Interstellar space travel is not possible according to known laws of physics. Matter cannot exceed the speed of light, and it would take light years to get anywhere, right? We’ve all heard this mantra repeated for decades by the mainstream media and academia. Those whose minds are clinging to the comfort of the status quo proclaim that since it is impossible to travel across the universe, then eyewitness sightings of flying saucers must be hallucinations or misidentifications. There is no physical way that a being could launch a rocket capable of crossing the vast oceans of space from a planet in our vicinity and still reach our planet with pilots alive to tell where they came from.

Other scientists wonder at the vastness of the universe and say why would anyone from another galaxy want to visit our little planet? This is a natural question when evolution in a deterministic world and chance explains everything. Who would be interested in us? Dr. Richard Haines calls this a deflated ego hypothesis, a defeatist point of view, we’re not important enough, “really a downer,” he says.

And yet, any serious thinker -- or Star Trek fan for that matter -- could easily come up with several possible ways around these “barriers”. 21st Century Radio focused on these ideas in a two hour special, June 4, 1997 with three eminent contemporary thinkers with physics in their background studies and professions: Stan Friedman, Mark Millis and Dick Haines.

Dr. Haines came up with three possibilities right off the top of his head:
1. A ship visiting Earth could be operated by a race interested in colonization and send out a ship of families to reproduce along the way during journeys of several years.

2. A ship visiting Earth could be operated by a race that has a life span of 500 years or 1,000 years or greater. Or perhaps they have a slower metabolism and their days are much longer than ours and they age at a much slower rate, thereby making longer trips possible.

3. A ship visiting Earth could be operated by a race that is much more scientifically advanced than ours and they have more advanced approaches to physics or science, and they could be using a beam transport or molecular breakdown type of travel, á la Star Trek.

THE UNIVERSE TEEMS WITH LIFE LIKE A PETRI DISH

The probability of contact is high. Stan Friedman, our first guest, says to find extraterrestrial life, we don’t really have to travel that far. “We’re not talking other galaxies, we’re not talking ACROSS our own galaxy, we’re talking about our own local neighborhood, within 54 light years, [there are] a thousand stars, 46 similar to the sun.” Potential for life is “around the corner”, and “our present technology can produce the energy necessary for interstellar travel.”

After all, a trip to one of our closest neighbors, Alpha Centauri, would take five years, traveling at the speed of light. The only thing stopping us from sending a manned mission there is the desire to take such a long trip -- we could do it if we wanted to.

SHOULD WE LOOK AT THE PAST OR THE FUTURE?

Just because we couldn’t do it before, doesn’t mean we will NEVER be able to do it, right? Yet this is the basic bad reasoning and mis-presumption made by those Stan refers to as “ancient academics”. Not that all academics are ancient, he’s quick to point out, “but the ones who take this attitude are. That we couldn’t do it before, and so we can’t do it now. They presume you’re stuck with using whatever technology was being used before... Mainly, that if you want to find out whether something is possible or not, all you need to do is look at sort of a “basic physics”.

THE DETAILS DON’T MATTER

“The details don’t matter, and boy, does that get one into trouble!” continued Stan. “A specific example, I guess, is called for... One of my favorites is Dr. Campbell, a Canadian astronomer,” who in 1941 was sick and tired of the science fiction pulp magazines with stories about going to the moon. “That was utter nonsense” according to Dr. Campbell, says Stan, and he set out to prove it by determining how big the chemical rocket would have to be to get a man to the moon and back. “So he published a paper in a respectable journal, lots of equations, bottom line.... How heavy would it have to be? A million million tons. Now, that’s big, very big... 30 years later, still with a dumb old chemical rocket, we got three men to the moon and back -- initial launch weight... 3,000 tons. He was off by a factor of 300 million because he... didn’t recognize how important individual assumptions were as to how you go about doing this.”

“There’s a long history here of put downs, if you will, by, the ancient academics” Stan says. “How do we determine the future? Do we just extrapolate the past?... The future is not an extrapolation of the past -- technologically speaking.” Just look at the way various inventions have evolved in use as time passes. The inventors of the laser, for example, probably never imagined it would be used as a pointer by lecturers and as a scanner by grocery store check out counters.

JUMPS IN TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES

“Magellan went around the world,” or at least his boat did, pointed out Stan, “he didn’t make it -- in three years. The shuttle is going around in an hour and a half. That’s a big jump in less than 500 years, and a system that’s five billion years old. So, we’ve hardly gotten started.

“...You also have to remember that our solar system is isolated. The next star over is four and a half light years away. There are two stars only 37 light years away that are both like the sun... but they are only three light WEEKS apart. You’d expect since they have a billion year head start on Earth that they would get started traveling to the NEIGHBORS a lot sooner than we would because they can see the planets around the next star... [and] the other star all day long, incidentally. We’re not in that situation, we’re out in the boondocks. So, you go into town a lot more often when you’re close to town, is the point.

BETTER THAN FUSION

“Now, a lot of techniques have been suggested that could do better than fusion if we knew how to do it. You know, we couldn’t build lasers 50 years ago either. For example we go from the big fat atoms down to the small nucleus. We go down in size and up in energy, which sounds crazy, frankly, but isn’t... How to take advantage of this, we don’t know yet. Will we? Sure. No question about it, as far as I’m concerned.”

LOVE THOSE BLACK HOLES

“But you don’t need to put the power plant on the rocket,” continues Stan. “I love the black hole business, except you can’t get too close, because you can get a heck of a gravity assist, if you will. But what really excites me is the work of people like Hal Puthoff and others. Theoretical physics-types who come up with a whole new view with the energy locked in the vacuum of space. That sounds like a contradiction entirely. How can you have something there, if there’s nothing there? But theoretically his papers have been accepted in physics journals. It seems like you might almost have an unlimited source of energy.”

HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

Stan predicts that before the end of the next century, man will be sending rockets to the stars. “Unfortunately neither one of us will be around to see whether I’m right or not,” he says, but after all, “the first Indians to get from the New World back to Spain around Columbus’ time didn’t go in their canoes. They went on Columbus’ sailboat.” So perhaps in the near future we will be sailing to other stars on ships a little bit bigger and faster than our own, too. “Now, maybe we’ll hitchhike [with] some of the aliens that are coming here -- because, as you know, I’m convinced aliens are coming here. Overwhelming evidence our planet has been visited.” The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy may sound funny, he says, but the basic idea is sound.

SHIELDING GRAVITY

Another system Stan is attracted to for potential future propulsion is gravity. “Gravity is a weak force but it’s pervasive,” he says. “In other words, electromagnetic forces are much, much stronger than gravitational, but if you could SHIELD gravity it would take only a little push to move a rocket up, with nothing pulling it down. There’s some exciting work going on in Finland, and down in Huntsville, Alabama where super conducting magnets spinning at high speed SEEM, and I underline that word, to provide shielding against gravity. In other words, the force of gravity is lower above it than it is below it.” Gravity shielding is not understood yet, he continues, but there are analogies to other crazy-sounding predictions that have been confirmed through the years of science.

“If somehow we could figure out a way to make materials diagravitational as opposed to diamagnetic, that means excluding a magnetic field [something] that excluded gravitational fields, boy, you’ve got a real head start on a propulsion system.”

ENERGY FROM THE VACUUM OF SPACE

Dr. Hal Puthoff and others are working with another force that is not easy to explain. “It’s something like the energy of the vacuum,” says Stan. “That sounds far out, but remember, every new thing sounded far out when it was first proposed because nobody spent a lot of money on it. That’s the difference between looking back and looking forward. Don’t compare the most highly developed system of the past with the barely developed ones now. The first airplanes were slower than the fastest trains at the time, but they had greater potential. And incidentally, about airplanes, some of us are old enough to remember when they said the maximum speed for an airplane during World War II would be the speed of sound. And maybe it’s true for propellers, but it sure as heck isn’t true for rockets and jets and things like that. So, I’m excited about the prospects.

“And I should add one other thing. I keep hearing that Einstein says you can’t go faster than the speed of light, so if you want to go 37 light years away to Zeta Reticuli, the fastest you can do it is 37 years, right? Wrong. Because what Einstein also said and it’s been demonstrated -- experimentally, I better add -- that even though it’s crazy, as you get close to the speed of light, TIME SLOWS DOWN, so the thing’s moving that fast. Just to give you one example, at 99.99% of the speed of light, you can go 37 light years in six months pilot-time. That sounds weird. You go out, come back, marry your granddaughter’s best friend, or whatever the case may be. You know, that’s good physics, [but] it may be weird sociology.”

NASA’S BREAKTHROUGH PROPULSION PHYSICS PROGRAM

Hal Puthoff referred us to Mark G. Millis, Aerospace Engineer at NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to speak about the adventurous thinking going on in propulsion physics. Puthoff called Millis one of the young, adventurous explorers at NASA looking into breakthrough propulsion physics trying to make Star Trek science a reality. Millis has been with NASA’s Lewis Research Center since 1982 after earning a degree in physics from Georgia Tech. In addition to his more conventional assignments that have spanned engineering cockpit displays for zero gravity aircraft trajectory, ion thrusters, control and monitoring systems for rockets, cryogenic propellant delivery systems, he has also conducted theoretical and experimental research towards creating propulsion breakthroughs. Millis formed collaborations with other researchers, like Puthoff, across the nation working on similar ambitions. His group of colleagues was recently formalized into the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program and it is being led by Mr. Millis.

HOW TO ADVANCE SPACE PROPULSION

“Dan Goldin, NASA Administrator, asked Marshall Space Flight Center to do a long range space propulsion technology plan,” Mark explained, “how you would advance space propulsion over the years. He asked them to be more visionary than what had been traditionally done.” They contacted Mark knowing about his informal network of collaborators, and suggested a program looking at the breakthroughs in sciences that might be able to get us to the stars. “The kind of things that typically had not been touched yet,” he continued. “And so I got my collaborators together... about how you would actually go about doing real research in this area, and proposed a program.”

LOOKS BEYOND TEXT BOOK SCIENCE

Revolutionizing space transportation to make deep space travel practical and affordable is no simple goal for NASA scientists in the 1990s. They have outlined three goals directed at the three major hurdles they have defined as hindering ideal space flight. Mark explains: “Those three hurdles are mass, speed, and energy. So, the three goals are related... The first one means to discover some way to propel a vehicle where you don’t have to carry all that propellant mass. Number two is speed, finding out how to get through space as fast as absolutely possible, to go faster than light. And the third one is to discover the energy breakthroughs that would be required to power either of those previous ones. The third one is in there because even if you did achieve either of those two breakthroughs you’ll likely need an energy breakthrough, too, to propel them.”

NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR GRAVITY AND INERTIA

Gravity and inertia are being reconsidered in peer-review literature. Perhaps they are electromagnetic side affects of vacuum fluctuations as proposed by Dr. Hal Puthoff in 1989 and Dr. Bernhard Haisch in 1994. “We’re starting out from what is already appearing in the peer review scientific literature,” says Mark. “One phenomenon called vacuum fluctuation energy, or sometimes called zero point energy, is a phenomenon that got our interest. In a nutshell that phenomenon is that if you remove all the energy out of space, take out all the matter, all the heat, all the light, there’s still some energy left. And it turns out, that if you calculate how much energy might be there it’s an enormous mind-boggling amount. I think a cliché has been that there is enough energy in the volume of a coffee cup to boil away all the Earth’s oceans. For awhile that seemed too hard to swallow, if you’ll allow the pun, but there’s physical evidence to show that, indeed, exists. Whether those energy levels are exactly that is debatable, but... from the propulsion point of view, [it’s] like getting to the first goal. If you are looking to propel a spacecraft without having to bring on all the propellant, you need something else to push against. And so if there’s this enormous energy in space, if there was some way to interact with that asymmetrically so it would be stronger on the back and weaker on the front, that might be a way of propelling you along.

“Related to that are other theories... still open for debate. These theories are too new to have either been proven or discounted. But, they do provide other ways of thinking about it. They say that the phenomenon of gravity is nothing other than an electromagnetic side affect of this vacuum energy. And also, inertia itself -- the resistance a body has to being accelerated -- is just a drag interaction with these vacuum fluctuation energies. And that this is totally an electromagnetic effect. And why that seems attractive is that if you’re looking for some means to have a controllable effect it would be nice to be able to flip a switch and [have] everything work reliably. It would be nice to find out how the forces of inertia or gravity are functions of electromagnetics. And why that’s nice is that electromagnetics is a technology we’re pretty proficient at. We can create magnetic fields and electric fields where and when we want them pretty well. Gravity and inertia are phenomenon that we have taken for granted for so many years. So, that’s one avenue.”

SPECIAL RELATIVITY VS. GENERAL RELATIVITY

The easy way to remember the difference between special relativity and general relativity, says Millis, “has to do with SPEED. The light speed issue of how things look funny when you go fast,” says Millis, is special relativity (S for Speed). “General relativity, G for GRAVITY, has to do with how gravity works. As we’ve all been told, special relativity says that nothing made of matter can go faster than the speed of light.”

NO MATTER CAN GO FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Mark refers to some theories in General Relativity, such as the Alcubierre warp driveand worm holes as gaining popularity. Well established physicists are saying the real question is how fast can SPACE-TIME itself move? Rather than trying to move faster than the speed of light within space-time, they are asking, how fast can SPACE-TIME itself move? “That’s kind of the back door in.” Another one is “Can you distort space-time enough to where you can create short cuts -- this is a worm hole -- so that you don’t have to travel all that distance in-between?”

BUT WHAT ABOUT PROPULSION?

“The unfortunate side of all these things I just mentioned,” continued Mark, “getting back to the theories of inertia and gravity and vacuum fluctuation, is those theories -- even if they were correct -- don’t really give a good handle about how you might use it for propulsion. The worm hole and the warp drive theories, as they presently exist, would require enormous and even unattainable energy densities to make them happen.”

STILL TOO NEW

Mark described several other experimental propulsion ideas and added, “Again, these theories are still too new to have been either proven or discounted. The interesting thing that comes to mind is that if you can indeed interact and extract energy in some form from this vacuum fluctuation, does that mean the prospects are there for interacting with it in some unbalanced way, some asymmetric way where you can get forces out of it? These are laboratory scale experiments. These do not require large atom smashers and things like that to do them in expensive long term space experiments or anything like that. So, there’s laboratory scale experimental science that could be done to start exploring some of these issues to find out -- are these theories genuine? And then if they are, can we turn them into some useful technology in the foreseeable future?”

ALCUBIERRE WARP DRIVE

One of the most promising theories is that of Dr. Miguel Alcubierre, which Mark describes as “trying to move within space-time, faster than the speed of light [by collapsing] space-time in front of you. In other words, make it get smaller in front of you and make it get bigger behind you. This kind of has the effect of creating a bubble where... this bubble of space time itself moves. And it’s unknown how fast space time itself might move, or changes of it might move. Right now there is no theory to say it couldn’t move faster than the speed of light so, that’s the idea.” One stumbling block to make this a reality is that is requires something called negative energy densities, which is somewhat similar to negative mass. Some physicists say negative energy densities are impossible, and the enormous quantities seem unattainable. How to turn it on and off is another question.

WHAT IS A WORM HOLE?

Mark explains this difficult concept by comparing the space-time fabric to a sheet of paper. “And you want to get from one corner to the other. You either have to traverse all the distance across the paper [or find] some way of folding the paper over so that the two corners met... You would have a much shorter distance to go.” Imagine using worm holes for space travel by creating a ring or hoop of very dense matter “that would be electrically charged and spinning at high velocity. You would create a gravitational well so deep in there that if you had another one of these rings someplace else they might actually connect and make a short-cut across space. So, if you went through the worm hole, you could get to the other destination faster than if you had gone through normal space. But like all things, there are catches here. Again there is a need for exotic matter, the same way that the warp drive does.” Still open for debate are nasty problems like time travel paradoxes and so on, he adds.

TAKE US TO THE AGE OF STAR TREK

After NASA announced the program with Millis as director, he was deluged with propulsion ideas and approaches, and they had to first figure out where to begin. “Some of the things that grab our attention are those which can be experimentally explored at low cost and those that might have the quickest return on investment in this sort of thing.” The hard part is having to see into the future assessing which theories will become mature and credible.

As reference he likes to remember advice passed on to him by Robert Forward: “Back in the turn of the century there was this weird phenomenon where radium had this excess energy. It wasn’t really believed until in 1911, Madame Curie published her report that said this is radioactive decay and it was a real genuine phenomenon. A little over three decades later we had the first working nuclear reactor. Robert Forward drew the analogy to this vacuum fluctuation phenomenon [which] has finally reached the point where it is credible. Now, I think 30 years to have some useful device to take advantage of it might be a bit quick. I mean, in the past, we had two world wars to accelerate progress, which by no means is my way of advancing technology by any stretch of the imagination... Even if these goals were impossible, I think we stand a lot more to gain from trying to discover them than if we were just to sit back and do nothing.”

HIGH RISK AND VISIONARY

One of the new propulsion program’s biggest challenges is the competition from other programs for funding. “Other projects that are nearer term and definite pay-off, whereas this is a high risk and also visionary.”

THE REVOLUTIONARY DR. HAL PUTHOFF

Dr. Hal Puthoff, the Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, has joined us on previous programs of 21st Century Radio, but for the broadcast date of this particular special, he had a schedule conflict attending the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) Conference. He has published over 30 papers on electron beam devices, lasers, and quantum zero point energy effects, and has patents issued and pending in the laser communications and energy fields. In the field of new propulsion thinking, he is THE man to talk to. He is co-author of a Wiley Publishing textbook, Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics. Puthoff regularly serves various government agencies and the Executive Branch in Congress as consultant on leading edge technologies and future technology trends. He is a member and officer of several professional organizations and is listed in such biographical reference works as American Men and Women of Science, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, and Who’s Who in the World. He was designated a Fetzer Fellow in 1991. In one of his papers Dr. Puthoff tells us Alcubierre showed that without violating the constraint of the local velocity of light that it is possible to achieve motion faster than the speed of light by distorting the local space-time metric in the region of a spaceship in a certain prescribed way. Furthermore, the Alcubierre solution shows that the proper acceleration along the spaceship’s path would be zero and the spaceship would suffer no time delation, features presumably very attractive in interstellar travel.

Therefore, he concludes, with sufficient technological means that appear magic at present, travel at speeds exceeding the conventional velocity of light COULD occur without the violation of fundamental physical laws. Arthur C. Clark says a highly advanced technological civilization would appear magic to less advanced ones. This could be done, in principle, with a concept as extreme as worm hole traversal. Dr. Hal Puthoff says reduced time interstellar travel by us in the future is not fundamentally constrained by physical principles. Nor would the laws of physics as we know them today prohibit advanced extraterrestrial civilizations visiting our planet at present.

Dr. Richard Haines, an aeronautical and astronautical specialist for NASA for over 20 years, presented a supporting viewpoint that further explicates the Alcubierre approach as a special case. Our third guest on 21st Century Radio’s focus on the physics of flying saucers, Dr. Haines calls the Alcubierre approach an over-arching concept of metric engineering that can be stated in an especially compact form fully incorporating general relativistic dynamics.

Richard F. Haines has studied the UFO evidence for almost 30 years and has published numerous books on the subject. His academic background is in experimental psychology/physiology. A Ph.D. from Michigan State University, he is sighted in Who’s Who in America, Janes Who’s Who in Aviation and Aerospace, American Men and Women of Science and others. He is another scientist from NASA who believes that the serious study of anomalous aerial phenomena is important for our nation and teaches valuable lessons.

Dr. Haines points out that many of our naive assumptions about the possibilities of interstellar travel result from our anthropomorphic limitations. “It’s one thing to say we can’t go there,” he says. “It’s quite another to say they can’t come here, assuming THEY exist. And to me this is one of the fundamental biases that we are imposing on creation -- that whatever WE can’t do nobody else can do. It’s like saying we know everything there is to know about science. We know that science is a very young discipline... This anthropomorphic bias, as I call it, puts a filter in front of our eyes and our thinking and it colors the way we conceive of other sentient life forms. Should they exist... they have to have two legs and two arms and two eyes and bilateral symmetry, and an IQ of 100 and so forth. Well, I don’t see anywhere where that has to be valid.”

Dr. Haines laments the fact that of all people, scientists demonstrate the most bias in considering extraterrestrial intelligence. “Let me suggest that the man on the street, most Americans particularly, walk around with a lot of common sense and they do not impose some artificial assumptions, let’s say, on possible life forms, as many of my colleagues do. And if anyone should be creative in how they think about things it should be the scientists. They should feel ultimately free to explore any avenues that they think they need to in order to get to the bottom of the subject they’re studying, you see. For some reason when it comes to extraterrestrial life these biases just come in by the handful.”

WE ARE LIVING IN A FEAR BASED WORLD

“From a psychological point of view, I think it’s largely fear,” that creates these biases. “I think that we are living in a fear based world these days more and more, a sense of powerlessness. We’ve heard that before, of course, on a lot of talk shows and so forth. The modern world is taking our choices away, and I think that’s very unfortunate. This is one of the reasons I enjoy studying UFO phenomena. Because it’s a pioneering... frontier area. It is wide open for creative thought and if it proves to be true it could open up tremendous possibilities in energy management, storage, generation, transmission, all kinds of areas just in the energy area alone. Then you add on communications, sociology, psychology... almost every science discipline. And I have been urging my colleagues to spend some time, at least LOOKING at the evidence, and there’s plenty of that. At least considering it as a possible hobby as I do. I don’t get paid for my work.”

CHALLENGING THE ASSUMPTIONS

“First of all... from the human point of view,” he says regarding long-distance space travel, “...we hear the experts say that we CAN’T do it. I’d like to suggest that we DON’T WANT TO do it... We really don’t want to commit ourselves to a one way journey. Now, why one way? Because the distances are so vast, the energy requirements are so great, and the time available is so short that it’s a one way trip. In fact, to get to Alpha Centauri is almost five light years, that’s a long distance. That’s traveling at the speed of light for five years. And you have to speed up or accelerate to that speed. So, my first point would be that it isn’t that we can’t do it because we could if we wanted to, it’s really that we really don’t want to at this time. It comes back to our anthropomorphic biases again, that fundamentally our egos want to have an astronaut mentality, which means we can go out on a mission and come back and be a hero... This leads me then to the first assumption. What if there are sentient, intelligent beings in outer space who don’t have the same kind of ego structure that we have and, in fact, are on a one way trip in the name of colonization? Of course Star Trek and other science fiction books have this theme woven through them all the time... Who are we to say that other people can’t plan their space travel to other parts of the universe in ways that are different than ours?”

A DAY AND A NIGHT FOR AN ET

“The second point I would want to make,” continued Dr. Haines, “is that just because we need to have eight hours sleep in a 24 hour period, biologically, who is to say that an intelligent species somewhere else has not perfected suspended animation and in fact slowed down metabolism to the point where one day to us is a long, long time to them. Thus they could biologically show up at their destination a long ways away at whatever speed in pretty good biological shape. Third point: who is to say that just because man has an average IQ of 100, biologically speaking, that everybody in the universe has to have an IQ of 100. What happens if some of these “beings”, let’s call them, have an IQ of 200, 300, 500, 1,000? Their technology and use of quote “science” or whatever they would call it, would be vastly different and far advanced of ours. So, they might actually be doing a beam transport or kind of a molecular breakdown, á la Star Trek again. My fourth point is that just because we live three-score and ten years, called a normal life-time, again this is biological thinking, who is to say that there aren’t beings somewhere else that have a life time of 500 years or 1,000 years? ...Relatively speaking, a slow metabolism... from our point of view.” We have no way of predicting what another race of beings is capable of. Other species might use a different spectrum, seeing in X-ray, while humans can see only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. “You take these kind of assumptions that have been thrown at us for about two generations now and you mix them together and you do come up with a prejudice. And it’s a very dangerous prejudice which says all of these lights in the sky and these disks that people are photographing and the phenomenon that are leaving marks in the soil -- and I could go on and on with the evidence -- there’s a lot of it, radar, visual, motion pictures, satellite imagery -- who is to say that those are [all] natural phenomenon? Not me, certainly.”

ADVANCES IN SUSPENDED ANIMATION

Suspended animation is already a fact on Earth, at least in its infancy. Dr. Haines says there are commercial firms in America that will cryo-freeze you with the hope that medicine will progress, “and that 100 years from now or sometime, you will be taken out of the freezer and you will come back to life, and your cancer can be cured. That is one attempt -- there are many attempts to avoid death, of course, that our culture seems to be playing with. But I believe, personally, that death is inevitable. I don’t believe there’s any way around it. Now we’re almost on the border of religion, of course, which is perfectly fine with me. The matter of taking risks and faith go hand in hand, and I think that the space-faring nations of the world -- of the universe -- are going to be those with the greatest FAITH, not only in themselves but in their assumptions, and also the ability to take risks.”

TRAVEL BEYOND THE SPEED OF LIGHT--IS IT POSSIBLE?

Judging all the possible exotic avenues and the difficulties that might arise from the various methods to travel beyond the speed of light, electromagnetic side affects of vacuum fluctuations, gravity altering affect from spinning superconductors, worm holes, warp drives, vacuum fluctuation energy, etc., which has the best chance of succeeding? Dr. Haines did not consider himself qualified to answer this question because he has not systematically studied everything, but “I would put my money on Hal Puthoff’s work, on zero point energy. One of the reasons being, that if it’s true, then it exists everywhere and it’s just a matter of being in a place and knowing how to extract it. Now, that is ultimately elegant. That is simple.... I think that his work is seminal.”

WHY ARE WE SO AFRAID?

“That’s the $64,000 question. And I certainly could be wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that. But I see in many of my colleagues... that ultimately they do not want to deal with UFO phenomenon out of fear of what they might find. And some people have said well, it’s because they’re afraid of funding losses, that they’ll get cut off from their money supply or whatever, if it’s like government sponsorship of some sort. I don’t think so. That might be a small proportion but I think it’s much more fundamental and buried in the psyche than that. I knew Immanuel Velikovsky personally and in fact we had him here to speak at the Ames Research Center. I invited him to come and speak to the staff. They had a large turn out, and he shared something very interesting with me, personally, which has shown up in some of his books, by the way. He said that as a psychiatrist it was one of his beliefs that mankind carried around with him at the racial consciousness level a fear of annihilation that was borne from hundreds and thousands of centuries before when a cataclysm occurred on this planet. Now, whether or not that’s correct, that’s not my issue, but I was so struck with the reasoning that he had, that made some sense.... Maybe there’s a parallel here in the subject of UFOs. What if our planet has been visited for a long time? What if those encounter experiences have been so amazing, traumatic, frightening, scary, awesome, whatever words you like, that they were essentially buried in the racial consciousness of mankind and by leaving them there they pop out at kind of unexpected times perhaps, but they provide a stimulus for fear, you see. And fear is a very normal healthy response. It’s to protect us under some circumstances. So, what if mankind is basically afraid of the unknown because he’s afraid that he might encounter something that he has encountered before?”

YOU’VE GOT TO ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE

“Going back to the skepticism and pessimism of science, I would much rather be told by all these authorities that it’s POSSIBLE to go into outer space, you know, to travel the universe, and to be challenged to go find out how to do it, rather than to be told, no it’s not possible because of this reason and that reason. So, I would encourage the “science leaders” of our country and the world to take a positive attitude here, a positive approach and to challenge and encourage us, be told that it’s POSSIBLE.... It’s just a matter of the assumptions that you make and your attitude.

Dr. Haines is working on a new book about Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind -- human initiated contact. “I’m quite excited about it,” he says. “The book contains over 225 cases world-wide where people have deliberately and overtly signaled to a UFO in some way and gotten a response back. Now, many of these cases are multiple witnesses. Some are documented on video camera. Some of them are extremely provocative from the hypothesis that we’re dealing with an intelligence behind the UFO.... If the UFO phenomenon is natural then I would not expect it to behave in any systematic or regular way when one shoots a gun at it, for instance -- which happens a lot, by the way -- or when somebody shines a bright spotlight at them at night, or whatever. On the other hand if there’s an intelligence behind the phenomenon then I would expect to have at least some modicum of regularity or consistency shown by the response of the phenomenon.” He expects the book to be published in the near future by LDA Press.

Titles by Dr. Richard Haines include Advanced Aerial Devices Reported During the Korean War, LDA Press, 1990; The Melbourne Episode: A Case Study of a Missing Pilot (a very interesting book!), LDA Press, 1987; and Project Delta: A Study of Multiple UFOs, LDA Press, 1994. For ordering information on these books send an SASE to: LDA Press, P.O. Box 880, Los Altos, CA 94023-0880.

For more information on Marc Millis’s NASA Program on Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, visit “Warp Drive, When?” at http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp. Please note that due to the large amount of correspondence received, not all Emails can be answered.

For a list of papers written by Stanton Friedman, and a free copy of “Cosmic Watergate” send an SASE to Stanton Friedman, P.O. Box 958, Holton, ME 04730-0958. To order his books, videos (“UFOs The Real Story” is excellent), or CD Rom, call 1-800-704-3777. s