UFO, page 57
That September: Robert Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 33–35.
Now, in the weeks: Ibid., 48.
The team’s evening drinking sessions: Ibid., 98.
A plane using the Rad Lab’s breakthroughs: Ibid., 149.
That fall: Ibid., 168–69.
By then, radar: Ibid., 225.
On January 25, 1946, the front page of the New York Times: Jack Gould, “Contact with Moon Achieved by Radar in Test by the Army,” New York Times, January 25, 1946, 1.
Since the first time: “Radar Scientists Hoping to Detect Life on Moon,” Fort Myers (FL) News-Press, January 26, 1946, 1.
“[Radio astronomy] led to information”: Smothers, “Commemorating a Discovery.”
Radio astronomy centers: Buderi, The Invention, 279.
The Australians relied: Ibid., 287.
“No one believed radio noise”: Ibid., 288.
By the mid-1950s: Bart J. Bok, “Toward a National Radio Observatory,” National Radio Astronomy Observatory, August 7, 1956, 5, https://www.nrao.edu/archives/items/show/21729.
“The number of active radio astronomers”: Symposium on Radio Astronomy, C.S.I.R.O. Radiophysics Laboratory, September 1956, https://books.google.com/books?id=r-jPAAAAMAAJ.
CHAPTER 18: PROJECT OZMA
“Not only was it one of many”: Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?: The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delta, 1992), 5.
“Everything I had read”: Ibid., 8.
“He raised the practice”: Ibid., 11.
“In the space of a few moments”: Ibid., 12.
The significance of Struve’s: “Messenger Lecture Explains Nebulae, Star Origin Theory,” Cornell Daily Sun, December 6, 1951, 3.
“I realized that a radio telescope”: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 18.
As Drake recalled, “Any scientifically savvy civilization”: Ibid., 19.
“What I felt was not a normal emotion”: Ibid.
“I sat down, sweating”: Ibid.
“Radio telescopes needed big collecting dishes”: Ibid., 15.
After a nationwide survey of thirty suitable locations: Richard Emberson, “National Radio Astronomy Observatory,” Science 130 (1959): 1307, https://www.gb.nrao.edu/~fghigo/biwf/biwf2/biwf2016final7opt.pdf; Bart J. Bok, “Toward a National Radio Observatory,” National Radio Astronomy Observatory, August 7, 1956, 5, https://www.nrao.edu/archives/items/show/21729, 23.
Construction for the remote site: Eggers and Higgins, Feasibility Report for the National Science Foundation, May 5, 1955, 17, https://www.nrao.edu/archives/files/original/3672bc248757ed6fc145276db88e474b.pdf.
The town of Green Bank: D. S. Heeschen to L. V. Berkner, November 12, 1957, https://www.nrao.edu/archives/files/original/e2543ba8b7515aa9acb84cf93d7404a3.pdf.
The groundbreaking took place: Graham DuShane, “Groundbreaking at Green Bank,” Science 126 (November 1957), https://www.gb.nrao.edu/~fghigo/biwf/biwf2/biwf2016final7opt.pdf.
Ultimately, though: John W. Finney, “Radio Telescope to Expose Space,” New York Times, June 19, 1959, 6.
Popular Mechanics called: Martin’s Mann, “New Radio Telescope Is Man’s Biggest Machine,” Popular Science, December 1959, 85.
“In reports by”: James Bamford, “The Agency That Could Be Big Brother,” New York Times, December 25, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/weekinreview/the-agency-that-could-be-big-brother.html.
The two telescopes: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 24–25.
“It was a remarkable idea”: Seth Shostak, Confessions of an Alien Hunter (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009), 9.
“He had a reputation in science”: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 27.
Drake named the effort: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 27; Karl S. Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction, trans. Helen Atkins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 2.
“For centuries Platonists”: Ibid., 4.
Goethe wrote,“Of all discoveries and convictions”: Ibid., 45.
As Guthke traces: Ibid., ix.
As Guthke notes,“Galileo himself, soon widely hailed”: Ibid., 95.
In many ways, the debate for centuries paralleled: Ibid., 50.
The Bishop of Chester: Ibid., 148.
By the 1700s and 1800s: Ibid., 200.
Discoveries around 1860: Ibid., 325.
“For the first time”: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 215.
As Drake recalled,“There’s something aesthetically appealing”: Ibid., 43.
Radio telescopes: Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature 184 (September 1959): 846.
“SETI has always made me unhappy”: Philip Morrison, interview by Owen Gingerich, February 22, 2003, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/30591-1.
CHAPTER 19: PHANTOM SIGNAL
Others were about to claim: Kenneth I. Kellermann, Ellen N. Bouton, and Sierra S. Brandt, Open Skies: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Its Impact on US Radio Astronomy (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021), 234.
“It is probable that a good many”: H. Paul Shuch, ed., Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI Past, Present, and Future (Chichester, UK: Praxis, 2011), 15.
The presence of the two women: Ibid., 33.
“It had the simplest possible output device”: Ibid., 36–37.
“The rate at which the phantom signal”: Ibid., 15.
“We had failed to detect”: Ibid., 41.
Thus, since 1955: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 5.
Project staff could dine at the nation’s first McDonald’s: Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (New York: Harper, 1986), 90.
Through World War II: Ibid., 91.
“The entire project became the most”: Richard M. Bissell Jr., Jonathan E. Lewis, and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 105.
Information was so sensitive: Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, “Developing the U-2,” in The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs (Central Intelligence Agency, 1992), 59–60, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%202.pdf.
It could stay in the air: Beschloss, Mayday, 92.
“Manufacturing this special fuel”: Pedlow and Welzenbach, “Developing the U-2,” 62.
“With 12,000 feet of film”: Beschloss, Mayday, 92.
Pilots for the program were plucked: Ibid., 108–09.
“Once U-2s started flying”: Pedlow and Welzenbach, “Developing the U-2,” 72.
By the CIA’s secret estimate: Ibid., 73.
As one CIA memo noted: Jacobsen, Area 51, 88.
CHAPTER 20: THE DRAKE EQUATION
He hung a sign: Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delta, 1992), 45.
Born in the working-class: Carl Sagan, “Growing Up with Science Fiction,” New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1978, 24.
By age ten: Ibid.
The final two sentences: William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 12.
As a high school student: Ibid., 15.
“Not a single adult”: Ibid., 20.
At just sixteen years old: Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: John Wiley, 1999), 49.
Urey, the recipient: Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 23.
They wanted to build: Melvin Calvin, “Chemical Evolution,” American Scientist 63, no. 2 (March–April 1975): 169.
In fact, later analysis after Miller’s death: The Cell, episode 3, “The Spark of Life,” aired August 26, 2009, on BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mbvfh.
It would become: Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano, “Prebiotic Soup—Revisiting the Miller Experiment,” Science 300, no. 5620 (May 2, 2003): 745–46.
“The scientists who designed NASA experiments”: Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 39.
With a vote of confidence: Ibid., 40.
“I believe that this nation”: John F. Kennedy, “The Goal of Sending a Man to the Moon” (Washington, DC, May 25, 1961), Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/may-25-1961-goal-sending-man-moon.
In a strong Oxford accent: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 46.
“Yup,” the man replied: Ibid., 49.
This, he now explained: Ibid., 52.
Closer examination, though, raised more questions: Walter Sullivan, We Are Not Alone: The Search for Intelligent Life on Other Worlds (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 254.
At one point, Su-Shu Huang joined in: Ibid., 249.
Calvin’s own recollection: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 54.
“Let’s imagine what”: Ibid., 60.
Life might take many forms: Sullivan, We Are Not Alone, 252.
Lilly, for his part, raised a final challenge: Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 59.
By the conference’s end: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 62.
“This is work for society”: Ibid., 63.
“To the value of L”: Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 59.
CHAPTER 21: THE SEARCH EXPANDS
“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future”: Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 31.
“It makes a compelling argument”: Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?: The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delta, 1992), 68.
“Under normal circumstances”: Iosif Shklovsky, Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, trans. Mary Flemin Zirin and Harold Zirin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 250.
The book was a huge success: “Is Communication Possible with Intelligent Beings on Other Planets? by I. S. Shklovskiy,” card catalog entry, CIA, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00772R000200960023-6.pdf.
“The early world-leading space exploration program”: Lev M. Gindilis and Leonid I. Gurvits, “SETI in Russia, USSR and the Post-Soviet Space: A Century of Research,” Acta Astronautica (2019), 2, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.03225.pdf.
A talented artist: David W. Swift, SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk about Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 168–69.
As technology improved, Harvard astronomer: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 97.
According to Sagan’s biographer: William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 77.
“It was impossible not to like him”: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 98.
The book went through fourteen: Poundstone, Carl Sagan, 92.
There, over three days: Shklovsky, Five Billion Vodka Bottles, 254; L. M. Gindilis, “Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Soviet Astronomy 9, no. 2 (March–April 1965): 370.
Together, they called for: Rebecca A. Charbonneau, “Mixed Signals: Communication with the Alien in Cold War Radio Astronomy” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2021), 79, https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/7e186d38-914c-4175-bd0c-d9501279dd98/content.
One of the conference’s most notable: Leonid I. Gurvits, Yuri Y. Kovalev, and Philip G. Edwards, “Nikolai Kardashev,” Physics Today, December 16, 2019, https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/Online/5586/Nikolai-Kardashev; “Nicolay S. Kardashev,” International Astronomical Union, https://www.iau.org/administration/membership/individual/3990/.
It was of the “utmost importance”: N. S. Kardashev, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Soviet Astronomy 8, no. 2 (September–October 1964): 220.
“Should there even exist”: Ibid., 219.
As Kaku wrote,“These time scales are insignificant”: Michio Kaku, “The Physics of Interstellar Travel,” https://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-interstellar-travel/.
“It is speculated that even some sources”: Kardashev, “Transmission of Information,” 217.
Now, with the broader resources: Kellermann, Bouton, and Brandt, Open Skies, 249.
“Many of the details of Sholomitskii’s observation”: Charbonneau, “Mixed Signals,” 72.
At an April 1964 colloquium: Ibid., 81–82.
The elder Shklovsky: Ibid., 83.
On April 13, 1965: Walter Sullivan, “Russians Say a Cosmic Emission May Come from Rational Beings,” New York Times, April 13, 1965, 1.
“I saw Jane Fonda”: Drake and Sobel, Is Anyone Out There?, 104.
“It is rather sad”: “People in Space? ‘No Proof Yet,’ ” Evening Standard (London, UK), April 13, 1965, 11.
CHAPTER 22: THE SOCORRO INCIDENT
“UFOs had been reported”: Mark O’Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs (New York: Dey St., 2017), 146.
“Professional astronomy is a field”: Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science: Journals 1957–1969 (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1992), 71–72.
“The great tradition”: Ibid., 72.
A Grenoble farmer: Ibid., 67–68.
Worried about the sightings: Wilkins, Flying Saucers Uncensored, 59.
Vallée shared: Joshua Malin, “The 1954 French UFO Craze that Led to the World’s Weirdest Wine Law,” VinePair, July 7, 2015, https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/chateauneuf-du-pape-ufo-wine-law/.
“[Our first meeting] lasted”: Vallée, Forbidden Science, 72.
“He is a warm and yet a deeply scholarly man”: Ibid.
Vallée remembered:“Hynek watched us fight”: Ibid., 76.
In January: Ibid., 84.
“We only have vague theories”: Ibid., 87.
Even as the conversations: Ibid., 88.
On the afternooon: “Unidentified Flying Object, Socorro, New Mexico, April 24, 1964,” statement by Lonnie Zamora, May 8, 1964, FBI, 2, https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/fbifiles/paranormal/FBI-UFO-Socorro-fbi1.pdf.
Then, he saw “two figures in what resembled white coveralls”: Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, “Socorro CE2/CE3.”
“10-44 [accident]”: “Unidentified Flying Object, Socorro,” 5.
He heard a couple: Ibid., 5–8.
A New Mexico State: Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, “Socorro CE2/CE3.”
The local FBI agent: “Unidentified Flying Object, Socorro, New Mexico, April 24, 1964,” statement by Arthur Byrnes, May 8, 1964, FBI, 1, https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/fbifiles/paranormal/FBI-UFO-Socorro-fbi1.pdf.
The FBI report: Ibid., 2.
As he told: Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, “Socorro CE2/CE3.”
At the meeting: Vallée, Forbidden Science, 100.
“The attitude of the Air Force”: Ibid., 92.
As historian Jerome Clark notes: Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, “Socorro CE2/CE3.”
In a confidential memo: Ibid.
Interestingly, one of the FBI reports on the incident: Albuquerque 62-1028 3P to Director, teletype, April 27, 1964, FBI, https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/fbifiles/paranormal/FBI-UFO-Socorro-fbi1.pdf.
Writing in the CIA’s: Hector Quintanilla, Jr., “The Investigation of UFO’s,” CIA, 18, https://www.cia.gov/static/835f2989f8b975cc31ebbfd2f78e7d34/Investigation-of-UFOs.pdf.
Local legend eventually: Ibid.
The “unusual case”: David Michael Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 190–91.
CHAPTER 23: EXPLORING MARS
In 1610: Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (New York: Crown, 2021), 11.
“If we could believe with any probability”: Ibid.
It would be another: Rebekah Higgitt, “Mapping Mars: A Long and Highly Imaginative History,” Guardian, August 6, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/aug/06/mapping-mars-history.
“During those nights up on the rooftop”: Johnson, The Sirens of Mars, 25.
“The evidence of handicraft”: Percival Lowell, Mars (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895), 208, https://books.google.com/books?id=w9JJAAAAMAAJ.
As one of Lowell’s: W. W. Campbell, “Mars,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, August 1, 1896 (Vol. 8, No. 51), p. 209, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40667612?seq=3.
Even as pieces: Johnson, The Sirens of Mars, 29.
“My first observations positively terrified”: Nikola Tesla, “Talking with the Planets,” Collier’s Weekly, February 9, 1901, https://earlyradiohistory.us/1901talk.htm.
One of Tesla’s biographers: Marc J. Seifer, “Nikola Tesla: The Lost Wizard,” ExtraOrdinary Technology 4, no. 1 (January–March 2006), https://teslatech.info/ttmagazine/v4n1/seifer.htm.
Science fiction was a popular: Johnson, The Sirens of Mars, 13.
As they saw it: Ibid., 7.
On November 28, 1964: Ibid., 5.
President Johnson touted: Lyndon B. Johnson, “Inaugural Address” (Washington, DC, January 20, 1965), Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-20-1965-inaugural-address.
“Looking at a planet”: Johnson, The Sirens of Mars, 15.
“My God, it’s the moon”: Ibid., 17.
“As a member of the generation”: Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks Upon Viewing New Mariner 4 Pictures from Mars” (Washington, DC, July 29, 1965), American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-upon-viewing-new-mariner-4-pictures-from-mars.
The next day’s: Walter Sullivan, “Mariner 4’s Final Photos Depict a Moonlike Mars,” New York Times, July 30, 1965, 1.
