Did an alien vessel pay humans a visit? A Harvard astronomer thinks so geo.tv - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from geo.tv Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Summary
In the introduction of his sixth book,
Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Avi Loeb, chair of the Harvard Department of Astronomy, acknowledges the elephant in the room: In the spirit of transparency, know that some scientists find my hypothesis unfashionable, outside of mainstream science, even dangerously ill conceived. But the most egregious error we can make, I believe, is not to take this possibility seriously enough. The provocative possibility he refers to is that an interstellar object known as Oumuamua (Hawaiian for scout ), which passed through the Solar System in 2017, is an artificial object created by intelligent extraterrestrials.
I dug my slippered heels into our shag carpet and bore deeper into my lime-green vinyl bean bag chair, thoroughly terrified but unable to avert my widened eyes from our console television. The riveting hypnosis scene from the 1975 television movie âThe UFO Incidentâ starring James Earl Jones was imprinting itself permanently into my impressionable eleven-year-old brain.Â
The memory still gives me the willies, 43 years later.
The movie depicted the real-life story of Betty and Barney Hill, an average New Hampshire couple who, while driving home from a holiday in Niagara falls on a dark lonely road, claimed to have been briefly abducted, then medically examined, by aliens. In the hypnosis scene, Barney (played by Jones) cries out as he recalls horrifying details buried by traumatic amnesia.