Tis the season of the weird

October can be considered the season of the weird I suppose in that our thoughts tend to turn to the bizarre, the spooky or just plain weird this time of the year.

I'm not a huge UFO person, but from time to time things catch my eye that draw my interest toward unidentified flying objects if only for a little while. Several recent news items have caught my eye and I wanted to take the time this week to share them with you and ask what you think about them.

First and foremost, the Vatican has come forward in the past year or two and offered some pretty strange rulings with regard to UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In a first directive last November, the Vatican granted its Catholic faithful the approval to believe in life on other planets. If that wasn't unusual enough the Vatican's official astronomer not more than three weeks ago announced that if an alien has a soul, then the church is willing to baptize an extraterrestrial life form.

Is it just me or does this seem a little weird? Of all the problems in this world with which we need to deal and solve, alien issues just don't seem to rank up there. Unless someone knows more than they are telling the public, this doesn't seem to make sense but a search of the Internet could provide some clue as to how this story made the news.

Many stories over the past year chronicle how scientists are discovering scores of planets orbiting stars throughout our galaxy and according to the odds they believe many could be earthlike and contain life. In 1962, SETI founder Frank Drake developed an equation that allegedly calculates the number of civilizations with whom we could make contact in our galaxy. Some estimates when plugged into his formula produce a value of at least two other civilizations are within communications reach of Earth.

Just as recently as a week after the Vatican made its baptism statement, astronomers called out another planet that could sustain life in its earth like atmosphere. With our current technology at least that which is made public, we have no way to communicate with such planets in a meaningful manner even though there could be life there. This lack of ability will not last forever most likely simply because we will continue to explore, redefine and solve the problem until we succeed. When we do make contact, the Vatican apparently will be ready.

Vatican scientist Guy Consolmagno defended his statement though by saying that while the odds are remote we can actually find and make contact with alien life, he conjectured that if we did, they could very well have a soul. He actually told reporters if an alien does come in contact with us and it expresses a willingness to do so, he would baptize the life form.

This would be humorous on its own, but around the same time the United Nations discussed appointing an ambassador to alien life to act as a liaison when the big day arrives and we meet aliens for the first time. I must admit I feel more comfortable knowing that the UN may not have solved problems about terrorism but no alien will slip throughout its watchful worldwide guard unchallenged.

While on the subject of UFOs, former Air Force officers held a press conference last Monday in which they admitted to seeing and experiencing UFO's on the site that toyed with the guards and even fried the circuitry in the nuclear missiles on the sites in which these objects were seen. The missiles actually needed to be repaired in order to make them able to be launched once again. This event occurred on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967 according to Captain Robert Salas.

I think many UFO events have a natural explanation. After all, a UFO is simply an Unidentified Flying Object. Nowhere in that definition does it say they are extraterrestrial, but there are numerous cases of objects that are clearly nothing from this earth. In that case, I think they are grouped with common identification with extraterrestrial life.

Could it be the government and the Vatican are preparing us for something to transpire in the near future? Are they just taking advantage of some public news stories to generate some of their own headlines? Have we already made contact and the only thing that is being held back is the announcement that aliens are already here?

We may never know for sure what the true situation, but it is interesting to think about it especially during this Halloween season.

Til next time …