The Real "Battle of Los Angeles"

Sixty-nine years ago today, one of the first unidentified flying objects to receive substantial national press coverage was spotted and fired upon in Los Angeles. The incident would come to be known as "The Battle of Los Angeles". As most of you have probably heard, there's a movie based on the incident coming out next month.

At the time there wasn't a lot of discussion of aliens. For one thing, Roswell hadn't happened yet and aliens weren't firmly embedded in the American consciousness. But we were also newly at war with Japan, who had launched a strike on Hawaii less than three months previously. Attention immediately turned to the Japanese rather than extraterrestrials.

The government concluded it was a weather balloon. But then, that's what we'd expect them to say, isn't it?

Aliens and Trade

Krugman suggests extra-terrestrial life would be good for trade. I imagine (if we survive the encounter) the bigger boost will be from technological development, but still a good point.

The same would be true, of course, for a human colony on Mars - division of labor is the foundation of civilized life.

But the trade would be very different - we'd probably be trading actual goods to Mars, but I doubt we would get goods back. The ones we would send would have to be absolutely essential, too, because of the cost of the trip.

So what would we trade? Knowledge. I imagine the early Martian colonists will do three things, for the most part: farm, build, and produce knowledge (maybe mining too if it turns out there's anything worthwhile up there). Knowledge is cheaper to send back to Earth than anything else, so it will likely play an important role in interplanetary trade a century or two from now (if we don't at least have a consistently manned outpost there before I die I'm going to be extremely disappointed).

Lovecraft talked some about extra-terrestrial exchange (not always voluntary, of course) when he wrote his alien stories. What was traded with the Yithians? With the Mi-Go? Knowledge.

...plus some aliens

Jonathan Swift would be proud... or sad... or amused. I don't know.

New Acquisitions...

So I was at the public library's book sale room this past weekend and at Second Story Books today and have a few new acquisitions.

1. First, for fifty cents at the library I finally got a copy of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. "Seminal" is a designation that is applied too liberally to books, but this one probably qualifies. I haven't read any of Bailyn's books before, but I also own The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century.

2. At Second Story Books I found Herbert Hoover: The Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914-1923, a conference volume from the Herbert Hoover Centennial Seminars. This was the first volume from the seminars. I recently got the second volume (without knowing there was a first) in Boston. That one is called Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice 1921-1928. So now I have a quite thorough coverage of Hoover's activities in the early 1920s - which is quite hard to find. Most of what is available on Hoover addresses the Depression (the other Depression, that is). And guess who authored the chapter "Hoover's 1919 Food Diplomacy in Retrospect"? None other than Murray N. Rothbard! I've read the preface to the second volume that I had acquired previously already, and it sounds like a very thoughtful, thorough book. I'm quite excited to have both of these now. As far as I can tell these are the only two volumes.

3. Also at Second Story Books, I was excited to find a first edition of Edward Ruppelt's 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (an online version is available here). I only know a little about Ruppelt, but I'm eager to learn more. Ruppelt was a part of the government's Project Bluebook which in 1952 was tasked with studying the UFO phenomenon. Ruppelt approached the issue seriously and tried to rigorously assess what sightings could be explained and what couldn't. He fought against the common term "flying saucer" at the time and popularized the term "unidentified flying object" to reduce the sensationalism around the phenomenon and emphasize the fact that it was fundamentally unexplained. The book looks like it will provide an account of the Blue Book years and the way that they weeded through and addressed different sightings. I haven't written an alien post for a while, but I think people have a sense of my interest in this. First, of course, UFOs could really be aliens. It doesn't get much more spectacular than that prospect. Second, UFOs always provide a fascinating exercise in epistemology and method. How do we know what we know about them? What don't we know? When is evidence credible? Can we reason through what is probable or improbable? How do we reason through these phenomena when we have no basis for assessment? Finally, the dawn of the UFO age in the late 40s and early 50s represent the beginning of an important era in human, but especially American history when we started to understand ourselves in the context of a much, much wider cosmos. I find that cultural shift interesting from a historical perspective.

*****

For anyone in the D.C. area, I wanted to (1.) promote Second Story Books because it's a great store, and (2.) especially promote the DuPont Circle location in D.C., which was where I went. They have a ton of Liberty Fund books scattered all over the store that were not there when I was there last time. There is a lot of good seventeenth century English stuff, a lot of colonial writings, many Mises volumes, Mandeville, some Grotius, some Tullock, etc. I didn't end up getting any of it but there is a truck-load of it. Either Liberty Fund had a big sale or some local guy that had a bunch of Liberty Fund books sold his library to them - I'm not sure, but it was pretty cool that they had all that.

A New Earth?

Twenty light years away. I was shocked by what Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California Santa Cruz, had to say about it: "Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it". I suppose he wouldn't say that without some cause, but making a claim like that about a single planet seems a little much to me.

I don't know much about the dissipation rates of signals we send out, but if this "Goldilocks planet" (not too hot, not too cold - good for liquid water) is twenty light years away, we need to be bombarding it with signals. If there is intelligent life there to receive it and send something back, we could hear back before I die.

... oh and just to keep this all economics-relevant... bombarding planets with signals that will take no less than 40 years to hear back from is not something that market forces can optimally provide. Markets are tools - and you use the right tool for the right job. You don't use a hammer to bang in a screw and then yap about how dedicated you are to hammers - that makes you look dumb.

Some alien updates

1. Retired airmen recently discussed UFO sightings at nuclear facilities around the country, going back decades. Testimony of trained professionals like this is always interesting because they know much better what they could be looking at than the average person. Then again, seeing this stuff near military bases (and high-security ones at that) always makes things difficult. On the one hand, it makes sense - that's exactly where you'd expect aliens to hover. On the other hand, it's exactly where you'd expect new military technology to be. We've reached an impasse and all we can really do is speculate. I found it interesting that (1.) there was malfunctioning of the nuclear systems themselves, (2.) this apparently happened to the Soviets too, and (3.) UFOs were seen decades ago doing things we still can't do now... even if this was secret new military technology, you'd think that something we saw a long time ago would be used and known about now.

2. The UN apparently appointed an official ambassador to alien visitors. The only problem is, the appointed ambassador appeared to be out of the loop on the decision, and SETI has some bruised egos over it.




All of this is great stuff because right now I'm reading Lovecraft's The Whisperer in the Darkness (1931) - which is a part of his transition from supernatural horror stories to science fiction and explicit extraterrestrial stories. In The Whisperer in the Darkness, we're faced with the fungi from Yuggoth (also the subject of an earlier poem by Lovecraft). Yuggoth is intended to be Pluto (identified in the book as the undiscovered planet beyond Neptune) which was discovered in February 1930, the very month Lovecraft began writing the story. I'm really enjoying it - it's shaping up to be one of my favorite stories from him yet - better even than The Shadow Out of Time, which I enjoyed a lot.

New commenter with some great blogs

Ahtzib, a new commenter, has great detailed thoughts on the second post on Lovecraft and race, and the post on alien skepticism that are worth going back to look at.

He also has two great blogs on these topics. First, Miskatonic Museum has interesting thoughts on the Lovecraft universe. Recent posts include a discussion of the sources that Lovecraft used to learn about cannibalism, the geography of Lovecraft (i.e. - where exactly is R'lyeh?), and artifacts that look an awful lot like Cthulu. The second blog is Spooky Paradigm, which is dedicated to UFOs and cryptozoology - it seems like a skeptical, speculative, interesting approach he takes to it all (which I think is precisely the right balance to strike).

Both of these blogs are on my blogroll now, and if anything interesting comes up I'll repost it here.