I for one, welcome ...
oh, never mind.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:11 PM by John Houghton

Lots more. The reason it's not posted is that Jim has been following Betty and Barney Hill's route, taking photos and checking facts. He's been planning this one for a while.

Here's the teaser: Betty and Barney Hill's UFO is still there. You can go see it for yourself. Jim says it looks darned spooky.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:14 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Yeah, but he should have used "Keep watching the skies!" as his end-tease.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:49 PM by Ray Radlein

I confess, I have always assumed that folks who report themselves as having been abducted by aliens are batshit crazy, for some value of the term. Yes, I loved Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at least until the ending when the aliens actually appeared. Makes no difference.

I hope you are not going to disabuse me of this comforting notion.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:04 PM by Lizzy L

No spoilers -- but surely you've gotten Jim's measure by now?

Posted September 19, 2007 11:07 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

They're also referenced in the TV Miniseries Taken.

And I like Andras Corbin Arthen's theory that the people who today have alien abduction experiences would have "gone to visit the elves" long ago...they have a lot of things in common like lost time, non-human humanoids (often diminutive), etc. Andras thinks it's a real experience (i.e. they're not lying), but it's a spiritual one, not an ordinary-reality one.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:22 PM by Xopher

Xopher @ #6:

Carl Sagan mentioned this idea in A Demon Haunted World. Was he borrowing from Arthen?

Posted September 19, 2007 11:41 PM by Tom S

#6 It's not their theory alone, and some (many?) with that theory attribute it to endogenous or environmental or accidental ingestion of DMT.

Posted September 20, 2007 12:02 AM by BSD

Ray Radlein @ 3... he should have used "Keep watching the skies!" as his end-tease

Tonight, on Alpine Abductions...
Keep watching the skis!

Posted September 20, 2007 12:15 AM by Serge

All the really cool stuff happens in New Hampshire.

Posted September 20, 2007 12:40 AM by Madeleine Robins

Haven't thought about this in ages. I remember buying the book from the Science Fiction Book Club, but I mostly remember watching the tv movie -- James Earl Jones as Barney Hill just blew me away, especially when Hill was reliving his experiences under hypnosis.

Posted September 20, 2007 12:55 AM by Jeffrey Smith

Wow, I hadn't thought about this in years either. When I was seven or eight, I got really interested in books about UFOs, TV shows like "In Search Of...", etc. And always, Betty and Barney Hill was a centerpiece story...

Posted September 20, 2007 1:56 AM by Evan Goer

Xopher @ #6: That's one of the central themes of R.A. Wilson's Cosmic Trigger. If you've never read it, it's worth a read. He brings out a great sense of how all these occult and mystic types, when you catch them right, would say something to the effect of "Something strange is going on here, but I'm not really sure what."

Did you ever hear of the mid 19th-century airship sightings? Supposedly during the mid-late 1800s, people in various remote parts of the US reported meeting friendly visitors descending from the sky in giant airships, who explained they were just traveling from some-remote-part-of-Europe in these airships, and they're the latest thing on the continent.... only of course there wasn't any such thing.

Posted September 20, 2007 2:18 AM by Clifton Royston

Yeah, those aliens have really good abs.

Posted September 20, 2007 3:06 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

If I were a "believer" (I'm not), I'd say: "Of course people in the olden days claimed they'd seen 'elves' -- they didn't know it was really alien visitors!"

The weakest part of abduction stories, like a weak case against a murder suspect, is "motive".

Why would highly advanced aliens travel a tremendously long distance, at astronomical (ha ha) costs, just to kidnap somebody? What's their motive? (Excessive boredom?)

Posted September 20, 2007 3:33 AM by A.R.Yngve

So it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Yarrrr!), Hermione Granger's birthday, AND the anniversary of one of the weirdest stories I unearthed in the library as a kid?

Wow.

I feel as though three phases of my fannish existence just hopped into a Tardis to have tea at Milliways.

Posted September 20, 2007 3:43 AM by Jenny Islander

Used to be dragons. And mysterious flying wheels.

she wrote. “At this point, my husband became shocked and got back in the car, in a hysterical condition, laughing and repeating that they were going to capture us.”

Anyone know what Barney Hill did in WW2, because this sounds like a flashback, some sort of PTSD? Though is seems a dreadfully long time after the war. Still, something like that would really screw up anything from hypnosis.

Posted September 20, 2007 3:45 AM by Dave Bell

Never been sure why disproving stories like this is so all-fired important.

Posted September 20, 2007 5:18 AM by Zander

A suggestion, Jim; you could mark out the location on a Google Earth KMZ overlay, so everyone can appreciate exactly where you can see the Presidentials from. And add any photographs you may happen to take. Or get Kathryn Cramer to do it:-)

Posted September 20, 2007 5:56 AM by Alex

@ #15: "Why would highly advanced aliens travel a tremendously long distance, at astronomical (ha ha) costs, just to kidnap somebody? What's their motive? (Excessive boredom?)"

I'm sure many Pacific Islanders in times gone by used the same argument to demonstrate why White Europeans were a myth.

Perhaps we need to concede that an alien culture might have alien motivations.

Mac

Posted September 20, 2007 5:57 AM by Mac H.

"Today, this very day, forty-six years ago, Betty and Barney Hill drove down U.S. 3, right past my house and into history. "

So Jim set them up, right? He made a deal with his masters from beyond the void and sacrificed these two innocents to monsters of unholy lust.

I think I should definitely write this up. The truth needs to be told.

Posted September 20, 2007 6:35 AM by bryan

#15 A.R.Yngve: Why would highly advanced aliens travel a tremendously long distance, at astronomical (ha ha) costs, just to kidnap somebody? What's their motive? (Excessive boredom?)

My theory has always been that they heard through the galactic grapevine about a strange race of beings that believes it is being visited by flying saucers and so, astonished, they came down here to have a look for themselves.

Posted September 20, 2007 6:47 AM by Michael Weholt

Jim taking the time and trouble to do this is cooler than I can possibly express.

Posted September 20, 2007 7:08 AM by Steven Brust

#15: "Why would highly advanced aliens travel a tremendously long distance, at astronomical (ha ha) costs, just to kidnap somebody? What's their motive? (Excessive boredom?)"

I'd always heard it was because Earth women were hot. That probably didn't apply to Betty at her age, though.

Posted September 20, 2007 7:16 AM by John L

I read somewhere that 10% of Americans think they have been the subject of alien abduction.

What I want to know is where are J and K when we really need them?

Posted September 20, 2007 7:40 AM by marrtyn

Ooh, I remember finding that book on a relative's coffee table when I was in my early teens. I spent an evening reading it and got completely freaked out--at 14 I'd believe anything.

I told my mom about it, and she explained what folie a deux meant.

Posted September 20, 2007 8:04 AM by K.C. Shaw

::: Clifton Royston @13 Did you ever hear of the mid 19th-century airship sightings? Supposedly during the mid-late 1800s, people in various remote parts of the US reported meeting friendly visitors descending from the sky in giant airships, who explained they were just traveling from some-remote-part-of-Europe in these airships, and they're the latest thing on the continent.... only of course there wasn't any such thing.

They were from France? Snrk.

MAO

Posted September 20, 2007 8:37 AM by oldsma

Curse you! You have sold me a whole seat, but it is in excess of my specific requirements.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:00 AM by Leah Miller

I'd always heard it was because Earth women were hot. That probably didn't apply to Betty at her age, though.

Perhaps we need to concede that an alien culture might have alien motivations.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:10 AM by Kip W

It doesn't apply in this case, but a lot of alien abduction stories sound to me a lot like sleep paralysis. I've experienced an episode (sans aliens) and it was scary as hell. Complete awareness of sounds, touch, etc. combined with total paralysis of voluntary muscles. I couldn't open my eyes; couldn't even speed up my breathing by trying. I wasn't worried about aliens, but until I found out what it was I was concerned I might have some horrid neurological problem. (I do have a relative with narcolepsy.)

Posted September 20, 2007 9:10 AM by Lila

Earth might be some sort of rest stop on a galactic backroad. A place to get out of the ship for a while, or do some minor maintenance made easier by gravity and atmosphere. The amusing natives could just be a bonus, like picking up frogs near a pond ("I was abducted by hairless apes"). You don't hear about all the ships where nobody has an interest in the local fauna.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:11 AM by Seth Finkelstein

#30 Lila: It doesn't apply in this case, but a lot of alien abduction stories sound to me a lot like sleep paralysis.

I've heard this theory before and, based on my own experience with sleep paralysis, I find it plausible.

Having said that, I will lay a small wager that there is at least one person reading this thread who has had what he or she believes was an alien abduction experience. I would love to hear about it. I personally won't try to argue you out of it, though I won't say I won't find the notion dubious. And I can understand hesitancy in the face of what would likely be an avalanche of skepticism. I have talked with people who describe having had this experience. They are usually extremely shy about discussing it.

Still. If you have a story you feel like telling, I personally would be interested in hearing it.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:32 AM by Michael Weholt

And I like Andras Corbin Arthen's theory that the people who today have alien abduction experiences would have "gone to visit the elves" long ago...they have a lot of things in common like lost time, non-human humanoids (often diminutive), etc.

This requires some setup, but I promise there's a connection.

So back before GURPS (it's a roleplaying game) did its most recent reboot, they put out a setting book called GURPS Technomancer. The premise was that Oppenheimer's Death-Destroyer-of-Worlds quote, in combination with the atomic bomb test, had ripped a hole in reality and let, basically, magic in. So the setting was essentially "what the 2nd half of the 20th century would look like if magic suddenly worked".

There were some very neat bits--why, yes, JFK was killed with a literally magic bullet, why do you ask? Eva Peron's cancer was cured by magic, and she was still running Argentina in the 1990s. And the sidebar on "sidhe abductions", complete with teensy implanted metallic "elfshot". I thought that was so beautiful, it was almost worth the price of the book on its own.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:45 AM by Carrie S.

I would like to see a graph of the total reported cases of different weird memory-glitch-like phenomena over time. Do the stories of visits with angels and elves drop off as the space alien visits increase? What replaces them as space alien visits become less common?

My guess: Some oddball thing happens, and the person maps it to the best match they can find, and then retells the memory internally till it is internally consistent. This underlying oddball thing could conceivably be contact with space aliens or spirits or angels, though I am pretty skeptical of that. But the nature of memory is that people tend to reconstruct a sensible story from what is remembered, and this can be really far from reality.

It's really a fascinating experience to read old journal entries or to try to reconstruct a sequence of events from documentary evidence, and compare it with what you remember. I recall putting together a resume a few years back that I had messed up a bunch of sequences of events (order of classes as reported on my transcript, sequence of school/job/life events, etc), including some for which I had enough logical consistency in my "memories" that I would have bet a lot of money on my memories being right. I guess that extremely intense and scary experiences, and experiences that you see in a very different light many years later, are much worse in this regard than fairly simple and unemotional things like "when did I take that finance class, when did I take statistics, and when did I overlap the ideas between them?"

Posted September 20, 2007 9:52 AM by albatross

#33: said GURPS book is clearly disinformation from The Laundry.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:53 AM by Jon Meltzer

Having said that, I will lay a small wager that there is at least one person reading this thread who has had what he or she believes was an alien abduction experience. I would love to hear about it.

I do not personally have such an experience, but I have two accounts from friends--directly from the person, in both cases. One claims to have seen a UFO outside his window while fully awake (and he also has sleep paralysis, which he says is scary and completely different); the other is a more conventional "abduced from bed" story with a bit of a twist to it.

He says that the aliens, as is apparently fairly common, carried him through the wall and that while they were doing so he noticed a carpenter's pencil in the wall space. He chalked it up to a dream, but several years later, when renovations of the room were undertaken, a carpenter's pencil was in the wall in the right spot. He tells me that he thinks it's possible he had the abduction dream and then went back and unconsciously filled in the pencil afterwards, but that's not how he remembers it; he remembers having seen the pencil before the wall came down.

Posted September 20, 2007 10:00 AM by Carrie S.

I'm afraid Barry Ween, Boy Genius has entirely ruined me for alien abduction stories; I can't think about the subject but the words "Look at me! I'm John Holmes!" (along with Judd Winick's rather... evocative art) spring, unbidden, to mind.

Posted September 20, 2007 10:07 AM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

Kip @ #29:

Well, given the very low number of "hot Earth wimmen" that have been abducted, I'd say that theory was bogus.

Otherwise, we'd be having an epidemic of abducted NFL cheerleaders or similar groups.

Posted September 20, 2007 10:12 AM by John L

Xopher @ 6... Andras Corbin Arthen's theory that the people who today have alien abduction experiences would have "gone to visit the elves" long ago

I think that theory first came up in 1978, with French writer Bertrand Meheust. If you can read French, the link below will take you to the site of SF writer Elisabeth Vonarburg, who talks about the recent re-release of Meheust's book:

http://www.noosfere.org/heberg/auteurstf3/Sommaire.asp?site=58

Posted September 20, 2007 10:14 AM by Serge

Considering the "use" the Europeans generally put indigenous populations to, I think we're lucky with our new alien masters. So far.

Posted September 20, 2007 10:51 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Ya'll know about the "Lights over Phoenix" right?

Okay, these are flares. I live not far from Barry Goldwater range and I see these lights on a very regular basis. They're military flares. And the famed "lights" are up there four or five nights of the week. The news media just chose to make a story out of it.

Anyway, /vent

Several years ago I was driving home on Maricopa Road -- which, at the time, before Phoenix vomited urban sprawl into Pinal County, was a lonely country road. It was possible to crash and not be seen until dawn if you ran off the road on on a particular curve.

So I come up on this curve and there's a guy in the road frantically waving his arms. I figured he'd been in a wreck or had seen one, got my cell phone out, stopped, cracked my window, and asked him what happened.

"They're coming! They're coming!"

-- The guy's pointing at the flares, which, as I said, are so common as to not even merit mention by the locals.

He continued to rant, "You've got to turn back! They're out there! They're coming!"

... I put my foot on the gas and left him in the dust, then called the cops to report Teh Crazy In Teh Road Stopping Teh Traffic.

Couldn't help but think, though, that if he'd had a video camera and had submitted pictures of his "UFOs" to the local media it's quite likely that there would have been a new round of Phoenix Lights stories. Because the local media just loves to carry those stories ...

Posted September 20, 2007 10:55 AM by Leva Cygnet

Xopher #6 And I like Andras Corbin Arthen's theory that the people who today have alien abduction experiences would have "gone to visit the elves" long ago...they have a lot of things in common like lost time, non-human humanoids (often diminutive), etc.

There are often similarities between "recovered" memories of alien abduction and "recovered" memories of abuse by Satanic cults...in particular, women claiming to have had a child when there is no evidence of such.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:16 AM by Richard Brandt

Personally, I'm expecting a glowing tombstone.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:25 AM by DaveL

albatross @ 34: Similar to Connie Willis's theory of near-death experiences in Passage? Perhaps people are experiencing a mini-stroke in a very specific part of the brain, or passing through a particular kind of marsh gas, or falling into a form of highway hypnosis particular to rural nighttime backroads environments -- something like that causes an experience that people try to fit to the nearest narrative their society has?

Do non-technological societies have similar abduction/fairy realm stories that haven't been updated to incorporate European airships or UFOs?

Posted September 20, 2007 11:31 AM by michelel

Hmm, well, my aunt Cindy (a sane and generally sensible person) tells this story. I believe it was the early to mid 1970s. Cindy drove my mom home late one night and dropped her off, then continued across (small, rural) town to her own house. On the way she saw a huge spherical light hovering just over the trees by the road; she said it was as big as a house and seemed to have rectangular "windows" near its top. Cindy said she slammed the accelerator and was afraid to look back. She said she was afraid she'd see people moving around behind those windows.

So that's the closest anyone I know has come to an alien abduction story. My uncle the rocket scientist occasionally tries to figure out what the UFO might have been ("streetlight?" "it was too big"; "reflected light from a nearby house?" "it was too BIG"), but without success. It has passed into family lore and we all accept that Cindy saw a UFO.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:32 AM by K.C.Shaw

There will be photos. When I figure out how to do a Google Earth overlay, I'll have that too.

Here's a sample for right now: Old Route 3, to give you an idea of what it would have looked like in 1961 (a section that was cut off when the road was straightened and improved, about six miles north of Colebrook).

I'm about to embark on a detailed commentary on Chapter One of The Interrupted Journey.

This will, alas, be long. Fortunately, the RSS Feed has already gone, I think, so folks' email (or whatever -- I'm unclear on how RSS Feeds work) won't be too clogged.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:35 AM by James D. Macdonald

I recently read a very interesting book on how people end up believing in alien abductions. It is called "Abducted", by Susan Clancy. It is highly recommended.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:37 AM by Andres

Thanks! This is fascinating.

That's a pretty area, by the way.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:38 AM by K.C.Shaw

Zander, #18: It's the fight for the minds of the bystanders. Nothing will ever convince the True Believers that they're mistaken, but there are an awful lot of people who can be swayed by con-jobs based on that sort of thing (see the "Lying in the Name of God" thread for more discussion about this), and that in turn can affect public policy in potentially-disastrous ways.

K.C., #45: Yes, what your Aunt Cindy saw was a UFO -- an unidentified flying object. What she didn't see was an alien spacecraft, because then it wouldn't be unidentified, now would it? :-) I'm with Asimov on this issue; if people want to insist that they're alien spacecraft, then don't call them UFOs, call them alien spacecraft... or flying saucers.

BTW, Arthur C. Clarke wrote an essay titled something along the lines of "Flying Saucers I Have Known", which I highly recommend to anyone who's interested in this sort of thing. The account of one such item which turned out to be a flaming golf ball from a trash fire, rocketing around the garden spitting sparks as it went, had me laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:58 AM by Lee

#46 James D. Macdonald: Here's a sample for right now: Old Route 3...

See, now, were I driving along that particular road late at night, I'd be half expecting to be alienly abducted, myself. But then I love scary stories about The Lonely Woods, Late at Night. The best thing about being a Cub Scout was going on overnight camp-outs to The Scary Woods. "The Blair Witch Project" was right up my secret fears alley.

Honestly, truly, bringing that pic up in my browser just now, in the context of this discussion, I got a little chill right up my spine.

Posted September 20, 2007 12:28 PM by Michael Weholt

That's a pretty area, by the way.

Indeed it is. And well-supplied with tourist cabins that can be rented by the day or by the week, for people who want to spend some time where it's usually at least ten degrees cooler than New York or Boston, even in the heat of summer.

Also -- if you're interested in making a thorough getaway -- the local cell phone service is spotty at best. If the office wants to find you, they may have to send out scouts on foot.

Posted September 20, 2007 12:40 PM by Debra Doyle

I too read the Fuller book on "the Hill case" when I was in, oh, sixth grade or so. Devoured everything having to do with UFOs and such. What sci-fi reading kid in rural Arkansas wouldn't want to be spirited away by more interesting beings to more interesting places? Then eventually I put away childish things and found more interesting places and people on my own.

But, lo, what contactee craziness Betty Hill has inspired since then, especially in the Internet age. For instance, the vast, many-leveled parking garage of conspiracies, contacts, and psycho-ceramics found at zetatalk.com, where you can read about the Hills' encounter straight from the ETs themselves here, here, and probably elsewhere.

Looking forward to rest of Jim's report with enthusiasm.

Posted September 20, 2007 12:41 PM by Mark

I guess I'm not surprised that the Sidhe/Aliens theory isn't original with (or at any rate unique to) Andras. I'm not sure he even represented it as such when he was discussing it. I like it and I got it from him (a decade or so ago, but after Sagan died, I'm pretty sure), so I attribute it to him.

Sleep paralysis, as Teresa could tell you, is normal during REM. People who don't have it are commonly known as sleepwalkers. If you have a sleep disorder you may have it without REM or have REM when you're partially awake. Seeing lights moving in the sky is a very simple kind of hallucination; Teresa's descriptions of some of the things she's seen go wayyy beyond that.

The first time I saw a UFO I was a child, and hadn't yet figured out that sometimes you get stuff on the lens of your eye, too small to hurt but big enough to show up. Since then I've seen a number of things that I, for one, could not identify, which makes them UFOs, but I don't actually believe they were alien spacecraft.

The thing that gets me is, if the aliens want to study some humans, why don't they ever take the ones who really want to go? I'd be delighted to take part in some alien interaction! (And no, ethan and Michael Weholt, I'm not referring to that old Kids In The Hall sketch, where the alien says "Qba'g lbh guvax guvf vf xvaq bs cbvagyrff? Jr cvpx hc gurfr Rneguyvatf, cebor gurz nanyyl, naq chg gurz onpx, naq fb sne nyy jr'ir qvfpbirerq vf gung gra creprag bs gurz qba'g zvaq ng nyy!" [might be slightly NSFW if you use a really big font])

More seriously, when I was an extremely troubled (and rather weird) adolescent, I spent a lot of time standing on the highest place I could find within walking distance of home (none too high in glacier-scraped Michigan), calling occupants of inteplanetary craft. Now, I might not have been much of a projective telepath, but you'd think I'd've gotten something for all those hours and hours of standing there thinking, with all the force and drama of an adolescent in the grips of those opera-sized emotions adolescents have, "Please come and take me away. I don't belong here. Please come and take me away."

Needless to say, my cries fell on deaf telepathic receptors, if there were any.

We're a speck (on a speck)^n, as wassisname says. And we're way out on the edge of the galaxy. It's unlikely we're the only intelligent beings in the universe, or even in our galaxy, but also unlikely that anyone could or would visit us. Any radio signals we picked up from them would be after their solar system died, and they won't get ours until we've been gone for millions of years.

It would be nice to believe in FTL technology (has anyone debunked Asaro's theory about it yet?). And yes, aliens will have motives we don't understand. But given our speck^n-ness, even if aliens found us worthy of visiting, how would they find us? Even if they can go faster than c, our radio signals can't; how would they know to look for us, out in this unlikely and sparsely-populated (starwise) backwater of the galaxy? It just seems fabulously unlikely.

I want it. I really, really want to meet a member of a nonhuman intelligent species someday. But since when do people like us get what we want?

Posted September 20, 2007 1:14 PM by Xopher

Lee, #49:

That's something I try not to think about too much when the subject comes up, because it makes me unreasonably irritable. Do I believe in UFOs? Of course I do, and everyone else does too, because to believe there's never gonna be anything flying around that you can't name right away is preposterous. Whether I believe in flying saucers is a completely different question.

Posted September 20, 2007 1:16 PM by R. M. Koske

Xopher @ 53

You mean you didn't wave a towel around? No wonder you didn't get picked up!

Posted September 20, 2007 1:42 PM by Sisuile

#18 Zander:
Never been sure why disproving stories like this is so all-fired important.

Because some of us like our reality as-is, complete with natural wonders.

Explaining what previously was unexplainable is the ultimate exercise in critical thinking. It'd be really nifty if there were aliens but it's even better that, with just a tweak of our perceptions, we can see how easily it is to shape our experienced world into something fabricated by our subconscious. Even better, we learn just how bizarre and wonderful the world is, without having to fill in the holes in our perception with elves and aliens.

Plus, thinking is just cool.

Posted September 20, 2007 1:55 PM by Keith

Xopher @ 53: maybe it would have worked better if you'd said "I wish the goblins would come and take me away right now?"

Not that that's ever worked for ME, more's the pity. And if it did work, with my luck, Jareth's reign would be over and the current Goblin King wouldn't look nearly so fetching in tights.

Posted September 20, 2007 1:56 PM by Rikibeth

Speeds, etc.

I've known people consistently mis-estimate their average travel speeds, sometimes quoting ridiculous journey times. In any case, peak speeds might be quite high, without much changing the average speed.

It's also quite possible that a speedometer would be over-reading, without giving a grossly wrong distance record. There's two mechanisms driven from the same source.

Posted September 20, 2007 2:02 PM by Dave Bell

Xopher @6: [..] I like Andras Corbin Arthen's theory that the people who today have alien abduction experiences would have "gone to visit the elves" long ago...they have a lot of things in common like lost time, non-human humanoids (often diminutive), etc. Andras thinks it's a real experience (i.e. they're not lying), but it's a spiritual one, not an ordinary-reality one.

One of my favorite books is Miracle Visitors by Ian Watson. Fiction, but it seemed more convincing than any "factual" books of alien abduction I had read.

Posted September 20, 2007 2:09 PM by Rob Rusick

#46, #50--
It must be my upbringing--here I was thinking it didn't look any worse than Old US 66 near Devil's Elbow (close to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, for those unacquainted with the northern Ozarks), or any of the other roads I spent my teenage years driving around on--or many of the roads I'm familiar with in Tennessee or Kentucky.

If you showed my the picture without an identifier and asked me to guess, I'd spend a lot of time wondering if this was a trick question, and this was maybe a picture of the road to a relative's house.

Of course, you're only going to get any speed on that road if you're well-acquainted with it, and it's daylight in good weather. With a stick shift, on some stretches you'd be changing gears almost as often as you do with town driving.

Posted September 20, 2007 2:11 PM by fidelio

Seth Finkelstein #31:
The amusing natives could just be a bonus

And the anal probes? Just a bit of zipless rishathra with the natives?

Posted September 20, 2007 2:45 PM by thanbo

fidelio #60:

Agree totally. We used to go banging along roads like that in Kentucky at much too high a speed after dark; it was my father's one thrill-seeking habit. Lots of times we'd go out with the expressed intention of chasing thunderstorms, flickers barely visible beyond the horizon; we never caught one, but the lights looked spooky enough to make one think of flying saucers.

Posted September 20, 2007 2:47 PM by joann

Re motives of intergalactic visitors: do cows ever wonder why they get tipped?

Posted September 20, 2007 2:53 PM by Connie H.

#61 thanbo: [Seth Finkelstein #31: The amusing natives could just be a bonus] ... And the anal probes?

It may be that the aliens don't have anuses themselves and so misinterpret ours as spiritual paths.

Wait, is this the religion thread...?

Posted September 20, 2007 3:04 PM by Michael Weholt

Michael, the anus IS a spiritual path.

I know mine is.

Posted September 20, 2007 3:10 PM by Xopher

michelel @ 44, I do recall reading about a folk belief of the native people in Guatemala, that might fit the bill. I'd have to find my old photocopies to be sure, but roughly, it was about spirits (white-bearded and dressed in white) who lived in mountains, who took the Indian people away to be their servants or to work on underground plantations. They were guarded by fierce dogs, but occasionally someone would escape and return to his village to tell the tale.
-Barbara

Posted September 20, 2007 3:39 PM by Barbara Gordon

Xopher #53: If FTL is allowed, then many of the arguments making UFO alien green/grey men from Zeta Reticulis impossible are gone, extinct, ex-arguments.

It's a measure of how fundamentally we all believe Einstein that anything which requires him to be wrong is regarded as deranged.

A bit like Darwin, in that respect.

Posted September 20, 2007 3:53 PM by Niall McAuley

Xopher @ 53

Well, now really, if you received an impassioned telepathic cry from a teenager, would you pick him up and carry him off to live with you? I had two teenage sons at one point, and my answer would be "no". I'd find someone who wouldn't be quite such a handful.

As for the probability of contact, read David Brin's essay on the Fermi Paradox. I think he's posted it on his blog/website somewhere. Basically, if there's someone out there in this galaxy at all, they can visit every solar system in the galaxy in less than 3 million years for a small initial capital outlay if they're willing to build and launch a relatively small number of von Neumann probes, that arrive at a star system, build a few more of themselves, and all move on.
No FTL drive needed, and the time can be reduced considerably if each probe builds hundreds more at each stop instead of only a handful.

Posted September 20, 2007 3:58 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Xopher @ 65

Ah, but the path to what?

Posted September 20, 2007 4:02 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#49/#54: "If I threw a pepperoni pizza across the back yard and you didn't know what it was, it would be a UFO." --My favorite quote (probably slightly mangled) from a UFO researcher/debunker, whose name I now forget.

Posted September 20, 2007 4:08 PM by Mary Aileen

But if it were sausage and mushroom I'd recognize it immediately.

Posted September 20, 2007 4:10 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Sausage and mushroom? Around here, it'd be an unidentified frying object.

Posted September 20, 2007 4:17 PM by Dave Bell

For knitters, it would be an UnFinished Object. We have lots of them.

Posted September 20, 2007 5:11 PM by P J Evans

Colebrook is "lying in the shadow of Mt. Monadnock"?

Posted September 20, 2007 5:19 PM by Dave MB

@53: Now, I might not have been much of a projective telepath, but you'd think I'd've gotten something for all those hours and hours of standing there thinking, with all the force and drama of an adolescent in the grips of those opera-sized emotions adolescents have, "Please come and take me away. I don't belong here. Please come and take me away."

But no one wants to hang around with angsty emo teenagers except, you know, other angsty emo teenagers (not even — heck, maybe especially not — former angsty emo teenagers like myself); so unless the aliens were also dramatic adolescents who thought that Earth sucked, they'd probably fly the other direction, fast. And if they were of the opinion that Earth sucked, they probably wouldn't be hanging around here, on account of their fancy interstellar spacecraft and all.

So your target audience was probably limited to bored alien kids whose parental units were stuck on Earth as zoologists or whatever, and who had their learner's permits but weren't allowed to leave the solar system.

Posted September 20, 2007 5:32 PM by Ray Radlein

Dave@#74: Yes, Colebrook lies just across the Connecticut River from Mount Monadnock, but it probably isn't the Mount Monadnock that you're thinking about. (Yes, there are two of them. The one in southern New Hampshire has all the good PR.)

Posted September 20, 2007 5:42 PM by Debra Doyle

I wonder if the various UFO abductees had an experience similar to mine?

I recall, at a young age, being taken from my home. I was surrounded by people dressed in white and all I could see were their eyes. They did things to me that hurt, and probed me with various instruments (yes, even there). After a while I awakened and I was back home.

What actually happened was this: when I was four, the family came home from a shopping trip. I went into my room, tripped, and hit the bridge of my nose on the edge of the toy box. My mom and dad heard my screams, grabbed me (and I presume the rest of my siblings) and rushed me to the emergency room, where they examined me, determined the extent of my injuries, x-rayed my skull, took my temperature (rectally), applied a local, then stitched up my nose.

I was four and I barely remember the episode, but I do remember enough to note the similarity to abductee reports. How many of them had similar episodes when very young?

Posted September 20, 2007 5:55 PM by Steve C.

martyn @ 25:
I read somewhere that 10% of Americans think they have been the subject of alien abduction.

That sounds like an exaggerated version of a poll done in the 1990s, which claimed that about 2% of Americans had experiences "suggestive of" an alien abduction. What the poll did was ask a sample of people if they'd had various experiences (e.g., sleep paralysis; experiencing an hour or more of lost time; seeing strange lights they couldn't explain; etc.). The authors of the poll then interpreted positive answers to enough of the questions as somehow indicating alien abduction.

So what the authors of the poll actually claimed (using highly dubious logic, to say the least) was that about 2% of Americans could have experienced alien abduction -- not that any particular fraction actually said they'd been abducted.

Posted September 20, 2007 5:58 PM by Peter Erwin

Awesome post, looking forward to the rest of it.

anyone here seen Ratatouille? remember the Pixar short at the beginning, about the (failed) alien abduction?

there's your alien teenager out crashing the family car...or family spaceship, as it were...

Posted September 20, 2007 6:13 PM by Diana

I get impassioned email pleas from teenagers with some regularity. I tell them to hang in there, that things will get better, that being a teenager (especially a gay teenager) sucks bigtime (npi), and sucks in direct proportion to distance from a major city, and that they should bide their time and learn everything they can until they're old enough to flee their tiny little town (if that much) forever.

I don't IGNORE them, which is what those damned aliens did to me. Bastards.

Posted September 20, 2007 6:22 PM by Xopher

What's this about Mary Aileen abductions?
("Alien. Not Aileen.")
I can take off my tinfoil hat then?

Posted September 20, 2007 6:26 PM by Serge

R.M. Koske, #54: More annoying yet are the people (only a few to date, thank ghu) who become completely bumfuzzled when I say I don't believe in flying saucers... because wait, don't I read science fiction?

To which my usual response is, "Yes. And that means I can also tell the difference between science fiction and fantasy."

Posted September 20, 2007 6:40 PM by Lee

How about Gerry Anderson's U.F.O.? Remember the year 1980, when the men wore jumpsuits, and the Moonbase's female personnel wore bright purple wigs?

Posted September 20, 2007 6:44 PM by Serge

Diana @ 79

Yes, that was hilarious. Typical terrific Pixar animation; with characters like that, who needs dialog?

Posted September 20, 2007 7:20 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Serge writes in #83:

How about Gerry Anderson's U.F.O.? Remember the year 1980, when the men wore jumpsuits, and the Moonbase's female personnel wore bright purple wigs?

The Moonbase, the submersible supersonic interceptors, the AI tracking satellite, the silver miniskirts, and the VTOL-airlifted anti-saucer crawlers were all secret. For all we know, they're still out there defending the Earth, mostly successfully, except for the occasional stray Peruvian death meteor.

(Serge and I seem to share a fondness for certain kinds of schlock SF... Fumetti, anyone?)

Posted September 20, 2007 7:35 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Serge (81): I'm sure you'll be crushed to know that you're not the first to make that connection. I had a high school classmate who, on seeing my name written out for the first time said puzzledly, "Mary Alien?"

Posted September 20, 2007 7:39 PM by Mary Aileen

michelel, #44, I've had an NDE. I haven't gotten to Passages yet, but I believe the scientific evidence, which is that as the brain loses oxygen, it dredges up images and ideas from your past.

Jim, great work! I'm looking forward to the next part.

Posted September 20, 2007 8:04 PM by Marilee

Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey @ 85

I used to watch that one too; that and Space: 1999 are about all I remember of that year or two in Boston (not my favorite place). But tell me, how can you keep those miniskirts secret as long as there are hetero males around? And also, how did the actors keep from being beheaded by the gullwing doors of the cars when they got out? Looked to me like the props guys had snorted one too many DeLoreans.

Posted September 20, 2007 8:24 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Bill Higgins @ 85... Serge and I seem to share a fondness for certain kinds of schlock SF

Indeed. Gerry Anderson's oeuvre was a great part of my initial exposure to SF. Supercar... Stingray... Fireball XL-5... Yes, he has a lot to answer for.

Posted September 20, 2007 8:25 PM by Serge

This is incredibly fascinating, and I want to hear more about it -- and I'd really like to see the whole thing published as a book (or at least put up in one piece on a website when you were done.)

Posted September 20, 2007 8:26 PM by Tony Zbaraschuk

Mary Aileen @ 86

Ever since I moved here I've been wanting to do a midnight tagging raid on the exit sign on Route 217 that marks Allen Road. I figure just black out the a bit of the second 'l' and we'll see how long it takes before people start talking about "Alien Road". It drives me nuts every time I go by there because that's the only way I can read it now.

Although with the way the whole immigration issue is going I'm not sure but it wouldn't start a real ruckus: that part of Beaverton is where a lot of Hispanics have been moving in as the Asians move west out of the first ring suburb. This whole area has been playing Musical Minorities for a couple of decades now.

Posted September 20, 2007 8:31 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Serge #89: But not, I am shocked to see, Torchy the Battery Boy ('Torchy, Torchy, the Battery Boy...' sang three-year-old me along with the theme song.)

Posted September 20, 2007 8:46 PM by Fragano Ledgister

So... Is this write-up earmarked for The Skeptical Inquirer?

Posted September 20, 2007 8:56 PM by Pfusand

I can't wait to see what comes of this strange "meteorite" hit in the high and dry plains of the Andes. I feel certain we will soon be hearing The Truth about it, by way of the Coast to Coast AM Show or whatever. A new manila file folder has been opened in the drawer marked "X", I'm absolutely certain of it. Watch the skies.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:00 PM by Michael Weholt

@53 and @68, re the Fermi paradox: it really is a puzzle; most reasonable assumptions about the nature of the universe lead to the conclusion that we ought to have alien visitors. But not aliens who pop down to probe us and then disappear: logcally, we would expect to be in the middle of a galaxy-spanning alien civilization. There'd be an office park and a WalMart on Venus, a strip-mining operation dismantling Jupiter, and a mini-storage facility where the asteroid belt used to be. A lot of SF novels are basically explorations of random ideas about why this appears not to be the case.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:20 PM by Wim L

Wim #95:

For the Fermi Paradox: While all the alien civilizations will conclude that there must be older, more advanced civilizations out there, one of them will be wrong.

I wonder if we are the most advanced civilization in the universe?

Posted September 20, 2007 9:27 PM by James D. Macdonald

Fragano @ 92... I've never even heard of Torchy. But there was Joe 90, Father Unwin and Matthew, Captain Scarlett (where the same hero dies at the end of each and every episode)... And Thunderbirds of course (would you feel comfortable flying on an atomic-powered plane called the Fireflash?)...

Posted September 20, 2007 9:36 PM by Serge

#96 James D. Macdonald: I wonder if we are the most advanced civilization in the universe?

I don't see any reason to exclude that possibility. Granted, the age of our system is, what, 1/3 to 1/2 the estimated age of this universe? My feeble amount of astronomy suggests to me that no sort of life that we are familiar with could arise from a system around An Original Star (i.e., one that didn't arise from the detritus of a nova or supernova) so it seems reasonable to me that all occupied systems might be as young as, or younger than, our system.

It's got to be a razor-edged race to be the oldest, though. What's the age difference between a stone-age civilization and a star-faring one? If we make it 10,000 years further on, I'll bet we'll be star-faring in some manner or other, either robotically or what-all. 10,000 years is a tiny fraction of the age of a system capable of giving rise to life (as we know it). If there are a bunch of life-capable systems out there, and we are the oldest, 10,000 years from now we could be in the midst of an incredible blossoming of contacts.

Or, maybe we aren't the oldest and it could start tomorrow, or even later tonight.

All of which, I'm sure, only exposes my genuine ignorance on this subject.

Posted September 20, 2007 9:51 PM by Michael Weholt

Is it just me? I have this group of rebel neurons that, whenever I hear or read "Betty and Barney", or "Barney and Betty", insist on trying to put "Rubble" after it. Legacy of a misspent yoof? Signs of being a certain age …

Speaking of which, a friend entertained me while I was sick by (among other things) showing me episodes from his DVD box set of the UFO series. We only saw some of the Gerry Anderson series in Oz, so I don't recognise all of the examples here; my fave was Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (poster) with its unseen villains — how can you have a schoolgirl crush on a puppet? People are strange.

But gullwing door cars, like the series, distinctly pre-date the 1980s Delorean, e.g. the Mercedes Benz 300L (some here) is from the 1950s.

Posted September 20, 2007 10:42 PM by Mez

Ray Radlein @ 75: "So your target audience was probably limited to bored alien kids whose parental units were stuck on Earth as zoologists or whatever, and who had their learner's permits but weren't allowed to leave the solar system."

I'd read that.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:00 PM by Heresiarch

Heresiarch @ 99: Parke Godwin's Waiting for the Galactic Bus has some resemblance to that plot.

Posted September 20, 2007 11:14 PM by Joel Polowin

Zander: It's not "so all-fired important"; note the difference in tone between JMD's dissection and the fanaticism ("no wiggle room for the doubters!") in some of the believing works. That being said, some reasons why it might be:
- Exposing fraud is a mitzvah, like picking up trash by the side of the road; there will always be more, but reducing entropy even for a minute is a Good Thing. (Reducing entropy, however temporarily, could be considered a mark of sapience.)
- Many of us live by facts, or at least give them far greater importance than wild speculation (let alone outright lies) presented as fact.
- While we live by facts, many of us genuinely like to be surprised by new information; but we like the information to be genuine. Fraud is such an industry that undercutting it gives us more real fun to play with.
- Sometimes we're just insulted that people think we should believe this rubbish. (Never underestimate the power of pique.)
- It's an intellectual exercise to filter the few facts out of a farrago of nonsense, then show how the facts have nothing to do with the nonsense (cf Keith@56). Occam's razor is fun to wield, and is more likely to improve the environment than solving abstract puzzles.
- Some debunkers may even dream of public fame; blowing up a ridiculous story is a lot more comprehensible than proving a mathematical theorem.

That's half a dozen reasons, to go with the impossible things some people believe before breakfast.

Posted September 21, 2007 12:21 AM by CHip

I think Douglas Adams did a bit about teenage aliens that would go to a backwards planet, dive bomb cars on lonely roads, etc.

I loved the show U.F.O. I particularly liked the one where the aliens made Straker think he was actually an actor on a sci-fi TV show about UFOs and aliens. That sort of paranoid recursiveness worked well with the genre.

The whole alien thing seems to go in phases. Other than a few singletons like the "Phoenix lights", you don't have people getting rectally probed every other week.

I wonder if the conspiracy hounds have found other outlets in governmental conspiracies and it's just a few old-timers still pulling for the flying saucers. I just ran across the Denver Airport conspiracy yesterday (thanks, Wikipedia!). I've never been through the new airport, but it's apparently chockablock of Evil artwork and Evil coded messages, and let's not forget the Masons.

Posted September 21, 2007 12:49 AM by Alan Hamilton

Michael Weholt @ 98

We might not be the oldest, but we're very likely the oldest for some distance around. It's possible, even at velocities no higher than 10% of c to explore every star in a galaxy the size of ours (between 400 and 1,000 billion stars) in less than 10 million years based on what I think are fairly conservative technological abilities that we could develop in the next few hundred years. So it doesn't take long even in biological terms, let alone geological or astronomical terms, to cover a lot of distance. At the same rate I think we could expand to the entire local group of galazies, total more than 5 trillion stars, I'd guess, in a volume 10 million light years across in less than 200 million years.

So if they haven't gotten here yet they must be coming from a long ways away.

Posted September 21, 2007 12:55 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

I've been watching U.F.O. recently--I'd go so far as to say it's not schlocky, just very campy. And very smart.

Posted September 21, 2007 1:02 AM by ethan

Personally, I think the aliens took one look at what we've been broadcasting, and quarantined us.

It's quite possible we're the only ones in the galaxy, or at least the only intelligence currently exhibiting both curiousity and technological means --, or, at least, dreams.

I do wonder what the odds are of another techonological civ arising if we disappeared from the earth. How long would it take? What would it be? Another primate? Cetacea? African Grays?

Posted September 21, 2007 1:12 AM by Steve C.

Steve C. @ 105

It's not clear that intelligence provides either a long-term survival advantage, so that once achieved an intelligence species is likely to persist for a long time, or that there is a typical evolutionary path to intelligence that is sufficently stable all along its length as to give a high enough probability of completing it that a significant number (> 1) of species will actually do so in the lifetime of life on Earth.

Maybe if we do ourselves in, nothing will replace us. Or maybe half a dozen species will dance around our graves.

Posted September 21, 2007 1:38 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#65?

Don't know how cows feel about being tipped, but it surprised my horse.

Locally, our felines (indoor variety) are complaining about having been scooped up into boxes last Saturday, put in a unnaturally fast vehicle, and taken to a place full of bright lights, white walls, and strange furniture, where not-our-aliens gave them rectal probes, shots, stared at their teeth and clipped their claws. They were taken back to their home at the end of all this and released, but it was all most upsetting.

It was all very upsetting.

Posted September 21, 2007 2:07 AM by Margaret Organ-Kean

Written about 50 years ago, by Loren Eiseley:

"Darwin saw clearly that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal pattern imposed from without, or moving exclusively in one direction. Whatever else life might be, it was adjustable and not fixed. It worked its way through difficult environments. It modified and then, if necessary, it modified again, along roads which would never be retraced. Every creature alive is the product of a unique history. The statistical probability of its precise reduplication on another planet is so small as to be meaningless. Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is ever to come that way again."
...
"In a universe whose size is beyond human imagining, where our world floats like a dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably lonely. We scan the time scale and the mechanism of life itself for portents and signs of the invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet -- perhaps the only thinking animals in the entire sidereal universe -- the burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. We uncover the bones of the past and seek for our origins. There is a path there, but it appears to wander. The vagaries of the road may have a meaning, however; it is thus we torture ourselves."

"Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever."

-- Loren Eiseley, "Little Men and Flying Saucers," The Immense Journey

DANG!

Posted September 21, 2007 2:24 AM by Stefan Jones

Stefan @ 108 -

Thanks for that - Loren Eiseley was one of our best essayists.

Posted September 21, 2007 2:38 AM by Steve C.

I loved the UFO series, too, when I was a sprog in the 70s. I think I was too young for it, though: I'd watch a given episode, which would abruptly end, and I'd be left going, "What?" Not really understanding the story, basically.

I remember, around the same time, falling hard for the von Daniken nonsense--oh, it was totally plausible! It was!--and spending altogether too much time looking up at the sky, and kinda wishing a lot. This was before I also learned that one should always be careful what one wishes for.

When I first got onto the Internet in the early 90s, when you had to have so many different utilities to do different jobs, I discovered vast troves of fascinating UFO/alien-related documents in an archive at Rutgers University, and spent a lot of time downloading and reading them. They were all of the form of badly written and formatted text files about everything from secret aliens at Groom Lake, to CIA Mind Control (MK-Ultra, and everything), to you name it. I found that I was more interested in how passionately the people concerned believed in all this stuff than I was in the stuff itself. What was it about the material that stirred up such extraordinary passions, that made the believers (and the equally passionate disbelievers, for that matter) so intense? The material itself was thin and not that convincing, but you had people investing their whole selves in it, like a religious ecstasy, only involving "Space Brothers".

Nowadays, of course, even if it did turn out that the US government had a bunch of dead alien guys on ice at Groom Lake or somewhere similar, I'm inclined to think nobody much would give a damn, since everything else the government is doing is so much more terrifying, worrying, etc.

That all said, Jim, that was a damn fine post (I've now read the whole thing). Good on ya for going out there and looking into it all in such detail.

Posted September 21, 2007 2:48 AM by Adrian Bedford

#96 - I wonder if we are the most advanced civilization in the universe?

That is the most terrifying thing I have seen all week.

Posted September 21, 2007 3:02 AM by Koneko

While travel times between stars seem managable tat the civilisation level, nobody has really considered the energy cost. The sort of large-scale interstellar flood-fill being described has a huge launch overhead for each probe.

A van Neumann approach might not have the background energy consumption of a civilisation, but the change in system radiation as the next salvo of probes is fired off might be detectable.

Variable stars?

Posted September 21, 2007 3:10 AM by Dave Bell

If they used e.g. light sails, we might only be able to detect them if we were in line of sight.

Posted September 21, 2007 6:25 AM by Nix

Dave Bell @ 112:
A van Neumann approach might not have the background energy consumption of a civilisation, but the change in system radiation as the next salvo of probes is fired off might be detectable.

Variable stars?

I think there was a Larry Niven short story where the first signs of aliens approaching the Solar System was the "nova" they set off in another system to speed them on their way.

Alas, most well-studied variable stars have plausible physical mechanisms that explain their variability without needing aliens or von Neumann machines.

On the other hand, the various forthcoming all-sky surveys (ground-based and space-based) are probably going to turn up tens or hundreds of millions of previously unknown variable stars, so there's room to speculate about exotic mechanisms for a while yet.

Posted September 21, 2007 6:39 AM by Peter Erwin

Michael Weholt @ 98:
I don't see any reason to exclude that possibility. Granted, the age of our system is, what, 1/3 to 1/2 the estimated age of this universe? My feeble amount of astronomy suggests to me that no sort of life that we are familiar with could arise from a system around An Original Star (i.e., one that didn't arise from the detritus of a nova or supernova) so it seems reasonable to me that all occupied systems might be as young as, or younger than, our system.

It's reasonable to assume that you do need a fair amount of "metals" (astronomer-speak for all elements other than hydrogen and helium) in the cloud that a star forms out of to end up with planets and such, which does indeed require several rounds of supernovas.[*] And the Sun is a relatively "metal-rich" star, as stars go. (And "1/3 the estimated age of the universe" is spot-on.)

But you can get several rounds of "star formation -> supernova -> metal-enriched gas clouds -> new star formation" in a surprisingly short time[**], if the conditions are right. The central region of our galaxy has quite a few stars that are as metal-rich as the Sun -- or more -- but are billions of years older. Stars that are both older than the Sun and metal-rich are relatively rare out in our part of the disk, but they do exist. (It's speculated that they may have formed closer in to the galactic center, and been scattered out to larger radius by some mechanism, perhaps by the gravitational influence of the galactic bar.)

So even if you make the assumption that intelligent life requires a star as metal-rich as the Sun, you're still going to have a significant number of candidate stars in our galaxy that are several billion years older than the Sun.

[*] Or supernovae, if you prefer your plurals to be Latinate. (Novas/novae are different beasts, and don't contribute a whole lot.)

[**] Astronomers, like geologists, have screwy time scales, so "surprisingly short" here means something like "only tens or hundreds of millions of years."

Posted September 21, 2007 7:18 AM by Peter Erwin

ethan @ 104... Actually, if you take away the women's ghastly fashion, U.F.O. had some good stuff in it. For example, Straker had to pay a price for being in charge of a Secret Organization, with his marriage ending in divorce.

Posted September 21, 2007 7:51 AM by Serge

As far as fashion goes, futuristic film and TV seems to assume that the fashion catwalk is the only clothing source.

And I could imagine that sort of clothing in some nightclubs. Look at the fashion crazes of the last thirty years. But they didn't become uniforms or flood the market.

Posted September 21, 2007 8:08 AM by Dave Bell

Serge #97: The Andersons were very busy people, that's for sure. Hmmmmmmm. 'When the Mysterons plan to conquer the Earth/That indestructible man will prove his worth! Captain Scarlet!'

Posted September 21, 2007 8:11 AM by Fragano Ledgister

Dave Bell... You mean that the crews of submarines don't wear fishnet shirts?

Posted September 21, 2007 8:17 AM by Serge

Peter Erwin #114: That sounds like Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.

Posted September 21, 2007 8:17 AM by Fragano Ledgister

Fragano... Not quite. In Mote, the extreme brightness that announced the approach of aliens was caused by superduper lasers used to propel the alien sailship.

Posted September 21, 2007 8:29 AM by Serge