And he REALLY hated star maps...
Many of you know the Marjorie Fish story, so I'll just give you the basics to recap (or you can go to page 213 in your heavily dog-eared copy of my J. Allen Hynek biography The Close Encounters Man and read about it there):
When Betty Hill and her husband Barney were allegedly abducted by aliens and taken aboard a UFO in 1961, Betty asked one of her alien captors from where he and his crew had come. The alien "Leader" showed Betty a star map of his race's trading and exploration routes (a map that the podcasters on Oh No Ross and Carrie hilariously think looks suspiciously like a sex organ), but the alien did not point out to Betty which was his home star.
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Sorry, Ross & Carrie (and Sigmund), sometimes a star map is just a star map. |
But here, I am free to tell the whole story, and to use as many words as I damn well please with which to tell it:
Oscar-winning actress
Geena Davis; best-selling author Jean Auel; international concert pianist
Patricia Jennings; former Playboy “Playmate” Dr. Julie Peterson; what do they
all have in common? All four belong to Mensa, the international society whose
only entrance requirement is that members possess an IQ in the top two percent
of the population.
Add to this exclusive group of geniuses Marjorie Fish,
the Ohio schoolteacher who had become so fascinated by the star map dawn from
memory under hypnotic suggestion by UFO abductee Betty Hill. Since she had
first seen the map in John Fuller’s account of the Hill abduction, “The Interrupted Journey,” Fish had
wondered whether the stars on the map might be plotted and identified. It
seemed possible, if one assumed that our sun was one of the stars depicted on
the map, and if one could pinpoint the exact point in space from which the
stars on the map aligned in just the way Betty Hill remembered them. It seemed
possible, but perhaps only to a Mensa member.
Imagine
taking on such a project without an observatory, without a computer, equipped
with little more than marbles, beads, string, glue, tape, a catalog of stars,
the generous advice of some friendly local astronomers, a genius IQ and a
boundless sense of determination. By any objective measurement, it was a
ponderous, tedious, mind-boggling task. Fish would be working with scant,
possibly unreliable information, remembered under hypnosis by Betty Hill years
after she claimed to have seen the map. In addition to the essential assumption
that one of the stars on the alien’s map was actually our own sun, she would be
making endless assumptions about the likelihood of whether any neighboring
stars had planets, whether those planets could support life, whether traversing
interstellar space was even remotely possible, whether the stars were even in
the Milky Way galaxy. Nearly everything was stacked up against her. She should
have failed.
In
August of 1969, Fish visited Betty Hill in New Hampshire to better understand
the conditions under which Betty saw the map, and those under which she
recalled and drew the map. Among other things, Fish learned that Betty’s
drawing was made under exceedingly strict post-hypnotic guidelines administered
by Dr. Simon: she could only draw the map once she fully remembered it, and she
could not pay attention to what she was drawing. Betty told Fish that when she
was able to draw the map, she broke the post-hypnotic directive twice, consciously
erasing and correcting errors.
Fish
returned home and she went to work.
“Marjorie
Fish constructed several three-dimensional models of the solar neighborhood in
hopes of detecting the patterns in the Hill map,” wrote the editor of ASTRONOMY magazine. “Between Aug. 1968
and Feb. 1973, she strung beads, checked data, searched and checked again. A
suspicious alignment, detected in late 1968, turned out to be almost a perfect
match.”
But,
there was a twist: it was only recognized as a match once information from a
1969 stellar catalog became available, at which time several unknown stars
drawn in by Betty Hill in 1964 were finally identified. It seemed that either
Betty Hill was a time traveler, or she was privy to information in 1964 that no
astronomer on earth knew.
Carl
Sagan was fond of dismissing the UFO phenomenon with the saying, “extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence,” and here was something rather
extraordinary. Fish identified the vantage point of the map as being 55 light
years away from our solar system. She identified the main, foreground stars on
the map as Zeta Reticuli One and Two; one of them would, presumably, be the
home of the Hills’ aliens. She identified our sun as one of the stars on what
the alien Leader had identified as an “exploration” route, as opposed to a
trade route. She identified 16 stars from the aliens’ map whose arrangement
from her chosen point of view lined up very closely with Betty’s stars. And two
of the stars Betty Hill had placed on the map, and for which Fish was able to
account weren’t even listed on official star catalogs, and wouldn’t be for
another year. It was an extraordinary display of speculative spatial reasoning
on Fish’s part, and a plausible verification of Betty Hill’s map.
“Since
we did not have the data to make such a map in 1961 when Betty saw it, or in
1964 when she drew it, it could not be a hoax,” Fish said in an address to a
1974 UFO Symposium. “Since the stars with lines to them are such a select
group, it is almost impossible that the resemblance between Betty’s map and
reality could be coincidental. Betty’s map could only have been drawn after
contact with extraterrestrials.”
This, of course, assumes that Fish’s star identifications were correct, which Fish and several brave scientists believed. Dr. David Saunders, late of the Condon Committee, said, “I can find no major point of quibble with Marjorie Fish’s interpretation of the Betty Hill map,” while Walter Mitchell, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, said, “The more I examine it, the more I am impressed by the astronomy involved in Marjorie Fish’s work.”
This, of course, assumes that Fish’s star identifications were correct, which Fish and several brave scientists believed. Dr. David Saunders, late of the Condon Committee, said, “I can find no major point of quibble with Marjorie Fish’s interpretation of the Betty Hill map,” while Walter Mitchell, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, said, “The more I examine it, the more I am impressed by the astronomy involved in Marjorie Fish’s work.”
When
ASTRONOMY Magazine editor Terence
Dickinson penned a fair-minded article expressing genuine curiosity about
Fish’s findings, quoting Saunders, Mitchell, and many more supporters of Fish’s
detective work, he sparked a full year of ferocious debate in his magazine. “The Zeta Reticuli Incident,” Dickinson’s
article, “sparked more interest among our readers than any other single article
in ASTRONOMY,” wrote Jeffrey L.
Kretsch in a follow-up piece.
“The
pattern discovered by Marjorie Fish has an uncanny resemblance to the map drawn
by Betty Hill,” wrote Dickinson. “(T)he stars are mostly the ones that we would
visit if we were exploring from Zeta Reticuli, and the travel patterns
generally make sense.”
“In
general, the entire sequence of events just does not smell of falsification,”
Dickinson wrote. “Coincidence, possibly; hoax, improbable.” And, while Dickinson felt that
the evidence did not support any firm conclusions, he felt that the only
response to Fish’s findings was to “continue the search.”
In
his article, “The Age of Nearby Stars,”
Kretsch, a graduate student of Hynek’s, wrote that “In her analysis, Ms. Fish
linked all 16 prominent stars in the original map... to 15 real stars in the
southern sky. The congruence was remarkable.”
“(W)e
are confronted with evidence which seems to raise as many questions as it
answers,” Kretsch concluded. “But the search for answers to such questions
certainly can only advance knowledge of our cosmic environment.”
This
did not sit well with Carl Sagan, who, with graduate assistant Steven Soter,
wrote a rebuttal to ASTRONOMY. Sagan
and Soter felt that Marjorie Fish and the editors of ASTRONOMY had used shoddy research methods and had “contrived a
resemblance” between two “nearly random data sets.” In other words, Fish had
fooled herself, seeing a resemblance that was purely coincidental, and ASTRONOMY had in turn been bamboozled by
her mistake.
Sagan
and Soter made no secret of their disdain for the Betty and Barney Hill
abduction story in general and found it “riddled with internal and external
contradictions.”
For Sagan, this was crucial. If he were to allow any possibility that Marjorie
Fish’s conclusion had even the slightest validity, then he would also have no
choice but to allow that the Hill’s story of alien abduction had some validity
as well. Ergo, Sagan could never, under any circumstances, bestow any validity
to Fish’s findings. He simply had to find a way to condemn Fish’s work that
would stick; the trouble was, one can’t blithely accuse a Mensa member of being
deluded, or of hallucinating.
ASTRONOMY
editor Dickinson defended his article, stating that Sagan and Soter were wrong
to reduce the problem to simple “pattern resemblance.” He insisted that his
examination of the case had indeed been rigorous, and reminded his readers that
Marjorie Fish had considered, then rejected, many possible patterns before
finding her possible match. “The fact that she came up with a pattern that fits
as well as it does is a tribute to her perseverance and the accuracy of the
models,” Dickinson wrote.
Replies
in the next issue from Dr. David Saunders and Northwestern graduate student
Michael Peck countered Sagan’s and Soter’s assertions with a barrage of dense
mathematical and statistical calculations that led Saunders to conclude that “I
continue to find the star map results exceedingly interesting,” and Peck to claim “We can
conclude... that the degree of resemblance between the two maps is fairly
high.”
By
the time Sagan and Soter responded to Dickinson, Saunders and Peck, the
argument had reached epic proportions. Had they simply ignored Dickinson’s
original article, the matter would likely have been all but forgotten in a
matter of weeks, but Sagan and Soter seemed determined to keep the issue alive.
In their latest tome, the two accused Saunders and Peck of falling victim to
statistical fallacies—knowing full well that Saunders taught statistical
analysis at the University of Chicago—and concluded emphatically that, “(T)he
Zeta Reticuli argument and the entire Hill story do not survive critical
scrutiny.”
Next
up in ASTRONOMY, NASA computer expert
Robert Scheaffer
argued, quite oddly, that because the Hill map could be said to resemble three
different local star patterns—and that more were likely to be discovered in the
future—Fish was mistaken in claiming that it resembled any one particular
pattern.
The
editorial battle reached its zenith with a strenuous response by Marjorie Fish
herself. Fish, who now worked as a research assistant at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee, argued that Scheaffer had, like Sagan and Soter before
him, ignored the fact that her stars had not been randomly selected. She had,
in fact, considered only stars that fit very specific characteristics, such as
their probability of having planets. “My final interpretation of the map was
the only one I could find where all the restrictions outlined above were met.”
It’s
impossible to know whether any inquiring minds were changed, one way or
another, by the long-playing war of words in ASTRONOMY, but the episode certainly illustrates the lengths to
which scientists will go to defend their own particular interpretations of
difficult data.
###
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The truth is in here... |
Oh, one more thing: I contacted the one of the current editors of ASTRONOMY Magazine for her take on this controversy, and here's her reply:
That's a damn shame, because I would love to know what Mr. Dickinson thinks about "The Zeta Reticuli Incident" now...Unfortunately, there is no staff members [sic] around from that period of time. As for Terence Dickinson, I don't have any contact information for him.
14 comments:
Have you read "Goodbye Zeta Reticuli" by Brett Holman, published in the November 2008 Fortean Times? It applies recent star position data to the Fish interpretation and finds the true position of the Zeta (et al) stars no longer bears any resemblance to the pattern in Betty's drawing.
Sagan himself was "riddled with internal and external contradictions."
How many are aware that while he was at Stanford Univ. he produced a research paper which posited "there is the statistical likelihood that Earth was visited by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization at least once during historical times."?
The project was allegedly funded by a NASA research grant.
Needless to say...it was buried.
That "lost" paper is the subject of a fairly new book: "The Sagan Conspiracy"
https://www.newpagebooks.com/?section=home&product_id=619
Since Fish's map was made based on on a memory retrieved under hypnosis, it's suspect in that respect. Much recent psych research has demonstrated that hypnosis is actually pretty lousy for recovering memories, even when it's performed by a trained professional. Subjects are likely to construct false memories during sessions. Fish meant well and Hill believed what she told Fish was true, so no attempt to mislead was intended. But Betty's memory about the alien star map is highly questionable since it was recovered through hypnosis.
> Needless to say...it was buried. That "lost" paper is the subject of a fairly new book: "The Sagan Conspiracy"
That allegation is wholly without merit. See here:
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-the-sagan-conspiracy-by-donald-l-zygutis-part-1
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-the-sagan-conspiracy-by-donald-l-zygutis-part-2
@Terry,
You point us to a professional skepti-bunker to buttress your denunciation.
That guy cannot deny that the paper was written. All he can do (according to HIS perspective) is deconstruct Sagan's thinking vs. Zygutis's interpretations.
It boils down to one person's "framing" vs. another's.
"Merit" can be as much subjective as objective.
@Bill
> You point us to a professional skepti-bunker to buttress your denunciation.
Using the term "professional skepti-bunker" is an empty, gutless, dishonest evasion. It does not excuse you from addressing the facts and analysis at the links.
For instance, you stated Sagan's paper was buried. Colavito demonstrates this assertion is completely untrue. Therefore, your alleged conspiracy never happened. Your claim is objectively without "merit."
Using facts and logic is not "framing." Only a conspiracy monger could think so.
@Terry,
Dude...your insults merely demonstrate an ideological attachment to interpretations you accuse others of being blind to. It's a common trait of fanatics.
Zygutis has one perspective...based on his understanding and interpretation of the facts.
Colavito has another.
To call a fellow commenter on this site gutless and dishonest is to demonstrate the weakness of your position.
@Bill
Evasion.
@Terry,
...sigh... whatever.
@Bill
Funny that you, a guy evading substance, also wants to have the last word.
There is a Terence Dickinson who is editor emeritus of SkyNews magazine. It might be possible to get in touch with him through their website.
Since I am unfamiliar with both Colavito and Zygutis, and since it looked like I would have to do a LOT Of reading to catch up with this dispute, I haven't been able to wade into this until now. I've read a little and I;m not clear in the disagreement.... Are you disputing whether Sagan wrote this paper or whether the paper was suppressed, discredited and debunked? God knows Sagan's views on this topic were all over the place. At various times he stated:
--We have been visited by aliens but at least a million years ago (or 100K years, depending on his mood)
--To suggest that we've been visited by ancient aliens that triggered our development "sells the human race short"
--Why would they visit us? We're nothing special.
--UFOs are a delusion driven by a need to believe that old men in flowing white robes will save us
And then he went and founded the SETI institute...
So, somebody please help me make sense of this Zygatis book!
@Mark,
The paper was written. No dispute.
Some argue that it was deliberately suppressed, and some counter-argue that it simply "faded away," like old soldiers, into the history of a budding celebrity scientist whose views on cosmic matters changed over time.
One commenter leans toward the Establishment's "conspiracy of silence & denial," with all of its tentacles.
One does not.
@Mark,
To be even more precise: one commenter thinks Zygutis's book "THE SAGAN CONSPIRACY" presents reasonably credible evidence Sagan's paper was deliberately suppressed...
and one commenter thinks that's a load of tosh.
All the rest is a comical ego circus.
Neither of the armies at Agincourt took a step backward.
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