Do you believe in aliens? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about an encounter with aliens and what could exist in our massive universe.
Do you believe in aliens? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about an encounter with aliens and what could exist in our massive universe.
* Share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
Camp Adventure: A Kids Summer Camp Podcast
S2 E04 An Encounter with Aliens
[INTRODUCTION]
[bugle plays a welcome]
Louis: Welcome to Camp Adventure.
The camp in your bedroom or living room. The camp that's in the bus or in the car.
Camp Adventure is for everyone, no matter who you are.
This week's theme is An Encounter with Aliens .
My name is Counselor Louis. And I'm so excited to be here at camp with you.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention it's evening time here at camp and we always get a campfire going. And my favorite thing about campfires are campfire stories. And you know who stories are the best? Well, Camp Counselor Ben.
So Camp Counselor Ben, take it away.
[WELCOME]
Ben: All right, welcome back campers. I hope that you're doing well.
It's time for our evening check-in because it's time to gather around the crackling campfire, to get nice and cozy and settled in. This is the kind of storytime adventure where you got to, you got to just sort of settle in and listen to the story.
That is an adventure in and of itself, isn't it? It's challenging sometimes. You find out interesting things, discover stuff. That's great.
All right. Well, we're talking aliens today. How about that? Aliens from outer space.
Ever think about aliens? Where they might come from or what they might look like?
You probably heard stories or seen movies or shows about aliens.
Well, we're going to read from the book that we did already, our other story. The book is titled Strange But True. And it's written by Catherine Hulick and illustrated, some really cool pictures, and it, illustrated by Gordy Wright.
We're going to start that. And I am interested, I'm wondering, what you are thinking about aliens here before we even begin. I wonder if you've had any experiences with aliens. If you have please write to the show and let us know. We would love to know about that at Camp Adventure.
But, we're going to read this story and I think there's some challenging and really interesting parts of it. Maybe some surprises along the way.
Alright. Sound good? Here we go.
[STORYTIME]
Ben: “An Encounter with Aliens” by Katherine Hulick.
A car drives along an empty stretch of highway late one night in the mountains of New Hampshire USA. Out of nowhere, a bright light appears could it be a falling star?
It's September 19th, 1961, and Betty and Barney Hill are on their way home from vacation in Montreal, Canada. Strangely the bright light seems to follow them. Then the car starts to vibrate and then the Hills here are strains buzzing and beeping sound, and then a feeling of drowsiness washes over them. They're tired. Suddenly they find themselves 35 miles away, further south. They have vague memories of taking a sudden turn and encountering a roadblock, but several hours have passed that they cannot explain. They arrive home around dawn. When they get there, they discover that Barney's binocular strap is broken and his shoes are scuffed up. Betty later notices that her dress is torn and stained.
Ten days later, Betty starts having vivid dreams about going through an alien abduction.
Abduction means they took her away and brought her back or at least that's what she's thinking. Let's keep reading.
A few years later, under hypnosis the Hills recall a horrifying ordeal. In this memory, the light drops rapidly and a large disc shaped ship hovers overhead. Barney gets out and peers through his binoculars at an astonishing sight. Almost a dozen figures in black uniforms stare out from inside the spacecraft. The figures who look like humans, take Barney and Betty inside. They bring them to different rooms and put each of them through a series of medical tests and procedures. Betty cries out when her examiner pierces her belly button with a sharp needle, but then she talks to her captors. They show her a book full of strange symbols and a map of stars. After one of the hypnosis sessions, Betty draws the star map that her captors showed her. The map seems to represent the Zeta Reticuli system. A pair of dim stars located around 230 trillion miles from the earth. Could the Hills have been victims of an alien abduction?
Matthew: I know the answer to this and the answer is ABSOLUTELY! What else could it have been?! Strange, human-like figures? Poked and prodded in some kind of weird experiment? Strange symbols and star maps?
I mean… I’ve seen enough sci-fi movies to know an alien abduction when I hear one.
And this happened over 60 years ago.
So… yeah… did they even have alien movies then? Maybe this is where all of those alien movies take inspiration from, right?
It’s gotta be real.
GOTTA be.
Right?
Oh! Sorry, Ben. Sorry for interrupting. We can all listen and find out.
Ben: The Hills experience became famous, but it was not the first or the last in alien encounter to capture the public's imagination. Many people have seen lights or flying objects that they cannot explain. In June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he saw nine objects flying in formation, along the Ridge line of the mountains. He described them as looking like saucers, skipping across the water. The name “flying saucer” stuck. And the news of this sighting spread around the world.
A few weeks later, a rancher named Mack Brazel brought some unusual debris to the sheriff of Roswell, New Mexico: tin foil, rubber, and pieces of a strangely lightweight, yet strong, reflective material. Brazel had found the stuff scattered around his property and wondered if it could be the wreckage of a flying saucer. The nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base had no idea what to make of the debris either. They told the media that they had recovered a flying disc. Shortly afterwards, higher up government officials claimed it was just a crashed weather balloon, but those who had seen weather balloons before didn't believe it. Was this a government conspiracy to hide a real alien landing?
Soon after these two incidents, sightings of flying saucers began flooding in from all over the United States. In 1952, the air force launched project blue book to investigate what they dubbed UFOs, short for “unidentified flying objects”.
Though this investigation ended, sightings have continued. Today, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) logs over 500 reports every month of sightings from around the world. Could all of these people, including the Hills, be wrong?
Louis: Well, hello again. It is I, Counselor Louis.
So what do you think? Are aliens real? Or do you think they're not?
Well, while you think about it, let's take a quick break. Just move around, wiggle a little, think about it. And when we come back, we'll hear the rest of this story.
Be right back.
[BREAK]
Louis: And we're back. Hello there!
So, I saved you a spot by the campfire. So just come on over, get comfortable so we can hear the rest of the story from Counselor Ben.
Ben, it's back to you.
[STORYTIME CONTINUED]
Ben: In many cases, people really do see strange lights or shapes in the sky. But that does not mean extra terrestrials have visited the earth. There are other more rational explanations. For example, the crashed craft at Roswell was actually a top secret us government attempt to spy on the Soviet union during the cold war. It was a balloon carrying a sensing device, complete with microphones and a disc shaped antennae. Most of the officials who looked at the debris knew nothing about that new technology, so they wrongly assumed that it was not human.
Human technology and natural events get mistaken for UFOs all the time. Common false alarms include stars, planets, unusual clouds, mirages, flares, balloons, rocket launches, drones and more. How do people mistake these things for an alien spacecraft? Well, it's important to understand that what you see is not always actually what's out there in the world. “It's a recreation in your brain of what you think you're seeing”, explains James McGaha, a retired US Air Force major and astronomer.
The brain is a machine that works to keep you safe. When early humans had to watch out for dangerous animals, it was safer to believe that a rustling sound or a shadow was a beast than to assume it was just the wind or a trick of the light. The brain seeks edges, shapes, patterns, and connections. It often finds things that could be considered a threat–like an alien aircraft–even when they aren't really there. For example, the objects that Arnold saw were probably a mirage, says McGaha. Mirages are illusions that happen when light bends as it passes through layers of cold and warm air.
Matthew: Awwww!
Is it wrong to want aliens to exist?
Like… it’s okay if sometimes it’s a weather balloon or a trick of the eye or some other explanation, but it’s a great big universe.
SO big!
And SO much of it is unexplored. There’s got to be life out there, right?
I mean… I don’t know if anything out there asks the same questions we do here on this rock that we’re all on, hurtling through space. But if they’re at all curious, of course they’d want to know if life exists elsewhere, right?
And then of course they’d go looking, right? I mean, if I had the advanced technology I know I certainly would!
Ben, tell me there’s hope here? Tell me there’s still a chance of life beyond Earth?
I mean, did Betty and Barney Hill make it all up? Or did they really see something?
Ben: So what really happened to the Hills that night? Something certainly made their journey take a lot longer than expected. It was late at night and they had been driving for a very long time. They remembered feeling drowsy, which is a common sign of a state of reduced awareness called “highway hypnosis”.
Perhaps they drifted off the road or they took a wrong turn and got out of the car while trying to figure out what happened. This could explain the reported damage to their shoes, to the binocular strap and to her dress. A disturbing event like this, coupled with Betty's interest in UFOs, may have inspired her to dream about an alien abduction. She shared her dreams with her husband and later these were recalled and new details added under hypnosis, which made the dreams feel like real memories. We'll never know for sure, but perhaps this is the most likely explanation.
The truth is that there are many UFO and alien encounter stories, which are not easily explained away. Believers like to offer “unexplained” sightings as evidence that something otherworldly must be happening. But “unexplained” does not mean “unexplainable”.
A lack of information may make it impossible to identify the real cause of a strange light. Casual observers. Often don't note the time, the date location, distance, speed, duration, or the other facts which could solve the mystery.
And in very rare cases, a strange light remains mysterious even after some serious analysis. In the remote valley of Hessdallen in Norway, balls of lights have been appearing, hovering and flashing regularly since the 1980s. Some UFO enthusiasts have claimed the valley as a portal into other worlds and some skeptics say it's all a hoax.
Meanwhile, a small group of scientists has been methodically measuring the lights and collecting data since 1983. One of their theories suggests that the valley may act as a giant natural battery. The rocks on one side of the river contained copper and those on the other side, contain iron and zinc. And sulfur from an abandoned mine flows through a river at the bottom of the valley. This unique arrangement may produce an electrical field, but the field on its own wouldn't make visible light. It needs some other energy source.
This may come from the sun. When its activity increases, it pelts the earth, the sun does, with bursts of radiation. Sometimes scientists suspect that this may spark lights in that valley.
The source of the Hessdallen lights remains a mystery, but extra terrestrial visitors are very unlikely to be the explanation. The truth is that the natural world is an amazing place that we still do not fully understand.
Real aliens.
Someday people may encounter alien life. It's not impossible. “We are beginning our own exploration of space so it's entirely reasonable that there would be others who have done so,” says James Oberg, a retired NASA engineer. Since life evolved on earth, the same process could certainly take place elsewhere in the universe. It is a huge place.
“There are billions and billions of galaxies. Each one with about 200 billion stars, just like our sun”, says Eddie Itzarie, a solar system ambassador for NASA. Planets circle some of those stars and some of those planets may have the right conditions for life.
However, to arrive at earth, an alien species would need to develop enough intelligence to build technology more advanced than our own. Plus they would need to explore far beyond their home planet to discover the earth. So most astrophysicists are not expecting to encounter intelligent life anytime soon. Rather, they focus on looking for planets that have the conditions to support any kind of life.
One of the most important ingredients for life as we know it is liquid water.
In our own solar system, liquid water lurks beneath ice caps on moons of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as on Mars. If life does thrive in these hidden waters, it is most likely microscopic. Bacteria and other microbes can survive in extreme conditions on earth. So it is reasonable to expect that they are much more common in the universe than more complex life forms like us (human beings). Perhaps one day, we will be the aliens who visit another planet and abduct it's microbial life.
The end.
Louis: Well, what an amazing story!
I told you, counselor Ben has some of the best stories and as a lover of science, it is always amazing to hear about other planets and the possibility of aliens.
This week's theme has been absolutely amazing. (Well, just like all the others.) And next week's theme is “Teamwork makes the dream work”. And I'm so excited about that because I think it is true.
So before we go, I want to let you know it has been super duper, fantastic spending time with you. And I want to kick it over to Camp Counselor Matthew so he can say a few words.
[CLOSING CREDITS]
Matthew: Thank you, Louis! And thank you Ben for sharing that story with us. As the campfire’s dying down, I’ve just got a few reminders and bits of information to share.
A reminder to all campers to share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.
Camp Adventure is written by Ben Tertin with help from the A Kids Podcast About team.
Permission to use excerpts from Strange But True, written by Kathryn Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright, was granted by the publisher Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, an imprint of The Quarto Group.
The show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner.
Audio production is by Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
See you back at camp next week for another adventure!