Essay: A FRESH LOOK AT FLYING SAUCERS

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In the event that a civilization exists on some planet orbiting a nearby star, and has been able to detect transmissions from Earth, it is unlikely that any of its saucers have yet arrived to investigate. Even the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away. And because presumably no spaceship—or any matter—can travel at or beyond the velocity of light, which is the universal speed limit according to the Einstein theory of relativity, it would take considerably longer than 4.3 light-years to reach the earth from its nearest stellar neighbor. At the 17,500 m.p.h. that astronauts travel, it would take nearly 170,000 years.

What of the possibility that an advanced culture may somehow have learned to circumvent the Einstein limit, and thus be able to send craft to distant stars at incredible speeds? Says one physicist: "My God, could our whole science just be a fiction completely unrelated to what the UFOs might have? All this earthly science—F equals ma and all the rest that I so much believe in—could it really be something else?" Many laymen, baffled by the scientists anyway, might find the overthrow of all their lore quite entertaining. But most scientists insist that their laws are universal; even the motion of distant stars and the nuclear reactions within them appear to obey the laws of terrestrial science.

To saucer advocates who suggest that extraterrestrial beings accidentally discovered the earth's civilization during random exploration of the universe, Sagan has an answer: "If each of a million advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy launched at random an interstellar spacecraft each year, our solar system would, on the average, be visited only once every 100,000 years."

For vehicles guided by supposedly intelligent beings, the UFOs have exhibited remarkably ineffective and capricious behavior. Instead of concentrating around obvious examples of intelligent life on earth, such as large cities, they have been seen most often above deserts, farms and backwater towns. Their only reported communication has consisted of trite exchanges ("Don't be afraid") with relatively simple citizens or outright fanatics. But saucer buffs point out that man has studied the behavior of bees and learned their social order and "language" without even attempting to communicate directly with them.

The most telling argument against the reality of UFOs is that no proven physical evidence or hardware has ever been found to support the saucers' existence. And although astronomers photograph the sky incessantly, no UFO has ever left an image on their photographic plates.