The Ancient Alien Question

by Philip Coppens

  I hear some thinking, Hold on here. What about the hundreds of satellites orbiting our planet? Isn’t there physical evidence of our presence on the moon? The photographs of Cape Canaveral and its numerous launches, the hours of footage shot onboard the various Space Shuttle missions? Assuming it all survives the next millennium, it will indeed all add to the controversy, but if a historian wants to explain it all away, he can do so. That is precisely what those unwilling to believe we went to the moon are doing at this very moment.

  Contact’s main message is that belief and a willingness to explore are two vital ingredients required to establish and accept alien contact. It was the final message that Carl Sagan sent out to humankind, as he died during production of the movie. But his quest for extraterrestrial life began many decades before.

  The Man Behind Contact

  Sagan’s youth was characterized by an interest in science fiction. The remainder of his life was spent in an effort to answer the question of whether or not there was life elsewhere in the universe, including how to contact it, if so, and whether it had already contacted us. In 1951, when he first set foot in the halls of academia, he predicted that humankind would set foot on the moon by 1970. It was not a scientific prediction; he just hoped that we would take this important step, just as his heroes in science fiction books had done. Sagan felt that the moon, then the rest of the solar system, and finally the entire universe had to be researched in an effort to find life. He wanted to be Captain Kirk.

  His first scientific writings speculated on the possibility of life on Jupiter, Venus, or Mars. Even though science constantly gave a negative answer to every question he posed, Sagan would not stop asking. When it became likely that our entire solar system was devoid of any intelligence, he felt we had to set our sights on other such systems.

  In retrospect, such enthusiasm might seem childish. But when Sagan started his quest, in the early 1960s, there really was little if anything known about the physical conditions on our neighboring planets. Many scientists were open to the possibility that our own solar system contained other life-forms. Various UFO sightings and stories, specifically during the previous decade, seemed to underline this possibility. Sagan was initially intrigued by these accounts, but his own research convinced him more and more that the methodology used by UFO researchers would never lead to a satisfactory answer. He also believed that the “evidence” they presented was not evidence at all. In later years, he would do his best to undermine the entire field of ufology, as he felt it was a powerful detraction from where the real quest for extraterrestrial intelligence should be directed.

  Sagan spearheaded the Western scientific search for ET, and however scientific his approach was, it is a fact that most other scientists looked down on him and his attempts. They felt it was an endless game; the universe was simply too big to find out whether, somewhere, life might have originated, too, and could be flourishing, with alien intelligences trying to make contact with us.

  Sagan understood the difficulty of his quest; when he discovered that life did not exist on Venus, it merely meant he had to look elsewhere. It is like the famous Edison statement that he had found 2,000 ways of not making a light bulb before he found a way to make one. Sagan was inspired by his sciencefiction heroes from his youth, who always went farther, pushed boundaries, and, to paraphrase Gene Roddenberry, boldly went where no one had gone before.

  Sagan was a scientist, and felt that it was his personal mission to educate the public about scientific methodology. He feared that the public wouldn’t understand his scientific methods because they seemed more alien than the intelligence he was searching for. He was horrified when he noticed that the public adopted “pseudoscience” as a methodology—it provided them clear, unambiguous answers to the questions everyone had, but for which science did not have definitive answers. He was thus instrumental in the creation of CSICOP (The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), a group of skeptics who can be seen as the modern-day Inquisition, and who battle what they call “pseudoscience,” whether that is ufology, the Ancient Alien Theory, astrology, or parapsychology. But in the end, Sagan became disillusioned with their methods, arguing that they were just as unscientific.

  When NASA began to send missions to Venus and Mars, in an effort to map those planets, Sagan was there to make sure the missions would educate and inform the general public. He felt that those missions had to have cameras, which most scientists felt was unimportant. What could a camera possibly contribute to scientific research? they wondered. At first, Sagan’s proposal was not accepted, but soon enough a camera became a standard feature on missions, to show the general public on an accessible level what those alien planets looked like.

  It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Sagan became a household name. The American television channel PBS created a 13-part series produced by Sagan, called Cosmos, which became the realization of his dream: bringing a scientific topic into the general household, via the medium most suited for that purpose—television. Sagan became the host of the series, and it was the perfect excuse for his scientific colleagues, who had always seen him as being on the edge of science, to proclaim they felt he was more of a celebrity than a scientist. They felt scientists had to live in labs and ivory towers, never leaving them to give an opinion on any show whatsoever. Science, they felt, had no requirement to be accessible to the general public.

  In 1986, Sagan finished Contact. The book was largely autobiographical, mapping a scientist’s quest to find extraterrestrial life. From the early 1990s onwards, Sagan knew that his life might not be long-lasting. He suffered from an illness that only bone-marrow transplants would heal. It created in him a sense of urgency, and also gave his work a more religious framework. The opposition between religion, the irrational side of humankind, and science, the rational opposite, was found everywhere, from the pages of The Demon Haunted World to the screens on which Contact would posthumously be projected.

  Selling the movie itself was a difficult exercise, as its subject was science—never as popular as science fiction in Hollywood. The movie strove to convince the public of the importance of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but it starred a single female as the main character. She was furthermore without children, and an atheist—three characteristics that did not sit well in America, and Hollywood therefore had to be more forcefully persuaded that the project had a chance of box office success. Eleven years later, on July 11, 1997, the movie Contact was shown in American theaters; the following month I would see it in Orlando. Seven months earlier, Carl Sagan had died in Seattle, following a lung infection. He himself had made an interdimensional voyage, but unlike the scientist of Contact, he would not return to tell the tale.

  Message in a Bottle

  Sagan was responsible for three attempts to notify the universe of our existence: In 1972–3, the Pioneer spacecraft was equipped with plaques of his design, detailing a diagram of a hydrogen atom; a pulsar map with the sun at the center, showing the relative distances of 14 pulsars and the binary code of their periods; figures of a nude man and woman set in front of a to-scale silhouette of Pioneer; and a sketch of our solar system. Then, in 1974, Sagan, together with Frank Drake, created the so-called Arecibo Message, in which a message was beamed into space, aimed at the M13 star cluster. The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits that, when collected, formed an image of our little blue planet. The message incorporated the numbers 1 through 10, as well as the atomic numbers of the elements found in DNA, the formula for DNA, a DNA helix, and much more information about life on planet Earth. In 1977, Sagan created the Voyager Golden Records, containing 116 images detailing life on Earth and methods of finding us, just in case something intelligent were to stumble upon the little probe.

  In the five decades of humankind’s space exploration, we have sent a small number of these and similar messages into the universe, some riding with our interplanetary probes, others specifically broadcast via radio to distant galaxies where we hope someo
ne is listening. At the same time, we have used our telescopes to listen to anyone out there who might be broadcasting—so far, without any success. In fact, some scientists believe that an extraterrestrial intelligence is unlikely to use radio waves to communicate their presence because radio signals have to compete with background noise and require a selection of radio frequencies, thus reducing the chances of being discovered.

  Instead, it is thought by some, including American physicist Paul LaViolette, that beacons, sometimes referred to as “galactic lighthouses,” would be built, announcing to anyone in the galaxy that they are not alone. John Learned of the University of Hawaii has proposed using the Cepheid variable stars (the brightest of the “variable” category of stars, which change luminosity through time) as a beacon, arguing that by manipulating their pulsation cycles, much like Morse code, the stars could be used to broadcast a message to the universe that would be far more likely to be received by alien civilizations. He has outlined a theoretical model as to how this could be accomplished, and though we currently lack the resources and some of the technology to accomplish this, future generations might advance as far—extraterrestrial civilizations might have advanced as far a long time ago.

  The idea of galactic lighthouses was originally proposed by Thomas Gold in June 1968, but has been most popularly promoted in the last decade by Paul LaViolette. His book, The Talk of the Galaxy: An ET Message For Us?, argues that some of the pulsars that we have discovered have actually been modified by an extraterrestrial intelligence, and that our radio telescopes are therefore picking up an extraterrestrial message; we just refuse to accept it.

  The idea that pulsars could be created by an extraterrestrial intelligence received widespread attention in 1974 with the discovery of PSR 1053+29. Its extraterrestrial origin was proposed because of its strangely constant pulsation rate. The pulsar also betrayed no sign of spinning down, which meant it was not behaving as “normal pulsars” did. Alas, observations of this specific pulsar throughout the following years showed that it was in fact slowing down, though at such a slow rate that it still begs the question of whether it might be an extraterrestrial signal. Since then, more than a dozen other such pulsars have been identified, and scientists continue to question whether these are indeed galactic lighthouses, though most scientists believe that, no matter how weird, we are confronted with a totally natural phenomenon.

  The best candidate for a galactic lighthouse is PSR 1937+21, one of the fastest pulsars in the sky, flashing 642 times per second, with a very constant pulsation period. In fact, the beacon surpasses the best atomic clocks in its precision. The so-called Millisecond Pulsar is also unique in that it is one of two pulsars known to emit giant pulses, becoming the brightest pulsar in the sky and therefore making it easily identifiable. After all, we have identified it, and the only question we have is whether its period is artificially created or natural, with the usual division between the two camps.

  LaViolette, in The Talk of the Galaxy, states that, “If extraterrestrial civilizations are attempting to communicate with us and are distinguishing their transmissions by doing ‘something that can’t be done in nature,’ the pulsar signals certainly are the closest thing known to fit this criterion.” But apart from communication, he also points out that the pulsars are ideal for space navigation, as they provide a means whereby a spacecraft can determine its position through triangulation. In short, pulsars could be the echoes of the imaginary network of space portals that Sagan concocted to allow for interdimensional travel in Contact.

  Were We Not Alone?

  The Ancient Alien Theory proposes that we should not merely be looking into the deep abyss of space, trying to find out whether contact can be established, but that contact might have already been established, in the ancient past, and that physical or other traces of this contact are still visible or present here on planet Earth.

  The theory of evolution suggests that we are the pinnacle of creation, and science is quick to assume that we are at the pinnacle of civilization. We think of today’s world as unique compared to previous ages, but our everyday existence is only partially so:

  The ancient Romans would create one-way traffic in certain streets to cope with peak-hour traffic.

  Pompeii had arm-waving traffic policemen to cope with congestion.

  Babylon had street signs 2,500 years ago.

  At Nineveh, there were “no parking” signs.

  Antioch had street lighting.

  The Aztecs used a permanent colored strip in the paved road to divide the two lanes of traffic.

  By today’s technological standards, the Apollo space capsules of the 1960s were pretty basic, and the computers NASA used to put a man on the moon are far inferior to your average modern laptop. In fact, what the moon landings showed was how relatively easy—provided we had the correct understanding of astronomy and astrophysics, and a means of escaping the Earth’s gravity—a voyage to the moon was. Isn’t it interesting that, whether we look at the Ancient Egyptian or Mayan civilizations, we always find that these ancient peoples possessed a body of astronomical knowledge far surpassing their requirements—in fact, far surpassing our own requirements?! Immediately we see one of the three basic ingredients of space travel fulfilled by what scientists until a few decades ago considered to be primitive societies.

  That these societies were not primitive at all is precisely the message Erich von Däniken beamed into the world in 1968. His medium was not a radio telescope, but a book, Chariots of the Gods. Though he popularized the topic, von Däniken did not create the subject. Some of the pioneers of this could-be science were actually Russian. Nicholas Rynin (1877–1942) graduated from the Imperial Institute of Communications of St. Petersburg in 1901. After the Revolution, he wrote a three-volume book called Interplanetary Contacts (1928–1932), credited as the first encyclopedia on the history and theory of rocket technology and spaceflight. Less-well-known is that in it he analyzed ancient legends regarding air and space ships, from the Greek legend of Icarus to the Hindu Epic of the Mahabharata. He also tackled Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and found that the novel’s premise was infeasible. But in his opinion, the science of the ancient legends was feasible.

  Rynin himself was walking in the footsteps of Yakov Perelman, who in 1915 published Interplanetary Journeys, the world’s first book on the science and technology of spaceflight. Years ahead of Western Europe, Perelman was popularizing the idea of rocketry and spaceflight for a Russian audience, resulting in the Soviet Union sending the first man into space in 1961.

  Most of the rocket pioneers, including the likes of Hermann Oberth and Werner von Braun, all wanted to use their rocket technology in the hope that it would propel humankind into the depths of the universe, and establish contact with alien life. Instead, their inventions were principally used to fight terrestrial wars.

  Constantine Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) was probably the first person to realize that rocket technology was the means by which to travel into space. Along with Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard, he is considered to be one of the great theoreticians of spaceflight. In the early 1930s, Dr. Hermann Oberth was not shy in attributing the honor of making people dream of exploring the galaxy to Tsiolkovsky, whom he identified as the father of astronavigation—traveling toward and through the stars.

  In 1928, Tsiolkovsky published Will of the Universe, in which he wrote, “It is difficult for us to imagine a being superior to earthman. This narrow-minded view prevents us from picturing an intrusion of extraterrestrial entities in terrestrial affairs. Yet a great number of events still remain unexplained because of this attitude. Many curious happenings are recorded in history and literature.” Tsiolkovsky was “only” a teacher in a provincial town, but he is considered to be a prophet of science and his papers were often discussed in the highest echelons of academia. He is considered to be the father of the multi-stage rocket, as well as the word astronaut.

  In an issue of Messenger of Knowledge (Mos
cow, 1930, Nos. 5–6), Rynin and Tsiolkovsky spoke out in defense of aliens visiting Earth, with Rynin writing, “The statement that inhabitants of other worlds have not visited our planet is indeed corroborated by the accepted history of all countries. However, if we turn to the tales and legends of hoary antiquity we shall notice a strange concurrence in the legends of lands separated by oceans and deserts. This concurrence is contained in the fact that many legends speak of the visitation of earth by the inhabitants of other worlds in time immemorial. Why not admit that a grain of truth lies at the bottom of these legends?”

  Fully 35 years later, the status quo of the scientific community on the Ancient Alien Question remained, which is why von Däniken posed it to a Western audience. Though he was, and is, by far the most popular author in the field, he was neither the first nor the only one to pose this question to a Western audience. Italian journalist and writer Peter Kolosimo received the Premio Bancarella, one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, for Non è Terrestre (Not of This World). Published in 1968, it was Kolosimo’s fourth book exploring the mysteries of our planet, the first being Il Pianeta Sconosciuto (The Unknown Planet), published in 1959.