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IS THE FISH INTERPRETATION UNIQUE?

By Robert Sheaffer

The story of Marjorie Fish's attempts at identifying the star
patterns sketched by Betty Hill was told in "The Zeta Reticuli
Incident" by Terence Dickinson in the December 1974 issue. This pattern
of solar type stars unquestionably bears a striking resemblance to the
map that Betty Hill says she saw while she was being examined aboard a
flying saucer. But how significant is this resemblance? Is there only
one pattern of stars which will match the sketch convincingly?

Betty Hill herself discovered an impressive resemblance in a star map
published in the New York Times. In 1965 a map of the stars of the
constellation Pegasus appeared in that newspaper, accompanying the
announcement by a Russian radio astronomer (Comrade Sholomitsky) the
radio source CTA-102, depicted in the map, may be sending out
intelligent radio signals. Intrigued by this remarkable claim, Betty
Hill studied the map, and added the corresponding star names to her
sketch. As you can see, the Pegasus map -- while not exactly like the
sketch -- is impressively similar. If CTA-102 -- appearing near the
"globes" in her sketch -- was in reality an artificial radio source,
that would give the Pegasus map much additional credibility.

However, the case for the artificial origin of quasar CTA-102 soon
fell flat. Other scientists were unable to observe these reported
strange variations which had caused Sholomitsky to suggest that CTA-102
might be pulsing intelligently.

In 1966, when Marjorie Fish was just beginning her work, Charles W.
Atterberg (employed by an aeronautical communications firm in Illinois)
also set out to attempt to identify this star pattern.

"I began my search by perusing a star atlas I had on hand," Atterberg
explained. "I soon realized that this was a pointless and futile
project." Any star pattern useful for interstellar navigation, he
reasoned, would not be Earth-centered as are the familiar constellation
figures. Thus Atterberg began to look in three dimensions for a pattern
of stars that would approximate the Hill sketch.

Working from a list of the nearest stars, Atterberg "began plotting
these stars as they would be seen from various directions. I did this
by drawing the celestial position of a star, I would draw a straight
line penetrating the sphere at a known position, and measure out to the
distance of the star...It at first took me hours to plot this out from
any one particular direction."

When plotting the stars as seen from a position indefinitely far away
on the celestial equator at 17 hours right ascension, Atterberg found a
pattern of stars conspicuously similar to the Hill sketch. After much
work he refined this position to 17 hours 30 minutes right ascension, -
10 degrees declination. The resulting map resembles the Hill sketch
even more strongly than does the Fish map, and it contains a greater
number of stars. Furthermore, all of the stars depicted in the
Atterberg map lie within 18.2 light-years of the sun. The Fish map
reaches out 53 light-years, where our knowledge of stellar distances is
much less certain.

Carl Sagan states in Intelligent Life in the Universe that, excluding
multiple star systems, "the three nearest stars of potential biological
interest are Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi and Tau Ceti." These three
stars from the heart of the Atterberg map, defining the two spheres in
the very center of the heavy lines that supposedly represent the major
"trade routes" of the "UFOnauts". Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti were the
two stars listened to by Project Ozma, the pioneering radio search for
intelligent civilization in space.

Other heavy lines connect the spheres with the sun, which we know has
at least one habitable planet. Thinner lines, supposedly representing
places visited less frequently, connect with Groombridge 1618,
Groombridge 34, 61 Cygni and Sigma Draconis, which are designated as
stars "that could have habitable planets" in Stephen H. Dole's Rand
Corporation study, Habitable Planets for Man. Of the 11 stars (not
counting the sun) that have allegedly been visited by the aliens, seven
of them appear on Dole's list. Three of the four stars which are not
included are stopping points on the trip to Sigma Draconis, which Dole
considered to have even better prospects than Epsilon Eridani or
Epsilon Indi for harboring a habitable planet.

Another remarkable aspect of the Atterberg map is the fact that its
orientation, unlike the Fish map, is not purely arbitrary. Gould's belt
-- a concentration of the sky's brightest stars -- is exactly
perpendicular to the plane of the Atterberg map. Furthermore, it is
vertical in orientation; it does not cut obliquely across the map, but
runs exactly up and down. A third curious coincidence: The southpole of
the Atterberg map points toward the brightest part of Gould's belt, in
the constellation Carina. The bright stars comprising Gould's belt
might well serve as a useful reference frame for interstellar
travelers, and it is quite plausible that they might base a
navigational coordinate system upon it.

No other map interpreting the Hill sketch offers any rationale for
its choice of perspectives. The problem with trying to interpret Betty
Hill's sketch is that it simply fits too many star patterns. Three such
patterns have been documented to date. How many more exist
undiscovered?

Robert Sheaffer is a computer systems programmer currently working at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

Jerry
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