Delusional Encounters: Neil deGrasse Tyson debunks favourite alien theories

DO ALIENS EXIST? We don’tknow.

Possibly. Do they exist here on Earth? Not a chance. That sums up

Take Me to Your Leader by Neil deGrasse Tyson, arguably one of the most famous science popularisers in the world. Here, he takes on a subject that he himself, like millions who have relished movies and books of alien encounters, wants proven. Alas, the case is overwhelmingly against, and Tyson tells you why with dry amusement, debunking conspiracy theories and representations of aliens in popular culture.

The image in your mind of what an alien should be is mostly a portrayal of your own wishes. Aliens, for instance, have some common physical characteristics in how they are conceived by humans.

Tyson lists 12 archetypes that include “bald, gray, almond-eyed”, “humanoid reptiles”, “little green men”, “tall, luminous, wise, with subtle aquatic features” and so on. They are also around human height usually, give or take a few feet. It would be considered hard for insect-sized beings to build spacecraft that cross galaxies. But Tyson

gives one example of size to show how they might view humans by pointing to a satirical 1752 novella, Micromegas by Voltaire in which an alien from a planet around the star Sirius, who is 23 miles tall and has a lifespan of 10 million years, comes to Earth along with another one from Saturn who is 6,000 feet tall. They meet a man who argues that the world has been uniquely made for human beings and burst out laughing at this.

If an alien comes to Earth, Tyson says they would think cars are the dominant life forms because they are just more visible in number from the top. And should they connect to humans, almost everything will be indecipherable to each other. For instance, in sci-fi movies the location to meet is sometimes helpfully provided by the alien in latitudes and longitudes, but these are measures humans have given themselves; it means nothing to an outsider. “The Aliens would further need to hack into our culture and figure out that we measure angles in something called degrees,” he writes.

Certain numbers that apply all over the universe, like the Planck’s constant, could however be a common reference point of communication. Tyson also explains why it is just not possible to have flying saucers because they violate physics and any such saucer accelerating at incredible speeds is sure to kill anything inside. Towards the end of the book, Tyson takes apart popular ‘evidence’ of aliens. Everything seen as being from outer space has simpler explanations, like weather balloons or the optical illusions of luminous cloud formations. Some are psychological, like alien abductions. And the proof of it is that once smartphones with cameras arrived, reports of alien abductions dropped. It became hard to explain why they didn’t just shoot a photo.

Even roadside flying saucer reports dropped after automobiles stopped using hubcaps. “Along bumpy roads, especially where potholes lurked, a car was almost guaranteed to drop a hubcap without the driver noticing. Most were affixed to the wheel by friction, with no nuts or bolts. They were heavy, but throwable like Frisbees, and you could photograph them flying through the air. Yup, hubcaps made excellent faked evidence of flying saucers,” he writes. Photos that exist of aliens are always for some reason fuzzy when high resolution cameras have been around for decades now. He has a joke about UFO sightings being mostly in English-speaking countries too.

Tyson doesn’t wade too much into the science to make it forbidding for the general reader. There is only just enough to make the case compelling, and it is peppered with dry wit and anecdotes. Take Me to Your Leader is an entertaining takedown of a desperate obsession that human beings can’t let go of.