(No planets have been discovered around either star. This southerly sky location makes Zeta Reticuli invisible to observers north of Mexico City's latitude. They are each fifth magnitude stars - barely visible to the unaided eye - located in the obscure southern constellation Reticulum. The two stars are known as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, or together as simply Zeta Reticuli.
( Editor’s note: by no metric is this true outside conspiratorial circles.) This hypothesis is based on a strange, almost bizarre series of events mixing astronomical research with hypnosis, amnesia, and alien humanoid creatures. I’ve annotated a few spots where our knowledge has improved.Ī faint pair of stars, 220 trillion miles away, has been tentatively identified as the "home base" of intelligent extraterrestrials who allegedly visited Earth in 1961. It’s a good tale of hokum that went awry. After all, it’s hard to claim a UFO or alien or ghost when we all have a cell phone in our pocket. In some ways, the UFO folklore is fading from consciousness. It would come through tiny hunts for a needle in a haystack, the distant, minute hum of a radio signal not of natural origin.
But eventually (around the time the Contact movie came out) I wised up and realized the real hunt for life on other worlds wouldn’t come from the sky in cigar shaped flying spheres or in the middle of the night through a light in the window. Here’s the thing: I used to be obsessed with UFOs. Our editor-in-chief, Dave Eicher, laughed it off until my face told him ‘I am serious and seriously nuts.’ I showed the issue to our other senior editor, Michael Bakich. ‘I’m going to run this for Halloween,’ I told our mild mannered senior editor Rich Talcott. John Wenz, associate editor, note: “Every time I mention this piece, someone in the office shudders. What better time to share a silly tale of alien abduction, and bad journalism, than Halloween?Įnjoy those pumpkins. But even in 1982, when I joined the staff as an assistant editor, the magazine crew still jokingly referred to this legendarily awful story as “The Zeta Ridiculi Incident.” I wasn’t around on Astronomy’s staff in the 1970s. But after several years the magazine’s fortunes recovered and by 1980, the time of the Voyager flybys, Astronomy became the world’s most widely read publication on the subject. Second, it nearly ruined the reputation of this young astronomy magazine. Two things happened from this absurd tale. The map supposedly showed the sky as seen from a planet orbiting the star Zeta Reticuli, from which the alien abductors had arrived. Betty Hill famously drew a star map from memory, in 1964, under psychoanalysis. This feature described the so-called Betty and Barney Hill story, in which a New Hampshire couple claimed to have been abducted in 1961 and taken aboard an alien spacecraft. Astronomy was just a year and a half old at the time, and this story set the fledgling magazine’s credibility back a long way. It probably cost Terry his job, as he was gone from the magazine a few months later. In the December 1974 issue of Astronomy, the then-editors published a lead feature story titled “The Zeta Reticuli Incident.” The well-known astronomy popularizer Terence Dickinson, then Astronomy’s Editor, penned the article.