Something (Probably) Is Out There

At the end of a century, at the dawn of a millennium, American presidential politics has boiled down to a choice between Republican middle-of-the-roadism and Democratic split-the-difference-ism--a battle between the bland and the blanched. Yet just 30 years ago this month, on July 20, 1969, Americans did something truly bold: They put men on the moon.

Then the U.S. stepped back from greatness; the space program was mothballed, an innocent victim, perhaps, of the Vietnam War. In the minds of many, the Right Stuff rocket jocks were too close to Phantom-flying baby-napalmers. The first Earth Day, in 1970, signaled an anti-technology backlash; meanwhile, counterculturalist historians were redefining discoverers and explorers as despoilers and exploiters. And short-termist politicians expanded domestic spending programs that crowded out funding for space. Even now, with the deficit days over, Washington is transfixed by such weighty questions as whether Medicare should pay for Viagra. Manifest Destiny will just have to wait.

But if NASA isn’t doing much, there’s MUFON. That’s the Mutual UFO Network, based in Seguin, Texas; some 700 “X-Files” types gathered in Washington last weekend for their annual convention. MUFON is an outsider vigilante space organization; if Uncle Sam won’t own up to looking outward and upward, then it will. And while one can easily make fun of flying saucer followers, and while all of them are likely misguided in their particulars, they’re probably right in general: Something is out there. And whether It becomes known to us in the next year or the next thousand years, all those who watched and waited by the sky horizon will have earned their vindication.

Unfortunately, most MUFONeers are to serious space research what astrology is to astronomy. Typical is Budd Hopkins, a New Yorker who has been writing about alien abductions for a quarter-century. In a speech to a rapt audience, he recounted the tale of a man who claimed he had been kidnapped and physically probed by space aliens in 1961. Of course, there is no physical evidence to support his story; his account emerged when he was under hypnosis. But to UFO true believers, the more incredible the claim, the more credible it is. As Hopkins said, even survivors of the Holocaust have a hard time believing it happened to them, even though it did. So, by that sleight-of-logic, Hopkins argued, if it’s hard to believe in alien abduction, then it’s easier, maybe, to believe it actually happened.

Philip Klass, a veteran writer for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, also attended the conference. He has studied UFOs for three decades, written four debunking books and publishes a skeptical newsletter. He has seen zero evidence, he says, for anything extraterrestrial. Then why does he stay on the case? Because if ET does exist, he wants the story, he says, still eyeing the future at age 79: “I’d win a Pulitzer Prize and every other prize there is.”

The search for the truth out there also animates the newest star in UFO firmament, Joe Firmage, a Silicon Valley mogul who was pushed out of the company when his interest shifted from cyberspace to outer space. Firmage is a believer; he has written in the past of an encounter with “a remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light.”

But in an hour-long presentation to MUFON, he made a more modest argument: the more scientists learn, the more they learn about what has yet to be learned. And so, given the enormity of the universe, isn’t possible that others have learned more than us? Now all of 28, he has both a fortune and a mission to last a lifetime; he will shortly unveil the International Space Sciences Organization, which will attempt to bring scientific rigor to UFO research.

Many, maybe most, will regard Firmage as a crackpot, but Christopher Columbus was lightly regarded until he discovered America; today he is justly remembered as a man for the millennium.

But now another millennium is coming, and a new set of heroes will emerge. Since the current crop of vision-thing-less politicians have so little to offer, someone such as Firmage has a chance to step into immortality. The next thousand years will quite possibly be remembered as the era when They find us--or we find Them.