UFOs in Reality (26 page)

Edward Ashpole.

As a result of a recommendation from Ken Phillips that he should contact me, biologist, science writer and SETI author Edward Ashpole came into my life during 1988. Edward had just completed a book called
‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Life’
(which was later published in1989) in which he had discussed the evolutionary probability of life existing in other parts of our galaxy, the development of extraterrestrial technology and the possibility that ETs may have developed the means of visiting this planet quite frequently. In the penultimate chapter he had ventured onto scientists’ forbidden ground and speculated that perhaps some UFO reports might qualify as evidence of this.

Plate 1

When Edward decided to contact me by ‘phone, we arranged that we should meet at my home so that he could have sight of some of my original work and we would be able to go on from there.
Plate 1
shows us together during that first meeting. Edward’s publisher had asked him whether he could write a book about the UFO evidence and, when we met, he was then in the process of collecting information for that proposed book. He was clearly impressed by my methodical and objective approach to the evidence and even more so by the development of the Astronautical Theory. He asked if he could include this information into his forthcoming book and I was only too pleased to comply. At last someone respected by the scientific community was willing to publicise and recommend the work for scientific testing. Thereafter, whenever I felt I’d been wasting my time, Edward would cheer me by telling me I had produced the
only
objective theory, based on the world-wide evidence, which could be
tested
in various ways, not least by astronomers.

We kept in touch by telephone quite frequently during the new book’s gestation period, spending hours discussing various difficult aspects. Having only basic astronautical and astronomical knowledge to help him, Edward found my terminology and 3-D geometry quite difficult to grasp (and he was not the first or the last!). When, in 1995, the book
‘The UFO Phenomena’ [18]
was finally published, Edward had devoted an entire chapter to an explanation of the AT, which was not entirely accurate, even though he had used quotations and diagrams from me to assist the readers’ understanding. However, he had done his level best with very difficult material and had called for astronomical observations of the sky to look for the delivery and retrieval craft in space. I was extremely grateful for his perseverance and for the amount of space he had allocated to my work, even though he had decided to distance himself from my crop circles work and from my admission that a few claimed ‘contactee’ (not ‘abductee’) reports had been included in the database.

Throughout the years from our first contact, Edward Ashpole and I have become very good friends-at-a-distance. We are also colleagues in our quest to bring scientists (especially astronomers) to consider the evidence. Whilst some of our top radio astronomers continue to search for radio evidence of ET life out there in the cosmos, it could be that some ETs found us a long time ago and are regularly monitoring our activities, sometimes at close quarters.

The Essay Competition.

On July 27th, 1998, I received a telephone call from an enthused Edward Ashpole. He had just read in a science magazine that a new organisation in America, calling itself
the National Institute for Discovery Science (N.I.D.S.)
, based in Las Vegas, had announced that it was running an Essay Competition for essays on our topic. The winning essays would be published on their web site and attractive prizes were being offered. He thought we should produce a joint essay and enter it. He could provide a scientific rationale to support the idea that technologically advanced ETs might have reached us in the past, and this could preface a description of my
Astronautical Theory
for SAC events and an explanation of the means by which the theory could be tested. He thought we had a good chance of winning. Still staggering from all this, I couldn’t help expressing my doubts. The misgivings were further reinforced when Edward added, “The difficulty is that the closing date for entries is August 11th”, but he still thought we could achieve that. I agreed to have a go, but the difficulties facing us turned out to be even greater than I could have anticipated then.

On July 30th, I received the details of the competition in the post. Neither Edward nor I were on-line via the Internet then, so all communications between us had to be by telephone, post and, occasionally, by FAX. Basically, the elements to be addressed by the essays were:

1. If ETs were to contact humans on Earth or in the solar system, what would be the probable means by which that could occur and how would we know we were being contacted?

2. Design a rigorous and innovative research project, or a set of such projects, focusing on how to detect and verify the presence of ETI.

Drawing information from previous articles and papers written by me, by August 2nd I had produced my draft contribution to the essay. In fact, I had produced a first draft by July 31st but then had to find a way of making my Wordstar output compatible with MSWord software being used by NIDS. The two software systems are incompatible. Only by converting to ASCII format was it possible to provide the script in, hopefully, acceptable form. Edward Ashpole had also been using Wordstar for some years and had found himself in the same situation. On August 3rd I received his draft contribution, on floppy disc, in the morning post. As requested, after checking through for errors and then adding my contribution to the disc, it was posted back to him on the noonday post. The draft of the complete essay, now with Edward’s suggested title
‘The Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Solar System’
, was received from him on August 5th, for editing. Changes were communicated by ‘phone. On August 7th Edward informed me that he had posted off the package to NIDS, in the hope it would be received before the deadline on the 11th. All we could do then was to find other things to do and to hope our late entry would be acceptable. We were relieved when we received notification from NIDS on August 22nd that our essay had been received and was being considered.

Many things then occupied me for the following two weeks. A very welcome interruption came with the receipt of a FAX from NIDS, late afternoon on September 10th, informing me that our essay had been awarded one of three
First Prizes. As Edward did not have a FAX facility, I rang him immediately with that excellent piece of news. We learned later that because the judges had been unable to choose between the three essays, the (millionaire) Executive Director of NIDS, Mr. Robert T. Bigelow, had generously decided to regard them all as being worthy of the First Prize money. NIDS also asked our permission to display the essay on their web site and promised to bring all the essays to the attention of leading academics. What a result! It seemed as though at last we had broken through to academia. As things turned out, nothing could have been further from the truth. One exception to this rule was provided by two FAXes I received from Dr. Allen Tough, Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto, Canada, with queries. Dr. Tough wanted a copy of a paper I’d referenced in the Essay and, as this was not able to be readily reproduced at that time, I referred him to
Jennifer Jarvis’ web site,
‘ORBWATCH’
(see below), where Jennifer had tried to reproduce it. (This link-up with Dr. Tough was to develop further during 2002). Otherwise, relatively little useful response was received to the essay and no one came forward offering to research my findings. Plate 2 shows the Certificate issued to each of us to commemorate our success in the competition.

Mr. Bigelow must have been very disappointed too. Later, he purchased videos from me and members of his scientific team asked for timings graphs for four specified areas in the American Far West. I discovered later their teams had not been in the right places at the right times for the short periods when they had been located in those areas. It became clear, also, that their main interest had been in finding positive links between UFO activity and animal mutilations.

The British Interplanetary Society and the Essay.

At the end of March, 1999, ‘out of the blue’, Edward Ashpole received a letter (which he copied to me) from the editor of the Journal of the
British Interplanetary Society
(JBIS), informing him that our essay had been forwarded, by a learned member of the Society, for publication in the JBIS. It had been reviewed by external readers and their very critical remarks were given in the letter. Both reviewers had regarded it as a ‘paper’ rather than an essay. The editor then informed Edward that our ‘paper’ could not be published in the JBIS.

Plate 2

Edward discussed this letter with me and then immediately sat down to answer it. He pointed out the essay had been regarded incorrectly and that, since he and I retained the copyright, no one should have offered the work for publication without our permission. He then went on to demolish the arguments ranged against us and, especially, against my part of the essay. He pointed out that I would have been quite capable of producing a scientific paper on the work, but that had not been the purpose for the essay. Edward received a polite but curt letter of response from the JBIS editor during April. “You never submitted your essay to JBIS. JBIS would not have accepted your essay for publication even if you had. So, no great problem after all.”

I think that attitude speaks volumes for itself.

The difficulties we had experienced in communication with NIDS served to convince both Edward and me to update our obsolescent computer systems, especially, by adding MSWord software and getting onto the internet with e-mail facilitated.

The Farmer’s Contribution.

Some of the time Marion and I spent in Wiltshire and Hampshire during August 1991, we stayed at a farmhouse close to an ancient (prehistoric) pathway called the Wansdyke Path. One evening, on returning to the farmhouse after a long trek round the crop circle sites, the landlady and farmer’s wife, Mrs. Bull, offered to make a warm supper drink for us, an offer we were pleased to accept. The Bull’s joined us in the lounge for this period of respite and Mrs. Bull had something she needed to tell us. About midday that day she had seen, from a window, a large quantity of cut straw, lying in a field close by, suddenly swirled into the air in otherwise still conditions. The straw had been lifted high above the field and had then drifted off, like a dark cloud, towards the south-east. Neither she nor her husband had ever seen anything like it after many years of farming there. (Some time before, I had investigated a similar event in Marple, Cheshire, so I was not unfamiliar with the phenomenon.) Mr. Bull had estimated that the column had been about 12 to 15 feet (4 to 5 metres) in diameter and the straw had climbed to a height of about 1000 feet before forming a dark mass and drifting away. Mr. Bull then went on to describe something that was even more interesting. Last August, he said, he had been in another stubble field and he and his men had been burning off the stubble there, when the most memorable happening had occurred. A narrow black ‘tube’ had suddenly appeared only a matter of yards (metres) away from him, and it had seemed to have originated from beyond the sky haze above. I asked if , tomorrow morning, I could go out to examine the area. Mr. Bull kindly said that, after breakfast, he would take me to the location in the nearby field where the straw had been lifted.