Duncan Lunan

Background

Duncan Alasdair Lunan (born October 1945) is a Scottish author, journalist and broadcaster who writes on astronomy, spaceflight and science fiction. He grew up in Troon, graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1968, and co-founded ASTRA (the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics). He was a science fiction critic for the Glasgow Herald from 1971 to 1985. His non-fiction includes Man and the Stars (1974). His reputation in this area rests largely on his writing and on one highly publicised claim.

The 1973 claim

In April 1973 Lunan published an article in Spaceflight, the magazine of the British Interplanetary Society, arguing that a robotic probe might have been orbiting the Moon for thousands of years, waiting for humans to develop the means to contact it. His evidence was a reanalysis of radio echoes recorded in the late 1920s by the Norwegian researcher Carl Størmer and the Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol, who had been studying long-delayed echoes of radio signals. Lunan plotted the echo timings and found a pattern that he read as a message. He placed the probe's apparent origin at Epsilon Boötis and linked the position of Arcturus to a date about 13,000 years earlier, when he believed the probe had arrived. The idea drew wide press attention. Time reported it on 9 April 1973, CBS Evening News covered it in June 1973, and Rod Serling's 1975 documentary In Search of Ancient Mysteries later featured it.

The reaction from scientists was largely dismissive. Sir Martin Ryle, the British radio astronomer, told Time that "Lunan gave no evidence, only beliefs." The MIT physicist Philip Morrison put the odds at "nine in ten" that the whole story was a hoax. Ronald Bracewell, whose 1960 proposal about robotic probes had inspired Lunan's thinking, doubted that the echoes were deliberate signals at all and suspected a natural atmospheric effect.

Withdrawal and later work

In September 1976, in the Journal of the Society of Electronic and Radio Technicians, Lunan withdrew the theory and presented evidence against it; other researchers had also refuted it. He returned to the idea in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1998, reinterpreting part of the positional astronomy.

Lunan's later writing moved toward folklore and speculative history. In 1996 he proposed in Analog that the medieval Green Children of Woolpit had come from an extraterrestrial settlement, a theory he developed in his 2012 book Children from the Sky. The Woolpit idea is also widely regarded as speculative. Lunan has said that he does not believe in UFOs, and he has presented his hypotheses as provocative interpretations rather than established findings.

Assessment

Lunan's case is useful for understanding how a respectable science writer can produce an extraterrestrial hypothesis that is taken seriously for a few months and then falls apart. The radio anomaly he interpreted has since been explained by other causes, and the SF Encyclopedia entry on him notes that the radio anomalies have been otherwise explained while judging his work as argued from sound science rather than pseudoscience. His 1973 claim is best read as an early and well-publicised example of a "message from the stars" argument built on contested data, and his own withdrawal is part of the record. For that reason, his credibility is rated contested. The claim was public, its author retracted it, and it was refuted by other researchers.