There is no known record of when the first UFO was sighted on Earth. We now have a wealth of data to confirm the sightings, but there is much more that has been lost to history. Ancient alien theorists have collected several examples that may suggest some medieval UFO sightings. But what is the earliest recorded UFO sighting? About 780,000 years ago (or 790,000-800,000), a strange object entered the solar system at speeds well over 20,000 miles per hour, which was much smaller than other space objects. It was about 2 kilometers wide, 110 times larger than the Chelyabinsk meteor that hit Russia in 2013.
There are two conceivable outcomes when a massive body falls toward Earth at such enormous speeds: either the object will be accelerated by our planet’s gravity or it will hit the surface. The nature of the second scenario is devastating.
However, NASA studies have shown that the object had put itself into orbit, perhaps with the ability to slow down. While some rocky bodies the size of a car or smaller have briefly orbited Earth, our planet is simply too large to have such an impact on objects larger than a few kilometers in diameter. The small rocky worlds of the inner solar system do not have the same gravitational effects as Jupiter and Saturn, which are known to deflect fast-moving comets.
The strange visitor underwent a prolonged process of superheating or self-fusion that reduced it to glass after an unknown amount of time in orbit. Then, from Antarctica to southern China, bubbles of frozen liquid glass began falling from the sky.
According to a chemical analysis of the recovered debris, whatever it was, it contained significant amounts of aluminum, iron, calcium oxide, magnesium oxide, potassium oxide and several trace elements, as well as quartz crystal, which is an essential material for our information processing technologies. A surprising number of them are compounds with characteristics that could be important for spacecraft design.
The evidence for this strike comes in the form of tektites. These are fragments of Earth material that the impact superheated, melted, and then ejected into the atmosphere. Although some are larger, tektites are typically centimeter-sized chunks of green or black glass. They are known scientifically as “tempered molten ejecta.” They were scattered across a vast region known as the Australasian Strewnfield.
No known natural asteroid, comet or meteorite has ever had a silica content greater than 60%. According to several studies, the object may be the first extraterrestrial visitor to our solar system ever discovered because it has traces of isotopes that suggest an intergalactic origin.
After 200 years of research, the creation and distribution of Australasian tektite still poses a challenge to science. An interstellar object hypothesis explains any remaining oddities. When the potential of tektites as a technosignature is analyzed, it is determined to be strong. No one is sure what it was, where it came from, or how it got into orbit before exploding after a century of study, making this parent body the first Unidentified Flying Object ever seen.
Some scientists have proposed a massive asteroid strike somewhere in Southeast Asia to explain the Australite mystery, while others have argued that it must be the result of a piece of the moon blowing off and hurtling toward us. While each of these long-debated ideas has its strengths, both have failed to account for the available evidence.
The moon hypothesis has the advantage of providing an explanation for how a glass-like substance could fall to Earth from space. Some of the resulting tektitic material could have come to us if an asteroid had struck the lunar surface and ejected a quantity of molten rock. As it became clear that the moon was not composed of a substance that would have matched the australite debris, this theory soon lost traction. The terrestrial-impact hypothesis provided a convincing argument that the glass contained compounds that could have matched some of the shales mixed in on Earth.
Could the vast debris field and strange glass formation be explained by a fast-moving object hitting Earth with enough force in exactly the right place? The answer is no, although this model is still widely used. NASA studies make it quite clear that the so-called australite buttons were formed in space during a long period of heating before gradually entering the atmosphere. Not only do they contain almost no water, but they also contain hard vacuum bubbles.
The data suggest that the tektite glass must have been heated by a certain method that eliminated most of the bubbles and left a fairly homogeneous material. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of all, as it contradicts the widely established Stokes equation for frictional force in liquids. The energy released during an impact is very strong and fleeting.
What could it be if it wasn’t a piece of the moon breaking off or any other known natural object hitting our planet? Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who is a proponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, says, “If you’re not prepared to find exceptional things, you’ll never find them.” He might suggest that “to reap the rewards of other technological civilizations, we should look in our own backyard of the solar system for objects that came from outside it. Some of the objects we find may be intelligent, while others burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.”
Could one of these hyper-advanced entities have already visited Earth with our distant Homo erectus ancestors observing their vast silica network orbiting above their heads in the night sky?
A recent study published on ReseachGate titled “Australasian Tektites as Interstellar Object Debris: Anomalies in Composition, Formation and Distribution” considers the likelihood that the parent body of the Australasian tektites was a natural interstellar object or could have been an artificial megastructure monitoring the Earth’s biosphere.
It is also interesting to note that the last total geomagnetic reversal on Earth occurred 780,000 years ago. The complete reversal of the north and south magnetic poles. Could the destruction of the world’s first UFO and the subsequent major shift in the planet’s energy be somehow connected?
