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Jan. 14, 2002 - Art Bell

02:35:39

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - William R. Alschuler PhD - An Astronomer Examines the Science of UFOs

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	♪♪♪ From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I
	bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be at all.
	24 time zones of the world, but here's this program.
	How are you?
	I'm Art Bell, and this program is Coast to Coast.
	A.M.
	in the next hour, William Alshuler, who is Professor Alshuler, I guess I should say, who is a An astronomer is going to be commenting on the likelihood of alien life, what it might be like, and such subjects.
	Having an astronomer comment on all of this will be very, very interesting, won't it?
	So, welcome.
	Let's look at what's going on out there, shall we?
	War news.
	U.S.
	warplanes pounded terrorist hideouts in eastern Afghanistan on Monday in bombing raids aimed at striking Osama bin Laden's Die-hard supporters, but they still don't have him.
	They still don't have him.
	The military is looking to cut back what it's doing over the U.S.
	It has been flying and flying and flying and flying at a cost of about $324 million.
	The round-the-clock patrols over our skies, designed to deter any terrorists, may be beginning to strain both the planes and the people involved in trying to do it.
	So they're going to be cutting back on some of that.
	Hopefully, the reason to cut back is a sound one, meaning the threat is less.
	Another category of what comes around goes around, or what goes around then comes around, I guess.
	A Palestinian militia leader who boasted of shooting Israelis was killed himself when a bomb exploded as he emerged from his West Bank hideout and walked along a quiet street on Monday.
	So, live by and die by, I guess, huh?
	Enron, speaking of dying, there's another Enron story tonight.
	Washington and Enron employee warned the company chairman in August that, and this is a quote, we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals Unless the company halted certain practices that eventually sent it into bankruptcy.
	Our stock's down.
	96 points on the Dow.
	The Tokyo exchange at this hour following suit and dropping like a rock.
	Again, more stories.
	It seems to be a sure thing now.
	El Nino is on the way back.
	The periodic warming of the surface of the Pacific Ocean that can trigger severe worldwide weather and environmental disasters has been observed to be building up by none less than a U.S.
	government agency.
	The phenomena brought droughts and floods, causing thousands of deaths and serious malnutrition across Latin America, Southern Africa, and the Pacific region during its last appearance.
	That was 97-98.
	Just millions of people losing their homes in China, while Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras.
	The phenomena caused serious delays to the monsoons in India, severe flooding in Bangladesh.
	It impacts the whole planet.
	Scientists believe that the small rise in temperature in the Indian and Pacific Oceans was enough To also provoke a, get this folks, a severe cold wave in Europe in October of 98 and a crippling ice storm in the southern US.
	So, everybody gets affected when El Nino comes around and it's coming around once again.
	It just doesn't seem like it's been long enough.
	But I guess it has.
	Didn't we just finish talking about El Nino, I thought?
	And here's a puzzle for you.
	The Antarctic has cooled during the past 35 years, despite worldwide temperature rises.
	According to a study published today, finding challenges the belief that global warming is raising temperatures across the whole of the southern continent, but the authors accept that some Antarctic hotspots Have gotten warmer, actually, over the past few decades.
	So, it's really, really weird what's going on.
	They're saying, overall, they now think that the Antarctic is colder, but in certain areas, specific areas, it's hotter.
	So, I don't know what category to put that one in.
	Now, I want you to listen very carefully.
	I know there are a lot of truckers in my audience.
	And it doesn't matter whether you're a trucker or not, you will appreciate this story.
	But if you are a trucker, I think you will appreciate it all the more.
	It comes from somebody I will call Mark.
	He kindly supplies his last name.
	Actually, I'd love to talk to him on the air.
	But he was very good at writing all of this down.
	Listen to this.
	My name is Mark, and I'm a truck driver from Brayman, Oklahoma.
	That's B-R-A-M-A-N, Oklahoma.
	I listened to your Ghost to Ghost program last October, and I have a story sure to raise the hairs on your neck, but didn't have the time to pull over and call in that night.
	Not to mention some of the stories that I've heard that night were anything but scary anyway, but here it is.
	It was three years ago in late January.
	I was on a run from Oklahoma City to Anaheim, California.
	It was 2 a.m.
	Westbound on I-40, approaching Flagstaff, Arizona.
	As I climbed the mountain pass, I ran into the heavy snow.
	Actually, it had been snowing for some time.
	The road was a solid sheet of ice.
	Any trucker's nightmare.
	So, I had to reduce my speed to a mere crawl.
	Figured I could reach the truck stop at Belmont and I'd be okay, so I kept going.
	So I made my way up the mountain and reached the top at about 2.45 a.m.
	The east and westbound lanes In that area are separated by a median that is heavily timbered and both east and westbound are at different elevations.
	As I topped the rise, I saw heavy mist coming from the trees in the median.
	As I got closer, I realized it wasn't mist, it was smoke.
	I saw a dim yellow flame rise above the brush, barely visible over the edge of the drop.
	When I pulled parallel to this flame, I clearly saw what it was.
	It was a car upside down.
	The glint of light on the still-spinning rims was unmistakable.
	Now, stopping a loaded semi on an ice-glazed road is one thing no trucker will do willingly, or without damn good reason, because you may not get started again, and there you will stay until help comes, or the road thaws.
	But what I saw, I felt the risk was acceptable, so I pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped.
	I made my way towards a car.
	It was upside down.
	And other than a few dents, it seemed to be in relatively good shape.
	A small flame was burning under the oil pan, releasing black smoke that was nauseating.
	As I made my way closer, I heard muffled movement and hushed, almost inaudible voices.
	I ran through deep snow to the passenger side and looked in.
	Two people.
	A man in his 30s and a younger woman were there.
	At seeing me, they started shouting, help us please!
	They were both wearing their seatbelts, which kept them suspended upside down.
	I tried to open both doors with no success.
	I told them I was going for something to pry the door open with and I'd be right back.
	I ran to the truck.
	Fished out my largest pry bar and some rope, returned to the car.
	By now, the whole motor compartment was ablaze.
	I pried with all my might, but the door wouldn't budge.
	I tried to crawl into the car, ripping my coat in the process.
	In the attempt to cut their seatbelts and drag them out, no luck.
	The top was caved in just enough to thwart any attempts at entry.
	So I told them to hold tight.
	I was going to try to radio for help.
	As I withdrew, I felt extreme heat on the back of my neck.
	The fire was spreading rapidly along the bottom of the vehicle as I ran.
	Or rather, I ran as fast as I could to the semi.
	All the while, I could hear the screams coming from the couple.
	I knew their time was running out.
	And quickly, I tried frantically to raise someone on the CB, but all I got was static.
	The flames were lighting up the clearing now.
	My mind raced trying to decide what to do and then suddenly, without any warning, the flames went out.
	Puzzled and a little relieved, I made my way back to the car.
	When I arrived at the spot, there was no sign of the vehicle, no smoke, nothing.
	I was sure I had just Ran to the wrong spot, since the snow was very heavy and visibility not the greatest.
	I searched for five minutes, using my truck as a point of reference.
	Soon I tripped over something.
	It was the round, plate-shaped rock I had put my knees on to look into the car.
	Well, I have to tell you, I've never been so scared in my whole life.
	I made a mad dash for the semi, once in, locked the doors, tried calling on my CB, still wasn't working.
	After a few minutes got the truck rolling and in half an hour I was safely at the Belmont truck stop.
	A waitress I knew greeted me as I walked into the restaurant and I'm sure I must have looked terrible because she kept asking if I was alright.
	We sat and talked.
	After a while I did calm down and told her my story.
	Her face went white and her eyes wide.
	She told me of a couple of a few years ago a couple of from a few years back They were somewhere up from the Northeast.
	They were on their way to visit relations in California when they got caught in a snowstorm up on Flagstaff.
	They lost control, crashed, the wreck trapped them, and the car caught fire.
	No one was out that night.
	The weather wasn't too bad.
	They were found the next day burned to death.
	I still drive, but I gave up long-haul driving.
	I don't stray more than a few hundred miles from home.
	That day, those images, it will haunt me for the rest of my life.
	And Mark, if you would like to get hold of me and talk on the air about this, I would love to speak with you.
	Sound of jet engine.
	All right.
	Why don't we do open lines for the balance of this particular hour?
	And then, as I said, it's going to be, I think, very, very interesting to hear an astronomer speak on the subject of aliens and alien spacecraft.
	You don't frequently get an astronomer to do that.
	Actually, this one has written some books on the subject.
	So it should be pretty interesting.
	Here we go.
	First time caller line.
	You're on the air.
	Hello.
	There you are.
	Hey, sir.
	This is Joe calling from Jackson, Mississippi.
	Yes, sir.
	I've been listening to you for about six years.
	Well, thank you.
	I've got a request for you.
	Okay.
	On the show you did on the 4th, your Open Minds, you talked of a story of some guys that drilled a hole into the earth.
	That's right.
	And they recorded some sounds.
	That's correct.
	Could you tell that story again and play that recording?
	Sure.
	I will do it briefly.
	Be glad to do it briefly, I suppose.
	Actually, I've been, you're not gonna believe this, I've been working on my cart rack,
	so I've got them on the floor.
	When I work on my cart rack, the only way I can fix this thing is with glue, super glue.
	And you all know the record I've had with super glue.
	As a matter of fact, since, so I've got them all on the floor.
	Since the horrible super glue incident which occurred to me, I've had several others.
	I do not have luck with super glue.
	There is simply not a dispenser that I have found faultless.
	I've been sent some good stuff.
	Somebody sent me like a little, it's sort of like a woman's nail polish thing, you know,
	and it dips down into the super glue.
	The trouble with that is that after a while they fray a little bit and it flips the super
	glue into the air and you're as likely to get it on you as any other way and then there
	was some other super glue.
	You know, there are lots of good ideas.
	I mean, people have good ideas, but the very nature of superglue is that it will get you no matter what.
	As you're holding it, as you squirt it, as whatever, you're going to be picking superglue off yourself for a while.
	Well, that day I Superglued my lips together and then in a frantic effort to get back on the air again Actually Ripped a piece of my lip off.
	It was disgusting But when your lip is actually glued glued together and you're a talk show host you have to act quickly All right this story has been around for some time and it comes from Siberia and And, uh, it has been in several mainstream, uh, media.
	I think it was, uh, what was it?
	Reuters or AP or one of the news services, anyway, ran this story about a group of Russian scientists that drilled a hole.
	Uh, I don't know what they were drilling for or why.
	I think the story made mention of it.
	Actually, we've had this on the website before.
	They drilled the world's deepest hole, and somebody heard something, or for some reason they became suspicious that they were hearing something they ought not.
	So they lowered microphones into the hole.
	This sound, this audio I have, is allegedly that recording.
	Again, this was in a legitimate wire service, and I was provided this audio by an anonymous donor.
	Actually, it was not anonymous, the person who sent this, as I recall, now that I think about it.
	We had it up there for a while.
	And it was represented as being the legitimate audio that came from that microphone, lowered into that hole.
	And that's what the caller was talking about, and here it is.
	Listen carefully.
	I'm going to tell you a story.
	Anyway, that's it.
	Pretty, uh, pretty horrible stuff.
	And if you want the hair to stand up on the back of your neck, just listen to that one a couple of times.
	So I can't tell you any more about it than that, but that is the story as requested.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hey, Arthur Levi.
	I'm up here in Portland, listening to you on, uh, 1190.
	Yes, sir.
	Are you, uh, in a truck or something?
	Yeah, I'm shut down at the fuel aisle in here, just getting ready.
	All right.
	Did you happen to hear the story from that trucker I read a little while ago?
	Sure did.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, there are stories like that that happen quite often, and a lot of people are kind of shy about talking about it.
	Yeah.
	It affects them pretty deeply.
	I would imagine.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Hey, I got a request for you on your FM station over there and maybe a Valentine's bumper music.
	There's an old song that I really did like years ago called All These Things by The Uniques.
	Does that ring a bell?
	It does not, but I have almost every music list in the world, so I'll see if I can find it.
	Okay, well have a good night.
	All right, you take care, sir.
	Thank you all who sent music lists to me.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Yes, hello, Art.
	How are you?
	I'm okay, sir.
	This is Francis from Western Pennsylvania calling.
	Yes.
	And I'm calling regarding the sound of the microphone that was dropped into the hole.
	Yes.
	That you had mentioned.
	I had sent you an email last February about that.
	And using the Pro Tools 5.1 software by Digidesign and the Bruno and Echo plugins, it's possible to create sounds similar to that, including placing a Doppler effect on the track.
	I'm sure that you can do anything with anything, sir, just like it's, in fact, probably more easily than fooling around with photography, you know.
	That's true.
	But the point is, I've worked with that software, and for one of my musical pieces for background ambient sounds, I did do something very similar to that.
	So it's fairly easy to do.
	You have the control of digital, but you can get sounds that have been generated in the past by analog synthesizers.
	That's all I wanted to say.
	All right, sir.
	Glad you said it.
	You have a good morning.
	Of course.
	Digital photography, digital audio, anybody can fake anything anytime now, these days.
	There's absolutely no question about it.
	However, in this case, it follows a legitimate wire service story.
	And so it's kind of interesting.
	Of course, I understand when you hear it, you wouldn't really want to believe it, would you?
	That's exactly what it is.
	Good morning, everybody.
	Open lines between now and the top of the hour then.
	William, uh, Professor William Ausler.
	I hope that's right.
	I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
	He is an astronomer, and he's going to be here commenting about all kinds of interesting things, like perhaps his own UFO experience.
	And then I guess because he's had that, if I'm correct, he'll then be able to comment, or would be willing to comment, on all kinds of other aspects.
	He's in fact written books on the subject, so...
	Should be very interesting.
	I don't know. Not to...
	That's interesting, an IRS commercial.
	In there, in the beginning, it's kind of neat.
	They sing, I love you.
	The IRS loves me.
	Welcome to the Rockies.
	You're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Hello.
	This is Kathy in Phoenix.
	Hey, Kathy.
	You played that Sounds of Hell.
	The Hell Tape, yes.
	Yes, and that reminded me.
	I had been listening to a commercial here.
	It's easy to grow up.
	That teaches people how to work at the stock market.
	Every time I hear the thing come on, I want to scream and I couldn't figure out why.
	You know, since you mention it, actually, if you've ever heard the market on one of their really, really bad days,
	CNN covers them.
	You know, when the market's in sort of a crash situation, they'll always go down to the floor.
	Oh, it's horrible.
	And, uh, they put some poor little reporter down in the middle of this floor.
	People are running by, almost knocking the reporter over.
	Everybody's in a panic.
	And you're right.
	It sounds just like that.
	Just like hell.
	I know.
	It does.
	No, I know why.
	No, there you are.
	Okay.
	All right, thank you very much and take care.
	Yeah, she's right.
	She's exactly right.
	You ever seen those?
	I always wonder about the person who's sent down, and no doubt they send them down into the most, probably the most chaotic part of the floor.
	You know, so you get the most dramatic effect.
	Oh my God, the market's crashing.
	Well, it's down 540 points.
	We just don't understand it.
	You know, and people are rushing by and Phones are ringing and people are screaming and you know,
	and they do that for the effect. It's let's go like when there's a hurricane
	They send some reporter down to where they figure the eye is going to cross land
	You know, he's got a stand there and report same deal at the stock market first time calling line. You're on the air.
	Hello Hi, no
	Despite what I think of some of your guests. I always thought that you've had a really great taste in music and
	I'm the collector of certain kinds of music and I was going to send you some but I guess you're not accepting anymore
	Does it also include UPS?
	Oh, you mean by mail?
	Yeah.
	Well, yes, it does include UPS, because there's nowhere to deliver to.
	Okay.
	So, yes, I'm afraid, you know, it's just, it's ruined it, and I wonder when we are going to be all feeling safe enough, particularly public people, to accept mail.
	I don't know what the answer to that is, but I'll let you know.
	Well, you said you've got quite a complete song list.
	How about if I If I tell you some of the titles, um, and these are ones that I picked out that kind of fit with some of the themes on the show.
	Well, you want to email it to me, that's fine.
	Yeah, that's a good idea.
	Yeah, okay.
	Okay, the other thing I wanted to talk about is the pretzel.
	Oh, the pretzel.
	Yeah.
	The pretzel and the prez.
	I think there's one thing we have to remember.
	What?
	Guns don't kill people.
	Pretzels kill people.
	Pretzels kill people.
	Unless, of course, you fall on the floor hard enough so that the Secret Service hears you and picks you up and performs the Heimlich on you.
	Yeah, uh, okay, thank you very much.
	You know, I should have commented on that at the top of the hour, because it was probably in some ways the biggest piece of news in the last day or so, and it was a shock.
	Now, let me tell you something.
	They don't tell us a hell of a lot about presidential medical conditions.
	I think that's something that for long before I was born, There's been a tradition about, you know, if the president has a condition, they don't talk about it.
	Something happens, they rarely talk about it.
	Now, this, they talked about.
	I guess they had no choice, in view of what happened to his face.
	But it sounded pretty serious.
	And, I guess, potentially fatal.
	You know, it could be fatal, something like that.
	So, I haven't heard who was there.
	Whether someone Heimlich him or what happened?
	Just that you know his blood pressure went through the floor suddenly and it would as you were choking on something like that and Of course they looked him over and I guess he's okay, but boy that's pretty scary stuff and because of the presidential cloak of You only hear what they want you to hear.
	We may not know exactly what really did happen.
	May never know.
	Until someone writes a book.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Yes.
	Hey, how you doing?
	I'm okay, sir.
	Where are you?
	I'm calling from Memphis.
	All right.
	And can I say hello to the folks in the grassy knoll?
	Yes, you may.
	Okay.
	And we miss seeing you there.
	Well, you know, I come in there from time to time.
	And I also go to some of the Ethnet channels, but well, you know what I found?
	It's really unfortunate.
	When I go into these places, people don't believe it's me.
	And so it's like I give up.
	I hear you.
	They honestly don't believe it's me.
	And they have kicked me off FNET channels because, oh, there's another fake art belt.
	Boom!
	And you're kicked off.
	Oh, man.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, what's up?
	Do you remember about the middle of November, whenever a molecular biologist disappeared?
	I do.
	OK.
	You know, his car was found on one of the Mississippi River bridges.
	I heard that, yes.
	OK.
	His body was found about a month later.
	Yeah, I think they're calling this an accident, aren't they?
	I live in Memphis, Shelby County.
	They're trying to call it an accident, right?
	They are saying that he accidentally fell off that bridge.
	Uh-huh.
	Art, I don't know if you've ever seen that bridge, but I just... No, I haven't.
	Tell me.
	How hard would it be to accidentally fall off that bridge?
	I think, don't they design bridges to make it hard for you to fall off?
	Well, I don't know, sir.
	You're near the bridge.
	I'm not.
	You tell me.
	I'd have to say yes.
	I just... That is the most hokey... There's no way.
	That is just totally unbelievable.
	Absolutely unbelievable.
	You've seen the bridge?
	Yes.
	Okay, well, you know, there have been a number of scientists who have worked with things like that scientist did, molecular biology, and on a lot of these pretty scary things, and they've ended up dead now.
	Coincidence?
	I think not.
	Falling into rivers and stuff like that?
	And I just wanted to, and I fast blasted you and emailed, I hope I'm not overreacting, but, you know, that the medical examiner could come through and say that with a straight face.
	I know.
	I know, sir.
	I appreciate the call and I share your concerns all the way, believe me.
	Yeah, I've seen the story.
	And of course, this is the way the majority of them are explained away now.
	Maybe it is just an incredible coincidence at a time like this, but... I don't believe in coincidences that much, do you?
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello?
	Hello, Art.
	Yes, that would be me.
	Hello.
	This is Pat calling you from Old Forge, Pennsylvania.
	Yes, Pat.
	I had a suggestion for a show.
	Oh, an entire show?
	Yes, I think a whole show could be devoted to this particular subject.
	What would that be?
	That would be Mysterious Vanishings.
	Oh.
	Well, it would blow everybody out there away to know how many people Virtually vanish.
	And that's the truth.
	I mean, they are just gone.
	There's an investigation that goes on for a while, but after a while, they cannot be found.
	They just get written off as vanished.
	Now, where have they gone?
	I don't know.
	Like, are you familiar with the case that took place back in the 1930s when Japan was invading Nanking in China?
	Yes.
	And I forget exactly the exact number, but I know that several thousand soldiers were commissioned to defend the front lines of the city.
	Yes.
	And apparently those soldiers vanished without a trace.
	Are you familiar with that?
	No, that is certainly one story that I have not heard.
	Ah, I would love to look into it.
	Vanishings, uh, and thousands of soldiers.
	Well, kind of hard to prove in China, I suppose.
	But all over the world, every day, there are vanishings, and where these, you know, some of them obviously run away, I suppose.
	Begin a new life somewhere else.
	But then, some certain percentage of them, perhaps, well, perhaps something else happens.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hello?
	Hello, Art Bell?
	Yes.
	How are you?
	I'm okay, sir.
	Where are you?
	I'm calling from California.
	Okay.
	Go ahead.
	Uh, I was calling about Bugs.
	Bugs?
	Oh, yes, Bugs.
	What about him?
	Uh, information.
	I haven't been listening and I haven't heard anything about him.
	That's because there's nothing more to hear.
	Uh, we did a series of shows, the last of which we thought for sure... In fact, Bugs had indicated, uh, just go ahead and...
	Pass out my phone number, and I made him wait 24 hours.
	48, actually.
	And when I went back to him, his wife said she wouldn't let him do it.
	And I don't blame her.
	And that is the last news.
	One other question, Art.
	Yes?
	Did you hear about a gentleman who actually hit one of these Bigfoots and had it in his garage?
	Did you hear about that?
	No.
	Okay.
	Did you?
	Yes, on one of the shows, this gentleman actually had hit it and took it down to his basement.
	And I could have sworn that was your show.
	Well, that... that was an alien, not a Bigfoot.
	Oh, okay.
	You talking about the one that went in the freezer?
	Uh, no, these people had... Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay.
	They had blood samples... Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
	All right, I know now what you're talking about.
	Yeah, that was a Bigfoot.
	And the guy, how did that end up?
	The guy refused to allow, we had, I remember now, we had Linda Moulton Howe and some others contact this man.
	You know, I had permission to give the number and I did.
	And Linda and some others contacted him.
	And once again, this man had lowered the body, if I'm remembering the story correctly, into this shelter.
	It wasn't a basement, it was a bomb shelter, actually, a shelter.
	And in the end, he refused to allow a vet to examine the body.
	That's pretty interesting.
	People, as you might imagine, when they think that they may have committed
	some sort of crime, get very, very hesitant to proceed as they consider it.
	They consider that they may be charged with a crime, and in fact they might.
	Can't deny they might be.
	First time caller line, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Morning.
	Good morning, sir.
	How you doing?
	All right.
	Turn your radio off, please.
	It is.
	Okay.
	My name is Nick from Memphis.
	Yes, Nick.
	600 W-R-E-C.
	You bet.
	About a guy called in One of your programs about the professor that they found supposedly fell off the bridge.
	We just talked about it, yes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He could actually fall off that bridge because there's no safety restraints.
	I'm a constable in Arkansas.
	Okay, so you're saying he could have fallen off it.
	Oh yeah, definitely.
	We've had people fall off, jump off.
	Jump off one could understand.
	Fall off is a little bit harder.
	What's making people nervous and a little bit suspicious is that so many people working in this area of molecular biology, science, have been dying in a series of rather bizarre circumstances.
	Yeah.
	I know the medical examiner was talking about how he had been drinking that night.
	That could have easily happened from scenarios that I've seen before.
	Yeah, I didn't see that in the story.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The medical examiner came out with, because he had been at one of the hotels there downtown at a function and had been drinking that night.
	Well, anything is possible.
	Again, I think the heightened suspicion Is that at this particular time, when the nation is so concerned about... I don't know, you hear stories every single day about it, right?
	About the possibility of some sort of bug being unleashed upon us.
	But naturally, when you have a bunch of people in this field that are showing up dead under rather unusual circumstances, and particularly a number of them, it makes us a little itchy.
	Itchy, right?
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Would have been.
	Sorry, we missed you.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hi.
	I'm calling about the other night you had someone call in about a mystery light in Michigan.
	Oh, yes.
	Okay, I lived in that area for when I was growing up.
	What kind of phone are you on, on your old one?
	I'm on a cell phone.
	I live on a ranch with no power.
	And we listen to you every night with our battery radio.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Well, go ahead.
	Okay.
	It's called the Paulding Light.
	It's in Paulding, Michigan.
	Right.
	And it's over 100 years old.
	It's been there for over 100 years.
	They believe that it is from an engineer that got killed during the logging days.
	You mean that it's truly a ghost light?
	Yes, it is.
	It was on Unsolved Mysteries.
	It went there and did a lot of tests and and checked it all out and they could find nothing but the light was there and it flashes from red to green for stop and go like the engineer used to have the old light during the railroad days.
	Did you hear the trucker story I read earlier?
	I think I was in the shower.
	Oh, then you're going to want to catch that in the repeat, yes.
	Thank you very much.
	This whole thing about lights or plasma balls, if you will, is something to consider plasma balls.
	The most recent science on this is they are discovering these plasma balls are able to sustain themselves in the atmosphere and even grow in strength in the atmosphere but at the bare minimum sustain themselves and that defies all laws of physics.
	Anything that generates something like that You could imagine lightning doing it or something or another.
	It would be a process that would slowly lessen until finally it exploded or winked out or the energy was used or whatever.
	That's the way things work.
	But that's not the way these plasma balls work.
	This is now documented science.
	First time caller line, you're on the air.
	Hello, Art.
	Hello.
	Good talk to you.
	And you, sir.
	Long time listener.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Central Illinois.
	My name's Don.
	Okay, Don.
	I've got a question for you.
	Sure.
	Do you have that rotten feeling that you had right before 9-11?
	No.
	No.
	Good.
	No, I don't think that I do.
	You don't think there's going to be any more problems here in the United States for a long time?
	Oh, I didn't say that.
	Oh.
	I didn't say that.
	Well, I don't really have that real strong feeling, but I've got a feeling something's going to happen, and it doesn't seem like it.
	That's like anything to do with 9-11 terrorists, but I think it's something from outside... I don't know how to explain that.
	Like a comet or meteor or something coming towards us or something like that.
	I keep having this reoccurring dream that's been coming on for the last three or four years and it keeps refining itself, you know, you get more... Well, you are aware, of course, of the close call that we had.
	Earth had a very close call last Monday with something that would have ruined our day.
	You knew about that?
	No, I didn't.
	Oh, you didn't?
	No.
	Oh, yeah.
	Big old rock.
	Big old rock whizzed by Earth, sir.
	And it did so at about, I don't know, less than the distance to the moon or something
	like that, or maybe twice the distance.
	I forget.
	Very close, though.
	I should have been listening to you more.
	I probably would have found out about it.
	I'm going to have an astronomer on in just a very few moments, and that's one of the
	things we surely will ask him about.
	There's nothing coming at us or nothing to love other than that one big rock just went
	by it.
	Well, you see...
	They don't exactly know.
	They've only categorized one out of roughly ten of these rocks that are out there that would potentially hit us.
	In other words, they only know the whereabouts of, say, one out of ten.
	And the others, well, you might not even see them.
	If they're coming from one certain direction, you might not even see them coming.
	Like the sun's blocking our view or something?
	Yeah, something like that.
	So it could just suddenly happen.
	Because most times when they report on it, you know, the report starts out something like this.
	The so-and-so news service reports that yesterday, Earth had a very close call.
	Yeah, a day late and a dollar short.
	Uh, at least.
	You have a good evening.
	Yeah, you too, sir.
	Good morning.
	Thank you, and I hope you're wrong about your feeling.
	Anyway, we've got an astronomer coming on who's going to talk about UFOs next.
	Into the light.
	That's pretty good bumper music for an astronomer, huh?
	And that's who's coming up.
	Professor William R. Altshuler.
	...is an astronomer.
	He has just written a book.
	Actually, he's written several, but his latest, The Science of UFOs.
	The Science of UFOs.
	An astronomer examines the technology of alien spacecrafts, how they travel, and the aliens who pilot them.
	This should be pretty interesting.
	Coming up next, if you'll stay right there.
	All right, Dr. William R. Altshuler has a PhD in astronomy from the University of California at Santa Cruz
	and received his BA in astronomy at Harvard College.
	Mm-hmm.
	Dr. Altshuler has extensive college teaching experience in the sciences, holography, Lippmann photography, energy conservation, and solar building design.
	He is founder and principal of Future Museums.
	That's a consulting firm.
	Specializing in the design of exhibits and museums with a science or technology content.
	He's recently served as consultant to the California Science Center and the Getty Education Institute for Curriculum Development that combines art and science.
	He has been author or editor on the following.
	Listen to this.
	The Microverse UFOs and Aliens First contact, the ultimate dinosaur.
	Are we alone in the cosmos?
	And most recently, the science of UFOs.
	He is currently a science professor at California Institute of the Arts.
	Professor, welcome to the program.
	Thank you very much.
	You got all that perfectly.
	Oh, well, good.
	Including, I presume, how to pronounce your name, I hope.
	Yes.
	All right, good.
	Professor, it is, I suppose, I've got to ask right away, normally, and believe me, I've interviewed a lot of astronomers, people up at Griffith Observatory and a lot of different places, a lot of astronomers, really, people up in your class, from an academic point of view, and they generally are unwilling to pretty much discuss any of this at all.
	How come?
	No, no, no.
	Let me rephrase that.
	How come you are?
	I am because I'm really interested in discussing matters of science and things related to science with the general public.
	I've devoted most of my life and education to teaching classes for non-science students.
	I got started in this at a relatively early age.
	I actually got started thinking about astronomy when I was in grammar school.
	school principal who came around every year, this was in the early 1950s, and lectured
	class annually about what was going to be the space program before there was a space
	program.
	Wow.
	And that caught my attention and imagination.
	By the time I graduated from eighth grade, I pretty much knew I wanted to be an astronomer.
	When I was in high school, I was in a summer science program and I was at a college.
	college in the East where not only were high school students in a special program for students
	interested in science, but some grammar school teachers were in parallel programs at the
	same school.
	I wore my way into the good graces of a graduate student who was a teaching assistant for the
	teachers program and asked to see some of their exams, which probably he shouldn't have
	allowed me to see, but he did.
	I discovered, to my surprise, that some very good teachers, one of whom was from my old
	grammar school and my younger brother had as a teacher and I knew was absolutely excellent,
	did not know as much astronomy as I did and didn't do as good a job on writing tests as
	I did.
	I didn't think I was such a hot shot in any of that, just very interested and I was really rather surprised and at that point decided that really someone should take on the job of making sure that the people who weren't going into the sciences had some real grasp on what the sciences were about.
	It got me.
	It seems as though those who succeed in any area of professional endeavor almost always,
	not always, but almost always know where they are headed at a very early age and almost
	are consumed by it.
	Those seem to be the people that succeed in their various areas of endeavor, I have noticed.
	I agree with you.
	So anyway, there are interesting exceptions.
	There are, but they are the exception.
	The rule seems to be that people are just consumed suddenly by it at a very young age and it never stops.
	Okay, lots and lots to talk about.
	Before we do that, I want to ask you, last Monday, the Earth had a pretty close encounter
	with some rock that came within a couple of moon lengths or something of Earth, and I
	suppose in astronomical terms, pretty close.
	You know anything about that rock at all?
	No, I'm afraid I don't.
	I missed that near miss, though there have been a few others in the last decade that
	were sort of quickly upon us.
	And at least one of them looked like it was going to come back on another pass and possibly
	actually smack us.
	But when work was done after the near pass, the near miss, some more work was done on the orbit.
	It was pretty much discounted and decided that the thing would not come closer than the orbit of the moon the next time around.
	If one of these things were headed toward us, first of all, what are the odds that we would even know about it?
	Because so many times the story is, Astronomers revealed today that yesterday, or two days ago, Earth had a very near miss.
	I mean, it's like sometimes they don't seem to see them coming until after they've gone by.
	The ones that are coming right at us represent a pretty difficult detection problem, because since they're headed straight down our throats, generally the clue is you see a star in a location you didn't expect, which is getting brighter and brighter.
	If it's headed across us, Then you see something moving across the background stars, and it's a much easier task to detect it.
	So something coming toward us would simply be a slowly brightening star.
	It would be very easy for somebody to miss until it got awfully close.
	Yeah, I mean, there are different degrees of this.
	And of course, if we're talking about two things in quite different orbits, it might, in fact, move slowly across the background stars.
	But it's really headed straight for us.
	That's not usually going to be a huge motion across the sky.
	There is a patrol going on right now trying to find and catalog all of the objects in the solar system which have orbits across the orbit of Earth.
	But doesn't that mean the one most likely to get us is the one that we will most likely not be able to see?
	Well, it'll be one of the harder ones, but remember that if it's on an orbit which intersects us in the future but not immediately, it may represent an easier detection problem.
	If it comes around frequently enough to have been noticed before, right?
	Not even necessarily the case.
	Yes, of course, but if it's just coming around for the first time or we see it for the first time, but it's not going to hit us this time around, but the orbit shows up as, you know, the next pass or two passes from now, it's going to come real close.
	We might not have a difficult time getting it this time around.
	This seems like a real danger.
	There's somewhat of a debate about how big a danger it is.
	People have estimated how many objects are floating around in the solar system that are really possible dangers and how many we've cataloged out of this.
	I heard about one out of ten that would possibly cross our orbit.
	I'm not sure I want to commit myself on that, but I think the number of Planetoids that have been cataloged are now getting in the range of a couple of thousand, and the total number is up maybe five times that by estimate, but no one knows for sure.
	How many of those will actually hit us?
	I don't think anybody's really tried to make an estimate.
	It's more like, what is the rate of strike over the past history?
	There's a fair amount of controversy about that, but the ones we're worried about, which a five miles across or larger, are pretty rare and as far
	as we can tell, probably one in ten million years. Well they said that this wasn't
	nearly so big. I forget, only like 300 meters or something like that. But they said that
	it would have made a couple of miles deep and taken out a good medium-sized city and
	you know, totally. Would have been a mess. Would have been a mess, yeah. So it doesn't take a
	five mile rock to ruin our day. No. It would have made a nasty mess some place.
	Professor, I have had a really, really serious UFO experience and I am told I should ask you, have
	you had one? I have actually, though not really recently. Back in my misspent youth, one
	summer when I was working for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, I walked out the door of the
	planetarium at dusk at the end of my working day and as I usually did, I sort of
	looked around and it's a beautiful site right at the shore of Lake Michigan, just sort of outboard
	of the Museum of Natural History. And you look back towards the west and you see all
	of the water, all of the skyline, all the beautiful buildings and you look east and you are
	looking out over Lake Michigan and I happened to look east and hanging in the sky towards
	the southeast was a rather bright white disc with no features and no real shadowing.
	But discernibly a disc. Absolutely discernibly a disc. Something that was not too different in
	diameter, apparent diameter from a full moon. And it was silent and it wasn't really
	moving and I stood there and looked at it for a while and sort of ran through my head
	the catalog of things that might be and no obvious answer popped up. Then I decided that if I
	was seeing this, then a good chunk of Chicago was seeing it and it was a good chance that
	someone had called the planetarium switchboard and someone inside, it was not me, had figured
	out what it was.
	So I went back in, and sure enough, somebody had done a little bit of work, and it turned out it was a balloon below which was hanging, though I couldn't see it, a gondola which held a good cosmic ray experiment launched by the
	University of Chicago.
	Oh really?
	The whole thing hung there silently and of course it slowly drifted along, very slowly,
	and a few days later I read in the paper that it had come down in Texas, which was pretty
	much what they were expecting.
	Interesting.
	So your UFO experience really was an IFO?
	Eventually, yes.
	Eventually an IFO.
	With a sort of pause, yes.
	But I had no real immediate clue to it and by that time I was in college I had a lot
	of observing under my belt.
	I was well-traveled, so I was interested by the fact that I couldn't figure out what it was without going to talk to someone else.
	So if you'd been an average Joe and you could not have walked back into the planetarium, most people can't just walk into a planetarium, you might have To this very day.
	You might have imagined that you saw a flying saucer.
	Right.
	But it wasn't very zippy.
	Good point.
	When you look out into the sky and you look at all those stars and now I hear we're discovering increasing numbers of planets about the stars.
	Right.
	Makes life more likely or the possibility of life you would think more likely.
	I understand we're only spotting the biggest planets but that that would figure that Yes, absolutely.
	In fact, we've already got a couple of cases where there are smaller planets detectable around other stars and in at least one case, there's really good evidence that there's more than one planet traveling around a particular star.
	Oh, really?
	In those cases, you can see that The first planet discovered was the biggest, generally the one that was closest into its sun, for a reason which I can explain, and then the next ones which followed were smaller and or further away.
	And the only way these are detectable are by some sort of perturbation in the light coming from that star.
	Right.
	You look at the spectrum of a star and you can see generally lots and lots of line features,
	dark absorption from the elements of the star's atmosphere.
	You can see this in the sun.
	In fact, in the sun there are thousands and thousands of them.
	If you have a big enough spectroscope, you can easily see these when you spread the spectrum
	out.
	If you have an extremely high precision spectrograph, and this is the advance which has allowed
	the detection of these planets, of which I believe there are around now 70 announced
	Oh no kidding?
	I didn't know there were that many.
	Yeah, I just looked at the Planetary Encyclopedia on the web and people can easily go check this if they want to do a search.
	Just do a search on extrasolar planets and you can see the catalog.
	They're mostly pretty well confirmed in that there's years of observations on them and in some cases more than one observer has seen them.
	With a spectroscope of really high precision If the star you're looking at is moving in a cyclical fashion, for example, in response to something like a Jupiter traveling around it, then its lines shift to the blue and the red back and forth with every orbit.
	And if there are two planets, then you see two periods in the shifts, and it's a little more complicated, and if there's three, it's even more complicated.
	All right.
	Based, then, on what they have already found, Is it possible to mathematically make a fair guess, you know, if you extend it to all we see in terms of stars, and then can we make a fair guess on how likely planets are and how likely it would be that there would be one that
	Could be Earth-like.
	I mean, we have some other base of information.
	Right.
	The first one is easier than the second.
	And the first one is now in much better shape than it was a decade ago before we knew any of this.
	OK.
	It looks like, from the statistics, that there are so many discovered among the stars near us.
	And all of the discoveries have been for stars near us.
	Because we're not sensitive.
	We don't have instruments sensitive enough to look at things much, much further away that are much fainter.
	Right.
	That probably two-thirds of the stars near us, which are reasonably like the sun, have planets.
	Something like that.
	Wow.
	It's a really high percentage.
	It's possible it's higher because in the case where a planetary system around another star isn't set edge-on to us, so that we're looking at the orbit sort of edge-on, but face-on, so we're looking down on or up at the system, in that case you can't detect the motion by the technique I described.
	So, we're missing some, would be a way of saying it.
	There's some out there we can't detect just because of that.
	So the likelihood then of, let's see, you said that of the nearby stars, two-thirds of those could be reasonably expected to have planets, and of those, now your second question is much harder.
	We don't really know of a single case that I'm aware of, not in the catalog of stuff
	that I've looked at, where there's anything which is really the same mass as the earth.
	The great majority of them are much heavier because they're easier to detect and are presumed
	to be like Jupiter.
	Yeah, they're bigger.
	They're bigger and they're presumed to be gas giants, that is, things made of hydrogen,
	helium, methane, maybe ammonia, and maybe with an ice or a rocky core, but really like Jupiter.
	Many of them are in because they're easier to observe.
	They're in very small orbits.
	Yes, but if we can't see the smaller ones yet, the ones that more likely would have possibility of being like Earth, it's just because they're small that we can't see them.
	They're small and maybe they're in further out orbits.
	The likelihood is, though, that they are there, isn't it?
	I think it's reasonable.
	I don't know how to calculate the likelihood, though I feel much more confident about saying this now than I did before we knew about these 70 planets.
	I think my own opinion is, yes, they're almost certainly there.
	I think you'd find a divergence of opinion in the astronomical community, but I think a large number of people would say, yeah, we're likely to eventually find Earth-like planets.
	Well, given the number of visible stars, and you know what?
	We all talk about that.
	There's as many stars as there are grains of sand on the beach.
	I've always wondered, how many stars can we see?
	Does anybody know?
	Well, it depends what you're seeing with.
	With the naked eye, it's in the several thousand range.
	Yes.
	If you count the number of stars in pictures of the Milky Way, you quickly get up into the millions.
	Millions?
	And if you actually total up the number of stars we think are there by various techniques of estimation, you get something like 300 billion.
	300 billion stars?
	In our galaxy.
	All right.
	Professor, hold on.
	300 billion in our galaxy.
	That would be stars, which are suns.
	The majority of which would have planets around them.
	Think about the numbers.
	I'm Art Bell.
	We'll be right back.
	Once again, Dr. Al Shuler, welcome back.
	300 billion suns in our galaxy.
	Right.
	And of those, a very large number are more or less like the sun.
	A minority are brighter and hotter.
	The majority are as bright as or fainter than the sun and cooler.
	So that if we imagine planets at somewhat equal distances from those suns, as a strong possibility, then isn't the likelihood of life, although I know this is a big jump, but isn't the likelihood of life rather high?
	I would think so, because when you look at these suns, the great majority of them have chemical compositions that are like our sun.
	For that reason, one would think, since our sun has basically all the elements we find on Earth, though in different proportions, that it's pretty likely planets around other similarly composed stars will also, some of them, have compositions like the Earth, and therefore have all the elements for life.
	Presumably at some moment we're going to see some of these planets using new technology
	we don't have up yet, but on the drawing boards there is a range of techniques people are
	thinking about, mainly for space-based telescopes, successors to the Hubble, for example, with
	more specialized equipment.
	Are they much, much better than those on Earth?
	In certain ways, yes.
	One of the things that you can get away from when you get up above the Earth's surface
	is the absorption of the atmosphere of many different colors of radiation, most of which
	we can't see, but nonetheless important for detecting things around other stars.
	The other thing is that you can get away from the twinkling of the stars.
	Now, it turns out that there was a rather major step in this direction.
	I don't know if you're familiar with this, something that in the trade is sometimes called the rubber mirror technique.
	It's a way of actively deforming a telescope mirror system so that it compensates for the twinkling of the stars and focuses the image much better than you could otherwise.
	You mean it sort of like masks the effects of the atmosphere?
	Yeah, it compensates for them in a way which gets you maybe 80% of the detailed resolution that you would get from a telescope above the atmosphere.
	That's amazing!
	Yeah, it is amazing.
	How new is that?
	Well, that depends just what you want to count.
	I was at an American Astronomical Society meeting, I was more than that, I was closer
	to 30, at which a group from Canada announced a sort of low-tech version.
	At the same conference, a group from one of the defense-operated observatories in New
	Mexico described the high-tech version.
	People have been busy building either the one or the other ever since.
	I guess 30 plus years, though it wasn't really declassified in the literature until then.
	Was it ever classified?
	That's an interesting word.
	The defense version of it, which was done in an observatory in New Mexico, if I remember
	correctly, first, was for quite a time classified.
	It had to do with missile detection, I think, more than astronomy originally.
	The people who worked on it always knew that it had an application for astronomy.
	The people in Canada had no such other goal.
	They were simply interested in trying to get sharper images of everything, and they devised a technique which relied only on the light coming from the sky.
	The defense group actually used a laser to create an artificial star, in effect, by bouncing the beam off the upper atmosphere.
	As a matter of interest.
	If ground-based telescopes can be essentially made to ignore the adverse effects of the atmosphere while looking into space... Maybe I shouldn't ask this question, but I will.
	Wouldn't it seem logical that a spy satellite, going around the Earth, positioned where they want it?
	Would I find the same technology really useful looking down through the Earth's atmosphere at the Earth?
	Possibly.
	And I imagine that somebody's probably done work on that.
	It probably would require the laser system in that case to create some sort of artificial reference point because the advantage you have when you look out at the stars is you actually have point-like things to look at.
	And you know what a point should look like.
	Right.
	It should look like a point.
	Any distortion of that is information you can correct the system with to make the point.
	Well, gee, there'd be lots of points of light on Earth as reference points for exactly the same thing, wouldn't there?
	I suppose some.
	It depends what your target of interest is.
	Well, I mean, to calibrate with.
	Sure.
	I mean, presumably you could look at city lights, for example.
	Sure.
	And use those.
	Sure.
	Lighting outside of that, I'm not sure, but I suppose you could find some streetlights somewhere else.
	Well, that probably accounts for some of its classification, I would imagine.
	Possibly.
	Just don't know.
	Are you, as an astronomer, from time to time aware, are you able to be aware of classified technology that you couldn't talk about publicly?
	I'm really not.
	I'm just not involved in it.
	Every once in a while I have an idea that potentially could be classified, I suppose, but I've chosen not to do much with that.
	Most of what I know about classified stuff comes out unclassified when I find out about it.
	I have a few friends who worked in the defense industry for a number of years and every once in a while I shoot the breeze with them, but I've never heard much which I could say Do you ever get into the middle of conversations with them where they obviously would prefer not to go there?
	Very rarely.
	Really rarely.
	Mostly, you know, if that happens, they're just very straightforward and say, I can't talk about that, you know.
	I see.
	Fascinating.
	All right.
	Or for all I know, they're not going to say even they can't talk about it.
	They don't mention it.
	That's exactly right.
	I can't tell what they're not going to tell me.
	Quite right.
	What is your view, I mean there's a million UFO stories out there, there's a million abduction stories out there, on my program I hear most of them, or a lot of them anyway, and there are many who believe that we either have been or are being visited now.
	What's your view of that?
	I'm afraid I don't think so.
	You don't think so?
	I kind of wish we had been, but I don't think so.
	I think that until we get a sort of smoking gun, until somebody steps up to the mark and says, okay, I'm here, and provides some technological proof that they came from somewhere else, or biological proof, or both, that I'm going to choose to be skeptical of the accounts that I hear.
	An astronomer would be not at all very likely to necessarily see a UFO, would they?
	In other words, they're not really looking at things traversing close in.
	They may not be looking with their instrumentation, most of them, but there's a crew of people who are looking at near-Earth phenomena for purely astronomical or geophysical reasons who would.
	Okay, so for example, if a spaceship or something the size of a spaceship, I don't know what
	that would be, bigger say than the space station or as big as the space station just as a reference,
	were coming toward Earth, how long would it take to see it?
	Or is it likely?
	Well, that depends, I guess.
	I think that there is equipment in the world, if it was pointed right at the object, it
	could see it out as far as the moon.
	You'd have to know where to look.
	Well, that's not very far.
	Uh, no, but it's, you know, it's far enough depending on the speed to give you either hours warning or days warning or maybe just minutes warning.
	That's right.
	Um, you know, if you're looking for radio signals and the thing is broadcasting, then presumably lots of people can see it from a long distance out much further away than that.
	If it's somehow radar stealthed, it's relying on some technology either related to or not
	that like what we've used to conceal certain kinds of aircraft.
	Yeah, gee, we even have stealth now.
	Right.
	It's possible that something like that might not appear on radar until it got very close
	or maybe not at all.
	Or maybe not at all, right.
	It's really hard to say, but there are a lot of people with different purposes in mind
	looking at the sky all the time, you know, with detectors from the naked eye up through
	very large telescopes, very large radio detectors.
	There are big radar systems always looking at the sky.
	In fact, probably the thing that we send out to the stars that's most powerful is the radar pulses.
	Sure.
	Which are part of the defense systems of our country and the former Soviet Union and some other countries.
	If there's anything out there at all that's detectable by radar, we should see it.
	We really should.
	Well, let's think about this for a second.
	Our radar pulses Probably are what?
	60, 70 light years out at the most?
	50, 60 even?
	The big defense radars, they're not that far out.
	But the radio signals, they're 100 light years out.
	Radio signals started leaving us right around 1900.
	Yes, but what about the pulsed radar that really might have a shot at making it out?
	Those, I guess, are probably 30 or 40 light years out.
	Something like that.
	30 or 40 light years.
	And what is within 30 or 40 light years that might suddenly be out there going, Oh my God, look at this!
	Well, there are actually hundreds of star systems that are, hundreds of stars that are more or less like the sun.
	And of these, we now know, as I mentioned, There are something like 70 systems which are known to have
	planets.
	Within 30 or 40 light years there would be that much?
	Yes.
	Some of those planets are around stars which are further away than that.
	The group of stars we've been looking at go out further than 30 to 40 light years and
	the technique works further out than that.
	150 light years out might be or 200 light years might be the limit.
	Within that sphere there are many stars, many of which have planets.
	There could potentially be an audience out there.
	But if you imagine life is relatively common, although you certainly can imagine it might not develop along the exact same lines ours has, if you imagine that every now and then one invents radar or something like it that would emit some sort of recognizable signal, then shouldn't we have heard something by now?
	Well, a number of people think that's true and think further the fact that we haven't suggested there isn't any life out But there are several things that get in the way.
	One is just simple geometry.
	Even our extremely powerful radars, the farther they get, the weaker the signal gets.
	The signals are spreading out in space and they get to be fainter and fainter and pervading
	all of space in the galaxy, there is natural radio noise which comes from many different
	Every star emits some, the sun does.
	So eventually that signal would get lost in the noise level?
	Yes, and without sophisticated signal processing, which of course any civilization presumably further along than ours will have, your ability to hear that shrinks and shrinks.
	With advanced signal processing and some guess about the kind of signals The chances of hearing go up.
	But we have several people, several programs going on now around the world, most of them in the United States, specifically to detect radio signals, which so far haven't had any real success.
	They're listening hard.
	As a matter of interest, can you pin it down, in other words, with the noise floor being what it is, from all the stars and planets and everything up there making its radio noise, How far would that effectively limit our pulsed radar, for example, from being audible as something intelligent?
	I can't pin it down exactly, but I can give you an example, which is, suppose you take the largest radio telescope in the world, which is our telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which is a building in the mountains.
	It's a thousand feet in diameter.
	Right.
	And you used it as an antenna to broadcast a signal across outer space.
	They did that, you know.
	They did that.
	If the signal were sent across the galaxy, towards the other edge of the galaxy, on the far diameter of the galaxy, and a telescope the same size as Arecibo were pointed at us and listening, it would hear our signal.
	In principle, we can broadcast clear across the galaxy, but who would know to look at us?
	And the travel time for that signal is about 100,000 years.
	And the transmission time, incidentally, was extremely short in the test they did.
	And there was some interesting controversy after the test, and there still is that controversy going on now.
	Some scientists suggest It might not be such a bright idea.
	To advertise our presence.
	To advertise our presence.
	Right.
	That's true, though I think there is now consensus in the community that's most concerned with this, that we all hew to a protocol, which has actually been spelled out that says if we get real signals from someplace else, we get confirmation by having several different groups observe them, we announce them to the world, and then we decide what we're going to reply, if anything, to these signals.
	And so far as I know, there is not any large crew that anticipates doing anything else.
	And of course, there are occasionally questions, would anyone reveal such a discovery if it were made?
	Wouldn't it be classified?
	Wouldn't they keep it secret?
	Well, yes, I frequently interview Dr. Shostak from Cincinnati.
	Right.
	And we've had really spirited, interesting discussions about exactly that.
	So, I would like to ask you, in your discipline as an astronomer, if such information came to you, and you were either a confirming party or the discovering party, and then had it confirmed.
	Either way, in your honest opinion, Professor, what would happen to that information?
	I'd do my very best to see it published as soon as possible, with my name attached to it.
	As far as I know, everyone else who's professionally involved with it would do the same.
	I've thought about this one a lot, actually.
	I have this feeling, since we've played through the scenario of alien invasion and all kinds of interactions with aliens in science fiction books and movies, we've sort of gone through this again and again.
	If we haven't frightened ourselves to death, I just can't see any reason not to say something about the fact that we're here.
	And I would want to announce this to the world and make sure that they understood what had been found as much as possible, as much as the discoverers understood of it.
	and get the world's reaction.
	I kind of think the world would want to reply.
	That's my guess.
	Do you think the government would share your view of openness on this subject?
	I think so.
	At this point, I think so.
	There might have been a time when that wasn't true, but my sense is there just isn't a great interest.
	I've tried to think of what the political interest would be in keeping something like this classified.
	Depending, I suppose, on what it was we heard, there might be some justification for it in the minds of some people, but I doubt it.
	I think that this would be sort of the news of the millennium and everyone would want to have a piece of it.
	I think many politicians would want to find a way to acquire some piece of it for their political use and be involved in what was implied, and I think it would be An incredible event, obviously.
	Obviously.
	It's just that most of all that science fiction you've talked about, even some of the recent pretty good stuff like Contact and movies like that, have always shown, you know, the Defense Department and the military rushing in and taking quick control of the situation.
	For any military advantage there might be, perhaps because of I think it would.
	I wouldn't say I'm absolutely convinced, but I think the probability is it would be open.
	I mean, our government, after all, is made up of lots of secrets and they hold secrets,
	maybe not well sometimes, but they try and hold them.
	But you're convinced it would be open.
	I think it would.
	I wouldn't say I'm absolutely convinced, but I think the probability is it would be open.
	I think the interest of science and scientists would be so overwhelmingly in the direction
	of being open, that would have a major influence.
	I've tried to think about what scenario it would be that the Defense Department would really be interested in keeping this classified.
	I can't quite see why the mere fact of contact would be worth classifying.
	If you think that perhaps schematics for some set of weapon systems or, I don't know, some amazing energy generation system appeared out of the ether, so to speak.
	That they might have an interest in classifying it?
	They would certainly conclude that any race of beings or aliens that would have technology that would get here would at the very least have, for example, a drive system, a system of powering their craft, that would be like a 747 compared to what the Wright Brothers... Quite likely, I would say, yes.
	Or some much bigger factor of difference, indeed.
	Also, think about the difficulty of the problem of keeping this secret, because the signal's arriving to blanket all of Earth, unless something very strange happens.
	You know, it's going to be a radio signal from a great distance.
	It will blanket the Earth.
	And, or if it's a light signal, possibly the same thing is true.
	So, what do you do?
	Shut down the radio receivers all around the world?
	It seems like a rather unlikely thing, and there are astronomers all over.
	Now, by the way, Professor, is light as likely as radio?
	That's an interesting question.
	I would say that a decade ago, people would have said no, but now I think things have swung the other way, and I would say the majority opinion is that it quite possibly is.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	Hold on, we're at the top of the hour.
	We'll be right back.
	Indeed so, William Ashuler, a doctor, professor, is with us.
	He's an astronomer, and we're talking about things really out of this world.
	A trite line, I know, but that is the case, and we've got a lot of Territory to cover here, so stay right where you are.
	All right, once again, Professor Alshuler.
	Professor, I think a lot of my audience understands that In the radio world, you know, Shostak has been on and he's explained how we have a favorite place to look, which is near the hydrogen frequency.
	It's kind of a marker where we expect aliens might send a signal.
	Right.
	If, on the other hand, we expected to come, by some means, by light instead, where do we look and what kind of light emission would one expect?
	I don't think there's a favored frequency in the light range as there is in the radio range because there isn't a sort of similar extremely sharp single line from a single element that would be so favored that it's just obvious that that's the one to look at first.
	Well, is there any part of the spectrum that would more easily traverse the distances than other?
	Yeah, towards the red would get farther than the blue.
	The material between the stars consists of thin gas and some dust, and the dust scatters blue light more than it scatters red and infrared.
	Interesting.
	From that point of view, you can see further through the fog and the infrared than you can in the visible.
	But the people who started to work on this basically have said, well, it's not such a complicated problem to build a detector that looks at the whole spectrum, so that's what we'll do.
	And the chap who's leading in this, I think, is Paul Horowitz at Harvard.
	I don't know if you've had him on, but he's very interesting.
	He started off doing major radio searches and as far as I know those are continuing
	but he's also constructed a very high speed search engine using photoelectric detectors
	attaching that to the Harvard telescope in Harvard, Massachusetts which I believe has
	just been refurbished and he's starting up a new project.
	Oh well gee I have not had him on yet but maybe you could put in a word for me.
	I'll give it a try.
	So it would look at all the spectrum and look for I suppose as in radio anything that seemed
	not natural.
	Right and the assumption is that people who would send light messages would do so using
	lasers because they are extremely intense.
	They're very narrow in frequency.
	They can be focused extremely well, so that all of those things working together make them a pretty efficient way of sending a message.
	How would they do?
	In radio we have the problem we discussed last hour with the noise.
	Is there an equivalent noise in the light spectrum?
	Yeah, basically the light of the star around which the planet is circling that has the lasers.
	Right.
	It was for a while thought that you really couldn't beat that, that the starlight would simply drown out the laser light.
	As time has gone on and lasers have gotten more powerful, it's been realized that, in fact, if you know how to look in lots of little itsy-bitsy frequency bands in the light spectrum, the same thing works for you that does in the radio.
	A very narrow band signal will stand out against the background of the starlight.
	You're looking for a narrow spike just sticking up out of the starlight spectrum.
	It's not out of the question that we could have recorded these already in some of the long exposure spectra we've taken of stars, and there is actually a group of people, I believe, actually among the crew in California who've been discovering planets right and left using this high precision spectroscopy technique.
	Who are spending a little time examining that possibility?
	Exactly.
	They're looking back over old records and trying to find out if anything appears in any of those, but it would be anomalous enough, I think, That anyone who saw a bright spike at a laser frequency would suddenly say, hmm, that's not a natural frequency you see in stars generally.
	What's that?
	And would have already glommed onto it and tried to make something of it.
	In SETI they call that a wow signal.
	Yes.
	I assume that in light it would be wow too.
	Yes.
	I would think so, yes.
	Have there been any little wows in light yet?
	Not that I'm aware of.
	I asked Horowitz this question about a year ago and he had just started looking with one piece of equipment and was taking the telescope apart.
	He said no, but he just started.
	It's early days.
	There are others, by the way, who are doing this.
	I thought I'd mention, I'm sure that Mr. Shostak has also mentioned this, but there are amateur efforts connected to some of the professional ones in the radio region.
	Oh, SETI at Home.
	SETI at Home, also the SETI League, which is...
	Run, I believe, by a chap named Paul Shook.
	Right.
	And you can find that on the web at www.studyleague.org.
	And in fact they are shifting their efforts toward light, it is my understanding.
	I've heard that also.
	I know that one of the people who is associated with them wrote an article about light detection more than a decade ago and actually advocated amateur look programs for this a long time ago.
	If we were to err on the side of believing there is life out there, probably life more advanced than our own, that's not too hard to believe if you start with the premise there is life.
	There would be some more primitive, no doubt, but lots more advanced.
	What kind of alien life can you imagine there could be?
	Would it tend, in your opinion, to look like human life, bipedal, or could it be very different?
	I suppose it could be very different, but I'm going to make an argument that it probably will be reasonably similar to something we've seen on Earth, with the caveat that some of the things we've seen on Earth, we've seen in the fossil record, They're no longer with us, and they're very distinctively different than stuff that's running around now.
	My argument goes like this.
	I think that the chances are that all life that we'll ever find is carbon-based, and that if it's going to be anything else, it's silicon-based.
	We would have seen that on Earth since there is so much silicon lying around in the form
	of rocks and minerals.
	Though there are a few things on Earth that make silicon skeletons, silicate skeletons,
	for example there is this wonderful thing called a glass sponge.
	I don't know if you've ever seen one, but it's highly valued in Japan.
	It looks like a tube of open lattice crystal.
	In fact it's glass, it's silicate, and they grow very slowly over time.
	They're anchored by what look exactly like fiberglass threads, which is what they are,
	to the sea bottom.
	The living part is a sort of soft tunic mounted on this silicate skeleton.
	But the life of it, that is the genetic code, is like ours, DNA based on carbon.
	And since the Earth's been around for a long time, four and a half billion years, and all sorts of life have evolved which has evolved which is carbon based, and we just don't find any silicon based.
	And the fossil record doesn't show anything that looks like it might have been.
	I would say that carbon base is what we're going to find.
	Even sticking within the carbon base possibilities, how different could it possibly be?
	Or would it automatically be very much like us?
	I think it could be equal to the range of life on Earth, which is incredible.
	If you look around, this is a recommendation I give to my students, in fact a requirement.
	There is a wonderful book called The Five Kingdoms which was authored by Lynn Margulies
	who was Carl Sagan's first wife and co-author of I can't remember the name at the moment.
	In any case, it's around.
	It's been out for a while and it's a catalog of all different kinds of things on earth.
	When you look at it, you discover that there are things you have never seen which look
	like your worst nightmare and then some.
	They live in environments which are as diverse as the bottom of the sea and the hot vents
	where lava is coming up to the plateau of Antarctica where it's very cold and very dry.
	And the shapes and sizes and the things that they eat and what they need to breathe vary greatly.
	Based on that, I would say what we're going to run into will fall within that range, but it may not look like anything we've seen.
	And probably, and now of course the big question is intelligence, obviously.
	Right.
	I'm sure we'll find creepy crawly things and I don't think so.
	I think it's unlikely.
	I think it's very unlikely.
	here so it's probably going to be elsewhere. The question is, how likely do you think it
	is that we really are, and it's something you have to consider along with the other,
	that we really are totally, completely, in terms of intelligent life as we know it, utterly
	alone? I don't think so. I think it's unlikely. I think it's very unlikely for the reasons we already talked
	about. There are so many stars like the sun, that the composition of these stars is like
	the sun, that it's observable that they have planetary systems, and among those we'll
	find planets with the right distance and the right composition and roughly the same size.
	Though, of course, there's no law that says a rocky planet has to be Earth-sized, as far as we know, though it turns out our examples in this solar system are all roughly the size of the Earth.
	You look at Mercury, it's considerably smaller than Mars is, but Venus is almost a duplicate There could be something larger, for example, though we
	haven't seen it here.
	A different surface gravity could have an effect on the way life evolves.
	But if it's the same composition and it's at the right distance, the chances are good
	it will have liquid water, and that's key.
	If it has liquid water, I think the chances it will have life are excellent.
	If time enough is allowed, there will be evolution and you will get intelligent life.
	Myself, I think it's a virtual certainty.
	It's a question of how many and where.
	That's interesting.
	I find that in my discussion with you, if I get skeptical enough, then that forces you over on the other side, which is really interesting.
	Occasionally, I have considered the concept that we could be.
	Totally alone.
	That, you know, the biblical folks could be right.
	This was creation.
	It was done once.
	It was done here.
	That's it.
	There's nothing else anywhere.
	It's just pretty stuff to look at in the sky.
	I mean, it's an argument.
	I've thought about it.
	It is an argument.
	I think that argument rests on an idea of something like the evolution of life and further the evolution of intelligence is somehow extremely accidental.
	That The chain of events is so unlikely that it's just not duplicated.
	And I would say, even if it's quite unlikely, there are so many possible places for it to happen that it did happen.
	No, as you point out, in lava cones deep under the sea where the volcano rages, things live around it.
	So unlikely, but there they are.
	Right.
	Just given the heat, the energy.
	And there seems now to be a population of microbes that live in the rocks in general.
	Perhaps with more mass than all of the other living things on Earth.
	And, you know, there's a single-celled algae sort of thing living in the forests up near the Canadian border.
	Partly in Minnesota and partly in Canada.
	A single-celled thing which covers the ground in wetlands which is something like a hundred miles in extent.
	There was just an interesting organism discovered off the coast of New Zealand.
	Very interesting organism, and I don't know that I still have the story here, but it turns out this organism eats all sea life.
	I mean, it eats everything.
	They showed a blob of it in this fellow's hand.
	It was like a blob.
	And it literally devours everything, from the smallest to whatever it encounters.
	It just absorbs it.
	I don't think I've seen that.
	I did see a story about a very vigorous algae which has been discovered in the Mediterranean
	out of its original environment which was imported by one of the oceanographic labs,
	I believe in Monaco, and which escaped and has made a colony which is spreading fairly
	rapidly along the Mediterranean coast.
	Oh great.
	Yeah.
	Well, that one I hadn't heard of.
	There's an interesting article in Nature, and I don't know whether you've heard about
	this either.
	It's brand new.
	It says, the headline is, Cosmic Rays Could Find Holes in Standard Model of Particle Physics.
	The Pierre Auger Observatory, currently being constructed in Argentina to study cosmic rays, could examine the structure of space-time itself.
	According to physicists here in the U.S., if, as some suspect, the universe contains invisible extra dimensions, then cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere will produce tiny black holes.
	These black holes should be numerous enough for the observatory to detect.
	This is according to Jonathan Fang of MIT in Cambridge and Alfred Shapiro of the University of Kentucky at Lexington.
	Had you heard about that?
	I hadn't.
	I'm curious to know what they think.
	The signature of the black holes would be, and one assumes that whatever they are, they must not grow or we'd know about them in some very drastic way.
	These black holes must evaporate somehow.
	Fascinating.
	Travel away somehow, because if they could keep on acquiring mass, they'd eat the earth, presumably.
	That's what black holes do if they can keep on acquiring mass.
	They believe somehow there are copious quantities of tiny black holes generated.
	That's what they're talking about.
	That's possible.
	Stephen Hawking predicted some years ago that if you got a small enough black hole, contrary to the behavior of larger ones, they would be so small that quantum physics would get into the act in a way in which a loud material at the black hole's surface to evaporate. In effect, the black hole itself would lose
	mass, the surface would shrink, the effect would get larger, and the thing would evaporate
	catastrophically and go off sort of like a firecracker. So that micro black holes or
	mini black holes would have a finite lifetime and would eventually disappear. I don't
	think anyone has seen evidence for that yet, though maybe this is an example of something like
	that created by a process that Hawking did not anticipate as far as I know.
	The Science of UFOs.
	The Science of UFOs.
	An astronomer examines the technology of alien spacecrafts, how they travel, and the aliens who pilot them.
	Who wrote that?
	Me?
	You wrote that?
	You mean the cover copy?
	Well, I meant, you know, the subtitle here.
	Subtitle?
	Yeah.
	Actually, I think my editor at Byron Price wrote that.
	When he wrote that and sent that to you, did you object to it or did you say, well, all right?
	I pretty much said all right.
	How does somebody with your skeptical attitude about whether we've even been visited
	yet, either in our history or now, and you do have a skeptical attitude about that,
	examine the ships and the aliens who pilot them, just as a matter of curiosity. I like to
	think about it. It's one of those things which intrigues me and left over from my, as I
	already said, misspent youth when I was reading a lot of science fiction and actually a fair
	amount of sort of first contact literature which came out in the 50s.
	I sort of hang on to a remnant of the interest and besides that, just thinking about the physics and technology which would be involved if you could look at a spaceship of the sort of observed properties people have claimed, at least some of them, is a problem that interests me.
	So I thought about it.
	I thought it was worth talking about.
	And exactly how did you talk about it?
	In other words, how is it you come at the subject at all?
	Are you imagining these craft might be there, and if they were there, well then here's what they would have to be, or might be, or what?
	That's the basic idea.
	I tried to look at what people have reported in UFO sightings that I could get my hands on, and people have discussed about this.
	Then I thought about some of the science fictional proposals people have made.
	You look at Star Trek, for example, and there are some wonderful books out about the physics of Star Trek.
	And I thought, well, if you could think about what these different phenomena were people have reported and assign to them some idea of maybe some common phenomena that flow through the different kinds of reports.
	What do those mean?
	What are they and then what kind of physics might explain these things?
	What are they most attached to?
	If someone says, can we travel between different dimensions or are there more than the usual three spatial dimensions?
	Um, what does physics have to say about that?
	All right, all right.
	Hold it right there, and we'll examine all of that when we get back.
	A million good questions already asked on Heart Belt.
	Dr. William Kessler is my guest, and we're talking about his book right now.
	And, uh, what we're talking about specifically is, uh, given the kinds of UFO reports that we get, in other words, their behavior taken into consideration, Then what is it that we'd likely be dealing with in reality?
	What kind of physics?
	What kind of drive?
	What kind of everything can we imagine scientifically would support such a sighting?
	Once again, Professor Altshuler.
	Professor... Alright, fine.
	Then take me through one.
	Take a good sighting or a group of sightings where certain things were agreed on and then tell me what you thought about it.
	Well, there are a lot of sightings of discs which seem to be able to fly at very high speeds, make sharp turns, so very high accelerations.
	travel silently, leave no visible flame, smoke, or wake, and in some cases seem to disappear sort of on the spot, and others disappear in the distance.
	They get smaller and smaller and get farther and farther away.
	There are certain things about this one can speculate on, but this bears with it certain problems.
	But what might drive them?
	Well, there's a whole slew of possibilities.
	Probably something that has to do either with space warps or wormhole technology of one sort or another would be worth thinking about.
	And in either of those cases, you're basically playing with the shape of space.
	You're figuring out a way to warp space or curve space.
	You're doing this with a device on That's right.
	And with that device you have some way of either creating a hole in effect in front of you or a wormhole in front of you which you can jump into or travel into or which can drag you along or some way in which you create a curvature of space which pulls you in and perhaps one behind you which pushes you along.
	And in either case of this sort, it's possible to think of seeing the ship move extremely quickly.
	In the case of something in which you basically create your own warp and encapsulate the ship, the problems of extreme acceleration for the inhabitants of the ship, the crew, go away.
	But in most other cases, just the accelerations themselves for the inhabitants are very difficult to deal with.
	If you look at some of the reports, the accelerations are up in the range of hundreds of G's.
	Right.
	I believe the record for the strongest acceleration any human has undergone is 17 G's for about four minutes.
	That was really hard.
	Then we turn into jelly or something.
	Right.
	Above that, you start to think about turning into jelly.
	There are various techniques you can think of for cushioning human bodies and other living things against the rapid accelerations.
	Eventually, even if you get into injecting some sort of fluid into every part of everybody's
	body cavities, internal body cavities to cushion the motion of their organs, it still gets
	to be a very difficult problem.
	And you either have to have a particular kind of enclosed warp or you have to have control
	over inertia.
	If, Professor, we were to see a craft capable of the kind of warp that would avoid the problems
	we talk about with regard to our own biology.
	Bye.
	What do you think an observer might see on the ground?
	It depends what the particular kind of thing is, but let's say, for example, that it's some sort of a warp which enfolds the ship, then presumably the region just outside the surface of the ship, up to some distance, is severely curved or distorted space in a way which we're not used to but oh golly gee we've had a lot of reports like that and what you would see I think is depending on what time of day or night it was if it was against the night sky it would be most distinctive because then you might see stars in the same direction sort of drawn in to the side of the ship in a way which would create at least a somewhat luminous rim to the ship
	The ship itself might not show much, but this immediate ring around the ship might in fact become rather bright, at least briefly.
	And then, if the ship were accelerating away from us, presumably it would both get fainter and redder as it went, and then fade out.
	Oh, gosh.
	I just can't tell you how many reports exactly like that we have had.
	I mean, exactly like that, Professor.
	No kidding.
	Uh, of the UFO reports we get, so many include descriptions like you just gave.
	Gee.
	That's interesting.
	Isn't it?
	If we're coming towards us, I would expect to see something somewhat the opposite, that is, um, blue shift.
	Again, you'd see a luminous ring, which got maybe a luminous dot to start with, which
	got brighter and the closer it got to us for a bit, the bluer it would get.
	Then it would slow down and everything would become normal.
	I haven't actually seen records of UFO reports that look like that, I have to say.
	I've seen, as I said, lots of reports of ships which accelerate or decelerate extremely quickly,
	but not quite with what I've described.
	Oh, I've heard a lot of reports of the distortion that you spoke of.
	Many, many like that.
	And now, I know this is a burden to my audience, but bear with me for just one moment.
	I've told this story so many times, but it's, it's a true, you know, it's my own account.
	Right.
	So it counts for me.
	I live out here in Prompton, Nevada, near Death Valley.
	Very quiet area, desert.
	Beautiful area if you love the desert.
	Some people don't.
	But I do, and it's barren, but it's beautiful, and it's really not barren when you get down to the minutia of it all.
	It is, however, at night, exceptionally quiet.
	I mean, it's wonderful to walk outside my house and just hear absolutely nothing.
	You know, the humming in your own ears.
	It's a great experience.
	And this is where I live, and some number of years ago, my wife and I were on the way home from Las Vegas, and nobody on the road but us.
	And my wife said, what the hell's that?
	And she saw something coming from behind us.
	She just happened to catch a glimpse of something movement behind, and she did look back and she said, what's that?
	I said, I don't know.
	Pulled the car over, got out of the car, looked up, and coming up on us, I would guess at about 150 feet above us was this gigantic triangle and I mean a precise triangle just rounded slightly at the edges but a triangle and it was doing oh no more than about 30 miles an hour I mean this thing was you would describe it as floating
	Not flying.
	You know, I was in the Air Force, I know what aerodynamic flight takes, and this was not flying, trust me.
	In addition, you could hear crickets about a quarter mile away.
	Well, this thing passed so close to us, up above us, Professor, that I could have, if I hadn't been in shock, which I was, I could have taken a rock and tried to thrown it at it.
	You know, I mean, it felt that close.
	Stars went away.
	Almost full moon went away.
	Everything disappeared.
	This thing passed directly above us.
	And just kept on going right out across the valley toward Area 51, which is close by.
	Did it muster your hair or blow any dust up?
	The crickets never changed in volume, not so much as a whisper of sound or a wisp of wind emanated from this thing.
	Nothing.
	Dead, flat, silent.
	Now, I can imagine a lot of things.
	I can imagine that we have some sort of anti-gravitic technology that nobody knows about, or I can imagine I saw something from somewhere else.
	I don't know what to tell you as far as an explanation.
	The part that gives me the most trouble in some ways is the fact that there was no sound and no wind, and even if you say, well, there's anti-gravity, or some version of a warp drive that was taking it along.
	Not even a whisper.
	I would have thought that something would have stirred.
	Among other things, gravity drives, which work on the basis of some sort of space distortion,
	should create really major effects in their local vicinity.
	You shouldn't have been left standing there if the thing passed 30 feet over you and it
	was a gravity drive.
	Maybe 150 feet.
	Whatever.
	What you're talking about is something which to support itself, assuming that it was tenanted
	or it had significant instrumentation.
	Um, you didn't tell me exactly how big it was, but I'm assuming it was something like 30 or 40 feet long?
	Um, I would say much longer.
	It was monstrous.
	I mean, it was really, really big.
	I would say, I would estimate a couple of football fields from one point of triangle to the next point of triangle.
	Imagine that.
	This thing was gigantic.
	And it was close, really close.
	Then I can't tell you what the explanation is, and the biggest problem, as I say, is I can't conceive of what would allow it to pass not only silently but windlessly past you, even at 30 miles an hour.
	I haven't a clue.
	I don't know.
	Nor have I. But again, sorry folks for the burden, but I knew that I would not have been the only person who would have seen this.
	And I was not.
	In fact, in the next week, our local newspaper here ran a story indicating that many, many people had seen this object over the Pahrump Valley.
	And the newspaper had made an inquiry of Nellis Air Force Base, which is outside Las Vegas.
	And Nellis Air Force Base, interestingly, responded to the inquiry and said that, yes indeed, There had been a secret mission that may have overflown the Pahrump Valley at the time and night in question, but that it was a C-130 aircraft.
	Now, Professor, I flew in C-130s in the Air Force, and I can assure you, had that flown over my head at 150 feet, it would have rattled my teeth.
	I know.
	I have personal experience in this area myself.
	Once I worked for a camera company taking cameras out of the assembly line, movie cameras, and test,
	testing them by taking them outdoors and shooting airplanes that were just taking off from O'Hare
	Field. Yes. And they were about 100 feet above me and they shook me every single time.
	Well, a C-130 definitely would have done that. But I found that completely insulting,
	totally insulting. And so therefore, one has to, you know, one has to wonder either, could we have,
	do you know of anybody working on any technology that sounds like that?
	No, I really don't.
	I've looked, but I don't.
	That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
	As I said, my contacts in the secret world aren't super fantastic.
	But I've also looked for, you know, all those sort of reports of specular physics.
	There are various parts of the government which have directorates which work on speculative problems.
	It's not out of the question people can be working on something that doesn't look like, at first glance, it's conventional physics.
	I know that there are projects funded that don't, but I don't know of anybody who's working on something with those characteristics.
	Well, because Area 51 is famous for anomalous activities of all sorts now.
	We did, after all, develop the stealth aircraft in part in that area and kept that secret
	for a long time and now we're a long way down the line from stealth aircraft so one can
	only imagine what they're working on now, eh?
	Yeah.
	I don't know where I read this, but somewhere I read that a major advance in our stealth
	program came as a result of an openly published article by some physicists in the former Soviet
	Union.
	Oh, really?
	Yes.
	That their ideas that had to do with special coatings, if I remember correctly, were important
	to the coatings that were developed to put on the stealth fighter and the stealth bomber.
	And as far as I know, the Russians have not to this day succeeded in building anything
	really comparable to what we've got.
	But they had minds over there who thought...
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, again, you know, we must be a generation or generations beyond the stealth we know
	about, so...
	Yeah, you know, there was this code named Aurora aircraft that was mentioned in the
	literature maybe, what, eight years ago or something?
	The Aurora, yes, indeed.
	And I knew some people who thought they'd heard sonic booms in circumstances which were rather unusual.
	But that's sort of the flip side of things, isn't it?
	I mean, they couldn't see the aircraft, but they could hear the boom.
	You saw the aircraft, but there was no boom.
	That's right.
	In the case of the Aurora, there was some tracking that went on regarding sonic booms coming in from the Pacific toward this area.
	And I guess sonic boom leaves sort of a trail that one can somewhat discern, doesn't it?
	Right.
	I think allowed someone to suggest that they were seeing an aircraft that was traveling at much higher speeds than the announced aircraft that have entered chains, catalogs, and things like that.
	But beyond that, I haven't seen any reports of it recently, have you?
	Uh, no.
	No, which would indicate to me that perhaps they either solved that problem or they're just on to yet the next generation.
	I mean, who knows?
	But surely they are doing things that we don't know about, and so we have to imagine, parcel out some number of these UFO contacts to the possibility that it's our own secret projects.
	Certainly, it's possible.
	But as I said, the physical explanation for something which can fly over that size, even at 30 miles an hour, without causing, you know, at least a slight breeze.
	A little something?
	A little something.
	Yes.
	That's hard.
	That's difficult.
	If everything I said were true and you knew it to be true because you personally experienced it, how would you process that?
	that information. If everything I said were true and you knew it to be true because you
	personally experienced it, how would you process that?
	If I possibly could, I would try to find out what it was. I would keep it on the shelf
	and if I couldn't find out at a given time, I would go back to the problem periodically
	and try to find out. I might go back to the same location every once in a while and see
	if it repeated itself. I might ask, as I guess you did, for other people to contact me to
	find out what they had seen.
	Oh yes.
	And I probably would have put the question as you did to a number of different places
	and probably received just as unsatisfactory an answer as you did.
	But I would keep trying probably.
	Would you more likely conclude that it was something of ours, secret, or something from somewhere else?
	I mean, to me, those seem the only two possibilities.
	Yeah, more like the ours, I guess I would say.
	Even if I didn't understand what it was, I would say more like the ours.
	Well, then we're doing really well.
	Yes, we would be.
	That's true.
	One would want to know, if that exists, what are its limitations?
	How much energy would it take to drive it to the moon or some other more distant location?
	The answer to that depends on knowing what it's all about.
	But generally speaking, the farther and faster you want to go, the more energy you're going to need and somewhere, somehow, you've got to get a hold of it.
	You wrote a book called First Contact.
	How do you imagine First Contact may well occur?
	I think it's going to be by message.
	I think that one of our detection efforts is going to succeed in hearing or seeing something.
	After that, I really don't know.
	I'm not totally convinced that if we get in contact with others we'll ever actually shake hands because I'm not sure there's any feasible way to travel between the stars.
	Wish there were.
	Hope there is, but I'm not sure there is.
	You saw the movie, Conduct, of course.
	Yes.
	And is it feasible?
	Is that particular idea feasible?
	Yes.
	No one knows how to do it.
	In effect, I think that idea was an idea for creating a wormhole connection between one place in the universe and another.
	There is now some real theoretical work that's gone on that examines the possibility of making wormholes, and it's not forbidden by physics in the sense that it violates one or another principle, such as relativity.
	In fact, relativity gives rise to the idea of wormholes, but the material requirements
	for it, you could say the engineering requirements, the amount of energy is one thing and another
	is simply how do you open a wormhole and once you've opened it, how do you keep it open
	and preventing it from collapsing in on itself?
	The theory says to do that, at least one way of doing it is to find a kind of matter we've
	never seen, which has an energy of a sign opposite to the normal energy that we associate
	with the matter that we're made of.
	It has to be there though, doesn't it?
	No, it doesn't have to be there, but it's possible that it's there.
	No one's seen it, no one can put their hands on it yet.
	All right, hold it right there, Professor.
	We'll be right back.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Bye.
	This is Coast to Coast AM in the nighttime on the Premier Radio Network.
	Wanna Take a Ride, that of course came from my love of the movie Contact.
	I absolutely fell in love with that movie and said Ross Mitchell cut me a hey wanna take a ride kind of intro bumper.
	It probably is my favorite movie of all time.
	I'm Art Bell, and in a moment, the journey continues.
	I would imagine this would be something the professor would have discovered very early in his career.
	He's been looking up for a long, long time.
	But a professor for the average adult who has not made a career of astronomy, to get a really good telescope, a really decent telescope, and to spend some time with it, changes your whole outlook on life.
	I couldn't agree more.
	I hope it's universally true.
	It's certainly my experience.
	At a certain level, I suppose I have a rather different view of what goes on on Earth than a large number of other people.
	I think most astronomers do, because we routinely consider extraordinarily large distances and extraordinarily great sweeps of time.
	The things that occur quickly on an astronomical or cosmological scale, with maybe just a few exceptions, look like either zero change or glacially slow change to an ordinary human being.
	It does.
	It changes your perspective on everything.
	It's an interesting thing to allow to happen to you.
	Most adults don't do it.
	They don't ever get there.
	They are so consumed.
	with the business in front of them every day and you know it is their business is not your business it's answering phones and selling this or that or whatever it is they're doing every day in fact that just the mere fact of looking up the mere act of looking up yes is too little uh engaged in by most of the world i think probably especially those people who live in cities who if they look up look up one story and see the very brightly illuminated signs that are in front of them oh you are so correct in fact actually I maintain that if people looked up more frequently, the number of UFO sightings we have would go up exponentially.
	Oh, they would go up, I agree with you.
	And I love the fact that you're advertising telescopes, and I hope that the people out there who are listening, if they don't have one, think seriously about getting one, because it's a wonderful thing to have.
	It certainly is the beginning, yes.
	In here for some reason this sounds like a setup question in view of what I've heard already from you, but I'll ask it nevertheless.
	Do you believe the government has a stock of dead or alive aliens hidden away anywhere?
	No, I don't think so.
	I think if they had, They would have come to light by hook or by crook in the
	time interval between the time they most likely are thought to have arrived and now.
	I just don't think, as good as we are at keeping some secrets, that this one would have stayed
	secret and someone would have succeeded in coming out with a photograph or a small sample
	of whatever it was and made it convincingly public.
	The government commissioned the Brookings Institute to a study some time ago that I bet you've heard of regarding what the sociological impact of contact would be.
	And their conclusions were very, very interesting.
	They suggested that the most negative impact would occur on A very unlikely group or maybe a likely group and that would be the scientists.
	I think there's an argument to be made that the people in the sciences could be demoralized by sort of the arrival of greatly advanced science.
	But I think there's a counter argument to that, which is that many scientists would
	be delighted and spend a lot of time, even if they didn't think they could leap from
	where we are to where the visitors were in one jump, that it would be worthwhile spending
	the time to try to make progress in that direction.
	Well, if a fellow operating that giant UNIVAC computer that we used to have, that took up rooms and rooms, were to encounter somebody who walked in with a Pentium 4 2GIG machine, he'd be demoralized.
	Maybe for a few seconds, but I think he would then, then the wow factor would arrive, he would say, That's a fantastic toy.
	Let me at it.
	You just replaced six back rooms of equipment with that thing.
	I want it.
	That's right.
	All right.
	Well, listen, we've got phone calls and I would like to... Good.
	Oh, plenty of phone calls.
	So let's give it a try.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Professor Altshuler.
	Hi.
	No, my name is Mike.
	Where are you Mike?
	I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee.
	And my question is, the comment about the asteroid, was it an asteroid that almost hit?
	Mike, do you have your radio on?
	Yeah, here, let me turn it off.
	Turn it off, please.
	That was very important.
	Turn your radio off, everybody.
	Yeah, the close encounter we just had, yes?
	Yes, sir.
	And the one that happened when they said that it knocked out the dinosaurs.
	That was more than a close encounter.
	Yes.
	Right.
	Well, my question is, like, as far as it knocked out all dinosaurs, and what size would it take of that to happen to, like, knock out all of us?
	Right.
	And what would happen if one hit and it wasn't that big?
	But what kind of effects would it have?
	All right.
	Well, the best guess about the size of the thing that is thought to have impacted 65 million years ago and perhaps wiped the dinosaurs out is something like 10 miles across, which it turns out is about the size of the nucleus of Halley's Comet, as we measured it the last time around.
	Really?
	Yep.
	But Halley's Comet is largely ice, and the feeling is that While that would do damage, it wouldn't be as significant
	as if it were solid rock.
	Of course, there are some solid rocks around which are that big, and maybe some of them
	will eventually head our way.
	Though, as I think I said earlier, we don't know of any.
	A one-mile diameter item would be enough probably to completely blow away, say, the whole of
	The whole of Manhattan.
	And some surroundings also, and create significant firestorms in the forests of the Northeast.
	As a matter of curiosity, should we, let's say we detected something like this, and we said, okay, next time around, in three years, three years, next time around, it's going to hit us.
	It would seem like a high probability, you know, we can get the numbers crunched better when it gets closer, but the high probability it's going to hit us.
	And we had three years warning.
	What could we do about it?
	I think the best bet would probably be to try to divert it.
	There is an argument going on about this, but if we tried to blow it up, something that was, say, 10 miles in diameter, disintegrated into things which were a mile in diameter, which sprayed us, that maybe some would miss us but some
	would still hit, would do major damage.
	So it might be a wiser course to try to implant rocket motors on the thing or maybe to somehow
	put up shielded bomb explosions which forced it to take a slightly different path and miss
	us altogether.
	And do we have the technology to accomplish that now?
	That's a good question.
	I suppose for something that's a mile in diameter, we might.
	For 10 miles in diameter, I'm not so sure.
	Depends, again, on how much warning we've got and just what its path is.
	That would have a fair amount of mass.
	Right.
	Absolutely.
	There's a crew of people also who might be interested in actually putting it into orbit around the Earth, capturing it as a new moon.
	And if it were a rocky item, it probably would have a reasonable proportion of metals and might form a sort of orbital mine where extraction of the metals would allow you to do major construction in space, either build space stations or ships, without having to leave Earth to do it.
	As a matter of curiosity, something, a rock, say a mile or so in diameter, How far out in orbit would you get that, and would it be safe to have it out there orbiting about?
	The moon, of course, is what, 250-some-odd thousand miles away?
	Yeah.
	Oh, I suppose you'd want it up maybe 300 miles or a bit more.
	That would make it a stable enough orbit, considering the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere, that it would stay there for a good long time.
	Gee, that close, it would be quite a sight, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, it would be a reasonably good sight, indeed.
	That's interesting.
	That's very interesting.
	You wouldn't think they'd be so afraid of it that they would just want it to miss altogether.
	Well, I think there'd be a good strong argument, but if you had a pretty reliable way of controlling where it was going to go and could put it into orbit, aside from the mining idea, a lot of people would presumably want to go up and just take samples to see what the composition was and consider that as a sort of commentary like Oh, by the way, it just hit me!
	Before we go to the next call, there was a NASA plan that dealt with the problem of global warming.
	And it was suggested by some people at NASA that we move Earth a little bit.
	That we actually move Earth into an orbit somewhat more distant from the sun for a period of time.
	This is a serious suggestion, Howard.
	Right.
	And then when appropriate, to perhaps move it back.
	What do you think of such an idea?
	Sounds to me like something we can't technically do, and for which the energy expenditure would be the sort of major problem, and it would be much cheaper and easier, I think, to provide some shade for ourselves than to do that.
	put into orbit something which constitutes a shadow caster.
	It might be big sheets of reflective material.
	Or you might even put something into the atmosphere that would do that because when volcanoes
	go off...
	You could, for example, put balloons up which distribute large sheets or perhaps one of
	these newfangled solar-powered airplanes which could drag behind it a big reflector or a
	set of reflectors.
	But you could also, in orbit, you could, I suppose, disintegrate one of the asteroids
	and create a cloud of particles which would reflect a lot of the incoming light.
	And if they did that, that would be a whole lot less difficult, I think, than trying to move the Earth, which sounds really out of the question, even if NASA examined it.
	I have no idea how you would move a planet.
	I don't even have a clue, but they actually thought about that.
	Well, Cardline, you're on the air with Dr. Altshuler.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Yes, sir.
	Hello.
	Going once.
	Speak or I'm going on.
	OK, going on.
	Hello there.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Altshuler.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Chris in Chicago.
	Hello, Chris.
	And there's a couple of things I'd like to say.
	One thing concerning the range of life in the cosmos and what it might be consisted of, I would think that in view that life as we know it is so narrow On Earth, the conditions for it, much like our perceptions of the entire spectrum, the visible electromagnetic spectrum, that there would be a much vaster range of possibilities in space.
	For an example, we have bacteria on Earth that can feed on glass.
	Radioactivity, various types of toxic materials, and under tremendously high pressures and temperatures above that of boiling water.
	All of that I agree with entirely, but my comment is that every one of those things you've named is carbon-based and has a genetic code that's DNA, or maybe possibly in a few cases some viruses have RNA.
	DNA is universal, based on carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, and a number of other things, and I think it unlikely we're going to find a differently constituted genetic code.
	We might find someplace where it's not exactly the same four components of DNA that we've got, but it'll be a molecule with the same kind of structure, I think, and carbon will be at the heart of it.
	Professor, it's interesting you would say that, because Of course, we have just finished mapping early, I might add, the human genome.
	Right.
	And we are at least on the verge of genetic manipulation capability.
	Right.
	So, you know, what we can stand in terms of G's and the conditions in which we can live Could conceivably be genetically modified and if our society, if our civilization can do that in the next 100 years, 200 years, then why could not another have done so?
	Quite possible that there are civilizations out there that do very great genetic manipulation and I'm not saying it's totally impossible to create an organism which could withstand hundreds of G's but if you think about the design requirements It's not obvious that they could, and I think that if we sort of play the probabilities, it's kind of unlikely that that's happened.
	I would like to actually add also that I'm not trying to claim that the possibilities out there are so narrow that they could only be encompassed by what's here.
	But we have a very wide range here, and it seems to me fairly likely that what we will see out there is somewhere within the range.
	It probably won't look exactly like anything we've got here, but somewhere within the range.
	Not in the total monster category?
	Well, it could be total monster, but a carbon-based total monster, one which either likes to breathe oxygen or possibly consumes sulfur in its place, as the things that live at the bottom of the sea do, which live in the trenches.
	I am in Ellensburg, Washington.
	My first question is, what can you tell Arts Audience about Steady at Home, the screen
	saving program that measures, I think it's radio waves?
	Right.
	The second question is, have you read the book The Sparrow by Mary Dorea Russell?
	No.
	About radio contact?
	The second question is shorter than the first.
	Yeah, so let's try the first.
	SETI at Home, of course, is The number crunching on everybody's personal computer to help SETI out.
	Right, and anybody can participate as long as you've got a handy PC.
	You go find SETI at home on the internet, which is actually spelled out SETI and then A-T-H-O-M-E dot S-S-L dot Berkeley dot E-D-U.
	And it sends you, when you sign up, a routine which looks like a screensaver, but hidden behind that is a number cruncher which will acquire periodically a batch of information taken from the radio telescope somewhere in the world which was running to do an astronomical project, but for which the data was swiped for this project and cataloged on big storage capacity disks at Berkeley.
	and set up for processing using the sophisticated number cruncher.
	And when it gets through doing the batch that you've been sent, it gives the results both
	to you on the screensaver and sends them back to Berkeley.
	And it basically does this whenever you leave your machine on, but you're not using it.
	So in other words, you are helping the search for...
	You are helping the search.
	And last time I looked, there were a million and a half participants in this.
	Yes.
	It's the single largest... I've been in one of them.
	...number cruncher in the world, and other people are looking at it as sort of a model for weather processing, weather prediction, and other really big projects.
	That's a big project, all right.
	Professor, hold on.
	We'll be right back.
	From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast.
	It is, and we are honored to have Professor William R. Altshuler, Al Scheller, or Al Scheller, I guess either one works, he suggests, and I've probably been slaughtering it all night long.
	He is an astronomer, and we're talking about, believe it or not, UFOs, propulsion systems, what's likely, and what might happen, in all kinds of circumstances, ranging from Extraterrestrial life to big rocks that might come visit us.
	We'll get more of it in a moment.
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	Dr. Wagner talks about nighttime teeth grinding.
	Everyone is under more stress these days.
	For grinders, that can mean even greater damage to your teeth.
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	Oh, and about that stress, my advice is find somebody to hug.
	Ask your drugstore.
	All right.
	Sounded like a monster to me.
	Back down to our guest.
	Professor, I was just reminded by a nice caller that The NASA plan that I explained to you?
	Right.
	I left out the energy part.
	They actually had a plan for how to obtain the energy to move the Earth.
	Really?
	Easily.
	Yes, and it involved getting a large rock, like the five or ten miler that you were talking about.
	Yep.
	And having it make a close pass, just grazing Earth.
	And they were suggesting that would move us.
	It would, but the amount it strikes me would be unlikely to be anywhere near the amount that you'd like to do the trick that you're talking about.
	That's a sort of gravity assist slingshot effect type idea, which we've used very successfully to send some of our space probes out to the outer planets, principally using Jupiter as the slingshot.
	So it's not that outrageous.
	I mean, it could be.
	The general principle is certainly not outrageous, but it strikes me unlikely that a 10-mile diameter item would do the trick for the Earth.
	You'd want to have something more the size of the moon, it seems to me.
	The moon?
	Yeah.
	And of course, any small miscalculation, one way or the other, and I suppose the results wouldn't be good.
	Yeah, you wouldn't want to make a mistake.
	I mean, it's a great deal of effort to move the Earth either in or away from the Sun, and a mistake in either direction would have noticeable climate consequences, which would be probably much less reversible than the ones that we're currently worried about.
	And, you know, all sorts of other schemes with less import, it seems to me.
	By the way, have you noticed that the mainstream scientific community now seems to be suddenly making an awful lot of noise about rapid climate change.
	Indeed I have.
	Oh you have noticed?
	I have noticed that and there's been a big argument going on about what sets an ice age off for a number of years and the arguments have tended recently to be that the trigger is something which might involve the major ocean currents and that if you get say a certain amount of ice cap melting and the amount of
	fresh water that enters the oceans at the North Pole, for example, changes by a
	noticeable amount.
	The current changes its location, the temperature distribution changes, and everything happens
	very quickly as in a decade or two decades or three decades as opposed to thousands of
	Well, the public, the general public, is very curious about why there's so much noise about it all of a sudden.
	Because we observe that at the same time, we seem to be in the middle of some sort of climate change.
	Many have observed that anyway, and so some are a little concerned that this could be the beginning of the decade of change.
	It could.
	There's a great deal that we don't know and a great deal of uncertainty around this.
	The kind of data that we can most easily get from geology tends to smooth over very short term events, and so it's difficult to see to resolve really rapid changes and be sure that that's what we're seeing.
	There are always issues of how complete the geologic record is and things like that, but You can make models which suggest that this could happen very quickly, and there are some parts of the record which suggest now that there were rapid fluctuations going into and out of the last several ice ages, which took place in the time scale literally of decades, not of hundreds or thousands of years.
	That's disturbing because the fluctuations look like they're large enough to wreak havoc with agriculture and change everything that we think about as normal to something else.
	It would no doubt then create warmer places where it had been cool perhaps and then places
	like Europe for example no longer influenced by warmer ocean currents could become roughly
	like Alaska.
	Right.
	I don't know if you've ever seen a portrayal of this but for a while there was on display
	at the old state house in Boston an oil painting of the Boston Harbor in revolutionary times
	and the whole harbor was frozen over to the extent that big sledges could go out and pull
	freight off the ships that were frozen in the ice a mile out.
	And that simply doesn't happen now.
	You see the Boston Harbor get iced, but it's chunks of ice floating around in the water.
	You never see it frozen solid.
	OK.
	More phone calls.
	First time caller line.
	You're on the air with a professor.
	Good morning.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi, my name is Ryan.
	I'm from Joliet, Illinois.
	Hi Ryan.
	Hi.
	I was wondering what you guys thought of Stephen Hawking's theory of the other dimension.
	I already proved it mathematically or something.
	I wouldn't say he proved any theory of other dimensions, but he and a number of other people certainly think that Einstein had something when he talked about four dimensions, three of space and one of time.
	The work that's going on now in this area has really sort of jumped things up to the point where there are a number of people who think there's a possibility that there are ten dimensions and one of time, and that the seven we don't see are basically too small to encounter easily, but they're there everywhere.
	Every part of what we normally experience in three dimensions is connected to tiny seven additional dimensions.
	Well, gee, I notice we're beginning to get closer to a quantum computer.
	I'm hearing that phrase more and more now.
	It looks like it.
	And there are some people who believe that a quantum computer would have the ability to discern or draw information from more than the dimensions that we presently... I've seen that argument, though.
	I think we're going to have a version which works purely in three dimensions in some sense first.
	But there are some people trying to do experiments to see if we can detect any of these other small dimensions.
	Right.
	And the experiments are not so gigantic that there isn't a prospect of actually getting one going, which might succeed in seeing something.
	Well, that could certainly change a thing.
	That would change many things.
	Indeed, it would.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Al Shiller.
	Hi.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	Where are you?
	New Bedford, Massachusetts.
	Okay.
	First off, I'd like to say great show.
	Don't ever quit.
	Thank you.
	Before I go on and ask the professor something, might I post, I'm sorry, make a comment about an alternative recording source?
	Make a comment on what, sir?
	An alternative recording source.
	Sure.
	Can you listen to this?
	Sure.
	A wild thing at 775-727-1295.
	I want to put a particular brand name on the air.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	There are many, many pieces of software out there right now.
	Many companies make software which will allow you to record audio on your computer, on your hard drive.
	That's very common.
	Let's leave it at that.
	Okay.
	Okay?
	And my question for the professor is, and I jumped in a little late, so if you've already spoken about this, I apologize, but brown dwarfs?
	And if they would possibly be heading in our direction, what damage they could pose, and any satellites or planets they might have orbiting around them, if that's a possibility.
	And if life could possibly be on those.
	Brown dwarfs, for those who aren't sure, are a class of almost star.
	They're thought to be the sort of object which would be a star, if only they weighed a bit more.
	But as they don't quite weigh that much, they can't turn on their internal fusion reactions to make energy.
	So they're sitting there glowing from their own contraction, but that's it.
	And yes, they could have planets, though it's only very recently, and actually some of the same programs that are detecting extrasolar planets are also finding some of the brown dwarfs.
	We've begun to see brown dwarfs at all, and they are by and large The ones we found can find areas where there's lots of star formation going on which are not nearby.
	And as such, anything which is more or less star-like generally will share in the motion of the stars in the galaxy rotating around the galactic center.
	And though there could always be deviants and they could come our way, it's a relatively unlikely scenario.
	It would certainly be possible that a brown dwarf could have a retinue of planets.
	And if a brown dwarf headed into the solar system with its retinue, depending on just who passed close to whom, it could be severely disruptive or absolutely fatal.
	That's a fairly horrifying thought, and we see that coming for quite a while.
	We would see that coming for quite a while, and I'm not sure we could do anything about it.
	I don't think we could.
	I think that would be one of those cases where maybe the best thing we could do would be to leave.
	We follow.
	Take off for distant climes.
	Meaning not on this planet, right?
	Not on this planet.
	Maybe not even in the solar system.
	Gotcha.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Al Shuler.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello, Bill.
	Yes.
	Mr. Shuler, this is Chris in Illinois again.
	Chicago.
	I'm sorry, I can only allow you on one time per show.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with a professor.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	This is Dan in Idaho Falls.
	Yes, sir.
	The thing that they were going to use to move the planet Earth is four comets that were coming by.
	And I told them where the comets were and what direction they were coming from.
	And the first You know about a comet that nobody else knows about?
	Yes, I heard that.
	Professor, are you aware of these?
	No, I'm not.
	But that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
	However, I'm unaware of any comet anybody's ever seen which has a mass anywhere near the mass of the moon, our moon.
	Which is what it would take.
	I think it would really take something like that.
	A comet could easily have the mass of a significant asteroid, but
	the biggest asteroids are hundreds of miles in diameter and If a really near past was made by one of those you could
	get an effect which might possibly fall in the useful range But a comet the largest ones I know of have masses that are
	much smaller than that First time caller line you're on the air with professor. I'll
	show her hi Yeah, hi
	If I guess we had four or five of those comets coming this way, we could get pulled really far away from the sun, huh?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Yes.
	No, my question was, if we hooked up a meteorite and we had it going around to mine at 300 miles, how long would it last and how big would it be to see it from Earth at night time?
	But how long would it last before it degraded?
	And if it degraded, How would you get it back up in the air?
	The answer is if it's 300 miles up or more, it should last for hundreds of years.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	If you're much below that, you're starting to encounter the outer fringes of the Earth's atmosphere and then the atmospheric drag gets significant and things orbit will decay and it could come down in a matter of years.
	As to how long it would last, well that depends on its actual size and the rate at which you're mining it.
	I can't really give a single answer to that, but anything which is a couple of miles in
	diameter of fairly rich, say, iron and nickel, which some of the asteroids certainly are,
	would be a gigantic mine in Earth standards.
	Gigantic.
	So, many, many, many years.
	Why do you think we haven't gone back to the moon?
	Could you answer that?
	No, listen, no fear.
	All right.
	Why we haven't gone back to the moon?
	That's a good question.
	We went to the moon, and then we retracted completely.
	Not only have we not gone back to the moon, but a lot of us are wondering if we'll ever get to Mars.
	Yeah, I guess I would say, first, I hope we go back to the moon soon, and I hope we do go to Mars.
	And why we haven't?
	I think earthly politics and The intervention of concerns about the environment to some extent has caused us to
	To sort of look away from doing that scale of project.
	Concerns about the environment?
	Yeah, I think people, I mean, there's a whole issue about national priorities and I think the political judgment was made that space was not really the top of the list for most people, that something else, say education, social equity, environmental amelioration, you know, any of those things comes ahead.
	Would you generally agree with that or not?
	I think we can do both.
	What I think is that if we do the right thing, if we're careful about what we do, we can have our cake and eat it, too, in this area.
	I've always thought the same thing, that there would be, or should be, room for both, for a great nation like ours.
	And I don't think it would just be us.
	I think this is space programs or programs which Cry out for international cooperation and I don't see any reason why we can't have that too.
	Yes, although if you look at the space station, for example, it cried out for international cooperation and a lot of the international cooperation was pretty slow in coming and we picked up a lot of the bill.
	We have, though I would say the original biggest partner, which was the former Soviet Union, was I'm feeling more optimistic about this now than I have in a long time.
	I think they're coming back and that they will be significant partners in this and that will be good.
	I tend to agree with you.
	I think they are slowly beginning to come back.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with a professor.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Art.
	Yes, sir.
	Where are you?
	This is John in Atlanta.
	Good morning, Professor.
	You mentioned the Boston Harbor freezing over.
	Yeah.
	Now, if I understand this, this took place during what's been called the Little Ice Age, right?
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Now, I've read that during that same period of time, there was a period of our sun cycle called the Mounder Minimum during a 60-70 year period where there was virtually no sunspots and none recorded.
	Correct.
	My question to you, do you think there's a connection and what would that connection be and why did this take place?
	That's a very good question actually.
	Yeah, I think there is a connection and I think one of the sort of additional parts of the puzzle about climate change and global climate change is the influence of variations in the sun's brightness.
	It seems pretty likely now that the sun is at some level a variable star and Though it's counterintuitive, the more spots there are on the surface of the sun, apparently the brighter the sun is in total.
	And the reason is that with the spots come flares.
	So the total amount of energy the sun sends us when it's at the top of its sunspot cycle is actually greater, though you would think the opposite, than it is when there are no spots or few spots.
	Actually, there's something rather interesting going on right now, Professor, and that is that we really...
	According to, you know, I'm a ham operator, so I watch the cycle pretty closely, and we're supposed to be past the peak of the cycle.
	Right.
	But, gosh, the sun has been going totally berserk.
	Yep.
	I'm very aware of this because I like to show my students the service of the sun through a filter telescope, and we look at the sunspots, and also I'm very much interested in the northern lights, the aurorae, and They've been extremely active.
	Oh, yes.
	It's a wild time in the sun.
	And it seems to affect, it's my theory, that it affects everything, including biological organisms and the way we act and everything else.
	I think that's probably true.
	Oh, you do?
	I do.
	I think the effects may be rather subtle, and they may be something sort of built into us by evolution, and it may not be something which we respond to very directly, but You know, the atmosphere has tides just as much as the water does, and so there are atmospheric pressure changes that go along with all the water tidal changes, and there are even very subtle land tides, and there's some reason to think that people's moods are affected by pressure changes.
	And it's certainly not hard to imagine that the sun, even with a subtle influence, wouldn't have a hard time affecting our climate.
	That's true.
	Small variations in the solar output would have presumably a noticeable variation in our climate.
	And I think the Maunder Minimum and the Sunspot Cycle we were just talking about really are connected to what goes on here.
	Yes, it's a very interesting time.
	Professor, it has been such a pleasure.
	We're out of time, but I hope your book sells like crazy.
	I'm sure it will.
	We've got it up.
	It's called The Science of UFOs, and there's a link on my website for it.
	Amazon.com, I'm sure, has it along with the other books that you've written, and I hope we can have you back again.
	I'd very much like that, and I've enjoyed this myself.
	Thank you, my friend.
	Good night.
	Good night.
	There you have it, folks.
	The kind of stuff that will indeed take your breath away.

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