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Reverse Engineering Alien Technology ~ Myth or Reality?

Reverse engineering is the process of taking an existing product and figuring out how to manufacture it by taking it apart. This has been done throughout history by all nations of the world. The concept has been especially useful in military terms.

Mankind has used this throughout history but do we have Extraterrestrial Technology?

Famous examples of Reverse engineering for military purposes:

The Egyptian chariot: Was the “shock and awe” weapon of its day. The Assyrian army dominated with their chariots, and the Egyptians captured one, reverse engineered it, and went on to mass produce their improved design. With this new weapon of war, the Egyptians dominated the region for the next thousand years.

The Roman Navy: Was inferior to the Carthaginians during the first Punic war. They simply had no answer for the feared Carthaginian Quinquireme. A storm wrecked several quinquiremes on the Italian coast. Roman engineers copied the design and constructed several of their own ships to bolster the Roamn Navy. In 241 BC the Roman fleet sank 50 Carthaginian ships in the Battle of Aegus.

Tupolev Tu-4: Three American B-29 bombers on missions over Japan were forced to land in the USSR. The Soviets did not have a long range, heavy strategic bomber, so they decided to copy the B-29. Within a few years they had developed the Tu-4, a near perfect copy.

Soviet R-1 Rocket: Western Allies captured technical plans and hardware for the German V-2 rocket. The Soviets captured several German scientists who worked on the V-2 project. They worked with Soviet Scientists to recreate the rocket from the few documents they had. The V-2 rocket led to the space race between America and the Soviet Union

Vympel K-13 Missile: In 1958, an AIM 9 Sidewinder Missile was fired from Taiwan at a MiG-17 fighter. It did not explode upon impact. Instead, it became lodged into the side of the jet. When the pilot landed, Russian scientists reverse engineered their own copy.

BGM-71 TOW missile: In 1975, Iran was in negotiations with the U.S. for the purchase and production of the TOW and Maverick Missile. The revolution in 1979 brought an end to diplomatic relations between the countries, but Iran had reverse engineered their own copy and they are still producing it today.

Did some of our best technologies have an Alien Origin?

No matter how you slice it the 1950s and 60s was a time of great achievement by mankind. Some of the best minds in the world came up with integrated circuit boards which laid the groundwork for the Internet. Communication satellites, which is like taking the communication frontier into hyperspace. Some things had been around for a hundred years or more but we did not discover a practical use for them until the 1950’s such as titanium and fiber optics. One of the more startling facts is that we had computers in 1947 that were as large as a house, twelve short years later we had come up with the integrated circuit board! There was no evolution of the circuit board, one day it simply…. was! The invention of or the practical use of lasers, fiber optics, and the microchip were all put forward at the same time (1958). Transistors, cordless technology, remote controls, pacemakers,unmanned aerial vehicles , things were being put out there at such a rapid pace that it took years to get them into the mainstream.

These are not small things, these are things that changed the lives of most people on the planet. An entire host of laboratories sprung up at such a rapid pace that it made your head spin, to name a few, Bell labs, Westinghouse Labs, Zenith Corp, Hughes Aviation, Texas Instruments and not to mention major contributions by the Department of Defense. Have you ever given much thought about how these life changing inventions all came about in a twenty year period. Does it seem a bit odd that we knew about somethings like optics, night vision devices and titanium but it was not until the 1950s that we discovered how to make them work.

Here are few to consider:

Titanium
Sometimes called the “space age metal”, Titanium was discovered in 1791, but it was not until the early 1950s titanium began to be used extensively for military aviation purposes, particularly in high-performance jets, starting with aircraft such as the F100 Super Sabres and Lockheed A-12.

Transistor
The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its development in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things.

Fiber Optics

Fiber optic has been around for a hundred years but it was not until late 1958 that it was understood how it could be used for commercial and military purposes. Oddly enough the laser and fiber optics pretty much developed at the same time.

Integrated Circuit / Microchip

The first general-purpose computer, the nearly 30-ton ENIAC (1947), contains 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors. In 1959, the INTEGRATED CIRCUIT puts those innards on one tiny chip. Before the entire world is networked, there is the ARPANET—four computers linked in 1969. Even with the biggest skeptics among us this technology seem to happen overnight and changed the world in ways that we are still just beginning to understand.

The UFO Community will have you believe it is a Fact,..but is it?

Robert Lazar and Element 115

Back to the characters. In 1987, Robert Lazar shocked the world when he went on television claiming to have been part of an operation that worked on alien technology. Lazar said that the government has possession of at least nine alien spacecraft at a base called S-4. He claimed EG&G hired him to help reverse engineer the technology in the alien craft for use in U.S. military vehicles and power production. In the process, he discovered a rusty, heavy substance he called “Element 115″ that powered the alien spacecraft.

Lazar explained how the atomic element 115 (or ununpentium (Uup)) served as a nuclear fuel for the propulsion of the alien craft. Element 115 provided an energy source which would produce anti-gravity under particulate bombardment. As the intense strong nuclear force field of element 115′s nucleus was properly amplified, the resulting effect would be a distortion of the surrounding gravitational field. A vehicle producing this distortion could alter its own relation to the space around it, allowing it to dramatically shorten the distance between itself and its destination.

Lazar speculated that element 115′s probable absence on Earth was due to the fact that the supernovae in Earth’s region of the galaxy were insufficiently massive to produce nuclei of this density. He postulates that other parts of the universe could be richer in this element. Lazar indicated stocks of the element 115 were a gift from an off-planet civilization to be used as fuel for our own spacecraft.

In 2004, a team of American and Russian scientists succeeded in producing element 115 as an unstable isotope, confirming the existence of such an atom, however the real isotope has virtually none of the critical qualities Lazar describes.

Ultimately, there is no evidence to support Lazar’s claims. Even Stanton Freidman, usually a Ufology proponent of such stories, debunked Lazar – revealing how Lazar’s claim that he holds Masters degrees from CalTech and MIT is false because there’s no evidence he ever even attended either University. Multiple academic Physicists and Engineers reviewed the alleged propulsion system described by Robert Lazar and found it to be bogus. Two examples are Professor of Engineering George D. Hathaway’s analysis , and a Physical Review by Edward Halereqicz in 2008 where he writes, “Overall, it is revealed that a great number of Lazar’s ‘scientific explanations’ are critically flawed.”

Philip Corso and Alien Technology

In 1997 Philip Corso shook the UFO community with his book The Day After Roswell (co-author William J. Birnes) relating how he stewarded extraterrestrial artifacts recovered from a crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. According to Corso, a covert government group was assembled under the leadership of the first Director of Central Intelligence, Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (see Majestic 12). Among its tasks was to collect all information on off-planet technology.

Corso also claimed the reverse engineering of these artifacts indirectly led to the development of accelerated particle beam devices, fiber optics, lasers, integrated circuit chips and Kevlar material. He also said the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars”, was meant to achieve the destructive capacity of electronic guidance systems of incoming enemy warheads, as well as the disablement of enemy spacecraft, including those from extraterrestrial origin.

Corso claimed that different parts of the Roswell craft were sent to various defense companies, who reverse engineered their properties and that this engineering feat eventually led to a number of breakthroughs. Among them were integrated circuitry, night vision equipment, the laser, particle beams, and fibre optics. These claims have not been independently verified (in fact, the real history of the development of many of these technologies do not support his claims) and the according to Corso, contractors reverse engineering the technologies were told that the parts were stolen from Russia.

In the end, Corso’s stories also turned out to be riddled with holes and outright untruths. An article in the Klass Files reports a litany of holes, including the following:

“On page 197, Corso–who served as a commander of an Army anti-aircraft missile contingent in Germany–says that the Army’s Hawk anti-aircraft weapon is a “heat-seeking missile” for its terminal guidance. The Hawk is a radar-guided missile. The book claims that “the American public first heard about the existence of Stealth [aircraft] technology in President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against President Ford in 1976.” The first limited disclosure of the new B-2 stealth bomber did not come until four years later during the Carter-Reagan campaign.”

In Tom Mahood’s review of Corso’s book, he writes:

“He’s certainly had a pretty decent career, so why sully it with this UFO
biz? Much of what he writes is checkable (and what I’ve checked comes
up lacking), so if he’s making it up he’s gotta know he’s going down.
Is it some sort of “disinformation”? Many will say it is, but I don’t
know. Honestly, I’m not completely sure just what to make of it. I
know it’s not the truth, that he’s likley a loon, but beyond that….”

Richard Boylan and Antigravity Technology

Next up is Richard Boylan, who says “At this time, I am aware of the existence of ten kinds of special-technology advanced aerospace platforms, all incorporating antigravity technology in some form.”

Those ten were: the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, the Aurora Lockheed-Martin’s X-33A, Boeing and Airbus Industries’ Nautilus, the TR3-A Pumpkinseed, the TR3-B Triangle, Northrop’s Great Pumpkin disc, Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical’s XH-75D, Shark antigravity helicopter, and Lockheed-Martin and Northrop’s jointly-developed TAW-50 hypersonic antigravity fighter-bomber.

The TR3-B Craft – Anti-Gravity? Not Quite – Boylan Gets It Wrong

Of those craft listed by Boylan, the most fantastic and relevant to the field of UFOlogy is the TR3-B ’Astra”, which is allegedly a large triangular anti-gravity craft within the U.S. fleet. The alleged “TR3-B” is the claimed code name for what witnesses have seen – the very large triangular-shaped re-entry vehicle “with anti-gravity.” It’s what the November [2000] issue of Popular Mechanics identified as the Lenticular Reentry Vehicle, a nuclear-powered flying saucer – the first version of which allegedly went operational in 1962, [the version which Popular Mechanics illustrated.] Black projects defense industry alleged insider Edgar Rothschild Fouche wrote about the existence of the TR3-B in his book, Alien Rapture . He claimed an anonymous ex-NSA informant, ’Z’, also confirmed that the TR3-B is operational. Fouche claimed that the TR-3B generates an intense magnetic field that reduces its weight by 89 percent.

He says that the TR-3B does not have an antigravity propulsion system, but merely uses the Biefeld-Brown effect to reduce its weight so that more conventional propulsion systems such as scramjets can give it amazing speed.

However, others point out that the effect has been attributed to ionic wind and has been shown to not work in a vacuum, thus eliminating any alleged “antigravity” effects.

“Self-Healing” Materials

Another compelling real-world technology that is often utilized in the telling of alien reverse-engineering tales is the field of morphing metals. Take this quote by Anna McGowan, program manager at NASA’s Langley Research Centre (LaRC), “This is technology that most people aren’t aware even exists.”

The team working on the Morphing Project at LaRC have been testing materials with highly unusual properties. These include materials which have the ability to bend on command, ‘sense’ pressure, transform from liquid to solid when placed in a magnetic field and shape-memory polymers. The primary shape memory materials in use are alloys like Nitinol, which have the stiffness of steel but can return to its previous shape when heat is applied, the original shape having been ‘trained’ into the alloy.

Perhaps more incredibly, the Science team have been working on ‘intrinsically smart’ materials which can perform self-diagnosis and self-repair. By understanding the characteristics of these materials at the molecular level, ‘designer smart’ materials will be developed for future application in a number of fields – not the least aerospace – where we might see the development of distributed self-assessment throughout the wings and body of craft with self-repair properties.

The ‘self-healing’ materials are human-made (not alien made) of long-chain molecules called ionomers which react to penetration, such as a bullet, by closing behind it. The implications of this technology for space flight are tremendous.

The new shape-changing process is based on a flat sheet of beryllium copper alloy. Stress within it is manipulated using forming tools to bend, coil or twist the material.

“Imagine seeing a bullet shot through a sheet of material, only to have the material instantly “heal” behind the bullet! Remember, this is not science fiction. Self-healing materials actually exist, and LaRC scientists are working to unravel their secrets.

What we did at NASA-Langley was basically dissect that material to answer the question, ‘how does it do that?’” McGowan said. “By doing so, we can actually get down to computational modeling of these materials at the molecular level. Once we understand the material’s behavior at that level, then we can create designer ‘smart’ materials.”

It seems clear that the technology that’s referenced in these tales are not part of any sort of “reverse engineering” efforts, but instead they are simply fanciful tales. Philip Corso, Robert Lazar and Richard Boylan have all made attempts at convincing followers of Ufology that our latest technologies do, in fact, come from the stars – despite the fact that each of these technologies have verified histories (and actual human inventors) that prove otherwise. Do these fraudulent stories mean that we should disbelieve all stories related to the existence of odd flying triangles in our skies? I’ve personally seen one fly right over my head – and seeing is believing.

There is no fast, hard evidence to support any of these reverse engineering tales, but what the stories do generate are more questions than answers – that is, questions about the creators of these tales and their motives for doing so.

Looking like a UFO from an old science fiction movie, the new resin Orion heat shield hovers above its mold at the Lockheed Martin composite development facility in Denver. Credit: Lockheed Martin.