 Our next speaker is Karen Stahlsnow. She's a research fellow at the JREF, her talk which is gonna be cool from Klingon to Close Encounters, theories about alien language. Very exciting, very exciting. So here's her her limerick. The alien war left worlds charred as the two planets battled and sparred. If you study their writing, the reason they're fighting is over who's better, Kirk or Picard. Thank you. I've been saying I've been saying Karen's name wrong for years, so please welcome the wickedly talented Adele Designe. No, I'm sorry. Karen Stahlsnow. Hi everyone. My name is Dr. Karen Stahlsnow and I'm a linguist and a researcher and an investigator of Paranormal and Pseudo-Scientific Claims. I'm the author of the books God Bless America and Haunting America, thank you, which I actually wrote for the JREF. I'm a JREF fellow and a bad language columnist for Skeptic Magazine as well. So today I'm going to be discussing theories about alien communication taken from science fiction, from science and pseudoscience as well, and the implications of culture and cognition on possible alien communication. So this is my latest book, Language Myths. It's going to be coming out in a couple of weeks time through Palgrave McMillan. There are some flies which are available at the book table as well for a discount. So I'm going to be treating all different kinds of topics about language and pseudoscience and the paranormal. So including prayer and curses, channelers, chain letters, electronic voice phenomena, speaking in tongues, monster languages and alien languages as well, although I'm not talking about undocumented workers. So in popular culture, we've created aliens in our own image. So there might be little green men or there might be men in black, the grays or reptilians, but they have bodies similar to ours. And just like us, they usually have the ability to communicate among themselves and sometimes to communicate with us too. So here's one of the reptilians. But just be careful of what you call them. So in an article that I wrote a couple of years ago for CFI, I said about Jeff Peckman. I'm not sure if you guys have heard of him. He's a UFO disclosure activist. So I said that he plans to prove the existence of spaceships and little green men. And in a reply that he wrote for examiner, Peckman accused me of being discriminatory for calling aliens little green men. So remember aliens are people too. So science fiction has created many artificial or constructed alien languages known as conlangs. And the very first one appeared in this book here, Percy Greggs Across the Zodiac, in about 1880. So this book also is said to contain the first ever usage of the word astronaut, but it didn't mean then what it means now, then it was the name of a spacecraft. So some of these invented languages are highly simplistic. For example, the Martian vocabulary in the movie Mars Attacks is very limited. Here's a little example. So the script just read ACAC and that's exactly what the actors said. So it's just monosyllabic and some ad libbed and said rack as well. But it's not not very very complex. But in contrast, other science fiction languages are impressively elaborate. For example, the Klingon language, which is spoken by the Klingon people and the Star Trek films and TV series. So Klingon initially consisted of just a handful of words which were created by the actor James stewon, who who plays Scotty. And then a linguist by the name of Mark Ockrand expanded Klingon into a fully fledged language with its own vocabularies syntax and phonology and alphabet. So today there's a Klingon dictionary and Shakespeare's Hamlet and much ado about nothing and even the Bible have been translated into Klingon. So there's a there's a community of speakers and a Klingon language Institute that publishes a journal and magazine and holds an annual conference. So if we earthlings are going to encounter an extraterrestrial species, obviously, we're going to want to communicate with them. But it's unlikely that they're going to make it easy on us by saying take me to your leader in the Queen's English. So how might aliens communicate? And how might they communicate with us? That is if they do exist at all. So there's an area of an academic area called xenolinguistics. It's also known as exolinguistics or astrolinguistics. And it's the study of hypothetical alien languages. So this is really the realm of academic research. Instead, it's most often science fiction that tackles alien language and the human alien communication barrier. So here's an example of the writing system on the TV show Futurama that's been translated by fans. So let's just look at some of the theories about alien language from science fiction. So one theory is that there might be some kind of intergalactic language that's common to all. So a common language is known as the lingua franca, you may have heard of that term. So these are bridge languages that act as a medium for speakers who don't share a native tongue. So we might invent some kind of pan cosmic Esperanto as well, such as galactic basic, which is shown here. This language is spoken galaxy wide in the Star Wars films, although it sounds a lot like English. So if the aliens have a comparable communication system to ours, it's likely that we might invent a new language with them. So this would be a mix of their existing language and ours. For example, it might take from human vocabulary and an alien grammar. So these are called contact languages. You've probably heard of pigeons and creoles. They often form when there's no lingua franca and yet people have the need to communicate. So these languages came together a lot on plantations, Hawaiian Creole for example. Sometimes they just die out. And then other times there are children who are born into a community and they need to expand that pigeon or Creole and they evolve into fully fledged languages. So if there's no common tongue, a popular theory is that we'd use a machine translation device to understand what the aliens are saying. A good example is the the babel fish or the babel fish in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So when placed in the ear, this fish allows the hearer to instantly understand anything that's said in any form of language. The TARDIS machine from Dr. Who is another example and it enables its passengers to hear foreign languages in their own foreign in their own language. So this is actually the basis for the original speaking in tongues on the the day of Pentecost in the Bible too. There's also a universal translator on Star Trek although strangely it doesn't seem to always work when Klingon is spoken. And in the Darmok episode of Star Trek, the device translates the language of the Tamarind people. However, they find out that the language is based on metaphor of the Tamarind folk law and it's completely obscure when it's translated directly into English. So think about some of the idioms that we have in English and how strange they'd sound if they were translated directly into other languages. So a phrase like on the house. I think the equivalent in French or one of the equivalences in the eye. So to translate that literally it sounds pretty peculiar. So this illustrates the difference between knowing a language and being able to understand a message in it. So these sci-fi theories are all just workarounds to avoid the enormous problems which are posed by interstellar translation. So as you can see human to human translation is difficult enough. That's my favourite one. It's a bit naughty, my apologies. So the point is that there are over 6,000 human languages that are around today that all represent different ways of thinking and speaking about the world around us. But however as humans we all have some common ground. So living in a different solar system tends to alter your world view or universe view as the case may be. So an alien species would have taken a different evolutionary path to humankind. There might be radical differences in biology and ecology that would influence their culture and their cognition. So human to human translation simply wouldn't be the same thing as human to alien translation which might be done in the absence of common experiences and knowledge. So would we even recognise an alien language as language? So there are theories that aliens might instead use a non-verbal communication system that involves gestures or is based on chemicals like insects and plants. So an alien language could involve colour as well like the communication of cuttlefish and chameleons or it could involve communication that's based on taste touch smell or electrical impulses. So alien language could be very unexpected. So science is making a genuine attempt to search for life beyond earth. So I'm sure everyone here has heard of SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and they've been around since 1985 searching for alien communication but without success so far. And I like this quote here from Laurence Doyle of the Mountain View Bar SETI group. And I think this is an excellent reminder that while looking for communication from alien species there are plenty of communication systems here on earth that are left to unravel. For example he's a guy's name is John Lilly and he was a pioneer of interspecies communication. He founded a semi-secret society which is called the Order of the Dolphin of which Carl Sagan and Frank Drake were members interestingly enough. And they hoped to be able to crack the code of dolphin communication in the belief that they could decipher alien languages that we might encounter. So Lilly's methods they tended to drift away from the mainstream and to people like Carl Sagan and Frank Drake drifted away from him in the end. He tried to teach dolphins how to speak English. He injected them with LSD to see if it would affect their vocalizations which it didn't. So he's nowadays known as the psychedelic scientist and his work is by and large discredited. So not only are there systems of animal communication that we can't yet understand there are plenty of human languages and scripts that we can't yet understand. For example the writing on the Faistos disc that's the one there on the left. This is a bronze age artifact that was found in Crete about four thousand years ago or dates to about four thousand years ago in the linear A tablets there's an example there on the right which is also found in Crete and examples in Turkey and Israel. It's about the same age so both writing systems haven't been decoded yet. And here's an example of one of my favorite writing systems is called Rongo Rongo and it was used to write the Rapa Nui language in Easter Island up until the 1860s. So it's as of yet undeciphered too. So if we can't decipher the language of our ancestors then we'll probably have difficulty understanding the language of an alien species that have different anatomy and probably different vocal apparatus that is if they do use our language in the way that we do. So their language would likely exhibit unfamiliar structures and sounds. So Mark Ockrand capitalized on this with by using uncommon human sounds for Klingon to make it sound more alien. So many of you would have heard of the Voynich manuscript and it's been called the world's most mysterious writing system and it's a 15th century work which has an unknown language and script. There are lots of crazy theories about this one. One is that Leonardo da Vinci wrote this illustrated book but it actually predates him by a couple of decades. Other people think that it's an artificial language of some kind or it's a cypher or a lot of skeptics too believe that it's a hoax and Eric von Daniken says that we can't understand it because aliens wrote it in a language that's too complex for us mere humans to understand. However there's a British linguist by the name Stephen Bax who has made a recent breakthrough in deciphering the Voynich manuscript and he employed the same methods that were used to decipher the linear B writing system by looking for proper pronouns in these books and to link those to to drawings and then to compare these to other languages. So he believes that this is a natural language a real language. I've actually written about this in the current issue of Skeptic Magazine I think everyone's got a copy of that right now so my point is there are lots of mysteries which are still left in the world. So could we communicate with aliens maybe using some kind of universal language? So if we need to communicate across cultures and space literally some believe that a constant might be a solution such as mathematics. So a formal language could feasibly circumvent cultural bounds like the math-based language in Carl Sagan's contact and in the 1960s a Dutch professor of mathematics Hans Frodenthal developed Linkos here and this is for use in radio transmissions. So these signals combine to make up concepts or words. So formal languages could work that is if aliens have human-like thought. However a simplified language that's based in maths and logic would have difficulty conveying the abstract concepts and culture specific terms that language can convey. And musical tones are used for communication in close encounters of the third kind. So similarly a universal language might include pictures or it might include song although these so-called universals might not be universal after all and could pose problems. For example music wouldn't work if aliens didn't have hearing and pictures wouldn't work if aliens didn't have sight. So some people interpret stimuli differently too. So people with the neurological condition synesthesia might see letters and numbers as colors as an example that I found online. Or the sound of an instrument might cause a person to see a color. So likewise stimuli might be interpreted differently by different species. So another popular theory is that extraterrestrial communication would be more advanced than terrestrial communication like Eric von Dunnecken as he has said. So the idea is that they would have language but it would be more evolved and more complex than our language. So perhaps aliens would be capable of mental telepathy, the language of thought. So by this theory aliens would transmit their thoughts via thought rather than via speech. Telepathy in mind transference is explored a lot in science fiction such as the Vulcan mind meld that you see here and when using this telepathic link which requires physical touch using the fingertips the minds of two individuals temporarily share the same thoughts. However for telepathy to work beyond science fiction both the sender and the receiver would probably have to share a language because thought projection wouldn't necessarily include automatic translation. So if telepathy just involved sharing thoughts or or mental pictures this wouldn't be a complete replacement for the complex ideas that were able to express using language. So alien communication in in science fiction isn't yet science fact and fans of the Klingon language know that it's all fantasy well most of them do but there are some people who believe that alien languages do exist and that they can speak them. So these people claim that they've had close encounters of the linguistic kind and they call themselves contactees and abductees and experiences star seeds star children well they believe that they're the chosen one to help initiate first contact and strangely there are many chosen ones and many contacts have been first. So let's look at a few alleged contactees and their alien languages. Helene Smith this is a 19th century psychic she's also known as Catherine Elyse Miller and she claimed to be able to talk to Martians. So during trans sessions she described scenes of life on Mars and used automatic writing using automatic writing she wrote in a Martian writing system too and she said that the writing was dictated to her by the Martians. She also said that she was a Hindu priestess and Marie Antoinette in past lives so that's something I share with her because I was told by a past life regressionist that I was Marie Antoinette and other friends of me and other skeptics have been told the same thing too so she gets around a bit. So a psychologist by the name of Theodore Flournoy and a linguist called Ferdinand de Sassier he's actually the father of linguistics they examined these samples of Martian and they discovered that people from Mars seem to be fluent in French and that just happened to be Smith's native language. So Flournoy analyzed the language in his book from India to planet Mars and he concluded that this was an artificial language but not a very good one and that the grammar and the sounds and the vocabulary resembled French so not some kind of unknown language. So to be honest the alien abductee languages just aren't as convincing as the conlangs like Klingon and here's another example you might have heard of this one Betty Luca in 1967 she had a surprise visit from some aliens that she called the elders and she's drawn a picture of them here and they took her to the mothership where she underwent the usual tests and anal probes and so over in the course of many abductions and sessions of hypnosis the elders taught her a mystical language so it looks a little bit like shorthand to me but anyway a friend of mine a linguist by the name of Mark Newbrook has revealed that Betty's language is really a mix of Latin and Greek and other classical languages and worse still the words are in citation form so this is when she speaks this language so the words are in citation form and that is those are the unmarked words you find in a dictionary so this means that there's no grammar in the language at all it's really just a list of words and probably plucked straight out of Greek for beginners or something like that. So Sheldon Nidal is another person who claims that he's experienced multiple visitations and abductions and he claims to have alien implants in his body that have given him an advanced knowledge of maths and and physics so during his abductions he was taught six different star languages and he'd like to teach us a few words to help us prepare for first contact. So let me show you how you say hello in Liren and the way you say hello in Liren is Shama'am so if you hear Shama'am it is just the Liren's your first ancestor saying to you hello. Now the Centarians say hello they simply say Samaya. So if you feel intense energy is very loving it's just the Centarians coming up to you and saying hello and they will say Samaya. Now when the Pleiadians come up to you they will simply be saying Shala'am and Shala'am means hello in Pleiadian and they of course love to play games just they just love to have time they're into joy they're into joy. I like to be into joy too. Now the way they say hello is simply Salamatja. So if you hear Salamatja it is simply Syrians saying hello to you. So if you hear the Hercules they will simply be saying Salamatjara. So if you hear Salamatjara it's the Hercules saying hello. Now when you hear a Andromedon come up to you and say hello they will simply say Acharya. So if you hear Acharya it is them saying hello. So I hope that what I've just done is going to help inform you make you more aware of meeting our first contact team. There you go. So curiously I looked at some of these phrases some of these ways of saying hello in these languages and some of them bear a very strong resemblance to greetings which are found in Indonesian and Malaysian which derived from Arabic. But I thought it's very curious in that languages which are spoken only hundreds of miles apart can be vastly different and unrelated. So Sirius and Hercules are many light years away from each other and from us but if we're to believe Nidal then his alien languages are not only related to each other but they're related to languages here on earth already. This is Tracy Taylor and she's a fellow countrymen of mine. She's from Australia and she's an alleged abductee and with those eyes you can tell that she's a hybrid quite clearly. She claims to be fluent in another style language but this language appears to be Glossalia which is speaking in tongues. So she murmurs meaningless sounds and strangely enough they bear a resemblance to Japanese and in doing some research I discovered that yes she had spent some time in Japan as she lived and worked there as a model for a while. So she was obviously influenced by the sounds of that particular language. So here's some of her alien art and she claims to have received symbols from aliens and she draws these pictures. So Tracy is a client of a woman named Mary Rodwell. She's a hypnotherapist who's conducted thousands of hypnotic regressions with alleged alien abductees. So abduction stories are usually the product of fantasy or delusion or hallucinations caused by sleep disorders such as sleep paralysis or they're often created by the therapists who invent and validate false memories of anal probes and alien languages. So I'm sure many of you have heard of David Ike or David Ike whichever you prefer. So he believes that not only are we not alone but aliens are already among us but these aren't your average grays. These are blood drinking, shape shifting reptilian humanoids from the alpha draconis style system. So reptilians are common in science fiction but they're also common in conspiracy theories. Reptilians are supposed to hide in underground bases but ironically many are prominent figures including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, Queen of England and George Bush and so you can see these photographs of their scaly skin are proof that they're lizards. So these aliens are interesting in that they can speak English and they can they can speak English and get an MBA from Harvard and become president of the United States. So I did a bit of research and found that the first reptilian sighting was by a guy called Herbert Sherma of Nebraska and I'm sure he's no relation to Michael Sherma but it's spelt differently. So he claimed to have been taken aboard a UFO by reptilian aliens in December 1967. So interestingly Star Trek introduces a reptilian alien called the Gorn in the episode Arena that aired in on January 19th and July the 6th of that same year. So it seems to be a case of life imitating art. So aliens are elusive to scientists yet some people claim to be bothered by them constantly and Stan Romanek is one of these people. He says that he's been abducted by aliens over 100 times and that he's even fathered hybrid alien babies. So he's infamous for his viral video that allegedly shows of peeping Tom alien peering through the window I'm sure many of you have seen that. So then one day an alien began leaving messages on his answering machine and tape recorder. So here is how he described this message which was left for him and here is the actual message. So it sounded like a growl apparently but Romanek believed that it contained a hidden message. So of course he knew exactly what to do he played it at seven times the original speed as you do and then suddenly miraculously it revealed this message. Starseed. So Starseed it's time. So this is a clearly a hoax and it appears as though the message was recorded first and then slowed down and you might even recognize the voice too because it turns out that this is Audrey which is a the synthesized British English female voice from AT&T natural voices text-to-speech software. So pretty unimpressive. You might have heard of Mr Romanek in the news of late too so earlier this year he was arrested on suspicion of possessing and distributing child pornography but in true conspiracy theorist style he's now claiming that the images were planted on his computer and that the charge is a part of a government conspiracy to shut him up. So his computer has been confiscated so it'll be very interesting to see if it turns up any evidence of hoaxes. So alien abductees are really out there but it seems as though some of these people live read one too many science fiction novels. So overall it can be fun but also very frustrating to speculate about the existence of alien languages but we're still talking about a hypothetical language from a hypothetical species. So let's find the aliens first if they're really out there but for now it's unlikely that anytime soon there'll be a Rosetta Stone for alien. So thank you very much everyone and enjoy the rest of your conference. Karen Stalsman Thank you Karen Shalaaham