THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE...
Lights in the sky, levitating beings, hard science vs passionate conjecture — India’s UFO investigators work to sift fact from scifi. Roshni Nair recounts their stories
At the stroke of the midnight hour, as the world slept, Sunita Yadav awoke to a levitating alien.
She watched, petrified, as it hovered a foot above the ground. Standing 4ft tall, with grey skin and big, black eyes, it proceeded from the Yadavs’ backyard toward their front door before — as her son Hitesh remembers — it “just vanished”.
In the 15 years since, the humanoid has made numerous appearances in Panchkula, some 10 km away from Chandigarh.
“It’s now a mascot. Residents in the area believe it’s lucky to spot it,” says Hitesh, 20, now a tech student living in Gurgaon.
In their sketch, the alien looks like a swarthy dwarf. But Hitesh remains convinced that what he saw was an extra-terrestrial. And he spends much of his free time trying to prove it.
Hitesh runs a free bi-monthly e-zine called UFO Magazine India, is developer of the Ufology App and founder of Disclosure Team India, which investigates UFO sightings and encounters in the country.
“Disclosure has grown to 200 members since it was set up in January 2016, including 22 from the US and UK,” he says. The website has a form where people can report their sightings in detail. So far, four sightings have been reported to the group.
“I’m currently researching an alien abductee case in Chhattisgarh,” Hitesh says. “I don’t care what people think, because my parents and sister are accepting. But my relatives don’t know what I do. If they did, they’d surely call me crazy.”
II. ARRIVAL
In the inaugural March issue of UFO Magazine India, columnist Ramkrishan Vaishnav deconstructs the Drake equation, proposed by American astrophysicist Frank Drake — a mathematical formula that seeks to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrials (ETs) in the Milky Way.
“I’m a UFOlogist because I’m a scientist. Even the Indian military has reported sightings,” says the 27-year-old entrepreneur from Nagaur, Rajasthan. “We know little about what lies beyond our solar system. Why dismiss the possibility?”
In his teens, with the iconic ’90s sci-fi TV show The X-Files etched in his mind, Vaishnav signed up to help create 3D maps for NASA’s moon missions, analyse asteroid samples for The Planetary Society, and study radio data for the SETI@Home project, the UC Berkeley offshoot of SETI or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. Preserved in a drawer at home are the certificates they sent him. A turning point came in March 2008. Just two months after he’d set up TOP (The Other Planet) Research Group to investigate UFO sightings, Vaishnav heard of the sighting in Banswara village, where eight locals reported seeing an unfamiliar craft in the afternoon sky.
Six days later, Vaishnav was there. “The villagers described the UFO as a hatshaped object with a bright underlight. We also found an odd-shaped stone that looked like nothing else in the radius we scanned. Image evidence of this encounter is the best you’ll find in India,” he says.
Vaishnav is now founder of ExpeTechnologies and Shakti Innovative Products. He has four filed patents, for a solar satellite plant, non-conventional wireless mobile charging, touchscreen technology, and next-gen user-interface system. Tech research is his bread and butter, but ufology remains his Danish pastry.
“I’m intrigued by why many sightings are from Rajasthan and West Bengal. And the Kongka Pass in Ladakh,” he muses. “It’s also a remote military base, so you never know.”
III. SIGNS
On October 26, 2014, at 4.55 am, a man looks out of the window in Thane and sees a horizontal row of red, yellow and green lights that blink but remain stationary for several minutes, then disappear. He records footage on his cellphone.
On November 7, 2014, a fast-moving object is captured hovering over Bengaluru, framed against a full moon. It stays there for nearly an hour, then disappears.
These cases are among 60 sightings, all in 2014, that were assigned to Kumaresan Ramanathan when he joined the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
Ramanathan, 33, is a senior technical engineer with a Chennai-based IT firm who blogs as Alienseeker on Wordpress. In 2012, he became India’s first ‘certified UFO investigator’ under MUFON, the largest non-profit investigating UFOs, with 3,000 members worldwide.
“MUFON employs scientific methods, not conjecture,” he says. “You have to renew your membership and purchase manuals every year, take an exam and score at least 80% to become a qualified investigator.”
The test is a mix of objective and multiple choice questions, spanning subjects such as how to interact with eyewitnesses and the plan of action if a witness claims to have an encounter.
“They present hypothetical situations to gauge if you’d make for a good investigator,” Ramanathan explains. “All tests are examined at the MUFON headquarters in Newport Beach, California. If you make the cut, you’re given an ID and certificate.”
Of every 100 cases, about 97 end up being fake, though, Ramanathan says. “Optical illusions, doctored images, or everyday objects mistakenly identified as otherwise. This teaches you discernment,” he says.
Now an independent ufologist after working with MUFON for two years, Ramanathan will visit Aniketty, near Coimbatore, to study a spurt of unexplained objects reported since 2011.
“My family always supported me,” he replies, when asked what people make of his ‘other job’. “Some collegians would call me Jaadu [after the alien from the Hindi film Koi... Mil Gaya]. But who cares?”
IV. THE FIFTH ELEMENT
At 8.28 pm on December 15, 1987, six-yearold Kamal Pant stood on the terrace of his Dehradun home and observed a large, red light soaring directly overhead. “No, it wasn’t a plane, helicopter, or prank,” he says, before you’ve asked the question. “Whatever it was stayed there a while and made no sound.” The incident would spur the self-professed ‘sky watcher’ and fan of Star Trek, The X-Files, mythology, and conspiracy theories to scour the internet for all things UFO and ET. Then, in 2014, he photographed and filmed what he claims is “a mothership taking off from and landing on the moon.” Pant goes full steam ahead.
“I even mailed NASA about it, but didn’t hear from them. Until a month later, when I got an email from someone in Houston asking me to ‘stay away’,” he claims.
Does he have the email, or a snapshot of it? “No. My system got corrupt a day later, and some of my videos vanished. My computer had been tampered with,” he says.
Pant, a computer science lecturer at a private university in Dehradun, is what one would call a tinfoil hatter or conspiracy theorist. He believes NASA and the US are involved in a cover-up; that alien tech was obtained from the Roswell crash. He also claims to have CE-5 communication with ETs — that is, telepathic communication between himself and aliens.
“My mother and wife have seen everything and know I’m not lying,” Pant says. “Distant relatives call me sanki [madcap], but it doesn’t affect me.”
The 36-year-old father of a toddler works with both Disclosure and TOP Research Group. His colleagues at the university, Pant says, have no qualms with his interests and theories. And if they did, he wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
“Every time I look at the sky, I feel like something, and someone, wants to communicate with me,” he says. “And no one can take that away from me.”
I think the UFO phenomenon as we now have it stems from an instinctive knowledge that we, along with every other form of life, must have a space origin. PROF CHANDRA WICKRAMASINGHE, director of the Sri Lanka Centre for Astrobiology
V. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Pushkar Vaidya likes his coffee cold and his feuds hot.
From 2007 to 2015, the astrobiologist was embroiled in a scientific tug of war with astrophysicist and author Jayant Narlikar over the latter’s hypotheses supporting panspermia. That’s the theory that life exists throughout the Universe and is distributed via asteroids, comets, and meteoroids. In short: life on earth may have come from external sources.
A truce was eventually called when Vaidya founded the Indian Astrobiology Research Centre (IARC) in Mumbai, for which Narlikar now serves as mentor.
Established in 2006, IARC is an independent body that studies the origin, forms and future of life in the universe. Vaidya is now planning a Centre of Astrobiology at Chennai’s Satyabhama University.
“I’m open to the possibility of ET microbial or intelligent life. I just didn’t think there was enough evidence. If anything, panspermia research is one of IARC’s focus areas,” Vaidya says.
Vaidya isn’t a ufologist. The 36-year-old straddles the no-man’s land between belief and scepticism. He says his bond with the sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke (best-known for 2001: A Space Odyssey) has much to do with this.
“When I was 16 and studying in Sri Lanka, I wrote In Search of Aliens. Arthur Clarke lived in Colombo and as an ardent fan, I went to his home because I wanted him to pen the foreword to my book,” he laughs. “He didn’t write it, but that kicked off a two-year association.”
Vaidya credits Clarke for bringing wonderment and adventure to science. “Science is now increasingly taking on a tone of finality, especially when it comes to the search for alien life,” he feels.
But he also throws the gauntlet to ufologists. “The UFO phenomenon is real from a research perspective. The problem is how people go about it. If you look at everything as alien, you’re better off calling yourself a flying saucer investigator,” he says.
A long discussion touches upon everything from cattle mutilations to the Kardashev Scale, which hypothesises that the most intelligent civilisations can harness energies on a galactic — even cosmic — scale, to partake in astral travel.
There’s a lot Pushkar Vaidya believes in. What he’s waiting for is substantiation.
“As they say in The X-Files: ‘I wanted to know, but the tools have been taken away’,” he smiles.