U.S. Can Eavesdrop on Other Civilizations, Expert Maintains

Editor's Note: UFOs, or unidentified flying objects are they controlled vehicles from outer space comparable to the Moon and Mars shots of the United States and Russia; are they optical illusions; are they hoaxes? For the information of its readers, the NEWS continues today a series of excerpts from the book on UFOs that has eclipsed all others in arousing interest in the subject, and stimulating controversy, Flying Saucers — Serious Business.

THE UNITED STATES can eavesdrop on more than one intelligent civilization elsewhere in the universe anytime we are ready to tap into the hear! Bengard M. Oliver, famed electronics engineer and vice president of Hewlett Packard Corp., made that statement before the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in San Francisco on July 27, 1965.

Mr. Oliver contended that by building a net of 1,000 to 10,000 radio telescopes, each about one hundred feet in diameter, man could "virtually listen to creation itself."

The cost of such a project would be about one-tenth the cost of landing a man on the moon. "I predict that by such a listening post on the universe we would find not one — but several — sources of intelligent life," Oliver said.

MR. OLIVER'S statements would have been regarded as lunacy a generation ago ... or even less. In the last 20 years many things have happened — on earth — and around earth — that all point to the likelihood of intelligent life rather than human beings as terrestrial origin. In terms of money and manpower, it has become, by 1965, one of our major scientific endeavors.

One early researcher in the field of extraterrestrial life was a German geologist, Dr. Otto Hahn. Microscopically, he detected in a section of meteorite seen to fall in Hungary in 1866, delicate figures which resembled fossilized lifeforms of early earth creatures. Hahn photographed 16 family groups of crinoids, tiny living things, having "arms" which existed (and still do) in the sludge of primordial seas.

For corroboration, Hahn had a noted zoologist, Dr. D. F. Weinland, go over his researches. Weinland's findings confirmed Hahn's conclusion that all the objects had lived somewhere in space.

ANOTHER EARLY seeker of knowledge of extraterrestrial life was the Yugoslav scientist, Nikola Tesla, who developed alternating current. One of Nikola Tesla's 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, Nikola Tesla moved to Colorado Springs, Colo., where he set up his gear — a tremendous concentration of electrical equipment designed to deliver a giant-size blast of man-made 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.

By alternate changes of the flow of the current through an immense coil, 75 feet in diameter, and finally shooting it into a copper ball atop a 200-foot tower, Nikola Tesla produced bolts of artificial lightning. These literally rocked the countryside for many miles around. Before public outcry forced him to cease, Nikola 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 Nikola Tesla's gear back in 1899 were periodic and "with such clear suggestion of number and order ... 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."

At the same time that Nikola Tesla was testing in Colorado, young Guglielmo Marconi was tapping out the letter "V"; and his co-workers 50 miles away (Wimeraux to South Foreland) were finally succeeding in intercepting these signals.

In 1921, Marconi reported that he had been receiving strange, unidentifiable radio signals on his yacht in the Mediterranean. As Nikola Tesla had 22 years before, Marconi noted that unnatural regularity of the pulses. He was quoted 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 Marconi code.

In 1962, speaking to an American Rocket Society conclave in Los Angeles, researchers C. D. Jackson and R. E. Hohmann presented a paper on the long search for life in space. They dwell on the experiences of Tesla, Marconi, and also of the results of an experiment by the professor of astronomy at Amherst College, Dr. David Todd, on the night of Aug. 23, 1924.

The U. S. 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 electronic signals via scanning disc into television pictures.)

The Navy wanted to try to record possible signals from Mars during that planet's approach to earth in August, 1924, when it would be only 35,000 miles away. But the Navy observers chose to remain in the background, furnishing the money and the gear and the necessary technical manpower, while someone else fronted for the project should it fail. Dr. David Todd was their man.

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 — any radio signal being converted into a beam of light that would record on the photographic material. The recording material was about 30 feet long and on earth — slightly more than six inches wide. Other nations around the world cooperated by instructing their wireless stations to listen for strange signals. Some reported results, some made no reports.

The Jenkins Radio — Camera being used by Dr. Todd for the Naval Observatory functioned remarkably.

The news report on Aug. 28, said:

"Development of a photographic film record of the radio signals in a period of 40 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 them said that amazing strip of recorded radio signals ... were 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 noted that there was an interesting chronological relationship between this flood of signals recorded in 1924 and the earlier experiments conducted by Tesla and Marconi.

AS I SAID, Nikola Tesla repeated pulses of radiation in the high frequency band, 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 22 years, the Morse code "V" was received on earth under conditions which indicated transmission from an extraterrestrial source.

In 1901, Marconi flashed his first wireless message — the code letter "S" — across the Atlantic. From December, 1901, to August, 1924, when the letter "S" came streaming in from space, is a few months more than the 22-year period, but it is still within the apparent cycle noted before.

Twenty-two years after the space signal experiments of 1924, that is, in 1946, unidentified flying objects swarmed over earth, particularly over Scandinavian countries and parts of Soviet Russia.

HERE AGAIN it may have been pure coincidence, but such an interesting "coincidence" that as this phenomenon develops, coincidence alone becomes inadequate to explain what has happened.

Did these unexplainable signals mean that somewhere out there in space, at least 11 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 22-year round trip? If so, where were they — if they were there at all?

The stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon — Eridani, if they are inhabited, are just far enough away to fit the timelag we have noted.

Not until 1950 did space listening become an acceptable medium of scientific research. That was the year that radio telescopes, generally vast and expensive constructions, were necessary in scientists to analyze the sounds of the stars.

WHEN SPACE radio listening became respectable, a few courageous scientists dared to examine the innards of meteorites again, and to talk about the results.

A meteorite of the type known as carbonaceous chondrite (granular, containing carbon) had been found near Murray, Ky., in 1950. It was turned over to the Smithsonian Institution scientists, who identified their findings as "organic compounds" of the type common to primitive evolutionary processes. Few laymen were likely to see that statement; fewer still were likely to interpret it for what it was — a guarded admission that the basic stuff of life in that meteorite.

In 1953, a researcher at the University College in London, Dr. George Mueller, set about dissecting a meteorite from South Africa, a carbonaceous chondrite which had blazed to earth in 1838. The doctor secured from the stony mass a tiny amount of a resin which proved to contain organic acids in complex forms. He also reported finding traces of water which was unlike the water common to earth.

NEITHER OF those two reports drew any critical fire. Not so with the work of their successors in this field in the 1960s.

Dr. Warren Meinschein, an analytical chemist for an oil company, used a mass spectrometer which brought the conclusion that the hydrocarbons of crude oil were evidently derived from space. This provocative development came to the attention of two scientists at Fordham University, Bartholomew Nagy, a geochemist, and Douglas J. Henney, an organic chemist, who examined the hydrocarbons which a French scientist had isolated from the Fordham — well known Orgueil meteorite back in 1888.

Their findings stirred up a scientific storm when they were published in "Nature," the British scientific journal. "Nature" said that the study of the Orgueil meteorite had brought to light evidence of primitive life forms which resembled, but which were not identical to, ancient forms of algae which live in water on earth.

THE PRINCIPAL argument against the findings of the researchers was that the meteorite had been contaminated — by striking the earth. Therefore, any earth-like fossils had merely been reacquired by contact.

It was not an unreasonable assumption, but it was badly weakened when the scientists pointed out that they had actually studied two different meteorites, and the one from France (Orgueil) was identical in content to the one from Africa (Ivuna).

(Fragments of the Murray, Ky., meteorite of 1950, were turned over to the U. S. Biological Survey and in a fully sterilized environment, tiny samples placed in nutrients and carefully watched. By 1961 "some growth" had been noted. In the spring of 1965 they were still growing!)

Thus reputable scientists seem to have discovered considerable evidence indicative that somewhere in space there is, or has been, life. If developed under conditions which seem indicated by the nature of it, and by the content of the material in which it was found, then we have no reason to doubt that it continued to develop — at least until the cataclysm which rent the body on which the life existed.

THIS IN itself is not proof of intelligent beings — not even of little green men — but it is evidence that somewhere out there life did exist — and that is important.

Is it still there in some recognizable form on some celestial body which is capable of being interested in us ... and of reaching us physically, perhaps?

That question has not been neglected.

So far as the records show, there was no consistent search for radio signals from outer space prior to about 1952, by which time the equipment used for this work had become sufficiently sophisticated to justify the expense of creating and operating it.

AN AMATEUR, 25-year-old John G. Bolton of Australia, reported in 1947 (June) that he had picked up some interesting signals from a point in space which he was not able to locate precisely with his gear. But four years later Bolton's radio signal source was identified as Cygnus A. Radio astronomy grew rapidly following Bolton's discovery, although not necessarily because of it.

In August, 1956, Dr. J. H. Kraus of Ohio State University announced that he had detected interesting radio signals from Venus.

"These signals must come from a source of a rather complex type," said the scientist, "and they have many of the characteristics of 'terrestrial' broadcasting stations."

IN THE early winter of 1959 I reported that the giant radio telescope built at Green Bank, West Va., by the National Science Foundation, was to be used in a search for intelligent signals from outer space. This was promptly denied by the government.

The Green Bank station's was officially known as Project Ozma. In 1961, less than two years after it opened with fanfare and such an expenditure, the public was told that Project Ozma was ended. Its director, Dr. Otto Struve, indicated to newsmen that the project was of little value, and his response to questions on whether they might expect news of Ozma's renewed study of space signals, Struve suggested that they "come back in a hundred years."

However, this project was not ended at all. It was merely transferred quietly to a new location, in Puerto Rico. There, in a huge bowl-shaped valley, Office of Scientific Research, a branch of the Air Force, had set up a tremendous space listening station — a metal-lined bowl, about 1,000 feet in diameter, many times more sensitive than the movable radio "dish" at Green Bank.

THE PROJECT began operations in 1964. It is merely the transplantation of Project Ozma, but this time its findings were classified and concealed from the public.

During the latter days of the Green Bank operation, the radio dish at that installation had picked up some very strange signals which seemed to emanate from the region of the star Tau Ceti, which, along with Epsilon-Eridani, was suspected of being involved in the apparent 22-year cycle of signals Green Bank scientists announced their experience to the press.

The result was widespread publicity and an aroused public interest. But the subsequent explanation referred to the announcement from Green Bank as a "scare" and dismissed the signals received on that widely reported occasion as nothing more than earthly "experiments of a secret nature."

IN A LECTURE in San Francisco on March 17, 1965, one of the men who was close to the Project Ozma operation made a significant, and perhaps revealing, speech. Professor Harold Weaver, director of radio astronomy at the University of California, ventured the opinion that extraterrestrial races would probably first be attracted by our radio signals and that they would probably receive these signals from space probes which they would have sent into likely positions in the universe to intercept and re-transmit such signals, which in their original form would have been too feeble to cross interstellar space.

If such a thing has actually happened it is we would in all probability have been unaware of it, for it is only within the past 15 years that we have had gear (radio telescopes) capable of locating such space probes.

In that same San Francisco speech, Professor Weaver also said that if one of these space probes from an extragalactic source were to find an inhabited planet emitting artificial radio signals, the next logical step would be to try to contact that planet. "How does it communicate?"

How does it let us know? It sends some of our own signals back to us ... Maybe that is why we get those 'beeps' in Project Ozma!"

From the book published by Lyle Stuart, Inc. Copyright (c) 1966, by Frank Edwards. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.