I'm not what you might call an impulse buyer, but with a
title like that I dropped everything to watch it. This BBC 2 feature length
production combines speculative fiction interspersed with talking head experts;
however, of course, this being the BBC, they desperately tried to avoid consulting
any white males.
First Contact- an Alien
Encounter begins with a signal from space being picked up at the Jodrell
Bank Radio Observatory at the same time NASA picks one up from Voyager 1
outside the solar system. The scientific community study the signal amongst
themselves privately at first, trying to verify whether it is a genuine
artificial signal and whether it really comes from space. There have been many
false alarms in the past along those lines. It is a race against time because
they know they cannot keep this information secret for very long. Indeed by the
third day newsrooms around the world announce the discovery of the signal and,
as always, social media goes ablaze with hopes, fears and memes. By the following
day, protests break out. Concerned citizens believe the government is hiding
something about the signal. As I explain in the background links below, a conspiracy
of silence in astronomy is not possible. All the data is above our heads and
there are simply too many telescopes. Astronomy is the one truly democratic
science. Despite this, the signal has a positive knock on effect on UFOlogy, as
I predicted. The suspicion turns to fear and people start panic buying
supplies, like they did in the first Covid lockdown.
On the sixth day telescopes manage to pick up the source of
the signal. It is an object travelling at almost two million miles per hour and
is enormous, a hundred and twenty miles across; the size of a small planet. At
this point there is a non-fiction interlude about 'Oumuamua. I was annoyed that
of all the astronomers interviewed, they left out Avi Loeb. I wonder why. Maybe
because of his radical views about the interstellar object, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2022/09/hunt-for-alien-artefact.html.
The BBC's reconstructed image of 'Oumuamua specifically make it look like a
natural object, similar to the "turd picture" that you'll be familiar
with from most science and news stories about the object. The truth is, we
don't know what 'Oumuamua looks like. Nobody has ever seen it up close. It's an
artist's impression; pure guesswork. Back to the story, there is another surge
of public apoplexy as telescope data is published on the signal source, dubbed
"The Artefact". There is an emergency session at the United Nations
(If only Sir Eric Gairy were still alive!) and countries with a nuclear
deterrent put them on red alert. This enormous object is shaped not unlike a
modern space station; long thin modules attached together with structures
leading off it that resemble antennae. It is tumbling through space like 'Oumuamua
did without any form of propulsion or control... 'Oumuamua did not! The fictional
news sequences are very well made. They are extremely vivid because they star
actual news personalities like David Shukman, the BBC's real science editor.
When The Artefact becomes visible to smaller telescopes, telescopes themselves
become the focus of mass purchases and everybody goes out at night to try and
see The Artefact for themselves. Parks and gardens are packed with crowds
watching the skies all night. Recordings of John Greenewald Jr and Chris Mellon
are featured briefly for a few seconds and you can hear a discussion of UAP
with the voices of the
Nimitz pilots,
but these clips are all taken totally out of context, as we'll see. Sales of
guns in the
USA
increase and more riots break out, but not everybody is afraid. A large number
of people are more curious, delighted and full of wonder. Once The Artefact's
track has been calculated, astronomers are able to work out where is came from.
The Kepler space telescope turns to look at the location and finds a suitable
binary star system. The Artefact either originated from, or passed through,
that stellar system a hundred to two hundred thousand years ago. Everybody from
the UN to TikTokers prepare a message to send to the source stars. When the
James Webb space telescope is aligned with the stars it detects a Dyson swarm
around the star, a bit like Tabby's Star, see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/08/real-contact.html.
However there are no organized radio emissions from it. The civilization that
produced the Dyson swarm and The Artefact no longer exists. The Artefact is not
a spaceship; it's a piece of lifeless space junk. The signal was triggered by
an automatic process as it detected the sun. This is the "L" factor
in the Drake Equation, see background links below. Cultures, and even entire
species, when compared with cosmic timescales, endure for but a moment. When we
encounter the evidence of them it is far more likely that it will be evidence
of their past existence than their present, like in Arthur C Clarke's
heartrending short story,
The Star,
see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZPtCDGiTM.
Two independent species would have to be very lucky to encounter each other
while they are both enjoying that brief explosion of living activity. As one of
the experts says, exopolitics is more like archaeology. If we're lucky, there
might be a lot of well-preserved material from the lost aliens, like literature
and scientific knowledge. A month after the signal was detected, just before
The Artefact moves beyond the range of our telescopes to continue its eternal
mindless journey through the cosmos, millions of people hold a candlelit vigil
to celebrate the wondrous experience the earth has just enjoyed and hope that
whoever built the visitor from the stars is still out there somewhere and we
might meet them someday. Source:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001ctnr/first-contact-an-alien-encounter. And:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTwKVNHLlTM.
First Contact- an
Alien Encounter is a technically brilliant, well designed piece of
docufiction. It is lucid, realistic and very moving. I've referred to Arthur C
Clarke several times during this review and this is because it is exactly the
kind of story he would write. However, its poignant premise is happily false.
Finding extraterrestrial intelligence has already been achieved and it was
achieved a long time ago. The task is far easier that scanning the distant
reaches of space with a billion dollar telescope. You can just go outside and
look up at the sky or even go and knock on somebody's door. Aliens are not
somewhere out there; they're down here on the earth with us. We see their
vehicles all the time flying just a few feet above our heads. Many of the
beings look very similar to ourselves and you may well have met one of them.
It's odd because the programme briefly refers to the UAP issue and even
features prominent UFOlogists and witnesses; but this real and obvious evidence
is completely omitted from the story. I don't think this is accidental and I make the
same criticism of the BBC's film as I do of the SETI movement in general, see
background links below. I must ask the same question that I asked over the
Calvine photo, see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2022/10/calvine-clowns-day-off.html;
why now? More and more studios, publishers and TV networks are releasing
fictional accounts of extraterrestrial contact. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
Writers, like all artistic people, are very good at picking up the morphic;
subconscious inklings of what is actually going on, sometimes invisibly, behind
the scenes or waiting ahead in the future. I hope this question will be
answered soon.
See here for
background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/12/ben-emlyn-jones-at-awakecon-2017.html.
And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2022/08/ufo-disclosure-2022-why-now.html.
