He made the heavenly bodies obey him, and thus made his point. The natives finally showed him the respect he demanded. And they obeyed him, too, at least at first. The visitor was Christopher Columbus, and the astronomical knowledge that convinced the Carib tribesmen he possessed superior powers was the prediction of a lunar eclipse. It occurred on schedule, on February 29, 1504, as predicted by European astronomers of the day.

This seemingly advanced knowledge helped Columbus achieve his goal: Extorting provisions from natives on the island of Jamaica, where he was temporarily shipwrecked. Terrified when Columbus threatened to make the Sun go out altogether, Indians gave him all he requested. Stranger in a strange land, Columbus was able to return safely from his fourth and last voyage to America.

Half a millenium later, the "New World" explored by Columbus is supposedly the subject of fresh visitations by a new variety of aliens, this time from distant worlds in space, time, or dimensional reference. But in establishing their identity, these new visitors face a far more difficult task than any teenager in a bar, or any hobo trying to negotiate a cashier's check, or any refugee seeking asylum in an embassy. For these extraterrestrial aliens, there is no passport, birth certificate, fingerprints in an FBI file (or even fingers), or driver's license with two major credit cards. These creatures exist, if at all, completely outside the every day earthside paper trail.

How, then, can they establish their bona fides as tangible, matter-based alien visitors instead of mirages, fantasies, tall tales, pranks, or confabulations in the minds of man? The answer seems clear: Like Columbus, they could do so by imparting superior knowledge to the backwards humans they meet. These contactees, in turn, could use the info to convince other mere earthlings of the reality of the encounter.

In truth, if abductees came back with superior knowledge our scientists later verified as true, that would go a long way toward proving an advanced race of extraterrestrials with the power to span the cosmos --or at least the galaxy-- were here. What sort of information should abductees be on the lookout for? What might constitute evidence of visitation from the skies? Is there any way abductees can manipulate the conversation, or view alien documents, to come back with the proof conventional scientists need? For those in search of evidence, just knowing what to scout for might increase the chance they will succeed.

For instance, in the 1950's and 1960's, space visitors might have imparted a host of astronomical facts to establish their extraterrestrial origins as real. Earth's space probes, together with ground based astronomy, have unveiled a multitude of unexpected marvels of the Solar System, which any alien space visitors would have known, and which any genuine visitors could have told their earthling contacts. Wow, those volcanoes on Io are spectacular! Boy, do ever your astronomers have the spin rate of Mercury wrong! All your outer planets have rings, don't you know? Venus spins backwards in resonance with Earth's opposition, that sure is strange. You mean you haven't spotted Pluto's moon yet? Any of those comments would have been extraordinary and unexplainable.

What would really be useful in the 1990s is a simple jot list of useful questions to ask an alien visitor. If there really are thousands of such contacts occurring in the United States every year, hundreds of OMNI readers will be picked up in coming months. What is clearly needed for them is a pre-defined list of astronomical unknowns, which, when possessed by a UFO abductee and later authenticated by scientists, will provide convincing proof of a genuine conversation with an intelligent extraterrestrial visitor. If an alien tries the "Columbus Gambit" today, we have to be ready to verify it.

Empty Words

Speak to mainstream scientists, and they will tell you they have not yet heard the whispers of E.T., nor seen the "fingerprints" of an alien in the messages of abductees. Indeed, though humans have reported conversations with extraterrestrials since the 1950's, most of the time they offer little a scientist could really sink his or her teeth into to establish empirical proof.

"Radiation is the work of diabolical forces," one UFO contactee reported he was told. "Fight back with light." The problem is, light is also radiation, and even atomic radiation springs from natural forces. Further, this alien reportedly explained, "Our spaceships, though physical, become living flames in flight. When you fly the astral plane, both sides are pure." It's difficult to imagine a Nobel Prize in Physics hidden in this mumbo-jumbo.

"People of Earth!" proclaimed another alleged alien to a UFO witness, "you are becoming fourth dimensional whether you are ready or not! At the present time, Earth, Venus, and Jupiter are in an esoteric trine which allows the birth of Christ Conscious souls to the physical plane." Something must have been lost in translation, since this wouldn't check out in the Nautical Almanac.

The list of such informational tidbits goes on and on:

• A visitor named Orlon (the inventor of the miracle fabric?) tried to teach some basic physics: "Due to the high velocity waves reaching your planet from the Central Sun, imminent change or breakthrough of consciousness can occur at any time to any individual. At the same time, there are tremendous energies pouring in, in what you most probably would speak of as an ultraviolet radiation belt." This message looks like the classic kidnapper's note where they paste selected words cut out of a newspaper, only in this case somebody sneezed before the glue set.
• A centuries-old beauty from the Pleiades named Semjase advised a Swiss contactee: "Pyramid energies balance the human body when it is under stress. Those who utilize pyramid energies will be better able to survive the dramatic Earth changes that began in 1958 and will continue to the year 1998." Maybe their fruits won't rot and their razors will grow sharper, but no almanac in the library could verify any such "dramatic changes."
• An old contactee described the homeland of his alien friends as "the constellation Ganymede." Since Ganymede is a moon of Jupiter, this and similar nonsensical ravings led some serious UFO theorists to suggest that the aliens were trying to deceive earthlings and retard our planet's progress by providing false astronomical data. But that silly explain-everything hypothesis would only work if any earth scientist ever believed the ravings, and none do.

Such pseudo-poetic, pseudo-scientific gibberish clearly aims at bad metaphysics, not good science. And not a single bit of it can be checked out for validity against what can be found out from the real world, through experimentation, exploration, or observation.

Star Maps from Beyond

Through the years, however, there have been a couple of near-misses --reportedly alien messages that seemed solid enough to give some serious scientists pause, causing them to wonder whether genuine alien encounters had in fact occurred. Two tantalizing tales --one from West Africa and one from New England-- seemed to suggest that genuine, unavailable astronomical knowledge might have fallen into the hands of earthmen who had no way of learning it themselves.

Betty and Barney Hill's story has often been told. One night in 1961, the tale goes, the couple encountered a UFO on a lonely New Hampshire road. After months of nightmares, details were finally extracted under hypnosis. Though the tale that emerged is long and fascinating, most germaine here is a "star map" Betty said she observed aboard the alien ship. Indeed, under hypnosis, she sketched a pattern of spheres, dots and lines and even suggested the depiction represented the corner of the cosmos the aliens called home: Were the aliens depicting their own star system, in another part of the sky? For many UFO reseachers with a scientific bent, the race to analyze this so-called star map was on. Pundits even identified the alien home sun as the Zeta Reticuli system.

Attempts to decipher the map failed until the late 1960s, after some star positions were rectified in a new astronomical catalog by human astronomers here on earth. With the change, our human star map came to resemble Betty Hill's, suggesting confirmation of unknown astronomical knowledge the alien starmap contained.

This evidence, however, is tainted because of several other interpretations possible for Betty Hill's dots and lines. Embracing the Hill depiction as proof also depends upon a questionable re-interpretation of the original testimony, especially the assertion that all the circles -- including the two large ones with vertical lines-- were stars. The way Hill originally sketched them, these looked like planets! This problem is often covered up in later ufological accounts by blackening in all the circles, conveniently obscuring the damning lines on Hill's original sketch.

In the final analysis, the Betty Hill star map, while suggestive, remains ambiguous.

The second "near-miss" consists of the legends of the Dogon tribe in Mali, West Africa. Based on transcriptions of their oral legends made by anthropologists in the 1920s, these Africans knew far more about some astronomical objects than any such technologically primitive society had any right to.

For instance, the tribesmen spoke about an invisible companion to the star Sirius, the center of prayer for many primitive farming cultures. As described, in fact, this companion had many of the characteristics of the real white dwarf star Sirius-B, discovered in Europe only in the 19th century. The Dogon tribesmen talked about Jupiter's four companions; yet how could they have known about the four Galilean moons? They talked about Saturn's ring, and even described the gap between the ring and the planet. How did they know these things?

One non-alien explanation is particularly plausible. Many young men from French West Africa served in World War I, and spent years in France. Some of them could have pursued their celestial curiosity while in Europe; they could easily have viewed Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings through any of thousands of small telescopes scattered across France (a four-inch reflector, weighing no more than twenty pounds, would have been more than adequate).

Indeed, one aspect of the ring story points to the mundane explanation: There is no mention in the myths of other planets having rings. Any true spacefaring visitor would have noticed that attribute in all the outer planets --not just Saturn, but Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune as well. Yet humans didn't discover them until the 1970s, with ground based telescopes and the Voyager probes. Whoever told the Dogon didn't seem to know about them, either. It stands to reason they were probably earthlings, too.

In short, the Dogon legends of astronomical lore could reasonably be recent additions to an older, general body of myths. A clearcut pedigree to extraterrestrial contact is not provable.

Ask the Alien

Both these "near-misses" provide intriguing suggestions and also some useful hints as to how a genuine alien contact might actually look. But neither, in the end, satisfies the requirements for ambiguity.

So what kind of information would truly be persuasive? What verbal reports would really be as convincing as the Zeta Reticuli and Dogon tales were supposed to be, but weren't?

The requested information must be unambiguous and readily verified. It must be impossible for earthbound science to know the answers in advance. On the other hand, garnered information must be verifiable within a time span of one to two years. That's the part that's going to be tricky.

Predicting near-term discoveries of space probes could be one possibility. When will Voyager-2 find the edge of the Solar Wind? What is the shape of the most striking topographical feature on Pluto, or on the asteroid Ceres? Where will we find more stone faces on Mars? What is the precise chemical composition of Venus? Stay just one step ahead of human space discoveries, and you can prove you're more than human.

The late Dr. Harlan Smith, while director of the McDonald Observatory in Texas, enjoyed speculating on such extraterrestrial hints. For instance, he wanted to know where to point his telescope in search of "Planet-X", the hypothetical "tenth planet" beyond Pluto. Given a reasonably limited area of the sky to concentrate telescopes, a search could find it within a year or two.

Alternately, one might require advance knowledge of some impending astronomical phenomenon, just as Columbus predicted the lunar eclipse. When and where will we spot the next supernova in our galaxy? It has already occurred and the light wavefront is moving toward Earth. Star voyagers would have known about it for centuries and put it on their navigation charts. When will the next non-periodic comet appear this side of Jupiter? Predict the appearance within human telescopes of the next near-Earth asteroid. Specify what kind of sunspots are right now forming on the opposite side of the Sun? For true spacefarers, such tasks should be trivial.

Astronomy enthusiast and UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer has a simple request: "Tell us the direction, time, wavelength, bandwidth, plane of polarization, and other technical parameters that will enable us to detect signals originated by extraterrestrial intelligence. "That is, give us the answer to the decades-long quest for the SETI -- the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence -- grail.

To find other specific questions, I conducted a poll among space scientists at a conference in Houston. One scientist asked for a description of the composition of interstellar dust, easy enough for someone who can just wipe it off its windshield. Once the chemical compounds were listed, astronomers could check their reflective characteristics in laboratories and see if they matched the observed spectral data from the still-mysterious dust.

Astrophysicist Don Hale, meanwhile, wants aliens to describe other physical constants: Tell us where to find the nearest "brown dwarf" stars, if any exist, and specify the existence of any dust belts around Earth and the Solar System. Planetary geologist Ed Cloutis wants a description of the surface material on different types of asteroids, so he can match them with laboratory tests. Spaceflight specialist Fred Becker wants a list of any extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon, along with the locations of any naturally-occurring ice caps.

All these items would be easy enough for genuine space travellers.

If current literature is to be believed, thousands of new encounters between humans and aliens will be occurring in the future. You may experience one, too. Be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity, by memorizing your favorite questions, and see if any discoveries worthy of the Nobel Prize in Physics come your way. At the very least, if you tap this technique to "discover" a supernova or a comet or an asteroid, they ought to name it after you.