Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:  And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

   — Shakespeare,
       Hamlet

 
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 How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

   — Donald Menzuel
       quoting Sherlock
       Holmes (1953)

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UFOs — Low Signal-to-Noise Ratio

What we have here is a signal-to-noise ratio problem: There is indeed a fantastic amount of noise, represented by the many misidentification of familiar objects seen under unusual or surprising circumstances — balloons, birds, satellites, meteors, aircraft, stars — yet, in all scientific honesty, one is led to ask whether there might not indeed be a signal somewhere in the noise.

   — Dr. J. Allen Hynek (1966)

Ken Arnold's 1947 UFO Sighting

Kenneth Arnold - Flying Saucer - UFO Sighting - kenneth_arnold_sighting_1000f.jpg - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

Artist's Impression of Crescent-shaped UFOs
Sighted by Businessman-Pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947

Excerpted from YouTube
"[DVD] Ultimate UFO! - Part 1-1.avi"

Uploaded to YouTube by "dennyfromspace" on August 16, 2008

Info/Description: From around the world and across five decades come 250 film clips from 26 countries (and outer space!) backed up by fully authentic US government documents, many formerly classified "SECRET".

Ultimate UFO! Is the most comprehensive collection of UFO film and video clips ever assembled--more than five and-a-half hours' worth--covering almost fifty years of sightings! This DVD includes excerpts from the USAF's Project Blue Book Archive, Gulf Breeze, and Mexico City footage, official NASA footage from the Gemini, Apollo, and Discovery missions, and many other actual and purported UFO clips! Ultimate UFO! Also includes explosive selections from the now legendary Majestic-12 papers, the most controversial documents in UFO history!

 

Tags:  Ultimate UFO! Part 1950 1989

"THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE"

A multitude of theories, hypotheses, and feverish beliefs surround UFOs. Yet, paradoxically, everyone wants one tidy explanation. My feeling is that the truth lies on a continuum stretching from naturalistic explanations to metaphysical formulations. In other words, the answer is "all of the above". Each theory probably does explain some UFO sightings -- but no one theory explains all of them.

   — Dr. Virginia Bennett, UFOs
         (Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing)

UFO Mystery & Politicians

Many people believe that only the 'illiterate hillbilly-types' are concerned with or encounter extraterrestrial [ET] activity. There is no truth whatsoever to these claims.

  • [The late World War II British Prime Minister] Winston Churchill secretly feared an ET invasion ....

  • ... most American Presidents, this century [20th Century], have taken the [UFO-cum-Aliens/ETs] matter very seriously.

    • According to the Earl of Clancarty, alias Brinsley Le Poer Trench, President Eisenhower met with a group of human-looking aliens in 1954. These beings showed the President their craft and demonstrated their ability to make themselves invisible [cited source — Timothy Green Beckley, UFOs Among the Stars (1992), p.88].

    • Gerald Ford, before he moved in to the White House, stated that he thought the government was hiding something [cited source — Ibid., pp.88-89] ...

    • Jimmy Carter publicly reported having seen a UFO. In September 1973, he announced at a speaking engagement in Dublin, Georgia:

      I don't laugh at people anymore when they say they've seen UFOs, because I've seen them myself.

      The event took place at 7.15 pm on October 1969 in Leary, Georgia. He promptly reported the occurrence to his, then Press Secretary, Jody Powell, and to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP) who filed it under reference number: 301-949-1267. [cited source — Ibid., p.89] ...

    • [The late ex-President of the United States, Ronald] Reagan ... believed in the existence of alien beings. Not only did he see a UFO with his wife Nancy [sic; perhaps "Not only did he and his wife Nancy see a UFO], but often voiced his concerns about an alien invasion [cited source — Timothy Green Beckley, UFOs Among the Stars (1992), p.92]. On September 21st 1987, he spoke these words to the United Nations General Assembly:
      In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognise this common bond. I occasionally think, how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

   — Adapted from Christian von Nidda's Our Secret Planet
         (2005)


"What if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by an outer ... a power from outer space, from another planet?" — Ronald Reagan

   — Richard Belzer, UFOs, JFK, and Elvis
        Sub-title: Conspiracies You Don't Have To Be Crazy To Believe
         (New York, NY: Ballantine Books)


1.0   Preamble

Hi there!

This is a webpage about UFOs ... a humongously-large area of study that we shall collectively referred to as the UFO Mystery.

1.1   Why UFOs?

Why UFOs, you ask?

That's an excellent question ... After all, this kind of sensationalism is something I had resolved to avoid from the start, when I had decided to construct a website to examine the Mysteries of the World. Then, I realized it was inevitable ... given not only the nature of Mysteries ... but also due to the fact that because the topic of UFOs has been sensationalised too much already, it would therefore be educational to examine the topic of UFOs as an example of where such sensationalisations may take us afar from the truth.

In this webpage, I will start off by recalling what brought on this inclusion of UFOs as a direct result of building a website with pages and pages about various Mysteries and Mysteries-related topics, where each page is based on a keyword — resulting in a website based on the concept of the KFCP ... No! not Kentucky Fried Chicken Plate ... but "Keyword-Focused Content Page" ...The idea is simple enough: keywords are crucial.


UFO Mystery is Controversial ...!

No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century, even as H. G. Wells was writing his War of the Worlds, that the 20th century [and 21st century] would witness on a sporadic but large scale a strange new phenomenon in the skies of planet Earth, that this phenomenon, eventually known as "flying saucers" or "unidentified flying objects (UFOs)", would become the subject of raging controversy among scientists and the public alike; and that — for better or worse — this controversy would become intimately associated with the debate over the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence [ETI].

   — Steven J. Dick
        Life on Other Worlds:
        The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate

        (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

1.2   Questions about UFOs

Some of the questions that should be asked vis-a-vis the UFO Mystery — we just consider it collectively, and use the singular noun, 'Mystery' — include the following:

  • What exactly is a UFO?
  • Are we kidding ourselves with the UFO issue?
  • Is there a cover-up?
  • Why are we no nearer to a resolution?

Now, I know that, in the humdrum and mundane world of everyday living and work life, these questions about UFOs may appear to be unimportant, and you may want to say "Get a Life!" ... but hey! Wait one cotton-picking minute!

Let's see what one very intelligent person has to say ... here's the quote:


Quote from Einstein

einstein,genius,mystery,sense of wonder - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion."



Now, if you wanna disagree with good old (and dead) Einy, be my guest!

But the real issue ... the real question is ... "Have you lost your sense of wonder?"



Sorry! Don't mean to come on that strong about it!

But, you know? ...

Take a break ...

Now, let's see what there is to see ...

Let's get cracking, shall we?


2.0   "UFO Haiti"

Before we look at the above and other questions about the UFO Mystery, we should note that, unless we have physical evidence that we could examine under laboratory conditions, all we are going to be investigating are reports about UFOs and UFO sightings ... and these reports are essentially anecdoctal evidence, which is not only unsatisfactory (e.g., because not repeatable and not "falsifiable" in the usual way of "hypothesis testing"), but can be easily faked. And some of these reports comprise not only verbal or written text, but also audio, photographic and video "evidence". (It should also be noted that "evidence" does not necessarily equate to "proof".)

Of course, video evidence is the most exciting and compelling aspect of these UFO sighting reports. But videos can be mostly easily faked ...



3.0   Debunking UFOs

Dr. Michael Shermer,skeptics society,skeptic magazine - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.comBut Nicolas' "UFO Haiti" video and similar video pranks and hoaxes aside, what's the truth about UFOs? Fascination over the UFO Mystery continues and the debates and controversies don't seem to want to go away anytime soon ...

Here is one view from Dr. Michael Shermer, a professional skeptic associated with the Skeptics Society as its Executive Director, and who, for his trouble, gets to be called a "debunker" — which he says is "kind of a negative term, but let's face it, there's a lot of 'bunk!'".


If you want to hear a brief introduction about Dr. Shermer, please click the audio player below:



Anyway, Dr. Shermer is adamant that most, if not all, of the reported UFO sightings are not real — especially if the UFOs have anything to do with the so-called 'Crop Circles' (which is, of course, a most silly and pointless aberration of people who really need to 'get a life').

Dr. Michael Shermer,skeptics society,skeptic magazine,TED Conference - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

Below is an excerpt of a flash video entitled "Why People Believe Strange Things".

In the video excerpt, Dr. Shermer tells us about how those who work with Science (and Skepticism) would view UFOs and the silly 'Crop Circles' phenomenon.

The video clip is a recording of Dr. Shermer's lecture delivered at the 2006 TED Conference, held in Monterey, California. (TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design)

"Why People Believe Strange Things"
TED 2006 Conference @ Monterey, California
(TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design)



Download?
CLICK HERE!
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4.0   What's a UFO, Anyway?

Okay!

Enough of all these preamble remarks and 'techie' twaddles or fiddlings ...

Let's explore the topic proper ...

What's that first question about UFOs? Oh yeah, "What exactly is a UFO?"

Well ... The quick and simple answer is that a UFO is anything's that flying around and which is quite unidentified or unexplained so far! That's what the acronym UFO stands for, right?

I mean ... how profound an answer do we need? A UFO is unidentified and it's flying, period!


Perhaps, it is the fact that UFOs are unidentified and flying that makes them intriguing! Of course, it is not necessarily the case that a UFO must have anything to do with ETs (extraterrestrials) and the 'greys' (aliens).

Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH)

The rise of the extraterrestrial hypothesis [ETH] of UFOs ... is characterized by:

  • a central role for the media,

  • a schizophrenic attitude by the U.S. Air Force, and

  • (with two outstanding exceptions) the lack of substantial scientific participation.

While much of the media — with their usual mixed motives of truth and profit — continually pushed the extraterrestrial hypothesis on a receptive public, and while the Air Force was understandably preoccupied with national security aspects of the issue, scientists in many ways abdicated their role as critical analyzers of an unexplained phenomenon.

In part this was due to the reluctance of scientists to engage in a controversial issue that would do nothing to advance their careers and might do their reputation great harm.

In part the fleeting nature of the phenomenon and the resulting lack of hard data precluded easy scientific analysis, at least by the way of the normal scientific methodology.

And perhaps most significant, the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence [ETI] — the favored explanation for UFOs among the media and the public — was not yet a part of the collective scientific consciousness, as it certainly would be in later years.

For all these reasons, the UFO controversy ... assumes the surrealistic character of mostly nonscientific individuals and organizations thrashing about in the midst of a potentially significant phenomenon, resulting in sporadic reaction rather than systematic study.

And yet, for all that, it is unique in eliciting public and scientific attitudes toward extraterrestrial life that otherwise would never have been expressed.

   — Adapted from Steven J. Dick's
       Life on Other Worlds:
       The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate

       (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

The interpretation of UFOs varies over the centuries. There had been UFO sightings in Antiquity, and strange aerial phenomena have also been observed even earlier than that age. But it is unlikely that those UFOs were interpreted as alien spacecraft at the time! Most likely, the explanation then would tend towards the mystical and supernatural, including God, gods, angels, the Devil and assorted demons, witches and wizards, the occult, and the like. People were more primitive then, right?

Right!

Nowadays, of course, the interpretation of UFOs by the popular imagination is influenced by our knowledge and experience with high technology (such as autos, TVs, computers, iPhones, iPods, and similar stuff), as well as with the idea of space travel. We also realize that we live in a really vast, perhaps infinite, Universe that consists of planets, stars and galaxies, and groups and clusters and superclusters of galaxies, and that there is a possibility of extraterrestrial (ET) life and even ET intelligence 'out there'. Intelligent, sentient and hopefully sapien ETs is what SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is about.

Thus, the most popular picture of UFOs today is that they are some form of spacecraft being flown by aliens. This has been encouraged and reinforced by authors of UFOs and ETs books.

The UFO — and the Extraterrestrial Intelligence implied whenever someone says unidentified flying object — is one of the greatest mysteries of modern times. Elusive, shape-shifting, always just beyond our reach or comprehension, the UFO represents a horizon of possibility that threatens to affect everything we think we know about ourselves, the Earth, the Cosmos, even the Spirit.

Anyone who's looked long and hard at the topic knows what I'm talking about — since they'll have progressed beyond the tabloid nonsense peddled by the media or the kneejerk dismissals of most scientists and academics who haven't really bothered to examine the data.

They'll know that the UFO phenomenon is profound and unsettling.

Why?

Because it shows a great power, largely hidden from us.

Because it implies a superior and alien intelligence.

And because it defies our attempts at understanding it, often behaving as if it were simply toying with us or deceiving us, both as to its reasons for being here, as well as to its motives for doing what it does.

   — From "Preface By Michael Miley" (adapted)
       (Contributing Editor, UFO Magazine)
       in clinical hypnotherapist Dr. Virginia Bennett's book UFOs


One early author of UFO books was Morris Ketchum Jessup (1900-1959), who wrote that 1955 classic book, The Case for the UFO. In the book and the accompanying publicity tour, Jessup speculated that UFOs were exploratory spacecraft.

Morris Ketchum Jessup (1900-1959) - The Case for the UFO (1955) - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

It is not easy (some say "impossible") to find MK Jessup's classic book today, as only a small number was ever printed before his suicide four years later in 1959.

The UFOMystic website writes that Jessup "was found dead in his car on April 20, 1959, a hose running from the tailpipe to one of the windows. Most sober writers and friends of Jessup accepted that he had killed himself, but the paranoid wing of the UFO crowd still maintain that he was silenced by shadowy operatives". (www.ufomystic.com/wake-up-down-there/ufo-parnoia-jessup/)

MIBs, anyone? (Men in Black, duh!)

Anyway, I did manage to find a website called 'The Cassiopaea Experiment' (www.cassiopaea.org/cass/jessup.htm), which had extracts of Jessup's book. (The homepage states that "Cassiopaea.org and Cassiopaea.com and Quantum Future.net are the websites founded by Theoretical Physicist Arkadiusz Jadczyk and his wife, amateur historian and writer, Laura Knight-Jadczyk.")

There is also an "Annotated" version of MK Jessup's book that was published by the then "Varo Corporation", which did research for the military and was definitely very friendly or connected with the Office of Naval Research, or ONR, in Washington, D.C. It was the ONR who originally contacted Jessup in the spring of 1957, because they had received by mail, a copy of Jessup's book that had been heavily highlighted and "annotated" by person or persons unknown.

Click here to read more about Morris Jessup's book The Case for the UFO (1955) and some extracts of what he wrote about the UFOs that we found relevant or interesting.

Anyway, here is a URL for a PDF copy of the Varo Edition of the mysterious "annotated" Jessup book:

www.americanantigravity.com/documents/Jessup_Case_for_the_UFO_Annotated.pdf

Based on handwriting analysis of earlier mail that Jessup had received prior to being contacted by the ONR, it appeared that the "annotated" version of MK Jessup's book contained highlighted text and annotations by a certain "Carlos Allende" (aka "Carl M. Allen"?), the sailor responsible as the originator of the Philadelphia Experiment story. (We will present the Phily matter on another webpage!)

According to respected UFO researcher, or UFOlogist, Jerome Clark, who wrote and edited The UFO Encyclopedia: the Phenomenon from the Beginning (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1998; Visible Ink, 2005), it was MK Jessup who "linked ancient monuments with prehistoric superscience" years before similar claims were made by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods?. Clark also wrote that in ufological circles, Jessup was evidently regarded as "probably the most original extraterrestrial hypothesiser of the 1950s".

Erich von Däniken - Chariots of the Gods? - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

Here is one thing that is also evident ... It is quite clear that Kenneth Arnold's description of his 1947 UFO sighting, and the subsequent publicity that had resulted in UFOs being popularly referred to as "flying saucers" — even though many other UFO sightings point to different UFO shapes, and some UFOs were just 'lights in the sky' — had contributed to the public's mind of UFOs being flying saucers flown by aliens!

UFO visitations - Erich von Däniken - Chariots of the Gods? - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

Thus, it is not surprising that authors like MK Jessup (in his 1955 book and subsequent 3 books) would theorize about alien spacecraft flying in the skies of our planet Earth.

Jessup had also theorized that the UFOs may be using some form of 'anti-gravity'.


5.0   Close Encounters of the Biblical Kind?

An interesting twist to this UFO Mystery is that, with our modern perspective about space travel, UFOs have even been suggested for the 'happenings' (events) in Biblical times. For example, a 1710 painting by Aert de Gelder, which was named "The Baptism of Christ", has UFO proponents saying that the painting depicts a UFO. If you had been alive back in Jesus' time or even in the early 18th century, it is unlikely you would think "UFO". It would have been more than likely that you would have been thinking of angels, or God the Holy Spirit, etc. ... But ETs and spacecrafts — those would not have been anywhere near your mental horizon.

The Baptism of Christ (1710) - Aert de Gelder - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com


5.1   Pillars of God?

And remember the events described in the Exodus in the Old Testament? (Or in the "Hebrew Bible" — same difference, as my son used to like to say! He's much older now, so he no longer speaks like a teenager).

You know? That bit about the "pillar of cloud by day" and "pillar of fire by night" following and guiding the Hebrews across the desert and the Red Sea?

"What's that all about?", you might be asking.

Well, to the faithful, of course, those were manifestations of the God of the Hebrews (aka Israelites). God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob/Israel. God Jehovah, aka Yahweh, Himself (Yahveh, if you've got German leanings) — or maybe (not 'revealed' specifically!) it was Jesus, aka Yahshua (where "Yahshua", or "Yahushua", is Hebrew/Aramaic for "Yahweh saves!" or "Yahweh is salvation!").

Here are the relevant verses, not only from Exodus, but also from several other books of the Old Testament ...

Exodus 13:21-22  By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.


pillar of cloud,exodus,moses,hebrews,israelites - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com"Exodus & Pillar of Cloud"

pillar of fire,exodus,moses,hebrews,israelites - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com"Exodus & Pillar of Fire"

Exodus 14:24  During the last watch of the night the Lord looked down from the pillar of fire and cloud at the Egyptian army and threw it into confusion.


pillar of fire,exodus,moses,hebrews,israelites - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com"Exodus & Pillar of Fire"

Numbers 14:14  And they will tell the inhabitants of this land about it. They have already heard that you, O LORD, are with these people and that you, O LORD, have been seen face to face, that your cloud stays over them, and that you go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

Deuteronomy 1:33  Who went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents in, in fire by night, to shew you by what way ye should go, and in a cloud by day.

Nehemiah 9:12  By day you led them with a pillar of cloud, and by night with a pillar of fire to give them light on the way they were to take.

Nehemiah 9:19  Because of your great compassion you did not abandon them in the desert. By day the pillar of cloud did not cease to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take.

(NIV - New International Version)


5.2   Chariots of the Gods?

But, listen!

When I was much younger, I read Erich von Däniken's book, Chariots of the Gods? (1970), which we already mentioned earlier on (in section "4. What's a UFO, Anyway?", above ... about Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the God?) ...

And von Däniken, of course, said that those pillars of cloud and fire were UFOs operating in Biblical times!

That's great imagination, if Däniken's claim is false.

But if it's true, it would throw a whole new light on the Bible — and the Christian faith ...


5.3   Science & UFO-ET Visitations
        —Chariots of the Gods?


5.3.1   Two Options

Usually, there are two ways to treat any ancient document, such as the Bible: either you 'believed' in the material as a matter of your 'faith' or you don't.


5.3.2   Option #1

If you adopt the first option, that's OK; nothing wrong with it. After all, it's a personal decision which you have a right to do (and you may then have to respect other people's right to their own 'faith', but we won't go into that!).

Basically, the first option is a matter of your 'faith' and also probably a part of your overall 'belief system' or 'world view' or 'paradigm' ... call it what you will, it's yours!

But note this: it probably means also the end of the discussion or conversation or chain of enquiry. In other words, you would not then be examining the Bible — or any ancient document — as just (another) ancient document that may contain information and records and observations about potential ancient-time (Biblical-time) UFO sightings and alien encounters, and other occurrences (e.g., astronomical events, such as supernovae, eclipses, planetary conjunctions).


5.3.3   Option #2

What if you should choose the second option? Well, if you choose not to believe in the Bible (or any other ancient document) as anything other than just another ancient document to be studied scientifically and scholarly (even theologically?), then you probably can then proceed further along your exploration and investigation of the phenomenon or Mystery, in this case, the UFO Mystery.


5.3.4   Option #3 (!?)

Actually, there is a third option, although it is a fine or even a dicey one, if I may use that word ('dicey') without you thinking that 'dicey' necessarily relates to 'dodgy'!

This third option means that you still have your 'faith' in the Bible as a source of Divine Revelation, but you are willing to concede that certain passages in the Bible, for whatever reasons and motivations, may contain information and records and observations that can be studied to move us along the enquiry chain, including this exploration of possible "Close Encounters" with UFOs and ETs during Biblical or Ancient times.

This third option is the one I choose to take!

I think it is the one that many may also have taken! (But I have no data, sorry!)

Anyway, Option #3 doesn't negate my 'faith' as a Charismatic Christian, although it may 'angrify' (to cause to have anger) some Christians if they learn about it. But, believe me when I say that the Bible teaches us not to be men-pleasers but to be God-pleasers, so I don't worry at all what any other Christian think of my adopting the third option (I just pray that God's not too upset!).

Anyway, I don't wish to judge anyone (especially another Christian), because Jesus taught us "Judge not, that ye be not judged." (Matthew 7:1). So if any other Christian wants to judge me, let him or her be prepared to answer, at the Great White Throne Judgment Day (Revelation 21:11-15), why they choose to disobey Jesus who is the Christ and who commanded: "Judge not, that ye be not judged."

One more thing: The reason why I did not choose the second option is because that's usually the option chosen by the atheists and agnostics and so on (including non-believers). I am not an atheist, nor am I an agnostic, and I am clearly not a non-believer, since I have already stated in this website that I am a Charismatic Christian. So I embrace Option 3, as explained above.

But whether option 2 or 3, the question of the possibility that our Planet Earth may have been visited by 'ancient astronauts' can be addressed, and we can move forward along our enquiry, exploration, investigation, discovery ...


5.4   Dr. Sagan's Intelligent Life in the Universe

It is clear to me that many scientists — such as the late Dr. Carl Sagan (1934-1996), who is an avowed athesist, and who, by profession, was an astronomer as well as an exobiologist — have addressed this question of possible alien visitation in Earth's past ages.

Dr. Sagan collaborated with the world-famous Russian astronomer Iosif Samuilovich Shklovskii (1916-1985) to translate, annotate, extend, revise and re-publish a book that originally was written by Shklovskii and published, in Russian, in 1962, as Universe, Life, Intelligence by the USSR Academy of Sciences Publisher. The new Shklovskii-Sagan book was named Intelligent Life in the Universe and was first published in 1966 (which, you noticed, was two years earlier than Erich von Däniken's 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods?). One of the latest reissues of the Shklovskii-Sagan book was published in 1998 by the Emerson-Adams Press.

I. S. Shklovskii & Carl Sagan - Intelligent Life in the Universe - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

In that book, Shklovskii and his American counterpart Dr. Sagan, wrote that:

Our tiny corner of the universe may have been visited thousands of times in the past few billions of years. At least one of these visits may have occurred in historical times.

Actually, to be fair to Erich von Däniken, he also did asked questions that are similar to questions that scientists also asked. For example, the title of von Däniken's Chapter 1 is "Are there intelligent Beings in the Cosmos?", which is a fair question to ask, and is actually the basis for the SETI (or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) effort. But ... cough! ... the tone of jeering at "traditional archaeology" doesn't help von Däniken's cause!

In any case, we have no clear-cut physical evidence of any UFO visitations during the Earth's past. They left no physical remains, as far as we know. So such visitations remains within the realm of speculation and plausible theorizing. In other words, UFO & ET visitations remain a possibility; but, as I always maintain:

A possibility does not equal to a reality!

We shouldn't attribute any unexplained ancient mystery to visitations by UFOs and ETs, just because we now understand about space travel and similar technological wonders.

Especially, we should not jump to such wild conclusions and theorizing that visitations by members of some super-technological 'Alien Nation' are meant for 'seeding' our planet (however you want to interpret that — use your imagination!), nor should we speculate that these aliens, benign or otherwise, are still maintaining a guardianship 'watch' (or, horrors! 'animal husbandry' watch) over our civilization!

While books by Erich von Däniken and similarly-minded authors can be 'an interesting read' (especially on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon!), they are regarded by the mainstream as part of 'The Fringe'.

Indeed, there appears to be a tendency among the authors of popular books on UFOs and alien-encounters to interpret events recorded in the Bible and other ancient texts, in terms of UFOs and alien visitations.

Erich von Däniken is one of the first to do so, but he was not the earliest ... we have already seen that MK Jessup (1900-1959) wrote that 1955 UFO classic entitled The Case for the UFO. Jessup followed it with 3 other books, namely UFOs and the Bible (1956), The UFO Annual (also 1956) and The Expanding Case for the UFO (1957). All of Jessup's books predate von Däniken's 1968 Chariots.

In UFOs and the Bible, this is what Jessup had to say about the close encounters of the Biblical kind:

"There is a causal common denominator for many of the Biblical wonders ... this common cause is related to the phenomena of the UFO, both directly and indirectly."

Another author also had Biblical close encounters in mind when he wrote that

"I personally find the suggestion that the parting of the Red Sea was deliberately caused by intelligent beings in some sort of space vehicle to be the most persuasive explanation available at the present time."

That came from Barry H. Downing, author of a book with a really interesting and audacious title: The Bible and Flying Saucers (Philadelphia, J. P. Lippincott, 1968) — that is, Downing's book was published at about the same time (or year) as von Däniken's 1968 Chariots. Anyway, Downing's book has the sub-title: An Inquiry into Some Possibilities. In other words, Downing believes in the possibility that the parting of the Red Sea was accomplished by aliens in a cylinder-shaped UFO ("pillars", remember?) hovering over the waters of the Red Sea.

Barry H. Downing - The Bible and Flying Saucers - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

For the mainstream, or in this case, the orthodox faith or religion (i.e., religious mainstream), all these suggested close encounters of the Biblical kind are just plain nonsense and even collectively constitutes an attack on their orthodox faith. For the UFO enthusiasts, the jury is still out!

Two ET-UFO Hypotheses

By Dr. Carl Sagan

There are two hypotheses of this sort that have gained a following in the popular literature.

  1. The first postulates that the Earth is today being visited by spacecraft from other worlds — this is the extraterrestrial flying saucer or unidentified flying object (UFO) hypothesis.
  2. The second also postulates that the Earth has been visited by such spacecraft, but in the past, before written history.

First ET-UFO Hypothesis

The extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFO origins is a complex subject, powerfully dependent on the reliability of witnesses. A comprehensive discussion of this problem has recently been published in UFO's: A Scientific Debate (Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, editors, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1972), in which all sides of the subject have been aired. My own view is that there are no cases that are simultaneously

  • very reliable (reported independently by a large number of witnesses) and
  • very exotic (not explicable in terms of reasonably postulated phenomena — as a strange moving light could be a searchlight from a weather airplane or a military aerial refueling operation).

There are no reliably reported cases of strange machines landing and taking off, for example.

There is another approach to the extraterrestrial hypothesis of UFO origins. This assessment depends on a large number of factors about which we know little, and a few about which we know literally nothing. I want to make some crude numerical estimates of the probability that we are frequently visited by extraterrestrial beings.

Now, there is a range of hypotheses that can be examined in such a way. Let me give a simple example: Consider the Santa Claus hypothesis, which maintains that, in a period of eight hours or so on December 24-25 of each year, an outsized elf visits one-hundred million homes in the United States. This is an interesting and widely discussed hypothesis. Some strong emotions ride on it, and it is argued that at least it does no harm.

We can do some calculations. Suppose that the elf in question spends one second per house. This isn't quite the usual picture — "Ho, Ho, Ho," and so on — but imagine that he is terribly efficient and very speedy; that would explain why nobody ever sees him very much — only one second per house, after all. With a hundred-million houses, he has to spend three years just filling stockings. I have assumed he spends no time at all in going from house to house. Even with relativistic reindeer, the time spent in a hundred-million houses is three years and not eight hours. This is an example of hypothesis-testing independent of reindeer propulsion mechanisms or debates on the origins of elves. We examine the hypothesis itself, making very straightforward assumptions, and derive a result inconsistent with the hypothesis by many orders of magnitude. We would then suggest that the hypothesis is untenable.

We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars. The report rates, at least in recent years, have been several per day, at the very least. I will not make that assumption. I will make the much more conservative assumption that one such report per year corresponds to a true interstellar visitation. Let's see what this implies.

We have to have some feeling for the number, N, of extant technical civilizations in the Galaxy — that is, civilizations vastly in advance of our own, civilizations that are able, by whatever means, to perform interstellar space flight. (While the means are difficult, they don't enter into this discussion, just as reindeer propulsion mechanisms don't affect our discussion of the Santa Claus hypothesis.)

An attempt has been made to specify explicitly the factors that enter a determination of the number of such technical civilizations in the Galaxy. I will not here run through what numbers have been assigned to the various quantities involved — it's a multiplication of many probabilities, and the likelihood that we can make a good judgment decreases as we proceed down the list. N depends first on the mean rate at which stars are formed in the Galaxy, a number that is known reasonably well. It depends on the number of stars that have planets, which is less well known, but there are some data on that. It depends on the fraction of such planets that are so suitably located with respect to their star that the environment is a feasible one for the origin of life. It depends on the fraction of such otherwise feasible planets on which the origin of life, in fact, occurs. It depends on the fraction of those planets on which the origin of life occurs in which, after life has arisen, an intelligent form comes into being. It depends on the fraction of those planets in which intelligent forms have arisen that evolve a technical civilization substantially in advance of our own. And it depends on the average lifetime of such a technical civilization.

It is clear that we are rapidly running out of examples as we go farther and farther along. We have many stars, but only one instance of the origin of life, and only a very limited number — some would say only one — of instances of the evolution of intelligent beings and technical civilizations on this planet. And we have no cases whatever to make a judgment on the mean lifetime of a technical civilization. Nevertheless, there is an entertainment that some of us have been engaged in, making our best estimates about these numbers and coming out with a value of N. The result that emerges is that N roughly equals one tenth the average lifetime of a technical civilization in years.

If we put in a number like ten million (107) years for the average lifetime of advanced technical civilizations, we come out with a number for such technical civilizations in the Galaxy of about a million (106) that is, a million other stars with planets on which today there are advanced civilizations. This is quite a difficult calculation to do accurately. The choice of ten-million years for the average lifetime of a technical civilization is rather optimistic. But let's take these optimistic numbers and see where they lead us.

Let's assume that each of these million technical civilizations launches Q interstellar space vehicles a year, so that 106Q interstellar space vehicles are launched per year. Let's assume that there's only one contact made per journey. In the steady-state situation, there are something like 106Q arrivals somewhere or other per year. Now, there surely are something like 1010 interesting places in the Galaxy to go visit (we have several times 1011 stars) and, therefore, an average of 1/104 = 10-4 arrivals at a given interesting place (let's say a planet) per year. So if only one UFO is to visit the Earth each year, we can calculate what mean launch rate is required at each of these million worlds. The number turns out to be ten-thousand launches per year per civilization, and ten-billion launches in the Galaxy per year. This seems excessive. Even if we imagine a civilization much more advanced than ours, to launch ten-thousand such vehicles for only one to appear here is probably asking too much. And if we were more pessimistic on the lifetime of advanced civilizations, we would require a proportionately larger launch rate. But as the lifetime decreases, the probability that a civilization would develop interstellar flight very likely decreases as well.

There is a related point made by the American physicist Hong-Yee Chiu; he takes more than one UFO arriving at Earth per year, but his argument follows along the same lines as the one I have just presented. He calculates the total mass of metals involved in all of these space vehicles during this history of the Galaxy. The vehicle has to be of some size — it should be bigger than the Apollo capsule, let's say — and we can calculate how much metal is required. It turns out that the total mass of half a million stars has to be processed and all their metals extracted. Or if we extend the argument and assume that only the outer few hundred miles or so of stars like the Sun can be mined by advanced technologies (farther in, it's too hot), we find that two-billion such stars must be processed, or about 1 percent of the stars in the Galaxy. This also sounds unlikely.
Now you may say, "Well, that's a very parochial approach; maybe they have plastic spaceships." Yes, I suppose that's possible. But the plastic has to come from somewhere, and plastics vs. metals changes the conclusions very little. This calculation gives some feeling for the magnitude of the task when we are asked to believe that there are routine and frequent interstellar visits to our planet.

What about possible counterarguments? For example, it might be argued that we are the object of special attention — we have just developed all sorts of signs of civilization and high intelligence like nuclear weapons, and maybe, therefore, we are of particular interest to interstellar anthropologists. Perhaps.

  • But we have only signaled the presence of our technical civilization in the past few decades. The news can be only some tens of light-years from us.
  • Also, all the anthropologists in the world do not converge on the Andaman Islands because the fish net has just been invented there. There are a few fishnet specialists and a few Andaman specialists; and these guys say, "Well, there's something terrific going on in the Andaman Islands. I've got to spent a year there right away, because if I don't go now I'll miss out." But the pottery experts and the specialists in Australian aborigines don't pack up their bags and leave for the Indian Ocean.

To imagine that there is something absolutely fascinating about what is happening right here is precisely contrary to the idea that there are lots of civilizations around. Because if the latter is true, the development of our sort of civilization must be pretty common. And if we are not pretty common, then there are not going to be many civilizations advanced enough to send visitors.

Second ET-UFO Hypothesis

Even so, is it not possible that the second UFO hypothesis is true that in historical or recent prehistoric times an extraterrestrial space vehicle made landfall on Earth? There is surely no way in which we can exclude such a contingency. How could we prove it?

A number of popular books have recently been written that allege to demonstrate such a visitation. The arguments are of two sorts,

  • legend and
  • artifact.

Legends

I broached this subject in the book Intelligent Life in the Universe, written with the Soviet astrophysicist I. S. Shklovskii and published in 1966. I examined a typical legend suggestive of contact between our ancestors and an apparent representative of a superior society. The legend, taken from the earliest Sumerian mythology, is important, because the Sumerians are the direct cultural antecedents of our own civilization. A superior being was supposed to have taught the Sumerians mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, social and political organization, and written language — all the arts necessary for making the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to the first civilization.

But as provocative as this and similar legends were, I concluded that it was impossible to demonstrate extraterrestrial contact from such legends: There are plausible alternative explanations. We can understand why priests might make myths about superior beings who inhabit the skies and give directions to human beings on how to order their affairs. Among other "advantages," such legends permit the priests to control the people.

There is only one category of legend that would be convincing: When information is contained in the legend that could not possibly have been generated by the civilization that created the legend — if, for example, a number transmitted from thousands of years ago as holy turns out to be the nuclear fine-structure constant. This would be a case worthy of some considerable attention.

Artifacts

Also convincing would be a certain class of artifact. If an artifact of technology were passed on from an ancient civilization — an artifact that is far beyond the technological capabilities of the originating civilization — we would have an interesting prima facie case for extraterrestrial visitation. An example would be an illuminated manuscript, rescued from an Irish monastery, that contains the electronic circuit diagram for a superheterodyne radio receiver. Great care would have to be taken about the provenance of this artifact, just as art collectors are cautious about a newly discovered Raphael. We would make sure that no contemporary Irish prankster was the source of the circuit diagram.

Von Danniken

To the best of my knowledge, there are no such legends and no such artifacts. All the ancient artifacts put forward, for example, by Erik von Danniken in his book Chariots of the Gods? have a variety of plausible, alternative explanations. Representations of beings with large, elongated heads, alleged to resemble space helmets, could equally well be

  • inelegant artistic renditions,
  • depictions of ceremonial head masks or
  • expressions of rampant hydrocephalia.

In fact, the expectation that extraterrestrial astronauts would look precisely like American or Soviet astronauts, down to their space suits and eyeballs, is probably less credible than the idea of a visitation itself. Likewise, the idea expressed by von Danniken and others that ancient astronauts

  • erected airfields,
  • employed rockets, and
  • exploded nuclear weapons on Earth

is implausible in the extreme, precisely because we ourselves have just developed this technology.

A visitor from space will not be so close to us in time.

  • It is as if, framing such an idea in 1870, we concluded that extraterrestrials use hot-air balloons for space exploration. Far from being too daring, such ideas are stodgy in their unimaginativeness.

Most popular accounts of alleged contact with extraterrestrials are strikingly chauvinistic.

   — Adapted from
       Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection:
       An Extraterrestrial Perspective

       (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000)


6.0   Ancient Astronauts

The idea of UFO and alien-ET visitations has been extended to even earlier times than Biblical times ... in fact, into the very mists of prehistory itself (if we take the usual idea of prehistory as before written history ... writing is usually thought to have been invented about 5,000 years ago, i.e., sometime around 3,000 B.C.).

This prehistoric UFO visitation idea has even been given a name, such as the ancient astronauts theory. Actually, there are several such theories, depending on which author you read ... Click here to read a presentation of the 'Ancient Astronauts'.

And certain authors, such as Erich von Däniken, have advocated this ancient astronaut theory very vocally and strongly ... including that sightings of UFOs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and ancient astronaut visitations have been recorded in prehistoric cave paintings and rock art, some of which have been carbon-dated to be as old as 32,000 years old!


7.0   More Recent UFOs & ETs/Aliens

There are, of course, even more reports of UFO and ET/Alien sightings in recent times than during Antiquity/Biblical times ...

For example, in his book Aliens: Why Are They Here (1997; 2005), Bryan Appleyard mentioned the following:

  • In June 1864 in France a newspaper reported that American geologists had discovered a hollow, egg-shaped object containing the mummified body of a three-foot humanoid creature with a trunk projecting from the middle of its forehead.

  • In 1884 in Nebraska cowboys saw what was taken to be an airship from another planet crash to earth.

  • A wave of cigar-shaped UFO sightings began in northern California in 1896 and ended in the Midwest six months later.

  • A curious letter in the Otago Daily Times in New Zealand on 29 July 1909 confidently stated that local airship sightings were of 'atomic-powered spaceships' from Mars.

  • 'From about 1880 through 1946,' writes the folklorist Thomas E. Bullard, 'witnesses reported a stream of aerial mysteries — phantom airships, mysterious airplanes, foo fighters and ghost rockets — that reflected technological expectations of the day or looked one step ahead. The phantom airships of 1897 played to human hopes by heralding that man could fly at last, whereas foo fighters as supposed enemy secret weapons during World War II and ghost rockets as possible Soviet missiles at the onset of the cold war fueled human fears of destruction from the sky.'


8.0   Postscript

This is still very much a preliminary examination of the UFO Mystery ... Stay tuned for further updates ...

Cheers!




Paul Quek
Webmeister
Woodlands, Singapore


Paul Quek - Webmeister - Animated GIF 2009 - for www.mysteries-of-the-world.com

Incept Date: 01 September 2008
Rev'd Date: 09 March 2010

Four Points to Note

  1. Recently, we added a simple blog so that you know the latest changes. To get the updates automatically, CLICK HERE to subscribe to our RSS (you will get a new window or 'tab'). Thanks and cheers!
  2. Please do not assume or conclude that, just because I present many views (in the form of textual notes and video clips) on this website, it means that I am in agreement with or that I believe in the views offered-proferred ... That would be displaying such a parochial and provincial attitude, towards this website and towards me as well!

    As an ex-military officer, I assure you that I am in the habit of reading, viewing and digesting lots of stuff that I don't necessarily believe in ... We call all the stuff we read, view and digest, 'military intelligence' ... The same applies with 'business intelligence' in the business world, of course.

    Our aim, as usual, is to find out what others (including our friends, enemies, competitors, suppliers, strategic partners, business partners, etc.) believe in ... In order to do that effectively, we have to 'get out of the way', so to speak ... we have to remove our humongous ego! ... else we will never ever really have gotten started in our journey of exploration and discovery of the Mysteries of the World .

  3. Here is a sentiment that I am wholeheartedly in agreement with ...
    As I sit down to redo this book for an American audience, what rises before me is last night's dream: I'm in a broad and beautiful land among many trees. It's night. I look up at a huge old tree that's dark against the starry sky in its detail of twig and branch. There is room enough here for all of us, I realize, here in this big, intricately textured park. But I see that some want to cut down the trees and level it out, so huge throngs of people can gather to gaze up at the sun's glare. I watch dark twigs fingering the remote, untouchable stars. A voice speaks: "Don't turn this into a Copernican Garden."

    Waking up, I remember that I went to sleep wondering how to put this book together. And I take "Copernican Garden" to mean a parking lot vista where masses gather to honor the bright sun of traditional science with its old rules as the center of the universe.

    So I will not cut down the trees and level this book out. It is between you and me [or you and I], a conversation as we stroll along in a moonlit fractal garden past webby connections of thought that merge to patterned insight. Here hidden delights nestle in scaling patterns of self-similar but never quite repeating beauty. Here the tree of life hold stars in its branches. No matter how huge, this garden stays human-sized because we have a place in it, you and I. No need to cut down the connective forest and level things out for that bright Sol [sun] of left-brain logic whose daytime dazzle — so close and glaring — can blind us to the myriad constellations beyond.

    [...]

       — Katya Walter, Tao of Chaos
            Sub-title: Merging East and West
            (1994, 1996)

  4. Here is an observation (adapted) made in the Acknowledgement page of a book ...
    It takes many minds to produce a book [including an e-book, of course]. Although most authors [especially of non-fiction books and articles] would prefer not to admit this fact, fundamentally they are merely 'synthesisers' of accumulated knowledge.

    The process of synthesising may unveil a new reality map, or paradigm, which, in due course, will be used by future pioneers to unveil further paradigms.

    This principle was summed up by Sir Isaac Newton when he remarked: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".

    [...]

       — Christian von Nidda, Our Secret Planet
            (2005)

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As stated in our Mysteries Blog , the 'Mysteries of the World' Website does NOT aim to sensationalize any particular 'Mystery', although we will examine and explore all possible viewpoints pertaining to each 'Mystery' — including the fringe AND the mainstream.

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