Unwelcome Visitors: A Science Fiction Story

It happened with no warning, like a bolt out of the blue. One morning a UFO appeared in the sky over Washington, D.C. It moved to the center of the Ellipse, a huge expanse of grass near the White House. For one day it hovered in the sky at that spot. Then it slowly descended to the ground, and landed in the middle of the Ellipse. At the same time, astronomers noticed that a gigantic spaceship had started to orbit Earth. Pundits speculated that the small UFO had come from the much larger spaceship that orbited the planet.

The US military responded promptly. A ring of awesome firepower assembled around the perimeter of the Ellipse. It included Apache helicopters, M1 Abrams tanks, and companies of infantry armed with laser-guided missiles. The President of the United States walked the short distance from the White House to the Ellipse, to take charge of the situation.

Upon reaching the Ellipse, the President asked a general for a briefing.

“So what are these guys – friends or foes?” asked the President.

“We have no idea,” said General Holsen. “We've received no radio communication whatsoever.”

Finally a lone figure emerged out of the UFO, and stood next to it. It was rather clear that the visitor was expecting someone to walk toward the center of the Ellipse, so that a meeting could take place.

General Holsen suggested that an armed soldier walk up to greet the alien visitor, but the President would have none of it.

“I'm going out there myself,” said the President. “And I'm going alone.” The President knew that if he survived the meeting, he would be hailed for his courage, and it would help him win re-election.

The President walked slowly toward the center of the Ellipse. He saw next to the spaceship a figure about one meter larger than a man. The creature had a brain far larger than a man's. The extraterrestrial had huge blue eyes, a tiny slit for a nose, and a small mouth without lips.

“We come in peace,” said the alien. “We are here to welcome you into the galactic society of civilizations. Do not worry, our society abolished all traces of war 500,000 years ago, so there is no chance that we will harm you.”

“Welcome to our planet,” said the President. “We greet you as equals.”

“You greet us as equals?” said the alien, suppressing a giggle. “No, you've got it all wrong. You see our society is eons older and more advanced than yours. We come here to help you, like a human might help a little puppy lost on the street. And we come here to teach you a few great cosmic truths that your tiny little minds can understand. But almost all of what we have learned is far beyond the grasp of your minimal intelligence.”

“So your race is much smarter than ours?” asked the President.

“Yes, we are to you as you are to the bugs at your feet,” said the alien. “But don't worry, we can still teach you some tiny fraction of the mighty truths we have learned over the eons. But only if you give up all of your preconceptions, and sit down before us like a little child on its first day in kindergarten. If you do that, you can learn from us some of the greatest truths of the ages, secrets of time and space that took us many thousands of years to learn.”

“I understand exactly,” said the President. He walked away from the spaceship, and returned to the perimeter of the Ellipse.

“What happened?” asked General Holsen.

“They're invaders!” screamed the President. “Destroy them!”

The full military power of the mighty ring of weapons was unleashed on the UFO at the center of the Ellipse. All the M1 Abrams tanks fired their uranium-tipped shells All the Apache helicopters launched their Hellfire missiles. The soldiers launched their laser-guided missiles. The UFO was shattered into a thousand smoldering pieces. The damage was so great that biologists who later examined the wreckage were unable to find any trace of biological material that had not been burned to a cinder.

The large spaceship orbiting Earth then departed, never to be seen again.

The President was hailed as a hero, and won re-election in a landslide. The human race stumbled onward in its benighted ignorance. 

When Rhine and Pearce Got “Smoking Gun” Evidence for ESP

In the new book The Improbability Principle, mathematician David J. Hand spends a good deal of time attacking evidence for ESP (extra-sensory perception, commonly known as telepathy). His attack is something of a textbook example of the dubious rhetorical tricks and glaring omissions that a typical skeptic will use in addressing that topic.

In Chapter 2 of the book Hand looks at the research done by Joseph Rhine at Duke University during the 1930's, research which seemed to provide very compelling evidence for ESP. Hand begins by making the totally unconvincing suggestion that there may have been something wrong with dice Rhine used for some of his experiments, that they might not have rolled as randomly as casino dice. If there had been such a problem (such as a dice that preferentially rolled the number 6), it would have been noticed by any competent researcher. Hand then makes the insinuation that Rhine may have erred by searching around for talented subjects, stopping testing with subjects who showed no evidence of ESP. This, Hand insinuates, may have been some “selection effect” which might have skewed Rhine's results.

This criticism is invalid because it would only apply to tests involving a small number of trials, but all of Rhine's more convincing studies involved very large numbers of trials. Imagine I test 20 people for ESP, using only 20 attempts at guessing the symbol on a card that can have 5 possible values. If I throw out the 19 worst performers, and publish only the results of the person who did best, then purely by chance I might get something a little above what we would expect by chance. Purely by random chance, the best performer might guess 10 out of 20 cards correctly. 

  Zener cards used in ESP testing

But imagine if I use a very large number of trials, having each subject try guessing the symbols on 10000 cards. Then, according to a mathematical law very well known to Hand (the law of large numbers), it should make little difference if I select the best of 100 performers (assuming the non-existence of ESP), because all performers should get results close to what one would expect by chance. All of the performers should have close to 2000 correct guesses out of 10000.   

With a little programming, it is possible to simulate these type of trials, using some software code that makes use of a random number generator. I did just that, simulating 500,000 participants who each tried guessing 10,300 cards that can have one of five symbols. The best out of the 500,000 simulated participants scored 2256 successes, which isn't very much better than the expected chance result of 2060 successes.

What about Rhine's research – did he use a small number of trials, which might make Hand's “selection effect” criticism fair? No, he didn't. His most dramatic results involved very large number of trials, showing very dramatic deviations from chance far, far beyond anything that can be accounted for by imagining a selection effect.

Some of Rhine's most dramatic results were produced using Hubert E. Pearce Jr. as a subject. The research is described in detail here. The link mentions 10,030 trials in which Pearce scored 3746 successes (despite an expected chance result of only about 2060 successes). That is a result way, way better than the best result (2256 successes) that was achieved from my 500,000 computer-simulated guessers (each guessing 10,300 times). Such a result is very strong evidence for extra-sensory perception .

Of course, back in the 1930's Rhine was doing his research before the Internet was invented, working with a small staff, so we cannot assume that he tried testing anything like 500,000 people before coming on a result such as Pearce (or even 1 percent of that number). And even if he had, the odds would have been incredibly low that any of them would have scored by chance with a result anywhere near as good as Pearce's result (as my computer simulation indicates).

Hand mentions the case of Pearce, and he tries to leave the impression that Pearce's results were due to trickery.

Hubert Pearce Jr. guessed correctly around 32 percent of the time in hundreds of card-guessing experiments, compared with a chance expectation of 20 percent. Except, that is, when a magician watched him guess the cards, at which point his expectation fell to chance levels.

Clearly Hand wants you to draw the conclusion that Pearce was cheating, but he provides no clue as to how anyone could have cheated in such experiments (which had a protocol described below). In fact, Hand's claim is misleading. The link I just provided gives a table showing Pearce's performance in front of a succession of witnesses. When the magician was present, Pearce scored 92 out of 400 successes, a success rate of 23% that was above the expected chance result of 20 per cent (the results in front of all the other witnesses were much better). The link also reports, “Pearce was somewhat ill with tonsilitis on the day the magician was present,” which can easily explain the dip in his performance while the magician was present.

In the above link we also read these details about this magician witness:

The magician, Mr. Wallace Lee, tried a few series himself with only chance average results. He said frankly that he was convinced. It appeared that he was, at least as far as we all are, "mystified".

The experimental protocol is described below by Rhine, and it is not a protocol in which he can imagine any opportunity for cheating over a long series of trials.

The working conditions were these: observer and subject sat opposite each other at a table, on which lay about a dozen packs of the Zener Cards and a record book. One of the packs would be handed to Pearce and he be allowed to shuffle it. (He felt it gave more real "contact".) Then it was laid down and was cut by the observer. Following this Pearce would, as a rule, pick up the pack, lift off the top card, keeping both the pack and the removed card face down, and, after calling it, he would lay the card on the table, still face down. The observer would record the call. Either after 5 calls or after 25 calls,—and we used both conditions generally about equally—the called cards would be turned over and checked off against the calls recorded in the book. The observer saw each card and checked each one personally though the subject was asked to help in the checking by laying off the cards as checked. There is no legerdemain by which an alert observer can be repeatedly deceived at this.

The table below (from the link here) summarizes the results of Rhine's experiments with Pearce. These are tests in which the expected success rate is 5 out of 25, or 1 in 5. There is no way to work in some hypothesis of cheating with the results reported here. The table shows that Pearce got the same super-dramatic results even in a series of 650 trials when he was looking away from the cards, and also in a series of 300 trials in which there was a screen separating the cards and Pearce.

We can use the very handy binomial probability calculator at this site to calculate the likelihood of these results. The calculator gives a probability of simply 0 when we type in the overall results, so let's use a subset to try to get some non-zero result. Let's use only rows 2 and 6, involving either Pearce looking away from the cards or a screen between Pearce and the cards, either one of which should have ruled out any possibility of cheating. When I type these results in the binomial probability calculator, I get a result with a chance probability of 5 chances in 100 trillion, which we can round to be 1 chance in 10 trillion. This is a result we should never expect to get by pure chance even if we tested with every single person in the human race.

What we have in the case of Pearce and Rhine is a very well-documented case of experimental results far, far in excess of what chance can account for, what is basically “smoking gun” evidence of ESP. Mr. Hand is not at all able to debunk it. There is not the slightest reason for thinking that Pearce had any ability in magic, or that he could have used magic or fraud to achieve his results. Pearce went on to become a minister, and many years later sharply rebuked Martin Gardner when he asked (without any basis) for Pearce to confess to cheating.

What does Hand have to say about ESP experiments after Rhine? He tries to create the misleading impression that more recent experiences have not been as successful, by completely omitting discussion of the dramatic results of the ganzfeld experiments, and referring to, “the comments made by the believers in ESP and parapsychology as successive experiments failed to demonstrate the existence of the phenomena.”

The actual truth is very different. After Rhine's death, experimenters developed a protocol called the ganzfeld protocol, which involved ESP tests while a user had sensory deprivation such as halved ping-pong balls taped over their eyes. As described here, fifty-nine repetitions of such tests by various researchers produced an average successful match rate of about 30%, much higher than the 25% rate expected by chance. Rather than being a rare result that you only got with a few gifted subjects, such a result was repeated over and over again with a wide range of subjects. The odds of such results occurring by pure chance are similar to the odds of the Pearce results occurring by chance -- basically zero. 

What does Page have to say about such experiments, which are the main type of recent ESP experiments? He says nothing. Instead, he wastes time on trying to debunk other ESP experiments no one has heard of. It's the old skeptic's strategy: if you don't have an explanation for some evidence for something you are arguing against, just ignore that evidence, and hope no one notices.

Page does put in a little sales pitch for the multiverse (the idea of a vast collection of universes). A good question for Mr. Page is: why would you have us believe in a multiverse (an infinitely complicated, boundlessly extravagant fantasy for which there is not the slightest bit of evidence), but discourage us from believing in ESP (a nice simple hypothesis for which there is abundant good experimental evidence that you haven't succeeded in debunking)? 

Postscript: The original version of this post didn't even mention two other astounding cases nvolving Pearce. One was the Pearce-Pratt series of tests, conducted by Rhine's assistant J. Gaither Pratt. In this test, Pratt dealt out one card a minute from a shuffled deck. Pearce (located in a building far away) recorded his guesses as to the cards, at the same time. 1850 cards were dealt, and the expected chance success rate was about 370 cards. Instead, Pearce got 558 correct guesses. The chance probability of such a result was less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. In another informal test conducted in front of Rhine,  Pearce correctly guessed 25 cards in a row. The chance of that? One in three hundred quadrillion.

Postscript: See this post for my rebuttal of a skeptic's arguments against this evidence.  See this post for a discussion of an ESP test that got results even better than any test with Pearce  -- a phenomenal 73% accuracy rate on a test involving 1850 cards.

They Seemed to Know of Deaths They Should Not Have Known Of

I always find it interesting to read about or experience a case when a mind seems to have some knowledge or idea that we would not expect it to have. There was such a case the other day in my personal experience. I saw my adult daughter leaving, and I thought to myself, "I'll say to her: see you later, alligator." But then I thought to myself: I don't think a young lady would like being called an alligator. So I simply said, "See you later" in a flat voice. She then immediately replied, "See you later, alligator," an expression I can never recall hearing her use before. Cases such as these may be evidence for human abilities such as ESP, which is also supported by laboratory experiments skeptics are unable to explain away.

A more interesting case of anomalous cognition comes when a person seems to know of someone's death when that person should have had no such knowledge. Bruce Greyson made a study of such cases, which he called "Peak in Darien" experiences. The paper was entitled "Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences." Below is a list of some interesting cases documented in Greyson's paper.

• A woman had a dying vision of four of her brothers, only three of whom were known by her to be dead. The fourth brother was in India, and was thought to be alive. Not long after she died, a letter arrived announcing the death of the fourth brother.
• There were two brothers who died of scarlet fever. The death of the first brother was kept secret from the second brother. Just before the second brother died, he claimed to see a vision of the first brother, calling to him.
• John Alkin Ogle was on his deathbed and saw a vision of his dead brother and a man named George Hanley. Ogle had not yet learned that Hanley had died ten days earlier.
  
• Two schoolmates named Jennie and Edith died from diptheria. The death of Jennie was kept secret from Edith. Just before dying, Edith had a vision of Jennie, saying, “Oh Jennie, I am so glad you are here.”
  
• A woman on her deathbed saw a vision of her deceased father, who was next to her sister Vida. The woman did not know that her sister Vida had died three weeks earlier.
• While dying a woman named Eleanor called out the names of deceased loved ones she could see, and mentioned a cousin named Ruth, asking, “What's she doing here?” Ruth had unexpectedly died a short time earlier, and Eleanor had not been told.
• When Horace Wheatley went into a coma, he had a vision of a local government officer. Unknown to him, the government officer had recently died.
• A man had a near-death vision of two of his brothers, the second of whom had died two days earlier, unknown to the man. Only after his recovery did he learn about the death of the second brother.
• A 93-year-old woman dying of cancer had a vision of her sister calling him to join her. Unknown to the woman, the sister had died of cancer two days earlier.
• Two childhood friends named Ralph and Steve died at about the same time in different places. Just before he died, and just after Steve had died, Ralph had a vision of Steve.
• A dying man told his family that he had a vision of his dead grandmother, his dead mother, and his sister. He had not been told that his sister had recently died.
• A dying English woman reported hearing angelic voices, and then said she could see an old acquaintance of hers named Julia. The next day the newspaper announced Julia's death.
• On her deathbed a Mrs. Hicks had a vision of her son Eddie. Shortly after her death, the family learned that Eddie had died about the same time the mother had the vision.
• A woman had a near-death experience in which she saw a friend named Tom. Shortly thereafter, her husband learned that Tom had died in an auto accident.
• A native American woman was hit by a car. Asked by someone whether there was anything he could do, the dying woman instructed the man to tell her mother that she was “very happy because I am already with my dad.” The man found the woman's mother, who told him that her husband (the father) had died of a heart attack one hour before the auto accident.
• After his mother died in an auto accident, a son dying from the same auto accident told a doctor, “Everything is all right now. Mommy and Peter are already waiting for me.” The son died, and the doctor then learned that his brother Peter had died a few minutes earlier in another location.
• A man having a near-death experience reported that he saw his sister, who told him it was too soon for him to die. Later he told doctors that his sister must be dead. They assured him that she was alive. He told them to check, and they found the sister had indeed died.
• A young dying patient named Peggy saw her aunt, who lived in another state, appear right next to her. It was later found that the aunt had died at the same time.
• Having a feverish close encounter with death, a young boy named Eddie Cuomo reported seeing dead relatives in heaven, and being told by his sister Teresa that he must go back. Very shortly thereafter, his parents checked on the status of Teresa, and found out she had died while attending college.
• A woman had a near-death experience in which she reported seeing a vision of her brother, a brother she had never known of. Her father then confessed that she did have a brother, whose existence she had never learned of.

Some skeptics attempt to explain away near-death experiences through some hypothesis about the mind constructing some vision to match its expectations. Such an explanation does not work for cases such as these, because in each such case we have some unexplained report or vision which proved to be consistent with the unknown death of a person, but which did not match the assumption that we would expect to have been in the mind of the person who made the report.

 "The Final Doorway"

Postscript: Whenever discussing accounts such as these, it is important to track down the original account whenever that is possible. Greyson is not the original source of the account about Eddie and Teresa. The original source is pages 44 to 45 of the 1995 book "Children of the Light: The startling and inspiring truth about children's near-death experiences and how they illumine the beyond" by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger.  Below are those pages:

The source of the account is identified two pages earlier as "Doctor K. M. Dale, who practiced medicine for many years in the Pittsburgh area." The boy is identified as Eddie Cuomo. 

The Prospects of Colonizing the Skies of Venus

Ken Kalfus has written a long post called the The Folly of Mars, trying to throw cold water on the idea of exploring and colonizing Mars. But don't worry, space enthusiasts. Even if there are difficulties in colonizing Mars, there is another local possibility: colonizing Venus.

The idea of colonizing Venus may seem crazy to any person familiar with the basic facts about the planet. The surface of the planet is insanely hot (about 735 degrees Kelvin), so hot that it would quickly kill any human who tried to walk on it, even if he had a very good space suit. But there is another possibility. We could colonize the skies of Venus, by creating floating balloon cities there.

In this paper written by a NASA expert, it is proposed that we could create floating colonies about 50 kilometers above the surface of Venus. At this level the atmospheric pressure and gravity is roughly equal to that of Earth. Temperatures are also between 0 and 50 degrees Centrigrade (between 32 degrees and 122 degrees Fahrenheit), similar to temperatures on Earth.

The floating colonies would not be big balloons themselves, but would be suspended by giant balloons that might have an inner-tube structure, as shown in my visual below:

Floating colonists couldn't actually breathe the atmosphere of Venus, which is mainly carbon dioxide. But it would be easy to get oxygen for breathing, by extracting oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Such an operation could be easily powered by the abundant solar energy available on Venus, where it's easier to get solar energy.

What kind of life would colonists have in such a colony? The heavy winds on Venus would no doubt cause a frequent rocking of the colony. This would be something of a drawback. It might result in sea-sickness even worse than you would experience on a long sea voyage. Perhaps NASA would first need to develop some kind of super-effective sea-sickness tablet. Or perhaps it could create some type of fancy air-jet stabilization technology that would prevent the suspended colony from rocking too much.

I imagine it might be hard to recruit colonists for such a colony. I can only imagine the recruiting posters that NASA might produce:

Someone becoming a colonist would have to resign himself to living forever in some artificial space habitat, without ever again being able to walk on the surface of a planet. But there might be one cool perk for colonists. NASA could develop shuttle vehicles for transporting cargo between the different floating colonies. Imagine the fun of riding around in such a vehicle, shuttling between different floating Venus colonies. This might be the “hook” that could lure in many a potential thrill seeker.