The Ancient Alien Question Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the moon? The photographs of Cape Canaveral and its numerous launches, the hours of footage shot onboard the various Space Shuttle missions? Assuming it all survives the next millennium, it will indeed all add to the controversy, but if a historian wants to explain it all away, he can do so. That is precisely what those unwilling to believe we went to the moon are doing at this very moment.
Contact ’s main message is that belief and a willingness to explore are two vital ingredients required to establish and accept alien contact. It was the final message that Carl Sagan sent out to humankind, as he died during production of the movie. But his quest for extraterrestrial life began many decades before.
    The Man Behind Contact
Sagan’s youth was characterized by an interest in science fiction. The remainder of his life was spent in an effort to answer the question of whether or not there was life elsewhere in the universe, including how to contact it, if so, and whether it had already contacted us. In 1951, when he first set foot in the halls of academia, he predicted that humankind would set foot on the moon by 1970. It was not a scientific prediction; he just hoped that we would take this important step, just as his heroes in science fiction books had done. Sagan felt that the moon, then the rest of the solar system, and finally the entire universe had to be researched in an effort to find life. He wanted to be Captain Kirk.
His first scientific writings speculated on the possibility of life on Jupiter, Venus, or Mars. Even though science constantly gave a negative answer to every question he posed, Sagan would not stop asking. When it became likely that our entire solar system was devoid of any intelligence, he felt we had to set our sights on other such systems.
In retrospect, such enthusiasm might seem childish. But when Sagan started his quest, in the early 1960s, there really waslittle if anything known about the physical conditions on our neighboring planets. Many scientists were open to the possibility that our own solar system contained other life-forms. Various UFO sightings and stories, specifically during the previous decade, seemed to underline this possibility. Sagan was initially intrigued by these accounts, but his own research convinced him more and more that the methodology used by UFO researchers would never lead to a satisfactory answer. He also believed that the “evidence” they presented was not evidence at all. In later years, he would do his best to undermine the entire field of ufology, as he felt it was a powerful detraction from where the real quest for extraterrestrial intelligence should be directed.
Sagan spearheaded the Western scientific search for ET, and however scientific his approach was, it is a fact that most other scientists looked down on him and his attempts. They felt it was an endless game; the universe was simply too big to find out whether, somewhere, life might have originated, too, and could be flourishing, with alien intelligences trying to make contact with us.
Sagan understood the difficulty of his quest; when he discovered that life did not exist on Venus, it merely meant he had to look elsewhere. It is like the famous Edison statement that he had found 2,000 ways of not making a light bulb before he found a way to make one. Sagan was inspired by his sciencefiction heroes from his youth, who always went farther, pushed boundaries, and, to paraphrase Gene Roddenberry, boldly went where no one had gone before.
Sagan was a scientist, and felt that it was his personal mission to educate the public about scientific methodology. He feared that the public wouldn’t understand his scientific methods because they seemed more alien than the intelligence he was searching for. He was horrified when he noticed that the public adopted “pseudoscience” as a methodology—it provided them clear, unambiguous answers to the questions everyone had, butfor which science did not have