BREAKING NEWS - "Roswell Slides" in Shocking Video Footage

A secret source of mine within the NSA just sent this above top secret video clip of one of the aliens from the Roswell slides group - apparently one died in the crash, but his co-pilot survived and was integrated into American society without anyone in the general public knowing it. 

Shocking!!

Paul Kimball

Dr. John Mack - Alien Reality and Humanity

From my video vault - John Mack speaking at the 2001 MUFON Symposium press conference about the media and UFOs, and anthropocentric humanism and how an alien reality would change the way we view ourselves, and the society that we have created. Stan Friedman makes a cameo appearance at the end. 

 Paul Kimball

Rev. Kyle Wagner on The Other Side of Truth

My good friend Rev. Kyle Wagner, the Anglican rector for Seaforth Parish in Nova Scotia, joined me this week for a wide-ranging conversation about faith, spirituality, the nature of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, whether or not there is evil in the world, how and why the Church still engages in exorcisms, what happens to us after death… and some paranormal topics as well, including ghosts, the prospect of extraterrestrial life (whether here on Earth as visitors or “out there” among the stars) and how it might affect our view of ourselves and our relationship with God, and Kyle's own personal spiritual awakening.

Kyle has a Bachelor’s Degree in history and political science from Mount Allison University, and a Masters of Divinity from the Atlantic School of Theology. His occasional blog can be found here.

This episode was recorded on 4 September, 2013.

Download this episode directly here, or listen to it at The Other Side of Truth podcast here.

Paul Kimball

A Great Link

American biologist Craig Venter is best known for his key roles in being part of the team that sequenced the human genome, and in 2010 for announcing that a team led by him had created the first self-replicating synthetic life, by synthesizing a very long DNA molecule containing an entire bacterium genome, and introducing this into another cell.

He's also a man who has previously expressed an interest in extraterrestrial life.

So it should probably come as no surprise that he seems to be interested in combining the two. DARPA has just announced the 100 Year Spaceship Program, a blue-sky project which aims to enable a manned journey between the stars sometime in the next century or so. One of the proposals that has been floated, and is receiving a notice in virtually all of the press articles about the project, is Venter's notion of reconstituting humans from genomes launched into outer space.

Now, this is a very, very small program (the award for the best idea to carry forward is only $500,000, a drop in the bucket of military-industrial-scientific research), but this is the kind of thing that can stir the private sector to go far further, because it gives the whole idea an air of intellectual legitimacy. One can also assume that if this is what DARPA is willing to discuss publicly, then privately they are already working away on all sorts of ideas along this line. Any number of other government agencies are probably doing the same thing.

That's all beside the point for me, however. My "take away" from this news, and in particular Venter's idea, is that is we can imagine doing it, and leading scientists and entrepreneurs take the ideas seriously, then we should also consider the possibility that someone else, "out there", has also imagined all of these possibilities... and then actually made some of them happen.

Which leads one to consider Venter's idea, perhaps the most interesting of them all. If we can imagine seeding other worlds with the human genome, and reconstituting the human race there (a plan which obviates the need to worry about how to get there, because we could someday send thousands of ships at subluminal speeds throughout our galactic neighborhood, without needing to be concerned about how long it would take to get to distant worlds), then perhaps "we" already have - if not quite in a galaxy "far far away", then on a world "far far way".

In Canada, we all look to other parts of our world for our ancestors, whether it be England, Scotland, Germany, Italy, India, or if you go back far enough for the aboriginals, Asia. But what if we could all look somewhere else for our true ancestors - to the stars? What if billions of years ago, a quirky group of blue-sky human dreamers somewhere else in our galaxy (or even another galaxy, if we go back far enough), came up with the same idea that Venter has come up with... and then actually made it work?

And so perhaps here we are, getting ready not to travel to the stars for the first time and as a unique species, but rather getting ready to continue the journey that the human race began long ago, a link in a great, never-ending chain of life.

Paul Kimball

Isn't It A Pity?

"Some things take so long

But how do I explain

When not too many people

Can see we're all the same

And because of all their tears

Their eyes can't hope to see

The beauty that surrounds them

Isn't it a pity?"

- George Harrison

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.

Isn't it a pity?

Paul Kimball

A.D. After Disclosure - a review

During his lecture on "post-humanism" at the 2006 New Frontiers Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the late Mac Tonnies asked a critical question as he pondered whether we would make it to a post-human future (or any future, for that matter): "does humanity deserve to survive?"

The only thing more provocative than his question, which drew some raised eyebrows from the crowd, was his answer, which he gave after a short, thoughtful pause:

"I don't know."

When I look around the world today, much less at the whole of human history, I'm forced to agree with Mac in terms of his question, if not necessarily his answer (more on that below).

The truth is that we've done some amazing things in our relatively short time on this planet as a sentient species. We've built great cities, split the atom, crossed the oceans and then the skies, and eventually made our way to space.

But to what end, and at what cost?

I'm in Los Angeles right now, definitely one of those great cities that we've built, but the problem is that it's really only great for a privileged few. Poverty and homelessness is visible everywhere (except, perhaps, in the poshest neighbourhoods like Beverley Hills, where the police work very hard to make sure that the dark side of our society is kept at a safe distance, as if they were the zombies in  George Romero's Land of the Dead). And then there's the question of how we "acquired" the land to build this great city, and all the others like it - by committing genocide against the indigenous population. I'm sure there's a lovely memorial about that somewhere around here...

Midnight Oil summed it up nicely back in the 1980s with a number of songs, none of which was more direct than "Beds are Burning", but almost no-one listened to what they were saying, even as they heard the song. I remember it well, watching people on dance floors grooving and grinding and trying to get laid as the song played, and thinking to myself: "this is wrong - you need to listen." They didn't listen then. They aren't listening now.

Speaking of Los Angeles, and lovely memorials, the neighbourhood that I stay in when I'm here is predominantly Jewish.  The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is a couple of blocks away, and there's a nice statue on the corner of Fairfax and Beverley in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War.

However, the fact that we even have things like these reminds us of who we really are as a species, and it's not a pretty picture. For every Wallenberg, how many were there who actively participated in the Holocaust, from the top end, easy-to-identify villains like Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, all the way through the middle management guys who made it happen like Eichmann, Wirth and Höss, to the bottom-rung minions who did the dirty work, like the recently convicted Ivan Demanjuk? Perhaps worse still, how many simply looked away - and not just in Europe?

If the Holocaust was just an isolated incident in human history, perhaps we could rationalize it in some way, but it's not. The Armenian genocide, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, the killing fields of Cambodia, the millions killed under Stalin and Mao... it's a long list, and that's just the 20th century. As Dr. Shimon Samuels, director for International Liaison of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said: "Each case is specific as a threshold phenomenon, while each also adds its unique memory as signposts along an incremental continuum of horror."

A very long and ongoing continuum of horror, and violence, and oppression, often perpetrated by people who were once victims themselves. A cycle of violence, and inhumanity.

And then there are the smaller signs that we haven't progressed one iota as a species throughout our history. The Romans had gladiators? Well, so do we.



The difference? Roman gladiators sometimes died in combat, whereas our gladiators, who have a far larger audience within our culture, die years later, but far too soon, beset by myriad medical problems incurred in the name of entertainment.

Bread and circuses, then and now.

Now, it's true that on the other side of the ledger, we've had great composers, and authors, and philosophers, and spiritual leaders, and painters, and humanitarians, and peacemakers, all of whom have worked to enhance the human condition in their own way. But I would argue that these men and women are the exception rather than the rule, and they are not the exemplars celebrated by our society.

We remember MacArthur, Patton and Rommel, and have created a cult of personality around current military leaders like David Petraeus. Ask people who Dag Hammarskjöld was, and they'll probably guess that he invented a brand of ice cream. Mozart and Bach take a back seat to the pop tart du jour. Who wants to read Kierkegaard and Wiggenstein when we can watch Dr. Phil, or Dr. Drew? Romeo and Juliet becomes Gnomeo & Juliet... and so on, and on...

Ask yourself this question - would people be better off reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, or playing MadWorld?

Mac was more understanding than I am.

Where he answered that he didn't know when it comes to whether or not we deserve to survive as a species, I would answer that I do know.

As a species, we don't deserve to survive. We haven't earned that right. Maybe we never will.

None of this should stop us from trying. But it should provide us with some perspective.

Which brings me to my review of A.D. After Disclosure, by Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel. Even if one accepts their central premise (which I do not), that extraterrestrials are here, and that the government knows about it and has kept that knowledge secret, the book is dead wrong in its conclusions. Dolan and Zabel are hopelessly optimistic to the point of wide-eyed naiveté in their view of what the human response would be. In essence, they contend that things would go on pretty much as before, only better in the long run for us once we were made aware of "the truth".

The problem is that nothing in either our history or our current make-up indicates that this would be the case.  

Nothing.

The book, which is well written and worth reading despite what I've just written, will find favour with the so-called "disclosure" crowd, and will probably make an entertaining movie someday. But it is fiction, because it has to be.

There will be no disclosure, not by the government, and not any aliens that have visited us (unless they are here to do us harm, in which case they wouldn't care, and would have done so by now). Both would understand one simple truth in the scenario set out by Dolan and Zabel - we're just not ready for "disclosure" as a species. As individuals perhaps, and I think that may have been happening for some time, to a select few. But a species that cannot justify its own continued existence has a very long way to go before it's ready for contact.

We can't look to a fantasy world where the space aliens arrive and save us, which is really what the "disclosure" movement is all about. We need to look to the real world, and save ourselves.

Only then will we have earned "it".

Paul Kimball

Interpreting the UFO phenomenon and Non-human Intelligence

Recent discussions here and elsewhere about how a non-human intelligence might interact with us in an artistic or cultural sense got me to thinking about how art, in all of its many forms, serves as a useful metaphor for the very idea of how we should seek to understand and interpret any non-human intelligence we might come into contact with.

Take the example of the UFO phenomenon, and the idea that it might represent in some way a non-human intelligence. For decades now, most UFO researchers, and our society as a whole, has looked at "them" from a realistic perspective, much the way that artists used to do with their paintings, which were used to portray a specific event. The death of Nelson at Trafalgar is a good example - here is the famous painting The Death of Nelson, 21 October 1805 by Arthur William Devis, who sought to recapture that historic moment.

Devis' version was painted in 1807, and of all the major portrayals from the time is the most accurate (although definitely not without its historical flaws). The Death of Nelson, a far more idealised version offered by Benjamin West, was painted in 1806. West himself admitted that this was a representation of "what might have been, not of the circumstances as they happened."

In either case, regardless of the historical accuracy, the scene is recognizable, and easy to understand. It is based on the interpretations by the artists of events that they did not actually experience, filtered through their own perceptions and ideals.

In many respects, this is exactly what pro-ETH UFO researchers have done over the past six decades. The UFO phenomenon has been reduced to the most "realistic" interpretation possible, and then put forward as a narrative that may vary in particular details and interpretations, as did the paintings of Devis and West, but in all cases stays true to the central theme. They know that we are dealing with flesh-and-blood aliens in nuts-and-bolts spacecraft, and if one person's version of the aliens or their supposed spacecraft varies from another person's version, the big picture remains remarkably constant.

In other words, it is art based on certainty - regardless of the details of how Nelson died, there is no doubt that he died on board the Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar; Similarly, to most UFO researchers, regardless of what UFOs might look like, they are physical craft that are extraterrestrial in origin.

They know...

The problem is that with UFOs in particular, and non-human intelligence in general, we don't know what is happening. All that we can do is guess... theorize... speculate... and imagine...

Which is why we should be looking to the surrealists, and the abstract artists, and anyone who has offered a view of the world, and of reality, that is open to myriad interpretations, as the artistic model for understanding any interaction we may have with a non-human intelligence. 

Salvador Dali is an obvious choice.

Jackson Pollock is another:

Whereas the paintings by Devis and West clearly show interpretations of something that remains easily identifiable, and are wonderful within their own limited terms, the works of Dali and Pollock offer something much more difficult, and challenging, and personal to the viewer.

In other words, while Devis and West give the viewer answers, Dali and Pollock offer questions, and open the door to myriad possible interpretations. I'm convinced that the latter approach is the best way to try to understand the nature of a possible non-human intelligence that may be interacting with us.

Paul Kimball

The Nature of Contact

Let's make three assumptions, for the sake of discussion:

1. There is life in this galaxy other than ours.

2. At least some of these beings are more advanced than we are.

3. At least some of these more advanced beings want to make some form of contact with us.

If these things are true, then which one of the following scenarios is more likely (as told by an alien named Zorg)?

Greetings, Earth people - my name is Zorg. My species was buzzing about your part of the galaxy in our spaceships - you know, the one that looks remarkably like something out of a 1930s science fiction pulp magazine - and we noticed your interesting little world. Now, my species really isn't that much more advanced than you are, technologically speaking, so we have to be pretty careful when we get to planets like yours, because your radar might cause us to crash (similarly, thunderstorms, your fighter jets, swarms of bugs, watching an episode of Two and a Half Men... all sorts of things might make us crash - hey, stuff happens). Anyway, we wanted to make find out more about your species, so we decided to borrow a couple of you, and run some experiments. Unfortunately, our medical technology is really no more advanced than yours, so the experience is pretty horrifying, I'm afraid. That's why when we send you back, we erase your memory of it all (plus, we're kind of worried that you might remember our technology, manage to duplicate it, and then attack us or something). Alas, some of you have figured out that you can recover those memories through hypnosis, which was probably inevitable, as we decided a couple of your decades ago that a small sample wouldn't work, so we've been "borrowing" people by the thousands (we've taken so many, we've actually lost count). Well, the point is that we're really sorry about it all - but despite the fact that my species has developed super technology that allows us to travel between the stars, everything else about us is pretty much the same as you guys, which is really crazy when you think about it, but there it is. It's almost as if you invented us! Furthermore, despite the fact that all sorts of things can make our spaceships crash (note: I'm not the only one from my planet here doing these things - there's Zarg, and Zirg, and Zurg...), including your pesky fighter jets and WWII-era radar, your governments can't actually do anything about us "borrowing" you guys. Like I said, it's weird, but I guess that's just the way the universe works. However, you can rest assured that we're not here to take all of your resources and enslave your women. Honest. We're just curious, mostly. Heck, you never know - our technology is so similar, we might actually learn something from you! Plus, you're really tasty... whoops! I've said too much!

Or...

Hello. While my species doesn't really have "names" as you comprehend them, you may call me "Zorg". We find your species very interesting, at least from an anthropological point of view, so we decided to make contact, many thousand of your "years" ago (memo to Earthlings - your linear concept of time is extremely quaint, but then you're an extremely quaint species, which is why we like you). We have found it best to present ourselves in ways that fit in with the cultural norms of your time. Accordingly, we've actually been known by many names over the time we've been in contact with you, and we have appeared in many forms (the burning bush was my favourite, with the UFO meme a close second). We do this using a technology that is far, far beyond your comprehension. Your species is still confined to your physical reality, or at least what you perceive as "reality", but we operate on different "levels". I guess the best way to explain it to you is that when we make contact, we don't do it in what you would consider the literal sense, but rather in a more figurative way, using what you call dreams, and the subconscious, and... well, it all gets rather complicated, I'm afraid. Suffice it to say, we're far more interested in the mind and spirit than the body (that's what happens when you get to this level of development as a species), and so that's where we make contact. In a sense, we "speak" to you, across the vastness of space. The great thing about this form of communication is that it allows us to participate in your development, and slowly help guide you to a greater level of understanding, not about technology, but about yourselves. When you've been around as long as we have, that's what really matters. I have to admit that it's been a rough haul, but some of you seem to "get it" from time to time (two of my favourites have been Henry Alline and Hildegard of Bingen), and as a result we haven't abandoned the effort. After all, we have the "time" (some of you will know what I mean by that). Someday, our hope is that all of you will be able to understand and accept us, but that day is far in the future.

Now, which one of these two scenarios makes the most sense?

The first one represents the "alien abduction / nuts-and-bolts flying saucer" meme that has been prevalent for the past sixty years (abductions for a somewhat shorter time period).

The second one represents, to some degree at least, the "contactee" version of events, placed within the context of long-term interaction by humans with an advanced, non-human, probably extraterrestrial intelligence.

To me, the "abductee / flying saucer" scenario is the result of a "pre-Copernican" way of thinking that places us at the center of events, and imagines any advanced intelligence we may encounter as more or less us, with slightly better technology. The "contactee" scenario is far more likely, in my opinion - indeed, of the two, it is the only one that I believe might actually have happened. It takes into account the wide range of described encounters with a non-human intelligence throughout human history, and provides a reasonable narrative by way of explanation. It makes us part of the story, but not the center of the story. It may be true, or it may not be true, but it is a better fit for the evidence than the first scenario.

This is why I am convinced that there is more to be learned from studying the "contactee" scenario of "alien" interaction with humanity, than the "abduction" scenario. When done within the context of a bigger picture, which includes all forms of possible encounters, the contactees might actually provide clues to the nature of any non-human intelligence we could be dealing with. By contrast, the alien abduction / flying saucer meme, as an answer in and of itself (which is how it is presented by its proponents), has not, and will not, provide anything other than fodder for B-grade science fiction films and novels.

Paul Kimball

Kaku on the science of alien technology

Kaku states:

Scientists sometimes judge alien technology on the basis of what we can do, not on the basis of what a type three civilization, millions of years in advance of ours, can do.

For "scientists", substitute "UFO researchers", and you'll see where the problem lies in UFO research, even as it applies to the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Paul Kimball

Babylon 5 and the "Ant Analogy"

At its best, science fiction can serve as a populist springboard for ideas, and new ways of thinking. Babylon 5 is among the best science fiction series ever made, and in this excerpt from the episode "Mind War" in the first season, Ambassador G'Kar offers an analogy about extraterrestrial intelligences that mirrors my own thoughts on any ET that may be out there, and how we would stand in comparison to them... thoughts that have been expressed by many others with a far higher "scientific pay-grade" than me, including Michio Kaku when I saw him speak in London in 2009.

Paul Kimball

Stan Friedman - Religion and Flying Saucers

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In this excerpt from a lengthy pre-interview I conducted with Stan back in November, 2000 (in what was a very noisy office), he talks about the Bible and religion as it relates to his belief that the Earth has been visited by extraterrestrial beings.

Paul Kimball

How Do We Craft A Message To The Stars?

Very interesting interview in the National Catholic Reporter with Dr. Douglas Vakoch, the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at SETI.

How Do We Craft A Message To The Stars?

An excerpt:

Rather than emphasizing our strength and wisdom in a message to more advanced civilizations, I suggest a more humble approach. I think the most powerful message that we could send to beings on another world is that we are a young civilization. We are in our technological adolescence. We are struggling. We are uncertain that we’re even going to survive. And yet, we have enough hope that we are willing to send a message and listen, maybe a hundred or a thousand years, with the hope that we’ll get a reply.

On the one hand, the type of message that Dr. Vakoch is describing makes eminent sense to me. On the other hand, however, given that we have no idea what we might encounter "out there", caution should be the order of the day.

Paul Kimball

Michio Kaku - A Galactic Conversation?

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In May, 2009, I was in England filming four episodes of the television series Ghost Cases. After we were done, my co-host Holly Stevens and I stayed on in Europe for three weeks on vacation (England, Scotland and the Czech Republic). While in London, I attended a lecture by Dr. Michio Kaku at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) on the 28th of May, and took the opportunity to ask him a question about his view that we might be in the midst of an intergalactic conversation, and not even know it. This short episode of The Other Side of Truth features that exchange.

You can listen to the full lecture and Q & A here.

Paul Kimball

An Earthlike Planet

Found: An Earthlike Planet at Last

The planet is only about three or four times as massive as our home world, meaning it probably has a solid surface just like Earth. Much more important, it sits smack in the middle of the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at just the right distance from the star to let water remain liquid rather than freezing solid or boiling away. As far as we know, that's a minimum requirement for the presence of life. For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have wondered whether other Earths existed out in the cosmos. And since the first, very un-Eearthlike extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995, astronomers have been inching closer to answering that question. Now, they've evidently succeeded (although to be clear, there's no way at this point to determine whether there actually is life on the new planet).

Remember the day, and the name: 29 September, 2010 - Gliese 581g.

Does this mean aliens from Gliese 581g are visiting Earth? Of course not. But it does point out, yet again, why the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the UFO phenomenon, of all the "paranormal" hypotheses on offer, makes the most sense - by far.

Paul Kimball

The Drake Equation

Here is SETI's Dr. Frank Drake explaining his famous equation for determining the prevalence of alien life in the galaxy:



If you want to play around with the numbers in the Drake Equation, and see what you come up with, you can do so here.

You can also read Stan Friedman's critique of the Drake Equation (and SETI in general) here.

Paul Kimball

Scientists Discover... Krypton?

Have scientists discovered Krypton, the home planet of Superman?

No, not quite (although they have apparently discovered kryptonite). But it's fairly big news nonetheless.

Potentially Habitable Planet Found

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.

There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.

"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.

The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.

Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think.

"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."

Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one — simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves — will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.

Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer.

But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."

Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.

"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."

The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.

"I expect there will be planets like Earth, but whether they have life is another question," said renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in an interview with The Associated Press in Orlando. "We haven't been visited by little green men yet."

Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.

Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.

But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.

Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.

The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.

Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.

A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.

"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.

Hawking should know better than to state that we haven't been visited by any "little green men" - we have no idea what alien life would look like, and it's pure hubris to imagine that we would be at the top of the intelligence chain when it comes to life and how advanced it might be. So, while it's true that we can't get to the stars yet, there's absolutely no proof that it can't be done - meaning they might have made their way here (key word? "might").

This news will probably provide a little boost for the ETH in the short term, and, as more and more potentially inhabitable planets are discovered nearby (relatively speaking, of course), the possibility that some UFOs may be ET will look more realistic, or at the very least be met with fewer howls of derision.

Which is a long way from proof positive - rather, it's just a shifting of the odds a bit.

Paul Kimball

Carl Sagan explains the Drake Equation

Part 1



Part 2



Fascinating stuff from a great communicator.

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.

Paul Kimball