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3. CAN YOU DETECT ME NOW? Among other notables, several U.S. presidents have either seen UFOs or had access to information about them. But so far none has made a definite statement yea or nay.
Bill Holden, a steward on board Air Force One with John F. Kennedy, once asked JFK what he thought about UFOs. The president replied cannily, “I’d like to tell the public about the alien situation, but my hands are tied.” By whom?
Jimmy Carter said, at the 1976 Southern Governor’s Conference, “I don’t laugh at people . . . when they say they’ve seen UFOs. I’ve seen one myself. . . . It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and was about the size of the moon.” He promised to make all UFO secrets available to the public if he ever became president. Well, he did . . . but then he didn’t. Why not? The American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the U.S. Air Force. I strongly recommend . . . a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on the subject.
—GE R A L D F OR D, U.S. president
• Ronald Reagan saw a UFO while he was governor of California. A bright white light accompanied his plane, zigzagging around it for several minutes before sud¬denly whooshing straight up out of sight. Reagan re¬ported the incident to his wife but never mentioned it publicly for fear of being labeled a nut case. Years later, during a private screening of ET, Reagan reportedly turned to Steven Spielberg and whispered, “Only a handful of people know the truth about this.”
What about UFO crews? At least one president is supposed to have been in on the secret.
• The widow of legendary TV comedian and actor Jackie Gleason claims that Gleason, known for his obsession with UFOs, was invited by golfing buddy President Nixon for a secret late-night visit to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. There, Gleason confided to friends, they saw the remains of some half dozen wizened child-size humanoids. Some were mauled, as if they had been in an accident. The creatures had three or four fingers. Gleason was disturbed and excited by these beings, who were clearly “not human.” But he never understood why our government would hide the aliens from the public. Astronomers only cautiously comment on the probability of life elsewhere in the universe, even in “our local corner of the Milky Way.”
Scientists avoid sensationalism, since voicing hot-button opinions can damage reputations and derail careers. Few univer¬sities award professorships, or even grants—let alone tenure—to loonies who support ideas like aliens already here, humans mat¬ing with offworlders, secret interplanetary power-sharing deals. Hence the lukewarm assessments of the probability of contact with alien life any time soon.
For one thing, galactic distances (as we understand the idea) are unimaginably vast. Even traveling near the speed of light, journeys to all but the nearest stars would take longer than hu¬mans currently live. Such trips would take hundreds, even thou¬sands, of Earth years. Even one-way visits would require revolutionary improvements in spaceships, astronauts, and equipment—solutions to fundamental problems of physics and human biology. Not to mention human boredom.
And even assuming a return to Earth, it would not be the Earth the travelers had left behind, but one inhabited by very distant descendants.
9. LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. The most likely spots for alien life in our solar system is underground on Mars, the hot spot on Saturn’s moon Enceladus (its South Pole is dotted with geysers), and Jupiter’s moons Europa and Callisto, whose icy crusts may conceal vast underlying oceans of water.
Speaking of icy, one marine bacterium (Colwellia 34H) sporting around in the Arctic ocean not only survives but burns enough energy to reproduce—at MINUS 196 Celsius. Talk about sexual determination at the cellular level! That’s weather on the Martian surface, or in the liquid methane riv¬ers of Saturn’s moon Titan. This little bug would be right at home either place, theorizes microbiologist Dr. Karen Junge of the University of Washington’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences and NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.
10. HEY, HOTEP—DIDJA SEE THAT? Perhaps the earliest UFO sighting occurred in 1450 B.C., when Egyptians saw bright circles of light in the sky. Some UFO obsessives interpret Ezekiel:1 in the Bible as a UFO report.
Ezekiel describes the beings he saw (four wings, four faces, etc.), plus flaming wheels and hoopla. Landing craft? Probes? Hallucination? It is interesting how Ezekiel’s aliens (or angels or devils) differ from more recent historical ac¬counts of little gray smooth unspectacular individuals, emerg¬ing from quietly humming or whooshing craft.
What if UFOs are not, as we assume, vehicles, but or¬ganisms from an evolution based not on carbon but on iron, silicon, or neon? Or even electrons? Flowers? Gamma rays? What if UFOs are writing implements, musical instruments, or other tools from cultures we can’t imagine?
Most people who believe in extraterrestrials assume they’re from advanced civilizations on other planets. They can get here; we can’t go there. Rats! Our frustration is like the sixteenth-century Aztec frustration with Spaniards— creatures from inconceivably far away—who walked among them. Indeed, Spaniards did more than walk among the Aztecs. They slept among them. Similarly, interbreeding and sexual experimentation constitute a popular variation of the alien invasion theory.