Alien Intrusion Page 9
[30]"What Is Antimatter?"
[31]"God and the extraterrestrials," < creation.com/god-and-the-extraterrestrials >, September 13, 2009.
[32]"UFO-4: High Speed Collisions,"
[33]"UFO-8: Unable to Avoid Objects in Its Path,"
[34]The Doppler effect can cause the wavelengths of light to move up or down (be redshifted or blueshifted) dependent on the speed and direction of the object. It is the reason for the change of pitch in, for example, the sound of a car's engine as it moves toward you and then away from you. See chapter 3 for more discussion on this.
[35]"Clarke's three laws,"
[36]Atheists Blast Christianity "Testing God: Killing the Creator"
[37]Ronald D. Story, editor, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, "SETI Institute," by Frank Drake (London: Constable & Robinson, 2002), p. 192-193.
[38]Ibid.
[39]"FAQs,"
[40]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, article by Robert Sheaffer, p. 637-640.
[41]"FAQs,"
[42]Ibid.
[43]"Search for Life Out There Gains Respect, Bit by Bit,"
[44]Ibid.
[45]Story, The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, article by Robert Sheaffer, p. 637–640.
[46]Ibid.
3
Is There Life on Other Planets?
The Fermi paradox
In 1950, Nobel Prize winner and pioneer of atomic energy, Enrico Fermi, while working at Los Alamos nuclear facility in New Mexico, raised this straightforward question:
Enrico Fermi
Are we the only technologically advanced civilization in the universe, and if we are not, then where are they? Why haven’t we seen any traces of extraterrestrial life such as probes or transmissions?
Modern space agencies admit that they have failed — so far — to find even the slightest signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. National Geographic magazine pointed out, in an interview with SETI’s senior astronomer, Seth Shostak:
He and his colleagues have never found proof [that] anyone … or anything … “up there” is trying to make contact.[1]
This failure presents a real challenge for SETI scientists. If the universe is billions of years older than the earth, then intelligent life would have had plenty of time to evolve elsewhere. So why aren’t the airwaves filled with their communications? Shostak suggested an answer:
The usual assumption is they’re some sort of soft, squishy aliens like you see in the movies — just a little more advanced than we so we can find them. But the galaxy [our Milky Way] is two or three times that age [of the earth], so there are going to be some societies out there that are millions of years, maybe more, beyond ours.[2]
In other words, Shostak believes that we may be a primitive culture trying to communicate with older, more advanced civilizations, similar to a jungle tribe that bangs on drums and is listening for return messages from yuppies who communicate with mobile phones. If this is the case, then Shostak believes it should be enough to find even the merest speck of life, past or present, on other planets. He explains:
If another world — [such as Mars] the next world out from the Sun — is proved to have supported life, that would imply that the cosmos is drenched with living things. We could conclude that planets with life are as common as phone poles [emphasis added].[3]
But this suggestion does not satisfy Fermi’s original question. Surely intelligent aliens would be curious explorers just like us. In a 15-billion-year-old universe there should have been plenty of time for at least the very first advanced race to send starships to colonize planets. Even if the first colonizing expedition took a million years of travel (assuming several generations of explorers), the new colony, once established, and the original civilization, could then each send out another ship to colonize other planets, doubling the number of new colonies every million years. After 10 million years, there would be 1,024 alien colonies, and after 20 million years, there would be one million.
At that rate, in 40 million years, there would be one trillion civilizations. After 15 billion years, the number of alien civilizations in the universe would be tripping over each other — and this overpopulation assumes only one race of intelligent aliens.[4] The problem would be compounded further if two separate races had evolved.
This “lack of ETs” idea has become known as the Fermi paradox — in short, “Where is everybody?” Even SETI enthusiasts admit that the paradox is a difficult one to ignore, because any advanced alien race would surely have developed technology in the electromagnetic spectrum to be able to communicate as effectively as humans have done, and thus, we should be picking up their communications. Nonetheless, it is argued that we are dealing with the unknown, and therefore an unknown set of parameters — “The universe is a big place, so one cannot say for sure!”
Real science we can understand
Despite the space agencies’ lack of success in intercepting alien communications or discovering signs of alien life, scientists and UFOlogists alike are keen to keep up the search. What evidence are they looking for, and how can we know when they have found it?
In the following chapters, we shall carefully evaluate the evidence that UFOlogists have already put forward to support the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis); that is, the belief that extraterrestrials have been regularly visiting the earth. To look at the evidence fairly and objectively, it is essential first to understand the difference between claims which are scientifically testable and those which (whether true or otherwise) are not, and thus fall into the realm of beliefs held by faith.
We have earlier mentioned that pre-existing beliefs are always involved when people consider evidence; that is, the “facts” are always interpreted within an existing world view or framework of belief. Right at the very core of someone’s belief about extraterrestrials is the controversial issue of origins; a person will frequently base his ideas about the origin of alien life on his beliefs about how life arose on Earth. For instance, the science fiction writers mentioned in the last chapter (some of whom are self-avowed atheists) all based their writings on their beliefs about origins.
We have already discussed the subjective nature of claims in UFOlogy that are often presented as “evidence.” Can we scientifically investigate the claims made by “contactees” and “abductees,” who often say they have received messages delivered by our “space brothers”?
Millions of people claim to have seen UFOs or been contacted by aliens — even to the extent of being transported in spaceships with detailed descriptions of machinery. Yet we have never recovered an alien spacecraft or even found undisputed fragments of one. Nor have we captured any alien in the act of abduction. In fact, to date, and to the author’s best knowledge, there has not been one single documented encounter of a human with an alien that can be appropriately verified.
In an effort to explain this widespread phenomenon, John Mack, who was a world-famous alien abduction researcher and former professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, said that these claims are stretching our understanding of reality. He observed:
Other cultures have always known that there were other realities, other beings, other dimensions. There is a world of other dimensions, of other realities that can cross over into our own world.[5]
Is Mack suggesting that so-called aliens may be visitors from another reality, dimension, or even universe? These ideas, sometimes called the Interdimensional Hypothesis (IDH) or the Extradimensional Hypothesis (EDH), gained notoriety as a result of the writings of UFOlogist
Jacques Vallée (whose research we shall take a look at later) among others. Whether he is correct or not, his hypothesis appears to be outside of our present scientific ability to test. Unlike IDH and EDH, we can look at the ETH because, for extraterrestrial life forms to really exist, it is fair to assume that they must have a place to live. We can at least use the scientific method to search for their homes.
For example, science shows that the ability to travel at faster-than-light speeds within our universe is a physical impossibility (previous chapter), so extraterrestrial visitors must be inhabitants of our solar system or planets of nearby star systems that would not require several “lifetimes” of travel time to reach the earth. By this process we can eliminate all that is impossible, leaving us with a list of what is possible. However, what if we cannot find any suitable hard evidence to verify that the possible is probable or perhaps real? Then the best we can do, as a last resort, is to consider which belief system best fits the circumstantial evidence.
Before we proceed with our investigation of UFOs, we need to understand the limits of science. We can divide scientific procedure into two types commonly in usage today. The first is operational or process science. This is the science that everyone is familiar with. We enjoy the benefits of operational science every day. Advances in technology have given us modern medicine, electronics, aviation, and engineering; they have even put man on the moon. These discoveries are built upon principles that we can test and use in experiments — in the present. For example, you can go to the kitchen and boil water at 100o Celsius (at sea level). Tomorrow you can repeat the same experiment and will get the same results. With operational science, there is little room for speculation or guesswork.
The other type of science is historical or origins science. This involves working out what happened in the past. Unlike operational science, historical science is severely limited because we cannot experiment on, or test directly, past events. We do not have a time machine, so we cannot repeat or observe events in history. As we have previously mentioned, this problem is at the very core of the whole hypothesis of extraterrestrial life, which assumes that life emerged spontaneously on Earth; therefore it must have emerged spontaneously elsewhere as well. There is no testable, repeatable experiment to show, for instance, whether reptiles changed into birds, or apes into humans, as claimed by evolutionists. Even if one could arrange an experiment to turn a reptile into a bird, this experiment would not prove that the same thing happened “once upon a time.”
We do see changes in living things, which are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis of macroevolutionary change. This might be so if these were generally creative in the sense of generating new functional genetic information (the evidence to date indicates the opposite) but even then would not prove that it had happened in the past (see next chapter).
The origin of life on Earth is presumed to have occurred only once; so no living person has ever seen such a thing. In such historical (or forensic) science, the present-day facts (data) must be interpreted to fill in the gaps about the past. The scientist is forced to make inferences based on assumptions. The further he goes back into the past, the more he is removed from the events, and the more the methods of operational science become invalid. Speculation and pre-existing beliefs play a major role in the interpretation of data. If a scientist is already convinced that evolution is true, he will extrapolate results along that line of thinking (his views are religious because he has a belief system about the past). And vice versa for those who are already convinced that evolution is untrue, of course. Experts in historical science have astutely observed:
The conflicts between “science” and “religion” occur in … historical science, not in operational science. Unfortunately, the respect earned by the successes of operational science confounds many into thinking that the conjectural claims arising from origins science carry the same authority.[6]
Atheistic evolutionists generally reject the notion that an outside intelligence created the universe, because this is a religious belief, not science. Instead, they invoke an initial big bang that had no cause. Yet many famous atheistic scientists, such as Sir Fred Hoyle and
Sir Francis Crick (whose beliefs are discussed in the next chapter), have no problem with invoking “intelligence,” e.g., interfering aliens who supposedly created the first life on Earth. As we shall see, every view about origins, including the claim of materialists (materialism is the belief that matter is all there is) that “no god was necessary,” falls outside operational science (we were not there to see or test the events). They are all clearly religious beliefs. So where does “science” begin?
Science and beliefs
Beliefs about the past have nothing to do with the ability of scientists to do good operational science. Many of the founding fathers of operational science were, in fact, motivated by their belief that the universe was made by a rational Creator.[7]Famous names include Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Ambrose Fleming, Lord Kelvin, and Louis Pasteur. They believed that an orderly universe is the hallmark of a designer.
Billions of people around the world still believe in a creation by a divine being, and, amazingly, many thousands of highly qualified scientists also subscribe to this view. This fact may come as a surprise to many, but only because evolution is the prevailing belief and is presumed to be an indisputable fact.
If we are considering “world-shaking” claims that ETs are visiting the earth, surely we should presume nothing! Only by understanding the limits of operational science and by keeping an open mind can we properly investigate the evidence for life on other planets.
The big bang — briefly
It is our intention in the next few chapters to examine, in non-technical layman’s terms, the underlying philosophies of historical science — beginning with the big bang (the evolution of the cosmos). This theory claims to account for the creation of matter and subsequently all life forms, including any extraterrestrial ones. According to the big-bang theory, everything came into existence by itself, out of “nothing,” about 15 billion years ago. Most people accept this view based on the word of scientists. But few ordinary people have ever examined the details. The story goes like this. In the beginning there was nothing, but apparently a “quantum fluctuation” produced a singularity or “kernel” of energy that, some say, was no bigger than the head of a pin — and this “pinhead” contained the entire universe and all the matter in it, including space itself. Scientists don’t know what could have triggered such an event — it remains a complete unknown.
Actually, because time itself is said to have been brought into existence at the same moment, and because all the laws of science break down in such a singularity, we can’t know — in principle. And of course the alleged event can never be observed or repeated. Thus, by definition, the big-bang origin of the universe (even if it really were to have happened that way) cannot be said to be a scientific fact, but more in the realm of belief.
I recall attending a UFO conference where a seasoned investigator claimed that this was “real” science, which underpinned his belief about UFOs. The big bang had created innumerable planets elsewhere in the universe. He then explained that, since the great cosmic science experiment — namely evolution — had occurred on the earth, it must have occurred elsewhere in the universe.
On the cover of a famous science journal, a summation of an aptly described article called “Guth’s Grand Guess,” by the famous cosmologist and father of the inflation model of the big bang Alan Guth stated, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek fashion:
The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing — zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere.[8]
As the theory goes, the universe, mainly in the form of radiation, spread outward, and temperatures cooled enough for the first atoms to form. After about five billion years, the first stars began to form out of cooling gas clouds. Eventually, other proce
sses gave rise to galaxies, our Milky Way and planets.[9]
Interestingly, many argue that it is implausible to invoke a Creator who created matter from nothing. However, the big-bang theory invokes a similar belief without any basis in observed reality. Either matter is eternal (which neither camp believes) or there is a supernatural aspect or intelligence which brought matter and the natural realm into existence. Both are religious beliefs. This indicates the importance of starting assumptions in any origins theory.
Many cosmologists do not like to refer to the big-bang theory as an explosion of matter, arguing that it is really an expansion of space-time and energy.[10] Their reason is that the average person (including most non-specialist scientists) thinks of the entire material of the universe expanding into pre-existing space, thus our universe would have an edge and a center (like an expanding balloon). However, the most popular theory among the big-bang experts is that matter and space itself are expanding together, with no edge or center.