Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel by Shelby Van Pelt - 8

In spite of lifelong longings, I’ve never actually been abducted by space Aliens. And yes, I’d tell you if I ever were. Apparently, I’m not alone in this secret desire. The 1977 hit song “Come Sail Away” by the rock group Styx describes an Alien abduction, but only after line-by-line metaphors comparing one’s path through life to the allure of a voyage on the open seas. In a lyrical transition from angels to Aliens calling from above, the final two lines are explicit: “We climbed aboard their starship / We headed for the skies.” This brings us full circle. After the 1947 Roswell incident, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung referred to flying saucer sightings as “technological angels.” 1

I would later read Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five , a semi-autobiographical, sci-fi-infused account of the author’s life, especially his time as a POW in Dresden, Germany, just after the Allied bombing of the city toward the end of World War II. The book was followed shortly thereafter by a 1972 film of the same name. As illuminating as the story’s accounts of history may have been, that’s not what captured my imagination. Told via flashbacks, the main character gets abducted by Aliens at night in his backyard—via a beam of light, of course. You never see the Aliens, although you can hear them speak. The main character gets transported into their four-dimensional world as a zoo creature, but he gains full access to his entire timeline of life.

We live in three space dimensions plus one time dimension, as Einstein made clear at the beginning of the twentieth century with his theory of relativity. We can journey back and forth within any of our three space coordinates, but within our time coordinate we are prisoners of our present, forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. To the Aliens in Slaughterhouse-Five , their timeline instead behaves just like our space coordinates, allowing you to revisit your birth, your death, and any significant or interesting event in between. In that world, there’s no past, present, or future—all three exist simultaneously. Vonnegut’s brilliant narrative tool left me even more desirous of what the Aliens might have in store for me. Apparently, not everyone thinks that way. In 1998, UFO researcher Ann Druffel published How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction . I bought her book with my own money and blatantly flouted all advice it offered, like, avoid driving alone at night on an isolated country road. Disappointingly, I remain unabducted.

Of the two or three times I have been asked to testify before the US Congress, one was to represent my branch of science in support of government funding for “The Search for Life in the Universe.” 2 My subtitle was “An Overview of the Scientific and Cultural Implications of Finding Life in the Cosmos.” The need for this testimony came about because, in the late 1970s, NASA had been given Senator William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” award 3 for squandering public money in their support of SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Thenceforth, SETI would be forced underground, to be funded via private philanthropy.

As a noun, the word “fleece” references wool from sheep. Used as a verb, it means to be swindled, such as how a pickpocket might fleece you of your valuables without you noticing. Proxmire’s criterion for the award was simple—if he couldn’t figure out how or why the research was being conducted, or he could not imagine what the long-term benefits to society might be, the federal agency granting the money was “eligible” for the award.

Government-funded basic research exists at all because the commercial sector does not value it and cannot foresee a return on their investment within the horizons of quarterly and annual reports. Yet corporate R&D ultimately thrives on this basic research, birthing entire industries that strengthen our health, our wealth, and our security. In a world populated only by Senator Proxmire and acolytes, we would all still be living in caves.

Proxmire gave 168 of these awards monthly, from 1975 through 1988, until he left office. So successful was this public relations stunt that the watchdog organization Taxpayers for Common Sense gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1999, and resurrected the Golden Fleece in 2000, with Proxmire himself serving as honorary chair. My testimony was requested by NASA in 2001.

The backstory to all of this, of course, derives from an enthusiasm for Aliens that the public thinks the scientific community does not have. In 1961, Frank Drake, who would later give us nucleonic Aliens, proposed a formula to estimate how many intelligent, tech-savvy civilizations might be out there in our Milky Way Galaxy. We expect this number to be significantly lower than the number of planets with life at all, which requires some extra culling of the data for a reliable estimate. For example, of all the planets that could sustain life, what fraction actually do? And of all planets that harbor life, what fraction have anything more than single-cell organisms? (A state that Earth itself sustained for billions of years.) Of those planets with complex organisms, what fraction of those contain intelligent life? Of those planets with intelligent life, what fraction can communicate across the depths of space using radio-wave technology? I

That’s the number of civilizations of interest to us in our search for intelligent life in the universe. Although we might also ask how long such civilizations last. That matters because if societies come and go, then the ones that no longer exist today for having trashed their life-sustaining environment, or killed themselves off with their own technology, or simply lost all curiosity with the universe, should be removed from the accounting.

Running these numbers with the latest and best available estimates, as I’ve done elsewhere with Princeton colleagues, 4 we get about a hundred extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy that are capable of transmitting and receiving radio signals through space. That gives an average distance between such civilizations of about five thousand light-years. So, without wormhole communication, if we received signals from Aliens today, those signals would have been sent five thousand years ago, back when we were inventing paper. More importantly, for any signal we send today, we should not expect a response before a round-trip travel time of tens of thousands of years. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying.

A year before his formula, Frank Drake used telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, to monitor two Sun-like stars—Tau Ceti (12 light-years away), and Epsilon Eridani (10.5 light-years away)—that were presumed at the time to support Earth-like planets. This highly publicized project was called Project Ozma, named for Princess Ozma, ruler of Oz. Why? Drake was inspired by how Frank Baum, the author of the iconic series of books, kept in touch with his fictional creations:

As you know, I am obliged to talk these matters over with Dorothy by means of the "wireless," for that is the only way I can communicate with the Land of Oz. 5

One hundred and fifty hours of observations yielded no discernible signals in the din of cosmic noise. Not even “There’s no place like home.”

In 1966, Carl Sagan enlarged upon and republished a book written in 1962 by Russian astrophysicist Iosif Shklovskii, titled simply Intelligent Life in the Universe. The book explored, among other things, how one would mount a scientifically informed campaign to search for intelligent life in the universe. By 1971 NASA was off and running with a major study called Project Cyclops, detailing what bands of radio frequencies should be used, the number and size of the telescope arrays, how long the search might require, and how an exchange of radio signals might unfold. The anticipated cost to build and operate such a search was up to $10 billion over ten to fifteen years. In 1971 we were still walking on the Moon, so the scope and attendant expense, though ambitious, was not beyond anybody’s dreams.

It costs hardly anything to conduct a study. But when the time comes to build the thing, that’s when congressional bean counters take notice—as they did in a 1978 NASA proposal to implement the recommendations of Project Cyclops. It was never funded. No one country can own cosmic discovery. People in charge can either fund it or not fund it, which creates an ever-shifting landscape of who leads the world in one branch of science or another. Currently, Earth’s largest radio telescope—at a mile in circumference—is the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, acronymed as FAST, in the Guizhou province of China. In the world of telescopes, larger is better, enabling the detection of weaker and weaker signals. So, if any of those hundred or so civilizations in the Galaxy feel compelled to send messages to Earth, Chinese astrophysicists may be the first to decode them.

After 1978, what NASA would do is not emphasize the search for intelligent life but instead focus on exobiology and the search for life of any kind. That reduced the fleece factor and has served as a fertile driver of planetary exploration ever since: from highly capable SUV-sized Mars rovers, to a Europa mission in search of undersea life, to the search for exoplanets, to the search for gas molecules traceable to life itself in exoplanet atmospheres. These scientists are today called astrobiologists.

Based on circumstantial evidence, I have concluded that pure biologists make bad astrobiologists. Earth-based life so preoccupies them that thinking outside the box—or rather, outside the sphere—can be a challenging, if not impossible, task for them. In 1996, NASA announced the possibility of microfossil life on a meteorite that was traceable to Mars, based on the analysis of air trapped in pockets within the rock. The composition of gas molecules precisely matched that of the Martian atmosphere and no other planet—evidence that small rocks can escape planetary surfaces, flung by ground shocks induced from larger meteor impacts. They then wander through space and land elsewhere in the solar system. Earth’s stash of meteorites includes Moon rocks too, arrived without the benefit of a Moon mission to retrieve them.

That Martian meteorite, on close examination, contained a well-known organic molecule, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon—sensibly abbreviated PAH—and iron in two states: oxidized and non-oxidized. Generally, when you find iron, it’s either all oxidized, giving us the familiar color of rust, or it’s not oxidized at all, depending on the environment. To get both together requires special circumstances and scenarios that life provides for free. Within our bodies, for example, iron-rich hemoglobin gathers oxygen from our lungs and transports it to the rest of our body, where it gets metabolized as a source of energy. Afterward, the oxygen-less iron returns to your lungs to reload. So the simple act of breathing satisfies that condition. A tiny, tubular, worm-looking feature was also spotted in an image from a scanning electron microscope. Checking in at no larger than one-tenth the size of the smallest known cellular life on Earth, its existence was a mystery.

The discovery attracted so much interest that the press conference, normally held at NASA HQ, was hosted by President Clinton in the Rose Garden of the White House. Freshly appointed as director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, I was called by PBS, among other networks, to comment on the discovery in an installment of the news spotlight show Charlie Rose . I was live in studio, along with a philosopher and a third commentator, who was a biologist/anthropologist, brought in remotely on-screen. After the philosopher pondered the question of whether rocks themselves are living things, we moved on to the science of the discovery. For extraordinary claims you want to know whether the same evidence could be explained via ordinary means. So some skepticism of life on a Martian meteorite is, of course, scientifically healthy. After a brief back-and-forth about the PAHs and the iron, Charlie Rose showed the image of the wormy thing, at which point, unprovoked, the biologist firmly asserted, “That can’t possibly be life!” I was taken aback by his certainty. In my field of astrophysics, there’s too much we don’t know for anybody to carry that much confidence in a research result on the frontier. His reasoning was that it’s a fraction the size of the smallest life on Earth. That’s when I politely reminded him that we were talking about a rock from… MARS. I mistakenly presumed that countless Alien-themed movies might have softened his grip on Earth-based life.

The wormy thing on the Martian meteorite spawned studies of whether life at that size is possible at all, leading to the term “nanobes,” or more broadly, “nanobacteria.” II Controversial as that was, and continues to be, organic (nonliving) crystalline structures provide at least one feasible alternative account.

Returning to Aliens that might build spaceships, in 1995 there was a highly viewed primetime documentary, airing on the Fox Network, that showed an Alien autopsy, filmed just after the 1947 Roswell saucer crash. The full title: Alien Autopsy (Fact or Fiction?) , narrated with the trusted and mellifluous voice of Jonathan Frakes, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Shown in grainy black-and-white footage, in an old-timey operating room, the documentary was surely real.

Except it wasn’t.

The filmmaker would later admit that it was a modern hoax. But at the time, I didn’t need his confession. Three elements were dead giveaways of the fakery. As a summer intern at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1970s, I was sensitized to the history of telephone innovations. So I couldn’t help but notice that the wall telephone in this 1947 operating room had a coiled handset cord, which was not common until the 1950s and into the 1960s. Not only that; thanks to a filmmaking class I took in college, I noticed the style was cinema vérité, where the camera is not tripod-mounted, but follows the action, as though you inhabit the point of view of the doctors performing the autopsy. First appearing in the 1950s, cinema vérité was not fully developed until the 1960s. Lastly, from the little I know about physiology, you can’t just lift organs out of a surgically opened chest cavity without first detaching the organ from all that connects with it. During the autopsy, nothing was connected to anything else. The surgeons carefully, but effortlessly, lifted organs from the body as though the Alien was a patient in the Hasbro TM child’s game Operation .

Sad that the best-ever video evidence is faked—a sign of how strongly people want and need to believe that Aliens are among us.

So why not bring forth the Alien itself? In September and October of 2023, on national television, 6 as UAP testimonies from whistleblowers and others continued in the US Congress, I publicly called for physical evidence to be presented and not just described under sworn testimony. One of the many features of science that distinguishes it from other human pursuits is that we establish objective truths not by swearing with your right hand in the air while taking an oath. In scientific conferences we don’t even pinky-swear. We simply present the evidence, and our analysis of it, for review by colleagues. That’s when it becomes their duty to find any flaws in the methods and tools that acquired the data, and in the reasoning behind the conclusions.

Coincidentally, just a few weeks earlier, the Mexican Congress had held hearings on UFOs where scientists rolled out two humanoid Alien mummies from a thousand years ago, recovered in Nazca, Peru. I was delighted to see those carefully curated bodies out on display in protective glass cases. And in my interviews, I had contrasted that transparency in the Mexican Congress with the evidence-free testimony-fest in the US Congress. My praise precipitated an email exchange with one of the Mexican Peruvian-mummy wranglers, name withheld by request:

From: ____________________

To: Neil deGrasse Tyson

On Behalf Of Spes Clinica del Alma

Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2023 6:59 PM

Subject: THE NAZCA MUMMIES

Dr. Neil DeGrasse,

It is an honor to establish communication with you. My respect and admiration for your work.

I saw the interviews on CNN and The Late Show where you expressed the interest in continuing the investigation in relation to de Nazca Mummies. We want to express to you that we have the corpse that have shown in the Mexican Congress under legal protection in Mexico City. We want to share with you all the research and work we have made.

It is of our special interest to make alliance and continue this important research with you.

If this of your interest we extend a cordial invitation to you to come to Mexico City with expenses paid and with the cordiality you deserve.

Sincerely,

__________

With anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise in the United States and elsewhere, am I the only one to find the phrase “we have the [Alien] under legal protection in Mexico” to be geopolitically surreal? Regardless, who wouldn’t want an all-expense-paid trip to see Aliens? I was warmed by the invitation, which included links to their analysis, complete with X-rays, MRI scans, and subsequently a book on the findings. But I’m only an astrophysicist, so my reply was simple and direct:

From: Neil deGrasse Tyson

To: ____________________

Sent: Thursday, October 12, 2023 2:37 PM

Subject: Re: THE NAZCA MUMMIES

Thank you, Señor, for that kind invitation to visit Mexico City and personally inspect the Alien bodies you have brought forth to Congress.

I claim no special expertise in the analysis of biological tissue. That’s the work of biologists—and ideally, biochemists. Your research needs to be written up, submitted for peer review, and published in a research journal. And ultimately, offer samples of your specimens for peer analysis—sharing biological tissue via multiple labs.

That’s how objective truths are established in science. Not by sworn testimony or the impassioned plea of a single group of researchers.

We do this for findings much less extraordinary than what you have presented. On that level, it’s routine procedure. So it will never be about what I think, it’s about the quality of the data and its verification.

Best to you,

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Department of Astrophysics

American Museum of Natural History

The modern gray-Alien phenotype persists even in these Mexican mummies, and they are unmistakably classic: Large head. Almond eye sockets. Skinny bodies. Long fingers. Short—no more than a yard tall. Although an X-ray of one of their torsos revealed three large eggs—a curious reptilian element in an otherwise humanoid body.

By now you’d think the world of UFO enthusiasts would be jumping for joy. As noted, I was delighted to see evidence brought forth—something decidedly lacking during testimonies in the US Congress. But the person who revealed the mummies is a UFO enthusiast and had hoaxed the public before. So skepticism was justifiably high. A year later, an independent forensic archaeologist examined the specimens for the prosecutor’s office of Peru and reported: “They are not extraterrestrials, they are not intraterrestrials, they are not a new species, they are not hybrids, they are none of those things that this group of pseudo-scientists who for six years have been presenting with these elements.” 7 He added that the humanoid dolls were assembled with animal and human bones, put together with synthetic glue. Does he speak the truth, or is Peru just jealous of Mexico?

A friend and colleague of mine, Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel, chaired the 2022 independent panel on behalf of NASA to study the UAP phenomenon. The sixteen members incuded physicists, space scientists, astrophysicists, representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, a space law expert, a former engineer-astronaut, and assorted others from the space industry. Whenever scientists are involved, it will always be about the existence of rigorous, evidence-based data, not about eyewitness testimony. And if you’ve locked Aliens in a back room that you won’t show anyone, then scientifically, that’s the same thing as having no Aliens locked in the back room. The panel’s mission was “to identify what data—from civilians, government, non-profits, companies—exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyze it.”

Of the several conclusions drawn, beyond the absence of convincing evidence that we have been visited by Aliens, the panel noticed that:

There is no standardized system for making civilian UAP reports, resulting in sparse and incomplete data devoid of curation or vetting protocols.

Which led them to recommend that:

NASA explore the viability of developing or acquiring a crowd-sourcing system, such as open-source smartphone-based apps, to gather imaging data and other smartphone data from multiple citizen observers as part of a wider effort to more systematically gather public UAP reports.

Such efforts in the recent past have discovered not Aliens, but a new atmospheric phenomenon: a large-scale but fleeting, red-orange and occasionally blue electrical discharge that extends above the stratosphere into the mesosphere, up to ten times higher than airplanes fly. Known as Sprites, 8 these are blobs of glowing plasma that were first photographed in 1989 and not named until 1993. They tend to form above lightning storms and are likely triggered by them. Their taxonomy, which includes “jellyfish,” “column,” and “carrot” patterns, often punctuated with streamers, would surely enchant a UFO enthusiast. The lesson here is that mysterious phenomena masquerading as Alien activity continue to be discovered, and perhaps more await our efforts to document them. If we take a famous quote on the critique of miracles by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and swap a word or two, we find resonance:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle Aliens unless it is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous astonishing than the fact that it tries to establish. 9

To be clear, the goal of the panel’s recommendation was not to listen to your impassioned account, but to systematize the collection of data, which allows much more precise and accurate reporting, minimizing the error-prone role of the human senses.

If the Aliens do come and they are better looking than us, more mindful and demure than us, smarter than us, and more powerful than us, would we worship them? The urge to worship power—real or perceived or imagined—runs high in our species. Charismatic politicians, cult leaders, kings, queens, and gods all capture us in ways we cannot resist. We build monuments to them. We pray to them. We tithe to them. We organize rituals to worship them. Is the urge to find Aliens drawn from a genetic urge to worship? Among people who are religious, approximately 50 percent believe there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy. Among nonreligious people, however, that fraction rises above 75 percent. 10 This argues strongly that without religion the urge to worship remains, and is fueled by a belief system in the absence of definitive evidence that intelligent Aliens have visited us. We’ve all seen the same Alien movies and TV shows and documentaries. So this divide is not cultural. It’s entirely spiritual.

The UFO religion Raëlism, founded in France in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon (known by his religious name Raël), was formed to bridge that gap. Worldwide, their followers are currently rising through 100,000. Raëlians believe that an extraterrestrial species known as the Elohim created humanity using their advanced technology. The Elohim are not gods, just powerful Aliens, and have created forty Elohim-human hybrids who became well-known prophets on Earth, including Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, with Raël as the fortieth and final prophet. The Raëlians reject traditional religion as irrational and unscientific. Compared with mainstream religions, 100,000 believers is small, but that they exist at all affirms a need, even among those who are not traditionally religious.

Like the human ego, our power to believe knows no bounds. Strong beliefs convince you to think something is true not only in the absence of objective evidence, but also in the face of confounding evidence. Meanwhile, nobody has to “believe” that stars are hot, that Earth is round, or that planets orbit the Sun. Nor must you believe that whales, elephants, and bears exist. The good thing about scientific truths—established by repeated experiments—is that they’re true whether or not you believe in them. The existence of Aliens on Earth has an uncounted number of believers, even though nobody has ever credibly brought forth an Alien for examination by astrobiologists and other scientists. Until that happens, like it or not, Alien visitations will remain a belief system like any other. Curious, skeptical scientists will continue to search for themselves. The rest of us eagerly await Aliens from the locked back rooms of secret government offices to be escorted into congressional hearings, or welcomed into town squares across the land. We’re already confident that we are not alone in the universe—the time has come to confirm if we are alone on Earth.