Alien Universe (5 page)

FIGURE 1.2
.
Percival Lowell and his assistants catalogued many canals they believed they had observed on the surface of Mars. This 1905 drawing gives an indication to the extensive canal network he thought he found.
Courtesy of the Lowell Observatory Archives
.

While Lowell’s fame in the popular press was high, there were many doubters in the scientific community. The situation was not one in which there were but two positions: canals and no canals. Some astronomers accepted canals, but as natural phenomena, while others accepted splotchy features on the Martian surface that changed over time and were taken to be seasonal vegetation variation. Astronomer W. W. Campbell reviewed Lowell’s book
Mars
and said, “Mr. Lowell went direct from the lecture-hall to his observatory in Arizona; and how well his observations established his preobservational views is told in his book.” Campbell accepted the canals as real features, but he found ridiculous the attribution of the features as evidence of intelligent handiwork. Campbell was also aware that the amount of water available in the atmosphere of Mars was exceedingly low and found the lack of water compelling evidence that there could be no civilization on the planet.

The impact of Lowell’s advocacy can be measured in many ways, but perhaps the strongest is the appearance of stories of Martian civilization in fiction. Possibly the first occurrence would be H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel
War of the Worlds
. During the late 1880s, Wells was trained as a science teacher, and he had written a biology textbook. However, in 1894 he joined the scientific journal
Nature
as a reviewer. Much of his writing served to translate the highly technical innovations of the Victorian era into terms familiar to the educated lay reader. His essay
Intelligence on Mars
, published in 1896 in the
Saturday Review
, speculated about life on Mars and how the inhabitants would cope with what he considered to be an older planet. Much of the article, including his conjecture that the Martians might move to another planet to survive, was found in his famous fictional work
The War of the Worlds
. He even incorporates the reports of a flash of light observed on Mars by an astronomer in 1894 (and published in the August issue of
Nature
) as the start of the book. As will be detailed in
chapter 3
,
The War of the Worlds
describes the invasion of Earth by Martians and their subsequent defeat by Earth microbes.

Lowell is a central figure to the excitement about Martian intelligence, but he was neither the originator of the idea, nor did he resolve it. He was merely a true believer, articulate and enthusiastic, who excelled at communicating his vision. Indeed, Lowell never did really give up his beliefs, even when they were ruled out by better measurements.

The year 1909 was when there was another particularly favorable opposition for Mars and when Martian canals were ruled out, at least as far as the scientific community was concerned. The scientist who dashed the dreams of those who hoped it had been proven that mankind was not alone in the universe was Eugene Antoniadi, a Greek astronomer who gained some fame in later life as a scholar of ancient Greek and Egyptian astronomy. That Antoniadi was the one who resolved the debate came with some irony, as he worked at Flammarion’s observatory in 1894 and published his results in the journal of the French Astronomical Society, which Flammarion began. But such is the small world of professional astronomy.

Antoniadi was able to see dark, irregularly shaped spots on the surface of Mars, but he concluded definitively that the canals themselves were “an optical illusion.” His result made it to the United States, where a new class of telescopes was coming online, the big reflectors. The 60-inch reflector on Mount Wilson was turned to Mars, and the director wrote to Antoniadi, saying, “I am thus inclined to agree with you in your opinion … that the so-called ‘canals’ of Schiaparelli are made up of small irregular dark regions.” Antoniadi continued
to observe Mars, writing his own book
La planète Mars
in 1930. But in 1909 the astronomical world moved on.

As is often the case in these situations, there were true believers who refused to accept the new conclusions. Until his death in 1916, Lowell maintained that those who failed to see the canals were mistaken and doing sloppy work. Further, he still had the ear of many of the leaders in the popular media. For instance, in the August 27, 1911, issue of the
New York Times
Sunday magazine, a splashy article entitled “Martians Build Two Immense Canals in Two Years” described two canals, each a thousand miles long and 20 miles wide that had appeared on the Martian surface. The possibility that these were natural features was ruled out in the article.

The public was not as quick to give up on Martian canals as was the scientific community. First, they were not as close to the data as the astronomers were and, second, they had received a steady barrage of stories, speculating on Martian culture and how the civilization must be frantically trying to save itself. It was a gripping saga and not one that can easily be forgotten. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom saga (Barsoom being Burrough’s Martian name for Mars) began in 1912 with
A Princess of Mars
, and we will learn more of this iconic series of stories in
chapter 3
.

Wrap Up

The idea that we are fellow travelers in this universe is not a new one. As we have seen here and can be followed up in the suggested reading, there have been centuries of arguments over the question of extraterrestrial life; they were theological, philosophical, and quasi-scientific. However it wasn’t until the last years of the nineteenth century that the thought of life of non-earthly origins became a common topic of conversation outside the circles of the highly educated.

The reasons for the broader dissemination are various. First, the scientific instrumentation became better, allowing for more definitive arguments among academics. After all, questions like the existence of extraterrestrial life or intelligence is an empirical one, and there is no chance that a theological or philosophical discussion will definitively resolve the debate. Improvements in telescopes and the new technique of spectroscopy allowed for solid discussions, well informed by hard data. However the improved science doesn’t explain the change in the level to which the public was informed. For this, you need a communication method. In the 1800s, improvements were made in printing technology and the way in which the printed material was brought
to the public. Technology made it much easier for people to learn about the sorts of things that interested them, as evidenced in the tremendous response to the moon hoax.

As we will see in
chapter 3
, the first half of the twentieth century showed an increase of what we now call science fiction. While stories of extraterrestrials are not the only tales written in that genre, the Alien ones became somehow respectable, given the vast number of newspaper articles people had read about Mars. This is not to say that our version of Aliens hasn’t evolved since the first decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, our current view of Aliens differs dramatically from the speculations of Lowell, Wells, and their contemporaries. To understand how that came to be, we must turn to a world convulsed in war.

TWO
ENCOUNTERS

Deep Throat: Mr. Mulder, why are those like yourself who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on this Earth not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary?

Mulder: Because all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.

Deep Throat: Precisely.

Mulder: They’re here, aren’t they?

Deep Throat: Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a long time.

X-Files
, Season 1, Episode 2

The
X-Files
was a highly successful science fiction television show that ran from 1993 to 2002. In it, two FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, are tasked with investigating odd reports that are stored in the classified “X-Files.” While something like two-thirds of the episodes were devoted to the “monster of the week” (e.g., investigating whether a vampire or werewolf was involved in a string of murders), the remaining episodes were used to develop a storyline about Aliens on earth and the government’s cover-up of what they know.

This television show is an excellent example of how the media, entertainment industry, UFO devotees, and people who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials have interacted with one another and shaped one another’s views. Fact (meaning honestly believed reports of UFO sightings and abductions) and fiction are inextricably interwoven, leading to a narrative that is well known to society. A 2008 poll showed that 36% of Americans believe the Earth has been visited by Aliens and that 80% think the government knows more than it’s telling. Ask a random stranger (which I’ve been doing lately, generating some peculiar looks) what Aliens look like and what happens if you are abducted by them, and you get stories that are broadly similar; short, gray humanoids, with huge foreheads, small chins, and pupil-less black eyes. Further, the Aliens are inexplicably fascinated with the human reproductive system, probing it with various silver-colored implements. How can people with the most miniscule interest in Aliens be so aware of the abduction narrative? That kind of penetration of the culture takes years. In the following chapters, we’ll take some time to explore how that story developed and was disseminated.

We’ve talked a bit about earlier media and public interest in the moon, Mars, and Martians, but it was the 1940s where our tale of Alien contact began to take off. As we move forward, we need to keep a very important thing in mind. Students of UFO-ology have at their disposal an enormous literature to read. Tens of thousands of tales of “real” Alien contact have resulted in hundreds of books and many websites. Governments around the world have launched dozens of inquiries into the question of Alien visitation. Anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the literature of this culture has a daunting task before them. But we’re not going to do that.

In this book, we’re not interested in this obscure sighting or that unexplained abduction tale. We are interested instead in the “big” stories, the ones that got a lot of publicity, for only the ones that had extensive (and ongoing) media coverage are able to enter into the public consciousness. It will likely not surprise you that many elements of the stories that people tell about their contact with Aliens were already present in fiction accounts, which we look at closely in
chapters 3
and
4
. However, our current concern is to understand how a flight by a solo pilot in the 1940s or a long drive by an interracial couple in the early 1960s could change our collective vision of extraterrestrial life. Our tale begins in earnest over the skies of Europe, as the Allies tried to push the Nazi armies back into Germany.

Foo Fighters

Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his book
On War
, “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently—like the effect of a fog or moonlight—gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.” He was writing on the difficulty for commanders to get full situational awareness and its effect on their subsequent decision making. But war is an adrenaline-raising situation that has an effect on a combatant’s perception. Incomplete information, conflicting reports, and high stress mean that mistakes will be made.

Let’s face it. Being in a B-17 over the skies of Germany between 1943 and 1945 pretty much guaranteed that you would be a little tense. Something about the strafing by the Luftwaffe and tons of antiaircraft flak objecting to your visit is bound to add a little excitement to your day. I imagine that a pilot in a P-51 Mustang flying combat air patrol and tagging along for the ride probably shared in the bombardiers’ heart-pounding experience.

These are the kinds of men who reported what is now generally accepted as the first observations of the phenomenon that would later be called flying saucers. Airmen over Europe began making reports of seeing balls of light that shadowed their airplanes as they flew through the skies. The balls of light would cling to wing tips, even when a pilot pushed his fighter over in a dive that approached speeds of 360 mph. Other balls of light would tail them or travel in parallel paths but not be in contact with the plane. Occasionally, a pilot could outrun the lights. “Kraut fireballs” or “foo fighters,” as they became known, were not seen as potential extraterrestrials, but rather in terms of possible Nazi weapons to explain and counter.

A report in the January 2, 1945, issue of the
New York Times
quoted a pilot as saying, “There are three kinds of these lights we call ‘foo-fighters.’ One is red balls of fire which appear off our wing tips and fly along with us; the second is a vertical row of three balls of fire which fly in front of us and the third is a group of about fifteen lights which appear off in the distance—like a Christmas tree up in the air—and flicker on and off.”

The report goes on to state that foo fighters were thought to be German in origin and both a psychological as well as a military weapon, although “it is not the nature of the fire-balls to attack planes.” A second pilot thought at first that they were “some new form of jet-propulsion plane after us. But we were very close to them and none of us saw any structure on the fire balls.”

This report was not the only one. An Associated Press report from Paris two weeks earlier (December 13, 1944) said that the Germans had thrown silvery balls against pilots doing daytime bombings and that these balls appeared both individually and in clusters. This report was repeated in the January 15, 1945, issue of
Time
magazine. However, this article showed that the reports of foo fighters did encounter skepticism. Some scientists dismissed the balls as persistent visions induced by pilots seeing flak bursts. Others suggested St. Elmo’s fire or ball lightning.