Faint Echoes, Distant Stars

by Ben Bova

  Karl T. Pflock, who describes himself as a “pro-UFO-logist,” investigated the Roswell incident over many years, at first as a believer in the alien flying saucer story. But the deeper he probed, the more the story unraveled. There were no alien crew members, alive or dead. Much to his personal disappointment, Pflock came to the conclusion that the Roswell UFO never existed, although a Pentagon cover-up certainly did, for nearly half a century.

  THE HILLS’ ABDUCTION

  Over the years, UFO stories have moved from mere sightings of strange flying objects to tales of kidnappings by aliens.

  The classic case is the “abduction” of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. According to their story, Mr. and Mrs. Hill were driving late at night along a country road in New Hampshire. They stopped to look at what seemed to be a brightly shining object that had landed in front of their car. The next they remembered, they were driving along another section of road, miles from where they had stopped. A look at their watches told them that two hours had passed; they remembered nothing of the elapsed time.

  Weeks later, plagued by uneasiness and bad dreams over the missing time, they went to a psychiatrist who hypnotized them separately and instructed them not to discuss what they remembered with each other. They individually remembered seeing a craft of some sort on the ground. Although they tried to run away, they were somehow brought inside the spacecraft against their will. The aliens subjected them to medical examinations, taking skin and hair samples, probing Betty’s abdomen with a needle in what the aliens said (telepathically) was a pregnancy test, and taking a sperm sample from Barney. Then the Hills were returned to their car and their memories erased.

  The Hills became famous, or infamous, depending on how much of their story you believe. Hypnotic regression is a notoriously unreliable method for recovering “lost” information; the patient is terribly vulnerable to suggestions planted by the therapist, even though the therapist might be acting in perfectly good faith and planting the suggestions unknowingly.

  Barney Hill died a few years afterward, while Betty became something of a media star among the UFO believers. She even draw diagrams that she said were star maps she remembered seeing inside the alien spacecraft. Analyses of her drawings by astronomers drew a blank; they did not resemble any recognizable constellations.

  Perhaps the Hills were perfectly truthful. Perhaps their memories were accurate and they really were abducted briefly by aliens. We have no way of knowing. There is no evidence except their unsupported word. As Sagan said, many times, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  Evidence or no, abduction stories became standard fare among UFO enthusiasts. Their psychosexual overtones of helpless women being subjected to weird medical procedures make one wonder what the purported aliens might be up to.

  ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS

  Meanwhile, in 1969, Erich Von Daniken created a worldwide sensation with his wildly popular book, Chariots of the Gods?, in which he proposed that “ancient astronauts” had visited the Earth thousands of years ago and helped to build the pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, and other mammoth architectural works.

  Von Daniken’s thesis was that such massive undertakings were far beyond the limited technical abilities of mere human prehistoric societies. The ancient astronauts moved the multi-ton stones of the pyramids, carved the enigmatic stone statues of Easter Island, raised the giant monoliths of Stonehenge, even laid out the mysterious drawings in the high desert at Nazca, Peru (as possible landing fields for flying saucers, no less). His technique was to ask how and why primitive human societies could have accomplished such wonders. His suggested answer was that they were helped by alien visitors, for reasons of their own.

  The fact that most of these “mysteries” were not mysterious at all did not bother Von Daniken one bit. Nor his readers, who were ignorant of the facts unearthed (literally) by archaeologists and anthropologists. For example, the Egyptians left plenty of evidence about how they built the pyramids, using enormous numbers of laborers who worked with ropes, rollers, ramps, and plenty of sweat. Human engineering and organizational skills were all that was needed to build these ancient wonders. The Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl showed how the gigantic stone statues of Easter Island can be carried from the island’s hillside quarries down to the beach and erected overnight with nothing more than pulleys and earthen ramps.

  But to millions of enthralled readers, Von Daniken’s tantalizing suggestion that we have been visited and even guided by beneficent aliens was much more satisfying than the raised eyebrows of his detractors.

  PERSONAL REMARKS

  I believe that life exists beyond Earth. I believe that intelligent life must exist somewhere in the vast universe of stars and galaxies. I recognize that there is, as yet, no evidence to support this belief of mine.

  Precisely because I am a “believer,” in this sense, I remain guardedly skeptical about claims of UFOs, alien abductions, and ancient astronauts. It is all too easy to fall for unsupported stories that tell us what we want to believe. I would like to see some scrap of hard, palpable evidence; maybe as much as a person would take to traffic court to prove he wasn’t illegally parked when he got a ticket.

  I can relate three incidents in my own experience that have shaped my attitude about UFOs: my own UFO sighting, a laboratory analysis of a metal sample purportedly taken from a UFO, and an encounter with the redoubtable Herr Von Daniken.

  My UFO sighting. I was having brunch with my family in the restaurant atop the Prudential Tower in Boston. It was a sparkling clear Sunday morning, and from our window-side seat we could see all the way out to the hills of New Hampshire. Suddenly I noticed, off on that distant horizon, a small red aircraft darting back and forth at impossible speeds, making maneuvers that no human airplane could make. A UFO! I thought.

  Fortunately, there was an observation deck one floor below the restaurant. I raced down and trained one of the telescopes there on the UFO. It turned out to be a child’s kite. Instead of being far off on the horizon, it was only a few blocks away. With no way to judge its true distance, my mind assumed at first that it was on the horizon. At that distance, its stunts and speeds were phenomenal. At the distance of a few blocks away, it was quite normal.

  A laboratory analysis. When I was the editor of Omni magazine, we worked hard to track down UFO stories. They always somehow vanished into smoke and air. One day a gentleman came into my office bearing a sliver of metal that, he claimed, had been scraped from the hull of a flying saucer. “It’s unlike any metal on Earth,” he kept repeating.

  It struck me and the rest of the editorial staff that it might be pretty difficult to scratch off a sliver of such a metal. We suggested that we take it to a reputable metallurgy laboratory for analysis. The visitor was very reluctant to do so. At last, after several hours, we persuaded him to go to Boston with one of our editors and have the sample analyzed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He agreed only after we promised to pay all the expenses for the trip.

  MIT reported that the metal was ordinary aluminum, the stuff of cooking pots and skillets. It may have come from the hull of a flying saucer; aluminum is a good structural metal for flying vehicles. But it certainly was not “unlike any metal on Earth.”

  Erich Von Daniken. I was invited to appear on a televised panel discussion with Von Daniken in Toronto. He spoke about certain passages in the Old Testament that showed that Moses may have used a laser weapon against the enemies of the Israelites. And where could he get a laser in those ancient times, except from visiting aliens? Watching his performance, I began to understand the technique of half-truths that he was using. When it came my turn to speak, I said that by using the same technique that Von Daniken used, I could show that Manhattan was built by ancient astronauts.

  The show’s host was intrigued and asked me to proceed.

  There is plenty of evidence that mysterious Manhattan was built by ancient astronauts, I began. For example, there is a park in
the middle of the island that is perfectly rectangular, but you can’t see its rectangular shape from the ground. You must be high in the air, perhaps even in orbit, to see the true shape of Central Park. Then, too, the main thoroughfares of Manhattan run north-south, the same alignment as the Earth’s magnetic field.

  What do people call the tallest buildings in Manhattan? Skyscrapers. Where do these towers point? Toward the stars. Moreover, there is a giant copper statue in Manhattan’s harbor that no human being could possibly build. (A team of humans could and did, but no individual could raise the Statue of Liberty by himself.)

  The show’s host and the other panelists guffawed. Von Daniken left and returned to his native Switzerland.

  EVIDENCE VS. OPINION

  Skepticism is a valuable trait, although it can be carried too far.

  Thomas Jefferson did not believe that meteors were bodies of rock and metal that fell to Earth from outer space. When informed that two professors at Yale had claimed so, he said, “I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than stones fall out of the sky.”

  The essence of science is measurement and proof. Ideas must be tested before they are accepted as valid. Indeed, this concept of testability is central to scientific understanding. Every idea, every measurement, must be tested to see if it holds up under examination.

  When claims of UFO sightings, alien abductions, and ancient astronauts are tested, they wither into empty air. We are left with a person’s story about a strange experience; there is no palpable evidence to back up the story. Much evidence has been offered, but it invariably turns out to be either wrong or an outright hoax.

  For example, UFO publications printed photographs of eerie lights photographed by American astronauts from one of the early Gemini flights. Photographic proof that their spacecraft had been accompanied by UFOs! James Oberg, who spent years ferreting out the secrets of the Soviet space program during the Cold War, established that the photographs actually showed the running lights of an Agena module that the Gemini craft eventually linked to. In the photo that the UFO magazines published, the Agena was in the dark shadow of the Earth’s night side and all that could be seen of it was its running lights. The next exposure on the same roll of film showed the Agena in daylight. No mystery. No UFO.

  Thinking about the differences between SETI researchers and UFO believers, Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, put it this way in the December 2001 issue of Scientific American:

  A clear distinction can be made between SETI scientists and UFO-logists. SETI scientists begin with the null hypothesis that ETIs (extraterrestrial intelligences) do not exist and that they must provide concrete evidence before making the extraordinary claim that we are not alone in the universe. UFO-logists begin with the positive hypothesis that ETIs exist and have visited us, then employ questionable research techniques to support that belief, such as hypnotic regression (revelations of abduction experiences), anecdotal reasoning (countless stories of UFO sightings), conspiratorial thinking (governmental cover-ups of alien encounters), low-quality evidence (blurry photographs and grainy videos), and anomalistic thinking (atmospheric anomalies and visual misperceptions by eyewitnesses).

  Isaac Asimov once said that he had no argument with reports of UFOs. “It’s the IFOs that bother me,” he added. Yes, there are unidentified objects seen in the sky. But the conclusion that these unidentified objects are extraterrestrial visitors is unsupported by any solid evidence, even after more than half a century.

  Turn the question around. Look at the UFO phenomenon from the viewpoint of the alleged alien visitors. If you had traveled across many light-years of space and found a planet that bears intelligent life, would you confine your activities to stunt flying in the dark of night and abducting random individuals for obscure medical examinations? More likely you would either announce your presence in an unmistakable manner or you would keep yourself hidden from human detection while you study the Earth and its inhabitants without interfering with the subject of your study.

  There may be myriads of highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Their representatives may indeed be swarming over our planet. We simply have no credible evidence of it.

  Arthur C. Clarke is even harsher in his judgment. In the preface to the 2001 reissue of his 1953 classic science fiction novel, Childhood’s End, Clarke said that although he had once been “impressed” with claims of paranormal powers and UFOs, now he had become “almost a total skeptic.” He goes on to berate the media that “cynically exploit . . . the gullible.”

  Bookstores, newsstands, and airwaves are all polluted with mind-rotting bilge about UFOs, psychic powers, astrology, pyramid energies, channeling—you name it, someone is peddling it in a final outburst of fin-de-siécle decadence.

  William Alschuler, in his book The Science of UFOs, summarizes more dryly: “UFOs and abductions have remained irreproducible phenomena, without supporting, accepted physical evidence.”

  During the American Civil War, when reports from the battlefields were often unreliable, many newspapers used a headline that warned their readers that the story they were about to read might not be accurate. The headline was “Good News, If True.”

  That is how I feel about UFO reports. It would be wonderful to know that we are being visited by intelligent aliens. But I doubt that it’s true.

  Section V

  Tomorrow

  Epilogue: An Agenda for the Future

  There can be no thought of finishing, for “aiming at the stars,” both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.

  —Robert Goddard

  THE STAGE IS SET for the biggest discovery in human history, the discovery of extraterrestrial life, the proof that we are not alone in the universe. And, in tandem with this, astrobiologists will create life in their laboratories out of nonliving chemicals.

  I believe that these two breakthroughs are inevitable, and that they will come soon, perhaps within the next decade. When they are accomplished, we will know for certain that life is an integral part of the universe, not a statistical fluke or the special, onetime act of a creator. Life—you and I—are as much a part of the universe as the stars and planets.

  This prediction is based on the tremendous strides that have been made in the past ten years:

  * The discovery of the extremophiles has shown that life can exist under a much wider range of environmental conditions than anyone had dreamed of previously. In particular, the realization that a deep, hot biosphere exists kilometers below the Earth’s surface raises hopes that similar underground biospheres could exist on other solid bodies of the solar system, such as Mars or the larger moons of the outer planets.

  * The detection of extrasolar planets has confirmed a key hypothesis: Our solar system is not alone in the galaxy; other stars form planets. Although the planets found to date are very unlike Earth (most of them are hot Jupiters), the next generation of technology should allow us to find Earth-sized planets circling stars as far away as fifty light-years, at least.

  * The possibility that the nanometer-sized forms found inside meteorites that originated on Mars are the fossilized remains of once-living organisms raises the prospect that a deep, hot biosphere existed on Mars early in that planet’s history. Perhaps it still does, although the available evidence suggests that Mars’ interior is now cold.

  * The indications that several of Jupiter’s Galilean moons probably have extensive oceans of liquid water beneath their ice mantles raises the prospect that life may exist on Europa, Ganymede, or Callisto. Water is one of the prime requirements for life on Earth—and, most likely, beyond.

  * Laboratory experiments have shown that the fundamental chemical interactions that lead to the formation of organic molecules can take place in the ice that forms comets. Other experiments have shown that primitive cell-like structures can arise on the grains of interste
llar dust or in asteroids.

  But what about intelligent life? Will we find our intellectual peers (or superiors) among the stars? SETI has found no trace of intelligent signals from the stars despite nearly half a century of searching with radio telescopes. Optical SETI, which looks for laser pulses, is in its infancy.

  All these factors add up to the conclusion that life probably is abundant in the universe, but the most prevalent form of life is most likely unicellular. After all, the single-celled archaea, bacteria, and protists are the most abundant forms of life on Earth. Why should we expect otherwise on other worlds? As paleobiologist Steven Jay Gould put it:

  We all realize in honest moments that bacteria rule the earth—so why deny them the universe as well?

  Intelligent life may be very rare, although—as the Drake equation shows—we simply do not know enough to make even the roughest sort of guess about that.

  THE PROSPECTS FOR TOMORROW

  Finding life on other worlds, creating life in the laboratory, all scientific work, depends on the funding support that scientists receive. Since World War II, by far the largest source of funding for scientific research has come from national governments. In a democracy, it is ultimately the taxpaying citizens who decide how far and how fast scientific research can proceed. In the United States, this means that research depends on the president and Congress. Thus, science becomes irretrievably ensnarled with politics; the search for life in the universe hinges on Washington infighting.