Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan was an astronomer affiliated with the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.¹ At Harvard University, his mentor was Donald Menzel, described as essentially the Carl Sagan of his own day.² In his 1975 paper on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Sagan said the subject had recently evolved from a largely disreputable pseudoscience into a speculative endeavour within the boundaries of science,³ and considered the 1975 Royal Society discussion meeting itself an indication of that growing respectability.⁴ He calculated the odds of an extraterrestrial civilisation existing within the Solar System at about 10 to the power of minus 7.⁵ The paper’s illustrations included a Mariner 9 photograph of Phobos Mars, the heavily cratered moon of Mars, shown against black space.⁶

Beyond radio astronomy, Sagan’s SETI-related work included physical messages sent into space. The Pioneer plaque was designed by Sagan together with Linda Sagan and Frank Drake,⁷ engraved on a 15 by 22.5 centimetre gold-anodised aluminium plate attached to the antenna support struts of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft.⁸ It depicted the hydrogen hyperfine transition, a radial pulsar map marking the Sun’s location, line drawings of a man and a woman, and a diagram of the Solar System showing the spacecraft’s trajectory.⁹ Sagan and his colleagues considered it appropriate that a simple cosmic greeting card accompany the craft despite the remoteness of the chance it would ever be intercepted.¹⁰ The name of the field itself later became a point of dispute: Richard C. Hoagland objected to the term, which he regarded as a moniker developed by Sagan for radio-astronomy searches, arguing it lent unnecessary credibility to work Hoagland considered a waste of time or an outright scam,¹¹ and believed the term would give Sagan unearned influence over what Hoagland called the new science of extraterrestrial archaeology.¹²

On extraterrestrial visitation of Earth, Sagan said that such visits, if they occurred at all, would be very rare.¹³ His personal view was that none of the claims of past extraterrestrial visitation - whether historical artefacts and legends, Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings, or patterns in ionospheric echo delay times - had anything approaching compelling evidence.¹⁴ As a Cornell University professor, Sagan stated many times that there was no evidence that unidentified aerial objects and visitors exist.¹⁵

He told John Brandenberg, regarding Brandenberg’s work on Cydonia, that the question was not whether Brandenberg was right or wrong, and that Sagan himself was not even in the conversation.¹⁶ Hoagland has said that, while helping Mark Carlotto publish papers, Sagan simultaneously attacked the Cydonia issue publicly in a piece Hoagland characterised as disinformation in Parade (magazine).¹⁷ According to Dark Mission, Sagan eventually gave up trying to get Louis Friedman to look at the Cydonia images, and told Brandenberg and David Webb he would deny the meeting had taken place if he were ever asked about it.¹⁸ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) later issued documents responding to letters from Robert Roe, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, using Sagan’s Parade magazine article as a model.¹⁹ Sagan was also a member of the O’Brien Committee, which included him as a prominent astronomer from Cornell University.²⁰

The Mars Pathfinder landing site became known as Sagan Memorial Station, named after Sagan.²¹ In December 2000, after seeing Glass Tunnels of Mars images on Hoagland’s website, Arthur C. Clarke made a fuss about them at an event hosted by Sagan’s Planetary Society.²² Sagan’s popular writing also reached readers well outside academic or UFO-research circles: Tyler D. found and read a copy of Sagan’s book on the cosmos and space travel, Cosmos, that someone had left in his office,²³ and said it helped him settle down and sleep well, becoming his saving grace during a difficult period.²⁴ Reading the book changed Tyler D.’s life and started him on a path of fusing what he had learned in the space programme with his ideas about biotechnologies to form companies that helped heal people.²⁵