Me Human, You Alien: How to Talk to an Extraterrestrial
by
Jonathan Vos Post


(c) 1996 by Emerald City Publishing
an excerpt from a book entitled MAKING CONTACT: A SERIOUS HANDBOOK FOR 
LOCATING AND COMMUNICATING WITH EXTRATERRESTRIALS, edited by Bill Fawcett,
July 1997, New York: William Morrow & Co.


Copyright 1996, by Emerald City Publishing

All rights reserved.  May not be reproduced without permission.  

May be posted electronically provided that it is transmitted unaltered, in its
entirety, and without charge.




Note: the book edited by Bill Fawcett has many fine chapters by other 
excellent authors.  The excerpted book on this web site is an expanded 
version of the chapter by Jonathan Vos Post, which contains more quotations 
from and discussions of specific science fiction novels, stories, films, 
and teleplays.


This on-line book excerpt is roughly 256 Kilobytes of text in length, and may 
load slowly if you have a slow modem, or not completely if you are short 
of memory.


TABLE OF CONTENTS





Introduction

	This is your first meeting with an un-Earthly non-human entity: an Extraterrestrial (ET).  
	If you handle it well, you will be the greatest hero alive, and be able to make a fortune 
	selling your story to the media.  If you blow it, the repercussions could be unimaginably 
	terrible, perhaps an interstellar war that could annihilate humanity.  
	
	Feeling a little stressed out?  Rule Number One: DON'T PANIC.{1}  
	
	Just follow these simple guidelines, and all will be well.  We hope.
	
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A Handfull of Coins, A Loop of String, a Flashlight, and Two Magnets

	Hopefully, the extraterrestrial you encounter is not injured from the crash of its UFO, 
	poisoned by local chemicals or germs, irrationally terrified of you, nor irrationally 
	intent on injuring you.  Hopefully, its senses will allow it to see the items you are 
	carrying in your pocket right now -- if you've read this Handbook before this 
	Close Encounter, and had time to prepare.
	
	If the ET has radically different senses, seems uncommunicative, 
	or otherwise nonresponsive, then you will have to skip ahead to the time that 
	teams of experts have been assembled to assist you in your task of Contact.
	
	But if these problems do not obstruct you, you will be initiating communications with 
	a set of cheap, easily obtained communications tools, using the following:
	(1) 18 specific coins, totalling $3.27, as detailed shortly.
	(2) A loop of string, at least 48" (but no more than 72") in circumference.
	(3) A pocket flashlight.
	(4) Two small bar magnets.
	(5) A pad of paper and a couple of pens or pencils.
This may not sound like much, but may work wonders.  If you also have a camera, a videocam, 
and/or a cassette recorder, so much the better.  Obviously, the more rolls of film, 
blank cassettes, and extra batteries you have, the better.  

Practice using your equipment beforehand, so that you may use it easily when under the 
unprecedented excitement and stress of First Contact.  

Photograph and tape everything that happens in your Close Encounter if you can.  

If not, then at least take quick and careful notes on what happens, using the paper and pen 
or pencil, until the experts can take the next steps.

	Good luck! 

Return to "Me Human, You Alien" TABLE OF CONTENTS	

	

Pocket Change Worth Billions

	Now that you've bought A Handbook for UFO Contact,
	make a further investment of $3.27.  
	
	Get the following coins assembled, and keep them in a little envelope or pocket, 
	separate from your usual pocket change:
	
	1 	Susan B. Anthony dollar coin	$1.00
	2	pennies					        $0.02
	2	nickles					        $0.10
	9	dimes					        $0.90
	3	quarters					    $0.75
	1	half-dollar coin			    $0.50
	--	-----------------			    -----
	18	miscellaneous coins totalling	$3.27

	Practice arranging these coins on a flat surface as shown in figure 1.  
	These coins represent the Sun, planets, and major moons based on their 
	approximate relative sizes as follows:

	SUN		Susan B. Anthony coin (a silver dollar is even better, if possible)
	MERCURY	a penny
	VENUS	a nickel
	EARTH	a nickel, circled by the MOON: a dime
	MARS	a penny
	JUPITER	the half-dollar, circled by the four giant Galilean moons: 
	    IO, EUROPA, GANYMEDE, AND CALLISTO, represented by four dimes
	SATURN	a quarter, with its giant moon TITAN: a dime
	URANUS	a quarter
	NEPTUNE	a quarter, with its giant moon TRITON: a dime
	PLUTO	a dime, with its moon CHARON: a dime

	When you meet the Extraterrestrial, locate a flat surface (sidewalk or bare dirt) 
	between the two of you, and lay out the coins as you have practiced.
	
	If it is daytime, point to the Dollar coin, then point to the Sun, and say "SUN!"  
	
	If you have your pocket flashlight, hold it close to the Sun-Dollar, 
	so that the coin is brightly illuminated.
	
	Then point to the second nickel, pat the ground, point at the ground all around you, 
	and say "EARTH!"  Pick up the Earth-nickel and, keping it close to the ground, 
	move it around the Sun-dollar, then put it back down where it was.  
	
	If the moon is visible, point to it, point to the dime next to the Earth-nickel, 
	and say "MOON!"  Pick up the Moon-dime and, keeping it close to the ground, 
	move it around the Earth-nickel, then put it back down where it was. 
	
	Then be silent for a minute, back away from the coins, and watch for a response.
	
	If the ET knows the structure of our Solar System, as observed by it or 
	its companions from remote observation, or by more immediate observation 
	on the way in towards Earth, it will recognize the model of the Solar System 
	that you have shown it.  
	
	This will establish that you are an astronomically sophisticated being, 
	who knows the way around your own local part of the Galaxy.  
	
	The ET now has the chance to show you something about that Solar System model.  
	It might, for example, place a few pebbles or sand grains in between the 
	Mars-penny and the Jupiter-half-dollar to show you where most of the 
	asteroids are concentrated.  
	
	It may indicate planets or the Oort or Kuiper Belt of comets far beyond Pluto.  
	
	It may convey some information about the Moon or some other planets, 
	if it made one or more stops on the way to Earth.  
	
	It may construct a model of its own Solar System.  
	
	If it moves the coins into any new configuration, be sure to record that in 
	your written or photographic notes.
	You have gotten information that may be worth billions of times your original $3.27.

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A Loop of String, Approximately 72" in Circumference

	Allied pilots, during World War II, who had to fly over certain remote and exotic
	areas such as Borneo (now called Kalimantan), were encouraged to carry a loop of string 
	up to six feet long, the ends of which were tied together to make a single loop about 
	three feet long.  
	
	The idea was that if they crash landed their plane in an area where 
	non-English-speaking natives were likely to be present, 
	the pilot should (when someone approached through the jungle), 
	casually take the loop of string from his pocket and begin to make 
	a "cat's cradle" string figure, and as many other string figures as he knew.  
	
	It is said that, on more than one occasion, this was actually tried.  
	In each case, the story goes, the native watched with increasingly friendly interest, 
	and then politely borrowed the loop to demonstrate some string figures popular in 
	his own tribe.  
	
	It seems to me that such an anthropological First Contact technique might be useful 
	in extraterrestrial First Contact as well.  
	
	You will find out if and how the ET pays attention to your activity, 
	have something to talk about, and -- after you've handed the loop to the ET -- 
	learn something about how dexterously the ET manipulates at least 
	one kind of object.  
	
	If you're very lucky, the ET will show you patterns of its own culture.  
	After all, the string figure has been (sometimes independently) discovered and 
	perfected by members of the tribes, areas, or nations: 
	Apache, Austria, Australia, Borneo, Chaco, Cherokee, China, Chippewa, Clayoquaht, 
	Denmark, England, Eskimo, France, Germany, Hawaii, India, Ireland, Japan, Kabyles, 
	Kiwai, Klamath, Korea, Kwakiutl, Lifu, Melanesia, Natik, Nauru, Navaho, New Guinea, 
	the Netherlands, New Zealand, Omaha, Onandaga, Osage, Pawnee, the Philippines, 
	Polynesia, Pueblo, Pygmy, Salish, Scotland, Switzerland, Tannas, Tewas, Tlingit, 
	Tsimshian, Uap, Ulungu, Wajiji, and Zuni.  
	
	The best reference on how to weave with both hands a hundred intricate patterns 
	supposed to represent natural and artificial objects is 
	     String Figures and How to Make Them {77}.
	Perhaps the most important anthropologist ever, Dr. Franz Boas, 
	was the first to publish a careful description of how a so-called primitive people 
	(Eskimo) make string figures, in 1888.  
	
	Other cultures use "a thong of skin... a cord of cocoanut fibre ... 
	[or] of human hair finely plaited.  A woven cord which does not kink 
	as easily as a twisted cord will prove most satisfactory; 
	unfortunately, it cannot be spliced, the ends therefore must be knotted 
	in a small square knot or laid together and bound round with thread."
	
	We describe below how to make the common "cat's-cradle" and Figure 3 
	is a copy of an illustration by Walter E. Roth in Brisbane, Australia, in 1902. 

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Cat's Cradle

	The first thing to do is to make the familiar "Cat's Cradle" as described below. 
	It is known in many parts of the world.  
	In Southern China, it is called Kang Sok = Well Rope; 
	in Korea it is called Ssi-teu-ki = Woof-taking; 
	in Japan it is called Aya ito tori = Woof pattern string-taking; 
	in Germany it is variously called Aheben = Taking off, 
	     Faden-aheben = Taking-off strings, 
	     Fadenspeil = String game, and 
	     Hexenspeil = Witch's game.
	     
	Step One: Take the untwisted loop of string and pass the four fingers of each hand 
	     through the loop, and then separate the hands, 
	     keeping the palms facing each other.  
	     You are now holding the loop taut so that each end of it 
	     passes across the backs of your hands 
	     and one side of the loop rests on the webs of flesh 
	     between thumb and forefinger.
	Step Two: With the thumb and index finger of the left hand, 
	     turn the left near string away from you across your left palm, 
	     and then toward you across the back of the left hand, 
	     bringing the string to the right between the thumb and index finger.  
	     Separate the hands, keeping the palms facing each other.  
	     You are now holding the loop taut. 
	     You now have two strings across the back of your left hand 
	     (a little loop around your left hand) 
	     and one string across the back of your right hand. 
	Step Three: With the thumb and index finger of the right hand, 
	     turn the right near string away from you across your right palm, 
	     and then toward you across the back of the right hand, 
	     bringing the string to the left between the thumb and index finger.  
	     Separate the hands, keeping the palms facing each other.  
	     You are now holding the loop taut. 
	     You now have two strings across the back of each hand, 
	     and a single string across each palm.
	Step Four: Bring the hands together, 
	     and put the right middle finger up under the string which crosses the left palm, 
	     and draw the loop out on the back of the finger 
	     by separating the hands (palms still facing each other).
	Step Five: Bring the hands together, 
	     and put the left middle finger up under the string which crosses the right palm, 
	     and draw the loop out on the back of the finger by separating the hands 
	     (palms still facing each other).
	     
	You should now be in the position shown in Figure 2.  
	
	There is a loop on each middle finger and two strings across the back of each hand; 
	the "cradle" being formed by a straight near string, a straight far string, 
	and the crossed strings of the middle finger loops.
	
	Show this to the ET.  Note its reaction.
	
	If there are two people involved in the First Contact, then you are in good shape.  
	First of all, this means that one of you can be doing the talking, motioning, 
	and demonstrating, while the other keeps notes, takes photographs, or narrates 
	into a cassette recorder.
	
	If there are two of you, you can now "play cat's cradle" by 
	first having one of you make the cat's cradle according to the above five steps, 
	and then taking turns transforming it through a series of different configurations 
	as follows.

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Soldier's Bed = Church Window = Fish Pond

	The next step in the game of cat's cradle has three different English names, 
	and in Korea is called Pa-tok-hpan = Chess board; 
	and in Japan nekomata = mountain cat.
	
	By "near", "far", "left", and "right" we describe the position 
	of the strings as seen by the person from whose hands 
	the figure is being taken away.
	
	Step One: Person "A" makes the Cat's Cradle as above.
	Step Two: Person "B" puts his left thumb away from "A" 
	     under the right near middle finger string and his left index finger 
	     away from "A" under the left near middle finger string.
	Step Three: Person "B" brings the thumb and index finger together 
	     and picks up between their tips the two near middle finger strings 
	     just where they cross at the near side of the figure.
	Steps Four and Five: In the same way, person "B" picks up 
	     the two far middle finger strings, by putting the right thumb toward "A" 
	     under the right far middle finger string, 
	     and the right index finger towards "A" 
	     under the left far middle finger string,
	     then bringing the right index finger and right thumb together 
	     and picking up between their tips the two far middle finger strings 
	     just where they cross at the far side of the figure.
	Step Six: Now separating his hands, "B" draws the right hand away from "A" 
	     and the left hand towards "A" (figure 742) and carries 
	     the thumb and index finger of each hand, 
	     still holding the strings, 
	     around the corresponding side string of the figure 
	     and up into the center of the figure (Figure 743).
	Step Seven: Then, by drawing his hands apart 
	     and separating the index fingers widely from the thumbs 
	     he removes the figure from "A's" hands 
	     and extends the "Soldier's Bed" (Figure 744).  
	     There is now a loop on each thumb, 
	     a loop on each index finger, 
	     and a string passing across the backs 
	     of the thumbs and index fingers of each hand.  
	     The figure is formed of the four finger loops crossing in the middle, 
	     a straight near string and a straight far string.
	     
	There are a series of other transformations that will end up passing 
	the figures back and forth between the two players through at least 
	eight configurations total, the other six of which are called in English "candles", 
	"Manger", "Diamonds", "Cat's Eye", "Fish in a Dish", and "Clock."
	
	Consult the reference book listed, or a bunch of children, 
	to learn the other positions.  You may be challenged to learn 
	more complicated string figures, too.  Practice makes perfect.
	
	You can now not only play with children and other UFO enthusiasts, 
	but have a chance to do something peaceful, interesting, and revealing 
	when you make First Contact.
	
	When I first wrote this, I thought that I was the first to contemplate it for 
	human-ET first contact.  But in further researching this chapter, 
	I found a science fiction author, the anthropologist Chad Oliver, 
	had beaten me to the punch my some 36 years.  
	
	In the novelUnearthly Neighbors {101}, 
	I was stunned to read this paragraph [p.73, revised edition]:
		Tom Stein maneuvered two of the [ET] kids, both boys, 	
		down the trail that led to the stream [on Sirius Nine].  		
		He took a length of cord from his pocket and made a 	
		skillful cat's cradle on his fingers.  The boys were 	
		intrigued, and watched him closely.  Tom went through 	
		his whole bag of string tricks--the antropologist's ace
		in the hole--and tried his level best to make friends.
	So give Chad Oliver credit, not me, when you play cat's cradle with an ET 
	and make friends.  Assuming, of course, that anthropologists and 
	science fiction writers are on the right track at all.

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A Pocket Flashlight

	A small pocket flashlight (with as many extra batteries as you like to carry) 
	is a good thing to have in any case, as you know if you drop your keys in the dark 
	on a moonless night. 
	     It may be very valuable during extraterrestrial First Contact. 
	This surely applies if the First Contact begins, or continues into, the night.  
	     If the ET communicates with light (see the handbook section on "Sound, Light, 
	Viruses, and Neutrinos," (a) Light), then it is absolutely necessary.
	     The flashlight helps to demonstrate that you are a technological being.  
	Don't point it first at the ET; that might appear hostile, rude, or weapon-like.
	The flashlight gives you a chance to point at various things and speak their names: 
	"ground, tree, foot, human, ET, coins, string.... and what is that thing in 
	your third claw?"  
	     Even parrots can be taught to learn the names of things repeatedly 
	pointed to or held up: "This is a grape.  I'm holding a grape.  Do you want 
	the grape?"
	     The flashlight can be used to illuminate the pad of paper and writings 
	done with pen or pencil.  It can be used to illuminate the coin in the center 
	of the coin-model solar system, to make it shine like the Sun.  
	     If you wear eyeglasses, or carry a magnifying glass or other lens, 
	you can use it to demonstrate simple concepts of optics (Figure 4).  
	You can cast shadows with it.  If you have sunglasses or can knock use the 
	plastic of your car tail-light, then you can project different colors, 
	and name those colors. 
	     The use of the flashlight can be occasionally contrasted with, 
	amplified by, or accompanied by the the flash of your camera, 
	if you are carrying one.

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Two Small Bar Magnets

	If you have two little bar magnets, the kind often glued to the back of a decorative "refrigerator magnet," then there are some things you can demonstrate and test. 
	The purposes of these experiments are four:
	
	(1) To show to the ET that you are a representative of a technologically 
	     sophisticated scientific civilization;
	(2) To provide specific scientific items and phenomena to talk about and to 
	     develop a common vocabulary, if possible;
	(3) To see how the ET reacts to demonstrations of scientific principles;
	(4) and to begin testing the properties of UFO or ET-related substances.
	
	You should have at least the two small bar magnets suggested here.  
	You can enhance your demonstrations to the ET if you also have:

	(1) a pocket compass
	(2) a long steel knitting needle
	(3) a few iron tacks
	(4) a long iron nail
	(5) a sewing needle
	(6) a cork
	(7) thread or string beyond that used for your cat's cradle demonstration.
	
	Before you meet the ET, mark your bar magnets to show which are the north poles 
	(the poles that attract the north-seeking end of a compass needle) 
	and which are the south poles (the poles that attract the south-seeking end 
	of a compass needle).
	
	What kind of magnets are the two that you are carrying 
	in your ET communications kit?  They are permanent magnets, 
	as opposed to electromagnets that only work when electricity is flowing 
	through wires.  Permanent magnets have been known for thousands of years 
	(at least since the ancient Greeks investigated the mineral lodestone, 
	today called magnetite), but have become much more sophisticated 
	in the 20th century.  Two Japanese physicists, Honda and Takei 
	(no, not the car company or the actor who played Sulu on Star Trek) 
	in 1917 first added cobalt to tungsten steel to make powerful permanent magnets.
	  
	In 1932 another Japanese team created even stronger magnets from alloys of 
	iron, nickel, and aluminum.  Many such materials are available under trade names 
	such as Alcomax, Alnico, Hycomax, and Iconal.  
	Other magnets are made today from ceramic materials.  
	The poles of the magnets may be near the ends or the faces of the magnets. 
	Magnetic rubber strips are often used on refrigerator doors, 
	and rolls of this strip are available in hardware stores. 

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Experiment 1: Magnet and Compass

	It is believed by some historians that the Chinese may have discovered 
	the magnetic compass.  The Chinese Emperor Hwang-To is said to have had 
	a magnetic (lodestone) compass in his chariot, approximately 2050 years ago.  
	We are certain that the French crusader Petrus Peregrinus, in 1269 A.D., 
	gave detailed written descriptions of a floating compass and a pocket compass 
	much like the kind we use today.  Nearly 450 years ago Queen Elizabeth I's 
	physician, William Gilbert, first hypothesized that the Earth itself acts like 
	a giant magnet.  He built a spherical model of the Earth out of lodestone 
	and showed that it had a magnetic field around it similar to the field of the Earth.
	
	  We think that the Earth's magnetic field is caused by a molten iron/nickel/sulfur 
	material swirling in the Earth's core -- the so-called dynamo effect.  
	The much more powerful magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn are believed 
	to be caused by dynamos of metallic hydrogen, a substance first created on Earth 
	(at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) in early 1996.  
	
	Most likely the ET comes from a planet that has a magnetic field, 
	and therefore has some chance of recognizing the behavior of a pocket compass.
	
	Show the pocket compass to the ET.  Say "Compass."  Place it on the ground.
	  
	Point to the needle that's pointing north, point with your arm and finger in 
	that same direction, and say "North."  
	
	Point in the opposite direction and say "South."  Observe if the ET looks at 
	the compass, in the directions that you have pointed, and write down or dictate 
	into a cassette recorder what the response is.
	
	Move one of your bar magnets near the compass, so that the needle 
	points away from north.  Hold up the magnet and say "magnet."  
	
	Show how the bar magnet can pick up tacks or the long nail.  
	
	Write down what the ET says or does.  If there are any pieces of UFO material 
	or other substances nearby that seem related to the ET, 
	pick them up and prepare to use them in the next experiment/demonstration.
	
	If possible, float one of the bar magnets on top of a cork in a puddle 
	or open container of water.  
	It should also point north/south, like the needle of a pocket compass.
	
	Finally, if you and the ET are still interested, you can show that 
	the magnetic north pole and the geographic north pole are not in the same place.  
	This is very important to people who use the compass the actually navigate.  
	You can show the angle between true north (that is, geographic north) 
	and magnetic north (as shown by the pocket compass) in your First Contact location.
	When the sun is at the highest point in the sky 
	(noon, unless modified by daylight savings time) 
	then hold a plumb line (a string or thread with any weight tied to the end) 
	so that it casts a shadow on a piece of paper lying on the ground.  
	This shadow will lie in a north-south direction pointing towards true north 
	(geographic north).  
	
	Now place your pocket compass on the shadow, and draw a line showing 
	the direction in which it points.  The angle between this line and the shadow 
	is called the declination.  Some planets have a very large declination, 
	such as Uranus in our solar system.  The ET has a chance to show whether 
	or not it understands this, if the ET has given meaningful responses to 
	other experiments/demonstrations so far.

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Experiment 2: Testing UFO Material

	You know from ordinary experience that some materials can be picked up 
	by magnets and some cannot.  The situation is a little more complicated than that, 
	as shown in Fig.297.  Instead of merely classifying materials into two categories, 
	magnetic and non-magnetic, we need to be more scientific if we are going 
	to analyze materials relating to an ET.  
	
	Two centuries ago Michael Faraday discovered that all the materials he tested 
	were influenced in one way or another by a magnetic field.  
	Some were attracted by a magnet, and some were repelled although they weren't 
	themselves magnets.  We call the kind of material which is strongly attracted 
	ferromagnetic because they behave like iron (Latin: ferrum).  
	
	This includes iron, nickel, and cobalt.  If you have a Canadian nickel, 
	it is ferromagnetic because it is mostly nickel, and will cling to a magnet 
	the same way as does iron.  The kind of material that is very weakly attracted 
	to a magnet (so that under ordinary conditions it seems that they are not attracted)
	are called paramagnetc. The kind of material that is 
	weakly repelled by a magnet is called diamagnetic.  
	
	Diamagnetic materials include bismuth, copper, glass, water, and mercury.  
	These weak repulsions typically take a strong electromagnet to discover. 
	 
	Another category of material that has been rapidly developed since World War II 
	is the ferrimagnetic which have magnetic properties although they are electrical 
	insulators (nonmetals).  Examples of this type are the ferrites.  
	A ferrite rod is used as the aerial of many transistor radios. 
	 
	If there are pieces of the material of the UFO available, 
	or pieces of material near the ET, test them with your magnets 
	and make a first rough attempt to classify them as ferromagnetic, 
	paramagnetic, ferrimagnetic, or diamagnetic.
	
	If the compass needle moves when you hold a piece of ET material near it, 
	then that material is itself a magnet.  
	
	If the material does not appear to be a magnet, 
	but is strongly attracted to and sticks to one of your bar magnets, 
	it is ferromagnetic.  
	
	If that material is not shiny and metallic in appearance, 
	then it may be ferrimagnetic, although this needs to be validated 
	by showing that it is not an electrical conductor 
	(which would require a battery and wires, or a continuity tester).  
	
	If the material does not seem to respond to the magnet at all, 
	it may be either paramagnetic or diamagnetic.  
	
	If it is clearly repelled by your bar magnet, then it is diamagnetic.  
	
	Maybe the ET has materials that are more powerful diamagnets than anything we have.  It is worth investigating.  
	To test for diamagnetism, you may need to suspend a piece of the material 
	by a thread and dangle it right between the north pole of one bar magnet 
	and the south pole of the other.  
	
	If the ET material twists on the thread to line up with the line connecting 
	the two magnets, it is ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic.  
	
	If the ET material twists on the thread so that it is perpendicular 
	to the line connecting the two magnets, it is diamagnetic. See figure 296.

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Experiment 3: Magnetization, Magnetic Induction, and Curie Point

	Take the unmagnetized knitting needle.  
	Hold your pocket compass (if you have one) 
	to show that both ends of the knitting needle attract the same pole of the compass. 
	Now magnetize the knitting needle with the bar magnet, as shown in Figure 290.  
	Hold the knitting needle immobile on the ground, 
	touch the north pole of one bar magnet 
	(the end that attracts the "North" pointing pole of the compass) 
	and drag the magnet along the length of the knitting needle to its end, 
	then (keeping the knitting needle in place), 
	pull away the magnet and repeat exactly a few time.  
	
	The knitting needle should now be magnetized.  
	Show this to the ET by demonstrating that one end of the knitting needle 
	attracts a different pole of the compass than the other end does.
	
	Attach a chain of tacks to the end of one of your bar magnets as shown 
	in figure 299. 
	
	Strongly heat one of the tacks with a match flame or 
	(better) a pocket cigarette lighter until that tack and the tacks beneath it 
	fall off.  
	
	When a ferromagnetic material (like the tack) 
	is heated above its "Curie point" it stops being ferromagnetic.
	
	Hang a long nail (if you have one) suspended from the south pole 
	of one of your bar magnets, as shown in figure 300.  
	
	The X end of the nail has now become, by magnetic induction, 
	a north pole, and the Y end a south pole.  
	
	Bring the north pole of the other bar magnet near the Y end of the hanging nail.  
	It should be attracted, and swing to point towards the north pole 
	of the second bar magnet.  
	
	Now bring the south pole of the other bar magnet near the Y end 
	of the hanging nail.  
	
	It should be repelled, and swing away from the south pole.
	
	When a magnet is brought close to a ferromagnetic material such as iron, 
	some of the "magnetic domains" in the material change so that the material 
	becomes a magnet. 
	
	This process is called magnetic induction.  
	
	When the magnet is removed, most of the domains change back to the way 
	they were before, so that the material is no longer a magnet.  
	
	Materials which act this way are called nonretentive or magnetically soft.  
	
	Magnetically soft materials, like your iron nail, mumetal, and Permalloy C 
	are used in the cores of electromagnets and transformers.  
	
	They stop being magnets as soon as the electricity is switched off.
	
	Other materials, including steel, have microscopic magnetic domains 
	that stay in place once changed by a magnet, 
	so that the steel continues to be a magnet after being in contact 
	with the magnet that touched them.  
	
	Your knitting needle is an example of that.
	
	Take a piece of any ferromagnetic material you have identified from the UFO or ET.  
	Stroke it with one of the bar magnets, and then see if it has been 
	induced to become a magnet or not.  
	
	Now you can determine if the ET material is magnetically hard or soft.

[Some of these experiments and diagrams are suggested by, or modified from 
"Physics is Fun, Book Two", Jim Jardine, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1964]	

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A Pad of Paper and a Couple of Pens or Pencils

Have some ready -- you should write stuff down.

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Speech Lessons, Informants, and Two or More Extraterrestrials

	Your best chance to start learning the extraterrestrial language is 
	if there are two or more of them, and that they are speaking to each other.  
	
	If so, the following steps are recommended, based in part on  
	How to Learn an Unwritten Language {71}:
	
	(1) Determine what your best approach is to language learning.  
	Some people learn best by merely hearing and mimicry (imitation), 
	the way children learn, leaving the pattern making to their unconscious minds. 
	A few people are natural mimics, who apprehend, react to, and remember 
	new language patterns almost at once.  
	     If you are such a person, it is good luck for planet Earth, 
	as you will not have to consciously analyze the extraterrestrial language 
	in order to speak to the ET or ETs in a way that they will at least 
	recognize as language.  
	     You should correct your natural bias by being particularly careful 
	to record every ET speech act, and not being distracted by your own 
	involvement in mimicry.  
	     You should make a concerted effort to use whatever analytical 
	approaches are recommended in this Handbook, in addition to your own talent.
	     Other people learn best by memorizing rules and vocabulary, 
	then practicing speech patterns as examples of those rules.  
	If you are such a person, then you will be virtually unable to use 
	language patterns until you have explicit conscious insight and awareness 
	of the relationships of sounds and system.  
	     To compensate for your bias, you must force yourself to make 
	a social contact with the ET or ETs, thus avoiding the danger of 
	an overly elaborate written analysis which does not contribute to 
	the possibility of some small degree of conversation with the ET.
	
	(2) Make and effort to listen carefully, while recording, 
	normal conversation between the two or more ETs 
	(or, at least, any soliloquizing by a single ET).  
	     The ability to catch even a hint of the "drift of a conversation" 
	will be a great success.  At first, look and listen for the ETs' 
	culturally acceptable indications of continued attention, 
	or the YES of agreement.  
	     These are prerequisites for you to contribute to any dialogue 
	or group conversation.  The most likely opportunity for observing 
	conversation between the ETs is when they are sharing a work task, 
	such as trying to repair their UFO, or collecting samples, 
	or tending to the medical needs of an injured ET.  
	     In case of such apparent injury, it is recommended that you don't do anything.
	     The Hippocratic Oath of doctors says that first of all, 
	you must do no harm.  In the case of the ET, anything you do -- 
	changing the position of the body, or wiping away fluid, 
	or pouring water into a mouth, may be a fatal mistake.
	
	(3) Make many attempts to engage in conversations with individual ETs,
	 using the coins, string, flashlight, and so forth as something to talk about.  
	 You should seek out chances for conversation, and should make a point of 
	 talking to every ET with whom you have direct contact.  
	 
	      Make a particular effort with any ET which intuitively or analytically 
	 seems to be a child, based on body size or playfulness.  
	 You might well be wrong -- for example, a "dimorphic" species 
	 is one in which two sexes (if they have two sexes) may differ greatly 
	 in size or appearance -- but as we will explain in the section 
	 "What is the Meaning of Meaning?" 
	      Children, especially babies, have a superior ability to learn 
	 new languages quickly.
	 
	(4) Spend several brief periods, within view of the ET or ETs, 
	listening intensively to materials recorded on your audio cassettes, 
	and mimicking them as best you can.  
	     These materials should include both connected texts and word lists.  
	     The texts that you will repeatedly try to mimic should be short enough 
	to be repeated several times in a single listening and rehearsal period.  
	The purpose of doing this is that the cassette recorded accurately records 
	such things and rhythm and intonation pattern, and if you listen often enough, 
	you may pick up enough "feel" to be ably to mimic, albeit crudely at first.  
	     This is not likely to be possible in "free conversation" where patterns 
	may shift too quickly for you to follow.  In addition, by using the cassette 
	recorder, you can concentrate your attention on hearing and mimicry without 
	being confused by trying to understand the meaningful content of the sounds 
	or of planning to say something.
         Listen to recorded lists of words, to try to distinguish tone, 
    stress, and length patterns.  Listening for these things should 
    alternate between lists in which one feature is identical, 
    and lists with contrasts between items (as discussed in our section on 
    "By Way of Contrast."  
         For example, if the ET language has syllables, practice with one list 
    of ET words that have stress on the first syllable, 
    one with stress on the second syllable, and one with stress on the third syllable.
    
	(5) Gather new data whenever possible.  There are three ways to do this. 
		(a) Record and make written notes on any ET utterance you hear, 
		     and write down or photograph the context in which it occurred.  
		(b) If one of the ETs volunteers a special role in trying to 
		     communicate with -- the "informant" -- then use the coins, string, 
		     flashlight, and so forth to provoke or elicit language data 
		     from the informant.  
		(c) Record conversations between ETs on cassette.
	It is the unelicited data (a and c) that are most likely to be smooth and accurate; 
	elicited data is likely to be "wooden" and "foreign," contaminated with 
	the flavor of the English language that you are using in you speech.  
	Conversely, some ET language details can be studied and understood more 
	quickly if the crucial examples are elicited in a patterned way, 
	such as by moving through the list of numbers, planet names, 
	objects that you point to, or the Periodic Table of the Elements.
	
	(6) Processing of data.  When the top scientific experts begin to arrive, 
	they will take over this important task.  
	     It is vital that each day's collection of audio, video, photographic, 
	and written noted data be processed almost at once.  A backlog of material 
	that has not been analyzed becomes a source of frustration and a roadblock 
	in the way of further activity.  
	     This means that all audio-recorded data should be transcribed 
	as soon as possible (and soon after, computerized).  
	     Each ET utterance elicited from the informant should be planned 
	to illuminate some particular problem or an example of a particular pattern.
	
	(7) Organize the Contact episodes.  At least the nucleus of what you learn 
	every couple of hours should be a planned lesson, including drilling 
	on the sound system (4 and 9), one or more grammatical patterns 
	to be practiced until you develop some ET language habits, 
	and some vocabulary items (the ET name, the name for "Earth", 
	the words for "One, Two, Three") to be memorized within the 
	grammatical context.  
	     You are both student, trying to learn a bit of the ET language, 
	and teacher, trying to get the ET to get a little English.
	
	(8) Drill and memorize what you learn from each session.  
	Review old sessions.  Each session, you should hope to learn something new, 
	have the ET learn something new, and have a shared experience of 
	mutual satisfaction with progress.  
	     What you learn should be reviewed often, and not counted as learned 
	until you and/or the ET can use that material in "free conversation" 
	at normal speech speed.
	
	(9) Drill on the sound system with the informant.  
	Each session, have several intensive minutes of contrastive listening and mimicry, 
	especially by you of ET sounds that are different from English sounds, 
	and by the ET of English sounds that are different from ET sounds.  
	     Your cassette recorded may not be up to the task, as only high-fidelity 
	sound equipment can accurately record fine differences between phonetic sounds 
	(such as "sss" versus "fff", or "t" versus a glottal stop).  
	     Contrastive listening means listening for particular sounds and, 
	especially, listening to pairs of words in which similar but contrastively 
	different sounds occur.  In such drill, you and the ET are doing intentionally 
	and consciously what a child does unconsciously in its hours of repetitive babble.
	     There is a possibility that would help you very much, if you are lucky.  
	That is, the ETs may have intentionally simplified their language, 
	and made it more logical.  They might communicate through, 
	not an ancient "natural" language, but through a more modern, 
	deliberately designed "artificial" language.  
	     After all, humans have proposed or created over 500 such languages 
	since the 17th century, such as Basic English, OPA, Loglan, Interglossa, 
	and Esperanto.  
	     If the ETs have created such a language, presumably to eliminate 
	the threat of war, to aid in complex enterprises between beings of 
	different birthplace, and to aid in international, interplanetary, 
	and/or interstellar communications, then they have made your job vastly more simple.  But don't count on it.

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Protocol and Protagoras: The Empirical Approach

	In this handbook, we assume that the evidence of the ET is so overwhelming 
	that nobody on the scene can dispute the fact that humans and aliens 
	must now communicate.  
	     We assume that the survival and comfort of the ET is not in 
	immediate jeopardy, so that you may concentrate on careful communications 
	while a team is brought to bear on solving longer-term problems.  
	     We also assume that your being in the right place at the right time 
	makes you the focus of all activity for some time to come, and gives you 
	access to an essentially unlimited line of credit from the local government 
	and banking institutions.  
	      If these conditions are not met, you must simply do your best to 
	apply the lessons of this Handbook as best as you can with the more 
	limited resources at your immediate disposal.
	      Let's say, though, that all is well at the outset.  
	      The first step is to be sure that you can concentrate on communicating, 
	 and not be tied up in local politics.   
	       Appoint someone you trust to be Political Liaison, and issue them this order:
	"Your job is to keep the politicians off my back while I talk to the ET.  
	Issue a communiquŽ at once, citing this Handbook's 
	"Appendix: Declaration of Principles Following the Detection of 
	Extraterrestrial Intelligence," 
	the First Soviet-American Conference on Communication with 
	Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) {2};
	U.S. President Jimmy Carter's and Secretary General of the United Nations 
	Kurt Waldheim's statements recorded on the Voyager spacecraft record {3}, 
	the International SETI Petition by Carl Sagan and friends {4}, 
	and the SETI Post-Detection Protocol [see Appendix].  
	     Invite the delegations of all nations, as well as local, county, state, 
	and federal authorities, to convene a council to agree on a political modality.  
	That will keep them too busy to bother me."
	
	The 1982 film by Steven Spielburg, ET" The Extraterrestrial {5}, 
	one of the most successful box office draws of all time, 
	showed us a loveable extraterrestrial, but also gave the worst possible advice 
	for you in your own Close Encounter.  
	     In E.T., the plot hinges on well-intentioned children hiding the 
	abandoned extraterrestrial from government authorities, 
	on the grounds that scientists would just want to kill and dissect it.  
	Nonsense!  
	     Your job is to make sure that the proper authorities are notified, 
	but that you have assembled such a winning team of experts that the 
	government can't take the lead away from you.
	     The second step, therefore, is to get the proper technical assistance.  
	Appoint a second trusted friend as Technical Liaison, and issue him or her 
	this order:
	"I need the following people and their staffs here immediately 
	(then get him a copy of the Appendix: People to Contact for First Contact, 
	listed at the end of this article).  
	Never mind, for now, who they are.  
	Trust me, they are all influential enthuiasts for and/or experts on 
	Communications with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI). 
	Tell them that they all work for me, and if they don't follow my orders, 
	I won't give them access to data or list them as co-authors of anything.  
	Go get them!"  
	
	The third step is to secure local infrastructure.  
	Appoint a third trusted friend as Logistics Commander.  
	Tell him or her the following: 
	"(1) reserve every hotel room, motel room, bed and breakfast, 
	student dormitory room, and rental car or truck in a 20 mile radius; 
	(2) phone the Regional Sales Director of AT&T, MCI, and Sprint and demand a 
	dedicated T-3 phone line from each of them, 
	being sure to tell each who else you asked; 
	(3) call the PR Director of Apple, IBM, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard, 
	tell them each that you need 100 top-of-the-line workstations 
	and their fastest Internet server, 
	fifty thousand gigbytes of hard disks, 
	emergency power generators, and tell each which competitors you talked to; 
	(4) call every restaurant and fast-food outlet within 20 miles and tell them 
	that you'll list their names and numbers on press releases if they 
	provide free food for the duration; 
	(5) call the nearest major hospital and tell them you have over 
	100 top scientists arriving from all over the world who are already 
	over-excited, and need stand-by medical observation and support.  
	And get me a couple of aspirin."
	
	Theory is of little consequence right now.  
	     You need to tap the brains of masters of the field of communications 
	and analyze how they actually work.  
	     The first man to do this was the fifth century B.C. Greek sophist Protagoras.  
	He is credited with being the first to distinguish sentence types: 
	narration, question, answer, command, report, prayer, and invitation.  
	     Today we classify more forms of what Firth calls "speech functions," such as: 
	commands, requests, invitations, suggestions, advice, offers of assistance, 
	gratitude, agreement and disagreement, greeting, leave-taking, encouragement, 
	permission, promising, apology, threats, warning, insulting, pleadings, 
	and so forth.  
	     "There are very many such terms in the everyday language 
	(one might compare, on a different plane, G. W. Allport's collection of 
	18,000 terms in English referring to personality characteristics" {73} (p.47).
	     Aristotle also said that Protagoras was the first to call attention 
	to the distinctions of gender and tense. 
	     Your job is like his, except a million times harder. 

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What Kind of Language?

	We assume that the ET is not a super-linguist who already knows English, 
	or can learn it while you are still getting a grip on the situation.  
	     We assume that he does not carry the equivalent of a Universal Translator 
	(a probably impossible gadget) or The Klingon Dictionary: 
	The Official Guide to Klingon Words and Phrases {6} by Marc Okrand.  
	     No, we must think long and hard about what Language is, 
	and how our experience with human languages might extend to ET languages
	(Xenolinguistics). 
	     Francis P. Dineen, Georgetown University Institute of Languages and 
	Linguistics, says that there are 11 characteristics of language.{7}  
	     He was thinking of human languages, so we will need to make a few adjustments.
	       He lists:
	       
	(1) Language is Sound
	(2) Language is Linear
	(3) Language is Systematic
	(4) Language is a System of Systems
	(5) Language is Meaningful
	(6) Language is Arbitrary
	(7) Language is Conventional
	(8) Language is a System of Contrasts
	(9) Language is Creative
	(10) Languages are Unique
	(11) Languages are Similar
	
Let's take these one at a time, and reconsider them in the UFO context.

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Sound, Light, Viruses, and Neutrinos

	Language is Sound.  Or is it?  Most humans speak and listen to language, using the same fleshy articulatory equipment to produce speech sounds and to hear them.  The sounds may appear strange to you, but they may be accurately described in terms of the movements of organs such as vocal cords, tongue, lips, and teeth.  But the primacy of speech is not absolute, given the importance of writing, and the use of various sign languages.  We have no evidence yet that the ET uses sound, or writing, or sign language, so we must immediately find out what MEDIUM is used for language signals in the ET.
	Your science team, since they arrived, has been observing the ET with every scientific instrument imaginable.  Ask them which medium the ET seems to be emitting the most complex signals in:
		

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	(a) Light.  
	Aliens may be emitting electromagnetic radiation, 
	such as radio waves [see "The Waveries" {99} for a story of ETs which 
	ARE radio waves], microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, 
	or gamma rays.  
	     Deploy any additional sensors needed in each frequency range, 
	record everything, digitize those records into the computer system, 
	and tell the scientists to set up software-controlled gadgets to emit 
	coded radiation in whatever frequency or frequencies the ET is emitting. 
	Examples in science fiction of light-communicating ETs include the novel 
	"VOR" {8} (which stands for Violet Orange Red), and Steven Spielberg's 
	1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind {9}.
    	Even on Earth, quite a variety of lifeforms generate light. 
    	 As one essay {72} puts it: "Many insects, fish, crustaceans, squids, 
    fungi, bacteria, and protozoa bioluminesce: They throb with light.  
    The angler fish even hangs a glowing lure from its mouth, which attracts prey.  
    A male firefly flashes its cool, yellow-green semaphores of desire, 
    and the female, too, is randy, she flashes back her consent."   
         The legend of the Fall of Troy includes mention that the news of 
    ultimate victory was flashed from Asia Minor to Greece by a sequence of 
    signal fires, a technique that led to the rise of the heliograph 
    (relaying signals by reflecting sunlight by mirrors spaced far apart).
     	Try to determine if the ET is emitting light by natural, biological means, 
    or by the use of some hardware.  
         Use your pocket flashlight and/or camera flash to copy whatever 
    light patterns you can see.

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	(b) Sound.  The ET may be producing subsonics, 
	too low in frequency for humans to hear, as Blue Whales, alligators, 
	and elephants do; 
	     or sounds that we can hear; 
	     or sounds too high in pitch for our ears, as dolphins, praying mantises, 
	and bats can do.  
	     Bats "echolocate" by responding to the echos of the 50,000 clicks per second 
	that they can produce (more than twice the frequency we can hear).  
	     The frequency range may be narrow, or it may cover many more octaves 
	than human speech, as with dolphins.
	      Record everything, and get it digitized for the computers. 
	The microphone arrays set up by the science team will reveal this pretty quickly.  
	Have them set up a computerized frequency transponder system to stretch or 
	squeeze the sound into a human-audible range for the Linguistics sub-team to hear.  
	Have your Tech Liaison bring John Lilly, at 
	xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, 
	and any dolphins they can bring and keep comfortable.  
	     Dolphins might be better at sonic communication than humans, 
	and might be useful ambassador-translators.
	
	A special case of sound is music, again invoking Close Encounters of the Third 
	Kind {9}.  As one poet {72} observed, 
	     "a single chord is a calling card and, 
	     at that, a mighty simple chord, 
	     based on universally shared mathematics.  
	     This is an old idea, going back to the Greeks 
	     and the music of the spheres.  
	     There has always been a connection between music 
	     and mathematics, 
	     which is why scientists 
	     have often been inordinately fond of music.... 
	     Science fiction argues that if music is mathematical, 
	     it must be universal.  
	     For interstellar space, 
	     don't bother with verbal messages; 
	     send a fugue.  
	     To be safe, send both," 
	and indeed Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 
	carrying a digital record of miscellaneous sounds of Earth, including music.  
	A popular joke (in NASA and SETI circles) is that the ETs land and demand 
	"send more Chuck Berry!" 
	     George Rochberg, a composer, says that 
	     "music is a secondary 'language' system whose logic
	     is closely related to the primary alpha logic of the human body.  
	     If I'm right, then it follows that the perception of music 
	     is simply the process reversed, 
	     i.e. we listen with our bodies, with our nervous systems 
	     and their primary parallel/serial memory functions."  
	The problem with this theory is that, while every single human society has music, 
	then music in each culture is different.  
	     Philosophy Professor and science fiction pioneer Olaf Stapledon 
	agrees {68}:
	     "Man himself, at the very least, is music, 
	     a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, 
	     its matrix of storms and stars."
	Observe if the ET produces patterns of sound with an object -- it might be 
	a musical instrument.  
	     If you can, imitate its sound with a harmonica, guitar, violin, 
	or any other instrument that you happen to have on hand and with which you 
	are familiar. But don't expect full emotional communication.  
	As Victor Zuckercandl says in The Sense of Music: 
	      "We can translate from any language into any other language; 
	      yet the mere idea of translating, 
	      say, Chinese music into the Western tonal idiom 
	      is obvious nonsense."  
	 Music, like primary language, is arbitrary, in the sense of our section on 
	 "Arbitrary is as Arbitrary Does."
	 
	In the novella "The Moon Moth" {53} the protagonist reads in the 
	Journal of Universal Anthropology the following: 
	
		"The population of the Titanic littoral is highly 	
		individualistic, possibly in response to a bountiful 
		environment which puts no premium upon group activity.  		
		The language, expressing this trait, expresses the 	
		individual's mood, his emotional attitude towards
		a given situation.  Factual information is regarded as
		a secondary concomitant.  Moreover, the language is
 		sung, characteristically to the accompaniment of a small 
		instrument.  As a result, there is great difficulty in 	
		ascertaining fact from a native of Fan, or the forbidden
 		city of Zundar.  One will be regaled with elegant arias 
		and demonstrations of astonishing virtuousity upon
 		one or another of the numerous musical instruments.  
		The visitor to this fascinating world, unless he cares
 		to be treated with the most consummate contempt, must
 		therefore learn to express himself after the approved
 		local fashion." 
	This includes instruments such as: 
		"stimic: three flute-like tubes equipped with plungers.  
		Thumb and forefinger squeeze a bag to force air across
 		the mouth-pieces; the second, third, and fourth
		little fingers manipulate the slide.  The stimic is an
 		instrument well-adapted to the sentiments of
 		cool withdrawal, or even disapproval.
  Krodatch: a small square sound-box strung with resined gut.  
		The musician scratches the strings with his 			
		fingernail, or strokes them with his fingertips, 
		to produce a variety of quietly formal sounds.  
		The krodatch is also used as an instrument of insult."

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	(c) Smell. 
	Smell is the most ancient and the most 
	emotionally evocative sense you have.  
	     When you sniff an odor, molecules of the scent are absorbed by 
	the mucous membrane of the fatty, moist, yellow tissue in your 
	nasal cavity, behind the bridge of your nose, and stimulating microscopic 
	cilia on special olfactory nerve cells which are replaced every month or so.  
	     The nerve cells send messages to your brain.  In fact, the "olfactory bulb" 
	in the brains of fishes is the evolutionary ancestor of your entire cerebrum --
	the thinking part of your brain.
	     You have, according to the popular "stereochemical" theory of 
	J. E. Amoore (first suggested by the poet Lucretius in about 60 B.C.!),
	seven basic smell-receptors (shaped and sensitive molecules) 
	on those nerve-cilia, and therefore everything you smell is a combination 
	of seven basic smells.  
	     They are: pepperminty, floral, ethereal (alcohol, or pears), musky, 
	camphoraceous (moth balls), pungent (vinegar) and putrid (rotten eggs).  
	     Something smells pepperminty to you if it has wedge-shaped molecules that 
	fit into a V-shaped receptor site on your nerve cilia, and floral 
	if it has a molecule shaped like a disk with a straight handle, which fits 
	into a bowl-and-groove-shaped receptor site.  
	     Putrid molecules are negatively charged, and couple to positively 
	charged receptors; while pungent molecules have a positive charge 
	that links to a negatively charged receptor.
	     In all likelihood, the ET will have a completely different set of basic smells.
	     Your receptors are locks, designed to fit particular key molecules. 
	     The ET will have different locks and different keys.  
	     Still, it might be informative to present a series of smells, 
	     which are basic to you, to the ET, and to smell if it replies 
	     with any smells that you can recognize.  
	     On the down side, you might be poisoning the ET.  
	A specially important type of smell communication is that of "pheromones" 
	-- from the Greek words pherein (to carry), and horman (to excite).  
	Precise scent molecules trigger some creatures to ovulate, 
	to courtship behavior, to taking a dominant or submissive role, 
	to mark territory, to identify family, to designate egg-laying places, 
	or to make a trail back to home.  
	     Pheromones are important to insects and to mammals.  
	Martha McClintock demonstrated that a group of women living together 
	synchronize their menstrual cycles because of some pheromone in their sweat.
	      One way of telling if the ET has evolved as a smell-priority creature 
	is where its smell receptors are located.  If the ET, for instance, 
	is snake-like, with a head close to the ground, it is more likely to 
	smell odors that cling to the ground.  
	     If the ET has feathery antennae, like moths or butterflies, 
	it may have the super-sensitive pheromone receptors on these antennae.  
	      If the ET has four or six legs, and a head dropping close to the ground, 
	 then it may be somewhat like a bloodhound or truffle-hunting pig.  
	 But this is only a hint, not a certainty.  
	      After all, how can tell whether or not the ET is smelling with its feet?  
	 Well, maybe if it wears no shoes....
	      The chemistry and biochemistry experts on the Science Team 
	have been running samples of exhaled and secreted gas and liquid from the ET 
	through Mass Spectrometers and other analysis devices.  
	They are coding that data for the computer system, 
	and will now tell you if the molecular output from the ET is 
	varying quickly over time.  
	      If the ET is like terrestrial insects in its use of pheromones 
	and other chemicals as a medium of communication, 
	we need to track the changes in smell, and be able to make 
	stinky signals in return.  
	       Have the chemical synthesis sub-team make stocks of every chemical 
	 that the ET produces, and set up a smell-o-vision gadget that will puff 
	 software-controlled coded smells at the the ET.  
	      Call in the top perfume designers and "noses" from London, New York, 
	 Tokyo, and Paris, just to be sure.

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	(d) Taste.  
	Follow the instructions for Smell, except based on samples from the surface 
	of whatever part of the ET seems involved, such as mouth (as in people), 
	antennae (as in insects), or carapace (as in lobsters).  
	     Pay attention to your master chef, but don't feed anything to the ET yet, 
	for fear of poisoning.
	     Our word taste comes from the Middle English tasten 
	(to sample, touch, examine), which in turn derives from the Latin taxare
	(to sharply touch). 
	     Taste is important to mamals, who evolve a love for the flavor of their 
	mother's milk; and later to tell good food from bad.  
	     Observe carefully to see if, how, when, and in what context the ETs eat, 
	drink, and touch objects to the organs of eating and/or drinking.  
	     Observe whether they eat what appears to meat, or plant matter 
	-- taste has different significance for hunting carnivores than for grazing 
	herbivores.
	      You have roughly 10,000 tastebuds on your tongue, 
	 as first noted by Gerg Meissner and Rudolf Wagner in the last century, 
	 with specific areas of your tongue devoted to the four basic tastes -- sweet (tip),
	 bitter (back), sour, and salty. 
	       Your taste of food and drink is really a combination of taste and smell.
	     The ETs may be cannibals, by the way, in the sense of eating each other, 
	but unlike shlocky sci-fi movies, they will not want to eat humans.  
	     We are guaranteed to be extremely poisonous to them, 
	if they have anything like an immune system responsive to foreign proteins.  
	For a dissenting view, however, see Anything You Can Do.{69}

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	(e) Touch.  
	The ET may communicate through vibrations, squeezes, scratchings, 
	or other tactile modalities.  
	     We are most sensitive to touch on certain hairless areas of skin: 
	fingertips, palm, foot sole, tongue, nipple, and sexual organs.  
	     Many mammals are most sensitive with whiskers near the mouth. 
	Look for what body parts the ET uses to delicately touch objects in its 
	surrounding environment.  These are probably among the more touch-sensitive 
	places on its body.  
	     There may be social barriers to touch in specific places or in 
	particular contexts.  You don't want to accidently be guilty of 
	extraterrestrial sexual harassment!  
	     The legal phrase, noli me tangere, means "don't interfere", 
	but literally means "don't touch me."  
	     Your sense of touch comes from tiny encapsulated nerves called 
	Meissner's corpuscles, buried between the top layer of skin (epidermis) 
	and the second layer (dermis).  You have almost 10,000 such touch nerves 
	on each square inch of fingertip.  
	     You also have deep pressure-touch sensors, called Pacinian corpuscles,
	near joints, and in mammary glands and genitals, that signal to your brain 
	what is pressing on your body, how your organs are shifting position, 
	and what position your limbs, fingers, and toes are in (proprioception).  
	These Pacinian corpuscles are also sensitive to vibration.  
	     In addition, you have Merkel's disks (which sense and signal about steady, 
	constant pressure below the surface of your skin) and Ruffini endings, 
	deep beneath skin, which respond to presure, and special nerves for sensing 
	temperature, and the sensitivity to touch at the base (follicle) of your hairs.  
	     Maybe, but not surely, the ET has touch sensors of similar kinds.  
	     Observe carefully if the ET has hairs, Vibrissae (stiff cat-like whiskers), 
	snouts, bristles, cerci (vibration-sensors on the bellies of cockroaches), 
	antennae, tongues, bills, fingers, tentacles, or other parts likely to be 
	touch-related. 
	     Look for how the ETs (if there are more than one) touch each other.  
	     Try to note which touches look like caressing, kissing, biting, sucking, 
	scratching, patting, nudging, massaging, kneading, fumbling, wiping, tickling, 
	fondling, grooming, brushing, stroking, prodding, banging, hugging, or licking.  
	     You may be way off base, but photograph, sketch, video, or note in writing 
	whatever you can about such behaviors.  If the ET reaches out to touch you, 
	be very careful not to jerk away or to over-react. 
	      Try to touch it back in the same way.
	     Gather some musicians (who can make precise motions with fingers or tongues), 
	safecrackers (with ultrasensitive fingertips), 
	chiropractors (good at bendings, twistings, pullings, and squeezing), 
	doctors, chiropodists, manicurists, barbers, and masseuses.  
	     And have the Science Team set up tactile-transponders for 
	computer input-ouput, that can translate touch into software and the reverse.

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	(f) Posture.  
	The ET may communicate by wiggling its limbs or other body parts in a visual 
	language.  Your Science Team has been watching, recording, and computerizing 
	its motions.  
	     Enhance that analysis with a top American Sign Language expert, 
	Marcel Marceau or other available master Mime, modern dancers {89}, 
	dance instructors, choreographers, semaphore signallers, and Labanotation 
	folks who can translate choreography into computer notation and vice versa.  
	     Tell Robin Williams that you've got a sequel to "Mork and Mindy" 
	in production, and fly him here.
   	     There are conventionalized symbolic gestures to convey narration and emotion 
   	in the dances of Indonesia, Indo-China, Korea, China, and Japan.  
   	"It would seem as if kinesthesia, or the sensing of muscular movement, 
   	although arising before language, should be made more highly conscious 
   	by linguistic use of imaginary space and metaphorical images of motion," 
   	says Whorf {45} (p.155). 
   	     "Kinesthesia is marked in two facets of European culture: art and sport.  
   	     European sculpture ... is strongly kinesthetic, conveying great sense 
   	     of the body's motions; European painting likewise.  
   	     The dance in our culture expresses delight in motion 
   	     rather than symbolism or ceremonial, and our music is greatly influenced 
   	     by our dance forms.  Our sports are strongly imbued with the element of 
   	     the 'poetry of motion.'  Hopi [Native American] races and games seem 
   	     to emphasize rather the virtues of endurance and sustained intensity.  
   	     Hopi dancing is highly symbolic and is performed with great intensity 
   	     and earnestness, but has not much movement or swing."  
   	Watch carefully for signs that the ET sometimes moves in dancelike or 
   	gamelike ways, but expect that the differences in the nature of those 
   	motions may be greater than the differences between European and Hopi dance.
	     Weston La Barre {70} gives a referenced list of human gestural or 
	allelo-languages, including: "the sign languages of Australian aborigines; 
	the silent gestural language of European monks, designed to avoid interrupting 
	the meditations of others, an allegedly international language of 
	travelling medieval monks, reliably dated from, at the latest, 
	the fourth century A.D. onward; 
	the hand-language of deaf-mutes and those who would communicate with them; 
	the gestural argots or kinesic trade-jargons of truck drivers, Hindu merchants, 
	Persians, gypsies, carnival folk, burglars, street urchins, tobacco auctioneers, 
	and others; 
	the elaborate gestural language of the Hindu natya dance-dramas; 
	the ritual handposes or mudras of Buddhist and Hindu priests in Bali; 
	the drum languages of West Africa and Central Africa, 
	the Jivaros, Melanesians, Polynesians, and Javanese; 
	the 'whistling language' of the Canary Islanders and some West Africans; 
	the special camphor-gathering language of the Jakun, 
	and the allusive communications of Patani fisherman and many hunting peoples...."
	    In modern American and international life, think of railroad semaphores, 
	naval flags, and the universal code of weather maps, military salutes, 
	and thumbs up or down.  As scientist/science fiction author Gregory Benford warns,
	rules of thumb might be different for beings with different thumbs.  
	    R. L. Birdwistell {76} (pp.158-9) lists the basic assumptions of kinesics 
	(the systmatic study of the communicational aspects of body motion) 
	as measured in interpersonal contexts, in a way that we believe might also 
	apply to Extraterrestrials:
		(1) Like other events in nature, no body movement or expression 
		     is without meaning in the context in which it appears.
		(2) Like other aspects of human behavior, body posture, movement, 
		     and facial expression are patterned, and thus, 
		     subject to systematic analysis.
		(3) While recognizing the possible limitations imposed by 
		     particular biological substrata, unless otherwise demonstrated, 
		     the systematic body motion of the members of a community is 
		     considered a function of the social system to which the group belongs.
		(4) Visible body activity like audible acoustic activity 
		     systematically influences to behavior of other members 
		     of any particular group.
		(5) Until otherwise demonstrated such behavior 
		     will be considered to have an investigable communicational function.
		(6) The meanings derived therefrom are functions 
		     both of the behavior and of the operations by which it is investigated.
		(7) The particular biological system and the special life experience 
		     of any individual will contribute idiosyncratic elements 
		     to his kinesic system, but the individual or symptomatic 
		     quality of these elements can only be assessed following 
		     the analysis of the larger system of which his is part.

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	(g) Biomorphic writing.  
	The ET may have evolved (or been modified for) direct production of writings 
	of some sort.  For example, in the story "Help, I am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" {10}, 
	aliens have specially shaped teeth for chewing sequences of symbols onto sticks 
	that they pass back and forth for visual inspection and re-chewing.  
	     The ET may write on paper with self-made ink (like squid ink), 
	or carve marks onto stone with diamond claws.  
	     Give it copies of any bits of material found on or near its person 
	or from its vehicle.
	     Look for variations of the "writing" methods devised by early human cultures: 
	the knotted ropes and notched sticks of ancient China, South American indians, 
	and West African and Australian natives.  The quipu (knots) used by Incas in 
	old Peru, included yellow ropes to symbolize gold, white ropes for silver,
	 red ropes for soldiers, green ropes for grain, a single knot for 10, 
	 two knots for 20, a double knot for 100, and so on.  
	 The messages conveyed by these knotted cords evolved to such complexity 
	 that quipucamayocuna (offical keepers of the knot)
	  were apointed to interpret them.  
	       It is possible that extraterrestrials have evolved some such 
	  non-pictoral non-written pseudo-writing, and may even have evolved 
	  special variations of their ancestral manipulatory organs to 
	  produce them rapidly and efficiently.

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	(h) Biological vectors.  
	The ET may use other living things as the medium of communication.  
	For instance, it may produce and analyze coded DNA (or its equivalent), 
	encapsulated in linguistic viruses.  
	     In such case, add to the Science Team Dr. Leroy Hood, formerly from Caltech, 
	now at the University of Washington in a chair endowed by Microsoft's Bill Gates, 
	to build a computerized genetics-to-computer-to-genetics translator.  
	     And put the Centers for Disease Control on alert.

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	(i) Direct nerve contact.  
	The ETs may directly join their nervous systems together and speak brain-to-brain.  
	If so, get the top neurologists and microneuroanatomists to modify their 
	squid axon voltage clamps into devices for reading and writing 
	the electrochemical impulses of the ET nerves.  
	     Start the Science Team working on a neural interface to fit 
	in between the ET nerves and a human volunteer's nerves.  
	Note that our nerves use a particular pulse-frequency code, 
	sodium/potassium ion transport scheme, and neurotransmitter menu 
	likely to be quite different from the ET's nervous infrastructure.  
	That's why the neural interface is a must-have.
	     We may not have such a technology yet, but might evolve one in the future.  
	This is suggested by the short story "Crisis" {98} by Edward Grendon in 1951:
		By 1980 the balance had shifted.  The progress of the
 		physical sciences had by 	no means stopped, but had
 		slowed considerably.  The social sciences, on the other hand, 
 		had moved ahead with unexpected speed.  
		The integration between academic and therapeutic
		psychology had been the first step; the rest followed
 		quickly.When the final rapprochement 
		between psychoanalysis and neurology was made, 		
		there existed, for the first time, a comprehensive
 		theory of behavior, not only of human beings and animals
 		but of other--so far theoretical--nervous systems as
 		well.  Just as the mathematicians were able to postulate
 		geometries that existed in no known Universe when they
 		were first devised, the psychologists were now able to
 		postulate non-Terran behavior systems.

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	(j) Exotic radiations.  
	Outside the electromagnetic spectrum of (a), 
	there are other forms of radiation which may be used by beings or civilizations.  
	These include ions, electrons, neutrons, mesons, neutrinos, and gravity waves.  
	     Unless the ET is the size of a moon, it is unlikely to produce significant 
	gravity waves, and unless it has a fission or fusion reactor in its belly, 
	it is unlikely to emit neutrons, mesons, or neutrinos.  
	     Still, it never hurts to have the Science Team look for such emissions, 
	and be prepared to produce similar ones, perhaps piped in through 
	magnet-guided vacuum pipe from the nearest atom smasher.  
	     Neutrinos or gravity waves may, on the other hand, be the way to 
	detect the ET civilization in the first place, but that discussion belongs in 
	another chapter.  

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	(k) Telepathy.  
	While there is no clear evidence that people 
	can ever "read" each others' minds, we are socially familiar with the notion 
	of telepathy, and many cultures have such a notion.  
	     There are South American natives who believe that the drug Yage 
	allows people to read minds in religious ceremonies, and J.B. Rhine and others 
	at Duke University have performed experiments which tantalized some scientists 
	for decades.  
	     It may be that telepathy would give such a Darwinian advantage 
	to any creature that evolves it that the very lack of such creatures
	on Earth means that telepathy is impossible.  But we can't be sure.
	     After all, in one of the few science fiction novels written by a 
	Nobel Prize winner, William Golding's The Inheritors {11}, 
	telepathic Neanderthals are displaced by non-telepathic Homo Sapiens who, 
	without the mental advantage of telepathy, are forced to develop language 
	and technology.  
	     The suggestion here is that telepathy is actually an evolutionary DISadvantage. 
	     If the ET is telepathic, there are several possibilities.  
	Maybe we can "hear" its thoughts, and it can't hear ours.  
	This gives our Science Team an advantage to exploit.  
	     Maybe it can "hear" our thoughts, but cannot project messages 
	back into our minds.  If so, it has the responsibility to let us know, 
	which puts us back to square one.  
	     Maybe we can sense its emotions, or it can sense ours.  
	This is of limited value, since we may not have the same emotions, 
	and even human emotional communications (i.e. music) produce at best 
	ambiguous results.  
	     Kurt Vonnegut {12} (p.198) has fictional author Kilgore Trout write 
	          "Earth was the only place in the known universe where language was used...
	          Everybody else used mental telepathy.... 
	          They [when humans taught them language] could get so much more done 
	          with language.... 
	          Mental telepathy, with everyone constantly telling everybody everything, 
	          produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information.  
	          But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, 
	          made it possible to think of one thing at a time -- to start thinking 
	          in terms of projects."
	If clear signals can go from ET to human and back by telepathy, 
	we need a very disciplined human thinker to communicate.  
	I suggest an expert in meditation, with a sense of humor and a delight 
	in technology, such as the Dalai Lama.  
	     Whatever you do, keep everyone else out of telepathy range, 
	or else the ET may tap into unspoken violence, prejudice, or the chaotic 
	human unconsciousness.

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	(l) Combinations.  
	The ET may use two or more of the above modalities 
	in combination.  The "waggle dance" of the honeybee combines direction 
	(with respect to the position of the sun), touch, and smell.  
	As an example of (c) and (f), Kurt Vonnegut {12} has written about aliens 
	who communicate by farting and tapdancing, who are all beaten to death 
	by irritated rednecks.

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Linear or Nonlinear?

	Language is Linear.  That means, for humans, that language sounds are produced 
	by a series of movements of the speech organs, one after the other.  
	We can represent human language by using distinct symbols for each individual sound,
	and by putting them in order from first to last in the same order 
	as the sounds are emitted.  
	     The order of the symbols (left-to-right as in English,
	 right-to-left as in Hebrew, or top-to-bottom as in Chinese) doesn't matter,
	 as long as we are consistent.
	     There is no guarantee that this is true for the ET.  
	     If the ET has a different perception of the flow of time, that is difficult, 
	but does not produce an absolute barrier to communication.{13}
What if the ET has a different perception of linguistic space?
	The alien might produce multiple sequences of sounds (or whatever) simultaneously, 
	in counterpoint.  For instance, it might make a series of eight noises in a row, 
	each of which has eight frequencies simultaneously.  
	     The message would not be coded as a string or line of symbols, 
	but rather as an eight-by-eight square of symbols, like pieces arranged 
	on a chessboard. 
	     Musical composers and conductors may be said to think in two dimensions,
	 which is why a musical score is written with multiple instruments 
	 from top to bottom as well as melodies written from left to right.  
	      An ET of this type might be speaking in crossword puzzles, rather than in words.
	So long as we can detect, record, and computerize everything the alien does, 
	we will be able to solve the crossword puzzle or to detect the pattern of 
	linguistic chess pieces.  It will be painstakingly slow, but we can proceed.
	      Similarly, the alien linguistic units may be connected to each other 
	not in sequence, or in fixed two-dimensional array, but as a network 
	of connected language atoms that point to, connect to, or refer to each other 
	in a pattern which is different every time.  
	     This would be a spoken version of what Theodore Nelson calls 
	hypertext.{14}  It took Ted Nelson some twenty years to convince the world
	that Hypertext made sense at all.  
	      I know, because I was one of the two computer programmers who first 
	put his idea into practice in the mid-1970s.  
	      Now, it is a commonplace on computers through software such as HyperCard 
	on the Macintosh, or more astonishingly, the World Wide Web on the Internet.  
	An ET that could speak Hypertext would be hard for us to keep up with, 
	but the computer provides the essential interface. 
	    Eventually, an alien on the World Wide Web would be a kind of 
	inter-society communications the likes of which we could not have imagined a 
	decade ago.
    	Another possibility is that the ET communicates in three dimensions 
    or more at once.  The ET might, for example, emit not just a sequence of sounds, 
    but a phased array of sounds in frequency space to produce an acoustic hologram.  
    Some people think that dolphins can send acoustic holograms to each other, 
    which are like three-dimensional diagrams of the perceived or imagined world.  
    We humans do not know how to think in holograms, but we can produce them 
    and analyze them by computer.  
         John Lilly and some dolphins in a tank would again be a useful translation team.
         Coincidently, one of Ted Nelson's first jobs was a documentary 
    film-maker for John Lilly's dolphin communication labs, 
    and my mother Patricia Frances Vos worked for Haskins laboratories, 
    which analyzed recordings of dolphin speech.
	      As Ted Nelson puts it, inventing a Lewis Carroll-like portmanteau word 
	 from "interconnected," "twisted," and "tangled" : 
	       "everything is profoundly intertwingled."

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Systematic, We Hope

	Language is Systematic.  That means that, in every human language on Earth, 
	the number of symbols needed, to write speech in that language as a linear sequence,
	is definite in number.  
	     As few as a dozen letters might be needed (as in Hawaiian), 
	or as many as fifty or so.  
	     But not every combination of sounds and symbols) is possible 
	in any given language.  That is, there are only a finite number of units 
	that have only a limited number of ways to be combined.  
	     If this is not so for the ET, we are in trouble.  
	     If the ET language has an infinite number of units, 
	we could never learn more than an infinitesimal part of that language.  
	But we cannot conceive of aliens being able to handle that, either.  
	     We suspect that this is a universal law of language, 
	applicable throughout the universe.  
	      Only infinite beings could use infinite languages.  
	      They would be as gods to us.
	The combination of linearity and systematic restriction on combinations 
	lets us describe and compare languages, both in terms of sounds and grammar. 
	To take an example from Dineen, table and stable are both common words 
	in English, and each can be made into other English words by adding 
	a single sound at the end (suffixing).  
	     We can now have tables and stables.  
	     But there is no sound that we can put at the start of 
	(prefix to) stable that would make an acceptable English word, 
	nor any sound that can be suffixed to tables or stables 
	to make an acceptable English word.
	     If there are no systematic limits to combining units of ET language, 
	our linguistic experience will be of little use, and we can only hope 
	that our Science Team will be provoked into making an unpredictable breakthrough.

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I Never Metasystem I Didn't Like

	Language is a System of Systems, or a Metasystem.  
	The table and stable example above is usually explained in terms of 
	two kinds of linguistic reasoning.  
	     We would say that phonologically (in terms of sound system) 
	there is no such word as jtable or ztable.  
	     We would say that grammatically there is no way to suffix a sound 
	after the -s at the end of tables.
	     That is, there is a system of sounds (phonology) and a system of grammar.  
	     Both systems are in force all the time, and both systems restrict 
	the combinations and the order within combinations. 
	     There are also systems of style (stylistics) and meaning (semantics) 
	which limit combinations and sequences.
	     If the ET language is not this kind of Metasystem, or system of systems, 
	each with its units and rules of combination of units, 
	then our current scientific method of analyzing a language into each system, 
	one at a time, is doomed to failure.  
	     Again, though, this is the kind of fruitful failure that could spur our 
	Science Team to a great leap forward.  But that would scarcely happen overnight.

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What is the Meaning of Meaning?

	Language is Meaningful.  The reason that you are in charge of studying 
	the ET language is that we assume that the language is connected 
	to almost every aspect of the ET's life and culture.  
	     On Earth, there is a stable relationship between the group of sounds 
	spoken by people of one language and the civilized environment 
	in which the speakers of that language live.  
	     We assume that the same is true of the ET.
 	     A child becomes a functioning part of his or her community 
 	primarily by acquiring language.  The leaders of each society become leaders 
 	and exert their leadership primarily through their ability to communicate 
 	with their constituency through language.  
 	     Let's look at each of these two sentences more carefully.
	     A baby is not an adult, not only because the baby is small, weak, 
	and unable to care for itself.  The baby cannot fully understand what we say to it, 
	nor to tell us precisely what it wants.  
	     True, a mother may be able to recognize her baby's cry from that of 
	another baby.  True, the baby can recognize Mommy and Daddy,
	and very quickly learn to respond to a few special voices and words.  
	But it takes a couple of years of almost constant linguistic experimentation 
	and play before the baby becomes a toddler able to speak and understand sentences.  
	     The baby also acquires its parents' language in the context of 
	interacting with toys, foods, parents, furniture, and the patterns of 
	daily home life.
	     Three times in history experiments were performed to see if children 
	raised in an environment with no language would speak a common proto-language 
	or create a language of their own.  
	     First, Psammetichos, King of Egypt had this tried;  
	     then Frederick II, King of Sicily, in roughly 200 A.D.; 
	     and finally King James IV of Scotland, approximately 1500 A.D. 
	     (using deaf-mute nurses, cooks, and servants in a remote castle).  
	These experiments would be considered unethical today, of course. 
	     Unfortunately, as the people of those times did not exercise 
	what we would call controlled scientific methods, the results were uncertain. 
	     How then can we communicate with an ET, since neither of us are babies 
	acquiring language for the first time?  
	     Babies have linguistic plasticity: an extraordinary ability 
	to almost effortlessly learn any language or combination of languages 
	spoken consistently in its environment.  This seems to be due to a 
	neural plasticity in which the baby's brain has an unusual ability to create, 
	compare, and extend language patterns.  Once the brain becomes less plastic, 
	as we grow up, it becomes harder and harder for us to learn languages.
	     The obvious solution is to have a human baby grow up while interacting 
	with the ET, or an ET baby grow up in a human environment.  
	     It is in this way that we intuitively accept Tarzan {15} learning the 
	language of apes while still a baby, or Michael Valentine Smith {16} learning 
	Martian by growing up on Mars.  
	     There would be legal problems in allowing a baby to grow up around 
	our ET, but perhaps there will be no faster way to truly acquire its language.
	      Secondly, we said that linguistic power yields leadership.  
	 If our ET is a leader, perhaps we can count on it having special 
	 linguistic plasticity or discipline.  
	      But if it is just an ordinary crew member or passenger, 
	 it would indeed want to ask us humbly to "take me to your leader."

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Arbitrary is as Arbitrary Does

	Language is Arbitrary.  The reason that speech alone does not suffice for people 
	to communicate if they speak different languages seems obvious.  
	     There is no particular connection between the sounds used in each language 
	and the message being expressed in those languages.  
	That is precisely why there are many languages on Earth -- 5,445 different 
	languages by one recent count.
	     If there were a one-to-one relationship between things and the words 
	for those things, there could fundamentally be only one language, 
	with one-to-one conversion rules to account for different sounds 
	for the same basic words.  
	     There are a few words that do relate directly to what they represent, 
	such as murmur, buzz, hiss, bang, whisper, hum, chirp, screech, slither, plop, 
	babble, thump -- but these imitations of the sounds of their referents 
	(onomatopoeia) is a very small part of human languages, which in any case 
	render the imitations differently.  
	     For instance, the English "cock-a-doodle-doo" imitation of a rooster 
	crowing is expressed as "cocorico" in French and "chicchirichi" in Italian.
	     We should not expect the ET language to be very different in this concern.

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Conventions: Pay at the Door

	Language is Conventional.  Although we have just established that there is 
	no predictable relationship between the expressions we use to represent things 
	and those things themselves, we may not deduce that language is 
	totally unpredictable.
	     When we consider a single item of language in isolation, 
	it is certainly arbitrary.  But no piece of language really exists in isolation; 
	it is (as we have seen) part of a system of systems.  
	     This means that there are regular and accurately specifiable 
	relationships between different units of the same language. 
	When humans speak to each other, the formation and use of language units 
	is so regular that it almost seems to be that there is an agreement 
	between the speakers.
	     This virtual agreement is what we mean by language being conventional.  
	     The idea that language is conventional goes back at least to Democritus, 
	Aristotle, and the Epicureans.
         The agreement is not explicit; it is an implicit agreement of 
    facts and actions.  Speakers in the same linguistic community use 
    very similar expressions to designate the same things, 
    and use the same set of conventions to deal with similar situations. 
    This is what creates linguistic systems and keeps them stable.
	     Because language is conventional in this way, we can be reasonably certain 
	that an accurate analysis of the speech of one person will apply to the
	speaking habits of another person from the same community.
  	     We believe that the same applies to extraterrestrials.  
  	     Therefore, as you lead the Science Team in learning to understand 
  	the ET's language, you can rest assured that this will make it 
  	very much more easy to communicate with the second ET from the same 
  	outer-space community.
	     There is a small but non-zero possibility that the ET language is not stable 
	and conventional in this way.  If so, we are in serious trouble.  
	As Robert Sheckley has suggested in "Shall We Have a Little Talk" {17},
	ETs with a sufficiently fast-changing language, and ability to adapt 
	to the continous change in language systems, will be beyond our ability to 
	communicate with them for more than a short and increasingly frustrating period:
		"I have learned an exceptional number of exceptions.
  		Indeed, an impartial observer might think that this
 		language is composed of nothing but exceptions.  		
		But that is damned well impossible, unthinkable, and
 		unacceptable.  A language is by God and by definition
		systematic, which means it's gotta follow some kind
 		of rules.  Otherwise, nobody can't understand nobody.  
		That's the way it works and that's the way it's gotta 	
		be...."
In Sheckley's profound yet funny story, the brilliant human linguist has struggled 
to learn a language, falls in love with an alien, and then is horrified as the 
language changes overnight into what he first suspects is a joke on him, 
then realizes is:
		"... a true language.  This language was made up at
 		present of the single sound 'mun.'  This sound could
 		carry an extensive repertoire of meanings through
 		variations in pitch and pattern, changes in stress and
 		quantity, alteration of rhythm and repetition, and
 		through accompanying gestures and facial expressions.  
		A language consisting of infinite variations on a single
 		word!.... He could learn this language, of course.  
		But by the time he learned it, what would it have
		changed into? ....  All languages change.  But on Earth
 		and the few dozen worlds she had contacted, the
 		languages changed with relative slowness.  On Na, the
 		rate of change was faster.  Quite a bit faster.... It
 		changed endlessly and incessantly, in accordance with
 		unknown rules and invisible principles.  It changed its
 		form as an avalanche changes its shape.  Compared with
 		it, English was like a glacier.... 	An observer could
 		never hope to fix or isolate even one term out of the
 		dynamic shifting network of terms that composed the Na
 		language.  For the observer's action would be gross
 		enough to disrupt and alter the system, causing it to
 		change unpredictably.... By the fact of its change, the
 		language was rendered impervious to codification and
 		control.. Through indeterminacy, the Na tongue resisted
 		all attempts to conquer it."

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By Way of Contrast

	Language is a System of Contrasts.  The main reason why a single speaker's 
	language habits are valid for others of his or her community is that 
	language can be considered a system of differences.  
	     How those differences are manifest is not very significant.  
	For example, parrots cannot produce exactly the same sounds as humans do, 
	because they do not have human vocal cords or nasal sinuses or tongues.  
	Yet parrots can produce sounds that differ from each other in a way 
	analogous to human, and so we understand their imitations of our speech 
	as if it were human speech.
	     We don't care if the ET makes human-like sounds by vibrating a membrane, 
	rubbing its legs together like a cricket, or directly stimulating air molecules.  
	If it can make sound, we can analyze its language as if (within limits) 
	it were spoken sound, as in the "Sound, Light, Viruses, and Neutrinos" section, 
	part (a).

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You're So Creative!

	Language is Creative.  As a system of contrasts, as discussed above, 
	language is a pattern which is maintained in common to an indefinite number 
	of speaking acts that refer to completely different referents.  
	     This pattern explains why we can, at any time, speak a sentence 
	that no human being has ever spoken before, and immediately understand 
	a sentence that we've never heard before.  
	     By using our imaginations to manipulate the phonological, grammatical, 
	lexical, and semantic systems of our language, we can act as fiction writers 
	or poets in extending human awareness of possible connections between things 
	in a creative way.  
	     In a sense, poets create a whole new world through language.  
	     This is so important that we will conclude our chapter with an examination 
	of the importance of poetry to extraterrestrial communications.
   	     First Contact with extraterrestrials will be very important in 
   	getting ourselves out of our parochial limitations of understanding.  
   	As Whorf {45} (p.154) suggests: 
   	     "Science ... following these well-worn cultural grooves, 
   	     gives back to culture an ever-growing store of applications, 
   	     habits, and values, with which culture again directs science.  
   	     But what lies outside this spiral?  
   	     Science is beginning to find that there is something in the Cosmos 
   	     that is not in accord with the concepts we have formed 
   	     in mounting the spiral.  
   	     It is trying to frame a NEW LANGUAGE 
   	     by which to adjust itself to a wider universe."

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Unique in All the Universe

	Languages are Unique.  Because languages are arbitrary, 
	systematic networks of contrasts (as we have shown above), 
	each human language deserves to be considered as unique, 
	one of a kind in all the universe.  
	     Even among the 5,445 or so languages on Earth, 
	each has something that no other has.  It may be a sound never used
	meaningfully (as a phoneme) as part of a word by other people, 
	or a unique number of parts of speech, 
	or a special way of combining those parts.  
	     Part of the challenge of learning a foreign language is to 
	discover and master such individual patterns.
	     All human beings descend from the same ancestors.  
	Current research on the mitochondrial DNA suggests that all living humans 
	descend from a particular woman who lived roughly 200,000 years ago in Africa.  
	Other research on the X chromosome suggests that we are all descended from 
	a particular man who lived perhaps 280,000 years ago, 
	but almost surely no more than 800,000 years ago.  
	     It will be awkward to explain if "Adam" and "Eve" lived 
	tens of thousands of years apart.
	     Just as we have common biological descent, our languages all evolved 
	(we think) from the same original language.  
	So as different and unique as each language is, 
	they are all cousins in the same family.  
	     Our ET does not have an ancestor in common with us.  
	     The ET language, similarly, did not descend from a prehistoric 
	Earth language.
	     The challenge for your team is that there are things, 
	we don't know in advance which things, common to all Earth languages 
	which might not apply to the ET.  
	We must start out assuming that it's language is "more unique" 
	than any we have ever encountered before.

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Similarity

	Languages are Similar.  As we have found, historically related languages 
	such as the Romance languages have many features in common.  
	All human languages, more broadly speaking, have features in common.  
	All humans encounter and experience the physical world through 
	the same senses (even if one or more is missing in an individual 
	through birth, disease, or accident) and all of us experience in 
	essentially the same way.
	     In the early 18th century Leibnitz first suggested that 
	all human languages derive not from an historical origin, 
	but from a common proto-speech.  
	     The 20th century Italian linguist Trombetti argued that the
    Tower of Babel story is figuratively true, in that all human languages 
    have a common origin.
	     As James Beattie {74} said over two centuries ago, in 1788: 
		"Languages, therefore, resemble men in this respect,
 		that, though each has peculiarities, whereby it is
 		distinguished from every other, yet all have certain
 		qualities in common.  The peculiarities of individual
 		tongues are explained in their respective grammars 
		and dictionaries.  Those things, that all languages have
 		in common, or that are necessary to every language, are
 		treated of in a science, which some have called
 		Universal or Philosophical grammar."
	The differences in linguistic systems reflect the "social organization of speech."  
	Arbitrary selection of significant features of experience makes it 
	hard to learn an unrelated language.  
	     It is easier for an English speaker to learn French or German 
	than to learn Iroquois or Bantu.  Because of the pervasive similarities 
	between all human languages, it is possible to learn new languages at all.
	     Since the ET may have a radically different social organization, 
	a radically different set of senses, and a radically different way of 
	experiencing the physical world, we must resign ourselves to the ET 
	language having far fewer similarities to human languages than do any 
	human languages to each other.
	     This leads us to ponder a key question: 
	what are bedrock, fundamental, inherent similarities between 
	our view of the world and the ET view of the world, 
	by which we can find SOME similarity, however slim, 
	between its language and ours?
	We will look closely at this question, and then explore the answers 
	in terms of the linguistic analysis that we must use to exploit those answers.

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PYTHAGORUS, ROSETTA STONE, AND OMNILINGUAL:
 

Clues from Science Fiction

	What do we know that we can be sure that the ET also knows?  
	The key to this, if we are on Earth and the ET has come to us in a UFO, 
	is that the alien civilization knows enough to be able to design, 
	build, launch, and navigate their UFO!

	¥ Gauss and Pythagorean Triangle
	¥ Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey"
	¥ Knuth and Arithmetic
	¥ Leinster's "First Contact"
	¥ Piper's "Omnilingual"
	¥ Sagan's Intellectual Seive
	¥ Aldiss' "Dark Light Years"
	¥ Clarke's "Childhood's End"
	¥ Dickson's "Alien Way"
	¥ Gallun's "Old Faithful"
	¥ Hoyle's "Black Cloud"
	¥ Leiber's "Wanderer"
	¥ Violent Sci-Fi Movies
	¥ Yefremov's "Heart of the Serpent"
	¥ MacLean's "Pictures Don't Lie"
	¥ Mann's "Eye of the Queen"
	¥ Masson's "Not So Certain"
	¥ Niven's "Mote in God's Eye"
	¥ Watson's "Embedding"
	¥ Delany's "Babel-17"
	¥ Vance's "Language of Pao"
	¥ Lem's "Solaris"
	¥ Sagan's "Contact"
	¥ Pohl's "JEM"
	¥ Moffitt's "Jupiter Theft"
	¥ Clement's "Mission of Gravity"
	¥ White's "All Judgment Fled"
	¥ Farmer's "Mother"
	¥ Lasswitz' "Two Planets"
	¥ Oliver's "Unearthly Neighbors"
	¥ Recent Fiction
	¥ Le Guin's "Author of the Acacia Seeds"
	¥ Sheckley's "Language of Love"	to be done
	¥ Fontenay's "Communication"	to be done
	¥ Kerr's "Communication"	to be done
	¥ Aarons' "Communicators"	to be done



Gauss and the Pythagorean Triangle


	This means that they know at least some of the same mathematics, 
	engineering, and science that we do.  This was first pointed out around 1820 
	by the supergenius mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss, 
	who proposed planting a vast forest in Siberia in the shape of squares 
	attached to the sides of a right triangle, thus allowing Martians to see 
	through their telescopes that we knew the Pythagorean Theorem. 

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Weinbaum's "Martian Odyssey"


	The first time this idea was explored in science fiction was in 1934, 
	when chemical engineer Stanley Weinbaum's story "A Martian Odyssey" {18} 
	introduced a fascinatingly different alien named Tweel, who, 
	for the first time in literature, was as smart as a human but did not 
	think remotely like a human.  
	     This birdlike Martian, who jumped into the air and landed on his beak 
	as a mode of travel, was able to learn the human protagonist's name, 
	and the human learn his name, but then their communications bogged down 
	in mutual incomprehension: 
	          "I couldn't get the hang of his talk.  Either I missed some 
	          subtle point or we just didn't think alike--and I rather 
	          believe the latter view."
	Weinbaum then solved the problem in a way that forms the basis of our Handbook: 
		"After a while I gave up the language business, and
 		tried mathematics.  I scratched two plus two equals four
 		on the ground, and demonstrated it with pebbles.  Again
 		Tweel caught the idea, and informed me that three plus
 		three equals six."
	This first step -- communicating about elementary arithmetic, 
	and then working up to more and more advanced mathematics -- is the 
	recommended technique, as many scientists today agree.

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Knuth and Arithmetic


	The problem is, there are many different ways of representing numbers -- 
	think of Roman Numerals.  Your guidebook to alternative arithmetic systems 
	should be Professor Donald Knuth {19}.
	    In my own novel, One Hundred Trillion Planets {20}, 
	human-ET communication is stuck for some time until the humans figure out 
	that the three-armed ETs' number system was based, not on base 10 as is 
	our (decimal) system, but on base -3 (negative trinary). 	

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Leinster's "First Contact"



	Another classic story of human-ET communications, indeed the one that 
	gave the name to this whole genre of fiction, was "First Contact" {21} 
	by Murray Leinster in 1945.  
	     A human-crewed spaceship and an alien-crewed spaceship encounter 
	each other thousands of light years away, in the Crab Nebula.  
	They communicate by radio, again beginning with mathematics, 
	and accumulate a vocabulary of words that they can both agree upon.  
	     They find that they, broadly speaking, think in the same way.  
	Unfortunately, that means that they both realize that if either of them 
	returned to their home planet, the other might follow and begin an 
	interstellar war.

		"I'd like to say," said the skipper heavily, 
		"the appropriate things about this first
 		contact of two dissimilar civilized races, and of my
 		hopes that a friendly intercourse between the two
 		peoples will result."
	Tommy Dort, the radio operator, sends this message, and receives a 
	response from the ET captain:
		"He says, sir, 'That is all very well, but is there any
 		way for us to let each other go home alive?  I would be
 		happy to hear of such a way if you can contrive one.  		
		At the moment it seems to me that one of us must be
 		killed.'"
	Rather than destroy each other on the spot, they have a clever idea:
		"Swap ships!.... We can fix our instruments so they'll
 		do no trailing, and he can do the same with his.  
		We'll each remove our star maps and records.  We'll each
 		dismantle our weapons.  The air will serve, and we'll
 		take their ship and they'll take ours, and neither one
 		can harm or trail the other, and each will carry home 		
		more information than can be taken otherwise."
They communicate so well that, by the end of the story, they are telling 
each other dirty jokes!

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Piper's "Omnilingual"



	Further confirmation of our basic strategy was intelligently presented in 
	the story "Omnilingual" {22} by H. Beam Piper in 1957.  
	
	Human archeologist on an alien planet try to understand a vanished civilization.  
	They succeed, based on the discovery of an alien "Rosetta Stone" which permits 
	translation of the alien language.  
	
	The key to recognition of shared knowledge is the Periodic Table of the Elements.  
	
	Both humans and ETs have found the same inevitable pattern of the elements 
	Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and so forth.
	
	From that pattern, on the "Rosetta Stone," the alien arithmetic and technology
    become quickly able to be decoded.

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Sagan's Intellectual Seive



	As Carl Sagan has explained {75} (pp.232-233):
		"... the laws of nature ... are the same everywhere.  We
 		can detect by spectroscopy the same chemical elements,
 		the same common molecules on other planets, stars,
 		and galaxies.... Gravity, quantum mechanics, and the
 		great bulk of physics and chemistry are observed to be
 		the same elsewhere.... Intelligent organisms evolving
 		on another world may not be like us biochemically ...
 		but they must come to grips with the same laws of
 		nature.... all those organisms who perceived their
 		universe as very complex are dead.... Natural selection
 		has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing
 		brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal
 		with the laws of nature.... we will find that much of
 		their biology, psychology, sociology, and politics will
 		seem to us stunningly exotic and deeply mysterious.  But
 		I suspect we will have little difficulty in
 		understanding each other on the simpler aspects of
 		astronomy, physics, chemistry, and perhaps mathematics."
	Too many stories to mention involve a human drawing a Sun with orbits of 
	planets around it, then pointing to the third circle and saying "Earth -- 
	we come from the third planet."  
	
	Any race able to fly from one solar system to another will have much 
	of the same knowledge of Astronomy that we do, including Newton's laws, 
	Kepler's Laws of planetary motion, and the like.  
	
	Your Science Team will know more than enough to engage in dialogue on 
	Astronomy, once the mode of communication and mathematical preliminaries 
	have been established.
	
	The problem may come after this point of mutually comprehended science.  
	Even human beings of different cultures and at different times think in 
	alternative Paradigms, or patterns of thought, lists of essential 
	questions and agreed-upon solutions, sets of implicit assumptions, 
	allowable tools for problem-solving, and definitions of what things 
	are in the universe of discourse.  
	
	We may also find each others' social behavior distasteful or hard to fathom.

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Aldiss' "Dark Light Years"



	For example, in The Dark Light Years {23} Brian Aldiss 
	describes an intellectually advanced but (to us) physically repulsive 
	race with an intricate but alien code of social behavior, 
	which tends to make humans who understand it become (by human terms) insane.

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Clarke's "Childhood's End"



	In the classic novel Childhood's End {24}, Arthur C. Clarke 
	outlines a race of beings superior to human beings, who effortlessly 
	communicate with us, but achieve their mysterious goals by educating 
	human children to attain super-human powers, until our children's behavior 
	passes beyond that of human and alien alike.  
	
	On the same theme, Arthur C. Clarke's book 2001: A Space Odyssey {25}, 
	and the film made in collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick, 
	involve human-ET communication which results in one man transcending human 
	limits and human understanding.
	
	The inverse of this occurs in the short story "The Children's Hour" {96} 
	by Kuttner and Moore, in which the apparently adult ET with whom the 
	protagonist falls in love is in fact a superchild:
		A child can't completely comprehend an adult.  But a child can more 
		or less understand another child--which is reduced to the same equation 
		as his own, or at least the same common denominator.  
		A superman would have to grow.  He wouldn't start out mature...
	Similarly, Ted Sturgeon's story "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff" {97}
	has ETs on the verge of destroying the human race until they have fun 
	with a child, and understand us at last:
		Throughout the continuum as we know it (and a good deal
 		more as we don't know it) there are cultures that fly
 		and cultures that swim; there are boron folk and 	
		fluorine fellowships, cupro-copraphages and 
		(roughly speaking) immaterial lifeforms which swim and
 		swirl around each other in space like so many pelagic
 		shards of metaphysics.  And some organize into super-
		entities like a beehive or a slime-mold so that they
		live plurally to become singular, and some have even
 		more singular ideas of plurality.... Prognosis [for
 		Earth] Positive.  Their young are delightful.

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Dickson's "Alien Way"



	The Alien Way {26} by Gordon Dickson follows an Earthman 
	in an alien brain who struggles to learn the complexities of an 
	extraterrestrial culture.  

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Gallun's "Old Faithful"



	The popular story "Old Faithful" {27} by Raymond Z. Gallun... xx
xxxxxx
xxxxx
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Hoyle's "Black Cloud"



	A particularly important novel for you and your Science Team to read 
	is The Black Cloud {28}, by prominent Astronomer-Author 
	Sir Fred Hoyle.  
	
	He explores the communications problems between humans and a very 
	intelligent and powerful, but very alien, creature made up of organic life 
	distributed on particles within an ultra-cold "molecular cloud" in space.  
	
	This novel also lays out (for the 1950s) a good summary of the kind of 
	logistics needed to assemble and support a Science Team.

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Leiber's "Wanderer"



	The Wanderer {29} by Fritz Leiber is also a 
	detailed and thoughtful examination of First Contact, 
	in which a planet-sized UFO (The Wanderer) pulverizes our Moon 
	for fuel and raises deadly tides on Earth.  
	
	"Then a voice, strangely sweet and cajoling, called to him 
	[astronaut Don Merriam] in only slightly slurred English: 
	'Come!  Unsuit yourself and come down!'" [p.138].  
	
	The felinoid ET Tigerishka is offended that humans keep cats as pets, 
	and on meeting her, Merriam ponders 
	
	"It was unreasonable to think of an alien being being able 
	to speak English without any preliminary parleying.  Or was it?" [p.143].
	
	It turns out that these ETs are telepathic, and disdain humans: 
	
	"Monkeys!  Cowardly, chattering, swarming -- no individuality, no flair!... 
	We think he smells.  Makes smells with his mind, too" [p.170].  
	
	They have a fabulous technology, though: 
	
	"I come superior galactic culture.  Read minds, throw thoughts, 
	sail hyperspace, live forever if want, blow up suns, all that sort stuff.  
	Look like animal -- resume ancestral shapes.  Make brain small but really 
	large (psychophysiosubmicrominiaturization)!  We stay superior.  
	You not believe?" [pp.192-3].
	
	The story then gives an explanation for why we haven't seen ETs before, 
	despite their being prevalent: 
	
	"Because mankind is young, you think the universe is, too.
  	But it is old, old, old....  You think that space is empty,
 	but it's full.  Your own solar system is one of the few
 	primeval spots left, like a small, weed-grown lot overlooked
 	by builders in the heart of a vast but ancient city that has
 	overgrown all the countryside....  There is the drama of
 	meeting other life forms -- shocks, moments of poignent
 	wonder....  The universe is full....  Intelligent life is
 	everywhere, its planets darkening the stars" [pp.255-256].

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Violent Sci-Fi Movies

	Must we assume that ETs will be similar to us in warlike aggression, 
	as in  Murray Leinster's story, or so many violent Sci-Fi movies such as 
	War of the Worlds {30}, 
	The Thing {31}, 
	Invaders from Mars {32}, 
	Invasion of the Body Snatchers {33}, 
	This Island Earth {34}, or 
	Forbidden Planet {35}?  
	
	Not necessarily. Out of the Silent Planet {36} by C.S. Lewis has 
	protagonist Dr. Ransom enter into philosphical commmunications with 
	peaceful and spiritual Martians.

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Yefremov's "Heart of the Serpent"



	Similarly, in "The Heart of the Serpent" {37}, Soviet Paleontologist 
	Ivan Antonovich Yefremov endorses the optimistic notion that any creatures 
	technologically advanced enough to be able to travel to Earth must have 
	evolved socially beyond the need for paranoia and militarism.
	
	As editor Groff Conklin put it, in his introduction to a reprint of 
	Edgar Pangborn's story "Angel's Egg" {100}:
	
			On the other hand, some authors take it for granted
 			that the creatures from 	space will be friendly
 			even though they are a few thousand years ahead of 
 			us, eager to help us even though most of us would
 			blindly and savagely strike them down if we could,
 			and willing to work painstakingly with the few
 			humans who have the imagination and ability to
 			learn, even though, in doing so, the aliens might
 			become permanent exiles from their home planet.

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MacLean's "Pictures Don't Lie"



	"Pictures Don't Lie" {38} by Katherine MacLean suggests that it might be 
	a mistake to assume that aliens are very much like humans, 
	even if they look very human on television.  
	
	The story opens with our expectant view of:
	
		... the airfield where They would arrive.  
		On the concrete runway the puddles were 
		pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing 
		untouched between the runways of the 
		unused field glistened wetly, bending 
		before gusts of wind.  Back at a 
		respectful distance from the place 
		where the huge spaceship would land were 		
		the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera 
		crews huddled inside their mobile units, 
		waiting.  Farther back in the deserted, 
		sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, 
		artillery was ringed in a great circle, 
		and in the distance across the horizon 		
		bombers stood ready at airfields, 
		guarding the world against possible treachery
 		from the first alien ship ever to land from space.
 		
	Reporters and scientists speculate on how human the ETs will be, and how 
	earth-like their home planet.  
	
	Nathan, the Military Intelligence radio decoder who first descrambled 
	the ET broadcast recalls:
	
		You see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up
 		a message on a record until it sounds just like that, 
		a short squawk of static, and then rebroadcasting it....
 		I'd recognized a scanning pattern, and I wanted
 		pictures.  Pictures are understandable in any
 		language.... I recorded a couple of package screetches
 		from Sagittarius and began working on them.... 
		It took a couple of months to find the synchronizing
 		signals and set the scanners close enough to the right
 		time to even get a pattern.... 		
		It took eight months to pick out the color bands and
 		assign them the right colors, to get anything
 		intelligible on the screen....
 		
	Nathan sent the Disney-Stravinsky The Rite of Spring, from Fantasia, 
	as a TV broadcast into space, towards Sagittarius, expecting it to 
	take years for a response.
	
		Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed down a new
 		batch of recordings, we found an answer.  
		It was obviously meant for us.  It was a flash of the
 		Disney being played to a large audience, and then the
 		audience sitting and waiting before a blank screen.  
		The signal was very clear and loud.  We'd intercepted a
 		spaceship.  They were asking for an encore, you see.
  		They liked the film and wanted more.
  		
 	The ETs lat