Man’s Quest To Find Fellow-Beings

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30725, 14 April 1965, Page 11

Man’s Quest To Find Fellow-Beings

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright)

LONDON, April 12.

Man’s quest to find fellow-beings in outer space has ranged from probing countless reports of flying saucers to speculation about living matter on other planets.

Statements and articles by Soviet radio astronomer, Dr. Nikolai Kardashev have gained wide publicity in the last two years. Last October the "New York Times” reported he had suggested that two sources of powerful radio signals far out in space might be the beacons of advanced civilisations. The unusual nature of these signals were first observed in 1960, the newspaper reported. In 1963 the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain said their peculiarities were “worthy of special mention.” Antenna System last month Dr. Kardashev said it was planned to build an antenna system in the Soviet Union which would make it possible to scan in detail a big part of the celestial sphere. With the help of this system, it would be

possible to pinpoint the sources of certain radio signals.

In September last year a prominent American scientist speculated that creatures as intelligent as man may live on planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Dr. Harrison Brown, a geochemist of the California Institute of Technonogy said: “One might conclude that man is not alone in this galaxy. Searching for evidence of such intelligent life forms may indeed prove to be profitable and exciting.”

“Three Times”

In March last year two Soviet writers claimed that light signals from highlydeveloped beings on another planet had reached earth at least three times.

According to the writers, Generikh Altov and Valentina Zhuravleva, the signals came in 1882, 1894 and 1908.

The last was in answer to the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa on an island in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, on August 27, 1883, which the beings mistook for a signal from earth, they said in an article in the Leningrad magazine, • “Zvezfa.” Altov and Zhuravleva thought the signals came from one of the planets of the sixty-first star of the Constellation of the Swan.

The writers claimed that a highly-developed civilisation of the star had long been sending signals in the direction of the sun.

In July, 1963, Sir Bernard Lovell, director of Britain’s Jodrell Bank observatory, said during a visit to Moscow he believed there were “many communities of other beings in different parts of the universe.”

He told a newspaper conference: “My own conclusion is that there must be many such communities, but the problem of making contact with them is a formidable one. It would require a pooling of all the world’s resources in astronomical equipment.” The previous year, Professor I. Shovsky, head of the radio astronomy section of the Soviet Institute of Astronomy said there were reasons to believe “reasonable beings might have emerged” on some of the millions of planetary systems in the galaxy. “These civilisations,” he said, might have “created a civilisation with all scientific technological achievements.” No Threat '

Last month a U.S. Air Force report said there had been 663 sightings of unidentified flying objects from 1947 to 1965 but no evidence that they originated from beyond the earth. In that time the Air Force investigated 8908 reports of “flying saucers” and other types of objects in the sky. The report said that none of the objects “has ever given any indication of a threat to our national security.”