UFOs & Electric / Hybrid Vehicles

[Tunn11]

I couldn't find a thread on the effect of UFOs on car engines, but I know it crops up in various sightings. I was wondering whether there have been any reports of the supposed effect on all electric or hybrid motors? I thought I'd seen somewhere something about differing effects on petrol and diesel engines, but I don't recall anything on the effects on the increasingly common electric and electric hybrid - or hydrogen fueled engines for that matter. Differing effects may shed some light on the cause. Perhaps the reticulans approve of them and leave them alone?

 

[feinman]

I couldn't find a thread on the effect of UFOs on car engines, but I know it crops up in various sightings. I was wondering whether there have been any reports of the supposed effect on all electric or hybrid motors? I thought I'd seen somewhere something about differing effects on petrol and diesel engines, but I don't recall anything on the effects on the increasingly common electric and electric hybrid - or hydrogen fueled engines for that matter. Differing effects may shed some light on the cause. Perhaps the reticulans approve of them and leave them alone?

Take a look in
Historic UFO Encounters: Newspaper Articles
there are a number of them, but not for electric motors or hybrid motors.
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/historic-ufo-encounters-newspaper-articles.65811/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Interesting question ...

If there are relevant clues, they are to be found in reports where a vehicle stalled during a UFO sighting. The main problem with this is that the reports of cars (etc.) stalling when a UFO is present aren't all that common, and the examples documented for this effect tend to date back to the Sixties and earlier.

Come to think of it, I can't think of a single case in more recent decades that mentions an engine stalling when a UFO is observed nearby.

This may be a clue in and of itself, because it suggests the UFO-stalling-engines-effect seems to have existed (or at least been far more extant) back in the days before electronic ignition control systems became standard.

Kevin Randle posted a couple of items to his blog back in April 2014 that focused on this effect. Both can be found on this single webpage:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/cars-stalled-by-ufos-part-two.html

 

[EnolaGaia]

Randle attributes the engine stalling effect to electromagnetic (EM) interference of some sort, which apparently interferes with the electrical circuit or power fed to the spark plugs in a sparked-combustion engine.

A fairly obvious alternative hypothesis would be that the interference is with the fuel supply itself. However, earlier engines (e.g., from the time period of stalling reports) were carburetted and used mechanical fuel pumps rather than the electrical pumps common today. The introduction of the electrical pumps strongly correlates with the introduction of electronic fuel injection (EFI).

Because the bulk of the stalling stories come from the era of mechanical fuel pumps it suggests the interference effect concerned the spark rather than the fuel supply.

Randle provides an example that further illustrates how the interference seems to have been specific to the ignition system. He refers to Mark Rodeghier’s UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference:

Rodeghier reported that for a long time that it was only the gasoline engines that stalled but diesel engines seemed to be immune. Rodeghier wrote, “For example, a UFO passed over two tractors in Forli, Italy, on November 14, 1954, one tractor with a diesel engine the other with an internal combustion engine. The engine of the diesel tractor continued to operate, but the other tractor’s engine stopped and could not be started until the UFO had vanished.”

NOTE: Rodeghier's 1981 book can be accessed at CUFOS.org.

Because the diesel engine ignites its fuel by compression rather than an electrical spark, it doesn't require an electrical input to keep running (at least for older diesels with mechanically controlled injectors and mechanical fuel pumps).

 

[EnolaGaia]

Some - but not all - engine stalling stories include mention of the car's lights dimming. There are also stories that mention the lights dimming or cutting out entirely without the engine being affected much or at all. There are less frequent mentions of radios and / or other electrical accessories fading or dying while a UFO is nearby.

The most obvious electrical effect consistent with this bag of symptoms is a current drain / voltage drop.

I haven't invested the time and effort to read through all of Rodeghier's examples, but ... I haven't yet seen any report that claims the vehicle's battery was dead or completely drained once the UFO moved away.

On the one hand I seriously doubt anyone thought to check their battery's charge in the aftermath of an encounter, meaning there's no basis for claiming there's a loss of stored charge. On the other hand I can't come up with a reasonable explanation for how there could be a current / voltage dropout without there being some sort of drain or drain-like effect.

My first wild guess would be that a pure (non-hybrid) EV might be stalled or have diminished power during such a UFO encounter. It would be interesting to learn whether the onboard charge meter / indicator was registering lower / less after the encounter was done.

 

[Frasier Buddolph]

Not to hijack the thread, but when a Russian pilot defector landed his MIG-25 fighter in Japan in 1976, there was a lot of hooting and hawing because the plane's control system actually contained vacuum tubes. Come to find out, vacuum tubes are much less sensitive than solid state devices to EMP. Whether or not it would have made the MIG more survivable in a nuclear battlefield environment, I can't say.

Could one infer from this that modern automotive electronics are more susceptible to electrical interference than those of, say, fifty years ago? Of course, modern systems are much better shielded and hardened against electronic interference.

Automotive electronics fifty years ago were pretty rudimentary. Seems to me the ET's must have been employing a very peculiar type of interference to shut them down.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Oh, yes ... It was well known that the Soviet Union continued to rely on vacuum tubes long after the West had mainly switched over to solid state circuitry, and it was suspected as early as the 1960s that reliance on solid state circuitry represented a potential vulnerability in nuclear exchange scenarios. This led to a series of innovative countermeasures including a hardened computer-based comm and C4I system - the ancestor of the Internet you're using now.

The "new news" as of the mid-1970s lay in discovering the extent to which the Soviets had extended and refined vacuum tube technology.

Moving back to the topic at hand ...

The engine stalling effects of the earlier reports couldn't have been related to electronic (as opposed to electrical) interference, because vehicle engines of that time didn't use electronic control units. The only electronic components on mass market vehicles up through the 1960s were the radios and audio components.

This means the related (but not clearly connected) reports of radios going nuts or spewing static noise were the only elements of the reports that could have involved electronic issues.

 

[Tunn11]

Thanks, all. Interesting. Given the mention of aircraft, what about aircraft engines and communications? I don't know a lot about UFO sightings and I can only think of Frederick Valentich and Mantell, the latter being attributed to him blacking out by flying too high rather than any possible problems with the engine. Incidents involving aircraft often seem to involve radio conversations with air traffic control etc. - so no break up of that signal. So unless many aircraft crashes are caused by UFO interaction and we don't know about it, there doesn't seem to be any interference; although a car stalling isn't as serious as an aircraft stalling. In fact there seem to be more supposed UFO crashes than air crashes caused by UFOs?

 

[Sid]

Oh, yes ... It was well known that the Soviet Union continued to rely on vacuum tubes long after the West had mainly switched over to solid state circuitry, and it was suspected as early as the 1960s that reliance on solid state circuitry represented a potential vulnerability in nuclear exchange scenarios. This led to a series of innovative countermeasures including a hardened computer-based comm and C4I system - the ancestor of the Internet you're using now.

The "new news" as of the mid-1970s lay in discovering the extent to which the Soviets had extended and refined vacuum tube technology.

Moving back to the topic at hand ...

The engine stalling effects of the earlier reports couldn't have been related to electronic (as opposed to electrical) interference, because vehicle engines of that time didn't use electronic control units. The only electronic components on mass market vehicles up through the 1960s were the radios and audio components.

This means the related (but not clearly connected) reports of radios going nuts or spewing static noise were the only elements of the reports that could have involved electronic issues.

Rather interestingly 'EnolaGaia,' is the distorted, and non-working effects of all the instrumentation which was being used on an Skinwalker Ranch investigation programme just recently shown on Blaze Channel.

 

[RaM]

A friend once told me her ex hubby was on the way home late one night on the A635 Holmfirth rd
he was in a newish then Vauxhall Viva, when everything turned green, the car cut out and coasted to
a stop, he got out and everything had a green glow but did not see anything else, after 10 or 15
min the green glow slowly faded he was able to start the car and go on is marry way, never mentioned
it again it can be very quiet and bleak up there, it was the road linked to the moors murder case.
Only other thing that could have any bearing on it is that the Emley Moor high power tv transmitter
is line of sight on that road.