1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:09,940 We come to our last and our most distinguished speaker, a man who is certainly qualified 2 00:00:09,940 --> 00:00:15,120 probably as no other president is to give us an accurate idea of what space visitors, 3 00:00:15,120 --> 00:00:19,000 if and when, will look like. 4 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:24,320 What you've seen, after all, is the testimony of people. 5 00:00:24,320 --> 00:00:29,520 We have no evidence that these creatures actually existed in anything else than the 6 00:00:29,520 --> 00:00:33,080 imaginations of the people who reported them. 7 00:00:33,080 --> 00:00:39,240 We have the tales of the people who have messages from big brotherly visitors. 8 00:00:39,240 --> 00:00:49,120 We have no evidence, and for lack of evidence, we can simply try to apply our minds to what, 9 00:00:49,120 --> 00:00:52,920 if and when I repeat, space visitors come, they will look like. 10 00:00:52,920 --> 00:00:59,360 And we are very fortunate tonight to have the man, as I say, who can tell us more authoritatively 11 00:00:59,360 --> 00:01:04,280 what space visitors will look like than probably anybody else. 12 00:01:04,280 --> 00:01:06,760 You know I'm speaking of Mr. Willie Lay. 13 00:01:06,760 --> 00:01:17,760 Mr. Lay has been interested in space travel for a good many years, despite his useful appearance. 14 00:01:17,760 --> 00:01:27,840 In fact, his first book was entitled, Tripped Into Space, and that book was written or published 15 00:01:27,840 --> 00:01:30,080 twenty-nine years ago. 16 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:36,800 That is the extent of Mr. Lay's history of interest in space travel. 17 00:01:36,800 --> 00:01:41,960 He has written many other books since then, not only on space travel, but also on one 18 00:01:41,960 --> 00:01:49,800 of his specialties, which is biology, biology. 19 00:01:49,800 --> 00:01:54,080 Some of those books, for instance, you probably know about, they have delightful titles, the 20 00:01:54,080 --> 00:01:58,760 longfish, the dodo, and the unicorn. 21 00:01:58,760 --> 00:02:01,280 Salamanders and other wonders. 22 00:02:01,280 --> 00:02:10,000 Incidentally, both of those books have the subtitle, An Excursion into Romantic Zoology, 23 00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:16,240 and I would be in time to make a private guest to myself, that this is a term which might 24 00:02:16,240 --> 00:02:24,120 describe Mr. Lay's conception of reports of space visitors as of the present time, Romantic 25 00:02:24,120 --> 00:02:25,120 Zoology. 26 00:02:25,120 --> 00:02:26,120 I don't know. 27 00:02:26,120 --> 00:02:34,000 Without any further word, then, I'll turn the platform over to Mr. Lay, and he will 28 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:41,520 tell you what will certainly be the most solid and worthwhile information of the evening. 29 00:02:42,520 --> 00:02:49,040 Ladies and gentlemen, what I am carrying here are not notes for a speech, but the invitation 30 00:02:49,040 --> 00:02:53,560 which you have all seen giving me the timing. 31 00:02:53,560 --> 00:03:00,760 That's not a new invitation, and it says for me, nine-fifty to ten-fifteen-twenty-five 32 00:03:00,760 --> 00:03:01,760 minutes. 33 00:03:01,760 --> 00:03:06,200 According to this, we are running five minutes late. 34 00:03:06,640 --> 00:03:13,880 However, the CAA regulations state that the pilot does not have to report deviations from 35 00:03:13,880 --> 00:03:18,240 the flight plan if they are less than ten minutes. 36 00:03:18,240 --> 00:03:24,880 So I think my justice will go ahead, whether I will speak for twenty-five minutes or not, 37 00:03:24,880 --> 00:03:28,280 is something I simply do not know. 38 00:03:28,280 --> 00:03:35,520 Now, let me first state, so to speak, a statement of qualifications. 39 00:03:35,520 --> 00:03:42,320 Secondly, a statement of attitude, and then I go into the theme, power. 40 00:03:42,320 --> 00:03:49,320 The statement of qualifications is that I have read most of the books written on flying 41 00:03:49,320 --> 00:03:58,360 saucers, if in some cases being annoyed by obvious nonsense, I may have skipped a few 42 00:03:58,360 --> 00:03:59,360 pages. 43 00:03:59,360 --> 00:04:06,760 Second of attitude is that I do not say people are lawyers because they have seen something 44 00:04:06,760 --> 00:04:15,760 in the sky that cannot be explained, but that I believe this term is used here in the non-religious 45 00:04:15,760 --> 00:04:28,920 sense, that I think that UFOs, provided they exist at all, exist only inside the atmosphere 46 00:04:28,920 --> 00:04:32,600 and are natural phenomena. 47 00:04:32,600 --> 00:04:40,560 My reason for expressing this inside the atmosphere is something which is not as well known as 48 00:04:40,560 --> 00:04:50,280 it could be, and that is that for quite some time, intensive searches were made of space 49 00:04:50,280 --> 00:04:53,720 in the vicinity of Earth. 50 00:04:53,720 --> 00:05:01,440 One of the reasons for these intense searches were the forthcoming artificial satellites. 51 00:05:01,440 --> 00:05:11,040 It was known to the people involved that artificial satellites would happen sooner or later. 52 00:05:11,040 --> 00:05:19,600 It was believed at the time that artificial satellites would broadcast in the literal 53 00:05:19,600 --> 00:05:28,040 sense their presence by means of transmitters, but it was also thought correctly so that 54 00:05:28,040 --> 00:05:33,280 these transmitters would be battery-powered and the batteries would go out, and then all 55 00:05:33,280 --> 00:05:39,920 you had left was visual tracking with optical instruments and tracking with sharp ways by 56 00:05:39,920 --> 00:05:42,480 radar. 57 00:05:42,480 --> 00:05:50,880 And in order to do that effectively, you had to make very sure that there were no natural 58 00:05:50,880 --> 00:05:57,440 bodies in space which you might misunderstand for artificial satellites. 59 00:05:57,440 --> 00:06:08,680 And for this reason, a very thorough search was instituted for the space between the Earth 60 00:06:08,680 --> 00:06:17,320 and our natural moon, and in this search absolutely nothing turned up. 61 00:06:17,320 --> 00:06:25,920 No natural satellites, no planned espionage of the artificial satellites, and no space 62 00:06:25,920 --> 00:06:30,200 ships coming from elsewhere or going to elsewhere. 63 00:06:30,200 --> 00:06:36,400 Of course, it is always possible to make the hypothesis that wasn't advanced technology. 64 00:06:36,400 --> 00:06:43,520 Obviously things are both invisible and indetectable by radar, but I like personality or like one 65 00:06:43,520 --> 00:06:46,240 hypothesis at a time. 66 00:06:46,240 --> 00:06:53,520 So having stated my personal convictions, I'll go to the theme for which I was really 67 00:06:53,520 --> 00:06:55,520 asked to speak. 68 00:06:55,520 --> 00:06:59,920 I must say I brought this all by myself. 69 00:06:59,920 --> 00:07:03,600 I was invited for lunch by the editors of this week. 70 00:07:04,080 --> 00:07:09,200 Now I should just have let them buy me a few cocktails and the lunch, and I should have 71 00:07:09,200 --> 00:07:11,200 kept my mouth shut. 72 00:07:11,200 --> 00:07:12,560 No, what did I do? 73 00:07:12,560 --> 00:07:14,800 I answered questions. 74 00:07:14,800 --> 00:07:24,800 And the result of answering what I suspected to be well-meaning questions, I wrote an article. 75 00:07:24,800 --> 00:07:30,400 But this article had a flaw, my God, which I did not write myself. 76 00:07:31,200 --> 00:07:40,560 Lester Del Rey spoke here first essentially as a science fiction author. 77 00:07:40,560 --> 00:07:49,360 And the past origin of this article I wrote was for science fictional purposes. 78 00:07:49,360 --> 00:07:59,040 I have been in the habit all my life to look at the history of everything that comes my way. 79 00:07:59,040 --> 00:08:06,320 As a matter of fact, as I said recently somewhere else, at Basal, if you have to know, I'm a member 80 00:08:06,320 --> 00:08:12,160 of the history of science society, and of course our pride and glory there always is to 81 00:08:12,160 --> 00:08:17,680 know earlier sources than the men who are speaking. 82 00:08:17,680 --> 00:08:26,720 And so all my life I've been in the habit of looking for earlier sources. 83 00:08:26,720 --> 00:08:37,760 So I, when I began reading American science fiction, I tried to find Ulla science fiction. 84 00:08:37,760 --> 00:08:43,360 And I like to give you a very quick rundown because this is pertinent to the story. 85 00:08:43,360 --> 00:08:50,240 Science fiction does go back to 160 AD, that's the first science fiction story in all. 86 00:08:50,240 --> 00:08:54,560 The next one came 1600 years later. 87 00:08:54,560 --> 00:09:04,000 In both cases nobody visits us, but people from Earth, technically absolutely inadequate means, 88 00:09:04,800 --> 00:09:11,600 go to the moon. Because I can't even believe the others for having used technically inadequate 89 00:09:11,600 --> 00:09:19,120 means, characters hadn't been invented at the moment. The first story which I have been able to find 90 00:09:19,360 --> 00:09:28,240 in which people from Earth's work come to Earth is a German novel that was written in 1893. 91 00:09:29,280 --> 00:09:36,880 So some 20 years ago I was sitting with Sprague de Camp, another well-known science fiction 92 00:09:36,880 --> 00:09:43,840 author in his apartment here in New York, and I was mentioning this novel to him. 93 00:09:43,840 --> 00:09:47,600 He didn't know it because it had never been translated into English. 94 00:09:48,560 --> 00:09:56,800 And he said, well, how do these visitors look? Well, I said in this particular case they are 95 00:09:56,800 --> 00:10:02,800 so human that they even can cross-breath. And then we started thinking of 96 00:10:03,600 --> 00:10:09,040 then-reasoned science fiction stories and how the extraterrestrials had looked. 97 00:10:10,000 --> 00:10:15,440 And the extraterrestrials had been all kinds of impossible mixtures. You know, 98 00:10:15,520 --> 00:10:20,800 70 peats with 20-pound wings aerodynamically completely impossible. 99 00:10:22,160 --> 00:10:28,400 Something like lobster's worth, a few appendages, not precisely propellers, no, 100 00:10:28,400 --> 00:10:34,800 the artist didn't go that far, but also something that neurologically made no sense. 101 00:10:36,080 --> 00:10:44,080 And so the two of us, Sprague de Camp and I, then sat down and said, now what would an 102 00:10:44,160 --> 00:10:49,680 extraterrestrial actually look like from the scientific point of view? 103 00:10:50,800 --> 00:10:56,240 Let's assume that there are some. What would they look like? 104 00:10:57,920 --> 00:11:06,400 We quickly discovered that we could not pin down extraterrestrial life as a whole. 105 00:11:06,400 --> 00:11:14,880 You do have these enormous differences on Earth between the sandy peat and the jellyfish, 106 00:11:15,920 --> 00:11:27,120 the bird and a moorie star. But what we could pin down or thought we could pin down 107 00:11:27,120 --> 00:11:31,520 was the question of how would intelligent life look. 108 00:11:32,400 --> 00:11:35,600 Now, a few things were quite obvious in the first place. 109 00:11:36,400 --> 00:11:41,920 Intelligent life shows its intelligence by building things, by making things, 110 00:11:41,920 --> 00:11:47,280 and it grows more intelligent in the process. And finally, it comes across methods. 111 00:11:48,640 --> 00:11:56,960 Therefore, if it has to use methods in the end, it cannot be an underwater civilization. 112 00:11:57,360 --> 00:12:03,760 You might theoretically have an underwater civilization of the cultural and technological 113 00:12:03,760 --> 00:12:11,680 equivalent of the Neanderthal men, but you cannot even go to the Chroma and Yon because 114 00:12:11,680 --> 00:12:18,000 he already needed methods. Metals must be smelted and that cannot be done underwater. 115 00:12:18,240 --> 00:12:28,160 I don't want to bore you with every detail which we reasoned out. It took us two days of debate. 116 00:12:29,280 --> 00:12:36,720 I'd just like to say something or to repeat something that Lester Del Rey said about the 117 00:12:36,720 --> 00:12:46,320 books of the contactees, what they called, namely that eight years after this article was written 118 00:12:46,320 --> 00:12:51,120 and published, was written by a great decay and what we discussed it together, 119 00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:57,920 eight years after it was written and published, I have found out that the Dutch scientists had 120 00:12:57,920 --> 00:13:08,880 done the same thing 200 years before us. His name is well known in the history of science. 121 00:13:09,760 --> 00:13:18,480 I'm going to pronounce it the way he did. I wish to point out that I do not have a respiratory 122 00:13:18,480 --> 00:13:29,120 infection. Some Dutch names just sound that way. His name is Christian Heufens. Christian Heufens, 123 00:13:29,760 --> 00:13:36,960 in about 1700, pointed out that the inhabitants of other planets must have 124 00:13:37,920 --> 00:13:47,600 eyes to see what. We can pin this down a little more. Last night I was driven home by an Air Force 125 00:13:47,600 --> 00:13:58,160 Colonel who expressed his surprise that our eyes utilized only such a small part of all the possible 126 00:13:58,160 --> 00:14:05,840 ways. Well, the reason why our eyes do is a very simple one. Our eyes utilized that part of the 127 00:14:05,920 --> 00:14:15,840 spectrum to which our atmosphere is transparent. Our eyes cannot see X-rays. I'm simplifying this, 128 00:14:15,840 --> 00:14:23,200 of course, in the course of long evolution that has come about that. But our eyes do not see X-rays 129 00:14:23,200 --> 00:14:33,520 because X-rays, which started 200 miles away, wouldn't get to them. So our eyes work on those 130 00:14:33,520 --> 00:14:39,520 rays to which our atmosphere happens to be transparent. That's what we can add to evidence. 131 00:14:40,320 --> 00:14:54,160 Heufens said furthermore that the intelligent beings must have organs like hands or other of the 132 00:14:54,160 --> 00:15:02,080 functional hands to manipulate things. We can add to that that that leaves out a tentative, tentative 133 00:15:02,080 --> 00:15:09,600 like organ, like the elephant's tent, which is very strong in pulling but is not for lack of 134 00:15:09,600 --> 00:15:18,080 internal brazing strong in pushing. Obviously an intelligent being must be able to move around. 135 00:15:18,720 --> 00:15:27,840 Therefore it has to have legs of some kind. One of the things that old Huygens 200 years ago did 136 00:15:27,840 --> 00:15:34,640 not mention but would surprise, first break became and me, when we thought about it and discussed it, 137 00:15:35,520 --> 00:15:47,360 is to think that of all creatures with an internal skeleton on earth, you never had more than four 138 00:15:47,360 --> 00:15:59,040 limbs. It just doesn't exist. What we do not know, what we cannot tell is whether this is a sheer 139 00:15:59,040 --> 00:16:06,960 accident of terrestrial evolution or whether there is a natural law that we simply do not 140 00:16:07,040 --> 00:16:19,520 happen to know. At any event, I want to pull this together, we came to the result that an intelligent 141 00:16:19,520 --> 00:16:29,360 being of another planet cannot be much smaller than a human being because then there would be 142 00:16:29,360 --> 00:16:35,280 not enough body cells to support the brain cells and there must be so and so many brain cells because 143 00:16:35,280 --> 00:16:42,640 we have postulated that it is intelligent. Now can it be much larger than something else 144 00:16:42,640 --> 00:16:50,640 comes in which is known as the square pubular and which makes it very clumsy. In short, we ended up 145 00:16:51,920 --> 00:16:59,760 with a creature, which as I have phrased it later, if somebody who needs glasses but doesn't wear any 146 00:16:59,760 --> 00:17:10,000 in dust, seen from a distance would not at once be able to tell from a human. This of course does not 147 00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:18,400 mean minor accidents of evolution. A minor accident of evolution is whether my ears are large and 148 00:17:18,400 --> 00:17:24,640 floppy or whether there aren't any external ears. A minor accident of evolution is whether I have 149 00:17:24,720 --> 00:17:32,000 hair all over or none at all. Even smaller accidents of course is a different skin coloring. 150 00:17:32,640 --> 00:17:40,640 A very small accident would be the procession or absence of the tail. So as soon as somebody 151 00:17:40,640 --> 00:17:47,680 tells me I have contact with people looking just like us, I already have all the biological reasons 152 00:17:47,680 --> 00:17:55,440 and the words for not believing it. How large the differences might be is something we can't tell 153 00:17:56,160 --> 00:18:04,800 but the living body has to fulfill certain functions and there must be a general resonance. 154 00:18:06,160 --> 00:18:13,280 In conclusion, I'd like to say one more thing. In all this reasoning, 155 00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:24,000 one main assumption has been made without being mentioned. Namely that the chemical constitution 156 00:18:24,640 --> 00:18:37,360 of the non-terrestrial life is similar or more precisely the same, very much the same as ours. 157 00:18:38,160 --> 00:18:46,080 Are we justified in making such an assumption? In some cases, ignorance is a justification. 158 00:18:46,800 --> 00:18:57,280 We are talking here somewhat from ignorance. Our bodies are built on the carbon atom. The 159 00:18:57,280 --> 00:19:05,680 carbon atom has three characteristics which are quite unique. One is it combines readily with 160 00:19:05,680 --> 00:19:15,680 almost anything, either neon-crypton and so on, being obvious exceptions. However, it does not 161 00:19:15,680 --> 00:19:24,240 favor anything unduly, any other atom for combination. And the third characteristic is that carbon 162 00:19:24,240 --> 00:19:32,000 likes to look into itself and form enormous chains thereby producing molecules of the size and 163 00:19:32,000 --> 00:19:43,920 complexity necessary for what we call life. And it has been said, oh in about 1900, that there 164 00:19:43,920 --> 00:19:52,800 might be a life form in which the silicon atom replaces the carbon atom. This of course would 165 00:19:52,800 --> 00:20:00,160 lead to very interesting creatures. But in the first place, silicon is not as versatile 166 00:20:00,240 --> 00:20:11,680 in the second place, silicon favors oxygen in a very pronounced manner. In other words, if you 167 00:20:11,680 --> 00:20:20,960 have any silicon hydrogen compound, a single molecule of excellent oxidant coming wafting along 168 00:20:21,040 --> 00:20:30,000 will break this up. So you do not get the complexity of the compounds to fulfill 169 00:20:31,600 --> 00:20:39,040 the life processes. In other words, we are pretty sure now that although silicon is quite similar 170 00:20:39,040 --> 00:20:47,760 to oxygen, to carbon, it is not similar enough to be a substitute. And if silicon 171 00:20:48,080 --> 00:20:54,880 life exists anywhere in the universe, it would be on a planet where there is no free oxygen around. 172 00:20:55,920 --> 00:21:06,320 And it probably would be about as intelligent and as mobile as an average, not too type of stuff. 173 00:21:07,760 --> 00:21:13,520 I make, being brought mind that although I was cautioned in the beginning not to be, 174 00:21:13,600 --> 00:21:20,240 being brought mind that I made one possible exception. So far I am spoken about life at 175 00:21:20,240 --> 00:21:28,240 temperatures which we would find either comfortable or at least bearable, not killing. 176 00:21:29,520 --> 00:21:38,240 It has been suggested that at very low temperatures, those temperatures which on earth happen when 177 00:21:38,480 --> 00:21:48,960 somebody makes liquid oxygen, that there is another life chemistry possible. Well, 178 00:21:49,760 --> 00:21:57,920 we do not know enough chemistry to say that it is possible. Since we do not know enough chemistry, 179 00:21:57,920 --> 00:22:06,000 we also cannot say it is impossible. So I have to leave this open. Now to sum up, 180 00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:16,480 I believe A, that life exists elsewhere in the universe. On the other hand, I do not believe 181 00:22:17,200 --> 00:22:29,280 that the so-called UFOs can even exist outside of our atmosphere. I think they are natural phenomena, 182 00:22:29,680 --> 00:22:40,960 but if we ever get a visit from space, I believe that the life forms, the intelligent life forms 183 00:22:41,600 --> 00:22:50,320 that built this ship will be built along the lines of our chemistry and will obey the mechanical 184 00:22:50,320 --> 00:22:58,320 laws which have come into play in building the bodies of earth creatures. Thank you.