Plucked

Thomas N. Hackney

Is someone protecting our species from dangerous asteroids and comets, or just showing off? It’s a question any planet-bound, intelligent species might well ask, because the mastery shown over some of these space objects in recent years has been nothing short of amazing.

Take the Peekskill meteor impact of October 9, 1992. The thing to notice was how long and narrow the remaining left signal-light was. The right signal-light has been pulverized, from one end to the other, yet the chrome on either long side of it remains intact. How exactly this is possible in the real universe remains a mystery. Who was the true aimer here? Mother Nature? Impossible. The tail-light(s) measured approximately five by twenty-two inches; the Peekskill meteorite measured four-by-five-by eleven inches. So, no, it had to be … someone else. Conveniently, the mystery offers up a clue! Extra-terrestrials just happened to be the thing we were looking for at the time. A-ha!

Photos show that the thin chrome accent running along the upper edge of the signal-light has been bent down at the number ‘9’ on the license plate (a few inches away) in order to over-score the numbers 933. Now, many will call the notion that extra-terrestrials could be that good preposterous. Nonetheless, the Peekskill meteor event occurred’ 9’ October 1992, shortly before 8 p.m., which was ‘3’ days before the Ames Research Center commenced its Targeted Search for extra-terrestrials, and ‘3’ days before Christopher Columbus discovered America exactly five-hundred years earlier (Oct. 12). That certainly made perfect sense.

Ames? Targeted? It’s a good thing alien-hunters come in all shapes and sizes, because I, for one, am not one to pooh-pooh “signals” that take other than radio-wave form. Who needs radio-waves when you can control objects traveling in space to this degree?

NASA’s hypothesis on conducting the radio-astronomy experiment was simply stated: Extra-terrestrials exist. Noting that it was the right signal-light that was pulverized, not the left, the preemptive rejoinder becomes: “Right, Ames, extra-terrestrials do exist. Here’s a small peek.” Aren’t they wonderful, though?

The numbers 933 might also refer to the comet-string, Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was about to be discovered by the comet-hunting team of Eugene and Helen Shoemaker and David Levy in March the following year (or ‘93/3’). Scientific history reports that SL9 went on to impact Jupiter twenty-one times with its twenty-one large fragments up to two kilometers in diameter. They caused the most energetic explosions, or events of any kind, ever seen by man, in real time (a super-nova explosion was seen in 1054). Aside from the fact that this was the first time anyone had ever seen a cosmic object smash into another cosmic object, the more important thing to notice about these comet “fragments” was their number: twenty-one (21), to be precise. This is more than a little curious because in 1994 the 21st century was ‘just around the corner.’ Comets augur things (they always used to, anyway), like the death of a king, a plague, or other terrible disaster.

So we are not alone after all. The news comes not so precipitously and ‘over-night’ as one might have expected -- no global alerts or running in the street, no religious or economic upheavals. One question gnaws, though. Could extra-terrestrials be that good? The math says they could, for the simple reason that our Sun is 1.5 billion years younger, on average, than half the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Considering how far the human species has advanced, technologically, in, say, the last five-hundred years, what might extra-terrestrial beings be capable of if they’d had three million times longer to figure things out? Quite a lot it turns out.

Author Notes: The author's webpage and car photo is available at http://www.setifacts.com

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