UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

One of the weirdest alien abduction accounts there is began in the early morning hours of April 6, 1974, in the remote farming town of Kitami, in Hokkaido, Japan. On this dark morning, a farmer by the name of Yoshihiro Fujiwara was sound asleep in his bed when he was pulled from his dreams by the sudden pounding of someone at his door and his dog barking and howling outside. Considering his was a fairly isolated farmstead in the middle of nowhere, it was odd indeed to get visitors at 3 in the morning, and the rather annoyed Fujiwara at first thought it was merely some kids messing around. There would have been no reason in this safe little hamlet to think it was anything else, and he trudged to the door to fling it upon to a sight that would change him forevermore. And so would begin one of the most flat-out bizarre and controversial alien encounter reports that Japan has ever seen.

There standing in the chilly early morning darkness was a diminutive, 3-foot-tall high being dressed in a clear one-piece suit that seemed to be made of transparent vinyl, and the thing itself was only passingly humanoid, resembling what the witness would later call a combination of “starfish and human,” with four tentacle-like appendages, a bulbous head reminiscent of an octopus clad in a blue helmet, slanted eyes, and a strange V-shaped set of nostrils, the whole of it covered with mottled brown and slimy, bumpy toad-like skin and rested on two of its stalk-like limbs and rounded nubs for feet. It was completely silent and motionless, except for its weird conical helmet had antenna jutting from it, which generated a visible electrical humming charge that ominously rippled through the air.

The startled farmer and this anomalous being stood there for several moments merely staring at each other, perhaps each as surprised as the other, before that strange frozen moment in time was shattered by a sudden movement from the creature as it flicked one of its tendrils to point up towards the sky. This was followed by a ray of blinding light that washed over everything, generating a profound heat that sent the frightened farmer reeling back into his house to slam the door shut. A quick look outside showed that the brilliant orange colored light was emanating from an illuminated disc-like craft that measured around 26 feet across and was apparently shooting off beams of orange light.

If Fujiwara thought he was safe merely gawking from his window at this outlandish sight he was wrong, as he suddenly felt his feet being pulled forward by some inexplicable force. At first he was merely dragged across the floor, much to his amazement, but then he allegedly began to hover, before finally being levitated fully off the ground to go flying out of the window and towards the inscrutable floating disc with its scintillating beams of light. He was drawn faster and faster towards the object, seemingly on a collision course, but rather than smack against its metallic side he found himself being drawn through its walls to be dumped upon the floor of the craft.

The interior of the craft was described as being bright blue, with some sort of writing on the walls that the farmer could not fathom and the whole of it all overlaid with a repulsive stink that made him feel lightheaded. It was then that two creatures identical to the one who had freaked him out at his doorstep approached him to tell him telepathically, “No danger. We promise to release you at your home.” As peaceful as this sounded, the two entities nevertheless made to grab him and forcefully hold him down, upon which Fujiwara felt the fear left him and his survival instinct take over, tearing away and dashing through an open hatchway to go careening through air to the ground below, which luckily for him was only around 10 feet down.

Fujiwara vaguely recognized that he was around 2 miles from where he had left, and went running wildly towards the house of a person he knew in the area, who let him in. It was at their house that he would realize that a full hour had passed, even though to him it seemed that it had been mere moments since he had been taken aboard the strange craft by its odd octopoid inhabitants. Although the experience had been baffling and not a little terrifying, Fujiwara was at least relieved that it was over, and he quietly went back to his home to try and find some way to get over what had just occurred. Little did he know at the time that it was not quite over just yet.

The very next evening, Fujiwara was sitting alone in his house, his thoughts no doubt wandering back to those strange tentacled dwarves and their otherworldly craft, when he was suddenly overcome with a sharp pain worming its way through his ears and fingertips. He felt himself slipping into a daze, and for some reason his hands took on a life of their own and began to scrawl strange letters onto a piece of paper of their own volition. This was all followed by a voice that reverberated through his skull, which commanded him, “When the disc lands on the mountain you will come and board by yourself,” which was accompanied by a potent vision of the area they wished him to come to, left blazing into his mind. After that the pain abruptly left, leaving Fujiwara there shaken and with bizarre hieroglyphics etched onto paper by his hand but the meanings of which he did not know.

The farmer took the voice’s command as being the nearby Nikoro Mountain, and although he was still frightened by his ordeal he felt a compulsion to go there to see what would happen. To this end, he gathered up some supplies and two companions to join him and they set out, unsure of what awaited them up on that lonely peak. Fujiwara apparently then made his way alone to the area he had seen in his vision, where there awaited that same luminous disc-shaped craft and he boarded it without a fight. Once aboard, the aliens then supposedly took him on a flight into space, flying around the moon and around the earth twice, all within about the space of an hour. When they returned from their dizzying journey the farmer then lost consciousness, after which he was apparently just left lying there on the mountainside for his friends to find.

This wasn’t even the end of it all, as Fujiwara would claim that the last trip had left him with strange telekinetic powers that allowed him to move objects and bend spoons, and he was telepathically invited on yet another excursion on April 13, 1974. This time the bizarre beings took him on a journey that went around the planet Jupiter, as well as the moon of Saturn, Titan, where one of the creatures would allegedly go out to retrieve a rock from the surface as a souvenir for him to keep.

This mysterious rock would go on to prove to be rather controversial, indeed. It was sent to scientists for analysis, but came back as just one of the many common rocks from a Kitami cave, which brought a fair amount of ridicule down on Fujiwara and his astounding tale. In the meantime, the farmer would begin to address himself as the earthly representative of the “Summon Call Space Union,” and he claimed that his telepathic powers increased exponentially, allowing him to levitate objects, predict catastrophes, and even teleport across vast distances, of which he would say:

I can teleport to a star 250 million light years away in 6 minutes. My role is delaying natural disasters such as earthquakes and eruptions.

He would also claim that he could actually travel within the earth to stop volcanic eruptions, and pull together tectonic plates to prevent earthquakes. It is all totally bizarre to say the least, but one Japanese UFO researcher named Ninichi Arai has offered evidence that there was something to this when he found that several other locals who did not know Fujiwara also reported seeing strange lights in the skies during the same time frame, and there were others who claimed to have been first hand witnesses to the farmer’s mental powers, somewhat corroborating his weird tales. Was this all the doing of entities from another world or merely the tripping of balls? Is there anything to this account or is Fujiwara a a disturbed individual and unreliable witness? It is hard to know for sure, but it is a wild ride all the same, and goes to show that alien abduction accounts can be truly surreal affairs to be sure.

Why is this important?

In the next decade, we’ll be peering at spectra and sometimes images of extrasolar Venus-type planets that may or may not have harbored technological civilizations for a few thousand years at least, Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California --- Riverside, told me.

Would a putative alien civilization on a nearby, habitable exoVenus even be aware of such coming catastrophe?

Not necessarily, says Kane.

We are very fortunate to have a Venus in our solar system; essentially a planet the same size and mass as Earth, but at a much more advanced stage of planetary and atmospheric evolution than our own, says Kane.

“If we didn't have our Venus, some of my colleagues have said that then an advanced runaway greenhouse would have been extremely difficult to predict,” said Kane.

That’s because, as he points out, the physics to make such predictions are very advanced and, in fact, even today’s best atmosphere models have trouble accounting for Venus’ current state.

Even if an advanced civilization understood how stars evolve and that this evolution would have an adverse effect on their planet's oceans, says Kane, they might not understand the full implications of how environmentally-hostile their planet would become.

Simulation of lightning on Venus.

CREDIT: ESA

For exoplanets, thecurrent detection methods are more sensitive to planets close to their host stars, meaning that we're better at discovering Venus analogs than Earth analogs, says Kane. We, thus, expect to be discovering and characterizing many runaway greenhouse planets in the coming years, he says.

But some of these could have previously been habitable, says Kane.

Estimates range from 400 million to one billion for the duration of clement conditions on Venus.

Four hundred million years, or perhaps even one billion years of clement Venusian conditions are much too little for the evolution of a high-tech intelligent species, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Germany’s Technical University Berlin, told me.

For Earth, intelligent life took roughly 4 billion years to evolve, says Kane. But he notes that there is a large range of stellar ages for the exoVenus host stars he and colleagues have discovered. And they lie mostly in the one to ten billion-year range. So, Kane thinks that many of these Venus-like planets will be more than 4 billion years old and could well have evolved intelligent life on them at some point.

ExoVenuses that were paired with lower mass stars would have had more time to play with before their parent stars robbed them of a habitable zone. That’s because as Kane points out, high-mass stars evolve very quickly and simply do not spend enough time on the hydrogen-burning main sequence. Thus, an exoVenus’ time in the habitable zone when orbiting a high-mass star should be relatively short-lived.

Venus has what is known as a "stagnant lid" surface, meaning that it's not broken up into plates like earth's surface but instead is mostly a solid surface ruptured by areas of volcanism, Kane explains. This means that Venus underwent a catastrophic resurfacing event about a billion years ago. This likely largely erased any record of its surface conditions.

“We can gain some insight from evidence in the atmosphere, particularly from isotopes that trace the presence of possible liquid water on the surface, said Kane. “But it is difficult to know for certain.”

This uncertainty, he says, has led to a lot of speculation regarding our own Venus’ past habitability, with some researchers contending that the planet may have had a temperate surface as recently as a billion years ago.

But the Sun’s increased luminosity soon caught up with our sister planet.

Would alien civilizations living on their own Venus-type planets be helpless in staving off this inevitable climate change? Or could they geo-engineer their way out of an eventual runaway greenhouse?

If so, Kane says it would need to be a coordinated planet-wide effort. He says this would entail not just extracting carbon dioxide (CO2) from a Venus-like atmosphere, but also storing it in a way that is sustainable.

Earth's own thermostat is sensitive to changes in temperature and CO2 levels and adjusts itself accordingly over million-year time scales, Kane explains. If geoengineering is used to compensate for breaking that delicate balance, he says then that civilization will have to take over to maintain the planet’s thermostatic cycle.

Any disruption to their geoengineering efforts would immediately cause the planet to return to its journey towards a runaway greenhouse. So, they would see it coming, Kane says. But he says by that stage it's probably much easier to leave the planet than manually take over its geological processes.

Kane’s hope is that once things get desperate, such threatened alien civilizations would be able to move to another suitable terrestrial planet a bit farther out from their parent star.