A silent, disk-shaped UFO seen over Chicago airport by 12 United Airlines employees could hold the key to interstellar spaceflight, according to a group of 30 physicists

An international think-tank of physicists believes a famous UFO sighting in Chicago could hint at “faster-than-light” space travel.

At approximately 4:14 p.m. on November 7, 2006, an apron attendant at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport spotted a metallic, saucer-shaped aircraft hovering in the sky.

The sighting, which lasted five minutes and was observed by at least 12 United Airlines employees, made international headlines thanks to a recording of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radio communications released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Though the FAA attributed the incident to a “hole cloud,” and astronomer Mark Hammergren, then a staffer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, agreed, the case remained unsolved — and a mystery to UFO researchers ever since.

Now, 30 PhD physicists working for the privately funded research group Applied Physics believe the 2006 O’Hare UFO case shows the telltale signs of a theoretical interstellar propulsion system called “Alcubierre warp drive.”

The concept, a special class of Star Trek-like “warp drives” first developed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, would fly between the stars by bending the fabric of space and time around itself.

Theoretical astrophysicist Alexey Bobrick, Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Applied Physics, first published his calculations describing the ideal shape of an Alcubierre propulsion vehicle in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in 2021.

Bobrick theorized that the most energy efficient shape would be flat.

“Some models of warp-driven spacetimes suggest that the shape of the spacecraft and the resulting geometry of spacetime curvature could significantly reduce energy requirements,” Bobrick told the Tech News website The debriefing.

“Depending on the specific design of the warp drive,” says Bobrick, “the passenger liner could benefit from a saucer or spherical shape according to the laws of general relativity.”

The applied physics The team determined that, similar to decades of classic UFOs, the Chicago O’Hare UFO of 2006 was a traditional, iconic flat-bottomed flying saucer: Witnesses described the completely silent object as somewhere between 22 and 88 feet in diametera magnitude that could bring further energy benefits worth exploring in the future, the group suspects.

As first published in Chicago Tribune According to columnist Jon Hilkevitch, the O’Hare UFO was “reported to the airline by up to a dozen of their own employees,” and some of those employees contacted the airport’s air traffic control crew.

The sound of it The call — between a United warden hoping the control tower had positively identified the mysterious disc-shaped craft hovering silently over Concourse C of the United terminal — was later released via FOIA by the FAA.

Brandon Melcher, a physicist who studied cosmic “dark matter” at Syracuse University and contributed to the Applied Physics team’s analysis of the O’Hare case, found that the UFO motions also matched those of an Alcubierre drive.

‘From that [witness testimony]”It seems reasonable to suggest that a metallic object about 50 feet in diameter was hovering about 1,500 feet above a passenger gate at an international airport in regulated airspace,” Melcher said.

“After some time, the object accelerated almost instantaneously from 0 to about 1,000 to 2,000 feet per second.”

Compare that to the current Guinness World Record Holder for the fastest acceleration of a drone: 224 miles per hour, or just under 329 feet per second, less than a third of the O’Hare UFO’s top speed.

As the Applied Physics team found, there is no known aircraft today, nor in 2007, capable of resting in the air and then accelerating straight up at several thousand feet per second.

However, because the evidence in the O’Hare UFO case is all anecdotal, the physicists are the first to admit that their study cannot go beyond the category of purely educated speculation.

“The only way to fully investigate sightings like this is to collect more data,” Melcher noted, adding that “the reluctance expressed by several witnesses should be a cause for concern, which is why we need to remove this dangerous stigma.”

“The search for truth should be the norm,” he said, “not the suppression of facts and scientific discourse.”

Melcher, Bobrick and the rest of the Applied Physics team conducted the O’Hare study as a thought experiment and as an opportunity to share their work for the group’s Advanced Propulsion Laboratory and facilities Physical Warp Drives Project.

But even the lack of recorded evidence in the O’Hara UFO case was, in her view, a sign that a “warp-drive” spacecraft is feasible: specifically the lack of a radar return that would otherwise verify a UFO floating over Hall C.

Ultimately, the FAA attributed the entire event to an unusual “weather phenomenon,” an optical illusion created by a cloud of holes, citing the lack of radar data as the best evidence.

But the Applied Physics group isn’t so sure.

“One intriguing effect of warp bubbles is how they also explain the lack of a radar signal,” Melcher told The Debrief. “Alcubierre’s warp drive also causes light rays arriving from behind to bounce off the bubble but deviate from their original trajectory.”

In other words, little to no airport radar would bounce back and be detected as “radar return,” giving the FAA the wrong impression that the radar beam was still sailing through the clear, empty sky.

“Light rays propagating from behind appear to diverge away from the center of the bubble, obscuring their detection,” says Melcher.

“This would explain why there was no radar ping on the object that was said to be hovering over the passenger gate at ORD.” When the light is deflected away from the object, there are no radar pings.’

According to Melcher’s analysis, the radar cross section would be “incredibly small” for any device powered by an Alcubierre warp drive.

While all of this reported behavior of the seemingly flying disk bears a striking resemblance to the team’s understanding of how a warp-driven spacecraft might behave, the lack of concrete evidence limits their ability to draw any conclusions.

And considering that no known human has ever come close to being able to make an Alcubierre warp drive themselves, such a conclusion would raise far more questions than it answers.

“It’s important to note,” Melcher said, “that the object was seen during the Chicago O’Hare UAP.” [UFO] incident [employed] “A warp drive raises the question of its origin.”