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Tuesday, May 24, 2011

UFO conspiracy theories

A UFO conspiracy theory is any one of many often overlapping conspiracy theories which argue that evidence of the reality of unidentified flying objects is being suppressed by various governments around the world. Such theories are often intentionally hoaxed, and are backed by little or no evidence, and absolutely no reliable evidence despite significant research on the subject by non-governmental scientific agencies,[1] and therefore, are considered pseudoscience.[2]
They commonly argue that Earth governments, especially the Government of the United States, are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrials despite public claims to the contrary. The theory's tendency to target the United States government over others can be attributed to many possible explanations. Among them two of the most often put forward are; A.) Because it is an American cultural phenomenon.[3] , or B) Because in the event that there were a conspiracy of infiltration by a non-terrestrial power, friendly or hostile, the United States as the dominant military , political, and economic power would present the primary obstacle to such a design were it to oppose that design, as such it would in all likelyhood constitute the primary target of any plan of co-option. Particularly one dating back to 1947 when the U.S. possessed 50% of global economic output, was the only nation with nuclear weapons, and was without substantive opposition in the political sphere, as the cold war was still in it's opening stages, not yet in full swing, and the former imperial powers of Europe and Asia were devastated by both WWII & their disintegrating colonial empires, with economic output near zero.
Some of these theories claim that the government is explicitly allowing alien abduction.

Origins
Charles Fort's 1919 The Book of the Damned exposed a small but influential group of readers to Fort's extensive references to unidentified objects. Fort himself was extremely critical of scientific consensus, and his book contained extensive references to reports he said were "damned" or ignored by scientific dogma. The Fortean Society was founded in 1931 to promote his works and over time its members included H. L. Mencken, R. Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright. According to the Durant Report on the CIA's top-secret 1953 Robertson Panel, "The writings of Charles Fort were referenced to show that 'strange things in the sky' had been recorded for hundreds of years."
These "strange things in the sky" captured the world's attention in the summer of 1947. Kenneth Arnold's description of nine shiny metallic-looking objects flying at an estimated 1,200 mph on June 24 was followed by sightings all over the United States and Canada, and later the entire globe. On July 9, 1947 the Roswell Daily Record ran a headline stating, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region". The Army Air Force changed their story the next day, saying that instead a balloon had crashed with a radar-reflecting disc suspended from it.
By August of 1947, a Gallop Poll indicated that 9 out of 10 Americans had heard of flying saucers. A wide diversity of theories were offered in the press about the origin of the UFOs. Some newspapers interviewed Forteans who offered historical context and were among the first to theorize that the objects could be extraterrestrial in origin. This idea was given a fictional treatment by popular AP writer Hal Boyle on July 9th with his story "Trip on a Flying Saucer." The story and its followup installments ran in newspapers all over the nation and detailed Hal's trip to Mars with an 8 foot tall green alien who is on a scavenger hunt to find Orson Welles.
Donald Keyhoe later began investigating flying saucers for True Magazine. Keyhoe was one of the first significant conspiracy theorists, asserting eventually that the saucers were from outer space and were on some sort of scouting mission. Keyhoe derived his theory from his contacts in Air Force and Navy intelligence. Project Sign, based at Air Technical Intelligence Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and its successors Project Grudge and Project Blue Book were officially tasked with investigating the flying saucers. As reported in Edward Ruppelt's book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, many people within these research groups did in fact support the hypothesis that the flying saucers were from outer space.
Keyhoe later founded NICAP, a civilian investigation group that asserted the US government was lying about UFOs and covering up information that should be shared with the public. NICAP had many influential board members, including Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA.
Popular culture and opinions

Various conspiratorial UFO ideas have flourished on the internet and are frequently featured on Art Bell's program, Coast to Coast AM.
In fiction, television programs (The X-Files and Stargate), films (Men in Black and Independence Day) and any number of novels have featured elements of UFO conspiracy theories.
Elements may include the government's sinister operative from Men in Black, the military bases known as Area 51, RAF Rudloe Manor or Porton Down, a supposed crash site in Roswell, New Mexico, the Rendlesham Forest Incident, a political committee dubbed the "Majestic 12" or successor of the UK Ministry of Defence's Flying Saucer Working Party (FSWP).[4]
Some civilians[who?] suggest that they have been abducted and/or body parts have been taken from them. The contention that there is a widespread cover-up of UFO information is not limited to the general public or UFO research community. For example, a 1971 survey of Industrial Research/Development magazine found that 76% felt the government was not revealing all it knew about UFOs, 54% thought UFOs definitely or probably existed, and 32% thought they came from outer space.[5]
Notable persons to have publicly stated that UFO evidence is being suppressed include Senator Barry Goldwater, Admiral Lord Hill-Norton (former NATO head and chief of the British Defence Staff), Brigadier-General Arthur Exon (former commanding officer of Wright-Patterson AFB), Vice-Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (first CIA director), astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell, former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer, and the 1999 French COMETA report by various French generals and aerospace experts.
Chronology

This is a list of events, statements and personalities which are related to UFO conspiracy theories.
1930s
On the night before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles directed the Mercury Theatre in their live radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's classic novel, The War of the Worlds. By mimicking a news broadcast, the show was quite realistic sounding for its time, and some listeners were fooled into thinking that a Martian invasion was underway in the United States. There was widespread confusion, followed by outrage and controversy. Some later studies have argued that the extent of the panic was exaggerated by the contemporary press, but it remains clear that many people were caught up, to one degree or another, in the confusion.
In other countries, reactions were similar. In 1949, part of the script for the War of the Worlds was read out at San Quentin, without announcement, as if it were a major piece of breaking news. Huge crowds of people emerged onto the streets and sought refuge inside of churches with their families. When the radio station was informed, they broadcast the fact that there was no invasion. An angry mob formed and burned the station to the ground, resulting in somewhere between six and twenty deaths. There were many other countries that experienced problems when broadcasting The War of the Worlds.[6]
According to U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt,[7] the Air Force's files often mentioned the panicked aftermath of the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast as a possible reaction of the public to confirmed evidence of UFOs.
1940s
The Great Los Angeles Air Raid
Main article: Battle of Los Angeles
"The Great Los Angeles Air Raid" also known as "The Battle of Los Angeles" is the name given by contemporary sources to the imaginary enemy attack and subsequent anti-aircraft artillery barrage which took place from late 24 February to early 25 February 1942 over Los Angeles, California.[8][9] Initially, the target of the aerial barrage was thought to be an attacking force from Japan, but Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox speaking at a press conference shortly afterward called the incident a "false alarm." A small number of modern-day UFOlogists have suggested the targets were extraterrestrial spacecraft.[10] When documenting the incident in 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of "war nerves" likely triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries.[11]
Ghost rockets
In 1946 and 1947, numerous so-called ghost rockets appeared over Scandinavian countries, primarily Sweden, and then spread into other European countries. One USAF top secret document from 1948 stated that Swedish air intelligence informed them that some of their investigators felt that the objects were not only real but could not be explained as having earthly origins. Similarly, 20 years later, Greek physicist Dr. Paul Santorini publicly stated that in 1947 he was put in charge of a Greek military investigation into the ghost rockets sighted over Greece. Again, they quickly concluded the objects were real and not of conventional origin. Santorini claimed their investigation was killed by U.S. scientists and high military officials who had already concluded the objects were extraterrestrial in origin and feared public panic because there was no defense.
Roswell Incident
Main article: Roswell UFO Incident
In 1947, the United States Air Force issued a press release stating that a "flying disk" had been recovered near Roswell, New Mexico. This press release was quickly withdrawn, and officials stated that a weather balloon had been misidentified. The Roswell case quickly faded even from the attention of most UFOlogists until the 1970s. There has been continued speculation that an alien spacecraft did indeed crash near Roswell despite the official denial. For example, retired Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, former commanding officer of Wright-Patterson AFB, told researchers Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt that a spacecraft had crashed, alien bodies were recovered, and the event was covered up by the U.S. government. Exon further claimed he was aware of a very secretive UFO controlling committee made up primarily of very high-ranking military officers and intelligence people. His nickname for this group was "The Unholy Thirteen" (see also Majestic 12) [12]
Mantell Incident
The 1948 death of Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell (the so-called Mantell Incident) may have contributed to a distrust of governmental UFO studies. Mantell's airplane crashed and he was killed following the pursuit of an aerial artifact he described as "a metallic object...of tremendous size." (Clark, 352) Project Sign personnel investigated the case and determined that Mantell had been chasing the planet Venus, a conclusion which met with incredulity. Later this theory was changed to include a Skyhook balloon instead of Venus, an explanation which continues to be debated to this day.
Project Sign
The U.S. Air Force may have planted the seeds of UFO conspiracy theories with Project Sign (established 1947) (which became Project Grudge and Project Blue Book). Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Blue Book, characterized the Air Force's public behavior regarding UFOs as "schizophrenic": alternately open and transparent, then secretive and dismissive. Ruppelt also revealed that in mid-1948, Project Sign issued a top secret Estimate of the Situation concluding that the flying saucers were not only real but probably extraterrestrial in origin. According to Ruppelt, the Estimate was ordered destroyed by Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg.
1950s
The UK Ministry of Defence’s UFO Project has its roots in a study commissioned in 1950 by the MOD’s then Chief Scientific Adviser, the great radar scientist Sir Henry Tizard. As a result of his insistence that UFO sightings should not be dismissed without some form of proper scientific study, the Department set up the Flying Saucer Working Party (or FSWP).[citation needed]
In August 1950, Montanan baseball manager Nicholas Mariana films several UFOs with his color 16mm camera. Project Blue Book is called in and, after inspecting the film, Mariana claimed they returned it to him with critical footage removed, clearly showing the objects as disc-shaped. The incident sparks nation-wide media attention.
Frank Scully's 1950 Behind the Flying Saucers suggested that the U.S. government had recovered a crashed flying saucer and its dead occupants near Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. It was later revealed that Scully had been the victim of a prank by "two veteran confidence artists".[citation needed]
Donald Keyhoe was a retired U.S. Marine who wrote a series of popular books and magazine articles that were very influential in shaping public opinion, arguing that UFOs were indeed real and the U.S. government was suppressing UFO evidence. Keyhoe's first article on the subject came out in True Magazine, January 1950, and was a national sensation. His first book, Flying Saucers Are Real also came out in 1950, at about the same time as Frank Scully's book, and was a bestseller. In 1956, Keyhoe helped establish NICAP, a powerful civilian UFO investigating group with many inside sources. Keyhoe became its director and continued his attacks on the Air Force. Other contemporary critics also charged that the United States Air Force was perpetrating a cover-up with its Project Blue Book.
Canadian radio engineer Wilbert B. Smith, who worked for the Canadian Department of Transport, was interested in flying saucer propulsion technology and wondered if the assertions in the just-published Scully and Keyhoe books were factual. In September 1950, he had the Canadian embassy in Washington D.C. arrange contact with U.S. officials to try to discover the truth of the matter. Smith was briefed by Dr. Robert Sarbacher, a physicist and consultant to the Defense Department's Research and Development Board. Other correspondence, having to do with Keyhoe needing to get clearance to publish another article on Smith's theories of UFO propulsion, indicated that Bush and his group were operating out of the Research and Development Board.[13] Smith then briefed superiors in the Canadian government, leading to the establishment of Project Magnet, a small Canadian government UFO research effort. Canadian documents and Smith's private papers were uncovered in the late 1970s, and by 1984, other alleged documents emerged claiming the existence of a highly secret UFO oversight committee of scientists and military people called Majestic 12, again naming Vannevar Bush. Sarbacher was also interviewed in the 1980s and corroborated the information in Smith's memos and correspondence. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Smith granted public interviews, and among other things stated that he had been lent crashed UFO material for analysis by a highly secret U.S. government group which he wouldn't name.[14]
The Robertson Panel was a secret, CIA-assembled scientific UFO review committee that met in January 1953. In part, it recommended a public relations campaign to reduce public interest in UFOs, including ridiculing and discrediting those who claim UFO encounters, and to spy on civilian UFO groups. The Robertson Panel's existence was first disclosed in 1956 by former Blue Book director, Edward Ruppelt, who had participated in the discussions. Immediately after the Panel, Blue Book public relations officer Al Chop told Ruppelt that, "We've been ordered to work up a national debunking campaign, planting articles in magazines and arranging broadcasts to make UFO reports sound like poppycock." (Dolan, 193-202) This protocol is still in effect.
A few weeks after the Robertson Panel, the Air Force issued Regulation 200-2, ordering air base officers to publicly discuss UFO incidents only if they were judged to have been solved, and to classify all the unsolved cases to keep them out of the public eye. In addition, UFO investigative duties started to be taken on by the newly formed 4602nd Air Intelligence Squadron (AISS) of the Air Defense Command. The 4,602nd AISS was tasked with investigating only the most important UFO cases with intelligence or national security implications. These were deliberately siphoned away from Blue Book, leaving Blue Book to deal with the more trivial reports. (Dolan, 210-211)
In 1954 an automatic working station for UFO monitoring was installed at Shirley's Bay near Ottawa in Canada. After this station detected the first suspicious event, all data gained by this station was classified as secret, although the cameras of the monitoring station could not make any pictures because of fog.(citation?)
1956 saw the publication of Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, the book which publicized the idea of sinister Men in Black who appear to UFO witnesses and warn them to keep quiet. There has been continued speculation that the men in black are government agents who harass and threaten UFO witnesses.
Also in 1956, the group Foundation for Earth-Space Relations, led by film producer Tzadi Sophit, tested their own flying saucer outside the Long Island town of Ridge Landing. It is speculated in Robertson's "The Long Island Saucer" that an FBI cover-up silenced witnesses. (citation?)
On January 22, 1958, when Donald Keyhoe appeared on CBS television, his statements on UFOs were precensored by the Air Force. During the show when Keyhoe tried to depart from the censored script to "reveal something that has never been disclosed before", CBS cut the sound, later stating Keyhoe was about to violate "predetermined security standards" and about to say something he wasn't "authorized to release". What Keyhoe was about to reveal were four publicly unknown military studies concluding UFOs were interplanetary (including the 1948 Project Sign Estimate of the Situation and a 1952 Project Blue Book engineering analysis of UFO motion presented at the Robertson Panel. [Timothy Good, 286-287; Richard Dolan 293-295]
Astronaut Gordon Cooper reported suppression of a flying saucer movie filmed in high clarity by two Edwards AFB range photographers on May 3, 1957. Cooper said he viewed developed negatives of the object, clearly showing a dish-like object with a dome on top and something like holes or ports in the dome. The photographers and another witness, when later interviewed by James McDonald, confirmed the story. Cooper said military authorities then picked up the film and neither he nor the photographers ever heard what happened to it. The incident was also reported in a few newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times. The official explanation was that the photographers had filmed a weather balloon distorted by hot desert air.[15]
1960s
Throughout much of the 1960s, atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald suggested—via lectures, articles and letters—that the U.S. Government was mishandling evidence which would support the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
1970s
Although strictly unrelated to a UFO conspiracy theory, the Watergate affair brought the curtain down on the era when authorities were generally trusted by the public. A decade after the assassination of John F. Kennedy a cottage industry of JFK conspiracy theorists seemed to spring up out of the woodwork, fed by the tabloids. UFO conspiracy theories found fertile ground in this paranoid zeitgeist.
Clark also notes that many UFO conspiracy theory tales "can be traced to a mock documentary, Alternative 3, broadcast on British television on June 20, 1977, and subsequently turned into a paperback book." (Clark, 213–4)
Holloman Air Force Base
Clark cites a 1973 encounter as perhaps the earliest suggestion that the U.S. government was involved with ETs. That year, Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler of Los Angeles, California, were in contact with officials at Norton Air Force Base in order to make a documentary film. Emenegger and Sandler report that Air Force Officials (including Paul Shartle) suggested incorporating UFO information in the documentary, including as its centerpiece genuine footage of a 1971 UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Furthermore, says Emenegger, he was given a tour of Holloman AFB and was shown where officials conferred with EBEs. This was supposedly not the first time the U.S. had met these aliens, as Emenegger reported that his U.S. military sources had "been monitoring signals from an alien group with which they were unfamiliar, and did their ET guests know anything about them? The ETs said no." (Clark 1998, 144) No film was ever presented, however, and the documentary was released in 1974 as UFO's: Past, Present and Future (narrated by Rod Serling). The alleged Holloman UFO landing was discussed in the documentary and was depicted with illustrations.
In 1988, Shartle said that the film in question was genuine, and that he had seen it several times.
Paul Bennewitz
The late 1970s also saw the beginning of an affair centered around Paul Bennewitz of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
1980s
MJ-12
The so-called Majestic 12 documents surfaced in 1982, suggesting that there was secret, high-level U.S. government interest in UFOs dating to the 1940s.









Linda Moulton Howe
In September 1979 to May 1980, Linda Moulton Howe, Director of Special Projects at KMGH-TV, Channel 7 (then a CBS affiliate) produced, wrote, directed, edited and reported a documentary film for TV entitled A Strange Harvest about the Colorado and worldwide phenomenon of bloodless, trackless animal deaths called "animal mutilations." The documentary was first broadcast as a two hour special on May 18, 1980, and Howe was awarded a 1981 Regional Emmy. Some time after the broadcast, Linda was contacted by Jean Abounader, Director of the Documentary Division at Home Box Office, about producing an hour for HBO that would go beyond A Strange Harvest.
On March 21, 1983, Howe was in New York City to sign a contract in the HBO offices to produce an hour with the working title, UFO's: The ET Factor. Peter Gersten, New York attorney who had filed Freedom of Information Act inquiries on behalf of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) for UFO information from the CIA, NSA and other intelligence and military organizations, met with Howe in New York City. Mr. Gersten showed Howe correspondence he had from an AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations) Agent named Richard C. Doty. Doty's correspondence with attorney Gersten was about an alleged military exchange at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota with a landed UFO and humanoid entity that fired a ray of light at a security guard's gun. The ray allegedly melted the gun and burned the guard's hand. Gersten said that he and CAUS would like to investigate the Ellsworth AFB case and that he would arrange contact for Howe with Richard Doty. A meeting was set for April 9, 1983, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the Kirtland AFB office of AFOSI. Howe thought she was to receive names and phone numbers for eyewitnesses to the Ellsworth AFB event. Instead, Doty showed her a "Briefing Paper for the President of the United States On the Subject of Unidentified Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)." (Clark 1998, 154) Howe says she was not allowed to copy the paper or take notes, and was required to read it in Doty's presence. The document, Howe reported, detailed a series of events: several UFO crashes and recoveries, including one where an alien occupant was alive and remained in the care of the U.S. government at Los Alamos Laboratory "until it died of unknown causes on June 18, 1952."
Howe reported that Doty promised considerable confirmation, including documents, film and photographs. She called Jean Abounader at HBO and the two agreed that an official letter from the U. S. Air Force was necessary to back up the promise of film, photographs and documents for use in Howe's HBO documentary. Abounader asked Howe to meet with the number two executive at HBO, Bridgett Potter, on May 18, 1983, to discuss the government's potential contribution to the HBO TV production. Howe met with Potter, Abounader and others at the New York HBO offices, but no official letter was ever forthcoming. Potter gave Howe until October 1983 to come up with official administration and military confirmation to her at HBO about the details of the briefing paper. Doty stopped communicating with the Howe/Gersten effort in June 1983 and nothing of an official nature was provided. HBO and Howe reached the October deadline and the documentary project ended.
Howe continued to develop her own military and intelligence sources independent from the HBO/Doty/Gersten period of March to June 1983 and produced four books and other documentaries, including An Alien Harvest: Further Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms (1989); Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. 1: Facts & Eyewitnesses © 1994; Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. 2: High Strangeness (1998); Mysterious Lights and Crop Circles (2002); Strange Harvests 1993, an hour documentary film about an upsurge in animal mutilations and human interactions with aerial lights in Alabama and surrounding region from 1993 to 1994.
By 1999, Linda Moulton Howe created Earthfiles.com, a news website Howe reports, writes and edits about science, environment and Real X-Files issues and breaking news. Earthfiles has received several journalism awards for excellence. The Real X-Files section contains interviews, documents, illustrations and photographs related to a non-human presence on Earth and its interactions with civilians and military.
Milton William Cooper
In the 1980s, Milton William Cooper achieved a degree of prominence due to his conspiratorial writings.
Bob Lazar
In November 1989, Bob Lazar appeared in a special interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS to discuss his alleged employment at S-4. In his interview with Knapp, Lazar said he first thought the saucers were secret, terrestrial aircraft, whose test flights must have been responsible for many UFO reports. Gradually, on closer examination and from having been shown multiple briefing documents, Lazar came to the conclusion that the discs must have been of extraterrestrial origin. In his filmed testimony, Lazar explains how this impression first hit him after he boarded the craft under study and examined their interior.
For the propulsion of the studied vehicles, Bob Lazar claims that the atomic element 115 served as a nuclear fuel. Element 115 (provisionally named 'Ununpentium' (Uup)) reportedly provided an energy source which would produce anti-gravity effects under proton bombardment along with the production of antimatter used for energy production. Lazar's website says, as the intense strong nuclear force field of element 115's nucleus would be properly amplified, the resulting effect would be a distortion of the surrounding gravitational field, allowing the vehicle to immediately shorten the distance to a charted destination.
Lazar also claims that he was given introductory briefings describing the historical involvement by extraterrestrial beings with this planet for 10,000 years. The beings originate from the Zeta Reticuli 1 & 2 star system and are therefore referred to as Zeta Reticulians, popularly called 'Greys'.
Lazar says he has degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1993, the Los Angeles Times looked into his background and found there was no evidence to support his claims.
"UFO Cover-Up?: Live!"
On October 14, 1988, actor Mike Farrell hosted "U.S. UFO Cover-Up: Live!" a two-hour prime-time syndicated television special that was broadcast in North America (and elsewhere). William Moore and Jamie Shandera appeared (among many other guests) and discussed the acquisition of the Majestic 12 documents, and introduced their sources "Falcon" and "Condor", allegedly high-level government intelligence officials. Interviewed in shadow and with masked voices, Falcon and Condor disclosed information about the U.S. government’s involvement in UFOs and alien interaction, UFO crashes and occupant retrievals, and alien biology. This broadcast also included the first known mention of Area 51 on television. Also known as the "strawberry ice cream show" in reference to the informants' remark that a captured EBE enjoyed strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music.[16]
July 1989 MUFON Convention
The Mutual UFO Network held their 1989 annual convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 1, 1989.
Bill Moore (ufologist) was scheduled as the main speaker, and he refused to submit his paper for review prior to the convention, and also announced that he would not answer any follow-up questions as was common practice. Unlike most of the convention's attendees, Moore did not stay at the same hotel that was hosting the convention.
When he spoke, Moore said that he and others had been part of an elaborate, long-term disinformation campaign begun primarily to discredit Paul Bennewitz: "My role in the affair ... was primarily that of a freelancer providing information on Paul's (Bennewitz) current thinking and activities." (Clark, 1998, 163) Air Force Sergeant Richard C. Doty was also involved, said Moore, though Moore thought Doty was "simply a pawn in a much larger game, as was I." (ibid.) One of their goals, Moore said, was to disseminate information and watch as it was passed from person to person in order to study information channels.
Moore said that he "was in a rather unique position" in the disinformation campaign: "judging by the positions of the people I knew to be directly involved in it, [the disinformation] definitely had something to do with national security. There was no way I was going to allow the opportunity to pass me by ... I would play the disinformation game, get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those directing the process into believing I was doing what they wanted me to do, and all the while continuing to burrow my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about who was directing it and why."(ibid., 164)
Once he finished the speech, Moore immediately left the hotel. He left Las Vegas that same night.
Moore's claims sent shock waves through the small, tight-knit UFO community, which remains divided as to the reliability of his assertions.
Rendlesham Forest Incident
Britain's most celebrated UFO incident, and one of the best-documented in the world, occurred outside the US Air Force base at Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, shortly after Christmas 1980. Various lights were seen in neighbouring Rendlesham Forest by numerous servicemen, who investigated and found an apparent landing site. This site was examined by the deputy base commander, Charles I. Halt, who took readings with a Geiger counter and was also witness to a flashing light in the direction of Orford Ness as well as star-like objects in the sky. Copies of Halt's letter to the U.K. Ministry of Defense were routinely released by the American base public affairs staff until the base closed.[17]
1990s
On November 24, 1992, a UFO crashes in Southaven Park, Shirley, NY.[18] John Ford, a Long Island MUFON researcher, investigates the crash. On June 12, 1996, Ford is arrested and charged with plotting to poison several local politicians by sneaking radium in their toothpaste. On advice of counsel Ford pleads insanity and is committed to the Mid Hudson Psychiatric Center.[19] Critics say the charges are a frame-up.[20]
The Branton Files have circulated on the internet at least since the mid-1990s. They essentially recirculate the information presented above, with many asides from "Branton", the document's editor.
Philip Schneider made a few appearances at UFO conventions in the 1990s, espousing essentially a new version of the theories mentioned above. He claimed to have survived the Dulce Base catastrophe and decided to tell his tale.
In 1999 the French government published a study, "UFOs and Defense: What Must We Be Prepared For?" Among other topics, the study concludes that the United States government has withheld valuable evidence.[21]
2000s
UFO conspiracy theories show no signs of abating. 2003 saw the publication of Alien Encounters (ISBN 1-57821-205-7), by Chuck Missler and Mark Eastman, which primarily re-states the notions presented above (especially Cooper's) and presents them as fact.
MoD secret files
1978 to 1987 eight files on UFO sightings were first released on May 14, 2008, to the National Archives' website by the British Ministry of Defence. 200 files are set to be made public by 2012. The files are correspondence from the public sent to government officials, such as the MoD and Margaret Thatcher. The information can be downloaded.[22] Copies of Lt. Col. Halt's letter regarding the sighting at RAF Woodbridge (see above) to the U.K. Ministry of Defense were routinely released (without addition comment) by the American base public affairs staff throughout the 1980s until the base closed. The MoD released the files due to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.[23] The files included, inter alia, alien craft flying over Liverpool and Waterloo Bridge in London.[24]
Allegations of evidence suppression

There have been allegations of suppression of UFO related evidence for many decades. There are also conspiracy theories which claim that physical evidence might have been removed and/or destroyed/suppressed by some governments. (See also Men in Black) Some examples are:
On July 7, 1947, William Rhodes photographed an unusual object over Phoenix, Arizona.[25] The photos appeared in a Phoenix newspaper and a few other papers. An Army Air Force intelligence officer and an FBI agent interviewed Rhodes on August 29 and convinced him to surrender the negatives, which he did the next day. He was informed he wouldn't be getting them back, but later unsuccessfully tried to retrieve them.[26][27] The photos were analyzed and subsequently appeared in some classified Air Force UFO intelligence reports. (Randle, 34–45, full account)[citation needed]
A June 27, 1950, movie of a "flying disk" over Louisville, Kentucky, taken by a Louisville Courier-Journal photographer, had the USAF Directors of counterintelligence (AFOSI) and intelligence discussing in memos how to best obtain the movie and interview the photographer without revealing Air Force interest. One memo suggested the FBI be used, then precluded the FBI getting involved. Another memo said "it would be nice if OSI could arrange to secure a copy of the film in some covert manner," but if that wasn't feasible, one of the Air Force scientists might have to negotiate directly with the newspaper.[28][29] In a recent interview, the photographer confirmed meeting with military intelligence and still having the film in his possession until then, but refused to say what happened to the film after that.[30]
In another 1950 movie incident from Montana, Nicholas Mariana filmed some unusual aerial objects and eventually turned the film over to the U.S. Air Force, but insisted that the first part of the film, clearly showing the objects as spinning discs, had been removed when it was returned to him. (Clark, 398)[citation needed]
According to some conspiracy theorists, during the military investigation of green fireballs in New Mexico, UFOs were photographed by a tracking camera over White Sands Proving Grounds on April 27, 1949. They claim that the final report in 1951 on the green fireball investigation claimed there was insufficient data to determine anything. Conspiracy theorists claim that documents later uncovered by Dr. Bruce Maccabee indicate that triangulation was accomplished. The conspiracy theorists also claim that the data reduction and photographs showed four objects about 30 feet in diameter flying in formation at high speed at an altitude of about 30 miles. According to conspiracy theorists, Maccabee says this result was apparently suppressed from the final report.[31]
On January 22, 1958, when NICAP director Donald Keyhoe appeared on CBS television, his statements on UFOs were pre-censored by the Air Force. During the show when Keyhoe tried to depart from the censored script to "reveal something that has never been disclosed before," CBS cut the sound, later stating Keyhoe was about to violate "predetermined security standards" and about to say something he wasn't "authorized to release." Conspiracy theorists claim that what Keyhoe was about to reveal were four publicly unknown military studies concluding UFOs were interplanetary (including the 1948 Project Sign Estimate of the Situation and Blue Book's 1952 engineering analysis of UFO motion). (Good, 286–287; Dolan 293–295)[citation needed]
A March 1, 1967 memo directed to all USAF divisions, from USAF Lt. General Hewitt Wheless, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff, stated that unverified information indicated that unknown individuals, impersonating USAF officers and other military personnel, had been harassing civilian UFO witnesses, warning them not to talk, and also confiscating film, referring specifically to the Heflin incident. AFOSI was to be notified if any personnel were to become aware of any other incidents. (Document in Fawcett & Greenwood, 236)[citation needed].
John Callahan, former Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the FAA, Washington D.C., also a Disclosure Project witness, said that following a 1986 encounter of a Japanese airlines 747 with a giant UFO over Alaska, recorded by air and ground radar, the FAA conducted an investigation. Callahan held a briefing a few days later for President Reagan's Scientific Study Group, the FBI, and CIA. After the briefing, one of the CIA agents told everybody they "were never there and this never happened," adding they were fearful of public panic.[32]
source:WIKIPEDIA

Monday, May 23, 2011

Fermi Conclusions About Aliens

Solutions to the Fermi Paradox can be grouped in three categories:


They Are Here

Those who attribute UFOs to alien spacecraft have a ready answer to the paradox. However, there is little mainstream support for this view.

They Exist But Have Not Communicated With Us

Another possibility is that advanced civilizations either deliberately or accidentally hide evidence of their existence from humanity. They might do so out of ethical concerns for primitive beings or a desire to encourage cultural diversity. This has the Uniformity of Motive flaw common to other Fermi solutions: assuming that all alien civilizations throughout time will behave in the same way.

Civilizations might be deliberately hiding themselves in order to avoid destruction from more advanced civilizations. It has also been proposed that a fundamental information theoretical axiom might be behind the lack of recognized signals. Information theory states that a message which is compressed maximally, is indistiguishable from white noise. The counterargument to this would be that even though as bandwidth becomes a bottleneck to communication, there ought still be some niche technologies which would not or could not strive to maximal data compression. Science fiction authors have proposed another possible explanation -- that someone, or something, is destroying intelligent life in the universe as fast as it is created. This theme can be found in novels such as Frederik Pohl's Heechee novels, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels and Greg Bear's The Forge of God. Technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves via nuclear war, biological warfare, grey goo or destroying their planet's ecosphere) before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology (a very real possibility).

Another possible explanation is that advanced civilizations would construct multiple concentric Dyson Spheres around their stars, each one radiating less energy than the next smallest one, with the outermost sphere radiating energy at close to the background radiation. These would be essentially unobservable from any distance.

Yet another is that all intelligent life inevitably evolves towards a technological singularity and quickly becomes unrecognizable to humanity in our present state.

They Do Not Exist

Others argue that the conditions for life, or at least complex life, are rare. For instance, some hypotheses say that complex life required the stimulation of tides from Earth's moon to evolve, and the Moon is the result of freak
occurrence, a body of a certain mass striking Earth at just the right angle to
carve off the material and put it in a stable orbit.

Another possibilty is that ice ages, comet or meteor impacts, supernovae, gamma ray bursters or other catastrophic planetary or galactic events are so common that life rarely has the time to evolve. Alternately, these events may not be frequent enough on other planets and evolution is slowed because there aren't enough mass extinctions to encourage diversity.

Even if the conditions for life are common, the evolution of human-like intelligence, the invention of radio technology or interest in the exploration of outer space may be vanishingly rare.

Conclusion

A common concept used in the scientific method to test the validity of certain ideas is Occam's Razor. To paraphrase, Occam's Razor states that the explanation for a given phenomenon that has the fewest assumptions should be preferred over more complicated ones.

All this draws us to a few possible conclusions, say adherents of the Fermi Principle: that as a technologically advanced species, we are alone in our part
of the Cosmos. The simplest explanation, say adherents to the premise behind the Fermi Paradox, is the last one.

Aliens Origin

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book “Flying Saucers”, stated “something is being seen, but it isn’t known what.... This formulation leaves the question of ‘seeing’ open. Something material could be seen, or something psychic could be seen. Both are realities, but different kinds”.

Albert Einstein said, “as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”.

Timothy Mcveigh, recently executed for the Oklahoma bombing, blamed an implant in his brain for his actions and described several UFO encounters to police investigators.

Between 80 and 90 percent of (UFO) reports are misperceptions of fairly conventional, natural or man-made phenomena, hoaxes.

Theories about UFO and aliens are numerous but can be divided into four categories:

ntelligence from another planet with advanced technology

In the thirties, Mars and the Moon were the most popular candidates for hosting aliens but it seems that we have to go beyond the solar system to find the first planet with similar living conditions than the Earth. Though scientists last century thought the planet Mars might be a good candidate, and some even thought they detected a huge canal system stretching across the planet, recent probes sent to Mars have failed to detect even bacteria-like creatures, let alone a civilization capable of producing a flying saucer. With the rest of the planets in our solar system seemingly too hot or cold, the best hope for intelligent life seems to be across the void of interstellar space in other parts of our galaxy. If we do assume there is intelligent life in places other than Earth, where might they be? In an attempt to detect intelligent life beyond our solar system researchers have conducted a number of SETI programs trying to use radio waves to detect the existence of other civilizations. So far no SETI program has been successful in finding intelligent life, but there are millions of stars in our galaxy alone that might have planets that could harbor life and carefully looking at each one of them will take a long time.







Time-travelers

The chupacabra, or aliens that we are seeing would be humans of the future.... our own children.... travelling through time in order to prevent the chemical crisis that caused them to evolve into "chupacabras". This would explain the "time-line" of sightings and the secrecy of the U.S. government regarding their findings. Our future-humans arrive at times when chemical progress is at a peak - in order to either warn us or attempt to prevent the progress of the technology that will go awry and cause physical mutations. What might cause such a leap in evolution, to create the unusual appearance of chupacabra? Is it a large-scale chemical war? Instant, single-generation mutation? Or a slow, gradual "morphing" of physical structure in order to adapt to our habitat - which we created through ignorance? Is it a positive change, or a negative change? Certainly, chupacabra is not attractive to us, pre-historic man.







Psychic phenomenon

Aliens are only the results of hallucinations caused by numerous alterations of the mind of witnesses. This argument is used in most cases of paranormal apparitions wether it is a ghost, a Bigfoot or an alien.







Hidden earthly intelligence

According to this theory, what we call aliens would be pre-flood civilizations that have found a refuge in the depths of the sea or underground.
Frequent reports of strange balls of light (some captured on video) and sounds prior to the appearance of formations added fuel to the argument that they were being created by some as yet unknown, either natural or supernatural force.

Other odd occurrences have been reported, like electronic equipment failing to work inside the circles, then functioning normally once taken out and abnormal magnetic and radiation readings inside fresh circles. Not only does the physical appearance of the plants and soil seem to change, but there is change at the molecular level.


The Hoax Theory

The Plasma Vortex Theory
Various researches were conducted in this phenomenon and a number of observations have also been made over the years that finally seem to indicate that there are particular characteristics that "genuine" (or non-mandmade) formations appear to exhibit.

Research has been conducted over a ten year period with samples and thorough laboratory testing carried out by the biophysicist Dr. Levengood, Nancy Talbott, and John Burks -- the BLT Research Team, and a small army of volunteers worldwide. Their findings include from samples taken within the crop formations in contrast to the control samples taken from outside the circles.

Levengood studied biophysics at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and holds several patents on his inventions to increase seed growth and vigor. He has studied biochemical and biophysical changes in crop formation seeds and plants for over a decade.

He has found out that the plants from more than 95% of the sampled events revealed either single or multiple anomalous and readily apparent structural alterations at the macroscopic level. In general, these consisted of significant enlargements of the cell walls, expulsion cavities in the nodes of the plant stalks, significantly extended node lengths, and changes to the soil composition (ie. vastly higher level of magnetite concentration) Significant changes in seed germination and development were also found. Affected plants also have characteristics suggesting the involvement of transient high temperatures. Not one of these clearly anomalous plant alterations had been mentioned – much less explained – by the proponents of the croppies theory, nor can they be accounted for by the supposed methods employed to create crop formations through claims made by the circle makers.

Levengood thinks what is creating the crop circle is a complex energy system that he describes as a "spinning plasma vortex" of ions with microwave frequencies that rapidly heat water in plants, causing them to collapse to the ground with stems not cracked or broken. Further, the microwave frequencies can heat up water in the plant's growth nodes which burst out, creating small holes that have often been found in extraordinary crop patterns. Those complex energies can also affect the seeds.

Levengood. W.C. 1994. Anatomical anomalies in crop formation plants. - Physiol. Plant. 92: 356-363.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~icircle/dcircles/Levengood_Physiologia.htm

“The affected plants have components which suggest the involvement of rapid air movement, ionization, electric fields and transient high temperatures combined with an oxidizing atmosphere. One naturally occurring and organized force incorporating each of these features is an ion plasma vortex, one very high energy example being a lightning discharge.

Atmospheric-associated plasma formations may plausibly originate in regions where there are clear indications of energy exchange between the ionosphere (60-100 km) and electrical storms in the upper atmosphere (Franz et al. 1990). Currently under consideration are ion plasma vortices which form in unstable regions and act as heat and angular momentum transporters. In fluid dynamics, gases, including air, are considered as having liquid properties (Prandtl and Tietjens 1957). In such a scheme the descent of a vortex through a liquid produces unstable secondary products which form complex, symmetrical patterns such as circles, rings, triangles, double lines and ovals with tubes or 'paths' extending from them (Levenoood 1958). In its descent to the crop surface the shaping of these features of vortex instability would be guided by variations in the Earth's magnetic field (Rossi and Jastrow 1961). At the crop surface the heat, ionization, associated electric fields and angular momentum would be transferred to the living plants. Taken as a whole, ionized air plasmas are electrically neutral, although internally, charge separation takes place and they can have high concentrations of positive ions and free electrons (Lehnert 1961), which in contact with plant tissue might produce transient heating and account for a number of the plant transformations.

The Electro-magnetic Field Theory

The UFO Theory

The Ley Lines Theory

Crop circles are often created near ancient sites, and according to some along ley lines. According to this theory, crop circles would be the result of abnormal burst of electro-magnetical energy from the Earth.
Ley lines, or Leys, are alignments of ancient sites stretching across the landscape. Ancient sites or holy places may be situated in a straight line ranging from one or two to several miles in length. A ley may be identified simply by an aligned placing of marker sites, or it might be visible on the ground for all or part of its length by the remnants of an old straight track.

Ley Lines were 're-discovered' in June 1921 by Alfred Watkins (1855-1935), a locally well-known and respected Herefordshire businessman, who while looking at a map for features of interest noticed a straight line that passed over hill tops through various points of interest, all of which were ancient. At the time of his discovery, Watkins had no theory about alignments but on that June afternoon saw "in a flash" a whole pattern of lines stretching across the landscape. Four years later, in 1925, he described his vision in a book he titled The Old Straight Track:


"Imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could reach, and paid out until it reached the 'high places' of the earth at a number of ridges, banks, and knowls. Then visualise a mound, circular earthwork, or clump of trees, planted on these high points, and in low points in the valley other mounds ringed around with water to be seen from a distance. Then great standing stones brought to mark the way at intervals, and on a bank leading up to a mountain ridge or down to a ford the track cut deep so as to form a guiding notch on the skyline as you come up.... Here and there, at two ends of the way, a beacon fire used to lay out the track. With ponds dug on the line, or streams banked up into 'flashes' to form reflecting points on the beacon track so that it might be checked when at least once a year the beacon was fired on the traditional day. All these works exactly on the sighting line."

In 1936, the British occultist Dion Fortune wrote a fictional book, a novel, called The Goat-Foot God, in which she put forward the notion of 'lines of force' connecting megalithic sites such as Avebury and Stonehenge in southern England. In 1938, Arthur Lawton, a member of the Straight Track Club, wrote a paper in which he claimed that leys were lines of cosmic force which could be dowsed. Through the 1970s and the 1980s, the idea of energy lines grew and grew and became a part of the New Age movement.

New agers claim that ley lines correspond to energy currents that cross the Earth and that the alleged energy is connected to changes in magnetic fields. Ancients built their temples on special places wher they could tap the energy.



From Places of Power, by Paul Devereux:

''The ancient sites of power were sometimes found, and sometimes deliberately constructed to mimic or enhance what could be found in nature. In either case, the forces of the natural world were used. And they were used for a variety of purposes, such as the promotion of fertility and for healing. But the over-riding purpos was the need to have gateways through which contact with spirit could be achieved. In the ancient world there were certain people who knew how to work with the physical world in order to create access to the spiritual.''
The Natural Music Theory


The Electro-magnetic Field Theory

According to Dr Colin Andrews, who has studied crop circles for 17 years, about 20% are caused by eddie currents in the earth's magnetic field - a mysterious shift in the electro-magnetic field creates a current that flattens the crops in its path.

That could probably explain the numerous reports of electronic equipment failing in crop circles and compasses spinning out of control in and over the crop circles (even when flying over in aircraft).







The UFO Theory

Crop circle formation is similar to alleged UFO landing site reports where a circular swirling pattern is formed in grass, the grass remains unharmed, and is in inaccessible locations for vehicles.

Channelers and ufologists pretend that crop circles are not symbols intended as a 'message to man.' These deliberately created pictographs are signposts, or reference marks produced by aliens moving in space and time (back and forth/in and out), who are monitoring the course of event trajectories. The pictographs serve primarily as reference markings and for 'event line' orientation and are deliberately embedded in a short-lived, perishable medium so that man's attention would not be attracted to specific locations.

Production of the circles occurs via two primary mechanisms:

Macroscale: external area effects; heat and overpressure
Microscale: internal plant stem effects; pressure changes and cellular damage.
Ultrasonics are produced as gasses escape the plant stem. The concominent drop in turgor pressure within the stem causes the plant to bend over. there is a gentle 'swish swish' sound as this effect is induced, en masse.

Some craft halt in the vicinity of the circles for what appears to be communications checks. On occasion, craft temporarily stop and conduct exploratory probing/testing in the vicinity of the circles.

It must be added that circles have given rise historically to various beliefs connected with the supernatural. for instance, the circles inspired the idea of the 'elves' green rings. The Nazca lines and, most noteworthy, Navajo sand paintings, were ideas born of attempts to copy the 'marks of the Gods', so as to evoke a visitation or response.





The Whirlwind Theory

The official government explanation is that whirlwinds, created by heat thermals, are the true cause of the crop circle anomaly. But whirlwinds or Mini-tornadoes are not static, they travel around and it is very unlikely that they would create such intricate and symmetrical patterns.





Natural Music

Hawkins observed that the circle patterns embodied geometric theorems that expressed specific relationships among the areas of the various circles, triangles, and other shapes. These patterns displayed "exact numerical relationships" (i.e., diatonic ratios) similar to those found in a scale of musical notes. For example, if a circle within a formation is 90 degrees and another is 80 degrees, the ratio is 9/8 which is the same ratio between the notes C and D, C being the eighth note of the diatonic scale and D being the ninth. These are the same ratios that are found in popular music, or in playing the white notes on the piano.

According to Stephen J. Smith, a paranormal investigator and amateur composer, these ratios are not the result of chance "because the numbers have to be very precise in order to be a diatonic ratio. This is why music sounds like music instead of noise, because it is built on precise ratios."

To derive music from the crop circles, Smith used a fractal music-generating computer program. He entered photographs of the formations into the computer, which ëreadí the photographs and generated music from the photos, using the crop circle scales to play it back.

Curiously, not all crop circles embody diatonic rations in their formations. Hence, some do not have musical qualities. Possibly, Smith says, the real circles have diatonic ratios, and the faked ones do not. Further, diatonic ratios may be only a part of the overall geometry of the formations.

Crop circle Makers

The croppies

In 1991 two retired lanscape painters Englishmen, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, proclaimed they were responsible for all the crop circles in England since 1978, starting as a joke to make people think UFOs were landing.

They demonstrated their technique for the cameras with a 1.2-metre board attached to a rope they hung around their necks. One held one end of a string in the centre to determine the radius while the other held the other end and stomped down the plants with the board. Newspapers and TV stations around the world trumpeted the solution to the crop circle mystery.

Since Doug and Dave's "retirement" in 1991, another generation of hoaxers has appeared. The only group to go public calls itself the Circlemakers (http://www.circlemakers.com). They have not taken credit for any one formation in particular, except a few commercial exhibitions (Mitsubishi, Weetabix) and a couple of television programs (History Channel, …), saying that revealing which circles they've created would ruin the mystery and appreciation for what they call their "land art." To date, they have not responded to numerous challenges to reproduce any of the complex formations in front of witnesses.

John Lundberg leader of the Circlemakers, considers their practice an art. Lundberg estimates that there are three or four dedicated crop circle art groups operating in the United Kingdom today, and numerous other small groups that make one or two circles a year more or less as a lark.
Two phenomena appear to be pushing the evolving art.

To combat a widely promulgated theory that the circles were the result of wind vortices—essentially mini-whirlwinds—crop artists felt compelled to produce ever more elaborate designs, some with straight lines to show that the circles were not a natural phenomenon, said Lundberg. The other impetus is true of all art forms: Artists influence one another, and designs evolve in response to what has been done before.

The crop circle season extends from roughly April to harvesting in September, although the best time to make a circle is in mid to late June. When still immature, wheat rises back toward the sun, making a circle look brushed rather than flattened, said Lundberg.

While the relationship between crop artists and cereologists is uneasy, the relationship between artists and farmers is mutually beneficial. Farmers provide the canvas, the artists bring in the tourists. The circles are a major tourist attraction, spawning bus tours, daily helicopter tours, T-shirts, books, and other trinkets. The circles draw people who believe the formations have a unique energy. They visit the formations as a sort of spiritual Mecca, to meditate, pray, dance, and commune with worldly spirits. Farmers frequently charge a small fee or have a donation box for people who want to enter the circles. In 1996 a circle appeared near Stonehenge and the farmer set up a booth and charged a fee, collecting 30,000 pounds (U.S. $47,000) in four weeks. The value of the crop had it been harvested was probably about 150 pounds ($235).



How to make crop circles ?

Anybody can make a crop circle with simple tools. The only tools you need are rope, boards or metal pipes and a willing crew. Here is a common way of making crop circles.

1 A stake is hammered into the field at the center of the area where the circle will be created.

2 A rope is tied to the stake and stretched to the edge of the circle.

3 A crew member at the end of the rope makes a perimeter by walking in a circle around the stake.

4 Boards or heavy pipes are then dragged over the crop to flatten plants within the space.

5 Outside the new circle, rings can be made by leaving sections of the crop undamaged.

Where to find crop circles?

Each year more than 100 formations appear in the fields of southern England. About 10,000 crop circles have been documented worldwide since records began to be kept in the '70s. Not including this year's formations, England tops the list with around 1,784, followed by the U.S. with 228, Canada with 135, Germany with 105, Australia with 71, the Netherlands with 62, Hungary with 23 and Japan with 19, most of them appearing in rice paddies. Dozens of other countries on every continent have also reported small numbers of simple formations.

Wiltshire County, UK is the acknowledged center of the phenomenon. The county is home to some of the most sacred Neolithic sites in Europe, built as far back as 4,600 years ago, including Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill, and burial grounds such as West Kennet Long Barrow. Some pretend that crop circles are usually aligned with ley lines, so you may discover new crop circles by following the lines.

History of Crop Circles

One of the earliest reports was in Lyon in 815AD, and a late 16th Century woodcut depicts the devil mowing a field into patterns. They began to appear in significant numbers in the fields of southern England in the mid-1970s. Early circles were quite simple, and simply appeared, overnight, in fields of wheat, rape, oat, and barley. The crops are flattened, the stalks bent but not broken.

As the crop circle phenomenon gained momentum, formations have also been reported in Australia, South Africa, China, Russia, and many other countries, frequently in close proximity to ancient sacred sites. For the thousands reported every year, the vast majority go completely undetected. Most of the complex formations occur in the United Kingdom and they are also more likely to be detected because of the country's smaller land mass.

Over the last 25 years, the formations have evolved from simple, relatively small circles to huge designs with multiple circles, elaborate pictograms, and shapes that invoke complex non-linear mathematical principles. Since the early 1990s, however, the phenomenon has grabbed world attention, as the formations evolved into enormous, increasingly mathematically complex and perfectly executed shapes appearing in fields, often near the sacred sites of Wiltshire.

The largest to date, a perfectly formed spiral formation 244 metres in diameter, composed of 409 circles covering almost the entire field, appeared overnight on a rainy night at Milk Hill in Wiltshire Aug. 12, 2001.

The movie Signs, starring Mel Gibson, while universally scorned by serious crop circle researchers, nevertheless renewed interest in crop circles after years of the phenomenon being dismissed in the media as a sophisticated hoax, following the announcement of two elderly landscape painters named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley who confessed in 1991 that they had been making crop circles in English grain fields since the 1970s after reading about the Tully, Australia Saucer Nest of 1966. The truth is that they were both unable to draw a decent crop circle in daytime and to remember the exact location of their exploits.

CROP CIRCLES

Crop circles are large circular depressions or patterns that appear overnight in the middle of grain fields (mostly wheat and corn) when the crop is quite high. The phenomenon has spawned its own science: cereology. Crop circles is also part of the UGM category (Unusual Ground Markings), which also include "tripod marks", saucer nests,burn marks, etc.

Most crop circles have been found in the southeast of England since the early 1980s, but others have been reported in the United States and Europe. Some have been exposed as hoaxes, but others remain unexplained. Crop circles range in diameter from as small as 3 metros (10 feet) to over 100 metros (315 feet). They appear overnight, and no tracks leading up to them are found, suggesting some external force from above is responsible. Visually, the stems are partially flattened, and entangled or intertwined. The plants are all bent and face the same direction, clockwise or counter clockwise. The crops are never damaged, broken, or show signs of forced bending. The plants continue to grow normally throughout the rest of their growing cycle. UFO sightings, moving orange lights, "whooshing" or warbling sounds usually preceed the formations of circles.

For the UFO crowd, the circles are signatures left behind by visiting spaceships. For mother-earth mystics, they’re the manifestations of deep waves of natural energy. For psychics, they’re the conscious results of remote-viewing experiments. For fringe physicists, they’re the tracks of ionized plasma whirlwinds. But the most likely is that the pranksters or circlemakers are human that take fun in building such weird circles. As yet no conclusive evidence has been found for any of these theories.

ALIEN TECHNOLOGY

Kenneth W. Behrendt writes for this in its essay "Anti-mass generator for UFO drive" the following: "computations show that the UFO would have to go in ten seconds on a height of approximately 35 km (!), so that it would together-shrink to a so small point that it could not seize the human eye any longer. If the acceleration of the missile were constant, then its crew would have felt the crushing strength of 68,38 g´s, produced by acceleration and at the end of their ten seconds ascent would have reached it a speed of over 10.000 mph. If the UFO had a dead weight of ten tons, then its engines would have had to produce a thrust of approximately 620.000 kg. Its engines would have had to deliver an output of 27.36 million HP or 20.000 megawatts achievement. This achievement would be equivalent to 2.500 jet engines by Pratt & Whitney with 11.000 HP each, those for the drive of the B-52 of long-range bomber of the USA to be used
or about twenty 1.000 megawatt nuclear power stations with maximum power work!"



Antimater

The production such enormous energies within a small spaceship are almost
inconceivable for us. A possibility would be actually the use of antimatter, by means of those one anti-gravitational fields also during a longer period away and with different intensity work to let could. Scientists succeeded in producing antimatter in laboratories artificially but in extremely small quantities with extremely high expenditure. Aerodynamic problems are solved perhaps by the fact that UFO`s ionize and by magnetic fields from itself keep them away surrounding air.



Pulsed Detonation

One is nick named the "Pulser" aircraft. There have been many sights of this aircraft by several different witnesses. When sighted it has repetitively been described as "A high-speed aircraft characterized by a very loud, deep, rumbling engine noise (1-2 Hz pulse rate) reminiscent of heavy-lift rockets." The smoke trail of the aircraft is described as being segmented and in a linked sausage shape. (Or another good example would be to look at one side of your coat zipper, un-zipped, with the teeth facing you) It is also described as a high-altitude aircraft that crossed the sky at extremely high speeds. Both ground based and airborne observers have reported it to be seen flying at altitudes above 50,000 ft. observers have reported see the aircraft as a single bright light that seldom changed direction, however speed changes where observed. One observer estimated that it covered 350 miles in 6 minutes. (3500 miles/hr)

This this aircraft may indeed exist. There has been research in to what are called Pulsed Detonation Engines (PED's) also refereed to as Pulsed Detonation Wave Engines. These are different type of engine than the pulse jet engines, which is already publicly know, and has been tested in aircraft. The PED's are said to be in laboratory and computer analysis level of development (reported oct of 91) The PED's exhaust emission produces smoke trails that closely match the pulser aircraft. Simulations of theses engines are said to be able to propel large aircraft in the "Mach 0.2-3.0 flight regime"

How PED's work: PED's use shock waves created in a detonation to compress the fuel-oxidizer mixture prior to combustion. A cylinder chamber designed to support the detonation is constructed with a flat forward end which makes up the thrust wall. Air along with fuel is fed into the engine from behind the thrust-wall. The detonation wave created travels forward to the thrust wall at about Mach 4 and compresses the fuel-air mixture, promotes supersonic combustion and causes a pressure rise in the engine. The wave then strikes the thrust wall and rebounds accelerating the combustion products towards the nozzle. Some of the products are ejected by the wave to the outside air-stream through the air inlet openings creating a toroidal vortex out side the engine. Then the cycle repeats.

The said advantages of this type of engine are:

* Theoretically a higher fuel efficiency than a "constant pressure engine"
* Engines can be produced in many sizes and thrust outputs from a few inches in diameter at a thrust of several pounds to larger one that can output in the thousands of pounds range.
* They have high thrust to weight ratio (ie.lighter engine, more thrust)
* They are mechanically simple, and have few moving parts.
* They could operate in or out of the atmosphere using fuel oxidizers.




Hyperjump

Theoretically it is possible to curve by high gravitation the area that starting point and the endpoint move each other closer to the area are so far distorted that they - for the generator operator - lie directly together, as a metal spring for example, whose ends we press together. One
needs "to slide" now no longer pedantically over the whole metal, but make only a step over the together lying ends. The actual transition would be then for example also through magnetic fields stabilized "wormholes" conceivablly. If one switches now the gravitational field off, the area relaxes again and one concerned immediately in this way at the goal, without considerable time delay.



Antigravity

According to Bob Lazar, former government worker who claims he was hired to reverse engineer alien craft, the "flying disks" operate using an antigravity-propulsion system. The craft generates its own gravitational field, causing it to move forward at a perpetual down-hill motion. The "ships" are built for rapid travel (in space), and appear to wobble and move sporadically when hovering or traveling at slow speeds.



Microwave Lightcraft

Another technology puts an unorthodox disk vehicle, whose drive is based on microwave energy behind the so-called "Microwave Lightcraft", which lets the object float as from spirit hand in the sky. The microwaves, which are radiated for example from a satellite network, form thereby before the flying object a shock wave, whereby surrounding air is ionized and brought to shining. As NASA communicated, these similar spacecraft are
to take 2040 whole 10.000 off times per year starting from the year. Lasers Lightcraft

Still another technology contains the "lasers Lightcraft". Here the light of an enormous in space or on earth of stationed laser is to exert pressure on a probe and propel these. With sufficiently large plants allegedly a journey is possible to the next stars such as alpha Centauri. Top speed of 20.000 mps are here already conceivable. Microprob could be within 25 years with our neighbour star.

Already in October 1997 it succeeded, on the "High Energy laser system test Facility" - to HELSTF (high-energy systematical test area) in the White of sand Missile rank under employment of a high performance carbon dioxide laser an ultralight test object into air at centrifuges. The pulsed laser beams were bundled thereby by the parabolically formed tail of the lightrcraft in a circular chamber. Air flowed from the outside into the chamber, which was heated up by the laser light to a bluish shining plasma with a temperature up to 30.000 °C. This procedure happened in a fraction of one second, so that air heated up escaped like an explosion. There is to already be concepts to the building of laser starter systems on the moon and Mars.

Mysteries of WOW

In August 1977, a sky survey conducted with Ohio State University's "Big Ear" radio telescope found what has become known as the 'Wow' signal. Registering an enormous signal strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register as a hit for today's Project Phoenix.). The shape of the signal had the characteristic rise and fall expected for its short 72 second lifetime. But a hitch remains: the signal has not been retrieved from other sky surveys, making it more anomaly than confirmable cosmic source. This odd, one-beam behavior could be caused by an alien transmission that simply went off the air during the 3 minutes between beams.

If the putative aliens permanently shut down their transmitter, then there's no chance of ever hearing the Wow signal again. Like a single sighting of the Loch Ness monster, we would never be able to prove what it was. But if the signal is periodic - if, for example, the aliens are using a rotating radio beacon that sweeps the star-studded strata of the Milky Way once every five minutes or every five hours - then we could hope to find it by just looking again.

For the moment, despite the use of the Harvard META SETI system, the Very Large Array (VLA) and the new 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania, Wow has not been detected again.

Extra solar planet

An extrasolar planet is a planet which orbits a star other than the Sun, i.e. which belongs to a planetary system other than our solar system.

Extrasolar planets were discovered during the 1990s as a result of improved telescope technology, such as CCD and computer-based image processing along with the Hubble Space Telescope. Such advances allowed for more accurate measurements of stellar motion, allowing astronomers to detect planets, not visually (the luminosity of a planet being too low for such detection), but by measuring gravitational influences upon stars (see astrometrics). In addition, extrasolar planets can be detected by measuring the variance in a star's apparent luminosity, as a planet passes in front of it.
Besides the detection of at least 80 planets (mostly gas giants), many observations point to the existence of millions of comets also in extrasolar systems.

The Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan claimed to have found the first extrasolar planets in 1993, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Subsequent investigation has determined that these objects are not "true" planets in that they are technically "sub-brown dwarf masses orbiting an object that is or once was a star"; it is believed that they are unusual remnants of the supernova that produced the pulsar, and did not form as conventional planets do.

The first "true" extrasolar planet was announced on October 6, 1995 by Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz; the primary star was 51 Pegasi. Since then dozens of planets have been detected, many by a team led by Geoffrey Marcy at the University of California's Lick and Keck Observatories. The first system to have more than one planet detected was Upsilon Andromedae. The majority of the detected planets have highly elliptical orbits.

There are two main methods of detecting extrasolar planets, which are too faint to be detected by present conventional optical means. The first involves measuring the displacement in the parent star's spectral lines due to the Doppler effect induced by the planet orbiting the star and moving it through mutual gravitation. The second involves catching the planet as it passes in front of the star's tiny disk which will cause the light of the star to "dip" in a distinctive way, and do so periodically as the planet completes multiple orbits. The second method is theoretically more sensitive, but is newer and has scored fewer successes. It also depends on the plane of the planet's orbit being aligned with the line of sight between the star and the Earth. As a result, any number of stars with planets that are not so aligned will be missed.

Most of the planets found are of relatively high mass (at least 40 times that of the Earth); however, a couple seem to be approximately the size of the Earth. This reflects the current telescope technology, which is not able to detect smaller planets. The mass distribution should not be taken as a reference for a general estimate, since it is likely that many more planets with smaller mass, even in nearby solar systems, are still undetected.

One question raised by the detection of extrasolar planets is why so many of the detected planets are gas giants which, in comparison to Earth's solar system, are unexpectedly close to the orbited star. For example, Tau Boötis has a planet 4.1 times Jupiter's mass, which is less than a quarter of an astronomical unit (AU) from the orbited star; HD 114762 has a planet 11 times Jupiter's mass, which is less than half an AU from the orbited star. One possible answer to these unexpected planetary orbits is that since astrometrics detects the extrasolar planets due to their gravitational influences and partially-ecliptic interference, perhaps current technology only permits the detection of systems where a large planet is close to the orbited star, rather than such systems being the norm.

On November 27, 2001, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they had detected the atmosphere of the planet orbiting HD 209458, from its absorption of light when passing in front of its star. Also during that year, a star was located which had the remnants of one or more planets within the stellar atmosphere - apparently the planet was mostly vaporized.

In 2002 a group of Polish astronomers (Professors Andrzej Udalski and Marcin Kubiak and Dr. Michal Szymanski from Warsaw, and Polish-American Professor Bogdan Paczynski from Princeton) during project OGLE (the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) worked out a method of easily finding extrasolar planets, based on a photometrical method. During one month they claimed to find 46 objects, many of which could be planets.

On July 10, 2003, using information obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists discovered the oldest extrasolar planet yet. Dubbed Methuselah after the biblical figure, the planet is about 5,600 light years from Earth, has a mass twice that of Jupiter, and is estimated to be 13 billion years old. It is located in the globular star cluster M4, approximately 7200 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.
The Kepler Space Mission will be launched in the next few years. It is a space-based telescope designed specifically to search large numbers of stars for earth-sized terrestrial planets.

The frequency of extrasolar planets is one of the parameters in the Drake equation, which attempts to estimate the probability of communications with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Confirmed extrasolar planets

The following is a list of main sequence stars with confirmed extrasolar planets. Note that the masses of the planets are lower bounds only. If a planet is detected by the spectral line displacement method referred to above, no information is gained about the inclination of the planet's plane of orbit around its star, and a value for this is needed to calculate the mass. It has become customary to arbitrarily assume that the plane is exactly lined up with the line of sight from Earth (this produces the lowest possible mass consistent with the spectral line measurements). The planets are listed with indications of their approximate masses as multiples of Jupiter's mass (MJ), and some also have approximate distances in astronomical units (AU) from their parent stars.

·HD 83443 - .35 MJ and .16 MJ
·HD 16141 - .215 MJ.
·HD 168746 - .24 MJ
·HD 46375 - .249 MJ
·HD 108147 - .34 MJ
·HD 75289 - .42 MJ
·51 Pegasi - .47 MJ (0.25-AU)
·BD -10 3166 - .48 MJ
·HD 6434 - .48 MJ
·HD 187123 - .52 MJ
·HD 209458 - .69 MJ
·Upsilon Andromedae - .71 MJ (0.06AU) , 2.11 MJ (0.83AU), and 4.61 MJ (2.5AU)
·HD 192263 - .76 MJ
·Epsilon Eridani - .86 MJ
·HD 38529 - .81 MJ
·HD 179949 - .84 MJ
·55 Cancri - .84 MJ (0.25-AU) and >5? MJ
·HD 82943 - .88 MJ and 1.63 MJ
·HD 121504 - .89 MJ
·HD 37124 - 1.04 MJ
·HD 130322 - 1.08 MJ
·Rho Coronae Borealis - 1.1 MJ (0.5-AU)
·HD 52265 - 1.05 MJ
·HD 177830 - 1.28 MJ
·HD 217107 - 1.282 MJ
·HD 210277 - 1.24 MJ
·HD 27442 - 1.43 MJ
·16 Cygni B - 1.5 MJ (1.5+AU)
·HD 74156 - 1.56 MJand >7.5 MJ
·HD 134987 - 1.58 MJ
·HD 160691 - 1.97 MJ
·HD 19994 - 2.0 MJ
·GJ 876 - 1.98 MJ and .56 MJ
·HD 92788 - 3.8 MJ
·HD 8574 - 2.23 MJ
·HR 810 - 2.24 MJ
·47 Ursae Majoris - 2.54 MJ (2+AU) and .76 MJ
·HD 12661 - 2.83 MJ
·HD 169830 - 2.94 MJ
·14 Herculis - 3.3 MJ
·GJ 3021 - 3.37 MJ
·HD 80606 - 3.90 MJ
·HD 195019 - 3.43 MJ
·HD 213240 - 3.7 MJ
·GJ 86 - 4 MJ
·Tau Boötis - 3.87 MJ (0.25-AU)
·HD 50554 - 4.9 MJ
·HD 190228 - 4.99 MJ
·HD 168443 - 7.2 and 17.1 MJ
·HD 222582 - 5.4 MJ
·HD 28185 - 5.6 MJ
·HD 178911 B - 6.47 MJ
·HD 10697 - 6.59 MJ
·70 Virginis - 6.6 MJ (0.5AU)
·HD 106252 - 6.81 MJ
·HD 89744 - 7.2 MJ
·HD 141937 - 9.7 MJ
·HD 114762 - 11 MJ (0.5-AU)

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/catalog.html

Fermi Paradox

The commonly held belief that the universe has many technologically advanced civilizations combined with our observations that suggest otherwise, appears to be paradoxical, suggesting that either our understanding or our observations are flawed or incomplete. The Femi paradox, after Enrico Fermi who first publicised the subject, suggests that our understanding of what is a "conservative" value for some of the parameters may be overly optimistic or that some other factor is involved to eradicate the development of intelligent space-faring life.

Many people believe that extraterrestrial life exists and that there are many planets in our own galaxy that harbor life. The idea that life is common everywhere and propelled from star to star by the pressure of starlight was proposed by Svante Arrhenius, who called it "panspermia," but this theory is now in disfavor.

Some believe that our current knowledge of both chemistry and of biology strongly indicates that life is an exceptionally improbable thing to arise spontaneously. "Strong life" proponents counter that because life arose on Earth as soon as the crust cooled, life itself must be intrinsically linked with
terrestrial planet formation. Current data on this issue seems to support this
second view or a related hypothesis that life originated elsewhere within the
solar system and was transported to the Earth by a meteorite.

The fact that signs of life on Earth seem to be present almost as soon as it cooled enough to support it, that life has been found in a variety of environments once thought incapable of supporting it, that planet formation seems to be fairly common, and that conditions to support bacterial life seem to exist elsewhere in our own solar system all support the position that life should be fairly common. A statistical analysis that treats the question of life arising on a planet like winning a lottery—and generalizing from the special case that, on the only terrestrial world we have seen, the lottery was won—some astrobiologists have concluded that there seems to be at least a one-in-eight chance per billion years of "appropriate" conditions that life will form.

As for the Earthly origin of life, it now seems fairly certain that it began within our solar system. The hard radiation of interstellar space coupled with
the extremely low probability that any extra-solar rocks capable of protecting
life in the harsh inter-stellar environment have ever struck the Earth seem to
indicate that, if terrestrial life originated elsewhere, it would almost certainly have to have been carried here on purpose. It is possible that life was brought here, but, if so, it becomes difficult to explain why the first forms of life were simple, single-celled life instead of further up the evolutionary chain.


A widely-accepted view is that terrestrial life originated on the Earth itself.
Lately, there has been increasingly more support for an idea first mentioned by Lord Kelvin— that life first came about on Mars and was transported to Earth by a meteorite. This latter position is defended on the basis that conditions which might support Earth-compatible life existed within a relatively short distance hundreds of millions of years before the Earth cooled. The more improbable that one deems life beginning spontaneously, the more likely it becomes that life arose first on Mars.

The issue of whether intelligent life develops as readily as simpler forms is
still an open question.




The Rare Earth Hypothesis

An emerging line of thought even argues that multicellular life may be exceedingly rare in the universe because of a probable rarity of Earth-like planets. This line of reasoning has been dubbed the Rare Earth hypothesis and relies on that fact that many improbable coincidences converged to make complex life on Earth possible.

Spiral arms have many novas, and the radiation from them is believed inimical to higher life. The solar system is in a very special orbit within the galaxy. It is a nearly perfect circular orbit, at a distance in which the solar system moves at the same speed as the shock waves forming the spiral arms. The Earth has been between spiral arms for hundreds of millions of years, more than thirty galactic orbits, almost all of the time there has been higher life on Earth.

Another crucial item is the moon. Many scientists believe it was formed by a rare collision between the young Earth and a Mars-sized body 4,450 million years ago. The collision had to occur at an exact angle; too direct and Earth would have been obliterated, too shallow and the Mars-sized body would have been deflected. This giant impact sent much of the felsic rich mantle of Earth into orbit. The removal of light-rock types (felsic rock) allowed for the formation of the first ocean basins (which are heavier (mafic) rock). The impact spun the Earth. Lunar tides stabilize the Earth's axis. The axis of rotation of a sphere is unstable, and if the Earth's axis varied, the weather would vary dramatically over periods too short for animals to evolve. Lunar tides also have helped heat the mantle. The molten mantle generates the magnetic field of the Earth. The magnetic field shields the Earth's air from the solar wind, which would otherwise acclerate light molecules away, sapping the air and water over a period of a few million years.

Furthermore, the presence of different crustal rock types allows for the existence of plate tectonics, which recycles limestone into biologically-active carbon dioxide. This is just part of the Rare Earth hypothesis.

Current Data

Our solar system if seen from a radio telescope within a few tens of light years away would seem unusual for the huge amount of radio waves being emitted from what appears to be an otherwise unremarkable main sequence star. One can presume that a similar solar system civilization nearby would be immediately characterized as unusual by us.

Radio and observational data have for several decades been collected and analyzed by such projects as Project Ozma, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and the various projects searching for extrasolar planets.
So far the SETI data seem to indicate that we are the only radio-transmitting
species in at least that portion of our part of the Galaxy that has been surveyed; there are no known main sequence stars with unusually bright radio emissions. In addition, to date, the majority of the extrasolar planetary
systems that have been found appear to be harsh environments for advanced life-forms.

Some people contend that these results probably have a significant amount of sampling error: that we are searching the wrong radio frequencies in SETI and that we can more easily find planetary systems with planetary orbits and
configurations that are less stable than our own. Still other people contend that we are probably the only spacefaring species in at least our galaxy; otherwise we would be awash in their radio transmissions, and have already been overrun by early colonization efforts.

The Argument Over the Premise Behind the Fermi Paradox

Some of those who subscribe to the Fermi principle state that given enough time to develop, the radio transmissions of any sufficiently advanced civilization will begin to outshine their parent star in the radio part of the spectrum.

Further, the mediocrity principle states that physical laws are the same throughout the Universe and the development of anything within the Universe has to follow these laws. Since the use of the electromagnetic spectrum for information transmission is relatively cheap and easy, one would expect any technological civilization to take advantage of at least a part of this spectrum during their development. We have been actively searching for extraterrestrial signals for almost 30 years with projects such as SETI and have been passively listening to radio static for nearly 100. During this entire period we have yet to hear any confirmed alien broadcasts nor have we observed any main sequence stars with unusual electromagnetic radio signatures that might indicate a technological civilization.

Those that believe the galaxy has many technologically advanced civilizations
counter that the extraterrestrials may simply be using a medium other than radio or they eventually choose to hide their transmissions for some unknown reason.

This could very well be so, proponents of the Fermi Principle say, but only if there are very few such civilizations in both space and time and they very quickly abandon radio as a means of data transmission. Either way, they say, if there were very many of these civilizations their transmissions would make a large impact on at least some part of the electromagnetic spectrum for at least some part of their development. They further state, that if there are as many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations as Drake and Sagan have estimated, then their presence would be made obvious by their transmissions.

The Anthropic Principle

Those that believe the Fermi Principle also state that from the Anthropic Principle one can see as a logical fallacy the following statement: "With billions of galaxies and countless trillions of planets in the Universe, intelligent life must exist somewhere besides Earth. After all intelligent life happened here, so why not on many of the trillions of other worlds? It is illogical to think that we are the only one." With the Anthropic Principle, Fermi Principle adherents say, one can quickly point out that if a particular planet is the only planet out of the trillions that has intelligent life on it, it would be certain that the people there would assume that they couldn't be the only planet with intelligent life. They would think that, given the sheer numbers of other worlds, there must be others like themselves in the Universe. However, the Anthropic Principle makes it necessary to gather additional information before such an assumption could be made.

Freeman Dyson's Contribution

Popularized by Dr. Freeman Dyson, a Dyson Sphere is an opaque shell around a star. Such a shell would be created by advanced alien civilizations that wished to harness as much of the radiant energy of their sun as possible. The exact design of the Dyson sphere was not specified; it could consist of billions of independent solar collectors and space habitats or be a single unified structure, but in any case it would be made of solid matter and would intercept most of the star's emitted light to re-radiate as waste heat. A star surrounded by a Dyson sphere would thus emit a distinctive black body spectrum without the strong emission lines that incandescent stellar plasma exhibits, probably with its peak unusually far into the infrared for a star of its size. With this speculation, he advised astronomers to search the night sky for unusually colored stars, which, he postulated, could only signify highly advanced and intelligent life. No such stars have yet been found.

Some adherents to the Fermi Principle state that it is highly unlikely that all advanced civilizations would not eventually take full advantage of the power source of their home star, and in doing so changing the electromagnetic signature of their sun.

Dr. Dyson also proposed a type of invention which he deemed likely to appear within the life-span of an intelligent civilization, the absence of which tends to support the Fermi Principle. He said that he thought that it would soon be possible for us to create an explorer-device which drew power from its surroundings to propel itself through the universe in search of intelligent life forms. Moreover, it would be possible to create versions of this device which could create and launch vast numbers of copies of itself by the process of machine reproduction. Even allowing for the realities of vast distances between stars and the relativistic speed-limit, if intelligent life were common, stars in our own galaxy much older than our own would be within a range to have built and launched fleets of these automated exploration devices.

Extraterrestrial Colonization

Adherents to the Fermi Principle furthermore argue that, from what we know about life's ability to overcome scarcity and colonize new habitats on our own planet, we can reasonably assume that life elsewhere will follow similar principles. Given this, Fermi Principle adherents state that any advanced civilization will almost certainly try to seek out new resources and colonize first their solar system, and then surrounding solar systems. Several writers have tried to estimate the amount of time it would take for such a civilization to colonize the entire galaxy. What they have determined is that it would take 5 to 50 million years to accomplish this feat [1] - which is a tiny amount of time on even a geologic scale (not to mention a Galactic one).

Conclusions to the Fermi paradox

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