UFOs, Plasma Lasers, And The Pentagon’s ‘Voice Of God’ Weapon
Forbes
Jul 6, 2021 6:00 AM
As previously reported by Forbes, the U.S Navy is looking at ultra-short laser pulses which create glowing plasma in mid-air to decoy missiles away from aircraft. This might explain some of the “UFOs” described in the recent Pentagon report on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. It turns out that interest in this technology goes back further than you might think — and not just in the U.S.
Back in 1966, commentators were trying to make sense of a previous report on UFOs, the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Like the modern version, this concluded there was no evidence that UFOs were extraterrestrial craft, but was thin on explanation. Philip Klass, avionics editor at Aviation Week and notable UFO skeptic, wrote his analysis with the added perspective of a background in electrical effects. He concluded that some UFOs were “luminous plasmas of ionized air, a special form of ‘ball lightning’ generated by electric corona that occurs on high-tension power lines under certain conditions.”A 2010 Chinese paper on Femtosecond Laser Applications to EO-countermeasures also discusses the potential for short-pulse lasers in confusing missile guidance, but there do not appear to be any other Chinese open-source papers on this topic. Again it may have been a crazy idea which went nowhere, or it may be that research is not carried on openly.
One of the most interesting stories in this field was the rumor which New Scientist journalist Justin Mullins heard about a bizarre new weapon supposedly being developed in the New Mexico desert back in the 1980s. It was called the Voice of God:
Modern ultrashort-pulse lasers provide a reliable means to create plasma remotely. Pulse duration is measured in femtoseconds – 10-15 or millionths of billionths of a second. In 2005, two research scientists working for French defense giant THALES published a paper looking at the missile defense potential of this effect, in particular for countering heat-seeking missiles . In addition to other possibilities they suggested “plasma that can be used as active decoys against IR homing electronics,” just like the U.S. Navy work from 2018.
THALES is a world leader in short-pulse lasers. NASA’s Curiosity Rover uses a THALES laser to zap rocks into plasma and analyze their chemical composition from the light they produce. But while they talk freely about scientific and commercial uses, the THALES laser web page does not mention military applications. Perhaps the idea was not pursued; or they do not wish to discuss it.
Mullins never succeeded in finding out whether there was any truth behind the rumored experiments. Talking to various scientists he concluded that the Voice of God would be “possible in the lab but very difficult to produce in the sky.”
Taken on its own sounds like a crazy and unsubstantiated story. However, in 2018 the Pentagon’s Joint Non-lethal Weapons Program released a video of short-pulse laser creating an actual talking plasma fireball relaying barely-comprehensible speech – “the creepiest thing you’ll hear all week” according to Popular Mechanics. While this does not confirm that scientists were playing with laser fireballs in the sky in the 1980s, it suggests that the Voice of God project was not a complete fantasy.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/03/us-military-making-lasers-create-voices-out-thin-air/146824/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a19565020/pentagon-mimicking-human-speech-with-lasers/
http://opr.news/237b4c33210706en_us?link=1&client=opera