Pentagon officials say a solar system mothership might send tiny probes to Earth.
Military authorities said this week that extraterrestrials may be visiting our solar system and sending smaller probes similar to those used by NASA to study far-off planets. This was mentioned in a draught document from the Pentagon.
A draught study paper by Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and Abraham Loeb, chairman of the astronomy department at Harvard University, on the physical constraints of anomalous aerial occurrences was released on March 7.
"An artificial interstellar object may hypothetically be a parent vehicle that deploys several small probes throughout its close approach to Earth, an operational structure not too unlike from NASA missions," the researchers noted.
These "dandelion seeds" may become detached from the parent ship due to the Sun's gravitational attraction or a moving object.
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The AARO was established in July 2022 and is in charge of monitoring objects that can move across domains, including those that are in the air, sea, and space.
The paper claims that Congress ordered NASA to detect 90% of all nearby objects greater than 140 metres by 2005, which prompted the creation of Pan-STARRS telescopes.
On October 19, 2017, Pan-STARRS spotted a peculiar interstellar object that was eventually given the Hawaiian name 'Oumuamua, which means scout.
The object's flat appearance, the fact that it was propelled away from the sun without releasing a cometary tail, and its cigar-shaped structure led scientists to conclude that it was artificial.
Another object, NASA's rocket booster 2020 SO, which had no cometary traces, was discovered three years later, according to the report.
The research states that six months before 'Oumuamua made its closest approach to the earth, IM2, a meter-sized interstellar meteor, had the same shape and velocity as 'Oumuamua at a considerable distance.
As the parent spacecraft passes by within a fraction of the Earth-Sun distance, these small probes "with an ideal design, would reach the Earth or other solar system planets for investigation," the scientists write (exactly like "Oumuamua" did).
Astronomers would not be able to notice the rain of tiny probes because they do not reflect enough light for current survey telescopes to find them.
