Jeff Fortenberry

I wanted the opportunity to play for Tom Osborne. Here we are in the locker room at half-time, gathering around Coach Osborne. It grows quiet, and I'll never forget what he said. He said, 'Let's get this over with.'

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.

The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, 'Nothing out there!'