From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Date: Fri Jul 11 1997 - 20:04:46 MDT
Max M wrote:
>
> > From: Michael Lorrey
>
> > Personally, I don't know. I do know of the things I saw when I was in
> > the Air Force that I still can't talk about. Given that all of the stars
> > in our region of the galaxy are relatively the same age, I would give it
> > a 50% chance that we've been visited in the past or will be visited
> > within the next 100 years.
>
> I didn't make an argument about whether we have, or will be, visited. I
> simply tried to say that if anybody was able to visit us thru space, they
> would probably be able to do so without us detecting them in any way.
There are physical limits to stealth capability. Any "Stealth" vehicle
can still be seen by radar from a certain range of angles. A stealthed
vehicle is designed so that the large majority of angles at which radar
is likely to hit it at are such that they are reflected in a direction
different from that which it came from. This is passive stealth, which
if maximized, is usually hard to detect. Incidentally, the flying saucer
is the most stealthy shape useful in a flying vehicle.
Active stealth, which can more effectively hide a vehicle from detection
equipment designed for a specific range of emanations, will require the
use of electrical, magnetic, or gravitational fields, all of which are
capable of being detected by additional specialized gear.
Remember, even in Star Trek, they were able to eventually develop a
countermeasure detection capability to the Klingon cloaking device.
The most effective possibility is materials which absorb as much
incoming radiation as possible. Some such materials are used today to a
limited extent for radar absorption, but are only effective in absorbing
diffused radar. The main beam reflection must still be redirected. It
cannot all be absorbed. Even if fully absorptive materials are
developed, it will then be possible to detect vehicles by the absence of
background radiation, that which is being absorbed by the vehicle.
The Roswell incident was supposedly due to some sort of on board
explosion, a malfunction. Given that machines always do break down no
matter who builds them, it is not unreasonable that a vehicle would
break down after an interstellar flight and entering our atmosphere. Man
made air vehicles have always had maintenance requirements of between
20-100 man hours per flight hour. THe more cutting edge ones always had
higher maintenance requirements, with the exception of some of our new
military planes like the F-22, but vehicles like the space shuttle and
the stealth bomber are still way up above the top of the range.
I once used this to debunk some abduction nuts. They were claiming that
1 out of every 40 people have had abduction experiences. Doing a
utilization analysis of this figure relative to the populations of the
US and the world, I was able to come up with figures showing that we
should be experiencing between 1-12 UFO crashes per YEAR in order to
support the size fleet required to abduct one in 40 people. Given this,
we should statistically have seen at least several such crashes in
highly populated areas that would have been witnessed by thousands of
people.
As for your assertion of any visitors not being detected, this goes
against logic. Given that some group, corporation, or government on
another planet would have shelled out billions if not trillions of
EBE-bucks for such an expedition, the idea that they would not try to
wring out the maximum PR, scientific, or economic value from that
investment is ludicrous.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael Lorrey
------------------------------------------------------------
mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive
Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com
Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/
Mikey's Animatronic Factory
My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA)
MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday
Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH)
------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL
@k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_
]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256;
&S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
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