An interesting recent interview (7th July, 11 minutes) of Dr. Andrey Kinkelstein, the Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Applied Astronomy, about the scientific reasoning behind his controversial statement that in 20 years, humanity will discover aliens and they are likely to look much like humans….
This biologic issue of potential convergent evolution is in line with what I wrote my document that I recently posted (UFOs and Exogenous Intelligence Encounters): Can the alien physiologies be conformed or a close approximation of our own? Generally, scientists scorn the movie industry’s simplistic notion of the extraterrestrial, whose anatomy is invariably inspired by the body plan of Homo sapiens. The debate seems to be still open. After the Royal Society’s interview of the leading evolutionary paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris, this is the turn of A. Kinkelstein to mention that an extraterrestrial form will “definitely be well-known to us”. In his opinion “…life and intelligence, should they exist elsewhere at all, should be highly human-like”.
A second interesting comment relates to a program of reporting in the USSR sightings of UFOs. This program, called “the net”, was allegedly composed of two parts: The Defence Minstry’s net looked for what might be traces of new types of weaponry; and the other part, the so-called “AN Net”, looked for phenomena previously unknown to humankind. According to Kinkelstein, for more than 20 years, the USSR General Staff had issued an order to various units under the Defence’s Ministry’s command to report any UFO. Apparently they detected approximately 1000 unusual phenomena, only two of which remain unexplained to this day.
Besides the fact that this is the first time that this news come out (but I might be wrong), it could be hoped that one day the program’s archives are released.
Finally and more importantly, what about the two remaining unexplained cases ? We don’t need hundreds of them…one or two sufficiently documented could be enough for attracting the attention of the scientific community…