The Search for Alien Life

In the 60's, humankind took it's first steps in space, a whole world beyond what we knew. The galaxy, infinite, lay sprawled ahead of us, and we began to imagine: somewhere... out there, in the vast expanse of infinite space, there simply has to be other living, intelligent beings, right? The universe is too massive for such a statement not to be true.

If you believe it, you're not alone. In 1984, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) was founded. It currently employs over 100 scientists, educators, and research staff; projects are sponsored by such groups as NASA, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological Survey and Hewlett Packard.

Until it's final deployment in February 2004, SETI used Project Phoenix to "listen" to nearby stars -- nearby defined as withing 200 million light years. Currently, the Allen Telescope Array is under construction after much waiting and set to launch after completion in June 2008. Named for Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, due to his sizeable donation covering the first two phases of construction, the Array will eventually consist of 350 dishes and combined, shall be the largest telescope in the world. It will reach far deeper into space than Phoenix Project, be able to explore black holes, and classify over 250,000 extragalactic radio sources as either starburst galaxies or active galactic nuclei. We'll be able to listen to 1 million stars and detect the slightest waver in frequency.

So, what drives us to search the limitless boundaries of space? What makes us love the alien stories on Roswell and the X-files? Why do we gaze up and wonder?

There's no doubt that many things are blamed on aliens. If you're a fan of The Cold Spot, you may have seen this mentioned in other articles regarding Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle and the Pyramids of Giza. That's not all that's linked alien life forms. Undoubtedly, you've heard of Area 51 and crop circles. Both are widely accepted as distinct parts of an extraterrestrial world.

Groom Lake, also known as Area 51, transports it's 500+ employees via a small fleet of planes every Monday morning, yet it's so secret that the government denies existence of it. However, over a period of decades, civilians have become aware of flight-testing of the most advanced aircrafts in the world, and possibly alien crafts, as believed by many.

It's privacy is secured by the most highly technologically advanced surveillance equipment, some even rumored to actually smell a person crossing the boundaries of the facility, and more than that, to differentiate the intruder from a field mouse or wandering animal.

The borders are constantly patrolled by teams of 2's, the men called Cammo Dudes (not very clever, is it?) in Jeep Cherokees. Occasionally, border viewers have caught sight of their helicopters, too.

Rumors persist that deep underneath the dried lake, top secret experiments regarding alien technology keep secret scientists busy.

In July 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, something made of some sort of metal crashed on a night when a severe thunderstorm hit the area. Brazel, the rancher who owned the land where the crash occurred, was thoroughly awed by the unusual properties of the strange metal and took a piece to a neighbor's house. They suspected it was debris from a secret government project at the very least. After a couple of days passed, a press release announced that an 'unidentified disc crashed.' The next day, they recanted the statement, saying they made a mistake and clearly the debris came from a crashed weather balloon. The military confiscated all evidence of the crash and they've stuck with the story of the balloon ever since.

UFO chasers raised their eyebrows at this, and years later, it was rumored that the debris, not to mention actual alien corpses from the crash, were taken to the underground facility at Area 51 for further study. True? We may never know. Whether authentic or not, photos of alien autopsies exist and seem real enough to cause us to wonder.

Furthermore, while some are confirmed as hoaxes, we have crop circles as possible evidence of intelligence beyond our own. Some have been made as deliberate hoaxes as experiments, however the effects of true crop circles cannot be reproduced.

Those that are human-made take many hours through the night and sometimes two nights, and are still very basic circles, after careful planning, plotting and designing by scientists interested in the phenomena.

True crop circles, some that are quite complex in design, appear overnight and during a few instances, while witnesses were not far away. There had been no lights, no sound, no indication of any presence at all. In rare instances, like the Julia formation, some appear in broad daylight in a matter of minutes.

While the designs are scattered around the world, many are in England and some appear very close to Stonehenge or in a directly linear location to the mysterious monolith, which begs the question: is there a connection? Maybe the locations of specific designs are as meaningful as the formations themselves.

In addition to the limited times and mysteriously quiet appearances, researchers are aware of other evidence that separates a hoaxed circle from a true one.

One of the most surprising discoveries was within the plants themselves. In the fields where the circles form, the shapes are not merely burned in with some giant intergalactic branding iron. In fact, no damage is done to the crops unless it's a hoaxed circle. A plant stem holds nodes which are almost like an unbendable joint, in a way. When inside the circle, these nodes are inexplicably elongated, yet otherwise undamaged. When humans create a circle by artificial means, the nodes are never elongated and are blown where they're forced to bend.

Additionally, plant stems inside true circles have increased in diameter with a quite precise circular symmetry, caused by extensive heat. In fact, when this effect was reproduced through research, it was proven that it could only happen as a direct result of a radiation pattern from an electromagnetic point of a height no less than four meters and ten centimeters above the field.

Dr. Haselhoff, who realized this, utilized this method of testing on several circles, coming to identical conclusions: "balls of light" are involved with the creation of the circles. His article was sent and published in Physiologia Plantarum, an international scientific journal, and is now widely accepted as fact among his peers. Other oddities of true circles:

• Some radiate a sound at approximately 5.7hz in the electromagnetic spectrum and the same frequency is often detected during UFO sightings.
• For up to 6 months, some formations will remain in the soil, long after crops are plowed.
• Inside some formations, compasses go bezerk, indicating magnetic disturbances.
• Different crop characteristics between crops inside circles and the crops outside. For example, canola plants cannot be bent at all (like raw celery), but in crop circles, bent 90 degrees to lay flat and undamaged.
• Intricate weaving of stalks within the circles.