
'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story - JJLongusa
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-those-alien-alloys-in-the-new-york-times-ufo-story/
======
jonstokes
I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I
also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed
scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a
hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because
the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51.

This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get specific terms of art
wrong, and nitpickers nitpick and clarify. I know this because I made a career
of such nitpicking and clarifying once.

My point here is that nothing put forward in this article means that there's
not a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange
properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how. It
just means that said materials are not properly "alloys" and the journos got
that word wrong, as journos often do when they're way outside their area of
expertise.

~~~
reaperducer
> a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange
> properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how

A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien
artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in
downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a
sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.

~~~
DonHopkins
It sounds like you're joking, but you aren't!

It'd kind of beautiful, actually.

[https://vitalvegas.com/excavators-hit-mother-lode-wtf-las-
ve...](https://vitalvegas.com/excavators-hit-mother-lode-wtf-las-vegas-club/)

It makes me wonder what it will look like when they tear down the building
storing old Star Trek: The Experience junk. The UFO conspiracy theorists are
going to have a great time with those photo.

~~~
colanderman
You know, I saw something like this in Boston just yesterday. They are tearing
down a condemned parking garage near my office; I saw a room they had started
demolishing that was packed chock-full with what looks like winter clothes.
Like, they had been stuffed in it as insulation or something. Some had fallen
out onto the rubble below. Very strange.

------
gfodor
As usual, the claim that #2 could possibly be due to pilots misinterpreting
visual evidence is tossed out as a hand wavy excuse despite the fact that the
cases investigated by the Pentagon are (allegedly) corroborated by targeting
systems, radar and satellite images, and possibly more evidence not disclosed.
The entire point of the revelations was that after bringing to bear the entire
analytical arsenal of the Pentagon there is no obvious explanation remaining
for these cases other that these objects indeed exist and have an unknown
origin. (This doesn't mean "aliens.")

The entire story hinges on the credibility of the Pentagon officials and
pilots interviewed. If they are credible with regards to the narrative around
just how many resources were used to generate alternative explanations, then
the media should stop building up strawmen that these specific cases were due
to pilots being fooled by their visual system.

~~~
valuearb
The problem is there is zero evidence of their credibility. Essentially it's
an appeal to authority argument.

And the video itself doesn't show anything of the claimed behavior. No
hovering over the ocean, no super fast motion, just a blob or smudge
superimposed over a cloudy background as video pans around.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
Which is one of many reasons we need total transparency when it comes to
government. Every "state secrets" arguments falls well short when it comes to
the need for the public to know everything in order to make informed
decisions. Without informed consent we simply live in a police state.
"National Security" is always a distant second to the need for transparency.
Democracy dies behind closed doors.

------
notadoc
My interpretation was that the origin of the material was simply unknown,
which doesn't mean much.

If I wake up in the morning and there's an unexpected beer can in my yard that
I did not place there, then that would be an object that arrived from an
unknown origin. It doesn't make the object itself particularly mysterious, but
you could have a lot of fun imagining how it got there or why it was placed
there. And you can imagine that getting reported in an interesting way. Did a
squirrel carry it into the yard? Did a neighbor drink a beer and toss the can
into the yard? Did beer drinking aliens drop it from a space ship into the
yard? Well, the latter is a fun story.

Of course it's infinitely more interesting to have a genuinely mysterious
alloy or element that is inexplicable or just new and fascinating for whatever
reason. I'm sure a lot of people felt that way about vanadium oxide, for
example.

[https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/vanadium-
oxides/8838...](https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/vanadium-
oxides/8838.article)

~~~
mortenjorck
There are still plenty of other degrees of interestingness in between "known"
and "definitely aliens."

These alloys could very well be mysterious not so much for their composition,
but for their condition, or their use at all in aircraft.

~~~
starpilot
I could see them as hyper advanced metamaterials with effects we don't
entirely understand. Materials science is still a very empirical field with
lots of physical experimentation, trial and error. We can observe with SEM,
x-ray etc. without fully connecting the dots to the end result. Sort of like
dropping an iPhone X into the hands of a Victorian era scientist, who just
dismantles it and sees it's a bunch of metal, without a chance of ever being
able to reverse engineer it. It's just too advanced.

But this is probably nothing.

------
colordrops
I hate articles like this. Someone makes an extraordinary claim, journalist
finds some experts to insist that claim must be false based on their current
understanding rather than testing the claim. This is ridiculous. Either ignore
the claim, or test it. Speculation is information-free and a waste of
everyone's time. Same goes for the EM drive. I don't care about hearing some
random expert's opinion on why it's impossible. I want them to either ignore
the story altogether, or show evidence that the proposed effect or technology
doesn't work.

This is the same sort of thinking as flat earthers, except that they happen to
have the status quo on their side. Science and truth aren't based on opinion
or emotion, but on test results.

~~~
Osmium
> based on their current understanding rather than testing the claim.

The point is that there is no claim. It is very very straight forward to
identify an unknown material (figuring out how it was made, what it's for,
etc., is the difficult task). If you want to claim there's an 'unknown'
material, show us your XRD patterns, your EELS/XPS/NMR/EDX/PL/SIMS spectra,
your AFM surfaces, your electron micrographs, atom probe tomography, any
number of a hundred other characterization techniques ... then you'd actually
have a claim we could have an intelligent conversation about.

At this point, there isn't even a claim that needs an expert opinion to
respond to, it's all just BS.

~~~
colordrops
Right, so if they have no idea what the material is then what's the point of
their comments claiming that they are impossible?

~~~
Osmium
I read it as saying it was impossible that there were materials being stored
that we couldn't identify[0], not that the existence of the materials
themselves was impossible. The point being that if these materials exist it
should be quite straight forward to identify them, and if they're 'unknown'
then that's simply because no one's taken the time in a lab to figure it out.

[0] To be charitable, I have no doubt that there exist substances in the
universe we can't currently characterize. But if you restrict it to objects
that you can physically store in a warehouse (that is, they're stable under
ambient conditions), I have little doubt we can figure out what they are
without much trouble.

~~~
colordrops
I think your interpretation of the article is incorrect, but to address your
point:

> I have little doubt we can figure out what they are without much trouble.

How can you be so sure of that? Have we learned pretty much all there is to
know about material science and physics at this point? Do you think someone
from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic?
Do you think we could figure out a material designed by a being a million
years in advance of us? The physics as we understand it in 200 years is
certainly going to be magic and "impossible" by today's standards, let alone
alien tech.

Of course the materials could not actually exist, or not be of alien origin.
But given the premise that they are of alien origin, it's not absurd at all to
think that we can't figure out the nature of the materials.

~~~
Osmium
> How can you be so sure of that? ... Do you think we could figure out a
> material designed by a being a million years in advance of us?

It's a fair question, but I'm pretty sure we could. We have constraints: we
know the object can be stored in a warehouse, we presumably can infer it can
be touched, and can be seen.

 _Even if_ it were of alien origin, wondrously advanced, made of some kind of
matter that fits outside our standard model of the universe, we would at least
know it interacts with light, with the electromagnetic force. We understand
that force very well, so we could still characterize it. And that's _if_ it's
something deeply weird; deeply strange. (And if it were really that bizarre,
it'd be the discovery of the century and obscene to keep it locked up in a
warehouse somewhere.)

Far more likely, it's just made up of atoms (which is what we'd expect, given
its temperature and density are within the realm of 'objects that can exist on
earth in a warehouse'), and then we can use all our normal techniques just
fine and it's not a problem.

> Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some
> superconducting ceramic?

Again, to emphasize, this is a valid question -- but we've already gone past
that threshold. We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further
to go when it comes to the question of what things are made of, at least to a
rough approximation.

However, the next question would be "can we make it?" and the answer to that
is very different. If someone gave us some electronics from the future, we
could still find out what it's made from quite easily. Understanding how it
works and how to re-create it would be vastly more difficult, and possibly
beyond us. But this is true of the past too; there were ways of making steel
and concrete in the distant past that we've long lost the knowledge of how to
make.

~~~
colordrops
> We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further to go when it
> comes to the question of what things are made of.

That may be true but also seems like a strong assumption and doesn't fit with
our current trajectory of understanding. A paradigm shift in physics which
replaces fundamental notions, such as the nature of fields, could make the
current understanding become seem a rough approximation just like relativity
did to Newtonian mechanics.

------
bugs_bunny
This idea that we have a database that covers all possibilities for anything
that would qualify as alien is delusional. It's like Neatherandals claiming
that they have a complete database for hard things, and it contains exactly
two entries: rock and stick. If they somehow stumbled across an iPhone, and
ran a few tests, they would decide it is a rock (since it can skip across
water - just like other flat rocks). In the very near future we will have
complex dynamic alloys that do not fit neatly into any database because their
characteristics will be change depending on the surrounding conditions. This
is by a species that can't even build a space elevator. Who knows what is
possible for a species capable of interstellar travel.

~~~
yk
Quite simply, x-ray diffraction tells you the distribution of electrons in the
unit cell of the alloy. So you just put an sample into your spectrometer and
it will print out the chemical elements and how they are assembled. And even
if there is another island of stability of super heavy elements or something
like that, it will still just tell you the charge of the nucleus. So this side
of quite literally magic, as in all of chemistry of the last 150 or so years
fails catastrophically, there is no possibility of having an alloy sitting in
a warehouse and not knowing exactly what it is.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
What if there are no electrons, because there are no atoms?

The suggestion that all these alleged weird alien materials are “alloys” is
just a placeholder for “looks and acts metallic, therefore made of metals.”

But if we happened to be dealing with real alien tech, that’s a naive and
unscientific assumption. We already have people thinking about how to build
programmable matter with variable properties, and it’s a fair bet we’ll have
working examples within 50-100 years.

And there is no possibility that conventional x-ray diffraction will reveal
how that kind of matter works.

~~~
patmcc
Assume for a second this is real alien tech. No atoms, programmable matter,
literal magic, whatever.

Why would this be in a warehouse of a $22 million (i.e. super small potatoes)
government project? It would be the biggest budget and highest secrecy project
on the books.

~~~
sgt101
Also the NYTimes would not be allowed to print it, to the extent of the editor
disappearing.

Also people posting on hacke

------
sandworm101
"Alloy" isn't the correct term when it comes to potential alien metallurgy. We
can easily identify which elements are present in a sample. With a bit more
effort we can identify the structure. That doesn't mean we can replicate the
exact mix and structure.

Some metals don't mix. They mix as liquids but as they cool they crystallize
differently, sometimes separating from each other. So an "alien alloy" could
be a mix that was formed by some advanced tech (zero-g fabrication, strong
magnetic fields etc) that we cannot replicate. Try getting a perfect
crystalline mix of steel and neon. Maybe it is a miracle substance. But we
don't know because we cannot fabricate such structures. If that showed up in a
lab it would be "alien".

A few years ago any jet engine would contain "alien alloys" in the sense that
nobody could have replicated the single-crystal structures now common in
blades.

------
eps
The NYT article they are discussing -

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-
prog...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-
harry-reid.html)

~~~
jwilk
HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940674)

------
_Codemonkeyism
Obviously there could be something we can't analyze.

But it would need to be based on a different structure than atoms, so not some
new element or alloy but something completely different. Say some hard matter
based on some condensed unknown field.

This sounds highly unprobable. But if true, this would have implications about
all of physics, not just some new material science.

------
noetic_techy
Alloy Test:

Is it in the alloy database? yes : no

Is its isotopic ratio terrestrial? yes : no

Does it appear manufactured or natural in elemental distribution? yes : no

If the answer is yes to the first two, then yes, the alloy is indeed
"mysterious". Simple as that. This article didn't debunk anything. It just
corrected a wording technicality.

------
legulere
One such "alien alloy" we still haven't been fully able to analyze or even
reproduce:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel)

~~~
naiyt
After reading that it sounds like they just haven't been able to reproduce the
process of making it, not that it's an alloy that they don't understand the
composition of.

~~~
rbanffy
Understanding the composition is just the first step of duplicating the
process that made something. It can be as simple as melting two bars of
different metals to etching elaborate patterns through complicated physical
and chemical processes.

------
chiefalchemist
Could it be we're confusing what an alloy (or some composite) is made of vs
_how_ it's made?

For example (and it's just an example for the sake of discussion), many here
couple probably analyze the skin of a stealth bomber and identify what it's
made of. But that still leaves how it was made.

It seems reasonable to think we have things - which could be non ET - that we
can't quite figure out and don't want anyone else to know either.

Obviously not a popular idea for HN but certainly not impossible.

------
ramgorur
What does it actually mean by "unknown alloy"? All periodic table
metal/metalloid elements can be extracted and detected. Even a standard high
school chemistry texts include these processes with wet experiments to be done
in the labs. Do they mean new element? If that is the case then those elements
must be radioactive. Or do they actually mean "known alloy with new
electromagnetic/crystalline properties"? Still it does not make any sense.

------
Animats
If it exists, it's probably some facility where broken debris from research
aircraft are stored. Edwards is always testing something, and when something
breaks, it gets studied.

I once worked in a hydraulics R&D facility which had a scanning electron
microscope. Parts which failed were examined to find out why. Their screen
usually showed broken edges of something under high magnification.

------
InclinedPlane
Let me break this down into a much simpler and more direct argument.

We have ways to very reliably identify the elemental composition of any
material you can imagine. That doesn't tell us how to manufacture that
material, but it does tell us what it's made out of. These are extremely
robust techniques (x-ray diffraction and x-ray fluorescence) that work on
anything made out of atoms.

The claim, any claim, of an "unidentifiable alloy" is simply _not credible_
without presenting x-ray fluorescence and x-ray diffraction data to back that
up.

It is infinitely more likely that no one examining these materials had such
instruments available to them, so they just sort of shrugged and said "I dunno
what it is" which then got telephone-gamed into "unidentifiable alloys!" along
the way. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is an
extraordinary claim with _no evidence_. So it is not a credible claim.

------
mncolinlee
Given that we discover new elements[1] from time to time, it's not impossible
that we'd discover a new alloy. However, something about this story is fishy
and is likely being blown out of proportion.

It's a common trope that there exists a "God of the gaps" where we fill in our
lack of understanding with God, ghosts, or aliens. If a door slams in your
house, it's seen as a ghost, rather than pressure equalizing between rooms.
This feels like an case where we attach our uncertainty to an explanation
before we have enough data to form a viable hypothesis.

[1] [https://www.lenntech.com/periodic-chart-
elements/discovery-y...](https://www.lenntech.com/periodic-chart-
elements/discovery-year.htm)

~~~
geon
> Given that we discover new elements[1] from time to time, it's not
> impossible that we'd discover a new alloy.

It should still be relatively simple to identify each of the elements in it by
it's atomic number. Our periodic table is complete to the 7:th row, and any
unknown (un-named) element with a higher atomic number would be very likely to
have a very short half life.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table)

------
blackflame7000
This biggest qualm I have about this article is that it attempts to disprove
alien tech using human tech. Any sufficiently advanced beings would appear to
us to be magical of sorts since they would have mastered elements of the
universe we don't even know exists. You cant simply say well since we've seen
these combinations of letters in the atomic alphabet we can therefore deduce
the meaning of all combinations. What if they discovered a noble gas in the
compound? (kryptonium perhaps) It would completely change the way we view
chemistry.

~~~
LoSboccacc
> it attempts to disprove alien tech using human tech

Not even that, it just goes babbling “impossible! Impossible!” - no trch nor
science involved, they basically asked two random scientists if they believed
in aliens, the answer was as predictable as pointless

------
goombastic
It's not an unknown alloy.

I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high
purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a
crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G
environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know
how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as
well. But I guess they genuinely don't understand how the layering was
achieved.

What they say they don't know is how to manufacture it.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Umm, care to provide a link or source?

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
I would hazard a guess that someone with access to that info wouldn't provide
a source were they to leak it, also that someone with access to a source
wouldn't leak it in such a public way or on HN.

Regardless, this explanation is now head-canon, regardless of whatever facts
or otherwise may present themselves.

------
wnevets
As Matt O'Dowd from PBS's Spacetime likes to say, it's never aliens.

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
thats the thing though, no one expects the spanish inquisition.

------
andrewflnr
For heaven's sake, we're not completely sure how Damascus steel was made, and
that was done by humans hundreds of years ago, with thousands of samples lying
around the world. And we're just supposed to assume that because we've tried
all the combinations of alloys we can think of, there are no other
possibilities?

Have some imagination. Think about nano-layering and quasicrystals, to say
nothing of stable-island heavy nuclei and other exotic forms of matter not
ruled out by physics as we know it. Come lecture me about impossibilities when
you've finished solving solid-state physics, mkay?

Those aren't technically "alloys"? Fine, but that's a useless nitpick in the
face of the actual question under consideration. Reading through the mistakes
of science-illiterate journalists and politicians should be a reflex by now;
you don't get any points for proving you have a better technical vocabulary
than they do.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is different. Any example of "Damascus steel" that you can point to you
can use an XRF device on to figure out the actual alloy composition. That
doesn't tell you exactly how to make it, it just tells you what elements it's
made out of.

~~~
andrewflnr
How is it different? You're practically making my point for me: knowing the
composition doesn't mean you understand a material in any meaningful way. If
the people supposedly running these warehouses are honest, we have to assume
they've done all the obvious tests and are still confused.

Just to belabor the point some more, we didn't know until recently that
damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes (probably derived from plant
material). Was an XRF machine ever going to pick that up? Not in any detail,
I'm guessing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel)

And this is all _without_ using any imagination. If you're dealing with the
question of alien technology, that's silly.

~~~
InclinedPlane
What point are you trying to make here? Again, the claim of an "unidentifiable
alloy" without XRF data backing it up is simply not credible. Period. Worse,
the claim here is of an "unidentifiable alloy" without any evidence
whatsoever. That is not credible.

The issue of being able to reproduce an alloy or material is an entirely
separate one from being able to identify what it's made out of. _Nobody_ calls
Damascus steel an "unidentifiable alloy". We know what it is, a type of steel,
we know what it's made out of. Whether or not we can manufacture something
with identical properties is irrelevant to whether or not we can identify it.

This whole "unidentifiable alloys" thing is a lot of meaningless speculation
that hinges on a throwaway phrase with zero evidence backing it up. Show me
the XRF data then we'll have a discussion. Until then it's just a bunch of hot
air.

------
mark-r
Aren't there Carbon configurations that we wouldn't have been able to identify
20 years ago? We would have been able to identify them as Carbon, but not
accounted for their unique properties. Maybe it's not completely far-fetched.

------
alkonaut
I’m not sure what the initial claim was about this material, but it could be
“exotic” even if it is identifiable.

If you sent a sample of carbon nanotubes to the 1950’s, they’d say “this is
carbon”. That doesn’t mean the sample wasn’t exotic to them and hard for them
to reproduce or understand.

An “alien material” or “alien alloy” would be one where we just didn’t
understand how it’s made, even if we can see perfectly how it’s structured and
what it consists of.

~~~
sgt101
Depends (on the CNT's) If you sent it to them anonymously in the post I agree,
it would probably have been binned. But if you said "this is special and
interesting, can you tell me why and here's $100k to do the work" then my
guess is that about three days later you would get a visit from a red eyed and
overwhelmingly excited person who would shout at you about allotropes of
carbon that could be conductive.

Then you'd get the "so how do we make them long enough to use and have a
reliable process that costs in" discussion, and I think that you'd be there
for about 70 years. Sadly, maybe longer...

------
jseip
Sad to see this (clickbait) story come from SI. No substantive refutation of
the evidence, just speculation and the truism that atomic components of any
alloy can be identified, which of course they can. But alloys -and
nanomaterials- can and do have extremely interesting properties independent of
their chemical composition and these are often non-obvious. SI completely
glosses over that point.

------
wybiral
What if it isn't actually an alloy but instead is some kind of alien-
engineered nanomaterial?

(This is purely scifi musing from my behalf, I don't believe in some kind of
cover-up at this scale.)

------
dpedu
Hmm, the article has no substance besides speculation from external scientists
based on the wording of the release. Not worth reading.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I read it as an extended argument for concluding that there is no such thing
as an 'unknown alloy.' I have seen this as a tactic to pressure people to
provide more details.

Simply writing "we don't believe them when they say this" doesn't carry as
much weight as "we don't believe them because x, y, and z."

------
LiweiZ
Might be interested for layman like me to take a look:

[http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread976484/pg44](http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread976484/pg44)

Electromagnetism, UFOs, and the Weaponization of Alien Technology(page 44)

------
theklub
Watch the Tom Delgone interview with Joe Rogan for some entertainment and
conspiracy in this vein...

~~~
R_haterade
Careful or you'll have everyone in this thread screaming about blue beams.

------
valuearb
There is a very simple explanation for why the alloys are so mysterious.

Harry Reid was able to get the program funded, and directed most of the $22M
in spending to one of his closest backers, Robert Bigelow so he could build a
fancy warehouse. If that fancy warehouse wasn't storing super valuable alien
artifacts it just looks like Reid filling the pockets of a close friend with
government monies, and people might think Bigelow might be laundering that
money to pay back to Reid after his retirement.

Since both of these upstanding citizens are known to have such high ethics
that can't be possible, clearly the warehouse was full of priceless alien
stuff. We can scientifically examine these alloys right now, except Reid
agreed to cancel the program, because of deficits? or Harry's retirement
accounts were fully funded.

But we also have an esteemed government director who can corroborate all of
this, Luis Elizondo. He has no reason to make up sensationalistic stories,
he's too busy helping Tom Delonge convince backers to fund the "To The Stars
Academy of Arts & Science" to research alien stuff, and which supposedly is
contractually obligated to pay Tom $100,000 a year once funded. What it's
going to pay Luis is no-ones business.

Yep, completely on the level. Can't understand why these scientists are so
skeptical.

~~~
reaperducer
While I don't doubt that Harry Reid is as corrupt a politician and as expert
at funneling money to his cronies as, say, the late Robert Byrd was; there are
A LOT easier and quieter ways of making it happen.

Especially for a sum as small as $22 million. Even county-level politicians
can make that amount of money disappear without a trace and without leaving
behind a warehouse and a paper trail.

To play the other side: What we have in the linked article is a couple of
people who have never seen the objects in question stating categorically that
they don't exist, or are ordinary. I'd believe the skeptics more if they'd at
least _seen_ the objects. But it's just a couple of guys several thousand
miles away second-guessing some other guys with actual access to the objects.

Thanks, for the clickbait, SI. Next...

~~~
titzer
I dunno, I read the article and the "guy a thousand miles away" gave pretty
damn good reasoning why it'd be short work to identify and categorize "alien
alloys".

Or do you have an actual argument as to why these materials couldn't be
readily identified and studied by competent physicists using well known
technology?

~~~
byebyetech
Would a material composed using highly advanced nanotechnology have strange
properties purely due to its structure? Does it have to be an alloy?

~~~
ridgeguy
Yes, and it doesn't have to be an alloy.

Structure is the basis for 'invisibility cloaks', materials with small-scale
structures which confer optical properties not found in the same unstructured
bulk materials. [1]

Another example of where structure confers strange properties on elements (not
alloys) is light emission from indirect-gap materials like silicon. Make
silicon particles small enough and you can get light emission that you can't
from bulk silicon. See quantum dots [2] and other similar structures.

Structure can really change things.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_cloaking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_cloaking)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot)

~~~
QAPereo
One key point is that metamaterials have unusual _bulk_ properties, but
they’re still made from the usual materials, alloys, etc.

------
donald_knuth
As a former scientist well practiced in x-ray diffraction it has been really
fun watching these blatant flasehoods spread. We have mastered identifying the
atomic structure of materials.

Sadly spreading these claims is how these programs self propegate. Luckily
they don't do much real damage other than misleading the public and wasting
government funding.

~~~
fastball
You don't think a civilization with sufficiently advanced nanotech could
fabricate a material that would flummox x-ray diffraction? That seems a bit
short-sighted to me. Our imaging and composition technologies are not
sufficiently advanced to determine exact structures of anything - we still
have to include many assumptions in order for the data to make sense.

For x-ray diffraction in particular, we assume all materials are made from
atoms. However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don't think
it's possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom
part?

~~~
mindcrime
_However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don 't think it's
possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom
part?_

This sounds like pure sci-fi to me. AFAIK, everything we know about physics
suggests that there are no stable substances made up of sub-atomic particles
in a way that "skips the atom part". If that were possible, it would be in the
realm of "entirely new physics".

Not to say that it's not possible of course... you don't know what you don't
know and all that. But the Standard Model seems to be pretty firmly grounded
and I haven't seen anything to suggest that it allows for such a thing.
Personally, my bayesian prior on this being possible would be awfully close to
0 right now.

Then again, maybe it's Dwarf Star Alloy.[1]

[1]: tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dwarf_star_alloy

~~~
stordoff
Close to but definitely non-zero IMO. The quark model has been around for less
than 100 years; push that out to, say, 1000 year time-scale, and I could
certainly see it developing entirely new physics compared to what we now know.
The Standard Model is well-founded, but explaining the things it currently
doesn't (gravity/dark energy/neutrino masses etc.) could well require it.

------
monochromatic
This is kind of a ridiculous article. The main point seems to be that some
scientists (who have nothing to do with this supposed UFO research) say that
all known alloys are known, and that it would be surprising to find one that
couldn’t be figured out.

Well, no shit.

------
api
Just to play devils' advocate:

I totally believe that we could identify any normal alloy, but what about more
far-out kinds of materials? Humans have already experimented with
metamaterials, weird composites made of many different kinds of constituents
layered or interposed in various ways, materials with embedded electronic or
even "smart" computational capabilities, etc.

Now imagine what a more advanced civilization might be capable of producing.
I'm imagining a composite with embedded "smart" programmable behaviors that is
3d printed at the atomic scale. Every single atom is positioned intentionally
to yield "smart matter" with incredible strength or other really exotic
capabilities.

I can imagine it being difficult to identify or characterize such a thing
without destructive testing, and if we did have such a sample we'd probably be
very reluctant to do that.

