RAND's 'A Survey of Exobiology' (1963): Alien Life, but No UFOs

What this record is

This is a RAND Corporation research memorandum, RM-3178-PR, titled “A Survey of Exobiology” and written by Paul G. Seybold. It was published in March 1963 in Santa Monica, California, for “United States Air Force Project RAND” (page 3 of the PDF). The title page on page 5 of the PDF records that the work was sponsored by the Air Force under Project RAND contract AF 49(638)-700 and monitored by the Directorate of Development Planning, Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development, Headquarters USAF, with the standard caveat that its views are not official Air Force policy. The preface says the compilation was completed in May 1962 and that the survey should interest “those working in related areas in the national space program”.

The PDF runs to 62 pages, many of them blank backs. The memorandum has a preface, summary and acknowledgements, five sections, more than 70 numbered references and a bibliography arranged by topic. It was unclassified from the start. Page 1 of the PDF is an Air Force Historical Research Agency index card with the call number K146.003-87, whose abstract calls the report “a review of speculations and experiments relating to the existence of and the search for extraterrestrial life forms”. The acknowledgements (page 11 of the PDF) thank, among others, S. H. Dole of RAND and Carl Sagan, then at the University of California, Berkeley.

What it says about UFOs

It says nothing about them. A search of the OCR for all 62 pages finds no occurrence of “UFO”, “flying saucer”, “unidentified flying object” or “unidentified” in that sense. A keyword scan does flag 13 pages (pages 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 24, 33, 40, 42, 43, 44 and 48 of the PDF), but every one of them is about extraterrestrial life, not unidentified objects. This is a survey of the science of life beyond Earth as it stood in 1962, and it treats the subject as a matter for biology, chemistry and astronomy.

The summary on page 9 of the PDF credits the term “exobiology” to Joshua Lederberg and lists six topics: the origin of life on Earth, the chemistry of life, whether the planets of the solar system could support native life, contamination, instruments for detecting life on space probes, and the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Its central judgement is cautious: across the field, “speculations vastly outnumber scientific facts”, and the most promising questions were whether Mars had life of any kind and where the organic matter in some meteorites came from. The long middle sections walk through origin-of-life work by Oparin, Urey, Miller and others, why carbon and water seem favoured, planet-by-planet prospects, the risk of contaminating other worlds, and the life-detection instruments then being developed under NASA contracts by Lederberg at Stanford, Wolf Vishniac at Yale (whose device was nicknamed the “Wolf Trap”) and others (pages 40 to 43 of the PDF).

The closest the memorandum comes to the UFO question is its final section, “Intelligent Extraterrestrial Beings” (pages 44 to 46 of the PDF, pages 30 to 32 of the report). It opens by calling this the extreme case of speculation outrunning fact, then summarises the serious work. It cites Harlow Shapley’s estimate of life on 100 million planets, and it quotes the 1960 Brookings Institution report to NASA, which warned that anthropological files “contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated” on contact with unfamiliar ones. It describes Cocconi and Morrison’s 1959 proposal to listen at the 21-centimetre hydrogen line, and the 1960 search at Green Bank, West Virginia, which listened to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti and found nothing. Two further ideas are summarised: Ronald Bracewell’s suggestion that advanced societies might send probes rather than signals, so that “we might, then, look and listen for probes within our own solar system”, and Freeman Dyson’s proposal to search for stars enclosed in artificial shells glowing in the infrared. The section notes a private meeting of leading scientists at Green Bank in November 1961 and ends with a warning, attributed to Hibbs, that contact might leave humanity in “the relative position of a domestic animal” at best, so that signalling other societies would be imprudent.

Bracewell’s probe idea is as close as the memorandum gets to anything resembling a visiting craft. Seybold presents it as a reason to look and listen, not as an explanation for anything already seen.

Context

The report reflects the moment when the space programme made the question of life elsewhere respectable. NASA had begun funding exobiology, Mariner 2 had flown past Venus in December 1962, and radio astronomers had just made the first search for signals. Readers who want the thread of that story can follow it to the Drake equation, formulated for the same November 1961 Green Bank meeting that the survey mentions, and to the Wow! signal of 1977. The survey calls the Cocconi-Morrison proposal “often referred to as ‘Project Ozma’”. That runs together two separate efforts: Cocconi and Morrison published the idea in 1959, and Frank Drake’s Project Ozma at Green Bank carried out a search independently in 1960.

The Air Force’s UFO program in the same years, Project Blue Book, dealt with the separate question of what people were seeing in the sky. Nothing in this memorandum links the two. For the Air Force’s UFO rules of the period, see the transfer’s copy of AFR 200-2 from 1962.

Status

As a UFO record, this adds nothing. It has no sightings, no analysis of reports and no reference to the Air Force’s UFO program. It is a competent, cautious literature review of astrobiology commissioned for the Air Force’s long-range planners, and its tone, in which evidence is separated from speculation and the most speculative claims are flagged as such, is itself worth noting.

Why it was swept into a transfer of UAP records cannot be established from the file. The most likely explanation, and this is an inference, is that the Air Force Historical Research Agency’s search for relevant holdings used subject terms such as “extraterrestrial” and “extraterrestrial life”, which this memorandum matches on its index card and on almost every page. The UAP Records Collection Act’s definition of relevant records is broad, and an agency working through decades of holdings would reasonably err toward inclusion. A reader should not take its presence in this collection as a sign that the Air Force linked exobiology research to UFOs in 1963. The document gives no sign of that.

Sources

• National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/659965416
• PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/656595571/00907058_A_Survey_of_Exobiology.pdf
• Series: Records from the Department of the Air Force Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/656595571
• National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615