A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a "time-slip," and found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it, until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:

Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point, the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home -- and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky.

One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first as we see it from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it.  It doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper. Here's the constellation as it's seen from Earth, and the same stars as viewed after a ninety-degree revolution around the star in the lower left corner:

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:

Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.

The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars) to choose from, but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with a quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

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Crying wolf

There's a bias that's a bit like an inverted appeal to authority: anyone who repeatedly and stridently makes claims that prove to be unsubstantiated, far-fetched, or outright false eventually finds that people simply stop listening.  At that point, even if they did come up with something reasonable and insightful, it's doubtful that anyone would pay attention.

We've seen a number of people who've exhausted their credibility in that fashion here at Skeptophilia.  Some notable examples:

• Geneticist Melba Ketchum, who has claimed several times to have hard evidence of the existence of Bigfoot (including its DNA).  She wrote a paper about her findings that she finally was able to get published -- but only in a "scientific journal" she herself started for the purpose.  Worse still, it turned out that most of the citations in the paper were bogus, including one that says in the cited paper itself that it was written as an April Fool's joke.
• Author Richard C. Hoagland, who despite having (direct quote from the Wikipedia article about him) "no education beyond high school level... no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field" has become famous for a variety of loony pseudoscientific ideas, my favorite one being that the hexagonal cloud patterns on Saturn are "produced by the same phenomenon that causes crop circles."
• Journalist Jaime Maussan, who says he has conclusive proof that some mummies found in Mexico aren't human -- i.e., are aliens.  Surprising absolutely no one -- well, no one rational, at least -- the mummies that have been DNA tested are one hundred percent Homo sapiens, and the ones Maussan is the most convinced are aliens show signs of recent tampering to make them look less human.
• Mark Taylor, a prominent evangelical inspirational speaker, who claims that having orchestral instruments tuned to A = 440 Hertz is a secret plot by the Freemasons to alter your DNA so that you will hate Donald Trump.  I'd like to be able to say that this is the most insane thing that Taylor has said, but that unfortunately would be a lie.

All four of these people have found that restoring your credibility once it's shot is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  Although in the case of Taylor, I suspect he doesn't care -- part of his shtick is that he's a Lone Voice Crying In The Wilderness, so he probably falls back on the impeccable logic of "Many brilliant truth-tellers have been considered crazy -- people consider me crazy, so I must be a brilliant truth-teller!"

In any case, the latest in this Parade of Shame is Luis "Lue" Elizondo, who was a U. S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and now is a prominent member of the UFO/UAP Truthers community.  Lately we've seen lots of claims that the U. S. government has concrete proof of extraterrestrial intelligence; a year ago there was a big hearing in Congress where people like alleged whistleblower David Grusch said they'd not only seen, but participated in the recovery and testing of, "non-human biologicals" and the spacecraft that allowed them to get here.  My point then, as now, was: fine, you want us to believe you?  Let's see the goods.  Turn at least some of it over to independent unbiased scientists for study, under peer review, and then we can talk.  But of course instead we have additional claims of an X Files-style coverup because of issues of national security, and so far what we've seen is bupkis.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MjolnirPants, Grey Aliens Drawing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Now, Elizondo is publishing his memoirs, and you can bet they'll be replete with claims of UFO shenanigans.  The problem is, skeptic Jason Colavito got a hold of some advance excerpts, and besides the usual Cigarette Smoking Man antics you'd expect, Elizondo is making a whole bunch of other clams that make his UFO stuff look like Nobel Prize material.

One of the weirdest is that Elizondo says he's been haunted for decades by "glowing ghost bubbles."  There are green ones, clear ones, and blue ones -- the green and clear ones are harmless, he says, but the blue ones are "malevolent."  Then he launches into a bizarre passage about the veracity of the Book of Enoch -- one of the biblical Apocrypha, about which I wrote last year, and which (to put not too fine a point on it) is really fucking bizarre -- and in these excerpts he has a lot to say about our old friends the Nephilim:

Enoch's journey is filled with heavenly accounts, including descriptions of angelic and demonic hierarchy, God's throne, God's inner circle of guards, and even the language of the supernatural.  On paper, Enoch's travels don't sound that dissimilar to reported nonhuman encounters.  We also looked at the sixth chapter of Genesis.  That's the chapter that contains the story of Noah's ark.  Before we get to Noah, verses 1 through 4 of that chapter quickly share that otherworldly beings came to earth and mated with human women. Some translations call these offspring giants, while others refer to the visitors by the original Hebrew word, Nephilim, which some scholars say means something like fallen angels, or beings that cause others to fall.

At this point he seems to be aware that he's doing a synchronized skating routine with Erich von Däniken on very thin ice, because he goes on to say, "To be clear, I'm not advocating the ancient astronaut hypothesis that many today believe.  I'm simply drawing some interesting parallels."  Which is the woo-woo equivalent of making some loony claim and then excusing it by saying you're "just asking questions" (which a friend of mine calls "JAQing off").

The problem, of course, is that if Elizondo wanted anyone to take him seriously other than people who think Ancient Aliens is a scientific documentary, this kind of nonsense is not doing him any favors.  Admittedly, I haven't read the memoirs -- they're not available yet -- only the excerpts Colavito provided.  But honestly, given their respective track records, I'm much more likely to trust Colavito's perspective than Elizondo's.

And that's coming from someone who would dearly love to see hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.

So there you have it.  One more example of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Like any other bias, it can lead you astray; the whole point of the fable is that eventually there was a wolf, no one believed the boy, and the boy got turned into a lupine hors-d'oeuvre.  But even if it's a bias, it's an understandable bias.  If Elizondo really does have good evidence of aliens but has blown his own credibility to the point that no one is listening any more, he has only himself to blame.

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ET, call Lexington

If you needed more evidence that we're living in surreal times, some scientists have collaborated with the Tourism Board of Lexington, Kentucky to send a message to aliens inviting them to come to the city for a visit.

The message was sent via infrared laser toward TRAPPIST-1, a multi-planet system about forty light years from Earth.  Astonishingly, they actually got permission from the Federal Aviation Administration -- not a government office known either for its flexibility or its sense of humor -- to beam the message out.  The message, in coded bitmap form, contained information regarding the intent of the transmission, some photographs of the Lexington area, and an audio recording of blues musician Tee Dee Young.

"The bitmap image is the key to it all," said Andrew Byrd, a linguistics expert at the University of Kentucky, who was one of the scholars involved in the project.  "We included imagery representing the elements of life, our iconic Lexington rolling hills, and the molecular structure for water, bourbon, and even dopamine because Lexington is fun."

It also contained the message, "Come to Lexington!  We have horses and bourbon.  Just don't eat us."

I feel obliged to interject here that I'm not making any of this up.

The Lexington Tourism Board's promo art for the project, which I also did not make up

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that the possibility of alien life -- perhaps intelligent life -- is a near-obsession with me, but I'm not sure this is really the way to go about trying to contact it.  While TRAPPIST-1 isn't a bad choice given the fact that it's fairly close and we know it has seven planets, there's no indication any of them host life.  Four of the planets appear to orbit within the star's "Goldilocks Zone," where the temperatures are "just right" for water to exist in liquid form, but that doesn't mean the planets have liquid water, or even atmospheres.  The fact that the planets have such tight orbits -- the farthest one only has an orbital radius six percent of Earth's, and orbits its star in nineteen days -- suggests they're probably tidally locked, meaning the same side of the planet always faces the star.  (I wrote about the difficulty of life evolving on a tidally-locked planet a year ago, if you're curious to read more about it.)

Then there's the problem of waving hello at aliens who might be vastly more powerful than we are and would respond by squashing us.  Stephen Hawking addressed this in stark terms back in 2010, saying, "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans.  If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Of course, if there are intelligent aliens out there, they probably already know about us.  At least the ones under 104 light years away do, because there's an expanding bubble of radio and television transmissions sweeping outward from us at the speed of light that began with the first commercial radio broadcast in 1920.  Assuming any aliens on the receiving end are at least as smart and technologically capable as we are, they're probably already decoding those transmissions and listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and watching Lost in Space, after which they will definitely think we're no more valuable than bacteria.

The last issue -- and this may be the good news, here, if you buy what Hawking said -- is that because TRAPPIST-1 is forty light years away, any aliens who might live there won't receive the message until 2064, and the earliest we could get a response is 2104.  Even if they have some kind of superluminal means of travel and jumped into their spaceships as soon as they got the message, it wouldn't be until the 2060s that they could even potentially get here.  

At least the Lexington Tourism Board has a good window of time to get their hotels ready for the influx of alien tourists.  And if they turn out to be hostile, at that point (if I'm still alive) I'll be over a hundred years old, and I figure that an alien laser pistol blast to the face is about as dramatic a way to check out as I could ask for, so I suspect I'll be fine with the Earth being invaded regardless which way it goes.

So the Lexington Tourism Board's efforts fall squarely into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  And I guess the more time people spend focusing on this sort of thing, the less they'll spend dreaming up new and different ways to be awful to each other.  So as far as that goes, I'm all for sending messages to the stars.

Even if the best things you can think of to talk about are horses, bourbon, and dopamine.

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A galactic rabbit hole

It was over ten years ago that I ran into the bizarre claim that the Rh negative allele -- the gene that gives people type-negative blood -- comes from aliens.  According to Roberta Hill, who wrote a book about it, Rh-negative blood also comes along with a lot of other characteristics, such as a love of science, psychic abilities, unexplained scars on the body, and having an extra rib.

Since I only have one copy of the gene, maybe that's why I only hit one out of four, there.

Given that evolutionary genetics is kind of my thing, I happen to know that the actual origin of the Rh negative allele is a mutation that occurred something like fifteen thousand years ago in the Basque region of Spain, where the gene is still most common.  (My mom's ancestry is mostly from western France, so her being Rh-negative is no real surprise.)  

Anyhow, I proceeded to forget all about my alleged alien ancestry until yesterday, when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site called Galactic Anthropology, which (1) expanded the alien blood type thing to include everyone with type O blood, and (2) launched me down a rabbit hole that it took me over an hour to escape from.

The post in question contains information from someone called "Myrah," who is supposedly a "Sirius B/Pleiadian hybrid" and who is "a medical specialist specializing in interdimensional implant technologies."  Whatever the fuck that means.  As far as her having ancestry from Sirius B, allow me to point out right here that Sirius B is a white dwarf star, the companion star to the (much) brighter Sirius A (from our perspective, the brightest star in the sky other than the Sun).  Being a white dwarf, it's the leftover core of a large-ish star that burned through its fuel and then went nova, so it's a little hard to figure how any inhabitants of planets orbiting it would have survived.

Maybe Myrah's family escaped because they're "interdimensional," I dunno.

Then, there's the problem that the other half of her ancestry is from the Pleiades, which is an entire cluster of stars, so I don't know how that'd work, either.

Anyhow, there's an illustration of Myrah on the site, and she looks a little like the love child of Uma Thurman and one of the aliens from Avatar:

What Myrah says is that the O blood type is extraterrestrial, and got into humanity because the Annunaki came here and had lots of sex with humans, but then they found out that O-type blood was "not compatible with other Terran blood types."  Notwithstanding that it's the most common blood type on Earth, and seems not to be associated with health issues of any kind.  But this didn't stop Myrah and her friends from engineering the Rh antigen, because supposedly that would stop people with O-type blood who mated with other types from having sterile children.

Which, of course, runs up against the minor difficulty that this never happens.

I'm a case in point, in fact.  My mom was O-negative, meaning she had O-type blood but lacked the Rh antigen.  My dad was A-positive.  If Myrah was right, I'd be sterile, and I have two boys who are completely normal except for the fact that they both look like me, which is unfortunate but not life-threatening.

Oh, and I also found out that if you are O-negative, you are less likely to be eaten by Reptilian aliens, because they "dislike consuming their own blood."  Probably accounting for how my mom made it to 84 without being eaten by Reptilians.

So because the whole blood type thing was kind of a non-starter, I decided to peruse the site a little more.  And that's when I vanished down a rabbit hole of weirdness that I still haven't recovered from.  Here are a few of the articles I found:

• How to be Reshuffled into a Higher-Density Avatar Body
• An Altean Ship as the Foundation of Atlantis
• Living Near Betelgeuse in the Orion Constellation
• Crystals As Bridges Between Densities
• An Atomic Toilet in Space

I swear I didn't make any of these up, even the last one, which includes the sentence, "After you’re done, some kind of haze comes up from below to make sure everything is very hygienic, and it leaves a nice smell behind, perhaps the smell of the Erran Oshksha flowers?"

Ha-ha, sure!  Erran Oshksha flowers!  Just like my grandma used to grow in her garden near Betelgeuse!

In any case, apparently O-type blood and Rh-negative blood both come from aliens.  Possibly explaining why my family is weird as fuck.  To the loyal reader who sent me the link, I just want to say thanks for convincing me that I understand my fellow humans even less than I thought I did.  But if "Myrah" has any more missives from Sirius B and/or the Pleiades, I'd just as soon not know about them.  I'm still going to have a while before I'm done processing what I learned about Atlantis, interdimensional implant technologies, and atomic space toilets.

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A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a "time-slip," and found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it, until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:

Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point, the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home -- and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky. 

One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first as we see it from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it.  It doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper.  Here's the constellation as it's seen from Earth, and the same stars as viewed after a ninety-degree revolution around the star in the lower left corner:

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:

Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.

The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars) to choose from, but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with a quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

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Remnants of forgotten civilizations

As silly as it can get sometimes, I am a dedicated Doctor Who fanatic. I'm late to the game -- I only watched my first-ever episode of the long-running series about seven years ago -- but after that, I went at it with the enthusiasm you see only in the born-again.

The best of the series tackles some pretty deep stuff.  The ugly side of tribalism ("Midnight"), the acknowledgement that some tragedies are unavoidable ("The Fires of Pompeii"), the Butterfly Effect ("Turn Left"), the fact that you can't both "play God" and avoid responsibility ("The Waters of Mars"), the sad truth that you can sometimes give it your best game and still lose ("The Haunting of Villa Diodati"), the devastating fact that the ones orchestrating war are seldom the ones who suffer because of it ("The Zygon Inversion"), and the terrible necessity of personal self-sacrifice ("Silence in the Library").  Plus, the series invented what would be my choice for the single most terrifying, wet-your-pants-inducing alien species ever dreamed up, the Weeping Angels (several episodes, most notably "Blink").

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when Doctor Who got a mention an article in Scientific American, but it still kinda was.  It came up in a wonderful piece by Caleb Scharf called "The Galactic Archipelago," which was about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe (probably very high) and the odd question of why, if that's true, we haven't been visited (Fermi's paradox).  Here at Skeptophilia we've looked at one rather depressing answer to Fermi -- the "Great Filter," the idea that intelligent life is uncommon in the universe either because there are barriers to the formation of life on other worlds, or that once formed, it's likely to get wiped out completely at some point.

It's even more puzzling when you consider the fact that it would be unnecessary for the aliens themselves to visit.  Extraterrestrial life paying a house call to Earth is unlikely considering the vastness of space and the difficulties of fast travel, whatever the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos (of Ancient Aliens fame) would have you believe.  But Scharf points out that it's much more likely that intelligent aliens would have instead sent out self-replicating robot drones, which not only had some level of intelligence themselves (in terms of avoiding dangers and seeking out raw materials to build new drones), but could take their time hopping from planet to planet and star system to star system.  And because they reproduce, all it would take is one or two civilizations to develop these drones, and given a few million years, you'd expect they'd spread pretty much everywhere in the galaxy.

But, of course, it doesn't seem like that has happened either.

Scharf tells us that there's another possibility than the dismal Great Filter concept, and that's something that's been nicknamed the "Silurian Hypothesis."  Here's where Doctor Who comes in, because as any good Whovian will tell you, the Silurians are a race of intelligent reptilians who were the dominant species on Earth for millions of years, but who long before humans appeared went (mostly) extinct except for a few scattered remnant populations in deep caverns.

The Silurian Madame Vastra in the episode "Deep Breath," played by the incomparable Neve McIntosh

A while back, astronomers Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, of NASA and the University of Rochester (respectively), considered whether it was possible that an intelligent technological species like the Silurians had existed millions of years ago, and if so, what traces of it we might expect to find in the modern world.  And what Schmidt and Frank found was that if there had been a highly complex, city-building, technology-using species running the Earth, (say) fifty million years ago, what we'd find today as evidence of its existence is very likely to be...

... nothing.

Scharf writes:

[Astrophysicist Michael] Hart's original fact [was] that there is no evidence here on Earth today of extraterrestrial explorers...  Perhaps long, long ago aliens came and went.  A number of scientists have, over the years, discussed the possibility of looking for artifacts that might have been left behind after such visitations of our solar system.  The necessary scope of a complete search is hard to predict, but the situation on Earth alone turns out to be a bit more manageable.  In 2018 another of my colleagues, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, produced a critical assessment of whether we could even tell if there had been an earlier industrial civilization on our planet.

 
As fantastic as it may seem, Schmidt and Frank argue -- as do most planetary scientists -- that it is actually very easy for time to erase essentially all signs of technological life on Earth.  The only real evidence after a million or more years would boil down to isotopic or chemical stratigraphic anomalies -- odd features such as synthetic molecules, plastics, or radioactive fallout.  Fossil remains and other paleontological markers are so rare and so contingent on special conditions of formation that they might not tell us anything in this case.

 
Indeed, modern human urbanization covers only on order of about one percent of the planetary surface, providing a very small target area for any paleontologists in the distant future.  Schmidt and Frank also conclude that nobody has yet performed the necessary experiments to look exhaustively for such nonnatural signatures on Earth.  The bottom line is, if an industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it.  That absolutely does not mean one existed; it indicates only that the possibility cannot be rigorously eliminated.

(If you'd like to read Schmidt and Frank's paper, it appeared in the International Journal of Astrobiology and is available here.)

It's a little humbling, isn't it?  All of the massive edifices we've created, the far-more-than Seven Wonders of the World, will very likely be gone without a trace in only a few million years.  A little more cheering is that the same will be true of all the damage we're currently doing to the global ecosystem.  It's not so surprising if you know a little geology; the current arrangement of the continents is only the most recent, and won't be the last the Earth will see.  Because of erosion and natural disasters, not to mention the rather violent clashes that occur when the continents do shift position, it stands to reason that our puny little efforts to change things won't last very long.

Entropy always wins in the end.

The whole thing puts me in mind of one of the first poems I ever read that made a significant impact on me -- Percy Bysshe Shelley's devastating "Ozymandias," which I came across when I was a freshman in high school, and which is still a favorite.  It seems a fitting way to conclude this post.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Room for exploration

As a followup to yesterday's post, about my generally dubious take on the claim of a Mexican scientist that he'd discovered fossilized alien bodies, today we're going to look at why we haven't run across aliens yet.  As big as the universe is, it seems like we should have heard from someone by now.  What are we, a bad neighborhood, or something?  Do the aliens go zooming by the Earth, making sure their windows are rolled up and their doors are locked?

I mean, Elon Musk alone would be justification for their doing so, but it's still kind of disappointing.

I've discussed the Fermi Paradox here at Skeptophilia before -- and the cheerful idea of the Great Filter as the reason why we haven't heard from alien life.  As I explained in a post a while back, the explanation boils down to three possibilities, nicknamed the "Three Fs."

We're first, we're fortunate, or we're fucked.

Being an aficionado of all things extraterrestrial, that has never sat well with me.  The idea that we might be all alone in the universe -- for any of the three Fs -- is just not a happy answer.  

Yes, I know, I always say that the universe is under no obligation to act in such a way as to make me happy.  But still.  C'mon... Vulcans?  Time Lords?  Ewoks?  G'gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs?  There's got to be something cool out there.  With luck, lots of cool things.  The Dentrassi, the Ood, Quantum Weather Butterflies, the Skithra, Andorians, the Vashta Nerada...

Okay, maybe not the Vashta Nerada.  But my point stands.

The Andromeda Galaxy [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Adam Evans, Andromeda Galaxy (with h-alpha), CC BY 2.0]

So I was considerably cheered yesterday when I ran into a study out of Pennsylvania State University that attempted to estimate what fraction of the universe we actually have surveyed in any kind of thorough fashion.  The authors, Jason Wright, Shubham Kanodia, and Emily G. Lubar, write:

Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found.  Tarter et al. (2010) and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans.  Here, we develop the metaphor of the multidimensional "Cosmic Haystack" through which SETI hunts for alien "needles" into a quantitative, eight-dimensional model and perform an analytic integral to compute the fraction of this haystack that several large radio SETI programs have collectively examined.  Although this model haystack has many qualitative differences from the Tarter et al. (2010) haystack, we conclude that the fraction of it searched to date is also very small: similar to the ratio of the volume of a large hot tub or small swimming pool to that of the Earth's oceans.  With this article we provide a Python script to calculate haystack volumes for future searches and for similar haystacks with different boundaries.  We hope this formalism will aid in the development of a common parameter space for the computation of upper limits and completeness fractions of search programs for radio and other technosignatures.

The actual analogy Wright and his colleagues used is that saying our current surveys show there's no intelligent life in the universe (except for here, which itself seems debatable some days) is comparable to surveying 7,700 liters of seawater out of the total 1.335 billion trillion liters in the world's oceans.

So basing a firm conclusion on this amount of data is kind of ridiculous.  There could be intelligent alien species out there yelling, "Hey! Earthlings!  Over here!  We're over here!", and all we would have to do is have our radio telescopes pointed a couple of degrees off, or tuned to a different wavelength, and we'd never know it.

Which is pretty cool.  Given the fact that my all-time favorite movie is Contact, I'm hoping like hell that people don't read Wright et al.'s paper and conclude we should give up SETI because it's hopeless to make a thorough survey.  When I think about what poor Ellie Arroway went through trying to convince her fellow scientists that her research was valid and deserved funding... yecch.  And if anything, the current attitudes of the government toward pure research are, if anything, worse than those depicted in the movie.

But despite all that, it's awe-inspiring to know we've got so much room to explore.  Basically... the entire universe.  So my dream when I was a kid, sitting out in my parents' yard with my little telescope, that as I looked at the stars there was some little alien boy in his parents' yard looking back at me through his telescope, may one day prove to be within hailing distance of reality.

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Crying wolf

While I understand being deeply fascinated with a specific subject, there's a point at which an interest becomes an idée fixe.  The result, especially for a scientist, is such a single-minded focus that it can cloud judgment with regards to the strength of the evidence.  We've seen that here at Skeptophilia before -- two examples that immediately come to mind are the Sasquatch-hunting geneticist Melba Ketchum and the British proponent of extraterrestrial panspermia, Chandra Wickramasinghe.  And the problem is -- for them, at least -- their obsessions have had the effect of completely destroying their credibility in the scientific community.

I can already hear the objections -- that (1) said scientific community is a hidebound, reactionary bunch of sticks-in-the-mud who resist like mad any new ideas, and (2) there are times the mavericks have been vindicated (sometimes after a long and arduous battle to get someone, anyone, to take them seriously).  The former can sometimes be true, but almost all scientists are well aware that groundbreaking ideas -- as long as they are supported by adequate evidence -- are how careers are made.  Look at the list of Nobel Prizes in the sciences in the past fifty years if you want examples.  Virtually all of them were awarded for research that expanded our scientific models dramatically (in some cases, overturned them entirely).  

As far as the second -- that sometimes the fringe-dwelling researchers who say "our entire prior understanding of the science is wrong" turn out to be correct -- okay, yeah, it happens, but if you consider the history of scientific paradigm shifts, what will jump out at you is how seldom that actually occurs.  The Copernican/Galilean/Keplerian heliocentric theory, Newton's Theory of Gravity, Maxwell's and Faraday's studies of electromagnetism, the Germ Theory of Disease, Einstein's Theories of Relativity, quantum/atomic theory, thermodynamics, Darwin's evolutionary model, Hubble and the Big Bang, the gene as the carrier of inheritance, and the plate tectonic model of Vine and Matthews. 

And that's about it, in the last five hundred years.

The point is, we're in a position now where the amount of evidence amassed to support the edifice we call science is so colossal that the "it could all be proven wrong tomorrow" objection I used to hear from my students (especially the lazy ones) is about as close to absurd as you want to get.  Sure, there will be some modifications made to science in the future.  A few -- probably very few -- will be major revisions.  But there's no reason to think that science as it stands is in any way unstable.

And people who come at it with earthshattering claims based on extremely slim evidence are almost certainly wrong.

Which brings us to Avi Loeb.

Loeb is an astrophysicist at Harvard University who has garnered significant notice (and notoriety) in the past few years from his fixation on the extrasolar source of some astronomical objects.  (By extrasolar I mean "originating from outside the Solar System.")  In 2017 he made headlines by claiming that the oddball astronomical object 'Oumuamua was not only extrasolar -- something fairly certain given its trajectory -- but that it was the remnant of a spacecraft from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.  Since then, his obsession with extraterrestrials visiting the Solar System has become so intense that it has drawn unfortunate comparisons with this guy:

The latest salvo from Loeb et al. is a sample of metallic beads scavenged from the floor of the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea, that Loeb says are the remnants of a meteor that exploded in 2014.  So far, nothing to raise an eyebrow; meteoritic debris is cool but hardly uncommon.

But (as always) he goes one rather enormous step further, and claims that the meteor it came from was extrasolar, and the concentrations of metals in the beads indicate the object that exploded may have been an alien spacecraft.

Look, I'm as eager as the next Doctor Who aficionado to have a meet-cute with intelligent aliens.  (As long as they don't turn out to be Daleks, Sontarans, or Stenza.  I do have my boundaries.)  Hell, the way things are going down here on Earth, I might even ask to be taken on as a crew member when they leave.  But if you're asking me to believe you have bits of an alien spaceship, I'm gonna need more than a few oddball microscopic metal beads.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan used to put it.  And this ain't it.  

At the moment, Avi Loeb is increasingly reminding me of a famous character from fiction -- The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  I have no problem with Loeb and his friends continuing to search; maybe (to quote a luminary of the field) The Truth Is Out There, and Loeb's dogged determination will eventually pay off.  But the problem is, there's a significant chance that (like The Boy in the fable) if he ever actually does find the hard evidence he's looking for, by that time he'll have exhausted people's patience to the point that everyone will have stopped paying attention.

So sorry to rain on the UFOs-and-aliens parade, but me, I don't think we've got anything here but some pieces of a curious metallic meteorite.  Worthy of study, no doubt, but as far as what it tells us about extraterrestrial intelligence, the answer seems to be: nothing whatsoever.

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The whistleblower

From the make-of-this-what-you-will department, today we have: a well-respected and decorated military veteran and former member of both the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office who has stated under oath to Congress that the United States is in possession of "intact and partly intact craft of non-human origin."

His name is David Charles Grusch, and his shift from intelligence officer to alien whistleblower came as a shock to the people who know him.  An Army colonel who worked with him called him "beyond reproach;" another called him "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."  He went to Congress with the information, he said, to expose "a decades-long publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages."

The recovered "material," he said, is clearly not of human manufacture.  It is "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures."

Further -- although details were not forthcoming, as the transcript of the hearing was classified -- several current members of the recovery team testified under oath to the Inspector General, and corroborated Grusch's claims.

Grusch has stated that his actions have resulted in retaliation, although it is unclear by whom.

Now that Grusch has come forward, a surprising array of officials have voiced their support.  Jonathan Grey, an intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said, "The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early twentieth century, should no longer remain a secret.  The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage...  A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin."

The whole thing is curious, to say the least.  On the one hand, we have several highly-respected and high-ranking military officials putting their reputations on the line to come forward with this information, and -- thus far -- all of them pretty much corroborating each other's stories.  On the other hand, we still have zero hard evidence that has been made available to scientists.  I am especially curious about the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" Grusch refers to.  How are we to tell the difference between an odd, but naturally-occurring, material and one of alien manufacture?  Take, for example, quasicrystals -- about which I wrote here at Skeptophilia a few months ago -- which were thought to be only produceable in the laboratory, until a sample was found in a Siberian meteorite.

If we had piece of a spaceship console with lettering in Klingon, I might pay more attention.

Now, I'm not saying I disbelieve Grusch et al., mind you.  I'm merely saying that, to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, "what I've seen so far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence required in science."

As I've said about a hundred times, nobody would be more delighted than me at having unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  But this -- as of right now -- is still in the category of "equivocal."  So I'm willing to defer forming a definite opinion, pending someone dragging out the "intact craft of non-human origin" and letting us all take a look at it. 

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