I remember the event as if it happened yesterday. In the early 1950s, George Singleton, my next door neighbor in Nashville, Tennessee, where I grew up, who was 12 years old, told me about his eyewitness account of seeing aliens landing in his back yard. I was eight or nine years old at the time. A large space craft that looked like a saucer hovered over his back yard, then landed, a door opened, and about a dozen creatures came out. I recall his saying that they were only about three of four feet tall and looked a little like chubby giant lizards. Terrified, he jumped backed into bed and tried to go back to sleep. When he woke up the next morning and looked out his window, there was a large black circle of burned grass but no spaceship. I carefully examined the site the next morning and George was exactly right. A large circle in the grass had turned black and was still smoldering. I carefully examined the circle and all the details he had described about the landing site were true.

I did not ask whether his dad had been burning leaves the day before.In a blog post last week, I wrote about seeing mysterious lights in the 1990s following our fleet of four sailboats crossing in the middle of the night from Saint Martins to the British Virgin Islands. And there are many accounts of unexplained UFO sightings on the web. AI lists the ones described below as the most important but there are many dozens more listed on Wikipedia:

• The “Kenneth Arnold Sighting” happened in Mount Rainier, Washington when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine high-speed, disc-shaped objects flying past Mount Rainier. He described their movement as like “a saucer skipping across water.” This event popularized the term “flying saucer”.
  The “Roswell Incident” occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, also in 1947. A rancher discovered debris on a property near Roswell. The U.S. military initially announced they recovered a “flying disc,” but retracted it the next day to claim it was a crashed weather balloon. It remains the most famous alleged UFO crash in history.
• The “Rendlesham Forest Incident” occurred in Suffolk, England in 1980. Often called “Britain’s Roswell,” U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at an RAF base reported seeing a glowing, metallic, triangular craft in the nearby woods over multiple nights. Witnesses recorded unusual lights, and some reported high radiation readings.
• The “Belgian UFO Wave” happened in 1988-1989 when thousands of citizens and police officers reported seeing a large, silent, black triangular craft with bright lights. The Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16 jets, which locked radar onto an object that performed rapid, extreme maneuvers beyond standard aircraft capabilities.Of course, there are more questions than answers, the most important being why we haven’t been able to capture one of these objects or at least been able to make contact with its occupants. Some believers in aliens claim that we have, but governments are keeping the encounters secret.

But aliens and UFOs are not the primary subject of this post. The question of the day is whether advanced life exists anywhere else in the universe besides on the planet Earth (though people could argue about whether “advanced” life really exists here.) The answer to that question is yes. Of course it does. Here are the basic facts:

Scientists tell us that the laws of nature apply everywhere. For life to exist on a planet, it needs to be a rocky planet like Earth and requires these seven conditions:

1. Liquid Water: This acts as a medium to let organic chemicals mix, react, and transport nutrients over time.
2. Energy Source Available: This powers the chemical reactions needed for metabolism, whether from a star via photosynthesis or from geothermal heat (like deep-sea vents).
3. Nutrients and Chemical Elements Present: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur are needed to form complex molecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins.
4. Location in the Habitable Zone (“Goldilocks Zone”): The planet must sit at the right distance from its star, so it is neither too hot nor too cold, allowing water to remain liquid on the surface.
5. A Protective Atmosphere: Traps heat to stabilize surface temperatures (the greenhouse effect) and shields living things from harmful cosmic and solar radiation.
6. A Magnetic Field: Generated by a rotating molten core, it deflects dangerous solar winds and cosmic rays that could strip away the atmosphere.
7. Right Size and Gravity: The planet needs enough mass and gravity to hold down a stable atmosphere, but not so much that it becomes a crushing gas giant with no solid surface.

So there you have it: if a rocky planet is in the goldilocks zone of the star that it is circling, has the basic building blocks in place, is big enough and—I would add—is at least one or two billion years old, there is a very good chance that some form of  life will emerge. It is just a matter of our finding that planet or “them” finding us.

But what about advanced life? If the history of our planet is typical, it takes a very long time, billions of years, for advanced life to happen, and probably involves numerous mass extinctions as has happened here on the planet Earth. And how likely is it that there are other rocky planets about the same size as our planet and are about the same age and that are positioned in the Goldilocks Zone around their star, keeping in mind that there are billions of solar systems in each galaxy and there are believed to be trillions of galaxies? Well, I would guess the odds are high, probably 100 percent.

The challenge of a celestial encounter with advanced life on other planets is distance. Of course, there is life elsewhere in the universe—probably advanced life–but unless we humans can figure out how to exceed the speed of light (by a lot), we will never get there nor are they likely to get to us.

According to AI, astro biological calculation indicates that the odds of humanity being the sole “technological species” in the entire universe are less than one in 10 billion trillion—10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a 1 followed by 22 zeros). In other words, it is close to zero. Surveys also show that a large majority of scientists and astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial life exists.

No brainer, if you ask me. But what does it all mean? Here are some other questions: If there is a heaven, where is it? If God is the creator of the universe, not just our small planet, as most major religions stipulate, what is He up to in other locations? And if scientists agree that the universe will give out of hydrogen and die after a few trillion years, what is eternal life? And what is happening in other universes in the multiverse, if there is a multiverse.

Above our pay grade to figure out or to comprehend. But it should be enough to make us profoundly grateful that we are here on this beautiful blue planet, and how rare planets like the Earth are in this vast universe—or at least how rare we think they are. It should make us thankful that we humans are here now—a situation that in my view falls in the category of a miracle.

And it should put fire in our bellies to cherish and protect what we have. If we humans are not more careful and diligent, we could lose it.

Embry and I are headed to Morocco next Monday for a two-week adventure so the next few posts (including photographs ) will be about our trip. Stay tuned.

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Enough about sailing and back to issues of the day. This post is a serious one and not for the faint of heart.

So, how about AI’s mass extinction of humans that the Tech Bros are warning us about? That is hardly a pleasant topic, and some would argue that for someone at my advanced age—mid 80s—that such a horrendous idea is irrelevant. Yet this is what we are being told by the Tech Bros, who, by the way, are the ones responsible for getting us into this mess. Something like a mass extinction takes a long time so why should we old folks worry? But what about our children and grandchildren? Human life wiped out in 10 years?

What are we to make of all this? The timing may be off but they may have a point.

Let’s start off with the Big Picture and how we got to where we are in the first place. This is what we now know, thanks to the Web, Hubble and Kepler telescopes and all the new technology and the legacy of geniuses like Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein:

The universe began with a Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmic dust began to form “planetary systems” with a star in the middle, surrounded by objects called planets. Assisted by gravity, planetary systems began to form galaxies consisting of millions of planetary systems, billions for some galaxies. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to have over 100 billion planetary systems, perhaps as many as 400 billion. Scientists now believe the number of galaxies in the universe number in the trillions. They also believe that eventually the universe will run out of hydrogen and die. But wait! Some scientists also believe that our “universe” is part of a multiverse. These concepts and ideas are where science and religion converge. It is above our paygrade as Homo sapiens on the planet Earth to begin to comprehend fully.

And what about us, the Planet Earth?

Our solar system came into being about 4.5 billion years ago and our star (the sun) is about halfway through its life of about ten billion years. In other words, we only have a few billion years left before the solar system vanishes, but since our sun will become a red giant before it fizzles out, we on the planet Earth have only about a billion years left before life on Earth will vanish due to high temperatures. “Only” a billion years.

And how long have Homo sapiens been around? We are newbies—only about 300,000 years. Hey, that is 

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I admit it, this post is out too soon. It is Monday, not Tuesday. However, there is a reason. In my last post, “The Last Hurrah,” I referred again to my “guardian angel.” Even though it is not Tuesday yet, I felt compelled to respond to the various questions I have received as to how could someone like me, who has been known to describe himself as a soft skeptic, believe in “guardian angels”? The answer, of course, is because they exist. Think of your own life and the mistakes you have made, the reckless things you have done, and the close calls you have had and survived. We all have done stupid things. Yet here we are. How do you explain that? Well, guardian angels, of course.

You may ask this question,” If guardian angels exist, how do I explain all the bad things that happen to good people?” This is an excellent question. I too have been troubled by this from time to time and have done extensive research. (In fact, at Union Seminary where I studied theology from 1965-1968, I took several courses on guardian angels—GA 101, GA 102, and my senior year GA 103, the toughest one.) My answer is that some guardian angels are a whole lot better at what they do than others. And some—many—do not do a good job. It is not clear exactly how guardian angels are appointed for the job or how they are trained or supervised. I read somewhere that at times the really good ones are often promoted to another job. You know, climbing the heavenly ladder. Maybe the selection criteria should be beefed up, or the weak ones should be required to take additional training. My advice to those in charge would be to keep the good ones, fire the bad ones, or at least require them to get counseling or coaching or take more classes. Just think how much better the world would be if all the GAs were doing their jobs. Certainly, Donald J Trump would not be our president.

And to stipulate that guardian angels only take care of members of one faith or one Christian denomination is absurd. God is an equal opportunity employer.

So yes, of course, GAs exist. If you disagree, you tell me why some of us humans have it pretty easy and others have it pretty hard. How do you explain why bad things happen to good people and the reverse? This explains all of it.

The challenge is to get those in charge to a better job in selecting, training and supervising the GAs. And that is where I do not have an answer. “Above my paygrade,” as they say in DC. And though we humans are learning more and more about the vastness and complexity of the universe and the mysteries of creation, no one has been able to come up with an explanation which rings true regarding the nature of good and evil on our small planet. Until now. This explains everything. I am waiting for a Nobel Prize.

The Tuesday post is coming as promised. And that one is the last one about sailing. I promise.

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A note to readers: If you have been following my posts on my photo website, you might want to consider reading my posts on Substack since those posts now include a bunch of photographs. Let me know at joehowell476@gmail.com. if you would lie a link to that venue. 

 

What to do next? I loved the BVIs and was not ready to give them up. I remember hearing someone at Sunsail make a pitch about buying one of their charter boats. It turns out that most charter companies do not own the boats but lease them from people who like to cruise, a sort of sale-leaseback deal. The lease is for five years, and the financing works out so that all an owner has to do is pay the initial deposit. Financing is arranged from a bank so that the debt service on the loan equals the monthly leasing fee you get from Sunsail; and then after five years you sell the boat, pay off the bank loan, and get all your money back, or at least a lot of it. Okay, some of it. In the meantime, you get to sail Sunsail boats all over the world in one of their 90 or so locations at no charge. Hey, was buying a Sunsail charter boat a great idea or what?

I talked about the idea with Embry, who realizing how much this meant to me, agreed to go along with the deal without shaking her head (too much) in despair.

The boat that was available at the time was a Jeanneau 39i, which had been on the market for a while, and the price had just been reduced. I cleaned out my savings account and did the deal. (Embry and I always kept our savings separately.) I named the boat Second Wind, clever name, no? I bought the boat in 2015 and left her in the Sunsail fleet until 2020, when the lease expired and owners were required to move the boat out of the marina. Then not able to sell the boat when the Sunsail lease was up and having no place to put the boat, I paid a couple of Brits to move the boat up to the Chesapeake where Second Wind replaced Carolina Blue (which I sold to one of my crew) and became our last sailing vessel.

I know what you are thinking. This sounds like another disaster story brewing. But no, these Second Wind cruising years were (mostly) just as good as the Dan Look chartering years and, in some ways, even better. The way it worked was that for the five years between 2015 and 2020, I chartered with Sunsail–for free! — at least twice a year. One cruise each year was in the BVIs mainly with two or three good friends mostly from high school and college days or friends from Washington, and a second cruise was in faraway and exotic locations with Embry and two or three other couples. We chartered boats in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, Puget Sound, the Bahamas, Tahiti, and other parts of the Caribbean. Of course, there are stories that go along with each of these cruises, and we did have our share of close calls and challenges but overall the cruises were without serious incidents.

The one exception was an extremely challenging cruise in the Adriatic. Embry and I had completed five days of extraordinary cruising in perfect conditions with two couples who were great friends from planning school days in Chapel Hill. We had reserved a 45-foot Sunsail boat from their base in Croatia. We were warned that toward the end of the week, a “disturbance” was expected to move into the area from the southwest so I decided to sail in that direction so that when the disturbance did arrive, we would have the wind behind us, and it would be easier to get back to the base. Little did we know that in this case the “disturbance” would produce gale force winds.

Toward the end of our week-long cruise, we had docked in a very protected harbor on Viz, the farthest island to the west. We could tell that it was windy on the day we were to depart; but since we were in a protected marina at the base of a steep mountain, we could not tell how strong the wind was. We had two days to get back to the Sunsail base; but since we had 40 miles to cover, I decided that we should leave the marina and venture out. If the wind was too strong, we would return and stay another day.

None of the other cruising boats, however, were leaving the protected harbor.

As soon as we left the lee of the harbor, wham! We were headed to our destination, like it or not. The Adriatic, which the day before was a deep blue, looked like a chocolate milkshake with foam in the air everywhere. I made one feeble attempt to turn around and realized it was impossible. The wind gauge showed gusts up to 45 miles an hour and even higher. The rain was coming down in torrents.

What to do? Well, there was no choice. We could not make any progress if we tried to turn back given the strong winds, so I cheerfully said to the wide-eyed crew, “Well, here we go.”

Because the Adriatic is relatively shallow, you don’t get the giant swells you get in the ocean when there is a storm. You get chop with steep waves that are ten feet high and occasionally even higher. Fortunately, our destination, about 25 miles away, was almost directly downwind. So we never raised the main and sailed only with a mostly rolled up genoa. Even so, the ride was terrifying. Up we would go slowly with the huge chop behind us, then when the crest hit us, we would zoom down the front of the wave like we were on a roller coaster in an amusement park.

The challenge for me was not to jibe unintentionally since the gale force winds were directly behind us. It was not long, however, before three of our friends became seasick. Few words were spoken. Embry said that when I gave the order for everyone to put on life jackets she knew we were in big trouble. When we surfed down the front of the wave, I checked the boat speed and we were surfing at over 14 knots, almost double our normal, maximum boat speed.

The other challenge for me was to stay on course since in such high wind the only direction that the boat could go was almost directly downwind. That meant that if we passed by the protected anchorage that we were supposed to dart in to, we could not turn back to make our destination. The wind would be too strong. We had to get it right. Exactly right.

About two hours into the ordeal, just as I was feeling like I was almost getting the hang of it, directly ahead of us coming out of the mist and pouring rain appeared a giant cargo ship aiming right at us. If we did not change course, it would hit us. I had to jibe (change direction pointing away from the wind, in contrast to “coming about,” pointing into the wind). And I had to do it immediately. The genoa was rolled up so that only a tiny bit of sail was out, but I still did not know how much pressure that would put on the mast when the boom swung around. If we dismasted, it would be curtains.

I hollered “jibe-ho,” turned the wheel, and the boom slammed from one side of the boat to the other. The strong force did not take down the mast. Bravo! Dodged another bullet. The giant ship passed by us, missing us by several boat lengths. Talk about another close call. But what I could not figure out was what were the odds that in such horrid conditions we would get run over by another vessel. We had been battling the storm for over three hours; and in what had been a rather crowded sea the day before, this day we had not seen a single boat of any type—except for the giant freighter.

When we got close to our destination we had to go through a passage only about a hundred yards wide. Then we should be in a protected area and able to turn into the small, protected cove where the marina was. As we got closer to the passage, I could see the spray from the giant waves hitting the shore and going up into the air over a hundred feet. I had never seen anything like it before or since. This had to have been the Adriatic storm of the century.

But we made it, found the marina, and tied up. I finally could relax. Our dear friends, who had been seasick most of the time and never complained, recovered and after a while were talking to me again. This was the first time one couple had ever sailed. And to their credit this was not the end of our friendship.

This was the most sensational experience of our cruising days but not the only close call we had on Sunsail boats in exotic waters. When you cruise as much as we did, you are going to have adventures and some close calls, but if you pay attention and know what you are doing, you will come through them—at least we did. And of the dozen or more bare boat cruising adventures that I had over the years cruising in distant seas, this was the most dramatic and certainly the most dangerous. I was afraid that our good friends would never speak to me again, but thankfully they took it all in stride and we have remained great friends even to this day.

There were many other cruising adventures. Tahiti will go down as my favorite cruise in exotic waters, and I enjoyed all of them, even the Mediterranean, where I sailed with son Andrew and his girlfriend in similar conditions to the Adriatic. And my all-guys cruises with old friends and classmates from high school and college cruising mainly in the BVIs (and also the Grenadines and the Bahamas) will also always be special, and for those experiences I will remain profoundly thankful for as long as I am still kicking. One of my best friends from both high school and college was first mate on almost every one of these cruises and earned the nickname “Defacto,” since the title of “first mate” was reserved for Embry.

In 2015 the father and son Brits delivered Second Wind to Herrington Harbour on the Chesapeake where we had reserved a place for her. We raced and cruised that boat for four more years before selling her in 2024 after the Covid epidemic had passed. In fact, Second Wind was a godsend for us during the Covid years and we cruised with her many times anchoring in secluded coves on the bay far away from the pandemic.

And 2024 marked the end of my sailing career. We sold Second Wind to a young family who moved the boat to a marina on the bay about 30 miles to the south. But that did not keep us from chartering and that happened in 2023 at the tail end of Covid when we went on our final BVI cruise, billed as “The Last Hurrah.”

Stay tuned for that one next—the penultimate —post of the series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I can’t remember the exact date or even the year. I believe it was in the late 1980s when I got a call from Dan Look, a good friend living in Atlanta and who had his own consulting company specializing in providing technical assistance, mainly on food service, to senior living communities. He knew I was a sailor like him and asked me if I would like to be first mate on a week-long, “bareboat,” charter cruise in the BVIs that he was planning. He was going to invite seven or eight friends, all guys, mainly in the not-for-profit, senior living world though without much previous sailing experience. I enthusiastically accepted, had a terrific time, and volunteered to skipper a second boat the following year. It was not long before others learned enough about sailing to able to skipper a boat themselves. The event became an annual happening, and the fleet grew to four or five boats, occasionally even more. These cruises, which were almost always in the late winter or early spring, happened almost every year and went on for at least a decade. I made almost every one of them.

It did not hurt that the BVIs are widely considered to be among the best sailing waters in the world especially during the winter and spring when trade winds from the northeast are steady and consistent at 15-20 knots every day and it hardly ever rains.

A typical Dan Look BVI cruise would go something like this: Eager sailors, all men, from various locations in the United States would arrive on a Saturday. Many were executive staff of not-for-profit, continuing care retirement communities or consultants, bankers, or other professionals in the senior living industry though there also were usually some members of the Atlanta Rowing Club where Dan was a member. A week’s supply of food, which Dan had purchased and packaged the week before in Atlanta, would arrive there about the same time, and with help Dan would distribute the food (mainly for lunches and breakfasts) equally among the boats in the fleet. He would also distribute golf-type shirts for each participant with a special logo on the pocket showing the date of the cruise. The boats were chartered from Sunsail, at the time the world’s largest sailing charter company, and they were mostly identical 40-45 foot Jeanneau boats from France, each equipped with a large dinghy.

Dan would decide which men sailed on which boat; and while I usually already knew at least one or two people who were assigned to my boat, occasionally I would be assigned three of four guys I had never met. Everyone usually ate out together at the restaurant in the marina the first night. The next morning there would be a skipper’s meeting required by Sunsail for all charter captains and first mates. By late morning we would cast off to sail the islands. The big question was whether to sail the islands in a clockwise or counter clockwise fashion. Most of the time we cruised counter clockwise sailing first to Peter Island to the east, then Beef Island farther north a dozen miles away upwind, then Virgin Gorda, Anegada, Josh van Dyke, Norman Island and back to Tortola. My favorite was Anegada, which was situated by itself to the north, almost 20 miles away from all the other islands and the least populated. Each leg, of course, would often involve a race though those in the boats who arrived well behind the winner would usually argue that they were not racing. But my boat was and we often won.

The boats did not raft up in the BVIs the way they do in the Chesapeake Bay because of the strong winds and crowded anchorages, but at the end of the day, after anchoring or tying up to a mooring everyone would jump in their dinghies and motor over to Dan’s boat for drinks and dinner. Dan was a professional food service consultant, loved to cook for the 15 or so hungry guys, and on many of the cruises was assisted by the owner of a popular steak house chain in Atlanta. I don’t know how he did it, but the dinners were always delicious and always fun. My self-appointed job was bartender, and I got pretty good at making pain killers (black rum, orange and pineapple juice, with coconut milk and spices.) The participants for the most part were not heavy drinkers and anyone who wanted booze was responsible for bringing it on board themselves. As bar tender, however, I was careful to buy enough black rum to mix a pain killer for anyone who wanted one, and there were always takers. On one of the cruises someone presented me with a tee shirt which said, “Drinking Team with a Sailing Problem.”

There was always laughter, storytelling, and never a word about politics. Many of the crew came from faith-based, continuing care retirement communities and were from the South or Midwest so it was understood that we did not want to go there, unsure of their politics. Regardless from where the guys were from or what their politics were, I liked every person who ended up as crew on my boat; and making new friends with people who were not like me was one of the best things about these cruises.

One of the biggest thrills on these cruises was spotting whales. Over the decade that we cruised on the Dan Look cruises we saw several whales, mainly Humpbacks and some up close and personal. Our boat was once cruising alone when we saw a giant whale come out of the water about a hundred yards away, then disappear below the surface. We were all oohing and aahing, then looked down and saw the giant creature swimming just below the surface next to our boat, close enough that we could touch it. The creature, probably an immature Humpback someone said, was longer than our 40-foot boat. Then the animal suddenly disappeared not to be seen again.

The strangest experience that happened was on an overnight crossing from Saint Martins Island to Tortola, the only cruise that we had that did not originate in the BVIs. Four boats were motoring together in a flotilla on a moonless night and calm seas with no sign of any other boats except an occasional large cruise ship passing in the distance. Then around 3:00 AM three large, bright lights in a triangle appeared from nowhere and for a few minutes followed the first boat in our flotilla. The lights were so bright that you could not tell if there was a vessel associated with them or not or how far they were away from us. They appeared to be about six or seven feet above the water. Were they on another boat or on a helicopter?

The strange lights followed the first boat for a few minutes, then moved to the second and the third and finally to our boat. I was asleep at the beginning and awakened by a nervous crew when the lights got closer to our boat. I tried to figure out what might be going on but was stumped. Then suddenly the lights went out, and whatever they were, they were never to be seen again.

As you can imagine, we were all spooked. When we reached the BVIs around eight the next morning we anchored near the customs house; and after the skippers all motored their dinghies into the marina to do the paperwork, we compared notes. No one had a clue. For the next few days, I was haunted by the experience but eventually put it out of my mind though it seems as real today as I write about the account as it did at the time. Go figure.

And those were the days. I am not sure exactly why but after about a decade of these annual BVI cruises, they started to peter out. I always will be grateful to Dan for inviting me to join him that first cruise and for all the cruises that followed. I do not think I missed more than one or two.

But I was hooked and for me the closing of the Dan Look BVI cruises marked the beginning of my sailing experience in exotic waters, not the end. And these ventures included sailing in oceans all around the world. Stay tuned for the next post on the “Second Wind Days and More Sailing in Exotic Seas.”

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