The Pentagon Studied Warp Drives and Wormholes. Science Fiction Got There First
The newest UFO files include government papers on folding space. Writers were there decades before the Pentagon was.
By Brian Bullock | Everyone Knows | brianbullockwriter.com
On the eighteenth of September, the Pentagon released its sixth batch of declassified UFO files. There were seventy one files in all, including documents, videos and one audio recording, dating from nineteen fifty two to twenty twenty five. Most of the coverage went to the grainy videos of objects crossing military camera screens.
For anyone who reads science fiction, the more interesting part was a stack of thirty seven research papers with titles that could have come off a paperback rack. Warp drives. Wormholes. Antigravity. Invisibility cloaks.
The Program That Paid for Them
The papers came from a program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. The Defense Intelligence Agency set it up in two thousand eight to study what aerospace threats might look like all the way out to the year twenty fifty. Its focus was breakthrough technology, the kind that jumps ahead of where science is expected to go. The program ended in two thousand twelve.
The papers are called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents. All thirty seven have been public for years through Freedom of Information requests. This release adds details that had been blacked out before, including which offices produced them. The Pentagon's own note says the papers are summaries of existing ideas, not original research, and are not proof that any of it works.
Still, the United States military paid scientists to write about folding space. That idea has a long history, and it did not start in a laboratory.
Where the Warp Drive Came From
Science fiction writers were bending space long before physicists took it seriously. The phrase “space warp” was already common in the pulp magazines of the nineteen thirties. Star Trek made it famous in nineteen sixty six, when “warp speed” became something every kid in America could say.
Then in nineteen ninety four, a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre, a Star Trek fan, published a paper showing that Einstein's own equations allow something like it. A ship could sit inside a bubble of space, with space squeezed together in front of it and stretched out behind it. The bubble moves. The ship inside it never breaks the speed of light on its own.
The catch is fuel. The bubble would need something physicists call negative energy, which nobody knows how to make in any useful amount. The early estimates called for more energy than whole planets contain. Later work has brought the number down, but nowhere near anything we could build.
One of the Pentagon papers is titled “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.” Captain Kirk would have recognized the subject.
The Wormhole's Strange Path
In nineteen thirty five, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen showed that his theory allowed a bridge between two distant points in space. In nineteen fifty seven, physicist John Wheeler gave it the name that stuck: wormhole. The problem was that these tunnels would collapse the instant they formed. Nothing could get through.
Science fiction is what pushed the idea further. In the nineteen eighties, the astronomer Carl Sagan was writing his novel Contact and needed a believable way to send his heroine across the galaxy. He asked his friend Kip Thorne, a physicist at Caltech. Thorne and a student worked out what it would take to hold a wormhole open long enough to travel through it, and they published the answer in a physics journal in nineteen eighty eight. It needed the same kind of negative energy as the warp drive.
Thorne went on to serve as the science adviser on the movie Interstellar and won the Nobel Prize in two thousand seventeen for his work detecting gravitational waves. A novel sent a Nobel physicist to his chalkboard. Twenty years later, the Defense Intelligence Agency had its own paper on the subject, titled “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy.”
The Man Who Named the UFO
The same release includes an hour long recording from nineteen fifty two of an Air Force officer named Edward Ruppelt. Ruppelt went on to run Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official UFO investigation, which lasted from nineteen fifty two to nineteen sixty nine. He is also credited with coining the term “unidentified flying object,” because he felt “flying saucer” made the subject hard to take seriously.
In the recording, Ruppelt tells his audience that about twenty percent of the eight hundred reports the Air Force had reviewed came from reliable witnesses and still could not be explained.
The Film From Tremonton, Utah
The release also includes one of the most famous pieces of footage in UFO history. On the second of July, nineteen fifty two, a Navy chief warrant officer named Delbert Newhouse was driving with his family near Tremonton, Utah, when they spotted a group of bright objects in the sky. He pulled over and filmed them with his home movie camera.
Navy photo analysts studied the film and could not identify the objects. Others later suggested they were seagulls catching the sunlight. Nobody ever settled it. Now anyone can watch it and decide.
The Paper That Reads Like a Horror Story
One of the reference documents is different from the rest. Written in twenty ten, it describes three antenna engineers who were said to have had a close encounter with an unknown aerospace object. Afterward they suffered burns and hair loss, and one showed signs of radiation sickness.
The paper never identifies what they encountered. Its author concluded that some advanced systems might already be flying, and not fully understood by the United States. That is the kind of thing a science fiction writer would put in chapter one.
What It All Means
The files do not prove anyone is visiting us. The Pentagon says so itself. What they show is how an idea travels. The warp drive went from pulp magazines to Star Trek to a physics journal to a Pentagon report. The wormhole went from Einstein to a novel to a Nobel winner's chalkboard to an intelligence study.
Writers imagine what could be. Scientists check whether nature allows it. And somewhere in a government office, someone asks whether another country figured it out first.
Science fiction has always been a rehearsal for the future. Sometimes the people with the biggest budgets are reading along.
THE END
— Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | X @EveryoneKnws1