Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

In 1992, NASA began a SETI program, funded for 10 years with a budget of 100 million dollars. The program was conducted with two teams. One team, at the Ames Research Center, conducted a “targeted search” focused on 800 stars within 80 light years of the earth. This search was based on the assumption that it was quite likely that human civilizations like ours had arisen many times in our galaxy. A second team, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, did a wider search called the All Sky Survey. It was based on the assumption that advanced intelligent life forms were not so common and that we should have to search widely for them in the universe. In 1993, the NASA SETI program lost its government funding. The All Sky Survey stopped, but the target search program survived by transforming itself into Project Phoenix, run by the SETI Institute, a nongovernmental organization, which raises private funds (Lamb 1997, p. 224). A recent article in nature (2001, p.

260) reveals that much of the funding for the SETI Institute and other such organizations comes “primarily from wealthy technology pioneers such as William Hewlett, David Packard, Gordon Moore, Paul Allen and Barney Oliver.”

All of these programs assumed the standard materialistic cosmologies of modern science, which involve a universe and life forms composed only of the standard material elements and energies acting according to the known laws of physics. Following these assumptions, scientists calculated in various ways the likelihood of intelligent life forms coming into existence, their likely levels of technological advancement, and the likely times necessary for them to conduct interstellar or intergalactic communication or colonization efforts. Some scientists find a high probability for many extraterrestrial civilizations, some find a low probability that there is even one. I am not going to explore the details of the various calculations different researchers have made, because the fundamental assumptions upon which these calculations are made are flawed. There is more to the universe than ordinary matter and energy (in all their exotic varieties, including dark matter and dark energy). There is more to life than chemicals. And there are more ways to communicate than radio signals.

Alien visitors

A good many SETI researchers assert that as of now we have no evidence whatsoever that extraterrestrial beings have visited the earth or tried to communicate with us. Some take this as evidence no such beings exist. They say that if humanlike civilizations did exist elsewhere in the universe, they would have already explored or colonized every habitable planet in the universe. Other researchers counter that perhaps they are here, or have been here, but we have not noticed them yet. But perhaps some researchers have noticed them. This brings us to the topic of UFOs and alien abductions, as evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences.

Since time immemorial religious traditions, including the JudeoChristian tradition, have reported not only visitations by angels and superhuman beings, coming and going without the use of machines, but also visitations that involve some kind of machines. The Vedic literatures of India are full of descriptions of various kinds of vimanas, or spacecraft, a topic explored in depth by Richard L. Thompson in his book alien identities. Modern UFO reports are therefore not new, but represent a continuing set of observations of extraterrestrial or extradimensional craft.

The modern UFO phenomenon began in 1947 and has continued to the present. The UFO phenomenon has several components. The first is observations of machinelike flying objects that cannot be explained in terms of existing human technologies. The second is humanoid beings associated with such machines. And the third is paranormal phenomena connected with such machines and humanoids and their interactions with humans.

Observations of UFOs have been reported by professional scientists. In a letter to Science, J. Allen Hynek, chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University, said, “some of the very best, most coherent reports have come from scientifically trained people” (Markowitz 1980, p. 255). Hynek served as a scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force on UFOs from 1948 to 1968, and he was later director of the civilian Center for UFO Studies.

In 1952, a survey of 40 professional astronomers revealed that five of these astronomers had seen UFOs. The survey was included in a section of a government-sponsored report on the UFO phenomenon. The author of this section said about the sightings: “Perhaps this is to be expected, since astronomers do, after all, watch the skies.” He further noted that astronomers “will not likely be fooled by balloons, aircraft, and similar objects, as may be the general populace” (Condon 1969, p. 516).

UFO researcher Jacques Vallee was previously employed as a professional astronomer. He recalled: “l became seriously interested in 1961, when I saw French astronomers erase a magnetic tape on which our satellite tracking team had recorded eleven data points on an unknown flying object which was not an airplane, a balloon, or a known orbiting craft.

‘People would laugh at us if we reported this!’ was the answer I was given at the time. Better forget the whole thing. Let’s not bring ridicule to the observatory” (Vallee 1979, p. 7).

In 1967, James McDonald, a physicist and meteorologist at the University of Arizona, stated: “An intensive analysis of hundreds of outstanding UFO reports and personal interviews with dozens of key witnesses in important cases, have led me to the conclusion that the UFO problem is one of exceedingly great scientific importance.” McDonald favored “the hypothesis that the UFOs might be extraterrestrial probes” as being “the least unsatisfactory hypothesis for explaining the now-available UFO evidence” (McDonald 1967, p. 1).

In the 1970s, astrophysicist Peter Sturrock sent a questionnaire on UFOs to 2,611 members of the American Astronomical Association. The results, published in 1977, revealed that 1,300 members replied, and their reports contained 60 UFO sightings (Sturrock 1977). In July 1979, the journal industrial Research/Development polled 1,200 scientists and engineers about UFOs. They were asked, “Do you believe that UFOs exist?” Among these scientists and engineers, 61 percent said yes, they did believe in UFOs. In fact, 8 percent said they had seen UFOs, and an additional 10 percent thought they might have seen them. Fully 40 per cent said they believed UFOs originated in outer space (Fowler 1981, pp.

221–222).

Probably the most famous scientist to comment favorably on the existence of UFOs was psychiatrist Carl Jung, who said: “So far as I know it remains an established fact, supported by numerous observations, that Ufos have not only been seen visually but have also been picked up on the radar screen and have left traces on the photographic plate . . . It boils down to nothing less than this: that either psychic projections throw back a radar echo, or else the appearance of real objects affords an opportunity for mythological projections” (Jung 1959, pp. 146–147).

After initial reports of UFO sightings in 1947, some high officers in the American Air Force became concerned with the phenomenon. Edward Condon said in his official report on the American military’s research on UFOs: “Within the Air Force there were those who emphatically believed that the subject was absurd. . . . Other Air Force officials regarded UFOs with utmost seriousness and believed that it was quite likely that American airspace was being invaded by secret weapons of foreign powers or possibly by visitors from outer space” (Condon 1969, p. 503).