We had quite a time coming to believe that meteorites were real.

Told that two Harvard professors suggested that was the case, Thomas Jefferson exclaimed, "I would rather believe those scientists are crazy than believe that rocks fall from the sky."

When lots of rocks fell from the sky on a single French village and the notables sent them to Paris accompanied by affidavits, the Academy of Science replied that they could but look with pity at the spectacle of an entire village seized by such a delusion.

When I spoke last year at DefCon, the Las Vegas celebration of computer hacking, I talked about "Hacking as Practice for Trans-planetary Life in the 21st Century."

That title was a pretty safe bet.

Hacking is best understood as an expression of the irrepressible desire to explore, the curiosity that drives the most passionate scientists and explorers. And we are already trans-planetary. We have been to the moon and have lived in space for years. Robots have landed on Mars and mapped Venus and will land in 2004 on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. We are orbiting Jupiter and will orbit Saturn. We are colonizing "near-earth space."

Electronic communications, including the Internet, are essential to planetary exploration. McLuhan reminds us that Columbus was a map maker before he was an explorer. Making maps and internalizing the possibilities they disclosed transformed his stance toward the world.

Our interaction with the structures of our information technologies transforms how we hold ourselves in the world as possibilities for action.

Images of colliding galaxies, gravitational lenses, and luminous nurseries of stars disclosed by the Hubble Telescope, netcast images of Mars from the recent rover, change how we think of ourselves and our place in the universe. We are already reaching the edges of our exploration of near-earth space and are being challenged by the seeming impossibility of going trans-galactic.

This from a species that less than a century ago laughed at ideas of heavier-than-air flying machines and nuclear energy.

So why is it so difficult to grasp that we are not the only species in a universe teeming with life? Wherever life can happen, life does happen, much of it wondrous and strange, even on earth. Why are we so resistant to the possibility that older civilizations have broken through barriers we perceive as absolute?

Why do we insist on thinking those villagers are lying, when they tell us that rocks are falling from the sky?

There is a story this morning on the front page of the Wall Street Journal mocking Chinese scientists for believing in UFOs. In the West, UFOs are "the stuff of Hollywood pulp and supermarket tabloids," while the scientific establishment of China (snicker, snicker) is trying to figure out how they fly those things so fast.

Setting aside for the moment that it is possible for non-American scientists to make significant discoveries, let's think about what is really being said.

I have written about the craziness of the digital world of UFOs on the Internet ("Stalking the UFO Meme," first published in Internet Underground and anthologized in Digital Delirium; it's archived at my web site). Many UFO stories on the web sound like the tale of the gnome that showed a mortal who had captured him where gold was buried in the forest. The man tied his scarf around the tree and went to get a shovel, making the gnome promise not to untie the scarf. He returned to find that the gnome had kept his promise but had tied scarves around every tree in the forest.

A forest of disinformation (intentional cover stories acknowledged by intelligence agencies) and confusion based on mistakes (meteorological phenomena, military operations, perceptual error, etc.) means that most of the scarves on UFO web sites are on trees where there's just no gold.

But the WWW is also a space in which real people connect with real events. How can we know which rocks are really falling out of the sky?

The attitude expressed in the Wall Street Journal underscores the fear of ridicule that has kept many people quiet or off the record for years. We hesitate to say what we know or believe because others have had careers disabled or reputations destroyed merely for voicing the possibility.

Still ... I have had enough off-the-record conversations over the years to know there's gold under one of those trees.

I have been told by intelligence officers, USAF career officers, fighter pilots, and commercial air line pilots as well as plain people uninterested in publicity that UFO phenomena are real.

I have compared notes with serious researchers, some of whom network in the "invisible college" defined by J. Allen Hynek a generation ago. Our conclusions differ in details but generally agree about the Big Picture of the last fifty years.

Hacking IS practice for trans-planetary life. The digital world contracts spacetime in ways that make it feasible to extend ourselves beyond our island earth.

So why are we human beings so resistant not only to new data but to new possibilities? I guess we're just too frightened to acknowledge that we're not who we thought we were. But then, we never are, and the explosion of the Internet in just a few years' time ought to be a statement (boing!) that nothing stays the same, least of all our tentative conclusions about what's real in the universe.

Maybe two million years at the top of the food chain on our home planet has deluded us into thinking we have the same status in the universe. When power people enter the Net for the first time, they learn they can not exercise power in a web by dominating and controlling, but by contributing and participating. Maybe its the same as we enter the web of larger life spun throughout the universe.

It is not the Beginning of the End but the End of the Beginning.

November 7 1997