Odd Old Theory

For many years, the late Robert Bletchman fought for UFO disclosure. He believed public pressure could force the government to reveal all. I did not share his optimism. Since 1981, when he began his quest, I considered it futile. Undaunted by my views, and fascinated by what was concealed, Bletchman wanted disclosure within his lifetime. I wonder if three decades of failure induced him to reconsider my views.

Just recently, it occurred to me that his involvement with UFOlogy was not a total waste. Back around 1997, when crash dummies were invoked to explain alien bodies, Bletchman came up with an unusual interpretation of that claim. Aware of its obvious absurdity (crash dummies didn't even exist until the 1950s, or years after Roswell) Bletchman opined that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. In his view, the government was deliberately putting out nonsense as a kind of indirect preparation for disclosure. Since the dummy claim was obviously false, a coverup, hence ETs, looked more probable than ever. Naturally, this would increase belief in aliens, and pressure for disclosure.

At the time I didn't believe Bletchman's theory, and nor did others. It just seemed that the government was grasping at straws. Desperate to keep the public from believing aliens were at Roswell, it put out anything to divert attention from them.

Recently, Annie Jacobsen's book has caused me to reconsider the theory. Jacobsen included a dubious (to put it mildly) tale of a Stalin-Mengele connection. According to this story, Stalin, seeking to cause panic in the US, induced nazi doctor Joseph Mengele to produce genetically deformed humans to pass as aliens in a craft sent to crash in the US. No intelligent UFOlogist believes that; not even skeptics buy it. Since it originated with someone once at Area 51, this story was probably a government scam. Like MOGUL, and the Japanese POW story, it seems intended to replace the ET explanation with an alternative. But what is the point of producing a tall tale nobody will believe? Maybe it's just to get people tired of Roswell, by constantly adding absurd baggage. Bletchman's theory is flawed in that many years of nonsense have generated neither general acceptance of ETs nor disclosure. But who knows?

Terraforming Mars

Some time ago, an article in Nature discussed methods for making Mars habitable. Authors McKay, Toon and Kasting noted that, to raise the average surface temperature of the red planet above the freezing point, an absorber has to be active over the entire thermal infrared spectrum. An absorber active over only part of the spectrum would raise Martian temperatures no higher than 260 degrees Kelvin i.e. below freezing (273K). In contrast, a full-spectrum absorber would cause temperatures to shoot up rapidly to about 300 K--quite Earthlike. Somehow, terraformers will have to greatly lower the albedo of Mars, in effect transforming it from the Red Planet to the Black one.

The authors also noted that, given a denser atmosphere with a substantial greenhouse effect, the polar caps of Mars are certain to disappear via sublimation. That would greatly increase the density of the Martian atmosphere, especially in light of the big reservoir of CO2 at its south pole. But studies also indicate a new Martian atmosphere would only be in equilibrium if its pressure were 800 millibars and its average temperature 250 K. An average temperature below freezing may rule out most vegetation except in the lower latitudes.