UFO, page 44
Once again, SETI appeared dead; as a small gift, the federal government declared the expensive sky-hunting equipment “surplus” and donated it to the SETI Institute so at least they wouldn’t have to lose what they’d already built. Barney Oliver was livid: “To save the American taxpayer about eight cents per year, we are to be denied the chance to explore the universe and the sentient life forms that fill it.”
* * *
Funding wasn’t the only problem facing NASA and the space exploration community. In 1986, the Challenger explosion had dealt a crippling blow to the organization and given the world a very public view of both the dangers of space travel and the cultural flaws that had metastasized inside NASA in the decades since the glory days of the Apollo program. The incident had been so disastrous that numerous investigations and panels were convened to better understand what went wrong and hold negligible parties responsible; in the meantime, the shuttle program was put on a two-year pause. Four years later, the space shuttle Discovery carried aloft the Hubble Space Telescope, years behind and over budget, only to have distraught scientists realize upon its deployment that the billion-dollar telescope’s main mirror was off by 2 microns, just 0.00007874 inches. Instead of unprecedented clarity of distant galaxies, the telescope provided cloudy and all but unusable images. The public mistake turned the telescope (and NASA) into a national punch line.
It was at this critical juncture that the banner of space exploration was picked up by a new face at NASA, someone interested in reviving the agency’s early joie de vivre and restarting the search for life on Mars.
Dan Goldin had spent five years at NASA, starting in 1962 at the Glenn Research Center—and then a quarter century for an aerospace company, until April 1992, when President George H. W. Bush appointed him the space agency’s administrator. He had arrived back at NASA just as work was underway to launch an audacious outer space repair mission for Hubble. In December 1993, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour pulled alongside the telescope, latched onto it, and installed a new corrective mirror. Within days, Hubble’s new images wowed astronomers and helped rewrite the age of the universe. It was able to photograph the impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter, confirmed the existence of supermassive black holes, and—intriguingly for the search for life—found oxygen on Jupiter’s moon Europa, only the third time that Earth’s life-giving element had been found somewhere other than our home planet. Sitting atop NASA was, once again, one of the most exciting places in science to be, and Goldin was grateful for the opportunity. “The human life is more than survival. You need food, you need shelter, but you also need intellectual nourishment,” he said. “We ought to be humble. I mean, as I grow older, and as I learn more, I become more overwhelmed by what we don’t know.”
With some big successes and goodwill now under his belt, Goldin set his sights on Mars, hoping that renewed study could uncover signs of life. Though as other probes had visited the red planet—most notable the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions in the mid-1970s—the perception that Mars was a dead planet remained unchanged. Those first color images had famously established for humans the dark red of the planet’s surface and its pink hazy sky, but Viking’s biology experiments had struck out—despite initial excitement that they might have found biological elements in the soil, nothing had panned out. “There was not a hint of life—no bushes, no trees, no cactus, no giraffes, antelopes or rabbits,” Sagan had lamented when the first photos from Viking had transited the eighteen and a half minutes back to Earth in 1976. What had once been hailed as “the greatest experiment in the history of science,” an unbelievably complex series of automated tools working millions of miles from Earth made up of forty thousand individual parts, had failed to discover anything of consequence. “That’s the ball game,” one of the scientists said. “No organics on Mars, no life on Mars.”V
But Goldin’s hopes relied on Mars’ past, more than its current life. The planet, he understood, was distinct from Earth; Earth’s landmasses turned over with a great deal of frequency, and many scientists doubted that we would even be able to detect if highly advanced civilizations had once populated it hundreds of millions of years ago, but Mars was effectively static, almost unchanged geologically for three billion years. Perhaps if scientists looked, Goldin told a team of scientists, “Maybe we will learn that the same building blocks of life washed over both planets simultaneously. We could find fossils of cells with elements of proteins similar to those here on Earth. We might find the one fossilized cell that is the missing link between the planets. We might find actual life—imagine that!”
It wasn’t long after that Goldin became one of a tiny handful of people on Earth to know perhaps the most exciting scientific discovery of all time.
I. A briefing memo from Jack Gibbons, Clinton’s science adviser in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, ahead of the vacation warned, “[Rockefeller] will want to talk with you about his interest in extrasensory perception, paranormal phenomena, and UFO’s.” Gibbons added, “He knows that we are trying to be helpful in responding to his concerns about UFO’s and human potential—and that we’re keeping an open mind about such matters—but I’ve made no secret about my conviction that we must not be too diverted from more earthly imperatives.”
II. Despite Hillary Clinton’s apparent reading interest, it’s worth noting there is no proof of the Weekly World News report, in its cover story on June 15, 1993, that she adopted an alien baby while in the White House nor evidence the Secret Service constructed a special alien nursery in the White House.
III. Garn, a fifty-five-year-old former Vietnam naval aviator at the time of his shuttle trip, had probably been the best candidate for conversion: a Mormon, he had been raised in a faith that believed in celestial kingdoms.
IV. Bryan spent two terms, twelve years, in the Senate, and at least according to his Wikipedia biography, his cancellation of SETI was his one memorable—and dubious—contribution to US politics.
V. The longer-term answer has proven more ambiguous. Some scientists now wonder whether those early biology experiments would have correctly identified life in a radically different form. As SETI scientist Seth Shostak wrote, “A new analysis of the Viking mass spectrometer suggests it might easily have missed the Martians’ molecular building blocks. It would have been unable to find the organic material in, for instance, the salt-laced soil of Chile’s Atacama desert, which is chockablock with microbes. This new work—while not proving life was missed—at least reopens the door to that possibility.” Resilient Martian life, for instance, may thrive underground, in the planet’s underground aquifers, but few scientists believe that life there may ever amount to much more than, in Shostak’s words, “single-celled pond scum.”
44 The Mars Rock
Steadily through the 1970s and ’80s, research on Earth had found life in the most inhospitable places, from salty brine pools to sulfur-fueled life-forms at hydrothermal vents deep underwater to microbes in the hot springs of Yellowstone to the irradiated pools of nuclear water around Three Mile Island.I Even in places far more hostile to existence than anyone imagined, life willed out—which meant perhaps far more of the universe was capable of sustaining it than previously imagined. Scientists were finding life almost anywhere within two kilometers of the surface and at temperatures from zero degrees Fahrenheit in the Himalayans, all the way to microbes that lived and reproduced at temperatures around 250 to 260 degrees Fahrenheit on the seafloor. Maybe not even the ingredients we considered necessary for life—water and oxygen—mattered to creatures that were anaerobic or methane-based. Aliens might be quite alien to us indeed.
In the 1990s, the field originally known as “exobiology,” before being rebranded as “bioastronomy,” underwent a final transformation when it was reconfigured into “astrobiology.” There was another development in the fall of 1995, when Swiss and US scientists announced the discovery of seven planets outside our solar system—the first ever so-called “exoplanets” were a confirmation that our celestial arrangement may not be all that unique across the cosmos.II For three decades, SETI efforts had continued without anyone actually being sure there were any other planets out there at all, let alone inhabitable ones. Now they knew, for sure, that beyond our solar system there were perhaps other Earth-like bodies—a fact that could dramatically alter the variables of the Drake equation, and our understanding of how the universe functioned.III
Just as the Swiss-US team was working through its new planets, a team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston had begun working with a new electron microscope designed to inspect the tiles of future space shuttle flights, to protect against the disaster that felled the Challenger. It was a brilliant invention for its intended purpose, and would prove helpful in other areas as well.
Applying the new tool to biology, geochemists David McKay and Everett Gibson turned to a meteorite discovered in 1984 in Antarctica on an annual government collection mission. ALH84001 was one of the oldest Martian meteorites, somewhere around 4 billion years old, when liquid water had been on the red planet’s surface. The four-pound piece of planetary refuse had been blasted off Mars’s surface after a larger meteor collided with the planet somewhere around 17 million years ago, as the first apes emerged on Earth and the Arabian Peninsula slammed into Eurasia. It had landed as early humans first domesticated sheep in Mesopotamia in 13,000 BC.
Now, studying tiny flakes of the meteorite under the powerful microscope, McKay and Gibson saw something that looked, inexplicably, unexpectedly, and surprisingly like life itself. Was that a… worm? Or at least a tiny wormlike piece of bacteria? The duo kept the potential discovery secret as they continued to probe, not even telling their office neighbors in the Johnson Space Center’s Building 31. Before long, they’d found further evidence of chemicals and elements—what Gibson called a “blanket of biology” that indicated that they were looking at something at least approaching billions-of-years-old life.
McKay, at first, was skeptical. A career in space study had taught him not to get his hopes up too quickly. He’d been in the stadium at Rice University as a student in 1962 when John F. Kennedy had challenged the nation to reach the moon, an experience that had inspired him to join NASA during its most exciting chapter, but working in the Johnson Space Center had shown him the realities of that journey. He’d written hundreds of papers and estimated he’d examined fifty thousand rocks. As he neared the end of a distinguished career, “caution and conservatism had allowed him to develop an admirable if not spectacular reputation in the field of planetary science.”
This rock, however, was unlike any he’d seen before.
Gradually, he and Gibson brought in more experts. “We do not want you to tell anybody what you’re doing,” they cautioned colleague Kathie Thomas-Keprta, one of the world’s leading experts on cosmic dust, “one thing we think may be in this sample is evidence of biogenic processes.” Thomas-Keprta went home that evening and told her husband her colleagues were nuts, but gradually she was convinced herself. She joined the study, and for nearly two years, the team continued to test, examining and reexamining the flakes of the potato-sized ALH84001. In early 1996, Thomas-Keprta spotted tiny mineral grains known as gregite, which she knew were almost always a by-product of bacteria. “This could be the coolest day of my life,” she thought.
Satisfied that their hypothesis and evidence were solid, the team began to write up their findings for the journal Science. Their final sentence, each word chosen precisely, was ultimately left unchanged by journal editors and nine peer reviewers: “Although there are alternative explanations for each of these phenomena when taken individually, when they are considered collectively, particularly in view of their spatial association, we conclude that they are evidence of primitive life on Mars.”
“There were an infinite number of ways of saying maybe—strong maybes and weak maybes, maybes that sounded definitive and maybes that had gaping escape hatches,” wrote journalist Joel Achenbach, who covered the event later. “This was a strong, firm, chest-thumping maybe.”
On July 31, 1996, McKay, Gibson, and Thomas-Keprta traveled to Washington to present their findings to Goldin. The thirty-minute meeting ended up stretching to three hours as the NASA administrator listened, questioned, and contemplated the information before him, compiling twenty-seven pages of notes as he did so. At the end of the presentation, he asked one important question: Were they sure they were right? If they were, this would be perhaps the most significant discovery in the history of science.
“We have it nailed. We have it four different ways,” Gibson said.
Goldin paused to take that in, before issuing a second request to McKay: “Can I give you a hug?”
NASA called the White House, and Goldin and his deputy rushed into a meeting with White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, handing him a blown-up photo of the wormlike creature. Panetta was as startled by the news as anyone, and went down to the Oval Office. A few minutes later, the NASA administrator and deputy were asked to join him. President Clinton grilled the team from his desk, and when the briefing concluded, his reaction was simple: This is a day that we’ll remember.
Vice President Al Gore, a bit of a science geek in his own right, was incredulous: “Wait a minute—our guys, government scientists, did this?”
Slowly but steadily, the news began to trickle out. On August 7, the discovery was officially announced to the world in the pages of Science, in an article dryly titled “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic of Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001”—over a million people tried to access the paper online, a startling number on the still-nascent World Wide Web. That same day, President Clinton stood on the South Lawn of the White House and discussed the discovery. McKay, who had been off on a prescheduled family vacation, was rushed back to Washington to stand beside him.
“Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered,” he said. “Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental. We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people’s future.”
Once those remarks were complete, a NASA press conference began across town. It was the happiest moment that NASA had experienced in years. Goldin proclaimed it “a day that will go down in history for the American people, and indeed for all of humanity.” The excitement of the usually unexcitable scientists was palpable as they looked out onto a phalanx of nearly three dozen camera crews. “This was undoubtedly the most exciting thing I’ve done in my 27 years in science,” Gibson said. “It does beat Apollo, and that’s pretty tough to do.”
The one sour note—if one can call it that—was served by UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf, the staff’s chief skeptic. Schopf, like Sagan, believed that life was abundant in the universe, but that we hadn’t found it yet (“I’m certain we will find life elsewhere, probably within our solar system, if you give me 250 years,” he would say), and had been unconvinced from the moment he’d been brought in on NASA’s secret. For one thing, he thought the “worm,” which looked so definitive and real on the press conference photos, so surely like a worm, was simply too small—at 360 nanometers, it would have taken 150 of such worms to equal even the width of a human hair. Life just couldn’t be that small. At the press conference, he explained that on a plausibility scale of one to ten, the AHL84001 claim, in his view, was just a measly two.
The public didn’t care. The rock—and the NASA scientists who found it—inspired national awe, and breathed entirely new life into the space program.IV Clinton called for an all-out search for life on Mars. Earth’s primary life-beyond enthusiast, Carl Sagan, declared the discovery “the most provocative and evocative piece of evidence for life beyond Earth,” adding that, “If the results are verified, it is a turning point in human history, suggesting that life exists not just on two planets in our paltry solar system, but throughout our magnificent universe.”V
As it turned out, Sagan’s statement about the Mars rock episode in the summer of ’96 would be one of his final ones. A years-long battle with cancer had weakened him so significantly that when Drake met up with Sagan for lunch in San Francisco, he was startled by the stooped, elderly man who shuffled slowly into the agreed-upon restaurant. By the time Clinton’s summit on space exploration unfolded, Sagan could no longer stand.
On December 20, 1996, the most famous scientist the world had seen since Albert Einstein died at the age of sixty-two. In his final days, he admitted the great mystery of his life was still unsolved, referencing a previous famous statement of his that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and admitting, “The evidence for life on Mars is not yet extraordinary enough.”
Sagan was memorialized all over—three memorial services were held, but the one at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights was perhaps the most moving and demonstrative of his impact. As part of the service, a recording of Sagan reading from his book Pale Blue Dot (a reference to the photo he’d persuaded NASA to have Voyager 1 take of Earth as it sailed out of our solar system in 1990 some 3.7 billion miles from the sun) played out into the packed cathedral:
