Winston Churchill Wrote of Alien Life in a Lost Essay
that I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the o
In a newly unearthed essay sent to his publisher on Oct. 16, 1939 — just weeks after Britain entered World War II
and Churchill became part of the wartime cabinet — and later revised, he was pondering the likelihood of life on other planets.
"He’s really thinking about this,’’ Mr. Livio said, "and though he didn’t have all the knowledge at hand, he thinks about this with the logic of a scientist." Churchill’s interest in science
stemmed from his early years as an army officer in British-ruled India, where he had crates of books, including Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species," shipped to him by his mother.
Two other scientific essays — one on cell division in the body
and another on evolution — are stored in the museum’s archives in Fulton, Mr. Riley, the museum director, said in an interview.
In the interwar period, Churchill wrote numerous scientific articles, including one called "Death Rays" and another titled "Are there Men on the Moon?" In 1924, he published a text asking readers "Shall We All Commit Suicide?", in which he speculated
that technological advances could lead to the creation of a small bomb that was powerful enough to destroy an entire town.
Frederick Lindemann, a physicist, became Churchill’s "on tap" expert
and once described him as a "scientist who had missed his vocation," said Andrew Nahum, who curated an exhibition on Churchill and science at the Science Museum in London.