Alien Encounters

If any people are more gullible about Unidentified Flying Objects than Americans, it’s the Russians. And if any group of professionals is more gullible than Russians about UFOs, it’s the journalists. This truism was confirmed again this month when, around the world, wire services and other press outlets straight-facedly reported a new claim that a UFO had been involved in the great Tunguska catastrophe. Tunguska? That’s the then-uninhabited region in Siberia where in 1908 a mammoth explosion leveled and charred trees and killed wildlife over an area of 800 square miles. That night in northern Europe and western Russia, the skies glowed with an eerie light andin London, for example, it was light enough outside to read a newspaper.

The lone human being in the area, a trapper living near the periphery of the blast, was blown off the porch of his shack, but survived. Had the explosion occurred over London, say, or New York, the casualties would have been counted in the hundreds of thousands. Most scientists today believe that the Tunguska event was caused by an asteroid or a comet that heated so rapidly upon plunging into the atmosphere that it blew up some five miles above the surface with an explosive force of 10 to 15 megatons. But that conclusion is far too rational for Russians like scientist Yuri Lavbin, who heads the Tunguska Space Phenomenon public state fund. It was Lavbin who in July announced thathe would lead an expedition to Siberia and stated, “We intend to find proof that not a meteorite but an extraterrestrial spaceship crashed with the Earth.” Some might suggest that Lavbin was predisposed to making a remarkable discovery. And that is precisely what happened. A Russian scientific team headed by Lavbin scoured the Tunguska site early in August and breathlessly announced that it had found the remnants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, in the form of a large metallic block. After sending a 50 kilogram chunk of the block to a laboratory for testing, Lavbin chose not to await the results. “I can make an official announcement that we were saved by some forces of a superior civilization,” he proclaimed. “They exploded this enormous meteorite. ...

Virtually all SETI experiments probe the skies looking for broadcasts from afar: radio or light signals that would tell us that someone as sharp-witted as ourselves is out there. But could it be that while we use binoculars to scan the cosmic sea, bottled messages have washed up unnoticed at our feet? As Robert Roy Britt reports elsewhere, the Aug. 25 cover story in the journal Nature suggests that the most efficient method of sending messages between the stars is not to broadcast them, but to use snail mail. Rutgers University researchers Christopher Rose and Gregory Wright reckon that clever aliens aren’t going to prattle into a microphone.Instead, they’ll inscribe their messages onto some hunk of matter (film, floppy disks, and flash cards are simple examples of information-bearing media from our own technology), pack it all into an interstellar rocket, and launch it towards their extraterrestrial pen-pals.

The two computer scientists claim that, compared to broadcasting radio to someone else’s solar system, going postal could be enormously cheaper, requiring only a trillionth as much energy (or thereabouts) for the same message.Does this mean that SETI experiments are misguided? Should we be using rakes instead of telescopes to search for messages from other worlds? Is it possible that an advanced civilization has littered solar systems like ours with packaged dispatcheswe have yet to find?Answering these questions requires considering a few realistic scenarios for interstellar communication. First off, there’s the indisputable fact that physically transporting information can be quite efficient. Imagine packing a tanker ship with DVDs, and sailing it to Australia. You could jam approximately 10 billion disks into the tanker, which might take a week to cross the Pacific. That’s an average ‘data rate’ of 600 trillion bits per second, and a cost per bit of roughly 0.02 trillionths of a cent! Those are impressive numbers that not only blow away your internet dial-up, they clobber broadcasting, too: sending the same amount of information with a TV transmitter would take two million years.OK, bussing thebits. ...

A Russian scientist has reopened the controversy over a gigantic explosion in 1908 in Siberia with a claim that he has found debris from an extraterrestrial space vehicle, or UFO, which collided with a comet. On June 30, 1908 a colossal flash lit up the sky over Siberia, followed by an explosion with the power of a thousand atom bombs. It obliterated the taiga (forest) for hundreds of square kilometres (miles) in the basin of the river Podkamennaya Tunguska in the Krasnoyarsk region. People living in the villages of Siberia thought there had been an earthquake. Humans and animals were thrown to the ground by the shockwave, windows wereblown in.

No meteorite debris was found and scientists conclude that the core of a comet or an asteroid had exploded. Researcher Yuri Lavbin has spent 12 years researching the mystery of the "Tunguska meteorite" and believes he has found the key to one of the great scientific enigmas of the last century, though many scientists remain sceptical. He is president of the "Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon" Foundation in Krasnoyarsk, made up of some 15 enthusiasts, among them geologists, chemists, physicists and mineralogists, who have been organising regular expeditions to the area since 1994. Lavbin's theory is that a comet and a mysterious flying machine collided 10 kilometres (six miles) above the earth'ssurface causing the explosion. He and his team say that on an expedition to the Podkamannaya Tunguska river in July they found, between two villages, two strange black stones in the form of regular cubes with their sides measuring a metre and half (five feet). These stones "are manifestly not of natural origin," Lavbin says. They appear to have been fired and "their material recalls an alloy used to make space rockets, while at the beginning of the 20th century only planes made of plywood existed." He claims that the cubes are the remains of a flying machine, perhaps an extraterrestrial spaceship, while admitting that an analysis of the stones has yet to be undertaken. He found something else: a huge white stone"the. ...

Russian researcher into the paranormal has reopened the controversy over a gigantic explosion almost 100 years ago in Siberia with a claim that he has found debris from a UFO that collided with a comet. But the scientific establishment remains unconvinced. On June 30, 1908, a colossal flash lit up the sky over Siberia, followed by an explosion with the power of a thousand atom bombs. The explosion obliterated the taiga, or forest, for hundreds of square kilometres in the basin of the river Podkamennaya Tunguska in the Krasnoyarsk region. People living in the villages of Siberia thought there had been an earthquake. Humans andanimals were thrown to the ground by the shockwave and windows were blown in.

No meteorite debris was found and scientists concluded that the core of a comet or an asteroid had exploded. Researcher Yuri Lavbin has spent 12 years researching the mystery of the "Tunguska meteorite" and believes he has found the key to one of the great scientific enigmas of the last century, though many scientists remain sceptical. He is president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation in Krasnoyarsk, made up of some 15 enthusiasts, among them geologists, chemists, physicists and mineralogists, who have been organising regular expeditions to the area since 1994. Lavbin's theory is that a comet and a mysterious flyingmachine collided 10 kilometres above the Earth's surface causing the explosion. He and his team say that on an expedition to the Podkamannaya Tunguska river in July they found two strange black stones between two villages. The stones were regular cubes with their sides measuring a metre and a half. These stones "are manifestly not of natural origin," Lavbin said. They appear to have been fired and "their material recalls an alloy used to make space rockets, while at the beginning of the 20th century only planes made of plywood existed." He claimed that the cubes were the remains of a flying machine, perhaps an extraterrestrial spaceship, while admitting that an analysis of the stones had yet to beundertaken. ...