Showing posts with label aliens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aliens. Show all posts

June 11 - Premiere of E.T.

   Posted on June 11, 2022     


This is an update of my post published on June 11, 2011:



This science fiction film - which premiered in theaters on this date in 1982 - is about a friendly extraterrestrial creature stranded on Earth and the children who help him to re-establish contact (“Phone home!”) with his spaceship so he can go home. This movie was hugely popular, when it was first released; it became the highest-grossing film of all time, over Star Wars (A New Hope) - a record that stood for 11 years, only to be eclipsed by Jurassic Park (the first one!). It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won four Oscars plus other awards.

This movie was notable to me - at the time when it was released - because it was one of the few that portrayed alien creatures in a positive light. (Another that did, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was created by the same director as E.T., Steven Spielberg.)

How about doing a research project about how aliens are portrayed in movies and books? 

How many authors and screenwriters show aliens as monsters who attack humans and who need to be destroyed? 

How many show aliens as interesting possible friends? 

How many show aliens as powerful, technologically advanced good-guys?

How many show aliens who are super mysterious and impersonal and aloof, or hard to recognize as sentient in the first place?

Here are some movies that could be part of such an analysis:
Warning: some of these are really scary, and some movies may be rated R. But you can check plot summaries on the internet, rather than watching them.

  • Alien movies
  • Star Wars movies
  • War of the Worlds
  • Independence Day
  • Contact
  • Starship Troopers
  • Cocoon
  • Starman
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • The Day the Earth Stood Still
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact
  • K-Pax
  • Star Trek movies
  • Avatar
  • Battle: Los Angeles
  • The Blob
  • Men in Black movies
  • Guardian of the Galaxy movies
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  • Ender's Game
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June 24 - First “Flying Saucer” Reports

 Posted on June 24, 2021

This is an update of my post published on June 24, 2010:



On this day in 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine lights that seemed to pace his airplane and then zoom past Mount Rainier in Washington. He described the moving lights as boomerang shaped but also said that they moved like saucers skipping over water. 

Somehow Arnold was misunderstood and misquoted, and many people thought he said that the strange objects he saw looked like saucers flying through the sky. Soon reporters dubbed the sighting as “flying saucers.” Suddenly many people, worried or thrilled, started studying the night sky and seeing saucer-shaped unidentified flying objects.

And so began the modern UFO craze. Since people expected to see saucer-shaped items, they did see saucer-shaped items. This was very frustrating for Arnold, who has been photographed with a picture of what he did see (remember, he said shaped like a boomerang - see the photo at the top of the article).


These clouds are called "UFO clouds" - but their proper name
is "lenticular clouds." They sometimes look really solid.



Of course, many people over the years have assumed that "flying saucers" - aka UFOs - are and were extra-terrestrials (aliens) in spaceships.




All of these four pictures (above) are things that humans have drawn
or painted - NOT things that anyone has actually seen!

However, most reliable accounts and photos of unidentified flying objects can be explained in ordinary, non-E.T. ways: birds, the planet Venus, fireballs, meteors, human-built aircraft, mirages, hoaxes, clouds - the list goes on and on.

What is the explanation for Arnold's sighting? Given the shapes and motions he saw, some likely explanations are pelicans, mirages of mountain peaks, or meteors. We will never know for sure, but those explanations are far more likely than aliens.


Also on this date:


































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January 22 - Space-Stuff Day

 Posted on January 22, 2021

This is an update of my January 22, 2010, post:



On this date in 1992, Dr. Roberta Bondar, Canada's first female astronaut, became the first neurologist to enter space. She flew on the Discovery space shuttle and did microgravity experiments with a variety of organisms. Dr. Bondar also served as NASA's head of space medicine.


On this date in 1997, American Lottie Williams became the first—and, so far, only— human ever reported to be hit by human-made space debris (also known as “space junk”). Williams was jogging in a park near her Oklahoma home very early in the morning, and she saw a brilliant fireball-type meteor. She felt a “gentle tap” on her shoulder and looked down; on the ground was a piece of blackened metal. 

Later it was confirmed that the metal was a piece (shown in her hands, above) of a fuel tank for a rocket that had launched a U.S. Air Force satellite the year before. The rest of the fuel tank crashed into a field in Texas (shown below).



On this date in 2003, we said goodbye to Pioneer 10, the first thing made by humans to leave the solar system. The next day (January 23, 2003) scientists were able to detect the last feeble signal from the spacecraft as it continued to speed away from Earth.


Launched in 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to fly through the asteroid belt and to fly by Jupiter. Even though it accomplished these two main goals before two years had passed, Pioneer kept up the studies and transmissions as it streaked through the outer regions of our solar system. All told the spacecraft studied interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields; solar wind parameters; cosmic rays; the heliosphere; neutral hydrogen abundance; distribution, size, mass, flux, and velocity of dust particles, Jovian aurorae and radio waves, atmosphere of Jupiter and some of its satellites. Of course, it also photographed Jupiter and its satellites.


The mission was formally ended in 1997. After that time the probe was used in training flight controllers on how to acquire radio signals from space. Scientists believe that no longer have contact with Pioneer 10 because it is too far away and because the power supply is dwindling—not because of equipment failure.

A Message to Aliens?

Before Pioneer 10 and its sister spacecraft Pioneer 11 were launched, a journalist named Eric Burgess had a great idea—putting a message of some sort to any alien intelligences that may discover the probe, somewhere, someday. He made his suggestion to Carl Sagan, a famous astronomer and science writer.

Sagan loved the idea and, with the help fellow scientist Frank Drake and wife Linda Salzman Sagan, created a clever message to unknown creatures and minds, trying to communicate with images a little about who we humans are and where we live.


The plaque is 9 inches by 6 inches and made of gold-adonised aluminum. Here is an explanation of what the various symbols mean. And here is a great website to learn more about Pioneer 10.

Read about Space Junk.

Build a Pioneer 10 paper model.

Run gravity simulations.



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