Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Impish humor suffuses Achenbach’s ‘Captured by Aliens’

Friday, Nov. 12, 1999 | 10:38 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books/magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-2446 or dickens@vegas.com

All I remember of The Incident is a retina-searing light, followed by the agony of otherworldly instruments probing every private nook of my body as I writhed in the grip of a force I couldn't overcome. Then, suddenly, the job interview was over and I was named Shelf Life columnist, which is how I happen to be here discussing Joel Achenbach's new book, "Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe" (Simon and Schuster, $25).

The subtitle suggests something of the humor that flavors Achenbach's account of the dreamers, scientists and dreaming scientists who have and are trying to determine whether humans are alone in this intelligent-life business. He lets his big cat out of the bag early: "No one on Earth knew if there were intelligent beings, or any life at all, beyond the confines of our planet," he writes, describing an old attempt to radio-scan the heavens for extraterrestrial signals. "This was true in 1975, and it remains true today."

This is Page 15. Of a 369-page book. In case you still think maybe there's a little evidence, he follows up with this, on Page 32: "You can take everything conclusively known about extraterrestrial life and fit it on the period at the end of this sentence (with room left over for about 17 angels)."

So much for not giving away the ending. Now what?

Fortunately for Achenbach -- a witty and careful writer who scribes for the Washington Post in real life -- his subject is deep and wide, encompassing legitimate scientists and the face-on-Mars crowd, NASA space exploration and dreamy plans for space stations, from Carl Sagan, the great popularizer of the cosmos, to Carl Sagan, who once proposed that the Martian moon Phobos is really an abandoned alien satellite. That's a lot of space to cover, but at least it's not empty.

So Achenbach takes us on a first-person tour of the whole ET-finding enterprise, from the budget-slashed halls of NASA to the visionary edge of the lunatic fringe. Along the way he encounters many varieties of faith, hubris, false hope, scientific vanity and stubborn belief in the face of evidence. You know, the building blocks of life here on Third Rock. "A book about aliens," he writes, "became a book about life, intelligence, postmodernism, truth, fiction, love and death, the fate of the Earth, and the destiny of our species. It expanded a lot."

While patiently airing every point of view in the field, Achenbach lets his own presence in the narrative and his many funny throwaway lines keep the mood light, the pace brisk. Of gung-ho NASA administrator Dan Goldin, he writes, "After a while with Goldin, you simply get used to the fact that he sounds like Captain Kirk, minus the clenched fist and pajama top."

Likewise, Achenbach is alert to the nuances of absurdity inherent in his subject: "The alien in the notorious Roswell 'autopsy' documentary had six fingers, which many ufologists believed was proof that it was a hoax -- because their research showed that the real Roswell aliens had only four." The same wry wit serves him well in parsing the academic and scientific politics surrounding such controversial and speculative fields of study. If he sometimes goes a quip too far, it's usually in an attempt to keep his story from getting overbearingly sciency, to ground his flighty tale in good-natured skepticism.

The impish figure of Sagan occupies a good chunk of this narrative and hangs over the rest. Sagan is a curious synthesis figure: An intelligent, learned scientist -- the emblematic scientist of his time -- he often, maddeningly, allowed his belief in extraterrestrial civilizations to color his science. He saw no reason why Fermi's Paradox -- the cosmological question, posed by Enrico Fermi, that asks, if there are advanced alien societies in the universe, where are they? -- necessarily ruled out millions of such societies. Where are they? Why, out there, somewhere.

Sagan, then, was a man of hard science ("extraordinary hypothoses demand extraordinary evidence" he once said) and a man of sunny faith (I want to believe!). He lived at the intersection of knowledge and belief through which so much heavy traffic of our times has passed. He's the ideal muse of Achenbach's tale.

Early on, the writer pins down our enduring fascination with aliens. It's a matter of scale, he argues. Most of the Big Questions involve huge concepts but very tiny elements. How was the universe born? It blew out from an infinitely dense dot of cosmic material so small as to lack dimension. How did life originate? From amino acids. Very small. Where does human consciousness come from? Something to do with patterns of electro-chemical impulses moving through brain cells.

Aliens, on the other hand, are presumably our size; at least that's what "The X-Files" tells us. So the question about whether we're alone in this vast universe -- and few of us really want to believe we are because, man, that's lonely -- may involve an answer on a scale like our own.

Never mind the possibility, floated by writer John Leonard, that aliens may appear to us as music, or a scent, or a color (that would certainly explain chartreuse). We imagine them -- no matter how slimy, tentacly, buggy, big-eyed -- to be creatures. Sorta like us.

"What I'm trying to say," Achenbach writes, "is that, even though aliens are completely strange, we can still relate to them."

Reading list

Harper's, November 1999: Despite the assaults and insults of the Internet, print isn't dead yet. Books and bookstores still appear to be going concerns, even if both are far too concerned with diet books and the reading tastes of Oprah.

Still, you never know when the tide will change, and it's in that spirit that Harper's has gathered some musings by writer William Gass under the billing, "In the age of e-hype.com, a defense of the book." Sounds great! With adolescent tech heads making paper millions on IPOs of websites that have yet to earn a penny, I'd love to see someone stick it to the New Media but good.

Alas, Gass is not our man. He's content to lazily stitch together a saggy quilt of platitudes about how books are really good because there's stuff in them you didn't know; how libraries are treasure troves of books full of stuff you didn't know; about how good language can move you.

Ooooooo-K. I naturally agree with those parts of the essay I could follow through the underbrush of verbage and eyebrow-raising metaphors (sample: "... the vowels will open and close like held hands, and the consonants will moan like maybe someone experiencing pleasure ..." Yikes!). How could I not agree? My bookish friends and I have been saying the same things for years.

As for the promised showdown between Old Media and New, it fizzes quickly. Gass mostly settles for a few observations on the supposed lack of substance of the Internet. "Words on a screen have no materiality ... Off the screen they do not exist as words."

Unless, of course, you hit the print key.