Douglas Adams in his five-point plan on how to leave the planet* in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was to flag down a passing flying saucer. Easier said than done, unless you’re one of the many people who claim to have done just that.
It was late on 19 September 1961 when the aliens took Betty and Barney Hill. Driving home along a lonely road in New Hampshire, their journey was interrupted by a strange hovering illuminated disc. Barney could see a group of humanoid figures wearing sinister black uniforms watching them from inside. They sped off in the car, but retained no clear memory of what happened next – only through regression hypnosis in the months that followed did the bizarre story unfold: a rabbit hole of dreams, missing time and invasive medical procedures that was to firmly entrench the alien abduction myth into popular culture…
‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’
The modern ‘Flying Saucer’ was born on 24 June 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a string of objects flying ‘like saucers skipping over water’. He didn’t consider the possibility of them being alien in origin, but thought at first they could be a flock of geese. From the moment it was reported, an entire science fiction and conspiracy subculture was born that captured the post-war paranoia of the day and piqued the interests of the military and of luminaries such as psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Believing in life beyond the earth – especially simple life – is easy. Most of us, without direct evidence, can happily assume the earth is not the only cradle of life in the universe. Believing in technologically advanced spacefaring extraterrestrial civilizations that have mastered travelling vast distances to whisk you away from the earth for some rectal-probing, clandestine agenda is harder. But not impossible – according to a recent National Geographic poll, a startling 36 per cent of Americans believe in UFOs.
When trying to flag down a passing flying saucer (as anyone who’s hitch-hiked will tell you) it’s good to be conspicuous. Having a sign helps. We are already doing a good job at advertising ourselves to anyone watching us – from our geography, to our atmospheric chemical signatures, to our radio broadcasts. Whether aliens will be tuned in to these, or indeed care, is an unknown. We could keep sending greetings, such as the Arecibo telescope broadcast sent towards a nearby star cluster in 1974, and the mix-tapes attached to our spacecraft. SETI has been listening for signs of intelligent life since astronomer Frank Drake’s radio telescope search of the Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani star systems in 1960. The Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner’s $100 million ‘Breakthrough Initiatives’ programme is now investing heavily in a multi-disciplinary scientific search for life beyond earth. We’d all have to ignore Stephen Hawking, who has warned us of the dangers of advertising ourselves too freely – the history of first encounters between earthbound civilizations has often been disastrous. The fact that they have come to us means by definition they are more advanced than we are. Our ‘imagined self-importance’ maybe our undoing. Proceed with caution.
WHERE IS EVERYBODY?
How common are advanced civilizations in our galaxy? The famous Drake Equation, while not giving you an answer, does at least provide a sensible framework for asking the question and a starting point for scientists to argue over. It’s a series of assumed important ‘guesstimates’ based on seven variables, which when multiplied together will spit out the number of civilizations in the galaxy, ‘N’. We do know that the value of ‘N’ is 1 or more because here we are. Drake’s conservative estimate is 50,000.
N = R* · fp · ne · fl · fi · fc ·L
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible
R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space
LOOKING UP
As our own technology changes, so will the ways we hunt for our galactic neighbours. The Hubble Space Telescope has opened a window onto the universe. The Kepler space telescope has revealed thousands of new exoplanets, including planets in habitable Goldilocks zones around stars. The new James Webb space telescope, soon to be launched, will be able to detect not just more exoplanets, but also the chemical signatures of their atmospheres, which will reveal much about the activities of anything that lives there.
Keep an eye out for large-scale alien technology and engineering – alien megastructures orbiting stars, such as heat signatures from Dyson spheres, that may be built by advanced civilizations to harness the star’s power. The technological progress of a civilization can be ranked on the Kardashev Scale, named after the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, which describes a civilization’s ability to harness energy from its parent star or galaxy. There are three levels: Types I to III. Any civilization able to abduct you is going to be at least a Type II, able to harness the total energy of the parent star. We’re not even on the scale yet.
Wherever you are in the world, there will have been some UFO sightings nearby: Area 51 and Roswell in America of course. Mexico City’s mass sighting, Rendlesham Forest in England and Bonnybridge in Scotland are a few of the most notorious. While there have been many en masse UFO sightings, abductions seem to occur at night in isolated places and when there are few people to witness the event. Try dark forests, lonesome roads with no traffic, isolated farms. Or hang around your local top-secret military base.
LANGUAGE
It’s always useful to have a few local phrases up your sleeve. Music is a universal feature of all civilizations. Is it reasonable to extend this concept to civilizations beyond earth, as Carl Sagan and his Voyager golden record team did? Music as language has become a common motif in our science fiction, from the swanee-whistling Clangers, to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the music educationalist John Curwen’s solfège ‘do-re-mi’ hand gestures were used to teach the visiting musical spacecraft’s tonal messages.
Domingo Gonsales learned the musical language of the ‘Lunas’ during his sojourn on the ‘moone’: ‘The Difficulty of that language is not to bee conceived, and the reasons thereof are especially two: First, because it hath no affinitie with any other that ever I heard. Secondly, because it consisteth not so much of words and Letters, as of tunes and uncouth sounds that no letters can expresse.’
Here are a couple of useful phrases from the Lunas’ musical language that he picked up for you to try:
Translation: ‘Glorie be to God Alone’
Translation: ‘Gonsales’
BE PREPARED
If you get abducted then you won’t know where you may end up. Will they have Wi-Fi or snacks on board? Make sure your phone is charged, with a good data-roaming plan and lots of hard-drive space for taking videos and pictures. Have a small backpack ready with warm clothes. There’s a good chance you may be ‘examined’, so clean underwear is a must. A pen and paper, some water and food. Prepare for the unexpected. Check with your travel insurance company if leaving the planet is included. If not, it’s worth getting in touch with a specialist.
* By which this entire book was inspired.
