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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Tau Ceti. These are 10.3, 11.3 and 12.2 light years away respectively. The next questions that these intrepid cosmic thinkers tackle are: How many of these hypothetical planets are likely to contain life? And how many might contain "advanced technical civilizations"? In recent years, a number of researchers have been releasing electric sparks—miniature bolts of lightning through mixtures of gases and vapors (water, ammonia, hydrogen, methane) which are thought to represent primitive planetary atmospheres. They have been gratified to discover in the resulting mixtures a huge variety of complex organic substances like sugar, amino acids, urea and others associated with life. The next step is to arrange for a complex molecule to reproduce itself. This, too, has been done in the test tube, producing a simple form of nucleic acid, the genetic material that controls heredity. But there is a slight embarrassment: the reaction only works in the presence of an enzyme derived from a living organism. The enzyme is a protein—yet the synthesis of proteins is controlled by nucleic acids. If it needs a protein to make a nucleic acid, and it needs a nucleic acid to make a protein, then the prospects of life in the primitive planetary soup would be poor. So we must assume, say Sagan and Shklovskil, that some nucleic acids are formed "spontaneously." Thus, in principle (Sagan and Shklovskii say), life on earthlike planets may be the rule rather than the exception. In practice, we can't do much more than guess. ## A Tropical Mars? HOWEVER, there is circumstantial evidence of biological processes on Mars: the "waves of darkening" in spring and summer near the receding ice caps; spectroscopic evidence that dark areas include organic molecules; the curious fact that the red deserts appear to consist of an iron-rich compound containing much water and oxygen, normally found in the soils of hot, humid regions. Perhaps Mars was lushly tropical in the distant past? Venus is covered in clouds and the nature of its surface is thus speculative, but Sagan's guess is that it is "very like hell," with rocks glowing dull red in fierce heat trapped by the clouds above. Other theories propose an oily smog-like atmosphere, or oceans of soda water. Up in the clouds, it would be cooler-suitable, possibly, for the evolution of aerial organisms of some kind. Jupiter appears to have a primitive planetary atmosphere full of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, water and possibly frequent bolts of lightning—a promising scene for some "prebiology," or for bizarre biological surprises. The other planets seem poor life prospects in terms of earth-type life. Nevertheless, as a planetary system, we have at least one planet with life, one which quite possibly has life now and may have had more in the past (Mars) plus two possibly "prebiological" planets (Jupiter and Venus). Thus if the galaxy contains one billion potentially "habitable" planets, the total actually inhabited by something could be very large indeed. ## A Half-Mile Eye WHAT ARE the chances of "intelligent". inhabitants on other planets? Human intelligence has evolved, as has human anatomy, hand-in-hand with the terrestrial environment. But bizarre planets might produce bizarre anatomy and physiology. A planet with a turbid atmosphere, transparent only to radio waves, might produce organisms with radio eyes. But a radio eyeball, says Sagan, would have to be half a mile in diameter to be as efficient as a light eyeball. To understand such a structure, let alone decide whether it belonged to an "intelligence," would be a baffling problem for visiting earthmen. By the same argument, however, earthlike planets would seem likely to have earthlike inhabitants, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that a proportion of these have produced technical civilizations. Our own technical civilization has existed for a very short time on the cosmic time scale. Thus, if we are not unique, there should be many technical civilizations which are much older.. Suppose one of these was disposed to See PLANETS, Page E4, Column 1
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.