SUBJECT: SPACE ANIMAL THEORY FILE: UFO2780
From UFOs and the Limits of Science by Ronald D. Story c.1981
Reproduced for educational purposes only.
Space Animal Theory
The Space Animal Theiry was first brought to public attention,
curiously enough, by the U.S. Air Force during its Project Sign
activity in the late 1940s. The Project "Saucer" (Sign was then still a
classified code name) press release of April 27, 1949, admitted that
the idea had been "remotely considered" and that many UFOs "acted more
like animals than anything else." The Air Force concluded that few such
reports were reliable. The concept was also contained in the final
Project Sign Technical Report of February 1949 (declassified in 1961).
Trevor James Constable (writing under the pen name of Trevor James)
advocated a space animal explanation for UFOs in 1958, and no other
that Kenneth Arnold, the man whose sighting opened the UFO era and who
was responsible for coining the label "flying saucer," concluded the
UFOs "...are groups and masses of living organisms that are as much a
part of our atmosphere and space as the life we find in the oceans."
Naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson again addressed the question, and many
others, in 1967, concluding that there was "...nothing illogical,
irrational, or even improbable about it. In fact, it is so probable
that it must be given first rank in consideration of the question,
'What could UAO's [unexplained aeiral objects] be?'" That same year,
Vincent H. Gaddis addressed the topic, attributing the original idea to
a John P. Bessor, who had sent it to the Air Force the month following
Arnold's classic 1947 sighting. Gaddis discussed the writings on the
subject by Austrian Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki and John Cage, a New
Jersey inventor, and concluded that "...the time will come when one or
more of these entities will be caught, weighed, measured, and
exhibited."
Trevor James Constable again wrote about space animals in the 1970s,
this time in more detail. He postulated that the UFO space animals
"...are amoebalike life-forms existing in the plasma state. They are
not solid, liquid, or gas. Rather, they exist in the fourth state of
matter - plasma - as living heat substance at the upper border of
physical nature." He also believed that they are of low intelligence
and, because they remain in the infrared part of the electromagnetic
spectrum, usually invisible. he concluded that they had "...deeply
confused UFO research."
Although life may be found in the most unlikely places and under the
harshest of conditions on the surface of the planet, it is doubtful
that biological forms could evolve in space or even in the upper
regions of the atmosphere, where exposure to cosmic rays and other
radiations, such as those originating from solar flares, would be
maximized. The absence of oxygen for carbon-based life would also rule
out biological space animals, and the possibility of life existing in a
plasma state is, at best, speculative.
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