Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  10. They’re Coming to Get You

  What you don’t know can’t hurt you is what they say. The corollary must be that increased knowledge raises the capacity for endangerment. As we learn more about asteroids, there is more to fear. Sadly, the reverse does not seem to apply. We know nothing about alien life, but we fear this too. Why are tales of encounter with extraterrestrials so often couched in terms of threat? Wherefore the human predisposition to fear? Aliens might be able to show us a good time. What use is higher intelligence otherwise?

  Expecting Visitors

  ‘ “Aliens could attack at any time” warns former MoD chief’ Daily Mail

  In one of the most dramatic UFO sightings of recent years, a group of United Airlines pilots and other employees on 7 November 2006 reported seeing a grey saucer-shaped object hovering over one of the terminals at Chicago O’Hare airport before it shot up through the clouds. One of the group notified the air traffic control tower, but the controllers saw nothing, and nothing appeared on their radar. The airline and the Federal Aviation Administration said there was no further action to be taken, leaving the workers ‘upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously’.1

  The episode illustrates several traits common to the more plausible UFO sightings. It has apparently credible witnesses, here in the form of trained personnel accustomed to aerial observation. It was a sighting by a small group, not a lone individual or a large number of people spread over a wide area. Typically, their feelings are hurt when they are not taken seriously by officialdom. Finally, of course, there is the overwhelming likelihood that the object, although ‘unidentified’, was not an alien spacecraft but some highly localized weather phenomenon or a piece of debris held aloft in the breeze – or a hoax.

  After all, it doesn’t take much to produce a phenomenon worthy of investigation. A few months before the O’Hare flying saucer, the British Ministry of Defence leapt into action to investigate the sighting by several independent witnesses one balmy summer’s night of a mysterious pattern of lights hovering above Seaham, County Durham. The effect turned out to have been produced by party lanterns which had escaped into the sky like hot-air balloons. The party-givers later reported their doings: ‘Our garden lanterns started a UFO scare’. The news item added that the lanterns are now sold with a warning that they have been mistaken for UFOs.

  With sightings like this, it is hardly surprising that UFO stories tend to be regarded by the press as little more than an amusement. But the frivolity disguises a sense of unease at the possibility, however remote, that one day a flying saucer may indeed turn out to be a spacecraft containing an alien intelligence. This possibility excites curiosity in many, anticipation in some, foreboding in others, and in a few, real fear.

  It was ostensibly in an effort to assuage such public fears that the United States Air Force set up a programme to log UFO sightings known as Project Blue Book. Between 1947 and 1969 the military authorities examined 12,618 UFO reports. Recent British Ministry of Defence figures record 714 sightings in the six years 2001 to 2006, about the same rate of sightings per head of population as in America.

  There is nothing disreputable about seeing a UFO, or unidentified aerial phenomenon, as the official jargon now prefers to put it. They are after all ‘unidentified’. What is peculiar is to insist that a UFO is an alien spaceship when many other explanations are far more likely.

  Many daytime sightings can be put down to unfamiliar aircraft and birds, weather balloons, satellites, odd cloud formations or other effects. Nighttime sightings of luminous shapes and patterns may be aircraft lights, reflections of ground lights from clouds, fireflies, meteors or luminous discharges in the atmosphere (a range of phenomena largely unfamiliar to the public among which even the ‘well-known’ auroras borealis and australis have been seen by relatively few people). Perhaps 80 per cent of all UFO sightings may be quickly placed in one of these categories. When a sighting cannot be explained so readily, the question is whether the alien spaceship explanation is definitely more likely than any of these or anything else. In other words, which is more likely: that a bunch of airline employees see, let’s say, a piece of grey polythene borne aloft from a Chicago building site, or that they truly see a flying saucer?

  Where a physical phenomenon cannot be identified, a UFO sighting may be put down to a hoax, hallucination or delusion, depending on the number of people who saw it and their circumstances. Again, the balance of likelihoods argument applies. Is it more likely that a bunch of airline employees choose to perpetrate a hoax, or that they see a flying saucer?

  Of the 12,618 Blue Book UFO sightings, only 701 remained officially unexplained, meaning that they could not be firmly attributed to a physical or psychological cause. Most turned out to be due to America’s own spy planes – hence the military interest in the field at all. Of the 714 sightings that came to the attention of the British Ministry of Defence in 2001–6, twelve were ‘deemed to be worthy of further consideration’, according to a defence minister answering questions in the House of Commons. Questioned under the Freedom of Information Act, the ministry wouldn’t say what made them special, or what further consideration they actually received.

  This is not to say that there are no other rational explanations for such anomalies. In one year, 1952, there was a freak level of 1,501 sightings logged by Project Blue Book, three times the average; 303 of them were ‘unexplained’, ten times the usual number. The fact that Life magazine ran a major feature on UFOs in that year, and that a film came out of War of the Worlds, in which aliens come to earth aboard a glowing meteor, may not strictly count as explanations, but they certainly cannot be counted out as factors in the result. And the fact that a disproportionate number of the sightings for that year remained unexplained may in turn be simply down to the fact that they were not properly investigated, as the Air Force unit responsible for the work was stretched far beyond its usual volume of work. More significantly, even in a period of acute state paranoia, not one of the UFOs was deemed a risk to national security.

  There were other spikes in UFO sightings in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, and in 1978, when the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released. When The X-Files finally disappeared off our television screens in 2002, the whole idea seemed suddenly unfashionable. ‘The Martians aren’t coming: British UFO-spotting clubs may have to close because of a lack of sightings’, read one headline.

  Credence of UFOs is fuelled by the abundance of apparently credible witnesses, such as United Airlines pilots but also routinely including police and military officers. One such was Peter Horsley, a one-time equerry to Prince Philip who ended his career as deputy commander-in-chief of British Strike Command. He became interested in UFOs while working at Buckingham Palace in the early 1950s precisely because so many reports came from airmen. On the prince’s nod, he was permitted to look into the ‘more credible’ reports, provided there would be no publicity.2

  He did keep his counsel at the time, but his 1997 memoir is an unintentional casebook of military psychosis. At one point, he meets a general who believes that UFOs are alien spaceships come to warn us of nuclear war. ‘This was heady stuff but I knew that there are always a number of senior retired officers who are attracted to all sorts of fringe cults, most likely out of boredom.’3

  It seems it takes one to know one. Horsley is soon taken to meet a mysterious figure who wants an introduction to Prince Philip, for whom he has a message about humankind’s depredations against wildlife and who he believes can help him in his mission to promote ‘galactic harmony’. Horsley recounts eleven pages of ‘verbatim’ dialogue with this figure, full of curiously accurate details about developments in science and technology that took place from the 1950s to the 1990s.

  Aside from his thoughtful personal appeal to Prince Philip, the (future) president of the (not yet founded) World Wildlife Fund, the figure’s comments on our destructiveness in war were entirely char
acteristic of aliens’ sermonizing, noted in other witness reports. It does seem a shame that aliens would come all that way to warn us of a danger of which we were already acutely aware at the time, rather than tell us something usefully prescient about HIV, CFCs or CO2 emissions.

  From time to time, these distinguished witnesses gain sufficient momentum to challenge the establishment (people very like themselves, of course) about the cover-up they suspect to be taking place. The Daily Express reported one gathering in Washington DC with the headline ‘Don’t tell the CIA but generals have proof ET exists and wants to make contact’. Appearing at the conference were men from the FAA, a cardinal from the Vatican and Britain’s former Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Lord Hill Norton, who believed that ‘there is a serious possibility that we are being visited – and have been visited for many years – by people from outer space, from other civilisations; that it behoves us to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want’.

  During Congressional hearings on UFOs in 1966, the future American president Gerald Ford asked, ‘Are we to assume that everyone who says he has seen a UFO’s an unreliable witness?’ Well, it might be a good start. For, again, which is more likely: that a military officer suffers from some delusional condition, or that he has been visited by aliens? ‘Credible’ does not mean should-be-believed-under-all-circumstances, and even men in uniform may have funny turns. Even if we accept that a person with military training is in general a more reliable witness than an ordinary member of the public, there are large numbers of military personnel and so there is still a good chance that a few of them are experiencing psychological difficulties. Add in the special conditions that might obtain, such as forms of stress or oxygen starvation in flight, and we might be tempted to say that military UFO sightings should be given no special credence at all.

  Although aliens might seem inseparable from their vehicles, the creatures themselves present their own distinctive dangers. Ufology is essentially a harmless pastime – perhaps even useful, if it diverts bored air marshals from ordinary war-making. But aliens do claim human lives and minds. In the most spectacular case of ‘alien abduction’, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were found dead in April 1997, their souls having supposedly left their bodies in order to rendezvous with a spacecraft come to take them away.

  More frequently, individuals report seeing and hearing things, or discover that they cannot account for periods of time, and attribute this to alien contact or abduction. One in ten Americans claims to have seen one or more UFOs, a far higher incidence than the few hundred sightings a year investigated by the Air Force. Polls routinely find that a majority of people believe there is intelligent life on other planets, and around half ‘believe in’ UFOs – although of course they’d be fools not to, at least while the U part still applies. But 65 per cent of Americans also believe that a UFO crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, according to a CNN poll in 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of the most celebrated claim of an alien encounter. Nearly 4 million Americans claim to have been abducted by (not just to have seen) aliens according to another poll in 1992. Merely as tourism this is quite a figure – it’s more Americans than visit France each year.

  Aliens seem to be created in our own image. They are bipedal, they possess similar although superior technologies and have similarly dismaying ambitions of domination and control. Curiously, Americans’ reports over the years have gradually come to concur on the key details of what aliens look like. Equally curiously, reports of aliens made by people in other cultures diverge from this norm.

  This is to be expected when one considers the sources of inspiration available to these groups, while the disappointing general likeness of aliens to humans is not so much a failure of imagination, but a clue that aliens are not aliens at all but proxies for humans. Accounts of alien abduction closely resemble accounts of abuse, as Carl Sagan points out in Demon-Haunted World. Elaine Showalter adds that women’s ‘abduction scenarios closely resemble women’s pornography’.4 They may also reflect anxieties over conception and childbirth. The obsession with sex squares neatly with the idea of higher intelligence: of course these aliens want us for our bodies – they’d have no use for our inferior minds.

  But wait. Why not genuine aliens? Consider alien visitations not as a problem in psychology, but as one in probability. How many aliens are out there, and would they find us? In 1961, Frank Drake, an astronomer at Cornell University, devised a formula to find out. The Drake equation is simply the multiplication of a set of chances. Start with the number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Take the fraction of those that have planets; take the fraction of those planets that are chemically suitable for life; take the fraction of those planets on which life actually does arise; now consider the fraction where that life evolves to intelligence; and then the fraction that develops appropriate communication (or interstellar travel) technology. Most of these fractions are small, some very small, so that multiplied together they amount to a very small chance indeed. Still, the number of stars in the Milky Way is several hundred billion, so that helps raise the odds. Present estimates of the number of civilizations out there potentially able to communicate with us range from effectively none to maybe 5,000.

  This looks good, but now contact must be made. This brings in another series of long odds. The alien civilization must point their detection equipment our way – one planet orbiting one of several hundred billion stars. They must recognize the signal of our presence and they must then choose to act. Plus, there’s one final, vital term from the Drake equation to consider – one that makes the equation a child of its time during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. This is the fraction of the lifetime of the planet during which its communicating intelligent life flourishes. Both the alien civilization and our civilization must overlap in time if we are to make contact. We have only had the ability to send communications into space for around fifty years, one ten billionth of the lifetime of the Earth. Based on the Earth experience, civilizations tend to last no more than 500 years, and perhaps it’s the same on other planets. The chances of our connecting become incredibly tiny. Small wonder, then, that as John Allen Paulos cruelly puts it, ‘innumerates are considerably more likely than others to believe in visitors from outer space’.5

  That’s When It Hits You

  ‘Asteroid nearly rocks Earth’ Cape Argus

  You might want to put this date in your diary: 13 April 2029. It’s a Friday. Friday the 13th. This is the day, NASA announced in 2004, on which the Earth is most likely to be struck by a civilization-destroying asteroid. On Christmas Eve 2004, the space agency quoted odds of one in 300 – an unprecedented level of risk – that we would be hit by the recently discovered 2004 MN4, a 400-metre diameter chunk of rock orbiting around the sun. Later that day it dramatically shortened the odds to one in sixty-three. By the end of Christmas Day, the chance of the planet being largely wiped out stood at one in forty-five. On the Torino scale, asteroid watchers’ newly invented equivalent of the Richter scale, 2004 MN4 rose from a zero to a two and then to a four. These may be long odds for betting on a horse, but they are uncomfortably short when you consider what’s at stake.

  But at least there was twenty-five years to work out what to do about it.

  Most asteroids are thought to be remnants of a failed planet. They generally occupy an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, but numbers of them are regularly dislodged from this orbit by the gravitational influence of the planets. Small asteroids reach us all the time but burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, where we see them as meteors or ‘shooting stars’. A meteor that survives this process is termed a meteorite when it reaches the Earth’s surface. There are presently around 3,000 designated ‘near-Earth’ asteroids the size of 2004 MN4 or larger. ‘Earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to wipe out most of the human race. That is a certain fact. We just don’t know when,’ according to Lembit Opik, a worried British member of parliament.1 And while we are waiting for the big one,
there are also a billion objects out there the size of a bus, quite large enough to do considerable damage to our planet. These are frightening numbers.

  But consider what it must take for one of these asteroids to pose a real threat to us. First of all, the asteroid must be of sufficient size. Fortunately, the abundance of asteroids decreases sharply at larger sizes, so while there are indeed many out there, the billion or so bus-sized objects in fact represent a tiny minority of the total number of asteroids. Next, the asteroid must have enough energy to penetrate the atmosphere and do damage. This means that it must be both massive and fast-moving. Then, its composition must be right – a dense stony or metallic object will do more damage than a carbon-rich or icy one, which is more likely to break up high in the atmosphere.

  Most obviously, the orbit of the asteroid must coincide with that of the earth. This is no small requirement. Space, as Douglas Adams pointed out in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is ‘big, really big’. So the chance of the path of one fairly small orbiting rock (the Earth) overlapping with that of a far smaller one (the asteroid) is always going to be extremely low. This overlap must occur not only in space but also in time. And again, the chance that our asteroid crosses the Earth’s path at the precise moment that the Earth itself is at that point in its orbit is very small. In 1989, an asteroid missed the Earth by just six hours, which sounds close until you express it in terms of distance – 600,000 kilometres, well over the distance from the Earth to the moon.

  Finally, even if an asteroid does strike, it may not have a catastrophic impact on us. Only a very rare large asteroid would have major consequences for humankind regardless of where it hit the planet’s surface. Clearly, a rather smaller object could destroy a city like Los Angeles or Tokyo in a direct hit, but it is far more likely to fall in an almost entirely unpopulated region. If a meteorite falls into the sea, however, then the mortality due to the resulting tsunami is likely to far exceed that for an equivalent impact on land. A modest 100-metre asteroid might kill 10,000 people in a land impact, but the tsunami it would cause if it landed in the sea might kill 100 million. ‘The United States is, by this measure, one of the most vulnerable nations on Earth, since it has numerous major cities close to sea level on two separate oceans,’ observes the asteroid expert John Lewis.2