The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [49]
• The Famous Money Magnet: Would You Like More Money?
• Testament of Lael, Sacred Scriptures of a Lost Civilization.
• A New Book by ‘Commander X’ from Inner Light: The Controllers, the Hidden Rulers of Earth Identified. We Are the Property of an Alien Intelligence!
What is the common thread that binds these ads together? Not UFOs. Surely it’s the expectation of unlimited audience gullibility. That’s why they’re placed in UFO magazines - because by and large the very act of buying such a magazine so categorizes the reader. Doubtless, there are moderately sceptical and fully rational purchasers of these periodicals who are demeaned by such expectations of advertisers and editors. But if they’re right even about the bulk of their readers, what might it mean for the alien abduction paradigm?
Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in ‘contact’ with extraterrestrials. I am invited to ‘ask them anything’. And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, ‘Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem’. Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last
Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like ‘Should we be good?’ I almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgements, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence.* Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions.
[* It’s a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as such. It’s even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in Ten Questions to Ask an Alien’.]
In the good old days before the alien abduction paradigm, people taken aboard UFOs were offered, so they reported, edifying lectures on the dangers of nuclear war. Nowadays, when such instruction is given, the extraterrestrials seem fixated on environmental degradation and AIDS. How is it, I ask myself, that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent concerns on this planet? Why not an incidental warning about CFCs and ozone depletion in the 1950s, or about the HIV virus in the 1970s, when it might really have done some good? Why not alert us now to some public health or environmental threat we haven’t yet figured out? Can it be that aliens know only as much as those who report their presence? And if one of the chief purposes of alien visitations is admonitions about global dangers, why tell it only to a few people whose accounts are suspect anyway? Why not take over the television networks for a night, or appear with vivid cautionary audiovisuals before the United Nations Security Council? Surely this is not too difficult for those who wing across the light years.
The earliest commercially successful UFO ‘contactee’ was George Adamski. He operated a tiny restaurant at the foot of California’s Mount Palomar, and set up a small telescope out back. At the summit of the mountain was the largest telescope on Earth, the 200-inch reflector of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the California Institute of Technology. Adamski styled himself Professor Adamski of Mount Palomar Observatory. He published a book - it caused quite a sensation, I recall - in which he described how in the desert nearby he had encountered nice-looking aliens with long blond hair and, if I remember correctly, white robes who warned Adamski about the dangers of nuclear war. They hailed from the planet Venus (whose 900° Fahrenheit