07-30-2025, 11:40 AM
Carl Sagan Believed in UFOs
The depositing of Carl Sagan by fate or happenstance into the climactic last half of the 20[sup]th[/sup] century was a strange and remarkable occurrence. So placed, he lived in two conflicting worlds, the standard world and a hidden world. He could not have escaped the awareness and uncomfortable duality of straddling those worlds. He loved both and resented both. One was his passion for the near-mythical world of alien flying machines in the midst of our daily world, and the other world was ruled by the rigid disciplines of Scientific Methodology, supposedly uncompromising and true in its determinations of nature.
His worlds were both exciting and he was much engaged as a brilliant, and cutting-edge member of the modern scientific world actively exploring new worlds through the generosity-- if not control of government. While trained as a traditional astronomer, Sagan had little use for the mundane job of peering through a telescope. His main interests were in areas of exobiology, a field that fascinated him, the search for signs of other life among the planets and stars. This was his life-long interest. His obsession was gained in reading Edgar Rice Burrows as a young teen and the possibilities of life currently or formerly on Mars.
The other aspect of his life that crossed both worlds was his penchant to be what some have called a social gadfly scientist, a very public spokesman for himself, Science as a whole, NASA’s planetary efforts in particular. Perhaps not coincidentally, if not by design, he also took on the mantel as the frequent, if unofficial, government mouthpiece for denying all aspects of modern UFOs. This track was an obvious contradiction to his life-long passion but one he maintained throughout his career. While such a charade was his personal and professional right, it should not be simply viewed as an objective scientist expressing his views with a strong distain for the unofficial field of UFOs. In fact, it was typical for his field. It may have been his appointed job, certainly one he approached with zeal.
Sagan actually grew up with the UFO saga unfolding before his maturing eyes and mind. The UFO phenomenon burst upon the scene in June of 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, sighted a fleet of fast-moving, strangely-shaped craft weaving around Mount Rainer in Washington state. Then early in July, newspapers and radios rushed to the public with official news releases from the Army Air Corp that it had recovered the remains of a crashed disk near Roswell, New Mexico. Sagan was 12 at the time. Such astounding news would have been a strong jolt to his belief system. The news dovetailed precisely into his interests and goals. An avid science fiction reader, he was an easy, if not already convert.
William Poundstone, Sagan’s official, chosen, biographer, in his book, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, had these words to say about Sagan’s early views on UFOs. “…Sagan sincerely believed in UFOs—not as swamp gas, not as mass hysteria, but as alien spacecraft visiting the Earth.”
On July 19, 1952, UFOs buzzed the White House. Newspapers around the world carried pictures of several mysterious lights moving in restricted airspace over the Capitol area. The objects were picked up on radar at both Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. Hundreds if not thousands of persons, military officers, government employees and elected officials, witnessed the objects. The bizarre event started a fresh wave of sightings and public fervor. However, the resulting official explanation for the Washington objects was that they resulted from a “temperature inversion” of vehicle lights and were not real objects at all.
Poundstone continues: “There was nothing Sagan wanted more than to see a UFO himself. He did not think it wise to leave that to chance. All summer long, (1952) Abrahamson (Sagan’s roommate) would drag himself into the apartment after a long day’s work and Sagan would bug him to go out and look for UFOs. Abrahamson acquiesced once or twice. They saw nothing more than a few shooting stars.
“To Sagan the great mystery was why other people didn’t take flying saucers as seriously as he did. ‘Not a single adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs,’ he later wrote. ‘I couldn’t figure out why not.’”
On August 3, 1952, Sagan took a personal step with getting involved with the UFO phenomenon. While a grad student working in a university lab in Bloomington, Indiana, he started his efforts directly at the top. Poundstone writes: “…Sagan took a sheet of Indiana University stationery and wrote Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He asked what the State Department planned to do ‘if the unidentified aerial objects sobriqueted ‘flying saucers’ were conclusively proved to be extraterrestrial vehicles investigating the progress of the United States and other nations in the fields of astronautics and nuclear physics, in order to prevent our expansion into space at the present time.” He wanted to know whether the United States had plans to communicate with the aliens and/or to pool defenses against ‘the common enemy.’…A State Department underling wrote back tersely, ‘Under the circumstances of a purely hypothetical situation, the Department has no comment to make on the questions you asked.’”
The uninitiated should understand that before and especially after 1952 and for years to follow, various government panels, committees and projects made it obvious that the official policy toward all things deemed UFOs was to be denied at every turn.
The implication of that unstated policy was clear: It was an unhealthy career move to be a scientist or official working for the government or in the educational field and be receptive and outspoken about UFOs. In fact in those days, it was risky enough for a scientist to even talk much about exobiology except in general terms. At that time, we were still very much were an anthropocentric universe. As an ambitious, maturing scientist on the brink of deciding the specific game plan of his future, at some point the young Sagan evidently made a calculated choice. He could chase UFOs wholeheartedly and commit professional suicide as did some scientists that followed their hearts headlong after the phenomena, or he could create a unique option for himself. Somehow, he got the opportunity.
It was with a book by the Soviet maverick astrophysicist I. S. Shklovskii that gave young Sagan the opportunity to burst into the public’s eye. In retrospect, it was a daring if not reckless act for Sagan. The book could have been badly received or at the least could have gone unnoticed among similar works. But it came at an opportune time and was a bestseller. The space race was making people and nations look outward with questions. And always a man with forward thinking, Sagan found himself among the new thinkers about life beyond Earth and he, as Shklovskii, was not afraid to speak out.
Shklovskii’s book was published in the Soviet Union in 1963. Entitled Universe, Life, Mind, it went through several printings. The premise of the book was to give substance and validity for scientific and mathematical views that intelligent life throughout the Universe was a reasonable concept to hold in mind. With a strong, statistically solid case he argued for the inevitability that other life must exist on millions of stars within our own galaxy and many were far older and more technologically advanced with near god-like abilities.
One scientist not put off by Shklovskii’s views of life in the Universe, but who was avidly enthralled by them, was the young Sagan, then about thirty years old. When he got his hands on a translated copy of Shklovskii’s book, having had some prior correspondence with the Russian, Sagan wrote him and suggested that the book be translated into English and that he augment it with more information from Western scientific works. After a long delay an agreement was reached, the outcome was an English language version. Shklovskii was later surprised to discover that he shared joint authorship in the new version with Sagan. The book was basically unchanged from Shklovskii’s original except Sagan had doubled its length with large additions unbeknown to Shklovskii. Yet, Shklovskii was supposedly delighted with the result.
Sagan’s additions were set off by letter-sized triangles at the beginning and end of his words. The book went to press in 1966 with the name changed to Intelligent Life in the Universe. It was an instant success. Sagan had established himself. According to Poundstone’s research for his biography, many acquaintances of Sagan consider it to be Sagan’s best work.
At that time Sagan was teaching at Harvard and was set to become a tenured professor in the astronomy department. But something happened. Sagan got the message that he was not to be granted a full professorship, and he started looking for a position elsewhere. MIT was close and his likely next home, but he was not asked to join them either. He then gravitated to Cornell University. Poundstone wrote that Sagan never discussed his being turned away by Harvard and MIT (nor did Poundstone), but the rejection affected him deeply. The obvious conclusion, of course, is that Sagan’s brash views on exobiology, and possibly his work with Shklovskii, were too brazen for the dogmatic, older professors. Certainly at that time, Sagan learned, perhaps anew, a personal, hard lesson about how to conduct himself in academia. One can imagine that somewhere within that period of his less-than-ideal advancing in his life’s work that he vowed never to positively speak of UFOs again. He would keep strictly to dogmatic science where they were concerned.
.
Somewhere between Sagan’s 1952 letter to the government inquiring about its plans to deal with the UFOs, and his maturing into a savvy scientist in 1966 or so, he changed from a hot-blooded UFO enthusiast to arch critic and continual debunker of the total topic of UFOs. It is important to interject here that there was a super critical change in the reports about the phenomena in the years after 1961 with the newspaper accounts of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case and similar cases that started appearing across the country. It was traumatic enough for the world’s populace to consider the arrival of superior alien beings coming into our atmosphere in unique “flying saucers.” It was quite another to calmly ignore and reject the emerging and far more horrific tales of human abductions and even later the cattle mutilations of the early 1970s. Such travesties far over-shadowed the benign over-flights and even landings of earlier years. The stereotypical ‘little green men” of cartoons were joined by a more sinister version of the large-eyed grays giving gruesome “medical exams” to people lifted up into the ships. If you paid attention, the joke became a horror story.
In 1966, his fate took a slight turn to directly work in the area of UFOs. The air force was receiving a lot of criticism of its Project Blue Book. It was an on-going investigation of UFOs under one name or another since 1948. Prior project names had been Project Grudge and Project Sign. To squelch the criticisms, Dr. Edward Condon of the University of Colorado was tasked to review the air force’s work that was not finding much validity in the phenomena despite the thousands of sighting reports it had received. Condon knew Sagan and of his interests and asked him to join the team of six he assembled to conduct the review. Before long the team produced a short report that did nothing to settle the issue but urged that more of Blue Book’s information be available.
It was a full three years, to March of 1969, before a massive 967-page tome was published under the title of Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. (Sagan is not listed as a contributor in the final work.) The report was widely panned as a “whitewash,” ignoring some of the best cases both leaving some out of the study and including some within it but totally dismissing them with asinine conclusions. A major criticism was that the witnesses were almost universally doubted about observational abilities. At least one book was published by a disgruntled member of the group detailing the preconceived debunking conclusions that the report was mandated to follow.
The mental states of witnesses and abductees became a major part of the interpretation and understanding of cases. Earlier, psychologists generally discussed the impact of UFOs upon cultures and societies. Eventually, this involvement became more focused on individual UFO experiences. Great efforts were made to explain an abduction experience by such things as childhood sexual abuse, implanted memories, and mental disorders. This was a clever move; a psy-ops weapon used against the witness in addition to the outright debunking of the account. Such pre-event personal attacks even if generally applied to witnesses (by the mere mentioning of such words as “hallucinations’), discouraged reporting of the sighting itself and certainly put the witness under suspicion for being someone less than normal. The drumbeat of denial was required to intensify and covert and overt operations were put into action.
Sagan attempted to not quite dismiss the phenomena in a book he edited with Thornton Page in 1972. Entitled UFO’s A Scientific Debate, it was, nonetheless, a continuation of the whitewash using his favorite ploy of conventional rules of Science to dismiss ETs while turning a partially blind eye to the evidence. In the introduction Sagan argues, “… There is insufficient evidence to exclude the possibility that some UFO’s are space vehicles from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations,” but he maintains, “That other speculative hypotheses are equally probably or improbably, and that the insignificance of our civilization and the vast distances between the stars make the extraterrestrial hypothesis unlikely.”
Conversely, about that time he lobbied planners for the up-coming Viking missions to equip the landers with lights. Perhaps there were nocturnal Mars’ creatures that were only active during the cooler periods of night. His request was denied. Perhaps the best under-appreciated action of his career was to suggest to the planners that both of the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, were very untypically peculiar in several ways and the Viking orbiters would be in excellent positions at various times to image them, especially Phobos. Possibly that was a big mistake. The remarkable images of Phobos, from those Viking images alone, show unmistakable evidence that it has been intelligently manipulated. (This matter may be covered in detail here on DenyIgnorance at some point.)
This writer had the opportunity to witness Sagan lecturing in Chicago in 1973. Sagan followed an excellent presentation by Allen J. Hynek detailing his personal investigations of the famous Michigan “swamp gas” case and other credible cases. When Sagan followed, his dogmatic, old-school presentation reminded me of an old story about meteorites. In the 18[sup]th[/sup] century two members of the Yale faculty were sent to trace down the seeming then preposterous myth that stones had been witnessed to fall from the sky. Thomas Jefferson, as enlightened as he supposedly was, had this to say about the men’s investigations and correct conclusions: “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.”
Sagan was never a field UFO investigator, such as Hynek. Like the late Philip J. Klass, however, if he bothered, Sagan could dismiss the best of cases without ever leaving his chair or podium.
At that time Hynek was beginning to suspect after years of study and investigations that UFOs were utilizing a far different escape from physics than we could imagine. He could never explain the workings of that physics which seemed to be outside our realm of physics, but he did point out the discrepancies between actual observations and our laws of physics that were being violated. Sagan rose to the attack to protect the old order. He seized upon that as a weakness of the reality of the phenomena rather than observing that Hynek was making an honest, objective and telling contribution. When something was pertinent to his exobiology, no optimistic parameter was left unexpressed by Sagan. Yet, with UFOs, He was the rigid conservative, ignoring multitudes of UFO data to mouth the standard propaganda to appease the secretkeepers and to reassure the public. In the audience, you could have assumed from Sagan’s attack that Hynek was a fear monger opening the way to pure panic, while young, handsome Sagan was the absolute voice of reason.
It would have been far more characteristic of Sagan’s true nature if he had glanced at some of the best UFO cases demonstrating mass-canceling abilities and concluded that the UFOs obviously possessed that attribute. Canceling mass in some fashion would be an astounding revelation but not necessarily violating the laws of physics as he understood them at all. (It is simply a side-stepping maneuver, a technological technique.) But the problem for Sagan was that it obviously would make his iron-clad science mantra instantly worthless. In addition, if not most importantly, the attribute of a massless craft was one of the biggest military secrets about the UFOs to be contained, and he could only respond to Hynek by denying UFOs as a whole. In essence, Sagan won the debate based on a strict application of scientific dogma, It was a tactical argument devoid of subjective content, without a shred of evidence, but appealing to the grossly ignorant.
A simplistic critique of Sagan’s life could readily surmise that the reality of the UFOs simply stole the early Sagan’s future.. The UFOs gave him the worst world of his worlds. At any moment they were in a chance to short-circuit to the process of actual contact. The reality was that the aliens existed HERE AND NOW, as he made his way through dogmatic astronomy classes, and he desperately wanted them to be yet out there in the distance where he could search for them and be instrumental in finding them and bringing them down to earth. He did do that but probably not in the manner he would have wanted. He learned early in school and his stint with Edward Condon and his initial UFO whitewash project that he had to contain his beliefs and work towards them in indirect ways. His only defense as a scientist was to deny the creatures he sought were already here. Rather than personally embrace UFOs as he learned more about them, he had to turn against them, more than a skeptic, he became, at times, an out-of-touch critic.
His constant mantra he uttered over the decades bears repeating because it needs special attention. It is a clear testimonial to his denial of the issue in the most basic, perfectly scientific sense. He would say (paraphrased) time and time again, “Yes, there is intelligent life out there in the depths of the Universe, the Drake equation tells us that, but they cannot get here. Relativity physics won’t allow it. They live too far away.”
Those words preserved his safe place in conventional science while at the same time gave the false reality that the public needed to hear from a strong, visible member of the establishment. In the area of his work and goals, he and NASA found that they worked fabulously together as a team effort. No one seemed concerned about how he could use the science of mathematical probabilities to predict and expect that other life existed out there for untold ages in great numbers in our galaxy and in the next breath to deny the most explicit evidence of a local UFO report. Few scientists work to destroy their own pet theories, and for Sagan, that strict scientifically based spiel was his cornerstone of defense that he would revert to time and time again in the face of actual local events that indicated otherwise. It was faulty logic applied to a local situation but nobody seemed to mind or call him on the discrepancy.
But a question arises: Did he simply assume that position and followed it entirely by his own efforts, or was he enabled and groomed in various ways to rise to the prominence he eventually obtained because it was the in-between scenario the authorities desired and he was without a doubt the excellent candidate to fulfill that roll?
The reason for such a conclusion is simple. First, there has always been a conspiracy against the UFO. As a grad student he was aware enough to write the letter cited. Any honest person remotely connected to the field knows that truth. It is a given. Denial is the name of the game fostered by authorities from the first days of the “flying saucers.”
Not unsurprisingly, such efforts conform to the first law of political science. It is an automatic reaction in the natural order of the way Science and governments operate and protect themselves. After Mariner 9 and especially the Viking missions, there are many reasons to suspect that much of the data we acquired about Mars has been kept from the public because it was indicative of intelligence having been in action there. That, of course, enables a likely reality of UFOs seen here. That placed revealing Mars’ data and activities into a top secret compartment which is still well maintained.
Sagan was so involved in the instrumentation side of NASA and JPL that he was in the inner circles dealing with the data as it actually came down. Does that make him a bad guy? No. Not at all. How many other leaders, politicians, officials, UFO abductees, and even UFO investigators have been caught in the same web of forced deceit? From an outside perspective, it can be said that Sagan and the others were victims of the times, pushed into playing along with the false narrative, the consensus reality, that most of our systems and officials demand to ensure continuity.
Sagan’s part in those events as a naysayer should not mark the man.
In light of that understanding, Sagan was and must remain a true world-class hero in both the best and worst of his worlds.
END
The depositing of Carl Sagan by fate or happenstance into the climactic last half of the 20[sup]th[/sup] century was a strange and remarkable occurrence. So placed, he lived in two conflicting worlds, the standard world and a hidden world. He could not have escaped the awareness and uncomfortable duality of straddling those worlds. He loved both and resented both. One was his passion for the near-mythical world of alien flying machines in the midst of our daily world, and the other world was ruled by the rigid disciplines of Scientific Methodology, supposedly uncompromising and true in its determinations of nature.
His worlds were both exciting and he was much engaged as a brilliant, and cutting-edge member of the modern scientific world actively exploring new worlds through the generosity-- if not control of government. While trained as a traditional astronomer, Sagan had little use for the mundane job of peering through a telescope. His main interests were in areas of exobiology, a field that fascinated him, the search for signs of other life among the planets and stars. This was his life-long interest. His obsession was gained in reading Edgar Rice Burrows as a young teen and the possibilities of life currently or formerly on Mars.
The other aspect of his life that crossed both worlds was his penchant to be what some have called a social gadfly scientist, a very public spokesman for himself, Science as a whole, NASA’s planetary efforts in particular. Perhaps not coincidentally, if not by design, he also took on the mantel as the frequent, if unofficial, government mouthpiece for denying all aspects of modern UFOs. This track was an obvious contradiction to his life-long passion but one he maintained throughout his career. While such a charade was his personal and professional right, it should not be simply viewed as an objective scientist expressing his views with a strong distain for the unofficial field of UFOs. In fact, it was typical for his field. It may have been his appointed job, certainly one he approached with zeal.
Sagan actually grew up with the UFO saga unfolding before his maturing eyes and mind. The UFO phenomenon burst upon the scene in June of 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, sighted a fleet of fast-moving, strangely-shaped craft weaving around Mount Rainer in Washington state. Then early in July, newspapers and radios rushed to the public with official news releases from the Army Air Corp that it had recovered the remains of a crashed disk near Roswell, New Mexico. Sagan was 12 at the time. Such astounding news would have been a strong jolt to his belief system. The news dovetailed precisely into his interests and goals. An avid science fiction reader, he was an easy, if not already convert.
William Poundstone, Sagan’s official, chosen, biographer, in his book, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, had these words to say about Sagan’s early views on UFOs. “…Sagan sincerely believed in UFOs—not as swamp gas, not as mass hysteria, but as alien spacecraft visiting the Earth.”
On July 19, 1952, UFOs buzzed the White House. Newspapers around the world carried pictures of several mysterious lights moving in restricted airspace over the Capitol area. The objects were picked up on radar at both Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. Hundreds if not thousands of persons, military officers, government employees and elected officials, witnessed the objects. The bizarre event started a fresh wave of sightings and public fervor. However, the resulting official explanation for the Washington objects was that they resulted from a “temperature inversion” of vehicle lights and were not real objects at all.
Poundstone continues: “There was nothing Sagan wanted more than to see a UFO himself. He did not think it wise to leave that to chance. All summer long, (1952) Abrahamson (Sagan’s roommate) would drag himself into the apartment after a long day’s work and Sagan would bug him to go out and look for UFOs. Abrahamson acquiesced once or twice. They saw nothing more than a few shooting stars.
“To Sagan the great mystery was why other people didn’t take flying saucers as seriously as he did. ‘Not a single adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs,’ he later wrote. ‘I couldn’t figure out why not.’”
On August 3, 1952, Sagan took a personal step with getting involved with the UFO phenomenon. While a grad student working in a university lab in Bloomington, Indiana, he started his efforts directly at the top. Poundstone writes: “…Sagan took a sheet of Indiana University stationery and wrote Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He asked what the State Department planned to do ‘if the unidentified aerial objects sobriqueted ‘flying saucers’ were conclusively proved to be extraterrestrial vehicles investigating the progress of the United States and other nations in the fields of astronautics and nuclear physics, in order to prevent our expansion into space at the present time.” He wanted to know whether the United States had plans to communicate with the aliens and/or to pool defenses against ‘the common enemy.’…A State Department underling wrote back tersely, ‘Under the circumstances of a purely hypothetical situation, the Department has no comment to make on the questions you asked.’”
The uninitiated should understand that before and especially after 1952 and for years to follow, various government panels, committees and projects made it obvious that the official policy toward all things deemed UFOs was to be denied at every turn.
The implication of that unstated policy was clear: It was an unhealthy career move to be a scientist or official working for the government or in the educational field and be receptive and outspoken about UFOs. In fact in those days, it was risky enough for a scientist to even talk much about exobiology except in general terms. At that time, we were still very much were an anthropocentric universe. As an ambitious, maturing scientist on the brink of deciding the specific game plan of his future, at some point the young Sagan evidently made a calculated choice. He could chase UFOs wholeheartedly and commit professional suicide as did some scientists that followed their hearts headlong after the phenomena, or he could create a unique option for himself. Somehow, he got the opportunity.
It was with a book by the Soviet maverick astrophysicist I. S. Shklovskii that gave young Sagan the opportunity to burst into the public’s eye. In retrospect, it was a daring if not reckless act for Sagan. The book could have been badly received or at the least could have gone unnoticed among similar works. But it came at an opportune time and was a bestseller. The space race was making people and nations look outward with questions. And always a man with forward thinking, Sagan found himself among the new thinkers about life beyond Earth and he, as Shklovskii, was not afraid to speak out.
Shklovskii’s book was published in the Soviet Union in 1963. Entitled Universe, Life, Mind, it went through several printings. The premise of the book was to give substance and validity for scientific and mathematical views that intelligent life throughout the Universe was a reasonable concept to hold in mind. With a strong, statistically solid case he argued for the inevitability that other life must exist on millions of stars within our own galaxy and many were far older and more technologically advanced with near god-like abilities.
One scientist not put off by Shklovskii’s views of life in the Universe, but who was avidly enthralled by them, was the young Sagan, then about thirty years old. When he got his hands on a translated copy of Shklovskii’s book, having had some prior correspondence with the Russian, Sagan wrote him and suggested that the book be translated into English and that he augment it with more information from Western scientific works. After a long delay an agreement was reached, the outcome was an English language version. Shklovskii was later surprised to discover that he shared joint authorship in the new version with Sagan. The book was basically unchanged from Shklovskii’s original except Sagan had doubled its length with large additions unbeknown to Shklovskii. Yet, Shklovskii was supposedly delighted with the result.
Sagan’s additions were set off by letter-sized triangles at the beginning and end of his words. The book went to press in 1966 with the name changed to Intelligent Life in the Universe. It was an instant success. Sagan had established himself. According to Poundstone’s research for his biography, many acquaintances of Sagan consider it to be Sagan’s best work.
At that time Sagan was teaching at Harvard and was set to become a tenured professor in the astronomy department. But something happened. Sagan got the message that he was not to be granted a full professorship, and he started looking for a position elsewhere. MIT was close and his likely next home, but he was not asked to join them either. He then gravitated to Cornell University. Poundstone wrote that Sagan never discussed his being turned away by Harvard and MIT (nor did Poundstone), but the rejection affected him deeply. The obvious conclusion, of course, is that Sagan’s brash views on exobiology, and possibly his work with Shklovskii, were too brazen for the dogmatic, older professors. Certainly at that time, Sagan learned, perhaps anew, a personal, hard lesson about how to conduct himself in academia. One can imagine that somewhere within that period of his less-than-ideal advancing in his life’s work that he vowed never to positively speak of UFOs again. He would keep strictly to dogmatic science where they were concerned.
.
Somewhere between Sagan’s 1952 letter to the government inquiring about its plans to deal with the UFOs, and his maturing into a savvy scientist in 1966 or so, he changed from a hot-blooded UFO enthusiast to arch critic and continual debunker of the total topic of UFOs. It is important to interject here that there was a super critical change in the reports about the phenomena in the years after 1961 with the newspaper accounts of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case and similar cases that started appearing across the country. It was traumatic enough for the world’s populace to consider the arrival of superior alien beings coming into our atmosphere in unique “flying saucers.” It was quite another to calmly ignore and reject the emerging and far more horrific tales of human abductions and even later the cattle mutilations of the early 1970s. Such travesties far over-shadowed the benign over-flights and even landings of earlier years. The stereotypical ‘little green men” of cartoons were joined by a more sinister version of the large-eyed grays giving gruesome “medical exams” to people lifted up into the ships. If you paid attention, the joke became a horror story.
In 1966, his fate took a slight turn to directly work in the area of UFOs. The air force was receiving a lot of criticism of its Project Blue Book. It was an on-going investigation of UFOs under one name or another since 1948. Prior project names had been Project Grudge and Project Sign. To squelch the criticisms, Dr. Edward Condon of the University of Colorado was tasked to review the air force’s work that was not finding much validity in the phenomena despite the thousands of sighting reports it had received. Condon knew Sagan and of his interests and asked him to join the team of six he assembled to conduct the review. Before long the team produced a short report that did nothing to settle the issue but urged that more of Blue Book’s information be available.
It was a full three years, to March of 1969, before a massive 967-page tome was published under the title of Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. (Sagan is not listed as a contributor in the final work.) The report was widely panned as a “whitewash,” ignoring some of the best cases both leaving some out of the study and including some within it but totally dismissing them with asinine conclusions. A major criticism was that the witnesses were almost universally doubted about observational abilities. At least one book was published by a disgruntled member of the group detailing the preconceived debunking conclusions that the report was mandated to follow.
The mental states of witnesses and abductees became a major part of the interpretation and understanding of cases. Earlier, psychologists generally discussed the impact of UFOs upon cultures and societies. Eventually, this involvement became more focused on individual UFO experiences. Great efforts were made to explain an abduction experience by such things as childhood sexual abuse, implanted memories, and mental disorders. This was a clever move; a psy-ops weapon used against the witness in addition to the outright debunking of the account. Such pre-event personal attacks even if generally applied to witnesses (by the mere mentioning of such words as “hallucinations’), discouraged reporting of the sighting itself and certainly put the witness under suspicion for being someone less than normal. The drumbeat of denial was required to intensify and covert and overt operations were put into action.
Sagan attempted to not quite dismiss the phenomena in a book he edited with Thornton Page in 1972. Entitled UFO’s A Scientific Debate, it was, nonetheless, a continuation of the whitewash using his favorite ploy of conventional rules of Science to dismiss ETs while turning a partially blind eye to the evidence. In the introduction Sagan argues, “… There is insufficient evidence to exclude the possibility that some UFO’s are space vehicles from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations,” but he maintains, “That other speculative hypotheses are equally probably or improbably, and that the insignificance of our civilization and the vast distances between the stars make the extraterrestrial hypothesis unlikely.”
Conversely, about that time he lobbied planners for the up-coming Viking missions to equip the landers with lights. Perhaps there were nocturnal Mars’ creatures that were only active during the cooler periods of night. His request was denied. Perhaps the best under-appreciated action of his career was to suggest to the planners that both of the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, were very untypically peculiar in several ways and the Viking orbiters would be in excellent positions at various times to image them, especially Phobos. Possibly that was a big mistake. The remarkable images of Phobos, from those Viking images alone, show unmistakable evidence that it has been intelligently manipulated. (This matter may be covered in detail here on DenyIgnorance at some point.)
This writer had the opportunity to witness Sagan lecturing in Chicago in 1973. Sagan followed an excellent presentation by Allen J. Hynek detailing his personal investigations of the famous Michigan “swamp gas” case and other credible cases. When Sagan followed, his dogmatic, old-school presentation reminded me of an old story about meteorites. In the 18[sup]th[/sup] century two members of the Yale faculty were sent to trace down the seeming then preposterous myth that stones had been witnessed to fall from the sky. Thomas Jefferson, as enlightened as he supposedly was, had this to say about the men’s investigations and correct conclusions: “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.”
Sagan was never a field UFO investigator, such as Hynek. Like the late Philip J. Klass, however, if he bothered, Sagan could dismiss the best of cases without ever leaving his chair or podium.
At that time Hynek was beginning to suspect after years of study and investigations that UFOs were utilizing a far different escape from physics than we could imagine. He could never explain the workings of that physics which seemed to be outside our realm of physics, but he did point out the discrepancies between actual observations and our laws of physics that were being violated. Sagan rose to the attack to protect the old order. He seized upon that as a weakness of the reality of the phenomena rather than observing that Hynek was making an honest, objective and telling contribution. When something was pertinent to his exobiology, no optimistic parameter was left unexpressed by Sagan. Yet, with UFOs, He was the rigid conservative, ignoring multitudes of UFO data to mouth the standard propaganda to appease the secretkeepers and to reassure the public. In the audience, you could have assumed from Sagan’s attack that Hynek was a fear monger opening the way to pure panic, while young, handsome Sagan was the absolute voice of reason.
It would have been far more characteristic of Sagan’s true nature if he had glanced at some of the best UFO cases demonstrating mass-canceling abilities and concluded that the UFOs obviously possessed that attribute. Canceling mass in some fashion would be an astounding revelation but not necessarily violating the laws of physics as he understood them at all. (It is simply a side-stepping maneuver, a technological technique.) But the problem for Sagan was that it obviously would make his iron-clad science mantra instantly worthless. In addition, if not most importantly, the attribute of a massless craft was one of the biggest military secrets about the UFOs to be contained, and he could only respond to Hynek by denying UFOs as a whole. In essence, Sagan won the debate based on a strict application of scientific dogma, It was a tactical argument devoid of subjective content, without a shred of evidence, but appealing to the grossly ignorant.
A simplistic critique of Sagan’s life could readily surmise that the reality of the UFOs simply stole the early Sagan’s future.. The UFOs gave him the worst world of his worlds. At any moment they were in a chance to short-circuit to the process of actual contact. The reality was that the aliens existed HERE AND NOW, as he made his way through dogmatic astronomy classes, and he desperately wanted them to be yet out there in the distance where he could search for them and be instrumental in finding them and bringing them down to earth. He did do that but probably not in the manner he would have wanted. He learned early in school and his stint with Edward Condon and his initial UFO whitewash project that he had to contain his beliefs and work towards them in indirect ways. His only defense as a scientist was to deny the creatures he sought were already here. Rather than personally embrace UFOs as he learned more about them, he had to turn against them, more than a skeptic, he became, at times, an out-of-touch critic.
His constant mantra he uttered over the decades bears repeating because it needs special attention. It is a clear testimonial to his denial of the issue in the most basic, perfectly scientific sense. He would say (paraphrased) time and time again, “Yes, there is intelligent life out there in the depths of the Universe, the Drake equation tells us that, but they cannot get here. Relativity physics won’t allow it. They live too far away.”
Those words preserved his safe place in conventional science while at the same time gave the false reality that the public needed to hear from a strong, visible member of the establishment. In the area of his work and goals, he and NASA found that they worked fabulously together as a team effort. No one seemed concerned about how he could use the science of mathematical probabilities to predict and expect that other life existed out there for untold ages in great numbers in our galaxy and in the next breath to deny the most explicit evidence of a local UFO report. Few scientists work to destroy their own pet theories, and for Sagan, that strict scientifically based spiel was his cornerstone of defense that he would revert to time and time again in the face of actual local events that indicated otherwise. It was faulty logic applied to a local situation but nobody seemed to mind or call him on the discrepancy.
But a question arises: Did he simply assume that position and followed it entirely by his own efforts, or was he enabled and groomed in various ways to rise to the prominence he eventually obtained because it was the in-between scenario the authorities desired and he was without a doubt the excellent candidate to fulfill that roll?
The reason for such a conclusion is simple. First, there has always been a conspiracy against the UFO. As a grad student he was aware enough to write the letter cited. Any honest person remotely connected to the field knows that truth. It is a given. Denial is the name of the game fostered by authorities from the first days of the “flying saucers.”
Not unsurprisingly, such efforts conform to the first law of political science. It is an automatic reaction in the natural order of the way Science and governments operate and protect themselves. After Mariner 9 and especially the Viking missions, there are many reasons to suspect that much of the data we acquired about Mars has been kept from the public because it was indicative of intelligence having been in action there. That, of course, enables a likely reality of UFOs seen here. That placed revealing Mars’ data and activities into a top secret compartment which is still well maintained.
Sagan was so involved in the instrumentation side of NASA and JPL that he was in the inner circles dealing with the data as it actually came down. Does that make him a bad guy? No. Not at all. How many other leaders, politicians, officials, UFO abductees, and even UFO investigators have been caught in the same web of forced deceit? From an outside perspective, it can be said that Sagan and the others were victims of the times, pushed into playing along with the false narrative, the consensus reality, that most of our systems and officials demand to ensure continuity.
Sagan’s part in those events as a naysayer should not mark the man.
In light of that understanding, Sagan was and must remain a true world-class hero in both the best and worst of his worlds.
END
Intelligence seeks to proliferate itself
not necessarily via its own kind.
not necessarily via its own kind.
