Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life
All Shapes, Colors, and Sizes
Among the most frequently reported alien types are grays (short, spindly, big- eyed creatures that have been the dominant ET form for some seventy years); insectoids (fictionalized most famously in the novel/film Starship Troopers); reptilians (an intimidating, shape-shifting form also called draconians, saurians, lizard people, and, less commonly, reptoids and reptoloids); nordic (friendly blond aliens, sometimes called Pleiadians; tall, handsome, and sturdy, they brim with wisdom); Andromedans (creatures of pure energy that can nevertheless assume roughly humanoid shapes); and the venerable little green men (pint- sized, bulge-brained visitors à la Invasion of the Saucer-Men and Mars Attacks!).
Some other, less common alien types are reported often enough to be noted here: the diminutive hairy dwarves (unpleasant and unprepossessing creatures, famously reported across Venezuela in 1954 and in Essex, England, in 1974); sirians (aquatic or amphibious types in humanoid form); cryptids (folkloric and quasi-folkloric creatures, particularly those of the Bigfoot variety [such as the “Missouri monster” Momo and the Australian Outback’s Yowie] that encourage identification as extraterrestrial forms); and dropa (aliens that left small stone glyphs in China more than ten thousand years ago; the book Sungods in Exile, David A. Gamon’s 1980 account of an expedition to locate and decipher the glyphs, was exposed as Gamon’s little joke).
Variations and sub-classifications of major forms pop up as Arcturians (grays, except that they are blue); sirian-human hybrids (fashion-model beautiful); essassani (benevolent, physically attractive beings that are a complex hybridization of humans, grays, and reptilians); and yahyel (another hybrid species, described by one metaphysical Web site—and rather disappointingly— as a “gorgeous and graceful” species with “the appearance of an angelic anime character”).
Like Us? Not Likely
Biologists and other scientists frequently scoff at conceptions of intelligent extraterrestrial life that exhibit elements of the human form. The odds against alien life evolving along lines similar to our own are long, at best. It is more likely that intelligent extraterrestrial life looks nothing like us at all. The alien physiognomy may startle us. It may even repulse us, or trigger an atavistic urge to flee from it, or to destroy it. The familiar variations on the bilaterally symmetrical humanoid that walks upright—whether gray, scaly, or handsomely blond—invite charges of the narrow self-absorption that defines our fascination with monkeys and apes, and our representations of “ourselves” in dolls, puppets, and art. We are compelled to create those humanlike representations because of innocent arrogance, and because we need reassurance that our form is the form.
Because early humans had no conception of “star” or “planet,” they had no impression of “other planets.” When they thought about other intelligences, they thought of nonhuman things, such as rocks suffused with magical power, and unseen agents—particularly deities—that controlled the wind and the sea and other aspects of the natural world that were observed and experienced. The notion of extraterrestrial intelligence had still to evolve.
By the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras declared his belief that the Earth and Moon shared some physical properties. From there, the supposition of other Earthlike worlds was not a major leap. Because Anaxagoras had suggested the Moon had inhabitants, later thinkers wondered about intelligent, humanlike life on other planets.
In 165 AD, the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata issued A True History, a fanciful journey to the Moon via a violent whirlwind. The tale describes a universe filled with worlds populated by intelligent humans.
The Mars Craze
Fanciful tales about exotic-appearing Moon creatures found popularity with newspaper readers during the 19th century. The papers liked them as well, because they boosted circulation and encouraged readers to invoke the newspapers when discussing, for instance, the regal, bat-winged inhabitants of the Moon.
By the second half of the century, scientists had a better understanding of the kinetic nature of gases, and the particular properties that hold Earth’s atmosphere in place. This knowledge put an end to scientific speculation about life on the Moon, a body with neither the size nor gravitational pull to maintain an atmosphere. In 1901, the estimable H. G. Wells sidestepped the atmosphere issue in his novel The First Men in the Moon, a hearty adventure involving intelligent beings that live in an atmosphere maintained below the Moon’s surface.
Later, Wells’s speculative magazine serial/novel The War of the Worlds (1897–98) diverted public attention to the planet Mars. It was from that planet, Wells wrote in the book, that Earth’s affairs were “watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s. . . .” Wells’s tales revived interest in Martian canali (channels), which had been claimed by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. Because Americans translated “canali” as “canals,” laypersons eager to assume the existence of a great (or once-great) Martian civilization . . . assumed it. In 1926, American astronomers Carl Lampland and William Coblentz deduced that temperatures at Mars’s equator rose as high as thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and even as high as seventy-seven. But Mars, they said, grew cold overnight, with equatorial temperatures at dawn as frigid as minus-150 Fahrenheit. Further, the thinness of the Martian atmosphere allowed fatal levels of ultraviolet light to reach the planet’s surface. Despite this solid science, Mars and Martians continued to exercise a hold on the public imagination. If alien life was going to come from anywhere, it was going to come from Mars.
Partly because of Orson Welles’s October 30, 1938, War of the Worlds radio broadcast (see chapter fifteen), popular interest in Mars ran high. Throughout the 1940s, comic books, radio plays, pulp magazines, and movie serials suggested Martian life. Ray Bradbury’s elegant 1950 short story collection The Martian Chronicles crossed over into the literary mainstream, and helped spark popular notions about Mars exploration, a dying Martian race, and colonization of Mars by Earthlings—who become the new Martians.
American and Russian Mars probes undertaken beginning in 1962 reached a peculiar climax in the early 1990s, when British researcher David Percy studying Mars photographs was struck by an image of what appeared to be a five-sided pyramid located southeast of a cratered boulder field Percy called “the city.” So that the pyramidal shape might be easily discerned, Percy overlaid the photographic image with a precisely drawn polygon, with five lines radiating from the pyramid’s peak to the junctions of the five sides, creating a star within a polygon that looks like an elongated version of Chrysler Corporation’s venerable Pentastar logo. Because he imposed order on the Martian pyramidal structure, Percy felt free to infer that the configuration was an intelligently engineered pyramid. Based on this and similarly manipulated evidence, Percy fell into some fallacies of weak inference, such as, “[I]t already seems established beyond reasonable doubt that Mars must once have been inhabited by sentient beings.” Established by whom? Skeptics rightly pointed out that “pyramidal” is not the same as “pyramid,” and that Percy’s carefully drawn geometric lines amounted to calculated misrepresentation.
The Face
Discussion-provoking Martian news arrived via the successful American Viking 1 and Viking 2 orbiter-lander probes of 1976. In a photograph of Cydonia Mensae, a region peppered with mesas, there sat what appeared to be a mammoth, upturned humanoid face—with eyes deep in their sockets and a terse, implacable mouth. The effect of the sun on the Martian surface contributed to the eye-socket effect, and tiny black dots (visual evidence of unavoidable image dropout) seemed to express a hairline and a nostril.
Richard Hoagland, a science consultant temporarily associated with the Goddard Space Flight Center, claimed to be the first to see the face, which he identified (along with the pyramidal structures) as part of an enormous Martian monument. Because Hoagland lacked a university degree, and had pursued activities existing at the fringes of “legitimate” science, he was not taken seriously by the science establishment. Hoagland responded by naming NASA as party to a U.S. conspiracy to hide the truth about Mars. He subsequently turned the Martian face into a ticket to modest celebrity, which brought television and lecture appearances, and a book deal (The Monuments of Mars; 1987).
When support of the “face” theory came from the Yale-educated American astronomer Tom C. Van Flandern (who had a twenty-year professional relationship with the U.S. Naval Observatory), Hoagland’s claim appeared to pick up some credibility. Van Flandern, though, was an inveterate controversialist, forever at odds with the astronomical establishment because of his alternative views on such things as the speed of gravity and the origins of the planets. Van Flandern persisted in his conclusion about the Martian face even after high-resolution photographs of the site became available in 2001.
Richard Hoagland built a small career on the Martian face and his theory of conspiracy, but lost steam in 1997, when the Mars Global Surveyor mapped the Cydonia region, and others, with unprecedented clarity. Photographs from the probe showed that the supposed pyramids were natural forms, and the famous face was an assemblage of rocks that had been massaged by shadows in 1976.
Wishful thinking continues, though. Early in 2015, a Mars rover photograph of Martian rock rubble purportedly revealed a Martian “book,” a thick volume lying on its side amidst other rocks. Computer manipulation of random shadows by a person or group called the Mars Moon Space Photo Zoom Club “revealed” three neat columns of type on the book’s “cover.” This is how a random rock becomes a book. Despite acknowledging that the Zoom Club’s computer manipulation “cleaned up” the image, altered colors, and added detail (emphasis added), a blogger on ufosightingsdaily.com enthused, “I bet the rover could drive right up to it and open that cover up easily as if it came right off a shelf.” Other recent claims about Martian rocks have invoked an ankh, a large dome, and “a little hut.”
