The Numbers Are Astronomical

A press conference today laid bare some new results from NASA's Kepler space telescope. They're astounding.

It turns out that about 22 percent of all Sun-like stars boast a planet that's at the right orbital distance to sustain liquid water on its surface. In other words, one in five of such stars has an Earth-size orbiting world in the so-called "habitable zone."

This result, announced by astronomers Erik Petigura, Andrew Howard, and Geoff Marcy (from the universities of California and Hawaii), significantly plumps the odds that there's life elsewhere in the cosmos. That's because the prevalence of the messy, organic chemistry we gentrify with the term "life" is proportional to the amount of real estate available for it to arise and flourish. The argument is straightforward and unassailable, unless you're convinced that biology is zapped into existence with lightning bolts hurled by the gods.

Before the Kepler mission, no one knew what fraction of stars would have hospitable planets. So this work is both important and encouraging. Why encouraging? Well, consider the numbers that tumble from this result -- the quantitative consequences.

We'll do the simple math for you. However, and just in case arithmetic makes your eyeballs glaze over like a holiday ham, we'll make sure the bottom line of this article gives you the bottom line. It's a result you'll find useful for striking up conversation with people who are overly impressed with their own importance.

Here are the stats. As noted, 22 percent of all Sun-like stars will sport a habitable, Earth-size world. Since stars similar to Sol (so-called G and K stars) make up 20 percent of the roughly 200 billion stars of the Milky Way, they account for 9 billion planets able to support life. That's the contribution to the planetary population from cousins of the Sun.

However, three-quarters of the Galaxy's stellar complement is comprised of so-called "red dwarfs" -- dim, puny stars rather smaller and much dimmer than the Sun. A recent analysis of Kepler data by Harvard astronomers Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau implies that 16 percent of red dwarfs sport a planet in the habitable zone. Do the multiplication, and you can throw another 24 billion candidates for life into the galactic barrel.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars -- the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

So now we have the skinny for our galaxy: There are at least 33 billion habitable worlds. At least. (We haven't considered large moons that could be paved with protoplasm, such as the fictional satellite Pandora in the movie "Avatar"). If they exist, they'll simply swell this already-impressive crowd.

However, and before cutting to the chase, a brief, historic note: In 1961, a dozen scientists gathered in West Virginia to bat around the idea of intelligent life in space. The agenda of this small meeting was a simple equation, constructed by the organizer, astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake Equation has since become a staple of astronomy textbooks everywhere, as it neatly summarizes the parameters that determine how many aliens might populate space.

One of the factors in this famous formulation is the average number of Earth-like worlds in a random solar system. In 1961 -- which was long before planets around other stars had been found -- the meeting participants didn't dare to offer an official opinion on this number. But they did vaguely speculate that most stars might have such life-friendly locales. Today, their optimism seems both justified by the data, and remarkably insightful. They were either prescient, darn smart, or secretly clued in by aliens. I vote door number two.

So check out the Milky Way next time you're outside the glare of city lights, and ruminate on the thought that at least 33 billion habitable planets are somewhere up there. But that's just the local population. We can't see the entire universe, but the fraction we can see is studded with roughly 150 billion other galaxies; each with its own complement of habitable worlds. So the number of life-friendly planets that are currently in the part of the cosmos we can possibly observe is five thousand billion billion.

That's a big number. It's bigger than the number of cells in all the people of Earth.

You may note that we've generally reckoned these figures to two decimal places, although that accuracy isn't really justified. For example, you could argue about the definition of "habitable zone," and plenty of people do. Different zone limits would shift these totals by maybe a factor of two or three, one way or the other. But when you're talking five thousand billion billion, all that really counts is the number of zeroes (in this case, 21).

It's a real morale booster for those who are searching for extraterrestrial biology. Look at it this way: In the Powerball lottery, your chances of winning the jackpot on a single ticket are about one in 175 thousand. If Earth is the only planet with life in the visible universe, then our planet has done the equivalent of winning the jackpot four times in a row. Not just four wins. Four wins in a row. That would, I aver, qualify our home world as a miracle.

So here's that promised bottom line. Unless you're convinced that our watery planet, one of hundreds of billions floating in a non-descript galaxy similar to a hundred billion other galaxies, is somehow more worthy than all the rest, you should expect not merely an occasional Chewbacca or Klingon hanging out in space. The universe is far more likely to be a teeming shore of life, and biology as much a part of nature as rocks and rain.

Are you special? Sure you are. But it's a good bet that you're not alone.

The Echo Flight UFO Incident: James Carlson is Still Wrong After All These Years

     Saying that the moon is made of green cheese doesn’t make it true, even if one repeats that claim over and over, hundreds of times, or finds a small band of like-minded believers who parrot the claim.

It’s not entirely clear why James Carlson continues to post countless comments online, denying the existence of UFO reports during the Echo Flight missile shutdown incident at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, on March 16, 1967, in the face of witness testimony to the contrary—including from one of the missile launch officers present that day.

Carlson knows about the tape recorded conversation (see below) between myself and now-retired Col. Walter Figel, the deputy missile commander at Echo during the incident, in which he told me that he had indeed received a radio call from a security guard at one of the Echo missile silos, saying that he was observing “a large, round object” hovering “directly over the site.”


Figel also confirmed that he had, in response to the call, sent out two Security Alert Teams to investigate the report and that at least one of them confirmed seeing the object hovering over the missile silo. Figel also said that he and James’ father, Captain Eric Carlson, had been debriefed back at Malmstrom and told not to talk about the incident.

While my recorded conversations with Col. Figel took place between 2008 and 2010, he had made nearly identical statements in another taped phone conversation,(see below) with former Minuteman missile launch officer Bob Salas, in 1996.


There are other U.S. Air Force veterans who have also gone on the record about a UFO involvement in the Echo Flight incident, as well as a Boeing Corporation engineer, Robert Kaminski, whose job it was to find out why the missiles malfunctioned.

In 1997, in a letter to researcher Jim Klotz, Kaminski wrote that, “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert. In other words there was no technical explanation that could explain the event.”

Kaminski also wrote, “Meanwhile I was contacted by our representative at OOAMA [Office, Ogden Air Material Area], Don Peterson, and told by him that the incident was reported as being a UFO event—that a UFO was seen by some airmen over the Launch Control Facility at the time E-Flight went down.”

Actually, the large round object sighted by the missile guard and reported to launch officer Lt. Walter Figel, had been hovering over one of the Echo missile silos, not the launch control facility itself. Nevertheless, Boeing engineer Kaminski’s revealing testimony essentially confirms Figel’s account of a UFO-presence during the incident.

Of course, if James Carlson were ever to admit that Kaminski’s letter is important, or that Figel’s tape recorded statements to me and Bob Salas do indeed contradict his father’s now-discredited claim that there were no UFOs reported at Echo Flight, he would in effect be admitting that he has been making a complete fool of himself online for the past several years, by championing his dad’s untenable position and, in doing so, viciously insulting the other veterans and researchers who dare challenge it.

This is one reason why Carlson will never, in his many online rants about Echo Flight, provide a link to the tape recorded admissions by Col. Figel that are available online.

After all, one can hear Figel tell me that, while he was skeptical of the UFO report he received from the security guard, it nevertheless did indeed occur. Figel also says, clearly on the tape, that while he thought the guard might be joking, that individual’s demeanor was calm and businesslike. “He seemed to be serious and I wasn’t taking him seriously,” Figel told me.

When I posted the transcript of this conversation-excerpt in 2008, James Carlson doubted it’s accuracy and chided me to post the actual tape recording. When I eventually did, Carlson then claimed that I had doctored it to make it prove my points. All challenges by me, to have a team of audio experts examine the tape—to verify that it is pristine and unaltered—have been ignored by Carlson and his supporters. Of course, they would have to pay for that expensive analysis so, it seems, they are not prepared to put some money where their skeptical mouths are.

Another reason James Carlson does not want others to listen to my tape recorded conversations with Col. Figel is because he refutes Carlson’s claims, calling them “off-base”. Figel also says that Carlson “has an ax to grind,” something that James certainly does not want others to hear—given that Carlson incessantly cites Figel as someone who supports his own position. Regardless, James’ relentless hate campaign is quite obvious to anyone who reads his breathless tirades against me and Bob Salas.

Even Carlson’s handful of supporters have urged him to tone it down, given the manic, often hysterical tone of his blog comment postings in which he wildly attacks anyone who supports the notion of a UFO presence at Echo Flight during the shutdown incident. Other, unaffiliated readers of his rants—who have no strong opinion about the case, one way or the other—have called him a “nut”, “wacko”, “fruitcake” and the like.

Years ago I myself accused James Carlson of “foaming at the mouth”. However, that was before I learned that he had been medically discharged from the U.S. Navy due to a diagnosis of epilepsy. One symptom sometimes exhibited during epileptic “fits” is indeed a frothing at the lips during the seizures. Once I had James’ medical situation brought to my attention, I never again used that unkind characterization of his online outbursts.

Nevertheless, James’ usually bizarre, over-the-top tirades against me and Bob Salas—he has called us “liars and frauds” countless times—raises the issue of his state of mind. When I spoke with his father Eric, in October 2008, he continued denying that UFOs had been reported at Echo Flight, however, when I asked why his son was so out of control in his online posts, Eric responded, “James has some problems.”

That same month, in a phone conversation with an associate of mine, Eric told him that he was concerned that James would “have a nervous breakdown.” (I am willing to testify under oath in a court of law that the elder Carlson’s comment to me was exactly as I have portrayed here, and that I have accurately related the other conversation as it was presented to me.)

So, does James Carlson incessantly lie about the facts relating to the UFO events at Malmstrom Air Force Base because he is psychologically unbalanced, or is it just due to his complete lack of ethics? Or both?

Regardless, the questions remain: Why is James Carlson so unwilling (or perhaps unable) to accept the fact that his father misled him when he said that there were no UFO reports at Echo Flight at the time of the mysterious, full-flight missile shutdown? Why does James continue to deny or, in some posts, twist Col. Figel’s candid, taped remarks to me and Bob Salas?

Similarly, why does Carlson repeatedly lie about Salas’ former missile commander, Col. Frederick Meiwald, who has made emphatic remarks supportive of Salas? In 2011, Meiwald told me during a taped conversation (see below) that UFOs were indeed present at a different flight—Oscar—when those missiles malfunctioned eight days after the Echo incident.


Although Meiwald had been on a rest break in the launch capsule when the ICBMs began “dropping off alert status”, once awoken by Salas, he witnessed most if not all of the missiles malfunctioning.

Meiwald also confirmed that moments later, in response to triggered alarms at one of the silos, Salas had dispatched a two-man Security Alert Team to the site. Those men, said Meiwald, saw “a bright, flying object at low-level.” near the missile silo and immediately fled back to the Oscar Launch Control Facility. One man was so distraught that he had to be transported to the base hospital before completing his shift.

James Carlson has for years loudly proclaimed that Salas was lying when he said that he had witnessed a UFO-related missile shutdown at Malmstrom in 1967. True, until Salas located Meiwald in 1996, he couldn’t remember the designation of the flight and thought that he might have been at Echo or November.

Nevertheless, by the time Carlson started his public vendetta against Salas in the late 1990s, Col. Meiwald had already discussed the UFO-related events at Oscar Flight with Salas during a taped telephone conversation (see below). Meiwald later wrote him a follow-up letter (see below) containing more details.

Meiwald Letter 10-1-1996 -click on image(s) to enlarge -

Fortunately, James Carlson has a relatively small audience, even though he has posted hundreds of comments about these topics at various websites over time. Unfortunately, his hard core supporters, whose strong anti-UFO biases apparently allow them to endorse a delusional (or, perhaps, merely dishonest) person’s baseless charges, keep egging him on, rather than urging him to seek the help he obviously needs.

Now, in the wake of Bob Salas’ recent revelation about having had an apparent UFO abduction experience in 1985, the usual critics are gleefully sharpening their knives. Given their blanket rejection of anything UFO-related, Carlson and his crew can be expected to go after Salas with renewed viciousness.

Importantly, six other former U.S. Air Force personnel have provided similar accounts to me in recent years. Those individuals had previously been involved in a nuts-and-bolts UFO incident in one of the nuclear missile fields operated by various Strategic Air Command bases. Then, weeks, months or years later, they allegedly had an experience comparable to the one now being revealed by Bob Salas. In short, his account is not unique.

I will have more to say on this last subject at some point in the future. At the moment, I am still gathering data. While the number of military veterans who have told me of their strange follow-up experiences is quite small, compared with the number who make no such claim, their accounts obviously deserve serious, unbiased investigation.

Out of the closet, into the fire

For more than six years, De Void has tended to avoid the whole alien abduction thing because, well, radar tracks, multiple eyewitnesses, detectable electromagnetic effects and videos are one thing. Nasal probes, mindscans, teleportation, hybrids — that’s an entirely different conversation. Although, if UFOs are truly the manifestation of the technology they appear to be, running circles around our most advanced weapons systems, then it stands to reason that literally anything is possible. But if that’s true, if Zeta Reticulans or whatever can move like vapors into our bedrooms, then we’re all screwed, and De Void’s not into that. Furthermore, try to goad the mainstream media into getting a grip on the idea of beaming humans aboard starships seriously; hell, De Void can’t even get Texas public radio reporter Wade Goodwyn to examine ordinary FAA/National Weather Service records that painted a UFO incident he covered in his own back yard.

But, deep breath, here we go: Recently, retired Air Force captain Bob Salas went public with his own abduction experience. And there’s no getting around it because Salas was one of the first military veterans to go on record about UFOs tampering with and disabling U.S. nuclear missile systems. His example emboldened dozens of other USAF veterans to step up and share their stories about high strangeness in the missile fields. Salas took a no-nonsense stance and wasn’t afraid to call people out if he thought they were being dingbats. He spent years crafting a rep as a fully grounded left-brain type.

Now this -- an abduction in 1985 in Huntington Beach, Calif. You can read all about at the Open Minds site. The salient passage (cringe): “He floated off the bed towards the locked bedroom window, which he felt certain they [the aliens, presumably] would be unable to lock. Nevertheless, he went through the window in an upright position and was taken aboard a craft. He was shown a needle, eight to twelve inches in length, which was inserted into one of his testicles in order to collect semen.” Oy vey! “The pain was excruciating, and when Salas complained to his abductors, the pain suddenly ceased. This was followed by a physical checkup in which his back seemed to be of primary interest. He next remembers moving through a curved hallway and seeing a bright light before suddenly finding himself back in his bed.”

As abduction accounts go, this one’s pretty routine. Salas states he never forgot the incident after it occurred, but he didn’t recover the details until undergoing hypnotic regression in 2006. Only then did he begin discussing it with his wife Marilyn who, even today, recalls only the broader aspects.

“I don’t remember nearly as much as Bob does. I think I was being an ostrich about it, like, if I stuck my head in the sand it’d all go away,” Marilyn says from their home in Ojai, Calif. “I remember being on the side of the bed that faced the doorway, and when I opened my eyes, there was a foggy, bluish, gray light down the hallway that seemed to be coming from the living room area. That’s all I remember, but it was a freaky thing at the time and I shut my eyes, thinking ‘I don’t believe what I just saw.’ It was so strange I didn’t even mention it to Bob the next morning.” Nor did hubby say mention it to her.

Though they met in 1969, Marilyn says Bob didn’t even discuss the Minuteman missile shutdown at Malmstrom AFB, which happened just two years earlier, until the mid-1990s. Even then, it would be another decade before he started asking if she remembered a blue-light incident from Huntington Beach. Bob pressed the issue a lot farther than Marilyn did.

“Honestly, I don’t have any desire to know more than the blue light,” she says. “My concern, when Bob decided to discuss it openly, was how the general public was going to respond to it. But this is something Bob felt like he needed to do.”

Salas says he wanted to spill the beans as soon as he got sharper visuals through hypnosis. “Understandably," he says, "I wanted to fully establish my primary story before I talked about this. I did not factor my reputation into it — I’m not trying to make anyone’s life more difficult. But I feel a responsibility not only to myself but also to the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, who’ve been abducted.”

So there it is — the point man on UFOs and WMD, out of the closet. Will it damage his credibility? No doubt. Salas is unconcerned. “I’ve already received some blowback, but so be it,” he says. “But they’re not just here to fly around in our airspace. Something else is going on. If they're taking eggs and they're taking semen, then they're producing hybrid beings. And it could be either horrifying or unifying, depending on how you want to look at it.”

De Void doesn't want to look at it at all. Nevertheless.

The Numbers Are Astronomical

A press conference today laid bare some new results from NASA's Kepler space telescope. They're astounding.

It turns out that about 22 percent of all Sun-like stars boast a planet that's at the right orbital distance to sustain liquid water on its surface. In other words, one in five of such stars has an Earth-size orbiting world in the so-called "habitable zone."

This result, announced by astronomers Erik Petigura, Andrew Howard, and Geoff Marcy (from the universities of California and Hawaii), significantly plumps the odds that there's life elsewhere in the cosmos. That's because the prevalence of the messy, organic chemistry we gentrify with the term "life" is proportional to the amount of real estate available for it to arise and flourish. The argument is straightforward and unassailable, unless you're convinced that biology is zapped into existence with lightning bolts hurled by the gods.

Before the Kepler mission, no one knew what fraction of stars would have hospitable planets. So this work is both important and encouraging. Why encouraging? Well, consider the numbers that tumble from this result -- the quantitative consequences.

We'll do the simple math for you. However, and just in case arithmetic makes your eyeballs glaze over like a holiday ham, we'll make sure the bottom line of this article gives you the bottom line. It's a result you'll find useful for striking up conversation with people who are overly impressed with their own importance.

Here are the stats. As noted, 22 percent of all Sun-like stars will sport a habitable, Earth-size world. Since stars similar to Sol (so-called G and K stars) make up 20 percent of the roughly 200 billion stars of the Milky Way, they account for 9 billion planets able to support life. That's the contribution to the planetary population from cousins of the Sun.

However, three-quarters of the Galaxy's stellar complement is comprised of so-called "red dwarfs" -- dim, puny stars rather smaller and much dimmer than the Sun. A recent analysis of Kepler data by Harvard astronomers Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau implies that 16 percent of red dwarfs sport a planet in the habitable zone. Do the multiplication, and you can throw another 24 billion candidates for life into the galactic barrel.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars -- the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

So now we have the skinny for our galaxy: There are at least 33 billion habitable worlds. At least. (We haven't considered large moons that could be paved with protoplasm, such as the fictional satellite Pandora in the movie "Avatar"). If they exist, they'll simply swell this already-impressive crowd.

However, and before cutting to the chase, a brief, historic note: In 1961, a dozen scientists gathered in West Virginia to bat around the idea of intelligent life in space. The agenda of this small meeting was a simple equation, constructed by the organizer, astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake Equation has since become a staple of astronomy textbooks everywhere, as it neatly summarizes the parameters that determine how many aliens might populate space.

One of the factors in this famous formulation is the average number of Earth-like worlds in a random solar system. In 1961 -- which was long before planets around other stars had been found -- the meeting participants didn't dare to offer an official opinion on this number. But they did vaguely speculate that most stars might have such life-friendly locales. Today, their optimism seems both justified by the data, and remarkably insightful. They were either prescient, darn smart, or secretly clued in by aliens. I vote door number two.

So check out the Milky Way next time you're outside the glare of city lights, and ruminate on the thought that at least 33 billion habitable planets are somewhere up there. But that's just the local population. We can't see the entire universe, but the fraction we can see is studded with roughly 150 billion other galaxies; each with its own complement of habitable worlds. So the number of life-friendly planets that are currently in the part of the cosmos we can possibly observe is five thousand billion billion.

That's a big number. It's bigger than the number of cells in all the people of Earth.

You may note that we've generally reckoned these figures to two decimal places, although that accuracy isn't really justified. For example, you could argue about the definition of "habitable zone," and plenty of people do. Different zone limits would shift these totals by maybe a factor of two or three, one way or the other. But when you're talking five thousand billion billion, all that really counts is the number of zeroes (in this case, 21).

It's a real morale booster for those who are searching for extraterrestrial biology. Look at it this way: In the Powerball lottery, your chances of winning the jackpot on a single ticket are about one in 175 thousand. If Earth is the only planet with life in the visible universe, then our planet has done the equivalent of winning the jackpot four times in a row. Not just four wins. Four wins in a row. That would, I aver, qualify our home world as a miracle.

So here's that promised bottom line. Unless you're convinced that our watery planet, one of hundreds of billions floating in a non-descript galaxy similar to a hundred billion other galaxies, is somehow more worthy than all the rest, you should expect not merely an occasional Chewbacca or Klingon hanging out in space. The universe is far more likely to be a teeming shore of life, and biology as much a part of nature as rocks and rain.

Are you special? Sure you are. But it's a good bet that you're not alone.