| CAPTURED BY ALIENS The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe Joel Achenbach New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-684-84856-3 | ||||
| ISBN 0-684-84856-2 | 415p. | HC/BWI | $25.00 | |
Science writer Joel Achenbach is fascinated by the fact that we humans are fascinated by the subject of extraterrestrial intelligent life (commonly known as "aliens"). Many scientists today think it likely that life is common in the universe (although few believe higher life forms like ourselves are equally abundant). A significant portion of humanity in general is involved enough with this great question to dogmatically declare it already answered. They say the aliens are here in droves, their purpose being to help us, to "raise us up."1 Some swear they themselves have individually been "raised up", either to a higher plane of knowledge or into a spaceship where unpleasant experiments were performed upon them.
Achenbach is a journalist: a staff writer for the Washington Post and a commentator for National Public Radio. His book is a random walk, in both the physical and categorical senses, through the worlds from which "the alien question" draws serious interest. Here I use "worlds" metaphorically. A more exact term would be "communities sharing a common belief system".2 I'm quite certain (as is Achenbach) that everyone mentioned in this book originated on this planet, Terra, our own Earth. However, there is a vast gulf between the scientific and spiritual approaches to the question, a chasm that often proves unbridgeable, that frequently makes individuals on opposite sides of the divide totally incompatible. In conversational language, recognition of the incompatibility is expressed in questions like "What color is the sky on your world?" That word gets the point across in compact wise, so I'll stick with it.
The book begins with interviews of two leading representatives of the scientific world: the late astronomer Carl Sagan and Dan Goldin, former head of NASA. Sagan was perhaps the strongest advocate of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), though this search was only a minor facet of his scientific work. Intelligent life abounded in Sagan's conceptual universe, and he would have been delighted to find evidence of it. Goldin, as head of America's space agency, was responsible in recent years for a major part of humanity's efforts to get out there ourselves — to, as Achenbach puts it, "meet the aliens halfway." Toward the end of his tenure as administrator, he too became captivated with the search for extraterrestrial life. However, in his case the evidence he wanted to find was for life of the microbial type. Thus, the work of each man complemented the other's.
Achenbach first presents the younger Sagan, in 1975, preparing with his Cornell University colleague Frank Drake (of Drake Equation fame) to listen for radio signals from the galaxy called Andromeda. If his belief that the galaxies teem with intelligent, radio-communicating civilizations was correct, then the most efficient way to find some would be to listen to a whole galaxy at once.3 No signals turned up. This chapter also gives a brief history of the Arecibo Observatory, a fascinating topic itself. (By way of illustration, Achenbach tells us it was used as a backdrop for the James Bond film Goldeneye, and that Drake once calculated the volumetric capacity of its 1,000-foot diameter dish as 357 million boxes4 of cornflakes.)
Then, in Chapter 3, Achenbach plunges us into the world of those who believe UFOs are ships from Somewhere Else.5 To read the sections on these "true believers" in the book is to discover that there is much of the absurd in their beliefs and behaviors. (If you're reading this review, I doubt that you find that new and startling.) At some points I had the impression that Achenbach could barely restrain his laughter. But he did restrain it. Achenbach, having both feet firmly planted on the scientific side of the divide, clearly understands the comic aspects6 of some UFO believers. But he also understands the tragic aspects, as with the Heaven's Gate cult.7 And he perceives the common thread that ties UFO believers together with rational scientists: a longing to know what's really out there in all that immensity, and how it will affect us.
This chapter's free-wheeling use of language, its attitude of sly humor, and its recognition of both the sundering absurdities and the common longing make it among the book's most enjoyable. All these aspects come through clearly in the passage from pages 41-42, quoted below in slightly edited form.
Aliens are large. Aliens (as we imagine them) exist at the same scale as humans, roughly speaking. They are dynamic. Aliens do things. Aliens pilot starships and cruise across the galaxy and invade other planets. Aliens don't dither around, they have an agenda. No one has ever met a lazy alien. They're so enterprising! (This is why they're so otherworldly—they never seem to need to take a nap, drink a beer, or go fishing.) Aliens can whip one of their tentacles around your neck and hurl you across the room and into a vat of acid faster than you can say "chronosynclastic infundibulum". Aliens lay fat, oozy, pulsing, glow-in-the-dark eggs containing their repulsive larval offspring. What I'm trying to say is that, even though aliens are completely strange, we can still relate to them. |
And aliens might have answers. If the aliens were to send us a message, or land on the White House lawn (crushing Sam Donaldson in the middle of his nightly stand-up), they might well pony up the answers to some of the other big unknowns. They might simply announce that life on Earth began with the arrival of a radiation-resistant virus sent by the Vegans. |
But even aliens wouldn't know everything. Presumably they wouldn't be able to see the future (let's assume that even advanced interstellar travelers can't indulge in time travel), and the future, as it turns out, is the most intriguing unknown of them all. One reason the concept of making contact with aliens is so dazzling to the imagination is that it is a narrative that shows where humans are going. It's reassuring in its eradication of uncertainties. Contact with our space brothers would affirm our sense of being involved in a progressive development, an emergence from terrestrial barbarism, on our way toward cosmic citizenship. We want something like that because we know there are more awful alternatives. We know that as we use the tools of science to discover the secrets of nature, we are also misusing that knowledge to design weapons of mass destruction and other technologies that ravage the Earth. There has been, in ths era of thrilling science, a steady drumbeat of doom. I suppose I should add another question to my list: |
What is going to happen to us? |
Here on the home front, galactically speaking, one of the things that happened to us was the Cold War, which was the real motivation for the Space Race, sold to the public largely as a peaceful quest to open the doors to the solar system. When, because it had won the Space Race and needed the resources for other things (like the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, racial integration, responding to the Arab Oil Embargo), the U.S. government pulled back from the "New Frontier" and closed those doors to space, the public could not be blamed for losing interest. Attitudes were changing. The environmental movement showed the pitfalls in the traditional Western ideal of progress. Also, geopolitical trends brought the contrast between "third world" countries and the wealthy West sharply into focus; clearly it was in everyone's best interest for the standard of living in those undeveloped countries to be "raised up" — and there were no space aliens around to help. The net result was the growth of a desire to "put our own house in order" before venturing onward. Achenbach describes these complex changes in attitude very well in a passage from page 70:
The public didn't protest the decline of space travel [after Apollo]. The business of hopping around on the moon in space suits simply did not carry much relevance to the passions of the day. The intelligentsia applauded the cuts in NASA's budget. What was the point of spending $25 billion to send a dozen white men to the moon when so many cities were crumbling and rivers full of poison? The astronauts were not remotely representative of the human race. They seemed to be the same person, again and again. The only interesting astronauts were the ones who went crazy or got depressed. To the average professor at America's select universities, the Apollo program had been some kind of military-industrial stunt, a power play, implicitly hegemonic. The mid-1970s saw the rise in academia of postmodernism, which in its worst moments was the antithesis of rigorous scientific thinking. The postmodernists had a serious antipathy to traditional science, with its top-down, authoritarian regulation of truth and reality. To a postmodernist, reality is whatever we decide it is. There's no objective truth to anything. The Enlightenment was over. As the biologist E. O. Wilson would later write, protesting this trend, "Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing." |
The Space Age was written off as a neocolonial historical spasm, a fantasy of nerds with propellor beanies. It represented a psychological flaw—a pathology—of human beings. It was an analogue to war. We should make peace, and stay home, on Spaceship Earth. If we could send a man to the moon (people would say), why couldn't we solve (fill in heartbreaking social problem)? |
As the Table of Contents shows, Achenbach was assiduous in his efforts to document all facets of the groups that gave him his title: those whose imaginations have in some sense been "captured by aliens". As the book shows, he was persistent about scheduling and conducting interviews with subjects (Goldin must have been a real challenge) and fair in his treatment of their views. Those views come in all flavors, from rational to blissfully credulous to conspiracy-theory-mongering. It is an assemblage too varied to categorize, let alone analyze; it must simply be experienced. Achenbach's gift to us is that pure experience is what he presents here. He does comment on his experiences — about halfway through the book he takes to calling himself The Invalidator, since he cannot buy into either the "aliens are here to crush us" or the "aliens are here to save us" mythos — and he draws some conclusions. Here's one, from page 267:
The Invalidator says no to Mars, for now—maybe someday. For the kids out there who insist that their generation needs a challenge, here's a suggestion: Read some books. Learn. Love. Explore. ("Clean your room," suggests my space-savvy friend Dwayne Day.) There's hardly a young person today who could walk through a forest with a tenth of the capacity to observe that Meriwether Lewis had. A baby is a universe of mystery; so is my back yard. What I lack is not a challenge but, rather, the time to meet the challenges I already face. I want to read, someday, a small but sturdy fraction of the great books that have been written over the last thousand years. I would like to know some of the thoughts that passed through the minds of Leonardo, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King. There is so much unfinished work for all of us. My life does not need, on its list of Things To Do, an item saying "Travel to Mars." |
Yes, Achenbach draws some conclusions; but he leaves the detailed analysis to others. The book is the product of reams of research, scads of interviews (and countless miles of travel getting them), well annotated, thoroughly indexed. But this is no scholarly analysis; it is a pure narrative, and a very enjoyable one.
The last word on this description-defying subject should be Achenbach's (page 361):
The point being that the intellectual flexibility and creativity of the anomalistic community have no limit. The narrative of the aliens will always grow, mutate, and somehow lurch forward. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.