MAGAZINE
VOLUME 01: ALIENS | APRIL 2020
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ALIENS AMONG US In the 1940s and 50s reports of “flying saucers” became an American cultural phenomena. Sightings of strange objects in the sky became the raw materials for Hollywood to present visions of potential threats. Posters for films, like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956 illustrate these fears. Connected to ongoing ideas about life on the Moon, the canals on Mars, and ideas about Martian Civilizations, flying saucers have come to represent the hopes and fears of the modern world. Are these alleged visitors from other worlds peaceful and benevolent or would they attack and destroy humanity? The destructive power of the Atomic bomb called into question the progressive potential of technology. Fear of the possibilities for destruction in the Cold War-era proved fertile ground for terrestrial anxieties to manifest visions of flying saucers and visitors from other worlds who might be hidden among us in plain sight. If UFOs were visiting our world, where were these extraterrestrials? Could they be hidden among us? Comic books and television illustrates how the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors reflected anxieties of that era. The 1962 comic There are Martians Among Us, from Amazing Fantasy #15, illustrates the way fear of extraterrestrials could reflect Cold War anxieties. In the comic, a search party gathers around a landed alien craft, but it can find no sign of alien beings. Radio announcers warn those nearby to stay indoors. The action shifts to a husband and wife as he prepares to leave their home despite a television announcer’s warning to remain indoors. As he waves goodbye he reminds his wife to stay inside. The wife however decides to slip out to the store and is attacked and dragged off. The husband returns home
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and finding it empty runs towards the telephone in a panic. In a twist, the anxious husband reveals that he and his wife are the Martians. The fear that there might be alien enemies in our midst resonates with fears of Soviets and communists from the McCarthy era. Ultimately, in this story, the humans are the ones who accost and capture the alien woman. The shift in perspective puts the humans in the position of the monsters. Aside from depictions of UFOs in media, UFOs are also part of American folk culture. Ideas of aliens and flying saucers are a part of the mythology of America. You can find documentation of these kinds of experiences in folk life collections. An interview with Howard Miller about hunting and hound dogs, collected as part of Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia collection, documents an individual’s experience with a potential UFO sighting. In A mysterious light, a segment of an ethnographic interview, Miller describes a strange light he saw once while hunting with his dogs in 1966 “All at once it was daylight, and I looked up to see what happened. There was a light about that big, going up, drifting up the hill. When I looked and seen it just faded out. I’ve been in the Marines, and know what airplane lights look like, and it was too big for that.” When asked if he knew what it was he offered, “I don’t know what it was” but went on to explain, “If there is any such thing as a UFO that’s what that was.” This unexplained light on a walk in the woods is typical of many stories of these kinds of encounters. It’s not only the media that tells stories and represents these kinds of ideas, documentation of the experiences and stories Americans tell each other is similarly important for understanding and interpreting what UFOs meant to 20th century America. Scientists and astronomers express varying degrees of enthusiasm for the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. However, scientists generally dismiss the idea that there are aliens visiting Earth. In Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan reviews the possibilities of alien visitors
to Earth, and suggests that there is good reason to be skeptical of them. Much of Sagan’s work focuses on debunking folk stories and beliefs and tries to encourage more rigorous and skeptical thought. He similarly discussed criticism of beliefs in alien visitors in his earlier book, Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. This zealous criticism of belief in UFOs from Sagan, who was well known for his speculative ideas about the likelihood of alien civilizations, might seem to be a contradiction. Sagan himself had even speculated on the possibilities of visits by ancient aliens in his essay from the early 60s Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight. How do we reconcile Sagan the skeptic with the imaginative Sagan? Far from a contradiction, these two parts of Sagan’s perspective offer a framework for understanding him and the interchange between science and myth about life on other worlds. Skepticism and speculative imagination come together as two halves of the whole. It’s essential to entertain and explore new ideas, however strange, while at the same time testing and evaluating the validity of those ideas. As the 20th century began, interest in the potential of life on Mars and the possible civilizations there lead to a search for signals.
COULD WE COMMUNICATE WITH ANOTHER PLANET? How might we look for signals and messages from other worlds? An 1896 newspaper article titled “A Signal from Mars” offered one example of how we might receive communications from the planet. In noting “a luminous projection on the southern edge of the planet”, the article suggests that this might be because “the inhabitants of Mars were flashing messages”
to Earth. We can find this same idea in a piece of music. The 1901 piece, “A Signal From Mars, March and Two Step” offers music that Martians might be playing for us. From the cover illustration, it would appear that one rather civilized Martian is using a spotlight to communicate the tune while the other watches Earth with a telescope, likely waiting to see if we have the same taste in marches and two steps. Soon, the development of radio technology would provide a much more powerful way to listen for and send messages to other worlds. Tesla Promises Radio Communication with Mars In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the idea and development of wireless telegraphy, sending and receiving electromagnetic waves through the air, offered new method of searching for communications from space. In 1901, engineer Nicola Tesla made the astonishing claim that he was receiving radio communications from Mars. His story was picked up and reported on broadly in the press. An article from the Richmond Times offered an extensive description and commentary on his alleged discovery. “As he sat beside his instrument on the hillside in Colorado, in the deep silence of that austere, inspiring region, where you plant your feet in gold and your head brushes the constellations — as he sat there one evening, alone, his attention, exquisitely alive at that juncture, was arrested by a faint sound from the receiver — three fairy taps, one after the other, at a fixed interval. What man who has ever lived on this earth would not envy Tesla that moment!” While Tesla’s alleged communications with Mars captured media attention, it did not capture much serious interest from scientists. As radio took off, so did stories of communicating with Mars. One such article from 1920, Hello, Earth! Hello! Marconi believes he is receiving signals from the planets provides extensive commentary on similar signals observed by the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi. Aside from describing this discovery, the article quotes Thomas Edison as saying Marconi’s work offers “good grounds for the theory that inhabitants of other planets are trying to signal to us.”
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™YOU STILL DON©T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE DEALING WITH, DO YOU?∫
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kepler
NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the “habitable zone� -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.
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While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth. “The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind’s quest to find truly Earth-like worlds.” Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky. “We know of just one planet where life exists -- Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth,” said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. “Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward.”Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. “M dwarfs are the most numerous stars,” said Quintana. “The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf.” Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130-days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset. “Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has,” said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. “Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth.” The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth. The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins
-- Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star -- and measuring their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun. Ames is responsible for Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach. The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.” Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut pellentesque justo eget consectetur accumsan. Aliquam nec lectus vitae lorem posuere rhoncus. Nunc dignissim eros euismod ex mollis facilisis. Integer dapibus molestie nulla egestas euismod. Suspendisse ipsum felis, egestas eget congue ut, dignissim vitae arcu. Vivamus vel diam nec mi mattis hendrerit vel facilisis lorem. Maecenas aliquam semper volutpat. Duis pulvinar elementum metus eu fringilla. Nunc vel tincidunt est. Nullam vulputate ultrices maximus. Vestibulum sem lacus, rhoncus vitae ipsum non, ultricies luctus dui. Nunc sed rutrum urna. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae; Sed vel nisl rutrum urna dapibus dignissim. Phasellus ac purus a libero scelerisque tincidunt ac vel nulla. Curabitur non dapibus dolor. Nulla sagittis tellus eu sapien dictum, vitae consectetur lorem convallis. Integer dictum vel leo eget pellentesque. Aliquam vel elit id magna imperdiet aliquam a sit amet nisl. Cras quam enim, convallis euismod nunc a, lacinia pellentesque ligula. Integer in fringilla mi. Ut non turpis varius, elementum tellus eget, tincidunt dui. Aenean et feugiat metus, bibendum commodo nulla. Maecenas consectetur in odio ac ultricies. Curabitur imperdiet eros vitae dui posuere fringilla. Proin dapibus felis nunc, at rutrum massa pellentesque non. Proin tincidunt, ligula id ultricies imperdiet, tortor ante cursus ligula, vel tempor enim elit at tortor. Duis dapibus tellus vitae purus rhoncus tempor. Nunc cursus felis eget erat maximus, eu condimentum eros blandit. Nulla sit amet dolor ultrices, aliquam turpis nec, vulputate ipsum. Nam at malesuada massa, et commodo est. Phasellus rutrum ornare arcu, eu laoreet dui cursus ac. Vivamus eget sodales libero. Pellentesque ullamcorper odio eget libero laoreet, nec
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ABDUCTION BY LINDA LACINA Is it chasing us? That thought coursed through Betty and Barney Hill’s minds as they drove down the empty winding country road in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. It was a September night in 1961, they hadn’t seen a car for miles, and a strange light in the sky seemed to follow them. When they finally got home to Portsmouth at dawn, they were far from relieved. They felt dirty. Their watches stopped working. Barney’s shoes were strangely scuffed and Betty’s dress was ripped. There were two hours of the drive that neither one of them could remember. What had happened? With the help of a psychiatrist, the quiet couple eventually revealed a startling story: Gray beings with large eyes had walked them into a metallic disc as wide, Betty said, as her house was long. Once inside, the beings examined the couple and erased their memories. Their experience would kick off an Air Force inquiry, part of the secretive initiative Project Blue Book that investigated UFO sightings across the country. The incident would also become the first-ever widely publicized alien-abduction account and shape how stories like it were told—and understood—from then on. Debate continues as to whether the husband and wife were liars, fantasists, crackpots or simply sleep-deprived people who later recovered seriously scrambled memories. The Hills’ road trip was spontaneous, a well-earned break Barney decided the couple needed, as explained in The Interrupted Journey, a 1966 book they collaborated on with author John G. Fuller. Barney worked a grueling night shift at the post office, driving 60 miles each way. Betty’s job handling state child-welfare cases was no easier. The little free time this biracial couple had was devoted to their church and activities related to the civil-rights movement. After 16 months of marriage, Betty and Barney saw this trip through Montreal and Niagara Falls as their delayed honeymoon. They left so impulsively they had no time to go to the bank before it closed for the weekend. They got in their car with less than $70 in their pockets. On the last night of their three-day trip, the tired couple sipped coffee in a Vermont diner to recharge before driving back. Barney figured if they pushed through, they could beat the wind and rains from an approaching hurricane. They left the diner around 10 p.m., estimating they could reach their red-framed house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. at the latest. As they drove, strange light in the sky gave another reason to hurry. At first it looked like a falling star, but grew larger and brighter with each mile. Barney, an avid plane watch-
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er and World War II vet, was sure they had nothing to worry about. It’s just a satellite, he assured Betty. It probably went off course. The light seemed to move with the car as Barney steered down the curving mountain road. The light zigged and zagged, ducking past the moon and behind trees and mountain ridges, only to reappear moments later. Sometimes it seemed to move toward them in a game of cat-and-mouse. It had to be an illusion, they thought. Maybe the car’s movement made it seem like the light, too, was moving. Curiosity overcame them. The couple pulled over at road stops and picnic turnouts to get a closer look. Through binoculars, Betty saw that the white light was really an object spinning in the air. “Barney,” she told her husband, “if you think that’s a satellite or a star, you’re being completely ridiculous.” He knew she was right. Barney had an IQ of 140, noted Fuller in his book. Barney was also a pragmatic man who wouldn’t give flying saucers a second thought, remembered his niece Kathleen Marden in her work, Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill Experience. The night was too quiet for a helicopter, a commercial plane or even military jet with a
™THE FIRST- EVER WIDELY PUBLICIZED ALIEN-ABDUCTION ACCOUNT∫ hotshot pilot. He didn’t want to spook Betty, but he was becoming concerned. What was this light and why was it toying with them? About 70 miles past the diner, the object hovered just above the treetops, approximately 100 feet above them. Barney abruptly stopped the car, keeping the engine running. He shoved a handgun he’d hidden beneath the seat into his pocket and rushed into a dark field, leaving Betty in the car. What he saw was as big as a jet but as round and flat as a pancake. “My God, what is this thing?” he recalled thinking. “This can’t be real.” Behind rows of windows, gray uniformed beings seemed to look right at him, Barney recalled. He tried to lift his hand to his pistol but somehow couldn’t. A voice told him not to put down his binoculars. He had a startling thought: We’re about to be captured. Yelling hysterically, he ran back to the car and barreled down the road as Betty tracked the craft, craning her head outside the car window. Without explanation, loud, rhythmic beeps sounded from the car’s trunk. The couple felt instantly drowsy and lost consciousness. They came to around two hours later and 35 miles down the road.
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™ WHY HAVEN'T WE MET ALIENS YET?∫
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THE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE
BY DAVID CROOKES Sometimes the introduction of a news report will stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reread in fear you didn’t quite grasp its point the first time. That was certainly the case when Mail Online published a story on Mar. 21, 2017: “An alien satellite set up more than 12,000 years ago to spy on humans has been shot down by elite soldiers from the illuminati, UFO hunters claim.” And with that, the conspiracy surrounding the so-called “Black Knight” satellite appeared to be very much alive. It’s been 120 years since conspiracists believed the existence of the Black Knight was recorded. Those who subscribe to the theory lay claim of an extraterrestrial spacecraft in near-polar orbit of the Earth, although they draw upon evidence so disparate that it’s not entirely clear why people link them. What they amount to, however, is an intriguing set of ingredients that, taken together, cause people to scream loud about potential cover-ups by NASA and the government. In that sense, it is a legend that refuses to go away. The photo evidence that isn’t evidence A lot of the earliest discoveries that have come to be linked to the Black Knight satellite theory relate to radio signals. But a series of images from 1998 emerged that really threw the celestial cat among the pigeons. They were taken during STS-88, which was the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). There, for all to see, were images released by NASA that showed a black object hovering above the Earth in low orbit. And it wasn’t long after the images were thrust in front of a hopeful public before people were performing some conspiratorial sums and sharing them with the wider world. By way of explanation, astronaut Jerry Ross pointed out that the ISS was in the midst of being constructed when the images were taken. The U.S. team, he said, was on its way to attach the American module to the one created by the Russians and, as part of that work, they had taken four trunnion pin thermal covers with them. The task was to wrap these around four bare trunnion pins, these being rods that attached the module to the shuttle while it was being transported. This would act to prevent heat loss from the exposed metal. Unfortunately, during one of the extravehicular activities (EVA) things went a little bit wrong and one of the covers came loose from its tether, causing it to float away along with some other items. “Jerry, one of the thermal covers got away from you,” said commander Robert Cabana, and it soon became apparent that they wouldn’t be getting it back. Subsequently captured on camera, this black object was given the object number 025570 by NASA, and a few days later the object fell from orbit and burned up. Far from being an extraterrestrial object, the black item floating in space was nothing more than a blanket. Much of this has been placed on the record. Former NASA space engineer James Oberg, who personally knows Ross and the person who took the photos, Sergei Krikalev, has gone to great lengths to show that these supposed images of the Black Knight have less fanciful origins. “Before leaving NASA I led the trajectory design team that produced the mission profile,” Oberg told All
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About Space. “Every step of the way there is consistency with what I learned as a lifelong spaceflight operations specialist: why the blankets were needed, why one of them came loose, why it floated off the way it did. The difference is, for the general public all these features are unearthly to folks who are only familiar with Earthside principles of heating, working, motion and dozens of other never-before-encountered-in-history aspects of outer space.” Given Oberg’s debunking you’d think the matter would have drawn to a close. But no. Since the images were shared far and wide, conspiracy theories have continued. “They are probably some of the weirdest-looking 70 mm photos to ever come out of the space shuttle program,” Oberg said. “And apparently a NASA website update made the original links inoperative, sparking concerns over a cover-up. All normal journalistic practices — determining the timeline, asking witnesses, searching for the wider context — were skipped.”By David Crookes Sometimes the introduction of a news report will stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reread in fear you didn’t quite grasp its point the first time. That was certainly the case when Mail Online published a story on Mar. 21, 2017: “An alien satellite set up more than 12,000 years ago to spy on humans has been shot down by elite soldiers from the illuminati, UFO hunters claim.” And with that, the conspiracy surrounding the so-called “Black Knight” satellite appeared to be very much alive. It’s been 120 years since conspiracists believed the existence of the Black Knight was recorded. Those who subscribe to the theory lay claim of an extraterrestrial spacecraft in near-polar orbit of the Earth, although they draw upon evidence so disparate that it’s not entirely clear why people link them. What they amount to, however, is an intriguing set of ingredients that, taken together, cause people to scream loud about potential cover-ups by NASA and the government. In that sense, it is a legend that refuses to go away. The photo evidence that isn’t evidence A lot of the earliest discoveries that have come to be linked to the Black Knight satellite theory relate to radio signals. But a series of images from 1998 emerged that really threw the celestial cat among the pigeons. They were taken during STS-88, which was the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). There, for all to see, were images released by NASA that showed a black object hovering above the Earth in low orbit. And it wasn’t long after the images were thrust in front of a hopeful public before people were performing some conspiratorial sums and sharing them with the wider world. By way of explanation, astronaut Jerry Ross pointed out that the ISS was in the midst of being constructed when the images were taken. The U.S. team, he said, was on its way to attach the American module to the one created by the Russians and, as part of that work, they had taken four trunnion pin thermal covers with them. The task was to wrap these around four bare trunnion pins, these being rods that attached the module to the shuttle while it was being transported. This would act to prevent heat loss from the exposed metal. Unfortunately, during one of the extravehicular activities (EVA) things went a little bit wrong and one of the covers came loose from its tether, causing it to float away along with some other items. “Jerry, one of the
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By David Crookes Sometimes the introduction of a news report will stop you in your tracks, forcing you to reread in fear you didn’t quite grasp its point the first time. That was certainly the case when Mail Online published a story on Mar. 21, 2017: “An alien satellite set up more than 12,000 years ago to spy on humans has been shot down by elite soldiers from the illuminati, UFO hunters claim.” And with that, the conspiracy surrounding the so-called “Black Knight” satellite appeared to be very much alive. It’s been 120 years since conspiracists believed the existence of the Black Knight was recorded. Those who subscribe to the theory lay claim of an extraterrestrial spacecraft in near-polar orbit of the Earth, although they draw upon evidence so disparate that it’s not entirely clear why people link them. What they amount to, however, is an intriguing set of ingredients that, taken together, cause people to scream loud about potential cover-ups by NASA and the government. In that sense, it is a legend that refuses to go away. The photo evidence that isn’t evidence A lot of the earliest discoveries that have come to be linked to the Black Knight satellite theory relate to radio signals. But a series of images from 1998 emerged that really threw the celestial cat among the pigeons. They were taken during STS-88, which was the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). There, for all to see, were images released by NASA that showed a black object hovering above the Earth in low orbit. And it wasn’t long after the images were thrust in front of a hopeful public before people were performing some conspiratorial sums and sharing them with the wider world. By way of explanation, astronaut Jerry Ross pointed out that the ISS was in the midst of being constructed when the images were taken. The U.S. team, he said, was on its way to attach the American module to the one created by the Russians and, as part of that work, they had taken four trunnion pin thermal covers with them. The task was to wrap these around four bare trunnion pins, these being rods that attached the module to the shuttle while it was being transported. This would act to prevent heat loss from the exposed metal. Unfortunately, during one of the extravehicular activities (EVA) things went a little bit wrong and one of the covers came loose from its tether, causing it to float away along with some other items. “Jerry, one of the thermal covers got away from you,” said commander Robert Cabana, and it soon became apparent that they wouldn’t be getting it back. Subsequently captured on camera, this black object was given the object number 025570 by NASA, and a few days later the object fell from orbit and burned up. Far from being an extraterrestrial object, the black item floating in space was nothing more than a blanket. Much of this has been placed on the record. Former NASA space engineer James Oberg, who personally knows Ross and the person who took the photos, Sergei Krikalev, has gone to great lengths to show that these supposed images of the Black Knight have less fanciful origins. “Before leaving NASA I led the trajectory design team that produced the mission profile,” Oberg told All
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