As I
was doing some research the other day, I came across some information from Mark
Shippey (or information attributed to him) about a classified Air Force program
known as Contour. This is how he explained it:
Today I
met an old retired Air Force officer who claims that in the 1960s the Air Force
conducted secret projects concerning possible communications with alien life
forms…
He said
one project was called “Contour”. He said that this project involved
understanding “linguistic fundamentals of communication between different
species”, and that one part of the project focused on understanding how “primates
such as a gorilla might be taught to communicate.”
According
to this retired officer, the Air Force was publically disregarding UFOs,” but
privately was involved in “intense research concerning inter-species
communication.”
He
explained how one fascinating part of the project involved taking a gorilla
that had been raised amongst humans and taught “basic sign language” back into
the field to see how it related to and communicated with wild gorillas and if
the domesticated gorilla could act as a “go-between” to communicate between the
researchers and the wild gorillas.
All of
this was supposed to have happened to, “help us learn fundamentals of language
that could be helpful in communications with alien species.”
I won’t
go into the problems with this scenario as described, from the point that
gorillas aren’t very receptive to new arrivals, to the point that the
domesticated gorilla would not understand the wild gorillas’ communications
having not interacted with them. Sort of like taking a baby of Japanese
heritage raised in Oklahoma, for example, and dropping him or her into Tokyo
and expecting some sort of psychic connection with the Japanese. The Oklahoma
person would have no real connection with the land of his or her heritage and
would be as out of touch with the Japanese as anyone plucked from another
culture would be. The shared heritage might facilitate some interaction, but it
really would have little impact on the meeting.
No,
the problem with this tale, and I’m sure some of you recognize it, is because
it wasn’t an Air Force project, but a plot point in a novel. Here’s what was written
about it in the novel:
Pearl’s
thesis attracted considerable attention, and funding from the U.S. Air Force,
which had supported linguistic research since the 1960s. According to one
story, the Air Force had a secret project called CONTOUR, involving possible
contact with alien life forms. The official military position was that UFOs
were of natural origin – but the military was covering its bets. Should alien
contact occur, linguistic fundamentals were obviously critically important. And
taking primates into the field was seen as an example of contact with “alien
intelligence”; hence the Air Force funding.
Now
before we all take off on tangents to suggest this tale might be true, or have
the elements of truth in it, let me point out the linguistic similarities
between Shippey’s report and the paragraph in the novel. Let me point out that
Shippey’s story surfaced in 1999 and the novel was published in 1980. Let me
further establish that I have been unable to find any other references to
Contour as a real project, even one with a different purpose.
And
yes, I did try to find a Frederick Pearl who matched the description in the
book. Yes, there are a couple of them. One, called Fritz, died in 1970 but was
a gestalt psychologist and the other is an anthropologist, but is too young to
have been writing papers on linguistics in the 1960s. The name seems to be an
invention by the writer to advance the story and refers to neither a real
person nor a real thesis.
At
least this tale has not gotten wide spread circulation inside (or outside) the
UFO community. There is no evidence that such a program ever existed, and for those
who might suggest absence of evidence, well, they are required to produce some
of it.
Oh,
the novel? Congo by Michael Crichton…
