On the night of October 30, 1938, the sounds of
“ Ramon Raquello and his orchestra” were interrupted by the first of a series of increasingly alarming radio news flashes:
“We interrupt this program to bring…”
First came news of “ incandescent gas” explosions observed on the planet Mars, Then after more music came a hook-up (allegedly) to Princeton Observatory where an interview was broadcast with Professor Richard Pierson, who assured listeners that there was nothing to be alarmed at. After another brief interlude of music, the first reports of a meteor impact broke into the program.
At that point, a place called Grover’s Mill entered the story. That night the sleepy hamlet was set to become the center of the planet for a large number of people.
Grover’s Mill had become the beachhead for a Martian invasion. News flashes then plotted the advance of the Martians toward New York City, as American defenders were brushed aside and dozens of familiar place names along the way were destroyed. An emergency government announcement appeared to confirm the event.
At Trenton, thirteen-year-old Henry Sears was doing his homework when he heard the first news flash of the invasion.
He took the radio down into his mother’s tavern below, and he and a dozen or so patrons listened with rising fear to the broadcast. The men soon jumped up and announced they were going to get their guns and join in the defence at Grover’s Mill.
Recalled Mrs Thomas, also of Trenton: “ We were petrified. We just looked at each other, scared out of our wits.
Someone was banging on our front door. It was our neighbour across the street. She had packed her seven kids in their car and she kept yelling, ‘Come on, lets get out of here!’ ”
Panicked listeners began to bombard police stations with calls. All were assured nothing unusual had occurred and that rumours were due to a radio dramatisation of a play.
The cause of the panic was Orson Welles’ dramatic presentation of The War Of The Worlds, a novel by H. G. Wells.
About a million people believed a Martian invasion was actually occurring, even though the play began with this introduction:
“The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” Three further announcements that the play was fiction were made during the program. It was even listed as such in newspaper radio schedules.
Obviously, numerous people did not take time to check the authenticity of what they were hearing – and proceeded to close their windows to block out poison gas, or to flee from their homes, or even, in the case of one man, to leap out of a window to his death!
As Martin Gardner observed in his book Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science:
If… an invasion from Mars [could be] taken seriously in 1938, perhaps it is not so hard to understand a widespread acceptance of the spaceship theory of flying saucers in a decade that has split the atom.
(Martin Gardner, Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York:
Dover, 1957, p. 67)
* * * * * * *
Roland was aware that there had been lots of talk lately about “extraterrestrial intervention”. And since the trauma of his wife’s alleged alien “rape”, Roland was now sharply focused.
(a) Life spores drifted from outer space?
So now he began to ponder the speculation he’d once heard that perhaps life first appeared on some other planet, then drifted from planet to planet as naked bacterial spores, eventually ending up on this earth. Well, could it be? Typically, his research would be thorough. Then…
Sorry. Isaac Asimov had already announced that experiments showed ultraviolet light (UV) would quickly kill such spores. In space, UV is much more intense. Not only that, there are other forms of radiation that would kill off any microscopic spores. The big problem would be the accumulated dosages over an extended time period.
However, there was still that bottom line: that matter itself contains no information that can produce life, in the first place.
And then, Roland, if you expect similar results time and again on numerous planets… forget it.
Two facts struck Roland: 1. No DNA information can come from dead matter, even to create the spores. 2. Outer space radiation would kill spores travelling toward earth.
End of story.
(b) DNA brought by aliens?
Aliens. Well, that was one thing that extraterrestrial theorists had right, noted Roland. There were other worlds – and intelligent beings out there in space.
And although Roland sensed he was attempting to wriggle out of facing the obvious, yet, to satisfy himself, he had to ask it.
Might aliens have introduced the DNA on earth – and then let evolution take over?
No, again it hit him like a bus. Of course not. Again, evolution, to produce increasing complexity, would require continual adding of genetic information. And he was back to the fact that there was no natural mechanism that could add this information. Evolution take over? The laws of genetics said NO!
Roland almost laughed at himself, as he recalled something Thomas Huxley had said, “…great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Upward evolution – impossible! So no matter what aliens wanted to do, they’d be forced to create fully fledged, intelligent
humans in one hit. And the same for all the other life forms too… with no mutations able to add new information. In other words, no evolution to follow. Every life form had to be complete and functioning 100 percent. Right from the start.
(c) Aliens interbred with earth life?
Then one of Roland’s mates had come up with the idea, Could aliens have interbred with primates?
Sounded an interesting idea… but then again emerged some insurmountable problems.
For one thing, whether for physical sex, or artificial insemination, there would need to be a similarity in genetic make-up. That would be a biological necessity. Which was unlikely in the extreme. Not only would the chromosomes of the two species need to be of the same shape and number, but even their genes would need to be in the same basic arrangement – as well as being located on corresponding chromosomes.
To put it another way, their chromosomes would need to be interchangeable. Chromosomes and genes must both match up, Roland, which is extremely unlikely and does not happen even between animals and humans of the same planet.
And of course you realise that if the chromosome number and the arrangement of genes on those chromosomes were similar enough to permit fertilization and viable offspring, the two beings would already be of the same or closely related species – which means that man would be already intelligent.
So as much as Roland resisted the thought, it kept getting back to the question, who, then, was responsible for DNA in the first place?