by Don Lincoln
As the radar watches, a small object detaches itself from the bigger one and approaches the Earth, descending slowly. The object enters the atmosphere and appears to be headed to Washington, D.C. The combat air patrol permanently stationed over the city since September of 2001 heads to intercept, while fighters scramble from nearby airfields to lend support. The commander of the air force asks the president for orders. She’s a tough old bird, so she orders the vice president onto Air Force 2, tells the air force to hold their fire and waits in the Oval Office. As the fighters converge on the descending object, they see it is egg-shaped, with the wide end appearing to be the front.
Surrounded by dozens of air force fighters, the unknown craft descends onto the Mall in front of the White House, landing on the Ellipse. The military had earlier dispatched quick response troops, which now surround the egg. Secret Service agents on the top of the White House aim Stinger missiles at it, while the president watches pensively through the windows below. Overhead, the sky is relatively quiet, criss-crossed by jet contrails that have warned off the helicopters for the local television stations. And everyone waits. An extraterrestrial craft has landed on Earth. If this were a movie, a diminutive gray being would exit it and say, “Take me to your leader.”
But this isn’t a movie. It isn’t a book. It’s real. With all eyes on the craft, a glowing crack appears on its flawless surface, revealing what is clearly a door and a ramp. The crowd holds its collective breath and sees emerging a …
… a what? That’s really the question behind this book. What will we see when we encounter our first example of intelligent extraterrestrial life? Will it be a humanoid Gray? Will it be Adamski’s Space Brothers? Will it be Jabba the Hutt, ET, or Spock?
Of course it won’t. Nor can I tell you what it will be. It will be Alien, for sure. To remind us of Haldane’s famed quote, it will not only be weirder than we imagine, it may well be weirder than we can imagine. But we’ll try.
The Alien will be intelligent. It will have technology that surpasses our own. It will have limbs to manipulate the world around it and it won’t be a water breather. It will almost certainly be able to see light in the spectrum of its parent star. It won’t be able to breed with humans, nor will it likely be able to eat and digest Earth food. It will be a curious being and most likely it will be one that consumes resources, perhaps resources found here on Earth.
The Alien is likely to be carbon based and may well use oxygen in its respiration. It likely won’t be a traditional plant, although a photosynthetic animal is certainly possible.
But it will be a kindred spirit, thinking as well as a man, but different from a man. It will be a fellow traveler in this universe. It will be an ally and an enemy. It will be an opportunity to learn and to teach.
The distance between stars is large and it may be difficult to travel between them. Perhaps our first encounter with an Alien species will not be a landing on the White House lawn, but hidden in the hiss of a radio transmission. Perhaps the closest we will ever come to Aliens is to view them in their video signals. Somehow I find it hard to believe that if we ever discover that we have Alien neighbors that we won’t be drawn to visit them. So that wavering transmission from the depths of interstellar space might one day evolve into a visit to the neighbors.
Or we could be alone in the galaxy, or at least alone enough that encountering an Alien race is improbable in the next thousand years. The Drake equation with modern numbers in it suggests that there may not be many technologically advanced intelligent species out there. Somehow that would be a shame, a terrible waste of space, and yet a wonderful opportunity for humanity. As the planet hunters find Earth-like planets, humans would have places to go, new vistas to explore.
We won’t know the answer until we find an Alien. Until that happens, mankind will continue to turn some of our best scientific minds to the question. But in the meantime, we will have to do what we have always done, which is to turn our gaze upward and dream. While we wait, maybe it’s best that we should take the advice from the classic movie Thing from Another World.
Watch the skies. Everywhere, keep looking. Watch the skies …
SUGGESTED READING
General
Steven J. Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1996.
Steven J. Dick, Life on Other Worlds: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1998.
Early Aliens
Robert Crosley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History, Wesleyan, New York, 2011.
Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900, Dover, Cambridge, UK, 2011.
Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2008.
UFOs
George Adamski, Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus, Leonard-Freefield, Los Angeles, 1949.
George Adamski, Inside the Space Ships, Abelard-Schuman, New York, 1955.
George Adamski, Leslie Desmond, The Flying Saucers Have Landed, Werner-Laurie, Newcastle, DE 1953.
Kenneth Arnold, The Coming of the Flying Saucers, privately published, 1952.
Charles Berlitz, William L. Moore, The Roswell Incident, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1980.
Susan Clancy, Abducted: How People Came to Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.
Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1998.
Stanton T. Friedman, Kathleen Marden, Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, New Page Books, Pompton Plains, NJ, 2007.
John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer,” Dial Press, New York, 1966.
John Moffitt, Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Mass Culture, Prometheus Press, Amherst, NY, 2003.
Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies!, Berkeley, New York, 1995.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Ballantine Books, New York, 1997.
Dugald A. Steer, Alienology, Candlewick, Somerville, MA, 2010. For children, ages 8–12.
Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods, Bantam Books, New York, 1972.
Fiction
Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Ian Summers, Beth Meacham, Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, Workman Publishing, New York, 1987.
Patricia Monk, Alien Theory: The Alien as Archetype in the Science Fiction Short Story, Scarecrow Press, New York, 2006.
Life on Earth
Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Norton, New York, 1989.
Angeles Gavira Guerrero, Peter Frances, Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth, Dorling Kindersley, New York, 2009.
Tim Haines, Paul Chambers, The Complete Guide to Prehistoric Life, Firefly Books, Ontario, Canada, 2006.
Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1998.
Biochemistry
Jeffrey Bennett, Seth Shostak, Life in the Universe, 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2007.
Iain Gilmour, Mark A. Sephton, An Introduction to Astrobiology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2003.
National Research Council, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11919.html Clifford Pickover, The Science of Aliens, Basic Books, New York, 1999.
Kevin W. Plaxco, Michael Gross, Astrobiology: A Brief Introduction, 2nd ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011.
Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1992.
SETI
Albert Harrison, After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life, Basic Books, New York, 2002.
Marc Kaufman, Fi
rst Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2011.
Seth Shostak, Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, National Geographic, Washington, DC, 2009.
Seth Shostak, Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life, Berkeley Hills Books, New York, 1998.
H. Paul Shuch, Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI Past, Present and Future, Springer, Little Ferry, NJ, 2011.
Peter Ward, Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, Springer, New York, 2003.
Steven Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi’s Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, Springer, New York, 2002.
INDEX
abduction, 42–48, 91, 93. See also Hill, Betty, and Barney
Adamski, George, 37–42, 93, 100, 160, 183
alchemist, 140
alcohol, 151
Alien (movie), 71, 86–87
Aliens: ancient, 48–50
definition of, 2
intelligence, 118, 142
medical tests of, on humans, 48–50
non-serious, 97–98
warriors, 100. See also individual Aliens and types of Aliens
aliens, possible characteristics of: blood, 120–21
body symmetry, 117
cartilage, 118
cellulose, 112
color, 119
communication, 124
defense, 119
diet, 121
echo-location, 124
ectothermy/endothermy, 120
life span, 124–25
limbs, number of, 117
locomotion, 119
lungs, 122
metabolism, 139
nervous system, 118–19
reproduction, 122–23
senses, 123–24
sexual dimorphism, 123
size, 117–18
skeleton, 118
social structure, 125
speed, 119. See also temperature
Allen, Paul, 175
Allen Telescope Array, 175
ammonia, 148–49
amphibians, 122
animals, 115–16
Anomalocaris, 107
Antoniadi, Eugene, 23
Archaea, 108, 110, 137–38
Area 51, 36
Aristotle, 11
Army Air Force, 30
Arnold, Kenneth, 29–33, 51, 75
Asgard (Stargate), 89, 100
Atacama Desert, 153–54
atom(s), 128, 130, 134–35, 156
and constraints on life, 131–34
nucleus, 135
atomic bond. See bond, atomic
Autobots, 101
bacteria, 108, 110, 137
balloon, high altitude, 33–34
Barsoom (book series), 5, 24, 57–62, 100
John Carter, 5, 57–62
John Carter (movie), 60–61
A Princess of Mars, 57
Under the Moons of Mars, 57. See also Martian(s)
Battlefield Earth (Hubbard), 101
bees, 116
Berra, Yogi, 105
Berserkers, 157
Betazoid, 82
big bang, 140
Big Ear, the, 169–76
biochemistry, 138, 157
bond, atomic, 132–36, 143–44, 153, 155
covalent, 128, 135, 146, 149
ionic, 146
polar, 149
Borg, 83, 89, 157
Bradbury, Ray, 126
Brazel, W. W., 34
Brownlee, Donald, 162
Bruno, Giordano, 11
Bryant, Ernest, 42
Buckle, Eileen, 42
Buck Rogers (comic strip), 62–63
Bugs Bunny, 98
Burgess Shale, 107
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 5, 24, 57–62, 100. See also Barsoom (book series); Tarzan
Bush, George W., 51
Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson), 159
Cambrian period, 107
Cameron, James, 60, 109
Campbell, John W., 52, 61, 58, 101
Campbell, W. W., 22
canals, 19–24, 71–72, 169
Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience (Friedman and Marden), 44
carbohydrates, 131
carbon, 131, 133, 139–45, 151, 153–57, 183
carbon chauvinist, 157
Cardassians, 83
carnivore, 121
carrot, super, 70
Chariots of the Gods (von Däniken), 48, 88
chemical abundances, 139–45
chemistry, 131, 140, 144
acids, 147, 151
alkalinity, 151
bases, 147
electrons, 135–36, 139
energy, 115
gaseous state, 145
hydrocarbons, 149
hydrogen fluoride, 148–49
hydroxide, 147
molecules, 128, 135
noble gas, 131–32, 142
polar molecule, 146. See also atom(s); biochemistry; bond, atomic; chemical abundances; elements; methane; oxygen
Chi Sagittarii, 174
chitin, 111, 118
chlorophyll, 114
chloroplasts, 112
Chordata, 109, 115–16
Clarke, Arthur C., 63–64, 79
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 38, 92–97, 100
Communion (Strieber), 100
Communism, 64, 67
conspiracies, 91–92
contact, first, 37–42
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 11
Correa, Alvin, 55
Crick, Francis, 127
cryophile, 153
cybernetic, 157
Cylons, 101
Daleks, 101, 157
Darwin, Charles, 1, 12. See also evolution
Day, Benjamin, 13
Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 5, 40, 65–67, 100, 162
Dead Sea, 154
Death Star, 84
density, 148
dielectric constant, 147
DNA, 127, 131, 150
Doctor Who, 99, 101, 157
Dogon, 49–50
domains, 108
Drake, Frank, 163–68, 171–74
Drake Equation, 163–68, 176
Dreyfuss, Richard, 38
Edgar Bergen / Charlie McCarthy, 55
Egypt, 48, 88, 97 1835
moon hoax, 13–19
electric fields, 124
elements, 131, 141
calcium, 144
chlorine, 146
fluorine, 132, 149
helium, 131, 140–42, 158
hydrogen, 132–33, 135, 141–45
iron, 138–40, 152
sodium, 146
sulfur, 126, 139, 152. See also carbon; oxygen; silicon
Elizabeth, Queen, 51
Ender’s Game (Card), 100
energy, 113, 129–30, 136, 147–48
environment, 122
Epsilon Eridani, 173
Eukarya, 108–9, 111–16, 137–38
Evil Insects, 100
evolution, 137, 150
Ewoks, 101
extremophiles, 151–54
fats, 130
fermentation, 126
Fermi, Enrico, 161–63
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 161
Fermi Problem, 161–63
Firkon, 41
Fish, Marjorie, 47
Flammarion, Camille, 19–21
Flash Gordon (comic strip), 62–63, 82, 100
Flight 19, 93
flying saucer(s), 31, 34, 42–48, 51, 65–71, 73–77
Flying Saucer Conspiracy, The (Keyhoe), 44
Flying Saucers Have Landed, The (Leslie and Adamski), 40
foo fighters, 28–29, 64, 94
Fox TV, 33, 36
Friedman, Stanton, 36, 44
Fuller, John, 44, 46
fungi, 111–12
Galileo, 1, 12
gamma ray burster, 178
genetics, 138
Gernsback, Hugo, 61
glucose, 126
Goa’uld, 88–89, 101
Goldilocks zone, 179
Gold of the Gods (von Däniken), 49
Gort, 65–67
Graham, Alex, 181
gravity, 118
Grays, 50, 89, 93, 95, 99–100, 183
Great Depression, 63
Green Back Observatory, 163, 171
Gungans, 85
habitable zone, 178–79
HAL, 80, 157
Haldane, J. B. S., 127, 183
Hale Observatory, 38
Hallucigenia, 107–8, 117
halophiles, 154
Hangar 18, 36
Hart, Michael, 162
Hawkings, Stephen, 170
Hawkmen, 100
heat, 148
Heaven’s Gate, 42
herbivore, 121
hermaphrodite, 123
Herschel, Sir John, 14, 17, 19
Herschel, William, 19
heterotroph, 115
Hill, Betty, and Barney, 42–48, 51, 76, 80, 89, 93, 96–97, 100, 160
Holmes, Eamonn, 36
Hominidae, 109
Homo sapiens, 109
Horta, 131
Hubbard, L. Ron, 101
Hutt, 85, 183
hydronium, 147
hydro-oxygen microscope, 15
hydrothermal vent, 152
Hynek, J. Allen, 96
Hynek scale, 96
ice, 148
Icke, David, 51
Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator, 98
Illuminati, 92
infrared, 124
Inside the Space Ships (Adamski), 41
Intelligent Life in the Universe (Sagan and Schklovsky), 48
Interrupted Journey, The (Fuller), 44, 46–47
Iron Curtain, 63–64
Jedi knight, 84–85
Jell-O, 4
Jem’Hadar, 101
Juliana, Queen, 41
Kal-El, 98
Kardashev, Nikolai, 164
Kardashev Scale, 168–69
Keyhoe, Donald, 44
Kepler mission, 165, 176–77
King Arthur, 90
Klaatu, 66–67, 100
“Klaatu barada niktu,” 66
Klingons, 63, 82–83, 100
“Kraut fireballs,” 28
Krell, 75
Krypton, 98
Kzinti, 100
last universal common ancestor (LUCA), 137–38, 152
Leonard, Jonathan, 37
Leslie, Desmond, 41
life, 131–32
formation of, 138
