The Secret History of Extraterrestrials: Advanced Technology and the Coming New Race (20 page)

MARKER BEACONS

Perhaps the most striking of all pulsar characteristics is their placement in the galaxy. When their positions are plotted within the galactic “globe,” which is a projection of the galaxy similar to the Mercator projection for Earth, they all seem to congregate in certain key locations. The densest concentration is found on or near the galactic equator, not the galactic center as one would expect if they were created out of supernova explosions as theorized. Also, they seem to clump around two points along the equator. These two points are precisely at the one-radian marks as measured from the earth. A radian is a universally understood geometric measurement of an angle that marks off an arc around the circumference equal in length to the circle’s radius and is always 57.296°. Using the earth as the center of the circle and placing the galactic center on the equator, perhaps the most significant pulsar in the galaxy falls precisely at a one-radian mark! This is the Millisecond Pulsar and it is the fastest of all the 1,100 pulsars discovered to date. It “beats” at 642 pulses per second. It is also the most precise in timing, being accurate to seventeen significant digits, which surpasses the best atomic clocks on Earth, and it emits optically visible high-intensity pulses. LaViolette believes that the Millisecond Pulsar was deliberately placed there by ETs to function as a marker beacon expressly for our solar system, since they knew we would understand the significance of the one-radian point.

LaViolette’s main thesis is that all of the pulsars “visible” to Earth were deliberately placed by ET civilizations to convey a message to us relative to the galactic superwave. This, he says, explains why two very unique (in ways too complex to explain here) pulsars that LaViolette calls the king and queen of pulsars were positioned in the Crab and Vela nebulae, both of which were the sites of supernova explosions. He estimates that after reaching Earth about 14,130 years ago, the last superwave would have reached the Vela complex about one hundred years later and detonated a supernova there by heating up the unstable stars to the explosion point. Then, about 6,300 years later, it would have reached the Crab nebula and triggered a supernova there. These very large supernovas would have become visible on Earth at 11,250 BCE and 1054 CE, respectively. By placing marker beacons at these points, LaViolette believes that the ETs were giving us information about that superwave that we could use to predict future waves and their associated cataclysmic effects.

LaViolette believes that we already have the technology to build our own pulsars using something called force field beaming technology. Therefore, the day is not far off when earthlings can join the galactic community and help inform some other unfortunate planet of the approach of a fearsome galactic superwave.

BIOMES AND LUNGS

Built in 1987 as a private enterprise with about $200 million in funding from billionaire Texas oil magnate Edward P. Bass, Biosphere 2 was designed as an airtight replica of Earth’s environment. It consists of several large, connected glass terrariums housing five different “biomes.” A biome is a discrete Earth ecological system set in a unique temperature-humidity environment that is self-organizing and able to continually renew itself. The sealed-glass and space-frame structure built on 3.2 acres is 7.2 million cubic feet and contains a 900,000-gallon ocean replete with a live coral reef and wave-making technology, a rain forest, a savanna, marshlands, and a coastal desert as well as intense agricultural areas and a human habitat. The biomes are all open to each other and to the habitat so that the interior environment is essentially a simplified, miniature, encapsulated version of some of the varied landscapes of Earth.

The structure is constructed of 6,500 tetrahedron-shaped panels made from five-foot steel tubes fitted with high-performance glass panels. The steel-and-glass panels were manufactured and vacuum tested for air tightness at the factory and then fitted together and sealed on-site in a two-stage caulking process, much like the building of a geodesic dome. Buckminster Fuller himself was a consultant on the project, so the entire structure can essentially be considered to be geodesic in design. Heroic measures were taken to minimize corrosion and breakage. The glass is double layered and heat strengthened with a plastic layer sandwiched between the glass layers. To date, there have been only five cracked glass panels, but the airtight seal was maintained because only one side of the double layer cracked and the plastic layer remained intact.

Connected to the Biosphere by tunnels are two huge hemispheric structures of ingenious design. These are the “lungs” of the operation, so named because they “breathe” in and out to maintain a constant air pressure in the main building. As the internal air heats up during the day, it expands, and the pressure builds to critical levels, capable of rupturing the airtight seal. The heated air follows the path of least resistance and rushes through the tunnels and lifts large, weighted steel disks to make room for the expansion. At night, when the interior air cools and compresses, the disks push down and expel the lower-pressure air back into the building interior.

The trees, bushes, and grasses that populate the biomes were brought in from all over the world. They were first placed in a quarantine building to make sure they were free of destructive organisms before being transplanted to the Biosphere. The water for the “ocean” was taken from the Pacific near San Diego and the Caribbean Sea near the Bahamas and transported to the site in tanker trucks. When the building was completed in 1991, it contained about 3,500 species of flora and fauna.

MISSION 1

Mission 1 commenced on September 26, 1991, to a great public fanfare, as though the crew was departing the planet. On that date, an international team of eight “bionauts,” four men and four women, entered the Biosphere and were sealed inside. They remained there for two years, during which time they subsisted only on the food produced within the complex, although about 10 percent was grown prior to the human occupancy. Their diet was highly nutritious, averaging about 2,200 daily calories using over eighty crops, goat’s milk, eggs, and a small amount of animal meat. All their waste products were recycled.

Photosynthesis within the biomes was facilitated by the bright desert sun, and in the beginning there was abundant oxygen available for the bionauts. In the first year, there were some small leaks, but the oxygen concentration remained high. However, the project ran into some bad luck in the second year. It turned out to be the cloudiest winter in Arizona in over fifty years because of the El Niño effect. This pushed the oxygen level down to a low point of 14 percent as compared with the normal 20 percent. However, the operation was highly computerized using then-new Expert software and about two thousand points of data collection. With this high-tech assistance, the crew was able to keep the ambient environment stable and safe.

Mission 1 was an unqualified success, despite unverified rumors of some cheating. The eight bionauts stuck it out. They got along well and emerged healthy. According to a later critique by the one of the bionauts, “Many lessons were learned about managing a small closed ecological system in Mission 1, and there were proposed changes in the species stocking in preparation for a Mission 2. Facility sealing to give an air leakage of just 1% per year was anticipated for Mission 2.” And another of the crew wrote, “We may . . . be surprised, as we have been in Biosphere 2, by the adaptability of nature and by its resourceful self-organization into viable systems.”

A GRAND CONCEPTION

The story of this grand conception and experiment is as strange as the complex itself. We are asked to believe that it began as an effort to understand and attempt to duplicate the ecology of the earth, which the founders refer to as Biosphere 1. The man who led the project certainly is right for the role of “the brilliant ecological visionary.” John Polk Allen had a long history of ecological research before the advent of Biosphere 2. He was the cofounder and director of Eco Frontiers, Inc., which owns and operates large ecological research projects all over the world, one of which is the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to understanding the development, growth, and sustenance of coral reefs. Allen is also something of an adventurer, having captained ecological and sociological expeditions to Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tibet, India, Belize, and other exotic places. He is also an actor, a poet, a film producer, a playwright, and the author of over twenty-four publications, some of which are scientific and others purely literary. He has an undergraduate degree in metallurgical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

On the other hand, the motivation of Edward P. Bass to finance a basic research project of this magnitude is not entirely clear. Bass, who was in his forties at the time of Mission 1, is the second oldest of the four Bass brothers from Fort Worth, Texas. Their father, Perry Richardson Bass, who died at the age of ninety-one in 2006, inherited the oil fortune created by his legendary wildcatter-tycoon uncle, Sid Richardson, built it considerably through investments, and then turned the management of the family businesses over to oldest son, Sid Bass, in 1968. Edward attended Yale University and graduated in the class of 1967. George W. Bush was in the class of 1968, so he and Bass were basically classmates. Based on information from
Forbes
magazine, at the time he financed Biosphere 2 in 1987, Bass was probably worth around $800 million, which means that he invested about 25 percent of his entire fortune in this nonprofit ecological venture!

We don’t know who first proposed the arrangement, but in 1984, Allen’s company, Decisions Team Ltd. (DTL), went into partnership with Bass’s company, Decisions Investment Corporation (DIC), to form Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV) for the express purpose of building Biosphere 2. Even though DIC financed the entire development of the project, DTL was given a 50 percent ownership position because it was responsible for the planning, building, and operation of the structure and the experiments. Seven of the key people came from DTL. Allen became the executive chairman and later the director and vice president of research, development, and engineering, and Bass, who owned 80 percent of DIC, became the financial director of SBV. This management team remained in place for ten years and was responsible for the planning and construction of the structure as well as the management of Mission 1 and the aborted Mission 2.

A MARS COLONY PROTOTYPE

In a 1994 interview with David Jay Brown for the Internet edition of
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations for the New Millennium,
Allen said that the goal of Biosphere 2 was to see if a system modeled on Biosphere 1 (Earth) could be self-organizing. Allen didn’t mention it at the time, but he and his colleagues needed to know that because their real purpose was to create a design that could function as a prototype for a self-sustaining colony on the planet Mars. Despite the intense worldwide publicity when Mission 1 began in 1991, discussion of this goal was played down and basically avoided, but it is quite clear now, and there is an abundance of evidence. The name of the company itself, Space Biospheres Ventures, says it all. Mark Nelson’s position as director of Earth and space applications clearly indicates their purpose. And this explains the “snap-together” geodesic design. The building blocks are five-foot-square tetrahedron-shaped steel-and-glass panels, small enough to be carried on a spaceship and easily handled once there, although it would probably take many journeys to carry 6,500 panels to Mars, depending, of course, on the size of the spaceship. But given the climate of strict secrecy surrounding aerospace development, we really have no way of knowing what size of crafts, possibly using antigravity propulsion, actually existed or were on the drawing boards in 1984. For all we know, it could take only a single trip.

Lest there by any lingering doubt about the purpose of Biosphere 2, Allen has written many papers confirming that purpose. Of particular relevance was one written in 1992, titled “The Biosphere 2 Project and Its Application for Space Exploration and Mars Settlement.” After the Mission 1 project, Biosphere 2 went through some unsettled and troubled times, including two complete management changes. Now, since 2004, after all this, no pains are taken to disguise the original intent. The tour guide typically begins his presentation by telling visitors that Biosphere 2 was built as a Mars prototype colony.

The Biosphere 2 tour guides insist that NASA had absolutely no role in the conception or design of the project and showed increasing interest only as it progressed. However, it is now known that there was a well-funded and top-secret period of experimentation in closed ecological life-support systems (CELSS) over a twenty-year period in Russia, under government and military control, prior to Biosphere 2. Could it be that NASA was not interested in these projects either? Certainly the CIA would have been interested in this, and the CIA is known to have a very close relationship with NASA. And it is now openly reported by NASA that its scientists have been experimenting in CELSS since 1986 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. When we examine this time-line of development efforts in CELSS, it is fascinating to observe that this very expensive type of research has been carried out by three different agencies from the 1950s right up to the present without appreciable duplication or overlap and with a high level of cooperation! In trying to form a cohesive picture of what has really been going on, it would be instructive to look at what preceded and what followed Biosphere 2, and what continuity has existed.

THE RUSSIAN INITIATIVE

The initial Russian experiments in CELSS in the 1950s by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, now recognized as the great innovator in this field, culminated in the first sealed-environment project involving a human in 1961. In the Bios-1 experiment in a facility in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Yvgenii Shepelev breathed oxygen created by a type of algae called chlorella, a unicellular organism, which also absorbed the exhaled carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. The Russians eventually discovered that they needed eight square meters of chlorella to support one human. By 1968, they were also recycling the water and gases to cultivate the chlorella, and the overall efficiency of the system reached 85 percent (i.e., only 15 percent of the nutrients were supplied from outside the sealed facility). Next, an agricultural component was added. Wheat and vegetables were grown and recycled, permitting longer habitation periods.

This work progressed up to the top-secret Bios-3 experiment in Krasnoyarsk under the direction of Josef Gitelson in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This project was kept under tight wraps, and according to Allen, nobody in the United States had any inkling of what was going on. In Bios-3, two- and three-person teams were sealed for periods of up to six months, and the crops produced up to 50 percent of the nutritional requirements of the crew. However, the plants could not clear all the gaseous emissions, and eventually a thermo-catalytic filter was needed. Waste products were not recycled.

The Krasnoyarsk facility was built somewhat like Biosophere 2. About one-quarter of the structure housed the crew and food-processing and equipment-repair materials, and the rest of the facility produced the agricultural products, but there were no biomes. Artificial sunlight was used to foster the photosynthesis, since, unlike in the Arizona desert, the days are short in Siberia and the sunlight is not very intense.

Twenty years later, in 1986, in the early, heady days of glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, the original Russian scientists involved in the Bios experiments were very cooperative when Allen asked them to help with the design of Biosphere 2. Allen and his DTL team were welcomed at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow by Shepelev and Oleg Gazenko, the director of the institute, known for having selected and trained the dog Laika to fly on
Sputnik 2
. This institute was originally formed to study the effects of space on cosmonauts. Gitelson arrived the next day and shared the secrets of Bios-3 with Allen’s team in the form of a previously unavailable documentary film. Gitelson went on to become a key consultant in the design of Biosphere 2 and to help accelerate the planning. In 1987, Allen’s team and Gitelson’s team met and compared notes at the First International Meeting in Closed Life Systems, sponsored by SBV and the Royal Society of London. And in 1989, a second conference was held at Krasnoyarsk, cosponsored by Gitelson. Scientists from the European Space Agency attended that meeting. It was there that the term “biospherics” was unanimously adopted to describe their work.