1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,640 The important thing is the Star Map that Betty saw. 2 00:00:05,640 --> 00:00:09,680 I strongly recommend the book or the television movie which gets shown every once in a while, 3 00:00:09,680 --> 00:00:13,560 the UFO incident, James Earl Jones, Estelle Parsons. 4 00:00:13,560 --> 00:00:17,840 I was technical advisor on the film referred to Universal by the Air Force, which I don't 5 00:00:17,840 --> 00:00:23,720 understand at all, but it happened on Bled. 6 00:00:23,720 --> 00:00:27,000 Betty saw a Star Map that looked like this. 7 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:34,360 Supposedly heavy trade routes, light trade routes, occasional excursions is the word 8 00:00:34,360 --> 00:00:37,240 I'm looking for. 9 00:00:37,240 --> 00:00:39,120 She asked the alien where you are on the map. 10 00:00:39,120 --> 00:00:41,240 Wise Guy says, you know where you are? 11 00:00:41,240 --> 00:00:42,240 No. 12 00:00:42,240 --> 00:00:44,240 How can I tell you where I'm from if you don't know where you're at? 13 00:00:44,240 --> 00:00:46,240 End of discussion. 14 00:00:46,240 --> 00:00:49,560 Dr. Simon has her go over it again. 15 00:00:49,560 --> 00:00:51,200 She draws it. 16 00:00:51,200 --> 00:00:52,200 This is what came out. 17 00:00:52,200 --> 00:00:53,200 It's in the book. 18 00:00:53,200 --> 00:00:54,840 Probably we'll never know what it means. 19 00:00:54,840 --> 00:00:57,800 Obviously, there's no reference point. 20 00:00:57,800 --> 00:01:00,800 There's a couple hundred billion stars in the galaxy. 21 00:01:00,800 --> 00:01:01,800 Obviously they're not there. 22 00:01:01,800 --> 00:01:03,760 There are a thousand stars in the local neighborhood. 23 00:01:03,760 --> 00:01:05,400 Obviously they're not there. 24 00:01:05,400 --> 00:01:07,640 Hopeless, it seemed. 25 00:01:07,640 --> 00:01:13,760 Until a brilliant woman named Marjorie Fish did something nobody else had ever done. 26 00:01:13,760 --> 00:01:19,280 She built a total, I think now it's up to 26, three-dimensional models of our local galactic 27 00:01:19,280 --> 00:01:20,280 neighborhood. 28 00:01:20,840 --> 00:01:23,400 Here's one of her best ones from Ohio State University. 29 00:01:23,400 --> 00:01:25,520 Use it as a teaching tool. 30 00:01:25,520 --> 00:01:30,560 Every one of those beads stands for a particular star and it's proper three-dimensional location. 31 00:01:30,560 --> 00:01:37,160 Now, the hard part here, we know the angles to look at for a star from here, but we don't 32 00:01:37,160 --> 00:01:40,280 know the distances very well because the astronomers aren't going anywhere. 33 00:01:40,280 --> 00:01:43,120 What difference does it make how far or how near the stars are? 34 00:01:43,120 --> 00:01:45,360 She thought she'd get a lot of matches. 35 00:01:45,360 --> 00:01:46,920 The idea was to look at it from all different directions. 36 00:01:46,960 --> 00:01:50,280 She found a three-dimensional pattern that matched the two-dimensional one that Betty 37 00:01:50,280 --> 00:01:51,280 had drawn. 38 00:01:51,280 --> 00:01:52,280 Didn't get a match. 39 00:01:52,280 --> 00:01:57,880 Then a new catalog came out with the best distance data ever published, the Gleasy 1968 40 00:01:57,880 --> 00:01:58,880 catalog. 41 00:01:58,880 --> 00:01:59,880 Rebuilt the model. 42 00:01:59,880 --> 00:02:00,880 There was the pattern. 43 00:02:00,880 --> 00:02:02,680 Angle for angle, line length for line length. 44 00:02:02,680 --> 00:02:05,120 It was a great day for Marjorie. 45 00:02:05,120 --> 00:02:08,360 This is the sun. 46 00:02:08,360 --> 00:02:10,440 Several special things. 47 00:02:10,440 --> 00:02:13,720 All the pattern stars are the right kind for planets in life. 48 00:02:14,680 --> 00:02:20,000 Remember, only 46 out of 1,000 qualify and yet not only are all the pattern stars the 49 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:24,840 right kind for planets in life, but all the right kind for planets in life in this well-defined 50 00:02:24,840 --> 00:02:29,800 three-dimensional volume of space are part of the pattern. 51 00:02:29,800 --> 00:02:30,800 Coming and going. 52 00:02:30,800 --> 00:02:31,800 You've got it both ways. 53 00:02:31,800 --> 00:02:33,480 All the right kind and only the right kind. 54 00:02:33,480 --> 00:02:36,200 The chance of that being a coincidence. 55 00:02:36,200 --> 00:02:40,600 You grab a dozen stars and they just happen to be all the right kind and only the right 56 00:02:40,600 --> 00:02:41,600 kind. 57 00:02:41,600 --> 00:02:43,080 One in 10,000. 58 00:02:43,080 --> 00:02:45,880 It is not a coincidence. 59 00:02:45,880 --> 00:02:50,200 Turns out incidentally that all the pattern stars are in a plane, like thin slices of 60 00:02:50,200 --> 00:02:55,360 pepperoni on a very thin pepperoni pizza, not like raisins in a big fat loaf or raisin 61 00:02:55,360 --> 00:02:56,360 bread. 62 00:02:56,360 --> 00:02:59,040 It has never been discovered before. 63 00:02:59,040 --> 00:03:03,200 It's very helpful when you're traveling to stay in the plane instead of having to go 64 00:03:03,200 --> 00:03:06,640 out of the plane and take much more energy. 65 00:03:06,640 --> 00:03:11,480 Nobody doing what Marjorie did back when the experience happened in 61, but the book came 66 00:03:11,480 --> 00:03:13,400 out The Interrupted Journey in 66. 67 00:03:13,400 --> 00:03:17,000 Could have identified the stars properly because the correct distance data wasn't available 68 00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:19,560 until after 1968. 69 00:03:19,560 --> 00:03:24,680 The only source of the correct information, in other words, at the time this event took 70 00:03:24,680 --> 00:03:28,400 place was somebody who'd been away from our solar system. 71 00:03:28,400 --> 00:03:31,800 And none of us had been, so it must be alien. 72 00:03:31,800 --> 00:03:38,080 If you want to know the names of the neighboring stars and get a scale, here's the sun. 73 00:03:38,080 --> 00:03:42,800 These distances are in light years, 27 light years, 26 light years. 74 00:03:42,800 --> 00:03:45,880 Near a star to the sun is 4.5 light years away. 75 00:03:45,880 --> 00:03:50,760 Near a star we expect to have planets in life, to a steady 11 light years away. 76 00:03:50,760 --> 00:03:55,680 36.6 light years, call it 37, will be generous. 77 00:03:55,680 --> 00:04:03,960 The base stars, the heavy trade routes between them, Z1 and Z2, in particular, to which the 78 00:04:03,960 --> 00:04:07,680 normal responses, who cares, never heard of those two dumb sounding stars. 79 00:04:07,680 --> 00:04:08,680 Of course you haven't heard of them. 80 00:04:08,680 --> 00:04:09,680 You can't see them from here. 81 00:04:09,680 --> 00:04:12,680 You've got to go below the equator. 82 00:04:12,680 --> 00:04:14,160 Anything special? 83 00:04:14,160 --> 00:04:17,360 Well, yes, as it happens. 84 00:04:17,360 --> 00:04:18,360 They're unique. 85 00:04:18,360 --> 00:04:23,800 They're the closest to each other, a pair of sun-like stars in our entire local neighborhood. 86 00:04:23,800 --> 00:04:28,440 A hundred times closer to each other than the sun is to the next star over. 87 00:04:28,440 --> 00:04:31,840 They're lousy three light weeks apart. 88 00:04:31,840 --> 00:04:35,920 It's a weekend trip at the right speed. 89 00:04:35,920 --> 00:04:41,160 Now we're so far out in the boondocks we don't see the smoke from the next guy's chimney. 90 00:04:41,160 --> 00:04:43,160 These guys got next door neighbors. 91 00:04:43,160 --> 00:04:46,840 It wouldn't be surprising if they got started on their interstellar travel kick a little 92 00:04:46,840 --> 00:04:49,480 bit before we did. 93 00:04:49,480 --> 00:04:52,240 You can see the other star all day long. 94 00:04:52,240 --> 00:04:55,320 You can directly observe planets around the other star. 95 00:04:55,320 --> 00:05:02,760 And in addition, those two stars are only a billion years older than the sun, something 96 00:05:02,760 --> 00:05:06,920 we wouldn't have known except for Marjorie Fish's work. 97 00:05:06,920 --> 00:05:12,880 I did the first article on this work in 1972 in Saga Magazine, convinced Terry Dickinson 98 00:05:12,880 --> 00:05:17,760 of Astronomy Magazine, then the editor to do an article. 99 00:05:17,760 --> 00:05:20,920 Terry is Canada's finest astronomy writer. 100 00:05:20,920 --> 00:05:23,840 He's even a member of the Order of Canada. 101 00:05:23,840 --> 00:05:27,760 He did the article that got more response than anything they've ever published before 102 00:05:27,760 --> 00:05:29,840 or since. 103 00:05:29,840 --> 00:05:35,080 They published over the next year in the early 70s nine more letters. 104 00:05:35,080 --> 00:05:41,280 Then they put out this 32 page full color booklet and immediately sold 10,000 copies, 105 00:05:41,280 --> 00:05:42,800 unheard of for this kind of thing.