Chapter 17 UFO’S
Racing the sun across the heavens at an altitude of 33,000 feet gave us a twilight and sunset lasting about an hour and a half. The sunset was of a splendour I had never seen from the earth, and to have this extended threefold was awesome. A little nearer the Pole or a little faster, and time would have stood still for us.
By my side was an American scientist who attributed the spectacular auroral effects to volcanic dust and said that these high-altitude sunsets had been at their most impressive some eighteen months previously. He commented acidly on our fellow passengers.
"A sunset like this and no-one watching it! You'd think everyone would be fighting for places at the windows but instead they've brought paper-backs to kill time. I tell you, aircraft designers might as well stop putting in windows - just give them a T.V. screen and the "Flintstones".
He also spoke harshly of the modern willingness to believe that "everything is possible", which understandably set his scientific teeth on edge.
"The man in the street", he said, "loves to think he's smarter than his ancestors; that all the time new knowledge is overturning the old and that what they believed has been proved wrong. There is no new knowledge," he cried with a sweeping gesture that just missed my tea - "Newton is not proved wrong by Einstein and all things are not possible!"
As an instance of the public's gullibility, he spoke of Unidentified Flying Objects. He referred to a newspaper report of a scientist - here he looked as though he might be sick - supposed to have seen a U.F.O. and on the assumption that it held beings from outer-space, to have flashed his car's headlights at it, three times, once, and then four times. The flashing of 314, the approximate value of pi, was intended as a message to indicate to the U.F.O. that intelligent creatures inhabit the earth.
"Now, what a farrago of nonsense to publish!" exclaimed the scientist contemptuously. "Only because we have ten digits and therefore a decimal system, does 3.14 represent pi. Suppose these creatures from Space had seven digits or used a binary system - either of which would be better than the decimal system what then? But this is the sort of pseudo-scientific garbage the public loves!
With a snort of disgust, he picked up his Agatha Christie paperback and settled down to read.
My own paperback contained an amusing story of men, captured and in cages on another planet, who try to solve this same problem of proving their intelligence, by weaving baskets from their bedding material, whereon their captors decide that this is an instinctive courtship ritual and put a woman from another cage in with them.