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Mr. Crichton, having made it almost impossible for me to speak without it sounding like an

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anti-climax, I will say very briefly what I want to give you is a review of the scientific

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evidence for there possibly being something in UFOs, and then my own particular theories

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as to the possible relationship between unidentified flying objects and parapsychology.

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I'm deliberately sticking close to the text of the articles which have appeared in Flying

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Salsa Review. This will for one thing make it easier for you to follow the argument, it

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will also make it easier for you to get the end of it, which will be in the next issue

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of the review. I'm cutting as much of it as I can in a moment without going over the copyrighted

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lab. It has taken approximately 2,500 million years or in modern terminology 2.5 aons for

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biological life to evolve upon Earth and to attain a state of technological development

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where we can now break away from the gravitational pull of our planet and visit other worlds.

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So far we have been restricted to the use of unknown vehicles, but I think it would be quite

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unrealistic not to believe that within the next decade we are going to visit the moon

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and probably the nearer planets as well. These possibilities of interplanetary flight have

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only been known for about 30 years, and the possibilities of communication between worlds

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have only been known for about 60. Now after that vast time of 2,500 million years required

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for intelligent beings to develop on Earth out of primitive chemicals, the time required

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to go from a condition where we had no knowledge at all of communication by means of electromagnetic

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radiation to the time now when we can transmit television pictures from Mars to Earth is less

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than 100 years. That same brief period has also covered the transition from no knowledge

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of powered flight to the launching of interplanetary probes and the transition from no knowledge

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of electronics to the construction of computers which near human thinking ability. I would

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like you to get this idea quite clear of a vast period during which development goes

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on at a very very slow rate and then a sudden enormous technological leap. What happens after

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that we don't know. First slide please. The picture is quite familiar to you I am sure

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the endometre medulla and the reason why I am showing it to you is because it is believed

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that if we were beings on a planet of a sun within that galaxy our own galaxy would look

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very much the same. It is of similar type. It contains something like 100,000 million

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stars and so does our own galaxy. We will see presently what this means in terms of the

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probability of life on other worlds. The next slide please. The idea of there being other

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beings at all and of there being life on them couldn't arise until people realise that the

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little bites of crops that you see in the sky and I can't pin holes in the floor of heaven

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but sounds like our own. Probably the earliest story about life on other worlds was that written

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by Plato a couple of thousand years ago and medieval ideas were largely affected by ignorance

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and the fact that between us and other worlds there is an airless gulf. The atmosphere doesn't

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continue so that this idea from the middle ages due to Bishop Godwin of flying to the

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moon by means of a set of train geese wasn't realised to be impactable at the time. Next

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one please. And Serano de Berverac who is better known for his swordsmanship than for his

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science fiction thought that it was possible by means of battles of dew which are lifted

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up by the sun's rays he believed to fly similarly and the astronaut was not going to be inconvenienced

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by having no air to breathe because he didn't know there would be no air for him to breathe.

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Next one please. A little further on you had this 16th century picture of life and it's

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not altogether irrelevant to our subject because the very great astronomer Kepler in his famous

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Somnium had the idea that the theops builder his mother was a witch and that she had flown

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to the moon in the conventional way. Next one please. This most of you will recognise from

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Jules Verne's very fine book of A Marriage to the Moon. It's of great interest to us

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now because at the time Verne was slated by the scientists for suggesting that you could

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use the projectile with a few hundred rates of gun cotton because quite apart from what

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would happen to the inhabitants of the projectile the projectile itself if given sufficient

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velocity to break away from our gravitational pull would be flattened and of course it's

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interesting to note now that Project Heart which is the Canadian scheme for launching

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satellites by means of an Aval gun shows every sign of being quite successful. Next one please.

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Finally you have the more conventional type of satellite launcher and I would just like

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at this point to suggest that in the 300 years between the time when it was thought that

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witches might fly to the moon on broomsticks to the development of this rocket there's been

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quite a change and that change may be reflected in the next 300 years. This thing may look

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just like a broomstick by then. Next please. Thank you. We are still a long way from having

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control of our environment but with current progress with rain making by the chemical

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seeding of clouds and the French work in the Sahara with the meteor from making artificial

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thunderstorms and tornadoes it seems improbable that the final attainment will take more than

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now the 100 years and after that unless the irresponsibility of our leaders holds us into

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a final free societal war it seems reasonable to look forward to a long time during which

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we can enjoy the mastery of ourselves and our planet. Earth will remain habitable for

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thousands of millions of years yet so if we look from the distant past to the distant

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future we see and I reiterate it that the change over from a non-technological society

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to one with complete mastery of its planet occupies but the twinkling of an eye in the

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process of developing life. The consequence of all this is that the possibility of our

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ever discovering or being discovered by a race of extraterrestrial beings in a similar

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way to our own is negligible. The phase of transition from no technology to mastery

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of interplanetary flight is so brief that it can be ignored in relation to the time for

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which a planet stays habitable. The only race which could discover us would be one of the

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commander spaceflight and therefore one of the highly developed technology. The only races

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which we could discover ourselves would be either those which have not yet invented

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machines or those which are tremendously advanced. It's more likely then that they will have

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discovered us first and they may have done so. The probability of finding life in the

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course of an interstellar exploration is obviously related to the time for which a community

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endures. One of the things we want to know is do they always destroy themselves within a

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few decades of discovering atomic energy or do they survive the phase through which we

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are now going when technology advances faster in human compassion and go on to sociological

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attainments which we can't conceive. I think that in view of the opportunities for the

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triumph of brute force over reason or even for the triumph of inanimate nature over

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organized life which have failed to prevent the evolution of man so far, that there is

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reason to hope that communities do continue to endure until in the course of astronomical

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ages their planet is engulfed in the death struggles of its sun. Next slide please. This

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many of you will recognize as being a Hertzsprung Russell diagram which gives the relationship

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between the stellar type shown at the bottom. You probably remember the full mnemonic for

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the types OBA fine girl kiss me right now sweetest. The important thing to note is that

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the relationship between mass and temperature and the next slide please. And this gives

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you the, um, the first years or areas in which life could develop on the planet surrounding

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a sun. Where you have these very small stars here stars like the five type. The only

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heat up a very small zone. On the other hand because of this and the relationship between

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and the rate at which a plant, a star is consumed and it's mass they last for quite a long time.

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Period on the main sequence here 100,000 million years for an M5 but it's only developing a

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habitable zone which is about the size of the orbit of Venus. It's really quite small. On

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the other hand when you come to some of the giant stars they develop a very large area

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indeed but their time on the main sequence is consequently so short that it's doubtful

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whether they could evolve life in the way in which it evolved upon Earth. Next please.

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Now when you consider these various factors together with others, ellipticity of orbits

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most stars that you see are not single stars or either binary or multiple and consequently

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you can't get a stable orbit for a planet unless either you've got the two stars fairly close together.

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The planet is travelling in an enormous orbit around both which means that it is probably going from a fairly hot

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phase when it's close to both of them to a cold phase when it's a long way out. Or it's pursuing

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some very complicated orbit like a figure of 8 in between 2 which is likely also to be highly unstable.

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When you consider all these it seems that only about 2% of multiple star systems could possibly

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have habitable planets. Only about 10% of single stars. About 67% of the stars you see are binary

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and multiple so it's fairly simple mathematics to get 4.5% of all visible stars as the maximum

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number which could have planets which might give rise to intelligent life. As we saw earlier

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the content of stars in the galaxy is about 100,000 million which is quite a few stars.

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So even on that basis with 100,000 million galaxies around the number of planets which could have

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habitable life as we know it developed in the way in which we know it is enormous. If we stick to our own

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galaxy which is the only one we're ever likely to know much about the number is still somewhere around

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4,000 million possible habitable planets. Now of these stars which may have planets like a

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some of them are very much older than the Sun. Some as much as 5,000 million years older

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a few possibly as much as 10,000 million years older and this means that if life developed upon

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their planets at the same rate that it developed here it could have been technologically in

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advance of ours long before we climbed out of the primeval seas. The thing is it implies that they might

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have been watching us long before we were capable of wondering whether we could watch anything at all.

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It's possible that as Arthur Cox addressed it in one of his books, aliens faced of their

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specials may have descended to Earth's service countless times in the course of the ages.

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I'm rather interested in how the surveillance would be carried out. We're not really in a position to imagine

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the achievements of a race that's head science and engineering for a few million years any more than a

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near end air tower could understand the international bank or atomic energy station. It is almost certain

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that if ancient races do exist they would already have linked themselves up in some kind of interstellar

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community. Next slide please. Earth as you know is somewhere out from the centre of the galaxy

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which is in the region of the constellation Sagittarius. So here's the sun with Earth and its other planets

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and here is a region near the centre of our galaxy where I've indicated possible inhabited planets

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which are in communication with radiation. It seems to me that it might be a profitable thing to do

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to see whether you could detect any radiation in that way. The chances of course are very slim

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because with any form of transmission that we know at present you've got to beam it pretty tightly

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in order to make it travel even a few light years. So the chances of picking up radiation due to

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side loads are very small. Next slide please. In the stars we can extrapolate current lines of

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progress it seems more likely the interstellar exploration which involves journeys of thousands of light

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years would be achieved by highly evolved machines rather than by a biological organism. Machines which

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are an allergy from our own Mars vehicles and that sort of thing but vastly more complex are going to be

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capable of analysing and photographing and recording and computing and finally transmitting back to their bases

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neatly documented surveys of everything they can pick up. The fingerprints of our newborn

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civilisation may in fact already be known to the records department of some vastly distant older race.

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Before considering the ways the other ways in which that surveillance could be conducted we have to realise that the

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ways vary according to the types of entity that wish to know about us. We have seen a high probability for

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man being non-unique as an intelligence in the universe but it doesn't imply that the other

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intelligences have to be like man. Although many animal lovers will claim a high order of intelligence for their

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pets the only really intelligent organism at present known to man is man. By intelligence we don't

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mean here the dictionary definition of intellectual understanding which doesn't get through any further.

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That's specifically a capacity for abstract thought. Within the compass of terrestrial scientific knowledge we can

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conceive the possibility of three groups of intelligent organism excluding man. Firstly humanoid or non-humanoid

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biological species, secondly mechanical intelligences and thirdly stable intelligent plasmids.

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Despite the claims of spiritualists psychic phenomena provide no evidence for the existence of disembodied intelligences.

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That is because these phenomena can all be explained equally well by alternative hypotheses based upon the powers of the

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human mind. We will now consider in some detail three classes of possible intelligent organism.

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First of all biological organisms. I thought it was very interesting that the 1964 meeting of the British Association, the opinions of

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the scientists there, quite a number of quite orthodox biologists who thought that baguette monsters were a lot more probable than

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humanoid species. Baguette monsters of course because an animal is only adapted to its environment, it's only successful if it is

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adapted to its environment, it's only adapted to its environment if it collages changes closely. Therefore if an organism, if a race has

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developed upon a planet vastly different to ours it will probably have developed a vastly different form of body. And since we always call a

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monster anything that isn't familiar to us, baguette monsters. If we make the assumption that within limits the physical

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properties of material are not the same wherever they occur then we can predict quite a lot of things. For example the limit to the

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height of a living creature is reached at the point where its legs can't support its weight. So in general the height of living organisms

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must vary inversely as the gravitational field of the planet. So you would expect giant planets to have animals which were something

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like armor plated tortoises with multiple legs and you would expect very small planets to have something like a cross between a giraffe and a jellyfish.

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These physical characteristics of biological organisms now bear a direct relationship to the possibility of the organisms being intelligent.

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Intelligent seems to be a function of the number of interconnections between the neurons of the brain. There is therefore a minimum number of neurons.

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And neurons themselves are quite complex things. They have to have a finite size. There is therefore a limit to the smallness of an intelligent organism.

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The brain of a man has somewhere around 10,000 million neurons all of a finite size. So it's unlikely that a really intelligent organism is going to be very much

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smaller than a man that might be larger within limits. But there are limits again here because for one thing of the finite velocity of propagation of nervous impulses,

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nervous impulses very somewhat in speed, that they are really quite slow. In a branch of source it must have taken about one and a half to two seconds for a message from its big toe to get up to its little pea sized brain

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and say, how is somebody nibbling me? So by retiring a message we got back from the brain to big toe to say, well get out of it silly, the toe wasn't there.

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This probably had something to do with the branch of source dying off.

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Now, all of this means then that there are very definite limits to the size of an organism. It can't be too big, it can't be too small.

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Two other factors which come into limited size. The square cube ratio, the clinical exchange which can take place on surfaces, that is the absorption of food from the gut or respiration in the lung,

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is proportional to the square of the size of the organ. The total energy which the animal consumes is proportional to its bulk and this is the cube of the size of the organism.

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Clearly then, as you go up in size it gets more and more difficult for you to get enough energy quick enough to keep you going.

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So we expect that biological organisms are going to be within our fairly limited range of sizes.

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There are other requirements for intelligence. You need sensory organs to get data about your environment. You need motor organs in order to react back upon the environment.

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Coming to senses, we have five well known ones and in addition to that we have senses which relate to movement, position, acceleration, pain, pressure and temperature.

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If I ask any of you at this moment to think much of big toe on the right hand side feels like you know whether it's hot or cold, whether you were thinking about it before or not.

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You've got a temperature sense. It's not normally counted as a sense but it's quite real.

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Also if this whole room started to rotate rapidly you would know it. This is your sense of acceleration.

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When you do the on-man you start looking at some of the other animals on earth. They have senses which make one dog or the elasmapranx which includes the sharks, rays and dogfish.

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I have some little organs known as the ampulli of Lorenzini and these are voltage detectors.

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Now they're pretty good. The gill movements of a common place generate voltage gradients of the order of about a thousandth of a volt per centimeter.

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The organs of Lorenzini can detect something about a million times weaker than this.

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This means that a place can bury itself completely in the sand and a shark swimming by within about ten meters, thirty feet, can detect it because of the total voltage is given up by its gill muscles.

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And this is by no means the most remarkable. Mad snails and planarians have built in magnetic compasses.

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Bees and king crabs can detect the plane of polarisation of polarised light.

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Lipid wrappers including rattlesnakes are extremely sensitive to heat. They can detect a few hundredths of a degree so they can strap a warm-blooded prey in the dark.

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The eyes of a common snail are sensitive to X-rays so is the nose of a cat.

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Bees and butterflies cannot see red but they can see ultraviolet.

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So in addition to these senses possessed by various creatures but not by men, there are undoubtedly lots of others which we haven't even yet thought of.

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And the sort of collection of senses and motor organs which perfectly realistic creatures on another planet might have,

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they probably exceed anything the science fiction writer can dream up.

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Limbs, whilst a convenience for locomotion, are also a requirement for intelligence.

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The story of man's early travels to intelligence was the story of his travel to develop hands and then to free himself from the need to walk on them so he could use some of the tools.

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It's interesting the number of limbs employed by higher forms of life has stayed around for an awful long time, although the insects have tried anything from six to a few hundredths.

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Now, biological to mechanical intelligences.

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Twenty years ago, electronic computers were almost unknown.

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To do it, they were used by tens of thousands.

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They are dealing with everything from routine addition and subtraction to advanced accountancy, astronomical calculations and the economic planning of all industries.

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The latest machines, although they're still in the experimental stage, not only think for themselves, but in some cases think better than we tend.

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I won't go into the arguments now for describing what a machine does its thinking, except that I do believe that if a machine can't think neither can we.

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But I would like to show you a slide briefly. Some of you will have seen it in other worlds than ours.

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And this is a very frequent reaction to the suggestion that a machine can be intelligent.

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I call it the encounter of mechanical intelligence with human rage.

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Lightspeers.

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In spite of the evidence, whenever mechanical intelligence is discussed, there are strong emotional denials that machines can ever think creatively.

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But our brains are relatively barely organized, they are inaccurate and they're slow.

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They won't even evolve for the purpose of abstract thought, or for the pursuit of elusive concepts like truth, beauty and goodness.

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They were developed slowly over millions of years as a product of the struggle for survival.

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As Lord Balfour put it, our brains are essentially a food-finding system, therefore no more necessarily truth-finding than the snout of a pig.

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It's very well to bear these things in mind when we think about the problem of how long it's going to be before we build mechanical minds.

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Particularly since we now build mechanical muscles, bulldozers, that sort of thing, millions of times stronger than we are.

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The next thing is machines millions of times more intelligent.

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Most of the work on the early design of machines was done by a teacher to play games.

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The chest is particularly suitable. It's a microcosm of human struggles.

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It has its own hierarchy, rules, aims, logic.

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And the first chest-playing machine was this one, built in 1769 by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelheim.

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You can see the chest-player here. It's a life-size figure of a turk. There's the board.

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Under here you can see some sort of mechanism. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

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The machine is alleged never to have been beaten in the 80 years that it was around.

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It played against Mara Theresa and against Napoleon and beat both of them.

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It was possibly a thorn. Edgar Allen Poe suggested it was operated by a legless dwarf,

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as he couldn't imagine anything else that would be small enough to get in.

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And it was only the fact that other people had objected that stopped Edgar Allen Poe saying a totally limitless dwarf,

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which of course would appear to him more.

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The next slide, please.

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Now, Baron Kempelheim's robot makes a bit more sense if you consider it in comparison with the machines of its time.

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Around about 1740, the brothers Brots in Switzerland produced a series of animated dolls, which this is one.

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These were wound up and you press the button and the thing then started to write,

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I am Jan Brots. I am five years of age. I like to play the spin it.

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And various other things, making a total in all of about 60 lines,

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written in a very nice copper plate handwriting, at the end of which it shook the impetus pen and switched itself off.

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Now, for 200 years ago, that's not bad.

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The next slide, please.

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A big jump forward to 1914 when the senior Torres Cabrado, who was the director of the automation laboratory of Madrid,

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first showed this machine, which could win most games of chess against a human player.

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When I say that it could only play a limited game of chess, it couldn't use a full range of pieces.

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It could just play a king and a rook against a king.

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And it's not too difficult to push your opponent into a corner and finally beat him.

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Thank you.

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Lights.

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So today, there are numerous electronic computers which are able to program themselves.

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That is to say, they play a game of chess and when they make a move that doesn't pay off, they remember this.

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When they make a move which does pay off, they remember this.

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They then substitute this move in their memory bank for the unsuccessful one and play it next time.

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This isn't too difficult.

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It does give you an inkling, however, of how a machine can progress towards something which simulates intelligence.

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The rate of progress in less than 200 years from Baron Ron Kempelins, according to Edgar Allen Poglieland, chess player,

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to our electronic computers, which can beat their designers, is fairly typical of the advance of modern technology.

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I've got a slide here which on a rather arbitrary scale shows you what's going on.

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Starting up here with Ron Kempelins here and going on through the machines of the Bardo to the first machine

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for playing noughts and crosses, produced at NPL and on...

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I think it's fair to say that the rate of progress, as in so many things, is exponential.

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And where this is going to leave us in a few hundred years time, again, your guess is as good as mine.

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Next, please.

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It is possible, too, that a new phase of evolution is already beginning here, mechanical evolution.

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It could be that the change from biological evolution to mechanical evolution

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will prove to be of greater importance than the change which took place when we went over from chemical evolution to biological,

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two and a half thousand million years ago.

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It is even possible, conceiving the idea of similar biological races on other worlds,

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that whenever the biological organism gets to a stage at which it can begin to understand its own physiology,

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it starts to plan to improve upon it and to make mechanical replacements.

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The report from the New York Memorial Hospital about two years ago now

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of surgeons cutting a man in half from the ribs down and fitting him with an artificial crump,

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pair of his hand legs, points to one way in which this sort of thing is going.

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And the Russian experiments of about the same period of keeping alive and supposedly conscious a monkey brain,

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points to another way.

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There is another game which could lead computers to rule in the world if you don't watch out,

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and that is real-life monopoly.

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It won't be very long before political leaders realize, as scientists did quite a long time ago,

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that machines of superhuman thinking ability can be built and that they could completely alter human existence.

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The new nation which put out the tremendous effort, and it would be a big effort,

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to produce a mechanical minister.

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We're going to get a fair return for its money, and that means it would use it to the maximum capability,

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that would use it for the most complicated thing known to man, apparently,

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that is making political decisions.

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Any restriction to the range of data that you supply to the mechanical minister

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would limit his ability to make effective political decisions.

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But if you don't place any restrictions, then you surrender the control of your country to a machine.

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Of course the other side is doing the same, and it ends up with the machine fighting the machine.

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If they've got any sense, they're not going to get involved, they'll just put the men in,

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and we'll be back to where they are now.

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It depends how you plan it.

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If you've listened to the fine robots theorizers at Asimov,

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you will build into all your machines, a class one rule, that you must never do anything to hurt people.

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And secondly, if someone does get hurt, you minimize it.

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So they would figure out that wars were going to be down-bared things all the way around,

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and perhaps they would work it out the way that we should have worked our pages down,

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just to play it out at not some crosses.

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Another thing about mechanical life, one of the arguments aimed against the possibility

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of such a thing, reproduction, usually thought of as something exclusively biological, isn't.

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It's a phenomenon of wide occurrence.

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It is something which begins to take place in all dynamic systems of more than a certain very high degree of complexity.

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You see this well in chemistry.

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The problem, and American engineers are already working on it, is to program a machine,

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to make another machine like itself, and to equip the new machine with a copy of the instructions so it can go on.

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Slide please.

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And of course, one of them is saying to the other one, I wonder where it will all end.

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Lights please.

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John von Neumann was the first mathematician to find out that it is theoretically possible for a computer to design a better computer than itself,

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and for the two of them then to get together and design a third.

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And this is a way in which mechanical evolution could follow closely on the heels of mechanical interactions.

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And now for the third form of intelligence, stable intelligent plasmoids.

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A plasma is an ionized gas.

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That is to say, it is an aggregation of ionized and neutral molecules and atoms together with free electrons.

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And it is possible for such a system to store large amounts of energy.

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Plasmas are not a new discovery.

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Every time you look at a neon tube, you see a plasma, and all the old fashioned wireless valves which are now given place to transistors

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had plasma in them.

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The properties of plasmas were based upon two discoveries made by the same chap nearly 400 years ago,

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William Gilbert, the physician between Elizabeth I.

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In 1600, Gilbert found that an electrically charged metal knob,

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and usage of charge, when it brought near to a flame.

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That's a plasma property that a hot gas, which is an ionized gas, can conduct electricity.

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And Gilbert is also a member of the first man to carry out systematic experiments on magnetism.

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And so you get the name magnetotasmodynamics phenomena,

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which is a scientific way of complicating things and describing the action of plasma

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as the induced combined action of electrical charges and magnetism.

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How can a ball of hot ionized gas be stable?

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Well, at present we don't know the answer, but that they can be stable is abundantly proven.

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For one thing, natural ball lightning, thunderbolts,

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have frequently been observed to persist for 5 or 10 minutes at on rare occasions for more than a quarter of an hour.

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A study of magnetically confined plasmas was made at the University of California in their radiation laboratory about nine or possibly 10 years ago now.

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They made bone-actuate plasmoids, which they shot magnetically out of the ground at 120 miles an hour.

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And although they moved so fast, they could be photographed at a high speed camera.

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It was one of the first experiments in a chain of research going on in America with a double purpose.

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If you can produce artificial ball lightning, you've solved two things which are quite important militarily at any rate.

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The first one, the ultimate weapon.

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Artificial ball lightning, if it's anything like natural ball lightning, could result in shooting an almost massless charge

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with an energy content at the rate of something like 400 pounds of TNT for the finger size of a football.

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It would also, of course, solve the problem of limitless cheap power.

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When your donor cell is preparing a year on electricity, this is the sort of thing that thermonuclear power promises you.

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And the answer to both would be contained in the production of artificial ball lightning.

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Next slide, please.

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This is a reproduction of a drawing from a 100-year-old book.

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A little more than that, actually.

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A Ragoe sur le planer.

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And it shows a lightning strike on a conductor and the formation of three lightning beams at the end of the strike.

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Next one, please.

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This is a photograph, repeatedly taken in a world in Switzerland in 1907, and supposed to be of a lightning ball of about five feet in diameter.

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Next one, please.

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This is the Bendix Corporation in the States apparatus for the production of small artificial lightning balls or plasmas.

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They use a conventional radar, the energy of which is concentrated into a partly-evectuated tube.

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And when you're getting a nice output of energy into that conducting gas, they suddenly reduce the pressure in the chamber and you then get a lightning ball formed.

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Next, please.

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For now, we're going to ask, where does the intelligence come in?

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And I have to admit that it hasn't at the moment.

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But Dr. Kenneth Scholders of Stanford Research Institute in the States is working on this.

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The United States Navy had commissioned him to produce a very compact computer, run with 100,000 million components per cubic inch.

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In other words, about a thousand times more effective than the human brain.

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They hope that by making it smaller like this, it will be able to record information at the rate of 10,000 million primary units per second.

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Now, Dr. Scholders' first model is going to be something fairly ordinary.

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It's going to be conducting strips of molybdenum on an aluminium oxide base and it's going to run at red heat.

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But then, he's working already on the long-term project, which is to use the plasma in which electrons and ions whirling in a matrix of magnetic fields will store the information, the information being proportional to charge density.

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So, you have the possibility now of a computer which consists of nothing but a mass around ours, guess.

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So, it seems that there's another bit of science fiction likely to come true.

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Most of you will remember Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud.

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And the suggestion now is that instead of it coming from the direction of the constellation of Iran, it's going to come out of a North American university.

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Now, we consider three types of intelligent organism which might exist in other parts of the universe.

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We now have to consider the means which they would have to employ in order to make contact.

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The first is direct visitation.

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We can begin by noting that alleged sightings have reported entities which could be any of the types of intelligent organism discussed.

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Among the reports, every year we have humanoid and semi-humanoid species.

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I guess which could be described as humanoid robots, though I don't see what advantage a machine gets by making it look like a human being unless it does the job properly.

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And also things like willow the wisp, meteors, barrels of fire, all of which could be plasma intelligences.

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Next two slides please.

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One of them and the next one.

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Both of these are from a book on physics written about 120 years ago by Dr Dionysius Ladner who described these things as slow-moving meteorites.

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Without a lot more evidence, it's very difficult to say what they are.

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They don't appear from the descriptions to have been berylite or marsh gas, and for the want of anything else, I would think the most descriptive term is unidentified flower object.

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Next please.

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As for the means of transportation, we will try and simplify matters by discarding right at the start all transcendental devices of science fiction.

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That is, we are not going to have automatic dematerialization and rematerialization by a totally unspecified ray.

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We are not going to have doors through a hypothetical higher dimension or hyperdrives which permit velocities in excess of light.

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So the distant entities, whether they use their own bodies to space ships or employ vehicles for the purpose,

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so machines with no reason why they shouldn't use themselves, are going to be limited by the velocity of light and perhaps even more severely by problems of acceleration and deceleration.

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And it's also probable, even with machines, that as for human astronauts, there are limitations set by the need to minimize sensory deprivation and social deprivation.

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It's quite important to notice here that the recent work on sensory deprivation suggests that unless your means for analyzing external data and sorting it and working on it is more or less constantly employed, it very rapidly deteriorates.

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The probability of visits from communities at more than a few hundred light years from Earth becomes very small then under these conditions.

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Even a visit from our own galactic center and at a velocity of one half that of light, that is 335 million miles an hour, would require 100,000 years.

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Now we can't conceive even a machine. No machine has yet been built on Earth which continues around for that length of time.

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So he progressed long before, let alone by our legible organisms with their life spans at most of around about 100 years.

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It would be an unwarrantable dogmatism to assert that such marriages will always be impossible.

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But I do think they're so highly improbable as not to justify speculation.

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In the light of present day science and technology it seems very unlikely that it will ever be possible for men to visit worlds more than a few light years away.

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Or for man-made machines to visit worlds at more than a few tens of light years. Except on a one-way ticket.

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Redland is the prospect for advanced communities being situated within a few light years from Earth and of them finding us or of us finding them.

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Next slide please.

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One of the things that is fairly obvious, the number of communities on the assumption that they are distributed more or less uniformly throughout the galaxy as a whole,

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is that they go up as the cubists of radius. In other words, as your radius of search goes up from 10 to 100 to a thousand light years,

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the number that you are likely to find goes up from round about zero to round about a million.

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If you are going to go into this drop at all, it's worth building a machine with lots of power in it.

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Next slide please.

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And this is the sort of thing with which of course we are thinking of doing it, the Jobville Bank radio telescope at present engaged on other work.

393
00:45:17,000 --> 00:45:26,000
Though we shouldn't forget the Project Osmo, which was the first serious attempt made by scientists to detect messages coming from other worlds,

394
00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:34,000
was really originated at the suggestion from Cacione and Morrison that Jobville Bank should be used for the job.

395
00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:35,000
Next slide please.

396
00:45:37,000 --> 00:45:39,000
So we come to remote communications.

397
00:45:39,000 --> 00:45:51,000
Project Osmo was the name given to the attempt by Dr. Frank Drake of West Virginia to detect intelligent signals from Epsilon Eridani.

398
00:45:53,000 --> 00:45:58,000
I think that was the one that he concentrated on, but Paul said it was the other one he was interested in.

399
00:45:58,000 --> 00:46:06,000
The name of the project Osmo of course comes from Queen Osmo, who was the queen of the land of Oz in the storybook,

400
00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:13,000
which was very, very far away, very difficult to reach and full of wonderful and delightful things, and knows that name for the project.

401
00:46:13,000 --> 00:46:19,000
They used an 85 foot radio telescope fitted with the very latest receiving apparatus.

402
00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:25,000
They worked on it for about three months, during which they had done about 150 hours of actual listening in.

403
00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:31,000
They terminated in May 1961 when after recalculating they found that it wouldn't have worked anyway.

404
00:46:31,000 --> 00:46:42,000
They based it on the assumption that the people at the other end were using a telescope of at least the size of the job at all banks,

405
00:46:42,000 --> 00:46:50,000
and they were working on the assumption that a transmitted power of 160 megawatts per megacycle was enough.

406
00:46:51,000 --> 00:46:54,000
Fresh calculations indicate that it probably isn't.

407
00:46:54,000 --> 00:47:00,000
You're going to need a radio telescope of something like 500 feet to make it work under those conditions.

408
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:02,000
This isn't impossible.

409
00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:09,000
Now we come to the problem of how to carry on a two-way exchange of information.

410
00:47:09,000 --> 00:47:15,000
It's too complex to be gone into in detail, but there are some schemes which overturn the worst difficulties.

411
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:20,000
The only real problem is how to get information across at any speed at all.

412
00:47:20,000 --> 00:47:21,000
There are two aspects.

413
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:26,000
The first is that if you reduce the amount of information, the number of bits as an engineer would say,

414
00:47:26,000 --> 00:47:35,000
which you want to transmit in unit time, it's easier to get a good signal-to-noise ratio, and so get a bigger range for a given power.

415
00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:40,000
The second is that for anything like a conversation, you've got this enormous difficulty,

416
00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:44,000
that you've got to wait for your message to get to a distant star and come back.

417
00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:51,000
If you consider Torsetian Exand Arodani, which is what Project Osmo was listening to,

418
00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:56,000
and there are the nearest stars likely to be able to support life as we know it,

419
00:47:56,000 --> 00:47:59,000
it takes 21 years for a simple question and answer.

420
00:47:59,000 --> 00:48:02,000
This is worth some getting somebody to marry you.

421
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:07,000
With planets that still are greater distances, it gets quite ludicrous,

422
00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:11,000
and you can't hope to get more than one or two questions across in a lifetime.

423
00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:16,000
So all you can do then is to transmit an account of your own civilization,

424
00:48:16,000 --> 00:48:21,000
and hope that the people the other side will take it in and send you an account back of theirs.

425
00:48:21,000 --> 00:48:24,000
This is the way in which it suggests that it should be done.

426
00:48:24,000 --> 00:48:25,000
Next slide, please.

427
00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:30,000
I think most of you have seen it, you're probably familiar with it, but I'll go over it.

428
00:48:30,000 --> 00:48:36,000
This represents, once the pulses zeroes the spaces, they all occupy a unit of time.

429
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:39,000
We'll say it's a second, it doesn't have to be.

430
00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:41,000
And it goes...

431
00:48:45,000 --> 00:48:47,000
and so on until it reaches the end.

432
00:48:47,000 --> 00:48:51,000
Then there's a gap, and after a fair time you repeat it.

433
00:48:51,000 --> 00:48:54,000
The idea is that if you go on doing this long enough, some will say,

434
00:48:54,000 --> 00:48:58,000
it's funny, you know, but that series of puzzles always sounds very much the same.

435
00:48:58,000 --> 00:49:00,000
Supposedly tape it down.

436
00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:04,000
And when you tape it down, you find out that it comes out to a number,

437
00:49:04,000 --> 00:49:09,000
which is the product of two primes, in this case 19 by 11.

438
00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:13,000
And again, you reckon that it is not a terribly bright thing, but you'll say,

439
00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:17,000
well, let's arrange it in 11 rows of 19 or 19 rows of 11.

440
00:49:17,000 --> 00:49:22,000
One way you get this, which doesn't mean much, the other way you get that, which is quite suggestive.

441
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:26,000
Very suggestive to us, might still be quite suggestive to another race.

442
00:49:26,000 --> 00:49:29,000
Now, of course, you can go on further on this basis.

443
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:33,000
If they can work out the product of two primes, they can work out the product of three.

444
00:49:33,000 --> 00:49:39,000
And this means that you can send a set of instructions to make a three-dimensional object,

445
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:42,000
that you could turn out a bull, a banjo, or a bicycle.

446
00:49:42,000 --> 00:49:44,000
If you thought it would be instructive for them.

447
00:49:44,000 --> 00:49:46,000
Right, please.

448
00:49:47,000 --> 00:49:51,000
I think this is the more likely way of going about it.

449
00:49:51,000 --> 00:49:54,000
I call it ambassadorial liaison.

450
00:49:54,000 --> 00:50:00,000
The Nessar organisation in the States is now working on plans for the Mars exploratory vehicles.

451
00:50:00,000 --> 00:50:05,000
Roughly, they hope to put pretty large satellites in orbit around Mars,

452
00:50:05,000 --> 00:50:12,000
and to drop vehicles onto the Martian service that are not fast or to the size of a London double-decker bus,

453
00:50:12,000 --> 00:50:17,000
and which are fully equipped with automatic apparatus for soil sampling,

454
00:50:17,000 --> 00:50:27,000
the detection of bacteria, and all the other things which give you anything as to whether there is whatever has been left on the surface.

455
00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:37,000
So, we're within striking distance now of a pretty colossal technological feat.

456
00:50:37,000 --> 00:50:42,000
What the other people might be doing could be Mars in advance.

457
00:50:42,000 --> 00:50:49,000
If we accept this probability of innumerable other habitable worlds, many of them drastically older than our own,

458
00:50:49,000 --> 00:50:55,000
then we have to accept the idea that there could be probes around already,

459
00:50:55,000 --> 00:51:00,000
which are vastly more complex than anything that's yet on our drawing boards.

460
00:51:02,000 --> 00:51:08,000
It seems very likely, too, that the way a more advanced race would go about it,

461
00:51:08,000 --> 00:51:12,000
even if it was so advanced that it consisted of one giant mechanical mine,

462
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:19,000
would not be to go on these explorations itself, but to build lots of probes and pump them out.

463
00:51:19,000 --> 00:51:26,000
A very good way would be for these probes to go into a system that it wanted some information about,

464
00:51:26,000 --> 00:51:32,000
and to listen out for any sign of organised radiation indicating that lab was there.

465
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:37,000
It could then copper the radiation, amplify it, and send it back again.

466
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:45,000
And this would give some indication that there was something up there that could detect messages and do this.

467
00:51:45,000 --> 00:51:50,000
Subsequently, if it got useful information, it would take it,

468
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:59,000
and on this process of using high-pulse powers and long intervals, it would slowly transmit it back to its base.

469
00:52:00,000 --> 00:52:06,000
Now, the 68-dollar question here is, have there any evidence for anything like it?

470
00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:08,000
And we may have.

471
00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:16,000
Forty years ago, Sturmer and Vanderpoel, who were both distinguished engineers in the then relatively new field of radio,

472
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:20,000
reported powerful and long-delayed echoes from radio stations,

473
00:52:20,000 --> 00:52:24,000
echoes for which at that time there was no explanation at all.

474
00:52:24,000 --> 00:52:29,000
They were looking for squeakers, they were sending out a pulse, listening to go round Earth,

475
00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:32,000
they should get seven echoes back in a second.

476
00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:36,000
What they were getting was a desigrate echo after eight seconds.

477
00:52:37,000 --> 00:52:39,000
There was no explanation.

478
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:45,000
Today, apparatus capable of producing these echoes is familiar to all microwave engineers.

479
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:50,000
It closely caught to the public about the time of the U-2 incident.

480
00:52:50,000 --> 00:52:56,000
Military aircraft like that are equipped with apparatus which listens out for enemy radars.

481
00:52:56,000 --> 00:52:58,000
It coppers their characteristics.

482
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:01,000
It amplifies the interrogating signal.

483
00:53:01,000 --> 00:53:03,000
It distorts them suitably.

484
00:53:03,000 --> 00:53:05,000
Then we radiate them.

485
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:10,000
Certainly interrogating station gets the impression of an aircraft which is a lot nearer than it really is,

486
00:53:10,000 --> 00:53:12,000
and over there, not over there.

487
00:53:12,000 --> 00:53:15,000
So all the guns start poking up in the wrong direction.

488
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:20,000
Now, quite clearly, space probes could use similar equipment.

489
00:53:20,000 --> 00:53:24,000
But not with a view to military deception, but a simple statement which says,

490
00:53:24,000 --> 00:53:28,000
here I am, I can analyse and copy your signals, ain't I a bright boy?

491
00:53:28,000 --> 00:53:31,000
Would you like to send me more information?

492
00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:35,000
Well, Stoner and Vanderpoel made just have missed such an opportunity,

493
00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:39,000
and the visiting probes would then have gone on to other planetary systems,

494
00:53:39,000 --> 00:53:44,000
having reported back to their base that there was radio emission from the planet Earth,

495
00:53:44,000 --> 00:53:48,000
that it was a census jumble like that which we get from Jupiter.

496
00:53:49,000 --> 00:53:52,000
This brings us to another interesting possibility,

497
00:53:52,000 --> 00:53:57,000
that the emission from planets like Jupiter and Venus is only crazy natural.

498
00:53:57,000 --> 00:54:02,000
That is to say, that they are caused by something like the artificial control of weather,

499
00:54:02,000 --> 00:54:07,000
and that they have been given permanence and form by the artefies of intelligent beings.

500
00:54:08,000 --> 00:54:13,000
Visiting space probes which found evidence of communities just emerging from savagery,

501
00:54:13,000 --> 00:54:17,000
just starting on the long struggle towards technological development.

502
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:23,000
Mike set up a repeater station, hoping that when the local race was intelligent enough,

503
00:54:23,000 --> 00:54:26,000
it would decode the message and then reply.

504
00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:31,000
So it is quite possible that the various phenomena which we accept as entirely natural,

505
00:54:31,000 --> 00:54:34,000
are in fact artificially induced.

506
00:54:34,000 --> 00:54:39,000
Radio emanations from Jupiter, in particular, are very peculiar,

507
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:44,000
because instead of being incoherent outbursts of radio energy, which was the original idea,

508
00:54:44,000 --> 00:54:48,000
they would address things like gigantic thunderstorms in the Jodian atmosphere,

509
00:54:48,000 --> 00:54:54,000
they are now known to occur as tightly defined beams of frequency modulated waves,

510
00:54:54,000 --> 00:54:58,000
so that they are a lot more like a radio lighthouse than a natural noise source.

511
00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:00,000
Jupiter?

512
00:55:03,000 --> 00:55:08,000
I don't know whether we can see it, but you can just see it on this picture.

513
00:55:08,000 --> 00:55:11,000
We've got the familiar red spot there,

514
00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:19,000
and here you've got a faint shadow, which is the shadow of EO, the third largest satellite.

515
00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:27,000
And the interesting thing is that it seems to be EO, which carries out the modulation of the Jodian radio waves.

516
00:55:27,000 --> 00:55:35,000
How it does it, we don't know, but the waves always modulate when there is a particular angular relationship

517
00:55:35,000 --> 00:55:38,000
between Jupiter's magnetic field and the position of EO.

518
00:55:39,000 --> 00:55:41,000
Next, a lattice.

519
00:55:43,000 --> 00:55:49,000
And perhaps two, while we're looking around at things like the radio emanations from Jupiter and Venus,

520
00:55:49,000 --> 00:55:53,000
we ought to pay more attention to the Lagrange nodes.

521
00:55:54,000 --> 00:55:59,000
These are the five points in space in the vicinity of every pair of celestial bodies,

522
00:55:59,000 --> 00:56:02,000
where there is zero gravitational potential.

523
00:56:02,000 --> 00:56:08,000
If you are not familiar with the idea, and these are two celestial bodies,

524
00:56:08,000 --> 00:56:13,000
you have a zero here, where the gravitational field balance.

525
00:56:13,000 --> 00:56:18,000
You also have another zero on each side of the two primary bodies,

526
00:56:18,000 --> 00:56:25,000
and two further narrows on either side of the point intermediate between the two bodies.

527
00:56:25,000 --> 00:56:31,000
These nodes were predicted by the mathematician, Joseph Lagrange, about 200 years ago,

528
00:56:31,000 --> 00:56:37,000
and it's only recently that evidence has been produced to suggest that they have a real existence.

529
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:45,000
That is, that radio echoes have been found implying certainly a concentration of space dust at these points.

530
00:56:45,000 --> 00:56:50,000
A small probe, of course, would not be distinguishable from a space dust at that distance.

531
00:56:50,000 --> 00:56:58,000
And in fact, Saturn machine could be lying out there, waiting for the appropriate signal to start up its recorded message.

532
00:56:59,000 --> 00:57:07,000
Right, that finishes the review of scientific evidence for the possibility of something.

533
00:57:07,000 --> 00:57:12,000
And I now want to go on to my own ideas about parapsychology.

534
00:57:13,000 --> 00:57:15,000
Can I have a slide, please?

535
00:57:18,000 --> 00:57:23,000
This, in the time of Louis Cartour's, was the idea of a ghost.

536
00:57:23,000 --> 00:57:31,000
We don't see many ways to have got very far away from it, that the inhabitants of other worlds were so far in advance of us.

537
00:57:31,000 --> 00:57:38,000
When I say other worlds now, I'm not talking about other worlds in the astronomical sense, but in the spiritual sense,

538
00:57:38,000 --> 00:57:43,000
that they haven't got anything better to do than to tweak our bedclothes on and try and try and ask.

539
00:57:43,000 --> 00:57:45,000
Right, please.

540
00:57:47,000 --> 00:57:48,000
Right, please.

541
00:57:49,000 --> 00:57:50,000
Thank you.

542
00:57:50,000 --> 00:57:51,000
Thank you.

543
00:58:20,000 --> 00:58:27,000
But in the way and at the time desired by the sitters, by means of a code of signals they could give answers to questions.

544
00:58:27,000 --> 00:58:35,000
There are plans and messages obtained in this way were trivial, but they sometimes revealed facts known to only one of the sitters.

545
00:58:35,000 --> 00:58:39,000
Five, the phenomenon required arbitrary conditions.

546
00:58:39,000 --> 00:58:46,000
It was noted that, above all, the presence of certain people seemed to be necessary to their production, while others seemed to it.

547
00:58:46,000 --> 00:58:51,000
But it didn't seem to depend upon the belief or skepticism of the people in question.

548
00:58:51,000 --> 00:58:58,000
Nevertheless, the production of phenomena could not be guaranteed by the presence or absence of any particular person.

549
00:58:58,000 --> 00:59:07,000
The committee was quite unanimous on this, but there were various other matters such as the alleged apparitions of hands and faces,

550
00:59:07,000 --> 00:59:15,000
spontaneous playing of musical instruments, apparent invulnerability of some persons to injuries by red-hot cold,

551
00:59:15,000 --> 00:59:20,000
accrups of various objects, and the prediction of future events they couldn't agree on.

552
00:59:20,000 --> 00:59:22,000
Slide, please.

553
00:59:23,000 --> 00:59:35,000
This is a photo of Kula Bucks, which is quite a classical name in the field of far walking, as he appeared at the car show in Saturday, 1946.

554
00:59:36,000 --> 00:59:46,000
I make no further statement about far walking, except that it seems to depend very much upon the mind of the individual,

555
00:59:46,000 --> 00:59:51,000
more than playing around with things like alum and sulfuric acid on the feet,

556
00:59:51,000 --> 00:59:57,000
because at all the modern demonstrations there have always been university students present who are willing to have a go.

557
00:59:57,000 --> 01:00:03,000
A proportion of them always get over unscathed, and a proportion of them always get burnt, as I'm sure I would.

558
01:00:03,000 --> 01:00:05,000
Slide, please.

559
01:00:08,000 --> 01:00:18,000
Well, after a hundred years, during which psychical research has increased to an enormous extent, it is deflating to admit that there's been very little real progress.

560
01:00:20,000 --> 01:00:28,000
The books on psychical research, published in large numbers, are mainly devoted either to summoning the faithful with the rallying cry

561
01:00:28,000 --> 01:00:34,000
that where there have been several thousand years of spiritualist smoke there must be metaphysical fire,

562
01:00:34,000 --> 01:00:41,000
or else to attempt to debunk the whole thing by pointing to the admittedly numerous cases of fraud.

563
01:00:43,000 --> 01:00:48,000
Now, there are six possibilities behind the paranormal.

564
01:00:49,000 --> 01:00:56,000
One, the skeptical interpretation, which says it's all fraud and philocyberal, as Dr. Priestley puts it, a lot of boss.

565
01:00:57,000 --> 01:01:04,000
The negative attitude isn't Dr. Priestley's, by the way, he regards such an attitude as stupid, bigotry, and dangerously unscientific,

566
01:01:04,000 --> 01:01:08,000
but it is the view of a very large group of orthodox scientists.

567
01:01:08,000 --> 01:01:16,000
Two, the theory of natural anomalies. This postulates that the paranormal occurs, that it is utterly without significance.

568
01:01:16,000 --> 01:01:21,000
It is a sport, a statistical fluke, an exception which proves the rule.

569
01:01:21,000 --> 01:01:24,000
To my mind, that's just nonsense.

570
01:01:24,000 --> 01:01:30,000
Three, scientific monism. This suggests that paranormal phenomena are genuine,

571
01:01:30,000 --> 01:01:35,000
but they belong to an order of physical occurrences beyond the scope of present-day science.

572
01:01:35,000 --> 01:01:41,000
With further advances in science, the paranormal will become normal, as the laws recognized by science

573
01:01:41,000 --> 01:01:47,000
become more representative of nature as she is, instead of as the scientist thinks she ought to be.

574
01:01:47,000 --> 01:01:52,000
This theory then provides justification for serious investigational phenomena,

575
01:01:52,000 --> 01:01:58,000
and it has the merit that in course of time something will be proved, whether it is popular or not.

576
01:01:58,000 --> 01:02:04,000
Four, the theory of substantial dualism, which asserts that paranormal events occur,

577
01:02:04,000 --> 01:02:09,000
that belong to an order of mental events, which cannot be explained by physical science.

578
01:02:09,000 --> 01:02:15,000
Then we have the synchronicity theory of Jung. This is the most difficult theory to follow.

579
01:02:15,000 --> 01:02:19,000
It supposes that paranormal events are not based on the causal principle,

580
01:02:19,000 --> 01:02:24,000
but rather based upon any kind of parameternal mind-matter interaction.

581
01:02:24,000 --> 01:02:30,000
Paranormal events, according to Jung, are events connected by an e-cursal principle.

582
01:02:30,000 --> 01:02:33,000
I hope you can understand it. I can't.

583
01:02:33,000 --> 01:02:35,000
Jung, please.

584
01:02:35,000 --> 01:02:43,000
You may also remember Jung for his book about unidentified flying objects.

585
01:02:43,000 --> 01:02:51,000
It seems to have changed his mind once or twice, but by and large his assertion has been that they are wishful thinking.

586
01:02:51,000 --> 01:02:56,000
That seems to be the basic thing, although it is tied up in rather more complicated languages,

587
01:02:56,000 --> 01:03:03,000
to being the necessity for the belief in something a down-site wiser and more stable than we are.

588
01:03:03,000 --> 01:03:06,000
Like, please.

589
01:03:06,000 --> 01:03:10,000
Finally, we have the supernatural interpretation.

590
01:03:10,000 --> 01:03:15,000
Paranormal phenomena are caused or mediated by disembodied intelligences.

591
01:03:15,000 --> 01:03:20,000
Spirits, ghosts or what have you. They are supernatural and beyond both reason and explanation.

592
01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:24,000
That's much the simplest one. Anyone want to stick to it?

593
01:03:24,000 --> 01:03:30,000
Now, it's only a personal opinion, but of the six possible theories, only two seem worthy to me,

594
01:03:30,000 --> 01:03:34,000
that scientific monism and substantial dualism.

595
01:03:34,000 --> 01:03:39,000
The second of these, although it involves a difficulty which has puzzled philosophers throughout the ages,

596
01:03:39,000 --> 01:03:44,000
that is, how to explain the interaction of physical and non-physical entities,

597
01:03:44,000 --> 01:03:52,000
has the advantage that it is obviously suited to deal with the one special peculiarity of paranormal phenomena.

598
01:03:52,000 --> 01:03:59,000
Often overlooked, which is that they are almost invariably connected in some way with a human being.

599
01:03:59,000 --> 01:04:08,000
Scientific monism, on the other hand, has the advantage that it can be backed up by the whole army of organized science.

600
01:04:08,000 --> 01:04:12,000
Now, there are two parapsychological phenomena.

601
01:04:12,000 --> 01:04:18,000
They are the names of prosopod pieces and idioplasty, which we'll get used to before long if you don't know them already,

602
01:04:18,000 --> 01:04:26,000
which no matter how erroneous they may be in theory, are such valuable concepts that you couldn't get on far without them.

603
01:04:26,000 --> 01:04:33,000
Prosopod pieces is a word derived from the Greek prosopos, a theatrical costume or a stage character.

604
01:04:33,000 --> 01:04:40,000
It's used to denote any sudden change, whether induced or spontaneous, in an individual's personality.

605
01:04:40,000 --> 01:04:47,000
Sometimes people take leave of their usual personality and assume an utterly different one.

606
01:04:47,000 --> 01:04:54,000
They may lose their memory, their character may be completely changed, they may take a new name, they may hold new ideas.

607
01:04:54,000 --> 01:04:59,000
The new personality may remember the old one, but speak of it as if it were a complete stranger.

608
01:04:59,000 --> 01:05:08,000
The change from Dr. Ducal to Mr. Hyde or the other way round may be ephemeral, or it may be a crazy stable state and last for years.

609
01:05:08,000 --> 01:05:13,000
Despite the name derivation, it is not a question of play-acting.

610
01:05:13,000 --> 01:05:18,000
It is not a question of the person taking on a role for reasons best known to himself.

611
01:05:18,000 --> 01:05:21,000
It is a genuine change in the personality.

612
01:05:21,000 --> 01:05:25,000
It is a phenomenon that has been known for thousands of years.

613
01:05:25,000 --> 01:05:30,000
It is one which has been intensively studied since the beginning of this century.

614
01:05:30,000 --> 01:05:35,000
The name by which the phenomenon was known in the past was of course possession.

615
01:05:35,000 --> 01:05:42,000
And this must not be confused in any way with Schizophrenia, which although the name suggests a splitting of the personality,

616
01:05:42,000 --> 01:05:50,000
only involves a splitting away of the emotions from the rest of the personality, from the rational sentiments.

617
01:05:50,000 --> 01:06:00,000
And this together with hallucinatory tendencies leads to grotesque changes in the personality, but it is still the same person.

618
01:06:00,000 --> 01:06:03,000
Three slides, please.

619
01:06:03,000 --> 01:06:09,000
The first one here I think is rather delightful. Can you sharpen the focus a little?

620
01:06:09,000 --> 01:06:13,000
That's better.

621
01:06:13,000 --> 01:06:20,000
This is a 16th century painting of the 4th century Saint Xenobius.

622
01:06:20,000 --> 01:06:26,000
And can you see the little demons which he is exorcising from the mouths of his patients?

623
01:06:26,000 --> 01:06:32,000
And these are the little beings who speak with many tongues.

624
01:06:32,000 --> 01:06:35,000
The next slide, please.

625
01:06:35,000 --> 01:06:43,000
In Schizophrenia we have a change in the personality which causes the individual to see the world differently.

626
01:06:43,000 --> 01:06:49,000
This is one of the 20th century painter Louis Wayne's pictures of pussycats.

627
01:06:49,000 --> 01:06:56,000
There's a whole series of them. The first one is quite an obvious picture of a pussycat like you or I might draw.

628
01:06:56,000 --> 01:07:02,000
Then he goes on to this furry beast and the last one looks more like a dailier than a pussycat.

629
01:07:02,000 --> 01:07:13,000
The interesting thing of course is that this is precisely the sort of thing, is precisely the sort of view of the world which Schizophrenia appears to have when he speaks to you.

630
01:07:13,000 --> 01:07:19,000
And it also seems to be the sort of thing which one sees in a psychedelic experience.

631
01:07:19,000 --> 01:07:24,000
And it is also the sort of thing that you produce under the influence of drugs like mescaline.

632
01:07:24,000 --> 01:07:27,000
Next slide, please.

633
01:07:27,000 --> 01:07:37,000
Just in case you should think it's anything new, this painting is by the famous 15th century, a Romamous Bosch.

634
01:07:37,000 --> 01:07:41,000
This is his idea of hell, I can well believe it.

635
01:07:41,000 --> 01:07:56,000
And incidentally, of course, it is a very well known Schizophrenic characteristic that the victim believes that his body is transparent and that he can see inside it.

636
01:07:56,000 --> 01:08:08,000
It is alleged, I think there is a good deal of evidence for it, that in many cases they have the paranormal ability to diagnose their own diseases although they have no medical knowledge.

637
01:08:08,000 --> 01:08:15,000
But certainly they do have a great preoccupation with their own bodies as this person appears to have.

638
01:08:15,000 --> 01:08:17,000
Next, please.

639
01:08:18,000 --> 01:08:20,000
Now, idioplasty.

640
01:08:20,000 --> 01:08:27,000
The personalities which manifest themselves as seemingly new psychological individuals in process of pieces,

641
01:08:27,000 --> 01:08:37,000
arise from a central idea which has either been implanted by a suggestion on the part of a hypnotist or infrajected as an axi-auto suggestion.

642
01:08:37,000 --> 01:08:47,000
The term was coined by Durand of Gros about 1800 to denote the implantation of ideas in minds made receptive by hypnosis.

643
01:08:47,000 --> 01:08:53,000
And later, Akhorevits used the word to mean the physiological realisation of an idea.

644
01:08:53,000 --> 01:08:58,000
Idioplasty has for centuries been thought to occur during gestation.

645
01:08:58,000 --> 01:09:15,000
Kalk Kozol published an account in 1922 illustrated with photographs which were never proved to be fakes of a cat whose kittens were marked with a date and some stars which were printed on a sack on which the mother was lying.

646
01:09:15,000 --> 01:09:19,000
The markings were formed by groups of black hairs on a white background.

647
01:09:19,000 --> 01:09:22,000
An older example occurs in the Bible in Genesis.

648
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:32,000
And Jacob took him rods of green poplar and of the hazelnut and chestnut trees and he pulled white streaks in them and he made the white appear which was in the rods.

649
01:09:32,000 --> 01:09:41,000
And he set the rods which he had pulled before the flocks in the gatters, in the watering crops, when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink,

650
01:09:41,000 --> 01:09:48,000
and the flocks conceived before the rods and they brought forth cattle, winged streaks, speckled and spotted.

651
01:09:48,000 --> 01:09:55,000
A more recent medical example is the following. A 25 year old woman was two months pregnant.

652
01:09:55,000 --> 01:10:03,000
She was badly frightened by her two year old son nearly cutting off his left thumb, the member hanging only by a shred of flesh.

653
01:10:03,000 --> 01:10:08,000
She was in the backwood, she had no one to assist her. She'd rest the injury as best she could.

654
01:10:08,000 --> 01:10:16,000
Her mind constantly dwelt on the subject and in due course she gave birth to a boy whose left thumb hung from his hand by a pedicle of flesh.

655
01:10:16,000 --> 01:10:23,000
This was published in 1910 in the Journal of the State Medical Association of Tennessee.

656
01:10:23,000 --> 01:10:28,000
There aren't many similar cases in the medical journals.

657
01:10:28,000 --> 01:10:37,000
The foregoing all relates to an idea manifesting as a bodily change. The stigmata of the saints are precisely similar.

658
01:10:37,000 --> 01:10:46,000
But the concept of idiopastigos a lot further than this, it proposes that where there is no physiological mechanism to materialize the implanted idea,

659
01:10:46,000 --> 01:10:52,000
where you're really aching to do something that there's no way by which you can bring it about normally,

660
01:10:52,000 --> 01:11:01,000
or where the mechanism is inhibited from working, as in the case of a medium, has been strapped down to her chair so she can't move,

661
01:11:01,000 --> 01:11:06,000
then the idea still tries to manifest itself paranormally.

662
01:11:06,000 --> 01:11:17,000
Thus, the levitation of objects beyond a medium's reach, or the apportation of objects from other rooms, are supposed to take place by some sort of action at a distance.

663
01:11:17,000 --> 01:11:24,000
This notion is both too crude and too far-fetched to win scientific support without a great deal of observational evidence,

664
01:11:24,000 --> 01:11:31,000
but something of the kind may occur, and idiopastig in a more limited sense definitely does seem to occur.

665
01:11:31,000 --> 01:11:35,000
Incidentally, I'd like to give you my opinion on levitation.

666
01:11:42,000 --> 01:11:46,000
The cartoon is due to Charles Adams. I think it's absolutely delightful.

667
01:11:50,000 --> 01:11:51,000
Lights, please.

668
01:11:55,000 --> 01:12:02,000
There are many ways in which the concepts of precipitices and idiopastig are related to the subject of unidentified flying objects.

669
01:12:02,000 --> 01:12:10,000
For the start, precipitices, particularly in the form of rapidly alternating personalities such as we have studied,

670
01:12:10,000 --> 01:12:15,000
clearly has a bearing on the so-called contactee experiences.

671
01:12:15,000 --> 01:12:19,000
Nothing all of them, but there's a group which you can definitely recognize it.

672
01:12:19,000 --> 01:12:22,000
There is one very interesting application.

673
01:12:22,000 --> 01:12:29,000
Charles Bowen pointed out to me some time ago that there are lots of instances where observers report seeing an object,

674
01:12:29,000 --> 01:12:37,000
supposedly a spacecraft, swoop down as if it's going to land, and it passes behind a hill or a wood or something like this, at a little distance.

675
01:12:37,000 --> 01:12:44,000
Within a minute or less, long before the observers have had a chance to get themselves together and approach the landing site,

676
01:12:44,000 --> 01:12:46,000
figures are seen approaching.

677
01:12:46,000 --> 01:12:51,000
They're stereotyped. They are usually dwarfs or giants and often described as peary.

678
01:12:51,000 --> 01:12:57,000
Usually there is no encounter, sometimes an exchange of signals is reported,

679
01:12:57,000 --> 01:13:00,000
and then the visitors turn back towards their ship.

680
01:13:00,000 --> 01:13:05,000
Instantly, the minute they disappear from view, the ship is seen to take off.

681
01:13:05,000 --> 01:13:12,000
As Mr. Bowen has remarked, this odd cycle of events has been reported too many times to be casually dismissed.

682
01:13:12,000 --> 01:13:14,000
There has to be a mechanism for it.

683
01:13:15,000 --> 01:13:17,000
Well, you may suggest your own.

684
01:13:17,000 --> 01:13:25,000
Mine is that some of the reported landings are genuine, but I think they're the routine sample collection crypts of robot probes.

685
01:13:25,000 --> 01:13:32,000
This seems to me by far the most likely thing, that whatever the state of technology of other races is going to be,

686
01:13:32,000 --> 01:13:35,000
you'll find their probes long before you find them.

687
01:13:35,000 --> 01:13:40,000
But the craft which visit Earth are the creations of arse superior beings.

688
01:13:40,000 --> 01:13:45,000
Their science does embrace a good deal of what is still parisant to us.

689
01:13:45,000 --> 01:13:52,000
Suppose then that in addition to radars which can listen for our emanations and send back false signals to confuse our tracking stations,

690
01:13:52,000 --> 01:13:55,000
and there seems to be evidence for this.

691
01:13:55,000 --> 01:13:59,000
Suppose they have equipment which can track our thoughts.

692
01:13:59,000 --> 01:14:06,000
The landing vehicle then receives from a group of human beings some confused thoughts something like this, a flying saucer, fear,

693
01:14:06,000 --> 01:14:10,000
perhaps they're giants or hairy monsters. Let's run for it.

694
01:14:10,000 --> 01:14:14,000
Where no sooner received than the reflected thought images on its way,

695
01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:21,000
the human observers are met by visions of precisely the kind of alien creature they most feared to see.

696
01:14:21,000 --> 01:14:26,000
As soon as the craft has finished its job, which it's at a collecting soil cell, this is only a minute or so,

697
01:14:26,000 --> 01:14:30,000
they lift the fear barrier and the creatures disappear.

698
01:14:31,000 --> 01:14:41,000
Another obvious application of these parapsychological principles is to be a notion of an elite in our midst.

699
01:14:41,000 --> 01:14:48,000
Demygods of normal human descent are perhaps infiltration by the beings of an extraterrestrial race.

700
01:14:48,000 --> 01:14:55,000
The usual reaction to these ideas, at least on the part of orthodox psychologists, is that they are schizophrenic.

701
01:14:55,000 --> 01:15:03,000
And certainly it is a common schizophrenic symptom to believe that one is constantly in the presence of beings who are visible to oneself alone,

702
01:15:03,000 --> 01:15:06,000
and who command one's every action.

703
01:15:06,000 --> 01:15:10,000
In olden times these were thought of as demon familiars from the infernal to regions,

704
01:15:10,000 --> 01:15:14,000
and today sometimes they're thought of as the pilot supplying sources.

705
01:15:14,000 --> 01:15:18,000
But what about the people who claim extraordinary after-the-body experiences,

706
01:15:18,000 --> 01:15:22,000
or position by the minds of extraterrestrial beings?

707
01:15:22,000 --> 01:15:34,000
Idioclasti and Proscipti pieces here explain how a central compelling idea that of a race of supermen who will save mankind from his own homicidal stupidity

708
01:15:34,000 --> 01:15:40,000
can produce subsidiary or alternate personalities with the reported characteristics.

709
01:15:40,000 --> 01:15:43,000
But where does the central idea come from?

710
01:15:43,000 --> 01:15:47,000
I'd now like to show another small group of slides.

711
01:15:47,000 --> 01:15:49,000
First one, please.

712
01:15:50,000 --> 01:16:04,000
This is a modern psychologist attempt to estimate the intelligence of a number of outstanding people.

713
01:16:04,000 --> 01:16:13,000
As it's been projected back to front, I can't read them at the moment, but I'll give them to you, because I've also gotten them noted on my script.

714
01:16:13,000 --> 01:16:15,000
The next one, please.

715
01:16:17,000 --> 01:16:19,000
This is very interesting.

716
01:16:19,000 --> 01:16:27,000
It's one of the drawings of heliocopters made by Leonardo da Vinci, and the date for it is somewhere around 1500.

717
01:16:27,000 --> 01:16:29,000
Next, please.

718
01:16:29,000 --> 01:16:35,000
This is also very interesting, because it's taken from a painting of that time.

719
01:16:35,000 --> 01:16:45,000
It's just a detail from a large canvas, and it shows what is obviously a child's toy helicopter produced by pulling a string.

720
01:16:45,000 --> 01:16:56,000
Until I saw this, I never had any realization that these things which you used to be able to go and buy in Woolworth were in fact 400 years old, nearly 500 years old.

721
01:16:56,000 --> 01:16:58,000
Next one, please.

722
01:16:58,000 --> 01:17:13,000
And this, many of you will recognize, is the common Sangamang, about whom I don't propose saying anything more in the moment, except that in connection with this idea of an elite, this is perhaps the most outstanding character of all.

723
01:17:14,000 --> 01:17:25,000
You probably know that Bernard de Fontanel was supposed from the age of 45 until he died on his 100th birthday, never to have aged visibly.

724
01:17:25,000 --> 01:17:35,000
But the common Sangamang did very much better than that, because according to the historical records, he seems to have stayed at about middle age over a period of very nearly 200 years.

725
01:17:35,000 --> 01:17:39,000
You can definitely trace him over a period of about 17.

726
01:17:40,000 --> 01:17:46,000
This could just be a freak of human longevity. It could be something else. That's please.

727
01:17:48,000 --> 01:18:00,000
Yes, over that group of people that you saw, there was the car estimated at 19 of 150, Luther 170, Kent 175, Newton 190, Gertrude 210.

728
01:18:00,000 --> 01:18:10,000
Notes are at 165, Gertrude 190, Da Vinci 180, Galileo 185. We reckon we're doing damn well if we knock out 140.

729
01:18:10,000 --> 01:18:22,000
There certainly are, even if it is only a purely human manifestation, there certainly are among us a subspecies very different from the general one.

730
01:18:23,000 --> 01:18:31,000
The audio-plastic and proselytical piece is then can explain this compelling idea of a race of supermen.

731
01:18:31,000 --> 01:18:41,000
But is this idea picked up from others in the course of our workaday lives, or are we all, as some people believe, in contact with each other at a subliminal level?

732
01:18:41,000 --> 01:18:49,000
And if there is a universal unconscious telepathy between men, then why not between men and other intelligences?

733
01:18:49,000 --> 01:19:01,000
And perhaps the Russians are right, and their attempts to develop telepathy as a cheap and effective way of communication between Earth and the Moon is more realistic than things like the abortive attempt to Project Osma.

734
01:19:01,000 --> 01:19:18,000
It could be that many of the strange mental disturbances which we put down to madness, genius, historical dissociation, or just plain drunkenness on a Saturday night, are the early stirrings of idioplastic concepts produced by cosmic telepathy.

735
01:19:18,000 --> 01:19:30,000
On the subject of telepathy, I would like to show you just three slides. I'm not going into any further, you'll find this dealt with in detail in the next issue of the Flying Salsa Review.

736
01:19:30,000 --> 01:19:32,000
Next one, please.

737
01:19:33,000 --> 01:19:37,000
This little page is precisely what it appears to be.

738
01:19:37,000 --> 01:19:44,000
A metal page can sharpen up the both just a little bit, with inside of a bed and some apparatus.

739
01:19:44,000 --> 01:19:46,000
And it is that? Thank you.

740
01:19:46,000 --> 01:19:53,000
News by the Russian Professor Vasiliy, who's done a great deal of work on telepathy.

741
01:19:53,000 --> 01:20:00,000
In his experiment, the chapter he was being experimented upon didn't know that he was engaged in a telepathic experiment.

742
01:20:00,000 --> 01:20:08,000
He thought that he was carrying out a routine medical examination. He had to squeeze a bulb with one hand, and try and keep up a regular rhythm.

743
01:20:08,000 --> 01:20:16,000
Meanwhile, unknown to him, away in another room, some spooky bloke was trying to do a Houdini on him, saying, go to sleep, go to sleep.

744
01:20:16,000 --> 01:20:21,000
And he was marking down on the tape the times at which he made his suggestions.

745
01:20:21,000 --> 01:20:26,000
The chapter was squeezing the bulb, unknown he was marking down on the tape his own efforts.

746
01:20:26,000 --> 01:20:34,000
And the thing was to find whether there was a coincidence between the attempt of the hypnotist to put him to sleep, and the time at which he did fall asleep.

747
01:20:34,000 --> 01:20:40,000
Because if the experiment went on long enough, he always fell asleep. Sometimes took a long while.

748
01:20:40,000 --> 01:20:43,000
Next slide please.

749
01:20:43,000 --> 01:20:51,000
In America, Dr. Duren has been carrying out some remarkable experiments on telepathy. This isn't Dr. Duren.

750
01:20:51,000 --> 01:21:04,000
He had rather similar apparatus. What he did in fact was to control the alpha rhythm of his brain. We can all do this.

751
01:21:04,000 --> 01:21:15,000
If our eyes are open or shut, there's a difference in our alpha rhythm. If we think about a problem, such as something complicated like twice two, our alpha rhythm is immediately reduced.

752
01:21:15,000 --> 01:21:22,000
If we think of something really complicated, such as nine times nine times nine, it's quite suppressed for a moment or so.

753
01:21:22,000 --> 01:21:32,000
So Duren figured that he could pick up this change in his alpha rhythm since it easily appears on an electron-kephalograph, and end-perfect to do useful things.

754
01:21:32,000 --> 01:21:39,000
So then he found this work quite nicely. He could think or not think and switch the lights on or open the door for his car.

755
01:21:40,000 --> 01:21:49,000
This pussycat, which has nothing to do with that, is one of a series of experiments which have been conducted by Israeli scientists.

756
01:21:49,000 --> 01:22:02,000
So if you can measure an animal's reactions without the difficulty of having lots of electrical wires trailing all over the place, this little cat can transmit certain physiological stimulus,

757
01:22:02,000 --> 01:22:06,000
and then transmit by the temperatures, blood pressure and so on, back to base.

758
01:22:06,000 --> 01:22:15,000
What is more interesting is that other scientists have recently produced a very similar box of cooks mounted on their head or some call of a puss.

759
01:22:15,000 --> 01:22:23,000
Whereby, by pressing one button, they can command a thing to come, and by pressing another button, they can command it to go.

760
01:22:23,000 --> 01:22:32,000
This is simply by either producing in it the attraction due to food, or the repulsion due to a loud noise.

761
01:22:32,000 --> 01:22:36,000
In fact, it receives neither. It only receives an electrical signal, but different wavelengths.

762
01:22:36,000 --> 01:22:52,000
What I'm trying to bring home to you now is the fact that although it may not be possible to transmit a complex idea, it is perfectly possible to transmit an idea, the idea of come or the idea of go,

763
01:22:52,000 --> 01:23:00,000
but for even an inert apparatus in the brain of a cat, recently a number of people in America have reported hearing meteorites.

764
01:23:00,000 --> 01:23:07,000
Experiments have now been carried out which show that certainly some servicemen can hear radar waves.

765
01:23:07,000 --> 01:23:13,000
To be strictly truthful, they don't hear the radar waves, but they can hear what is called the pulse for current frequency.

766
01:23:13,000 --> 01:23:21,000
In other words, if they've got a radar which is working with a few thousand repetitions per second, they hear a high-pitched whistle.

767
01:23:21,000 --> 01:23:25,000
But this is not detected by their ears, if they're stoned therefore, if they're ears are plugged.

768
01:23:25,000 --> 01:23:29,000
They still hear the whistle inside their heads.

769
01:23:29,000 --> 01:23:34,000
And this also reminds us of certain experiments recently carried out on recess monkeys in the States,

770
01:23:34,000 --> 01:23:42,000
which have shown that you can produce a mental breakdown, or even drive them completely insane, by just transmitting television to them.

771
01:23:42,000 --> 01:23:46,000
You don't see the pictures, they only get the radar waves.

772
01:23:46,000 --> 01:23:50,000
The Lord knows what will happen if they saw the pictures as well.

773
01:23:50,000 --> 01:23:53,000
Can I have the next?

774
01:23:53,000 --> 01:24:00,000
This shows you what happens when a bird gets sucked into the air intake of a jet plane.

775
01:24:00,000 --> 01:24:06,000
It's fatal for the bird, it could be fatal for the pilot and his crew.

776
01:24:06,000 --> 01:24:14,000
Consequently, the Americans have become very worried about this, and they've done a lot of work on clearing birds, particularly large species, off their airfields.

777
01:24:14,000 --> 01:24:18,000
And how do they do it? Yes, you'd guess it, they do it by electromagnetic radiation.

778
01:24:18,000 --> 01:24:27,000
If you take a beam of radio waves, round about 10 centimeters wavelength, or an even longer wavelength, out to say 600 megacircles,

779
01:24:27,000 --> 01:24:35,000
if you beam this down, it doesn't have to be a very intense radiation, it is not a radiation strong enough to warm up the brain.

780
01:24:35,000 --> 01:24:39,000
There is no direct, obvious, mechanical effect like that.

781
01:24:39,000 --> 01:24:44,000
At a very low intensity, the bird becomes paralyzed and just falls down.

782
01:24:44,000 --> 01:24:51,000
This is what they do on the airfields, they have a beam like this which is swept around the airfield when a large jet is about to take off or come in,

783
01:24:51,000 --> 01:24:54,000
and all the birds are paralyzed for a few minutes.

784
01:24:54,000 --> 01:25:01,000
Within minutes or so of the beam being turned off, they're happily flapping around and getting in everybody's way again.

785
01:25:02,000 --> 01:25:06,000
I think that's the last slide, is it? Thank you, it lasts.

786
01:25:09,000 --> 01:25:19,000
Right, I don't propose breaking into the copyright of the mixed article in the Blind Salsa Review,

787
01:25:19,000 --> 01:25:25,000
which is the final one in my present series, in which I go over this matter and a number of other things,

788
01:25:25,000 --> 01:25:28,000
and draw it out into a more coherent theme.

789
01:25:29,000 --> 01:25:38,000
But I would like you thinking back over what we've gone through to realise that we had a perfectly good scientific evidence,

790
01:25:38,000 --> 01:25:43,000
quite partly in terms of feeling that lots of us may possess about life on other worlds,

791
01:25:43,000 --> 01:25:49,000
perfectly good scientific evidence that there are suitable environments available,

792
01:25:49,000 --> 01:25:53,000
there are homes for life elsewhere, if it has evolved there.

793
01:25:54,000 --> 01:26:00,000
And having looked at the possible ways in which communication could take place between worlds,

794
01:26:00,000 --> 01:26:06,000
there appears to be evidence or attempts having taken place, although we've got nothing terribly concrete to go on.

795
01:26:06,000 --> 01:26:12,000
There is also the possibility that we have overlooked a tremendously important field,

796
01:26:12,000 --> 01:26:20,000
that of parapsychology, the possibility that the emanations of the planet Jupiter, for example,

797
01:26:21,000 --> 01:26:28,000
may not merely be attempts to influence our minds, for all we know they are effective in influencing our minds.

798
01:26:28,000 --> 01:26:34,000
There are so many things that go on in our minds that we can't explain,

799
01:26:34,000 --> 01:26:40,000
that there is always a possibility that they are due to an external influence.

800
01:26:40,000 --> 01:26:45,000
The one piece of scientific evidence which shows that this is an all-utter moonshine

801
01:26:45,000 --> 01:26:52,000
is this recent series of electrical experiments indicating that you can paralyse birds,

802
01:26:52,000 --> 01:27:00,000
you can drive monkeys mad, little old human beings with television, and that you can transmit information.

803
01:27:00,000 --> 01:27:08,000
And finally, we must briefly consider the social implications of coming into contact with superior races.

804
01:27:08,000 --> 01:27:13,000
There can be no question of there having any fear of us, crude, though we may seem,

805
01:27:13,000 --> 01:27:21,000
since even a slightly more advanced society could, if it wished, completely exterminate terrestrial life with little or no effort,

806
01:27:21,000 --> 01:27:26,000
in much the same way as we exterminate lot of rum into us.

807
01:27:26,000 --> 01:27:29,000
On the other hand, it is probable that we have little to fear.

808
01:27:29,000 --> 01:27:36,000
Very superior races, societies of vast intellect, may well possess equally vast compassion.

809
01:27:37,000 --> 01:27:44,000
Although this is an idealist view, and I'm sorry to say it cannot be deduced from observations of human behavior.

810
01:27:44,000 --> 01:27:50,000
The establishment of contact with any superior community would obviously be of unparalleled importance,

811
01:27:50,000 --> 01:27:54,000
socially, technically, and culturally.

812
01:27:54,000 --> 01:28:01,000
It could lead either to our rapidly attaining a superior status ourselves, or it could lead to our extinction.

813
01:28:01,000 --> 01:28:09,000
And it probably depends upon how well we can conceal or overcome our great failings as social beings.