Thousands of UFO hunters converge on Area 51 in US

RACHEL, Nevada: UFO enthusiasts drawn by alien-themed festivities continued to pour into rural Nevada on Friday near the Area 51 US military base, but fears of a mass raid on the remote site or a public safety crisis proved unfounded, with only three people arrested.

An estimated 2,300 out-of-towners ventured on Thursday and Friday to the desert region around Area 51, a secretive US Air Force installation long rumoured to house government secrets about extraterrestrial life and spaceships.

The pilgrimage and two festivals welcoming the visitors were organised after a Facebook user jokingly exhorted readers to “storm” Area 51 on Sept 20 “to see them aliens.” The date chosen for the gathering was never explained.

Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee said the region’s guests were largely well behaved, with just a few exceptions. “I don’t want to jinx myself, but so far it’s gone pretty well,” he said on Friday afternoon.

One person was arrested, and another briefly detained, on suspicion of trespassing onto the grounds of Area 51, while two other people were arrested for indecent exposure and an alcohol-related incident, Lee said.

A steady stream of cars continued rolling into the county, and Lee said he expected the turnout to double or triple as more visitors arrived for the weekend.

The arrests were reported after a group of about 150 UFO fans and curiosity-seekers gathered outside the heavily guarded entrance to Area 51 around 3am on Friday, the date and time set by the social-media invitation that went viral.

One man wore an orange space suit and some sported tin foil hats and alien masks. A sign among the gathering read “Free E.T. from the government.”

“A bunch of random people in weird costumes standing outside of a government base, why would you want to miss that?” said a YouTube personality who goes by the name Atozy. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

One young woman ducked under a protective gate and was momentarily detained by authorities and released. Others stayed outside the perimeter, according to law enforcement officials keeping watch over the crowd.

“They’re just here to see what’s going on,” said Sergeant Orlando Guerra of the Nevada Department of Public Safety Investigation Division. “They’re here to have fun.”

The Air Force had issued a stern warning to the public not to trespass on the installation, which it said is used to test aircraft and train personnel.

Area 51 had long been shrouded in mystery, stoking conspiracy theories that it housed the remnants of a flying saucer and the bodies of its alien crew from a supposed unidentified flying object crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The US government did not confirm the base existed until 2013, when it released CIA archives saying the site was used to test top-secret spy planes.

The documents, however, did not end suspicion about space aliens there.

Area 51 sits about 19 km from the tiny town of Rachel, a community of about 50 year-round residents north of Las Vegas that hosted a music festival to entertain those travelling to the region.

Some residents had urged the public to stay away for fear the town would be overwhelmed with unruly tourists.

As of early Friday, roughly 2,000 people had pitched camp in town, most of them outside the Little A’Le’Inn, an alien-themed motel and restaurant that is Rachel’s only business. Another 250 attended a separate event 40 miles away in Hiko that featured musicians and ufologists.

Ed Callahan, 49, who drove from Victorville, California, to Rachel, described the atmosphere as “just chill.”

“It’s not this big, wild thing,” said Callahan, who sported a cowboy hat covered in tin foil and silver tentacles. “When they said 40,000 people, I didn’t want it to be that. If a few more people show up, it’d be alright.”

Connie West, the Little A’Le’Inn co-owner who scrambled over three months to mobilize for an influx of alien fans, said she was gratified that chaos failed to ensue.

In the early years of astrobiology and SETI, the two groups worked more side by side than they later would. After all, they just existed at different locations on a spectrum: Maybe microbes arose on a far-off planet, and maybe those microbes evolved and built radio transmitters. Astrobiology technically just means the study of life in the universe. But that encompasses a lot: Astrobiologists look into questions like how life started, how it evolved, and what environments can support it. To study these questions, scientists can gather data on this planet, drilling into frozen lakes, doing lab experiments involving the chemistry of early Earth, studying geological evolution on Mars, or gaining a better understanding of genetics to get a better sense of what alternatives might exist to our own DNA. They also investigate what life might look like on another world, whether it has existed on other solar-system planets, and how to pick out a habitable or perhaps inhabited exoplanet from astronomical data.

Those queries often come down to biochemistry and the search for particular combinations of elements and compounds—picked up by a rover on Mars or by a future telescope peering into an exoplanet’s atmosphere—that indicates a lurking living being.

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, falls logically within the scope of astrobiology. But this search, usually for electromagnetic transmissions, is more speculative, since it deals less explicitly with the kinds of chemistry, geology, physics, and biology we can observe in the solar system—and so perhaps beyond—and instead seeks signatures of technology whose nature we don’t yet, and may never, know.

Still, NASA initially supported both sorts of searches (although it called astrobiology “exobiology”). The venerable National Academy of Sciences, in its 1972 recommendations for the search for life beyond the solar system, listed SETI as an important component of exobiology, stating that “SETI investigations are among the most far-reaching efforts underway in exobiology today.” Trouble bubbled up between the groups, though, after SETI became the object of political ire. The search for smart aliens had already proven to be a favorite football for politicians, a frequent contender for cancelation—because of the low probability of success, the speculation required, and the money that they said could be better spent on Earth. For instance, in 1978, Senator Richard Proxmire awarded the nascent project his infamous Golden Fleece Award, for wasting government funds on what he considered a useless, futile endeavor. In the early 1990s, NASA finally began its first SETI observations, part of the project that had been on the drawing board when Proxmire mocked it: then called the High-Resolution Microwave Survey. But the year after the survey began, in 1993, Congress shut down the program.

After the survey’s cancelation, “SETI became a 4-letter S-word at NASA Headquarters,” notes a recent paper by prominent alien-hunting researchers. The National Science Foundation then banned SETI projects from its funding portfolio. Astrobiologists, wary of being put in the same doomed basket as SETI, sometimes inched themselves away, emphasizing the differences between their work and SETI: Little green men were silly. “Biosignatures,” chemical evidence of microbes, were serious. Looking for habitable planets was just what you’d do with a normal telescope. Studying how life arose on Earth has direct relevance to Earth!

The funding ban remained in place into the 2000s, and NASA did not oversee any more big SETI initiatives, putting SETI at the mercy of private investors like Paul Allen and Yuri Milner. And even after that, NASA denied the field some of its most important grant opportunities. “SETI, at least by that name, has always been a political lightning rod,” write the authors.

Part of the feds’ problem with SETI is its “giggle factor.” This, according to a NASA history paper, “wrongly associated it with searches for ‘little green men’ and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” Putting SETI on par with that laughable pseudo-research set it outside the bounds of proper science. And astrobiology wanted to stay firmly inside the acceptable lines, so its practitioners tended to keep their distance from their former allies. You can still see attitudes like this today, such as when famed exoplanet scientist Sara Seager said to Congress, in 2013, “[Astrobiology is] a legitimate science now. We’re not looking for aliens or searching for UFOs. We’re using standard astronomy.”

In their recent paper, the SETI scientists present a case for closing the gap between their work and that of people like Seager, putting SETI back on the astrobiology continuum. And that’s looking pretty possible: The House Appropriations Bill that Congress passed in April 2018 directed NASA to start including searches for “technosignatures” in its broader search for life beyond Earth. In September of that year, interested parties gathered to discuss what that would look like. Information from the SETI luminaries’ paper, arguing that their search belongs back within the sanctioned fold, will soon be considered by a committee that determines astronomy’s priorities for the coming decade. If things go well, “little green men” will be a warm joke, not a harsh slur, in the 2020s.

SETI v. Ufology

Ufologists, though, might argue that they, too, deserve to become legitimized. And that SETI scientists—as well as scientists more broadly—have kept distance from their work, called it silly so they don’t get contaminated by any green-tinged splashback. Why not include them in the continuum? (To be clear, “UFO” simply means an unidentified flying object, not necessarily one that aliens built, and many ufologists don’t take the extraterrestrial connotation for granted, although that connotation is what we’re talking about here.)

Sure, it’s hard to zoom across the vast vacuum of space. Sure, it’s hard to believe that aliens that could zoom that far would care enough about little ol’ Earth to hover over your chatterbox coworker Karen’s house. But is it that much harder than imagining light-years-away microbes growing into sentient beings that broadcast radio waves and beam lasers? Both positions require leaps we can’t yet justify based on the data.

Academic researchers can point to other, very real reasons ufology doesn’t deserve a scientific pedestal: Not much hard UFO data exists. UFOs are by nature ephemeral. What data does exist mostly relies on unreliable personal accounts. There’s no systematic plan of investigation. Ufologists don’t have a theoretical framework for explaining how aliens could build spaceships that come here and behave the way observers claim, or how an alien could survive the trip and the sojourn here. And most UFOs do often turn out to have banal explanations: Venus shifting colors through the thick atmosphere, planes coming your direction head-on, satellite, ball lightning, military projects. Ufology is not science in the way SETI researchers do science.

 

But the two groups haven’t always been so at odds. In the early days, some scientists took an interest in flying saucers (though this was still not the norm). “From the early-1950s through the 1970s, a number of academics took the study of UFOs seriously and regularly engaged with ufologists,” writes Greg Eghigian, a Penn State researcher, in his paper “Making UFOs Make Sense: Ufology, Science, and the History of Their Mutual Mistrust.” Back then the military had official UFO research programs, and so at least implicitly deemed them worthy of study, even though the conclusions the investigators usually came to amounted to “nothing to see here.”

Those programs ended, and the ufology ostracism truly began, soon after the conclusion of Air Force–sponsored study from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 1968. “Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” the final report stated. It wasn’t wrong.

Coupled with other factors, the report helped ensure that UFO research was consigned to the fringes.

Most scientists in most fields laugh at the notion of Karen's hovering UFO. But SETI scientists know better than most the risks of being seen as snicker-worthy. And so some SETI scientists have, in part, replicated their own ouster from astrobiology: If people associate your studies with woo-woo comedy, it’s harder to be taken seriously—by funding agencies, by other scientists, and by the public. Best to back away, fingers held up in an X. And of course it’s not just SETI scientists who X away from UFOs. It’s most scientists in most fields.

The Limits of Science

Researchers enact and enforce social codes, just like the cool kids’ lunch table did, to demonstrate to the wider world who they are, what they stand for, and also who they’re not and what they definitely don’t stand for. Social scientists have studied this phenomenon for decades, since sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn published his 1983 paper “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science.” When researchers do boundary-work, they create and maintain lines around who qualifies as a scientist and who doesn’t, and what is and what is not science. In so doing, they bestow legitimacy onto themselves and deny it to others. But it’s not as straightforward as “Did you follow the scientific method y/n?” As Gieryn noted, “[Science’s] boundaries are drawn and redrawn in flexible, historically changing and sometimes ambiguous ways.” Like anything else, what it means to color within science’s lines is culturally contingent.

It’s reasonable for scientists to draw these lines. After all, part of their job is to uphold rigorous standards, produce work that the public can trust, and help said public understand when an idea—a bad-faith climate claim or a cancer treatment or a jade egg you stick in your vagina—is just bunk. But when someone on high declares what, who, and whose stories count, that can work against scientific authority—by pushing people away from mainstream science, alienating them from experts and fostering conspiracy theories about The Man.

It has happened in UFO World: Left out in the cold, many ufologists have decided that scholars and politicians are “at best, narrow-minded or, at worst, engaged in a deliberate attempt to hide information,” writes Eghigian, who’s working on a book that covers the history of UFO sightings and reports of alien contact. You can hear that same sentiment from antivax activists, GMO no-goers, and people who say climate change has nothing to do with people.

“Natural scientists in particular have been mostly content leaving discussion about the matter to others, marginalizing talk of visitors from other planets as a subject unworthy of serious professional consideration,” writes Eghigian. “This silence and silencing has been dubbed ... a form of ‘social stigmatization’ in the service of scholarly orthodoxy.”

When a topic, like UFOs, is shoved outside polite scientific society, researchers don’t always treat it with as much rigor as they demand of their own work. Ufology “is not simply rejected as a legitimate discipline, it is categorically dismissed,” writes psychologist Stuart Appelle, in a chapter called “Ufology and Academia: The UFO Phenomenon as a Scholarly Discipline,” for a 2000 book published by University of Kansas. “There is a critical difference. Rejection suggests a conclusion based on close examination and careful reflection. Dismissal is an a priori judgment that close examination is not warranted.” Which is not very scientific.

Scientists also exhibit other logical fallacies, when talking about UFOs, that they would deride in others when speaking of traditional disciplines. None other than Stephen Hawking concluded, for instance, that absence of evidence essentially equates with evidence of absence. In this case, if no one has conclusive evidence of actual alien runabouts, they must not have ever visited this planet. The University of Queensland’s Adam Dodd, who teaches media studies and communication, sees their hand-wavy dismissals as “facework”: saving face, keeping up a reputation, by treating a topic scientists have deemed not-science as not-worth-consideration, demonstrating to your peers that you also deem it not-science and are thus a true scientist. Kind of like prophylactically letting everyone at the cool kids’ lunch table know that you also hate *NSYNC, because you know they do and that hating boy bands is cool.

This boundary-work can frustrate those who find themselves outside the fence, their experiences or interests rejected. We all know what happens when someone—your boss, your mom—waves you off, or debunks you in a way you find patronizing: You get mad. You see an Agenda in their actions. You want to prove them wrong. You go start your own table of people who actually do love *NSYNC and are damn proud of it. “Confronted by the apparent furtiveness of officials, the disdain of most physical scientists, and the seemingly skeptical gaze of behavioral researchers,” wrote Eghigian, “witnesses and ufologists were only reinforced in their judgments that their experiences were being disparaged, that there was a concerted effort to exclude them from official forums, and that they needed to place their trust mostly in one another.” Then, when scientists glanced at the UFO table and saw none of their own kind there, they grew even more likely to say, “Cranks!”

A Seat at the Table

That kind of cycle can send those who doubt The Establishment even farther from it, make them even more mistrustful of experts, and lead them to attempt their own analysis even if they don’t have the training. You can see this same swirl at work in climate-change-denial blogs, in the tweets of non-vaccinators, in the tirades of truthers who say “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.”

When talking about ideas outside the mainstream, scientists and outsiders doing their own, often flawed, investigations have an interest in keeping their distance from each other. For scientists, the professional consequences of close contact with out-there ideas is high. Which, in turn, means that orthodox science probably loses out on some new ideas: the edge cases, the kernels of truth in the nut bin.

The media, broadly, and many scientists tend to call those espousing pseudoscience ideas or conspiracy theories “anti-science” or “science deniers.” And that’s kind of true. But it’s also true that their disagreement speaks to what they and scientists have in common: a desire to find out the truth for themselves, and to collect and analyze their own data, rather than simply trusting what they’re told. Those desires don’t play out perfectly, or scientifically, and much of this denialism is dangerous—slowing action on climate change and incubating measles outbreaks. But it wouldn’t hurt to remember that many “deniers” (at least the ones not making money on deceptive schemes) just want to know what’s really real, or believe they have found out already.

For many, that knowledge construction involves information that doesn’t fit neatly in a spreadsheet or a Methods section: cultural knowledge, emotional knowledge, spiritual knowledge, personal knowledge, group affiliation. And “hard science” practitioners aren’t always great at understanding that those sorts of knowledge influence people’s interpretations of the world, often more than a line-of-best-fit plot. And so while ufologists’, antivaxxers’, and conspiracy theorists’ interpretations of that data may be misguided, dismissing their stories and beliefs—immediately handing them information to the contrary, that it was Venus, that the onset of their kid’s autism was a coincidence, that global warming is here but unevenly distributed—means dismissing them.

Perhaps the alien hunters offer a way for scientific insiders and outsiders to get along. Proper science is now more willing to embrace SETI: Astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the search’s pioneers, received radio astronomy’s highest honor—the Janksy Lectureship—in 2014. The chair of the Harvard astronomy department has repeatedly and very publicly suggested that an interstellar object called Oumuamua, cruising through the solar system, could be a visiting spaceship. A scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center recently proposed new SETI strategies—and included a radical idea: Astronomers shouldn’t cover their eyes to UFO reports. “I think the approach the scientific community could take ... is very similar to what SETI has done so far: find the signal in the noise,” he wrote. “In the very large amount of ‘noise’ in UFO reporting there may be ‘signals’ however small, that indicate some phenomena that cannot be explained or denied.”

Don’t just ignore all the outliers as outliers, in other words: Important truth, if not whole truth, can lurk inside of them too. And in many cases, those are someone’s truths. When “official” people listen to them, those formerly beyond the boundary may start to consider expert analysis more—rather than dismissing it as they were dismissed—even when that analysis says the alien mothership was actually just another drone.

They Want to Believe: UFO Hunters Plan Database to Track Sightings

An investigative organization has kick-started the creation of a worldwide UFO database, which will allow people around the globe to report their supposed extraterrestrial encounters.

A new tool from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) promises to help demystify the mystique that rides along with skywatchers' interpretations that extraterrestrial intruders are cruising Earth's airspace. But in today's age of video and cellphone cameras, iPhone apps, Twitter and other techniques, can these tools assist or hinder classifying the "strangeness factor" of UFOs?

Is such a database needed, and who cares? Moreover, what's the current status of UFOs in 2015? [Where to Spot UFOs (Infographic)]

MUFON's plan to plot out a new database is designed to advance the group's investigative and citizen-action sighting efforts.

The organization's mission is the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity, said Jan Harzan, executive director of MUFON, headquartered in Newport Beach, California. In that regard, he said that fulfilling this scientific quest requires the systematic study of the nature and behavior of the physical universe, based on observation, experiment and measurement.

"To do real science, one would need a way to collect and store observations and measurements taken from a given field of study" — in this case, UFOs — and also to retrieve and correlate this data in the form of analysis and possible experiments, Harzan said.

Detailed observations

Back in 2006, MUFON instituted a database system, inputting nearly 70,000 alleged UFO cases that had been submitted by the public and investigated by certified MUFON field investigators.

"Each month, MUFON receives between 500 and 1,000 UFO reports from all over the globe," Harzan said. "These reports come from many credible sources, including airline pilots, military personnel, former intelligence officers, doctors, lawyers, as well as the general public," with many detailed observations also involving photographs and video.

This information is then stored in the MUFON database and made available to the public and used for scientific analysis, Harzan said.

"Meanwhile, with the explosion of cellphones, video cameras, and print and online media reports, both past and present — as well as tens of thousands of paper UFO files collected by MUFON prior to 2006 — the need to be able to have all this data in one place and easily correlated is all the more important," Harzan told Space.com. That's why there's a need for a "new" global UFO database — "one that is easy to access, easy to use and easy to search, so that information can be correlated based on all sorts of parameters," Harzan added.

The goal is to catalog details like size, shape, color, flight characteristics, date and location from a wide variety of UFO reports, including newspaper and magazine article accounts, photographs and video.

Then, researchers can combine all of these characteristics to draw deeper correlations and understandings, which have the potential to lead to breakthroughs.

"Only then will the full picture emerge regarding the size and scope of this phenomenon and how it is affecting us as a civilization," Harzan said. [Read More News About the Search for Life]

Substantive puzzle

Larry Lemke, a retired aerospace engineer and a member of the executive advisory committee of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, is calling for the thoughtful scientific study of the UFO phenomenon. His comments represent only his own opinions, not those of any organization with which he may be affiliated.

"I think UFO reports represent a substantive puzzle that warrants serious scientific attention, without advocating any particular position on what the answer to that puzzle is … whether it is purely psychological, purely physical or some combination of the two," he told Space.com.

"Those of us who are old enough to remember the first half of the 'UFO era' have the definite perception that the public discussion of the topic has devolved," Lemke said. "As a society, we are collectively stupider on this subject than we were a generation ago."

Small signal, large amount of noise

There are many reasons for this "dumbing down," Lemke said, but one of them is the leveling effect of the Internet. For quite some time now, he said, it has become trivially easy for an individual to misidentify a rocket launch or a spacecraft re-entry, or to gin up a Photoshop hoax and blast it around the world as a "UFO sighting."  

"Then, everyone 'researches,' analyzes and comments on it with all the depth of thought that can fit in a 140-character tweet," Lemke said.

Lemke thinks the main challenge of "UFOlogy" has always been to "decipher a small signal amid a large amount of noise."

"What we need to do is, elevate the conversation to the professional research scientist/engineer level," Lemke said. "At the moment, the action on this front appears to be with private groups in France and Chile who have agreed to cooperate in the open investigation of UFOs. I wish them well in the coming years," he said.

Well-known UFO debunker James Oberg said he thinks the mass media's UFO coverage is sinking to "even lower lows of silliness and superficiality," such as the steady stream of "UFOs buzz the International Space Station" fairy tales.

"It gets harder and harder to filter out the truly interesting reports that are lost in the noise and garble," Oberg said, and he has found some such reports.

"They don't have to be alien visitors, and I have seen no convincing evidence for even a single event of this nature," Oberg said. "But they often can be secret military aerospace activity, particularly in Russia and China," and that fully explains U.S. military intelligence agency interest in foreign "UFO reports," he said.

"Any number of human agencies can — and probably has — found it useful to be mistaken by the public for flying-saucer visits, but that usually seems opportunistic rather than deliberate," Oberg added. "These can be governments, corporations, even criminal enterprises. Once in a while, a hoaxer or spoofing club adds more mud to the water."

Cultural 'garble factor'

But sometimes, interesting natural phenomena do get swept into the mix — and, through guilt by association, don't get the scientific attention they deserve, Oberg said. [UFO Quiz:

"So, diligent records-keeping, report writing, witness interviews, as conducted by generations of seriously interested private part-time investigators, can provide information which only years or decades later makes sense. It may not be the explanations most of them were hoping for, but it makes their work honorable and constructive all the same," Oberg said. "Kudos to them — may their tribe increase!"

Taking a long look, Oberg said that there is no denying the prospect that humanity may someday encounter evidence for the activity of genuine extraterrestrial intelligence, somewhere.

"It may be shockingly overt or gently subtle," he said. "The current cultural garble factor of 'UFO reports' probably is a serious hindrance to recognizing the latter kind of detection."

Hacked by Occam's razor

Writer and UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer said that part of the problem with so-called UFOlogy lies in separating science fiction from real science.

"The major fault line in UFOlogy today is the division between what can be called 'new-age' UFOlogy and what its proponents call 'scientific' UFOlogy … but is, in reality, science fiction," Sheaffer said. Both are junk science, he said, and consistently ignore Occam's razor — that is, all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.

"Proponents fail to reconcile whatever hypotheses they invent with the rest of the body of established scientific fact," Sheaffer told Space.com. "While the dividing line between the two groups is not hard and fast — and some UFO claims will contain elements of both — most major UFOlogists and UFO groups will fit clearly into one group or the other."

Sheaffer said that MUFON is not the first attempt to build a major UFO database, but merely the latest. Some have even sought to augment data collection with a "rapid response team" to go out and do real-time, on-site investigations, he said.

"None of these attempts have ever been successful," Sheaffer said.

Tabloid trash

The current trend in UFOlogy seems to be toward "tabloid trash," especially as seen in television shows like "Ancient Aliens," Sheaffer said.

In the reporting and investigation of UFO sightings, MUFON claims it strives to use the scientific method, Sheaffer said. But MUFON's promotion of itself through the tabloid trash cable TV show "Hangar 1" "has caused it to lose whatever claims it once had to scientific respectability." [7 Things Most Likely Mistaken for UFOs]

"'Hangar 1'is supposed to be the place MUFON's supposedly vast collection of UFO data, or UFO stories, is kept," Sheaffer said. "And what, exactly, does MUFON serve up from its precious archives? Some of the most preposterous, unsubstantiated stories in the UFO literature, and some outright fabrications."

In that recently debuted cable TV series, "the scientific method is nowhere to be seen," Sheaffer said.

True benefit

Doubters aside, MUFON's Harzan is resolute in his view that unraveling the UFO saga can have several clear benefits for humanity. For one, deciphering the technology these craft display, he said, would mean far faster terrestrial transportation, not to mention trips off-planet.

"A second major benefit would be breakthroughs in the energy these craft use to power themselves," Harzan said. "From the thousands of observations we have, they are not using propellers, jet engines or rocket motors to propel themselves, nor do they require large fuel tanks."

But Harzan said that the greatest benefit of understanding UFOs — if they are, in fact, advanced otherworldly craft with intelligent beings onboard — "would be the way that we look at ourselves as a human race, and where our place in God's great creation is amongst all the other sentient life he has created in the universe."

Harzan's personal view is that once humanity grasps that we are all part of the same human race, perhaps the need for wars due to our differences will end. "Now that would be a true benefit to everyone on this planet," he concluded.

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin's 2013 book "Mission to Mars – My Vision for Space Exploration," published by National Geographic with a new updated paperback version to be released this May. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.