CHIGAGO – An international think-tank of physicists believes a famous UFO sighting in Chicago may hold clues about ‘faster than light’ space travel.
At about 4:14 PM on November 7, 2006, a ramp employee at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport spotted a metallic, saucer-shaped craft hovering in the sky.
The sighting, which lasted for five minutes and was witnessed by at least 12 United Airlines staffers, made international headlines thanks to a tape of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radio communications released via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Although the FAA attributed the incident to a ‘hole-punch cloud’ and astronomer Mark Hammergren, then with Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, agreed, the case has remained unresolved — and tantalizing to UFO researchers ever since.
Now 30 PhD physicists working for the privately funded research group Applied Physics believe that the 2006 O’Hare UFO case shows the telltale signs of a theoretical interstellar propulsion system called an ‘Alcubierre warp drive.’
Theoretical astrophysicist Alexey Bobrick, Applied Physics’ chief science officer (CSO), first published his calculations describing the ideal shape of an Alcubierre drive vehicle in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in 2021.
Bobrick theorized that the most energy-efficient shape would be flat.
‘Some models of warp drive spacetimes suggest that the shape of the spacecraft, and the resulting geometry of spacetime bending, could significantly reduce energy requirements,’ Bobrick told tech news site The Debrief.
‘Depending on the specific design of the warp drive,’ according to Bobrick, ‘the passenger-holding craft may benefit from a saucer or spherical shape per the laws of general relativity.’
The Applied Physics team noted that the 2006 Chicago O’Hare UFO, much like decades of classic UFOs, was a traditional, iconic flat flying saucer: Witnesses described the completely silent object as somewhere between 22 to 88 feet in diameter, a size that may pose further energy benefits worthy of future study, the group suspects.
Read more at MSN
