of that journey of discovery. Imagine what a species only 100 or 500 years more advanced than us might have achieved already… and where we are in 500 years time.
And because we believe this, the Contact Initiative thinks it’s entirely possible that extraterrestrial spacecraft can visit Earth without too many difficulties.
The key to interplanetary travel is faster than light transport: a soliton warp bubble may be made from plasma, thereby warping space itself. A soliton warp bubble is a solitary complex wave, a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while propagating at a constant velocity.
This concept known as ‘warp drive’ makes it possible to break the light barrier without violating general relativity. It would be easy to bridge the chasm between the worlds of different solar systems and galaxies when one travels at hyperspeed.
Miguel Alcubierre was the first theoretical physicist who tackled the problem of FTL travel in the year 1994. The metrics he laid out were all very logical and did fit within the framework of general relativity, but they called for an unknown exotic form of energy to work.
Artistic impression of different spacecraft designs considering theoretical shapes of different kinds of “warp bubbles”.
Then, in March 9 2021, Dr. Erik Lentz published his “solution to warp field equations for positive energy”. He’s achieved a theoretical breakthrough because his approach uses positive energy instead of non-existent negative energy.
He went on to graduate school at the University of Washington and in Seattle he got his Phd in theoretical physics around 2017. Then he went on to do a post-doc at the University of Göttingen in Germany and he’s been working on theoretical physics ever since.
Erik studied at Embry Riddle University because of their degree program in space physics where he was able to specialize in exotic propulsion systems. At Embry Riddle he was exposed to a lot of very interesting ideas and learned a lot about general relativity, with, amongst others, Dr. Quentin Bailey.
Dr. Erik Lentz soon realized that faster than light travel was more of a fundamental physics problem than an engineering challenge. During the Covid-19 lockdown he found myself with a lot of free time and immersed himself in the problem and its solution. His discovery that exotic matter or negative energy is not required to create hyper fast warp fields is a breakthrough.
General relativity does permit these superluminal (faster than light) mechanisms. His warp equations obey what’s called the weak energy condition, essentially meaning that it only requires positive energy to make hyper fast Warp fields happen.
Video of Dr. Erik Lentz explaining his warp field solution, from the Jim and Linda Lee Planetarium
FTL travel is now a little more science and less fiction.
The Contact Initiative believes that life in the Universe developed more than once. We are one small island in an infinite sea of space harboring life. If we can develop a theory of faster than light travel, then there is a chance that other life in the universe has already done this before us.
Sighting of UAP near or over the authors house, reported by third parties in 2.9 km distance
In this case, shielded by fuzzy plasma fields, we may be in the process of being visited by UAPs that are not of this Earth. But who cares about the “may be”. The Contact Project wants to try and make radio contact, to discover the truth.
Original publication: Erik W Lentz, Breaking the Warp Barrier: Hyper-Fast Solitons in Einstein-Maxwell-Plasma Theory, Classical and Quantum Gravity, March 2021. DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/abe692 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abe692
The author examining 35 mm negative with a digital microscope, MUFON case #111680, 1995.
It isn’t clear if UAPs are the product of human or non-human technology. It is only by their shape and fantastic alien flight characteristics that a non-human origin can be inferred. Human planes can not make 90° hairpin turns or accelerate from zero to hypersonic speeds in the fraction of a second.
The majority of the public believes that other intelligent life in the cosmos exists and that we are not the only species inhabiting the Universe. This concept was popularized in the TV show “Cosmos” by exobiologist Carl Sagan and it is held to be true in the general consensus.
People who believe that humanity plays a more special role in the cosmos (anthropocentrists) do think that UFOs come from our own future, instead from alien worlds. They cite the large distances between solar systems as an obstacle for interplanetary spacecraft to make contact.
Some people think that it would be easier to build a time machine than a faster than light spacecraft. Otoh, with a time machine, superluminal flight would be easy. Just slow down the clock dial whilst maintaining forward momentum and viola!, speed is increased.
Superluminal flight implies time travel, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Time slows down progressively the more one approaches the speed of light. And should one travel in excess of light speed, then time begins running backwards. That follows from the theory and mathematics of relativity, which does not consider time paradoxes. It’s just numbers.
Book cover of “Identified Flying Objects”, 2019, by anthropologist Michael Paul Masters
Professor of anthropology Dr. Michael Paul Masters is one of the proponents of the UFO as time travelers. He explained it in more detail in his book “Identified Flying Objects” calling the time travelling occupants of these craft “extratempestrials”.
I believe that it’s a definitive possibility that some UFOs do come from our own future. Yet the infinity of possible futures in time means that SOME UFOs will also come from other worlds, even if it’s just our mutated time-traveling offspring from thousands of years into the future visiting their ancestral home planet.
If they exist they may be just visiting their ancestral home planet, or their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Is there a paradox?
The Contact Initiative (https://reddit.com/r/contactproject) wants to discover if it’s possible to make radio contact with UFOs, to ask them what they are. It’s as simple as that.
Headline of the Chicago Sun, June 26, 1947. This started modern UFO/UAP history.
It’s been 74 years since the first widely publicized UFO encounter of Kenneth Arnold in 1947, who coined the term “flying saucer” when he saw nine objects skipping along the sky from his plane. Since then there have been tens of thousands reported unidentified flying objects in the Earth’s skies, some of them even similar in shape to Arnold’s sighting.
Countless theories about the origin and purpose of these phenomena exist. UFOs were a subject of public interest and regularly reported in the media until the end of the 1960’s .
Fall RIver Herald News, July 29 1952: The invasion of WashingtonUFO/UAP captured from government survey plane in 1971 over Lake Cote, Costa Rica
After the moon landing, skeptical scientists who questioned the alien origin of Flying Saucers won the scientific debate, relegating believers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis to fringe status.
This pretty much ended serious mainstream media coverage of UFOs.
THE SAGAN STANDARD The mantra became that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’, a phrase known as ‘The Sagan Standard’.
To find extraordinary evidence for the existence of technologically intelligent aliens, lacking suitable specimens for testing, Sagan proposed instead to search for their signals in the sky with radio telescopes.
This concept he illustrated in his movie “Contact”, which had its premiere in 1997.
Two years after the premiere of “Contact” the University of Berkeley made it possible for anyone with a computer to join in the search for alien signals, when they launched the seti@home screensaver.
The seti@home screen saver
165000 people seized the opportunity to find ET on their computer, taking part in the largest participatory computing project in history. I was one of the first to sign up, on the 16th of May 1999. Sadly, seti@home stopped processing new data on March 31 2020. No announcement had been made whether or not it had been successful in its mission: to find radio evidence for extraterrestrial life.
PENTAGON ACKNOWLEDGES “UAPs” The next month, on the 27th of April 2020, 73 years after the first widely documented flying saucer sighting, the Pentagon publicly acknowledged the existence of UFOs, supplying pilots testimony, audio- and video recordings.
By now the UFO phenomenon had been so thoroughly discredited that skeptics quickly began questioning the Pentagon’s UFO/UAP material.
However, the material didn’t just consist of fuzzy camera footage, but also recorded radar tracks and simultaneous sightings by pilots and aircraft carrier personnel.
In any UFO/UAP sighting, camera images are corroborative evidence of the witness testimony. Very often the quality of the camera can not capture what the witnesses have perceived.
The Contact Initiative uses a wide variety of methods to verify UFO/UAP. First we have the human observer, who may be able to capture the UFO image in low-res with his smartphone camera.
Then the location of his sighting is forwarded to a number of search partners in his neighborhood. They will try to capture the UFO with HD telescopes, cameras and radar, as well as listening with RF scanners to incoming radio waves from the object.
Excerpt of “UFO Alert!” flowchart
The more data about a UFO/UAP sighting exists, in as wide a range of frequencies as possible, the easier it is to verify the sighting as genuine. And if that wasn’t enough, HAM radio amateurs will try to hail the sighting.
The Contact Initiative does not rely on images. Having the UFO Alert! app is like carrying the resources of an airplane carrier in your pocket.
Definition contact /ˈkɒntakt: 1. the state of physical touching. 2. the action of communicating or meeting.
By definition, merely receiving an extraterrestrial transmission does not fulfill the criterion of “Contact”.
Doug Vakoch, President of METI
It was in 2015 that scientists Douglas Vakoch, David Grinspoon, David Brin, Seth Shostak and others discussed this issue at the American Association for the Advancement Of Science (AAAS): is it a good idea to transmit messages to possible intelligent extraterrestrials in the Cosmos?
Within a week of this discussion a statement was signed and released, together with 24 other SETI experts, declaring that a “worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent”.
When the statement was signed, SETI by radio telescopes was humanity’s best hope to contact Aliens.
A then 68 year old phenomenon titled by the public as “UFOs” was known about at the time of this statement in 2015. But UFOs were not considered to be connected in any shape or form to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Neither were “UAPs”.
Even though there is no proof of it, some people have always believed that UFOs/UAPs are somehow connected to extraterrestrial intelligence. Those people were not necessarily represented at the AAAS conference in 2015, but they express their beliefs at other venues.
Roswell Parade
Are UFOs connected to Aliens? The Contact Initiative wants to find this out by trying to make radio contact with UAPs. To do this we’ll develop an open source app which is now on Github https://github.com/contactproject.
We, the Contact Project & Initiative, hope that the Contact app will be downloaded by many millions of people worldwide.
Once deployed, every one million app users will contribute to about 1 sighting per week that has absolutely no reasonable explanation. This estimate is based on the Allan Hendry study and a US UAP sighting survey.
We believe we have better chances of finding extraterrestrials or their technosignatures by targeting UFOs/UAPs than by targeting distant stars.
It doesn’t compute to intercept or attempt interstellar Alien communications with light-speed radio waves. At this stage in technological development, even we have a better outlook of building faster-than-light spaceships (Dr. Erik Lentz), than to generate impossible faster-than-light radio waves.
Why should Extraterrestrials be any different? It makes more sense to search for superluminal objects (UFOs) that can travel interstellar distances in days, rather than to listen for relatively snail-paced radio beams, taking years to cover the same distance.
Radio waves can only carry information. Objects on the other hand can carry more than information, such as passengers, but… objects can also carry much more information.
For instance, to physically store the information of all books ever written on Earth (Ref. 1) it requires the volume of 10 stacked 3.5 inch HD drives (175 terabytes of data (Ref. 2), HD capacity in 2021 (Ref. 3)).
In other words, in 2021 the knowledge from all books ever written on Earth fits inside a cube measuring 15 cm each side, weighing 6.7 kg (Ref. 4). To download the same amount of data by radio through space, considering our current data transmission capabilities between Mars and Earth (Ref. 5), it would take about 7.4 years (Ref. 6) of continuous transmission.
The Contact Project is about the reception and transmission of signals, as well as the possibility of physical contact. The gold standard for evidence is physical evidence. In a matter of such importance and possible consequence to human civilization as the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, nothing else may be sufficient to prove it.
A Proposal To Contact UFOs/UAPs by Radio Keywords: crowdsourced, open source, automated alert system, distributed, public and specialized observers, smartphone app, passive radar operators, proactive HAM radio operators, gigapixel camera operators, megapixel telescope operators, CETI, METI, SETI
Erich Habich-Traut, http://contactproject.org 27. October 2021
1. INTRODUCTION 2. IS ALIEN CONTACT A GOOD IDEA? 3. A BIT OF UFO HISTORY 4. WHAT IS A UFO? 5. HOW TO OVERCOME THE ‘LIGHT BARRIER’ 6. HUMAN PROGRESS 7. WHY UFOs/UAPs? 8. CHANCES OF CONTACTING UFOs/UAPs 9. DESCRIPTION OF THE “CONTACT PROJECT APP”10. FUNDING: THE ALIEN MARKETPLACE
1. INTRODUCTION After more than 70 years the US Government recently confirmed the existence of UAPs/UFOs. There is a possibility that some of these objects or phenomena are not of earthly origin. To find out where they are from we want to try and talk to them by radio,
The Contact Initiative (CI) believes that UAPs/UFO’s are under the control of some form of intelligence and non-hostile.
SETI has been trying for decades to find signals of alien radio communications by pointing radio telescopes often at random at nearby stars in the hope that they may harbour intelligent life.
SETI faces three difficulties: 1. It has to find a planet that is populated by intelligent life 2. The alien life must be using radio waves to communicate 3. Any alien signals detected will be decades or centuries old and will take twice that time for a reply. (If we receive a message from ET in 25 light years distance, and we respond with a message immediately, then it will take 25 years to send signals to ET and another 25 years before we can hear a response. Hence, a human lifetime of 75 years will have passed.)
Point three shows the difficulty of trying to use radio waves for interstellar communications. Very often the participants of such a communication die of old age before they have even exchanged first welcomes..
In the movie “Contact” Carl Sagan tried to circumvent this inconvenience by speculating that ET could send instructions for a wormhole transporter that doesn’t rely on slow radio waves.
Even in the idealized world of the Hollywood movie “Contact” this approach didn’t prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence to all sceptics, because the resulting exchange between human and ETI left no convincing physical evidence.
The premise of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is that we are not alone in the universe and that Alien life somewhere has developed radio technology just like us.
We expect the Aliens to be friendly or at least impartial to our existence. That is by no means a certainty, looking at the example of our own species.
The Contact Initiative (CI) has as its goal to implement “active SETI”, or ‘CETI’ as it is known (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence).
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