The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: The Star Map Investigation
Fish’s work was a splendid example of persistence and objectivity. She had to copy out all the coordinates, convert the data to useful angles and distances, string the beads, and hang them. Subsequently, she had to scan the results from many different directions, seeking a 3-D pattern that matched what Betty had drawn. Obviously there were limits, such as doorways, to the size of the model. Finally, in what was a relief to her, the Wilhelm Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars provided the best set of distance data. Decisions had to be made as to the maximum star distances to include. Obviously it was farther to the corners than to the nearest frame pieces if the sun is in the center. She was studying quite carefully the work of various authors as to which stars would be more or less likely to have planets.
We have found that it comes as a surprise to many people that stars vary much more than do people as to age, intensity, size, nearness to other stars, and so on. Some stars are so huge that if placed at the center of the solar system, the Earth would still be inside the star. For example, the giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion is so huge that if it were in the middle of our solar system, it would reach out almost as far as Jupiter. Sources differ, but most say that it is about 600 times bigger in diameter than the sun. The orbits of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth, which is 92 million miles from the sun, would fit inside the star. In contrast, some stars are not much bigger than the Earth. Some “burn” their nuclear fuel (nuclear fusion is the primary energy-production mechanism of the stars) in only millions of years. Others last for many billions of years, “burning” at an almost constant rate. To give a sense of perspective, Pluto is about 3.66 billion miles from the sun. The sun is about 800,000 miles in diameter, while the Earth is only 8,000 miles in diameter, and mighty Jupiter is 88,736 miles in diameter. It takes light from the sun only 8 minutes to reach Earth, only 43 minutes to reach Jupiter, and 320 minutes to reach Pluto. The speed of light, which physicists often quote as 186,000 miles per second, in more useful units is about 670,000,000 miles per hour. The distance to the nearest star is about 4.3 light years.
Thus our solar system, with our star, Sol, at the middle, is much smaller than the distance to our nearest solar neighbor. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years in diameter, and is a flattened spiral pancake containing a few hundred billion stars. The sun is about 28,000 light-years from the center. Two small galaxies, the small and larger Magellanic clouds are a few hundred thousand light-years from us. The next big galaxy, similar to ours, the Andromeda Galaxy, is about 2.2 mil- lion light-years away. The universe with its billions of galaxies is about 13 billion light-years across.
It is important to stress this information, because we have found that many people don’t know the difference between a solar system (such as our sun with its retinue of eight planets and dozens of moons, lots of asteroids, comets, and so on) and a galaxy. The universe is a very impressive place, but it is more important to focus on our local galactic neighborhood. Within only 54 light-years of the sun there are about a thousand stars. New ones are being found as we develop better observing techniques, especially space-based systems. About 46 of the thousand are quite similar to the sun, and were listed by Dickinson in his article. It seems absurd that some people will use terms such as intergalactic (between galaxies) to describe possible visitors and conclude it would take too long and too much energy to get here from somewhere else. Intragalactic and neighborhood travel make far more sense. It only takes a minute to walk to the neighbor’s to borrow a cup of sugar. A Bostonian would hardly walk to a friend’s house in Australia for the same purpose.
It is useful to focus on Fish’s fascinating results:
- All the pattern stars (connected with lines) are the right kind for planets and life, even though less than 5 percent of the stars in the local neighborhood qualify.
- All the sun-like stars in the volume of space taken up by the 3-D model are part of the pattern. Just a little smaller, and many would be missed. A bit larger and many more would be included.
There have been many estimates made of the probability that #1 and #2 are just a coincidence: From one in a thousand to one in a million, depending on the assumptions. In short, this is a very unlikely coincidence. - All the pattern stars are, roughly speaking, in a plane—similar to thin slices of pepperoni on a thin pizza, as opposed to being raisins in a big fat loaf of raisin bread. This was not known until Fish’s work. It matters, because it is much easier to travel within a plane. The planets of our solar system are also pretty much in a plane rather than scattered in all directions from the sun.
- Nobody doing what Fish did before 1961, when the Hill encounter took place, or before the book was published in 1966, or before the Gliese catalog was published in 1968, could have achieved the same results, because science didn’t have the right distance data. So how could Betty, who knew nothing about astronomy, have conjured up such a pattern?
- The three-dimensional pattern of the travel routes makes sense from nearest star to nearest star to nearest star, rather than out and back, out and back. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to expect that if the stars visited are the same kind of stars, then other similar nearby stars should also be visited.
- Finally, Fish’s work determined that the base stars, between which there were very heavy trade routes, were Zeta 1 Reticuli and Zeta 2 Reticuli, in the southern sky constellation of Reticulum: “The Net.”
As it turns out, for our neighborhood, this is a unique pair of stars. They are the closest (to each other) pair of sun-like stars in the neighbor- hood, being (as we now know because of the wonderful recent measurements of star distances made by the European satellite, Hipparchus) only 1/8 of a light-year apart from each other and only 39.2 light-years from the sun. Our star, the sun, is out in the boondocks; the nearest star to it is 4.25 light-years away. Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli are next-door neighbors. They are 34 times closer to each other than the next star over (Alpha Centauri—a triple star) is from the sun. Of great importance is that they are far enough apart so that each could have a stable planetary orbit around it, unlike the situation for a close double or triple star. An important additional fact is that Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 are about a billion years older than the sun.
The implications of the special situation are fairly clear. Beings on a planet around either star could directly observe the other star all day long. It would be more than 20 times brighter than Venus is in our sky. One would, within hundreds of years of developing telescopes, be able to directly observe planets around the other star and would soon know which of those planets had biological systems because of the composition of the planetary atmospheres. The composition of our atmosphere is to a large extent dependent on the creation of various gases, such as oxygen, by bio- logical processes. If none did, there would still be room for “terraforming,” as has been proposed for us to do to Mars. This would mean artificially changing the planet in such a way as to make it suitable for colonization. Finally, there would obviously be a far greater incentive to develop inter- stellar travel when there is a neighboring star system only an eighth of a light-year away. At a quarter of the speed of light it would only take six months to make the trip.
Anyone studying the development of advanced technology would recognize that technological progress comes from doing things differently, in an unpredictable fashion. Lasers aren’t just better light bulbs; they require entirely new physics. The nuclear fission rockets Stanton worked on are not just better chemical rockets; they require entirely different physics. The fusion rockets are, again, not just better chemical rockets. As a matter of fact, every advanced civilization would determine that fusion is the process that produces the energy of its star. With a billion- year head start on us, it seems reasonable that Zeta Reticulans would have developed entirely new (to us) techniques for energy production, transportation, communication, computers, biological activities—that we can’t even imagine. They would presumably study biology, aging, and reproduction, and be able to more or less control these as well.