Earth (13 page)

Mars

Fred Steckling, who had emigrated to the United States and worked with the U.S. Air Force in Germany, was a former chef and private pilot (with whom I flew on one occasion) and close associate of George Adamski, one of the first to claim regular contacts with aliens from Venus, Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system. Regarding the Martian climate, Fred pointed out to me a number of inconsistencies when we met in California a month after the Viking 1 lander had touched down on Mars in July 1976.

“On Mars,” he began, “they've photographed sand dunes, and there's an area there that is the same size and same height as the sand dunes of Colorado. The scientists are baffled by this, because with one-tenth of the
atmosphere, which is supposed to exist on Mars, these sand dunes could never be there, because the winds wouldn't be strong enough to produce this kind of sand dune.”

The winds vary from as low as 4 mph, gusting up to 50 mph, with occasional windstorms as high as 300 mph, apparently. Maybe, given the latter speed, sand dunes can be formed in such extremes? Fred made another point about the atmosphere, which seems harder to contest:

“In the Martian morning, they've photographed large patches of fog in the valleys. Now, in my standard pilot's book, it says that fog is a product of the temperature and humidity being nearly at the same point—called the dew point. So if the temperature is below freezing, there'll be no fog: it has to be above freezing to create fog, and the temperature has to be the same as humidity, so that if the temperature is, say, 40°—which is above freezing—and the humidity is 40%, you have fog…. If the temperature is below freezing, and the humidity is high, you still have no fog, because it will not be created. Consequently, if there are large patches of fog, there must be areas on Mars that warm up sufficiently to produce it. And from what they're telling us from the Viking Lander, so far, temperatures are too cold—it's always 20, 30, and 40 degrees below zero.”
17

A 2012 article on Mars in
Air & Space
gives the average temperature as –81°F (–63°C),
18
while the NASA Quest Mars current Web site states that temperatures may reach a high of about 70°F (20°C) at noon at the equator in summer, or a low of about –243°F (–153°C) at the poles. “In the mid-latitudes, the average temperature would be about –50° Celsius with a nighttime minimum of –60° Celsius and a summer midday maximum of about 0° Celsius.”
19

Contactee Apolinar (Paul) Villa, who took many fine color photographs of alien craft in New Mexico in the 1960s and had a series of encounters with their occupants, told me in 1976 that Mars was used as a base by his alien contacts. They said that the atmospheric pressure at ground level was equivalent to that at 12,000 feet on Earth. Life is sustainable there: cacti and other plants, for example, thrive.
20

Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner had been executive secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board in 1946 (under Dr. Vannevar Bush) and, later, a member of the top-secret Majestic-12 group and an adviser to the govern
ment and other agencies on the space program—including the alien situation. Carol Honey, another close associate of Adamski, revealed to me that while working at Hughes Aircraft, he sneaked into a closed lecture by Berkner. The subject was Mars. “Berkner said that the atmosphere was a shirt-sleeve-type southern California environment. He very definitely believed that you could walk around on Mars and breathe. And this guy was Eisenhower's space adviser….”
21

Venus

As for Venus, in 1921 Albert Coe's alien friend explained that although the planet was younger in evolutionary processes than Earth, “its higher regions are not too drastically different than the environment here.” Only ten percent of the Venusian terrain is highland, and the highest point on the planet is the mountain known as Maxwell Montes, towering 35,400 feet above the planet's “sea level” and 27,000 feet above a huge highland region the size of Australia known as Ishtar Terra. In any event it seems likely that, with their highly advanced technology, aliens are capable of converting the hostile environment—which in any case may be less extreme in the highland regions than we have been led to believe.

Carl Sagan, a world authority on planetary sciences, postulated that “terraforming”—involving in this case the injection of appropriately grown algae into the Venusian atmosphere—“would in time convert the present extremely hostile environment of Venus into one much more pleasant for human beings.”
22

In his book
Why Are They Here?
Fred Steckling describes some of his meetings with aliens in downtown Washington, D.C., one of which took place on March 19, 1966. A main topic of conversation was the Russian
Venera
space probes, Venus 2 and 3, which had just reached the planet: an object about twice the size of a football had been ejected from the one-ton Venus 3 into the planet's atmosphere and achieved a soft landing by parachute system on March 1—man's first spacecraft to reach another planet. Reportedly, no transmissions were received. The alien explained, however, that the small device had been sending radio signals for some time, signals that had shaken up our scientists' previous beliefs about the planet (thus presumably had been censored). He went on to explain that a “magnetic
shield” enveloping Venus served as protection from cosmic rays and “holds a very high temperature, as well as the natural electrical layers of the upper ionosphere. The protective magnetic shield is made artificially by the inhabitants of Venus.” Fred's unspoken thought that this shield probably cut down radiation levels to a minimum was confirmed verbally by the alien. (Venusian gravity, incidentally, is 91% that of ours, thus hypothetical Venusians would weigh a little more on Earth.)

Shortly before this meeting, Fred had written letters to some newspapers, including
The Washington Post
, challenging several of the published findings regarding Venus. In late 1962, the U.S. space probe Mariner 2, during its fly-by of the planet, reported surface temperatures of 428°C (802.4°F)—above the melting point of lead. Following the later soft landing by the Soviet Venus 3 probe, the
Post
commented: “Our scientists were sharply critical of this landing, for they were not sure the craft was sterilized [and] feared the unsterilized spacecraft may have carried germs from Earth to Venus, which might have jeopardized the chances of finding life on the planet.”

“I openly ask the scientists,” Fred challenged, “What life do they expect to find with an 800° surface temperature? If the boiling point of water, for instance, stands at 212°F, why does the space craft, then, have to be sterilized, if at only 212° all germs are killed automatically?” The letter was not published.
23

I should add here that Fred Steckling's son Glenn, currently a pilot with a major U.S. airline, also attests to a number of meetings with aliens living among us.

Another person claiming regular contact with Venusians during this époque was an American brigadier general. In a letter to Major Hans C. Peterson, Senior Air Traffic Control Officer in the Royal Danish Air Force (1949–1976)—Adamski's representative in Denmark—the general stated, in part:

“In regard to the space ships and their crews, so-called ‘flying saucers,' what I am about to impart to you I am asking you as a fellow Veteran not to divulge the source…. Let me first state that through no effort or expectation on my part, I was contacted one night eleven years ago while working late in my shop to finish a printing job. They came to my shop
door, insisted on my opening it, came in, looked around a bit, spoke no word, and motioned me to come outside. As I did so I became aware of a large object, a few feet overhead.

“I was taken aboard, and had my first experience of positive telepathy, a very informative few minutes. They left, saying they would return soon. They kept their word and they returned—I think I can honestly say a few hundred times since, in the past eleven years.

“They have requested that I act as their contact man with quite a number of our national and religious leaders, and my identity must remain a strict secret, except with their permission as in your case. You can understand that, if my identity and work were known, I would never have a single moment's rest, and would soon become worthless to both them and the problems I attempt to handle.

“Now to their ability to speak perfect English. If you, for instance, had been within close vicinity of Venus for 2,000 years, as the Venusians have the Earth, and had been able to hear any conversation in any language that was spoken on Venus, do you not think you would be able to speak their language quite fluently? Among their own people they use thought only, but we of Earth, because of our habit, they have learned our language so perfectly that if one of them was to step up and speak to you in your place of business or your home or on the street, you would not recognize him from one of your own people, and in appearance, probably the greatest difference would be his handsome features and perfect proportions physically….”

It has been twenty-five years since the Russians and Americans—or any other nation, apparently—have sent a lander to Venus. In late 2009, however, NASA awarded the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder) $3.3 million for a detailed, one-year concept study for a lander mission to Venus “to study the history of its surface, climate and atmosphere and to predict its ultimate fate in the solar system.” The mission had been proposed by CU-Boulder Professor Larry Esposito, science team leader on the proposal. As part of CU-Boulder's Surface and Atmosphere Geochemical Explorer (SAGE) mission, the lander would descend onto the flank of an active volcano known as Mielikki Mons, which is about 200 miles across and 4,800 feet in altitude. Once the lander was in place, instruments would
dig about four inches into the surface, then “zap the soils with two lasers and a vacuum tube shooting large pulses of neutrons, which would bounce back data to the lander with information on surface composition and texture,” it was reported in 2011. The lander would be constructed to survive the harsh conditions on Venus for three hours or more. “Venus has gone terribly bad since it first formed,” says Esposito. “The surface pressure is a hundred times that of Earth and its temperature is similar to that of a self-cleaning oven….”
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According to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) planetary scientist Suzanne Smrekar, at eight miles above the surface of Venus, the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere becomes so dense that it turns “supercritical.” “Supercritical carbon dioxide is a gas-liquid mix that can eat through metal, and SAGE is designed to keep this nasty stuff from entering the sealed vessel,” explains Sam Kean. “For protection from the crushing atmospheric pressure—1,300 pounds per square inch—the lander will be roughly spherical…. The one redeeming quality of the heavy atmosphere is that it cushions the lander's descent. Terminal velocity on Venus is a leisurely 25 mph—so slow that the parachute is no longer needed after the spacecraft is 42 miles above the surface.”

“Temperature is the thing that will kill you the quickest,” claims Smrekar, who adds that to protect circuits and batteries, she and others have been testing advanced insulation materials such as lithium nitrate. But insulation, per se, would be insufficient, and planetary scientist Mark Bullock points out that such landers will require “active” cooling—that is, multi-stage refrigeration.
25

Is Venus the veritable hellhole it's cracked up to be? Who are we to believe—the contactees, the “Venusians,” or the down-to-Earth scientists? Could it be that official statements about Venus are deliberately distorted? In addition to Fred Steckling, others have come forward to dispute the official findings. John Lear, whom I first met in 1990, is a former pilot who has flown over 160 different types of aircraft in many different countries. The son of William P. Lear, designer of the Learjet, he is the only pilot ever to hold every airline certificate issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, and has also flown numerous missions for the CIA. He became interested in UFOs and the space program in the early 1980s. Behind the
scenes, he has learned much about NASA and, in the following instance, about Venus in particular:

“In the late 1950s NASA was formed to compartmentalize, containerize, and sanitize information from all space platforms and vehicles,” claimed Lear in an interview with Art Bell in 2003. “We sold NASA to the public, claiming that all information would belong to them, but they got very little, and even that was highly sanitized.

“Our first efforts were to keep the public from learning about Venus—a very similar planet to Earth, and its population very similar to ours, just [more] technologically advanced…. Starting with the Russian Venera 1 and U.S. Mariner 2, we made Venus look like a lead-melting, volcanic surface, spewing sulfuric acid into a pressurized atmosphere 90 times that of Earth. And as often is the case, we overdid it, and we wondered why nobody asked how a parachute survived a descent into 800-degree air.”
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During my fourteen years with the London Symphony Orchestra, a fellow member learned from a scientist friend in the 1970s that the director of a top-secret U.S./German space research center in West Germany was of Venusian origin. This revelation, my colleague informed me, was restricted to a quorum of scientists at the center. The information supplied by the director proved invaluable in their research effort, which I assume was related to the liaison program. In the 1980s my friend had the opportunity of meeting the director over dinner in London, together with his scientist friend, and was satisfied as to the director's “credentials.” Like some of the aliens in the Amicizia group (Chapter 13), the director enjoyed good food and wine. And why not?