Radiosignals from other worlds
We shall examine their research in its proper place, chronologically
speaking; for in the meantime other men, using other approaches, had been busy in this
field.
One of these researchers was the noted Yugoslav selftaught scientist,
Nikola Tesla. He is probably
best known for the Tesla coil, but
his greatest impact on the modern world was his victory over
Thomas Edison which resulted
in alternating current, advocated by Tesla, superseding the direct-current system
advocated by Edison. (He refused, in 1921, to share a Nobel Physics prize with Edison,
for whom he had a strong personal dislike.)
By 1899 Tesla was a wealthy, though
somewhat eccentric, figure in the new era of electric power and wireless. One of his
pet theories was that power could be drawn from the magnetic field of Earth in such
stupendous quantities that it could be used to signal other planets-in case anybody
might be listening there.
After a great deal of conferring with government
experts to select a highly charged location for his work, Tesla moved to
Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he set up his gear.
It was like nothing
that man had ever constructed before; it was a giant-size package of electrical
equipment designed to deliver a giant-size blast of manmade lightning which could be
loosed in such fashion that it would cross space in a sequence indicating that it was
the work of intelligent beings.
In the generation of a mighty wallop, Tesla
succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. By alternately changing the flow of the
current through that immense coil, seventy-five feet in diameter, and finally shooting
it into a copper ball atop a two-hundred-foot tower, Tesla produced bolts of
artificial lightning which literally rocked the Countryside for many miles around.
He also burned out a power generating station, and lighted electric bulbs
miles away by the immense flow of current from his experimental installation--a
fantastic story which you will find in the book Prodigal Genius by John
O'Neill. And before public outcry forced him to cease and desist to avoid arrest,
Tesla felt that he had evidence to support his original contention . . . that
somewhere out there in space his gargantuan dots and dashes had been detected . . .
and answered.
The signals picked up by Tesla's gear in 1899 were periodic and
“with such clear suggestion of number and order that they could not be traced to
any cause then known by me."
And he added: "Although I did not decipher
their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as accidental... there was a
purpose behind those signals ... they were the results of an attempt by some human
beings, not of our world, to speak to us by [wireless] signals. I am absolutely
certain they are not caused by anything terrestrial."
Tesla's contention
that he had been listening to extraterrestial wireless signals was well-founded, for
at that time Marconi was barely able to send puny little signals a distance of fifty
miles--and it was two years AFTER Tesla's experiences at Colorado Springs that Marconi
managed to get the letter "S" across the Atlantic in intelligible form. Tesla said
that his instruments picked up a transmission with a regular pulse-which is not a
characteristic of natural stellar radiation, as we now know after years of study. The
regularity of the signals, and the apparent promptness with which they followed
Tesla's gigantíc sparks, are unique in this type of experiment.
At the same
time that Tesla was blastíng the heavens with his artificial lightning in Colorado,
young Marconi was tapping out the letter “V"; and his co-workers fifty miles away
(Wimeraux to South Foreland) finally succeeded in intercepting the signals.
In
1921, Marconi reported
that he had been receiving strange, unidentifiable radio signals on his yacht in the
Mediterranean. As with Tesla twenty-two years before, Marconi noted the unnatural
regularity of the pulses. He authorized his London representative to quote him as
saying that the signals certainly represented some sort of code which he could not
recognize, other than the letter ”V” then being used in the Marconí code.
In
1962, speaking to the American Rocket Society Convention in Los Angeles, researchers
C. D. Jackson and R. E. Hohmann presented a superb paper on the long search for life
in space. In it, of course, they dwelt at length on the experiences of Tesla, Marconi,
and also of the fantastic results of an experiment conducted with the cooperation of
the United States government by the
Professor of Astronomy at Amherst College, Dr. David Todd, on the night of August
23, 1924.
The Navy was an active participant in this venture for several
reasons, one of them being that the Navy had made arrangements with
Charles Francis Jenkins to test a device he had just built--an instrument which
could record radio signals on sensitized paper tape or on film. Jenkins was best known
as the man who built the first successful machine for projecting motion pictures. In
later years he built the first practical device for converting television signals into
television pictures-the crude and cumbersome (but workable) jenkins scanning-disc
system.
In 1924 Jenkins had progressed as far as this method of intercepting
and recording radio signals on photographic material. The Navy wanted to try to record
possible signals from Mars during that planet's near approach during August of 1924,
when it would be only 35,000,000 miles from Earth.
But the Navy was loath to be
tarred with the brush of lunacy if the word got out that it had sought space signals
and failed. It preferred to remain in the background, furnishing the money and the
gear and the necessary technical manpower-while someone else fronted for the project.
The "old Army Game" of "Heads We Win, Tails You Lose" was also the old Navy game in
this instance.
In Dr. David Todd they found their man. He was a respectable
astronomer who was fully justified in being curious about Mars. Instead of the
old-fashioned telescope he would try to use the new-fangled radio recording device.
It was a great night in the annals of eavesdropping on space.
For one
thing, the government ordered all American radio transmitters to remain silent during
the period of the test. Inside the “Jenkins Radio-Camera” a roll of sensitized paper
tape crept past a fluctuating point of light-the radio signal being converted into a
beam of light that would record on the photographic material. The recording material
was about thirty feet long and slightly more than six inches wide.
With the
antenna directed toward Mars, and the tiny light flickering the incoming signals onto
the paper film, the hours dragged by. Around the world, other nations participated by
instructing their wireless stations to listen for strange signals.
Some
reported results; some made no reports. A British Columbia station reported that it
had received a baffling series of signals which consisted of four dashes in code,
repeated for many minutes. Amateurs in France and England also reported picking up
short bursts of what seemed to be meaningless code. What our own Naval vessels
received, if anything, was not revealed.
One thing is-certain--none of them got
the same results as the jenkins Radio-Camera being used by Dr. Todd for the Naval
Observatory. It had functioned perfectly-if remarkably. Along one side of that tape
were recorded the dots (and dashes) which other receiving stations had reported.
Along the other side of the tape, at intervals indicating a time lapse of
about thirty minutes between the markings, were strange clusters of signals.
The NEW YORK TIMES reported on August 28: “Development of a photographic film record
of the radio signals in a period of 29 hours when Mars was closest to the earth, has
deepened the mystery of the dots and dashes reported heard at the same time by widely
separated operators of powerful stations.
“The film... discloses in black on
white a fairly regular arrangement of dots and dashes along one side, but on the other
side at almost evenly spaced intervals are curiously jumbled groups, each taking the
form of a crudely drawn human face."
The scientists who examined that
amazing strip of recorded radio signals... “of curiously jumbled clusters each
taking the shape of a crudely drawn human face”... were understandably bewildered
by this strange turn of events. Especially so, since the inventor himself had no idea
how the signals could be transmitted to produce such a bizarre result. The apparent
caricatures were a sort of seven-day wonder until they were finally filed and largely
forgotten.
But the scientists had already noted another aspect of this
experiment which may in the final analysis be of greater import than the “faces.” They
had noted that there was an interesting chronological relationship between this flood
of signals recorded in 1924 and the earlier experiments conducted by both Tesla and
Marconi.
For instance, Tesla transmitted repeated regular pulses of radiation
in the high frequency bands at a power of many millions of volts, in 1899. Marconi
transmitted the letter "V" in the Morse code used by telegraphers, also in 1899.
In 1921, after a time lapse of twenty-two years, the Morse code “V" was
received on Earth under conditions which indicated transmission from an
extra-terrestial source.
In the closing days of 1901, Marconi flashed his first
wireless message across the Atlantic. It was the code letter “S" and it was a much
stronger signal than his earlier efforts.
From December of 1901 to August of
1924, when the letter "S" came streaming in from space is a few months more than the
twenty-two-year period, but it is still within the apparent cycle noted before.
It may be pure coincidence, of course, but the seemingly intelligent nature of
the signals, duplicating those we had sent out so many years before, makes coincidence
alone rather unlikely.
Which brings us to still another facet of our
discussion: Twenty-two years from our space signal experiments of 1924 brings us to
1946, the year the Unidentified Flying Objects swarmed over Earth, in this case over
the Scandinavian countries and parts of Soviet Russia.
Here again it may have
been pure coincidence, but such an interesting "coincidence" that it deserves
inclusion, for we shall see that as this phenomenon develops, coincidence alone
becomes inadequate to explain what has happened.
Still another broadcasting
experiment which lies precisely on that twenty-two-year line was that conducted by the
noted Kentucky eccentric,
Nathan Stubblefield, in the summer of 1902. The WASHINGTON EVENING STAR told the
story in bold headlines in its issue of May 21, 1902:
BY LAND AND WATER THE
FIRST PRACTICAL WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY HEARD FOR HALF MILE
The STAR reported that
Stubblefield had broadcast voice messages from the Potomac River steamer Bartholdi and
had interchanged voice messages with prominent members of Congress on the banks of the
river, by sending the radiations out through two wires dangling in the water behind
the steamer.
To make the record inclusive, we should note that this headline
event took place almost exactly twenty-two years before Dr. Todd and the Naval
Observatory technicians intercepted those strange signals. And Stubblefield's
transmissions of the human voice were, of course, followed forty-four years later by
the dramatic appearance of the ubiquitous flying discs.
Did these unexplainable
signals mean that somewhere out there in space, at least eleven light years away,
somebody was trying to let us know they were listening? Were they recording our
signals and sending them back to us-a twenty-two-year round trip? If so, where were
they-if they were there at all?
It did not take a great deal of calculation to
narrow the field to a pair of probabilities: the stars
Tau Ceti and
Epsilon-Eridani. If they have inhabited planets which are interested in us, they
are just far enough away to lit the time-lag we have noted.
Somebody in high
place thought the subject worth exploring after the incredible Jenkins Radio-Camera
experiment of 1924; for in 1926 both the Navy and the Signal Corps, this time using
Johns Hopkins University as a front, built a huge wireless receiving installation in
Nebraska. It cost the government an admitted one hundred thousand dollars; not much
now but enough to construct a very powerful receiving station in 1926.
Precisely what happened there that summer has never been a matter of public knowledge.
The backers of the project admittedly were hoping to intercept radio signals from
space and they admittedly tried. After several weeks of activity, the official
statement said only that the results had not been satisfactory, which was probably
correct. At any rate the station was closed down, the records were absorbed in the
vast government files, and the attempt was virtually forgotten. But it was made and it
was devoted to recording space signals, if any.
- Life Out Yonder page 139-146
UFO's from Moonbases
Let us examine the chronological
sequence which seems to indicate a relationship between the doings of man and the
interest of the UFO's.
It was roughly one year after the first atomic bombs
were exploded before these strange craft began to appearn in Europe. Since we do not
know what maximum speeds they can attain in their various devices, it is idle to
speculate on why there was that lapse of time, assuming that they were attracted by
the A-bomb flashes or radiation. Perhaps they were surprised by the bombs and it took
them some time to organize their expedition. At any rate there was that one-year
interval between the event on Earth and the arrival of the UFO's.
Since that
time, however, the interval has been much shorter, generally only a matter of two or
three days if there is any ínterval at all.
This might be construed to mean
that these devices are based either in some isolated spot on Earth or on some
relatively nearby object, natural or artifcial.
A logical suspect would be the
moon.
The wealth of oddities which have been noted on the lunar surface is
nothing short of astounding. In 1879, two years after man first noted that Mars had
two very bright satellites, we discovered that our own satellite was pockmarked with
lights and lines and geometric figures where none had been seen before. The British
Astronomical Society asked its members to report such anomalies as they discovered
them, in the hope that scientists might be able to discern some attempt at
communication with us. After only two years the Society had to ask to be released from
its proposal; more than two thousand reports of oddities on the moon had been recorded
in that two-year period. Of this deluge the scientists could only conclude that the
moon must be a very strange place, beyond their understanding.
Major Patrick
Powers, head of the United States Army Space Development Program wrote in FAMILY
CIRCLE magazine that in his opinion "the first men to reach the moon must be prepared
to fight for the privilege of landing."
In December of 1962, at the convention
of the American Rocket Society in Los Angeles, the speaker was Dr. Carl Sagan, the
Advisor on Extra-terrestrial Life to the Armed Services. Dr. Sagan told his audience
that mankind must be prepared to face the probability that we have already been
visited by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe-and that they have-or
have had-bases on the averted side of our moon.
By that time we were already
involved in a twenty-billion-dollar program to send men to the moon. We had already
designed and were building devices to photograph the moon at close range before
crashing into it. And we had already arranged for many observatories, including
Palomar, to devote as much telescope time as possible to studying the moon--which had
long ago been abandoned as a major astronomical project in favor of more distant and
more difficult objects.
(One of the problems confronting us in our proposed
moon trips was that of communicating with the devices in transit. In 1951, Navy
scientists used bulldozers to scoop out a bowl-shaped hole about 250 feet in diameter
and about 50 feet deep at the center, near Boulder, Colorado. This hole was then lined
with heavy metal foil to increase its reflectivity. A radar transmitter was set up in
the center of the depression. Its signals bounced off the moon and returned to the
bowl, October 21, 1951. Using radio, recognizable voice returns were obtained by the
same process a short time later. Manmade instruments could therefore be sent to the
moon under control-1iteral1y on the beam. The electronic road was open.)
Major
Powers declined to amplify his interesting statement about the possibility of men
having to fight for the privilege of landing on the moon-so we must leave it there as
interesting but enigmatic.
To date, Russia has sent two photographic devices
close enough to the moon to make and return pictures of reasonable quality. Please
note that upon both occasions the device photographed the AVERTED side of the
moon-they did not take a single picture of the near side of the moon. Russia showed no
interest in the side of the moon where she hopes to land a man but devoted all her
efforts to filming the averted side, where Dr. Sagan suggested that someone may
already have landed.
Our own photographic lunar probes had a long record of
mystifying failures before we finally scored. Known as the Ranger series, six of them
went out and slammed into the moon without returning a single picture. Number Seven
finally came through for us by producing, in the summer of 1964, a total of 4,320
pictures of surprising clarity before it banged into the lunar landscape. One of those
pictures, which showed two large Iumpy white objects in one of the pits or craters,
was recalled and briefly "classified"-then re-released with the explanation that
the strange objects were only rocks. Since this explanation was only a guess from
250,000 miles away, it carries little conviction.
The pictures by Ranger Seven
were featured in newspapers and magazines for weeks; that is, the "selected" pictures
which were released were widely published. They were our first close-up look at the
moon. They had been frightfully expensive but they were remarkably detailed and
interesting.
While Ranger Eight sent back about 7,000 pictures a few months
later-pictures that were admittedly far more detailed than those of its
predecessor-you will have to dig to find them in any quantity in the public prints.
They were so much better, photographically, that they were correspondingly more
interesting. But after a small initial release of “selected” frames they dropped out
of sight.
Photographically, they were better pictures. They were also pictures
of an unusually active area of the moon. But few of them were exhibited-which leads to
the suspicion that perhaps they may have shown too much. In the present state of
affairs between the government and the public, it seems improbable that we shall ever
know just what the Ranger Eight pictures did show. The crater Alphonsus-true-but what
did they tell us about that crater that was new and different?
Lunar anomalies
were by no means restricted to the late years of the nineteenth century. They continue
to this day.
Equally interesting are the so-called “moon domes” which are
discussed in Harvard Observatory's magazine SKY AND TELESCOPE for January, 1958.
Noting that in recent years astronomers have been paying increasing attention to
"lunar domes, small rounded hills being observed in increasing numbers," the magazine
displays a drawing of one of these objects, made by an astronomer in France who had
studied it through a ten-inch telescope.
The presence of these domes was first
noted in the l930's; by 1960 more than two hundred of these rounded, white,
hemispherical objects had been recorded on the lunar surface. Whatever they are, they
are not hills; for hills do not appear and disappear on an airless orb. The shadows of
these objects show them to be rounded and they show a marked tendency to appear in
areas which are apparently level.
In order to be seen at all from Earth, these
things would have to be about 600 feet in diameter. They are admittedly close to the
limits of visibility, which may mean that they are possibly 750 feet in diameter. This
would be tiny for a volcanic cone by our standards, but it would not be small for an
inflatable or portable space base, such as we ourselves have considered for similar
purposes. Furthermore, these domes are seen first in one place and then in another. If
volcanoes do move on the moon they differ in that respect from terrestrial volcanoes.
Volcanoes can hardly be expected to pick up their cones and shuffle off to new
locations. Space bases would be logically expected to do just that.
The
well-documented peripatetic moon domes may be still another hint that the moon is not
as lifeless as some scientists profess to believe.
In 1958 and again in 1961,
Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kozyrev announced that he had detected what appeared to be
volcanic activity near the crater Aristarchus. He had first made the detection of this
anomaly by telescope from the observatory at Pulkovo and confirmed it by spectrograms.
The sneers he drew for this report came largely from those western scientists
who knew that the moon was only a great lifeless orb, alternately frozen and broiled
by the sun.
But in late 1963, four prominent American astronomers confirmed
Kozyrev's first reports: There was certainly some action “apparently volcanic” in the
crater Aristarchus. In the December, 1963, issue of SKY AND TELESCOPE, Lowell
Observatory reports that on the night of October 29 it had detected two clusters of
bright red lights north of the crater Herodotus; on the night of November 27, the red
spots had vanished from their previous location and were clustered in an oval
formation along the south rim of the crater Aristarchus!
[Please do not
misconstrue these bright red lights moving from place to place on the moon as
indicative of life there. They were officially nothing more than that rarest of all
phenomena . . . galloping volcanoes.--F.E.]
In June of 1965 an amateur
astronomer alerted professional observers in both California and Arizona to a strange
brilliant white ray of light that had streamed out of Aristarchus, which was then well
over on the dark portion of the lunar disc.
In July, the observatories saw it
too-a beam of white light which lasted for about one and a half seconds each time it
appeared.
The observatories made arrangements with numerous amateur radio
operators to flash the word from one observatory to another when the flash was
spotted. Known as "Astronet," by August of 1965 it included “ham” operators of
short-wave radio transmitters in Phoenix, Tucson, and Prescott in Arizona; at Mt.
Wilson, San Diego, and the Los Angeles area in California; and another in Las Vegas,
Nevada.
In July and again in August, the astronomers who were watching this
latest moon mystery were able to talk with each other as though they were in the same
room, thanks to this hookup of amateur short-wave radio facilities. As each scientist
observed the flash he would report it to his colleagues.
Aristarchus is in the
south left center of the moon as viewed from Earth and can be seen by a telescope of
four inches or more with ease.
And what of the light? The scientists who have
logged it in their observatory records do not believe that it is any reflected star
light-nor a vagrant sunbearn-for at the time it is seen, Aristarchus is around the
curve of the lunar landscape from the sun.
What is it, then, that is flashing
that strange light from that unusual crater which has spawned so many enigmas in
recent years? The scientists aren't talking. But they and their friends of Astronet
are still watching Aristarchus-and are still marveling at what they see there.
Robert E. Curtiss of Alamogordo, New Mexico, is not only a very capable astronomer, he
is also a skilled photographer.
On the night of November 26, 1956, Mr. Curtiss
was making some test shots with a Mitchell 35 millimeter motion picture camera. It was
loaded with highly sensitized film and was coupled to the rangefinder of his 16-inch
reflector telescope. With this setup he was able to shoot pictures of the moon at
speeds of 24 to 48 frames per second. The telescope was covering that portion of the
moon around Fra Mauro, which lies between Parry and Copernicus.
When Mr.
Curtiss developed and printed his films he was startled by a peculiarity. just to the
left of the terminator, which is the dividing line between sunlight and shadow on the
moon, there was a small white Maltese cross. It was on frame after frame and was
unquestionably either on the surface of the moon or very close to it.
SKY AND TELESCOPE ran the picture in June of 1958. They appended a suggestion by
Walter Haas, Director of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, who
ventured the possibility that the strange white cross with the four anns of equal
length might be only a group of ridges or mountain spurs, visible in this particular
form only for a fleeting period when the sunlight reaches the lower slopes.
It is an interesting theory. Unfortunately it conflicts with nature. For ridges or
mountain spurs to cross each other at right angles is a physical impossibility,
according to the U.S. Geodetic Survey, since the forces that created one ridge would
automatically destroy the other.
The cross was there. Mr. Curtiss photographed
it. Thus far, it seems, no one has been able to explain it.
Something very
powerful indeed is the driving force behind our frenzied effort to reach the moon.
Dr. Sagan's suggestion, if correct, might explain why the UFO's now appear within such
a short time after we do something spectacular. A lunar base would simplify the task
of keeping us under Surveillance at all times and of conducting intensive surveys on
short notice. The conclusion that the moon is, or might be, harboring such a base
would serve as an urgent motivation for our drive to reach the moon. . . and would
probably explain Russia's singular preoccupation with the averted side of the moon.
The Race Into Space page 195-203
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