(1950) Enrico Fermi Asks Where Everybody Is

And a famous paradox gets started ...

May 07, 2024

In 1950, Herbert York paid a visit to Los Alamos. The Soviet Union had recently detonated its first Atomic Bomb and the famous national laboratory was now in the middle of a “crash development program” to build a better one.1 This crack at the world’s first “hydrogen bomb” was a magnet for some of the most prominent physicists in the world, and, that summer, four of them went to lunch.

On the Way to Fuller Lodge

What would become one of history’s more interesting conversations began with Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Herbert York walking toward the dining hall. The topic of discussion had turned to the “Flying Saucers” that had so-dominated public consciousness in the later days of 1949.2 That December, retired Naval Aviator, Donald Keyhoe had drawn on his military contacts to write an article called “The Flying Saucers are Real.”3 His broad argument - that the UFO Phenomenon was a real thing and that the military was withholding information from the public - evolved into a book of the same name published in June 1950.4 Though it’s unclear to what extent Keyhoe’s work contributed to this conversation, it was certainly well-timed as a potential catalyst.

Later that summer, at least three of the United States’ top physicists were interested enough to have their own sidebar on whether or not the flying saucers were, in fact, “real.” Years later, Edward Teller would recall their early conversation as “superficial” and reaching a general agreement that they were not, though his memory was not exactly shared by the other physicists at the time (more on that later).5

As they continued their walk, they were joined by a fourth physicist, Emil Konopinski. Konopinski had recently read an issue of The New Yorker, where a cartoon in classic New Yorker style had depicted extra-terrestrials stealing all the municipal garbage cans in the city. There had been a rash of garbage can thefts at the time and Konopinski offered the little green men depicted in the cartoon as a plausible explanation. Fermi joked that “it was a very plausible theory since it accounted for two separate phenomena: the reports of flying saucers as well as the disappearance of trash cans.”6

But as physicists are want to do, the conversation soon devolved into physics. There was a lively discussion on whether or not flying saucers, if real, could exceed the speed of light. There were odds assigned. Calculations exchanged. There was the lunch order. And eventually, the conversation switched to other down to earth topics.7

At the Table

By the time the four men had sat down, the conversation had moved on in a way that Enrico Fermi clearly hadn’t. With a lingering curiosity shared by many, he steered his friends right back onto the topic they had started with by suddenly blurting out: “Do you ever wonder where everybody is? Where is everybody?” Edward Teller would recall that “the result of his question was general laughter because … in spite of Fermi’s question coming from the clear blue, everybody at the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extra-terrestrial life.”8

The conversation that followed formed the basis for what would eventually come to be known as The Fermi Paradox, which is, essentially, the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence for advanced extra-terrestrial life compared to the high likelihood of its existence. Fermi began to opine with a series of calculations on the probability of earth-like planets, the probability of life given an earth, the probability of humans given life, and the likely rise and duration of high technology. Together, they concluded that “we ought to have been visited a long time ago and many times over.”9

But for these men, with the knowledge they had, and the time they lived in, that clearly wasn’t a reality. And that prompted a second, equally important conversation: why? Early thoughts included the idea that interstellar flight is impossible, always judged to not be worth the effort, or technological civilization doesn’t last long enough to make it happen.10 Here, again, Edward Teller recalls a pivot to a light-hearted view of the subject where “the distances to the next location of living beings may be very great and that, indeed, as far as our galaxy is concerned, we [might be] living somewhere in the sticks, far removed from the metropolitan area of the galactic center.”11 There was no definitive conclusion but there was a lively discussion that carried them all the way through dessert.

In the Classroom

One of the more interesting parts of this conversation is that it was never formalized in any academic way. Enrico Fermi never went on to write a paper and “The Fermi Paradox” only entered the public lexicon in 1977. It would ultimately be up to other academics to expand on this informal, lunch-time chat. Most of that expansion happened in the backdrop of a congressional fight over funding for the U.S. “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” (SETI) program, which some saw as a giant waste of time and money.12

As this idea picked up steam, the Fermi Paradox basically evolved into two expressions:

Why are no aliens or their artifacts found here on Earth, or in the Solar System?
Why do we see no signs of intelligence elsewhere in the universe?

Of course, for our purposes, that first expression of the Fermi Paradox has been under dispute since the lunch-time conversation that sparked it. Members of the UFO community from Keyhoe on forward have consistently alleged that proof can be found but is deliberately withheld or ignored. But by the standards of the time the Fermi Paradox became the conventional way, the classy way, to engage with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, wrapped in the safe assumption that we hadn’t found any.

In the History Books

Enrico Fermi died of Cancer in 1954, an outcome that was not helped by his long involvement with nuclear weapon development. The story of the Fermi Paradox and the lunch-time conversation that started it existed as a kind of “urban legend” in the Los Alamos community long after his death. In 1984, Eric Jones, another physicist at the laboratory wrote to the three surviving members to capture their recollection and that forms the basis of our understanding today.13

The story could end there, but there is one additional note that is highly relevant to members of the UFO Community. While Herbert York and Emil Konopinski would not have any further involvement in the extra-terrestrial space, the same could not be said for Edward Teller.

In the 1980’s, Teller would go on to meet and then correspond with a now-famous figure in the UFO Community named Bob Lazar. Lazar’s account of his experience has always been contentious, but, as he describes it, he struck up a conversation with Teller at a lecture in 1982. When Lazar found himself looking for scientific work in 1988, it was Edward Teller who referred him to EG&G “Special Projects” out of McCarran Airbase in Nevada. As Lazar tells the story, this ended up being a job on a U.S. Government reverse-engineering program for recovered extra-terrestrial craft.14

Did Edward Teller know what he was referring him to? Did this even happen? All good questions for a deeper exploration of Bob Lazar’s story and Edward Teller’s later life. But you should note, that of all the surviving physicists weighing in on that fateful lunchtime conversation, only Teller was forceful in characterizing it as “brief and superficial,” only “vaguely connected to astronautics,” containing remarks that were “purely negative,” and containing the “obvious statement the flying saucers [were] not real.”15 None of his colleagues felt the need to make these points.

Today, the Fermi Paradox is often remembered as a clinical, academically detached conversation about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. But to deny its true history – one where four friends had a casual chat sparked by aliens in popular culture - is to deny the impact that a belief in UFOs has had on our actual lives. And the focus on Fermi, and Fermi alone, ignores some of the more interesting historical implications: one where at least some of the participants may have had to wrestle with this conversation, privately, long after lunch.

P.S. Would you like to learn more about how UFOs have shaped our history? Then you might want to:

Herken, Gregg. Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2002. Pg 201.

Jones, Eric M. “‘Where Is Everybody?" An Account of Fermi's Question.” Los Alamos National Laboratory LA-10311-MS, March 1985. https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf. Pg 1.

Keyhoe, Donald E. “The Flying Saucers Are Real.” True Magazine, December 1949. https://www.saturdaynightuforia.com/library/fsartm/truemagazinetheflyingsaucersarereal1950.html.

Keyhoe, Donald E. The Flying Saucers Are Real. New York City, NY: Gold Medal Books, 1950.

Jones, “Where Is Everybody?” Pg 7 (Enclosed letter from Edward Teller).

Jones, “Where is Everybody?” Pg 1-2.

Jones, “Where is Everybody?” Pg 2, 7 (Enclosed letter from Edward Teller).

Jones, “Where is Everybody?” Pg 3.

Jones, “Where is Everybody?” Pg 8 (Enclosed letter from Edward Teller).

Gray, Robert H. “The Fermi Paradox Is Neither Fermi’s Nor a Paradox.” Astrobiology 15, no. 3 (March 2015): 195–99. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1605/1605.09187.pdf. Pg 1.

Gray, “The Fermi Paradox Is Neither Fermi’s Nor a Paradox.” Pg 2.

Rogan, Joe. #1315 - Bob Lazar & Jeremy Corbell. Other. The Joe Rogan Experience, June 20, 2019. https://youtu.be/BEWz4SXfyCQ. At 2min 13s.