Young-hae Chi, who teaches Korean at the university, also claims to know what the aliens have in mind. In lectures given at the university, he says they're creating alien-human hybrids as a hedge against climate change.
To support his unorthodox theory, Chi notes that for several decades the number of reported alien abductions has risen. He bases this statement on the work of David Jacobs, a retired Temple University historian who has published several books on ufology and who runs the International Center for Abduction Research.
Jacobs has interviewed more than a thousand people who claim to have been abducted, using hypnotic regression that apparently allows them to recall their unearthly encounters with aliens.
Mind you, this too is controversial, and Jacobs himself admits that people should be skeptical of these recollections. Chi takes the claims at face value, and links the growing number of abductees cataloged by Jacobs to the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases. He doesn't imply a cause and effect: The abduction experiment is not responsible for global warming.
Rather, it's a reaction to it. The extraterrestrials are producing hybrids that can better withstand the rigors of a toastier planet. By producing a new model of Homo sapiens , this project would eliminate the need for difficult climate accords or elaborate geoengineering projects.
It would also help the aliens themselves — who are said to be living among us — by preserving the part of their DNA that's carried by the temperature-tolerant hybrids. Of course, human-alien hybrids, no matter how well adapted to a warmer world, don't address the crux of the climate change problem. Even unimproved humans can handle hotter temperatures; after all, they already live in a plethora of steamy environments including the Congo, Amazonia and downtown Tucson. An archival search of U.
By , Jacobs had arrived at the University of Wisconsin campus to pursue a graduate degree in U. That same year, the U. Air Force, concerned with national security and investigating claims with an effort called Project Blue Book , took in 1, UFO reports from around the country.
It also presented the 1,page Scientific Study of UFOs report to Congress, claiming that most — but not all — sightings could be explained away by phenomena such as tricks of light, weather balloons, and swamp gas.
Jacobs began collecting reported sightings from Wisconsin for both. This seemed a familiar pattern to Jacobs. Ordinary people witnessing extraordinary things, who were then dismissed.
It was this topic — not whether UFOs were real, but how reports were handled by government authorities — that Jacobs took on for his doctoral dissertation in A later edition included a foreword by J. There, he taught U. M eanwhile, miles to the north in New York, a man named Budd Hopkins was gaining attention for his hypnosis work with people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. Over the next five years, he conducted hypnosis sessions with more than 60 abductees, each of whom sought him out.
Many displayed signs of trauma, even posttraumatic-stress disorder. Under hypnosis, they each recalled being abducted by strange-looking beings and subjected to a variety of medical procedures, and their stories shared commonalities such as floating through a closed window or lying unable to move on an exam table. It meticulously details 13 cases from those first five years of interviews. As it turns out, this was only the beginning.
Over the next 30 years, Jacobs would go on to investigate more than 1, abduction events with more than abductees. He wrote three more books and appeared as an expert source in dozens of articles and movies. His hypnotherapy interviews — and the conclusions he drew from them — became increasingly hard to believe, and increasingly dark. It makes sense, even from a geocentric point of view. Silicon is similar to carbon , it has four electrons available for creating bonds with other atoms. But silicon is heavier, with 14 protons protons make up the atomic nucleus with neutrons compared to the six in the carbon nucleus.
While carbon can create strong double and triple bonds to form long chains useful for many functions, such as building cell walls, it is much harder for silicon. It struggles to create strong bonds, so long-chain molecules are much less stable.
Compare this to highly soluble carbon dioxide, for example, and we see that carbon is more flexible and provides many more molecular possibilities. Life on Earth is fundamentally different from the bulk composition of the Earth. Another argument against a silicon-based shadow biosphere is that too much silicon is locked up in rocks. In fact, the chemical composition of life on Earth has an approximate correlation with the chemical composition of the sun, with 98 per cent of atoms in biology consisting of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.
So if there were viable silicon lifeforms here, they may have evolved elsewhere. That said, there are arguments in favour of silicon-based life on Earth. Nature is adaptable. A few years ago, scientists at Caltech managed to breed a bacterial protein that created bonds with silicon — essentially bringing silicon to life.
So even though silicon is inflexible compared with carbon, it could perhaps find ways to assemble into living organisms, potentially including carbon. To find it, we have to somehow think outside of the terrestrial biology box and figure out ways of recognising lifeforms that are fundamentally different from the carbon-based form.
There are plenty of experiments testing out these alternative biochemistries, such as the one from Caltech.
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