Isaac Asimov vs. Jerry Pournelle on UFOs
Which one was right about Fermi's Paradox?
The Flying Saucer Era is now entering its 70th year. In June 1947, businessman and private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny unidentified flying objects moving at supersonic speeds near Mt. Rainier.
Arnold was a reasonably (although not, to my mind, extremely) credible witness.
The world had seen colossal improvements in aeronautical technology over the previous 44 years since the Wright Brothers, and much more was to come by just 22 years later with the moon landing. For example, four months after Arnold’s UFO sightings in June 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.
Science fiction writing was entering a golden age. And both science fiction writers and scientists assumed it plausible that intelligent life existed on nearby Mars and/or Venus. (Martians were widely assumed to be philosophically advanced, like Tibetans, but fading in the life drive. Venerians were assumed to be teeming with reproductive energy but slightly dim, like the inhabitants of the tropical rain forests.)
Earthlings were merely two decades from sending unmanned probes to Mars and Venus, so the notion that Martians and/or Venusians were visiting Earth seemed to be only fair play. In 1947, the theory that Earthlings had evolved far beyond Martians and/or Venerians seemed, frankly, racist.
Many of the other early witnesses of UFOs were hardly Randy Quaid’s demented paranoiac in Independence Day.
As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine in 2017, one UFO observer in 1953 was, quite likely, America’s single most credible aerospace witness:
For instance, America’s top aerospace engineer, Kelly Johnson, the founder of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, saw a curious phenomenon in the western sky on Dec. 16, 1953, that he thought was a flying saucer. The next day, he ran into the crew of a Lockheed Constellation that had been remodeled into a prototype Navy Airborne Early Warning airplane. They had seen the same inexplicable glowing shape. They then all filed detailed reports with the Air Force.
Similarly, in 1969, Jimmy Carter observed a weirdly glowing UFO in the night sky. As I wrote:
Future president Jimmy Carter saw a curious series of lights in 1969 that he called a UFO.
Now, this is often dismissed as no trustworthier than Carter’s claim while president to have been attacked by an enormous swimming rabbit.
But the president really was attacked by an enormous swimming rabbit. (Things like that just seemed to happen to poor Jimmy.) …
On the David Susskind show, sci-fi great Isaac Asimov and Jerry Pournelle debated Fermi’s Paradox. Jerry wrote:
During the Cold War treaties forbade putting weapons in orbit, or building and testing orbital bombardment systems. This was interpreted to include FOBS, Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems, in which a weapon is placed into Earth orbit, but de-orbited to re-enter before it makes a complete orbit around the Earth: in other words, it depends on what the meaning of the word orbital is. The USSR, for what seemed to them good strategic reasons – with a FOBS system they could attack the US from the south, and thus avoid our Early Warning systems – decided to develop and test orbital weapons. In order to avoid detection the weapons were launched southward and made to re-enter the atmosphere over South America. Those re-entering dummy warheads were seen by far too many people to be simply dismissed as hallucinations. An explanation was needed, and the KGB provided one: they spread UFO stories including stories of sightings of aliens. Meanwhile, the US didn’t want the USSR to know just how much we knew about their experiments, so the CIA did nothing to counter the rumors. In a word, there was a coverup in which the leading intelligence services of the world pursued different ends to accomplish the same result: people believed they had seen “real” UFO’s, and neither side was interested in debunking the stories. …
I was also President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and was often on book tours promoting my books, so I got asked about the subject a lot. As it happened, I was on one television show – I think David Susskind – with Isaac Asimov, and when the subject of UFO’s inevitably came up, Isaac said “They can’t exist. If they were real, they’d come to the government and say ‘here we are,’ unless of course they have some reason to be secret, but if they do want to be secret, any technology that would let them be here at all would be enough to let them BE secret. There’s no possible explanation of those sightings! If they want to be secret, they’ll be secret.”
That irritated me, and I shot back “Isaac, you don’t work much with students, do you? Suppose the Alpha Centauri University department of Xenothropology wants to study us and forbids the students to contaminate us with knowledge of their existence, do you really think seniors and grad students might not get drunk and play some tricks?” To which Isaac had no answer, but he remained convinced: there were no such things, there never were, and that’s that. If the standard UFO investigators seemed to me insufficiently skeptical, Isaac seemed overly so
But as video cameras became more ubiquitous, UFO sightings declined in number. I wrote 9 years ago:
The spread of ubiquitous camera phones in this century has reduced interest in UFOs. There remain unidentified flying objects, but when recorded on video, they mostly remain unidentified rather than jaw-dropping proof that Somebody Is Out There.
Over the last decade, most of the interest in UFO has come from aged government officials.
Since about 2000, my theory has been that the U.S. Deep State has psy-opped itself into finding UFOs plausible. I wrote in 2017:
Finally, my guess is that the UFO craze that began in 1947 had something to do with the lavish postwar investment in aerospace R&D.
The scale of Cold War spending can be hard to grasp. Recent research, for instance, suggests that Jimmy Carter’s UFO was the result of the Air Force launching two rockets from Eglin AFB that evening to release exotic gases into the upper atmosphere. Why? I don’t know, but if you had that kind of budget, why wouldn’t you rocket weird substances into the sunset to see what they look like?…
All sorts of bizarre aircraft took to the air during this period. For example, Northrop’s B-2 stealth bomber’s flying wing design was not originated in the 1980s. Northrop had first test-flown its YB-35 flying wing bomber way back in 1946.
Johnson’s Skunk Works churned out improbable airplanes, such as in 1954 the Mach 2 F-104 with wings only seven feet long, in 1956 the spindly U-2 high-altitude spy plane, and in 1962 the Mach 3 A-12/SR-71 Blackbird.
The Blackbird was so radical in shape that for national-security reasons it couldn’t be flown from Lockheed Airport in Burbank to Area 51 (yes, it’s real) in Nevada. It had to be trucked in giant wrapped packages, guarded by CIA men with submachine guns. When the convoy accidentally dented a Greyhound bus, the CIA agents handed the bus driver a little under $5,000 in cash to get his vehicle repaired, no questions asked.
In 1963, when an A-12 crashed on its way back to Area 51, the crash site was immediately “sanitized.” Civilians who stumbled upon it were given a prearranged cover story that the crash was merely a run-of-the-mill F-105, but an F-105 carrying a nuclear bomb, so they had better head over the horizon fast. They were paid off in cash, perhaps $25,000 each, and informed never to speak of what they had seen.
Back in 2017 in Taki’s Magazine, I put forward various theories for UFOs, concluding:
Paywall here.
