because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
But ancient astronauts are only a sideshow, a minor codicil of the principal doctrine along these lines of the twentieth century, and that is flying saucers or unidentified flying objects. And here we have not just the writings of a half dozen people but some collective enterprise involving an enormous number of people all over the world, and something like 1 million separate sightings since 1947, when the term 'flying saucer' was first coined.
The standard mythos is quite straightforward. It's that a device of exotic design and manufacture is seen in the sky, at least sometimes doing things that no machine of terrestrial manufacture could do. More rarely, it discharges exotic beings, who engage in conversations with terrestrials, capturing people from the Earth, performing exotic medical examinations on them, taking them to other planets, and occasionally having sexual congress with them, resulting in offspring who are fully human-a feat somewhat less likely, if we bear in mind the clear evidence of Darwinian evolution, than the successful mating between a man and a petunia.
Now, what would we require, if we took even a modestly skeptical approach, to be convinced? We would not require a million cases. I don't think we would require more than one, provided that one case were absolutely solid. We would require that that solid case be simultaneously very reliably reported and very exotic. It is insufficient to have several hundred people see it independently as a light in the sky. A light in the sky can be anything. It has to be much more concrete, much more specific. On the other hand, it is also insufficient to have, let us say, a twenty-meter-diameter, saucer-shaped, metallic object land in a suburban garden on Long Island, a seamless door open (there is some fascination with seamless doors in these stories), a four-meter-high robot walk out, pet the cat, pick a flower, wave to the startled householder, and then disappear back into the seamless door, which closes, and the craft takes off. If only one person saw it, the cat being unavailable for corroboratory testimony, then this likewise is not a compelling case. We would require that the examples be, simultaneously, extremely reliably reported and extremely exotic.
I have spent, although not recently, a great deal of time on UFO cases, feeling that it was my responsibility, since I'm interested in extraterrestrial life, to see if the problem has not been finessed, if the extraterrestrials are not here, in which case, of course, my colleagues and I would be saved a great deal of effort. I spent time on a committee established by the U.S. Air Force to look into this story and have interviewed some of the participants in a few of the most famous cases. And let me give you my overall impressions.
By no means are all UFO cases identified, established as to what they are. Some of them are too sparsely and scantily reported, and a few are sufficiently mysterious, so of course you couldn't expect that to be the case.
But let me give you a sense of routine UFO reports that have been checked out and we do know what they are:
The Moon. You may think that there is no way that someone could identify the Moon as an extraterrestrial spacecraft. But there are many cases where not only has that been done but the Moon has been reported as following and even harassing the observer.
The aurora borealis; bright stars; bright planets, especially under unconventional meteorological conditions; flights of luminescent insects; a low overcast, an automobile going up a hill, the headlights moving rapidly across the overcast; weather balloons.
There was a famous case in which a firefly was trapped between two adjacent panes of glass in an airplane cockpit window and the pilots were radioing about fantastic right-angle turns, defying the laws of inertia, estimated fantastic speeds.
They imagined it at some huge distance away instead of right in front of their noses.
Noctilucent and lenticular clouds, lens-shaped clouds, conventional aircraft with unconventional lighting. Unconventional aircraft.
Then there is a vast category of hoaxes. As soon as you could get your name in the newspaper by reporting a UFO, a lot more people started seeing UFOs than had done so previously. And some of them were done in good fun, some not. A famous case was a set of plastic bags from dry cleaners that were fashioned to form a hood around candles and the whole business sent aloft to make a small hot-air balloon, which can be done. And this very primitive technology was reported by hundreds of people as UFOs and performing maneuvers that, it was claimed, could not possibly have been performed. So there's a hoax plus some misapprehensions or flawed reporting, and the net result is something extraordinarily exotic. But it was only strange moving lights. This is one of the reasons I say that merely moving lights are insufficient.
Then there are cases of so-called high evidence. Photographs, for example. One of the earliest photographs of UFOs from the late 1940s was from a man named George Adamski, who was a space enthusiast and, in fact, identified himself in his first book as George Adamski of Mount Palomar. Mount Palo-mar was then the site of the largest optical telescope on the planet. And George Adamski was from Mount Palomar. He owned a hamburger stand at the base of Mount Palomar, in which he had a small telescope, and through that telescope he photographed wonders that the astronomers, consigned to the lofty recesses of the mountain, never saw.
One of his most famous photographs shows a clearly metallic, saucer-shaped object with three large spheres at the bottom, which he identified as landing gear and which later turned out to be a chicken brooder suspended by thread. This is one of those devices that encourages the eggs to hatch, and ordinary light-bulbs are used to warm it. And indeed there developed an entire detective industry to determine what common object was being photographed close up to explain this particular unidentified flying object case.
Now, I've probably made the point implicitly, but let me make it explicitly. I do not think there is any fundamental difference between this sort of UFO hoaxmongering and the sale of relics in the Middle Ages-pieces of the true cross and so on. The motivations are almost identical.
There are also cases, and Adamski was one of them, where people not only photograph or see UFOs but are hailed by the occupants and taken aboard. Some of these cases are useful to examine in retrospect. For example, Adamski was taken to the planet Venus, where conditions were very much like those in Eden. The extraterrestrials spoke mellifluously, walked among rivulets and flowers, wore long white robes, and gave heartening religious homilies.
We know now, as we did not know then, that the surface temperature of Venus is nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The surface pressures are ninety times what they are in this room. The atmosphere contains hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, and sulfuric acid. So at the very least, the long white robes would have been in tatters. We can in retrospect see that there must have been something wrong with the story. Maybe he just got the planet wrong. But one is left with the distinct impression that Adamski's account was contrived out of whole cloth.
It is remarkable that in all these million cases there is not one example of physical evidence that sustains even the most casual scrutiny. No pieces of spacecraft chipped off with a penknife and put into an envelope and carried back for laboratory examination of exotic alloys. No photograph of the interior of the spacecraft or the extraterrestrials, or a page from the captain's logbook. Somehow, in all of these cases, there is not a single example of concrete physical evidence. And that again is suggestive, I maintain, that we are dealing with some combination of psychopathology and conscious fraud and the misapprehension of natural phenomena, but not what is alleged by those who see UFOs.
I'd like to give you a specific case, because I think it's an example of how people with the best intentions in the world can nevertheless be badly fooled. Sometime in the 1950s, a highway patrolman in New Mexico is driving along a rural road that he knows extremely well, having driven along that road many many times. And, to his astonishment, he sees a large, saucer-shaped object just settling down on the ground, the sunlight glinting off it. He's astonished. He pulls off to the side of the road and examines it. He then drives some tens of meters away to an emergency telephone at the side of the road and gets patched in to some scientists he happens to know at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He tells them, 'The most extraordinary thing has just happened to me. This is a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity. I have just seen a flying saucer land. It is within my sight now. I have not had anything to drink. I am fully awake. I am in full possession of my senses. And if you get out here right away with monitoring equipment, we have the find of the century.'
This scene is so compelling that the scientists are able to commandeer a helicopter and fly to the site. They land on the highway, approach the policeman-and, sure enough, in front of them is just what he described. Saucer- shaped, metallic, large, gleaming in the Sun. So, carrying their equipment, they rush toward it, and as they approach, they notice a farmer who is doing his farming things, totally oblivious to this large saucer that has just landed in front of him. They start thinking, is it possible that the saucer is invisible to the farmer but visible to them?
