Message from 61 Cygni

Sixty-one Cygni is a rather ordinary, fifth-magnitude star in the northern sky; its chief distinction is a planet about ten times as big as Jupiter. No one knows precisely what the inhabitants of that planet look like. But one day in the year 1894, Cygnian scientists, hunched over their radios, heard the familiar static of space crowded into the background by an unfamiliar signal. The message was undecipherable, but its meaning, they decided, was clear. They were receiving greetings from Earth, that little planet in the solar system some 66 trillion miles away.

Obviously, the signal demanded an answer, and the thoughtful Cygnians labored mightily over their reply. They hoped that earthmen would understand it, since they were sending it back by laser beam. But they were wrong.

For all their advanced skills, the sci entists of Cygnus made two important errors. In the first place, the signal they received contained no message at all. It came straight from Indonesia, where the volcano Krakatoa had erupted elev en years before, generating meaningless radio waves with its churning plasma.

Even worse, the Cygnians' laser-beamed response packed far too powerful a punch. When it hit the earth's atmosphere, high above central Siberia, its tremendous energy became a tremendous bomb. It blasted a group of craters 15 miles across and knocked men flat more than 30 miles away.

Incredible Crash. Is this what really happened? Yes it is, say Russian Science Writers Genrikh Saulovich Altov and Valentina Nikolaevna Zhuravlyova. It is their carefully detailed attempt to account for the incredible crash that rocked the Tungus region of Siberia over half a century ago. Something certainly landed on the Tungus. The craters are there, and men still remember the blast.

The Altov-Zhuravlyova article in the Leningrad magazine Zvezda last week is the latest in a long series of far-out theories. Russia's romantic science reporters have never been willing to settle for the most likely explanation--that the big blast was caused by an outsized meteorite.

Painfully Solemn. Some of them insist that it was caused by a comet; others prefer to believe that a huge, extraterrestrial spaceship crashed in Siberia, or perhaps jettisoned nuclear fuel that exploded and dug the crater. In 1959, an expedition of students from Tomsk University claimed to have found that the area is still radioactive, and so many Russians accepted their observations that the Soviet Academy of Sciences sent its own expedition--which found no abnormal radioactivity.

Serious Soviet scientists are hardly likely to endorse the laser-beam-from-Cygni theory, but they are not likely to denounce it either. If they took the trouble to knock down every wild theory that poses as science in the Soviet press, they would have little time for research.

Soviet publications are painfully solemn in most respects, but in science they go the limit in their search for sensationalism. They tell with wide-eyed enthusiasm of numerous sightings of abominable snowmen. They have seriously reported salamanders that came to life after being frozen solid for 5,000 years; a semiconductor device that gives out more energy than is fed into it; a monster that leaves tracks on the bottom of the ocean; a heavy mass of ice that fell from space and did not melt; a mysterious force pervading the universe that makes all revolving bodies, such as Earth, take on a heartlike shape.

Sooner or later, such reports always prove to be false, but the fictioneers go on. And rarely has their futuristic science reached so far into the past as the eruption of Krakatoa.

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