The Truth Is Out There: 5 Things You Need to Know about UFOs for the Upcoming X-Files Revival

“They’re here, aren’t they?” said Fox Mulder to his secret informant, known to viewers only as Deep Throat. 

“Mr. Mulder,” began the old man, in a reprimanding tone, “They have been here for a long, long time.”

As many of you know, the X-Files revival starts soon (the new six episode mini-season picks up, appropriately, 13 years after the X-Files went off the air). Just recently, they had a premiere in Los Angeles of the first episode for the new mini-season, and Fox recently released a 1 minute clip online.

For those of you who don’t know, the X-Files was one of the most popular US TV series in the 1990s, at its height averaging 20 million viewers per episode. The main protagonist Fox Mulder, is an FBI agent whose sister was taken from their room when he was a kid, in what Mulder believed was an alien abduction. This fueled his lifelong obsession with paranormal phenomena and uncovering the truth about UFOs, Aliens, and a global conspiracy. I watched the show religiously with friends, staying in on Friday nights when it first came on, before it got really popular and moved to Sunday nights.

Years later, when I became an executive producer on the documentary Thrive: What On Earth Will It Take, made by Foster Gamble and Kimberly Carter Gamble, (one of the most watched documentaries of all time), I started to do a little research on this subject on my own. I found out that while many Americans believe in UFOs, there tends to be a lot of misunderstanding about the phenomenon and about the people who’ve had these experiences, particularly in the minds of many of my “scientific” oriented friends.

So, just in time for the X-Files revival here are 5 things you may not know about the UFO phenomenon that inspired the X-Files:

1. The X-Files wasn’t purely science fiction, according to Chris Carter.

Like many others fans, I took the X-Files to be “simply” an original work of science fiction, which sprung from the mind of Chris Carter, the show’s creator. While the series is fiction, Carter himself will tell you that that many of the elements are based on real-life accounts.

When I started to investigate on my own, I started to meet people in the UFO community and hearing their accounts. The stories I heard sounded a lot like what I had seen in the X-files. The implants, the eyewitness accounts of triangular craft and bright lights, the cases of missing time, all of these have been reported by numerous witnesses.

 In fact, I was told by a mutual friend that Chris Carter discouraged his actors from attending science fiction conventions because the X-Files wasn’t purely science fiction. In preparation for the upcoming revival, if you watch the very first X-files episode, Pilot, and watch carefully, you’ll see that it says, “The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts” at the beginning of the episode. I actually met Chris Carter last year, before they started filming the new season, at a UFO-related event in San Mateo, and it was clear that he was continuing to research what people had to say on this subject — perhaps some of his new research will show up in the revivial.

2. Myth: Only people who wear tinfoil hats and tabloid reporters take UFOs seriously.

One of the persistent myths about UFOs and people who believe in them is that it is a fringe group of people who “live off the grid” and wear tinfoil hats. After having been to a dozen UFO events and interviewing hundreds of people, I haven’t seen a single tinfoil hat (OK I saw one but that was fro teh benefit of reporters who wanted to take a photo of “weird UFO people”). In fact, I have met intelligent people from all walks of life — scientists, engineers, people who worked for NASA, to independently wealthy businessmen and women, to retirees. The only commonality I could find was confidence in what they’ve seen and experienced, and strong belief that the “truth is out there” and that it should be investigated more seriously.

There are many well-known people who have had UFO sightings, and many who support finding out the truth. . In Los Angeles, Dan Akroyd is a well known proponent of UFO research. John Podesta, who served as an advisor to President Obama and Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, has been very vocal about his interest in the subject and his desire to get the truth out, a process known to UFO enthusiasts as “Disclosure”. John Podesta tweeted in 2014 that his biggest regret in working for the Obama white house was that he was unable to secure disclosure of top secret UFO files.

In fact, Hillary Clinton, was recently asked about UFOs by a reporter in Conway, New Hampshire while campaigning there. Mrs. Clinton said she believed we might have been visited by aliens in the past, and that if elected president, she would get to the bottom of it.

And UFOs are not just for tabloids. Leslie Kean, a serious investigative reporter, received a copy of a report from retired French generals that said that they believed the UFO phenomena was real and should be investigated seriously (called the “COMETA” report). Kean’s book, UFOs: General, Pilots ,and Government Officials Go On the Record, is a great book for those who know nothing about the phenomenon or are inclined to dismiss it out of hand. There have been many pilots, many members of the military, and many other government officials who have been willing to speak on and off the record and Ms Kean does a great job of presenting finally about this phenomenon. It’s a shame that this myth is so prevalent that many “serious” scientists and engineers won’t even take the time to read books like Ms Kean’s.

3. Myth: There is no evidence of UFOs.

Many skeptics say there is no evidence that UFOs exist. They’re not quite right. First of all, there are tons of photographic evidence of odd “unidentified” objects flying over both rural and urban landscapes. The next argument is that these pictures are all photoshopped — a charge that doesn’t hold up when the photos are from the 60’s and 70’s — I’ve seen some of these older photos, some taken by the members of the military, and they are very convincing. Moreover, when there are multiple witnesses that corroborate the photographical evidence (like in the Phoenix lights incident — more on this one below), the skeptic’s view that they are all doctored doesn’t really hold-up.

And then there are literally thousands of eyewitness reports –ranging from places like O’Hare airport to Rendlesham Forest in the UK (in a famous military sighting).

If that isn’t enough evidence for you, Emeritus Professor of applied physics at Stanford, Peter Sturrock says, “radar evidence” is physical evidence, and there have been multiple sightings where radar evidence was available that corroborated what pilots say they were seeing.

This includes a well-known incident over Alaska in 1986, where a Japan Air Lines pilot, Kenju Terauchi, was flying near Mt. McKinley when he reported seeing a UFO: “Then there was a kind of reverse thrust, and the lights became dazzlingly bright. Our cockpit lit up. The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it looked like it was standing still. The next instant it changed course. There’s no way a jumbo could fly like that. If we tried, it’d break apart in mid-air. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity,” Terauchi said.

John Callahan, the FAA Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations branch, had the data, which covered more than a half hour. Callahan has testified many times about what he saw, “As far as I’m concerned, I saw a UFO chase a Japanese 747 across the sky for over half an hour on radar.”

If that’s still not enough to convince you that there is “some” evidence, in the abduction area, there have been physical objects (known as “implants”) that have been pulled out of abductees bodies, and X-rays also count as physical evidence. In the cases where doctors surgically extracted them, the metallic objects somehow evaporated, in other cases they were able to preserve them and find that they a unique “anomalous” structure and were meant to be housed inside the human body.

Whether you believe in aliens or not, these implants had to have been placed there by someone. The question is who? It’s unlikely abductees would have the surgical skill to put them there themselves — so the question remains, who put them into their bodies? This question remains unanswered. In the original X-files, implants were a not insubstantial part of the story, and whenever the government got a hold of one, as at the end of the first episode of the X-Files, in a scene reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Warehouse 13, they put it away in the midst of a giant government warehouse, to be lost.

4. Myth: Sightings only happen in the countryside, only in the US, and only since we started flying airplanes.

Again, these are myths. There have been anomalous objects reported in the sky well before the modern era of airplanes, going back to the 1500s and beyond. In their wonderful book, “Wonders in the Sky”, Jacque Vallee ad Chris Aubeck have catalogued these sightings. Jacquee Vallee, a long time French UFO researcher, was in part the inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, made by another UFO believer, Stephen Spielberg. In one of the most famous pre-airplane incidents, in 1561 a number of spheres and disks, which were red, blue, and back, were seen to come out of two vertical cylinders over Nuremberg, Germany. The residents of the town reported that these objects seem to fight each other — there’s even a well-known drawing of this image. 

In recent times, lest you buy the myth that sightings only happen in remote places, one of the most famous sightings was the Phoenix Lights. In 1997, an estimated 10,000 people saw a set of triangularly arranged lights not just hovering but moving over the Phoenix metro area from North to South. There were numerous photographs of the incident, and a great book (along with a documentary) by Lynne Kitei, M.D., called called The Phoenix Lights. 

At first, Arizona Governor Fife Symington III made fun of the sighting and the military tried to dismiss the lights as “military flares”. But this theory didn’t hold water — the lights stayed equidistance apart, as if they were part of a single, large craft. Later, the Governor admitted that he was lying, and that he too had seen some kind of large anomalous craft in the sky that night. You don’t have to take my word for it — you can go interview people who were living in Phoenix in 1997. One witness told me she looked up, and the stars dimmed and then weren’t visible — it was definitely some type of large craft and not individual flares.

There have been other mass sightings, in Mexico City, in Russia, in South America, and elsewhere. UFO sightings are not a modern phenomenon, they are not a US-only phenomenon. UFOs are a global phenomenon, and as his secret informant told Agent Mulder at the end of the second episode of the X-Files, “They have been here … for a long long time”

5. Are UFOs top secret military craft that defy gravity?

In the second episode of the X-Files, Deep Throat, and in many episodes later in the series, witnesses at the edge of military bases see UFOs at night performing maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of inertia and gravity. These scenes are actually based on many eyewitness reports of objects and lights that hold stationary in the sky, have no apparent sound, then “jump” horizontally or vertically to a new position in the blink of an eye. The fact that these sightings have occurred often near military bases has led many, particularly in the skeptic and scientific community, to assert that UFOs are really top secret military craft that the public does not know about.

This of course, begs the question, do we have top secret military craft that defy the known laws of physics and gravity? If so, why doesn’t the so called “scientific community” know about the science between how these craft work, why are they being hidden, and why aren’t they more curious about them?

A respected NASA scientist, Paul Hill, decided to collect reports from eyewitnesses during his 25 years working for the space agency. He wrote a book (which he wasn’t allow to publish while working for NASA, so his daughter published), called “Unconventional Flying Objects” that was published by his daughter, in which he categorized these maneuvers (“sudden reversal of direction”, “acute angel turn”).

If these are top secret military vehicles, where did they get the basic design and aeronautic principles from? The disc-shaped object and its ability to seemingly defy gravity, which have led the UFO community to call these “anit-gravity technology”. Mark McCandlish, an accomplished aerospace illustrator who has illustrated top secret military aircraft based on descriptions for the covers of magazines like Popular Science, was baffled when friends in the military told him they had stumbled into hangers that had round, bell shaped craft that were hovering over the ground. It seemed like a scene out of Independence Day, not just the X-Files. McCandlish drew out the components of the ARV, or Alien Reproduction Vehicle, as it’s been called, and his drawings are readily available on-line. It resembles many reports of UFOs, including rumors of the Nazi Bell — new type of Bell-shaped flying craft that the Nazis were supposedly working on at the end of World War II.

As in the X-Files, many of these facts are unknown to the general public, or they are ridiculed by so-called “experts” who subscribe to some of the myths. In fact, the premise of the show was that a scientist, medical doctor, Dana Scully was brought in to de-bunk Mulder’s “wild” paranormal and UFO-related theories. As she became more involved in the investigations, she came upon more and more items that could only be classified as “unexplained”.

Professor Sturrock of Stanford, who did research on the attitudes of astronomers and members of the American Institute of Aeronautic and Astronautics found that the more time people spent reading this subject, the more they would come to the conclusion that there needs to be more serious scientific study of UFOs. Because it’s not a “fashionable” area for university research to get funding, it’s usually ignored.

Similarly, too many of my friends in the scientific and engineering circles, tend to dismiss UFO lore and stories as simple “crazy stories by crazy people” without having done any research of their own. The less research they’ve done, the more likely they are to dismiss UFOs out of hand. It’s very easy to ridicule or demean a group of people on the internet — but if you take the time to get to know the people that are making these claims, if you, like Dana Scully in the X-Files, you might just find, that the Truth is Out There!

I’ll leave you with another great quote from the second episode of the X-Files to ponder while we ait for the X-Files revival to begin on January 24:

“Mr. Mulder, why are those like yourself, who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on this earth, not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary?” asked the secret informant.

“Because, ” began Fox Mulder, pausing for a second, “ … all the evidence the contrary … is not entirely dissuasive.” 

The old man nodded to Mulder in acknowledgement, and walked away quietly.

Superman, Aliens, and Not Fitting In: 5 Moments in Man of Steel that (Unexpectedly) Touched Me

Last weekend, I went to see Man Of Steel, the new Superman movie directed by Zach Snyder.   I’ve always been a big fan of Superman movies – as a kid I watched each of the old Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve over and over (even the one with Richard Pryor as a computer genius!).  In those days, superhero movies were few, unlike today, when you can’t drive by a movie theater without bumping into one (or two playing simultaneously!).

But Man of Steel actually touched me in a way that most other films don’t these days.  It had nothing to do with the special effects or the over-the-top action sequences in the last third of the film.  Rather it had to do with not fitting in, as a kid or as an adult!  

Here are 5 very special moments from Man of Steel for those of us that don’t fit in: 

1.             A Young Clark Kent asks: “Mom, What’s Wrong With Me?”

Early in the movie a young Clark Kent, who realizes he’s different from other kids and can’t fit in at school, hides in a closet at his elementary school. When his mother (played by Diane Lane) comes to rescue him, you can sense his inner turmoil when he cries out: “Mom, what’s wrong with me??”

Whether we say it out loud or not, most of us who grow up different ask that question at some point in our childhood.  In my own case, not only did I not look like the other kids and have a different religion, I was always drawn to geeky subjects (back when being geeky wasn’t cool).

I think that one of the reasons that stories of heroes like Clark Kent (or for a later generation, Harry Potter) appeal to so many kids is that they reassure us that it’s OK that we’re not “like everyone else”.  Secretly, it gives us hope that maybe we have other abilities – not exactly superpowers or magic – but other gifts that make us special.   Maybe it’s the ability to do math or write computer programs, maybe it’s the ability to dress weird and sing strange songs, or simply the power to imagine whole worlds in our heads that others can’t see or fathom.

Lady Gaga, in her Monster’s Ball concert in New York City, talked on stage about how she still feels like “a loser kind in high school” because of the way others treated her - she clearly didn't fit in.  And if like me, you were different enough that you couldn’t get a date in high school, remember words of wisdom from journalist Lester Bang from another film, Almost Famous: “That's because we're uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem.”

2. John Kent asks: What kind of man are you going to be?

There’s a great scene where a slightly older (but still young) Clark Kent is being bullied by school kids.  His father, John Kent, played by Kevin Costner, comes up and the kids move away to reveal that Clark is holding on very tight to a fence and holding back his anger and power.  You know he just wants to belt those kids.  And you knew he very well could!

Anyone who’s been bullied (whether in the schoolyard as a kid physically, or as an adult verbally by bigoted or opinionated people) knows this feeling of wanting to fight back!  As a kid this might mean curling up that fist and smashing them in the face. As an adult it might mean some more sophisticated form of revenge, or maybe, you still just want to belt them!  But like the teenage Clark, you don’t, because that’s not the kind of person you want to be.

As John Kent tells the confused young man at that moment:  “One day, you’re going to have to make a choice.  You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be.  Whoever that man is, good character or bad, it’s going to change the world.”  .  I believe we all have to make choices like these and collectively how we choose affects the course of the planet.

What really touched me about Superman wasn’t that he was able to punch out General Zod in the skies of Manhattan and save the Earth.  It’s that the young Clark Kent saved all those kids in the schoolbus, even after they had been bullying him and calling him a freak.  That must’ve been tough.  Forgive, be kind to others, and as Kevin Costner says, “think about the kind of man you want to grow up to be.”

3.  Lois Lane tries to publish a story about UFO’s in the mainstream media.

In Man of Steel, when a respectable reporter, Lois Lane, discovers that there is a UFO and an “alien” (i.e. Clark Kent before he becomes Superman) hiding in plain sight, she attempts publish an article in her respectable newspaper, the Daily Planet.  The editor refuses to print it, saying “I’m not going to print a story about Aliens walking among us!”  She has to turn to some fringe conspiracy website as her only way to get the story out!  Now of course, this would never happen in real life...would it?  

When respected investigative journalist Leslie Kean got a call from retired members of European military saying that there was something to the UFO stories that have been proliferating and that they were putting out a report about this she got all kinds of warnings from her colleagues (spoken and unspoken) about the stigma around the subject, which she feared might be career suicide.  She wasn’t fitting in.  Luckily, she kept at it, and eventually wrote a New York Times bestseller that is a great book the subject for believers and skeptics alike: UFO’s: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On The Record.

When the late John Mack, a psychiatry professor at the Harvard Medical School (and Pulitzer prize winning author), made waves by writing that abduction phenomenon should be taken seriously back in the nineties, he was subject to all kinds of “harrumphing” by his colleagues at Harvard. To paraphrase Alan Dershowitz, a well known Harvard Law professor: There were certain things that you were and were not allowed to study as a Harvard professor.  Angels? That was a fine.  Aliens? Not so much.  Angela Hind wrote, "It was the first time in Harvard's history that a tenured professor was subjected to such an investigation." 

Again, you are free to write or study whatever you like, as long as it fits in. Sometimes, I feel that to be considered “respectable”, we are given a modern, socially enforced, equivalent of Henry Ford’s choice about the Model T: you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black!

4.    The young Kal-El escapes from a dying Krypton.

The scenes of Krypton in Man of Steel were visually stunning and moving, a virtual “film within a film”. But there was something else about this story that moved me.

The idea of escaping an advanced civilization during or just before a cataclysm is really the latest incarnation of a very popular old idea.  Somewhere, in our collective unconscious, as Jung called it, is the mythology of an advanced, dying civilization and the dual archetypes of the wise “old man” who foresaw its destruction and the “child” who escapes.   These patterns repeat themselves in stories that humans have been telling for thousands of years, ranging from the Lost Continent of Atlantis, Aeneas escaping the fall of Troy to found Rome, Noah escaping the Flood, the stories of the Anunakhi from the Sumerian texts, and numerous Native American myths of coming from “over the water” or “under the earth” after escaping a cataclysm (of fire, or water) to start a new civilization here in North America.

Most popularly it’s called the “Atlantis myth”, and if you imply that it might be something more than that among historical scholars - well, let's just say you won't fit in any longer!   In the modern view, civilization and technology advance linearly from simple to complex (like a very straight arrow).  But times like the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome, the loss of complex building techniques after the fall of Egypt, the loss of the library of Alexandria put a lie to this myth – the true path of advancement may be much more circular or spiral.

Whether it’s simply a collective psychological archetypal story that appeals to us, or an actual genetic memory of some long lost event in humanity’s deep past, there is something seriously worth studying in this collective mythos of an escape from an apocalypse (not to mention, in this latest version, as in some versions of the Atlantis myth, the Kryptonians misused the resources of the planet and this was responsible for the catastrophe).  How do we know, for sure, that we’re not living in an extended dark ages after the fall of some advanced civilization like a Krypton or Atlantis?  Don't ask.  You won't fit in.

5.    “Come on!  I grew up in Kansas. I’m about as American as you get!”

After being very skeptical of Superman, the humans (all Americans in this film), seem to realize that he brings them some benefits along with his “otherness”.  But this doesn’t stop them from trying to use surveillance drones on him to find out what “he’s up to”.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Unlike Snowden in the recent NSA spying scandal, the government doesn’t go after Superman  for “opting out” of the government spying program.  It’s too bad you or I can’t opt out.

In my opinion, this movie depicts an undertone in America against those who are “different” going way back:  Irish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Jewish Americans, Catholic-Americans were all questioned  about their “Americanness” and had to “prove themselves”.  And if, like Superman, a Kyrptonian-American, you weren’t born here, so much the worse!  Hell, in Obama’s case, he was born here but still had his “American-ness” repeatedly questioned (though after the recent spying revelations, you might argue, like the New York Times did, that he’s proving himself just fine by becoming, in effect, George W. Obama).

This last scene of the film moved me personally.  In the aftermath of 9/11, I was shocked at the kind of questioning and looks I got whenever I left the big city, simply for being a Pakistani-American.  Sadly, I felt I had to be careful and diplomatic, not cause any waves, and not always say what I was thinking.  What was I really thinking? 

Honestly, I wanted to throw up my hands, as Superman did, and say: “Come on! I grew up in Michigan. I’m about as American as you get!”

These five moments in Man of Steel (among others) had a profound resonance for me (and I hope for others who don’t “fit in”).   Maybe that’s why I like speculative and fantastical fiction in general, it allows us to see truths about ourselves without ruffling any feathers since it’s “obviously fiction”!

So, maybe these 5 moments in the story may not be the same ones that appeal to the majority of the movie-going audience, or even to traditional Superman fans.  After all, I’m not talking about Life, Justice, and the American Way here. 

Or am I? After all, I never was very good at “fitting in”!

Nerds set Twitter on Fire: Did Football screw up the X-Files premiere for millions??

Well the new X-files reboot has finally started. You could probably tell that I was excited about it ( see my last post The X-Files Revival: 5 Things About UFO)

Finally,  just before 7pm pacific I, like millions of others, tuned into Fox - a network that I honestly don't watch that much anymore because so many of the best shows are on cable channels these days.  Expecting to see the X-Files,  I saw there was a football game on.   That's right - a football game!

So, in one of the biggest sci fi events in years, a public relations and ratings coup for Fox to bring this show back that so many of us are waiting for, and what do we see? Football.  

I, like many other X-File fans, am not a big football fan,  but it looked like the game was almost over so it wasn't worried.  In fact, the game ended on time just before 7pm, so I started looking on twitter to see what people were saying about the X-Files.    

Then 7pm came about, and guess what, the game was over but rather than start the X-Files premiere on time, they were still showing commentary on the game!   So basically, the millions of people who tuned into Fox to see the X-Files were treated to commentary on a football game.

Twitter lit up, and in the old days, pre social media, the geeks among us would have to just grin and bear it while the "mainstream" chided us for not being good consumer-fans of all-american football who jump up and down when their favorite team wins or loses. How can you not like Football - what are you some kind of wimp?

@aspen_musing shows how fox had the perfect strategy to piss off fandom!

@Gretchel expressed a lot of nerds feelings towards football vs. the X-Files.

 As we waited, and watched the talking heads go on and on about football ... nerds were on a twitter rampage - see what @see_clair_write said:

The best tweet may have come form @stevekemple who saw it as a conspiracy from the X-Files CSG (Cigarette Smoking Man) to get millions more to watch football.

Now some of you might say, what's the big deal ... it's just football!   Why was it enough to start a full jocks vs. nerds smackdown??  Look at what @LadyHawkins and @alie_asstrocyte said about jocks vs. nerds.

But for many of us, it brought us back to high school.  Those of you who went to high school before nerds were cool, mind you.  Back then, we were made to feel "less than" because we weren't into sports - and football in particular.  We liked being on our computer more than watching a bunch of dumbasses grab at each other while hunching over on the football field.  We were arguing about Kirk vs. Picard rather than XXX vs. XXXX (OK - see I can't even namey any football stars from my day - maybe OJ Simpson??).

You see, it wasn't just that Fox had delayed the X-Files premiere, but it was like a slap in the face that they had done it for Football - the one thing most nerds are not into and were made to feel bad because we weren't into it!

But don't take my word for it - Twitter started to reflect these sentiments really well!

Plus at that point, we weren't sure if we were going to *miss* the first 20 or 30 minutes of the premiere!

The real problem for Fox though is that today, many millinoso f people watch shows recorded on their DVR/PVR.  And most of us who didn't watch it live simply set our cable box to record it.  Now imagine the surprise of people when they put their kids to bed and sat down to watch teh X-Files - what did they see? 20 or 30 minutes of talk about Football!

Many of these people are pissed off because the DVR only reocred the 30 minutes of the show! That means they missed half of the premiere episdoe!  And the next episode is on tomorrow night! That means that unless they can see it on demand, or Fox airs it again, Fox just screwd up the whole mini-series for them!

Way to go Fox - as far as fuckups go - this was a big one!

For those of who did manage to tune in, while I'm excited to watch the next episode monday night (I will provide a review once I've seen more episodes), the truth is still out there - thankfully the football season is almost over so there can't be any monday night football, can there???

Aliens, Radio Signals, Warp Drive, and Dead Heads: SETI con asks "Are we alone?"

Anyone who’s been reading my blog will know that I’m a big fan of science fiction, and maybe even that I’m a big fan of scientific discovery, which is why I was excited to attend the first ever SETIcon in Santa Clara last weekend.

Although I had read a lot about SETI in the past, my main knowledge of the guys running SETI came from watching the movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster and based on the novel by astronomer Carl Sagan (of “billions and billions” fame).

Those of you who’ve seen the movie will recall Jodie Foster’s radio astronomer character (“Ellie Arroway”) being very upset when the funding for her search for extraterrestrial signals was cut off. In a last ditch effort, after being turned down for funding from everywhere including Hollywood (“Those guys have been making money from aliens forever!”), she ended up getting funding from an eccentric billionaire.

Whether art was imitating life or the other way around, SETI itself used to receive funding from NASA, but this was cut off in the 1990’s. Since then, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (yes, whom some would call an eccentric billionaire) donated quite a bit of money to set up the Allen Radio Telescope array so that the search for ET could go on utilizing private funding.

For those of you who don’t know, SETI basically studies radio (and now light) signals from various stars in the night sky, looking for evidence of an “intelligent” signal that could only come from an “intelligent” species that at the very least has mastered radio technology. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and has been going on in some form or another for almost 50 years.

To date, no confirmed signal has been found, though there have been several “candidate” signals that could never be re-acquired for further study.

The SETI institute is located in Mountain View, CA, which is just down the road from where I live (another benefit of being in Silicon Valley), and I was glad to be able to attend this conference so easily (it was held in Santa Clara). There were attendees from as far away as India and Kuwait, and as close as well, Santa Clara.

A Blending of Science, Science Fiction, and the Grateful Dead??

Since science fiction (in all of its forms) has always been a great way to get the public excited about science (everything from the Alien Attack movies in the 50's to Star Trek in the 60's forward), I was glad to see that this conference was not just about Radio astronomy (which I'm sure is a fascinating subject in and of itself), but included an intelligent blending of scientists and sci-fictionists (for lack of a better term). In my opinion not only did this make the conference more fun, but it also helped to open up our imaginations a bit, something that is necessary because the whole idea of extra-terrestrial intelligence is still speculation.

Despite being the first year of SETIcon, and a relatively small number of attendees, there were some great speakers – all of whom were pretty easy to approach and get to know. Here's a small sampling of SETIcon:

• Mickey Hart - On Friday night, we were treated to seeing a preview of work from Mickey Hart – yes, that Mickey Hart, the drummer of the Grateful Dead , about the “rhythms of the universe”. It turns out he’s been collaborating with the scientists at the SETI institute working on a “sounds of the universe” DVD/CD. Mickey said he loves “timelines” and he always begins his books with a timeline that starts with “The Big Bang” from 13 billion years ago.
  For years, he’s wondered what this most primordial event of the universe (the Big Bang) might sound like. This DVD showed his on-going attempt to capture the sounds of the universe ("Everything is vibrating, so everything has a sound" - Mickey), and mix them with incredible visual images to make "art". Mickey pointed out that the Hindus and others speak of an original sound and the Greeks refer to the music of the spheres, so this isn't a new undertaking.
  Listening to this was almost like having a mystical experience, and added a bit of needed "right brain" creativity to what has been mostly a "left-brained" search for ET, and as a fan of the mystical, I enjoyed Mickey's presentation quite a bit. There were some deadheads in the audience, and you can bet they were more than a little excited to meet Mickey!
  
  
• Dr. Frank Drake – anyone whose investigated the scientific possibility of for Extra Terrestrial intelligence will know of Frank Drake, who started investigating whether radio signals could be coming from intelligent alien signals some 50 years ago, dubbed Project Ozma. Frank Drake is considered the Father of modern day SETI, and he is the creator the of the well known Drake Equation, which is an equation that tries to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations there may be in our galaxy. Anyone who’s looked up at the night sky, marveling at the number of stars and wondering how there couldn’t be any life out there amongst the billions of points of lights will intuitively understand the Drake equation. Wikipedia even has a section on it: click here .
  Basically if you plug in some assumptions about the number of earth like planets orbiting earth like stars, and how many of these might have life on them, and how many of those are intelligent, and how long those intelligent civilizations might last, you end up wtih an estimate of how many intelligent civilizations we might communicate with our galaxy.
  
  Of course the big thing that's open about the Drake Equation are the actual factors - which make the resulting number vary widely. Carl Sagan estimated the number to close to 1 million, while Frank Drake himself estimates closer to 10,000. No matter how you slice it though, it's very difficult to make the number come out to "1", which makes it unlikely we are alone! On Saturday night at the conference, we had a banquet honoring Frank’s 80th birthday and 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, which was a fitting way to start the first SETIcon.
  
  
• Dr. Jill Tartar. Jill is the director of SETI research at the SETI institute, and has a host of honors and recognition as a scientist and educator. Many say she was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, including being the point person for “pitching” for SETI funding after NASA discontinued it’s funding.
  
  
• Tim Russ and John Billingsley Star Trek fans will recognize these names. Tim Russ played the Vulcan Tuvok on the Star Trek: Voyager series, and John played Dr. Flox in Star Trek: Enterprise series. Tim is an amateur astronomer and really committed to both astronomy and the SETI cause, and it was great to hear him on several panels. Although I couldn’t go to all the sessions, I think that he played out one of the most thought-provoking scenarios about interstellar travel (More on this later).
  

Of course there were many other speakers, including Robert J. Sawyer, an award winning science fiction author (who was the author of the novel that the TV series Flash Forward was based on), Andre Bormanis (who was the science advisor for several Star Trek series), Seth Shostak, SETI’s senior astronomer, who also does their podcast “Are we alone?” each week, Kevin Grazier (science adviser for Battlestar Galactica, who finally answered the question, How does Galactica’s FTL engines work?), Robyn Asmiov (Isaac Asimov’s daughter), and many real scientists - astronomers, astrophysicists and astro-biologists.

The speakers included, on a more personal note, an old mentor of mine from MIT, Greg Papodopolous, who left MIT many years ago to become the Chief Techonology Officer at Sun Microsystems. I did a research project with Greg on parallel computing during my undergrad days at MIT, and it was great fun to see him again and learn that he'd been involved with SETI also.

So, Did we Answer the Question? Are We Alone?

OK , so by now you’ve probably guessed that attending this conference was fun (it definitely was!), and from the speaker list, you probably guessed that I got to mix with a lot of interesting personalities (I did, and am still in touch with some of them!).

But, did I learn anything? More importantly, did it answer the burning question: Are we alone?

Yes and No.

Yes I did learn something, and no it didn’t answer the question of whether we are alone or not (you’d probably have heard about it on CNN if the conference had gone that far!)

But the conference raised a number of related questions which are equally as interesting, and easier to discuss, which the panelists did enthusiastically. On this front, I think mixing science fiction authors and actors with professors and PhD’s was a very smart move, since these questions have no simple answers, and are still to a large part, a matter of speculation.

Here they are, in my humble opinion, five of the most interesting questions raised at SETICON 2010 (other than “Are we alone”, of course), in no particular order:

1. Should we be sending out signals to extra terrestrial societies? If so, what should we send? And Who speaks for the Earth?
   
   • This question came up again and again. Of course, SETI’s official charter is to look for signals, not to broadcast them. But there have been many broadcasts from Earth (including our TV signals starting from the 1940’s and 1950’s, as well as broadcast by Frank Drake from Arecibo, the big radio telescope in Peurto Rico).
     
     As eminent a scientist as Stephen Hawking has suggested that if we broadcast a signal, it could be picked up by a much more advanced civilization than ourselves, and …well you might see something like Independence Day (remember that movie with Will Smith)?
     Actually, joking aside, this a pretty serious concern, as many speakers pointed out that a less technologically advanced civilization has rarely withstood contact with a more technologically advanced civilization (case in point: the Native American population after contact with Europeans). Given my interest in both science fiction and native american history, I find this topic more than a little fascinating … I actually started writing a novel once about what might happen if a more technologically advanced alien civilization arrived here on Earth -it's called Synchronized - and this conference has led me to believe it's worth completing.
     
   
   


2. Will we ever develop warp drive and be able to travel to the stars?
   
   • The scientists discussed this at length along with the science fiction authors and consultants to TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. From the point of view of the scientists, this would require traveling faster than the speed of light, something that is not permitted by Einstein’s theories of relatively. Lots of interesting ideas were discussed for “folding space” which wouldn’t violate Einstein's general theory of relativity, but the answer was that it would take so much energy to do this as to be practically impossible. When many members of the audience objected, the scientist pointed out that they weren't saying this to be negative. In fact, most scientists would love to figure out a way to get around Einstein's laws (they'd land a nobel prize if they could), but as far as we know, travelling to the stars at faster than light speeds would violate the known laws of physics.
     
     I actually thought the best answer to this question came from Tim Russ, of Star Trek: Voyager fame, and the only member of the panel who had actually flown faster than light (at least in a TV series). He said to imagine that we were sitting at a similar symposium at the time of Columbus, and the question we were being asked wasn’t about traveling over the water to the other side of the earth, but of traveling to the moon. Using the technology of the time, wind power and sails, it would seem “impossible” to ever get to the moon, even if all of the wind power on earth was utilized in the effort. So Tim was suggesting that there may be some kind of breakthrough that we don’t know about yet, which will let us travel to the stars – his bet was that it might have something to do with quantum mechanics and parllel realities. The scientists bet was that it wouldn't happen.
     
     I agree whole-headertedly with Tim that most scientists of today, just like the scientists of every other era, are a bit short-sighted and only looking at a limited perception of reality - that which has been proven in the past. I'm reminded of the head of the US patent office who resigned in the early 1900's because "everything that could ever be invented had already been invented"! Boy, was he wrong! Someday, there will probably be some unexpected new discovery or breakthrough that may make it possible to travel to the stars.
   
   


3. If Aliens exist, where are they, why aren’t they here?
   
   • On an not-unrelated note, there was the more serious issue that if travel across stars will ever be possible, then we should assume some technologically advanced races (say a million years more advanced than we are) would have mastered that technology already. So, why haven't they visited us?
     
     This is a pretty controversial topic, because it relates to UFO theories and sightings, which pretty much every speaker on the panel dismissed as "lacking credibility".
     
     The only answer that made sense to me was that Earth is in a relatively uninteresting corner of the galaxy, and given the millions of likely planets out there, it’s unlikely that an intelligent species would visit here without some concrete reason to (other than to abduct us and do experiments on us). Since we've only mastered radio signals in the last 100 years, this means that any star that is more than 100 light years away wouldn’t have received any transmission from us, making Earth an unlikely place that someone from another part of the galaxy would want to visit. This seemed logical answer.
   
   


4. Is Radio Astronomy the right way to look for Alien civilizations? How will we communicate with an alien civilization?
   
   
   • We are taking our current technology (radio signals) and using that as the basis under which a more advanced civilization might be broadcasting to us. This of course, gets at two core questions – will aliens communicate like we do, and is SETI looking in the right place?
     
     In my personal opinion, this is an interesting question and there’s no good way to answer it, and it probably deserves a much more investigation than was done at the conference. The best answer, given by senior Astronomer Seth Shostak, was that this is the best we can do right now, and any advanced civilization might realize that less advanced civilizations “come of age” when they master radio technology or wireless communication. Just as columbus didn't wait for better ships to be built, we can't wait for better radio telescopes to start our quest.
     
     
   
   


5. Is SETI a worthwhile endeavor, should we continue to fund it?
   
   • Underlying many of the other questions, this was the pink elephant in the room. If it's such a difficult task to scan the whole night sky, and aliens might not even be communicating in ways we understand, is SETI worthwhile to do? Well, actually, as I mentioned, the government is no longer funding SETI proper (i.e. the search for radio signals, though NASA does fund astrobiology research at the SETI institute).
     
     100% of funding for SETI proper comes from private donations and tickets for events like SETI con. Personally, I think SETI has the ability to light up the imagination of the young, to make them more interested in math and science in a way that few other “official activities of our day” do. Whether an alien signal is found or not, it makes sense to have a program like SETI. Of course, if an alien signal IS FOUND, then this would probably be the biggest discovery in the history of the human race ... so I think i can speak for everyone at the conference who thought that we should all help fund SETI to a certain extent, since it concerns us all - not a single state or profession or nation. So, let's all chip in - at the very least if you're interested in the answer to these questions, be sure to attend SETICON 2011!
     
   
   

As you can see, answering each of these questions is not simple; I think I could easily write a separate blog post (or even a chapter in a book) on each of these questions. The panelists (and attendees!) brought up many thought-provoking points and counter-points on each of these and many other topics. (see www.seticon.com ) to see the full program.

In short, I think the conference was not only fun, it was also worthwhile. These kinds of questions force us to think of ourselves as a common species on a common planet, and not as individual fiefdoms known as countries or religions, which is why it’s very important to have something like SETI.

In the meantime, while SETI continues to search the heavens, it was pointed out again and again at the conference that that our TV broadcasts have been in space for more than 50 years already, which means that someone out there (within 50 light years) may have detected our presence already.

Which means that even if there were no signals directed at us in the past, there may very well be something – a signal or who knows what - coming our way in the future… all we have to do is keep our eyes (and ears and telescopes) aimed at the sky!