SETI Strategy

The traditional, even the untraditional Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going on now for over five decades; six decades if you include UFOs, and a century’s worth if you include listening for Martian radio signals. Of course, as we are all well aware, nothing has, to date, come from these extensive searches. Either there’s nothing out there worth searching for, or perhaps one is shooting at a moving target. A better search strategy might be to shoot at a stationary target(s). My suggestion is for an optimal static SETI target – the Moon.    

Traditional SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, uses a search strategy of looking for extraterrestrial radio signals broadcast by technologically advanced, well, extraterrestrials.  Alas, you don’t know in advance where in space the alien radio station is; what strength it’s broadcasting at; what radio frequency it’s using; how often it’s broadcasting or for what duration per broadcast. Further, the station is probably on a rotating planet, and we on the receiving end are rotating too and so the meshing of the two such that we face each other is dicey at best. It’s a search with all the odds stacked against it. That’s what I call SETI in motion. Static SETI has better odds in its favour, IMHO. What SETI needs is to eliminate the motion associated with possible ETI from the search. In other words, search for ETI via those artefacts of ETI that 1) pretty much stand still and 2) remain standing still for very lengthy time frames.  

TRADITIONAL SETI IN MOTION: The Electromagnetic Spectrum

Optical and radio wave SETI relies on some alien technological civilization pointing a radio or optical transmitter in the outward bound direction and letting briefly fly the photons in just the absolute right direction such that a terrestrial radio or optical receiver just happens to be pointed in that exact same direction at the exact relevant time frame later on down the track. The odds are not good that all these variables of motion will mesh together. I mean, what if you had one spinning terrestrial globe (globe A) with some random rate of spin and orientation (axis tilt), and another spinning globe (globe B) with another random rate of spin and orientation, both positioned at some random distance apart, what odds that say, one specific latitude and longitude on globe A would exactly match up in a straight line, allowing for the speed of light representing that straight line, with the exact same latitude and longitude on globe B?

UNTRADITIONAL SETI IN MOTION: Space Probes

We have sent out messages to ET in the form of plaques (Pioneer 10 and 11) and audio-visual recordings (Voyager 1 and 2), which have odds of success that even the most optimistic of optimists wouldn’t bet a nickel, far less the family farm, on achieving reality. That’s because space probes are very, very small and space is really, Really, REALLY, very, Very, VERY, big, as “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as so adequately pointed out and made that concept clear to us. Finding alien space probes: it’s the needle-in-a-haystack or perhaps the message-in-the-bottle carried to extremes.

UNTRADITIONAL QUASI-SETI IN MOTION: UFO SETI

The problem with trying to search for and pin down UFOs as an example of ETI is that UFOs will not stand still. They come and they go like short-duration will-of-the-wisps in a totally random way that cannot be forecast in advance. But the skies can be monitored 24/7, and they are monitored 24/7, and guess what, UFOs are spotted 24/7. Of course a UFO doesn’t automatically translate into an alien spaceship, and in any event, while the skies stand still in a manner of speaking, those pesky UFOs don’t.

TRADITIONAL STATIC SETI: Galactic Searches

External galaxies, like stars in our galaxy, sit still in the night sky. Unlike targeting individual stars in our galaxy, or rather the inhabited planets whizzing around them (orbiting and rotating) which is traditional SETI in motion, targeting entire galaxies at one go, assuming a reasonable number of ET civilizations are in that galaxy, suggests that something that’s of an EM nature (on a myriad of frequencies) emitted at random time intervals by someone(s) or something(s) is intersecting our local geography upon which sits our radio telescope 24/7. The fly in that ointment is that, as the introduction to “Star Wars” pointed out, external galaxies are far, far away. That means that while we’re getting some signal(s) from an external galaxy 24/7 just on sheer probability, it’s like trying to hear someone, say your ex, shouting at you from L.A. when you’re, alas, in N.Y.C.

STATIC SETI: Omnidirectional Signals

Omnidirectional electromagnetic signals would appear as a ‘light bulb’ that was always on, but the drawback is that it is a very energy intensive way of advertising yourself and saying “hi there” to the cosmos.

STATIC SETI: Dyson Spheres

We’re all for solar energy, and a really advanced extraterrestrial civilization could take the concept to an extreme. Only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the Sun’s output hits Earth, so even if all of that were captured and put to good use, it would still be just a tiny fraction of what’s theoretically available. But, if one could build a quasi-flexible sphere (of say colony space stations) around a parent star, then a large fraction of the star’s solar energy could be intercepted and put to a useful purpose. The light energy would ultimately be converted to heat energy, or infrared (IR) wavelengths. So, if we SETI by looking for anomalous infrared stellar sources, we just might detect or capture evidence of a vast extraterrestrial astro-engineering projects, known in the trade as Dyson Spheres. The trick will be to distinguish a natural IR source from an artificial one. Further complicating matters is that the search pretty much has to be conducted from above Earth’s atmosphere which is pretty opaque to IR wavelengths.

STATIC SETI: Pulsars

When pulsars were first discovered, they were immediately thought to be the SETI smoking gun, and were named LGM 1, LGM 2, etc. where LGM stood for “Little Green Man”. Alas, it quickly became apparent that in terms of SETI, pulsars were too much of a good thing, now numbering in the thousands, and a natural alternative explanation quickly came to the fore – rapidly rotating neutron stars. However, if author Paul LaViolette* is to be believed, pulsars are not naturally rapid rotating neutron stars but artificially constructed interstellar navigation and communication beacons – the product or creation of ETI. Fortunately pulsars stay put and thus LaViolette’s ideas can be tested.

STATIC SETI: Planetary Disequilibrium

Another possible example of static SETI is the search for planetary atmospheres in chemical disequilibrium – the search in all probability for bio-signatures. Earth’s atmosphere is in a state of disequilibrium; so apparently is Titan’s atmosphere. The ‘intelligence’ part comes in regarding the detection of unnatural pollutants, again in disequilibrium. A variation on that theme is to look for anomalies in a star’s spectrum, say for uranium, plutonium, radium, thorium, or technetium. Finding such would be suspicious – hey, what’s going on here? The answer being that a technological civilization used their parent star as a nuclear waste dump (quite a sensible idea); or to advertise their existence.

STATIC SETI: The Sun

As per above, there are some who have suggested that extraterrestrial intelligences with advanced technologies might deliberately ‘pollute’ their parent star with unnatural or anomalous elements, perhaps an exercise in radioactive waste disposal. The upshot being that the stellar spectra of such ‘polluted’ stars would give the game away that there was intelligence afoot since no natural process could account for such anomalous spectra. Now if such a strategy were used as a calling card by said extraterrestrials, perhaps they have artificially altered the natural solar spectra of our Sun. Alas, I assume by now our Sun’s spectra has been analysed and re-analysed and re-re-analysed with nothing anomalous discovered.

STATIC SETI: The Moon

If you want to leave a message or a calling card akin to “Kilroy was here” for someone unknown or unknowable in the future (whether near future or distant future is also unknown) what would you do, especially if you had some space-faring capability? Translate that scenario now and assume that there must have been some sort of visit to Planet Earth by ET(s) over the past several billion years (and Earth was inhabited even if only by microbes at that time) and maybe they left behind their equivalent of “Kilroy was here”. Well you wouldn’t leave your calling card on Planet Earth since Planet Earth is both geologically and meteorologically active and the ocean bottom isn’t much better. You wouldn’t leave it in high Earth orbit or at the Langranian Points since that makes your message a moving target and/or subject to dislodgment from gravitational forces say from a passing near Earth asteroid or a close encounter with a passing comet. Solar flares, etc. over the long haul could also disrupt any stable orbit. Positioning the message elsewhere in the Solar System is probably placing it too distantly away requiring too much power to sustain itself over the long haul – assuming ET supplied it with batteries – or placement would result in just too much real estate to have to cover for future recipients. What about the Moon as a repository for an alien artefact or two? Did Arthur C. Clarke get it right in “2001: A Space Odyssey”?

The Moon has and hasn’t for all practical purposes any dynamic geology or meteorology and certainly no ocean bottoms. The Moon is not, for all practical purposes a moving target as we tend to think of moving targets. Has the Moon ever been targeted by SETI? Not formally to the best of my knowledge.

If there was an EM beacon on the Moon broadcasting on our radio/TV frequencies we’d know about it. I imagine there must have been times when the Moon was in view or in the line of sight with radio telescopes doing traditional interstellar electromagnetic (radio) SETI analysis. If so, no dice resulted. I imagine the Moon (from space) has been looked at in the ultraviolet, infrared, and other parts of the EM spectrum not readily accessible from ground level. Still, I think a formal SETI attack on the Moon might not be a bad thing – if only to dot I’s and cross all the T’s.

QUASI-STATIC SETI: Transient Lunar Phenomena

For more years than you can shake a stick at - and that’s a lot of years - anomalous lights, glows, or luminescences have been seen and recorded on the Moon by astronomers, both amateur and professional. These enigmatic lights have been tagged with the general phrase Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLP). They come and go with total unpredictability. The usual theory is some sort of volcanic activity, maybe a meteor impact, but to date they remain just one of those mysteries Mother Nature chucks our way. TLP’s require far more investigation, just in case they have a ‘Kilroy’ aspect to them.

STATIC SETI: Alien Artefacts

The ‘Face on Mars’ is probably the best known example of an ‘alien artefact’, and when first photographed by a Viking orbiting space probe it indeed looked like a human ‘face’. However, later photographs under differing lighting conditions just revealed a big rock that had to be lit just so in order to show a pseudo-‘face’. Though the ‘Face on Mars’ proved not to be a real ‘face’, the key point with respect to SETI is that the ‘face’ stood still to be photographed and studied another day under differing conditions. It stood still!

STATIC SETI: Ancient Astronauts

Many myths and legends, from ancient cultures around the world, especially surrounding religious figures of all-powerful deities, can often be reinterpreted in terms of flesh-and-blood aliens as opposed to supernatural gods and goddesses. Alas, while provocative, its marginal evidence at best for ancient astronauts. Engineering feats seemingly impossible for ancient societies are equally provocative, are bona-fide archaeological mysteries, but are again just marginal evidence for high-tech aliens, not smoking guns. However, if there were artefacts, images or equivalent, indisputably produced by ancient man yet which clearly exhibited a degree of knowledge they could not have possessed, that’s a different horse of quite another colour. As a hypothetical example, if there was an image or carving clearly showing the planet Saturn and satellites, all in correct proportionality, in say an ancient Egyptian tomb that would be more than just something provocative. Ditto the image of a kangaroo or a map showing Tasmania or Long Island (N.Y.). Even better would be a really real alien artefact with a “made in Krypton” stamped on it somewhere! Regardless, I suggest a detailed examination of ancient artefacts/images as viewed from the eyes and perspective of a physical, even biological scientist or geographer as opposed to a traditional archaeologist might be in order. Even    

STATIC SETI: Crop Circles

Crop circles stand-sit-lie still (as it were until farmers mow them down) but I’m not convinced they have anything to do with ETI, even if they are high strangeness. But if they do, have anything to do with ETI that is, they would a tempting SETI target.

STATIC SETI: Junk DNA

Some out-of-the-box thinkers have suggested that aliens might have left an internal message within us (as in terrestrial life) that ‘Kilroy was here’ the message being in the form of a coding within those parts of an organism’s DNA that isn’t particularly used for anything – junk DNA. The only problem I see with that is that even junk DNA can and will mutate and thus change the message, just like changing one letter in a word can render that word meaningless. 

CONCLUSION

Our Moon offers the best bet for uncovering evidence that aliens have been (and maybe still are) in our neck of the stellar woods. Since the Moon is close by, and can be observed 24/7 (we know where it is at all times) and is a logical place for aliens to have left evidence of any visitation, it should be the focus of SETI. Such evidence, by implication, would prove that ET exists, or at least one ET existed once upon a time.

*LaViolette, Paul; The Talk of the Galaxy: An ET Message for Us?; Starlane Publications, Alexandria, VA; 2000.



Impossible, Improbable & Imaginary Extraterrestrial Geographies

Far away places with strange sounding names. Sometimes they exist; sometimes they exist but not quite in the way at times suspected or expected; sometimes they don’t exist at all. It’s the latter two categories I examine here.

Impossible, improbable or imaginary geographies are often located, as things turned out, off planet. Here are a few examples of those impossible, improbable & imaginary extraterrestrial geographies.

Vulcan: We all know that Mercury is the closest planetary object to the Sun. But that’s not celestial physics set in stone. There could be objects even closer in, though difficult to see in the intense glare of our parent star, just as many of us haven’t ever seen Mercury being too close to the Sun to be seen with the unaided eye unless conditions are absolutely spot-on. So, way back when, when astronomical instrumentation and technology wasn’t as good as today, coupled with expectations and the thrill of the chase, well it’s not too surprising that astronomers ‘found’ that there was a planet even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Such a planet would be hot property indeed, and so when looking for mythological names that were ‘hot’ with which to christen it, well Vulcan fit the bill. And so it came to pass that Vulcan was the planet closest to the Sun; Mercury relegated to next in line. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Wishful thinking trumped less than ideal observations and so Vulcan was created in the mind as opposed to being actually verifiable. Mercury was restored to first rock from the Sun status – Vulcan became imaginary real estate. But, as Star Trek fans all know, the name lives on as the (non-solar) home of Mr. Spock and kin. 

Neith: Venus, the Goddess of Love, should have a lover – a companion. Venus, the planet, should too have a companion. After all, Venus is the near twin of Earth in terms of size and proximity to the Sun (Venus is second rock out), and Earth has a natural satellite so it stood to reason that Venus should have one too. Alas, it was not to be, but not for lack of trying. Take Neith – companion (but in mythology not lover) to Venus the planet. As with the case of Vulcan, wishful thinking, plus perhaps less than ideal telescopes (relative to modern scopes) led to a flurry of sightings of that expected satellite of Venus, named Neith, so confident were the discoverers that this was no illusion but a physical object. Now there’s a slight problem here. Venus isn’t that close in proximity to the Sun that solar glare should have caused problems. It wasn’t just one professional astronomer who sighted Neith, but many. And while the optical equipment of the day wasn’t 2012 state-of-the-art, it was more than adequate, or should have been more than adequate, to see a reasonable sized satellite in orbit around Venus. So, one could argue that Neith was indeed an actual bit of celestial real estate that went walkabout. Natural satellites don’t have a habit of going walkabout and disappearing. Unnatural satellites on the other hand… Now, might our own Moon be such an unnatural satellite?

Spaceship Moon: Once upon a time there was no real scientifically satisfactorily explanation for the Moon, or rather how the Moon came to be our Moon. One idea that the Moon was an independent body in an irregular and rogue orbit that somehow in a just-so kind of way happen to get gravitationally captured by the Earth was really too implausible. The Moon could have formed jointly with the Earth out of the same cosmic interstellar dust cloud that gave rise to the rest of the solar system. Some bits of that cosmic dust clumped together to form the planets around the parent star, the Sun, and in like fashion other bits of that dust came together around the planets to form natural satellites. Alas, post Apollo, chemical analysis of Moon bits compared to Earth bits ruled that out. For a similar reason, as well as problems in celestial physics, the Moon wasn’t born of a rapidly spinning proto-Earth leaving behind the Pacific basin as its scar, in the same way water droplets would be flung off a globe that was rapidly spinning.

Enter stage left the far-out-star-scout alternative idea that the Moon had nothing to do with the proto-Sun and proto-solar system and proto-Earth. The Moon wasn’t a rogue object captured by the Earth’s gravity, but it was a rouge object that was deliberately steered into an Earth orbit. The Moon was actually a hollow artificially constructed spaceship, covered with lots of dust and rock debris as a natural shield against cosmic radiation and other cosmic bits that would now and again slam into this spaceship – hazards of an interstellar voyage. Anomalies like Transient Lunar Phenomena (strange glowing lights seen on an irregular basis on the lunar surface) are explained as artificial. The Moon’s aliens are the source of the UFO phenomenon. The reason for the aliens steering the artificial Moon into Earth orbit in the first place is that Earth provided all the close at hand next door resources the aliens could ever want.

Of course to spoil that good artificial hollow Moon theory, some bright scientist comes up with yet another natural lunar origin explanation that now fitted all of the facts – a rogue near Mars-sized planet slammed, albeit just a glancing blow, into the proto-Earth, and the resulting mixture of thrown off debris from the proto-Earth and the near totally destroyed smaller rouge planet came together under gravity in near Earth proximity to become, the Moon. So, alas, the artificial hollow Moon proved to be another bit of implausible geography.

Face on Mars: The ‘is there or isn’t there life on Mars’ game was set afoot when the American Viking space probes arrived in the Martian arena in 1976. On the scale of micro-organisms, that question still hasn’t been resolved. There are those who are convinced the Viking craft that landed on the Martian surface hit biological pay dirt. Most others say it was only chemical, not biochemical pay dirt. The fence is being sat on by others to this day. However, the other Viking craft that orbited Mars boldly detected not microbial life, but intelligent life on Mars. One photographed the ‘face on Mars’, and by Jove, that’s exactly what it looked like – one huge monolithic massive stone structure on the Martian surface that resembled down to exacting details, a human face. Well, appearances can be, and often are, deceiving. All of us, at one time or another has seen geometry and recognizable shapes, including faces, in the clouds or in rock formations or on toasted cheese sandwiches. Images of ‘Jesus’ appearing on all manner of things are regular fodder for the tabloids.  Anyway, the whole ‘face on Mars’ issue spawned an entire mini publishing boom, though sceptics were 99 & 44/100’s % convinced that it was all just an illusion. And so it came to pass that NASA went back to Mars post-Viking, and, under pressure, had a new orbiting probe take another look under differing lighting conditions. The score – sceptics one; ‘face on Mars’ advocates zero. It really was all just an illusion, a trick of those lighting conditions that when coupled with some wishful thinking produced another example of imaginary geography.     

Hollow Moons of Mars: But wait, we’re not quite through with Mars yet. Mars has two relatively tiny satellites discovered in 1877 and both named after offspring of Ares/Mars – the god of war - that orbit around it. The one farther out and smaller of the two is called Deimos (about 4 miles radius and over 12,400 miles altitude) and the other larger and closer moon is Phobos (about 7 miles radius; altitude 3700 miles from the Martian surface). Actually it would be more accurate to say that neither is a perfect sphere; potato-shaped is a more spot-on description.

Now it came to pass that some scientists monitoring the relative orbits of Deimos and Phobos noticed that they were shrinking much, much, faster that they should have been. The moons were spiralling in towards the planet, eventually destined to have a close encounter of the Ka-Boom impact kind. The very tenuous Martian atmosphere isn’t much of a drag to what must be solid rock moons. The only alterative explanation is that these satellites were hollow; much less dense than solid rock, and therefore, wait for it, artificial, probably relics of a long extinct Martian civilization. Well actually, there was another alternative explanation – the observations of the shrinking orbits were at the limits of resolution technology and were erroneous. Space probes that have since passed up-close-and-personal to and photographed these satellites, and show exactly what you’d expect – not gleaming metallic hollow space stations or the image of a Star Wars type of Death Star configuration, but irregular, potato-shaped, cratered hunks of rock.

Heaven: If you accept the literal truth of Biblical passages, you can draw no other conclusion other than that Heaven is a physical place not of this Earth since there are lots of passages relating beings ascending and descending twixt the two. Therefore Heaven must be located somewhere up there or out there and as the Bible points out, home to an assorted range of supernatural deities (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and staff, presumably angels (or extraterrestrial officers and crew depending on point of view). Unfortunately, despite Heaven being physical geography, it ain’t been seen by man, telescope or space probe. Heaven would have to be fairly conspicuous – deities and staff don’t reside on a quarter acre block. Try something more like the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or Angkor Wat all cubed.

Of course perhaps Heaven is located light-years away among the stars, but that would hinder rapid interventions by the Heavenly residents here on Terra Firma. Prayers can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and like radio broadcasts, rapidly fade according to the inverse-square law – twice the distance, one-quarter the strength; thrice the distance, one-ninth the strength, etc. So, Heaven, if it makes any sense at all, should be nearby, in cosmic terms. Maybe Heaven resides and is hidden within the cloud bands of Jupiter, though that’s hardly a tranquil or ideal location as is in fact most of the solar system’s real estate. Of course if Heaven were a spaceship, a large spaceship – think Buckingham Palace cubed again – well perhaps that explains Neith. It just moved from the Venus environs to a less conspicuous location like in the asteroid belt or within the rings of Saturn - hidden in plain sight as it were. The upshot is, until proven otherwise, Heaven must be considered a mythical place.

Perhaps we all should be satisfied with the geography we got for real, keeping in mind that the geography we know is but a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny (repeat several hundred more times) of the geography yet to be discovered and explored – the vast cosmos beckons.

Aliens Did Not Build the Egyptian Pyramids

Though I find much admirable and compelling about the ‘ancient astronaut’ hypothesis of Erich von Daniken and a host of other converts, I just cannot accept the idea that ‘ancient astronauts’, that is aliens or extraterrestrials if you prefer built the Egyptian pyramids however difficult it may appear for ‘primitive’ humans without benefit of the wheel or the pulley to have constructed them.

Aliens, ‘ancient astronauts’ or perhaps the ancient Egyptian ‘gods’ (really extraterrestrials) may have helped inspire the building of the Egyptian pyramids (like God inspires the building of cathedrals), but it was your basic human blood, sweat and tears that did the actual construction despite all the hardships. Here are some thoughts on why we have to pat ourselves on the back and not the backs of aliens for these impressive structures, one of which is the last one standing of the seven original ancient wonders of the world.

*One common theme in creation mythology is that the ‘gods’ created humans to serve them and do the hard yards in terms of sweat and toil. That alone is suggestive that the so-called ‘gods’ (that is, the ‘ancient astronauts’) did not sweat and toil and build the pyramids using whatever high-tech at their command; rather humans erected these massive structures as tombs (and as a stairway to the heavens in the afterlife) to honour their ‘gods’, of which the pharaoh was considered to be as one after death. So a tomb for the departed king was also a monument erected to the ‘gods’.

*Archaeological digs within sight of the Great Pyramids at Giza have uncovered ‘towns’ and cemeteries where the human labour force that planned and built the pyramids, and provided the required infrastructure (like food) lived and died and were buried, including, of course, the skeletal remains of those workers.

*Detailed medical analysis of those skeletons reveals the sorts of anatomical conditions and accidental injuries that would be commonly associated with; that which would result from the backbreaking sort of work associated with stonework; moving and positioning massive stone blocks.  

*Images or reliefs in various temples, tombs and other structures depict scenes of large groups of men hauling massive stone blocks and/or doing the sorts of things that stonemasons do.

*Graffiti has been uncovered inside numerous ancient Egyptian pyramid sites left behind by the work gangs who did the hard yards. It’s a sort of ancient equivalent of the WWII “Kilroy Was Here” sort of thing.  

*The pyramids show a natural evolution in styling from the simple mastaba to the more complex as in mastabas piled one on top of the other (the Step Pyramid), then finally to the true pyramid shape now so familiar to us in their design and structure, starting with the Red Pyramid at Dahshur. Pyramids are not all near identical clones that those at the Giza necropolis might suggest.

*Associated with that evolution, we find pyramids that ended up in an ‘oops’ condition; pyramids that suffered construction mishaps like the Pyramid of Meidum where the outer bits just sort of collapsed in a heap revealing the inner core. The Bent Pyramid was “bent” because it was realised half-way through that the original angle was too steep and the top half was constructed at a lesser angle. The pharaoh concerned was an unhappy camper about that ‘oops’ and so the Bet Pyramid was then abandoned unused. Aliens wouldn’t have made such trail-and-error mistakes.

*The pyramid shape is hardly something out-of-this-world. It’s a fundamental geometrical shape well known to the ancients.

*Looking at images of the pyramids, both external and internal, you’d be pretty hard pressed to think of these as something high-tech. If ‘ancient astronauts’ can get from there to here in high-tech spaceships, and when they arrived they then built these pyramids, then you’d expect something a bit more futuristic ‘gosh-wow’, ‘golly-gee’, with flashing lights and lots of glass, chrome-and-steel, ceramics-and-plastics, all incorporated into that sort of architectural engineering that we employ today. Pure stone might be impressive, but high-tech it’s not.

*Modern scholars and Egyptologists have shown plausible ways ancient humans could have used ‘primitive’ techniques that oriented the pyramids and levelled them with respect to the ground and constructed them to high levels of precisions of length and slope. No high-tech was required.

*What possible motive could ‘ancient astronauts’ have had to construct such things in any event? They weren’t tombs for aliens; they certainly weren’t apartments or office blocks for extraterrestrials.

*No out-of-place artefacts have been discovered in or around the pyramids that can be associated with the time of the pyramids and the pyramid builders, the sort of tools and equipment you might find in any modern hardware store. And certainly nothing that looked like it should belong among the props on the “Star Trek” film or TV set has been documented.  

*The only real out-of-place artefact I’m aware of that’s suggestive of some odd goings on is that little wooden ‘bird’ found within an ancient Egyptian tomb at Saqqara in 1898, dated to several centuries BCE, now at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo [1]. Alas, it’s labelled a “bird” because it would be silly to label it an “airplane”, yet that’s exactly what it looks like, and scaled up models fly like a plane and are aerodynamically sound. That’s hardly evidence, far less proof, aliens were in ancient Egypt and therefore must have built the pyramids, but the game is afoot and explanations are required. 

*Ancient Egyptians left behind an awful lot of images on the walls of tombs, temples, obelisks, stele, etc. of their gods, pharaohs, their everyday life at work and play, their family activities, warfare scenes, etc. Nothing leaps out as anything obviously ‘out of this world’ as in depictions of ‘The Greys’ or of flying saucers or any sort of celestial scenes like say the planet Saturn complete with rings or an accurate pictorial depiction of say our solar system. Some of their ‘gods’ do look more than just a little bit strange with their animal heads, but at least they are the heads of terrestrial animals depicted. 

*However, an interesting image or relief at the Temple of [the goddess] Hathor at Dendera, Egypt shows two ancient Egyptians, apparently priests, each holding up what appears at first, second and even third glance to be an enormous light bulb complete with cable attachments at the rear end [2], though judging by other humans in the petroglyph nothing really is to scale. However, a light bulb by itself is useless. To be effective and do its light bulb thing, a massive infrastructure is required behind it. You’d need an electric power plant, or generator, or large batteries and electric wiring. There’s no power source shown and there’s no such electric generating infrastructure uncovered in the archaeological record. This image appears to be a one-off and the objects probably aren’t what they seem to be to our modern eyes. Only those depicted in the image, and perhaps the one who carved it and the intended audience would know what it really signifies. 

*However, that image does raise an interesting question, and, IMHO, a bona-fide mystery. How were passageways in tombs (like the pyramids) and temples, sometimes kilometres in length when taking into account all the twists and turns; often tunnels (with multi side chambers) descending down to depths equivalent to a 30-story building, lighted? Experiments with reflecting mirrors using outside natural light fail after several hundred feet. There are all sorts of highly detailed inscriptions/hieroglyphs chiselled on the walls and ceilings; ditto paintings. Yet, if all was lite by burning torches, where’s all the smoke soot? Can you construct such elaborate passageways/chambers from solid rock and highly detailed paintings and carvings and inscriptions in total darkness except for candles/torches without leaving soot behind and ruining your eyesight to boot? Could you? I couldn’t. Somewhat related is a viable oxygen supply in some of those really deep tombs. There just wouldn’t have been enough to support many workers. Even archaeologists descending down today can find themselves in difficulty.

*Finally, much of what applies here applies equally to the pyramids associated with the various cultures of Mesoamerica. I see no evidence at all that humans couldn’t of constructed these structures. 

Now don’t get me wrong, there are indeed many, many unsolved (but not unsolvable) anomalies or mysteries associated with the Egyptian pyramids (like lighting) that will keep Egyptologists and archaeologists and historians busy for generations yet, but invoking ‘ancient astronauts’ doesn’t seem to be very helpful in pushing forward such solutions that research will eventually solve and pin the handiwork where it belongs, on the human being. That said, I’m more than willing to concede that aliens might be associated with one or more reasons for humans building the pyramids, but that’s a far cry from saying aliens actually built the pyramids or gave humans our modern even futuristic (by our standards) technology to accomplish same.

P.S.: Contrary to typical and stereotyped Hollywood (and similar) depictions, slaves didn’t build the pyramids either. You had a voluntary labour force (in service to the pharaoh), a well fed, housed and looked after workforce.

[1] Corliss, William R. (Compiler); “The little wooden airplane” (in) Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts; The Sourcebook Project, Glen Arm, Maryland; 1978; pages 454-455:

[2] Sanderson, Ivan T.; “Frightfully ancient electrics” (in) Investigating the Unexplained: A Compendium of Disquieting Mysteries of the Natural World; Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; 1972; pages 179-196:

Gods of the Chariots

One telltale sign that the ‘gods’ were really extraterrestrials would be if they displayed advanced high technology before humans could have come up with those same high-tech goodies. An obvious electronic circuit; a diagram of some sort of particle physics interaction; an aerodynamically sound aircraft, even a depiction of Saturn’s rings represented as a 50,000 year old  petroglyph or as cave art would just about be proof positive to convince the most strident of ancient astronaut sceptics. Alas, no such evidence – yet at least. But we do have those ‘chariots of the gods’, a topic worthy of further exploration.

When it comes to high-tech in our ancient history, few things impress me as representing extraterrestrial technology, such as the Baghdad (Parthian) battery or the Antikythera mechanical/astronomical ‘computer’. While impressive in their own terrestrial right, they are hardly the stuff of which extraterrestrial influences on our home planet are made. Ditto that for most of the megalithic structures like Stonehenge or massive building works like the Egyptian or Mesoamerican pyramids. Terrestrially impressive as representing massive undertakings involving lots of hard labour over long periods of time – yes. As extraterrestrial structures they leave a bit to be desired. You tend to think of alien stuff as a lot more futuristic looking – polished metals, weird designs, next generation computers, lots of flashing lights and unexplainable gizmos. If ET builds a building on Earth you’d hope for something more imaginative than a pyramid built with blocks of stone.

What else is there to consider? Well, machines that fly seem to be futuristic gizmos that were beyond the capabilities of the ancients to build and operate.

We have those vimanas (flying machines in Hindu mythology)  and the ‘Wheel of Ezekiel’ (in Biblical mythology) and those Pre-Columbian little gold model ‘aeroplanes’ from Central and South America, not to forget to mention those ancient Egyptian wooden ‘birds’, so-called, and pigeon-holed as such, yet ‘birds’ aerodynamically perfect as rigid fixed-wing  models that could really fly when scaled-up. While these and more have occupied much attention from ancient astronaut theorists, more traditional ‘chariots’ from much better known mythologies haven’t really captured their attention despite that title of Erich von Daniken’s best selling book. Alas, Erich didn’t provide an index entry for “chariots” in that tome of his, so maybe not even he was willing to put money where his mouth was when it came to just plain every old day aerial ‘chariots’.    

There’s nothing overly high-tech about a chariot, apart from those cultures like those of the Americas (North, Central and South) for example that never invented the wheel or cultures who hadn’t domesticated a horse to pull one. I guess to the Incas a horse-drawn land chariot of the ancient Egyptians might have seemed high-tech indeed.

But to the ancient Europeans, especially southern Europeans like the Greeks, Romans, and other cultures in the Mediterranean and nearby regions like Mesopotamia, and of course the Egyptians, even unto India and China, chariots were part and parcel of their transport and means of waging war.

But chariots that fly, aerial ‘chariots’, are a whole new ballgame, yet those ancient cultures and more had aerial ‘chariots’, often described as ‘fiery’, contained within their mythologies. Of course these winged ‘chariots’ weren’t meant as a public transport network for the great unwashed (like a subway or bus system), rather as limousines reserved for the gods, goddesses and just plain deities in general. Are they fact or fiction?

There’s no shortage of ‘gods’ who make use of aerial transport in the form of ‘chariots’. They tend to read like a who’s who of deities in mythology. They can be sky gods like Zeus; Thor (of the Norse) is obviously another; Apollo (Greece) ditto that; the Greek Moon goddess Selene (Luna if you’re Roman) is another as is the Greek goddess of the dawn Eos (the Roman’s Aurora). Most mythological Sun gods are associated with aerial chariots like the Nordic god Sol and the Hindu god Surya, or a solar barge (or boat) as in ancient Egypt.

Now you might think it obvious that chariots (or a boat) would be associated with a Sun god or a Moon goddess (or a sky deity in general).  Something has got to pull those celestial orbs along (recall this was way before Newton and that falling apple that came down with gravity). But, do you see a chariot (or a boat) associated or in proximity with the Sun and the Moon? You don’t? Well the ancients had eyesight equal to us moderns, so no doubt they didn’t see any chariots associated with the Moon or Sun, any more than you do. So there has to be another explanation for those ‘chariots’. Perhaps one needs to separate the god or goddess or deity from what they represent. Selene may be the goddess of the Moon, but she is not actually the Moon and it’s her ‘chariot’ not the Moon’s ‘chariot’ that is an issue here. Translated, the Moon doesn’t need transport; the goddess does.

Now following the Greek god’s War of the Titans, Zeus divided up the cosmos among his clan by their drawing of lots for the various portfolios and spoils of war that go to the victors. The Greek Sun god Helios, though well respected by Zeus, missed out on the spoils being fully occupied at the time with solar duties. However, Helios did take a ‘shine’ to a new piece of real estate that popped up in the Aegean Sea, so Zeus gave him title to that. It was called Rhodes and the locals later erected a statue of Helios in his honour – one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the famed ‘Colossus of Rhodes’. Now mortals do not go to that sort of time and trouble, expend vast amounts of money and energy, on constructing gigantic statues of and to imaginary beings. There’s no benefit of doing so, either personally or for the community. Conclusion: Helios was real.

Now Helios, like nearly the entire ancient Greek pantheon of deities, had his share of offspring. Helios had various offspring-producing lovers like Rhode (the nymph of his island) and Clytie (another nymph) as well as his wife Perse (or Perseis), an Oceanid. [Talk about girls having a really hot time in bed – it doesn’t get any hotter than with the Sun god!] Among his kids were Circe (a sorceress) and Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, who had herself an affair with a bull (but that’s another story). Helios also had a fling with the Oceanid Clymene, resulting in a son Phaeton; setting the stage for the tragedy to follow.  

Now after that little interlude, let’s return back to those ‘chariots’. There’s one ‘chariots’ case history that really stands out and that’s the story of that Greek Sun god Helios, and especially the story of Helios and his son Phaeton. Now daddy very unwisely grants his son a wish. That wish is to drive the family car without benefit of a driver’s license or even any driving lessons. Now the family car is of course an aerial ‘chariot’. The end result was that the son suffered a bit of a prang – well that’s actually quite the understatement. Let’s just say modern Greeks even today could be finding pieces of the wreckage. Shades of Roswell! In fact, this might be the ancient Greek or Mediterranean version of Roswell!

Being a bit of a typical teenage hoon with a yen for fast ‘chariots’ (some things are probably universal even across extraterrestrial societies), Phaeton put the pedal to the metal, doing burnouts in the sky, and of course he lost control. Passing too close to ground level, the out of control ‘chariot’ scorched fertile plains, burned mountains and forests, turned lands into deserts, destroyed towns while burning the locals to a brownish crisp. No wonder Helios’s ‘chariot’ was thought to be the personification of the Sun!   

With the fate of the Earth at stake, a rather pissed-off Zeus brought this unhappy state of affairs to a quick conclusion by blasting the ‘chariot’, Phaeton and all, out of the sky via one of his famous thunderbolts. The ‘chariot’, trailing fire like a shooting star, fell from the heavens. The ‘chariot’ crashed and Phaeton’s dead body ended up in the River Eridanus. Good riddance to bad rubbish Zeus and no doubt the rest of ancient Greek society probably concluded. It doesn’t seem to be recorded what Helios thought – probably a silent “I told you so”. And that’s the story of the ancient Greek version of what I conclude as their Roswell.

In a further conclusion, the ancients could only label unknown exotic flying machines (UFOs) by what they were familiar with – like boats and chariots. In that sense I guess they, those aerial ‘chariots’ weren’t really UFOs since they had been identified, albeit incorrectly, in familiar terms.

UFOs: What A Load of Rubbish

If E.T. is (UFOs), and/or was (ancient astronauts) here, then there would be alien fossils or artifacts left behind, even if it’s just E.T.’s garbage and little else. Unfortunately, there’s no such undisputed fossil or artifact evidence. Not one bit of E.T.’s litter to be had and put under the microscope. Now is this a legitimate argument that rules out any visitations and somewhat lengthy stays by extraterrestrials to our humble abode, Planet Earth? If there is no UFO rubbish, is the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) rubbish?

Pro-UFO (as in supporting the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis) and ancient astronaut buffs are happy to claim evidence for extraterrestrials having been, or even now are, as just plain folk, tourists, scientists, colonizers, whatever, sharing with us this Third Rock out from the Sun.  Now a logical objection to this scenario is that there’s no obvious extraterrestrial detritus or garbage sites (kitchen middens) or ruins, etc. they left behind. There’s no fossil evidence for any non-terrestrial critter or of the mythological and possible extraterrestrial hybrids (like centaurs, the sphinx or mermaids). There are no skeletons of E.T. itself thus far uncovered. We’ve yet to find the burial remains (if any) of the alien Cyclops.

That’s not to say there aren’t some pretty weird fossils in the geological record - within the strata of the rocks – but nothing that ultimately can’t be interpreted in terrestrial and Darwinian evolutionary terms. Trilobites were terrestrial.

Of course as any palaeontologist is happy to point out, what fossils we do have amount to a tiny fraction of those still existing within the geological rock record; all fossils (discovered or not) are but an incredibly tiny fraction of all those critters (including plants) that once upon a time got fossilized. Of those that got fossilized, many remain buried, but many have since been destroyed by natural forces; that subset, all those potentially undiscovered fossils, or fossils that no longer exist, are in turn but a super ultra tiny fraction of all critters who have ever lived and died. Most (nearly all) critters when they die serve as food for something else, even if just bacteria. They get biodegraded in one way or another – dust-to-dust and ashes-to-ashes. Translated, the odds that one lone (out of trillions) Joe Trilobite will ever have been fossilized discovered and ultimately grace a museum display is astronomically against. So, that would have to apply to E.T. as well. There might well exist buried in the ground some bona fide E.T. artefact, even an E.T. itself, but that does nobody any good if that artefact remains buried or more likely as not, has been destroyed over geological eons by various and destructive natural geological processes.

In summary, if any such extraterrestrial artefacts and fossils exist, they are so few in number, so eroded and weathered and buried and biodegraded that the proverbial-needle-in-the-proverbial-haystack is easy pickings by comparison. If anyone is familiar with the History Channel’s documentary series “Life After People”, infrastructure when left unattended to the mercy and forces of nature and ravages of time don’t last or survive all that long before crumbling to dust. It’s said that ‘man fears time, but time fears only the pyramids’. However, even so, it’s obvious that time has in fact taken its toll on those ancient wonders at Giza in Egypt. In another 50,000 years, even if ten times that, even the pyramids will have been recycled back to sand as the wind and rain and pollution and earthquakes do their destructive things.

Still, maybe an amateur archaeologist or palaeontologist or just plain lucky prospector or individual who happens to look at the right spot at the right time might stumble onto the find of the century – E.T. Actually it would be the find, not just of the century, but of all time.

Those same natural geological forces and biological agents would also strut their natural recycling and breakdown stuff on E.T.’s waste. But, in addition, E.T. can and does have the option of removing their detritus off the planet. One also needs to ask; would we of necessity recognize and distinguish E.T.’s rubbish from all other forms of human rubbish? Would there be any obvious differences that would suggest extraterrestrial rubbish is somehow different from human rubbish? If we wouldn’t immediately jump to a conclusion that a metal bolt we found was extraterrestrial, would we then go to the trouble and submit it to complex analysis, analysis that would be required to confirm that this rubbish wasn’t ordinary rubbish but extraordinary rubbish?  Lack of E.T.’s garbage is not evidence of a lack of E.T.

The lack of extraterrestrial rubbish dumps and artefacts could well be that E.T. cleaned up after themselves (unlike prone-to-litter humans on which a lot of human prehistory is based – excavations of our ancient garbage dumps, technically called kitchen middens, etc.). The E.T. ‘gods’ (ancient astronauts) took all of their stuff with them when they left, including the end products of their genetic experiments (apart from their ultimate final product – we humans and our hominoid ancestors which had died out on their own), the hybrid half & halves (like the Minotaur) of our mythology.

Unless we humans start launching our garbage into space, say the ultimate incineration in the solar furnace; well let’s just say that option is going to increase waste disposal rates several thousand fold and therefore isn’t a realistic option – for us. Therefore, we have little option but to use Planet Earth as a garbage dump – much to the delight of archaeologists who base much of ancient human history on just such detritus. But of course, as noted earlier, time, natural forces and biological agents ultimately deal with most forms of human waste – solid, liquid and gaseous.

There’s yet another solution to a lack of E.T.’s rubbish. A technologically advanced E.T. is probably equally advanced in recycling technology. If you undertake interstellar voyages you’d better be damned efficient at recycling. Anyway, I don’t recall anyone in ‘Star Trek’ for example leaving behind their litter – an artifact, maybe like a book on Chicago’s gangsters yes, but not rubbish! Even that book was a violation of the Prime Directive! E.T. would pay closer attention to rules and regulations.

Whether extraterrestrial artefacts have been eroded away by time or whether the aliens nearly removed or recycled their detritus, any and all remaining physical evidence as interpreted as evidence for E.T. is therefore evidence from our more modern eras, not the geological past. That evidence might be contained within human mythology or human archaeological relics that depict in one way or another the ‘gods’, entities that could be alien beings – figurines, artworks, monuments, etc. or the half & halves hybrids (like the stone monument of the Sphinx that rests near the trio of those great but crumbling pyramids on the Giza Plateau in Egypt). However, any archaeologist worth his or her salt will tell you that these are all the works of humans – works by man. Some out-of-place artefacts have been discovered but while anomalies or curiosities, they aren’t so totally extraordinary as to make a solid case for the existence of aliens. But, in conclusion to that observation that all roads that point to extraterrestrial ‘gods’ were paved by humans, well, absence of direct evidence linking extraterrestrials on Earth isn’t the same as evidence of extraterrestrials absence on Earth.  

But speaking of artifacts related to E.T. or ancient astronauts, there have been lots of authors, quite apart from Erich von Daniken, who have made careers out of pointing out archaeological evidence suggestive of E.T. Now clearly much of that is embellishment and wishful thinking and often plain nonsense, but, as most of life’s little mysteries are, this isn’t an either/or situation. There are many shades of gray here and I’ve seen quite a few artifacts, especially images that are quite suggestive of an E.T. in our past, and of course if past tense, why not present tense? Now throw in that mythology to complement the archaeology…

Finally, consider your own environment – home, work, community. Within that sphere that you exist in for the most part, what proof do you have that meteors exist? Has any meteorite landed in your back yard; crashed into your place of employment or for that matter anywhere within your day-to-day environment? What about an aircraft? You see these strange flying objects all the time yet you find no artifact of them, an artifact falling to earth in your back yard, your place of employment, or within your community. You probably have no actual physical piece of evidence to prove meteors or aircraft exist. It’s all just an eyewitness reality on your part. Of course if you claim to see a ‘shooting star’ or a Boeing 747 fly overhead; no one is likely to rubbish your sighting. So, can we rubbish UFOs just because there are no artifacts to be conveniently had, rather just eyewitness testimony in the main?

And so, based on your own patch of turf, you have as much in the way of artifacts for E.T. as you have for meteors or airplanes (unless you have been unfortunate enough to really anger the gods and have a plane or meteorite land on your roof).

But wait, what about that July 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and other alleged incidents involving UFO crashes? Unfortunately, even if true, the alleged extraterrestrial artifacts are not in the hands of the scientific community. There are no peer-reviewed papers in scholarly journals on the studied remains. There’s no literature full stop in existence that isn’t controversial. The alleged artifacts aren’t on display in museums. Only the need-to-know elite have access, and they’re not talking. So, Roswell is a yes, but as proof positive, it’s a no – at least so far.

However, there are modern UFO artifacts of sorts. In geology, not all fossils are bones or shells. In fact not all fossils are even remains of living things, but rather events. For example, there are fossilized rain drop impressions in now solid rock; ditto ripple marks. But with respect to former living creatures, there are fossils of just their burrows, and more frequently, just their footprints. A UFO ‘footprint’ is akin to a ground trace left behind after a UFO landing, like say the Socorro, New Mexico landing on 24 April 1964 as witnessed by local police officer Lonnie Zamora. Magnetic traces left behind on metal objects like automobiles or physiological effects incurred on human (or plant and animal) tissue is something else that can be dealt with and analyzed in a laboratory. So, in one manner of speaking, there are UFO ‘artifacts’.

So hunting for UFO or ancient astronaut artifacts, is akin to the old needle-in-a-haystack quest. But that’s something scientists employed in the scientifically legitimate Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) quest can identify with. That needle/haystack argument is their fallback position when SETI scientists are pressed or pressured into explaining why they haven’t themselves detected E.T. (albeit out there and not here) in over five decades of searching the heavens for that artificial radio beam or optical beacon. They would state, and rightly so, that absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. And so that pithy saying too assists in coming to terms why UFOs (and ancient astronauts) are not rubbish. Absence of E.T.’s garbage is not the same thing of necessity as evidence of E.T.’s absence.

Exobiology: UFOs: Area 51, etc.

Exobiology was the original term given to the sciences central to the question of life-in-the-Universe. It’s now been largely replaced by Astrobiology, but I’ll stick with the original. Assuming one or more extraterrestrial civilizations with advanced, interstellar spaceflight capability exists; then they know about Planet Earth. Say ‘hi’ to those pesky UFOs. The Big Question not only is, is there an official UFO cover-up, but is Area 51 part of that cover-up? There are many people who have investigated this issue and decided the question in the affirmative. Are they right?

“Area 51”, as it is commonly called, is a large military base in the remotest of the remote part of the US state of Nevada. It clearly deals with a lot of top secret high technology R&D work, for the most part involving prototypes of futuristic military aircraft and various technologies that will (ideally) make them better than that possessed by any other country. The question most often asked is whether of not 1) America has in its possession one or more ‘flying saucers’, crashed or otherwise; 2) if ‘yes’, are the saucers extraterrestrial, and if so, 3) is any associated alien technology being back-engineered in order to give America that futuristic edge in military aviation?

Many UFO investigators will tell you, but obviously can’t prove is that if UFO sceptics could have access to the secrets of Area 51, well, they just wouldn’t be sceptics any longer. The idea that Area 51 is a geek’s paradise getting to play with all sorts of alien high-tech gadgets is also well re-enforced in the film and TV industry, and a common plot in sci-fi alien cover-up conspiracy novels. An obvious example was the many references to Area 51 in the hit sci-fi TV series “Stargate: SG-1”. 

If a government, any government of any country, had possession of alien technology, say the remains of a crashed flying saucer, there is little doubt that the powers-that-be would try to 1) figure it all out and b) keep it secret from other foreign powers-that-be. That would be the case as well if say the Americans were to obtain terrestrial technology with military applications from captured Russian or Chinese or for that matter even Australian hardware. Thus, it would come as no real surprise that such a government would have one or more top secret sites where such back-engineering would be done, and secrets kept. However, even if no government had any alien technology, they still would have top secret sites for producing, testing, and etc. terrestrial technology vital to national security. Thus, the existence of Area 51 (a.k.a. Dreamland) does not of necessity prove that the United States (in this example) has alien technology in its possession. But, if you accept Roswell (and/or other tales of captured alien technology), then Area 51 (or akin) follows of necessity.

So, even assuming that Area 51 (Groom Lake, Nevada) has bugger-all to do with UFOs doesn’t negate secrecy going on. There’s no denying the place exists. That’s on the public record. Satellite and ground photographs exist. There’s no getting around the fact that signs are posted around the site that there will be ‘no trespassing’ and that if you do, ‘use of deadly force is authorised’ to keep you out. [That especially includes UFO believers!] That too is on the public record, filmed and documented. Translated, there are things going on at Area 51 the American government and military doesn’t want anyone to know about. Pine Gap in Central Australia is another such location. Many more exist throughout the world. You want cover-ups, censorship and related – call it what you will. Well, something that immediately comes to mind was the Manhattan Project. Then there’s that U-2 spy plane (and a whole range of stealth military aircraft that remained top secret while in development). Likewise, the Project Mogul package designed to detect foreign nuclear weapons testing, launched to high altitudes by balloon, as beloved as an explanation for Roswell. (I’m sure Project Mogul existed, whether it really explains Roswell is quite another matter.)

In conclusion, if the American government/military has in its possession alien technology, probably from a crashed UFO (flying disc), probably the one from Roswell, then Area 51 is a likely place for it to end up, and you, part of the great unwashed with no need to know, aren’t likely to find out the real facts of the matter anytime soon. The powers-that-be will deny have extraterrestrial technology in their possession, but they would have to say that regardless of whether or not it was really true.

Further readings:

Darlington, David; Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles: The Legend of America’s Most Secret Military Base; Henry Holt & Company, New York; 1997: 

Jacobsen, Annie; Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base; Little, Brown & Company, New York; 2011.

Patton, Phil; Travels in Dreamland: The Secret History of Area 51; Orion Media, London; 1997:

The UFO ETH: Pro and Con: E.T. is a Litter Bug

With both the existence of pure theory and applied evidence supporting the plausibility of the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) – where the UFO remains a UFO after appropriate expert analysis has failed to find a more terrestrial explanation – lets look at a few snippets of the phenomena, this time the endless stalemate between those supporting the UFO ETH, and those sceptical debunkers of the UFO ETH starting with the most basic of all arguments, UFOs can not be extraterrestrial because investigators and/or archaeologists would have found their artefacts, garbage dumps or at least their litter.

OBJECTION #10: If E.T. is here (via UFOs), and/or was here (those ancient astronauts) then there would be alien fossils or artifacts left behind, even if it’s just E.T.’s garbage and little else. Unfortunately, there’s no such undisputed fossil or artifact evidence. Not one bit of E.T.’s litter to be had and put under the microscope. Now is this a legitimate argument that rules out any visitations and somewhat lengthy stays by extraterrestrials to our humble abode, Planet Earth? If there is no UFO rubbish, is the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) rubbish?

ANSWER: Pro-UFO (as in supporting the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis) and ancient astronaut buffs are happy to claim evidence for extraterrestrials having been, or even now are, as just plain folk, tourists, scientists, colonizers, whatever, sharing with us this Third Rock out from the Sun.  Now a logical objection to this scenario is that there’s no obvious extraterrestrial detritus or garbage sites (kitchen middens) or ruins, etc. they left behind. There’s no fossil evidence for any non-terrestrial critter or of the mythological and possible extraterrestrial hybrids (like centaurs, the sphinx or mermaids). There are no skeletons of E.T. itself thus far uncovered. We’ve yet to find the burial remains (if any) of the alien Cyclops.

That’s not to say there aren’t some pretty weird fossils in the geological record - within the strata of the rocks – but nothing that ultimately can’t be interpreted in terrestrial and Darwinian evolutionary terms. Trilobites were terrestrial.

Of course as any palaeontologist is happy to point out, what fossils we do have amount to a tiny fraction of those still existing within the geological rock record; all fossils (discovered or not) are but an incredibly tiny fraction of all those critters (including plants) that once upon a time got fossilized. Of those that got fossilized, many remain buried, but many have since been destroyed by natural forces; that subset, all those potentially undiscovered fossils, or fossils that no longer exist, are in turn but a super ultra tiny fraction of all critters who have ever lived and died. Most (nearly all) critters when they die serve as food for something else, even if just bacteria. They get biodegraded in one way or another – dust-to-dust and ashes-to-ashes. Translated, the odds that one lone (out of trillions) Joe Trilobite will ever have been fossilized discovered and ultimately grace a museum display is astronomically against. So, that would have to apply to E.T. as well. There might well exist buried in the ground some bona fide E.T. artefact, even an E.T. itself, but that does nobody any good if that artefact remains buried or more likely as not, has been destroyed over geological eons by various and destructive natural geological processes.

In summary, if any such extraterrestrial artefacts and fossils exist, they are so few in number, so eroded and weathered and buried and biodegraded that the proverbial-needle-in-the-proverbial-haystack is easy pickings by comparison. If anyone is familiar with the History Channel’s documentary series “Life After People”, infrastructure when left unattended to the mercy and forces of nature and ravages of time don’t last or survive all that long before crumbling to dust. It’s said that ‘man fears time, but time fears only the pyramids’. However, even so, it’s obvious that time has in fact taken its toll on those ancient wonders at Giza in Egypt. In another 50,000 years, even if ten times that, even the pyramids will have been recycled back to sand as the wind and rain and pollution and earthquakes do their destructive things.

Still, maybe an amateur archaeologist or palaeontologist or just plain lucky prospector or individual who happens to look at the right spot at the right time might stumble onto the find of the century – E.T. Actually it would be the find, not just of the century, but of all time.

Those same natural geological forces and biological agents would also strut their natural recycling and breakdown stuff on E.T.’s waste. But, in addition, E.T. can and does have the option of removing their detritus off the planet. One also needs to ask; would we of necessity recognize and distinguish E.T.’s rubbish from all other forms of human rubbish? Would there be any obvious differences that would suggest extraterrestrial rubbish is somehow different from human rubbish? If we wouldn’t immediately jump to a conclusion that a metal bolt we found was extraterrestrial, would we then go to the trouble and submit it to complex analysis, analysis that would be required to confirm that this rubbish wasn’t ordinary rubbish but extraordinary rubbish?  Lack of E.T.’s garbage is not evidence of a lack of E.T.

The lack of extraterrestrial rubbish dumps and artefacts could well be that E.T. cleaned up after themselves (unlike prone-to-litter humans on which a lot of human prehistory is based – excavations of our ancient garbage dumps, technically called kitchen middens, etc.). The E.T. ‘gods’ (ancient astronauts) took all of their stuff with them when they left, including the end products of their genetic experiments (apart from their ultimate final product – we humans and our hominoid ancestors which had died out on their own), the hybrid half & halves (like the Minotaur) of our mythology.

Unless we humans start launching our garbage into space, say the ultimate incineration in the solar furnace; well let’s just say that option is going to increase waste disposal rates several thousand fold and therefore isn’t a realistic option – for us. Therefore, we have little option but to use Planet Earth as a garbage dump – much to the delight of archaeologists who base much of ancient human history on just such detritus. But of course, as noted earlier, time, natural forces and biological agents ultimately deal with most forms of human waste – solid, liquid and gaseous.

There’s yet another solution to a lack of E.T.’s rubbish. A technologically advanced E.T. is probably equally advanced in recycling technology. If you undertake interstellar voyages you’d better be damned efficient at recycling. Anyway, I don’t recall anyone in ‘Star Trek’ for example leaving behind their litter – an artifact, maybe like a book on Chicago’s gangsters yes, but not rubbish! Even that book was a violation of the Prime Directive! E.T. would pay closer attention to rules and regulations.

Whether extraterrestrial artefacts have been eroded away by time or whether the aliens nearly removed or recycled their detritus, any and all remaining physical evidence as interpreted as evidence for E.T. is therefore evidence from our more modern eras, not the geological past. That evidence might be contained within human mythology or human archaeological relics that depict in one way or another the ‘gods’, entities that could be alien beings – figurines, artworks, monuments, etc. or the half & halves hybrids (like the stone monument of the Sphinx that rests near the trio of those great but crumbling pyramids on the Giza Plateau in Egypt). However, any archaeologist worth his or her salt will tell you that these are all the works of humans – works by man. Some out-of-place artefacts have been discovered but while anomalies or curiosities, they aren’t so totally extraordinary as to make a solid case for the existence of aliens. But, in conclusion to that observation that all roads that point to extraterrestrial ‘gods’ were paved by humans, well, absence of direct evidence linking extraterrestrials on Earth isn’t the same as evidence of extraterrestrials absence on Earth.  

But speaking of artifacts related to E.T. or ancient astronauts, there have been lots of authors, quite apart from Erich von Daniken, who have made careers out of pointing out archaeological evidence suggestive of E.T. Now clearly much of that is embellishment and wishful thinking and often plain nonsense, but, as most of life’s little mysteries are, this isn’t an either/or situation. There are many shades of gray here and I’ve seen quite a few artifacts, especially images that are quite suggestive of an E.T. in our past, and of course if past tense, why not present tense? Now throw in that mythology to complement the archaeology…

Finally, consider your own environment – home, work, community. Within that sphere that you exist in for the most part, what proof do you have that meteors exist? Has any meteorite landed in your back yard; crashed into your place of employment or for that matter anywhere within your day-to-day environment? What about an aircraft? You see these strange flying objects all the time yet you find no artifact of them, an artifact falling to earth in your back yard, your place of employment, or within your community. You probably have no actual physical piece of evidence to prove meteors or aircraft exist. It’s all just an eyewitness reality on your part. Of course if you claim to see a ‘shooting star’ or a Boeing 747 fly overhead; no one is likely to rubbish your sighting. So, can we rubbish UFOs just because there are no artifacts to be conveniently had, rather just eyewitness testimony in the main?

And so, based on your own patch of turf, you have as much in the way of artifacts for E.T. as you have for meteors or airplanes (unless you have been unfortunate enough to really anger the gods and have a plane or meteorite land on your roof).

But wait, what about that July 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and other alleged incidents involving UFO crashes? Unfortunately, even if true, the alleged extraterrestrial artifacts are not in the hands of the scientific community. There are no peer-reviewed papers in scholarly journals on the studied remains. There’s no literature full stop in existence that isn’t controversial. The alleged artifacts aren’t on display in museums. Only the need-to-know elite have access, and they’re not talking. So, Roswell is a yes, but as proof positive, it’s a no – at least so far.

However, there are modern UFO artifacts of sorts. In geology, not all fossils are bones or shells. In fact not all fossils are even remains of living things, but rather events. For example, there are fossilized rain drop impressions in now solid rock; ditto ripple marks. But with respect to former living creatures, there are fossils of just their burrows, and more frequently, just their footprints. A UFO ‘footprint’ is akin to a ground trace left behind after a UFO landing, like say the Socorro, New Mexico landing on 24 April 1964 as witnessed by local police officer Lonnie Zamora. Magnetic traces left behind on metal objects like automobiles or physiological effects incurred on human (or plant and animal) tissue is something else that can be dealt with and analyzed in a laboratory. So, in one manner of speaking, there are UFO ‘artifacts’.

So hunting for UFO or ancient astronaut artifacts, is akin to the old needle-in-a-haystack quest. But that’s something scientists employed in the scientifically legitimate Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) quest can identify with. That needle/haystack argument is their fallback position when SETI scientists are pressed or pressured into explaining why they haven’t themselves detected E.T. (albeit out there and not here) in over five decades of searching the heavens for that artificial radio beam or optical beacon. They would state, and rightly so, that absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence.

So, IMHO, the tenth objection fails because that pithy saying assists in coming to terms why UFOs (and ancient astronauts) are not rubbish. Absence of E.T.’s garbage is not the same thing of necessity as evidence of E.T.’s absence.