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32 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE<br />
line and so many lines per frame, Lunan transferred the various<br />
intervals on a chart as he would have done on a television screen.<br />
He then successfully obtained several different drawings of the<br />
same constellation, with different orientations, but with the same<br />
star always at the center.<br />
As Lunan says in his book Man and the Stars, as an astronomer<br />
it did not take him long to recognize the constellation as<br />
that of Bootes and the star as Epsilon Bootis, which our ancestors<br />
called Izar and which is located at about 103 light-years, or<br />
975 million million km, from the earth.<br />
One of Lunan's important discoveries was that the configuration<br />
of the Bootes constellation shown on his charts was not exactly<br />
the same as that we can see today from the earth, and he<br />
found an explanation. The big star Alpha Bootis, or Arcturus, is<br />
one of the fastest moving stars in our skies. It has an angular motion<br />
of 2.29 seconds of arc per year in a southwest direction, and<br />
its position in the sky moves by an apparent diameter of the<br />
moon in only 800 years.<br />
According to Lunan, Arcturus now appears to us about 7 degrees<br />
apart from where it appears on the chart, which means<br />
that the map could have been established and transmitted 11,000<br />
years ago. However, Arcturus does not move with a constant apparent<br />
velocity, and taking an average of only 2 seconds of arc<br />
per year, we obtain a date of 12,600 years ago which corresponds<br />
to those of the other stars.<br />
As a consequence, assuming there is<br />
an alien spacecraft presently<br />
orbiting the earth, it arrived in its present position about<br />
13,000 years ago, and, after observing the configuration of their<br />
native constellation of Bootes as they saw it from their orbit<br />
around the earth at that time, the astronauts on board have been<br />
continuously transmitting signals since then, waiting for human<br />
astronomers to become intelHgent enough to understand them.<br />
Finally, around 1900, the first radio signals were transmitted<br />
from the earth by Marconi, Testa, and others and the Izarian astronauts<br />
knew they were now in business. They started retransmitting<br />
the earth signals, with various intervals representing a<br />
code, and the code represented a map of the constellation of<br />
Bootes with the star Izar at the center.<br />
For me, however, the most extraordinary and the most contro-
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