Exhibit Aliens . . . Are We Alone? entertains idea of otherworldly life, but scoffs at Grays
4/18/2000
AlienZoo's Mr. Smith and Wiggz.
What are the youth of today learning about extraterrestrial life? What are their tender, believing minds absorbing about the potential of non-human life forms? One answer can be found at the exhibition Aliens . . . Are We Alone? exhibition, on view at the Arizona Science Center, a children.s science center located in the heart of downtown Phoenix, Arizona, until April 30.
Basically, Wiggz and I (Mr. Smith) learned, Aliens welcomes kids to entertain the potential of microbes thriving in the crust of faraway planets, just as astrobiologists hypothesize. But when it comes to UFOs and Grays - things taken very seriously by thousands of UFO enthusiasts - kids are basically encouraged to turn their attention elsewhere.
Case in point: In a far, darkened corner of the Aliens show rests a Styrofoam alien body in a glass case, with lime-green light underlighting the scene. A galvanized-steel panel serves as a backdrop; a cyclone fence blocks off the foreground. A military-scientific sense of secrecy weighs heavily here.
The kicker is the sign in the background, however. A sign of an alien head is crossed off with a slashed red circle, communicating "out of bounds." And in the foreground another sign reads, "Genuine Fake Alien. As seen on TV! And that.s the only place you.ll see a creature like this one. Humanoid visitors from distant worlds are creatures of science fiction, not fact." Note the seemingly paranoiac emphasis on the word "only."
What results is a conflicting message. Here, the innocent, impressionable, sponge-like minds of young children are influenced by the assertion that Gray aliens do not exist. But elsewhere in the exhibit, children are asked to imagine what aliens might look like.
In a display set adjacent to the "genuine fake" alien, a San Francisco local TV station.s report on an alleged UFO sighting is played over and over, further debunking and discrediting a UFO case with each playback. In analyzed footage, a UFO mysteriously jets past a man on a hill who is talking into the camera. Played in slow motion, however, the video shows that the UFO image was superimposed on the film, as it can be seen flying across the man.s T-shirt.
Nearby this TV, there's a box filled with hay, in which lies a sewing needle. This is a representation of the "rare Earth" hypothesis, that we're just incredibly lucky to be breathing on Earth right now, because there's an extremely low chance of intelligent life existing on other planets in other galaxies.
What to make of it
On our way into the Arizona Science Center, Wiggz and I were polishing up a theory about the Aliens exhibit. Was it a subtle plan - much like the Teletubbies - launched by the Establishment to prepare children of today for "the truth" revealed by government disclosure? We were trying to come to terms with the "real" motivation (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) behind doing a museum presentation on aliens, UFOs, space, and science, all wrapped up into
one exhibit. Leaving the show, we were left wondering.
Presented in a favorable light are SETI astrophysicists Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak. We should note that Shostak openly argues that proof of alien life still eludes us. "Now, if we get a signal, how do we know it.s really from ET?" Shostak asks the audience in a video profiling SETI, which searches for extraterrestrial radio signals from the Arecibo telescope. "If the signal is at one spot of the radio dial, that means that it.s an artificially produced signal, a signal that must come from some piece of machinery, presumably ET.s transmitter."
A poster for the movie Contact echoes SETI's presence. Shostak mentions this movie in almost every interview I've heard him do - including his AlienZoo interview - as a means of explaining what SETI does at Arecibo. In fact, the movie's star, Jodie Foster, was modeled after Tarter. One may wonder: Why does SETI trumpet this movie? Is there something more to this film than meets the eye? Just what if it's another step in a global publicity campaign to acclimatize the populace to ET's call? Perhaps such ideas aren't new.
Shostak.s demonstrated willingness to entertain the possibility of ET life is undermined by a bias against UFOs that inescapably overshadows his message. Visitors feeling frustrated with the "Arecibo or bust" attitude can step a few strides
to their left, and turn the knobs of the Drake Equation calculator up to 10. The result is 2.4 trillion possible life-forms gliding around in the universe. How you choose to view the world all depends on your math.
Another part of the exhibit is comprised solely of the science fiction aspect of aliens. Clips and posters of old sci-fi movies that have long sparked our imagination adorn the walls here, illustrating how yesterday.s science fiction is today.s science reality. You see posters for The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Saucer Men, and War of the Worlds. We laugh at the old movies that showed humans prancing around on the Moon and living in Earth-orbiting space stations.
Future generations may laugh at how we depict aliens in our films and literature; the technology we portray today will look so simple by the future's standards.
Aliens made by children, for children
Up to this point, we've understated how much fun this exhibit really is. It's a treat, especially considering how some of the mechanized aliens on display were designed by elementary school kids, in conjunction with Seattle's Pacific Science Center. They came up with names like the Gusty Traveler and The Clumping Rockettes to describe their imagined beings. Looking at these life-forms reminds us of reading Cliff Pickover's The Science of Aliens, in which Pickover attempts to catalogue the biological traits that ETs might have, given their planets' atmospheres.
The Gusty Traveler, for example, floats around its thick atmosphere like a hot-air balloon. It eats by sucking in nutrients from the air; some of its body parts light up in the dark.
The Clumping Rockettes, meantime, are lava-red, wormlike creatures that hail from a planet where the days are long and hot, and the nights are cool. Naturally, they come out at night; during the day, they blend in with their surroundings. They use their teeth, too, to dig for food, and their eyes can look in different directions, to spot predators sneaking up on them.
Here on Earth, myriad life-forms seem truly bizarre. The green-jewel weevil, jungle nymph, giant leaf-footed bug-spider wasp, speckled planet-hopper, and devil's velvet ant all depart from the evolutionary norm. In their own way, these insects are "alien" to us. The exhibit also makes the case that the
oceans are teeming with alien life - thousands of organisms that we just don't yet understand. What we learn from studying ocean life can be applied to our studies of life forms beyond Earth. This represents a mainstream way of looking at aliens, of course, but it can open kids' minds to new possibilities.
Despite apparent hostility toward Grays, we think Aliens . . . Are We Alone? should travel to cities throughout the world, carefully showing children the importance of keeping their minds open about the UFO and ET question.