Major Tom and Contact

And now, having spread doom and gloom with respect to the prospect of disclosure / contact with an advanced non-human intelligence by humanity as a group, let's take a look at what I think is far more likely, indeed, what has probably been happening throughout human history - contact with individuals who are ready for it.

As always, this kind of analysis is best presented by puppets and 80s pop music - Peter Schilling's hit Major Tom (Coming Home), as imagined by Fluff & Such puppetry:

Frankly, this one song and video tells us more about what might be waiting for us than 60 years of books and videos about UFOs and the paranormal... or 2,000 years of priests and preachers standing in a pulpit.

Paul Kimball

P.S. Here are a couple of non-puppet versions.

In German:



The original video in English:



Finally, an interesting video that uses images from Stanley Kubrick's classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey:

After Disclosure - Update 16/06/11

So... there's a hockey game in Vancouver (7th and deciding game of the Stanley Cup finals), and the home team loses, and rioting breaks out in the city.

Clearly, humanity is ready for "disclosure" or "contact".

Paul Kimball

ET in Hollywood - Keyhoe vs. Sagan

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.

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