How is it that a 22-year-old kid with no scientific training has traveled deeper into space than any astronaut in history? Well, let's just say he had some help.
On Nov. 5, 1975, Travis Walton and six other young men came across a saucer-shaped craft hovering in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona as they were headed home from a logging job.
As they came to a stop in a clearing, 100 feet from the craft, they all watched in horror as Walton jumped out of the truck they were riding in and ran up to it, thinking it would take off before he could get close.
But the saucer lingered long enough for all seven men to get a better look than they even wanted.
And although they all agree it was traumatic and beyond scary, they pretty much also all seem to agree that, at the same time, it was an incredible, extraordinary experience.
The craft itself, metallic and hovering 15 feet above the ground, was a very impressive piece of machinery.
"It was prettier than a brand new Corvette," says witness John Goulette, who also maintains rather bluntly that the encounter was "the most horrifying experience of my life."
"It was beautiful," Walton says of his 45-degree-angle view from beneath the ship. "It was like glass."
"It was really terrifying and exciting at the same time," Walton says earnestly.
When the craft zapped Walton with a blue-green light and sent his body flying, the men in the truck, already scared, thought they had just witnessed the young man's death.
So they took off down the road in a panic, thinking they were about to die too.
But soon they stopped, collected themselves and gathered the courage to go back to check on Walton. When they reached the spot, he was nowhere to be found and the UFO was gone.
The youngest of the guys on the logging crew was 17-year-old Steve Pierce, who lied about his age to get the job and probably now wishes he never had.
"It was scary," Pierce says with a half-smile and gleaming eyes reminiscent of Captain Quint during his famous Indianapolis speech in Jaws. "I thought the world was coming to an end."
To make matters worse for the teenage Pierce, he had no family support during the aftermath of his traumatic encounter.
"It was hard to come to terms with," Pierce says, in his cowboy hat. "I got two brothers who don't believe me and my mom don't believe me. That's the hard part – you tell the truth and people think you're lying. I left Arizona and didn't come back."
And that's the thing. We live in a world where people will laugh at you and call you crazy if you believe in extraterrestrial life, more commonly referred to as aliens. But the same people think it's totally not weird to believe in a virgin giving birth, a guy walking on water, parting the Red Sea, goofy miracles, and on and on.
In fact, of the 7.5 billion people living on Earth, it is said that 84 percent of us believe in such hokus pokus. Probably because it makes us feel good and, more importantly, in control, despite the obvious reality that we are insignificant dust at the mercy of cosmic winds.
We are space people and we don't even know it. We are on a giant self-driving cruise ship in the middle of an ocean so vast, it has no end. It's not a very reassuring scenario, so it's no wonder why humans have invented tidy origin stories to help relieve some of that anxiety.
But aliens are much more likely than a Santa Clause-like creator in the sky.
If you think about the profound bigness of space, it's mathematically impossible that our young species is the only intelligent life in the universe (or multiverse). It's not only crazy to not believe in extraterrestrial life, it's also rather arrogant.
We are tucked away in the corner of one tiny galaxy among at least 100 billion galaxies. 100 billion! I mean, I rest my case.
"To declare that Earth must be the only planet in the universe with life would be inexcusably big-headed of us,” says famous astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson in his book Death By Black Hole.
When your tooth hurts, you go to a dentist; likewise, when you want to know about space, you ask a physicist or an astronomer.
Famous theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking says that in a universe with 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars – some potentially habitable – it is unlikely that Earth is the only planet where life has evolved.
What's 100 billion x 500 million? A number so big the human mind can't even begin to grasp it. And that massive number represents all the potential for intelligent life out there.
And I'm not talking about microbes. I'm talking about little guys flying ships the size of cities at incomprehensible speeds.
"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Hawking told The Sunday Times in 2010.
The problem is that ordinary people construct their realities about the physical world based on what they see around them every day. Alien life is like a rare geological event; if most people don't experience it, they don't believe it.
Just because Chicago isn't known for its earthquakes doesn't mean they can't happen there.
The New Madrid fault is a major seismic zone located on the border region of Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee, just below southern Illinois. Most Americans have never even heard of it, let alone know that it has potential to produce destructive earthquakes in the future.
Likewise, in 2011 a magnitude 5.8 quake struck in Mineral, Virg., and shook D.C. hard enough to crack the Washington Monument and cause $20 million in damage. It was bizarre but only because of how we think about these things and what we think we know. Out of sight, out of mind.
In the early 1800's, the New Madrid fault produced four of the largest North American earthquakes in recorded history, with magnitudes estimated at seven or higher.
For a little context, the major Loma Prieta quake that collapsed highway bridges and interrupted Game Three of the 1989 World Series at Candlestick Park was a 6.9.
So a 7.0 in the southern Midwest is unheard of even though it has happened and will happen again. Yet go try to find someone in Arkansas who's aware of the fault beneath their feet.
Likewise, most people outside of Japan and Hawaii had no idea what a tsunami was before the devastating Indian Ocean earthquake-tsunami of 2004 that killed roughly 250,000 people in 14 countries.
All sorts of seemingly crazy things are possible, but since most of us never experience them ourselves firsthand, we jump to the conclusion that they are impossible.
We are used to earthquakes in California because they are more frequent there, but when the big one hits coastal Washington state – and it will – people will be just as shocked as if the mothership has landed.
Since many seismic zones are inactive for so long, we assume they are closed for business. But we have absolutely no concept of time.
The Earth is 5.5 billion years old and the universe is estimated to be almost 14 billion years old. That is a lot of time, especially considering the human memory lasts only about a few generations – less than 100 years.
For example, there are probably great stories from my ancestors from hundreds of years ago but I've never heard them. Time goes on and people re-learn the lessons of the past.
Also, the variety of life on Earth should amaze and inspire us to realize that any life form is possible in other worlds.
Look at a giraffe! Look at all the crazy, alien-like insects we take for granted! Animals with environment-matching camouflage! Behold the wonderful sea creatures, some highly-social, that inhabit 71 percent of our planet – some at depths so dark they have bio-luminescent "lights."
If that doesn't open your mind to the possibilities, I don't know what will. Do they need to play jazz at the Cantina for us to see how unique they all are?
Literally anything is possible in the space that surrounds our little planet, yet all of the religious explanations for the origin of life – with the exception of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction cult of Scientology – are totally Earth-centric.
They put our world at the center of everything when, in reality, we are just a tiny blip on an outrageously large and ever-expanding radar. A little, tiny dot.
Consider that the nearest major galaxy to ours is the Andromeda galaxy, a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth. 2.5 million light years. And that's close.
Remember, one light-year is how far an object travels while moving at the speed of light – 671 million miles an hour – nonstop, for 365 days. About six trillion miles.
So travelling 671 million miles an hour, nonstop, for two and a half years you reach our neighbor Andromeda. Imagine sitting on an airplane that's shooting through the sky at 671 million fucking miles an hour! For two and a half years! To get to your neighbor's house! The farthest known galaxy is 13.26 billion light years away from us. 13.26 billion. Light years.
There's a thing called the mediocrity principle and it basically states that we are nothing special. Earth does not occupy a unique position in the universe.
And that should be exciting but we have no imagination because we're not raised to be aware of the star children that we are.
There is nothing more awe-inspiring than the stars in our dark skies, yet we pollute the children with Bible stories and blindfold them to the fact that they are just one of many space species.
We force-feed their malleable minds stories of doom, gloom and eternal punishment instead of limitless possibility, optimisim, and wonder.
Imagine how children would respond if we taught them that Star Wars is not fiction, after all. They might grow up to be the next Stephen Hawking.
"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet," Hawking has speculated about intelligent extraterrestrial life. "Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."
Just like humans did. Build ships and set sail for new lands to conquer. It's totally natural, but not necessarily non-violent. Look how European settlers treated the natives when they discovered new worlds.
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," Hawking has warned.
Despite the dangers, we've been reaching out to aliens the way Chris Hansen solicits child sex predators online – cast a wide net and be ready to accept all takers.
In 1974 astronomers sent the "Arecibo message," a radio transmission blasted toward a distant star cluster from Puerto Rico's Arecibo radio telescope.
Think of the message as a time capsule; it contained information about the planets in our solar system, a crude cartoon of a human, the structure of our DNA, and other basics about us. Like speed dating in space.
We didn't hear anything back but that doesn't mean nothing heard us.
Nevertheless, we sent a new message last October (2017) from Norway on the anniversary of Arecibo. It was aimed at one of the closest nearby star systems – just 12 light-years away – known to contain a potentially habitable, Earth-like planet.
The message contains rudenmentary information about mathematics, counting, clocks and time-keeping – the sort of stuff an advanced species would no doubt laugh at if laughing is a thing they do.
Regardless of safety, the president of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) thinks it's a super idea.
Douglas Vakoch told New Scientist he thinks getting a response from the red dwarf star would be an "unlikely" but "welcome outcome."
But the general consensus among the scientific community about reaching out to aliens seems to be that it is something we should not be doing.
Hawking and others warn that the possibility of intelligent life outside our planet is so likely, and so likely to be far older and more technologically advanced than us, that blindly broadcasting messages into space is risky behavior.
The folks over at SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) who have been listening for a sign of life and have so far struck out, apparently agree.
“Ninety-eight percent of astronomers and SETI researchers, including myself, think that METI is potentially dangerous, and not a good idea,” Dan Werthimer, a SETI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told New Scientist.
“It’s like shouting in a forest before you know if there are tigers, lions, and bears or other dangerous animals there.”
Indeed. We are like a blind, newborn critter. Each movement and sound we make increases the chances of becoming a target for hungry predators. Every little broadcast has the potential to lead to instant annihilation.
So where is that rare Ilinois earthquake of UFO/ET evidence that we can point to and say "See?"
I return to Travis Walton and his six co-workers in 1975.
Walton eventually reappeared 15 miles from where he was taken; he thought it was the same night as the abduction, but five days had passed. In other words, his trip was not short.
Meanwhile, the entire town including the sheriff assumed Walton's logging crew had murdered him and ditched his body in the mountains where they worked, and where they reported seeing the saucer.
Seven men witnessed the same thing that night, and to this day – more than four decades later – they have all stuck to their original story, despite being stalked by skeptics and offered thousands of dollars to say it was a hoax.
They have been ridiculed and ostracized by family, friends and strangers alike, despite all having long since passed polygraph tests.
"Travis wasn't hiding (during the five days he was missing)," Goulette says plainly. "We didn't make the story up, he didn't make the story up. It was all for real. Terrifying but it was real."
You can't watch them interviewed and not believe them. (And you can watch five of them interviewed in Paranormal Witness: The Abduction [Season 2, ep 9], which, ironically, airs on the SYFY network, and is where I got all these quotes.)
I have seen a lot of World War II documentaries and these men act just like those who have gone through terrible combat together and narrowly survived. They are all shook up to this day.
It's not just what they say, but how they say it. There is fear in their eyes.
"I was like a little kid – afraid of the dark," says Ken Petersen, the straight-laced Mormon guy who, of everyone, seems the most freaked out by the encounter even all these many years later.
"I was afraid to look out the window," Petersen admits, fighting back tears. "For a guy, 25 years old, being afraid you're going to see a spaceship.. (It's) something that I haven't gotten over. I wish I could."
Eventually, Walton recalled waking up in a ship, fending off horrifying creatures that were trying to examine him, encountering an emotionless human-faced "person" who took him off the small saucer and into a huge hangar or mothership where other small craft were docked.
He then remembers being taken into a room and strapped to another exam table by dead-eyed human-looking beings before waking up on the roadside on the outskirts of town.
His last memory is seeing the craft shoot off into the sky.
"I tested Travis in 1993," says polygraph examiner Cy Gilson. "Travis was not lying. It did happen as he said it did. Exactly as he said it did."
"I'm 100 percent sure of what happened to me," Walton says confidently. "All of us experienced a life-changing trauma."
Scientists say there is probably other intelligent life right here in our Milky Way galaxy, not to mention the rest of the universe.
Nathalie Cabrol is head of the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe. In Jim Al-Khalili’s book Aliens, Cabrol says, "The discovery of an abundance of exoplanets (outside our Solar System) has revolutionized our concept of how many habitable worlds could exist in a very small fraction of our galaxy alone."
“Astronomy and astrophysics are also opening wide the potential for habitable worlds in the 100 billion galaxies now estimated in our universe," Cabrol says in the book. "The idea that we could be alone is simply completely at odds with statistics.”
So the smartest people on the planet are confident that there is intelligent life living in space doing lordy knows what.
And if that's true, every science-fiction movie we've enjoyed over the decades – from Star Wars to Alien to E.T. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Avatar – isn't science fiction at all, but rather, non-fiction.
Except cuddly little E.T. is probably coming to examine or vaporize you, not get drunk and hang.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we know as much about space – and therefore, big picture reality – as a guy in ankle-deep water thinking he's an ocean expert.
But why are we so afraid to dive in? It's just sitting there and we don't seem to care. We're all wrapped up in ourselves and our own invented origin stories, which we cling to like a child's security blanket.
"Some people just keep telling themselves such things can't happen," Walton says. "Look at the facts. The facts speak for themselves."
Meanwhile, there are creatures flying around in spaceships and living their lives in other worlds.
How cool and/or scary is that??
