Cozy mystery on Aliens

I had come to spend my annual vacation in my favorite town of Bicholim, in the state of Goa. I was walking down the narrow street bordered by lush green grass lawns, interspersed with mango and palm trees. As I was passing the town library, I thought of meeting Mrs. DeSilva, the quinquagenarian librarian and an erudite scholar. She had written a few cozy mystery books for children where the crimes took place off stage and the wounds inflicted on the victim are seldom used as clues. They were very popular, and I was keen to know about her next story.

As I ascended the stairs and was walking towards her room, I found her standing before a bookshelf frantically searching for something. I stood quietly behind her for a few seconds before greeting her, “Good Morning! Mrs. DeSilva, looking very busy! Are you searching for your new book?”

She turned round, smiled amiably, and said, “Oh, no! Not at all. These days there is lot of speculation about ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ (UFO) visiting our planet and several claims are made from people to have seen them. NASA is silent on this topic and says that they are all rumors. I am just trying to search some magazines and journals where details about the sights are written.”

“That’s terrific!” I yelled. “You are going to become a grandmother sleuth to track out these intruders! Have you given up writing those cozy mysteries which I had been reading in my school days?”

“These days children have become much more intelligent than those in your days. They talk about artificial intelligence, aliens, and satellites. They are not interested in those mundane mystery stories! Come, let’s go to my room and I will tell you some very interesting stories relating to UFOs,” she said, as she led me to her cozy room carrying a few books in her right hand.

“The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947, as told by journalist Annie Jakobsen to National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington D.C. in 2011, when she published a book about the mysterious Area 51 in Nevada.”

“Jacobsen added that the Army intelligence corps went on a search for former Third Reich aerospace designers who were said to have created a flying disc. That same year, the Air Force started a program to investigate UFO sightings, called ‘Project BLUE BOOK’. Over the next two decades, 12,618 strange sightings were reported to the project. When it was phased out in 1969, around 700 sightings were still categorized as ‘Unidentified’ according to the National Archives.”

“This means that the stories about Area 51 and the strict secrecy around the area, which I had been hearing, are true,” I exclaimed with a degree of satisfaction. “I also heard that some aliens who were captured, were subjected to rigorous medical tests in the secret laboratories in that complex. Have you anything to say on this subject?”  

“I enquired from the National Archives, but they are unable to locate any documentation among the ‘Project BLUE BOOK’ records which discuss the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico,” she replied.

“However, in September 1994 the Secretary of the Air-Force, Sheila Windell, announced that the US Air Force had completed its study to locate records that relate to the alleged 1947 UFO incident near Roswell. Pro-UFO researchers claim that an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien occupants were recovered near Roswell in July of 1947, and that this fact was kept from the public.”

“There you are! All good things happen in September. Do you know the fabulous tune of the movie “Come September” starring Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida in 1961?” I asked.

“Of course! Who doesn’t know it,” she remarked emphatically while standing up and making some delicate hip movements to demonstrate the truth of her words. ” I used to dance this item many times during my college days.”

“So did I!” I exclaimed. “Can’t we rejuvenate ourselves by looking back in retrospection to our golden days?”

She laughed heartily and asked, “Do you want to know more mysteries about aliens?”

“Ah! Yes, I am curious to know if there is any possibility of other worlds hosting organisms ranging from bacteria to technological beings. Researchers have announced that they have captured a very mysterious beam of energy in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum at 980 megahertz, coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light years away.”

She pondered for a while and replied, “Researchers are excited with this signal, but cautious, explaining that there could be more mundane sources, like comet, hydrogen cloud, or even human technology mimicking an alien signal, and it will take time before they can receive convincing proof that the signal is sent from extraterrestrials.”  

Alice in Wonderland Analogy

“I will tell you another interesting story. In September 1954, Santiago Airlines Flight 513 departed from Aachen, West Germany, destined to Porto Alegre, Brazil. The flight should have taken around 18 hours. However, it took 35 years and on October 12, 1989, without any contact with air traffic controllers, Santiago Flight 513 was spotted circling the Porto Alegre airport, where it made a successful landing.”

“OMG! How is it possible to take 35 years for a flight of 18 hours?” I screamed in disbelief.

“Yes, indeed it is unbelievable!” she agreed. “What is a much more shocking is that when the door of the plane was opened, the skeletons of 92 people buckled into their seats were seen. The skeletal body of Captain Miguel Victor was found in his pilot’s seat, hands on the controls, with the engine still humming.”

“Is there any scientific explanation for these phenomena?” I inquired hoping for a convincing reply.

“We must dive deep into the realm of cosmology to find a possible explanation. In our world there are many places where aircrafts, ships, boats, or even people go missing without any traces. Many scientists believe that those places unpredictably create some kinds of time portals called Vortex, which is said to be a result of the parallel universe theory. According to this theory, Vortex opens on another world – a parallel world consisting of antimatter – that can absorb people, masses or even light and time. In other words, people gone missing in this world actually reach another world within seconds,” she explained.

“I find this concept of people, masses and other items, especially time, getting absorbed into another parallel world rather confusing.  All I understand is the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ written by Lewis Carrol.  Here Alice, a young girl, sits bored by a riverbank where she spots a white rabbit with a pocket watch and waistcoat lamenting that he is late. The surprised Alice followed him down a rabbit hole, which sent her down a lengthy plummet but to a safe landing. So, your Vortex is nothing but a rabbit hole into which all the missing people, which are represented by Alice, and time, represented by the pocket watch of the white rabbit plummet! So, this is equivalent to the same cozy mystery stories written earlier? I asked perplexedly.

She sat down on her chair and thought for a while before answering, “At the origin of the universe, the matter was not alone to appear, antimatter accompanied it in equal quantities.  Thus, matter and antimatter separately formed two distinct Universe: a universe of matter and a universe of antimatter. These two universes coexist within the same ‘space’, but not within the same ‘time’. It is this temporal barrier between them that prevents them from mixing. If this were not the case matter and antimatter would destroy each other when in contact.”

“Is this barrier identified as a ‘time-warp’?” I asked.

“Time-warps can be thought of as anything that disrupts the flow of time by making it go faster or slower. This idea was predicted by Einstein’s theories of special relativity. In short, anything with mass is a time warp. However, the effect is only detectable for objects with large masses, such as planets, stars, or black holes, which can create significant distortions in space-time. In fact, if you were able to somehow place a clock close to a black hole and observe it from far away, you may notice that it would appear to tick more slowly than your own watch that was next to you. This effect is called gravitational time dilation and it results from distortions in space-time,” she clarified.

She added further, “Travelling at high speeds can also cause time dilation. For example, if you travel in a spaceship at the speed of light, time will essentially come to a standstill for you from the viewpoint of an observer back on earth. This scenario can be described as time-travel because you would move into the future faster than the observer.”  

“Do you mean to say that the passengers of Flight 513 were time travelers who went to another parallel world for a few seconds and came back after 35 years?” I asked exasperated.

“Well! According to Einstein’s theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true. For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set exactly to the same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane going in the same direction as the earth rotates. After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. Thus, a person aged 25 years who goes to another planet and back in one month, according to his clock, finds his friend on earth has grown 50 years old according to his clock!” she answered.

“Fantastic! In the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ when Alice plummeted down the rabbit hole she came to a safe landing in a room with a tiny door. She was pondering how to fit through the door when she discovered a bottle reading, ‘drink me’. Alice hesitantly drank a portion of the bottle’s contents and to her astonishment she shrank small enough to enter the door. Alice also found a cake and when she ate it, she grew to a tremendous size. This is equivalent to ‘time dilation’, that you are talking about. In this case the cause and effects are clearly defined, whereas in your scientific explanation there are no reasons given beyond suggesting that it is based on a relativistic theory which is invisible,” I proclaimed triumphantly.  

“Oh, no! The mathematics of time travel does affect the things we use every day,” she said with caution.

“For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town? GPS satellites orbit around Earth very fast, at about 8700 miles per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second. However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth at an altitude of 12,550 miles. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slightly larger fraction of a second.”

“How does that happen?” I shot back.

“Einstein’s theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth’s gravity is much less. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground. The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Now do you get it?” she asked. 

I could only nod my head in the affirmative to convey my answer. Mrs. DeSilva, the librarian, had done a sleuth’s job in systematically deciphering a paranormal event in the light of an application of metaphysical laws in physics and explaining the possibilities of its occurrence. It appeared to be the modern version of the older cozy mystery stories I heard with much eagerness in my younger days. After this meeting I got educated with some of the simplified theories in cosmology and continued my walk into the future!

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