On The Net
The Zoo Hypothesis
by James Patrick Kelly
craze
On June 24, 1947 a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had an adventure https://www.history.com/videos/kenneth-arnold that would change his life and the lives of many others.
Or did he?
Flying a wooden-winged two-seater monoplane with a top speed of a hundred and twelve miles per hour, Arnold was cruising near Mount Rainier when he claimed to have spotted a string of nine shining unidentified flying objects skipping through the air like saucers, They were zooming in formation at what he estimated as twelve hundred miles an hour. Excited and puzzled, he went straight to the offices of the local newspaper when he landed to report the sighting. Arnold was an experienced pilot and a careful observer. According to the reporter who interviewed him https://pierrelagrangesociologie.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/1998/12/lagrange-interviewwithbillbequette-iur-internationaluforeporter-winer1998-copie-2.pdf, “Mr. Arnold did not impress me as a person who ‘saw’ things.” The day after the story ran, it was on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Many, many more sightings occurred that June during the 1947 flying disc craze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_flying_disc_craze, with over eight hundred confirmed reports, but possibly thousands of others. Dentists and railway workers, cops and waitresses, moms and dads and kids saw some thing (or things) in the sky. Entire groups claimed sightings: the crew of United Flight 105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_105_UFO_sighting bound for Pendleton, Oregon, and a group of sixty picnickers in Idaho. Observers in Portland and Vancouver submitted multiple reports to police.
Almost a month before Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, an Army Air Force balloon based at the Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico crashed. It was part of the top secret Project Mogul program. Weeks passed before rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel discovered the debris on his property. He called the local sheriff, the sheriff notified the Army, and a team from Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) was dispatched to pick up the wreckage. On July 8, the public information officer at RAAF issued a press release reporting that a “flying disc” had been recovered near the base. “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.” The next day the headline in the local newspaper read RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/in-1947-high-altitude-balloon-crash-landed-roswell-aliens-never-left-180963917/.
Why cook up the original flying disk story? Perhaps because the secret of Project Mogul was that the US believed that the Soviet Union was already close to developing nuclear weapons and the balloons were designed to detect sound waves from an A-bomb test. The higher-ups in the military-industrial complex did not want to admit their concern to the public, but whoever thought the flying saucer spin would deflect attention from Roswell was dead wrong. “Apparently, it was better from the Air Force’s perspective that there was a crashed ‘alien’ spacecraft out there than to tell the truth,” said Roger Launius, the recently retired curator of space history at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “A flying saucer was easier to admit than Project Mogul.”
The Army almost immediately retracted the statement and claimed instead that what they had recovered was just a weather balloon. But this lame retraction came too late. The AP ran with the original flying disk story and one of the most famous conspiracy theories of the twentieth century was born.
However, the Army’s Cold War coverup did work for a time. Over the years the Project Mogul balloon crash faded into obscurity until the mid-1970s, when several “witnesses” came forward to revive Roswell mania. Publication of the fact-challenged The Roswell Incident https://archive.org/details/roswellincident00berl/mode/2up in 1980 ushered in a new era in UFO publishing (I counted 500+ book entries on Amazon before I gave up) and Roswell passed into folkore, with wild tales of alien autopsies and re-engineered spaceship technology locked away either in Hangar 18 https://www.history.com/news/hangar-18-ufos-aliens-wright-patterson or Hangar 84 https://www.lodedevroe.be/hangar-84/ or Area 51 https://www.space.com/area-51-what-is-it.
It wasn’t until 1995, when the government declassified Project Mogul in The Roswell Report https://www.dafhra.af.mil/Portals/16/documents/AFD-101201-038.pdf, that the Air Force owned up to this true story.
We interrupt this column for a brief rant: Yes, I know that we’re supposed to call them Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). But the government has so mishandled UFO investigations that responsible observers are understandably reluctant to come forward with reports. So the Department of Defense desperately needed this rebranding, which took hold only with the establishment of the awkwardly named All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office aaro.milaaro.mil in 2020. We’re sticking with UFO for now in protest over DOD’s bureaucratic word salad.
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but why?
When we look at reports of UFO incidents, it makes sense to apply the standard proposed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan https://carlsagan.com/: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Misperception and flawed memory dog so many of these accounts and the evidence is most often wispy. Alas, it seems that as soon as an incident is explained away, two more pop up, as they did in that summer of 1947. Debunking tales of UFO encounters is hard and thankless work.
Lacking proof that they exist, we are left to speculate about the nature of aliens and their interstellar spaceships. In the last installment we discussed what scientists think about the possibility that advanced civilizations might exist on other planets. Such conjectures matter not only to ufologists, but also to those of us who are UFO skeptics and yet believe there could be intelligent life elsewhere. Applying recent discoveries made using the Kepler Space Telescope https://science.nasa.gov/mission/kepler to the Drake equation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AnLznzIjSE, we have reason to believe that there are trillions of exoplanets in our galaxy, of which a significant fraction may sustain life. But how many exoplanet biospheres are likely to give rise to intelligent life? And if intelligent beings create advanced technology, how long will their civilization thrive? The Kardashev scale https://www.space.com/kardashev-scale imagines levels of technological development based on energy usage. If our alien visitors had advanced to somewhere between a Type I (able to harness the energy of a star) to a Type II (able to harness multiple stars) civilization, then they might be able to afford the enormous expenditure of energy and resources to mount an expedition to our Solar System. But again, we come to the Fermi Paradox https://www.space.com/25325-fermi-paradox.html. We’ve been searching for techno signatures from extraterrestrial intelligences for decades and have yet to discover any trace of their existence. In SETI https://www.seti.org/ circles, this frustrating state of affairs has come to be called The Great Silence https://earthsky.org/space/meti-workshop-in-paris-fermis-paradox-great-silence/.
Let’s reiterate a fundamental truth about the size of our galaxy: everything is mind-bogglingly far apart. Constrained by the speed of light, even if aliens had the capability to travel between stars, most trips would take centuries. Earth, at one edge of the Milky Way, is almost 27000 light years from the galactic center. Who signs on to leave home forever to play hide and seek with homo sapiens? And how does a civilization benefit from sending astronauts off on a subrelativistic mission to a distant planet, exiled by time dilation to a remote future? Perhaps intelligent aliens see no point in contacting us, much less visiting. And even if they were open to communication, they may be too far away to be detected. Or our technology may be too primitive. Or we may simply be looking at the wrong part of the sky. All are reasonable explanations for the Great Silence.
Or, as ufologists would probably argue, maybe they don’t want to be found.
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the zoo hypothesis
At this point we are approaching the boundary that separates science fiction from science. As the basis for an SF story, it’s fun to consider why civilizations more advanced than ours might have reasons for concealing themselves. But it turns out that astrobiologists have played this game as well, as you can see by clicking After All of This Time Searching for Aliens, Is it the Zoo Hypothesis or Nothing? https://www.universetoday.com/165005/after-all-of-this-time-searching-for-aliens-are-we-stuck-with-the-zoo-hypothesis/. Much of it will seem familiar to Asimov’s readers.
In 1973 the late MIT radio astronomer John Ball published a paper that suggested that if there are advanced alien civilizations, they might have adopted a hands-off policy with humankind, isolating Earth as a kind of wilderness zoo so as not to interfere with our development. In some variations, these first civilizations are closely monitoring us (UFOs, yes.) although there is no reason for them to be close at hand (UFOs, no.) They may have altruistic reasons for concealment, for example, respect for the well-being of an intelligent species, or a scientific purpose to study the diversity of intelligence in a kind of controlled experiment. The conspiracy-minded may posit a more active experimentation in which alien scientists steer our development with surreptitious interventions. Or it may be that, having found us, the first civilizations have decided that we have not yet progressed (Technically? Socially? Morally?) enough to warrant contact.
I’m sure that astute readers are already compiling mental lists of science fiction stories that rely on variations of the Zoo Hypothesis. And at least a couple of our classic writers had the idea long before John Ball. In Star Maker (1937) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker, Olaf Stapledon wrote “Great care was taken by the Symbiotic race to keep its existence hidden from the primitives, lest they should lose their independence of mind. Thus, even while the Symbiotics were voyaging among these worlds in rocket vessels and using the mineral resources of neighboring uninhabited planets, the intelligent worlds of pre-utopian rank were left unvisited.”
Arthur C. Clarke revisited the idea several times, for instance, in Childhood’s End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End. And not only do the alien monoliths of 2001: A Space Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(novel) notify their makers of human progress, but in 2010: The Year We Make Contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two comes a stern warning to preserve developing intelligence: “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.”
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exit
Take heart, ufologists! While the Zoo Hypothesis has problems, it appears to be your best hope for rationalizing all those sightings, then and now. And don’t forget that while Carl Sagan did ask you for extraordinary evidence, he had another favorite aphorism.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Copyright © 2024 James Patrick Kelly