Flying Saucers UFO Reports

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Today the skies hold the challenge for adventurers that the seas held for our ancestors.

at light speed or faster are moving away at a greater velocity than their light can speed back to us, therefore we will never see their light. It naturally follows that galaxies exist beyond detection of any instruments man can devise.

Such "island universes" may contain hundreds of billions of advanced planetary (and interplanetary or interstellar) civilizations. But these galaxies are lost forever to each other. By almost any measure the situation is paradoxical; the loss is incomprehensible.

Returning inside the Milky Way galaxy to our own relatively close planetary and stellar neighbors—and the Equation of Existence—it stands to reason by the simple law of averages that if Mother Earth was able to nurture dinosaurs, polar bears, eagles, whales, humans, elephants, microbes, plankton and trees, crabs and kangaroos and armadillos, then surely almost every celestial body is the home of some form of Life. And one Life form will cause a whole ecology.

The experts who devised the Equation of Life claim that each society of intelligent beings has a certain life-span, and a certain point in its history when its science and technology make it want to communicate with other worlds in space. The seminar of extraterrestrial life at which the Order of the Dolphin was founded suggested that Phase "L" was either very short or very long—probably somewhere between a thousand years and a thousand million years!

If the "window in time" period is very short, Homo sapiens may be on the threshold of its most unique historical period, a time much shorter, say, than Egyptian history. This period could determine when Earthmen are able and eager to communicate with other civilizations. If the period is excessively long, and our evolution continues as it has, we're in for a truly halcyon epoch.

But this "Renaissance" period could pass, claim the scientists, and man could fade back into a new Dark Age or blow up the planet or the entire solar system in a nuclear war. It is also conceivable that civilization could come to a grinding halt through an unexpected, unforseen cosmic upheaval. According to Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky of "Worlds In Collision" fame, this is precisely what happened to bring down the final great Chinese, Indian and Egyptian dynasties. Cosmic debris such as the immense cloud of rubble that follows sixty degrees behind our Moon in its orbit, the rings of Saturn, and the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, point up the evidence for prehistoric catastrophe on an interplanetary scale. The immense craters of the Moon and Mars can only have been formed by catastrophe, either natural or made by "intelligent" beings.

Assuming that such catastrophes could interrupt the smooth flow of history, invention, science and technology, how can we further sharpen our abilities to communicate with alien races-if they exist?

Unfortunately, the magical Equation of Life excludes the possibility of superintelligent Life, which could be billions of years old! This is not a novel idea. Such intelligence could have evolved long before the period during which the experts tell us the Universe was born. The fact is that no one, regardless of his credentials in any science, can state this with any degree of certainty. Nothing in science can be said with dogmatism. It is pure egotism on our part to assume we will automatically be the "teachers" who send signals into space—to be eagerly grasped and used by "backward" worlds to communicate with us.

The fact that we have thought of it indicates that other worlds must also have conceived the idea; but so far we have failed miserably to decipher even those mysterious nearby "messages" emanating from Jupiter and Venus. No one can say whether the radio waves (which could be artificial) contain any message for us. We should be equally eager and able to speak an alien language as to have them understand us.

No leading scientist has openly declared the real possibility that Earthmen may be so far down on the evolutionary scale that we might be about as interesting to Outworlders as viruses under a microscope are to an accountant or politician.