Michelle Thaller
Conspiracy theories (or the truth IS out there)
Like any profession, scientists spend almost all their time talking to people in their own field. We work together and socialize together, which tends to give us a distorted picture of what people outside science think about us and our work. I often find myself pounding on tables, trying to convince scientists that it is essential that the general public feel a sense of ownership in NASA. Do they think we're doing the right things, asking the right questions? Do they even know what we've been up to lately? After all, they're the ones footing the bill.
To try and remedy this disconnect, I've developed some travel habits. I spend a lot of time on airplanes, so what better time to talk to a random member of the public: the person who happens to get seated next to me on a flight. Somewhere after takeoff I strike up a polite conversation about our destination, whether the trip is work or pleasure and whatnot. When we talk about work I mention NASA and astronomy and try to get their opinion about recent scientific missions and discoveries.
This is often so personally gratifying to me that I end up feeling guilty I brought the subject up. By and large, people seem genuinely fascinated by the space program, and even feel it's a good use of their taxes (at least the $7.70 per taxpayer that NASA costs). They ask about black holes and newly found planets and failed missions to Mars (oh well, at least they were paying attention).
Very often they ask about life on other planets. Do I believe in it? Is NASA looking for it? I love talking about the possibility of life outside Earth, because for the first time, we seem to be really hot on its trail. Embedded in the newly discovered sedimentary rocks on Mars or floating in the oceans of Europa, we may well discover an ancient fossil or even a living microbe in the next fifty years.
But that's not really what my traveling companions usually mean by life outside the Earth. They want to know about intelligent life, especially the possibility that Earth has been visited by extra-terrestrials. I get asked about UFO's. Many people have a UFO story of their own. Why don't scientists take these claims seriously, people ask. If so many people have reported seeing aliens or even being abducted by them, doesn't there have to be some truth to it all?
This is where I start to get a little shaky. The last thing I want to do is come across like some high-and-mighty scientist, telling them with a smug air of superiority that there is no truth to these stories. I could tell them that astronomers are watching the night sky all over the world, all night, every night, and not one observation of a UFO has ever been recorded.
Or I could ask them several questions I've had about alien abduction stories: why do aliens always forsake universities and national laboratories in favor of landing in trailer parks? Why do aliens exclusively abduct Americans? But I'm on treacherous ground here, and I know it. The problem is that if I attack the idea of alien visitations too ardently, I'm immediately accused of being part of the scientific conspiracy.
I can see why this makes so much sense to people. After all, contact with an alien civilization would be the greatest scientific achievement in the history of humanity Nobel prizes and worldwide acclaim for sure. So why aren't scientists more interested in UFO's and alien abductions? Maybe they know more about this topic than they're willing to admit. Maybe they're hiding something. And simply assuring people that there is no conspiracy is utterly futile.
Maybe I'm not highly enough placed at NASA to know the truth. Maybe the government has sworn us all to secrecy, on the pain of death. There is nothing I can say to prove the government isn't talking with aliens, or doesn't have a captured alien spacecraft. Nothing I can say will prove that there is no conspiracy. If all the evidence is hidden by definition -- how can I argue against it?
I've given this some serious thought, and I think the larger scientific community should too. The idea that scientists have a separate (and possibly malicious) agenda from the general public is an old one, but still a dangerous one. But we're part of the public too. We have no reason to hide these things, and even more importantly, I don't think we could hide them. Why not?
First reason why scientists couldn't hide aliens even if they wanted to: news leaks. I don't care how draconian an X-Files-like secret government organization might be, there is no way contact with aliens could be kept quiet. Scientists are just as greedy as the next person, and the reward for releasing this kind of a story would be huge. It's not just about greed either; scientists just aren't organized enough to suppress such a huge story.
Let me give you an example from personal experience. A good friend of mine works for the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, which uses powerful radio telescopes to search for signals from aliens. The telescopes sweep the skies looking for narrow, beamed signals with mathematical structure. Now, the sky is totally lit up with radio signals, not only from TV and radio stations, but from garage door openers, remote controls, and commercial satellites. Sifting through all the noise takes ingenuity and patience. When an interesting signal is detected, there are many steps of evaluation, checking and re-checking to go through before anyone is ready to say that the signal comes from outside our own atmosphere, let alone from an alien civilization.
About two years ago, a quiet night at SETI was interrupted by an astonishing signal. Check after check revealed that it was indeed coming from space. It was piercingly narrow-beamed, meaning that it was almost certainly artificially generated. The signal had a clear mathematical structure. Lists of known satellite signals were culled through. Nothing matched. The signal's position on the sky was measured -- no satellite from Earth should have been there. About twenty minutes had gone by since the signal was detected, and the energized astronomers at SETI were running around figuring out what check to do next when suddenly ... the New York Times called.
I'm totally serious. Twenty minutes after detecting a possible signal from space, the Times was on the horn. Someone had talked to some friend, who had talked to some family member, and now a cover-up was all but impossible. Twenty minutes. No one had a statement prepared; no one had been threatened by the military or the CIA.
The denouement to the story hardly matters, and you can probably guess it, as you never did read in the Times that signals had been detected from an alien civilization. A satellite called SOHO had been observing the Sun, and malfunctioned some weeks before. It drifted from its previous position and wasn't broadcasting at the right frequency, making it impossible for the solar astronomers who built it to up-load new instructions. While SETI didn't find aliens that night, they did do NASA a huge favor by finding the errant satellite, which was later recovered. And SETI is still looking for those alien signals. Keep posted.
Reason two why scientists couldn't hide aliens even if they wanted to: believe it or not, not all scientists are American. Let's think about this, guys. The night sky does not exist only over the United States. Any signals from space would be picked up by telescopes all over the world at once.
That's actually one of the ways SETI checks up on interesting-looking signals; collaborators around the world are called and asked to observe the same part of the sky. Do they see the same signal? Even if the U.S. government could control its own citizens, what power would they have over scientists in Germany, or Russia, or China? Radio telescopes exist all over the world, and are run by foreign governments. With politics the way it is, I'm sure some country or another would refuse to be part of a global conspiracy, or at least wouldn't have the total control over its citizens to stop any news leaks.
The thing I said earlier about aliens abducting only Americans isn't strictly true. I did some research, and I found concentrations of alien abduction claims in the U. S., Britain and, strangely, Queensland, Australia. England also has the lovely and mysterious crop circles, which many believe to be associated with UFO's (even after two well-meaning but mischievous local men admitted to making the circles themselves).
But on the whole, alien abductions and UFO sightings are mostly limited to wealthy, European-based cultures. It's true that this may be a selection effect (a poor peasant in El Salvador probably doesn't have a local news organization to tell about a UFO he's just seen), but I believe this trend is telling. Aliens just don't like to visit places where people haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the X-Files.
I know I'm not convincing everyone out there with these arguments. And I'm not trying to be smug or superior. But scientists work with facts,and right now, there are no facts to back up the existence of life on other worlds.
Personally, I believe that life outside the Earth does exist, and I think there's a good chance that intelligent life might have arisen elsewhere too. I so look forward to the first signal SETI detects that we can't explain away, or the first delicate little cell we find fossilized in the rocks of Mars. I will look up into the sky with tremendous joy and relief that we are not alone.
And, I promise, I will tell you all about it.