More recently other “witnesses” to various facets of flying saucer recovery operations in the American southwest have told their tales. They still amount to unsubstantiated stories, which prohibit further confirmation and are useless to science. However, the infamous Scully hoax is quite enlightening. It demonstrates beautifully the symbiotic relationship that exists between science fact, science fiction, and modern mythology.
What originally inspired the Scully hoax was no doubt the 1947 Roswell incident, in which an announcement was made by a U.S. Air Force representative that a flying saucer had crashed in the New Mexico desert and was recovered by the military. It took just a little imagination to embellish the account, and presto: we have the ingredients of a modern myth.
Some years later we have a revival of the Roswell case (based on recent “eyewitness” testimony—not accounts that were documented prior to 1950), an alleged alien autopsy film, and reverse engineering at Area 51 of alien technology from the saucers that were recovered and brought to the Roswell base. The story elements are related to each other in a circular relationship that is mutually supportive. If the later embellishments of the Roswell case—details that did not surface prior to 1950—can be traced to the Scully hoax, it appears that the Roswell case rests on a shaky foundation that is not only weak, but fraudulent.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Cahn, J. P. “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” True magazine (September 1952).
The MUFON UFO Journal (July 1978).
Scully, Frank. Behind the Flying Saucers (Henry Holt, 1950).
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The (SETI) The attempt to locate intelligent civilizations that may exist elsewhere in the universe. SETI is not to be confused with an uncritical or credulous belief in aliens. While the overwhelming majority of scientists reject popular UFO-related claims that alien visitors are surreptitiously visiting Earth, most scientists support SETI as a worthwhile scientific enterprise.
The age of SETI began in 1960, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in West Virginia, when Dr. Frank Drake carried out Project Ozma, a search for intelligent signals at the twenty-one centimeter wavelength of interstellar hydrogen. Using an eighty-five-foot radio telescope, Project Ozma examined only two stars: Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti.
From 1972 to 1976, also at the NRAO, Dr. Benjamin M. Zuckerman and Dr. Patrick Palmer continued this work, with Project Ozma II. The second Ozma had the use of radio telescopes as large as three hundred feet in diameter, gathering nearly twelve and a half times as much radio energy as an eighty-five-foot dish. Where the first Ozma had just a single radio receiver, Ozma II had 384, each one tuned to a slightly different wavelength (in the vicinity of the target wavelength). Project Ozma examined only two stars, whereas Project Ozma II examined seven hundred.
At Ohio State University, Dr. Robert S. Dixon began conducting a twenty-four-hour, all-sky SETI survey in December of 1973, continuing until 1998 when the “Big Ear” radio telescope was dismantled. No attempt was made to pre-select target stars in advance (the rotation of the Earth constantly sweeps the ear of the radio telescope across the sky); hence, there were an average of three favorable nearby stars being examined at any moment of the night or day. The Ohio State project is planning to resume after new equipment can be designed and built.
The Harvard SETI project, led by physics professor Paul Horowitz, began a small-scale observing project in 1978 using the 1000-foot Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. During the 1980s more sophisticated receivers were built to search a greater number of simultaneous targets with greater sensitivity and accuracy. By 1985, a millionchannel SETI radio array was on-line at Harvard in Massachusetts. Since 1995, a billion-channel array has been in operation, searching for possible alien transmissions.
The SETI Institute of Mountain View, California, was founded in 1984 to “conduct scientific research and educational projects relevant to the nature, prevalence, and distribution of life in the universe.” Among its directors is SETI pioneer Frank Drake. It has been conducting a search project that targets approximately one thousand sunlike stars using several different radio telescopes in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
Between 1978 and 1994, NASA was given a limited amount of funding for SETI programs. However, the project was unpopular with Congress, and funding was cut off several times. Currently, all U.S. SETI projects are privately financed; however, NASA’s efforts in the search for extraterrestrial life are being stepped up dramatically at the present time.
Contrary to what some people suggest, UFO skepticism is not synonymous with Earth chauvinism. Paradoxically, UFOlogists have largely been critics of scientific SETI projects, while some of the best-known proponents of the idea of SETI have been UFO skeptics, such as the late astronomer Carl Sagan. Many UFOlogists, on the other hand, take a dim view of SETI, viewing it as a competitor for resources that otherwise might be available to them. However, the scientific community has almost unanimously supported the view that unlike SETI, UFO beliefs are not based upon the kind of critical thinking that is a part of the scientific method.
As of yet, no SETI project has turned up any solid evidence of any extraterrestrial artificial radio source. A few radio “glitches”” have been detected, but could not subsequently be confirmed, and were probably due to terrestrial interference. While there is no way of knowing for certain when (or if) the first detection of an alien civilization will take place, we would all do well to keep in mind the tremendous obstacles to early success in the SETI field.
Dr. Frank Drake has estimated that the total number of combinations of wavelength, direction, bandwidth, and other parameters which must be searched to find the first extraterrestrial signal is on the order of 1019 (1 followed by 19 zeroes). Assuming this estimate to be correct, it could take more than three hundred billion years before we detect the first alien signal.
Fortunately, there are certain plausible SETI assumptions which, if correct, might make this seemingly-hopeless undertaking less than totally futile. For example, if all intelligent civilizations in the universe realized this problem and adopted some “natural” wavelength—perhaps one related to the prominent twenty-one-centimeter wavelength of interstellar hydrogen—our one-combination-a-second search might find an alien civilization as often as once every thirty years. Also, modern SETI receivers can search millions of channels at the same time. Perhaps Drake’s estimates will turn out to have been overly pessimistic as to the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy, the strength of their radio signals, and the average distance between civilizations. On the other hand, some astronomers believe that he may have been far too optimistic.
Perhaps we are located in a region where we have one or more interstellar neighbors nearby—much closer than the average distance between civilizations—or we may happen to reside in an exceptionally lonely corner of the universe. In any case, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is certain to be a long, tedious, and trying undertaking. It will require large commitments of capital, manpower, and scientific expertise for an indefinite period of time, with no guarantee of eventual success.
As SETI advances, a “counterrevolution” of SETI skeptics has likewise gained ground in the scientific community. A controversial conference was held at the University of Maryland in 1979. Participating were such well-known SETI advocates and theorists as Ronald Bracewell, Sebastian Von Hoerner, Benjamin Zuckerman, Patrick Palme, Freeman Dyson, and Michael Papagiannis. The general theme of the conference was that, using space colonies as giant, lumbering space-arks to spend centuries crossing interstellar space, it should be possible for a single civilization to colonize the entire galaxy in roughly ten million years—just a tiny fraction of the age of the galaxy. If millions or billions of other civilizations far older than ours are supposedly out there, why has not one of them progressed to this stage? The logical conclusion would seem to be that it is because we are alone in the gal
axy—perhaps even in the universe. The most pessimistic of SETI skeptics, astronomer Michael Hart of Trinity University, told the conference that even the most ridiculously optimistic estimate of the occurrence of life in the universe yields far less than one planet having life in each galaxy. In fact, Hart estimates, at most only one galaxy in 1031 has even a single planet with life of any kind.
Astrophysicist Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University finds the “Where Are They?” objection to extraterrestrials quite insurmountable, charging SETI advocates with promoting unfalsifiable, and hence pseudoscientific, hypotheses: “SETI will become a science—and hence be worth doing—only when its proponents tell us exactly what will convince them that it is reasonable to assume we are alone.”
Also weighing in with the SETI doubters were physicist James Trefil and the late astrophysicist Thornton Page, who had taken a mildly pro-UFO stance starting in the 1960s. In 2000, the book Rare Earth by scientists Peter Ward and Donald C. Brownlee mustered new support for the SETI pessimists’ position. They argue that recent scientific discoveries suggest that extrasolar planets are generally subjected to far more meteoric bombardment, and far greater orbital instability, than our Earth, making the Earth with its abundant and varied life forms a cosmic rarity.
Today, thousands of individuals are participating in the SETI effort, using their home computers. A number of sponsors including the Planetary Society, the University of Califonia, and numerous high-tech companies have established the SETI@home project. The software runs in the background like a “screen saver” when your computer is idle, analyzing data from radio telescopes downloaded over the Internet. Should anything unusual turn up, scientists are alerted. This allows SETI researchers to use the resources of thousands of individual computers for data analysis without cost.
Nobody knows when, or whether, the first evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence will be discovered.
—ROBERT SHEAFFER
Secret Life (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Temple University history professor David Jacobs believes aliens are here to exploit us in a program of genetic alteration of our species that begins for abductees in childhood. He has performed more than 325 hypnosis sessions with 60 abductees. From this information Jacobs found a pattern of remarkably similar stories being told of the abductees being subjected to the same mental and physical tests and procedures by the aliens.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
SETI Institute Founded on the initiative of Tom Pierson in 1984, the SETI Institute is a nonprofit organization that fosters research programs related to the search for extraterrestrial life. It was originally set up in the time of the NASA SETI program to minimize the amount of monies spent on overhead. After the elimination of the NASA program in 1993, the SETI Institute became the nexus of its privately-funded successors, as well as the home of related research.
Today, the SETI Institute runs Project Phoenix, the most comprehensive radio SETI search, and is engaged (with the University of California, Berkeley) in constructing the Allen Telescope Array. In addition, it manages approximately 40 other research projects dealing with such related topics as the question of life in the solar system, the origin of terrestrial life and the nature of cosmic biogenic materials. These latter projects are principally funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. The Institute also runs a comprehensive program for education and outreach.
In 2001, the Chairman of the Board of the Institute was Frank Drake, and its Chief Executive Officer was Tom Pierson. The Institute’s offices are in Mountain View, California, approximately 40 miles south of San Francisco.
—SETH SHOSTAK
Address:
2035 Landings Drive
Mountain View, CA 94043
U.S.A.
Web site:
www.seti.org
shapes of UFOs It is essentially true what astronomer Donald Menzel wrote in his 1963 book The World of Flying Saucers (coauthored with Lyle Boyd), that “No two reports describe exactly the same kind of UFO.” A rare exception is seen in the accompanying photographs. One photo was taken by a farmer, Paul Trent, near McMinnville, Oregon, on May 11, 1950, and the other by a pilot over Rouen, France, in the summer of 1954.
McMinnville above; Rouen below
Nevertheless, in spite of the great diversity of reports, some general patterns have been noted with respect to UFO shapes. The disk shape is clearly the most common, representing about 26 percent of all UFOs reported. Spheres account for about 17 percent, and oval or elliptical shapes make up roughly 13 percent. According to the U. S. Air Force Project Grudge Report of December 1949, the basic types of shapes were broken down as follows:
(1) “The most numerous reports indicate daytime observation of metallic disk-like objects roughly in diameter ten times their thickness.”
(2) “Rocketlike objects.”
(3) “Sharply defined luminous objects” appearing as lights at night.
An analysis of UFO cases by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), for the period of 1942 to the end of 1963, found that the above pattern was “well established.”
Investigators for Project Blue Book later found it necessary to increase the number of shape-descriptive terms for coding purposes. The following table presents these shape terms and the percentage and number of UFO sightings evaluated (by a panel of judges) to be of unknown nature with at least 95 percent certainty. These values represent UFO entries for the period 1947 to 1952 (Project Blue Book, Special Report No. 14, Air Technical Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, May 5, 1955).
Another source of UFO-shape terms is found in Jacques Vallée’s book, Passport to Magonia (1969), from which a total of 891 cases was reviewed (cases 32 through 923) for the period October 28, 1902, to November 22, 1968. Four hundred and forty-five cases (49.9 percent) were found to possess a total of 79 single words of phrases representing perceived shape.
(See also Haines, R. F., “UFO Appearance Recognition and Identification Test Procedure,” UFO Phenomena, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1976.)
Still other shapes have been reported by eyewitnesses. Some of them are listed here to further illustrate the extremely wide range of object-shape terms people-feel they must refer to in order to describe what they perceived: “arrowhead,” “ball,” “balloon,” “birdlike,” “cushion,” “dart,” “discus,” “dots,” “dumbbell,” “globular,” “hamburger sandwich,” “jumbo jet (without wings),” “oyster shell with ribbed structure,” “pea,” “pinpoint,” “rhomboid,” “Saturn disk,” “smudge,” “tadpole,” “teardrop,” “triangle,” “water tank,” “wedge.”
Since around the mid-1980s, more boomerang and triangular-shaped objects have been reported in ever-increasing numbers. The objects seem to display a preponderance of straight edges and equally spaced circular sources of light on their surfaces. As Fowler (1996, 1997) and others have made clear, ultra-large, silent, three-sided (often dark) aerial objects have been appearing over much of the globe. The debate continues over whether these triangular objects are of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin. Interestingly, stronger arguments can be made on the extraterrestrial side.
Since it is a truism that a picture is worth a thousand “shape” words, what is known about drawings of UFOs by eyewitnesses?
The illustrations that accompany this encyclopedia entry present eyewitness drawings obtained from the open UFO literature and grouped into similar-shape categories. Each drawing has been reduced to fit the available space without appreciably changing the original line thickness, shadow, or other basic details; all identifying labels, symbols, or markings were deleted, however.
It should be noted that photographs of alleged UFOs tend to correspond to the drawings made by eyewitnesses. The reader may confirm this observation for himself or herself.
Visual perception of an unexpected anomalous phenomenon is subject to numerous kinds of transformations (e.g., deletions, distortions, additions) which can, later, appear in a UFO drawing (see
Haines, R. F., Observing UFOs, 1979; Wertheimer, M., in Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1968). Also, there may well be cultural or symbolic correlations between reported or drawn UFO shapes and the psychological state of the witness (see Grinspoon and Persky, in UFO’S—A Scientific Debate, 1972; Jung, Flying Saucers. A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959). The apparent symmetry of many UFO-shape drawings could have significance for those interested in attempting to identify the true nature of the “core” of the UFO phenomenon, and for those interested in perceptual and psychological factors of eyewitnesses. Indeed, Carl Jung suggested (in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959), regarding the round object, that “…whether it be a disk or a sphere—we at once get an analogy with the symbol of totality well known to all students of depth psychology, namely the ‘mandala’ (Sanskrit for ‘circle’). This is not by any means a new invention, for it can be found in all epochs and in all places, always with the same meaning, and reappears time and again, independently of tradition.”
In UFO sightings in which the phenomenon was larger than a point of light (i.e., possessed apparent area), a perceived two-and three-dimensional shape becomes one of the most prominent physical characteristics available for study. Literally thousands of UFO eyewitness drawings, verbal descriptions, and photographs of this nature are available. In order to properly evaluate the UFO-shape data that is available, several useful operating principles must be adhered to:
1) A clear distinction must be made, and maintained, between the physical form (geometric configuration of boundaries) of the stimulus that produced a UFO report or drawing and its associated perceived shape (see Bartley, Principles of Perception, 1958).
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 96
