The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  Within a few minutes, a second Exeter police cruiser, driven by Officer David R. Hunt arrived at the scene. Officer Hunt sat in his cruiser, while Bertrand and Muscarello sat in the other, and the three of them continued watching the object move around the area for an estimated five to ten minutes. Officer Bertrand later described how the object was capable of moving from one area of the sky to another, accelerating and stopping faster than the witnesses were able to track its movement visually.

  All of the witnesses later reported that the object was extraordinarily bright, and that it was painful to look at it because of its brilliance. In addition, the five lights, or “window,” on its side would pulse, or “flash,” in a repeating sequence, such that four were illuminated at any given moment, and the fifth was not illuminated.

  Moreover, the three agreed that the lights were so bright that it was difficult to perceive the precise outline of the larger body, which remained indistinct to the observers. The light formed a distinct haloeffect around the object, as well.

  The bizarre object proceeded to float around the nearby field, at one time passing within 100 feet of the three witnesses, they estimated. Slowly, it moved away from the three observers, passing to the southeast, over the roadway, and generally to the southeast. It passed over a tree line approximately 500 yards to the south, and disappeared over the top of Shaw’s Hill, headed toward the New Hampshire shoreline. As it moved away, the object appeared to rock slowly from side to side.

  Later the same morning, at approximately 3:30 A.M., Officer Hunt witnessed what he presumed to be the same object, located at a considerable distance from his location at the time on Route 85-101 Bypass.

  Making the case even more intriguing is a report from a telephone operator in nearby Hampton, NH. She reported receiving a call from a man calling from a pay telephone, who urgently requested that he be connected with a local police department. He told her that he had just been chased by a “flying saucer.” Suddenly, before the operator could get the man’s name or identify the pay telephone he was calling from, the line went dead. Neither the caller, nor the pay telephone, was ever traced.

  Hours after the incident on Shaw’s Hill, the Exeter Police contacted nearby Pease Air Force Base, near Portsmouth, NH, which dispatched at least two officers, a major and a lieutenant, to investigate. One of the officers, who gave his name as Lt. Alan B. Brandt, was interviewed at Pease AFB by The Derry News, shortly after the two military officers had conducted their investigation. Lt. Brandt reported during the interview that the officers had traveled to the site on Shaw’s Hill, and that they had interviewed both police officers involved in the sighting, as well as Mr. Muscarello. The officer added that they had checked the area near Shaw’s Hill, where the object presumably had been resting on the ground, for radioactivity, but had detected none. Lt. Brandt stated to the reporter during the interview that, whereas he had been a skeptic regarding UFO’s prior to this case, the evidence he had witnessed related to the Exeter case had forced him to reconsider his opinion on the matter.

  Mrs. Muscarello, the mother of the witness, later reported to UFO investigators that the officers had come to her home and asked her questions about her son and the alleged incident. She reported that she thought the name of one of the officers was “Brant.”

  The case attracted immediate attention in the New England press, being reported by the Manchester Union Leader, The Derry News, The Haverhill (MA) Gazette, and perhaps by other local and regional newspapers, as well. In addition, the case was investigated by noted UFO investigator, Raymond E. Fowler, and by the Boston columnist, John G. Fuller, who authored the book entitled Incident at Exeter (first published in 1966).

  There are other aspects of the case that have been alleged, but which remain unconfirmed. One of the assertions by a resident of Kensington suggested that an officer from the U. S. Air Force had attempted to purchase all the copies of the ManchesterUnion Leader that had a major article about the sighting. The same source, who worked as a nurse, stated that the Hampton Police Department had contacted the Exeter Hospital to inquire whether a man suffering from shock might have been admitted there.

  The bottom line is that the Exeter case remains as one of the best-documented UFO encounters on record.

  —PETER B. DAVENPORT

  & PETER GEREMIA

  extra-celestial Coined by a group of spiritual teachers associated with the “ET Earth Mission,” this term denotes an ET Walk-in soul transfer which incarnates from the Angelic Kingdom into the Human Kingdom, taking over the life of a human being, to better serve the spiritual evolution of humanity.

  —SCOTT MANDELKER

  ESP (ExtraSensory Perception) This term is used to describe a range of non-ordinary powers and abilities which suggest the use of sensory faculties which transcend the range and powers of the standard five physical senses. This type of power is responsible for telepathy and the range of ET channeling, and figures prominently in some of the more spiritually-oriented ET contacts occurring.

  —SCOTT MANDELKER

  ET (extraterrestrial) This term has been used for decades (equated with “Space Brothers” among the 1950s contactees), but was more recently popularized by the Hollywood movie of the same name. It is broadly used to describe individual beings and entire planetary races that originate from beyond the confines of the physical Earth, and are generally associated with other solar systems. ETs are linked to UFO phenomena, modern channeling, worldwide abductions, and New Age spiritual philosophy. Individuals who may be called “Wanderers, Walkins, or ET souls” are considered to be incarnated ET beings in human form, who by voluntary agreement, have chosen to enter human evolution to better serve planetary development. They agree also to forget and lose their higher dimensional powers and awareness, and during their series of human incarnations, are susceptible to all the same confusion and suffering as non-ET souls.

  —SCOTT MANDELKER

  Extraterrestrial Civilizations Crown Publishers, 1979). Science fact and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov believes we are not alone, advanced civilizations are common, but they rarely come into contact with each other because of the vast distances between them. Using a series of variables in his own equation to calculate the numbers of extraterrestrial civilizations, Asimov predicts that 600 million planets in our galaxy are life-bearing, of which 530,000 have produced a technological species which still exists. If these are spread evenly throughout the galaxy then 630 light-years separate every two neighboring civilizations, a distance sufficiently daunting so that visits may be out of the question.

  —RANDALL FITZGERALD

  Extraterrestrial Encounter David & Charles, 1979). British science writer Chris Boyce believes that alien probes or databanks may already be located on our planet or somewhere in our solar system. Sometime in the early 21st century humankind will obtain a piece of “hard irrefutable evidence” that other intelligent life exists, and we must begin preparing for the consequences this contact will have on us, challenging our culture, our religions, and all of our perceptions of ourselves as a species.

  —RANDALL FITZGERALD

  extraterrestrial hypothesis The most popular and appealing notion about UFOs is the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), the idea that intelligent beings from other planets are visiting Earth. To some, it is more than a hypothesis and can best be described as a belief. To others, it is an impossibility that should not be seriously considered. Much emotion has predominated these debates since the late 1940s.

  The ETH hinges on a long list of variables related to stellar and planetary physics and chemistry, and evolutionary biology. Data acquired on other planets in the solar system since the 1960s, mainly through onsite instrumentation delivered by American and Russian space probes, have made very dismal the prospects of extraterrestrial life in the solar system, much less intelligent life. The Victorian image of advanced beings on Mars carefully nurturing scarce water resources supplied by annual melting polar caps has been totally discarded, and e
ven the most active proponents of the ETH now accept the fact that if UFOs represent alien intelligence, we must look elsewhere; that is, outside the solar system to planets associated with other stars.

  The closest stellar system to our Sun is Alpha Centauri A, B, and C—a triple-star system located 1.32 parsecs from the solar system, equivalent to 4.3 light-years or 39.6 trillion kilometers. (A light-year represents the distance covered by electromagnetic radiation, such as light, in a one Earth-year period, at a speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second. A light-year is thus equivalent to almost 10 trillion kilometers, or 6.25 trillion miles.)

  Moving out to a radius of about five parsecs (16.7 light-years), there are about 40 more stars, some of which are good candidates for possessing life-bearing planets. All of these are located in a relatively provincial region of our Milky Way galaxy, which has been estimated to contain between 100 and 130 billion stars. So, on the surface, it would appear that the UFO problem is resolved by the very large number of possible abodes for intelligent life in the galaxy. Beyond our own galaxy are many millions of other galaxies, reaching out to the edge of the observable universe. The number of potentially habitable planets in the entire universe is almost too awesome to contemplate, and most astronomers content themselves with speculating on the number of habitable planets in our own Milky Way galaxy.

  Several hundred galaxies are visible in this view of the universe, called the “Hubble Deep Field,” made with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

  One Rand Corporation study, for example, produced a figure of 600 million planets in the galaxy capable of supporting intelligent life. More conservative analyses have produced a figure of 10 million habitable planets and a figure of 4.5 million planets on which sufficient time has elapsed for life to have evolved to intelligence, and the late Cornell University planetary astronomer Carl Sagan calculated the number of advanced technical civilizations in the galaxy at one million.

  Astronomers have used various methods to arrive at these figures, usually for the purpose of estimating the number of possible sources of intelligent extraterrestrial signals. Since 1971, the study of this topic has become quite fashionable in astronomical circles and has been labeled the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Basically, the SETI-type analyses represent a process of elimination. Habitable planets should be affiliated with single-star systems, like our own, as binary-or triple-star systems would usually result in planets experiencing unstable orbits and periodically entering areas of intense heat or cold. At least half of the stars in the galaxy are thought to actually involve binary-, triple-, or even quadruple-star systems, and these are thus immediately eliminated from serious consideration. In a close study of the 123 sunlike stars visible to the eye in the Northern Hemisphere (all within 85 light-years of Earth), astronomers Helmut A. Abt and Saul Levy found that 57 percent did indeed have stellar companions.

  The parent star must also be of a certain mass, and it should be in its “calm phase,” allowing several billion years of stability for life to evolve. The mass of the planet itself is also important, as this will result in the retention or loss of numerous important chemical components necessary for carbon-based life. Its mass must be greater than 0.4 but less than 2.35 that of the Earth, and, in order to avoid overheating or overcooling, its period of rotation should be less than four Earth days.

  In making all these kinds of calculations, however, astronomers have generally ignored important evolutionary factors, and have proceeded on the basis that, once life begins, “intelligence” will sooner or later evolve. While there are some good reasons for believing this, related to the increase in physiological complexity up the phylogenetic scale observable on Earth, there is no actual proof to support this belief.

  A Miocene/Pliocene-ape lineage evolved into man only through a long series of chance and complex environmental, morphological, and social interactions occurring in unison at given places in given times. The probability of similar interactions occurring in unison elsewhere is not high.

  Even accepting the figure of one million civilizations proposed by Sagan, the problems related to an extraterrestrial origin of UFOs appear, on the surface, to be insoluble. Such civilizations would be spread randomly across the galaxy, which is about 100,000 light-years across and 30,000 light-years wide, and the average distances between them would be far too great for spacecraft to cross them on such a routine basis as implied by UFO reports.

  A good example of a first primitive effort is Pioneer X, launched in March 1972, which will be the first manmade object to leave the solar system and penetrate interstellar space. At its relatively slow speed, it would take over 100,000 years for Pioneer X to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, if it were moving in that direction, which it is not. In fact, it will take billions of years, perhaps even more time than the age of the galaxy itself, for Pioneer X to pass within less than 3 billion miles of another star, and the probability of such a star harboring advanced intelligent life (at that time) is almost absolute zero.

  It is these enormous interstellar distances which are difficult to reconcile with UFO reports, which sometimes give the impression that an operation the size of the Normandy landings is in progress. However, there are no physical laws prohibiting interstellar travel within human lifespans. The main obstacles, at least in our case, appear to be financial and, as a result, engineering.

  Several types of rocket propulsion systems besides the currently used chemical ones have been proposed over the years to surmount the problem of the vast interstellar distances: ion, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and photon. “Ideal” photon propulsion, which would convert all of its fuel into radiation and would have a very high exhaust velocity, has been called the most efficient, while another proposal called for a nuclear fusion-based interstellar ramjet which would scoop up interstellar gas as a source of energy.

  Others have proposed more efficient multistage nuclear systems which would permit travel to Alpha Centauri (4.3 light-years) in nine to fourteen years (Earth time) utilizing a fission rocket, and six to seven years (Earth time) utilizing a fusion rocket. Return trips (involving deceleration at Alpha Centauri), however, would involve sixty-six years (Earth time) with a fission rocket and twenty-nine years (Earth time) with a fusion rocket, barely within a human lifespan.

  Another analysis has indicated that only photon rockets would have the capability for really long interstellar flights, nuclear fission and fusion systems permitting only short interstellar flights, and ion rockets being totally inadequate.

  In the late 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) proposed a fly-by of Barnard’s star, which is believed to possess one or two planets. The BIS concept involves a two-staged rocket, Daedalus, about 600 feet in length, which would be ready for launch by about the year 2075. Weighing 54,000 tons, the vehicle would accelerate up to almost one eighth the speed of light, but would take fifty years to travel the meager 5.9 light-years to its destination. Furthermore, Daedalus, powered by a nuclear fusion-based propulsion system, would be an unmanned vehicle.

  A major factor involving interstellar travel which is often overlooked is that of “time dilation.” An object, such as a spaceship, traveling at a relativistic speed (that is, close to the speed of light) would be subject to the effects predicted by Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. The passing of time on Earth, if it could be observed from the spaceship, would appear to be speeded up, and the passing of time on the spaceship relative to a percipient on Earth (or on any slower moving object) would appear to be comparatively slow. Thus, an astronaut returning to Earth following a relativistic flight could suddenly find that he is the same “age” as the son he left behind, or even much younger. In fact, depending on the speed at which he traveled, and the length of time he maintained that speed, he could find that hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years had transpired on Earth during his absence. It is important to note that the astronaut would not perceive time passing “slower”
on the spaceship (as, indeed, it would not be), just as we do not perceive it passing “faster” on Earth. The astronaut would not live longer in the biological sense; his “absolute” lifespan would be unaffected. What would permit him to survive millions of years “longer” relative to those still on “Earth time” is the peculiar and hard-to-understand concept of relativity theory, which goes beyond the more comprehensible laws of classical mechanics.

  The Special Theory of Relativity is not just a fanciful and esoteric idea which might or might not be valid. Like many of Einstein’s propositions, it has withstood the test of time and has been validated in numerous ways in many observations and experiments. Perhaps the most interesting was an experiment conducted by the U. S. Naval Observatory in October of 1971. Four atomic clocks were flown twice around the world (in opposite directions) at commercial jet speeds to determine the time differences they would experience relative to “control” clocks which remained at the observatory.

  Because the clocks at the Observatory were actually moving (due to the Earth’s rotation), Special Relativity predicted a loss of 40 (give or take 23) nanoseconds (billionths of a second) on the eastward trip (consistent with the Earth’s rotation), which lasted 41.2 hours, and a gain of 275 (give or take 21) nanoseconds on the westward trip (against the Earth’s rotation), which lasted 48.6 hours. The experiment validated the prediction: On the eastward flight, the clocks lost about 59 nanoseconds (they “aged” slower), and on the westward flight they gained about 273 nanoseconds (they “aged” faster), thus demonstrating the reality of time dilation.