The Ancient Alien Question (4 page)

Chapter 1
One Small Question for Man, One Giant Question for Humankind

The term
First Contact
applies to the moment when we
employ a means of communication with alien beings that also have a means of talking back to us. There are several ways First Contact could happen. The most popular idea, originating from the UFO phenomenon, is the image of ET landing on the lawn of the White House and greeting the president. However, scientists hope
they
are the first to establish communication with ET, via radio signals. In science fiction, First Contact was most famously envisioned in the television series
Star Trek
. It occurred—or should that read,
will occur
?—on April 5, 2063, when Zefram Cochrane made the first warp drive flight on a ship called the
Phoenix
. The flight was noticed by the Vulcans, who then landed on Earth to make contact with humankind, telling us that we were not alone in the universe. From there on, we boldly went where no one had gone before.

In real life, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has said that First Contact would be an earth-changing event. After the discovery of fire, agriculture, writing, and mathematics, he says, “First Contact would top everything.”
¹
It would be the most giant step humankind had ever taken, or encountered. The question, of course, is whether First Contact has already been established, or is still a thing of the future. Proponents of the Ancient Alien Theory argue that First Contact has already happened, but that this momentous event has somehow been forgotten. Could that truly be the case?

Contact

In 1997, I attended the Ancient Astronaut Society’s World Conference in Orlando, Florida, and visited the Kennedy Space Center while I was at it. That same week, I saw the enjoyable movie
Men in Black
and the deeply inspired
Contact
, the latter based on a Carl Sagan novel in which the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI) makes contact with an alien civilization. What happens next is relevant to the Ancient Alien Question: The message humankind receives contains a blueprint of an extremely complex device, whose ultimate purpose is unknown, but is assumed to send a person to the aliens’ home world. The construction of the device also requires the active cooperation—and finances—of several nations. Once it is built, someone is selected to occupy the “seat,” which turns out to propel this person to another dimension, apparently light-years away, where the “only” thing that happens is a conversation with these alien beings—without leaving behind any material evidence that contact has been made between two intelligent species. When the human scientist asks the aliens whether they constructed a series of what seem to be stargates or interdimensional portals, the alien answers that they do not know who built this mechanism through which they and other species can hop through the universe; someone long ago built it, but the
who
is unknown.

The ensuing congressional hearings formally conclude that there is no evidence that contact was established, and that the device malfunctioned. Though the scientist swears it sent her into another dimension, none of the instruments there to monitor the device registered this event.

Let’s take this outside of the realm of fiction. If this scenario had occurred in real life, the only physical remains of contact with aliens would be two devices: one blown up by a terrorist on Cape Canaveral and the other on an island near Japan. Fast-forward several hundred (if not thousand) years, and what would we see? What would we remember? Would anything survive? Let’s be totally realistic, and ask what our ancestors a thousand years from now will find at Cape Canaveral. Will any of the metal launch platforms survive? Unlikely. Some of the ruins of the buildings might be found, but maybe not even that. If we are lucky, there might be accounts of how, for a brief period of time, humankind sent people into space, and that we once went to the moon. Today, there are several popular authors who hotly contest that we ever went to the moon, arguing that the landing was just American propaganda created to instill a sense of superiority over the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Though I do not agree, let us assume that some of their writings also survive the test of time, and the future historians incorporate them in their accounts. Future history might then say that “There was a widely held belief that humans walked on the moon, but even in their own times, some thought otherwise.” The historians might go on to say that they have found archaeological evidence at Cape Canaveral, but that the question of whether or not we ever went into space, or to the moon, cannot be proven.

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 someone 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.