Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth – ON RENDERING MATERIALS TRANSLUCENT
‘I will now turn off the compartment light and activate the viewing beam,’ said the voice. For a moment the room became completely dark. Then a beam of light came from the projector. ‘The beam, or the part of it which was visible at all, was a deep violet, at the very top of the visible spectrum,’ Fry explained.
The beam was focused so as to exactly cover the door through which I had come, and under its influence the door became totally transparent. It was as though I were looking through the finest type of plate glass or lucite window.’
As the voice went on to say that a few of the basic technical principles would be explained, Fry began to realize that the words he had been hearing were probably not coming to his ears as sound waves but seemed to be originating directly in his brain. The voice continued: As you see, the door has become transparent. This startles you because you are accustomed to thinking of metals as being completely opaque.
However, ordinary glass is just as dense as many metals and harder than most, and yet transmits light quite readily. Most matter is opaque to light because the photons of light are captured and absorbed in the electron orbits of the atoms through which they pass. This capture will occur whenever the frequency of the photon matches one of the frequencies of the atom. The energy thus stored is soon re-emitted, but usually in the infra-red portion of the spectrum, which is below the range of visibility, and so cannot be seen as light There are several ways in which matter can be made transparent, or at least translucent.
One method is to create a field matrix between the atoms which will tend to prevent the photon from being absorbed. Such a matrix develops in many substances during crystalization. Another is to raise the frequency of the photon above the highest absorption frequency of the atoms. The beam of energy which is now acting upon the metal of the door is what you would call a ‘frequency multiplier’. The beam penetrates the metal and acts upon any light that reaches it in such a way that the resulting frequency is raised to that between the ranges which you describe as the ‘X-ray’ and the ‘Cosmic Ray’ spectrums.
At these frequencies, the waves pass through the metal quite readily. Then, when these leave the metal on the inner side of the door, they again interact with the viewing beam, producing what you would describe as ‘beat frequencies’ which are identical with the original frequencies of the light.
As a rough analogy, the system could be compared to the carrier wave of one of your radio broadcasting stations, except that the modulation is applied ‘upstream’ as it were, instead of at the source of the carrier.
EARTH’S BROADCASTS MONITORED
Fry remarked that, for one who had never set foot on Earth, his unseen host seemed extraordinarily familiar with our terrestrial technology. ‘You are underestimating our technology,’ came the reply.
You have no idea of the amount of close-range observation to which your planet has been subjected by passing space craft during the past few generations. The radio messages and programs which you continually hurl into space can readily be monitored by our receiving equipment, at distances equal to several times the diameter of your solar system.
Within such a volume of space there will always be at least a few ships either passing through the system or pausing to store up energy from its solar radiation. Any data received from earthly broadcasts which is considered to be of potential interest to other races will be recorded and relayed to more distant receiving points which will relay in turn, until the data is ultimately available to much of the galaxy.