Tag: Conspiracy

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Could Bigfoot Be an Orangutan?

The legend of giant apes, from Bigfoot to King Kong, to  the Abominable Snowman, continues to fascinate, not only the public, but scientists as well. Gigantopithecus blacki  is the name of one such primate species, found mostly in Southeast Asia, but is said to have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years.

Though complete skeletons of the creature are extremely rare, scientists now claim they have learned how to sequence the protein from dental enamel in a tooth from the ape believed to be nearly two million years old. According to a new study published in the journal Nature, the closest living relative  to Gigantopithecus blacki is the orangutan. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1728-8)

In 2006 Jack Rink, professor of geography and earth sciences at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, found a skeleton of Gigantopithecus blackii and dated it to between 300,000 and a million year ago. The animal did coexist with humans at the time, Rink said,  and it might, indeed, be the original source of the bigfoot legends, if not King Kong.

Weighing as much at 1200 lbs. and standing nearly three meters tall Gigantopithecus would clearly have been much feared by its human neighbors. Many believe, though, that instead of being hunted into extinction it simply retreated deeper and deeper into the forests where it continues to survive and to avoid its ancient enemy, man.

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Fire from the Sky?

What Did the Babylonia Astronomers Know, and When Did They Know it?

The sudden destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as described in the Bible, has, for centuries. intrigued scholars, and provided preachers with much material for sermons on the cosmic consequences of rampant immorality. The underlying facts have been disputed for just as long, but now, a new study by archaeologists from the University of South Carolina, argues that, indeed, 3600 hundred years ago a meteor with Tunguska-like power struck an ancient Jordanian site known as Tell el-Hamman, near the Dead Sea, and could be the source of the original account.

In the Old Testament, the ‘wicked’ behavior of the Sodomites offended no less than the patriarch Abraham, who personally chose to live elsewhere. For the sake of his nephew Lot, who still lived there, Abraham pleaded with two angels sent to warn of the coming catastrophe, to spare the cities from their well-deserved doom. The evil cities did not escape, but Lot and family, the Bible tells us, were spared, though Lot’s wife, who disobeyed warnings, and looked back at the final conflagration, was turned, unfortunately, to a “pillar of salt.” The turning-to-salt part, some have speculated, could represent the fate of someone too close to a nuclear blast. And, according to Christopher R. Moore, lead author of the new study, the evidence now unearthed indicates that in 1650 BCE, just such an explosion created an airburst greater than the notorious 1908 event near Tunguska, Siberia, where a 50-mile-wide bolide detonated with a 1000 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Tell el Hamman, however, was not the first site involving an invading space rock, proposed to account for the Sodom and Gomorrah story.

In 2008, according to press reports, including one from Atlantis Rising contributor Frank Joseph (“Secrets of the Stars: The Amazing Lost Astronomy of the Ancient Sumerians,” A.R. #117), Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, a pair of British rocket scientists, claimed that an ancient stone tablet—known as the Planisphere, and discovered by the Victorian archaeologist Henry Layard in the ruins of the royal palace at Nineveh—was actually an ancient Sumerian astrologer’s description of the night sky shortly before dawn on June 29, 3123 BC. The tablet, said Bond and Hempsell was a 700 BC, copy of a far older one. Half of it showed the position of planets and clouds, while the other half described the movement of an object looking like a ‘stone bowl’ traveling rapidly across the sky. That object, said Bond and Hempsell, matched a kind of asteroid known as the Aten type which orbits the sun close to earth. Its trajectory would have put it on a collision course with the Otz Valley in Austria.  “It came in at a very low angle,” said Hempsell, “—around six degrees—and then clipped a mountain called Gaskogel around 11 kilometers from Köfels’.” Hempsell went on to explain how the object exploded as it traveled down the valley and produced an event of literally biblical proportions. The explosion, said Bond and Hempsell would have generated a gigantic mushroom cloud and filled the air for hundreds of miles with thick dust.

The hypothetical ‘Köfels event,’ where a kilometer-long asteroid, may have crashed into the Alps, was once thought to have occurred several millennia earlier than the date referenced, but Bond and Hempsell contended that contaminated samples used in prior analysis had caused an error, and that subsequent research showed that the strike, in fact, belonged in the same time frame as the fabled Old Testament episode.

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Re-Write for the Legend of Merlin

Merlin, the magician advisor and sponsor of  King Arthur, left us many, often contradictory, tales of his exploits. Now a rediscovered medieval manuscript is adding still further to the mystery and offering an alternative to the version familiar to most students of Arthurian lore. The fragmented handwritten parchment pages found in the bindings of much later books in a Bristol, England library were part of the early 13th-century Vulgate Cycle that inspired Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Lancelot-Grail romance. The fragments have been dated to 1250-1275. (See: The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment, Benjamin Pohl, Laura Chuhan Campbell, Leah Tether, and Michael Richardson, 2021).

Merlin, in the newly discovered pages, seems to be a little more chaste in his relations with the temptress Vivian—also known as the ‘Lady of the Lake’—than in later popular versions, suggesting to some that the later versions may have been intentionally heated up to sell more books.

The role of Merlin in the Grail romances has long been ambiguous, but the argument that he was just a romantic fantasy seems implausible. Indeed archaeology hints of possible involvement in an ancient Druid priesthood that may have been responsible for much of the megalithic stone architecture of Britain, including Stonehenge. In August, 2021, a mysterious stone tomb in rural Herefordshire—known as Arthur’s Stone because of its links to King Arthur—has been dated to almost 6,000 years ago and is seen as as part of an elaborate neolithic “ceremonial landscape” across the whole area. The site being excavated consists of nine upright, or “standing,” stones supporting an immense “capstone” weighing more than 25 tons.

Welsh history alludes to a very ancient and enigmatic sect of Druids, possibly the first wave of magician priests in the British Isles, even predating the Celtic Druids by hundreds or even thousands of years. Historical Welsh documents and rhythmic poems regularly recited by Welsh Bards, mention an obscure Druid sect known as the Pheryllt, a name denoting “metallurgists” and “alchemists.”

In 2016, a stone turned up which archaeologists believe may link King Arthur with his legendary birthplace Tintagel Castle. In the ruins on the Cornwall coast, walls a meter thick with hundreds of glass fragments from medieval France along with Roman and Phoenician pottery have been unearthed. Smaller buildings can also be found within the walls. This means whoever lived there was very wealthy. One slate found on the site in 1998 was engraved with the word “Artognou,” Latin for the English name Arthur.

 The stories of Arthur’s life, many scholars think, including his involvement with Merlin, are based on actual events, though they probably occurred during the iron age, six centuries before twelfth-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), the first detailed account of Arthur’s life. By 1136, after the site had already fallen into ruin, Geoffrey wrote that Arthur, with the help of Merlin, was conceived in the Tintagel fortress.

According to legend, Merlin disguised Arthur’s father to allow him to enter Tintagel and seduce a duke’s young wife, Arthur’s mother. In another story, Arthur was found by Merlin washed ashore in a cave below the castle. Archaeologists think the research could fill in some gaps in Tintagel history, but true believers hope it will finally prove what they have known in their hearts all along, the reality of Arthur, Merlin, and all that they implied.

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Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?

One of the great mysteries surrounding the Dead Sea scrolls may now be solved. Ever since their discovery in the vicinity of Qumran in 1945, scholars have wondered how an isolated group of scribes could have produced such an immense collection of fragments. Over 15,000 pieces from 900 original documents have been found so far in nearby caves, but the community of Qumran was never home to more than a few dozen residents at a time. The answer, says a new study, may now have been uncovered in a 1000-year Hebrew scroll preserved in the Cairo museum.

According the “Damascus Covenant,” members of the Essene sect, long believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, brought their treasured scrolls from all over the region for an annual gathering in Qumran, thus accounting for the immense volume of material found. A new study by Daniel Vainstub, archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, published in the journal Religions in June, 2021 says it all fits with known archaeology of the area (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/8/578/htm).

If nothing else, the new study should help put to rest the notion that the Dead Sea scrolls could have been created by any group other than the Essenes, as some have claimed, but many important questions remain unanswered. The Essenes, many have believed, made up the religious group out of which John the Baptist and/or Jesus himself emanated. While today, most have abandoned the idea that Jesus was directly linked to the Essenes, several still think the Baptist was part of the group. More difficult questions remain undiscussed, like the significance of the Copper Scroll found in 1952, and the arguments of British metallurgist Robert Feather of a strong connection to Amarna, the ancient capital of Egypt under the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti.

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Interstellar Inflences

When even the former chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department says he thinks an object from interstellar space was created by advanced intelligence of some kind, it is clear that the origins of intelligent life are fair game for respectable cosmic speculation. Dr. Avi Loeb has published his views on the mysterious object—dubbed ‘Oumuamua’—that passed through the Solar System late in 2017. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, soon became a NewYork Times best-seller, and in a  September 2021 followup article for Scientific American he speculated that “a distant star could have created immortal machines to roam the Milky Way and keep its legacy alive.” Could the gift of life itself, one might ask, have arrived on Earth from interstellar realms?

‘Panspermia’ is a theory that life spreads through space between worlds, with spores or microorganisms drifting from one planet to another. The theory is very old, but in its modern form it was first proposed in 1903 by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who suggested that spores or bacteria might be propelled through space by the pressure of sunlight or starlight. More recently, the theory was supported by the late British astronomer Fred Hoyle, and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, the Sri Lankan-born astronomer, mathematician, and astrobiologist, who believes that the universe is “biologically constructed” and that life has always been present. Many viruses and diseases, such as SARS (or even COVID 19?), he argues, may have originated on comets or cometary fragments.

As science reporter William B. Stoecker wrote in Atlantis Rising Magazine #117, “worlds like our own, though rare, almost certainly exist. Just how similar would their life forms be to our own?” Is some kind of Supreme Being controlling ‘evolution’ everywhere and producing parallel patterns of plants and animals on multiple worlds”? The answer, at least for most of academic science, is yet to be determined, but for some, like Chandra Wickramasinghe, and Avi Loeb, the evidence is already very strong.

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Will it be safe for humans to fly to Mars?

Stuart Wolpert | August 25, 2021

Sending human travelers to Mars would require scientists and engineers to overcome a range of technological and safety obstacles. One of them is the grave risk posed by particle radiation from the sun, distant stars and galaxies.

Answering two key questions would go a long way toward overcoming that hurdle: Would particle radiation pose too grave a threat to human life throughout a round trip to the red planet? And, could the very timing of a mission to Mars help shield astronauts and the spacecraft from the radiation?

In a new article published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather, an international team of space scientists, including researchers from UCLA, answers those two questions with a “no” and a “yes.”

That is, humans should be able to safely travel to and from Mars, provided that the spacecraft has sufficient shielding and the round trip is shorter than approximately four years. And the timing of a human mission to Mars would indeed make a difference: The scientists determined that the best time for a flight to leave Earth would be when solar activity is at its peak, known as the solar maximum.

The scientists’ calculations demonstrate that it would be possible to shield a Mars-bound spacecraft from energetic particles from the sun because, during solar maximum, the most dangerous and energetic particles from distant galaxies are deflected by the enhanced solar activity.

A trip of that length would be conceivable. The average flight to Mars takes about nine months, so depending on the timing of launch and available fuel, it is plausible that a human mission could reach the planet and return to Earth in less than two years, according to Yuri Shprits, a UCLA research geophysicist and co-author of the paper.

“This study shows that while space radiation imposes strict limitations on how heavy the spacecraft can be and the time of launch, and it presents technological difficulties for human missions to Mars, such a mission is viable,” said Shprits, who also is head of space physics and space weather at GFZ Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany.

The researchers recommend a mission not longer than four years because a longer journey would expose astronauts to a dangerously high amount of radiation during the round trip — even assuming they went when it was relatively safer than at other times. They also report that the main danger to such a flight would be particles from outside of our solar system.

Shprits and colleagues from UCLA, MIT, Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and GFZ Potsdam combined geophysical models of particle radiation for a solar cycle with models for how radiation would affect both human passengers — including its varying effects on different bodily organs — and a spacecraft. The modeling determined that having a spacecraft’s shell built out of a relatively thick material could help protect astronauts from radiation, but that if the shielding is too thick, it could actually increase the amount of secondary radiation to which they are exposed.

The two main types of hazardous radiation in space are solar energetic particles and galactic cosmic rays; the intensity of each depends on solar activity. Galactic cosmic ray activity is lowest within the six to 12 months after the peak of solar activity, while solar energetic particles’ intensity is greatest during solar maximum, Shprits said.

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Catastrophic supervolcano eruptions ever-present

Curtin scientists are part of an international research team that studied an ancient supervolcano in Indonesia and found such volcanoes remain active and hazardous for thousands of years after a super-eruption, prompting the need for a rethink of how these potentially catastrophic events are predicted.

Lake Toba, which filled the Toba caldera after the super-eruption.

Associate Professor Martin Danišík, lead Australian author from the John de Laeter Centre based at Curtin University, said supervolcanoes often erupted several times with intervals of tens of thousands of years between the big eruptions but it was not known what happened during the dormant periods.

“Gaining an understanding of those lengthy dormant periods will determine what we look for in young active supervolcanoes to help us predict future eruptions,” Associate Professor Danišík said.

“Super-eruptions are among the most catastrophic events in Earth’s history, venting tremendous amounts of magma almost instantaneously. They can impact global climate to the point of tipping the Earth into a ‘volcanic winter’, which is an abnormally cold period that may result in widespread famine and population disruption.

“Learning how supervolcanoes work is important for understanding the future threat of an inevitable super-eruption, which happen about once every 17,000 years.”

Associate Professor Danišík said the team investigated the fate of magma left behind after the Toba super-eruption 75,000 years ago, using the minerals feldspar and zircon, which contain independent records of time based on the accumulation of gasses argon and helium as time capsules in the volcanic rocks.

“Using these geochronological data, statistical inference and thermal modelling, we showed that magma continued to ooze out within the caldera, or deep depression created by the eruption of magma, for 5000 to 13,000 years after the super-eruption, and then the carapace of solidified left-over magma was pushed upward like a giant turtle shell,” Associate Professor Danišík said.

“The findings challenged existing knowledge and studying of eruptions, which normally involves looking for liquid magma under a volcano to assess future hazard. We must now consider that eruptions can occur even if no liquid magma is found underneath a volcano – the concept of what is ‘eruptible’ needs to be re-evaluated.

“While a super-eruption can be regionally and globally impactful and recovery may take decades or even centuries, our results show the hazard is not over with the super-eruption and the threat of further hazards exists for many thousands of years after.

“Learning when and how eruptible magma accumulates, and in what state the magma is in before and after such eruptions, is critical for understanding supervolcanoes.”

The study was led by researchers from Oregon State University, and co-authored by researchers from Heidelberg University, the Geological Agency of Indonesia, and by Dr Jack Gillespie from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and The Institute for Geoscience Research (TIGeR), Curtin’s flagship earth sciences research institute.

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The Magic Mirrors of Dr. Dee

New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew o

By J. Douglas Kenyon

The secret of John Dee’s ‘spirit mirror’ has been revealed. Or not…

Intended for communication with ‘angels’–among other things–a volcanic obsidian black-glass mirror, made by Aztecs and brought to Europe after the Spanish conquest, was used by Queen Elizabeth I’s esteemed advisor in politics and magic, occultist John Dee. A new geochemical analysis in the journal Antiquity, while making no claims about the ‘angel’ part, now documents the authenticity of the strange artifact displayed in the British Museum. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/mirror-the-magus-and-more-reflections-on-john-dees-obsidian-mirror/38D4BFEA2CB9766973791029C2EE1289)

The almost perfectly circular obsidian mirror, 7.2 inches in diameter, is polished on both sides. In a practice known as “scrying” (from “descrying”) or crystal-gazing, Aztec priests used such mirrors, it was said, to peer into the future. European scrying survived well into the Renaissance, but the Roman Catholic Church declared images appearing in crystal balls were the work of evil spirits, and condemned scrying as a “black art.” The church called its practitioners specularii—heretics—to be punished accordingly.

Anyone believing that the mysteries of Dr. Dee have thus been laid to rest, will be surprised to learn that the case of the legendary polymath/magus, and his many esoteric tools–including spirit mirrors–remains filled with anomalous revelations that can still leaved researchers perplexed and amazed.

In his book John Dee and the Empire of Angels (Inner Traditions, 2018), author Jason Louv  documented communications that occurred between 1582 and 1589, involving Dee, his associate Edward Kelly, and ‘angelic’ beings. In an excerpt published in Atlantis Rising Magazine #132, Louv told how, “the angels explained the true origins of humanity, and delivered the original language spoken by mankind before the Fall.” Dee and his associate Kelly, an itinerant psychic, claimed that this language, along with a mathematically complex system for making further contact with the angels, was to be used by Dee and Kelly to advance the world toward the ‘Apocalypse’.

While such a story might today be dismissed as mere fantasy, in the sixteenth century it was anything but a fringe event, as evident in the outsized role that John Dee continued to play in history. Alchemist, magician, and Christian cabalist, Dee is credited with coining the term, ‘British Empire.’ So impressed by him was the Queen that she asked him to examine her astrology for the best time for her coronation. In a highly literate age, Dee’s scholarship was unparalleled. His home at Mortlake, indeed, contained more books than any private library in England, as well as a ‘magic mirror’ that, it was said, would astound all who dared look at their reflection.

According to writer Steven Sora in Atlantis Rising #81, Dee was also a spy, and the inspiration for novelist Ian Fleming and his James Bond character. A hotbed of political intrigue, Elizabethan England saw rampant plotting, counterplotting, assassinations, and threats of war. The queen understood that keeping her throne meant knowing on whom she could rely. Dee reported only to her and her spymaster Francis Walsingham. Dispatches to Dr. Dee were signed by the Queen as “M,” just like Bond’s boss. Nearly four centuries before Bond’s famed code name, Dee referred to himself as agent “007.” Incidentally, a very important member of the court, the Earl of Leicester, whom Dee had tutored as a child, used a similar code, marking his secret correspondence with two dots, or two number “0”s representing eyes. Dee marked his corre­spondence to the Queen: “For Your Eye’s Only.”

Along with Sir Francis Bacon, Dee is considered the inspiration for, if not the co-founder of, the Rosicru­cian brotherhood. Since the ‘brotherhood’ in Dee’s time, was not yet chartered, it had no established organiza­tion or rules, officers, or even members. It was indeed, as claimed, a brotherhood of “Invisibles,” and for good rea­son. To be a ‘visible’ proponent of any science condemned by the Church could shorten one’s life expectancy considerably.

Many scholars believe the Rosicrucian brotherhood played a great part in Dee’s performance as Elizabeth’s spy. His position as court mystic, connections to the “Invisibles,” and his gifts that seemed almost su­pernatural, gained him ready access to Europe’s esoteric circles.

As for ‘magic’ mirrors, Elizabeth certainly had access to Dee’s “shew-stone,” an egg-shaped crystal ball that Dee said the “child-angel Uriel” had given him in a vision. Gazing into it, claimed Edward Kelley, revealed myriads of angelic spirits. It, too, apparently, is available to be seen in the British Museum.

According to writer John Chambers, in an article for Atlantis Rising #81, the use by British monarchs’ of such magic mirrors, goes back to King Rience of North Wales, perennial foe of King Arthur. Merlin the magician was said to have given Rience an enchanted, all-seeing, mirror that was “round and hollow, and . . . like a great globe of glass.”

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The Hunt for Shackleton’s Lost ‘Endurance’: Part II

The quest for ‘The Endurance’, the long-lost ship of famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton is scheduled to resume in 2022. Though a previous attempt in 2019 failed, organizers of the new expedition are undaunted, and more determined than ever to find the ship, lost since 1915. To succeed, the expedition will have to struggle through miles of pack ice and dive to 10,000 feet below the dark waters of the Weddell Sea. But though the target may be elusive, searchers, like Shackleton, perhaps may hope for some special help.

Author John Geiger’s 2010 book, The Third Man Factor, Surviving the Impossible, has many stories of how people at the very edge of death often sense a presence beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive.

Such anecdotes, it turns out, are quite common. In moments of great danger, stress and privation many find themselves accompanied by a stranger, or unseen presence, who comforts and guides them. The phenomenon is so common, in fact, that it has a name: ‘the Third Man factor’, described as an encounter with an unseen presence or spirit providing comfort in a traumatic situation.

Shackleton wrote about one such event in 1916 when he and two others were accompanied by a mystery companion during their arduous 36-hour hike across Elephant island to a whaling station in South Georgia on a mission to bring help to stranded colleagues. All three spoke later of their shared awareness of another individual who walked with them to the whaling station, but no further. Shackleton later wrote in his book South: “during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

The significance of such experiences are, of course, dismissed in orthodox circles as hallucinations brought on by stress—psychological disorders like sleep paralysis. When compared to the evidence, though, such explanations fall short. Shackleton and his companions, for instance, all experienced an encounter with the same individual, something unaccounted for by any theory of strictly subjective awareness.

Perhaps it is time to take another look at the notion of guardian angels. Certainly, in this tumultuous time, we could all use a little more angelic assistance.

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Should Earthling’s Welcome ET?

Tantalizing new evidence released by the U.S, military suggests that we may be on the threshold of some unprecedented contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. But something the people of Earth should NOT be doing, is trying to make such contact. Indeed, the whole idea is ‘reckless’ and we should stop trying to communicate with unknown worlds right now. That is the gist of a June, 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post by influential physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan. Among scientists agreeing with him is SETI astronomer Joe Gertz who sees such efforts as ‘the reckless endangerment of all mankind’ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ufo-report-aliens-seti/2021/06/09/1402f6a8-c899-11eb-81b1-34796c7393af_story.html)

Buchanan and Gertz find themselves echoing the views of the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking who warned that rather than seeking such contact we should be trying to avoid it. It is not that Hawking thought there is no life out there. On the contrary, he thought that, given the odds, there almost certainly is. It is just that there is no telling what it is like, and prudence would dictate that we do what we can to stay out of its way until we know a great deal more than we do now. I wrote about the Hawking warnings in my publisher’s letter for Atlantis Rising Magazine #82 (July/August, 2010).

Most alien life Hawking believed is probably microbial or simple animals. Any intelligent life and even civilized life, he thought, might very well view Earth as a target for colonization or some other form of exploitation. The first contact with arriving ETs might be very much like that of the American Indians greeting the European explorers, and that didn’t work out very well for the Indians, he reminded us. One also recalls the cargo cults of the south Pacific during World War II.

On some South Pacific islands in the 1940s the native tribes came to believe that western manufactured stuff (“Cargo”) had been created by divine spirits in the sky and was intended for their people. They objected to the unfairness of sending such bounty to white people alone and formed what were called “cargo cults” to enlist the gods in their cause. Meanwhile on other islands the natives worshiped the Americans who flew in the “cargo.” The phenomenon was studied and written up by celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead. Later, in the early days of NASA, Mead joined in a report from the Brookings institute recommending that any possible future discoveries of extraterrestrial life be withheld from the public on the grounds that, as in the South Pacific, such contact could be calamitous. Could she have had a point?

Interplanetary travelers, Hawking pointed out, could very well be nomads or pirates out to raid Earth to extract its resources and then to move on. If Hawking was right, then someone should warn some of those at SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) like Douglas Vakoch who runs a nonprofit research organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations, and seem to think it a good idea to broadcast our presence to the universe.

And what about some politicians who have complained that Hollywood portrayals often make aliens look unflatteringly threatening? For this school of thought, the politically correct treatment of aliens ought to be more like what was portrayed in the movie ET. But what if the aliens are more like those we saw in Independence Day, merciless and predatory?

Do we really know what to expect, and should we gamble the human race on the answer?