Documents / FOIA release
This CIA file, approved for release on April 2, 2001, holds newspaper material on flying saucers. The main piece is an article by Charles Cooke, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who says he helped name Project Blue Book. In it he reviews books by Fuller, Edwards, NICAP and the Air Force, and he collects UFO reports from before 1947 that go back to 1838. A second article, by John Davy of the London Observer, reviews Sagan and Shklovskii's Intelligent Life in the Universe.
“Alexander Hamilton”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# There Possibly Anybody # Out There? Even a Couple of Optimists Skirt Fantasy in Their Case for the UFO ## By John Davy London Observer LONDON-From time to time, a reader writes to me about my part in suppressing the truth about flying saucers. He is quite forbearing; he realizes, he says, that I am gagged by the authorities, who are fearful of the truth becoming known. For the fact of the matter is, he informs me, that an extraterrestrial civilization is making regular contact with this planet. But now, thanks to a remarkable collaboration between an American and a Russian astronomer, I am ungagged. I can freely report some remarkable arguments contained in their book "Intelligent Life in the Universe," which is shortly to be published in the United States by Holden-Day Inc., San Francisco. They conclude that extraterrestrial civilizations are not only possible but probable, and that they may well have made, or are attempting to make, contact with us. The American is Carl Sagan of Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The Russian is Academician Josef Shmuelovich Shklovskii of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute. They have never met each other—they collaborated by mail. Nor have they met any representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations. Their cosmic excursion is propelled by careful scientific argument laced with a dash of speculation. It is a heady mixture. For, as Sagan remarks in an introductory chapter, earthmen do not feel exactly detached about extraterrestrial civilizations. Some yearn for them to exist. Others would prefer them not to. Sagan says that he and Shklovskii are "cautious optimists" on the question. Clearly they would rather like extraterrestrials to exist, and they have written almost 500 pages to show that they might. Let us, then, follow some of their arguments, first tightly fastening our intellectual and emotional seat belts. ## Our Impossible Sphere A QUICK LOOK at the other planets of our solar system seems to reveal a poor prospect for life. Mercury and Venus appear too hot, Mars has almost no air, Jupiter and Saturn seem to be swathed in ammonia and methane. But can life exist on earth? A Martian astronomer would see a planet surrounded by a deadly gas, namely oxygen. It is well known that this very reactive element readily combines with almost anything, including the unstable compounds of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, out of which living organisms are built. All signs of life on earth must surely be quickly oxidized to dust and ashes. (Only earthmen know the remarkable methods developed by our bodies for coping with oxygen so that it does not burn us up.) Martian satellites dispatched to photograph the surface from a couple of hundred miles up (as the Tiros and Nimbus weather satellites have done) would reveal no conclusive signs of life. Arguments from one's own planetary experience are thus tricky. Nevertheless, Sagan and Shklovskii conclude that "habitable" planets could well be common in the universe. The emphasis is on "could," since there is no direct evidence. The largest earth-based telescope could not reveal a planet of another 'star. ## Indirect Evidence THE INDIRECT evidence is of three kinds: 1. There are many twin stars orbiting each other in the sky; many stars could have orbiting planets instead of an orbiting star-twin. 2. An astronomer at Sproul Observatory, Swarthmore College, Peter van de Kamp, recorded the position of Barnard's star in the constellation of Cygnus for 25 years and detected a small pendulum motion. This, he calculated, could be caused by a "dark companion"—a planet about twice the size of Jupiter orbiting the star once every 24 earth-years and affecting its motion. If he is right, this is the only planet detected outside our solar system. 3. Statistical arguments: there are 150 billion stars in our galaxy alone, a considerable proportion of which are similar to our sun. It is highly probable that there are billions of planetary systems similar to ours in our galaxy. This leads Sagan and Shklovskil to conclude that our galaxy may contain at least one billion habitable planets. The nearest promising stars, they say are Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi and
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 10 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.