When I moved to Washington D.C. in the late forties, my horizons began to expand. I had never heard of science fiction before. We lived in Silver Spring, just outside the District Line. Greensboro, where I came from, had streetcars. In those days, there wasn't much fear of getting kidnapped, so even when I was five and six, I could pretty much get around wherever the transportation took me. The Washington transit system was well developed, with streetcars running pretty much everywhere in Washington, and buses connecting the streetcar terminals with the outlying communities. As the bus connecting to the streetcar terminal at the District Line went by the corner up from my house, I pretty much could roam where I wanted to. The most fascinating place, however, was the newsstand at the District Line. It didn't take me long to find the tiny section dealing with science fiction. It was a revelation.
The section, however, was tiny, and replenished only monthly, so I didn't have much to get my hands on until, that is, I discovered Friend's Used Books on the corner of 9th and New York Avenue in downtown Washington. There I found the hardcover editions of E.E. Smith, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, all the early classics. In addition, crawling around underneath the overstocked tables I would come upon issues of Astounding Science Fiction dating back to the early 30s, in pristine condition, and each costing the princely sum of a dime. The issuance of the early anthologies spread my reading experiences even further. I even took a train to Philadelphia in the early 50s to attend one of the early science fiction conventions at which most of the mentioned authors were present and in a book-signing mood (not to mention a drinking mood, as I was kept awake the entire night by bottles crashing into the courtyard below my window).
Of course, all this stuff was pretty way out. While I think Asimov's Foundation Series one of the reading experiences of my early life, I clearly didn't buy into it. To me, Heinlein's early children's science fiction adhered pretty closely to what I would consider reality. However, the fantastic Dr. E. E. Smith, nowhere to be seen today, while spinning stories that were clearly beyond reality, still grounded himself in reality, or at least what I considered a possible reality. For instance, his invented mode of interstellar travel is not unlike that described by T. Townsend Brown's experiments with disks. His methods of decelerating his space ships through something called inertial drives take into consideration the fact that objects do not have weight without gravity. But more interesting, he met aliens wherever he went in the universe, and while some of the aliens were pretty wild, they were everywhere, unlike Asimov, whose galactic empire had a core source.
In short, one of the propositions I accepted in all the science fiction that I read was that we were definitely not unique in the universe, that there were countless stars in the sky, and therefore there were countless planets orbiting those stars and countless species that had evolved on those planets. This is not only common sense, the idea dates back to Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake in 1600, partially for this identical view. The proposition is simply not open to scientific analysis. To claim otherwise is simply religious nonsense. In law school, it's called Res Ipsa Loquitur, it speaks for itself.
That was the way things stood on July 1952, when Washington was blitzed with UFOs of the flying saucer type, photographed and picked up on radar and extensively reported in all of Washington's then 5 newspapers, as well as around the world. All very interesting, I thought, but even then I was of the opinion that anyone with the ability of interstellar travel would have about as much interest in contacting us as we have in contacting isolated tribes that have let time pass them by. I had already figured out that we'd missed the boat somewhere along the way, I didn't exactly know where, but that any interest we might excite by interstellar travelers would be morbid curiosity at best (I had yet to encounter the delights of sociology). I figured they'd fly around for a while and then simply take off for more interesting endeavors.
However, I thought the result here on Earth would be a reexamination of our basic theories about gravity. After all, I had been pursuing this subject since I was about four, and there wasn't a question of learning anything more about it other than what I already knew, that it was an inverse square phenomena, that objects of different weights fell at the same rate while needing different levels of energy to move against it. That's what empirical science knows about gravity and at the time, as now, it had no interest in knowing anything else about gravity.
Which made my knowledge of gravity greater than that of empirical science, because even back in the days of the '52 flap, I knew that gravity had to be dynamic simply because its effects were dynamic, another example of Res Ipsa Loquitur, although I didn't know the term at the time, I knew that matter had to be composed in a way that would allow gravity to act upon it the way it did, more Res Ipsa Loquitur, I knew that whatever caused gravity had to be generated by matter rather than simply being a property of matter, again Res Ipsa Loquitur, and finally, I knew that gravity had to exist between its source and its effect, really obvious Res Ipsa Loquitur.
So here I'm thinking, science, an open and inquisitive project, a dogma drilled into my head since my earliest memories, will go back and start to examine some of Newton's propositions to see if there was any flaw in them.
What do I get, not almost immediately, but immediately? The pictures and reports of radar contacts were replaced with reports of cranks and nitwits who were making false reports, lying to the press, to the military, to the government, that the citizens of the country, people who had just fought the war of the ages and won a fair and merciful victory, were really just a bunch of dumb sheep bleeping out for unknown reasons, the need for attention, deep seated psychosis, a hate for their mother and a love for their father, wait, I think I got that one backwards, but simply blathering away at what I was already familiar with, a party line dictated by a central authority. The subject of unidentified flying objects became the subject of flying saucers and tea kettles, to be ridiculed at all opportunities in as pubic and as humiliating a way as possible.
What promotes attempts to suppress people from talking about stuff that really doesn't make any bit of difference, after all, the saucer flap came and went without blowing up the Washington Monument, or without landing and having some silly robot emerge to incinerate the assembled forces of the war warmongering USA? Why go to all the trouble to suppress something if it doesn't exist. Hmmm. Res Ipsa Loquitur again. They wouldn't suppress nothing so they obviously must be suppressing something.
Operation Paperclip had brought over a lot of the German rocket scientists led by Werner Von Braun. They had been working without publicity to modernize the German V2 into a rocket that could put some sort of satellite in orbit. After the '52 flap, however, public interest in the subject of space travel brought these guys out of the shadows and gave them some publicity. They got a lot, the chief popularizer being a guy named Willy Ley. Ley's The Conquest of Space, written several years before the flap, became an instant bestseller. I had purchased Ley's book when it came out. It was very precise in what calculations would be used to put a rocket in orbit, and in describing the types of orbits rockets would be most stable in. It also described precisely how rockets could reach the moon and the planets. All these calculations were done using Newton's turned around celestial mechanics, where the orbits of planets were used to determine their content, and they all subsequently proved to be wrong. But in those preSputnik days, there was no experience to provide a guide.
With Von Braun's group and popularizers like Ley, however, people started asking, if we can get into space, then why can't others in space get here, giving substance to the UFO problem. The empirical community once again had to scramble to come up with a reason why objects that didn't move like our gravity is a property of mass engineered aircraft moved were spotted moving without getting into the shallowness of the gravity is a property of mass proposition. They came up with a doozy, and I have to admit, it was years before I bothered even questioning it. The distance to the stars, a relatively meaningless figure, Alpha Centauri, the closest star to the sun, is 4.35 light years away, had been drilled into us as kids. Because it was used to teach us what a light year was, the distance light traveled in a year, and how fast light traveled, I more or less simply accepted that Alpha Centauri was in fact 4.35 light years away because everything else we were dealing with was fact.
With the public pretty much already educated precisely how far the stars were, the empirical community started issuing statements how long it would take for a rocket to travel to Alpha Centauri and how impossible it would be for the inhabitants from other planets to get here even if they had advanced as far as we had, get that one, were as superior as we are. Even if we were not alone in the universe, we were stuck alone in this little corner of space. It dawned on me in college just how similar the motivation of this edict was to the Earth is the center of the universe edict. Both rested on the rock solid bulwark that we were unique on this planet and would continue on this planet as we are. While both are based on overwhelming ignorance, at least Aristotle's was honest ignorance. As we shall see, empirical science is protecting the rock upon which it is founded, the mass/gravity concept and Celestial Mechanics, and in the process, its remunerations, prestige and ability to dictate how reality is to be viewed. If objects could move like the objects that are continually being sighted move, then mass/gravity is exposed as so much bunk.
I pretty much left the UFO question behind, following it only when there were any of the government's extraordinarily idiotic pronouncements on the subject, which in my opinion did more for the UFO cause then anything because, while it may not have created a majority of believers, it created a majority of disbelievers, people who didn't know about UFOs one way or the other but knew they didn't believe the government (the latest Roswell explanation defies even that criticism, leading me to believe their dumb explanations are really a form of admission). However, when I started in on the Copernican Series in the nineties, I started to ask the basic question we all need to ask, how is it that empirical science knows what it claims to know, and that brought the distance to the stars back into my sights, not as a question of UFOs, but simply because the distances seemed wrong.
I finally addressed the question in Where Science Went Wrong. There I recounted our old friend Hooke's struggle with an edict by the Royal Society for him to get his butt out and measure the parallax the Earth produces so England would be the first country to prove Copernicus correct. To understand parallax, stick a finger out in front of your nose and alternately open and close each eye. The finger moves back and forth. This is parallax. The analogy to the Earth is, opposite sides of its orbit are the eyes and a distant star is the finger. The idea is, the star will move with respect to the background stars and this will prove the Earth has opposite sides to its orbit and thus Copernicus was right.
Well, Hooke kept delaying the measurement. However, the Royal Society President kept right on insisting, so Hooke finally turned in a measurement, and the world duly celebrated. The problem was, as the English astronomer, James Bradley, the astronomer who announced that parallax had been discovered to the world in 1728, noted, the claimed measurement was 30" (thirty seconds!) away from reality, which is to say the error was about six hundred times greater than current claimed parallax measurements, which are in the area of one twentieth of one second. Noting that it was not only grossly off, but off in the opposite direction, Bradley attempted to explain why the measurement appeared reasonable at first. Proffering the explanation that currently supports the entire house of cards that is empirical science, he stated that he "had no small opinion of the measurements' correctness because the length of the telescope [complexity of the equipment] and the care taken in making them exact [complexity of methodology] were both strong inducements to having thought them so." Bradley is defending the measurements because the measurements, rather than proving Copernicus, were being used to measure the distance to the stars, the parallax star being the height of a triangle whose base is the diameter of the Earth's orbit.
Because the measurement is impossible, empirical science simply claims it has made it. No one, without access to the equipment, can gainsay it, and no one can get access to the equipment without empirical credentials. This is how Flammarion explained it in Popular Astronomy (1894):
"In the whole of sidereal astronomy there is, perhaps, nothing more difficult to determine than the parallax of a star. To think that among all the stars in the sky there is not one which shows a parallax of one second! Now, one second is a millimeter seen at two hundred meters, it is a hair of a twentieth of a millimeter seen at 10 metes [32.8 feet]! Well, it is in this width that the annual motion of a star is performed. The telescope magnifies it, of course; without this it would be absolutely imperceptible; but how easily it can be concealed by the imperceptible motions of the telescope, by the influences of temperature, by refraction, precession, nutation, aberration, and by the proper motion of the star itself in space! All these united influences amount to several seconds, and are themselves subject to some uncertainties, and instrumental errors must still be added to them. How, then, shall we extricate trustworthy indications of the minute displacement due to the effect of the earth's motion? Astronomers, however, succeeded in doing so for some stars."
In short, the resulting measurement is smaller than each of the factors influencing the measurement. It's impossible, so empirical science just says, it's done. All the distances in space result from parallax measurements of the stars within 25 light years of Earth, and to put the situation in earthly terms, the claim that parallax measurement can measure the distance to any star is as credible as a claim that the statue of the bull on Wall St. could be put in place by surveying the tip of one horn using the angle allowed by a hole the size of a dime on the side of the Empire State Building where the location of the Empire State Building is determined by surveying the clouds passing the flame on the torch of the Statue of Liberty through the same hole!
Here's the real UFO issue. Empirical science has decided to put up one more ditch, I think in the middle ages they called them moats, between reality and UFOs. They are now putting out this gem. If UFOs are here, it's in violation of our scientific theories and our scientific theories must be false. But our scientific theories being false is patently absurd since we bet our lives on their truth every time we enter a building or fly in an airplane designed by our physics.
This is too easy. Empirical science lives on the fraud that its asinine theories produce technology. Let's take the basics. The Big Bang. What technology does that produce? Celestial Mechanics? What technology does that produce? Rockets, you say? What in the world does reducing planetary orbits to some sort of mathematical hocus pocus have to do with the technology of getting a rocket off the ground. Light as a water wave? Well, if Edison had relied on that little gem, we'd all be living in the dark. Quantum Mechanics, excuse me, science? Let's see, the notion that an electron jumping up in down in orbit produces light creates exactly what? Hmmm. Oh, that's right, nothing. Let me search my memory, here. Mass/gravity? As far as I can tell, rather than sending us out to do something, that little theory says we can't do anything. If something is a property, well, you can't change the color of gold or the weight of lead. Gosh, there must be something. Oh, right, in column 01-06 I mentioned Roy Glauber's Nobel Prize in physics for producing a mathematical structure that led to a revolution in optics. I also pointed out that's the empirical way, take a technological development that occurred in spite of idiotic empirical restrictions, create a bunch of mathematical crap no one can understand, claim it is the basis of the technological development, then write the author up in journals, load him or her with prizes, then claim the mathematical crap produced the technology.
So that leaves the empirical guardians with this statement: If UFOs are here, it's in violation of our scientific theories and our scientific theories must be false. Therefore, UFOs can't be here. If UFOs can't be here, then there's no reason to discuss them.
A science that refuses public discussion of a topic is not a science. And if empirical science is not a science, then there's no reason discussing reality with its members. There's no obligation to argue with ignorance.
ADDENDUM: I just learned an extraordinary fact that leads me to correct my comments about Hooke taking so long to attempt his measurement. I had, for Where Science Went Wrong, used comments from the minutes of the Royal Society, as well as the fairly dismissive attitude of empirical science toward Hooke (always a thing to avoid, but not always so easy as pervasive as it is on every subject), to paint a picture of Hooke dragging his feet on the issue. Well, to some extent he was. When the project was envisioned, no one realized its difficulty. The telescope Hooke employed was hopelessly inadequate, and while any telescope would be hopelessly inadequate, I assumed this was the reason for Hook's feet dragging. As it turns out, there's quite another reason.
The Great Fire of London occurred in 1666. Christopher Wren planned and built a monument to the fire. This took him nine years, 1671-79. The tower, 202 feet high (a figure apparently designed to show the distance to the fire's point of origin), has always been a tourist attraction because of the view it provides. In the nineties, Channel Four in Britain was doing a documentary on the fire. Lisa Jardine at the time was producing a massive biography on Wren. Channel Four asked her to take part in the shoot, as she relates in the Preface to On a Grander Scale (Perennial, 2002). It was a bitter cold morning and she had to huddle by the ticket booth while they set up the camera shots. After several hours, the attendant, taking pity on her, asked if she'd ever seen the basement of the tower. She said no. He rolled back the carpet to reveal a trapdoor. Lifting the trapdoor, Jardine found a beautifully carved set of curving stone steps leading into a massive chamber below the column. She knew immediately what it was. Wren, along with his lifelong friend Hooke, had turned the monument into a massive zenith telescope to fix the star he was using to measure parallax.
I had always taken Bradley's statement, that Hooke's erroneous measurement was reasonable because of the length of the telescope and the care taken in making them exact, was just more bloviating on the part of the establishment, but now I know it's due to the fact that Bradley was aware of Wren's and Hooke's trick of creating a scientific laboratory under a public monument. The two must have had many a laugh over it.
ADDENDUM: A nationally read columnist recently referred to a President's belief in UFOs as a preposterosity, a coined word that means what it looks like it means. Having lived in D. C. most of my life, I've always known every President, from Ike on, and perhaps, in light lf later events, Truman, were interested in UFOs, some to a greater degree than others. However, I've never done a column on it because UFOs are not my field, even my book, Let's Talk Flying Saucers doesn't deal with UFOs other than assuming they exist as real visitors from other planets, so I've never spent the time doing the research necessary to produce a sourced article on the subject. Dennis G. Balthaser, however, has, and his article on one Presidential candidate, can be found on his site.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com