Enrico Fermi was a man with outstanding talents, he had many interests outside his own particular field. He was credited with asking famous questions. There are long preambles to Fermi's questions like this: -'The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, many of them not unlike our Sun. Many of these stars are likely to have planets circling around them. A fair fraction of these planets will have liquid water on their surface and a gaseous atmosphere. The energy pouring down from a star will cause the synthesis of organic compounds, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. These chemicals will join each other to produce a self-reproducing system. The simplest living things will multiply, and evolve by natural selection and become more complicated. And eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. Civilization, science and technology will follow. Then, yearning for fresh worlds, they will travel to neighboring planets, and later to planets of nearby stars. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth'. And so Fermi came to his overwhelming question, -'If all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?' It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor who supplied the perfect reply to Fermi's rhetoric: 'They are among us', he said, 'but they call themselves Hungarians'.
This is Francis
Crick's version of the Martian myth. [Crick received the Nobel Prize for the double helix. The above quote is the first page in his book, The Life Itself, MacDonald, London, 1982.1 THE MYTH The myth of the alien origin of the Hungarian scientists who entered world history on American soil during World War Two, probably originated in Los Alamos, but suspicions arose even earlier: -'At Princeton a saying gained currency that John von Neumann, at 29-years-of-age in 1933, the youngest member of the new Institute for Advanced Study, was indeed a demigod but that he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly' (Richard Rhodes). As a matter of fact, these Hungarians (especially Theodore Karman, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, recently even George Soros) enjoyed the myth. Edward Teller became especially happy about his E.T. initials. The Yankee magazine [March 19801 reported the landing of Martians in detail: 'Kemeny, von Neumann, Szilard, Teller and Wigner were born in the same district of Budapest. No wonder the scientists in Los Alamos accepted the idea that well over one thousand years ago a Martian spaceship crashlanded somewhere in the center of Europe. There are three firm proofs