The whole Vatican-ET meme we talked about last week seems to be a lot more serious than these jokey news stories let on. A quick Google search on 'Vatican' and 'Extraterrestrial' gave me more than a million hits. Do they know something we don't, or is this all just a diversion on the part of a few eccentric old Jesuits?
Because the point is completely moot until there is irrefutable evidence of ET life or the possibility of contact on a mass scale. Neither of which we have ('we' meaning the proles and the plebes).
And as I've said before, I think most people would become extremely skeptical of any contact/disclosure scenario unless presented with mind-blowing evidence. Like trips around the Milky Way kind of evidence. And once that hurdle was cleared, there'd be the issue of humanity's limitless capacity for murderous xenophobia.
Which brings us back to our first question- why are we hearing so much about ETs being our brothers in Christ from the Vatican these days? They have all of those nifty telescopes to be sure, but more importantly they have those ancient texts they hid away from the rest of us 1600 years ago.
Some might argue the vast distances between stars, but there is that idea, expressed by researchers from Charles Fort to Jacques Vallee, that the UFOs that we see (and we've seen a lot of them for a long time, denialists be damned) are some kind of surveillance/control mechanism, keeping an eye on us for parties unknown.
And then there's the wild card in the pack - the Church of Latter-Day Saints. We've talked about how the rise of the Religious Right quashed talk of ancient astronauts in the late 70s- but not among the Mormons. Play the intro to Battlestar Galactica a few times, let it sink in.
Then remember that even though BSG was consistently the highest-rated show on Sunday nights in 1978, ABC inexplicably started shuffling it around the schedule, until finally cancelling at the end of season one. Again, BSG was created by Glen Larson, one of those legions of Mormon sci-fi writers.
Then watch the BSG/OS episode 'War of the Gods,' pt 1&2. It's fascinating to see Mormon doctrine of men evolving into godhood played out in a sci-fi setting (and how oblivious I was to all of it back in the 70s).
Or watch Hangar 18 again, produced by Sunn Classics, a Mormon-owned company.
And then remember that some UFO researchers- Jacques Vallee among them- believe that Joseph Smith was history's most powerful alien contactee.
Well, recent history's, at least.
