I
am in something of a quandary. For those who had read Reflections of a UFO investigator, you know that I interviewed
Carroll Wayne Watts about his encounters with, shall I say it? Men from Mars.
It was clear that Watts had a limited imagination. He suggested that the space
traveling aliens used paper maps, when an electronic survey would have been
much better… Just look at what we can do with our satellites, spy planes and
aerial photography. His descriptions seemed to be drawn from 1950s science
fiction movies rather than a tour of an advanced, alien spacecraft.
Where
am I going with this?
For
an upcoming interview, I have been reviewing the Hill abduction. As those of
you who follow this blog, you know I’m more than a little skeptical of the Star
Map that Betty Hill drew. There are four different interpretations of it, with
the Fish model suggesting the Zeta Reticuli double star system as the leading
contender. You can read about that elsewhere on this blog.
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| Alien from "Hocus Pocus and Frisby." |
You
might also remember that I have suggested that the illustration of the aliens
that Barney provided is reminiscent of the aliens shown on the Twilight Zone episode, “Hocus Pocus and
Frisby.” Betty had asked Barney at one point if he had been watching the Twilight Zone, though she said that she
had never seen the program herself.
And,
let’s not forget that in The Interrupted
Journey, she described the aliens, saying, “Their chests are larger than
ours; their noses were larger (longer) than average size although I have seen
people with noses like theirs – like Jimmy Durante’s. (page 298 in the hardback
edition).” Her later descriptions are somewhat different.
Just
so that I can again be accused of being an “abduction propagandist,” I noticed
something else in one of the sessions that Betty had with Dr. Benjamin Simon.
She was describing her talk (telepathic communication?) with one of the aliens.
She wanted something for a souvenir, to help validate her
story. He seemed
agreeable and she looked around for something. She said, “…there wasn’t much
around – but on a cabinet there was a book, a fairly big book. So I put my hand
on the book and I said, ‘Could I have this?’ And he told me to look in the book
and I did. It had pages, it had writing, but nothing like I had ever seen
before. It looked almost like a – I don’t know – it wasn’t a dictionary – maybe
a – it had the – the writing didn’t go across, it went up and down (page 172).”
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| Jimmy Durante |
I’m
thinking now, “A book? With pages? A book made of paper and writing that she
would later suggest looked like Japanese.” And while I understand that it
looked Japanese but certainly wasn’t, I’m wondering now why they would have a
book at all. I can’t tell you the last time I actually bought a book that was
printed on paper. I now get them digitally, on my iPad. I have dozens of them
that I can haul around easily and they take up no real space… and that would be
something important on a spacecraft. Saving space and weight. A data retrieval
system that is virtually weightless and doesn’t take up space would be ideal. I
certainly wouldn’t want to carry around any books.
I
have a one terabyte external hard drive. I mention this because, on it, I have
the Project Blue Book files. I have the vast majority of the more than 12,000
cases (though I have found a few minor gaps) and thousands of pages of
administrative files. On that same hard drive, I have most of The A.P.R.O Bulletins, CUFOS IUR, NICAP’s UFO Investigator and the MUFON
Journal beginning with the issues known as SKYLOOK. It also holds several dozen UFO books, including the
manuscript versions of many of my own.
The
point is that the hard drive is only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes
but not as thick. I can slip it into my pocket and carry to conferences, if the
mood moves me. No matter where I am, I have access to a huge amount of data
that not so long ago, would have been difficult to review.
To
make this worse, and as I have said many times, my cell phone is more powerful
than Star Trek’s communicator. I have
access to all of human knowledge through the Internet. True, I have to ask for
the right information, and sometimes there is a fee to access it, but it’s all
there, in my cell phone which is even smaller than that external hard drive that
I just mentioned.
Back
in the 1960s, when Dr. Simon was treating the Hills and John Fuller was writing
his book, no one thought in terms of digitally stored data. Having a book, and
something that might have been a paper star chart (or some other flexible
material that was rolled up) didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Astronauts,
pilots and nearly everyone else thought of data retrieval in terms of something
printed. But today, with my desk covered with electronic devices that give me
access to so much information, I have to wonder why a spacefaring race would
deal with books and paper. When Betty talked about a book in the 1960s, no one
thought about that being unusual. Today, well, you have to wonder.
Is
this a major problem with the Hill abduction? Nah. It’s just something that
struck me as I was reading parts of Fuller’s book. Everything we need is
available digitally with no need for ink and paper. There are schools that no
longer teach cursive because that is now an obsolete form of communication.
And
all that just makes me wonder about that book just laying around on that
cabinet in an alien ship. Wouldn’t everything be available digitally? Wouldn’t
they have advanced beyond pen and paper? Would they be carrying books? Did they
even use it if they are telepathic… but that’s a question for another time.
