The Demon-Haunted World[/i]]
(Não estou para corrigir as linhas. Será difícil arranjar maior autoridade em SETI's e UFO's do que ele)When the mother of celebrity abductee TravisWalton was informedthat
a UFO had zapped her son with a bolt of lightning and then carried him off
into space, she replied incuriously, `Well, that's the way these things
happen.' Is it?
To agree that UFOs are in our skies is not committing to very much:
`UFO' is an abbreviation for `Unidentified Flying Object'. It is a more
inclusive term than `flying saucer'. That there are things seen which the
ordinary observer, or even an occasional expert, does not understand is
inevitable. But why, if we see something we don't recognize, should we
conclude it's a ship from the stars? A wide variety of more prosaic
possibilities present themselves.
After misapprehended natural events and hoaxes and psychological
aberrations are removed from the data set, is there any residue of very
credible but extremely bizarre cases, especially ones supported by physical
evidence? Is there a `signal' hiding in all that noise? In my view, no signal
has been detected. There are
reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are
unreliable. There are no cases - despite well over amillion UFOreports since
1947 - in which something so strange that it could only be an extraterrestrial
spacecraft is reported so reliably thatmisapprehension, hoax or hallucination
can be reliably excluded. There's still a part of me that says, `Too bad.'
We're regularly bombarded with extravagant UFO claims vended inbitesized
packages, but only rarely do we get to hear about their comeuppance.
This isn't hard to understand: which sells more newspapers and books,
which garners higher ratings, which is more fun to believe, which is more
resonant with the torments of our time - real crashed alien ships, or
experienced con men preying on the gullible; extraterrestrials of immense
powers toying with the human species, or such claims deriving from human
weakness and imperfection?
Over the years I've continued to spend time on the UFO problem. I
receive many letters about it, frequently with detailed first-hand accounts.
Sometimes momentous revelations are promised if only I will call the letter
writer. After I give lectures - on almost any subject - I often am asked, `Do
you believe in UFOs?' I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the
suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I'm almost
never asked, `How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?'
I've found that the going-in attitude of many people is highly
predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable,
that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a
scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high-level
government conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us. Gullibility
about UFOs thrives on widespread mistrust of government, arising naturally
enough from all those circumstances where, in the tension between public
well-being and `national security', the government lies. As government
deceit and conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many other
matters, it's hard to argue that a cover-up on this odd subject is impossible,
that the government would never hide important information from its
citizens. A common explanation on why there would be a cover-up is to
prevent worldwide panic or
erosion of confidence in the government.
I was a member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board committee
that investigated the Air Force's UFO study - called `Project Bluebook', but
earlier and revealingly called `Project Grudge'. We found the on-going
effort to be lackadaisical and dismissive. In the middle 1960s, `Project
Bluebook' was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio,
where `Foreign Technical Intelligence' (chiefly, understanding what new
weapons the Soviets had) was also based. They had state-of-the-art technology
in file retrieval. You asked about a given UFO incident and, somewhat
like sweaters and suits at the dry cleaner's today, reams of files made their
way past you, until the engine stopped when the file you wanted arrived
before you.
But what was in those files wasn't worth much. For example, senior
citizens reported lights hovering over their small New Hampshire town for
more than an hour, and the case is explained as a wing of strategic bombers
from a nearby Air Force base on a training exercise. Could the bombers take
an hour to pass over the town? No. Did the bombers fly over at the time the
UFOs were reported? No. Can you explain to us, Colonel, how strategic
bombers can be described as `hovering'? No. The slipshod Bluebook
investigations played little scientific role, but they did serve the important
bureaucratic purpose of convincing much of the public that the Air Force
was on the job; and that maybe there was nothing to UFO reports.
Of course, this doesn't preclude the possibility that another, more
serious, more scientific study of UFOs was going on somewhere else,headed,
say, by a brigadier general rather than a lieutenant colonel. I think
something like this is even likely, not because I believe we're being visited
by aliens, but because hiding in the UFO phenomena must be data once
considered of significantmilitary interest. Certainly if UFOs are as reportedvery
fast, very manoeuvrable craft - there is amilitary duty to find out how
they work. If UFOs were built by the Soviet Union it was the Air Force's
responsibility to protect us. Considering the remarkable performance
characteristics reported, the strategic implications of Soviet UFOs flagrantly
overflying American military and nuclear facilities were worrisome. If on
the other hand the UFOs
were built by extraterrestrials, we might copy the technology (if we
could get our hands on just one saucer) and secure a huge advantage in the
Cold War. And even if the military believed that UFOs were manufactured
neither by Soviets nor by extraterrestrials, there was a good reason to follow
the reports closely.
In the 1950s balloons were being extensively used by the Air Force - not
just as weather measurement platforms, as prominently advertised, and radar
reflectors, as acknowledged, but also, secretly, as robotic espionage craft,
with high-resolution cameras and signal intelligence devices. While the
balloons themselves were not very secret, the reconnaissance packages they
carried were. High-altitude balloons can seem saucer-shaped when seen
from the ground. If you misestimate how far away they are, you can easily
imagine them going absurdly fast. Occasionally, propelled by a gust of wind,
they make abrupt changes in direction, uncharacteristic of aircraft and in
seeming defiance of the conservation of momentum - if you don't realize
they're hollow and weigh almost nothing.
The most famous of these military balloon systems, widely tested over
the United States in the early 1950s, was called `Skyhook'. Other balloon
systems and projects were designated `Mogul', `Moby Dick', `Grandson'and
`Genetrix'. Urner Lidell, who had some responsibility for these missions at
the Naval Research Laboratory, and who was later a NASA official, once told
me he thought all UFOreports were due to military balloons.While `all' is
going too far, their role has, I think, been insufficiently appreciated. So faras
I know there has never been a systematic and intentional control
experiment, in which highaltitude balloons were secretly released and
tracked, and UFO reports from visual and radar observers noted.
In 1956, overflights of the Soviet Union by US reconnaissance balloons
began. At their peak there were dozens of balloon launches a day. Balloon
overflights were then replaced by highaltitude aircraft, such as the U-2,
which in turn were largely replaced by reconnaissance satellites.ManyUFOs
dating from this period were clearly scientific balloons, as are some since.
High-altitude balloons are still being launched, including platforms carrying
cosmic ray sensors, optical and infrared telescopes,
radio receivers probing the cosmic background radiation, and other
instruments above most of the Earth's atmosphere.
A great to-do has been made of one or more alleged crashed flying
saucers near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Some initial reports and
newspaper photographs of the incident are entirely consistentwith the idea
that the debris was a crashed high-altitude balloon. But other residents of
the region - especially decades later - remember more exotic materials,
enigmatic hieroglyphics, threats by military personnel to witnesses if they
didn't keep what they knew to themselves, and the canonical story that alien
machinery and body parts were packed into an airplane and flown to the Air
Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Some, but not all, of
the recovered alien body stories are associated with this incident.
Philip Klass, a long-time and dedicated UFO sceptic, has uncovered a
subsequently declassified letter dated 27 July 1948, a year after the Roswell
`incident', fromMajor General C.B. Cabell, then Director of Intelligence for
the US Air Force (and later, as a CIA official, a major figure in the abortive
US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs). Cabell was inquiring of those who
reported to him on what UFOs might be. He hadn't a clue. In an 11 October
1948 summary response, explicitly including information in thepossessionof
the Air Materiel Command, we find the Director of Intelligence being told
that nobody else in the Air Force had a clue either. This makes it unlikely
that UFO fragments and occupants had made their way toWright-Patterson
the year before.
What the Air Force was mostly worried about was that UFOs were
Russian. Why Russians would be testing flying saucers over the United
States was a puzzle to which the following four answers were proposed: `(1)
To negate US confidence in the atom bomb as the most advanced and
decisive weapon in warfare. (2) To perform photographic reconnaissance
missions. (3) To test US air defenses. (4) To conduct familiarization flights
[for strategic bombers] over US territory.' We now know that UFOs neither
were nor are Russian, and however dedicated the Soviet interest may have
been to objectives (1) through (4), flying saucers weren't how they pursued
these objectives.
Much of the evidence regarding the Roswell `incident' seems to point to
a cluster of high-altitude classified balloons, perhaps launched from nearby
Almagordo Army Air Field or White Sands Proving Ground, that crashed
near Roswell, the debris of secret instruments hurriedly collected by earnest
military personnel, early press reports announcing that it was a spaceship
from another planet (`RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell
Region'), diverse recollections simmering over the years, and memories
refreshed by the opportunity for a little fame and fortune. (Two UFO
museums in Roswell are leading tourist stops.)
A 1994 report ordered by the Secretary of the Air Force and the
Department of Defense in response to prodding from a New Mexico
Congressman identifies the Roswell debris as remnants of a long-range,
highly secret, balloon-borne low-frequency acoustic detection system called
`Project Mogul' - an attempt to sense Soviet nuclear weapons explosions at
tropopause altitudes. The Air Force investigators, rummaging
comprehensively through the secret files of 1947, found no evidence of
heightened message traffic:
There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a higher
tempo of operational activity reported that would be logically generated
if an alien craft, whose intentions were unknown, entered U.S. territory
... The records indicate that none of this happened (or if it did, it was
controlled by a security system so efficient and tight that no one, U.S. or
otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system had been
in effect at the time, it would have also been used to protect our atomic
secrets from the Soviets, which history has shown obviously was not the
case.)
The radar targets carried by the balloons were partly manufactured by
novelty and toy companies in New York, whose inventory of decorative
icons seems to have been remembered many years later as alien
hieroglyphics.
The heyday of UFOs corresponds to the time when the main delivery
vehicle for nuclear weapons was being switched from
aircraft to missiles. An early and important technical problem concerned
re-entry - returning a nuclear-armed nosecone through the bulk of the
Earth's atmosphere without burning it up in the process (as small asteroids
and comets are destroyed in their passage through the upper air). Certain
materials, nosecone geometries, and angles of entry are better than others.
Observations of re-entry (or the more spectacular launches) could very well
reveal US progress in this vital strategic technology or, worse, inefficiencies
in the design; such observations might suggest what defensive measures an
adversary should take. Understandably, the subject was considered highly
sensitive.
Inevitably there must have been cases in which military personnel were
told not to talk about what they had seen, or where seemingly innocuous
sightings were suddenly classified top secret with severely constrainedneedto-
know criteria. Air Force officers and civilian scientists thinking back
about it in later years might very well conclude that the government had
engineered a UFO cover-up. If nosecones are judged UFOs, the charge is a
fair one.
Consider spoofing. In the strategic confrontation between the United
States and the Soviet Union, the adequacy of air defences was a vital issue. It
was item (3) on General Cabell's list. If you could find a weakness, itmight
be the key to `victory' in an all-out nuclear war. The only sure way to test
your adversary's defences is to fly an aircraft over their borders and see how
long it takes for them to notice. The United States did this routinely to test
Soviet air defences.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had state-of-the-art radar
defence systems covering its west and east coasts, and especially its northern
approaches (over which a Soviet bomber or missile attack would most likely
come). But there was a soft underbelly - no significant early warning system
to detect the geographically much more taxing southern approach. This is of
course information vital for a potential adversary. It immediately suggests a
spoof: one or more of the adversary's high-performance aircraft zoom out of
the Caribbean, let's say, into US airspace, penetrating, let's say, a few
hundred miles up theMississippi River until a US air defence radar locks on.
Then the intruders
hightail it out of there. (Or, as a control experiment, a unit of US highperformance
aircraft is sequestered and sent in unannounced sorties to
determine how porous American air defences are.) In such a case, there may
be combined visual and radar sightings by military and civilian observersand
large numbers of independent reports. What is reported corresponds to no
known aircraft. The Air Force and civilian aviation authorities truthfully
state that none of their aircraft was responsible. Even if they've been urging
Congress to fund a southern Early Warning System, the Air Force is unlikely
to admit that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to New Orleans, much less
Memphis, before anybody caught on.
Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level technical
investigating team, Air Force and civilian observers told to keep their
mouths shut, and not just the appearance but the reality of suppressionof the
data. Again, this conspiracy of silence need have nothing to do with alien
spacecraft. Even decades later, there are bureaucratic reasons for the
Department of Defense to be close-mouthed about such embarrassments.
There is a potential conflict of interest between parochial concerns of the
Department of Defense and the solution of the UFO enigma.
In addition, something that both the Central Intelligence Agencyandthe
US Air Force worried about then was UFOs as a means of clogging
communication channels in a national crisis, and confusing visual and radar
sightings of enemy aircraft - a signal-to-noise problem that in a way is the
flip side of spoofing.
In view of all this, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that at least some
UFO reports and analyses, and perhaps voluminous files, have been made
inaccessible to the public which pays the bills. The Cold War is over, the
missile and balloon technology is largely obsolete or widely available, and
those who would be embarrassed are no longer on active duty. The worst
that would happen, from the military's point of view, is that there would be
one more acknowledged instance of the American public being misled or
lied to in the interest of national security. It's time for the files to be
declassified and made generally available.
Another instructive intersection of the conspiracy temperament and the
secrecy culture concerns the National Security Agency. This organization
monitors the telephone, radio and
other communications of both friends and adversaries of the United
States. Surreptitiously, it reads the world's mail. Its daily intercept traffic is
huge. In times of tension, vast arrays of NSA personnel fluent in the relevant
languages are sitting with earphones, monitoring in real time everything
from encrypted commands from the target nation's General Staff to pillow
talk. For other material there are key words by which computers cull out for
human attention specific messages or conversations of current urgent
concern. Everything is stored, so that retrospectively it is possible to go back
to the magnetic tapes and to trace the first appearance of a codeword, say, or
command responsibility in a crisis. Some of the intercepts are made from
listening posts in nearby countries (Turkey for Russia, India for China), from
aircraft and ships patrolling nearby, or from ferret satellites in Earth orbit.
There is a continuing dance of measures and countermeasures between the
NSA and the security services of other nations, who understandably do not
wish to be listened in on.
Now add to this already heady mix the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA). A request is made to the NSA for all information it has available on
UFOs. It is required by law to be responsive, but of course without revealing
`methods and sources'. NSA also feels a deep obligation not to alert other
nations, friends or foes, in an obtrusive and politically embarrassing way, to
its activities. So a more or less typical intercept released by NSA in response
to an FOIA request will be a third of a page blacked out, a fragment of a line
saying `reported a UFO at low altitude', followed by two-thirds of a page
blacked out. The NSA's position is that releasing the rest of the page would
potentially compromise sources and methods, or at least alert the nation in
question to how readily its aviation radio traffic is being intercepted. (IfNSA
released surrounding, seemingly bland, aircraft-to-tower transmissions, it
would then be possible for the nation in question to recognize that its
military air traffic control dialogues are being monitored and to switch to
communications means - frequency hopping, for example - that make NSA
intercepts more difficult.) But UFO conspiracy theorists receiving, in
response to their FOIA requests, dozens of pages of material, almost all of it
blacked out, understandably deduce that the NSA possesses
extensive information on UFOs and is part of a conspiracy of silence.
In talking not for attribution with NSA officials, I am told the following
story: typical intercepts are ofmilitary and civilian aircraft radioing that they
see a UFO, by which they mean an unidentified object in the surrounding
airspace. It may even be US aircraft on reconnaissance or spoofing missions.
In most cases it is something much more ordinary, and the clarification is
also reported on later NSA intercepts.
Similar logic can be used to make NSA seem a part of any conspiracy. For
example, they say, a response was required to an FOIA request on what the
NSA knew about the singer Elvis Presley. (Apparitions of Mr Presley and
resulting miraculous cures have been reported.) Well, the NSA knew a few
things. For example, a report on the economic health of a certain nation
reported how many Elvis Presley tapes and CDs were sold there. This
information also was supplied as a few lines of clear in a vast ocean of
censorship black. Was NSA engaged in an Elvis Presley cover-up?While of
course I have not personally investigated NSA's UFO-related traffic, their
story seems to me very plausible.
If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of aliens from
us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the military and
intelligence establishments. At the very leastwe can push for declassification
of relevant information from decades ago, of which the July 1994 Air Force
report on the 'Roswell Incident' is a good example.
You can catch a flavour of the paranoid style of many UFOlogists, as well
as a naivete about the secrecy culture, in a book by a former New York
Times reporter, Howard Blum (Out There, Simon and Schuster, 1990):
I could not, no matter how inventively I tried, avoid slamming into
sudden dead ends. The whole story was always lingering, deliberately, I
came to believe, just out of my grasp.
Why?
This was the single, practical, impossible question that was balanced
ominously on the tall peak of my mounting suspicions. Why were all
these official spokesmen and institutions
doing their collusive best to hinder and obstruct my efforts? Why
were stories true one day, and false the next? Why all the tense,
unyielding secretiveness? Why were military intelligence agents
spreading disinformation, driving UFO believers mad? What had the
government found out there? What was it trying to hide?
Of course there's resistance. Some information is classified legitimately;
as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national
interest. Further, military, political and intelligence communities tend to
value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading
responsibility for incompetence or worse. It generates an dlite, a band of
brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the
greatmass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made
secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply
incompatible with democracy and with science.
One of the most provocative purported intersections of UFOs and secrecy
are the so-called MJ-12 documents. In late 1984, so the story goes, an
envelope containing a canister of exposed but undeveloped film was thrust
into the home mail slot of a film producer, Jaime Shandera, interested in
UFOs and government cover-up, remarkably, just as he was about to go out
and have lunch with the author of a book on the alleged events in Roswell,
New Mexico. When developed, it `proved to be' page after page of a highly
classified `eyes only' executive order dated 24 September 1947 in which
President Harry S. Truman seemingly established a committee of twelve
scientists and government officials to examine a set of crashed flying saucers
and little alien bodies. The membership of the MJ-12 committee is
remarkable because these are just the military, intelligence, science and
engineering people who might have been called to investigate such crashes if
they had occurred. In the MJ-12 documents there are tantalizing references
to appendices about the nature of the aliens, the technology of their ships
and so on, but the appendices were not included in the mysterious film.
The Air Force says that the document is bogus. The UFOexpert Philip J.
Klass and others find lexicographic and typographic inconsistencies that
suggest that the whole thing is a hoax.
Those who purchase fine art are concerned about the provenance of their
painting - that is, who owned it most recently and who before that ... and so
on all the way back to the original artist. If there are breaks in the chain, if a
300-year-old painting can be tracked back only sixty years and then we have
no idea in what home or museum it was hanging, the forgery warning flags
go up. Because the rewards of forgery in fine art are high, collectors must be
very cautious. Where theMJ-12 documents are most vulnerable and suspect
is exactly on this question of provenance - the evidence miraculously
dropped on a doorstep like something out of a fairy story, perhaps `The
Shoemaker and the Elves'.
There are many cases in human history of a similar character - where a
document of dubious provenance suddenly appears carrying information of
great import which strongly supports the case of those who have made the
discovery. After careful and in some cases courageous investigation the
document is proved to be a hoax. There is no difficulty in understanding the
motivation of the hoaxers. A more or less typical example is the book of
Deuteronomy - discovered hidden in the Temple in Jerusalem by King
Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reformation struggle,
found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views.
Another case is what is called the Donation of Constantine. Constantine
the Great is the Emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the
Roman Empire. The city of Constantinople (now Istanbul), for over a
thousand years the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was named after
him. He died in the year 335. In the ninth century, references to the
Donation of Constantine suddenly appeared in Christian writings; in it
Constantine wills to his contemporary, Pope Sylvester 1, the entireWestern
Roman Empire, including Rome. This little gift, so the story went, waspartly
in gratitude for Sylvester's cure of Constantine's leprosy. By the eleventh
century, popes were regularly referring to the Donation of Constantine to
justify their claims to be not only the ecclesiastical but also the secular rulers
of central Italy. Through theMiddle Ages the Donation was judged genuine
both by those who supported and by those who opposed the temporal claims
of the Church.
Lorenzo of Valla was one of the polymaths of the Italian
Renaissance. A controversialist, crusty, critical, arrogant, a pedant, he
was attacked by his contemporaries for sacrilege, impudence, temerity and
presumption, among other imperfections. After he concluded that the
Apostles' Creed could not on grammatical grounds have actually been
written by the Twelve Apostles, the Inquisition declared him a heretic, and
only the intervention of his patron, Alfonso, King of Naples, prevented his
immolation. Undeterred, in 1440, he published a treatise demonstratingthat
the Donation of Constantine is a crude forgery. The language in which itwas
written was to fourth century court Latin as Cockney was to the King's
English. Because of Lorenzo of Valla, the Roman Catholic Church no longer
presses its claim to rule European nations because of the Donation of
Constantine. This work, whose provenance has a five-century hole in it, is
generally understood to have been forged by a cleric attached to the
Church's curia around the time of Charlemagne, when the papacy (and
especially Pope Adrian I) was arguing for unification of church and state.
Assuming they both belong to the same category, theMJ-12 documents
are a cleverer hoax than the Donation of Constantine. But on matters of
provenance, vested interest and lexicographic inconsistencies, they have
much in common.
A cover-up to keep knowledge of extraterrestrial life or alien abductions
almost wholly secret for forty-five years, with hundreds if not thousands of
government employees privy to it, is a remarkable notion. Certainly,
government secrets are routinely kept, even secrets of substantial general
interest. But the ostensible point of such secrecy is to protect the country
and its citizens. Here, though, it's different. The alleged conspiracy of those
with security clearances is to keep from the citizens knowledge of a
continuing alien assault on the human species. If extraterrestrials really were
abducting millions of us, it would be much more than a matter of national
security. It would affect the security of all human beings everywhere on
Earth. Given such stakes, is it plausible that no one with real knowledge and
evidence, in nearly 200 nations, would blow the whistle, speak out and side
with the humans rather than the aliens?
Since the end of the Cold War NASA has been flailing about,
trying to find missions that justify its existence - particularly a good
reason for humans in space. If the Earth were being visited daily by hostile
aliens, wouldn't NASA leap on this opportunity to augment its funding?And
if an alien invasion were in progress, why would the Air Force, traditionally
led by pilots, step back from manned spaceflight and launch all its payloads
on unmanned boosters?
Consider the former Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, in charge
of `Star Wars'. It's fallen on hard times now, particularly its objective of
basing defences in space. Its name and perspective have been demoted. It's
the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization these days. It no longer even
reports directly to the Secretary of Defense. The inability of such technology
to protect the United States against a massive attack by nuclear-armed
missiles is manifest. But wouldn't we want at least to attempt deployment of
defences in space if we were facing an alien invasion?
The Department of Defense, like similar ministries in every nation,
thrives on enemies, real or imagined. It is implausible in the extreme that the
existence of such an adversary would be suppressed by the very organization
that would most benefit from its presence. The entire post-Cold War posture
of the military and civilian space programmes of the United States (and other
nations) speaks powerfully against the idea that there are aliens among us -
unless, of course, the news is also being kept from those who plan the
national defence.
Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there
are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with
great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and
`unscientific' even to contemplate the issue. I once helped to organize a
public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the
proposition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distinguished
physicist, whose judgement in many othermatters I respected, threatened to
set the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this
madness. (Nevertheless, the debate was held and published, the issueswere a
little better
clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew. )
A 1969 study by the National Academy of Sciences, while recognizing
that there are reports `not easily explained', concluded that `the least likely
explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by
intelligent beings'. Think of how many other `explanations' there might be:
time travellers; demons from witchland; tourists from another dimension -
likeMrMxyztplk (or was itMxyzptlk? I always forget) from the land of Zrfff
in the Fifth Dimension in the old Superman comic books; the souls of the
dead; or a `noncartesian' phenomenon that doesn't obey the rules of science
or even of logic. Each of these 'explanations' has in fact been seriously
proffered. `Least likely' is really saying something. This rhetorical excess is
an index of how distasteful the whole subject has become to many scientists.
It's telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we
really know so little. This is especially true of the more recent flurry of alien
abduction reports. After all, if true, either hypothesis - invasion by sexually
manipulative extraterrestrials or an epidemic of hallucinations - teaches us
something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong
feelings is that both alternatives have such unpleasant implications.
_Aurora_
The number of reports and their consistency suggest that there may
be some basis for these sightings other than hallucinogenic drugs.
Mystery Aircraft report,
Federation of American Scientists
20 August, 1992
Aurora is a high-altitude, extremely secret American reconnaissance
aircraft, a successor to the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird. It either exists or
it doesn't. By 1993, there
were reports by observers near California's Edwards Air Force Base
and Groom Lake, Nevada, and particularly a region of Groom Lake called
Area 51 where experimental aircraft for the Department of Defense are
tested, that seemed by and large mutually consistent. Confirming reports
were filed from all over the world. Unlike its predecessors, the aircraft is
said to be hypersonic, to travel much faster, perhaps six to eight times
faster, than the speed of sound. It leaves an odd contrail described as
`donuts-on-a-rope'. Perhaps it is also a means of launching small secret
satellites into orbit, developed, it is speculated, after the Challengerdisaster
indicated the shuttle's episodic unreliability for defence payloads.But
the CIA `swears up and down there's no such programme', says US
Senator and former astronaut John Glenn. The principal designer of some
of the most secret US aircraft says the same thing. A Secretary of the Air
Force has vehemently denied the existence of such an airplane, or any
programme to build one, in the US Air Force or anywhere else. Would
he lie? `We have looked into all such sightings, as we have for UFO
reports,' says an Air Force spokesman, in perhaps carefully chosen words,
`and we cannot explain them.' Meanwhile, in April 1995 the Air Force
seized 4,000 more acres near Area 51. The area to which public access is
denied is growing.
Consider then the two possibilities: that Aurora exists, and that it
does not. If it exists, it's striking that an official cover-up of its very
existence has been attempted, that secrecy could be so effective, and that
the aircraft could be tested or refuelled all over the world without a
single photograph of it or any other hard evidence being published. On
the other hand, if Aurora does not exist, it's striking that amyth has been
propagated so vigorously and gone so far. Why should insistent official
denials have carried so little weight? Could the very existence of a
designation - Aurora in this case - serve to pin a common label on a
range of diverse phenomena? Either way, Aurora seems relevant to
UFOs.
