Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Hallucinations
Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I
never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like
'Should we be good?' I almost always get an answer. Anything
vague, especially involving conventional moral judgements, these
aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything
specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know
anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence.*
Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer
questions.
In the good old days before the alien abduction paradigm,
people taken aboard UFOs were offered, so they reported,
edifying lectures on the dangers of nuclear war. Nowadays, when
such instruction is given, the extraterrestrials seem fixated on
environmental degradation and AIDS. How is it, I ask myself,
that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent
concerns on this planet? Why not an incidental warning about
CFCs and ozone depletion in the 1950s, or about the HIV virus in
the 1970s, when it might really have done some good? Why not
alert us now to some public health or environmental threat we
haven't yet figured out? Can it be that aliens know only as much as
those who report their presence? And if one of the chief purposes
of alien visitations is admonitions about global dangers, why tell it
only to a few people whose accounts are suspect anyway? Why not
take over the television networks for a night, or appear with vivid
cautionary audiovisuals before the United Nations Security Council?
Surely this is not too difficult for those who wing across the
light years.
The earliest commercially successful UFO 'contactee' was George
Adamski. He operated a tiny restaurant at the foot of California's
Mount Palomar, and set up a small telescope out back. At the
summit of the mountain was the largest telescope on Earth, the
* It's a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows
the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as
such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other
than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best
responses in 'Ten Questions to Ask an Alien'.
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