7. WHY INCLUDE UFOs/UAPs IN SETI?

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?

We don’t know.

UFO sightings at record levels
https://www.statista.com/chart/8452/ufo-sightings-are-at-record-heights/

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.”

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31721

I propose to transmit back to the UAP.

This may be a message of peace, mathematical code, or an echo of their own radio emissions. Or whatever else we can think of.

The Contact Initiative aims to establish radio contact with UAP.

In my understanding this project doesn’t fall under the restrictions of the statement of the SETI Institute concerning contacting alien civilization: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/meti_statement_0.html

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.

What do you think? Join the discussion on https://reddit.com/r/contactproject and https://contactproject.org.

Best, Eric

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6. HUMAN PROGRESS

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)
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
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
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
Dr. Erik Lentz solved Warp equations for positive energy, March 12, 2021

And in 2021 Dr. Erik Lentz published his paper “Breaking the Warp Barrier: Hyper-Fast Solitons in Einstein-Maxwell-Plasma Theory”, in the peer reviewed journal “Classical and Quantum Gravity”.

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.

If you want to join us visit https://contactproject.org and bookmark us. Or become a member of this reddit: https://reddit.com/r/contactproject.

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5. HOW TO OVERCOME THE ‘LIGHT BARRIER’

Warp speed ahead!

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.

Dr. Erik Lentz graduated in 2009 with a space physics degree from his Alma Mater at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, Arizona.

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.

We are the Contact Initiative on https://contactproject.org

References:
Star Trek’s Warp Drive Leads to New Physics, July 13, 2021
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-treks-warp-drive-leads-to-new-physics/

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

Dr. Erik Lentz homepage: https://www.eriklentzphd.com/

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4. WHAT IS A UFO?

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.

Prof. Kevin Knuth, Associate Professor of Physics and Informatics, University at Albany, explained this in his article “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles“.

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.

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3. A BIT OF UFO HISTORY

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 Washington
UFO/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.

The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense

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.

Best, Eric, founder,
https://contactproject.org



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2. IS ALIEN CONTACT A GOOD IDEA?

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”.

Illustration of an AAAS conference

Read: (STATEMENT REGARDING MESSAGING TO EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE (METI)

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)).

Illustration of information density for all the World's books in 2021 on 3.5 inch HD storage devices.

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.


References:
1: How many books in the world
2: How much storage each book
3: Seagate IronWolf Pro 18 TB HD
4: HD size
5: Current maximum bandwidth between Mars and Earth?
6: Broadband download time and speed calculator






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1. THE CONTACT INITIATIVE

Left: Kenneth Arnold with UFO sighting in June 24, 1947
Right: first official UFO/UAP footage from the USG, 2021

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, https://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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INTRODUCTION TO THE CONTACT INITIATIVE

People watching the sky
A group of people looks up toward the sky.

The CONTACT INITIATIVE looks for answers about the nature of UAPs/UFOs by trying to make radio contact with them. We need volunteers, outreach workers and programmers to develop an open source app.

My name is Erich Habich-Traut and I’m 57 years old. I’m the initiator of the ‘Contact Initiative’ (CI).

I’ve coordinated a multinational science project 2001 – 2015 with my website “Our Planet Earth From Space”, which tracked Earth Changes: http://opefs.com.

I’ve been a volunteer for Bigelow Aerospace from 2006 ~ 2012, providing real-time tracking of their prototype space habitats Genesis I & II via NORAD (https://web.archive.org/web/20120504010218/http://bigelowaerospace.com/genesis-1-tracking.php).

I’m writing to you as the initiator of the ‘Contact Initiative’ (CI). It’s primary goal is to make radio contact with ETI.

The difference between the Contact Initiative and classical SETI is that UAPs are included in its search for techno signatures.

The Contact Initiative wants to gather high quality evidence about the phenomenon. It also wants to inform and enthuse the public about the possibility of contact

UFO ALERT
The engine of this Contact Initiative is a smartphone app that records GPS coordinates of UFOs after a user alert. Users can also take snapshots or video of the UFO with their smartphone. But that is not the primary goal. When the smartphone is used to photograph the UFO, its gravity sensors record the elevation and the compass records its azimuth.

The UFO alert is sent to an astronomical database, NORAD database and air traffic databases to identify known flying objects. Secret military projects are excluded via NORAD TLEs.

The remaining objects qualify as prospective UAP. They will be investigated by forwarding their GPS coordinates to close-by search partners using the same Contact app. All this happens near real-time.

The search partners are selected by their proximity to the sighting and their capability/qualifications.

Search partners can be HAM radio operators, videographers, gigapixel camera operators, Unistellar telescope operators and (passive) radar operators. Passive radar is a subset of radio HAM enthusiasts.

To motivate the public to take part in this search prizes can be given for successful detections of UAPs, staggered by evidence weight:

less important:
1. confirmed UAP pictures, 2. video, 3. radar images,

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. Those 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.

MY OWN MOTIVATION

MUFON #111680, UK, 1995


My own motivation to get this “Contact Initiative” off the ground are my own UAP sightings from Ireland in 1986 and 1995 in the UK.

The 1995 UAP I managed to photograph twice on 35mm film, making it possible for me to finally triangulate it’s approximate size, distance and speed in May 2020, when I found the lost and forgotten negative film from 1995.

According to a Gallup poll over 40% of the American public believes in UFOs.  Now, after the release of the Pentagon ODNI UAP report in July 2021 the climate seems right to get to the bottom of this and ask the question for real and to get a real answer: Are we Alone?

After this introduction, could I please interest you in reading the proposal outline and flowchart of the “Contact Initiative”?

Keywords: Contact Initiative, GPS tracking, smartphone app, crowd sourced, automated alert system, distributed, public and specialized observers, passive radar operators, proactive HAM radio operators, gigapixel camera operators, CETI, METI, SETI, commercial funding, NFT, alien marketplace

Thank you for your time,

yours sincerely,

Erich Habich-Traut

https://contactproject.org

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