Debating UFOs with Carl Sagan
Early in my TV news career, after doing a ‘live’ half-hour show with Carl Sagan about Voyager II’s Saturn flyby, we debated UFO reality in a PBS parking lot. It was a close encounter I’ll never forget.
It was 1981 and the Voyager II spacecraft was about a month or more away from its “encounter” with Saturn. I was an investigative reporter at KCET, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, working on a series known as Newsbeat with Clete Roberts. It was a nightly show with extended pieces of fifteen minutes or more. I’d gotten the gig after my job as a CNN correspondent came to a crashing halt after the in-over-his-head Bureau Chief who hired me got sacked and the alcoholic new guy wanted his own people. That’s TV, folks, but it’s another story…
Space Was My Beat
In any case, because I’d covered some space stories at CNN, I’d convinced the powers-that-be at PBS that I should be the space reporter, and they’d said yes. That meant that I’d covered the Space Shuttle, actually going to Cape Canaveral with a camera crew back when the shuttle was brand new. It also meant that anything that happened at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena was my beat and, as an added bonus, a local story, meaning that no travel funds had to be expended for me to go there.
The Voyager II unmanned spacecraft had been launched in August of 1977. Now, four years later, it was due to make its closest approach to Saturn on August 25, 1981. It was even going to send back photos in almost real time.
I got an idea.
Reaching Out to the King of the Cosmos
The year before, in 1980, PBS aired Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by Carl Sagan, and it was a smash. Produced in 1978 and 1979 at KCET (the station where I was now working), it was ahead of its time in special effects, allowing Sagan to actually walk through environments, something unusual for the time. Good feelings were all around in those days. Emmys had been won. Sagan was as hot as hot could be.
I pitched my boss at Newsbeat on devoting an entire night of our show to the Voyager encounter. In my vision, we would reach out to Sagan, and appeal to his sense of cosmic fair play. PBS had done so much for him, and our station had been his home base for over a year.
Incredibly, he said yes. Instead of it being a night of our regular newscast, it was decided to turn it into a special, Saturn and Beyond. In fact, it grew so big, so fast, as an idea, that hosting the show was going to be given to our anchorman Clete Roberts and I was going to be the producer.
Clete and I got along. We were buddies. He told me that I reminded him of himself when he was getting started in broadcast journalism. That summer he did something amazing for me. He picked a fight with management over his salary to host the show, and then refused to do it, pretending they’d insulted him. He told them to let me do it. To my utter amazement, they said yes.
I got to host Saturn and Beyond, and it was going to be Carl Sagan and me “live,” without commercial interruption, for thirty minutes on a show that got picked up by PBS for broadcast across the United States. It was heady stuff. After all, he was designing the messages for extraterrestrial civilizations that would ride with that Voyager spacecraft on the “Golden Record” at the same time I was a hippie radio news jock in Eugene, Oregon during college. Now I was going to sit on the same stage with him and talk a little space travel.
Hot August Night
The show came together quickly. It was here that I first met my lifetime friend and collaborator Brad Markowitz, who was also assigned to the special. I had seniority so I got the producer title; he was a few years younger, fresh out of University of Missouri School of Journalism, so he got to be associate producer. It didn’t matter what they called us. We just worked our asses off and produced the shit out of it. We had all the graphics produced by NASA/JPL, interviews with scientists galore, and, burning a hole in our pockets, we had Carl Sagan who was going to come in studio and sit toe-to-toe with me and, if we got lucky, start rapping about “billions and billions” of planets out there like Saturn.
The show was great. Carl Sagan was great. He gave us everything we could want and more. We didn’t really have anything phenomenal in terms of photos coming in live just yet, but he made it sound so exciting anyway. I sure wish I’d taken a photo, or that someone had, just to prove it all happened because, for me, it was a magical moment in my news career, one that I’ll never forget.
As I recall it now, Sagan stuck around after for a few minutes, talking graciously with the crew. Everybody treated him like a movie star because not only was Cosmos nominated for five Emmys at the next month’s awards show, but he was like the conquering hero on his home turf at PBS. Weirdly, Cosmos did not win the next month. That honor went to Steve Allen’s Meeting of the Minds, a fine show, but one that no one remembers when almost everyone remembers Cosmos because, frankly, over a billion people have actually seen it.
Sagan was making the rounds that night. He’d done our show, and he had a few more stops at the commercial stations ahead of him. As these things go, as the show producer and the host, you could say that Carl was my guest that night. So I did what any gracious host might do. I offered to walk him to his car, and that’s just what was happening when things got really interesting.
Close Encounter of the Hollywood Kind
Supposedly, Carl Sagan’s ride was a 1970 Porsche 914. I’m not really a car person so I can’t tell you from my personal experience in that parking lot. I do remember thinking to myself that he was driving a considerably hotter car than the Datsun B210 that was getting me around Los Angeles.
If all I’d done is chatted amiably with Sagan and waved goodbye as he motored off in his Porsche that would still be a nice memory. Instead, things took a turn.
The thing is, in 1981, I was not a “UFO guy.” That would come later in my life and career when I created the NBC drama series Dark Skies about an alien invasion in the Sixties. I knew a thing or two about unidentified flying objects having grown up in Hillsboro, Oregon, only a few miles from where the now famous 1950 McMinnville photos were taken by farmer Paul Trent. I’d read a couple of books about them, including one by Donald Keyhoe as well as The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller. In 1975, as a radio morning news anchor, I’d covered the Travis Walton abduction. I guess you could say that I knew enough to be dangerous.
You have to understand that by this point, Sagan and I had done some pre-show chatting, done a thirty-minute live show, done some post-show back-and-forth. Neither one of us wanted to talk about Saturn any more, and we didn’t know each other well enough to get too personal either. I’d seen him on The Tonight Show a few times and he seemed like a fun guy so I just went for it. One of the things I’d learned to do as a reporter, and that serves me well even today, is to just ask people questions they are not expecting to see how they handle them. This is what I asked him:
“You’re famous for saying that there are billions and billions of stars out there in the Universe. You’ve actually said that you believe the Universe is teeming with life, and that some of it must be intelligent, probably more advanced than we are. But you also insist that none of these other beings could actually be here on Earth because the distances are too vast.”
Sagan’s smile left his face during this. He said, “What’s your point?”
“Well, only that you want us to look for radio signals coming from other civilizations out in space, but you say in Cosmos that UFOs aren’t really worth investigating, because they can’t be here in the first place. You’re a scientist. Why wouldn’t you want to investigate, particularly since it could prove we’re not alone?”
“I also said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” said Sagan. “The claims I’ve seen don’t come with much proof at all.”
We knocked the subject about for a few more minutes. It would be great if I had a photographic memory because this is one where I’d want to remember it word for word. What stands out, even today, is that Sagan was adamant that the vast majority of UFOs were misidentifications, something I agreed with. We talked about the Betty and Barney Hill case which he discussed on Cosmos, and which he gave zero credibility to and cited as an example of how unreliable witnesses were.
The truth of the matter, to me, is that he felt giving any quarter on the UFO issue could kill his career. He was a scientist, a popularizer of science, but he was no fool, given that he’d been denied tenure at Harvard for being a little too out there. And so he implied that if I started talking about these UFOs, then I wouldn’t be taken seriously either. I can’t specifically remember if he used the term “little green men,” but he definitely dismissed this as talking about flying saucers.
Sagan checked his watch, announced he was in danger of being late to his next interview which, if memory serves, involved him getting out to JPL to go live with Ted Koppel on Nightline. He thanked me for a great chat, shook my hand, and motored off onto Sunset Boulevard, heading for Pasadena.
I never saw Carl Sagan again in person but, as it turns out, I just couldn’t quit him either.
Writing Sagan into the Dark Skies Universe
Sadly, Dr. Sagan passed away far too young five days before Christmas in 1996 from myelodysplasia-caused pneumonia. I remember this date clearly because my NBC alien series Dark Skies had premiered just three months earlier.
By this point in my life, I’d moved onto my next career, leaving TV news for writing and producing one hour TV dramas and films. There is a constant need for new ideas to fill a series. When I heard about Sagan’s death, I thought back to that parking lot fifteen years earlier.
I remembered what I’d learned in the years since. That Sagan had been considerably more open on the subject of extraterrestrial visitation at the beginning of his career but his public statements on the subject had turned to the negative sometime in the mid-60s. During the 1947 saucer craze, a teenage Sagan had wondered if they might be alien spaceships. He went on to win a high school essay contest about ET contact here on Earth, advise NASA and even the Apollo astronauts, run symposiums on the subject of aliens, and talk openly about a Universe teeming with ET life. It seems, at least for a while, that he even had a Top Secret clearance with the U.S. Air Force. In 1966, however, he was part of the committee that reviewed Project Blue Book and recommended the study that became the now-infamous Condon Committee.
Then it hit me. What if Carl Sagan damn well knew that UFOs were a real phenomenon and the government reached out to him and made him a deal? What if that deal was as simple as this — Dr. Sagan, we will bring you inside our investigation and you can be one of our primary scientific consultants and, in exchange, we will need you to use your public persona to tamp down expectations about the subject, to act as a debunker?
So we wrote him into the series in a part played over multiple episodes by actor Joe Urla. The YouTube clip below gives you a chance to see his first and last appearance on the series. The NBC lawyers let us use his real name and say what we said because he was a public figure, now deceased. Remember Brad Markowitz, my fellow producer on Saturn and Beyond? We co-wrote the episode, along with my Dark Skies co-creator Brent Friedman.
Before you say, well, that’s just crazy, making him part of the Majestic-12 organization and a key player in the cover-up. All legit, but let’s remember Donald Menzel. He was the leading debunker of the 1950s and 1960s and, like Sagan, an astronomer of national reputation. According to research done by the late Stanton Friedman, Menzel also had a high security classification and led a secret life that was kept from even his wife, that he was a member of MJ-12 when it was formed after the Roswell crash recovery of 1947. And, here’s the kicker, Menzel hired Sagan as an associate professor of astronomy at Harvard back in 1961. Sagan later put him on one of his symposiums. These guys knew each other well.
So, a credible but currently unprovable argument can be made that our show’s treatment of Sagan as a man who lived a double-life, working inside the cover-up, yet publicly debunking UFOs, is at least a possibility. That was the low bar we had to clear for it to become a storyline in a dramatic TV series about an alien invasion in the 1960s.
A new wrinkle was added in 2010 when researcher and author Paola Leopizzi-Harris alleged that Carl Sagan revealed to the nearly as famous Dr. J. Allen Hynek that he believed UFOs were real but avoided any public statements to prevent the loss of academic research funding.
“My recollection is that Hynek said it was backstage of one of the many Johnny Carson Tonight shows Sagan did. He basically said (to Hynek) in 1984, ‘I know UFOs are real, but I would not risk my research funding, as you do, to talk openly about them in public.’ ”
Harris may have a leg to stand on with this story. She worked with Hynek from 1981 to 1985, after he had left Project Blue Book and was working for CUFOS, the Center for UFO Studies.
Who knows? It’s at least possible, based on this, that Carl Sagan might have been a closeted believer in UAP/UFO reality — professing one public scientific point of view yet maintaining a significantly contradictory personal belief. The next question might be why: just a fear of being shunned by his academic peers or because the powers-that-be brought him inside but made him pay a heavy price?
The proof here is thin, of course, based on hearsay. And, as the good doctor would say, extraordinary claims…
Dr. Sagan, I Presume?
Looking back now, however he came to have his opinions about UFOs, I feel privileged to have debated the subject with Carl Sagan, even if only for a few minutes in a parking lot. His was a brilliant, facile mind. To hear him argue that the Universe was teeming with life but that none of it could possibly be here was odd, but it did not lessen the intensity of this memory. That’s never left.
And if my Dark Skies television series turns out to be true in its dramatic interpretation of Sagan, one can only feel sadness for him. After all, he was our original scientific communicator, bringing complex issues to the public, talking about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. People like Bill Nye and Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson really just walk in his shadow, something they all acknowledge. What a great irony it would be that the thing Sagan probably wanted to most talk about was something he had to keep bottled inside. Is his successor as host of a rebooted Cosmos, Tyson, doing the same thing today? I think it’s possible. From Menzel to Sagan to Tyson… a lineage of denial and ridicule…
In any case, this close-mindedness from important scientific figures about UAP/UFO reality is something that has continued for the last 75 years. It’s a damn shame. In the name of science, they have held back science.
Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. The thing is, our own government, with the publication of the UAP Report, now says that we have it. If he’d lived, Carl Sagan would probably have consulted on that report, from the inside or from the outside.
In another world, in another part of the multiverse, I imagine myself hosting Carl Sagan on those PBS sound stages. Instead of talking about an unmanned probe of Saturn, we are talking about intelligently piloted craft from other worlds, other times, or even other locations on Earth itself. That would have blown Sagan’s mind.
Rest In Peace, Carl. It looks like that other intelligent life you were looking for has found us after all.
Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer Bryce Zabel and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.
