We haven’t reached Black Friday yet but fans of Doc Brown, Mr. Peabody and Doctor Who may have have already received the present they’ve wanted since they were kids.

“But thanks to some very interesting properties of space and time in Einstein’s General Relativity, traveling back in time may be possible after all.”

In a recent post on his Forbes blog, Starts with a Bang, theoretical astrophysicist and science writer Ethan Siegel lays out the parts and the plans for traveling backwards in time. Siegel claims this ‘time machine’ abides by Einstein’s general theory of relativity and will not destroy the universe as we know it. Yes! Tell us how to build one, Professor Siegel, so we can all go back change the answer on the test that kept us from getting into Harvard. Or one questionable election vote.

“The place to start is with the physical idea of a wormhole.”

Sigh. You skipped right over that part about Dr. Siegel being a “theoretical” physicist, didn’t you? Wormholes can exist theoretically – we just haven’t found one yet. Siegel starts with the accepted idea that positive/negative energy fluctuations can create a curve space wormhole that a particle could travel through from one point in spacetime to another. Who cares about particles, Dr. Siegel? We want to transport ourselves and possibly a cool-looking but poor-performing sports car back in time.

“If we want to scale that up, however, to allow something like a human being through, that’s going to take some work. While every known particle in our Universe has positive energy and either positive or zero mass, it’s eminently possible to have negative mass/energy particles in the framework of General Relativity. Sure, we haven’t discovered any yet, but according to all the rules of theoretical physics, there’s nothing forbidding it.”

With that assumption in mind, Siegel proposes a sort of reverse wormhole. Instead of the conventional “travel 40 light years out at nearly the speed of light, come back and you’ve aged 2 years while everyone else is 82 years older,” he proposes a wormhole with one fixed end and one that moves around at nearly the speed of light. The wormhole is created, you wait a year and then enter the end that has been in motion. When you come out at the fixed end, it’s 40 years prior. That means if you entered this wormhole today, you could travel back to 1978 …

I’m right again!

… provided someone in 1977 had created this wormhole. So Dr. Siegel’s time machine wormhole is dependent on a previous Dr. Siegel-type with his theoretical physics knowledge and more. What if that person was your grandfather? Could you go back in time to meet him and prevent your own birth?

“Satisfyingly, we discover that this form of time travel also forbids the grandfather paradox! Even if the wormhole were created before your parents were conceived, there’s no way for you to exist at the other end of the wormhole early enough to go back and find your grandfather prior to that critical moment. The best you can do is to put your newborn father and mother on a ship to catch the other end of the wormhole, have them live, age, conceive you, and then send yourself back through the wormhole. You’ll be able to meet your grandfather when he’s still very young — perhaps even younger than you are now — but it will still, by necessity, occur at a moment in time after your parents were born.”

So Dr. Seigel is satisfied that he’ll never be able to prevent his own birth, but are we satisfied that we’ll ever be able to travel back in time through one of these strange theoretical (for now) wormholes?

Anyone? Doc Brown? Mister Peabody? Einstein? Bueller? Anyone?

Inspired by the crop circle phenomenon, the 2002 movie Signsdraws broadly from the UFO mythos and, in one of its more comical scenes, has three of its characters huddled together in tinfoil hats, wracked by paranoia. Beyond such cliché, however, M. Night Shyamalan’s film exhibits a deeper—perhaps subconscious—awareness of the UFO phenomenon and of the effects of its mass-mediation in the post-modern world.

In the film, a Pennsylvanian farming family—headed by old-fashioned priest and widower Reverend Graham Hess (Mel Gibson)—is thrown into turmoil when a crop formation appears overnight in their corn field. From TV news coverage we learn that hundreds of similar crop ‘signs’ have appeared suddenly and simultaneously around the world, baffling experts. Graham is quietly concerned and seeks to distance his family from the inexplicable events unfolding around them by refusing them access to the media circus now spoon-feeding the hungry masses. “See, this is why we’re not watching TV,” says Graham, “people get obsessed.” For Graham, despite the undeniable physical reality of the sign in his corn field, and his own gut instinct that something strange is afoot, it is only through their mediation by TV news reports that the bizarre events can assume a sense of the ‘real.’

Discussing Jean Baudrillard’s notions of hyperreality, John Storey notes that, “Representation does not stand at one remove from reality, to conceal or distort it, it is reality”; implicitly aware of this, Graham opts to sever his own access to media imagery, leaving him free to interpret the outside events as he chooses and to continue to inhabit his own secure, albeit emotionally stagnant, reality. It is only when Graham catches a glimpse of an alien in his corn field one night that he submits to his family’s desire to be mediated (“Okay, let’s turn on the TV”). It is Graham’s submission to television that plants him firmly in the “present age” to which Feuerbach refers in The Essence of Christianity: an age “which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…” For Graham, the grieving widower and priest faced with an incomprehensible threat to his family, now, more than ever, “Illusion only is sacred, truth profane.”

The reality of the situation is unpalatable for Graham, so he opts to filter it through the lens of television.

As the family watch live footage of numerous UFOs over Mexico City, Graham’s brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) quips: “the nerds were right”—a reference to the generic UFO believers he had mocked in an earlier scene. Shyamalan’s decision to have the alien craft arrive over Mexico City was inspired by the real-life mass-sightings of UFOs over this same locale during the solar eclipse of July 11, 1991 when hundreds of people witnessed what appeared to be a number of hovering, metallic, disc-shaped objects. Signs again draws from the UFO mythos during a scene in which Merrill reacts with horror as the TV news runs grainy, daylight footage of an alien prowling the backstreets of Paso Fundo, Brazil. This is an oblique reference the famous “Varginha incident” of 1996 in which three teenage girls claimed to have been traumatized by a daylight encounter with an unearthly entity in the Brazilian city of Varginha.

M. Night Shyamalan directs Abigail Breslin.

Several scenes later, the whole family has succumbed entirely to the mystical power of their television as they stare passively at the numerous “lights” now hovering over Washington DC and over hundreds of cities worldwide. Such is the magnetism of their TV screen that, rather than driving to the nearest city in an attempt to see the lights for themselves, or even simply stepping outside to glance up at the sky, the family considers it more natural to watch the events on television and, most importantly, to record them. “We have to tape this,” urges Graham’s son, Morgan, “this is very important… the history of the world’s future is on the TV right now,” telling his younger sister Bo (Abigail Breslin), “We need to record this so you can show your children this tape and say you were there.” Clearly, the Hess family understand, as theorist John Fiske does, that the postmodern media do not simply provide, “secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the reality that they mediate,” and that, “all events that ‘matter’ are media events.”

Glued to the screen.

As the saucer-shaped lights twinkle overhead, the anchorman informs viewers that “This image has not been adjusted or enhanced in anyway. What you’re seeing is real. It’s unbelievable.” Later in the film, Graham asks himself, “Is this really happening?” Such dialogue points to an awareness on Shayamalan’s part that the literal existence of UFOs is difficult to accept, not because of what UFOs might represent (otherworldly intelligences), but because of how the phenomenon has been mediated (i.e. ridiculed) for over sixty years. Shayamalan’s concerns along these lines are expressed subtly in his decision to confine his UFOs and aliens securely to his characters’ TV screen as objects of media scrutiny for all but a few seconds of the film’s total running time.

“What you’re seeing is real. It’s unbelievable.”

The extent to which the family’s perception of UFOs has been historically mediated is also effectively illustrated through their inability to envisage what horrors might be unfolding beyond the four corners of their TV screen. When both their television and radio cease to function as a result of the unseen invasion outside, in the total absence of media to guide their perceptions, the Hess family are lost, as demonstrated when a terrified Merrill asks: “What’s going on out there?” A question to which Graham can only respond: “I can’t even imagine.” Indeed, in an earlier scene, when Merrill does attempt to make use of his imagination, he can’t help but fall back on iconographic imagery conjured by classic UFOlogical fiction, describing the scenes on TV as being “like War of the Worlds.”

During the film’s climax in which an alien intruder holds Morgan hostage in the Hess family’s living room, Shyamalan again chooses to objectify the aliens through television—this time quite literally. When Graham finally sees the alien up close it is in the form of a reflection in his TV screen, and, again, when the creature is defeated and lies dying on the floor, we see only its reflection in the glass of the television. Are aliens real, or do they exist purely as media constructs? In Signs, Shayamalan seems to answer the question with a question: “in today’s hyperreal society, does it even matter?”

One of several shots in ‘Signs’ in which the image of the alien is distorted quite literally through the televisual medium.

Signs is an anomaly in the UFO subgenre. Consciously or not, it engages with the UFO subject through the intellectual framework of spectatorship and hyperreality. As a meditation on UFOs as a media abstraction (viewed most comfortably through the filter of television), the film serves as a reflection of popular attitudes towards the phenomenon today, demonstrating that, when it comes to UFOs, even Hollywood in its mass-mediation of the phenomenon is acutely aware that there is no longer a clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its media representation.

Less often, there are reported incidents involving witnesses from multiple sources, such as commercial airliners, military aircraft, and even involvement by the likes of NORAD. Add to the mix the fact that the observed “mystery aircraft” in question has no active transponder, and couldn’t be detected on radar, and you have a genuine mystery.

This rare criteria for a “good” unidentified aircraft report is precisely what has surfaced, in relation to an incident that occurred back in October over the California/Oregon border. The story, which first appeared on Reddit, might have been dismissed as largely speculative or hearsay, had it not been for the fact that Tyler Rogoway, writer for The Drive, had heard about the incident previously from associates of his in the aviation industry; obviously, the story had already created a buzz, and rather than just appearing on an unsubstantiated Reddit thread, it seemed the existing talk over the incident was leaking there, too.

The story, according to the initial Reddit thread, goes like this:

“Just landed in Seattle coming from the bay area. Beginning over Southern Oregon we kept overhearing Seattle Center attempting to track an airplane with no transponder who wasn’t talking. A handful of crews were able to track it visually, best they could tell it was between FL350-370 [35,000-37,000 feet], northbound. Nobody close enough to see the type.

Last we heard it was over the Willamette valley northbound and some fighters, perhaps out of PDX [Portland International Airport], were scrambled to go take a peek. Center had trouble tracking it on primary radar.

Strange! My theory is they were running drugs to Canada. No news yet, not that I could find.

**Update 0500z. Called SEA ARTCC. The gentleman I spoke with said that they initially got alerted to the aircraft from Oakland Center who was painting it on primary [illuminating it with radar, but without transponder information]. For whatever reason they couldn’t track it themselves on primary, and that’s when I overheard them using airline aircraft to track it visually. The last airplane to see it had to descend into Portland and lost sight of it. The fighters were scrambled out of PDX but flew around for a while and did not find it. And that’s that.”

The report above gives few details about the aircraft itself, and due to the fact that craft was unresponsive via radio and radar systems, the pilots had been communicating with the pilots and crew of other commercial aircraft in the vicinity to try and obtain visual confirmation.

Few details about its appearance were related, apart from the fact that it was a “white airplane,” and appeared to be flying the same speed, or slightly faster, than other aircraft in the vicinity. However, one description of the aircraft’s flight behavior did describe a sharp turn that it made, which seemed to be outside the range of maneuverability of conventional aircraft. If true, this detail might support the notion of it having a military origin.

Recordings of the communication between commercial aircraft in the area and Seattle ATC has been made available here, which detail the confused pilots as they attempted to track the mystery aircraft.

Tyler Rogoway contacted the 142nd Fighter Wing based at Portland International Airport, the FAA, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on behalf of The Drivein order to try and obtain confirmation of the incident. As Rogoway notes, “NORAD’s reply was quick and clear. An incident involving multiple airline crews, air traffic control, and F-15Cs from the 142nd Fighter Wing based out of Portland did occur.”

NORAD further commented that, “airliner pilots were asked by FAA air traffic controllers to help track and possibly identify a ‘white aircraft’ traveling in the flightlevels nearby—roughly between 35,000 and 40,000 feet based on the radio recordings,” as evidenced by the recordings that were later released. Perhaps most compelling of all, however, had been the group of F-15s that were scrambled out of Portland, which presumably had been sent to intercept the mystery aircraft.

The FAA and 142nd Fighter Wing were less responsive following the incident, and primary details obtained are based on recordings of flight communications, and the NORAD statement.

On an interesting note, one Reddit poster, claiming to be an air traffic control operator, shared this interesting story:

“[O]ur QA department was working on this today, and got a call from the commander of the 142FW at PDX and was basically told to knock it off, and we know nothing.”

This statement cannot be verified, of course, but if true, might further suggest a military origin for the aircraft.

At present, and with so few details on hand, it is difficult to assess just what the nature of this incident entails, and whether the “mystery plane” was anything out of the ordinary. Current theories range from a possible drug smuggling operation (which seems unlikely, considering that the incident began at around 4:30 PM local time, thus having occurred in broad daylight), to a possible military test craft. Whatever it may have been, the incident represents one of those rare cases where corroborative data between multiple sources, both civilian and military, do at least confirm the incident, and the general description of the mystery plane in question.

For details on a similar incident, as reported to the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), see my earlier article on a bizarre “flying egg” that was observed several years ago near Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the meantime, anyone with further details on the October 2017 incident related here, or with similar stories or observations about unrelated incidents, can reach me via email here.

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