James Woodward- MUFON Symposium 2017

Secret Space Programs at the Dawn of the Interstellar Age

Secret space programs have been a fixation of a small community of mostly flying saucer aficionados at least since the early post-WW II era. Some might argue even earlier. The motivation for belief that such programs have existed and exist is easy to identify. The laws of physics as widely understood seem(ed) to preclude any technology capable of permitting travel between the stars, much less galaxies. If aliens are zipping around the skies in their saucers (or whatever), they must know how to do something that we don’t. And if aerospace companies, governments, and conspiracies of the X-Files sort believe in the reality of the zipping aliens, it only stands to reason that they would create secret programs to try to replicate the technologies under alien command.

Whatever you think of the zipping aliens and their hypothetical craft, there is a compelling question posed by all this: do the laws of physics allow for rapid transport by any means over interstellar distances; or if not, do any proposed “new” laws of physics, presumably plausible, make such transport reasonable?

In this talk I will address both the issue of secret space programs and the physics of interstellar transport from the perspective of my experience of the past 65 to 70 years.