EXTROPIA’S CURIOUS SCIENCE
“CRITTERS”
Welcome to my series devoted to fringe science, where we find crazy ideas that might just be profound insights into the nature of reality, or just plain crazy.
By definition, nobody knows what a ‘UFO’ is. That, after all, is why they are called ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’. Sometimes, sightings of skyborn objects turn out to be something familiar, such as the planet Venus. Sometimes they are shown to be fakes. But when such objects cannot be dismissed as by either a naturalist explanation or accusations of fakery, people turn to other possibilities. Perhaps they are top-secret experimental military craft? Maybe they are alien spaceships?
You might think that those were the most radical suggestions. But, you’d be wrong. For, in the 1970s, somebody thought he knew what UFOs were, and it was an explanation so fringe even Ufologists consider it ‘fringe’.
That someone was James Constable, author of a book called ‘The Cosmic Pulse of Life’. In this book, he suggested that UFOs were not machines (alien or otherwise) but a form of primitive life. Suggesting they were colossal amoeba-like organisms, Constable named these hitherto unknown form of life ‘Critters’. In the aforementioned book, he wrote, “critters appear to be an elemental branch of evolution probably older than most forms of life on Earth...They will probably one day be better classified as belonging to the field of macrobiology...inhabiting the aerial ocean we call the sky”.
Given that his theory proposed that UFOs were actually colossal primitive lifeforms roaming the skies as whales swim the oceans, you might be wondering why passengers and pilots don’t spot examples of macrobiology from airplane windows. Constable had an answer for that. He believed they usually existed in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, making them invisible to human sight. But, very occasionally, they stray into our visual field, and when we see them we mistake them for UFOs.
Constable was so convinced that Critters existed, he went looking for them with a special camera, fitted with high-speed infrared film and an ultra-violet filter. What he managed to capture were floating amoebas, the size of airships. Or, rather, that is what his photographs appear to show if you are willing to use a lot of imagination. Cynics would say these photographs show nothing other than the discolouration and stains that are a consequence of the development process.
Believe it or not, Constable’s ‘critters’ theory gained some followers, including one zoologist who went as far as giving them a scientific name, calling this supposed branch of life ‘Amoeba Constablea’ after their ‘discoverer’. And now, with the advent of digital cameras and smartphones, some people have claimed that there are also forms of life than can only be seen via digital devices. They call them ‘Rods’. But not everyone is convinced that what they are capturing are indeed a whole new order of life, dismissing such images and recordings as nothing more than dust motes, insects and other ordinary things leaving trails and stuff on film that overactive imaginations are interpreting as ‘unknown life’.
Or, maybe I am guilty of a lack of imagination and there really are giant amoeba-like forms of life than normally remain in the infrared spectrum but occasionally pop into our visual field, whereupon they are mistaken for UFOs? Hmmmm….I think even Fox Mulder would call that theory far out!
REFERENCES
‘Far Out’ by Mark Pilkington