DAVID DARLING'S NEWSLETTER

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Issue #17
December 5, 2003
 E-mail david  Darling by clicking here!
 Get to his website:By Clicking here!

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Contents

1. Meanderings
2. My Take on UFOs
3. Bookends

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1. Meanderings

Let me take this opportunity to wish all of you and your families
the very best for Christmas and the New Year -- wherever you are and
whatever your beliefs. I'm grateful to you for visiting my website,
buying (if you have!) my books, and, in general, listening to my
ramblings on life, the universe, and anything else that the first
two don't include.

If you haven't checked out the front page of my website in the past
week or so, take a look and see. I've changed the "latest news"
section so that you now get a picture and the first part of articles
of interest on astrobiology, astronomy, spaceflight, archaeology,
science in general, and other strange discoveries (really, anything
that takes my fancy), from sites around the world every day. There's
then a link to each of those sites if you want to read further. Let
me know if there's anything you think I could do to improve this
service or if you have any ideas for the website in general: the
website exists for your benefit. I'm always keen to add new entries
to the on-line encyclopedia, so please send me your thoughts and
contributions (which will all be properly credited) for this too.
And do consider registering as a member of my new bulletin board. We
already have some interesting threads going and a small band of
regular visitors. But more users, more threads, more ideas will
always be welcome.

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2. My Take on UFOs

It's with a slight feeling of trepidation that I offer you my humble
thoughts on that wonderfully murky modern contentious subject of
UFOs. I know that some of my readers are mildly to strongly
sympathetic to the notion that some UFOs offer good evidence for
extraterrestrial visitation, while others would rather have their
tongues stapled to the floor than entertain the idea that UFOs were
anything other than "Unsubstantiated Fantastic Ovoids" (thank you
Roget's Thesaurus!) Is it possible, while remaining true to science,
to occupy a  middle ground between these positions? Sure it is. For
one thing, if UFOs are defined as pretty much anything unexplained
that gives the appearance of flying or being capable of flight, then
a whole lot of phenomena come under that umbrella. UFOs don't have
to equal flying saucers or, for that matter, anything artificial,
although they might. Of course, they could all be a combination of
mistaken identities (satellites, clouds, Venus, fireballs, etc) and
hoaxes. But enough people report seeing them, apparently sincerely,
that science has a duty to consider them, even if it's under the
pretext of why so many people claim to be eyewitnesses to, and/or
believers in, the extraterrestrial hypothesis. It's at least a
psychological if not a physical if not an intelligently-directed
phenomenon. Anyhow, I want to kick off with my own UFO sighting.

It was a wild and windy night... Well, no, actually it was a clear,
fairly mild, Moonless night. But it was certainly atmospheric. Let
me give you the preamble. It was in 1969 (coincidentally around the
time of the first Moon landing ... hmm!) and I was 16 and living in
the Peak District of Derbyshire, England. Check out this map

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?
X=425000&Y=375000&width=700&height=400&client=public&gride=&gridn=&sr
ec=0&coordsys=gb&addr1=&addr2=&addr3=&pc=&scale=500000&advanced=&lang
=&multimap.x=171&multimap.y=154

(Because of word wrap you might have to copy these long addresses
into the address box at the top of your screen)

See where it says Coombs Reservoir, in the middle of the map, just
below Whaley Bridge? (I grew up in Little Hayfield due north, also
shown on the map.) That's where this incident took place. There'd
been a rash of UFO sightings in the north of England around this
time and, together with a friend, I got intrigued and wanted to find
out what was going on. The local paper had been carrying stories of
strange lights in the sky for several weeks and, being space
enthusiasts, we thought it might be fun to do a bit of our own
detective work and try to find out what was at the bottom of it all.
We started by interviewing a woman who had seen one of these mystery
lights while hiking near Kinder Downfall -- an amazing flow of water
that just hurtles off the edge of a sheer drop and is often blown
back up again high into the air. Then we decided we had to actually
go out, into the countryside at dead of night, to see what might be
happening for ourselves. So, we set up camp in the valley by Coombs
Reservoir, which was close to the center of the activity, and made
our way up onto the moor around midnight. It was coolish but not
cold, clear, and dark -- atmospheric almost to the point of being
surreal. The stars shone with an intensity I'd never noticed before.
And once we were away from the relative security of the wooded
valley, on the exposed windswept moor, we both felt suddenly very
isolated and afraid.

We were expecting something to happen -- and, right on cue, it did.
Over the far horizon we saw a single bright, white light moving
oddly, meandering its way silently across the sky. It was clearly no
ordinary aircraft or satellite. Nor was it any familiar celestial
object -- a shooting star or a bright planet. Its movements seemed
controlled but unpredictable. And then without warning, the object
split and there were two lights, apparently coming closer to us. By
now, we were excited, nervous, and egging each other on almost to
the point of hysteria. The mother ship, we were convinced, had
released a scout craft that was heading straight toward us, dipping
lower and brightening as the distance between us rapidly narrowed.
Then, with terrifying effect -- I shiver as I remember it -- both
lights abruptly went out. The craft had seen us, it would soon be
upon us, and inevitably we'd be abducted! Charging like wild things,
we leapt over peat bogs, vaulted over dry-stone walls, tearing our
clothes and skin on barbed wire, and hurtled down precipitous slopes
at manic speed. My friend turned his ankle and, gasping, we
eventually limped, three-legged, back to the all-too-flimsy
protection of our tent. After that, every noise in the wood startled
us back awake, and we must have looked a sorry, bedraggled sight
when we emerged, damp and bleary-eyed, into the gray light of dawn.

I'm telling you this because it's my only personal experience of a
UFO -- and it was very vivid, very persuasive, absolutely authentic.
So what had we actually seen? Well, as it happens, I can tell you,
but only for one reason.What compelled us to do it I don't know, but
as the Sun rose we made our way back -- slowly and, in my friend's
case, somewhat painfully -- to the spot where the strange lights had
seemed to buzz us the night before. I think we were too tired to be
scared any more and we'd both realized by then, a little sheepishly,
that we'd over-reacted. At any rate, the mystery quickly and rather
tamely resolved itself. Behind the far hill that we'd seen and taken
as the line of the horizon over which the UFOs danced, was another,
more distant hill down which ran a winding road. The rest you can
guess: our flying saucers were nothing more than headlights
zigzagging this way and that, sometimes disappearing behind
obstacles, at other times separating before coming together again,
as two cars, one close behind the other, shifted in relative
position along our line of sight.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not using this example as a way to
dismiss all eyewitness accounts of strange lights in the sky. Some 
descriptions that I've heard myself directly from people whom I
trust to be telling the truth simply can't be explained away in such
banal terms. But I can testify to this: on that night, 24 years ago,
I felt as if I'd been catapulted into another world in which alien
spacecraft and intelligent creatures from other stars had somehow
emerged from the realm of fiction and speculative imagination into
that of hard-edged fact. During the moments of greatest excitement
up on the moor I actually felt as if I were becoming a different
person -- a different person in a different reality. My mind was
wrestling with the problem as I fell asleep in the tent that night.
And it clearly continued to wrestle with it for the few hours that I
was unconscious, because in the morning I'd come to terms with the
problem. I was thinking rationally again. Maybe the UFOs were real.
Somehow that now seemed acceptable, logical. On the other hand,
maybe we'd gone over the top. The rush of adrenaline had ended and I
could see that we might have been carried away by hysteria. And so
it proved. But if we hadn't bothered to go back and check by the
cold, sober light of day, who knows? Perhaps the story I've told you
would have had a very different ending. And perhaps, with the
passage of years, my childhood tale would have grown in elaboration
and become another curious addition to the annals of the unexplained.

UFOs could be a lot of things. If we adopt Occam's Razor (i.e. don't
make unnecessary assumptions), we start by eliminating the most
mundane possibilities and then gradually working our way to the more
exotic: hoaxes, misidentifications of familiar objects,
hallucinations, more unusual but known objects both natural and
artificial (bright meteors, reentering spacecraft or rocket stages,
experimental planes), very unusual and poorly understand natural
phenomena (ball lightning, earthlights). And only when we've
absolutely eliminated all these options do we, as scientists,
entertain the outre -- including the possibility that some UFOs are
evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft. I don't know, personally,
whether any object on record can definitively be said to fall into
the last category. But I'll add a couple of remarks concerning this
possibility. First, the idea of extraterrestrial spacecraft in the
solar system isn't far-fetched. Indeed, the possibility that Earth
is under surveillance by interstellar probes is real and
scientifically justifiable. After all, if humans are already
discussing the prospect of sending high-speed probes to the edge of
our planetary system and beyond, why shouldn't other civilizations,
if they exist, which have been monitoring Earth from afar (by the
kind of equipment we'll also have available over the next few
decades!), have already dispatched robot spacecraft our way.
 See my encyclopedia pages:
The etprobe PROBE Theroy
The is Probe theroy

Second, there are some very sensible, well-thought-through projects
in train that are attempting to test systematically the
extraterrestrial hypothesis -- the claim that some UFOs are of alien
origin. One of these is a collaboration between the retired
aerospace engineer T. Roy Dutton and the astronomer Eamon Ansbro.
Another is connected with the
 Hessadalen Project that focuses on earthlight activity in Norway. See:

UFOs Dutton

Ansboro

Earthlight

In my view, the UFO phenomenon deserves scientific attention and
it's unfortunate that most professional scientists steer clear of it
because of the more extreme elements of the ufology fraternity. Its
thorough investigation would certainly tell us a great deal more
about ourselves, might well shed valuable light on little known
natural meteorological and geological effects, and just might --
though I'd personally say the probability is low -- help built a
case for the presence of other intelligence.

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3. Bookends

Looking for something to stuff in your oversized stocking at
Christmas, or to help hold your door open? Then consider one of my
space books!

The Universal Book of Astronomy

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471265691/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/10
2-7405692-8492962

The Complete Book of Spaceflight

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471056499/qid%
3D1025568782/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F0%5F1/102-7405692-8492962

or Life Everywhere

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465015646/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_3/10
2-7405692-8492962

Have a great holiday season!

All the best,
David Darling