The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [37]
The idea of flying saucers had dubious antecedents, tracing back to a conscious hoax entitled / Remember Lemuria!, written by Richard Shaver, and published in the March 1945 number of the pulp fiction periodical Amazing Stories. It was exactly the sort of stuff I devoured as a child. Lost continents were settled by space aliens 150,000 years ago, I was informed, leading to the creation of a race of demonic underground beings responsible for human tribulations and the existence of evil. The editor of the magazine, Ray Palmer - who was, like the subterranean beings he warned about, roughly four feet high -promoted the notion, well before Arnold’s sighting, that the Earth is being visited by disc-shaped alien spacecraft and that the government is covering up its knowledge and complicity. Merely from the newsstand covers of such magazines, millions of Americans were exposed to the idea of flying saucers well before the term was coined.
All in all, the alleged evidence seemed thin, most often devolving into gullibility, hoax, hallucination, misunderstanding of the natural world, hopes and fears disguised as evidence, and a craving for attention, fame and fortune. Too bad, I remember thinking.
Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in sending spacecraft to other planets to look for life, and in listening for possible radio signals from alien civilizations, if any, on planets of distant stars. We’ve had a few tantalizing moments. But if the suspected signal isn’t available for every grumpy sceptic to pick over, we cannot call it evidence of extraterrestrial life - no matter how appealing we find the notion. We’ll just have to wait until, if such a time ever comes, better data are available. We’ve not yet found compelling evidence for life beyond the Earth. We’re only at the very beginning of the search, though. New and better information might emerge, for all we know, tomorrow.
I don’t think anyone could be more interested than I am in whether we’re being visited. It would save me so much time and effort to be able to study extraterrestrial life directly and nearby, rather than at best indirectly and at great distance. Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed - if they’re here, I want to know about them.
How modest our expectations are about ‘aliens’, and how shoddy the standards of evidence that many of us are willing to accept, can be found in the saga of the crop circles. Originating in Britain and spreading throughout the world was something surpassing strange.
Farmers or passers-by would discover circles (and, in later years, much more complex pictograms) impressed upon fields of wheat, oats, barley, and rapeseed. Beginning with simple circles in the middle 1970s, the phenomenon progressed year by year, until by the late 1980s and early 1990s the countryside, especially in southern England, was graced by immense geometrical figures, some the size of football fields, imprinted on cereal grain before the harvest - circles tangent to circles, or connected by axes, parallel lines drooping off, ‘insectoids’. Some of the patterns showed a central circle surrounded by four symmetrically placed smaller circles - clearly, it was concluded, caused by a flying saucer and its four landing pods.
A hoax? Impossible, almost everyone said. There were hundreds of cases. It was done sometimes in only an hour or two in the dead of night, and on such a large scale. No footprints of pranksters leading towards or away from the pictograms could be found. And besides, what possible motive could there be for a hoax?
Many less conventional