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The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
Are we alone in the vast expanse of the Cosmos?
Hope is why we buy lottery tickets, bet on horses, believe in life after death and search for intelligent life in the Cosmos. It’s ironic, however, that we are searching for ET when there is overwhelming evidence that ET has already found us! So, let’s explore the world of flying saucers, what really happened at Roswell, the five kinds of close encounters, the SETI Institute’s search for extra compelling evidence, ECO Planets and what famous and not-so-famous men and women have said about aliens and flying saucers.
Unidentified Flying Objects
“Look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a… Flying Saucer!
Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have intrigued people for thousands of years. Researchers now call them Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), but the message is the same… millions of people have seen strange objects doing strange things in the sky. Yes, four out of every five (about 80%) have proven to be Identified Flying Objects (IFOs), but one out every five (about 20%) remain Unidentified.
Sightings in the Identified category (IFOs) are frequently ascribed to the validity of Occam’s Razor, the assumption that the simplest, most rational explanation is the correct one, and that witnesses have misidentified natural phenomena.
★Pelicans flying in formation. ★Venus, the brightest planet in the night sky. ★Lightning balls, meteors, lenticular clouds, and weather balloons. ★Reflections of headlights, search lights, or a lighthouse off a cloud or an overcast sky. ★Planes and helicopters. ★Hoaxes, hallucinations and false memories.
Sightings in the Unidentified category frequently include evidence that the observer has not misidentified the aerial phenomena, that flying saucers are real physical objects.
★ UFO movements that contradict the known laws of physics — extreme accelerations, sudden stops, and hovering without wings and noise.
★ Confirmation from others who also saw the phenomena.
★Imprints, rings and burn marks on the ground.
★Videos and photographs found to not be digitally altered.
★Radiation burns and brain damage confirmed by MRI Scans.
★Stars blocked by the UFO as it moved across the sky.
★Pilots watching a UFO fly next to their airplane.
★Weapons disabled when pilots attempted to shoot down a UFO. ★Unidentified radar blips confirmed by visual observations.
The Roswell Crash Site
Interest in UFOs intensified in 1947 when a flying saucer crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Despite thousands of UFO incidents since then, Roswell remains the most famous and most researched. Here are key reasons why.
✦ There were dozens of military and civilian witnesses.
✦ The government confiscated all the physical evidence.
✦ The witnesses were warned to keep quiet or else.
✦ The Air Force claimed crash site debris was a weather balloon.
✦ A telegram (circled) to General Vandenburg proved they were lying.
The words VICTIM and DISC should convince even a hard- core skeptic that Roswell is the crash site of a flying disc craft with a dead crew found on the inside. This has been corroborated by the testimony of military and civilian witnesses who saw the debris, the craft, and the bodies and decided to reveal the things they were told to remain silent about. Some, like First Lieutenant Walter Haut, came out of the closet years later to tell what they knew about the incident. After Haut’s death, ufologist Donald R. Schmitt’s published Witness to Roswell in which he relates his interview with Haut, who supposedly said, “I saw four little creatures with large hairless heads, big eyes and long fingers and one was still alive.”
Close Encounters
Despite the overwhelming evidence that we are being visited regularly by aliens from outer space, people are still ridiculed for claiming they saw or had an encounter with a flying saucer. Eyewitnesses have credibility in a court of law, but it’s the lowest form of evidence in the courts of science and common sense. So, it’s not surprising that skeptics are still saying, “It can’t be, so it isn’t. Sightings are the result of hallucinations, hoaxes or hyperbola.”
✦ First Kind… you spot something in the sky and it leaves no evidence.
✦ Second Kind… you see physical evidence of the UFO’s visit to Earth.
✦ Third Kind… you touch a UFO and/or see the occupants of the UFO.
✦ Fourth Kind… you are abducted for medical, zoological or genetic purposes.
✦ Fifth Kind… you communicate telepathically with aliens from another world.
The first two kinds are more likely to pique your interest and curiosity than to cause death or injury. The third kind could expose you to dangerous radiation. The fourth kind could end like the Twilight Zone episode titled To Serve Man. The fifth kind typically results by going outside with likeminded ufologists to mentally invite conversations with aliens. Skeptics warn ufologists that the aliens might transmit telepathic messages to influence us in ways that serve their purposes, not ours.
Where? Why? Who? What?
The alien in Spielberg’s movie E. T. was an odd-looking creature — like a turtle with a long neck. But ET was a friendly, likeable, intelligent being. So, he didn’t phone home to summon death and destruction on planet Earth. He just wanted to go home. But that was Hollywood. In the real world, who knows where they came from, why they are here, or what they look like. Are they gray or goofy? Friend or foe? Fact or fiction?
Do they look like us? Two legs, two arms, two eyes and a head centered on their shoulders? Do they walk upright on two legs or move with their arms and legs? Think of the advantages of symmetry. Two eyes are generally better than one because it makes depth perception possible. At least two legs are necessary for locomotion, and at least two arms are required to hold and handle tools. More than two legs or arms would require that the location of the third appendage not upset the creature’s balance.
The building blocks of life on Earth — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen — are the most chemically reactive elements in the universe. So, it’s likely that life on other planets would have evolved in ways similar to life on Earth.
Put yourself in their shoes, metaphorically speaking. If you were planning to investigate the inhabitants of the Amazon jungle, for example, and your initial research has revealed that more than a few of the tribes down there were cannibals, you would probably send intermediaries — biological androids, programmed robots, or minions of some sort — so you and your fellow aliens wouldn’t end up in the pot!
The SETI Institute
Some think SETI is as much a search for us as it is a search for others. Who are we? Where did we come from? How do we fit into the grand scheme? Are we the result of divine creation or millions of years of evolution? With everything you’ve read about UFOs as a context, let’s get into the details of how and why scientists at the SETI institute are searching the universe for intelligent life.
Drake’s Famous Formula
The Drake Equation estimates N, the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable. The value of N has been debated extensively, but Drake thought N equals 10,000 based on his guess that one transmitting society is produced every year and lasts about 10,000 years.
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His guess that an intelligent species lasts about 10,000 years calls attention to Enrico Fermi, a physicist who asked, “Where is everybody?” His question is called the Fermi Paradox. His answer is that intelligent beings are extremely rare and those that do exist create civilizations that don’t last long enough to connect with any other intelligent beings in the Cosmos. Makes me wonder how long we Earthlings will last before we nuke ourselves into extinction.
Exoplanets
Researchers have discovered thousands of exoplanets but only a few have satisfied the criteria of Astrobiology. The most important is that the eco-planet has survived long enough for living things to evolve into sentient, intelligent beings with a technology capable of sending and receiving radio signals.
Drake’s formula plays a role in the search for planets like Earth that would support life as we know it. But it does not answer the questions that the search for extra-terrestrial life has raised. What is life? What is intelligence? What is sentience? If we encounter life on another planet, will we be able to recognize it? Will we be able to distinguish life from non-life?
The theory of spontaneous generation held sway into the nineteenth century. Some living things were known to be alive — humans, dogs, horses, seeds, trees. But sometimes life just happened. When meat sat out too long, maggots emerged. A rotting log sprouted mushrooms… life from not-life! But the same year that Darwin published the Origin of Species (1859) Louis Pasteur put spontaneous generation to bed. So, we are now better equipped to detect life from non-life.
We are, however, stuck with the idea that detection of living things rests on the chemistry we know from life on Earth. So, we might not detect life with a different cellular structure. A more productive approach might be to search for life by its complexity, not by its chemistry. The current criterion for exoplanets is, however, based on the same biochemistry as life on Earth.
✦ It orbits its sun at a distance that keeps temperatures neither too hot nor too cold.
✦ It allows water to remain liquid on large portions of its surface.
✦ It spins quickly enough so day and night temperature differences are not extreme.
✦ It has enough mass so its gravity can hold an atmosphere.
Einstein’s Famous Formula
Einstein’s formula has implications beyond the explosive power of atomic bombs. One is how the speed of light impacts our search for life in the Cosmos. Conventional wisdom claims the distance between Earth and other planets makes it unlikely we will ever meet intelligent life face to face. Even if we receive a signal from ET, he would have died long before the signal reached Earth. Physicists have proposed theories of alternate modes of interstellar travel and radio communication. ★Worm holes and space warping to bring two locations closer together. ★Anti-gravity devices and warp drives so the speed of light doesn’t prevent shaking hands with aliens.
The Voyager Spacecraft
The Voyager took the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence beyond listening for signals from aliens. It carries two gold plated records. One contains sounds and images to portray the diversity of life on Earth. The other contains symbols to show the aliens how to play the records and how to find us if they decide to visit Earth.
The Voyager is like launching a bottle into the cosmic ocean. ~Carl Sagan
Food for Thought… Quotes
“It’s not a matter of belief if other life forms exist. The formation of life is a cosmic urge, as inevitable as the formation of atoms.” ~William Shatner
“Skepticism and wonder make strange bedfellows but a good marriage, for one must be open to ideas but willing to run them through a rigorous filter.” ~Carl Sagan
“We excavated the crash site and found a V-shaped ditch exactly as the witnesses recalled after the military cleanup. Something a balloon simply cannot do.”
“I’ve never seen a whale, but I’ve read many credible reports of their existence and yet nobody has ever asked me if I believe in whales.” ~J. Allen Hynek
“There is more evidence that UFOs exist than evidence that God exists.” ~George Carlin
“It’s arrogant to declare Earth is the only planet with life.” ~Neil deGrasse Tyson
“How quickly differences would vanish if we faced an alien threat.” ~Ronald Reagan
“The power of the government depends on people being afraid of something — communism, terrorism, asteroids and now extraterrestrials.” ~Shirley MacLaine
“If aliens were to visit us, the outcome would be like when Columbus landed in America — it didn’t turn out well for the Natives.” ~Stephen Hawking
“It is difficult to name another subject so quickly identifiable, so widely debated, so easily dismissed, and yet so little understood as extraterrestrial life.” ~ Garrett Graff
“Truth is furiously refuted, violently opposed, then accepted.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
“Aliens visiting Earth would conclude Earthlings are a primitive species whose chief obsession is tribal warfare.” ~Stanton Friedman
“As more exoplanets are discovered and more scientists will embrace the probability that life exists, the importance of studying UFOs will be more imperative.” ~Leslie Kean
Food for Thought… Research
Astrobiology
Avi Loeb’s Oumuamua Asteroid
Center for UFO Studies
Jessie Marcel Junior’s Testimony
Mutual UFO Network
NASA’s Search for Life
Roswell Witness Walter Haut
Skeptic Society on UFOs
The Fermi Paradox
The Roswell Incident
The SETI Institute
The “Take Me to Your Leader” book
The UFO Chronicles
The “Witness to Roswell” Book
UFO Skeptic Mike West
UFO Investigator George Knapp
UFO Reporter Leslie Kean
