John F. Schuessler
International Director
MUFON, Inc.
October 2003
Many agree that high strangeness UFO cases offer the best opportunity to learn something new and perhaps find a solution to the UFO mystery. However, few people are willing to risk speculating on the mechanism behind that strangeness factor. Instead they continue to investigate UFOs in the same old way, basing their findings on the accepted norm of the day. Therefore, many very interesting UFO incidents have been written off as mistakes or impossibilities because they do not fit the prescribed mold of what a UFO must do or not do to be accepted as real by today’s standards.
UFO reports by highly credible witnesses contain descriptions of seemingly impossible operating characteristics. Some are said to be huge but able to soundlessly hover in mid-air and then shoot away at extreme speeds. For years they have been clocked flying faster than the speed of sound, while in the atmosphere, but without creating the expected sonic boom. Some may appear as a disk or sphere and then suddenly become a point of light and then blink out. Others seem to change shape as they perform certain maneuvers. Some seem to have stealth capabilities and shield them selves from radar. There have been reports of objects becoming visible in the air as if they came through some sort of portal. Abductees tell how their captors come into their room and take them out through the wall. Perhaps if we looked at these characteristics from a futurist perspective, they may not be as impossible as they now seem.
In 1966, Dr. J. Allen Hynek said: “I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in the 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does today.”
What if there are other civilizations that are hundreds or even thousands of years ahead of us in their development? Isn’t is possible that their technology would be so far ahead of ours that it would seem to us to be impossible? Arthur C. Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Perhaps we should start trying to think about these things with an eye to the future rather than to the past.
In its simplest form programmable matter exists today. For example, an LCD screen’s optical properties can be dramatically altered by the application of electrical signals. Other examples are photodarkening or photochromic materials found in light sensitive sunglasses.
In the book Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms, by rocket scientist Wil McCarthy (Basic Books, March 2003, ISBN 0-465-04428-X, $26.00), programmable matter is treated as the wave of the future. The IEEE Spectrum magazine said: “the promise of programmable matter could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.”
McCarthy’s book description says: “Programmable matter is probably not the next technological revolution, nor even perhaps the one after that. But it’s coming, and when it does it will change our lives as much as any invention ever has. Imagine being able to program matter itself – to change it, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, from paper to stone, from fluorescent to super-reflective to invisible. Supported by companies ranging from Levi Strauss to IBM and the Defense Department, solid-state physicists in laboratories at MIT, Harvard, Sun Microsystems, and elsewhere are currently creating arrays of microscopic devices called “quantum dots” that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and then can be changed, as fast as an electrical signal can travel, to have the properties of a different atom. Soon it will be possible not only to engineer into solid matter such unnatural properties as variable magnetism, programmable flavors, or exotic chemical bonds, but also to change these properties at will.”
Before we discard the high strangeness UFO cases as impossible, perhaps we would be better off figuring out the mechanism behind the strangeness characteristics indicated in those cases. Maybe someone else has already done this and we have had a glimpse of the future.