Imagine that a machine scoops up the device you’re using to read this story right from your hands. It sends the elaborately designed and carefully assembled mix of silicon, plastic, and glass back 50,000 years through time, dropping it into the gnarled paws of a Neanderthal man. Your ancestor stares fearfully at the glowing box, then tosses it to the dirt at his bare feet. He’s unable to identify the strange object or grasp how this technology—indecipherable from magic—could improve his world.
Return to 2025, and you’ll find rumors the U.S. military allegedly has its own version of that Neanderthal’s magic box: an arsenal of recovered alien artifacts scavenged from crashed UFOs, laden with technology humans haven’t yet grasped.
Such reports on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) have come from high-ranking officials. During a startling Congressional hearing in the summer of 2023, for instance, David Grusch, a former member of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, claimed that current and former U.S. military and intelligence officials had informed him of a “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program.” While explosive, the claims remain unproven and rest entirely with one person, Popular Mechanics previously reported.
Still, it’s a common practice to tinker with others’ technology in hopes of creating your own, better version. In the defense world, this process of reverse engineering is secretly used to copy stealth secrets for jets or steal groundbreaking missile concepts; in the private sector, it’s openly used to understand and reproduce everything from software to complex machines.
To successfully reverse engineer a technology, researchers must decode the target object’s purpose and makeup (without destroying it!) before reproducing it. In theory, the same should be true in gathering, taking apart, and learning from extraterrestrial technology—that is, if it exists. So, we spoke with experts to learn more about what exactly the reverse engineering process entails, and just how difficult it would be to extract the secrets of alien technology.
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