There is an eerie consistency in many alien abduction stories when the victims describe their kidnappers...

A classic design from the movie 'Extraterrestrial'

It's resulted in an all-pervasive image of what an alien looks like. You know it: the pear shaped almost featureless face, smooth skin, tiny nose and mouth and huge almond shaped black eyes.

A typical encounter was recounted by a man named Sebastian:


"It was like three years ago. I saw this ET. It woke me up in the middle of the night, while I was mediating. They exist. If some could go like this and open your eyelids while you're mediating, while you're in deep man there's something out there. It looked like a little kid except it had big eyes, it looked just like a little kid except it had big eyes, small nose and a little mouth. Big eyes, small nose and a little mouth."

 It's dominated our media for decades as the catch-all symbol for extraterrestrial life. But why is the image so consistent? Could it be that all alleged abductees have been hunted by the same alien species; can this consistency of narrative be classified as proof that aliens truly exist?

Maybe.
But a more likely explanation for the consistency of experience could be down to how human consciousness has evolved - and survived- over the millions of years.

In his paper Close Encounters of the Facial Kind, Frederick V. Malmstrom suggests that instead the distinctive character of the alien face is due to an Inborn Facial Recognition Template. In his 1979 collaboration with Richard Coffman he found that out of a random sample of 30 reported aliens 100% were of a median height close to that of the average woman, and 80% displayed prominent diagonally oriented wraparound eyes, double slit nostrils and little or no mouth. In addition, most subjects reported to being between sleep and wakefulness when the encounters happened or later recalled this face when they were put into hypnotic regression. Both states of conciousness are ripe grounds for out of body experiences and hallucinations.

Similar experiments were conducted elsewhere, looking into the possibility that alien

Sketches on Barney Hill's alien kidnapper:
Top Image drawn under hypnosis
with bottom images as artist's
interpretations from his descriptions.
  (credit: NICAP 1972)

encounters were actually forms of out of body experiences. Richard Wiseman, in his book Paranormality, states that between 10-20% of the population have experienced out of body experiences when very relaxed, anaesthetised, experiencing sensory deprivation, under the influence of cannabis or following a life threatening situation (such as the famous 'light at the end of the tunnel'). He explains that out of body experiences are the product of the human brain continually seeking to identify where it is and it can be easily tricked. For example, by using mirrors and a dummy hand, along with simultaneous stimulation of their real -hidden- hand, a subject can be tricked into feeling as if the dummy hand is part of them because the confused brain anchors itself to the dummy hand that it is presented with. Out of body experiences are a similar decoupling of identity. When Michael Raduga conducted an experiment at the Out-of-Body-Experience Research Centre in Los Angeles more than half the volunteers he studied experienced at least one full or partial out-of-body experience (following guided relaxation techniques). Seven of the twenty volunteers were able to make supposed contact with UFOS or aliens during these dream like experiences.

In these lucid out of body experiences the brain is uncertain and falls back on a mix of subconscious memory and instinctual programming  and it is here that the Inborn Visual Recognition Template takes hold and gives us the distinctive image of the alien.


So what is the Inborn Visual Recognition Template?

The pupil schematic most favoured by
newborns according to Hess' study

Evolution is a amazing thing. In The Study of Instinct  Niko Tinbergen found that newly hatched chicks were born with an inherent knowledge of their predators and would automatically hide from shadow patterns that resembled dangerous hawks, while ignoring shadow patterns that showed benign geese. Human babies are particularly vulnerable infants and part of a species that survives due to social performance and so similarly are hardwired to recognise faces from the womb. As a matter of survival they respond favourably to these faces and seek them out.
Up until two months old, however, this ability isn't particularly sophisticated and they will seek out anything that has 'face-like' features, whether these are potentially scary - like a halloween mask - or benign. The key seems to be instead the makeup of the face - two eyes and, usually, a nose. Infants ignore one eye or three eyes and focus on two. Similarly, Eckhard hess found that they also respond more favourably to eyes with larger pupils. When I.W.R Bushnell took this research a step further, they found that babies found it easier to recognise a hairless and earless face and that this recognition is hardwired into the hippocampus - a noncortial 'lower' area of the brain. Only later does the baby start to use the 'higher' cortical areas of the brain to add in additional recognition cues such as the hairline and ear.


Another feature of newborn vision that is important to note is their limitations. While there is disagreement as to whether babies are born shortsighted or longsighted either way they will usually only pay attention to objects between 7-25 cm in front of their eyes, with this expanding to around a meter as quickly as one to two days after birth. In addition newborn vision is generally blurred and 'foggy' with very weak or entirely absent colour differentiation. When apply these restrictions to the image of mother's face at a typically intimate distance, the change is quite alarming, and revealing.

The mother's face in the vision of a newborn

Above is the standard mother's face having been reduced down to the vision range expected of a newborn. The second image was reduced to a coarseness of about 150 pixels and a field of a 50 degree visual angle with simulated radial astigmatism and a very shallow depth of focus. The third image smoothed to remove the residual high spacial frequencies following the digitization and simulate the 'fogginess' of new born vision.
In the process you can see how the facial recognition is still very clear when using the restrictions of newborn sight and when following the hardwired symbols of the hippocampus. Two large black eyes with large black pupils. Also, interestingly, it's clear to see how an alien face emerges - the large black slanted eyes, the almost non existent mouth, and the vertical slit nostrils, with a hairline blurred. We have our alien.

Sebastian's alien drawing

Aliens: The most primitive face?

During lucid dreaming and in out of body experiences it would be no surprise that the brain dips back into the subconscious and pulls out its most primitive programming.Therefore it seems likely that many of the creatures seen in 'alien abduction' stories aren't actually aliens at all but, fundamentally, an instinctual ghost of the Mother.

But, of course, it would be impossible to leave any article on aliens without returning a little ambiguity to the mix, so I leave you with this quote by Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York:


"You’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet was, say, one in a trillion...But even that guess — one chance in a trillion — implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about 10 billion other times over cosmic history."

We may not be getting abducted, but that's not to say that we're alone in the universe, so keep curious and keep questioning, and I shall see you next week.




Other Posts on Aliens...

-The Wonder of Snottites and the Search for Alien Life
-The Race to Europa
-Preludes Recommends: PBS Spacetime
-Review: Paranormality by Richard Wiseman







Keep in touch....

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Stay curious!

Sources

-This post as heavily influenced by the excellent paper 'Close Encounters of the Facial kind: Are UFO Alien Faces an Inborn Facial Recognition Template' by Frederick V.Malmstrom. At the Skeptic reading room
-The surprising origin of alien abduction stories -LiveScience
-Alien Abductions may be vivid dreams, study shows - LiveScience
-Betty and Barney Hill Abduction Case (Sept 19, 1961) - UFO Evidence.org
-Extraterrestrial movie
-The Universe has Probably Hosted Many Alien civilizations: Study - Space.com 
-Paranormality by Prof. Richard Wiseman
-The real Life X Files - meet people abducted by aliens - DailyMail

Some months ago there was a brilliant BBC-original TV series called Wonders of the Solar System, hosted by Brian Cox. 

Snottite Cluster by Kenneth Ingham

The series explored our whole solar system, exploring alien moons and what conditions allow our own planet to thrive, as well as questioning what was needed to find life in our own solar system.

It's one of my favourite documentaries (heck, almost anything with Brian Cox at the helm is brilliant) so I thoroughly encourage you to grab the DVD where Prof.Cox explores this week's topic with a hell of a lot more class (and budget!). You can pick up Wonders of the Solar System along with it's equally excellent sibling Wonders of the Universe here.


With all that said, if you're still here why not pull up a chair and we'll talk about one of the most intriguing creatures on our planet: Snottites.



What are snottites?

Like Slime Moulds, Snottites are not the most appealing of creatures. In fact, they're rather aptly named, but they are a remarkable scientific discovery. Appearing like a long strings of snot, they are in fact large colonies of single-cell bacteria.

Snotties live deep in caves all over the world, including North Wales, but perhaps one of the most interesting habitats for them is in Cueve de Villa Luz in Tabasco in Mexico. Here, the cave that they call their home is full with utterly toxic hydrogen sulfide gas.

Snottites are not alone in this environment, which has pools of acidic water housing pink fish and crabs closer to the surface. But deeper down, in the dangerously toxic environment the snottites thrive. Away from the sun, the Snottites are nevertheless above to do something remarkable: they can metabolise the deadly hydrogen sulfide, react it with oxygen and produce the equally deadly sulfuric acid. 

Credit: Daniel S Jones, Penn State

So what?


The sulphuric acid that snottites produce is as strong as battery acid and clearly is dangerous for humans, but it shows the very important fact that life can exist in environments that we once thought could only be barren. If snottites can metabolise in this way, then there is no reason why similar creatures can't do the same on hostile worlds.

Snottites' ability to live has become more important than ever, as recent exploration of Mars showed that it was covered in a network of caves which could be potentially open to exploration. It is now widely believed that Mars itself once held running water over its surface due to numerous canyons, horseshoe 'waterfalls', and other geographical structures that indicate the presence of water in it's past some 3 billion years ago. Furthermore traces of gipson also indicate that water was available on the surface. While the water was gone when Mars' temperature dropped and it's atmosphere was blown away by solar winds, there is the possibility of water in either liquid or ice form under its surface...in these caves.
Naturally the environment would be hostile but if snottites can subsist on hydrogen sulfide could life be supported below the surface, in these caves, where the environment is not quite so harsh as the surface?

Caves on Mars (Wikipedia)

Methane blooms on Mars

Another interesting feature of the Mars explorations was the discovery of large methane plumes which seemed to vary in seasons. These plumes still remain a mystery as, in 2001,the Curiosity rover attempted to measure the methane in the atmosphere and came out empty handed, despite the estimates that even only one plume contained 19,000 tonnes of gas. While scientists are baffled, it seems that Mars is cycling it's methane six hundred times faster than Earth, which means that there have to be major sources and pools of the gas that are creating this seasonal behaviour.

While one possible explanation is geological (see the 'mud volcanoes' that erupt methane from beneath the surface of the earth), many people are excited that this may be evidence of life on the red planet. 90% of all methane in our own atmosphere is created by life and a huge part of this is created by archaea bacteria.

What are archaea bacteria, you ask?

Hydrothermal vents in the sea

Why, our old friends the snottites and their cousins.

 Archaea bacteria have been found in some of the most hostile places on Earth. For example on the ocean floor, at 100 times atmospheric pressure and above, around hydrothermal vents that superheat the water to 300 degrees C and spew out sulphur...you can find the archaea coating the ocean floor.

While the need for water appears to be universal for life, just how much water is needed, and how full of other chemicals the environment is, are flexible. At a microbiological level it seems that life can be very hardy and very creative indeed.



But Mars is not the only place that could support alien life in our solar system

Europa

 Perhaps even more exciting than Mars as a place to support life snottite-like or otherwise, is the beautiful white moon of Europa. This moon of Jupiter is covered in a complete crust of ice that is interspaced with mysterious red lines. Looking on the surface, the ice has visibly cracked and shifted unusual distances before reforming, suggesting that underneath the ice there could be liquid that is potentially 100 kilometres deep or more. The strange red lines could potentially be blooms of colour associated with the activity of microbes.
Studies in Iceland have shown that there are some tiny micro-organisms that can actively live in frozen ice and secrete their own antifreeze proteins to create little pools of liquid water for them to live in.

Whether life takes on the shape of slime-moulds, other archaea bacteria, or the tiny ice-dissolving microbes that wriggle around in ice-caves, it seems clear that there is a huge potential for at least simple life to live and possibly even thrive on other planets.

All it takes is a little time and whole lot of research and maybe, just maybe, we're not as alone as we thought in the universe.


Sources
- The BBC's Wonders of the Solar System
-Why Evolution is True: Snottites
-Snottite in Cambrian Mine
-Extremofiles: at the Living Moon
-Caves of Mars project (Wikipedia)
-Mystery deepens as Martian methane eludes Curiosity (New Scientist)
-The Meaning of Mars' Methane: Signs of Subsurface Life? (The Daily Galaxy)