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Eyes to the Skies
Searching for aliens in our own and other worlds
By Michael Sims
DECEMBER 28, 1999:
For his new book, Washington Post staff writer Joel Achenbach has
come up with a wonderful topic. Captured By Aliens explores all the
colorful ways that our imaginations have been captured by the idea of
aliens from outer space. To do so, he addresses both the serious
astronomical search for extraterrestrial life and the outrageous claims of
true believers. Such a range allows for the most comprehensive approach to
this fruitful topic that I have ever seen. Achenbach had the intellectual
courage to tackle such a huge project, and the stick-to-it-iveness to pull
it off. The result is one of the most satisfying books of the year.
Achenbach is not a professional in planetary science, the psychology of
self-delusion, or any other scientific discipline. He's a journalist and
author. As a well-informed generalist, he researched until he knew the
right questions to answer. Then he asked them of experts in every field
from molecular biology to sociology. At times the experts themselves are
eccentric and colorful. Several well-drawn characters reappear frequently;
they include Carl Sagan, himself a passionate advocate of the search for
extraterrestrials and yet a devastating critic of the UFO crowd, and Dan
Goldin, NASA's chief optimist in the field of space exploration.
In his enlightening rambles through this fascinating interweaving of
topics, naturally Achenbach visits Roswell, N.M. This little town has
shamelessly exploited its sole claim to fame by promoting itself into the
epicenter of alien fever in millennial America. The facts behind the
fictional Roswell spaceship crash have long been known, although they
seldom make it into Fox Channel pseudo-documentaries and never into The
X-Files. Achenbach not only recounts the phenomenon, he visits Roswell
to dramatize its sheer goofiness. Although he remains fair and open-minded
at all times, this section of the book shows that he is a skeptical,
critical investigator, and one who doesn't mind having fun along the way.
Achenbach is also good at expressing the inadequacies of what passes for
reasoning among the UFO believers. We claim that these alien races are more
advanced than we are, he points out, and yet they're supposed to be
obsessed with us. "They come across mind-boggling reaches of space to meet
us, experiment with us, mate with us," he writes. "We have such enchanting
DNA, they just can't stay away. Ufology, for all its generosity in filling
the universe with life, nonetheless has a distinctly anthropocentric
flavor." This attitude is much like our preoccupation with angels: It
always comes back to how special we think we are--our desperate hope that
surely somebody up there is keeping an eye on us.
Sadly, Achenbach doesn't analyze E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the
movie that best dramatizes this savior theme in alien visitation. However,
he does touch briefly on Spielberg's other mishmash of alien daydreams,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What Achenbach calls "the wimpy
little critter" that walks out of the spaceship at the end of the movie is
one of the progenitors of the ubiquitous modern image of aliens. But even
this has an ancestor: Spielberg based the creature on the one that appeared
in the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident, which gullibly dramatized the
alien-abduction claims of Betty and Barney Hill.
Interestingly, although most alien encounter scenarios match Spielberg's
cinematic version, Betty and Barney Hill disagreed in their separate
accounts of their abductors. In Achenbach's words, "Betty said the aliens
had huge noses, sort of like Jimmy Durante. Barney said they had no noses
at all, just a couple of slits for nostrils. Betty said they had dark hair.
Barney said they had no hair at all."
On the other side of the ledger, Carl Sagan seemed to believe
passionately in the inevitable discovery of extraterrestrials. He had no
more evidence than the naysayers; he just had conviction, which is
different from science. Along with many others in his field, he pushed
numbers around to manufacture estimates of the "likely" number of habitable
planets in the universe. To Sagan's credit, in each case he would hold out
hope as long as he could, but finally the scientist in him had to admit
when another possible home for aliens bit the dust--the moon, Mars, Venus.
Still, like the UFO believers, his enthusiasm echoed the words of the 1950s
monster film The Thing From Another World: "Keep looking! Keep
watching the skies!"
However, as Sagan himself liked to intone, "Extraordinary claims demand
extraordinary evidence." In Captured By Aliens, Joel Achenbach looks
for the evidence to match the extraordinary claims of the flying saucer
crowd. In a recent interview on NPR, he admitted that he wouldn't believe
in aliens if one bit him on the leg. A typically colorful Achenbachian
remark, but a bit extreme: If it contained a little alien saliva, a leg
bite would be the rarest thing of all--genuine evidence.

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