MY THREE UFO-RELATED PAPERS IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS

Possible extraterrestrial strategy for Earth. Quart. J. Royal Astron. Soc., 27, pp. 94-101 (1986).

The arguments are reviewed which hold that our Galaxy is nearly saturated with extraterrestrial life forms, that our existence requires in hindsight that they were and are benevolent toward us, and that our lack of detection of them or communications from them implies that an embargo is established against us to prevent any premature knowledge of them. An inconsistency is detected, in that any sudden lifting of the embargo in a manner obvious to the public would cause societal chaos and possibly touch off a nuclear exchange, while any communications received via radio telescope would likely be either quickly confiscated by government agencies and not revealed to the public, or heavily censored. The inconsistency is that the advanced civilization should be expected to have planned some other strategy, if it is actually benevolent, experienced and intelligent.
It follows that any embargo not involving alien force must be a leaky one designed to allow a gradual disclosure of the alien message and its gradual acceptance on the part of the general public over a very long time scale. A possible strategy for their accomplishing this is proposed.

Examination of the embargo hypothesis as an explanation for the Great Silence. J. British Interplanetary Soc., 40, pp. 373-379 (1987).

The embargo or quarantine hypothesis for explaining the 'Great Silence' is reviewed and found to be more plausible than the view that, at most, we might expect to receive radio messages from some distant star. The latter hypothesis is shown to be compatible with extraterrestrial technologies only a few hundred years in advance of our own, whereas the embargo hypothesis more reasonably infers that they should be tens of thousands of years in advance and in control of any contact with humanity.
Reasons why the embargo hypothesis has received insufficient attention are presented: they involve failure to allow for the application of both greatly advanced alien technology and high ethical values by maturing societies of extraterrestrial intelligence. The implication of the embargo hypothesis for space development is that planets already harbouring diverse biota are ethically off-limits for exploitive colonisation.

Extraterrestrial communications. J. Communication, 37, pp. 181-184 (1987).
No abstract; but summary is as follows:

So far, the search for alien intelligence, in its concentration upon a radio message from the stars, has neglected to search right here on Earth and examine the UFO phenomenon. The prevailing scientific rationale responsible for this breakdown in logic fails to take into account the embargo hypothesis and Clarke's third law, which holds that the actions of advanced extraterrestrials would likely seem to us to defy the laws of physics.

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