SUBJECT: SPACE ANIMAL THEORY FILE: UFO2780 From UFOs and the Limits of Science by Ronald D. Story c.1981 Reproduced for educational purposes only. Space Animal Theory The Space Animal Theiry was first brought to public attention, curiously enough, by the U.S. Air Force during its Project Sign activity in the late 1940s. The Project "Saucer" (Sign was then still a classified code name) press release of April 27, 1949, admitted that the idea had been "remotely considered" and that many UFOs "acted more like animals than anything else." The Air Force concluded that few such reports were reliable. The concept was also contained in the final Project Sign Technical Report of February 1949 (declassified in 1961). Trevor James Constable (writing under the pen name of Trevor James) advocated a space animal explanation for UFOs in 1958, and no other that Kenneth Arnold, the man whose sighting opened the UFO era and who was responsible for coining the label "flying saucer," concluded the UFOs "...are groups and masses of living organisms that are as much a part of our atmosphere and space as the life we find in the oceans." Naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson again addressed the question, and many others, in 1967, concluding that there was "...nothing illogical, irrational, or even improbable about it. In fact, it is so probable that it must be given first rank in consideration of the question, 'What could UAO's [unexplained aeiral objects] be?'" That same year, Vincent H. Gaddis addressed the topic, attributing the original idea to a John P. Bessor, who had sent it to the Air Force the month following Arnold's classic 1947 sighting. Gaddis discussed the writings on the subject by Austrian Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki and John Cage, a New Jersey inventor, and concluded that "...the time will come when one or more of these entities will be caught, weighed, measured, and exhibited." Trevor James Constable again wrote about space animals in the 1970s, this time in more detail. He postulated that the UFO space animals "...are amoebalike life-forms existing in the plasma state. They are not solid, liquid, or gas. Rather, they exist in the fourth state of matter - plasma - as living heat substance at the upper border of physical nature." He also believed that they are of low intelligence and, because they remain in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, usually invisible. he concluded that they had "...deeply confused UFO research." Although life may be found in the most unlikely places and under the harshest of conditions on the surface of the planet, it is doubtful that biological forms could evolve in space or even in the upper regions of the atmosphere, where exposure to cosmic rays and other radiations, such as those originating from solar flares, would be maximized. The absence of oxygen for carbon-based life would also rule out biological space animals, and the possibility of life existing in a plasma state is, at best, speculative. ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************