A L S O_ T O D A Y Comics Carol Lay: "Potion Parts" T A B L E_ T A L K Are American undergraduates culturally illiterate? Discuss why or why not in the Education area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Sacred rites of an acid house By Isaac Zaur Beyond the bad food and the bad poetry, a tribe of students seek life's mysteries in a collective hallucination (09/21/98) Recess A one-stop playground for weekend frivolity and fun (09/18/98) Going adjunct By Andreas Killen The grueling plight of underemployed academics and the violent fantasies they entertain (09/17/98) Vocational fiction 101 By Carol Lloyd The principles of creative writing can help make sense of the absurd autobiographical art of résumé creation (09/16/98) Penile Ponderings By Lori Gottlieb When a professor asks you to grope your friend's organs for extra credit, what's the right thing to do? (09/15/98) BROWSE THE IVORY TOWER ARCHIVE

BY CHRISTINA VALHOULI | Take us to your professor. Since the time of Galileo, astronomers have pointed their telescopes at the heavens and asked, "Are we alone in the universe?" Now, that same question is being posed by historians, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists who don't use telescopes but the more elusive instruments of the soft social sciences: research, oral history, theory and, finally, conjecture. Recently, popular culture has been suffused by man-made aliens. From television shows like "The X Files" and "3rd Rock From the Sun" to movies like "Independence Day" and "Men in Black," from the ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle claiming the car has been "reverse engineered" from UFOs to commercials in which ETs promote Hostess Ding Dongs, Quisp "the qwazy energy cereal" and Chilis restaurants, we can't seem to get enough of these alternately adorable, wise and terrifying but always slimy creatures. They've even starred alongside Kenny, Cartman, Stan and Kyle in the premiere episode of "South Park," called "When Cartman Gets an Anal Probe." Academia has usually been a haven from crazes involving paranormal phenomena, but now there are signs that alien nation has finally caught fire within the once cool walls of the ivory tower. In July, Stanford University professor emeritus Peter Sturrock and a panel of scientists from Princeton, Cornell and the University of Virginia reviewed a series of UFO reports. Their conclusion? Although the incidents had nothing to do with extraterrestrial intelligence, the panel called for more thorough investigations and criticized scientists' reluctance to study UFOs. In April, Cornell University Press published "Aliens in America" by political scientist Jodi Dean, who teaches at Hobart and William Smith colleges. And in the fall of 1999, the University of Kansas Press will publish an anthology of UFO essays, written by professors from Johns Hopkins, Temple and Eastern Michigan universities. Peculiar though it may be, the marriage of aliens with academia should come as no surprise. A university experiment first gave rise to the contemporary notion of aliens back in 1947. UFO mania kicked off in the United States that year on June 24, when amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold said he saw nine mysterious objects flying at supersonic speed across the Cascade Mountains near Mount Rainier. The press dubbed them "flying saucers" and the phrase stuck. Later that summer, a ranch foreman, W.W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material scattered near Roswell, N.M. Military officials called the debris a fallen weather balloon but some believed it was a flying saucer containing aliens. The story gained so much momentum that in 1966, Rep. Gerald Ford headed a congressional panel that looked into UFOs that included testimony by scientist Carl Sagan. The Roswell sighting resulted from a classified experiment developed by scientists at Columbia University, New York University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The team worked on "Project Mogul," a program designed to search for evidence of nuclear blasts, according to an Air Force report. The fallen debris came from the broken balloons and radar reflectors. Since then, academia and UFOs have remained blessedly separate. Until now. Despite ufology's stigma as an area of study for Weekly World News suckers and backwater eccentrics, a growing number of academics are risking their careers to come out of the extraterrestrial closet and openly study UFOs. The best known and most controversial is Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who uses hypnosis to determine if people have been abducted. Once the crème de la crème at Harvard, Mack built its psychiatry program from scratch and won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 biography of psychoanalyst T.E. Lawrence. Now he could be considered crème brûlee. Mack's colleagues view him as an embarrassment and make no bones about it. "I disagree with his conclusions and think he's totally deluded," says Dr. Paul Horowitz, an astronomer at Harvard who is currently working on the SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Are aliens colonizing America?