Time of Contact

TIME OF CONTACT

by ‘Caius Axim’.

Published by GTC.

Edition 1.5.

“It is utterly absurd to allow ourselves to be so impressed by spatial elevation, by the fact that the demons live in the air while we live on the earth, as to suppose that this means that they are to be considered our betters”: De civitate Dei, by Saint Augustine, completed in the year anno Domini (AD) 426, Book VIII, Chapter 15.

GTC is based in eastern England with easy access to central London and the University of Cambridge. GTC also publishes handbooks to support people who write, negotiate, or manage information and communications technology contracts and related agreements.

The cover image is an impression of an evidently crewed but unfamiliar or “alien” aerospace craft, that was encountered as it hovered and then ascended between Gáldar and Agaete on Gran Canaria (Grand Canary Island) in the Atlantic Ocean opposite north-west Africa, at about 2130 hours local time on 22 June 1976: Canary Islands Landing: Occupants Reported, by Señor Jesús Maria Sánchez, translated from the Spanish language by Mr. Gordon Creighton and published in Flying Saucer Review, October 1977, Vol. 23, No. 3, pages 4 – 7. Further details of the encounter and an alternative illustration are provided in Chapter 3 (Alien craft) together with links to additional articles including The Rockefeller UFO report, The UFO Briefing Document, Part 2. Case Histories (xiii), 1976: Multiple Witness Case in the Canary Islands.

Another of Mr. Creighton’s translations is an encounter report from Argentina entitled Trancas, after seven years, by Señor Oscar A. Galíndez, Flying Saucer Review, May/June 1971, Vol. 17, No. 3, pages 14 – 20, & 32. The Trancas encounters are discussed in Chapter 2 (Alien technology); further information (including new investigations and analyses of the Trancas encounters and observations) is available online, especially in the Spanish language.

Reports of alien encounters and observations may be analysed in the context of our scientific discoveries and ideas, for example, we know that “by 3.465 billion years ago life was already diverse on Earth”. This knowledge, “coupled with the increasing number of known exoplanets (worlds in other star systems first discovered in the 1990s) and the sheer number of stars in the universe, points towards life being common throughout the universe” and “underscores that primitive life evolved quickly into more advanced microorganisms”: Life in the universe may be common, Snapshot section by Mr. David J. Eicher, published in Astronomy magazine, May 2018, introducing recent work by Professor J. William Schopf and his colleagues. Some scientists suggested that advanced alien civilisations may have constructed huge structures in space (megastructures) to capture most of the energy output from their host stars or to communicate across interstellar space. However, according to Professor Avi Loeb whose responsibilities include serving as Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University and of the Advisory Committee for Breakthrough Starshot, “Once a civilisation is advanced enough to have the technology to build megastructures, it’s much more likely to leave its planet”: We could build a galactic internet but it may take 300,000 years, by Ms. Leah Crane, published in New Scientist, 29 July 2017, No. 3136.

The reports of alien craft, aliens and their activities discussed in Time of Contact suggest that Professor Loeb is correct and that at least some alien civilisations developed or acquired transportation systems that enabled them to travel to and explore other star systems including our solar system. In addition, Breakthrough Starshot’s plans to send spacecraft to nearby stars which may have habitable planets using laser propulsion technology that we might be able to develop within a few years, suggests that aliens that were more scientifically and technologically advanced than us could long ago have visited other star systems.

Professor Loeb also advises Breakthrough Listen which like the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope team, tried to detect radio signals from ‘Oumuamua a cigar-shaped object that apparently entered our solar system from interstellar space (there have been many reports of cigar-shaped or cylindrical alien craft, examples of which are discussed in Time of Contact). The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mentioned ‘Oumuamua’s “unexpected parallels to Rama, a famous fictional interstellar spaceship” in the science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama, by the inventor, author, and presenter Sir Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1973: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, 22 November 2017; these parallels are discussed in Chapter 1 (How alien aerospace craft fly).

Our own journey into space began over a century ago with the pioneering work of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. We developed spacecraft and aerospace craft including lunar and planetary orbiters, landers and exploration vehicles, communications and surveillance satellites, space telescopes, etc. Our crewed craft carried spacesuits so that we can exit our craft and work for hours in space, and explore the surface of our Moon: Cosmic couture: The urgent quest to redesign the spacesuit, by Ms. Leah Crane, published in New Scientist, 6 January 2018, No. 3159. Other systems provided long-term, reliable life support that enabled us to live and work for months wearing relatively ordinary clothing inside the International Space Station and its predecessors.

We have navigated and communicated with some of our uncrewed spacecraft at and beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. Initiatives including Breakthrough Starshot and Starlight may enable us to send very small, uncrewed craft travelling at up to 25% of the speed of light to potentially habitable planets in other star systems, for example, Proxima b or GJ 273 b or Ross 128 b which are relatively close to us: Spreading life to other planets and Interstellar travel (II) - Life in the fast lane plus Space travel – Starchip enterprise, all published in The Economist, 14 April 2018, 4 November 2017 and 16 April 2016, and Could spacecraft make it to Proxima Centauri? by Dr. Monica Young, published in Sky & Telescope magazine, December 2016. Mars is the second closest planet to us (after inhospitable Venus) so it can be reached relatively quickly compared with most of our solar systems’ planets or their moons, for example, NASA’s Insight lander will arrive at Mars in November 2018 after a journey lasting only six months and 21 days. Mars’ surface environment is benign enough that our landers and exploration vehicles (rovers) have operated there for years. Humans should be able to explore Mars using suitable spacesuits, habitats, ground and air vehicles, etc. Mars’ thin atmosphere offers little protection from space radiation so we will need protective technologies and techniques (for example, living below the surface of Mars) to survive. In addition, the strength of Mars’ gravity at its surface is lower than on the Earth and may harm our health, based on the effects of a microgravity environment on people who stayed on the International Space Station.

Despite these challenges Mars has large amounts of “relatively pure water ice” close to the surface that may be accessible to and usable by human explorers; Mars also has at least one “lake” of probably very salty liquid water that is deeper under the surface and therefore less accessible: Astronomers have found a lake on Mars, published in The Economist, 28 July 2018, Mars Express detects liquid water hidden under planet’s South Pole, 25 July 2018 and Steep slopes on Mars reveal structure of buried ice, 11 January 2018.

If we develop or acquire the technologies needed for us to travel to and live on Mars in reasonable comfort and safety, it seems to be a natural choice for human colonisation: Making Life Multiplanetary, a presentation by Mr. Elon Musk who founded and leads SpaceX, at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC), 29 September 2017, Making human settlement of Space a reality, issued by the U.S. government on 11 October 2016, Mars – Race to the Red Planet, published in National Geographic magazine, November 2016, and Interplanetary settlement, published in The Economist, 1 October 2016.

Dr. Valentina Tereshkova the first woman we sent into space, said we “desperately need new engines and new spacecraft” for a crewed Martian expedition, during her appearance for the Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age exhibition of Soviet-era space achievements at the Science Museum in London which Dr. Tereshkova formally opened in 2015: In conversation with Valentina Tereshkova, at about 27 minutes into the video file, and Cosmonauts exhibition launch.

Time of Contact aims to help us to develop or acquire advanced spacecraft in which we can explore the solar system rapidly, economically, and in relative safety and comfort. Missions to other star systems may be possible that take only a few years, months or even weeks according to our starships’ on-board clocks. We will expand our manufacture of high technology products in space that are difficult to make economically on the Earth: Manufacturing in space, published in The Economist, 8 September 2018. We will also revolutionise many of our other, Earth-based transportation propulsion and energy generation and storage products, systems and industries.

However, if we fail we may share the fate of pre-human industrial civilisations that may have developed and subsequently collapsed on the Earth millions of years ago, based on evidence that includes previous periods of global warming which were accompanied by abundances of metals that we also use in technological processes and products: The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? by Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt and Professor Adam Frank,10 April 2018, introduced in the article Could an industrial prehuman civilization have existed on Earth before ours? by Mr. Steven Ashley, published online by Scientific American, 23 April 2018.

Time of Contact includes reports and analyses of alien craft imaged in photographs, videos or films (movies), data from radiation detectors, ground imprints apparently made by alien craft, etc. although most of our detailed information about alien craft, aliens and their activities originated in reports of what people said or wrote that they encountered or observed. In the mid-twentieth century reports were initially investigated and published by journalists and book authors, following a large increase in reports of unfamiliar aerospace craft during and after the Second World War of 1939 – 1945.

Independent citizen science organisations were subsequently founded to investigate, analyse and publish reports about peoples’ encounters and observations. They often published regular journals, sometimes supplemented by special reports and books. They held conferences and their management and members participated in discussions on radio and television media, etc. Their members, contributors, consultants, investigators and analysts included professional people such as scientists and engineers, medical doctors, lawyers, and clerics. Leading citizen science organisations included the United States-based Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (A.P.R.O.) and the United Kingdom-based Flying Saucer Review, that were active for decades and internationally-oriented.

Professional journalists had investigated and reported alien encounters and observations since at least the late nineteenth century and many of their articles are now freely available following the publication of historic newspapers online. For example, reports of what we may now conclude were alien aerospace craft that simulated the appearance of advanced European airships of the time (or slightly later) were investigated and published in New Zealand in 1909: The Airship Mystery, published by The Otago Witness, Wednesday 4 August 1909.

Much earlier, the nature and activities of what may have been aliens or their surrogates (for example, demons, jinn, incubi and succubi) were discussed in books by religious writers, such as De civitate Dei, by Saint Augustine, completed in AD 426, including in Book VIII, Chapter 15. However, it was impossible for us to begin to analyse aliens’ transportation systems or other technologies, or their activities until our own science and technology had advanced sufficiently.

For example, by 1909 Mr. Robert Grigor, a surveyor and engineer, could seriously and publicly propose that unidentified lights which had been observed in New Zealand were aerospace craft powered by “radium” i.e. atomic energy and crewed by intelligent beings that had travelled to the Earth from another world. He also suggested trying to communicate with the craft’s users with “wireless telegraphy” and employing a spectroscope to analyse the light the craft radiated: The Mysterious Lights, July 27 (1909), by Mr. Robert Grigor, published in the Letters to the Editor of The Otago Daily Times, Thursday, July 29, 1909, No 14,588, page 4, column 8 (the last column), penultimate letter. Mr. Grigor’s letter is reproduced along with selections from reports of observations of, or encounters with alien craft in New Zealand in 1909, in Chapter 3 (Alien craft).

Many reports of possible observations of or encounters with alien craft, or aliens or their surrogates (which may possibly have been robots or androids) were made by private citizens, members of the armed services, etc. to official military investigation and analysis units, or to local or national law enforcement (police) services, friends, family, work colleagues, medical practitioners, clerics, etc. There were reports by police officers of their own, personal observations of or encounters with alien craft, or aliens or their surrogates.

Since we depend for so much of our information on what people said or wrote they observed or encountered, we need to assess whether most human beings are good observers, including whether they can accurately remember and communicate the details of what they observed or encountered. Courts of law have for centuries and longer depended heavily on what people said they saw, heard, or otherwise sensed or experienced, or how they reacted to, or were affected by their experiences.

Most people can see objects or phenomena that reflect or radiate visible light. The superiority of human vision for observations over high quality film cameras even on the surface of the Moon was asserted by Dr. Harrison H. ‘Jack’ Schmitt, an astronaut and the geologist on the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon: Apollo 17: The untold story of the last men on the moon. In fact, “the human eye can detect single photons (of) visible light”: Interstellar Communication. I. Maximised data rate for lightweight space-probes, by Michael Hippke, 14 June 2017, at page 5.

Most of us can detect, categorise and remember sounds and odours (smells). We can sense phenomena like electricity and changes in temperature and air pressure, and we can feel and be injured by infrared (heat) and ultra-violet frequency electromagnetic radiation. The hairs on our body respond to electric fields. We can be disabled by powerful electromagnetic fields radiated by our Active Denial Systems. Alien weapons or tools that possibly radiated directed energy or particle beams have disabled or injured people, sometimes fatally, as discussed in Chapter 7 (Health, Security & Safety).

We all feel the pull of the gravitational, natural acceleration force field of the Earth. Some of us have experienced the weaker gravitational force field on the surface of the Moon or the “weightless” environments of spacecraft travelling in or beyond Earth orbit. A man may have been pushed to the ground by a gravity-like artificial or synthetic acceleration propulsion force field that repelled rather than attracted matter, when an alien aerospace craft ascended close to him. The force field evidently also broke the windscreen (windshield) of the man’s car, and he suffered subsequent health problems which may have been caused by powerful electromagnetic fields that were also radiated by the craft. This encounter is discussed in Chapter 2 (Alien technology): Strange Norwegian Encounter near Helleland, by Herr Anders Liljegren, published in Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, Supplement No. 4, April 1971, pages 4 – 7, and UFO-Car Encounter in Norway, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, January – February, 1971, page 7.

Our investigators have tried to obtain additional information from people who reported alien encounters or observations, by using techniques that included hypnosis, or the cognitive interview, or narcosynthesis or polygraphs as discussed in Chapter 4 (Aliens). Sometimes this was done because aliens had evidently tried to suppress peoples’ memories of their encounters. We too are working intensively to understand and manipulate memories, for example, developing techniques to try to suppress traumatic memories, recording memories from animals and transferring them to other animals, etc. as also discussed in Chapter 4 (Aliens). Some aliens apparently communicated with people using telepathy while others temporarily controlled peoples’ feelings, behaviour, ability to move, etc. We have made initial progress towards developing telepathy by linking brains electronically: Scientists prove that telepathic communication is within reach, by Ms. Corinne Iozzio, published by the Smithsonian, 2 October 2014. Our progress in neuroscience and artificial intelligence suggests that “in principle there appears no reason why the entire contents of our minds couldn’t be revealed”: We need to be mindful as we develop thought-reading tech, published in New Scientist, 10 March 2018, No. 3168.

As we make progress towards being able to display and listen to peoples’ sensory experiences, memories, dreams, or thoughts like a video or film recording we will need new laws to deal with advanced neuro-imaging and other “brain-scanning tools”: Preserving the right to cognitive liberty, by Dr. Marcello Ienca, published in Scientific American, August 2017 and Does mind-hack tech mean your brain needs its own legal rights? by Mr. Jamais Cascio, published in New Scientist, 17 June 2017, No. 3130.

Discussions about possible new laws to cover the activities of robots have been taking place for years; when such laws are enacted they may be applicable to aliens’ surrogates: Robot laws: Why we need a code of conduct for AI – and fast, by Dr. Will Douglas Heaven, published in New Scientist, 4 August 2018, No. 3189. If particular aliens are categorised as “people” (introduced in the Prologue following) they may be subject to existing criminal laws and civil laws, directives, regulations, codes of behaviour, conduct, ethics, or practice, guidelines, and customs, etc.

Aliens or their surrogates have evidently made little or no effort to comply with any of our laws, judging from some of the encounters discussed in Chapter 4 (Aliens) and Chapter 7 (Health, Security & Safety). For example, Professor Paul R. Hill, a NASA aerospace scientist and engineer concluded that, “Strictly speaking, UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) occupants have never been known to trade anything. Whatever they have wanted they have taken, giving nothing in return”: Unconventional Flying Objects by Professor Hill, published in 1995, Section XVII (The Humanoid Occupants), Part C (The UFO Occupant as a Scientist), Colonization and Trade?, at page 258.

We now have access to many more reports (especially online but also in books, magazines and other media) than Professor Hill did, and while it seems that aliens or their surrogates often requested water from (or discussed water quality with) people who encountered them, and did not always just take water, their communications may have had a symbolic rather than practical purpose as discussed in the Prologue following.

A historic report available online describes how an alien or surrogate offered to pay U.S. $10 to a man they encountered by chance or sought out, to purchase on their behalf: lubricating oil, tools called cold chisels, and bluestone (copper(II) sulphate) a chemical once used in batteries for wired telegraphy systems. The offer seems to have been disinformation intended to give the impression that an alien aerospace craft was an airship constructed and maintained using late nineteenth century human technology. The alien or surrogate said, “do as we request you and your kindness will be appreciated, and we will call on you some future day and reciprocate your kindness by taking you on a trip”: The craft’s rapid departure at the conclusion of the encounter was described as “like a shot out of a gun” which was not possible for human-made airships in 1897 any more than it is now: Supplies for Airship - A Rockland Man Helped The Aerial Navigators. Purchased Chisels and Lubricating Oil for “Smith,” the Man With the Mysterious Machine, Rockland, Texas, April 23 (1897), Houston Daily Post newspaper, Sunday Morning, April 25, 1897, page 13, column 3, discussed in detail in Chapter 4 (Aliens).

Unconventional Flying Objects by Professor Hill was prefaced by the late Dr. Edgar D. Mitchell, the lunar module pilot of the Apollo 14 mission and the sixth man in the Apollo program to walk on the Moon, as follows: “Paul Hill has done a masterful job ferreting out the basic science and technology behind the elusive UFO characteristics and demonstrating they are just advanced and exotic extensions of our own technologies. Perhaps this book will help bring solid consideration for making all that is known about extraterrestrial craft publicly available”. Professor Hill became a field investigator for the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (A.P.R.O.) a citizen science organisation introduced earlier.

Time of Contact takes advantage of the development of electronic and online books that have transformed publishing in the twenty-first century. A physically printed periodical or book is usually strictly limited in the number of words and illustrations that it can contain. An online electronic book can contain many more words and illustrations and be updated regularly by its author.

Time of Contact contains hyperlinks that provide access to reports, articles, analyses, etc. including in newspapers that can date back over a century, for example, A Strange Phenomena, published in The Dallas Weekly Herald, Dallas, Texas, Vol. XXV, No. 18, Saturday, January 26, 1878, page 3, column 4. The author of Time of Contact was directed to this report by a key work: Anatomy of a Phenomenon – UFOs in Space by a leading investigator, researcher and author, Dr. Jacques Vallée, published in 1965, Chapter One (The Legend of “Flying Saucers”), page 1.

Links to later newspaper reports are provided throughout Time of Contact, and official and private websites provide many others, for example, twentieth century newspaper reports from Australia and other countries via National Library of Australia Trove where a search using the phrase “flying saucer” displays numerous reports from the 1940s onwards.

Other hyperlinks in Time of Contact provide access to specialist and general news and analysis websites, content such as video and audio works including films and television documentaries, dramatisations of selected encounters or observations, and interviews and presentations featuring authors, investigators, or people who reported they encountered or observed alien craft, aliens, or their activities. Dedication & Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to Lydie who together with Eric kindly supplied generous hospitality and expressed unflagging interest in and discussed and contributed to, this book. Lydie and Eric encouraged me to study all relevant phenomena deeply and broadly including Unidentified Submarine Objects (USOs). I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the other people and organisations listed below and especially of my partner, who provided unwavering support and invaluable advice, insisted I took the time necessary to produce the best quality product of which I was capable, and created the images of the aliens displayed on the cover of this book and in other illustrations, as well as of a man and his dog who encountered aliens.

David, a friend trained in philosophy provided expert advice about the concepts of phenomenology and epistemology that are referred to briefly in Chapter 4 (Aliens). Other friends and relations kindly read and commented upon parts of the draft text and some of the illustrations. Friends provided generous hospitality during memorable visits to the Royal International Air Tattoo sponsored by BAE Systems that is held each July at RAF Fairford station of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in England. These visits strengthened my interest in aerospace craft, aircraft, etc. and included being invited aboard a United States Air Force Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey by its enthusiastic and helpful young crew. The Osprey is an advanced, shape-shifting, flexible and manoeuvrable craft that combines features of aircraft and helicopters. In one sense it may resemble a very remote precursor of the advanced transportation systems which are discussed in this book.

Courts of law may hear not only the testimony of people who saw, heard or otherwise sensed or experienced something relevant to a particular case, but also expert evidence provided by suitably-qualified and experienced scientists, engineers and other professional people. We too can consult the work of experts, for example, Professor Paul R. Hill, a NASA aerospace scientist and engineer introduced earlier, who wrote the key work Unconventional Flying Objects published in 1995.

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries scientific discoveries and technological developments transformed the study of alien craft, aliens, and their activities. According to NASA we have discovered over 3,700 confirmed exoplanets that orbit other stars; new or upgraded Earth-based and space-based telescopes are likely to increase the total number of known exoplanets very considerably: Exoplanetology, published in The Economist, 21 April 2018. We may even have detected an exomoon called Kepler 1625 b I orbiting an exoplanet: Signal may be from first exomoon, 27 July 2017.

Many exoplanets may be made of rock like the Earth and have surface land, oceans and atmospheres providing habitable environments for biological life like us: Newly discovered exoplanet may be best candidate in search for signs of life, 19 April 2017 and Study: Planet orbiting nearest star could be habitable, 25 October 2016. NASA published videos created from direct images of exoplanets orbiting their host stars on the webpage Holiday Special: Eight nights of exoplanet light, 14 December 2017, and proposed that even single pixel images of some exoplanets may be able to tell us whether they have water clouds, etc: NASA uses Earth as laboratory to study distant worlds, by Ms. Calla Cofield, 28 June 2018. The detection of natural gravitational waves from deep space may help us to understand the gravity-like, synthetic acceleration force fields that seem to propel alien craft and help to protect their hulls and users, or that they sometimes use to try to drag or hoist cars, animals, or even people towards and possibly into their craft. Eventually, we may be able to use this knowledge to develop or acquire much higher-performance aerospace propulsion and hull and user protection systems: Gravitational-wave astronomy starts in earnest, published in The Economist, 21 October 2017 and Neutron-star merger detected by many eyes and ears, by Dr. Susanna Kohler, published in AAS Nova, 16 October 2017.

Our aerospace craft and spacecraft could be made much faster and larger if we had synthetic acceleration force field propulsion and hull and user protection systems. These systems plus very powerful electromagnets whose magnetic fields protected the craft and their users from space radiation could reduce or eliminate the serious health problems which human space travellers experience, due to lack of gravity and “radiation exposure beyond low Earth orbit and the psychological effects of confinement and isolation”: Space changes how your brain thinks and it starts straight away, by Ms. Helen Thomson and Space travel’s mental health toll could endanger long missions, both published in New Scientist, 4 November 2017, No. 3150 and 14 January 2017, No. 3108 plus Opinion: Artificial Gravity would solve most space problems, by Mr. Robert Savage, published by Aviation Week & Space Technology, 21 August 2015.

Other relevant articles include Shields Up – Wraparound magnets studied for deep-space radiation protection, by Mr. Frank Morring, Jr, published by Aviation Week & Space Technology, 14 January 2013 and Shielding Space Travelers, by Professor Eugene N. Parker, published in Scientific American, March 2006. The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft honours Professor Parker: NASA renames Solar Probe Mission to honor pioneering physicist Eugene Parker, 31 May 2017.

Scientists used gyroscopes to try to detect an artificially-generated gravitomagnetic field and accelerometers to try to detect a gravitoelectric field induced “by a time-varying gravitomagnetic field”: Measurement of Gravitomagnetic and Acceleration Fields Around Rotating Superconductors, by Professor Martin Tajmar et al, 17 October 2006. This work suggests that sensitive, low-cost systems that contain miniature three axis (3D) accelerometers and gyroscopes may enable us to detect and characterise synthetic acceleration propulsion and hull protection force fields radiated by alien craft: New gravimeter-on-a-chip is tiny yet extremely sensitive, published by Physics World, 30 March 2016, and Chapter 2 (Alien technology).

Smartphones contain miniature accelerometers and some contain gyroscopes or magnetometers (which may detect powerful magnetic fields that alien craft may also radiate) suggesting that a mobile app could be developed to detect alien craft similar to the MyShake app for earthquake detection: Seismic sensing app detects 200 earthquakes in first six months, by Dr. Timothy Revell, published in New Scientist, 10 December 2016, No. 3103.

The humming, buzzing or similar sounds heard from many alien aerospace craft, examples of which are discussed throughout Time of Contact, suggest that the crafts’ synthetic acceleration force field propulsion systems may cycle at frequencies ranging from under one hundred Hertz to a few thousand Hertz. The propulsion force fields radiated by alien craft may already have been detected as strong, brief signals as the craft travelled over our successful gravitational wave receivers: LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Detector) and VIRGO, discussed in Chapter 2 (Alien technology), referring to the paper GW170817: Observation of gravitational waves from a binary neutron star inspiral, by Mr. Benjamin P. Abbott et al, 16 October 2017, page 3, first paragraph, column 1, and Figure 2 in column 2.

Free, online maps may let us see exactly where particular observations of, or encounters with alien craft or aliens occurred because precise location information was included even in many older reports. However, detailed downloadable maps published closer in time to when observations or encounters occurred may display historical roads, road names, buildings and land usage, etc. more accurately and assist us to better understand the reports. For example, in Chapter 4 (Aliens) reports are discussed of landed or low-hovering alien aerospace craft whose users gave the impression that they were inspecting, repairing or maintaining their craft just as we might work on our own craft or vehicles.

One “repair” report described two alien aerospace craft that were seen to descend and land, followed by an apparently lengthy and complex repair of what may have been the propulsion system of one of the craft, by users from both craft: UFO Landing and Repair by Crew, Part I – The Report, by Mr. Ted Bloecher, published in Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, published October 1974, pages 21 – 26. An official topographical map in colour dated about twenty years earlier may assist readers: New Berlin North, N.Y. N4237.5-W7515/7.5 edition of 1945 stamped by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems, services and software enable us to translate reports from their original languages into a language we understand. The author of Time of Contact used Google Translate (with additional help from online dictionaries) to convert into the English language, an earlier, written report in the Italian language about an encounter by Signor Bruno Facchini with aliens that also appeared to repair their aerospace craft: La Stupefacente Rivelzaione di un Operaio del Varesotto by Signor Guido Capra, that may be available via the web page 1950 – Abbiate Guazzone – IR3 on the UFO.it website, and Google uses neural networks to translate without transcribing, by Mr. Matt Reynolds, published in New Scientist, 8 April 2017, No. 3120.

The author of Time of Contact originally became aware of Signor Facchini’s encounter due to its inclusion in another key work: Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, by Dr. Jacques Vallée, published in 1998, Chapter 5 (The Celestial Component: Signs in Heaven, The Functioning Lie, pages 161 & 162. An online version of Dimensions may also be available to download, the encounter appearing on pages 86 & 87 of 150. An earlier article about the encounter was published in 1963: The Italian Scene – Part 2, that included information evidently provided by Signor Renato Albanesi, a reporter, translated into the English language by Mr. Gordon Creighton and published in Flying Saucer Review, March – April 1963, Vol. 9, No. 2, page 4.

A Google AI system was also used to discover a new exoplanet called Kepler 90i orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler 90 which now has eight known exoplanets (illustrated below) as well as Kepler 80g, one of six known exoplanets orbiting Kepler 80, a smaller star than our Sun: NASA briefing materials: Artificial Intelligence and NASA data used to discover eighth planet circling distant star, 20 December 2017.

The quality of many photographic images, video and audio sound files can be improved using restoration and processing software or services. We can automatically convert audio recordings or audio tracks on video recordings into text documents for faster analysis. For example, text files might be generated from the audio recordings of interviews with police officers who observed, pursued, and photographed an alien craft in the United States on 17 April 1966: filenames 20 - 23 (Cops & Saucers: Law Enforcement and UFOs 1957 – 1981 Guide) discussed in Chapter 1 (How alien aerospace craft fly), and Finding a voice, published in The Economist, 7 January 2017.

The author of Time of Contact gratefully acknowledges the efforts of the many independent and official investigators, analysts, journalists, authors and citizen science organisations throughout the world that continue to provide us with both new and historical reports and analyses on or via a variety of media.

Prologue

An “extrasolar” world or exoplanet called LHS 1140 b only 40 light-years distant was described as the “best place to look for signs of life beyond the solar system”: Newly discovered exoplanet may be best candidate in search for signs of life, published by the European Southern Observatory (ESO),19 April 2017. Ross 128 b and GJ 273 b are closer exoplanets that may also be habitable: Closest temperate world orbiting quiet star discovered, also published by ESO, 15 November 2017. Closer still, the exoplanet Proxima b orbits Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun. All of these exoplanets may be larger and more massive than the Earth but all may orbit within their host stars’ habitable zones, regions of space where biological life like us may possibly be able to live on the surface of a star’s planet or a planet’s moon: Study: Planet orbiting nearest star could be habitable, 25 October 2016.

More than 20% of over 3,700 exoplanets confirmed by NASA may resemble our Earth; NASA classifies them as “terrestrial”. The “maximum diameter of rocky planets (like the Earth) is 1.75 times that of the Earth”: Exoplanet Discoveries – latest data from NASA’s Exoplanet Archive (please check the web page for the latest information) and the articles Planetology and Exoplanets – Planets come in different species, both published in The Economist, 15 July and 22 June 2017. Over six hundred star systems are now known to be multiplanetary, each having two or more exoplanets.

Therefore, our Earth “is probably not special – that there are probably numerous Earth analogs throughout the Milky Way (our own galaxy) and the universe”: Exoplanet explosion, by Mr. David J. Eicher, published in Astronomy magazine, July 2015. Our galaxy “is probably home to at least a billion, habitable, Earth-like planets”: How to find ET: 7 ways aliens might give themselves away, by Mr. Adam Hadhazy, published in New Scientist, 16 January 2016, No. 3056.

Liquid water seems to be essential for the development of complex biological life like us. Water was detected in the atmospheres of several exoplanets, for example: HAT-P-26 b whose “atmosphere is relatively clear of clouds and has a strong water signature, although the planet is not a water world”: ‘Warm Neptune’ has unexpectedly primitive atmosphere, by Ms. Elizabeth A. Zubritsky, 11 May 2017. Water vapour was detected in the atmosphere of 51 Pegasi b the first exoplanet to be discovered that orbited an ordinary star: Water spotted in the atmosphere of nearby hot Jupiter exoplanet, by Ms. Shannon Hall, published in New Scientist, 4 February 2017, No. 3111.

A selection of astronomers’ tables of known exoplanets that may be habitable by our type of biological life are discussed in more detail below and in Chapter 5 (Other worlds). The tables include exoplanets “that are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit their stars in the conservative habitable zone – the range of distances where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet”: Astronomers help focus research in the search for another Earth, 4 August 2016. In addition, we have made “the first confirmed image of a planet (called PDS 70b) caught in the act of forming in the dusty disc surrounding a young star”: First confirmed image of newborn planet caught with ESO’s VLT, 2 July 2018.

When we obtain higher-definition images of exoplanets we may be able to distinguish between those which are only “potentially habitable” and those that are “likely inhabited” by analysing their atmospheres: Hubble rounds up the first worlds we’ll check for alien life, by Mr. Joshua Sokol, published in New Scientist, 26 November 2016, No. 3101 and Portraits of worlds, published in The Economist, also on 26 November 2016. Professor James E. Lovelock proposed to NASA the idea of detecting life on another planet by analysing its atmosphere: A physical basis for life detection experiments, by Professor Lovelock, published in 1965. This idea is discussed by him in the BBC television programme Beautiful Minds beginning at about 30 minutes into the video file. If we discover that an exoplanet’s atmosphere contains “oxygen, methane, and water vapor (this) could not be easily explained without life”: Early Earth’s air may show us how to find signs of alien life, published in New Scientist, 3 February 2018, No. 3163, Imaging Exoplanets - The Next Blue Dot, by Dr. Ruslan Belikov and Dr. Eduardo A. Bendek, published in Sky & Telescope magazine, October 2015, and More than 100 billion billion Earth-like planets might exist, by Mr. Jacob Aron, published in New Scientist, 29 August 2015, No. 3036.

Kepler 452 b is an exoplanet that is presently considered “the most Earth-like” of “the “30 ‘Earth-like’ exoplanets that Kepler (space telescope)” discovered. Kepler 452 b is about 1.6 times the size of the Earth and orbits in the habitable zone of Kepler 452, its Sun-like host star: Why weird star systems are where we’ll find alien life, by MacGregor Campbell, published in New Scientist, 21 July 2018, No. 3187 plus NASA’s Kepler mission discovers bigger, older cousin to Earth, 23 July 2015, and the paper Discovery and validation of Kepler-452b: a 1.6-R⊕ super Earth exoplanet in the habitable zone of a G2 star, by Dr. Jon M. Jenkins, et al, published on 23 July 2015 by The Astronomical Journal, that begins with a short history of our discovery of alien worlds.

Wolf 1061 c is a relatively close, potentially habitable exoplanet only about 14 light-years distant while Kepler 186 f was the first Earth-sized exoplanet we discovered which might be habitable. Their host stars Wolf 1061 and Kepler 186 are red dwarfs as are Proxima Centauri the host star of our nearest exoplanet Proxima b and the host stars of other relatively close, potentially-habitable exoplanets like Ross 128 b and GJ 273 b plus LHS 1140 b; LHS 1140 b was described as “the most exciting exoplanet ... in the past decade” that offers an excellent opportunity to search “for evidence of life beyond Earth”: Newly discovered exoplanet may be best candidate in search for signs of life, 19 April 2017.

Red dwarf stars are smaller and less massive than our Sun and much less luminous, but also very numerous and long-lived. Although Proxima Centauri like many other red dwarf stars emits intense flares that could make Proxima b uninhabitable, its larger companion stars Alpha Centauri A and B offer better environments for any planets they may have: Chandra scouts nearest star systems for possible hazards, 6 June 2018.

A survey by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is searching for radio- frequency electromagnetic transmissions from red dwarf star systems: New search for signals from 20,000 star systems begins, 30 March 2016; SETI is discussed in detail in Chapter 6 (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)). A “bold new (SETI) programme financed by a Silicon Valley tycoon will revitalise the hunt for alien civilisations”: Looking for extraterrestrials, published in The Economist, 25 July 2015. In addition, China’s new Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) will search “for radio emissions from exoplanets and whatever alien civilisation might be broadcasting from them”: Mega-Eye on the Sky, by Renjiang Xie, published in Sky & Telescope magazine, February 2017.

Venus, the closest planet to the Earth may possibly have been habitable from 2 billion to 0.7 billion years ago: The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? by Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt and Professor Adam Frank, 10 April 2018, at page 4. Solid organic compounds discovered just below the surface of Mars and detections of methane a hydrocarbon gas in its atmosphere may provide evidence that biological life like us once existed (or still exists) there. Even if the “complex organic molecules” that were discovered below the surface did not originate from living organisms, “they could have been food for microbes on ancient Mars. The molecules have lasted so long that any microbes, if they existed, could be similarly preserved”: Mars has complex organic material that may be from ancient life, by Ms. Leah Crane, published in New Scientist, 16 June 2018, No. 3182,and Methane and other organics on Mars, by Ms. Camille M. Carlisle, published online by Sky & Telescope, plus NASA rover hits organic pay dirt on Mars, published by Science, both dated 7 June 2018.

In the past “flowing water”, lakes and “hydrothermal activity” existed on Mars in several areas: The past and present of water on Mars, by Dr. Tanya Harrison, published in Astronomy magazine, July 2017. Mars now has a very thin atmosphere and is dry and cold compared with the Earth, but it once “had a thick atmosphere” and “23 million cubic kilometres of water pooled in a northern ocean covering nearly 20 percent of the surface”; even today there are several million cubic kilometres of water ice in Mars’ polar ice caps. In addition, at eight places on Mars “substantial deposits of water ice exist just a few feet below the Martian surface, reaching over 300 feet thick in some areas”: Massive, deep deposits of (water) ice found on Mars, by Mr. Jake Parks, published by Astronomy magazine, and Steep slopes on Mars reveal structure of buried ice, published by NASA, both dated 11 January 2018.

As mentioned earlier, liquid and probably very salty water has been detected deeper below the surface of Mars: Astronomers have found a lake on Mars, published in The Economist, 28 July 2018. Another, larger amount of water in the form of ice that is “about 50 to 85 per cent water, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles” is located “between 260 feet (80 metres) and 560 feet (170 metres)” below the Utopia Planitia region of Mars. According to Dr. Michael J. Mumma of NASA, Mars “was very likely wet for a longer period of time than previously thought ... suggesting the planet might have been habitable for longer”: Location of large subsurface water-ice deposit in Utopia Planitia, Mars, 22 November 2016, A lake of frozen water the size of New Mexico found on Mars – NASA, by Mr. Iain Thomson, published by The Register, 22 November 2016, The Red Planet under water, by Ms. Liz Kruesi, published in Astronomy magazine, January 2016 and NASA mission reveals speed of solar wind stripping Martian atmosphere, 5 November 2015.

In addition, there may be evidence for two Martian tsunamis: Impact crater linked to Martian tsunamis, BBC News – Science & Environment, 26 March 2017 and Mars was once devastated by giant 50-metre tsunamis, published in New Scientist, 28 May 2016, No. 3075.

Gale Crater, where the Mars’ rover Curiosity landed in 2012 was once covered by liquid water. “A long-lasting lake on ancient Mars provided stable environmental conditions that differed significantly from one part of the lake to another .... Different conditions favourable for different types of microbes existed simultaneously in the same lake”. A type of salty water (brine) may still exist and flow at times under or on the surface of Mars where chemical compounds called hydrated salts could “absorb water from the atmosphere and lower its freezing point, letting it stay liquid even in Mar’s cold climate”: Curiosity peels back layers on ancient Martian lake, 1 June 2017, Salty water seen flowing on Mars, not far from Curiosity rover, by Mr. Sam Wong, published in New Scientist, 3 October 2015, No. 3041, plus Extraterrestrial dowsing – Blue streaks on a red planet, published in The Economist, 3 October 2015, and NASA confirms evidence that liquid water flows on today’s Mars, 28 September 2015. The illustration below is reproduced from a NASA press release: NASA research suggests Mars once had more water than Earth’s Arctic Ocean, 5 March 2015.

Anomalous objects or phenomena are visible in photographic images attributed to mobile rovers exploring the surface of Mars and spacecraft in orbit around Mars that do not look like rocks, sand, or other naturally-occurring features or phenomena. Some of these anomalies may provide evidence for the existence of past or present alien life on Mars: The best way to detect aliens may be by finding their footprints, by Ms. Mika McKinnon, published in New Scientist, 22 July 2017, No. 3135. Later in this Prologue images attributed to the Mars rover Curiosity are introduced that may contain anomalies. Further possible anomalies are discussed, and links are provided to original NASA images in Chapter 2 (Alien technology), Chapter 3 (Alien craft) and Chapter 4 (Aliens).

Some of the Martian anomalies may be living things like the extremophiles that have been discovered on or under the Earth and possibly even in space. Martian extremophiles may include “electric bacteria” some of which seem to live on “naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals”. Different types of electric bacteria accept electrons from, or provide electrons to “magnetite, a common magnetic material”: Bacteria power up by using magnets as batteries and Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy, by Ms. Catherine Brahic, published in New Scientist, 4 April 2015, No. 3015 and 19 July 2014, No. 2978.

Information from the Viking and Phoenix Mars’ landers has helped us to develop ideas about how any Martian life may have changed in order to survive in an environment that became hostile as the planet’s liquid surface water, temperature, atmosphere, and global magnetic field all decreased. Dr. Harrison H. ‘Jack’ Schmitt, an astronaut and geologist on the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon asserted: “I suspect that until geologists (and) palaeontologists get down on the surface of Mars and begin to search for those fossils that I’m almost certain are there they won’t have a chance to top what we did on Apollo 17”: Apollo 17: The untold story of the last men on the moon, beginning at about 26 minutes into the 51 minute version published by NASAFLIX online. Professor Dirk Schulze-Makuch has stated that “Most of my fellow scientists feel confident that there’s a very high chance that life existed at some point on Mars. So the question is only, with conditions worsening to colder and drier, whether life could have hung in”: ‘Follow the salt’ may be best strategy to find Martian microbes, by Ms. Shannon Hall, published in New Scientist, 27 February 2016, No. 3062.

Some of the Martian anomalies may be (or may be intended to resemble) “artefacts”: remnants of the buildings, technologies, works of art, etc. of one or more indigenous civilisations, pre-human Earth-based colonists, or aliens. In addition, the appearance of some of the anomalous objects suggests that they may have originated on the Earth relatively recently. Other objects resemble the “natural-looking shapes” that resulted when components for a construction project were redesigned by computer software and produced using additive manufacturing (3D printing) systems: 3D printing: Wonderful widgets, and 3D printing transforms the economics of manufacturing, both published in The Economist, 5 September 2015 and 1 July 2017.

The possibility that interstellar travellers left alien artefacts in our solar system was suggested in a paper by Professor Dr. Carl Sagan an early version of which is now officially and freely-available online: Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight, presented on 15 November 1962. This version of the paper contains photographs and drawings of ancient human graphic art that may possibly depict anomalous objects or phenomena and aliens, although they seem to have been omitted from a 1963 version of the paper that appears in The Quest for Extraterrestrial Life – a Book of Readings edited by Dr. Donald W. Goldsmith, which also contains many other pioneering papers about the search for extraterrestrial life.

NASA helped to support Professor Dr. Sagan’s research at the University of California, Berkeley and there was an earlier reference to his work and NASA in a journal that published reports of observations of, or encounters with alien craft or their users: NASA Is New Subscriber, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, May 1962, page 1, column 3. Among his many other achievements Professor Dr. Sagan co-wrote and presented the original Cosmos television series, and suggested that the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph be taken of the Earth by the distant Voyager I spacecraft. Similar images of some exoplanets, even those comprising only one pixel may still contain useful information: NASA uses Earth as laboratory to study distant worlds, by Ms. Calla Cofield, 28 June 2018.

Project Blue plans to launch a small space telescope to image the habitable zones of the nearby stars Alpha Centauri A and B to try to discover a “potential Earth-like planet orbiting another Sun-like star”: Project Blue plans to send space telescope to snap nearby worlds, published in New Scientist, 15 October 2016, No. 3095.

The following impression of a painting on the wall of a cave in France made during our prehistory may depict an alien aerospace craft viewed by one or more of our remote ancestors, with its landing gear extended, its descent ladder deployed, and an alien standing by or below its hull. The same illustration is included and discussed in Chapter 3 (Alien craft).

The above and other selected cave paintings that may depict alien craft or their users were discussed in the article Palaeolithic UFO-Shapes – Mysterious drawings in the Stone Age caves of France and Spain, Flying Saucer Review, November - December 1969, Vol. 15, No. 6, pages 3 – 11, by the engineer, researcher, investigator, and author Monsieur Aimé Michel, translated from the French language by Mr. Gordon Creighton. A film about reports of alien craft and their users presented by Monsieur Michel may be freely available online: Aimé Michel et “Les Soucoupes Volantes” (in the French language).

Another leading investigator, researcher and author, Dr. Jacques Vallée analysed early written and other records of observations of, or encounters with what may have been alien craft or their users that were often similar to modern reports: Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, co-authored by Dr. Vallée, discussed reports ranging from thousands of years ago to the nineteenth century. An Open Minds audio interview with Dr. Vallée including about Wonders in the Sky may be available online (beginning at 27 minutes into the file) together with videos including Dr. Jacques Vallée, Contact: Learning from Outer Space, a presentation made at the 4th Global Competitiveness Forum, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in January 2011, an interview with Mr. Jeffrey Mishlove, and a presentation by Dr. Vallée dated 1979.

NASA’s selection of Gale Crater on Mars for exploration by the Curiosity rover now seems remarkably prescient or fortunate given the many apparent anomalies displayed in Curiosity’s images from that area. Three candidate landing sites have been selected for NASA’s Curiosity-class Mars 2020 Rover which will land on Mars in February 2021. The rover will carry our first airborne craft (a helicopter or rotorcraft) to help explore Mars: Mars helicopter to fly on NASA’s next red planet rover mission, 11 May 2018.

The rover’s “main goal ... is to search for signs of life, while also laying the groundwork for future missions to return samples to Earth”. The landing sites are “Jezero Crater, which used to be home to a lake the size of Lake Winnipeg in Canada ... north-east Syrtis, which was once warmed by volcanic activity that created hot springs” and “Columbia Hills, previously explored by NASA’s Spirit rover. Spirit discovered that hot springs used to flow in the Columbia Hills as well, making it another area where life may have existed and signs may remain”: Mars landing sites for 2020 NASA mission down to the final three, by Dr. Timothy Revell, published in New Scientist, 18 February 2017, No. 3113 and Picking a Landing Site for NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover and the Mars 2020 Rover Plans web pages.

Perhaps crewed expeditions to Mars may be preceded by what will in effect be Mars Archaeological Explorers that will image, sample and analyse anomalous objects that look like parts of buildings, equipment, or even works of art like sculptures, reliefs, or engravings. Increasingly, rovers such as Mars 2020 may image, sample and analyse what may be living things (or their remains) on or in the Martian rocks, surface material or atmosphere.

Most artefacts left by aliens or Earth-based, pre-human colonists such as “buildings and monuments” may have been destroyed over time in “the crushing environment of Venus and the churning plate tectonics of Earth” but on “slow-changing Mars, our moon and possibly the frozen satellites of the outer planets ... the tunnels and cities of ancient lost civilisations could survive buried under the soil and ice”: Let’s seek traces of ancient indigenous ETs (extraterrestrials) in our own backyard, by Professor Geraint F. Lewis, published in New Scientist, 13 May 2017, No. 3125. Future Martian expeditions may discover artefacts within underground or protected places such as vaults constructed to survive a Martian catastrophe, similar to our own Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Martian vaults may contain complete and even operational items of technology, libraries that may include written, video, audio, and software files, works of art, or biological material like that in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, any of which could advance our science, technology and other areas of knowledge.

Other Martian spacecraft include the joint European-Russian mission ExoMars 2016 whose Trace Gas Orbiter is orbiting Mars (its Schiaparelli lander crashed on Mars). NASA’s non- mobile lander InSight: Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport is en route to Mars and scheduled to land in Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018. More details are provided in Chapter 3 (Alien craft) about forthcoming missions to Mars, some of which may provide more images of and other information about Martian anomalies. Another joint European-Russian mission, ExoMars Mission (2020) is to be launched in 2020, and will land the ExoMars Rover. The United Arab Emirates Mars Mission plans to send an orbiter called Hope and China plans to send a Mars Global Remote Sensing Orbiter and Small Rover; these should arrive at Mars in 2021.

NASA’s plans for Mars’ exploration are discussed in NASA’s Journey to Mars – Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration, October 2015. A free Geologic Map of Mars that was published online by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2014 can be used to discover exactly where earlier landers and rovers touched down and the landing site options for forthcoming missions.

Among the many images attributed to Curiosity that seem to contain anomalous objects or phenomena is one dated 11 February 2013 (Sol 184) at 00:14:47 UTC in which an object that may be a bag, case or container appears at the far left of the image below the centreline. Another possibly-anomalous object is located to the right of, and below that object. An extract from the image that displays the two anomalies (which the author of Time of Contact has ringed in red and green respectively) appears below.

Hyperlinks to other images of what are apparently the same objects are provided in a more detailed discussion of the anomalies in Chapter 3 (Alien craft). This discussion includes estimates of their approximate dimensions based on what seem to be visible tracks in the Martian soil apparently caused by Curiosity’s wheels, that also appear in at least two of the images. Other Curiosity images that may display multiple anomalies are dated 29 July 2014 (Sol 703) at 14:08:14 UTC and 21 August 2014 (Sol 725) at 00:41:02 UTC, attributed to Curiosity’s right hand Mast camera (Mastcam). Panoramic views created by people who combined multiple downloadable NASA images may be available online, for example, Curiosity Sol 725 by Mr. Keith Laney. Original image data files may be downloadable from NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) Geosciences Node although the generation of images from the data files may require special software including operating system software, and considerable time and effort: Dig into NASA’s Planetary Data System, Sky & Telescope magazine, May 2018 and Image processing trick: How to open PDS-formatted images in Photoshop, 7 March 2018, both by Ms. Emily Lakdawalla.

One possible interpretation of many of Curiosity’s images is that they deliberately display the ruins of a technological civilisation in a mainly dry, inhospitable environment for our type of life as a warning of what may happen to us. We therefore need to consider the possibility that some or all of the apparent anomalies displayed in images received from Mars are symbols and not real objects or phenomena. We are now aware of many possible threats to our environment and our future posed by our own activities or that may come from space: 2017 ‘very likely’ in top three warmest years on record and Climate change: Data shows 2016 likely to be warmest year yet, both published by BBC Science & Environment News, 6 November 2017 and 18 January 2017, and NASA Office to coordinate asteroid detection, 7 January 2016.

Some aliens communicated direct warnings to people they encountered while others indirectly emphasised problems with our environment, for example, air, soil (dirt) and water quality. During an encounter in Brazil one of the humanoid aliens that exited an alien aerospace craft which landed on, or hovered close to the top of a hydroelectric dam evidently performed a symbolic action to warn us about the environmental dangers of constructing dams, by making a cursory attempt to remove some stones from the dam. The craft’s users also spoke to the person who reported encountering them (an armed guard on the dam) using what may have been a portable language translation device: Conversation with Entities at Marimbonda, by Dr. Walter Buhler, Flying Saucer Review, May - June 1979, Vol. 25, No. 3, pages 18 & 19, Billion-dollar dams are making water shortages worse, not solving them, by Mr. Fred Pearce, published in New Scientist, 24 June 2017, No. 3131 and Amazon culture clash over Brazil’s dams, a BBC World online article, 10 January 2017, plus Dams in the Amazon, published in The Economist, 5 November 2016 and Dambusters: The end of Brazil’s hydroelectric dreams? by Ms. Sue Branford and Señor Mauricio Torres, published in New Scientist, 7 March 2015, No. 3011.

A warning “that if the behaviour of Earth people continued as it has done up till now, very grave cataclysms would ensure” (from the context the word “ensue” was probably meant) was given by humanoid aliens to a person who encountered them in Argentina, using what may have been a language translation device mounted within an alien aerospace craft: The extraordinary case of Dionisio Llanca and the UFOnauts, by Mr. Gordon Creighton and Mr. Charles Bowen, Flying Saucer Review, published November 1980, Vol. 26, No. 4, pages 2 – 10.

During another encounter small humanoid aliens that claimed to have come from Mars and whose exact appearance could not be determined because they were entirely clothed in what may have been environment suits like our spacesuits, used metaphors to warn us that we were damaging our environment. They said that it was “impossible for them to land in congested areas” because the “fumes of traffic were too dense” or that “they did not fly near cities because the fumes or stuff in the air affected the flight of their ship” and “they tried to stay where the air was pure”: Gary Wilcox and the UFonauts, by Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, M.D., Flying Saucer Review, Special Issue No. 3 – UFO Percipients, August 1969, pages 20 – 27, at pages 21 & 24, and How to save ourselves from the invisible gas choking us to death, by Mr. Michael Le Page, published in New Scientist, 29 October 2016, No. 3097. An audio recording of an interview with Mr. Wilcox, file name 1. Ufology: A Primer in Audio 1964 – 1967 original filename UPA_34.mp3 from a radio show entitled Contact, with Bob Kennedy, 18 May 1964, beginning about 14 minutes into the audio file may be available on the Internet Archive website. The reported communications of aliens during these and other encounters are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 (Aliens).

Some aliens have evidently sampled water and some alien craft have taken large quantities of water. When aliens requested fresh water from people who encountered them the quantities involved were perhaps too small to be of much practical use; the aliens may have made symbolic requests to emphasise the importance of terrestrial fresh water or to warn us to maintain the quality and quantity of our fresh water lakes and rivers and possibly also the quality of our oceans: Some of the world’s biggest lakes are drying up. Here’s why, by Mr. Kenneth R. Weiss, published in National Geographic, March 2018, What we’re doing now will make the oceans completely unliveable, by Mr. Chris Baraniuk, published in New Scientist, 11 November 2017, No. 3151 plus Deep trouble – How to improve the health of the ocean, published in The Economist, 27 May 2017, What Happens to the U.S. Midwest when the Water’s Gone? by Ms. Laura Parker, published in National Geographic, August 2016, and We can avoid a water crisis, but the fix will be hard to swallow, an interview with Professor Arjen Y. Hoekstra, published in New Scientist, 23 April 2016, No. 3070.

For example, on the night of 19 April 1897 a man and his son encountered an alien aerospace craft and its seemingly human users, who requested water: Inspected The Air Ship - Beaumont Man Saw the Mystery at Close Range – Conversed With The Travelers – Says It Is Propelled by Four Huge Wings, Electricity Being the Power Used, Beaumont, Texas, April 20, Houston Daily Post newspaper, Wednesday Morning, April 21, 1897, page 2, column 7, discussed in Chapter 4 (Aliens).

In 1951 an engineer encountered a humanoid alien in South Africa who requested water. The engineer drove the alien to a nearby stream, provided a container for water, and then drove the alien to a landed alien aerospace craft inside which were more humanoid aliens: The UFOnaut’s plea for water, by Señor Juan José Benítez, translated from the Spanish language by Mr. Gordon Creighton and published in Flying Saucer Review, August 1978, Vol. 24, No. 2, pages 3 – 6, discussed in Chapter 2 (Alien technology) and Chapter 4 (Aliens).

Aliens have also been observed or encountered collecting or transporting soil (dirt) and plant life. For example, in one of the reports mentioned earlier the humanoid aliens that were encountered were carrying trays that contained “alfalfa, with roots, soil, leaves and brush” or “sod” and they expressed interest in our agricultural practices including fertilisers. They were possibly warning us indirectly about threats to our soil which due to “the slow rate of soil formation makes it practically irreplaceable”: Gary Wilcox and the UFonauts, by Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz, M.D., Flying Saucer Review, Special Issue No. 3 – UFO Percipients, August 1969, pages 20 – 27, at pages 21, 23 & 24, Soil isn’t sexy but we need to dig in and help conserve it, by Professor Molly Scott Cato, published online by New Scientist, 28 September 2016, Endangered earth: The secret battle to save our soils, by Dr. Joshua Howgego, also published by New Scientist, 10 October 2015, No. 3042 and Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (ipbes) reports released in 2018.

Reports such as those of the humanoids introduced above may suggest that some aliens although different from us, could be natural biological beings. However, other reports suggest that some aliens may use surrogates such as artificial biological beings (androids) or robots, or projections by augmented reality systems that may use Computer-generated imagery (CGI) to enable “users to overlay the digital world onto the real one”: Virtual and Augmented Reality, published in The Economist, 8 July 2017 and Video projector creates augmented reality with no bulky headset, by Ms. Victoria Turk, published in New Scientist, 8 April 2017, No. 3120. The investigator, researcher and author Mr. Brad Steiger speculated that aliens may “project vivid three-dimensional reality constructs” resembling, for example, human or evidently alien medical personnel that have sometimes abused people physically and terrified them, discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 (Aliens): Mysteries of Time & Space, by Mr. Brad Steiger, originally published in 1974, Chapter 14 (... And Some of Their Pupils), page 187.

A NASA aerospace scientist and engineer, Professor Paul R. Hill concluded, that “a very low percentage of the reported humanoids would pass for human. There seem to be as many variations among the humanoid features as there are variations in the detailed design features within the main classes of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects or alien aerospace craft). ... The humanoid entities cannot possibly be Earth creatures. Earth has no more produced them than today’s human technology can produce a UFO. If they are real and factual biological creatures, they have to have originated somewhere else”: Unconventional Flying Objects, by Professor Hill, Section XVII (The Humanoid Occupants), B. Physical Characteristics and Significance, page 252 of the paperback edition published in 1995.

Some aliens or their surrogates may have simulated the appearance of (or disguised themselves to resemble) human beings, animals, or imaginary or mythological creatures. Some of their communications with people have contained evident disinformation. Many aliens seemed to be conscious in the sense that they were apparently “aware and responding to (their) surroundings” but some or all of them may not have possessed consciousness any more than do our autonomous cars.

Some reports of aliens’ communications or other behaviours were sufficiently detailed that we may be able to analyse them to try to determine whether, for example, they displayed one or more of “the 10 signs of consciousness” that include “insight into the minds of others”, “highly flexible in making decisions”, etc. It is not yet known publicly whether particular aliens that were observed or encountered had a sense of self, or self-concept, or self-awareness, or measurable personality or other traits: Why be conscious? The improbable origins of our unique mind, by Dr. Bob Holmes, published in New Scientist, 13 May 2017, No. 3125 and What is consciousness? published in The Economist, 12 September 2015.

One of our latest speech synthesisers, Google’s Tacotron-2 can already generate human- sounding speech artificially rather than “assembling human-recorded sounds into words and sentences”: Human or robot? Google’s speech generator makes it hard to tell, by Ms. Nicole Kobie, published in New Scientist, 6 January 2018, No. 3159. It is possible that “alien languages” may share some characteristics with human languages: I’m working on a universal language to let us speak to aliens, by Dr. Douglas Vakoch, President of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, published in New Scientist, 9 June 2018, No. 3181. This might help to explain how some aliens, or their surrogates conversed with people who encountered them. Some conversed fluently while others were evidently unable or unwilling to communicate at all, or only in a limited way or without participating in a full dialogue.

The reported communications of some aliens or their surrogates were cursory or repetitive, or possibly scripted or pre-programmed; some moved quickly from topic to topic or used stock words, phrases or concepts. A lack of psychological affect (or some other qualities we associate with people) was apparent in the observed behaviours of some aliens or their surrogates, including their communications. For example, the “laughter” of some aliens has sounded “funny” (used in the sense of strange or peculiar), or “strained or artificial” to people who heard it. The user of an alien aerospace craft “laughed” in this manner in response to a question put to it, during an encounter on a road called the West Buford Street Extension in the town of Gaffney in the state of South Carolina, United States, early in the morning of 17 November 1966. During the encounter two police officers spoke with the alien (or surrogate) for “perhaps only two or three minutes”: The Little Man of Gaffney published in Flying Saucer Review, March/April 1968, Vol. 14, No. 2, by the journalist, investigator, researcher, and author Mr. John A. Keel, pages 17 – 19, at page 18 and endnote 4.

The alien (or surrogate) seems not to have answered questions put to it, and either “laughed” as mentioned or above or responded with a question of its own; in the latter case, the alien’s question was “why we (the police officers) were both dressed alike”. This type of possibly programmed, perhaps obsessive verbal behaviour may suggest that what was encountered was an Artificial Intelligence (AI) surrogate rather than an alien biological intelligence: A sense of curiosity is helpful for artificial intelligence, published in The Economist, 1 September 2018.

If we analyse the content and qualities of aliens’ communications and their other behaviour we may be able to determine whether they would qualify as “persons”: When is an animal a person? Neuroscience tries to set the rules, by Ms. Aviva Rutkin, published in New Scientist, 2 July 2016, No. 3080. The “Gaffney” alien or surrogate may not have fulfilled our criteria for personhood or possessing consciousness based on its reported communications and behaviour: The Little Man of Gaffney published in Flying Saucer Review, March/April 1968, Vol. 14, No. 2, by Mr. John A. Keel, pages 17 – 19. In the illustration below the images of the police officers were adapted and colourised using a Microsoft Office Image. This report and what may constitute “personhood”, etc. are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 (Aliens).

We should consider issues such as the existence and nature of consciousness and other human qualities that are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 (Aliens) to try to assess exactly what type of beings were observed or encountered according to specific reports. Some of the aliens that have been reported may not have been natural biological beings or alien surrogates if Professor Martin Rees, the United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal is correct. Professor Rees proposed that “We should accept that the era of organic intelligence is relatively short, and will be followed by a much longer era dominated by inorganic intelligences. Humans and our intellectual achievements will be a mere prelude to the deeper cogitations of a machine - dominated culture. Moreover, advanced AI (Artificial Intelligence) would not be confined to Earth-like biospheres”: A new hunt for ET could well find AI on non-Earthlike worlds, by Professor Rees, published in New Scientist, 1 August 2015, No. 3032. Professor Rees discussed his ideas in Aliens: The Big Think, a BBC television documentary first broadcast in the United Kingdom on 21 April 2016.

Aliens, their surrogates, or their craft (which have often simulated or been disguised as our own airships, aircraft, aerospace craft or other craft or vehicles) have surveyed, investigated, or sometimes intervened in or interfered with, the operation of our technologies, infrastructure and facilities, including civil and military nuclear systems. Aliens may be primarily concerned with any of our scientific experiments or measurements that could threaten them as well as ourselves but may have nothing to do with our ongoing degradation of the Earth or even our manufacture, deployment, testing and use in war of nuclear weapons: The human universe: Could we destroy the fabric of the cosmos? by Dr. Michael Brooks, Part 4 of Human Universe, a Special Issue of New Scientist, 2 May 2015, No. 3019.

Some alien civilisations may be extremely old, for example, the discovery of five alien worlds smaller than the Earth orbiting Kepler 444, a star 11.2 billion years old that is only 117 light- years distant, prompted the comments, “If life needs a long time to develop or lots of places to try to develop, having rocky planets this early in the history of the galaxy means planets with advanced civilisations should be everywhere” and “if other, similarly ancient worlds exist in more temperate climes, then life may have been possible in the universe almost from the beginning”: Ancient planets are almost as old as the universe, by Ms. Lisa Grossman, published in New Scientist, No. 3006 and Astronomy: Old planets, published in The Economist, both dated 31 January 2015.

If aliens have visited or been present on the Earth for a very long time, contact with some of them could hold remarkable possibilities. For example, as well as acquiring advanced scientific knowledge and technology, we might also access their surveillance video and audio recordings and other information about human prehistory and ancient history that would be invaluable for professionals such as anthropologists and historians, and of great interest to people generally. Over sixty years ago, this scenario was explored by the inventor, author, and presenter Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Bachelor of Science (BSc.), mathematics and physics, King’s College London, CBE, FRAS (Fellow of The Royal Astronomical Society) in an iconic science fiction novel. Sir Arthur described a fictional instrument supplied by aliens to humanity that “was nothing more than a television receiver with an elaborate set of controls for determining co-ordinates in time and space. ... One had merely to adjust the controls, and a window into the past was opened up. Almost the whole of human history for the past five thousand years became accessible”: Childhood’s End, first published in 1953, Chapter 6, page 81 of a 1990 revision, paperback published in 2010. A Syfy adaptation of Childhood’s End in three parts premiered in December 2015.

Geologists, climatologists, biologists, etc. might eventually benefit from access to video recordings and other data about the Earth that might be millions or billions of years old, including information about any pre-human civilisations that might have developed on, or colonised the Earth and possibly explored other planets or their moons: Could an industrial prehuman civilization have existed on Earth before ours? by Mr. Steven Ashley, published online by Scientific American, 23 April 2018, The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? by Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt and Professor Adam Frank, 10 April 2018, and Travel back in time to Earth’s mightiest rivers and mountains, printed publication title The Time Traveller’s Guide to Earth, by Mr. Daniel Cossins, published in New Scientist, 18 July 2015, No. 3030, pages 28 - 35.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century newspapers in the United States published illustrations and articles based on reports of what may have been alien aerospace craft, aliens, and their activities. In the early 1950s a United States Air Force team studied “hundreds of newspaper accounts” of these reports. Their director, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt concluded that the “first documented reports of sightings similar to the UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings as we know them today appeared in the newspapers of 1896. In fact, the series of sightings that occurred in that year and the next (1897) had many points of similarity with the reports of today”: Chapter Sixteen (The Hierarchy Ponders) of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Captain Ruppelt, published in 1956, at pages 214 & 215, freely available online including from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) Online books.

According to the astronomer, consultant to the U.S. Air Force, investigator, and author Professor Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Captain Ruppelt directed the U.S. Air Force’s investigation into reports of alien craft, Project Blue Book from March 1952 to February 1953, and from July 1953 to May 1954: The Hynek UFO Report, published in 1977, Chapter 1 (Blue Book Is Not a Book), page 25. Project Blue Book was terminated in 1969 although it was asserted that U.S. officials continued to collect reports of alien aerospace craft, as discussed in Chapter 7 (Health, Security & Safety).

In the twenty-first century some senior United States politicians were encouraged by the businessman and space entrepreneur Mr. Robert Bigelow to initiate the undisclosed but publicly-funded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that lasted officially from 2007 to 2012, under which reports of unfamiliar aerospace craft made by military pilots and others were collected: Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program and 2 Navy airmen and an object that ‘accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen’, both published by the New York Times on 16 December 2017. The former director of the program is now a member of the private To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. Mr. Bigelow who had earlier founded the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDSci) can be seen and heard speaking about alien craft and aliens in extracts from a CBS 60 Minutes video documentary dated 28 May 2017.

The illustration below displays an alien craft that simulated or was disguised as a human- made airship, and which was observed over the city of Sacramento in the state of California, United States, on 17 November 1896: Strange Craft of the Sky, a report in The San Francisco Call, Thursday Morning, November 19, 1896, Volume LXXX.-No. 172, page 1, columns 1 – 3, freely available online from the Chronicling America – Historic American Newspapers website along with other historical U.S. newspapers, or on another website: The San Francisco Call, Thursday Morning, November 19, 1896, Volume LXXX.-No. 172 in the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC). The above and other observations of, or encounters with alien craft are discussed in Chapter 3 (Alien craft).

Aliens that mostly closely resembled human beings and often stated or gave the impression that they were the airships’ inventors or designers, crew or passengers or had financed the airships, spoke with several people who encountered them in the United States in 1896 and 1897. An especially detailed report from this time can be compared with reports made during the twentieth century of observations of, or encounters with the users of what appeared to be alien aerospace craft, including detailed descriptions or drawings of the interiors as well as exteriors of some of the craft, and of conversations with their users: Was Aboard An Airship – The First Description Of The Modern Invention to Be Published. A San-Francisco-New York Line – Travel to Be Revolutionized Within Two Years-Speed of 1000 Miles in Eight Hours., The Galveston Daily News, Wednesday, May 5, 1897, 56th year – No. 42, page 7, columns 2 & 3, that may be freely available online via The Portal to Texas History website.

Such reports suggest that many of the beings whose conversations with people are reproduced, summarised or discussed in Chapter 4 (Aliens) fulfilled the requirements of the Turing test to confirm the existence of intelligent behaviour at least equal to that of a human being. The Turing test was dramatised in the film Ex_Machina released in 2015: Ex_Machina: Quest to create an AI takes no prisoners, by Professor Anil K. Seth, published in New Scientist, 24 January 2015, No. 3005. However, the “way to win the Turing test is to deceive” an insight which suggests that some aliens that have been observed or encountered displaying evidently deceptive behaviour (introduced later in this section) may have been Artificial Intelligence systems: The search for a new test of Artificial Intelligence, by Professor Gary F. Marcus, published in Scientific American, March 2017.

Reports that included photographs of alien aerospace craft began to appear regularly in newspapers, magazines, and specialist journals from the mid-twentieth century onwards. For example, several clear photographs were taken of a craft that flew between two military facilities in the United States, one of which was published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year 1966 under the heading Spacecraft. The camera used was carried by a highway engineer for his work. It was loaded with high speed monochrome film and could produce reasonably good quality photographs in rapid succession. It is doubtful whether many ordinary digital cameras or smartphones available today would have been able to take these photographs, because of the length of time that they require to start-up, or focus, or take an initial image. Reproductions and analyses of the photographs are available online: Reanalysis of the 1965 Heflin UFO Photos, by Ms. Ann Druffel, Dr. Robert M. Wood, and Dr. Eric Kelson. Examples of photographs, hardware and software that were (or may be) used to try to detect alien aerospace craft are discussed in Chapter 6 (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)).

Images of seemingly alien craft are regularly published online that are attributed to camera systems that display images of, for example, active volcanoes in Mexico such as Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl, and Volcán de Colima.

Drawings and sometimes paintings continued to be used to illustrate reports in specialist journals and books, only partly because most people did not regularly carry cameras until digital cameras (including video cameras in mobile telephones, tablets, etc.) became widespread in the early twenty-first century. In fact, photographs or videos may never entirely replace illustrations because of the limitations of many current digital cameras mentioned earlier, or because many observations of, or encounters with alien craft or aliens occur at night, or alien craft are so brightly-illuminated, or move so quickly that photographs or videos often contain much less information than observers’ descriptions or sketches.

Human observers’ descriptions of some alien craft or their manoeuvres, combined with measurements of the physical traces from where they apparently landed have enabled their acceleration, speed, mass and power usage to be calculated and have helped experts to develop ideas about how they are propelled and energised. Some photographs that may possibly show alien beings have been published, and specialist journals, books, and websites have published many more illustrations of aliens by artists based on the descriptions or sketches provided by the people who observed or encountered them. Models of alien craft and of the heads and bodies of aliens have been made, photographed and published.

Our Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems now enable reports or analyses of observations or encounters to be written about and shared rapidly, widely, and very cheaply. Our ICT systems also enable them to be spoken about and illustrated relatively easily using colour, still, or motion graphics, or re-created in video documentaries or dramas. For example, the following illustration is based on a report in an official Royal New Zealand Air Force file released in 2010 of a crewed alien aerospace craft that was encountered near Blenheim in the South Island of New Zealand, set in the South Pacific Ocean, in the early morning of 13 July 1959. The report is discussed in detail in Chapter 1 (How alien aerospace craft fly), Chapter 2 (Alien technology), and Chapter 4 (Aliens): New Zealand Defence Force, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) Files – copies for release to the public, file number AIR 244/10/1 Volume 1, opened 1959 – closed 1983, file declassified September 2010, including pages 147 – 151, & 204 – 206 of 225. Additional information may also be available online, for example, Finding Mrs. Moreland, published in March 2018.

In the United States and New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some newspapers that published reports of alien craft or aliens also included perhaps the earliest serious, published analyses in the English language that proposed an “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (ETH) to explain them. For example, in 1897 in the United States, an alien craft was observed that simulated the appearance of an advanced European airship of the period and it was proposed that it might belong to “an exploring party sent out by some other planet”: The Airship Was Seen - At Atlanta, Houston Daily Post, Thursday Morning, April 22, 1897, Thirteenth Year – No. 18, page 9, column 6. One person who observed such a craft in daylight in the U.S. suggested that “must have come from another planet, and is on a tour of observation”: The Airship in Texas – Seen in Milam County – Cast its Shadow over the Convicts while at work., Cameron, Tex. (Texas), (Sunday) April 18 (1897): The Galveston Daily News, Monday, April 19, 1897, 56th year – No. 26, page 2, columns 1 - 3.

As mentioned earlier, in 1909 a letter by Mr. Robert Grigor, a surveyor and engineer was published in at least two newspapers suggesting that the unidentified lights which had been observed in New Zealand were aerospace craft powered by “radium” i.e. atomic energy and crewed by intelligent beings that had travelled to the Earth from another world. Mr. Grigor proposed trying to communicate with the aliens using “wireless telegraphy” (radio frequency electromagnetic fields) and analysing the light radiated by their craft with a spectroscope: The Mysterious Lights, July 27 (1909), by Mr. Robert Grigor, published in the Letters to the Editor of The Otago Daily Times, Thursday, July 29, 1909, No 14,588, page 4, column 8 (the last column), penultimate letter. Mr. Grigor’s letter is reproduced along with selections from reports of observations of, or encounters with alien craft in New Zealand in 1909, in Chapter 3 (Alien craft).

Towards the end of the twentieth century our astronomers detected new worlds that we call exoplanets orbiting other ordinary stars. In the second decade of the twenty-first century exoplanets were discovered that might be able to support our type of biological life. For example, the exoplanet LHS 1140 b is only 40 light-years distant, has a diameter “1.4 times larger than the Earth” and is “probably made of rock with a dense iron core”: Newly discovered exoplanet may be best candidate in search for signs of life, 19 April 2017. Our nearest exoplanet Proxima b like LHS 1140 b orbits in the habitable zone of its host star, which in this case is Proxima Centauri the closest star to our Sun. Their host stars are red dwarf stars which are cooler, less massive, smaller, and much less luminous than our Sun: Study: Planet orbiting nearest star could be habitable, 25 October 2016, Planet found in habitable zone around nearest star, published by the European Southern Observatory, 24 August 2016 and Proxima b: Earth-like planet spotted just 4 light years away, by Mr. Jacob Aron, published in New Scientist, 27 August 2016, No. 3088. However, factors such as intense bursts of radiation from stars may make planets uninhabitable despite their being located in habitable zones: Chandra scouts nearest star systems for possible hazards, 6 June 2018 and The first naked-eye superflare detected from Proxima Centauri, by Mr. Ward S. Howard et al, 5 April 2018.

Seven exoplanets that are all similar in size to the Earth and may also be made of rock and iron, one or more of which may possibly have liquid water and atmospheres orbit the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 about 40 light-years from our solar system. Interplanetary travel would take less time for local space travellers than it does for us because the seven planets “are tightly packed, with distances between them similar to the separation of the Earth and the Moon. Each orbits in resonance with the others”: TRAPPIST-1 planets probably rich in water – first glimpse of what Earth-sized exoplanets are made of, 5 February 2018, Tides and atmospheres on TRAPPIST-1 planets may help life thrive, by Ms. Leah Crane, published in New Scientist, 13 January 2018, No. 3160 and Life on TRAPPIST-1 could hitch a ride on meteors between worlds, by Mr. John Wenz, published online by Astronomy, 14 June 2017 and in the printed paper edition dated October 2017.

The exoplanet Kepler 452 b was “the first-Earth sized alien world we have seen that circles a Sun-like star at a distance (in its host star’s habitable zone) that should allow liquid water to exist on its surface ... Even the planet’s year is familiar at 385 days long”. Kepler 452 b is “about 60% larger than Earth, with a surface gravity 2x (twice) that of Earth, and a fairly good chance of being a rocky planet, with an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s, and with active volcanoes”. Kepler 452, its host star, is slightly larger, more massive and more luminous, and older than our Sun: Earth-like alien world looms into view through Kepler telescope, by Mr. Joshua Sokol, published in New Scientist, 1 August 2015, No. 3032 and NASA’s Kepler mission discovers bigger, older cousin to Earth, 23 July 2015. More details are provided in the paper Discovery and Validation of Kepler-452b: a 1.6-R⊕ Super Earth Exoplanet in the Habitable Zone of a G2 star, by Dr. Jon M. Jenkins, et al, published on 23 July 2015 by The Astronomical Journal.

The exoplanets Kepler 438 b and Kepler 442 b both have diameters less than 1.5 times that of the Earth and probably orbit in the habitable zones of their respective host stars Kepler 438 (a red dwarf, late K or M-type star) and Kepler 442 (an orange dwarf, K-type star) that are both cooler, smaller, and less massive than our Sun: NASA’s Kepler marks 1,000th exoplanet discovery, uncovers more small worlds in habitable zones and Eight New Planets Found in “Goldilocks” Zone, both dated 6 January 2015. Some astronomers have concluded that smaller planets tend to have circular orbits around their host stars, like that of the Earth around the Sun. It is therefore possible that large numbers of smaller exoplanets could host stable environments that favour the development of biological life, or may make them suitable for colonisation: Small planets, circular orbits: a better chance for life, 2 June 2015.

Exoplanets such as Kepler 442 b that may be somewhat more massive than the Earth and orbit in the habitable zones of relatively small, long-lived stars could be “superhabitable” worlds that may be more suitable for the development and survival of our type of biological life over much longer periods of time than the Earth. These exoplanets may also be easier to detect than Earth-like planets which orbit more luminous, hotter stars such as our Sun: Planets more habitable than Earth may be common in our Galaxy, by Dr. René Heller, published in Scientific American, January 2015, Vol. 312, No. 1. Discoveries of Earth-like or possibly superhabitable worlds are regularly and widely discussed in many different media even including a leading global financial weekly magazine: Astronomy: Old planets and Exoplanets: Searching for pale blue dots, published in The Economist on 31 January and 10 January 2015, respectively.

The aerospace scientist and engineer Professor Paul R. Hill noted that “many aliens seem very sensitive to light. If these have colonized and adapted to planets of the highly numerous red stars (red dwarfs), this would change the whole civilization distribution picture, but would be consistent with UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects or alien aerospace craft) data”: Unconventional Flying Objects, by Professor Hill, Section XX (Summary and Conclusions), 18. UFO Occupants, Our Alien Visitors, page 335 of the paperback edition published in 1995. The closest multi-planet, red dwarf star system discovered so far is YZ Ceti, introduced in the article Discovery alert! Three Earth-mass neighbours, 28 August 2017.

The four known exoplanets in the Kepler 223 star system “orbit their star in the same configuration that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may have had in the early history of our solar system, before migrating to their current locations”: Dance of the sub-Neptunes: a planetary system in resonance, 17 May 2016. HIP 11915 b, an exoplanet with a similar mass to Jupiter, is about the same distance from its Sun-like host star HIP 11915 as Jupiter is from our Sun. This “opens the possibility that the system of planets around this star may be similar to our own solar system”: Jupiter twin orbits a twin of our Sun, 15 July 2015.

Simulations that assumed the presence of gas giant planets in developing star systems resulted in “around four rocky planets ranging from half an Earth mass to a little more massive than Earth – a pretty good match for our solar system”: More than 100 billion billion Earth-like planets might exist, printed publication title No place like home – or is there? by Mr. Jacob Aron, published in New Scientist, 29 August 2015, No. 3036, pages 8 & 9, at page 9, referring in part to the paper Chaos in Terrestrial Planet Formation, by Mr. Volker Hoffmann et al, 4 August 2015. Other simulations suggested that the orbits, changes in orbits, and strong gravitational attraction of the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system could have “cleared room for planets like Earth”: Wrecking ball Jupiter paved way for Earth, New Scientist, 28 March 2015, No. 3014 and Saturn’s calming nature keeps Earth friendly to life, New Scientist, 29 November 2014, No. 2997. The exoplanet Kepler 186 f has a diameter similar to that of the Earth and orbits in the habitable zone of its host star: First Earth-Size Planet in ‘Habitable Zone’, a NASA Kepler News item, 17 April 2014. Kepler 186 f, Kepler 452 b, and the Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury and their respective star system’s habitable zones are compared in the following illustration, and discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 (Other worlds).

At least four and possibly five exoplanets orbit the nearby Sun-like star Tau Ceti, two of which may be in the star’s habitable zone: Two potentially habitable planets detected orbiting the nearest Sun-like star, 9 August 2017. Tau Ceti was one of the first targets for the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). SETI astronomers try to receive communications from aliens in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum close to that used for digital television broadcasting in some countries or via laser light signals, discussed in Chapter 6 (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)). Tau Ceti appeared on a Star Map displayed below that may have been shown by an alien to Mrs. Betty Hill who in 1961 along with her husband Mr. Barney Hill reported they encountered and were abducted by aliens. Mrs. Hill later sketched the Star Map from her memory. Their experience is described and analysed in Chapter 4 (Aliens) and the Star Map is discussed in Chapter 1 (How alien aerospace craft fly) and Chapter 5 (Other worlds).

The version of the Star Map that is displayed below was created and updated by the author of Time of Contact to include exoplanet discoveries. Articles about the Star Map that may be available online include The Zeta Reticuli Incident, An Analysis of the Fish Model, by Mr. Walter N. Webb, published in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, September – October 1974, Vol. 23, No. 2, pages 8 & 9 and continued in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, November - December 1974, Vol. 23, No. 3, pages 3 – 7. An audio letter by Ms. Marjorie Fish, file name 18 CE-IV_18.mp3 begun on 14 October 1969 may be available on the Internet Archive website, along with comments on Ms. Fish’s work by the scientist, researcher, communicator and author Mr. Stanton T. Friedman, Master of Science (MSc.), audio file name 19 CE-IV_19.mp3.

The Sun-like stars Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli displayed on the Star Map are near enough to one another (3,750 Astronomical Units (AU) or about 0.06 light-years) to make interstellar communications and travel practical possibilities even for relatively less-developed alien civilisations, for example, a laser light, television or radio communication would only take about 22 days to travel between the two stars. These possibilities have also been discussed in the context of star systems within globular clusters that may be similarly close to one another: Star clusters could host long-lived technological civilisations, by Ms. Sarah Scoles, published in New Scientist, 16 January 2016, No. 3056. As our astronomical technology improves it will be very interesting to discover what planets or moons may orbit Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli. A debris disc “analogous to the Kuiper belt” in our solar system was discovered around Zeta 2 Reticuli.

In the twenty-first century our studies of aliens, their transportation systems and other technologies were transformed because many original written reports and analyses, illustrations, photographs, and video and audio files were made publicly available online or on other digital media. Billions of people can now access classic written reports and analyses many of which only reached an initial world-wide audience of possibly ten thousand subscribers at most when they were originally published in specialist, printed paper journals that came into existence in the mid-twentieth century.

The primary sources of reports that are publicly available online or on other digital media now include thousands of complete newspapers including many from the nineteenth century. Some of these sources contain information that was difficult or impossible to access by our predecessors, or who evidently had to omit some information when they summarised or edited original reports of observations or encounters, because of the limitations of their ICT.

Some earlier analyses used graphs and tables to collate and display fragments of many different reports. These methods could produce outputs that did not do justice to the original narratives on which they were based, which are often compelling and rich in detail. Graphs and tables still have their uses for certain applications, for example, in Time of Contact graphs and illustrations are provided to display “on board” or “ship’s clock” travel times between different star systems while tables summarise selected exoplanet discoveries.

Our ICT now permits us to search many original narrative reports that are now available in electronic form, automatically and very quickly. We can present reports, analyses, and our ideas in formats such as narrative text that can be as detailed and lengthy as we wish to make them. We can include hyperlinks to other relevant reports or information or include or link to coloured illustrations or video or audio files to better describe specific observations or encounters. We may be able to apply Artificial Intelligence services, software, or systems not only to translate but also to discover and analyse many more detailed reports originally published in a variety of original languages.

As large numbers of reports and analyses accumulated during the last half of the twentieth century, the limitations of manual storage and indexation systems became increasingly- apparent. In addition, printed paper publications which were the primary means of supplying reports and analyses to the global as well as national markets became more expensive to produce and deliver. In the United Kingdom, the Flying Saucer Review that was one of the world’s leading specialist journals published in the English language, could sometimes not be printed or delivered, or receive inputs from its contributors or customers during the 1970s due to endemic conflict between workers in key industries and their employers and other political, social, industrial, and economic problems.

The above-mentioned problems and the low sales of the Flying Saucer Review despite its generally high quality and the personal sacrifices that were required to keep it operating were regularly discussed in the magazine, for example, the editorial More Support Needed and the article following, entitled To Our Subscribers, by one of the Flying Saucer Review’s consultants, the aeronautical historian Mr. Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, MA, an Honorary Companion of the Royal Aeronautical Society, published in Flying Saucer Review, March – April 1972, Vol. 18, No. 2, pages 1 & 2. Some of these issues also affected the U.S.-based, internationally-oriented Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (A.P.R.O.) that was founded in 1952, many of whose A.P.R.O. Bulletins may be freely available online via the web pages Ignacio Darnaude Rojas-Marcos – Ufología Heterodoxa or the Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), etc. Even the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters subscribed: NASA Is New Subscriber, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, May 1962, page 1.

Many media channels served local rather than regional, national, or international markets and reports were often not distributed outside of their original markets. Cost or availability considerations for translators between different languages also limited the distribution of many reports about alien craft or their users. However both the Flying Saucer Review and the A.P.R.O. Bulletin regularly published reports from other countries that had been translated into the English language. The presence of Mr. Gordon Creighton a diplomat and talented, multi-lingual, professional translator on the Flying Saucer Review team for several decades ensured that the journal often contained reports that had been expertly translated from other languages.

An extract from a video interview with Mr. Creighton may be available online: BBC television documentary ‘UFOs Out of this World, 1977. Mr. Creighton can be heard speaking on audio recordings, file names 33.mp3 dated 1 February 1969 and 42.mp3 dated 5 September 1970 which may be available on the UFOLOGY A Primer in Audio UK AUS 1946 – 1989 Guide web page on the Internet Archive website. Today, thousands of free or low-cost reports and analyses from all over the world can be searched and retrieved quickly and possibly also translated automatically or converted from speech to text using affordable, consumer-grade ICT systems.

Despite technological, financial and other difficulties during the last half of the twentieth century many reports were collected, translated where required, investigated, analysed, published, and distributed nationally and internationally by independent journals. Many detailed reports and analyses were received from countries, which due to their large size, varied geography and sometimes-difficult communications were and still can be challenging areas in which to conduct private or official investigations, such as Brazil and what is now Papua New Guinea. For example, religious teachers in Papua New Guinea made intensive efforts to accurately record and distribute their data internationally despite having limited resources and working under difficult conditions.

Perhaps the most important scientific development that has occurred relatively recently was the discovery of the exoplanets, introduced earlier. We have discovered over 3,700 confirmed exoplanets according to NASA’s New Worlds Atlas. Many “candidate” exoplanets have also been detected although their existence of these remains to be confirmed: NASA Exoplanet and Candidate Statistics.

We have begun to analyse the atmospheres of some exoplanets, and star systems with exoplanets in stable circular orbits like those of our own solar system have been detected as well as star systems that may contain more planets than our solar system. Following such discoveries, astronomers have predicted that many billions of exoplanets may exist just in our galaxy. This suggests that many of the reported observations of, or encounters with alien aerospace or underwater craft or their users are correct, and that the craft or their users may have originated on other worlds. In addition, the discovery of biological life in extreme environments on and under the Earth suggests that such life may be abundant in the Universe.

Many exoplanets are probably orbited by exomoons that some scientists consider are “the most likely places to find alien life”. The exoplanet Kepler 1625 b may possibly host the first exomoon that we have discovered: First exomoon might have been spotted 4,000 light-years away, by Ms. Leah Crane, published in New Scientist, 5 August 2017, No. 3137 and Signal may be from first exomoon, published by BBC Science & Environment news, 27 July 2017, plus Home, sweet exomoon: The new frontier in the search for ET, by Mr. Andy Ridgway, published in New Scientist, 1 August 2015, No. 3032, pages 32 – 36, and Race to find the first exomoon heats up by Mr. Jacob Aron, published in New Scientist, 21 March 2015, No. 3013.

Liquid water has many special properties that make it essential for our type of biological life as discussed in Chapter 4 (Aliens). Water was detected in the atmospheres of several exoplanets; the Earth’s water may have been delivered from space by objects such as comets or asteroids or been generated by chemical processes in the Earth’s interior. It seems likely that water is essential to help create and maintain environments on planets or moons that will support our type of biological life, as discussed in Chapter 5 (Other worlds). Reports are introduced throughout Time of Contact where alien craft were observed hovering or flying over the surface of the Earth, or entering, exiting or travelling on or within bodies of water on the Earth, for example, Lake Erie in the U.S: Ohio Flap, by Mr. Richard P. Dell’Aquia, MUFON UFO Journal, January 1989, No. 249, pages 15 – 17. Another report described how alien aerospace craft evidently visited a water storage facility at the times when its water was being polluted by the discharge into it of industrial waste: North America 1966 – Development of a Great Wave, by Mr. John A. Keel, published in Flying Saucer Review, March – April 1967, Vol. 13, No. 2, pages 3 - 9, at page 4. As mentioned earlier, aliens have requested people to provide them with water or asked their permission to take water or questioned them about water quality. Aliens have been observed or encountered apparently taking or sampling water, and water was reported missing from storage tanks after alien aerospace craft were observed or encountered near to them.

Large quantities of liquid water may be present within one or more of the moons of the giant planets Jupiter or Saturn as well in other bodies in our solar system: NASA JPL Ocean worlds and NASA ocean worlds: the quest for life plus Waterworlds, published in The Economist, 30 May 2015. For example, Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede, which is larger than the planet Mercury may have a water ocean below its surface that is “10 times deeper than Earth’s seas”. Ganymede’s ocean may be between 10 kilometres and 100 kilometres thick depending upon its salinity, according to Professor Joachim Saur.

One of Jupiter’s smaller moons, Europa (slightly smaller than the Earth’s Moon) “sparkles with a glistening surface of water ice” and may have a water ocean “about 60 miles (100 kilometres) deep”: Your guide to the oceans of our solar system, by Mr. Michael W. Carroll, published in Astronomy magazine, November 2017, pages 24 – 29 and Hubble finds ‘best evidence’ for Ganymede subsurface ocean, by Mr. Jonathan Amos, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News - Science & Environment,12 March 2015. NASA’s planned Europa Clipper mission was based on Europa then being “the best candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life in the solar system”: NASA’s Europa Mission Begins with Selection of Science Instruments, 26 May 2015, and Mission to Europa will test Jupiter moon’s friendliness to life, printed publication title Europa mission to seek hints of life, by Ms. Aviva Rutkin, published in New Scientist, 6 June 2015, No. 3024.

However, “large, complex organic molecules” have been detected in “plumes of water vapor streaming from beneath the surface of Enceladus” a moon of Saturn: Cassini finds massive organic molecules in Enceladus’ plumes, by Mr. Nathaniel Scharping, published online by Astronomy magazine, 27 June 2018. Enceladus while only 505 kilometres in diameter may contain a “vast liquid water reservoir”. In addition “hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor”: NASA missions provide new insights into ‘Ocean Worlds’ in our solar system, 13 April 2017 and Cassini finds global ocean in Saturn’s moon Enceladus, 15 September 2015. Enceladus’ “deep pocket of liquid” water may be approximately 8 kilometres to 10 kilometres thick and have a temperature of 90 degrees Celsius or more. Enceladus may be “the only known place besides Earth with ongoing hydrothermal activity, and boosts the chance of finding life below its cold exterior”: Undersea Jacuzzi could give life to Saturn’s moon, by Mr. Jacob Aron, published in New Scientist, 14 March 2015, No. 3012. During an encounter in Venezuela which is discussed in detail in Chapter 4 (Aliens) three men reported that they were told by aliens that “two satellites of Saturn” were among the “inhabited planets”: Landing At San Pedro De Los Altos, by Señor Horacio González Gauteaume, President of the Sociedad Venezolana Investigadora del OVNI of Caracas and the Venezuelan representative of the U.S.-based Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (A.P.R.O.) published in Flying Saucer Review, March – April 1969, Vol. 15, No. 2, pages 21 - 23, & 30.

As mentioned earlier what is probably very salty water has been discovered below the surface of Mars, as well as much larger amounts of “relatively pure water ice” that may be more accessible and usable by human explorers: Astronomers have found a lake on Mars, published in The Economist, 28 July 2018, Mars Express detects liquid water hidden under planet’s South Pole, 25 July 2018 and Steep slopes on Mars reveal structure of buried ice, 11 January 2018. The Mars rover Curiosity and an earlier rover, Opportunity separately discovered that Mars once had liquid water some of which would have been sufficiently pure to be drinkable by human beings. Curiosity’s data suggested that “ancient Mars” may have “maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting (water) lakes at many locations” on its surface: NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to How Water Helped Shape Martian Landscape, 8 December 2014. Gale Crater where Curiosity is based “was once a large lake that might have stuck around long enough for life to get started. Mars may also have been humid, with a complex weather system”: Curiosity rover finds ancient lake in Martian Crater, published in New Scientist, 13 December 2014, No. 2999.

According to Dr. Agnès Cousin the discovery of “high manganese oxide content” in “3 per cent of rocks” analysed by Curiosity would have required “abundant water and strongly oxidising conditions, so the atmosphere may have contained much more oxygen than we thought”: First direct evidence of ancient Mars’ oxygen-rich atmosphere, published in New Scientist, 30 April 2016, No. 3071.

Solid organic compounds which were discovered by Curiosity just below the surface in Martian mudstone from Gale Crater may have been produced by living organisms. However, in the view of one commentator “If the organics Curiosity tested were from life, they’ve been altered an awful lot. They don’t show the diversity of molecules or the structural patterns usually created biologically”. In addition, methane a hydrocarbon gas that may also be produced by living organisms was detected in Mars’ atmosphere. Some methane emissions appeared to be seasonal while others may have originated locally to Curiosity, because the concentrations of the gas evidently increased and decreased rapidly: Methane and other organics on Mars, by Ms. Camille M. Carlisle, published online by Sky & Telescope, and NASA rover hits organic pay dirt on Mars, published by Science, both dated 7 June 2018, NASA Rover Finds Active and Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars, 16 December 2014 and Curiosity finds methane, other organics, also by Ms. Carlisle, published online by Sky & Telescope, 17 December 2014.

Curiosity may also have detected the organic compound chlorobenzene in Martian mudstone. On Earth, chlorobenzene is a manufactured compound used by us to make “commodities such as herbicides, dyestuffs, and rubber”. NASA Goddard Instrument Makes First Detection of Organic Matter on Mars, 16 December 2014, and Wikipedia. “Chlorobenzene – with six carbon atoms in a honeycomb shape, plus five carbon atoms and one hydrogen atom attached at the corners is produced when carbon molecules burn with perchlorate” – Martian perchlorates have been detected. “As such, it (chlorobenzene) is indirect evidence that there are organics on Mars”: Whoops! NASA burned best evidence for life on Mars 40 years ago, published in New Scientist, 14 July 2018, No. 3186.

During the last half of the twentieth century “credible observers” including military personnel and scientists some of whom used powerful cameras, theodolites, or other optical systems, radar, electronic countermeasures, or underwater detection systems, recorded and reported the appearance, manoeuvres, acceleration, velocity, and other characteristics of a wide variety of alien craft. Private citizens also reported their observations of, or encounters with alien craft or their users.

Professional observers and private citizens were sometimes equipped with instruments such as magnetic compasses or radiation detectors that enabled them to detect electromagnetic or magnetic fields radiated by alien craft: Flap in Alabama, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, January – February, 1973, Vol. 21, No. 4, pages 11 & 12. Today, many smartphones can record high definition video files of what may be alien craft, and may also contain accelerometers and gyroscopes that may enable them to detect synthetic acceleration propulsion and hull protection force fields radiated by alien craft using suitable accelerometer apps and gyroscope apps. Some smartphones contain magnetometers to support compass apps that might also be used to detect magnetic fields radiated by alien craft.

Beginning in the late 1940s many detailed reports were made public about observations of unfamiliar aerospace craft by military and civilian aircrew and other professionals such as scientists and engineers, as well as by non-experts. Many people including aircrew and ground observers had received training in aircraft recognition during the then-recent Second World War (1939 – 1945) which may help to explain the high level of detail present in many of the reports: A Brief History of Aircraft Identification Training, by Mr. Arthur C. Vicory (please try inputting the title of the above paper into the Google search engine if the link doesn’t open automatically), The George Washington University, Human Resources Research Office (now the Human Resources Research Organization), August 1968.

These detailed reports inspired some expert aerospace experts to develop ideas about how the unfamiliar craft were propelled and how their hulls and users were protected when the craft accelerated, decelerated, or manoeuvred rapidly, or travelled at very high speeds even in the Earth’s dense, lower atmosphere. Their ideas included that the craft flew by generating and controlling gravity-like, synthetic acceleration force fields, which were also used to help protect their hulls and users. It was obvious to the experts that the craft were far in advance of any aircraft or rocket that any nation had constructed or tested at that time: They Come from Outer Space, by Professor Dr. Hermann Oberth, published in Flying Saucer Review, May - June 1955, Vol. 1, No. 2, page 14.

Professor Dr. Oberth’s article can be compared with a letter introduced earlier that speculated about other unfamiliar airborne craft and their presumed users 46 years previously: The Mysterious Lights, July 27 (1909), by Mr. Robert Grigor, published in the Letters to the Editor of The Otago Daily Times, Thursday, July 29, 1909, No 14,588, page 4, column 8 (the last column), penultimate letter.

Many of our technologies including space suits, robotic arms, computing, communications, navigation, and environmental systems are now sufficiently well-developed for crewed interplanetary space exploration expeditions lasting for months or years. However, even the resumption of visits by people to our Moon may be uneconomic and unsafe until we develop or acquire much-improved energy generation and storage, propulsion, and hull and users’ protection systems for our aerospace and space craft that are like those of alien craft.

These systems will also be used to help to protect the structures of orbiting space stations and future bases on the Moon, Mars, or other planets or moons, asteroids, etc. and help to ensure the physical and mental health of their users. The same systems will dramatically reduce the time to travel anywhere on our planet and we will explore not only our solar system in new, fast, and safe crewed spacecraft but also eventually travel to exoplanets around other stars. Our new aircraft, aerospace and space craft, marine and underwater craft will be equipped with powerful defensive systems in order to manage the activities of the aliens or their surrogates if they break our laws including violations of human rights or animal rights or laws governing the control or behaviour of robots, androids, or other artificial or synthetic, autonomous or semi-autonomous entities, or other hardware, software, or systems, etc.

Many of the alien aerospace craft that have been observed or encountered have radiated very powerful X-ray or higher frequency gamma ray electromagnetic fields which are evidently used to direct and focus the gravity-like, synthetic acceleration force fields that propel the craft. These electromagnetic fields can exceed our radiation safety limits for living things at distances of up to hundreds or even thousands of metres. In order to avoid injuries to their eyes or skin, severe headaches, or other symptoms of injury or illness, people should avoid looking at the craft or their users, or the airglows around them caused by powerful electromagnetic fields, and rapidly take adequate cover or retreat from them, discussed in detail in Chapter 7 (Health, Security & Safety). Generally speaking, however, it appears that alien craft may cause less long-term harm to living things or our environment damage than most of our own existing transportation propulsion or power generation systems.

Most of the publicly available, detailed descriptions of alien craft that were observed at close range and of the appearance, behaviour, or activities of their users have been supplied by private citizens. This has happened because the very large numbers of private individuals or groups of people who are active in very many different geographical locations around the world are the most likely candidates to observe or encounter alien craft or their users, by chance. This is despite statistical studies based on large numbers of reports that strongly suggest that alien craft or their users generally operate at night or in remote, less populated areas, which tends to reduce the likelihood that they will be observed or encountered by people. Sometimes, what may have begun as chance observations of people or vehicles at night or in remote areas became close encounters initiated by the crafts’ controllers or users.

In 1947 a senior United States military officer concluded about the reports of unfamiliar aerospace craft up until that time that, “The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious”: AMC Opinion Concerning “Flying Discs” from the then-Lieutenant- General Nathan F. Twining, commanding Air Materiel Command (AMC) based at Wright Field (now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in the state of Ohio, addressed to Brigadier General George F. Schulgen, Chief, Air Intelligence Requirements Division, Washington, D.C., dated 23 September 1947. In 1960 Professor Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a professional astronomer, investigator, researcher, author, and consultant to the U.S. Air Force, concluded about reports of alien craft that, “Evidence so well attested would certainly be accepted in a court” (of law): UFO’s 1960, a presentation by Professor Dr. Hynek at the Hypervelocity Impact Conference held at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, United States, 27 April 1960, page 38. A copy of the presentation may be available online, for example, towards the end of the article entitled Our speaker tonight – Josef Allen Hynek.

Time of Contact reflects the above and other expert opinions such as that of Professor Dr. James A. Harder who wrote in 1973: “The issue of UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) existence will be with us for some time yet, we may assume; however, is it not time to go beyond that issue to the host of scientific problems and questions that are raised once one has accepted the fact of UFO existence?”: The Sedona ‘UFO Track’ Photo, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, March – April 1973, Vol. 21, No. 5, page 5. Professor Dr. Harder can be heard speaking on an audio recording, filename 53 CE-IV_53.mp3 (CEIV An Audio History of Alien Abduction and Animal Mutilation 1957 – 1976) that may be available on the Internet Archive website.

The modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) that was begun during the twentieth century tried to detect information contained in microwave radio frequency electromagnetic radiation from civilisations which might be based in other star systems. In the twenty-first century the SETI search was extended to include laser light signals. These efforts have been justified and further stimulated by the discovery of many exoplanets. SETI astronomers can now search more systematically for alien signals by aiming their receivers at confirmed star systems which astronomers consider may contain exoplanets or their exomoons which might be able to host intelligent life. Many star systems may contain home worlds where civilisations originally developed (like the Earth) or planets, moons, or bases that visitors from other star systems have explored, colonised, or established.

The discovery of numerous exoplanets has also helped to answer some past doubts about the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (ETH) that some investigators, researchers, or journalists raised. One of these, the influential and experienced journalist, investigator, researcher, and author Mr. John A. Keel stated: “there is not the slightest bit of evidence that even a single planet exists in any other star systems”: Visitors from Space (The Mothman Prophecies), by Mr. John A. Keel, published in 1975, Chapter Twelve, Part II, page 144.

As late as 1989 the large number of reports of alien craft was mentioned in a paper by a leading investigator, researcher, analyst, and author who questioned whether all of them were actually real, physical craft: Five Arguments against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects, by Dr. Jacques Vallée. A defence of the ETH made the year following in response to Dr. Vallée’s paper was provided in the paper The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis Is Not That Bad, by Dr. Robert M. Wood. Earlier defences of the ETH were made in the articles The ‘Parallel Universe’ Myth – A rehabilitation of the UFO as a method of interstellar exploration by the extraterrestrials of our universe, by Dr. Jacques Lemaître (a pseudonym for a French physicist), and In Defence of the “E.T.H.” (Extraterrestrial Hypothesis) by Monsieur Aimé Michel, published in Flying Saucer Review, November - December 1969, Vol. 15, No. 6, pages 22 – 24, & 25. We can now appreciate that many alien craft and especially the smaller ones may be advanced equivalents of our own, now very numerous and various, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) often called drones, or other uncrewed, autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft, aerospace, space, or underwater craft with which we now survey or reconnoitre the Earth and the solar system. For example, alien craft may have been among the unidentified airborne objects that were observed in France and Belgium over nuclear power stations in the last quarter of 2014 and in early 2015: French government on high alert after unexplained drone flights over nuclear power stations, published by The Independent online newspaper, 9 November 2014.

There have been reports of small alien craft departing from and returning to larger craft including very large “motherships” that suggest that aliens may deploy smaller, specialised craft after arriving in other star systems. Many of the smaller craft are evidently able to move very rapidly from place to place on a planet and probably other bodies as well such as moons and asteroids, or within bodies of liquid including water and possibly also other compounds or elements which are in a liquid state or gaseous state.

Most of the publicly available, detailed information that is available to study was provided by private individuals working alone or in groups who we now call citizen scientists. They collected reports about alien craft, their users, and their activities, and with the assistance of some professional scientists and engineers, they investigated, studied, and published the reports and their analyses of them. The widespread availability of advanced and affordable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems has enabled potentially, up to a billion citizen scientists to continue and extend this work, most of which has always been carried out by unpaid volunteers. We citizen scientists now have sufficient wealth, time, and access to powerful ICT to study the reports in the context of humankind’s latest scientific discoveries and technological developments.

Our ICT enables us to discover, rapidly search, compare, and draw useful conclusions from many more reports faster and easily than ever before. Citizen scientists already work with astronomers on the Planet Hunters project to help to discover more exoplanets. SETI citizen scientists contribute time on their computers or their own pattern-recognition abilities to try to recognise communications from exoplanets. Other citizen scientists help to search for natural gravitational waves from space, or for asteroids that might destroy our civilisation, or they study our galaxy, our Moon, our Sun, etc. The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has used another type of people-power called crowdsourcing to find experts to work on complex design projects. DARPA also invited inputs to a 100 Year Starship Study of interstellar craft. This could become a priority project if habitable exoplanets or exomoons are discovered around nearby stars.

Since “citizen scientists will have to be an integrated part of the scientific process of large facilities, not just in astronomy, but in other fields as well” our studies of alien craft and their users, and their activities must be based on clear philosophical, scientific, logical, and legal principles to be of practical use to fellow citizen scientists and to help to advance our science and technology. These principles can help us to resolve questions such as whether a report was probably authentic, whether it described something which was physically real and external to the observer, and which was probably not a natural or human-originated phenomenon, and whether the report was reasonably accurate and contained any useful information. The reports discussed in this book were selected from among those which seemed to meet most of these criteria.

A global team of over a billion people could now investigate, analyse, and share reports from all geographical locations and time periods to help with the research, design, and development of our own advanced aircraft, aerospace, marine, and submarine craft to be propelled by artificially-generated, gravity-like, synthetic acceleration force fields. We may also need to develop or acquire extremely powerful X-ray frequency electromagnetic field generators and X-ray mirrors or lenses (high energy X-ray optics) to direct and focus our new crafts’ acceleration force fields. As mentioned earlier new, compact and very powerful generators will eventually be required to power the crafts’ force field generators and other systems if they are to equal the observed performance of alien craft.

The human expertise, research and development facilities, and other resources required for us to develop or acquire our own high performance, synthetic acceleration force field- propelled and protected aerospace and underwater craft will inevitably exceed what citizen scientists alone can provide. The concepts proposed by some aerospace scientists and engineers to try to explain how alien aerospace craft fly and protect their hulls and users suggest that private and public research institutions and governments should allocate more resources for gravity-related studies, for example, observing cosmological objects that have very strong gravitational or gravitomagnetic fields such as black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarf stars. Experiments to try to generate and control synthetic acceleration force fields in our laboratories should also be restarted or expanded including in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station.

Landing gear (undercarriage) impressions that were left behind by alien aerospace craft whose approximate dimensions were also reported by observers have enabled their mass densities to be calculated: these were about the same as the mass density of water, or a modern nuclear-powered submarine. Since many alien craft have been reported to accelerate very rapidly we can easily calculate that the more massive craft especially, must generate, store, or control large amounts of power for propulsion.

More resources should be allocated to develop alternative designs for nuclear fusion-based energy generators that are compact, light-weight, and powerful enough to be integrated into and propel transportation systems such as aerospace, marine, and submarine craft. Relatively compact nuclear fusion-based generators may precede, supplement or even replace the physically much larger and more massive 500 megawatt output International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) that is presently being constructed in France: The Fusion Underground, by Mr. W. Wayt Gibbs, published in Scientific American, November 2016, Nuclear fusion: Can the stellarator unleash the power? by Mr. David Hambling and Dr. Richard Webb, published in New Scientist, 30 January 2016, No. 3058 and Little Fusion, Deep Learning and Other World Changing Ideas, by Mr. David Biello, published in Scientific American, December 2015.

Nuclear fusion reactors, just like nuclear fission reactors or fossil-fuelled electricity generators will need to capture and convert the energy they output, for example, “energetic neutrons”, heat energy or X-ray frequency photons into a usable form of power, most probably a stable flow of electricity. Energy capture and conversion systems will vary depending upon the specific design of a fusion reactor, and especially the type of fuel to be used. Some types of nuclear fusion reactors may use fuel that is radioactive, or they may produce radioactive waste: Opinion: Many Reasons To Be Skeptical Of Skunk Works’ Fusion Project by Mr. John T. Holland and Mr. Joe P. Holland, published in Aviation Week & Space Technology, 1 December 2014 and Q&A: Nuclear fusion reactor, BBC News, 6 February 2006. Various possibilities may exist for direct energy conversion. These issues are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2 (Alien technology).

The circular shape of many alien aerospace craft that is shared with the core systems of nuclear fusion reactors that are tokamaks (such as ITER) or stellarators (such as Wendelstein 7-X) may suggest that if the reactors’ magnetic containment fields or the plasma they contained were rotated (or moving waves of some type were created within the plasma) we might discover new phenomena including synthetic acceleration force fields that could be used to propel and to help to protect an aerospace craft. However, calculations suggest that the power usage of more massive or high-performance alien craft exceed what could be supplied by nuclear fusion-based generators; therefore alien craft may generate energy by reacting matter with antimatter.

Matter-antimatter-based energy generation systems should be studied intensively, the production of antimatter should be increased and existing antimatter storage systems improved to contain more antimatter for longer periods of time (“hundreds of antiprotons” have) been stored in a “reservoir trap” that uses “two overlying magnetic and electric fields” for over a year): Antimatter – Physicists investigate why matter and antimatter are not mirror images, published in The Economist, 22 September 2018, The PUMA project: Antimatter goes nomad, by Ms. Cristina Agrigoroae, a CERN Update, 11 March 2018, How a fiery matter-antimatter union may lead to limitless energy, by Mr. Jon Cartwright, published in New Scientist, 25 November 2017, No. 3153, pages 32 – 35, Antigravity: Discovering if antimatter falls upwards, by Dr. Joshua Howgego, published in New Scientist, 7 January 2017, No. 3107, pages 28 – 31,and The BASE antiprotons celebrate their first birthday, by Dr. Stefania Pandolfi, a CERN Update, 20 December 2016.

Resources should also be increased for theoretical and experimental physicists who investigate the fundamental particles called quarks and gluons, which are “responsible for the interactions of the strong nuclear force ... Gluons, unlike photons, also interact with themselves, and this could conceivably see them confining each other into a writhing mass of energy”. Professor Frank Wilczek was quoted as saying “I think the possibility of powerful X-ray or gamma-ray sources exploiting sophisticated nuclear physics is speculative, but not outrageously so ... Nuclei can pack a lot of energy into a small space ... If we can do really accurate nuclear chemistry by calculations as opposed to having hit-and-miss experiments, it could very well lead to dense energy storage: Quark ages: How these particles are the key to new physics, printed publication title Dawn of the Quark Ages, by Dr. Michael Brooks, published in New Scientist, 6 June 2015, No. 3024, pages 37 – 39, at page 39.

The hulls of some alien craft, especially what could be very large interstellar craft, may be constructed of very low mass materials or else the craft may be able to control their mass so that they can accelerate very rapidly without having to scale-up their power generation or propulsion systems. In 2012 scientists and engineers succeeded in using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to confirm a theory that particles acquire mass from contact with the hypothetical Higgs field: the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded to Professor Peter W. Higgs, CH and Professor François Baron Englert for their precursor theoretical work. Such theoretical and experimental work may eventually enable us to develop mass-reduction technology.

Organisations such as NASA have from time to time supported publicly-known studies of possible ways to achieve interstellar travel. The input of selected reports and analyses of observations of, or encounters with alien craft and their users to such studies could be helpful when deciding which ideas could justify further research and development. Serious, transparent, publicly-known, well-funded, long term projects to collect, investigate, study and publish reports of alien craft or their users could be commissioned that may help us to decide which new power generation and propulsion technologies to try to develop, and the astronomical observations towards which we should direct more resources. However, if and until this happens the citizen scientists of the world must do this important work, on which the future of humanity may depend.

The study of alien craft, their users and their activities can be fascinating in itself. As mentioned earlier, in the late nineteenth century there were reports published in newspapers about observations of, or encounters with what we may now interpret as alien aerospace craft and their users during the late period of the Old West, and in other parts of the United States. Many of these newspapers are now freely available online although access to some may require payment. The craft often simulated European airships of a slightly later time and some of their users masqueraded as human airship designers or inventors, crew, passengers, or investors. Their users often spoke perfect colloquial American English and displayed their knowledge of current human science and technology as well as of current political events and business practices. They made use of people they met, including their legal representatives, to communicate deliberately false information (disinformation) about their craft and themselves that became misinformation when it was widely distributed in good faith by the newspapers of the period. The purpose of the craft’s controllers or users may have been to ensure that these craft were interpreted by observers as being advanced human airship technology. The career of one of the legal representatives may even suggest an early interest in, knowledge of, or involvement by our military or security services with the aliens.

Historical newspapers may also illustrate that an evident desire by some people to be given irrefutable proof of a phenomenon without making any effort to investigate or analyse reports for themselves seems to have been as prevalent in the past as it is now. For example, during the last half of the twentieth century it was often written or said that people would only believe that alien aerospace craft existed when one “landed on the White House lawn”, and perhaps not even then. The same idea was expressed decades earlier when alien aerospace craft some of which simulated airships, appeared to survey New Zealand during 1909, discussed in Chapter 3 (Alien craft). A journalist wrote that “Until the phantom airship pays Dunedin a visit, a daylight visit, circles the Octagon, and descends for official examination at the Town Hall steps, I accept the doctrine delivered by Mr. Robert Grigor” (mentioned earlier) ... ‘A visitation from another world,’ is Mr. Grigor’s summing up of the phenomena”: Passing Notes published in The Otago Daily Times, No 14,590. Otago, Dunedin: Saturday, July 31, 1909, page 6, column 5, and Passing Notes (from Saturday’s Daily Times) published in The Otago Witness, No. 2890. Dunedin, N.Z: Wednesday, August 4, 1909, page 5, columns 2 & 3, which also contained (at page 32 and page 33) many reports of observations of alien craft in New Zealand. In the twentieth century, among the many reports of observations or detections of, or encounters with alien craft or aliens was a vivid and detailed report from Antarctica where members of a scientific team observed (and detected energetic radiation from) what we might now interpret as a pair of alien starships. The reported manoeuvres of these starships suggest that they were making their final tests before departing our solar system: A Cigar- shaped UFO over Antarctica, by Mr. Gordon Creighton, supplied by UFO Chile of Santiago, Chile (UFO Chile, No. 2 (October 1967)), Flying Saucer Review, March/April 1968, Vol. 14, No. 2, pages 20 – 22.

Although alien technology may be challenging to understand and emulate we have achieved a great deal technologically without yet having fully understood some very common natural phenomena. For example, despite all the progress we have made in developing and using electrical and electronic technology we still do not know how “the huge current of a lightning bolt ever begins to flow when air is an electrical insulator. It is possible to make air break down to form a conducting plasma, but this requires a fearsomely intense electric field of more than a million volts per metre”, whereas scientists have only measured electric fields in thunderclouds with a strength “about a tenth of that critical value” using airborne instruments. In addition, lightning “often produces flashes of X-rays and gamma rays, and even beams of anti-matter” and “radio pulses”. We do not understand forms of upper-atmospheric lightning that include red sprites, and elves (“glowing doughnut-shapes of light that grow to 400 kilometres across and then disappear – all in less than a millisecond”), and blue jets. Nor do we understand ball lightning, which has been reported for centuries and observed or encountered at ground level as well as in the atmosphere, in aircraft, surface marine craft and submarines, buildings, etc.

One study of lightning has suggested that a conducting plasma may be caused in our atmosphere by particles from the Sun. Further research may eventually assist our quest to develop or acquire powerful, non-polluting power generation and propulsion systems: Lightning leaves clouds of radiation and antimatter in its wake, published in New Scientist, 2 December 2017, No. 3154 and Bolt from the blue; Lightning doesn’t form like we thought also published in New Scientist, 15 April 2017, No. 3121, both by Ms. Shannon Hall, plus NASA’s Fermi Helps Scientists Study Gamma-ray Thunderstorms, 15 December 2014, plus There’s a lightning strike hike in strong solar wind, reporting work by Professor Christopher Scott and his colleagues, New Scientist, 24 May 2014, No. 2970, and the articles An unearthly answer to the lightning enigma, by Ms. Katia Moskvitch, New Scientist, 10 August 2013, No. 2929, and Strange skies: Cosmic confusion in the clouds, by Dr. Stephen Battersby, New Scientist, 25 February 2012, No. 2853.

Reports of alien craft, aliens and their activities do not necessarily support the idea that aliens or their surrogates are our cultural, social, moral, or even intellectual superiors. While their aerospace and underwater transportation systems and other technologies are clearly highly-advanced, the aliens or their surrogates have rarely displayed to us the qualities that we value most highly in intelligent, sociable beings, such as musical or other artistic talents, skills, or appreciation. In their dealings with many people who have encountered or observed them, they have sometimes been deceptive, for example, trying to distribute disinformation about the real appearance of their craft, and probably also themselves and their activities. The journalist, investigator, researcher and author Mr. John A. Keel reported in detail on what may have been a combination of alien and human deception efforts and how these affected his own investigations in his book Visitors from Space (The Mothman Prophecies), published in 1975. In addition, aliens or their surrogates have sometimes behaved callously or brutally towards people they encountered or sought out.

As mentioned earlier, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the controllers or users of at least some alien craft disguised them to simulate human-designed airships or early aircraft, evidently to try to persuade human observers that they had been constructed and were crewed by, human beings. During the twentieth century some of their transportation systems were disguised to resemble (or simulate) our contemporary aircraft, submarines, helicopters, aerospace craft, or cars. In the twenty-first century alien craft may have simulated the appearance and flight characteristics of small, remotely-controlled uncrewed helicopters or similar types of UAVs (drones).

Aliens have only occasionally displayed what we consider to be natural and desirable social behaviour or skills, or emotions such as empathy, friendship, humour, spirituality, kindness, patience, humility, pity, and the like. When the aliens have displayed this type of behaviour this may have been simulated because they have so often attempted to deceive people they have encountered or who have observed them or their craft. By contrast most of us have genuinely displayed one or more of the above qualities or behaviours at one time or another, so perhaps we humans are unique in these respects. In addition, it is possible that we may be starting to approach the level of some alien science and technology that has been observed or encountered, for example, our development of powerful directed energy weapons or tools, our use of magnetic fields to alter human brain activity, our experiments to suppress, erase, change, or replace the memories of human beings or animals, and medical implants into human bodies.

New technology power generation, propulsion, and hull and users’ protection systems will enable us to resume crewed space flights to the Moon, and make new and exciting crewed, interplanetary and eventually interstellar voyages. Therefore, it is appropriate to conclude this Prologue with an image of the crew of the Apollo 11 lunar expedition of 1969: the late Professor Neil Armstrong and Dr. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (at left and right in image) were the first people in the Apollo programme to walk on the Moon while Brigadier General Michael Collins, United States Air Force (retired) (at centre) orbited the Moon alone.