Contact across the Solar System

Continuing the Conversation

The Message Committee or MC now got into accepting questions for the SSC. The MC got a lot of them, even with its trying to avoid contentious subjects like religion and politics.

The CTIE made a big fuss about how the MC must address the issue of SSC espionage. Some politicians concluded that the espionage issue would be a good way to extract concessions from the SSC, so they also started making an issue out of SSC espionage. So the MC had to ask the SSC about it.

After consulting with some Earth observers and some Venusian and Martian politicians, the Adamski Gang decided on a response.

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We would prefer not to reveal how we learned what we learned for composing the capsules' messages. We regret that we have made some of your people feel violated and intruded on, but it was something like how many of your celebrities use false identities and wear disguises.

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The anti-espionagers were unsatisfied, and some of them felt affronted.

"Regret my ass. They should be ashamed of themselves. If they can feel shame."

"What brass balls they have -- comparing themselves to celebrities."

"I bet you what they really believe about their spying is that you need to break eggs to make an omelet."

The MC then asked about UFO's, explaining that large numbers of their fellow Earth people have seen them, and offering to send over more information about these entities. They had a lot of argument about how much information on UFO's to assume that the SSC has, given the SSC's evidence of having a terrestrial presence.

When they received this question, Orthon, Kalna, Ilmuth, and Zuhl exchanged anecdotes about odd objects that they and their pilot friends had seen. Anecdotes like of pilots chasing stars, planets, and moons, and of being chased by them. Kalna described how she was once piloting a ship over some clouds at the Earth when she saw a mysterious white spot on them. It looked like a reflection, but there wasn't any big sheet of glass or plastic or whatever. A fellow pilot tracked down what it was and found that it was a reflection off of oriented ice crystals, a "subsun". They also reviewed some efforts to find sightings of SSC spacecraft in published collections of UFO sightings, like the US Air Force's Project Blue Book archives.

They responded with:

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We are indeed familiar with your sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects or UFO's. A small number of them are likely sightings of our spacecraft, and we would prefer not to say which ones those might be. Some of them may be sightings of spacecraft from outside our Solar System, but we have too little on them to come to a clear conclusion. But in general, the large majority of UFO sightings are sightings of various known phenomena, and some of them are hoaxes. You have seen your air and space vehicles as UFO's numerous times, as well as meteors and celestial bodies and optical effects and other such things.

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UFOlogists had mixed responses, some of them celebrating the SSC's seeming endorsement of the extraterrestrial-spacecraft hypothesis, and others dismayed at how the SSC seemed like a bunch of UFO debunkers. But the SSC was stating what the more responsible UFOlogists were willing to concede, that the large majority of UFO sightings are of "Identified Flying Objects" or IFO's.

Then someone asked about crop circles and cattle mutilations. The Gang asked if anyone ever made any of that Earth-farm graffiti, and nobody owned up to doing so. Likewise for cattle mutilations. They responded

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We of the SSC's Earth Contact Committee do not know of anyone in the SSC who has made any crop circles. As far as we can tell, crop circles are a new art form that some of your people have invented.