UFO, page 21
“The rate at which the phantom signal traversed the sky suggested that it was emanating from an aircraft cruising at unprecedented altitude—perhaps 80,000 feet,” recalled H. Paul Shuch, who would later be the executive director of the SETI League. It was, to them, a literal unidentified flying object, just not one from an alien civilization like they’d hoped.
Over the next two months, with pauses for other experiments and observations, Project Ozma searched the skies for more than two hundred hours, frequently visited by a steady stream of scientists and luminaries. One day, the president of Notre Dame, Theodore Hesburgh, “came to ponder the religious significance” of discovering life beyond Earth; and on another, Barney Oliver, the head of research at Hewlett-Packard, phoned to tell Drake that he’d read about the project in Time magazine and wanted to come by when he was in the area on a trip to the capital. Drake pooh-poohed the idea, saying there was no way to do a day trip from Washington, DC, to Green Bank, to which Oliver only laughed: “You underestimate me.” A longtime fan of science fiction and a successful inventor, Oliver saw Ozma as a dream come to life and arranged for a private plane to bring him to the facility.
Despite the attention, though, Ozma’s recorders remained silent—the celestial silence uneventfully unfurled across thousands of yards of paper. Drake was disappointed but knew the realities of the work he and his team were doing. He often compared their efforts to the apocryphal story of a drunk searching for his lost keys under the streetlight: they’d looked only where it was easy. “We had failed to detect a genuine alien signal, it was true, but we had succeeded in demonstrating that searching was a feasible and even reasonable thing to do,” he recalled.
Overall, Project Ozma could—and would—still be considered a success, having established numerous lessons for the nascent field, including, Drake noted, how quickly boredom could set in, and how future efforts should be mixed and balanced with other observations and experiments. After all, work so far had only been conducted over just two months—a blip in the grander scheme of space and time. What if the period when his team had been looking coincided with when those civilization’s messages had been down for maintenance or pointed at planets on the other side of the galaxy? This was reason enough, he argued, to continue.
* * *
What Drake didn’t quite realize at the time was that Ozma had inadvertently uncovered a giant secret: that mystery plane detected in the opening hours had likely been one of the government’s best-kept secrets. As the Cold War intensified, the US had desperately needed to see behind the Iron Curtain to understand the Soviet military’s buildup, and military and intelligence leaders proposed to Dwight Eisenhower that a long-range plane, equipped with cameras, be developed to fly above the limits of the Soviet air defenses; Ike refused to allow the effort to be flown by actual air force personnel, fearful of the escalation of such incursions by uniformed military, but allowed the project to proceed under the cloak of the nation’s intelligence agency. Thus, since 1955, on the other side of the country in the Nevada desert, the CIA had been developing a secret reconnaissance plane to penetrate the deepest regions of the Soviet Union, what historian Annie Jacobsen called “the country’s first peacetime aerial espionage program.”
The effort, code-named Project Aquatone, was overseen by the CIA’s benign-sounding Development Projects Staff, and started after two CIA officials, Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller, took an administrative lead, flying across the deserted corners of the West to identify a new test facility. Existing air force test sites, like Edwards Air Force Base, where Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier, had been deemed too populated for such a secret effort, so they surveyed California and across north and east, up through Nevada and past Las Vegas, toward the remote desert known as the Nevada Test Site, where the Atomic Energy Commission and the military were conducting aboveground tests of the country’s nuclear weapons. Finally they found Groom Lake, a salt flat that had once been used as an emergency landing strip for World War II pilots. It was perfect for the new secret project—isolated and already adjacent to one of the most secure corners of the entire US. The new secret base would eventually be known as Area 51.
The task of building the plane itself was delegated to the Lockheed Corporation, an American aerospace manufacturer, and the parts and money required for the effort were stolen and hidden across the entire military’s budget; to kick things off, Bissell personally wrote a $1,250,000 check from one of the agency’s accounts and mailed it to the home of Lockheed’s chief engineer. Development work began in 1943 in Burbank, California, at the company’s so-called Skunk Works, a vast series of hangars, warehouses, and offices set amid the rising postwar prosperity and suburban sprawl of Los Angeles.II Through World War II and the Cold War, the Skunk Works was where many of the country’s best planes were born, including America’s first jet fighter, the F-80, and its fastest, the F-104 Starfighter, which in 1958 would break the world speed, topping 1,404 miles per hour.
“The entire project became the most compartmented and self-contained activity within the agency,” Bissell reflected in his memoirs decades later, cloaked in secrecy and achieved by any means necessary. Information was so sensitive that the Lockheed janitors weren’t allowed into offices, leaving engineers to police their own trash; when Lockheed needed altimeters that went up to eighty thousand feet from a company whose equipment normally only went as high as forty-five thousand, the CIA secured them with a story about experimental rocket craft. In order to produce twenty planes, each costing around $1 million, pieces were separately shipped to Area 51 at Groom Lake, where a newly paved runway awaited.
The craft, officially dubbed the U-2 (with the U for “utility label” purposefully chosen to be as bland as possible) resembled an ungainly albatross, with incredibly long, drooping fuel-filled wings that required extra wheels during takeoff. It could stay in the air for ten hours at a time, gliding along through the stratosphere for long portions of the flight with its engines off, consuming just a thousand gallons of specially designed fuel, known as JP-7.III The planes were remarkable feats of engineering, equipped with the most advanced and powerful cameras ever built in the United States; to demonstrate their readiness, Bissell sent one over Eisenhower’s farm outside Gettysburg and displayed to the president images of his cows drinking, taken from seventy thousand feet above the ground. “With 12,000 feet of film, the cameras were considered able to photograph a path from Washington to Phoenix in one flight,” historian Michael Beschloss noted.
Pilots for the program were plucked from the Strategic Air Command, who in a flurry of paperwork were then removed from the rolls of the air force and reemployed by the CIA for eighteen months, at a salary of $1,500 a month ($2,500 while deployed overseas). After their service, they were promised a return to the air force, with no time lost promotion-wise.IV That did not mean, however, that the job was all perks. The pilots had to wear special pressure suits, since their blood would likely vaporize above sixty-five thousand feet under normal conditions. The long missions, during which food and drink were limited, were grueling—pilots usually lost between three and six pounds of weight during a flight.
As the planes took to the sky, there was also the issue of visibility. “Once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports,” a secret 1992 CIA history, which was only declassified in 2013, revealed. “Such reports were most prevalent in the early evening hours from pilots of airliners flying from east to west… and appear to the airliner pilot, 40,000 feet below, to be fiery objects.
“Even during daylight hours,” the report continued, “the silver bodies of the high-flying U-2s could catch the sun and cause reflections or glints that could be seen at lower altitudes and even on the ground.” (Later, the planes were painted black.)
The air force, of course, knew about the secret missions and Project Blue Book staff regularly cross-checked their incoming reports of UFOs with U-2 flight logs. By the CIA’s secret estimate, U-2 flights “accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s.” In July 1956, “Angel” and its fellow crafts began flying over the Soviet Union, providing invaluable intelligence about its military readiness—as it turned out, the Soviet air force lacked any meaningful bomber capacity at all, despite public political debates and warnings of a “bomber gap.” As one CIA memo noted after the first blockbuster flight, “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union.” The flights rightly irked the Soviet Union—more than twenty MiG fighters tried unsuccessfully to intercept the high-flying American craft on its first mission, but each plane fell away after their engines flamed out in the climbing altitude—but Nikita Khrushchev and the military kept silent about the incursions, not wanting to demonstrate their own impotence at being unable to defend their own airspace.
Unable to hide the existence of the planes for much longer, the US eventually announced in 1956 that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)—the forerunner to NASA—had developed a new high-altitude weather research plane, although they vastly underplayed its performance capabilities, saying the plane could only reach fifty-five thousand feet. The cover story held until just a month after Frank Drake and Project Ozma had seemingly picked up one of its overflights; in early May 1960, President Eisenhower and US officials gambled on another U-2 reconnaissance mission, set to be the twenty-fourth over the Soviet Union, taking off from Pakistan and aiming to photograph two space sites, including the cosmodrome where Sputnik itself had been launched.
All seemed well, until, midway through the mission, pilot Francis Gary Powers, a veteran of twenty-seven U-2 flights, was hit by a Soviet SA-2 missile. The plane crashed, but Powers survived and was captured quickly. The incident and resulting public exposure of the crashed plane caused immense embarrassment to the US government and caused the collapse of a scheduled Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit in Paris weeks later. The U-2 overflight program, as a result, was abandoned.V
I. The presence of the two women on the team was hardly a coincidence; Drake’s thesis adviser at Harvard, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, was the first female astronomy PhD at Harvard, the first promoted to tenured professor, and, later, the first woman to head a department at Harvard. He, in turn, had similarly championed some young female PhD students, choosing two women—out of twelve slots—to participate in the observatory’s summer program and earning the opprobrium of a colleague, who chastised him, “This is a total waste of resources and contrary to all tradition!”
II. Project staff could dine at the nation’s first McDonald’s restaurant, which opened nearby just as the Aquatone work began.
III. “Manufacturing this special fuel required petroleum byproducts that Shell normally used to make its ‘Flit’ fly and bug spray. In order to produce several hundred thousand gallons of LF-1 for the U-2 project in the spring and summer of 1955, Shell had to limit the production of Flit, causing a nationwide shortage,” a once-secret CIA history noted.
IV. To preserve secrecy, CIA cable traffic referred to the pilots only as “drivers,” using the code name KWGLITTER-00, where the two-digits identified the specific pilot, and ensured that, if the cable codes were broken, the Soviet Union would be unable to understand who or what was involved.
V. U-2s, of course, would continue to be a vital US surveillance tool and another would be shot down over Cuba in one of the tensest moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The planes continue to fly today, and one was used to surveil the Chinese spy balloon in the winter of 2023.
20 The Drake Equation
In the aftermath of Project Ozma, Frank Drake’s profile in astronomy circles had been sharply elevated, and he felt that he’d earned some space to have some fun. He hung a sign on his office door at Green Bank: “Is there intelligent life on Earth?” It made people chuckle, but the truth was his new status meant he was now regularly hearing from some of the sharpest and most interesting minds in science. One of the many new pen pals he had was a budding young planetary scientist named Carl Sagan.
Born in the working-class Italian and Jewish neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1934, Sagan had become fascinated by astronomy and science fiction through the novels of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, featuring his Mars explorer John Carter, and comic books that imagined worlds beyond. By age ten, he later recalled, he was confident that life existed elsewhere: “I had decided—in almost total ignorance of the difficulty of the problem—that the universe was full up. There were too many places for this to be the only inhabited planet.”
He sent away for a mail-order book called Interplanetary Flight and marveled at its contents. The final two sentences, in particular, struck a chord: “The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still-untrodden heights and will be descending again along the long slopes that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.” As a high school student, he took great interest in Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucer tales, and desperately watched the skies himself in the evenings, hoping to spot one—he raced through school, graduating two years early, and during his senior year in 1952, he won first place in a Knights of Columbus essay contest, choosing as his subject “the question of whether human contact with technologically advanced extraterrestrials would be as disastrous as contact with Europeans had been for Native Americans.” To him, an obsession with the possibility of life beyond was not unusual—it was the lack of interest by so many others that felt odd. “Not a single adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs,” he wrote later. “I couldn’t figure out why not.”
At just sixteen years old, Sagan entered the University of Chicago, where he managed to attach himself to three of the leading thinkers about life on Earth: geneticist Hermann Muller, best known for his work on fruit fly evolution; molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, known for his work on microbial genetics; and physicist Harold C. Urey. Urey, the recipient of the 1934 Nobel Prize for his work discovering deuterium, had been a key figure in the Manhattan Project, helping to create the process that yielded enriched uranium for use in the first bombs, but postwar, he’d become a fierce critic of atomic weapons, refocusing his work on biology with a grad student named Stanley Miller to further understand how life began on earth—“I don’t like rocks, I like life,” he later quipped.
The resulting Urey-Miller experiment built upon relatively new advances and interest in the field of paleobiology, and sought to address and answer questions that several scientists around the country had begun to ask: How did life emerge from the stew of chemicals present in Earth’s early atmosphere, and what combination of processes had led to the organic compounds that would over eons become the building blocks of carbon-based life? They wanted to build on work by UC Berkeley professor Melvin Calvin, who had spent much of his career focused on plants and photosynthesis, but had become particularly intrigued by the question of how life started on Earth after reading a 1949 book on evolution by George Gaylord Simpson, the century’s most influential paleontologist. Inspired by some of Simpson’s theories and approaches, Calvin’s team devised an experiment to zap a mixture of carbon dioxide and water with radiation, in an attempt to re-create what they imagined the atmosphere had looked like on Earth as life began; the findings were somewhat inconclusive, although tiny traces of formaldehyde and formic acid were found, leading Calvin to believe that their experiment had failed.
Miller and Urey thought that Calvin had the right idea, but the wrong chemical mixture—they believed early Earth was composed of more methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen—and in August 1952, they tried to replicate the experiment with that combination instead. Almost instantly, it was clear that something amazing happened. When they hit the chemical-filled tubes with an electrical spark, the tubes clouded, meaning they were filled with amino acids, the basic components of DNA.I It would become one of the most famous experiments of all time, establishing in the public consciousness the idea that the building blocks of life could have emerged almost spontaneously from the “prebiotic soup” that existed on early Earth.
It was around this time that Sagan had arrived on the University of Chicago’s campus, and he was immediately captivated by the work of his soon-to-be mentor.II As his studies advanced, he dove ever deeper into physics and astronomy, working at one point at the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory under Gerard Kuiper, the only full-time planetary scientist in the country at the time. Then, in the wake of Sputnik’s launch, a moment when astronomy and space was where the money, energy, enthusiasm, and ambition all came together in science, Sagan seized a moment of opportunity. “The scientists who designed NASA experiments tended to be young, and in a single mission they could eclipse the patient work of elders who headed observatories or academic departments,” Sagan’s biographer wrote; and Sagan was perfect for a role in the organization. With a vote of confidence from Lederberg, he “sort of glided effortlessly between some kind of bull sessions late at night to advising the government,” and by 1960, Sagan was contributing to the experiments around the Mariner missions to Venus, what would be the first US probe sent to another planet as part of a new initiative introduced by John F. Kennedy. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” the newly elected president had told Congress in May of 1961. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
