Over the past couple of years, I posted several clips from a pre-interview I conducted with Stan Friedman in 2000 (while researching the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real), but I finally got around to putting them all into one video this past weekend.
Stan discusses a number of subjects, including Carl Sagan, Project Blue Book, space travel, and NASA.
One can imagine, if there really is an advanced non-human intelligence that interacts with us, and that has developed into a truly empathic being (or beings / civilization), that they might recommend this song to all of us.
To look at it another way, all that we have to do is look at ourselves as an extraterrestrial civilization would look at us - not as Canadians, or Americans, or Russians, or Iranians, or whatever, but rather as members of the human race, floating through space together on what Carl Sagan famously called this pale blue dot. As Sagan wrote: "There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Seen from 6.1 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot
Harrison would have undoubtedly agreed with the sentiment, as evidenced by his songs, even if he framed his views in a spiritual context that Sagan rejected. Two paths, one journey. Unfortunately, most of us don't think of these things as Harrison and Sagan did. Indeed, we rarely think of these things at all.
The new film Battle: Los Angeles represents a Hollywood version of extraterrestrial life that mirrors the views of Donald Keyhoe and those who have followed him (just about every modern pro-ETH researcher), which is to say the people who would have us believe that aliens are only slightly more technologically advanced than we are, and basically act with the same motivations as us.
This modern version of the "aliens-as-us-in-flying-saucers" meme, while admittedly more nihilistic and violent, is more or less the same as classic 1950s sci-fi epics like The Day The Earth Stood Still.
For the most part, the views that Hollywood have given us of aliens mirror those of the pro-ETH UFO research community. What once might have seemed imaginative has long since been revealed as wholly unrealistic from a scientific sense. Hence the term "science fiction", which applies equally to Keyhoe-ian UFO research as it does to Hollywood blockbusters.
But every now and then, a film comes along that offers a different and possibly more realistic view of what an encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence will be like, and what it will mean for humanity. Here is one of my favourites - Contact:
The film wasn't perfect, of course - few films ever achieve that standard. But the issues it raised, and the way it raised them, provide a better glimpse of what might lie ahead than a film like Battle: Los Angeles, or even a classic like The Day The Earth Stood Still.
For that we can thank Carl Sagan, who might not have had much use for the UFO phenomenon, but had a much better grasp than do most UFO researchers and Hollywood films in terms of what to expect from an encounter with an extraterrestrial civilization.
This is a clip from the pre-interview I did with Stan Friedman in May, 2001, prior to the making of the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real. In this part, Friedman discusses Dr. Carl Sagan, science, and UFOs.
Yours truly talking about a brief conversation at a Christmas party I had with Geoff Regan, at the time a Canadian cabinet minister, and how I used the opportunity to talk to him about real UFO evidence, a few top cases, and the history of Canadian governmental interest in UFOs, and why it stopped in the late 1960s (what I call "The Condon Effect"). One note: the last question about UFOs asked in the House of Commons was in the 1970s, not the 1960s as I mistakenly stated at Retro UFO 3. Hey - nobody's perfect!
Expanding on the ending of my clip, the late Carl Sagan, who was a great communicator and in many ways a visionary, had it absolutely right in this clip when he talked about how scientific research should be viewed by the people who fund it.
I absolutely agree with Sagan, although like Dr. Peter Sturrock I would extend his wisdom beyond the parameters that Sagan set, to include further scientific research into the nature of the UFO phenomenon.
And now, the real Carl Sagan, as he discusses the alleged abduction of Betty and Barney Hill by aliens.
Regardless of what one thinks of Sagan's analysis of the Hill case (and that should be the subject of some interesting comments here over the next few days), there are things he says here that ring true in a more general sense, and with which I wholeheartedly agree.
For example, when talking about lights seen in the night sky, Sagan states:
"If we can't identify a light, that doesn't make it a spaceship."
Exactly so. Brad Sparks made the same sensible comment to me a while back.
Sagan was cautious, and skeptical, and that's a good thing. To believers, he was too cautious; to disbelievers, he was too willing to consider "weird" possibilities, even if he rejected them in the end. I look at Sagan as one of the good guys - yes, maybe he ducked some of the harder questions about the UFO phenomenon (to my knowledge, he never looked into the RB47 case, and certainly never explained it), but he also kept an open mind, and I always got the impression when I was younger that he left the door open to the possibility that there was "magic" in the world, or beyond it. He just hadn't seen the proof that he needed, but he went further in looking for it than most scientists have.
If that isn't enough for the ETH believers, and too much for the disbelievers, it rings true to me, even when I disagree with his conclusions.
I'm not nearly as anti-SETI as most ufologists are - what's the harm in looking for radio signals? It's not like it costs that much money, and, as I said in a radio interview once, I think ufologists are just jealous that SETI has been more successful in engaging science and the public than ufology has.
But, whether you like Sagan or SETI or you don't, watching him do the calculations is interesting, especially if you accept the possibility that there may be millions of technological civilizations in the galaxy (a number that seems way too high to me; I would always go with a more conservative estimate, based on the principle that it's better to be pleasantly surprised than rudely awakened). It stands to reason, if that's the case, and if they manage to survive what Sagan calls their "adolescence", that they could - indeed, almost certainly would - develop the ability to travel between the stars, if not in person then at least in the form of advanced probes, probably using some form of artificial intelligence. From there it isn't a giant leap of logic to conclude that one or more of those probes, or perhaps even crews, made its way to Earth at some point, and took a look around. Perhaps they're still here. One can't prove that on the available evidence, but it's not an unreasonable hypothesis, even if there had never been a single UFO sighting.
Ironically, given that he was not a supporter of the ETH, Sagan's reasoning, using Drake's equation, should give comfort to those who are supporters of the ETH, and should give pause for thought to those who would dismiss the ETH out of hand.
