At the dawn of the space-age, Paul Hopkins takes a pessimistic look at the implications for ufology and humanity. From Merseyside UFO Bulletin, Volume 3, Number 5, November 1970

That man has reached the moon is now history. That he will shortly reach out to the planets is no longer confined to the realms of science fiction. Gone with man’s journey to the moon is a good deal of mystery, imagination and romanticism. Indeed the moon is dead, as expected. No air, no water, no life, or even signs that life may have existed there in the past.

Where then, Adamski’s are your moon bases? Where are those outposts of alien civilizations that contactees claim?  The footprints of Armstrung and Aldrin, and those of the following lunar missions will remain on the moon’s surface for many years to come, as they are slowly covered by accumulations of cosmic dust and meteoric debris. An advanced civilization with resources and man power as grand as that which the majority of the UFO contact books and cases infer would surely have at some time left lasting scars on a relatively inert body such as the moon? Unless of course these aliens have a broom like appendage with which they are able to cover their tracks and sweep up their cosmic garbage. I think not.

I also think that they were never there in the first place.

We are entering an age of stark realism and chronic symptoms of cosmic loneliness. Science on earth, through materialism, has steadily decreased old beliefs, fears and hopes about the supernatural world on earth, and in its place the world of the supernatural has moved into outer space. As the progress of science has shown that each planet, save the earth, in our solar system is devoid of intelligent life, so these infertile spheres have been filled with a proliferation of spirit creatures existing on different planes, in different dimensions, in different states, and God knows what.

Of course it is possible to contact these entities, not through radio or laser beam, but through the mind, telepathic contact. The meanderings of insanity mixed with personal beliefs and subconscious urges are given as messages from the great Aetherius, from Diophantes of Sirius Six, and from other intangibles. From a host of telepathic messages there has not been, to my knowledge, a single, properly authenticated gem of information that has proved of value or use to mankind. The prophecies such as they are, are completely withoat impact, since we are told such obvious and daft things as our sun will become part of aa binary system, and. that the orbits of the planets will be displaced, or even such brilliant foresight as ‘a new age will dawn’.

We are surely moving out of the era of sensationalist and unbounded speculation (just as we moved out of the dark ages) as the solar system is reduced to its essential physical and chemical equations by scientists and mathematicians. Thus the romantic flying saucer will die away in the minds of the cranks and nuts as generation gives way to generation. The flying saucer mystery will be killed largely by natural causes. Still, I believe an element of truth will still remain. Life must exist elsewhere in the universe, as mathematical probability is in favour. Must we keep it at arm’s length, or is it not kept from us by some divine plans or perhaps through man’s innate inadequacies

One Sunder paper recently carried a report on the dangers of seeking contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, and in particular warnings from Professors Zdenrik Kopal and Clyde Tombaugh. Both men agreed that it could be disastrous to contact other intelligent beings as we may well end up being treated like ants and put in test tubes, or treated little better than animals.

The fact is we are animals and our technological explosion has made us conspicuous by the amount of radio energy that this planet emits into space. I do not think it idle speculation to say that there is probably in the galaxy at least one race of intelligent beings thousands of years ahead of our technology who, having mastered the problems of interstellar flight, are quite aware of what is going on here on earth. Yet we are left alone. It is a process of civilization that there comes a point when intelligent beings realize that there is no need to ill-treat or eradicate lower forms of life without very good reason. A lesson that is only slowly dawning on the more enlightened homo sapiens after a million years or so of brutality, not only to animals in general but also to his own species.

If man lives or, should I say, survives a million years more, though he probes the universe to its outermost limits and the atom to its innermost secrets, he will never realize the meaning and purpose of the universe that imprisons him. We watch, and are watched. We observe, and see nothing. Yet we are ourselves observed and seen. We are as ants in a test tube, and when the experiment is done our owners will pour us down the galactic sink, and nothing we can do shall prevent it.

Is this the mystery of the flying saucer, and man’s sole purpose on earth? If so, what price religion now? What price admission to the human zoo?

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