Aliens and UFO

Much of the public believes that UFOs are alien spacecraft. This  represents a conceptual leap from unidentified lights in the sky or  radar bogies that were the UFO stories when I was growing up. Today,  “believers” are talking about actual alien contact, with alien bases on  the Moon and Mars, and their concerns receive reinforcement from radio,  TV, and Internet blogs. On one level UFOs are real, of course; many people occasionally see  objects in the sky that are not immediately identifiable as planes,  balloons, planets, stars, or unusual atmospheric phenomena. But the  questions I receive from the public (submitted to a NASA Web site)  suggest a belief system linking UFOs with alien visitations and  abductions spiced up by “conspiracy theories” to hide this information  from the public. If UFOs are alien spacecraft visiting Earth, then it seems reasonable  that evidence of alien civilizations might be seen by astronomers or  the radio signals from alien spacecraft might be picked up by the  sensitive receivers we use to communicate with our own spacecraft.  Perhaps astronauts who venture into space would be among the first to  make reliable observations of alien spacecraft or artifacts. Perhaps we  should look for alien bases on other worlds. Indeed, the Internet  carries many stories of such encounters. I will examine some of the  evidence cited for alien presence in the solar system. 

Astronaut Encounters with Aliens

One allegedly well-documented report stems from an interview in which  astronaut Buzz Aldrin describes seeing a UFO during the Apollo 11  mission. In an interview on the Science Channel (left, top), Aldrin  stated that he, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins saw unidentified  objects that appeared to follow their Apollo spacecraft. To get the story straight, I called Buzz Aldrin, who was happy to  explain what happened. He said that his remarks were taken out of  context to reverse his meaning. It is true that the Apollo 11 crew  spotted an unidentified object moving with the spacecraft as they  approached the Moon. After they verified that this mystery object was  not Apollo 11’s large rocket upper stage, which was about 6,000 miles  away by then, they concluded that they were seeing one of the small  panels that had linked the spacecraft to the upper stage (any part of  the spacecraft’s rocket upper stage will continue to move alongside the  spacecraft, as both are floating in free-fall). These panels were too  small to track from Earth and were relatively close to the Apollo  spacecraft. Aldrin told me that they chose not to discuss this on the  open communications channel since they were concerned that their  comments might be misinterpreted. His entire explanation about  identifying the panels was cut from the broadcast interview, giving the  impression that the Apollo 11 crew had seen a UFO. Aldrin told me that  he was angry about the deceptive editing and asked the Science Channel  to correct the intentional twisting of his remarks, but they refused.  Later, Aldrin explained what happened on CNN’s Larry King Live (left, bottom) but was nearly cut off by the host before he could finish.     With the popularity of YouTube, this same question is addressed to me  repeatedly, as in: “Check out this video on YouTube with Buzz Aldrin  saying he saw a UFO on Apollo 11. Who is fibbing? NASA or the great  American hero, Buzz Aldrin?” My answer was that the fibbing was being  done by the producers of the video, who omitted the second half of the  interview. It is instructive to watch this interview to see the ways the story  is embellished and ultimately manipulated. Most of the talking is done  by the interviewer and not Aldrin, but their comments have been edited  to create the illusion of a seamless narrative. Throughout the interview  we see a montage of short scenes from Apollo and other missions,  including a blurry image through the window taken during a later flight.  Only a critical viewer will distinguish what Aldrin said from the  narrative by the interviewer or realize that the video clips are  unrelated. The end product is clever disinformation, strongly  suggesting—without explicitly lying—that Aldrin and his crewmates saw an  alien spacecraft. Many Internet claims of encounters between NASA astronauts and alien  spacecraft are based on quotes from “secret communications” between  flight crews and Houston. It is true that there are such private  conversations, concerning crew health for example. But the Internet  stories of overheard conversations are never documented and often  attributed to leaks from unnamed NASA workers whose jobs (or even lives)  would allegedly be at risk if they were identified. Many of these  stories involve the Apollo 11 flight, and they include claims that alien  spaceships accompanied the NASA craft during its Moon landing and that a  row of alien spacecraft along a crater rim monitored the astronauts’  spacewalk on the lunar surface. (Incidentally, Apollo 11 landed on a  flat plain where there were no hills or crater rims to provide such a  viewpoint.) To my knowledge, no NASA astronaut has ever reported seeing a UFO in  space, let alone having a confrontation with aliens. However, this is  not to say that no astronaut believes that alien visitations to Earth  might be happening. Recently there were news reports that Apollo 14  astronaut Edgar Mitchell believes in the reality of some reports of  UFOs. He has attended a number of meetings of UFO believers, and he  asserts that some of these reports are true, and that the U.S.  government and military are aware of these alien visits. However,  Mitchell does not claim to have seen aliens himself. His astronaut  colleagues tell me that he has always had an interest in the occult, and  he even tried to conduct a parapsychology experiment on the way to and  from the Moon. It is easy for a journalist to ignore Mitchell’s caveats  about most UFO reports being untrue, or about not encountering an alien  himself, to give the impression that he and other astronauts have had  frequent encounters with beings from other worlds. One argument presented to me by several correspondents is that aliens  must have warned humans to stay away from their bases on the Moon.  Otherwise, why was the Apollo program suddenly terminated with three  more missions scheduled and almost ready for launch? (The huge  Apollo/Saturn-5 rockets that enthrall visitors to the NASA space parks  at Canaveral, Houston, and Huntsville are not mock-ups; they are real  hardware built for Apollo 18, 19, and 20.) The conspiracy story  attributes our failure to follow up on the Apollo flights to this same  interplanetary quarantine and suggests that NASA’s current program to  return astronauts to the Moon will be cancelled for the same reason. I  admit being baffled by the sudden termination of the Apollo program at  the peak of its success, but I accept the official explanation that it  was due to the changing political priorities of the Nixon  administration, where many looked upon Apollo as a Kennedy-Johnson  program. 

Mars: The Viking Era

Mars plays a unique role in public consciousness. Just a century ago,  this planet was widely thought to be inhabited by intelligent  creatures, largely due to astronomical studies and the popular writing  of Percival Lowell. The classic science-fiction novel War of the Worlds  by H.G. Wells reinforced public curiosity about the possibility of  aliens on Mars. But early space missions that showed decisively that  Mars was not really very Earth-like—with no canals and an atmosphere  only 1 percent the size of ours—damped much of the public’s fascination.  Scientific interest has steadily increased, however, and Mars is the  planet most visited by spacecraft. The first stage of scientific  exploration climaxed in 1976 with two identical Mars landers and  orbiters as part of the Viking program. All four Viking spacecraft were  fabulously successful, providing a comprehensive survey of the planet  together with detailed analysis at two landing sites, including clever  experiments to search for evidence of microbial life. After two decades of post-Viking neglect, NASA initiated a new series  of Mars missions with the 1996 Mars Pathfinder, which included a rover  about the size of a microwave oven. After two mission failures in 1998,  several remarkably successful orbiters and the two famous Mars  Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, followed. In addition to  high-resolution orbiting cameras, there is also a digital, global  topographic map based on laser ranging between the orbiter and the  surface. As a result, we have more detailed and quantitative data on  martian topography than we do for much of the Earth’s surface. Naturally, the tens of thousands of high-resolution photos from orbit  and on the ground (all publicly available) have been studied for  evidence of life and any potential artifacts of a possible ancient  civilization. In this respect, the most famous discovery was made by  Viking Orbiter 1 in 1977, in a low-resolution (about 40 meters) photo of  the ancient Cydonia region of Mars. In the midst of a heavily eroded  plain with irregular low mountains or mesas is the Face on Mars, one of the iconic images of the space program. The Face on Mars, seen under oblique lighting, seems to be an oval  humanoid face with eyes, nose, and a mouth. It is about one kilometer  across and surrounded by a sort of halo that reminds some of the cloth  headpiece worn by Egyptian pharaohs. It was spotted by Viking scientist  Toby Owen and released to the press as a joke to show how even on Mars  we (humans) could find features that looked vaguely like ourselves.  Unfortunately, Viking project scientist Jerry Soffen made an offhand  remark to the press that this “face” showed up only under this  particular lighting and not in other photos of the same site. The  problem was that Viking had not taken other photos of this spot at equal  or higher resolution, and the mission ended before this area could be  mapped again. Thus began another conspiracy theory: NASA was suppressing  confirming photos of the face. When the next NASA mission to photograph  Mars (Mars Observer) failed in 1992 shortly before its arrival at the  Red Planet, the story began to circulate that this failure was faked and  the spacecraft was really in orbit and sending back secret  high-resolution images of the face. The Face on Mars has been vigorously promoted by one energetic  entrepreneur: Richard C. Hoagland. A young freelance journalist and  one-time museum guide, Hoagland was a part of the large corps of  journalists who encamped at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the  Viking landings. Hoagland not only accepted the artificial origin of the  face, he went on to develop a detailed “theory” that linked this  feature with a number of others in Cydonia that he also interpreted as  artificial. These included a set of intersecting low ridges that he  called the “city” and several mountains of roughly pyramid shape.  (Pyramid-shaped peaks with three or four sides are a rather common  product of both ice and wind erosion on Earth.)   As improving technology allowed for higher photo resolution, the  “face on Mars” looked less like a face and more like the natural  landform it is.  Hoagland set out to study the geometry of this layout, finding  coincidences in the angles between the features that further  demonstrated (to him) their artificial origin. He published the results  from his “research” in a 350-page book called The Monuments of Mars  (now in its fifth edition). He also undertook a lecture circuit that  climaxed when a naïve public affairs officer at NASA Glenn (then Lewis)  Research Center in Cleveland invited him to present a director’s seminar  and then offered to put a videotape of this talk on the NASA TV  channel. Hoagland also began making regular appearances on Art Bell’s  late-night talk show Coast to Coast AM, where he still happily holds forth on the conspiracies of NASA and the U.S. government to keep the truth from the public. Hoagland’s elaborate interpretation of the “monuments” on Mars  represents an amazing flight of imagination. Since the features are in a  state of ruin, he concludes that the aliens who built them are no  longer present and dates the construction of these huge projects to  about half a million years ago. Since the face is (in his opinion)  clearly human and directed upward (best seen from above), he concludes  that it was built as a message for Homo sapiens, a species that  was just emerging on Earth at the time. The story then bifurcates:  either these aliens were also visiting Earth at the time and knew about  the future rise of humans (analogous to the opening sequences in the  book and film 2001, A Space Odyssey), or the monuments  themselves were built by an earlier race of humans that had moved from  Earth to Mars and left no traces of their tenure on our planet. Yet  another option is that Homo sapiens had a martian origin,  migrating to Earth when their own planet became uninhabitable (a  conclusion that flies in the face of all modern genetic analysis of  humans and their primate cousins). Hoagland’s analysis of the geometric patterns of the alleged  monuments convinced him that the entire layout in Cydonia was a  technical message to humans, one that included the key to a limitless  source of energy. Apparently he has deciphered the message but is not  revealing it just yet, other than to say that this energy could be  tapped only at latitude 19.5 degrees (north or south) on the Sun as well  as Earth and Mars. More recently, Hoagland linked the monuments on Mars  with the crop circles appearing on Earth, which also allegedly held the  key to unlimited energy, implying that the creators of the city on Mars  were also active today on Earth. The fact that Hoagland was able to  peddle this bizarre fairy tale for two decades and make a living selling  books and videotapes is a testament to his ability as a salesman, if  not to his unscientific acumen. The two-decade post-Viking hiatus from Mars provided plenty of time  for Hoagland to market his fantasy. The 1992 failure of Mars Observer,  far from ending this story, was twisted by Hoagland into an additional  conspiracy theory. The day the failure was announced, a group of his  followers demonstrated outside the JPL gates to protest the blanket of  secrecy they claimed had been thrown over this mission whose real  purpose was to allegedly study the face. In the late 1990s, one of the  two most frequently asked questions in letters and emails received by  NASA concerned the Face on Mars (the other topic was asteroid impacts). 

New Results from Mars

In 1998, a much-improved camera arrived at Mars on the Mars Global  Surveyor orbiter. A vocal segment of the public demanded that NASA give  high priority to re-photographing the face. NASA wisely argued that this  was not a high-priority target but quietly obtained a high-resolution  image of the face as soon as the spacecraft orbit permitted it. On April  5, 1998, when the Mars Global Surveyor flew over Cydonia for the first  time, Michael Malin and his Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team snapped a  picture ten times sharper than the original Viking photos, revealing a  natural landform. However, the new lighting was very different from that  of the original Viking photo, and some face proponents refused to  believe that this was really the same feature. On April 8, 2001, the MOC  captured a photo using the camera’s maximum resolution, better than two  meters, which was twenty times higher than the Viking original. This  spacecraft also carried another instrument, a laser ranging device,  which gradually built up an extremely detailed quantitative topographic  map of Mars that did not depend on lighting angles. With these data, it  was possible to reconstruct exactly how the mesa would look from any  direction. Many details of this story are recounted in the article “Unmasking the Face on Mars”. Additional images with even higher resolution were obtained in 2007 by the University of Arizona HiRISE camera on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  With a resolution of 25 cm, these photos showed features as small as a  briefcase. Such data eventually convinced almost everyone that the face  was simply a mesa surrounded by an apron of eroded debris. NASA’s chief  Mars scientist, Jim Garvin, even jokingly plotted a hiking trail that  ascended the rugged hill. However, as the true nature of this eroded  mesa became undeniable, the suggestion was made that the face had been  intentionally destroyed by NASA: the clandestine mission of Mars  Observer had been to first photograph the feature in detail, then deface  it with a well-aimed nuclear missile. Meanwhile, Richard Hoagland was moving on and generating new claims,  some even more bizarre than those associated with the face. The  Wikipedia article on Hoagland mentions his assertions that “Rocks on  Mars containing biological fossils were purposely destroyed by NASA’s  rover Opportunity. Numerous objects surrounding the landing sites of the  Mars Exploration Rovers are in fact pieces of martian machinery. There  are large semitransparent structures constructed of glass on the lunar  surface, visible in some Apollo photography. There is a clandestine  space program, using antigravity technology reverse-engineered from  lunar artifacts and communicated by secret societies. Federal agencies  such as FEMA and NASA are linked to Freemasonry.” Hoagland held a press conference at the National Press Club on  October 30, 2007, to “review NASA’s 50 years of cover-ups and hidden  solar system data.” His accusations against NASA appeared in more detail  in his book with Mike Bara, Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA.  He was also by then in his crop circle phase, promoting new sources of  energy revealed to him in the crop circles. And he is still a regular  guest on Coast to Coast AM, where he has the title of science advisor. Humans have a natural tendency to see anthropomorphic features in  natural shapes such as clouds and mountains. As thousands of new photos  of the martian surface were streaming back from the rovers, some of  these tendencies were bound to pop up. One of the funniest is an image  of a tiny eroded rock only a few centimeters long that looks rather like  the famous “little mermaid” statue in Copenhagen Harbor. This too has  been hailed as a real photo of a Martian. The continuing torrent of  spacecraft images from current missions to Saturn and Mercury as well as  Mars will probably generate new advocates for aliens in space.  Fortunately, the vast majority of people are happy to accept these  images as wonderful products of our space age exploration of the solar  system and not as a new episode in the great alien cover-up.