Art Bell launches a 48-hour shortwave listening experiment on 6.890 megahertz, inviting extraterrestrial beings to transmit on the frequency while millions of listeners monitor with their receivers. He also presents a striking UFO photograph taken at a national veterans cemetery in Hawaii that he considers one of the best unexplained images he has received.
Professor Paul Dixon of the University of Hawaii, a three-time Nobel Prize nominee, joins to warn that high-energy particle physics experiments at Fermilab near Chicago could trigger a catastrophic transition into what physicists call de Sitter space, an adjacent dimension containing energy densities vast enough to produce a supernova on Earth. Such an event would vaporize not only the planet but the entire solar system and everything within 50 light years. Dixon explains that he previously helped convince Fermilab's director to keep the accelerator 10 percent below full power for a decade.
With Fermilab planning to increase energies tenfold by 1999, Dixon urges the public to pressure Congress and demand a thorough safety review before the upgraded accelerator comes online. He argues that Type Ia supernovae observed in distant space may themselves be evidence of advanced civilizations that accidentally triggered this same catastrophic physics.
