There has been increasing interest of late in extraterrestrial vehicles, those things known in a simpler day as “UFOs,” or “unidentified flying objects.” Now they are “UAPs,” “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is arguably a fuzzier term in that while an “object” implies a physical thing, and “flying” is a description of what that thing is doing, “phenomena” can be something less definitive, like a cloud (not that a cloud isn’t a thing, but it is certainly more vague than something that might be called a “flying saucer”), and aerial simply indicates that it is in the air, as in that cloud just being, well, a cloud. What’s more, the Pentagon has established the “All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office,” which is certainly a mouthful of words that is sufficiently vague while being somewhat hubristic: is the Department of Defense going to “resolve” a UFO?

Earlier this week, a man who is apparently a “decorated Air Force veteran,” with the decoration somehow providing more credibility to him—not to in any way under-respect someone who has served meritoriously in the defense of our freedom, but in this case a “professor who has spent the last 20 years spending his days wandering around Groom Lake, Nevada, and nights monitoring telescopes and radar arrays” might seem more legit—filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General, claiming the government has obtained “partial fragments” and “intact vehicles” of “non-human origin.”

Cue the “da-da-duh” music and subsequent gasp.

Which got me to thinking about the golden record written about a couple weeks back being carried by the Voyager spacecraft titled “The Sounds of Earth” with the artist on the label indicated as “United States of America, Planet Earth.”

In addition to the record, there is a stylus to play it. And the protective cover of the record is inscribed by what are glyphs that provide instructions on how the recording can be played. As the Jet Propulsion Laboratory puts it, the drawing of the record and the stylus has “Written around it in binary arithmetic. . . the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom.”

The notion is that no matter what the alien is, they’ll know about that “fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom,” and I must confess that even though I am not an alien, I wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of what “0,70 billionth of a second” is, nor why the JPL uses a comma in that number rather than a decimal point (which leads me to understand my limited understanding of mathematics to boot).

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