Extraterrestrial Quotes

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

Me and Katy look adorkable in extraterrestrial highway shirts. You would just look stupid. You can thank me later.

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.

We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.

Hey, Katy!” I jumped at my name. “Hey, Luc…” “Look at what I got.” He dug into his bag and pulled out an extraterrestrial highway shirt. “We can be soul twins now.” “That’s…um, really nice.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.

Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct.

Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.

Evans: We don't know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

Riley tried not to hyperventilate or think too closely about the Alien movies and their take on extraterrestrial encounters. When he was done checking his belly and chest for signs of distension, it added reassuringly, 'Listen, I’m not going to mess with you, okay? Or… breed in you. Gah. That’s disgusting.

If you haven't said 'I love you' to someone today, do it. You won't always be happy, but you should try to be. Don't be too afraid of germs. Those people have no fun. Remember to look around sometimes. You might see something you haven't seen before or at the very least avoid being hit by a flying object. Speaking of flying objects, don't spend your life looking for extraterrestrial life, unless you work for NASA. Remember that you always have to cooperate with someone. Life is an endless negotiation. Play fair. Stay out of jail. Don't live in the past. Eat breakfast. It really is the most important meal of the day. Try to make new friends, even when you think you're too old to do that. ...And finally, remember this" 'Yes' is always a better work than 'no'. Unless, of course, someone has just asked you to commit a felony.

On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth

The music stops as they walk out of the forest toward the smooth extra-terrestrial spacecraft glistening in the sun on the far side of the meadow. To Atom, the ship feels like a time machine. Steven and Sylvia watch them with deadpan stares as the three astronauts walk with the spectacle of eclectic, colorful characters on feathered horseback following. A breeze picks up and Atom glances back to see stoic faces with vibrant robes and dresses flowing in the wind.

Me and Katy look adorkable in extraterrestrial highway shirts. You would just look stupid. You can thank me later.

It was one of the two questions people most frequently asked writers, and if he invited her to join him, it wouldn’t take her long to get around to the other one. “I’ve always wanted to know, Colin. Where do you authors get your ideas?” We steal them. From extraterrestrials. There’s a warehouse outside Tulsa…

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

The best proof of extraterrestrial intelligence is that they haven't contacted us.

One cannot find out whether or not there's an extraterrestrial intelligence inside the mushroom unless one is willing to take the mushroom.

My imagination? No, I don't think it's VIVID at all. On the contrary, it's not nearly potent enough. My poor imaginative faculties have always needed...extentions. That's why I'm here with you. You're smiling again, or rather you're SMIRKING. Funny word, smirk. Rather like an extraterrestrial surname. Simon Smirk. How do you think that sounds?

We humans, as species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestral intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphines, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales?

The problem with all men, and werewolves in particular, was their odd perspective. Sean viewed the gash across his ribs as a scratch. I viewed it as an open wound made by a monomolecular blade able to cut through the werewolf armor and contaminate his body with extraterrestrial microorganisms and possibly poison. We agreed to meet somewhere in the middle. He allowed me to sterilize and seal the wound, and I promised to stop threatening to restrain him.

Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?

I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yes, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.

Could it be that God was an extra-terrestrial? What do we mean when we say that heaven is in the clouds? From Jesus Christ to Elvis Presley, every culture tells us of high-flying bird men who zoom around the world creating magnificent works of art and choosing willing followers to share in the eternal glory from beyond the stars. Can all these related phenomena merely be dismissed as coincidence?

You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species... - with us excitedly chattering, "The Universe is created for us! We're at the center! Everything pays homage to us!" - and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots.

That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious.

For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

This is reality, Greg.-Elliot from E.T.

What a pity that the Earth, in spite of modern transport, still remains unknown to most. We are all extraterrestrials on Earth! Soon after we set out to explore the world, we realize that we have been living on an unknown planet all along. Paradoxically, the moment one becomes a world-traveler, he simultaneously becomes an extraterrestrial exploring an alien planet.

Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in “contact” with extraterrestrials. I am invited to “ask them anything.” And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, “Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like “Should we be good?” I almost always get an answer.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Well then, it’s time to introduce the world to a little bit of extraterrestrial awesomeness.

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.

Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them.

It's all right, dearheart," Dad assures me. "Folder three, scenario four: going into labor during a high-speed chase with extra-terrestrials.

I’m pretty sure I locked that door,” Daemon growled. Luc set the box of doughnuts down, and I eyed them like they held the answer to life. “And I’m pretty sure I let myself in. Hey, Katy!” I jumped at my name. “Hey, Luc..” “Look at what I got.” He dug into his bag and pulled out an extraterrestrial highway shirt. “We can be soul twins now.

It seemed there was an announcement every five minutes from the mythical conductor, imparting sagacious gems such as "large items should be placed in the overhead luggage racks", or that "passengers should report any unattended items to the train crew as soon as possible". I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon?

Look at what I got.” He dug into his bag and pulled out an extraterrestrial highway shirt. “We can be soul twins now.

It was this newsletter thing called "They Walk Among Us" ... All the news that no one in their right mind would ever believe. It's all this stuff about aliens and weird happenings that might be connected to alines. Like, apparently a twelve-year-old girl was murdered in London and people think she might have been a casualty in a secret war between extraterrestrials living on Earth. Totally nuts.

Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands - no, by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's 99% overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. "How to account for such irrational behavior? (...) religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?

Even if alien visitors did decide to drop by this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon—aka Yawnsville, USA—as their point of first contact. Not unless their plan was to destroy our civilization by wiping out our least interesting locales first.

The religion of the extraterrestrial father god ruptures humanity’s empathetic bond with the earth, Sophia embodied, yet it is that same religion that have given humanity in the Western world its historical and spiritual identity.

You have to think if we've been visited by extraterrestrial life, it was like a zookeeper walking into the chimp enclosure: He looks around, takes some pictures, then leaves without interacting significantly with the environment. Meanwhile the chimps have no idea what the fuck just happened.

Adina is surprised and pleased to receive this word. A human explanation for it all along! She wonders what other rational human qualities she wrote off as extraterrestrial because of a human's tendency to other what they don't understand.

People fill in the unknown with what fits with THEIR known.

[...] the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.

no self-respecting extraterrestrial would ever pick my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon—aka Yawnsville, USA—as their point of first contact.

Spun sugar clouds and extraterrestrial crystal vintage T-birds flying through space, morning-glory girls swinging from star-hung vines in cosmic gardens.

I require speech lessons and corrective lenses and most likely teeth braces. I am an expensive extraterrestrial. The reply: DESIGNED TO APPEAR NORMAL. What’s normal? YOU TELL US.

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass. More perplexing than that, who on earth could convince them otherwise ?

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

It was Thomas Edison’s belief that the spirits of the dead, along with every word spoken, exist among us.” She paused to pull open a croissant. “But it is my belief that extraterrestrial voices exist among us too. They are, in effect, whistling in the wind, hoping to be heard.

It might not be immediately obvious to some readers why the ability to perform 10^85 computational operations is a big deal. So it's useful to put it in context. [I]t may take about 10^31-10^44 operations to simulate all neuronal operations that have occurred in the history of life on Earth. Alternatively, let us suppose that the computers are used to run human whole brain emulations that live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments. A typical estimate of the computational requirements for running one emulation is 10^18 operations per second. To run an emulation for 100 subjective years would then require some 10^27 operations. This would be mean that at least 10^58 human lives could be created in emulation even with quite conservative assumptions about the efficiency of computronium. In other words, assuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives. If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth's oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.

That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?' 'Yes' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a plop of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it. 'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.

Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path. Life turns on your seeing clearly what’s in front of you.

Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones. Imagine explaining to an extraterrestrial visitor the concept of a horse. It would take some time. If the next thing you tried to explain were the concept of a zebra, the conversation would be shorter. You would simply point out that a zebra is a lot like a horse but with black and white strips. Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt – if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss is the common response. This is true of the end-Cretaceous, when the impact of an extraterrestrial rock caused near-immediate global winter, and of the end-Permian, when skyrocketing greenhouse gases from unprecedented volcanic eruptions sparked global warming.

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. There has been a certain amount of reverse engineering that has allowed some of these craft, or some components, to be duplicated. And there is some group of people that may or may not be associated with government at this point that have this knowledge. They have been attempting to conceal this knowledge. People in high level government have very little, if any, valid information about this. It has been the subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and create confusion so the truth doesn’t come out.

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Stars can’t shine without darkness, and Heat and pressure make coal into diamonds.

Mockery ends where understanding begins.

Math is not thinking. Math is procedure. Memory is storage. Thinking is thinking." -- comment from extraterrestrial character, whom books protagonist named "Rocky".

Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.

It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age.

And still others heard: dreeeple zoonnnnnnggggggg ummmmmtwrrrdssss Calling from the beyond Whatever it was, it touched E.T.'s healing finger, and caused it to glow. He healed himself.

it was not a good idea for the human race as a whole to make contact with extraterrestrials. The impact of such contact on human society would be divisive rather than uniting, and would exacerbate rather than mitigate the conflicts between different cultures. In summary, if contact were to occur, the internal divisions within Earth civilization would be magnified and likely lead to disaster.

A cover-up to keep knowledge of extraterrestrial life or alien abductions almost wholly secret for 45 years, with hundreds if not thousands of government employees privy to it, is a remarkable notion.

Science fiction,” Butler writes, “has long treated people who might or might not exist—extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science-fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.

This is Poyo. Poyo was exposed to a near-lethal amount of radiation as an egg, during the first stages of a government experiment to create mutant super soldiers--trained in exotic martial arts technique by Tibetan Kung Fu fightin' monks--and given strange bio-enhancements during a rash of farm animal abductions by extra-terrestrials. Nah, just kidding. None of that shit is true. Poyo is just really, really bad ass.

Or perhaps they are here, but in hiding because of some Lex Galactica , some ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations. We can imagine them, curious and dispassionate, observing us, as we would watch a bacterial culture in a dish of agar, to determine whether this year again, we manage to avoid self-destruction.

If history has shown anything, it is that where there is a God, there is an institution trying to lock up that God in its lifeless structure of orthodoxy, in order to have authority over people and sell tickets to the Kingdom of that God. Thus emerged all the pompous lies about the extraterrestrial Kingdom of God or Heaven.

It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.

A more ambitious bet would be to learn from what we imagine a more mature civilization might have attempted. To take the small scientific leap and allow the possibility ‘Oumuamua was extraterrestrial technology is to give humanity the small nudge toward thinking like a civilization that could have left a lightsail buoy for our solar system to run into. It is to nudge us not just to imagine alien spacecraft but to contemplate the construction of our own such craft.

Before leaving the cockpit, I take one last look at the Telescope screen. I don’t know why—I guess I just like to keep track of what extraterrestrial ships in my vicinity are up to. The Blip-A spins in space. It rotates end-over-end, probably at the exact same rate as the Hail Mary. I guess they saw me spin up the centrifuge and figured it was another communication thing. Humanity’s first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race. Glad I could be a part of it.

On the contrary, to know that you are an individual not put here for some mysterious reason by some supernatural means, and that you are not protected by unknown powers or beings; to know that you are a product of millions of experiments in the evolutionary process and not the result of a seed thrown on this planet by extraterrestrials—that, to me, is very exciting.

The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.

the center of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity, there’s an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, “Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects,” were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: “Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.

The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas.

It amazes me how people can close their minds off to the size of the Universe. With billions of stars, millions of galaxies, and possibly a googol of planets, how can it be that human beings are the only thinking animal in creation?

We Were Lonely My Valentine. along a pavement of loneliness you towards me and I towards you unknown celestial bodies eclipse at night we pass and our gravity of loneliness brings us together so close to touch but not close enough your presence draws my heart and I feel you can’t pull away from gravity we stargaze our loneliness orbits and companionship to fill the black void we touch and our solitude evaporates into the stratosphere and the night is secluded I take you as a lover and you take me as yours we enter the expanding universe at its core the night to linger in our arms we feel humanity as humans share we need each other as strangers share we feel included and wanted for one night only we are true lovers one last kiss my valentine celestial bodies continue on their extraterrestrial journeys as I walk in the breaking dawn along the pavement of loneliness I know loneliness can be confined

Someday they would discover that the stars were not sacred, but made from the same material as their bodies. They would learn it was the stars that created their worlds, that worlds created their minds, that minds created tools, and tools could create stars. Growing, sprawling, thriving until they too became masters of their own understanding, chasing enlightenment with the fervor of having nothing to lose, launching from their homelands like fireworks with glorious yellow tails.

The only way I can describe the visions I witnessed with even faint approximation is in terms of other scenes which might arouse similar impressions of tortuous chaos: perhaps a festival of colors twisting in blackness, a tentacled abyss that alternately seems to glisten moistly as with some horrendous dew, then suddenly dulls into an arid glow, like bone-colored stars shining over an extra-terrestrial desert.

It is pointless to worry about the possible malevolent intentions of an advanced civilization with whom we might make contact. It is more likely that the mere fact they have survived so long means they have learned to live with themselves and others. Perhaps our fears about extraterrestrial contact are merely a projection of our own backwardness, an expression of our guilty conscience about our past history: the ravages that have been visited on civilizations only slightly more backward than we.

If evidence of extraterrestrial life appeared in our solar system, would we notice? If we are expecting the bang of gravity-defying ships on the horizon, do we risk missing the subtle sound of other arrivals? What if, for instance, that evidence was inert or defunct technology- the equivalent, perhaps, of a billion-year-old civilization's trash?

Any life-form advanced enough to travel light-years through interstellar space would have nothing to learn by probing the rectums of farmers in Kansas.

We humans, believe we know it all. When you think about the vastness of the universe, you begin to realise we know nothing other than the limitations of our own environment.

truth is not dictated by the number of likes on Twitter but rather by evidence.

What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated by the extraterrestrials?

Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon’s icy crust. I

All I see is my father’s tax money being wasted on shooting satellite pictures of South America like you guys work for the Travel Channel. -- Todd Dooley (BLACK MARIAH - A Calling)

The problem with ID, of course, is that it leaves open the possibility that the intelligence behind nature may have a moral interest in us, having communicated already with humanity in the past, and might try to boss you around in your private affairs. With hypothetical advanced aliens residing at a safely distant address in the hypothetical multiverse, that is - to the relief of folks like Gribbin, Dawkins and the New Scientist - manifestly not the case.

In an effort to find an explanation, he or she might attribute the ominous feelings to poisons, electromagnetic radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, or even extraterrestrial influences. The spontaneous emergence of memories involving intrauterine disturbances or of the onset of the delivery from the womb, seems to be among important causes of paranoid states.

Gratitude produces happiness because it focuses your thoughts on the positive. And when you are in a positive mental attitude, you bring more good things to your life to be grateful for

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not. They

There's a strange contradiction revealed by the naivete and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a though, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

The late Chuck Missler would often describe the sixty-six books of the Bible, penned by more than forty different people over a period of several thousand years, as a highly integrated message system from an extraterrestrial source outside of time. Like a hologram, a facet of the message is encoded on every page that, when illumined by the light of the Spirit, projects a multidimensional portrait of its divine Author and communicates his plan to redeem, reconcile, and restore the sons and daughters of Adam to the glory of their original estate in the family of God.

Imagine that you’re an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands—no, by now millions—of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there’s a ninety-nine percent overlap, the remaining one percent’s enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. “How to account for such irrational behavior?

Loonies runnin' around everywhere. Sure the word 'Disclosure' isn't in the history books. Disclosure was a long series of leaked government secrets until extraterrestrials became common knowledge.

Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. Science fiction often describes a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole, and I believe the arrival of such a day need not wait for the appearance of extraterrestrials.

Youth is a matter not of biological age but of attitude. It is what makes one person willing to open up new frontiers of scientific discovery while others try to stay within the traditional borders.

We call a civilized world when all its inhabitants live in peace, harmony, and happiness, lovingly sharing all the resources of the planet. Therefore, there is no hunger, no wars, no catastrophes ...

One of the most difficult lessons to impart to young scientists is that the search for the truth can run counter to the search for consensus. Indeed, truth and consensus must never be conflated. Sadly, it is a lesson more easily understood by a student starting out in the field. From then on, year after year, the combined pressures of peers and job-market prospects encourage the tendency to play it safe.

The Nephilim (Aldebaran’s extraterrestrials in Maria’s messages) who survived the great deluge returned to Phoenicia; the Bible made reference to their return. They lived with the Phoenicians for 33 years and 33 days in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Baalbeck. The number 33.33 represents the period of the Tana-wir or Tanwir, which means enlightenment. The number 33.33 became the most important and the most secret number in Phoenician occultism, architecture, and numerology, because it refers to their place of origin, Jabal Haramoun (Mt. Hermon in Lebanon) which is located exactly at 33.33° East and 33.33° North.)   The number 33 is equally important in the Masonic rite King Hiram created with the assistance of King Solomon. This number is closely related to the compass and square, which were given to the Phoenicians as a gift from the Anunnaki lords. This explains how and why the early Phoenicians excelled in building ships, navigation and land-seas maps making, and surpassed their neighbors in these fields, beyond belief! Worth mentioning here, that the Egyptian Sphinx was built some 11,000 years ago, before the Biblical Great Flood by the early Phoenicians, the Nephilim and an army of Djinns created by the Anunnaki.

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

Virtually every element of significant interest to industry is known to exist on the Red Planet. 1 With its twenty-four-hour day/ night cycle and an atmosphere thick enough to shield its surface against solar flares, Mars is the only extraterrestrial planet that will readily allow large-scale greenhouses lit by natural sunlight. Mars can be settled. For our generation and many that will follow, Mars is the New World.

HOW TO FOIL A UFO ABDUCTION 1. Do not panic. The extraterrestrial biological entity (EBE) may sense your fear and act rashly. 2. Control your thoughts. Do not think of anything violent or upsetting—the EBE may have the ability to read your mind. Try to avoid mental images of abduction (boarding the saucer, anal probes); such images may encourage them to take you. 3. Resist verbally. Firmly tell the EBE to leave you alone.

Whether I was cooped up in my attic-cum-lab or trailing her scent through the rooms of the cabin with all but a tinfoil hat, she hung over me, extraterrestrial in both omnipresence and the ability to give me chills.

I’m frequently asked, “Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments—there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on.

Despite her extraordinary beauty, and so many young men were running after her, Maria remained virgin, never had a lover (But a fiancé for a very very short time) and always discouraged the Ladies of Vril from having intimate relations with men. She stated that celibacy is essential for enlightenment and scientific creativity.

Things were happening in New York City--they always are--but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep--reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn't concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn't matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn't have worried.

There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it

How wonderful it will be if the universe really contains other intelligences and other societies! Bystanders have the clearest view. Someone truly neutral will then be able to comment on whether we're the heroes or villains of history.

We couldn't trust them. They couldn't trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He thought of human dreams - both Old Empire and new - of contacting some extra-terrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We'd never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we'd still be those same two prisoners forced to trust - and risk - or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.

Your story -my story, our story- began billions of years ago," she says. "But that probably doesn't come first to your mind when you wake up in the morning." A pause fills the air-conditioned room. "We need to change that." [...] "We are intimately connected with these faraways times and faraways places," she continues, "because it takes a cosmos to make a human".

By any reasonable definition, the Christian God is an extraterrestrial. And given God’s track record of demanding human sacrifices and destroying whole cities, one could make a very strong case we are talking about an extremely malevolent force.

Maria Orsic has claimed that she has received direct messages from extraterrestrials and aliens from other planets and constellations, such as Alpha Tauri, and began to work on a super flying machine she could use to visit the aliens in Aldebaran.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.

The others have made governments of this earth keep the secret of their existence. I would...and perhaps you should. If you wanna tell world about the secret, they will silence you. If you don't give shit about the secret, then you just save their expenses.

The point is: I am here for you, and always will be, no matter what. No matter how many pounds of spoiled shrimp cocktail you projectile vomit, you can trust me. We’re a team, you and I. And Malcolm, when he’s not busy screwing his way through the Stanford population. So if Carlsen is secretly an extraterrestrial life-form planning a takeover of Earth that will ultimately result in humanity being enslaved by evil overlords who look like cicadas, and the only way to stop him is dating him, you can tell me and I’ll inform NASA—

When it comes to the notion of extraterrestrial life,” he began, “there exists a blinding array of bad science, conspiracy theory, and outright fantasy. For the record, let me say this: Crop circles are a hoax. Alien autopsy videos are trick photography. No cow has ever been mutilated by an alien. The Roswell saucer was a government weather balloon called Project Mogul. The Great Pyramids were built by Egyptians without alien technology. And most importantly, every extraterrestrial abduction story ever reported is a flat-out lie.

There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer, looked at who is in each group, you would see something strange indeed: those trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies—the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them; tribal societies; and first nations in Canada. They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

The end of this short story could be a rather disturbing thing, if it came true. I hope you like it, and if you do, be sure to COMMENT and SHARE. Paradoxes of Destiny? Dani! My boy! Are you all right? Where are you? Have you hurt yourself? Are you all right? Daniiii! Why won’t you answer? It’s so cold and dark here. I can’t see a thing… It’s so silent. Dani? Can you hear me? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving… I shouldn’t have done it! I'm so stupid sometimes! Son, are you all right?... We really wrecked the car when we rolled it! I can’t see or hear a thing… Am I in hospital? Am I dead…? Dani? Your silence is killing me… Are you all right?! I can see a glimmer of light. I feel trapped. Dani, are you there? I can’t move. It’s like I’m wrapped in this mossy green translucent plastic. I have to get out of here. The light is getting more and more intense. I think I can tear the wrapping that’s holding me in. I'm almost out. The light is blinding me. What a strange place. I've never seen anything like it. It doesn’t look like Earth. Am I dead? On another planet? Oh God, look at those hideous monsters! They’re so creepy and disgusting! They look like extraterrestrials. They’re aliens! I'm on another planet! I can’t believe it. I need to get the hell out here. Those monsters are going to devour me. I have to get away. I’m so scared. Am I floating? Am I flying? I’m going to go higher to try to escape. I can’t see the aliens anymore and the landscape looks less terrifying. I think I've made it. It’s very windy. Is that a highway? I think I can see some vehicles down there. Could they be the extraterrestrials’ transport? I’m going to go down a bit. I see people! Am I on Earth? Could this be a parallel universe? Where could Dani be? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving. I shouldn’t… That tower down there looks a lot like the water tank in my town… It’s identical. But the water tank in my town doesn’t have that huge tower block next to it. It all looks very similar to my neighborhood, but it isn’t exactly the same: there are a lot of tower blocks here. There’s the river… and the factory. It’s definitely my neighborhood, but it looks kind of different. I must be in a parallel universe… It’s amazing that I can float. People don’t seem to notice my presence. Am I a ghost? I have to get back home and see if Dani’s there. God, I hope he’s safe and sound. Gabriela must be out of her mind with the crash. There’s my house! Home sweet home. And whose are those cars? The front of the house has been painted a different color… This is all so strange! There’s someone in the garden… Those trees I planted in the spring have really grown. Is… is that… Dani? Yes, yes! It’s Dani. But he looks so different… He looks older, he looks… like a big boy! What’s important is that he’s OK. I need to hug him tight and tell him how much I love him. Can he see me if I’m a ghost? I'll go up to him slowly so I don’t scare him. I need to hold him tight. He can’t see me, I won’t get any closer. He moved his head, I think he’s started to realize I’m here… Wow I’m so hungry all of a sudden! I can’t stop! How are you doing, son?! It’s me! Your dad! My dear boy? I can’t stop! I'm too hungry! Ahhhh, so delicious! What a pleasure! Nooo Daniii! Nooooo!.... I’m your daaaad!... Splat!... “Mum, bring the insect repellent, the garden’s full of mosquitoes,” grunted Daniel as he wiped the blood from the palm of his hand on his trousers. Gabriela was just coming out. She did an about turn and went back into her house, and shouted “Darling, bring the insect repellent, it’s on the fireplace…” Absolute cold and silence… THE END (1) This note is for those who have read EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY. This story is a spin-off of the novel EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY and revolves around Letus’s curious theories about the possibility of animal reincarnation.

I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

While it is easy to dismiss someone who believes in unconventional religions as ipso facto delusional or schizophrenic .... there is no clinical reason to assume that a person who believes in UFOs and extraterrestrial communication is any more insane than a person who believes in angels and prayer.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

Another of Mack’s patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine? Apparently it’s not that baffling.

After misapprehended natural events and hoaxes and psychological aberrations are removed from the data set, is there any residue of very credible but extremely bizarre cases, especially ones supported by physical evidence? Is there a "signal" hiding in all that noise? In my view, no signal has been detected. There are reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are unreliable. There are no cases - despite well over a million UFO reports since 1947 - in which something so strange that it could only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so reliably that misapprehension, hoax, or hallucination can be reliably excluded.

We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.

It ended because of a set of discovered conclusions. Among them, that mob consciousness responded collectively NOT to rational intellectual perspectives, but to some kind of emotional empathy that was somehow subconsciously TRANSMITTED. This, however, could not be explained unless the concept of telepathy was brought into consideration.

In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England’s most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. “This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.” Exactly.

The data we confront tells us that ‘Oumuamua was a luminous, thin disk at the LSR, and when it encountered the gravitational pull of the Sun, it deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. These data points can be summed up as follows: ‘Oumuamua was statistically a wild outlier.

Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to be, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by a failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before seen a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology.

There are many other beings that G‑d created alongside human beings.

they were indeed real sentient beings,

While man sleeps, strange things flock to nature.

Money is a tool of control invented by the Archons and implemented by your banking families.

was never afraid of going to hell; it never made sense to me that a loving god would send his children to eternal damnation for any reason, let alone, for lacking in belief.

Nature helps us connect with higher levels of consciousness, beauty, aromas, and pleasant sounds, promote an exaltation of the spirit because we are part of this beautiful symphony. When we pay attention to it, we synchronize with the dance of life. And when we are in tune with the dance of life, we can access the infinite power of creation that is our birthright.

2 tsp. diced fresh garlic; 3 tbs. olive oil; 5 tbs. pure clover honey; 1 tbs. apple cider vinegar; ½ tsp. cayenne pepper; ¼ tsp. asafetida (optional); ¼ cup strong green tea, freshly made.

If radiation pressure is the accelerating force,” we wrote, “then ‘Oumuamua represents a new class of thin interstellar material, either produced naturally . . . or is of an artificial origin.

All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made? All living things on our planet are constructed of organic molecules—complex microscopic architectures in which the carbon atom plays a central role. There was once a time before life, when the Earth was barren and utterly desolate. Our world is now overflowing with life. How did it come about? How, in the absence of life, were carbon-based organic molecules made? How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to produce beings as elaborate and complex as we, able to explore the mystery of our own origins? And on the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth? Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different—other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are. In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability. On some of the billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, life may never arise. On others, it may arise and die out, or never evolve beyond its simplest forms. And on some small fraction of worlds there may develop intelligences and civilizations more advanced than our own. Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life—moderate temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, and so on. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect. We earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world will doubtless sing its praises too. All life on Earth is closely related. We have a common organic chemistry and a common evolutionary heritage. As a result, our biologists are profoundly limited. They study only a single kind of biology, one lonely theme in the music of life. Is this faint and reedy tune the only voice for thousands of light-years? Or is there a kind of cosmic fugue, with themes and counterpoints, dissonances and harmonies, a billion different voices playing the life music of the Galaxy? Let

Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. Science fiction often describes a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole, and I believe the arrival of such a day need not wait for the appearance of extraterrestrials. I

My conclusion is a startling one. I think it very likely—in fact inevitable—that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI.

Early SETI efforts were marked by overly optimistic estimates of the probable number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest and to take a more down-to-earth view. Earth may be more special, and intelligence much rarer, in the universe than previously thought. Skeptical Inquirer Volume 30.3, May / June 2006

Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest, and hardworking. Today, he’s an extraterrestrial. Whoever does not owe, does not exist. I owe, therefore I am. Whoever is not credit-worthy deserves neither name nor face. The credit card is proof of the right to exist; debt, something even those who have nothing have. Every single person or country that belongs to this world has at least one foot caught in this trap.

To make the syrup: “Sauté the garlic in oil for one minute, then add the other ingredients. Simmer and cook over low flame for five minutes, let cool. Strain into a glass jar, cover and refrigerate. Take one teaspoon per day.

This planet is not behind it is exactly where it should be. All the problems in this world are here to be resolved but most of us will do good to resolve our own problems. Problems were created for the purpose of challenging us.

Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine,’ wrote Theophrastus, who lived during the founding of the Library of Alexandria. We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.

The extraterrestrials Aryan from Adelbaran told Maria that they were here before, thousands of years ago. And people took them for gods. They descended in the Near East and created colonies. They also told her about the Nordics, the Lyrans, the Igigi and the Anunnaki who created us genetically in their Chimiti. This, seems to correspond to numerous texts and epics found on clay tablets in Mesopotamia and Phoenicia, as well as in Ugaritic myths and Biblical texts.

This level of access is called in some modern circles the “Akashic Records”. In Torah tradition, this is called the “Primordial Torah” and the “Well of Souls”. This is the collective consciousness and the collection of all souls in Adam.

Kauffman was in awe when he realized all this. Here it was again: order. Order for free. Order arising naturally from the laws of physics and chemistry. Order emerging spontaneously from molecular chaos and manifesting itself as a system that grows. The idea was indescribably beautiful. But was it life? Well no, Kauffman had to admit, not if you meant life as we know it today. An autocatalytic set would have had no DNA, no genetic code, no cell membrane. In fact, it would have had no real independent existence except as a haze of molecules floating around in some ancient pond. If an extraterrestrial Darwin had happened by at the time, he (or it) would have been hard put to notice anything unusual. Any given molecule participating in the autocatalytic set would have looked pretty much like any other molecule. The essence was not to be found in any individual piece of the set, but in the overall dynamics of the set: its collective behavior.

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth—scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books—might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

Somewhere else there might be very exotic biologies and technologies and societies. In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding, we are a little lonely; and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

Believing the world is calm because we have never seen it otherwise is like taking the attitude of a man who jumps off the top of a tall building and figures that, since 29 of the 30 floors have passed without incident, he is going to be okay.

A multitude of harlequin lifeforms bobbed and twirled and played in the depths of the Atlantic. Pink cucumbers with thorny backs. Algae. Starfish. Annelids with simple brains and a hundred toes. Sponges—like yellow, swollen hands—sucked in water and pushed out oxygen. Most amusing were the mysterious buggers who had no likeness on the previous earth; tiny beasts with exotic exoskeletons engraved with deep grid-like patterns, snails with horns, and slithering plants that looked like magenta weeping willows.

That which for all time construction shall determine I have laid out; Away from Eridu, where dry land begins, my quarters shall be, Laarsa will be its name, a place for directing it shall become. On the banks of the Burannu, the River of Deep Waters, will it be located, A twin thereof a city shall in future arise, Lagash I shall name it. Between the two on the plans a line have I drawn, Sixty leagues thereafter a healing city shall come into being, A city of your own it shall be, Shurubak, the Haven City, I shall name it.

I suspect that if aliens did come to Earth, it would be as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, looked like something out of an alien hallucination—a swirling collage of warped metallic forms that appeared to have been propped up against one another in an almost random way. Stretching into the distance, the chaotic mass of shapes was draped in more than thirty thousand titanium tiles that glinted like fish scales and gave the structure a simultaneously organic and extraterrestrial feel, as if some futuristic leviathan had crawled out of the water to sun herself on the riverbank.

Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and “unscientific” even to contemplate the issue. I once helped to organize a public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the proposition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distinguished physicist, whose judgment in many other matters I respected, threatened to sic the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this madness. (Nevertheless, the debate was held and published, the issues were a little better clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew.)

Between a monkey and a snake, the one that resists change the most is the snake. You can hardly domesticate a snake and make it your trustworthy friend. And so, taking into consideration that most people refuse to change their attitude, and instead decide to discriminate others and act as enemies to the human race as a whole, in their selfishness, competitiveness and egotistical stubbornness, without empathy or compassion for others, they are acting like reptiles, not mammals. We have too much of reptile-thinking inside the human race; and the distance between our reality and a fiction movie about an alien invasion, in which reptiles walk among us disguised as humans isn't that much. We have been corrupted already. Humanity is nearly extinct due to a massive invasion of a reptilian belief-system.

Maria Orsic, a stunning beauty and an unusual medium was not an obscure personality. She was known to many celebrities of the era and had a fleet of very powerful admirers and friends both in Germany and abroad; famous, brilliant and influential people like Charles Lindbergh, Nikola Tesla, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Henry Ford, Eva Peron, and the most illustrious figures in the spiritualism, parapsychological and psychical research in Great Britain. This was reported by Allies intelligence and documented by OSS operatives in Europe.

The entire evolutionary record on our planet, particularly the record contained in fossil endocasts, illustrates a progressive tendency toward intelligence. There is nothing mysterious about this: smart organisms by and large survive better and leave more offspring than stupid ones.

He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite--that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they were to perish they would perish by the "unbodying" of the space-ship and not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures.

That’s just the way life is. It can be exquisite, cruel, frequently wacky, but above all utterly, utterly random. Those twin imposters in the bell-fringed jester hats, Justice and Fairness—they aren’t constants of the natural order like entropy or the periodic table. They’re completely alien notions to the way things happen out there in the human rain forest. Justice and Fairness are the things we’re supposed to contribute back to the world for giving us the gift of life—not birthrights we should expect and demand every second of the day. What do you say we drop the intellectual cowardice? There is no fate, and there is no safety net. I’m not saying God doesn’t exist. I believe in God. But he’s not a micromanager, so stop asking Him to drop the crisis in Rwanda and help you find your wallet. Life is a long, lonely journey down a day-in-day-out lard-trail of dropped tacos. Mop it up, not for yourself, but for the guy behind you who’s too busy trying not to drop his own tacos to make sure he doesn’t slip and fall on your mistakes. So don’t speed and weave in traffic; other people have babies in their cars. Don’t litter. Don’t begrudge the poor because they have a fucking food stamp. Don’t be rude to overwhelmed minimum-wage sales clerks, especially teenagers—they have that job because they don’t have a clue. You didn’t either at that age. Be understanding with them. Share your clues. Remember that your sense of humor is inversely proportional to your intolerance. Stop and think on Veterans Day. And don’t forget to vote. That is, unless you send money to TV preachers, have more than a passing interest in alien abduction or recentlypurchased a fish on a wall plaque that sings ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ In that case, the polls are a scary place! Under every ballot box is a trapdoor chute to an extraterrestrial escape pod filled with dental tools and squeaking, masturbating little green men from the Devil Star. In conclusion, Class of Ninety-seven, keep your chins up, grab your mops and get in the game. You don’t have to make a pile of money or change society. Just clean up after yourselves without complaining. And, above all, please stop and appreciate the days when the tacos don’t fall, and give heartfelt thanks to whomever you pray to….

The Artificial Intelligence. This is another term for the Archontic hive mind. It is a binary operating system that imitates the many shades of gray characteristic of human intelligence—only to end up a circumscribed parody of it that processes everything strictly in terms of black and white.

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

In other words, assuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives (though the true number is probably larger). If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.

The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

Man lived like Gods, without vices or passions, vexation or toil. In happy companionship with divine beings (extraterrestrials?), they passed their days in tranquillity and joy, living together in perfect equality, united by mutual confidence and love. The Earth was more beautiful than now, and spontaneously yielded an abundant variety of fruits. Human beings and animals spoke the same language and conversed with each other (telepathy). Men were considered mere boys at a hundred years old. They had none of the infirmities of age to trouble them and when they passed to regions of superior life, it was in a gentle slumber.

We have no certainty we’ll contact extraterrestrial beings from one of the billion earthlike planets in the sky in the next 200 years, but we have almost 100 percent certainty that we’ll manufacture an alien intelligence by then. When we face these synthetic aliens, we’ll encounter the same benefits and challenges that we expect from contact with ET. They will force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our goals, our identity. What are humans for? I believe our first answer will be: Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve. Our job is to make machines that think different—to create alien intelligences.

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.

On Saturday 10 of 1917, and at the age of 19, Maria Orsic fell in a trance (or perhaps in a coma, for no apparent reasons) which lasted several hours. As soon as she came out of her coma and began to regain her senses, Maria Orsic told her mother that she saw tall beings of lights not from this world who came to her and said that they will be back once she starts to feel better.   During her state of trance, two tall beings talked to her in a language she could not understand. Her mother thought that Maria was deeply affected by what had happened to her, and made no remarks. But Maria Orsic was absolutely convinced that something extraordinary has entered her life.

All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever—proof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.

In the spring of 1974 about two years before the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, I was at a meeting in England sponsored by the Royal Society of London to explore the question of how to search for extraterrestrial life. During a coffee break, I noticed that a much larger meeting was being held in an adjacent hall, which out of curiosity I entered. I soon realized that I was witnessing one of the most ancient scholarly organizations on the planet. In the front row a young man in a wheelchair was, very slowly, signing his name in a book that bore on its earliest pages the signature of Isaac Newton. When at last he finished, there was a stirring ovation. Steven Hawking was a legend even then

We’re searching for intelligent, conscious, tool-making beings that have developed a language we’re capable of understanding. We’re searching for intelligent conscious, tool-making, communicative beings that live in social groups (so they can reap the benefits of civilization) and that develop the tools of science and mathematics. We’re searching for ourselves . . .

Except they kept asking me questions like 'What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?' Or 'Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?' Completely out of left field! "They didn't want to hear me tell them how much Pope Benedict supported the Vatican Observatory and its scientific work. So, finally, frustrated that they weren't getting the story they wanted out of me, one of them asked, 'Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?' "What did you answer?" "Only if she asks!" "I love it! How did they react?" "They all got a good laugh, which is what I intended. And then, the next day, they all ran my joke as if it were a straight story, as if I had made some sort of official Vatican pronouncement about aliens.

My father and I used to watch a ton of old horror movies when I was growing up. ’The Creature from the Black Lagoon‘ was one of my father’s favorites and he was very excited for me to see the film. But after the movie was over, I told him that I was kind of bored. I said to him, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but I saw the zipper in the back of the monster’s costume. From that point on, I was really never scared at all. The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t believe someone intentionally tipped off the target. And I maintain that no one made some horrendous mistake, which I’m now trying to cover up. I believe what really happened with the operation was that our target ended up seeing the zipper. Orlo Kharms realized something around him wasn’t… real. And he was able to avoid the trap we had laid out for him.

[A Tibetan Legend] "There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world. It is now, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the kingdom of Shambhala emerges. "You cannot go there, for it is not a place. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize a Shambhala warrior by sight, for there is no uniform or insignia, there are no banners. And there are no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves. "Now comes the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made. "The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because the weapons are manomaya, mind-made. This is very important to remember, Joanna. These weapons are made by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind! The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or extraterrestrial powers. They arise from our own choices and relationships. So, now, the Shambhala warriors must go into training. "How do they train?" I asked. "They train in the use of two weapons." "The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary. We need this first one," he said, lifting his right hand, "because it provides us the fuel, it moves us out to act on behalf of other beings. But by itself it can burn us out. So we need the second as well, which is insight into the dependent co-arising of all things. It lets us see that the battle is not between good people and bad people, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We realize that we are interconnected, as in a web, and that each act with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see. "But insight alone," he said, "can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world's pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.

Twisting space-time into knots requires energy on a scale that will not be available within the next several centuries or even millenia-if ever. Even if all the nations of the world were to band together to build a machine that could probe hyperspace, they would ultimately fail. And, as Guth points out, the temperatures necessary to create a baby universe in the laboratory is 1,000 trillion trillion degrees, far in excess of anything available to us. In fact, that temperature is much greater than anything found in the interior of a star. So, although it is possible that Einstein's laws and the laws of quantum theory might allow for time travel, this is not within the capabilities of earthlings like us, who can barely escape the feeble gravitational field of our own planet. While we can marvel at the implications of wormhole research, realizing its potential is strictly reserved for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.

Ben R. Rich, the ex-president of the famous “Skunk Works,” Lockheed-Martin’s Advanced Development Programs (ADP) group, revealed the truth just before he died. In an alumni speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993, he said, “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity . . . Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.

Even amid an avalanche of meetings with aliens in the years to follow, Truman referred to the aliens as “Space Monkeys”. Truman was a very complicated man, and did not trust anybody. Behind the screen, he had developed his own plans regarding German UFOs and aliens’ technology. He replaced the OSS with the Central Intelligence Agency by the 1947 National Security Act, and gave the agency an unlimited power to investigate everything and anything related to Germany’ UFOs and the alien phenomenon.

What he’s been working on is an idea, or the idea of an idea. It’s about a race of extraterrestrials who send a spaceship to explore Earth. They’re composed of crystals in a high state of organization, and they attempt to establish communications with those Earth beings they’ve assumed are like themselves: eyeglasses, windowpanes, Venetian paperweights, wine goblets, diamond rings. In this they fail. They send back a report to their homeland: This planet contains many interesting relics of a once-flourishing but now-defunct civilization, which must have been of a superior order. We cannot tell what catastrophe has caused all intelligent life to become extinct. The planet currently harbours only a variety of viscous green filigree and a large number of eccentrically shaped globules of semi-liquid mud, which are tumbled hither and thither by the erratic currents of the light, transparent fluid that covers the planet’s surface. The shrill squeaks and resonant groans produced by these must be ascribed to frictional vibration, and should not be mistaken for speech.

Our common fate . . . for where is the man—I mean a real sentient man—who does not remember vaguely having been deserted in the fullness of possession by some one or something more precious than life? . . . our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright—an extra-terrestrial touch. I ask myself with wonder—how the world can look to them—whether it has the shape and substance we know, the air we breathe! Sometimes I fancy it must be a region of unreasonable sublimities seething with the excitement of their adventurous souls, lighted by the glory of all possible risks and renunciations. However, I suspect there are very few women in the world, though of course I am aware of the multitudes of mankind and of the equality of sexes—in point of numbers, that is. But I am sure that the mother was as much of a woman as the daughter seemed to be.

Still, the alien biologist might be excused for lumping together the whole biosphere - all the retroviruses, mantas, foraminifera, mongongo trees, tetanus bacilli, hydras, diatoms, stromatolite-builders, sea slugs, flatworms, gazelles lichens, corals, spirochetes, banyans, cave ticks, least bitters, caracaras, tufted puffins, ragweed pollen, wold spiders, horseshoe crabs, black mambas, monarch butterflies, whiptail lizards, trypanosomes, birds of paradise, electric eels, wild parsnips, arctic terns, fireflies, titis, chrysanthemums, hammerhead sharks, rotifers, wallabies, malarial plasmodia, tapirs, aphids, water moccasins, morning glories, whooping cranes, komodo dragons, periwinkles millipede larvae, angler fish, jellyfish lungfish, yeast, giant redwoods, tardigrades, archaebacteria, sea lilies, lilies of the valley, humans bonobos, squid and humpback whales - as, simply, Earthlife. The arcane distinctions among these swarming variations on a common theme may be left to specialists or graduate students. The pretensions and conceits of this or that species can readily be ignored. There are, after-all, so many worlds about which an extraterrestrial biologist must know. It will be enough if a few salient and generic characteristics of life on yet another obscure planet are noted for the cavernous recesses of the galactic archives.

However, perhaps the most insidious aspect of the New Age movement is what I call the Optimism Gestapo, or those who regulate and insist on positive thinking by any means necessary, where any criticism or expression of negative or painful emotions are disdained. I once brought up to an Ashtar Command "ascencionist" (i.e. someone who believes that extraterrestrials will come and save her), the fact that democratic senator Paul Wellstone may have been murdered in order to get republican Norm Coleman elected. Before I could elaborate, she cut me off by saying, "It was just his time." She was intolerant of the fact that I dared interfere with the reality she was creating, free of conspiracy, cutthroat politicians, and skullduggery. And the more I have played devil's advocate with New Agers, the more I have discovered that such intolerance is the norm. For there currently is a belief amongst New Agers that anything negative that one expresses will only further magnetize negativity. However, those who pursue this line of thinking just end up repressing their negative emotions, only to have them burst forth in uncontrollable ways…. Anyone seeking a supportive metaphysical community should first ask themselves if their ability to think independently is being compromised. For keeping one's metaphysical radar functioning is most important in a world crawling with "forced cheer" gurus, COINTELPRO channelers, and self-help authors.

When I was growing up it was still acceptable—not to me but in social terms—to say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more. A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

In a conversation at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, he told us how, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the entire country and much of the world seemed to come together overnight. Since then, he wondered, has there been anything that could trigger a similar coalition of the righteous and committed? The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did that initially, many would argue. But the reaction didn’t last long, muddled and dissipated as it was by military action that arguably had nothing to do with the attack or threat. An alien invasion, though, that threatened the entire planet and forced human beings to set aside their differences would do it, the Durants believed. “Infectious diseases turn out to be a surrogate for an alien invasion,” Bill declared. “It’s why we were able to do smallpox eradication in the midst of the Cold War. Both sides could see this was an important thing to do.” To take the alien invasion analogy one step further, we would first have to convince the public that extraterrestrials had, in fact, landed on earth. Look at climate change: The science is well established and yet a large percentage of the population refuses to believe it. The same holds true for infectious diseases. Our task is to convince world leaders, corporate heads, philanthropic organizations, and members of the media that the threat of pandemics and regional epidemics is real and will only continue to grow. Ignoring these threats until they blow up in our faces is not a strategy.

Joseph Andreas Epp. Epp told us that German scientists had secret UFOs’ facilities in Germany and Poland. He particularly mentioned the UFOs’ hangars located in Letow, Breslau and Dresden, which was reduced to ashes by Allied aerial carpet bombings. He stated that 15 UFOs prototypes were built and flew successfully. He added that the early German UFOs were based upon blueprints and instructions given by Maria Ostric’s Vril Society. Epp in his own words, describing the UFO mode of operation: The circular wing blades rotated independently and smoothly around the external body (Chassis) of the machine as the craft moved forward in a centrifugical manner (Auto-gyrocopter), and the craft took off vertically in a spiral mode. It reached a high altitude at an incredible speed…close to a supersonic speed.

A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

Funding did become available for a much more modest proposal: to send a carefully coded message in 1971 to aliens in outer space. A coded message containing 1,679 bits of information was transmitted via the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico toward the Globular Cluster M13, about 25,100 light-years away. It was the world’s first cosmic greeting card, containing relevant information about the human race. But no reply message was received. Perhaps the aliens were not impressed with us, or possibly the speed of light got in the way. Given the large distances involved, the earliest date for a reply message would be 52,174 years from now. Since then, some scientists have expressed misgivings about advertising our existence to aliens in space, at least until we know their intentions toward us. They disagree with the proponents of the METI Project (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) who actively promote sending signals to alien civilizations in space. The reasoning behind the METI Project is that Earth already sends vast amounts of radio and TV signals into outer space, so a few more messages from the METI Project will not make much difference. But the critics of METI believe that we should not needlessly increase our chances of being discovered by potentially hostile aliens.

So why haven’t we been visited? Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy—or in the observable universe—on which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self-reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence. We are used to thinking of intelligent life as an inevitable consequence of evolution, but what if it isn’t? The Anthropic Principle should warn us to be wary of such arguments. It is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes. It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single-cell organisms, may live on if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Perhaps intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution, as it took a very long time—two and a half billion years—to go from single cells to multi-cellular beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available before the Sun blows up, so it would be consistent with the hypothesis that the probability for life to develop intelligence is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life. Another way in which life could fail to develop to an intelligent stage would be if an asteroid or comet were to collide with the planet. In 1994, we observed the collision of a comet, Shoemaker–Levy, with Jupiter. It produced a series of enormous fireballs. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth, about sixty-six million years ago, was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A few small early mammals survived, but anything as large as a human would have almost certainly been wiped out. It is difficult to say how often such collisions occur, but a reasonable guess might be every twenty million years, on average. If this figure is correct, it would mean that intelligent life on Earth has developed only because of the lucky chance that there have been no major collisions in the last sixty-six million years. Other planets in the galaxy, on which life has developed, may not have had a long enough collision-free period to evolve intelligent beings. A third possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form and to evolve to intelligent beings, but the system becomes unstable and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion and I very much hope it isn’t true. I prefer a fourth possibility: that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, but that we have been overlooked. In 2015 I was involved in the launch of the Breakthrough Listen Initiatives. Breakthrough Listen uses radio observations to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, and has state-of-the-art facilities, generous funding and thousands of hours of dedicated radio telescope time. It is the largest ever scientific research programme aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth. Breakthrough Message is an international competition to create messages that could be read by an advanced civilisation. But we need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilisation, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus—and I don’t think they thought they were better off for it.