Science from another worldJean-Pierre PETIT
Senior researcher in astrophysics
Thousand years ago, human tribes suffered under privations in their struggle for life. It was therefore important, not only to know how to handle a club, but also to possess the capacity of intelligent thinking, to take in account the experience gained by the tribe and to develop links which set the bases of cooperation with other tribes. Today the human race faces a similar situation. Several civilisations could cohabit in the infinite space, beyond these societies which may be wiser and more “performing” than ours. I stand for the cosmological hypothesis which consider that the universe repeats itself an infinite times, following essentials characteristics. Other civilisations, more performing included, are written an infinite number of times on the previous and next pages of the Book of the Universe. However, we should not minimise our sacred efforts in this world, where, like tiny lights in the darkness, we rised once from the emptiness of the unconsciousness to become material beings. We must respect the will of reason and create a life which is worthy of ourselves and of the goals that we hardly perceive.
Andréi SAKHAROV
End lines of the reception speech of his Nobel prize, pronounced by his wife Helena Bonaire, in Stockholm, in 1975.
Prolog
You certainly read books dealing about UFOs. Hundred and hundred of them have been published since forty years. At the beginning, they were only relating observations of some witnesses. In the fist year, the readers were enthusiastic. And, as the time went by, they became tired of the subject: nothing came from these stories.
However, these books told about really fantastic events. The machines, the witnesses said to have seen, were flying in a way defying the law of physics. Discoidal machines flying around our planes and jets, or staying over the country, as to flout us.
After some time they began to land, and from their sides popped out, still according to the testimonies, some humanoid creatures with or without helmets, some were tall, small, handsome or ugly. Some people say they met them and even talked with theme. Some also pretend they have been taken on board of their vehicles, willingly or reluctantly.
There was some traces on the ground. Some witnesses kept visible body marks from the adventure they pretend to have been through. Sometimes, the nature itself was marked : grass no more grew during years where the unknown machine landed or other things like that.
I will not sum up here the full UFO case, mostly puzzling. In the first years, the governments, in industrialised countries, in big nations, took this affair very seriously. Some panels were created, particularly in the united states. This worrying was logic. The war was just over. The states had dissimulated along years to the whole world a huge secret : the atomic bomb, which blown out in 1945. Another nation, as the powerful USSR, which had a lot of brilliant scientists, could have also discovered something extraordinary.
Let us fonfess we all have been very surprised as we discovered, in the fifties, their large technological advance in space science.
The politicians, the army and the American scientists knew that the Russians were certainly not weak in sciences. They proved it in their past. As a matter of fact, they could quickly overtakook the Americans in nuclear weaponnery and even passed them for the hydrogen bomb, thanks to the genius of the famous sovietic academician Andrei Sakharov 2.
The government of the United States made then a lot of investigations, sending spies in USSR. We have precise information about this point, since some American lobby, picked it from the safe the CIA, after a fifteen years long fightl. In one of this flavourful text, you may find a report aboutn a meeting which took place between American and Sovietic agents, which gave something like that:
– You mean us ? We have never build such things. We thought that would come from your side.
The idea that the flying saucers could have come from Russia became then very incredible. The official in Washington felt more secure. Eventually was the question of what UFOs could have been exactly. To this purpose, in the year seventy, the professor Condon 3 wasn in charge of the UFO’s study, to perform a scientific analysis and to give his conclusions.
So did he. He declared that this phenomena was not a danger for the United States, that UFOs was not of any interest in the scientific point of view, and said the best were no stop thinking about it.
The report also recommended to constitute scientists groups which could ‘‘explain’’ all about the observation to the public (this mean to put them at the level of natural phenomenon or collective hallucinations).
The news papers relayed this official version. In parallel, some scientists gave numerous explanations concerning these observations. The physicist Philip Klass, for instance, declared that in certain conditions (not notified), the earth atmosphere could ‘condense‘ and give what he called ‘wandering plasmoids’, lightening, and that the thunder bolt was the perfect example 4. There have been a lot of similar explanations, that were taken out each time a new observation occurred.
After some time, the subject joined the classical legends as those of ghosts and sea-snake, Nessie, inhabitant of the Loch Ness, in Scotland. It is true that, at this period, a lot of people began to write fabulous stories about UFOs.
The French Jacques Vallée, installed for a long time on the western coast of the States, tried to link the phenomenons to the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin and to the elves of the middle age. Some sects appeared, where adepts were waiting faithfully the landing of extraterrestrians, good and saving.
Of course, all that acted wonderfully t as a foil to the intellectuals and scientists, like pseudo scientific books, written by pseudo scientists. Today, the UFO problem is fully integrated to the folklore in a way which seems non-reversible. The scientist have a full of ready-to-use explanations to these questions. As for the army, they now have a new interpretation of the testimonies, based on the theme of the radar-invisible aircrafts, build with black programs funding. As the street man knows nothing about this subject, he still can imagine that what people observed corresponds to a ultra-sophisticated technology, kept under secret for security reasons.
Until the years 1975, I have never been specially interested by the UFO case. As a scientist, I did not know more than the man of the street and I considered the whole with an amused smile. I also never have been witness of anything worth being reported in this domain. I met, as every one, people saying to have seen things more or less strange. The books of the ‘ufologist’ felt from my hands. But one day, the hazard made me entering in the world of UFOs.
Nineteen years later, I am still dealing with. And I think to be a good scientist, with feet well anchored on the floor.
A strange problem
My friend Maurice was, like me, a scientist. He worked in a laboratory near mine, the laboratory of Spatial Astronomy of Marseilles. I was jealous of his way of leaving, always hanging large observation devices to big balloons. Launching this objects in the open air should be an exciting activity. On my side, I was astrophysicist at the Marseille observatory and my personal Universe was limited to a piece of paper, full of mathematic symbols and to the screen of a computer.
One day, he entered my office, handing a packet of bad photocopies, in Spanish.
– Jean-Pierre, I know you have better knowledge in physics than I have, please tell me what you think about all that. I am a little doubtful.
I had a look to the documents. This began by an introduction where the author was explaining that he came from a planet called UMMO, located fifteen light-years from Earth. His brothers and himself, would have taken contact with our planet in spring 1950, landing on a mountain, not far from Digne, in the south of France. The members of the expedition would have dug a cavity, by melting the rocks, within some hours, and would have settled there to study the surrounding population.
Why not ? But this was not a sufficient reason for being impressed. The following was more of interest. The other text, published by other contactees were generally very poor, this one was full of technical precision concerning the vehicles which brought them on Earth. Curious, I read the sheets. For the first time, this was not sounding like idiocy.
The hazard did so that in the former years, I worked a lot in a top technological field, the so called magnetohydrodynamic (in short MHD). At he beginning, I was an engineer for aeronautics. I knew the quite well every thing connected to aerodynamic, sub or supersonic flows.
I learned in my University, that when the sound barrier was passed, a shock wave system formed around the jet. These waves, which are responsible, when they reach the ground, of breaking window glasses, and kill your ears.
The machine used by those who called themselves ‘Los Ummitas’, was able, still according to the author of the documents, to travel at low altitude with a speed 5 equivalent to Mach 15, without producing shock waves, this means noiseless.
I knew that some people said to have seen such peculiar engines accelerating and flying with considerable velocoties in dense air. The night, they emitted a powerful light. In the framework of classical fluids dynamics, all that was nothing but a nonsense and a famous french academician, Evry Schatzman, used to say that ufos were nothing but hallucinations and fancy stories, not real objects.
But the text was explaining why the engine could travel to such a speed without making bangs : it was flying by sucking the air in front of it with the help of strong electromagnetic forces.
The hazard, as I already told you, made that I did, ten years before, some experiments in MHD, at the laboratory of fluid mechanics of Marseilles, before joining the observatory where I am still working today. We had there a supersonic wind tunnel somehow special, which could spit out gases very hot and dense, so hot that were good electrically conducting material.
We could then install some electrodes, in the pipe where the gas was rushing at a speed of 2700 meters per seconds. Powering these electrodes, we could make some current flowing in the gas. The pipe was also fitted with a strong magnet, which was creating a field of twenty thousands Gauss.
All good physicists know that when a current flows, in a fluid, a current perpendicular to the magnetic field direction, one can observed Lorentz force. You may verify it by using salted or acid water (such that the current may better flow inside) and a strong enough magnet.
Fig. 1 : A MHD accelerator
Simple and efficient. On figure 1 you can see the experimental apparatus. It is a sort of channel in which the water, saturated with salt, or mixed with chloryde acid, in order to get a better conductivity, flows.
Under this channel, a strong enough magnet is placed, creating a magnetic field directed vertically. In the channel, pressed on the sides, two wall-electrodes, connected to a generator. The schema on the right indicates the direction of the forces, according to the one of the magnetic field and of the current, following the rule of the three fingers (right hand).
Figure 1 bis : the three finger rule.
The electromagnetic force, the so called Lorentz force, acts on salted water and accelerates it. If you realise such an experimental setting which a permanent magnet and some electric supplies, you will speed up your water, even if the velocity will not reach more than few centimetres per seconds, because of the relative weakness of your magnet.
In my old laboratory, we had devices of another type. Instead of water we were working on high temperature gases, and so with a good conductivity 6. The intensity of the current in the pipe reached several thousandsf amperes. With our strong magnetic field, created by coils, the gas entering our MHD accelerator, with a speed of two thousand and seven hundreds meters per seconds,went out, ten centimetres farther, with a velocity of height thousand meters per seconds ! These experiments were performed at the institute for fluids mechanics of Marseille in 1967, and I think we were the first in the world to reach such tremendous accelerations 7.
The other way round, a gas transiting in our setup with supersonic speed could be slowed down, simply by inverting the current. I was, at this period, very amazed to see that we were producing in the pipe a strong straight shock wave, as there was no obstacles or a diminution of the cross section on the nozzle. I then acknowledge that we could very efficiently influence on the dynamic of a gas with electromagnetic forces. With this experiments, we were acting on a fluid inside a nozzle. In the texts coming from this strange planet, the author suggested to act directly on the air, outside the flying machine. When the turboreactor of jet works, it swallows the air it may find on its trajectory, inside the engine, accelerates it, and blows it out backward. This is the so called jet propulsion.
The Ummits were simply suggesting to put the engine outside the flying machine, and not inside. I never have read or seen that idea anywhere, and it did not sound idiot at all. With this technology, their machines were moving in the air, a little like the paramecium in water. These cells own vibrating hairs which move the water from the front to the back an move so, with a certain efficiency.
Fig. 2 : A paramecia flying in water, moving the water in front to it back with the help of vibrating hairs.
The flying machine of the Ummits swallows the air, acting on it with a system based on magnetic forces system. To make it work better, they were ionising the air with wall- devices, which were described in the letter. All that seemed coherent, and furthermore, it was new.
The machine had the form of a disk, so thas it was closer to an helicopter than from a plane.
Fig.3: Flow induced by the rotor of an helicopter.
When stationary, it was swallowing the air which was over it and blowing out downward (see figure 4)
Fig. 4 : How the electromagnetic vehicle hovers in the air with the help of its magnetic field forces, Lorentz forces.
Fig.5 : Flipping of the MHD saucer and the helicopter during a transition from stationary sustentation to horizontal translation.
In order to move laterally, it only has to swing, as an helicopter are does (see figure 5). To high speed this sucking effect was so intense that it produced a vacuum in front the vehicle. This is the reason why it was not producing any shock wave. In a conventional supersonic machine, the air gathers at the front part of the jet and is compressed. It then becomes warmer and heats the wall of the plane. This phenomenon, over Mach 2, becomes so important that it received the name of “heat wall”. By swallowing the air sufficiently, the saucer of the Ummits did not encounter such inconveniences. It travelled in the air like a flying mole !
Of course, this had nothing to do with the wing of a plane. It was some sort of flying vacuum cleaner. I found the idea very clever and began to make lots of calculations in the following days. I was good enough in theory to distinguish quickly that such a machine, if it could have on board a sufficently powerful generator, could achieve the performances as given in the document. The orders of magnitude of the magnetic field and electric current density remains moderate. If was science, not science fiction. The only thing we had to do was to place a light electric nuclear generator, say 10 tons, insides a craft, that was able to give hundred electric megawatts. We needed also some material that could behave like a supraconductor at ordinary temperature and good electrodes. With all that, this outsider craft could fly very decently.
This was of course impossible at the present time but could become feasible within the next fifty of hundred years. Anyway, whoever is the person who wrote this pages, human or extraterrestrian, he was a good expert in MHD.
The first experiments
All that was quite exciting. Unfortunatelys, in an observatory there are only telescopes and computers, no wind tunnels. My friend Maurice gathered some devices, in its own laboratory, and we began together experiments, based on my theoretical calculations. We first tried a floating machine with an external accelerator successfully. It was moving by letting the water flow on its sides, as foreseen. Something better even appeared: it could move in our basin with a very impressive speed without making waves.
This fact impressed me strongly. I knew that waves created by the hull of boats had the same origin than the shock waves around planes. They were similar phenomena.
Fig. 6 : Well-known analogy between the front and bottom waves of a boat and the shock waves around the wing of a plane in a supersonic flight.
We have built a boat which was cruising without making waves (even no turbulent wake !). Of course, it was only few centimetres long, but was working. I will not give you all the details of these experiments. They are available anyway. This work was published in the eighties in an international MHD held in Moscow.
However, at this state of the story, we had to admit that these weird texts were full of new realistic ideas, and that we will have to make the light on this affair sooner or later.
We also did experiments in gas, in low pressure air.
For this purpose we ionize the air helped, using a high frequency electric supply, as suggested in the documents. Then our discoidal machines were surrounded by a nice reddish halo, which went blue-white when increasing the electric input power. Our laboratory was turning into the one of a crazy scientist.
I could keep on to tell you all this story but this book would not be big enough. These first researches involved others.
The story of the Baron from Munchaüsen.A French scientist, the professor Evry Schatzman, member of the Academy of sciences of Paris, astrophysicist, played in our country the role of Philip Klass in the United-States. From the begining, he claimed everywhere that UFOs could not exist, precisely because they were producing no supersonic bangs. He pretended that was against physical laws. He explained that to people in numerous conferences. But when my work was known, the public asked him on one point:
- Professor, what do you think of the machine invented by Jean-Pierre Petit, which is propelled by MHD ?
- Well let's speak about it. It would not even be able to flight. Lots of theorems are against that. A machine can't sustain itself by creating both its own electric and magnetic field. This story is ridiculous and reminds me the legend of the Baron of Munchaüsen, in a German book. In this tale, he would have bogged one day his mare. Then, he would have taken her out of the mud by pulling her mane, staying on the saddle.This affair came to my ears. I was all the more surprised that Evry has been president of my phd thesis jury, in 1974. He knew than I was not the first cretin. Moreover, what he said was false. His theorem was valid for stars but certainly not to MHD aerodynes. This violent campaign against my person had to be stopped.
I ask for the right to answer him. In science, this right is not disputable, and the one who claims has the right to do it at the same place where he was discredited.
It occured several months later, in front a full auditorium. Schatzmann, a good theorician, way waiting for me at the blackboard with a chalk piece in the hand. But, negotiating that problem with equations would have confused the public. Maurice and I had prepared a surprise to which he was not prepared.
We settled in front of the audience an aquarium, full water plus some chloryde acid. . Then Maurice placed in there a little model representing the famous Baron on his mare.
I then turn myself to Schatzmann and said:
- Let's be clear. This model produced its own electric and magnetic field. If what you said one month ago is true, this experiment will not work.Viton pushed a button. The electric current flew in the water. The this discharge, combined to the magnetic field due an internal magnet, moved the water downwards. Of course the force was weak and we had to reduce the apparent weight of the system, balancing partially its weight. By this action on the water produced a net lift and Munchaüsen moved upwards, as expected.
Schatzmann was stoned and the audience stupefied. The champion of the struggle against UFOs had been defeated by his challenger. The demonstration was not disputable, the law of physics were with me. Schatzman jabbered out:
- Hum, I admit I was somehow short in my former declarations. You are right.
The ambiance became stormy. Some were very enthusiastic, other completely out of them. An old man then shout at me
- I suppose now that you will try to invent a machine able to cross light years ?
- Well, if this is possible, I will try.It was twenty five years ago.
The beginning of a scientific discussion.This thesis of suppressing the shock waves during supersonic flights, was putting everything in question about the UFOs. The French establishment was very upset. My director, René Pellat ( who became later the director of the frenche NASA ) tried to make pressure on me to abandon such a non reasonable research project. I resisted, confident in my calculations. Our successful hydraulic experiment had suppressed the wave in front of a small model boat, so what we were inclined to keep on our research in gas. A French scientist, Couturier, "specialist of shock waves" tried to convince me that this efforts were useless:
- You should think a little, the shock wave, you must find it again somewhere !
I tried to demonstrate him, invoking theoretical arguments, that the thing was feasible, but he did not want to hear them.
Fighting like mad, we could convince the direction of the National Centre for Research and Sciences to support our efforts. Its general director, Pierre Papon, gave funds to a student of mine, Bertrand Lebrun, who began a thesis work on the subject.As we had no laboratory, he decided to make his research through numerical simulations on a simple MacIntosh. Specialists of hydrodynamics will findt strange that we achieved such a work with a so basic computer 9.
But Lebrun was a tricky guy. He did not use a single MacIntosh but several. Each evening, he visited different colleagues who had personal computer and used them all night, inserting computational data.
The next the morning, he rrode his bicycle to collect on floppy disks the results of these calculations. Then he merged the whole in his own machine. With this method, we performed heavy calculations with these little computers, reinventing the parallel processing of much power full machines.
He calculated the induced flow around a ... flying saucer. This work was published in specialised magazines, ands presented in three international symposiums, at Moscow, 1983, at Tsukuba, Japan, in 1987 and later, at Peking in 1990. His phd thesis was presented in 1988, at the University of Poitiers, like all normal thesis. When his presentation was over and that he received the congratulations of the jury, composed of specialists of ionised gases, one of them said:
- Well, I think we have just attended the first thesis on flying saucers !
The stop order from the armyThe final step would have been of course to reproduce this crucial experiment in gas. That was not so easy. The hydraulic experiments were nothing in comparison. However, I knew perfectly what to do: one should only use a wind tunnel with hot gas, similar to the one we used fifteen years before in my old laboratory. I did, once again, a lot of canvassing at the general direction of the National Centre for Science and Research (CNRS). Finally these people found some credits. A laboratory with such a device was found and a team constituted.
But, in less than one year, all sorts of difficulties arose. First they refused to hire on this contract, Lebrun, who did a brilliant thesis. He had to leave the world of research. Then, the army made lots of pressure on the laboratory where these experiments should have take place, in order to keep me out of any official responsabilities.
All that happen as if someone wanted to impeach us. This was perfectly clear to me without knowing the true reasons. Finally, fifteen years later, I heard the background of the whole story and why we had to gave up. That was in spring 1994.
The truth.
At this time, I was dining in a Restaurant in Marseille with the director of my observatory, Jacques Baluteau and the president of the astrophysics and cosmology section, Dominique Le Quéau. At the end of dinner, Le Quéau, who had drunk may be to much rosé, was ready to make some revelations:
Dr. Le Quéau : Anyway, I can tell you something. It is the army which deliberately stopped the research of Petit in MHD.
Dr. J.Baluteau : But why ? They were not interested ?
Dr. Le Quéau : Not a all ! On contrary, they keep them secretly on, in some laboratory, under absolute secrecy.
Dr. J.P.Petit : But how do you have such information ?
Dr. Le Quéau : I have some privileged relations with the army. We, astronomers, we build very accurate mirrors that may be used to focalised military lasers.No more ask questions : the army, the politicians are very interested by the UFO case. We have here a direct evidence. The first try to gather in the scientific research some military applications. The MHD aerodyne is not for them a simple vehicle, it it the future hypersonic missile, an advanced weapon than no conventional missile can shoot down. .
In the same time, they do their best to keep people far from the truth that they know for long. To this purpose, they keep it secret but also make disinformation. Small Ufologist groups are financed, so that they discredit the UFO problem in the public, very efficiently.
You can't imagine what the army and the secret services do to keep the secrecy and to make the subject being perceived like a joke.
As for the scientists, either their collaborate secretly with militaries or they spontaneously participate to this general disinformation. Why ? Because they are scarred about being considered as fools.The man of the street believes naively that scientists look for knowledge. In reality, they are deadly afraid of it. The whole history of sciences is full of examples. Think of Galilee. The scientific community is organised like a church, which wants to keep the domination and its advantages. This idea blinds it completely.
One must say that a certain amount of courage or unconsciousness is needed to admit the idea that we would be visited and monitored by people from another world, more advanced in science. This perspective scares the politicians and the religious authorities. If such a truth was revelled, would our planet still be governable ? Would it create an uncontrollable wave of anxiousness ?
In 1977, two years after having contact with the first letters of the Ummits, I went to Spain to meet the people who received them and got thousands of papers. In another "report", I found that the Universe should have a twin structure. I did some theoretical calculus which were published at the Académie des Sciences moreover Paris. The reader will find, in the scientific appendix of that book, a copy of recent scientific articles, published by top level magazines with referees (where you can not published nonsense). This first try in theoretical cosmologys fixed, in 1977, completely my attention on this fabulous case. At this point, it was clearly impossible, as argued by some people, that this texts had been written by "science students of Madrid University". Behind this writings, there was necessarily some persons, who know more than we do in all this field.
One could no more throw this sheets in the trash bin with a shrugging. The hypothesis of a extraterrestrial origin of such documents should be considered seriously.
The UMMO case.
Reading these letters, I had the impression to be in a Spielberg movie. Lets try to sum up the main guidelines of this fantastic story.
It began in 1966, in Madrid. At his time, a man named Fernando Sesma, gave conferences in what we could call an esoteric circle. Each week he was speaking in the basement of the coffee-shop Leon. The room's wall were decorated with a huge painting, representing a whale, with a large smile. So this club was called "the club of the happy whale".
Sesma thought he was in contact with many extraterrestrial peoples, in particular Venusians. So he read each week, in front of an initiated assistance, some texts which were inspired from the sayings of Venusians and Martians. The assistance was all very attentive.Everyone knows that life is not possible at the surface of these two planets. The atmosphere of Venus would cook immediately all humanoids which would put his feet on its floor. Same thing for the atmosphere of Mars : it was too rarefied . But Sesma was not worried about such details.
Once he received a strange telephone call:
- Allô, Mister Sesma ?
- Hi, speaking...
- We read the book you wrote, titled " Me, the confident of extraterrestrians", and we found this book very interesting. We also, are extraterrestrians, coming from a planet called UMMO and we would like to meet you.
- No problem. This week will be short, but next week should be OK.The Ummits called him several times and sent him a huge about of texts. They wanted him to read them loud in the meetings of the Happy whale club. So did he.
First o fall : an experiment.After years, studying the contents of these texts we knew what were the goal of these people ( whose real existence remains of course still hypothetical, unproved ). They were just runing an experiment, involving some "guinea pigs of the Earth". They own, as they say, some systems which may analyse the function of the human brain, at distance. Some sort of scanner. They would have composed all sorts of texts about numerous matters. As Sesma read them loudly, they could analyse the reactions of the auditors, helped by ultra-miniaturized devices installed in the room. These texts, we knew it much later, were not written to be understood, and even less exploited. The Ummits just wanted to study how our brains were reacting when they are confronted with "ideas from another world".
Sesma was not a scientist, nor the persons hearing him. In a next letter explained to the Spanish why they were interested in him.
- In your book, we found a lot of false affirmations ( the word is weak, this was a list of pure idiocies, from a scientific point of view ). However, in certain sentences, you mentioned some information that a man from the Earth can't know. We then thought that you were manipulated by another extraterrestrial ethnic group, unknown from us. We then identified and meet them. But the way they act with the people from Earth does not fit our ethic and we would warn you to be very careful with them.This mysterious correspondents described themselves physically. They pretended they came from a planet similar to ours, distant from fifteen light-years. Gravity would be slightly stronger, so that when they landed on our floor they feltl their feet very light. Years after, we understood through these documents, that if they were really extraterrestrians, they were a nocturnal tribe. This means they were active night and sleeping during the day.
On earth, it exists diurnal and nocturnal raptores, morphologically identical. There is no reasons that an humanoid species, living on a planet where meteorological conditions could be quite different (heavy winds) could not appear and evolve this way.The authors of the documents say they are obliged to wear eyes implants which become automatically dark under light, what avoid them to be blinded by the day light. Their night-vision would be comparable to the one of cats. But their pupils where round like ours. This is not absurd. The owl hunts during the night, however its pupils are similar to the day species.
Their body would not fix the melanin, like on earth, for the albinos, what would give them the appearance of nordic persons, with white skin. One knows that the albinos are very sensitive to light (their skin, their eyes). Their iris is also unfitted with any pigmentation. If the inhabitants of this hypothetical planet UMMO were albinos, this particular pigment flecks, related in the letters without giving its location for security reasons, could correspond to the particular colour of their iris (which would be red, like the albinos' eyes). I would be curious to know if the albinos have a better night vision, a better skin-sensitivity to infrared and a better olfaction than the average human being. If that would be the case, we could ask ourselves if the albinos mutation, affecting sometimes human, is not an attempt of the Nature to "create" a night species. One should remark that species living in cave are general pigmentless. The fact of living in the obscurity obliges this species to compensate their lack of vision by developing other senses.
The night habits of the Ummits would have brought them, as mentioned in the documents a great sensitivity to infrared and odours, as accurate as the one of a dog (they would recognise each others through odours).
They would be tall persons, but not too big, so that they may not be recognised on Earth. By the way, they said to have some problems with dogs which begin to bark at them as they did not recognise the typical human smelling.They would have solved this minor problem by analysing the component of human sudation and by synthesising human odours, to change their olfactive signature.Let us do a short digression about the vision of the ummits. They say that they cover their eyes with a sprayed substance that gets darker when the light is strong. Today we know how to build sun glasses working that way. But, in 1967, did we ?
In the following we will find a description of the suit that the ummits are supposed to wear when they explore an unknown planet. All their body would be covered by an artificial epidermis, sprayed on the skin, after the eyes and other natural orifices had been suitably equiped. And the text says :This system was controlled by coded signals from the eyelid (it was enough to blink several times with the eyes, with a code)
Let us imagine what a ummit looks like, when he is equiped that way. We could get that :
