10 Things You Didn't Know About Aliens

1. WELL, THAT NARROWS IT DOWN A BIT.
Astronomers Mar-garet Turnbull and Jill Tarter of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, have compiled a list of 17,129 nearby stars most likely to have planets that could support complex life— not single cells but higher plants and animals. According to Turnbull, stars must be at least 3 billion years old for complex life to evolve. Planets where this is likely to happen must also have low mass and high levels of iron, since metals are needed to form earthlike planets.
It is not enough for a planet to have water and sufficient minerals and be within a certain temperature range. It also needs billions of years of consistent radiation from its star—a stable brightness—to incubate life beyond the unicellular level.
Bingo! In April 2007, astronomers discovered the “most earth-like planet yet” on one of the 100 stars closest to Earth, a mere 20.5 light years out. As galactic distances go, 120 tril-lion miles is a mere hop. The planet, dubbed “581-c” (third rock from “red dwarf ” star Gliese 581), has an estimated sur-face temperature between 32°F and 104°F—which means the possibility of water and life as we know it.
Although hundreds of planets have been discovered in the past few years, none had a positive “Goldilocks effect”—all were too hot or too cold. But “581-c” is just right. This combination of life-giving water and life-supporting temperature makes it an intriguing target for further investigation. Stay tuned.



2. COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE.
A Gallup poll in the late 1990s revealed that about a third of all Americans believe aliens have visited us—an increase of 5% over the pre-vious decade. The Mutual UFO Network Web site states: "according to a Roper poll conducted in 2002 for the Sci-Fi Channel, one in seven Americans say they or someone they know has had an experience involving a UFO."
A U.S. population approaching 300 million means roughly 100,000,000 Americans who believe in visitors, and 43,000,000 who know someone with alleged first-hand or second-hand evidence.
But if aliens have made contact, when and where, and where are they now? Why don’t they stick around? There’s no convincing proof of visits—only stories, hints, suppositions. No artifacts, footprints, or indisputable photo evidence. Why leave no calling card unless they wished to remain unde-tected? (And why would they wish to remain undetected?)




3. CAN YOU DETECT ME NOW?
Among other notables, several U.S. presidents have either seen UFOs or had access to infor-mation about them. But so far none has made a definite statement yea or nay.
• Bill Holden, a steward on board Air Force One with John F. Kennedy, once asked JFK what he thought about UFOs. The president replied cannily, "I’d like to tell the public about the alien situation, but my hands are tied." By whom?

• Jimmy Carter said, at the 1976 Southern Governor’s Conference, "I don’t laugh at people . . . when they say they’ve seen UFOs. I’ve seen one myself. . . . It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and was about the size of the moon." He promised to make all UFO
secrets available to the public if he ever became president. Well, he did . . . but then he didn’t. Why not?

• Ronald Reagan saw a UFO while he was governor of California. A bright white light accompanied his plane, zigzagging around it for several minutes before sud-denly whooshing straight up out of sight. Reagan re-ported the incident to his wife but never mentioned it publicly for fear of being labeled a nut case. Years later, during a private screening of ET, Reagan reportedly turned to Steven Spielberg and whispered, "Only a handful of people know the truth about this."


• The widow of legendary TV comedian and actor Jackie Gleason claims that Gleason, known for his obsession with UFOs, was invited by golfing buddy President Nixon for a secret late-night visit to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. There, Gleason confided to friends, they saw the remains of some half dozen wizened child-size humanoids. Some were mauled, as if they had been in an accident. The creatures had three or four fingers. Gleason was disturbed and
excited by these beings, who were clearly "not human."
But he never understood why our government would
hide the aliens from the public.



4. WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, FRANK?
Astronomer Frank Drake made the first scientific attempt to contact alien be-ings in 1960, with an 85-foot-radius dish at the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia to listen to signals from two nearby sun-like stars. So far his search has turned up zilch.
But can we be sure? Maybe they’re cheerfully yammering at us in their version of the King’s English (the Xpptffl’s Bz-rkkfnn), but our sense organs cannot perceive the signals they are sending. Or if they do, we primitives don’t recognize it as language. We assume that our thinking matches extraterres-trial thinking. This presupposes—probably incorrectly—that logic and the grammar of perception are the same everywhere. SETI scientists keep scrubbing the skies for signals represent-ing prime numbers, the hydrogen molecule signature, and other "obvious" things we know. But ideas that are meaning-ful to us may be too primitive for (or irrelevant to) advanced minds.



5. NOSE JOB, BOOB JOB, INTELLIGENCE JOB.
If we make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, how can we tell whether it is living, feeling, sentient organic being’s intelli-gence we are experiencing, or artificial intelligence?
We all receive auto-responses to phone calls and e-mails. "This is Dolores. I’m away until the twenty-fifth. Leave a message at the beep." If mere humans can create this re-sponse to an electronic stimulus, greatly advanced civiliza-tions may have greatly advanced programs designed for similar purposes. One can imagine civilizations so advanced that they are connected to a constantly expanding network of thousands, even millions, of others across the universe.
Most life on Earth is not even life as we know it. . . . Human life is a minuscule branch of the tree of life. —SA R A VI A , professor, University of Maryland



6. MAYBE HE KNOWS ZAGER AND EVANS.
Seth Shostak, se-nior astronomer at SETI, reckons—for reasons best known to him—that the 350-foot antenna Allen telescope array, now being built, "will trip across a signal by the year 2025."
Dr. Shostak, an imaginative lecturer and media personal-ity, is also noted in reference sources as the inventor of the electrical banana. We do not know what an electrical banana is or does. He is a skilled computer animator. These accom-plishments and others may have provided him with a predic-tive insight that exceeds the ordinary. It is unclear how he arrived at the year 2025.



7. WE’RE HIGH ON SPACE.
Astronomers are optimistic about the Allen Telescope Array, the latest advance in SETI, en-dowed by a grant from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. A joint operation of SETI and the Radio Astronomy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the ATA will enhance the search effort by a factor of one hundred by being available to SETI 24/7, instead of the limited time available on other galaxy tools.
Rather than one huge collector, the ATA, when com-pleted, will be an ingenious interconnection of 350 6.1-meter antennas, 2,135 cumulative meters in diameter, with a sig-nal scooping capacity of more than 7,000 feet (a mile and a third!) across.
Because it will scan many directions at once, the ATA’s collection potential is greater than that of any existing in-strument, even the giant 305-meter dish antenna in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Its wide-angle capability can target many stars simultaneously, boosting signal collection capacity from to-day’s 1,000 to 100,000—and eventually ONE MILLION star systems!



8. TRY THIS AT HOME.
You can download software from the SETI@home project (setiathome.berkeley.edu) to sift for alien signals from your home computer. Over 187,000 other people have already done so.
Connecting with alien signals requires huge computing power to allow searches to cover a wide range of radio fre-quencies. SETI needs all the computing power it can get.
Government funding and dedicated supercomputers are at a premium, so SETI seeks public help in the daily scut-work of data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye suggested orga
nizing a private array of home computers into a virtual supercomputer. Thus the SETI@home project, begun in May 1999, began to bring this vision to life.
SETI@home is privately funded, largely by the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization co-founded by Carl Sagan. Their search area is the 2.5-megahertz bandwidth, freeing up the rest of the vast radio spectrum to be searched by others.



9. LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION.
The most likely spots for alien life in our solar system is underground on Mars, the hot spot on Saturn’s moon Enceladus (its South Pole is dotted with geysers), and Jupiter’s moons Europa and Callisto, whose icy crusts may conceal vast underlying oceans of water.
Speaking of icy, one marine bacterium (Colwellia 34H) sporting around in the Arctic ocean not only survives but burns enough energy to reproduce—at MINUS 196 Celsius. Talk about sexual determination at the cellular level! That’s weather on the Martian surface, or in the liquid methane riv-ers of Saturn’s moon Titan. This little bug would be right at home either place, theorizes microbiologist Dr. Karen Junge of the University of Washington’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences and NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.



10. C’MON, GET IT OFF YOUR CHEST.
In Newfoundland, sleep paralysis is called the "old hag" because it is associated with visions of an elderly woman crouching on the sleeper’s chest. In the West Indies, the phenomenon is said to occur when a ghost baby bounces on the snoozer.
Aliens are the ghost or devil stories of modern times. All cultures have some version of the creature "pressing down" or "sitting on" the victim’s chest. But why are so many of these apparitions "hags" or old women?