Once I dug into Greg Bishop’s descriptions of the co-creation hypothesis, I realized that Gene and others like Paul Kimball have co-opted the name of Greg’s area of interest (which is actually just a field along the lines of perceptual psychology) and redefined it entirely to suit their narrative. Greg isn’t offering an alternative hypothesis to the ETH; he’s simply exploring the limits and ambiguities and faulty psychological interpretations of eyewitness reports in general.
Gene and others have twisted this around into an entirely distinct model, where humans seeing ufos are actually witnessing some kind of supernaturally generated hallucination that only appears to be a physical aerial device. In truth, they argue, some unspecified intelligence (preferably non-extraterrestrial, and perhaps “interdimensional” in origin) is using some kind of physical hologram or mind control to make contact with humanity in a manner that we can comprehend: intentionally mimicking our expectations of alien contact.
I call this the “intrepid Solaris” model, where some imponderable superadvanced consciousness is reaching out to us across vast distances of space or, as Gene prefers, across dimensions or realities.
I don’t rule this out entirely – perhaps once every 1,000 or 10,000 years, some essentially deific form of alien intelligence might make contact with somebody in this fashion. Or not. But my point is simple: which is more likely – drones from other planets or some outlandishly advanced entity rewriting the laws of physics just to appear to be what we seem to be seeing, i.e., solid aerial objects that like to evade our top performance jet interceptors.
This specific subject is the primary focus of my life-long research into theoretical physics, so I’m fairly intimately aware of the progress and skepticism surrounding this idea.
Back in 1994 Miguel Alcubierre simply explored a metric solution for gravitational field propulsion; he didn’t try to figure out how such a thing might be possible, other than relying on the earlier work on negative matter propulsion by Hermann Bondi and Robert L. Forward. And sure, if negative inertia/gravitation matter actually existed, then we could start working on building such a system today. But by all present indications, it doesn’t exist.
That’s as far as the common viewpoint goes, so the idea is rejected on that basis.
However, that’s a superficial position to take, because gravitational field propulsion doesn’t require negative mass after all. What’s actually required is a negative value of the Einstein stress-energy-momentum tensor, and rest mass is only one variable in that tensor matrix. Other factors, in particular the stress components which can manifest either pressure (positive stress) or tension (negative stress) comprise three of the other variables in the tensor.
This provoked a brilliant relativist named Manu Parajape to explore these components and their gravitational significance in a pair of academic papers that he co-authored with his grad students in 2013 and 2014. This one is particularly noteworthy:
“Negative mass bubbles in de Sitter space-time,” Mbarek and Paranjape, Physical Review D, 2014
What they found was ground-breaking. First, they found that the positive energy theorem (the basis of the theoretical objection to negative stress-energy-momentum states in the context of general relativity) doesn’t apply to our de Sitter universe, so those conditions are physically viable after all (which in retrospect seems obvious, because the dark energy effect is real and it falls into this class of solutions, i.e. negative/repulsive gravitation). But they developed the idea further, and found that a bubble of matter with the properties of a perfect fluid can be endowed with sufficient surface tension to generate an effective negative mass / repulsive gravity condition. So if we can engineer a body of matter to exploit the tension components of the stress-energy tensor as they describe, then we could couple that to ordinary matter and produce a free-fall acceleration in any direction that we wished for as long as like. And this approach, gravitational field propulsion, is the only known theoretical model for producing FTL spaceflight without any time dilation and no upper limit to the effective velocity.
It also just so happens to perfectly conform to the performance characteristics commonly reported by ufo witness since at least the 40s if not earlier: silent reactionless levitation, dramatic high accelerations without any subjective g-forces, supersonic flight without a sonic boom, and cross-medium travel.
In fact the recent statements made by the people involved with the TTSA and the AATIP indicate that the military has recovered a fragment of a photonic metamaterial made of atomically aligned layers of bismuth and magnesium (not Linda Moulton Howe’s sample of industrial residue, but rather something we haven’t yet seen in the public sector) which allegedly loses some of its rest mass under exposure to THz radiation.
I thought that was an odd but intriguing idea, so I looked into it. And it turns out that the Helmholtz stress-energy tensor which best describes the energy and pressure with such materials, includes a pair of terms (electrostriction and magnetostriction) which represent negative pressure (tension) terms within photonic metamaterials when the internal structure is arranged properly.
So it seems that we’re seeing a new frontier for metric engineering via quantum mechanics and advanced materials engineering, that may well yield the requisite characteristics for a field propulsion device that can mimic the exotic and eerily consistent flight characteristics that ufo witness continue to report all around the globe.
But even if all of that is wrong, the recent statistical and astronomical analysis of the distribution and age of the other potentially habitable earth-like worlds in our galaxy, arrived at an average estimated age more than 3 billion years older than the Earth. So, given that we already see a viable theoretical mechanism for producing a gravitational field propulsion system and we’re only about two centuries into the technological age, I think it would be ludicrous to assert that such a thing will not be developed on Earth sometime within the next 3 billion years, given what we know today. In which case, it’s all but absolutely certain that countless other civilizations devised such technology eons ago. And that’s what we’re seeing operating in our airspace from time to time, and toying with our top fighter jocks much as a child toys with a kitten using a laser pointer.