UFOs
Aliens 'already exist on earth'
From the Daily Telegraph, London, November 26, 2009:
Aliens from outer space are already among us on earth, say Bulgarian government scientists who claim they are already in contact with extraterrestrial life.
Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country's Space Research Institute said.
They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.
Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.
He said the centre's researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions. "Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time," Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media. They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them."
Mr Filipov said that even the seat of the Catholic church, the Vatican, had agreed that aliens existed. He said humans were not going to be able to establish contact with the extraterrestrials through radio waves but through the power of thought.
"The human race was certainly going to have direct contact with the aliens in the next 10 to 15 years," he said. "Extraterrestrials are critical of the people's amoral behavior referring to the humans' interference in nature's processes."
The publication of the BAS researchers report concerning communicating with aliens comes in the midst of a controversy over the role, feasibility, and reform of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Saucers full of secrets
Is our society is on the verge of acknowledging the existence of aliens? And why should this be happening now? We seem to be going through the biggest UFO flap since the 1960s.
Could it be that the perilous state of the planet is creating an acute psychological reaction? Is the internet encouraging more reports – and more hoaxes? Is it the "2012 effect"? We're now three years away from "doomsday", the midwinter solstice on December 21 that year, according to the prophecy of the Mayans. Maybe the clamour from ufologists and conspiracy theorists, convinced "the truth is out there", for the Ministry of Defence to open up its files, as it has been doing, has something to do with it. Perhaps it's a combination of all these things.
In 2008, there was a major spate of sightings across England and Wales. Dozens of mysterious objects were seen in the skies, in all shapes, colours and sizes. UFOs hovered over a Bruce Springsteen concert in Philadelphia in October – a fan took a video of four objects in the sky and sent it to the local TV station.
But the most sensational incidents last year came between May and September in Turkey when night guard Yalcin Yalman videotaped a series of UFOs. The case was welcomed by the Sirius UFO Space Science Research Center in Turkey, which pronounced the tapes genuine and "the most important UFO images ever" – and perhaps, viewing the videos on the internet, the most incredible! Close-up shots reveal "entities" at the controls.
British MoD files revealed that a US fighter pilot was ordered to shoot down a huge UFO over Norwich 50 years ago. But within seconds of firing at the alien craft – "the size of an aircraft carrier" on his radar – it took off at 10,000mph.
In April 1991, the captain of an Alitalia airliner, flying at an altitude of more than four miles from Milan to Heathrow, saw a missile-like object. found not to be a military weapon, and more similar sightings followed in the next six months.
Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell has said aliens exist and have been observing Earth for "quite some time".
Mitchell, 77, one of only 12 humans to have walked on the Moon, also said that events such as the reported 1947 alien spacecraft crash at Roswell, New Mexico, did actually occur and were hushed up by the American and other governments. He says he wants to "break open the alien visitation issue" and reveal the truth about cover-ups.
Former Space Shuttle ground test astronaut Clark McClelland, who came out in support of Mitchell, says he saw an 8-9ft extraterrestrial on his video monitors at launch control at the Kennedy Space Center. It was standing in the payload bay of the orbiting shuttle, "having a discussion" with two NASA astronauts, and its spacecraft was hovering nearby.
The Rev Jose Gabriel Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, pronounced that there was no conflict between a belief in extraterrestrial intelligent life and belief in God. "How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere?" he asked, implying even that some aliens might not have been subject to the separation from God described in Genesis. "There could be (other beings) who remained in full friendship with their creator."
In 2005, I took issue with the Sunday Times writer Brian Appleyard when I reviewed his book Aliens: Why They Are Here, in which he purveyed the pessimistic view that we live on an insignificant planet near an insignificant star lost in infinite space and, confronted with the immensity of it all, it was not surprising that we had visions.
Thus aliens were real, projected and demonic at the same time, a psychic manifestation triggered by deep-seated guilt about they way humans are treating their planet and each other. This presents something of a challenge to UFO watchers everywhere, of course, both "nuts and bolts" adherents (aliens and their craft are as real as you and I), and "third realmers" (they exist, but in another dimension).
The fact remains that UFOs are real for those who see them, although it's often said that the sure sign there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that it hasn't made contact with us. Yet, if there are some godlike aliens around, I say, bring them on. They may give God far more credit than we do. And we need all the help we can get right now
How the movies have encountered aliens
It's fascinating to look at the way cinema, our most popular art form, has portrayed extraterrestrials over the years, reflecting fears – and hopes – in the world at large. After all, any detailed discussion of intelligent non-human life-forms, apart from the scientific question of whether they can exist, has always been restricted to fiction and film.
In the 1950s, fears over the A-bomb and the implications of the Cold War, gave us movies such as The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It, the Terror from Beyond Space, and the first film version of War of the Worlds, in which alien visitors were far from friendly.
With the advent of transcendent New Age wishful-thinking in the Sixties, 
2001: A Space Odyssey began the mystical and inspirational strand of movies leading to the spiritual crux of Close Encounters and the hallucinatory fantasy of Star Wars in the Seventies, to ET in 1982, Contact a decade later and, most recently, Knowing (2009) where aliens assume a positively angelic role.
2001: A Space Odyssey began the mystical and inspirational strand of movies leading to the spiritual crux of Close Encounters and the hallucinatory fantasy of Star Wars in the Seventies, to ET in 1982, Contact a decade later and, most recently, Knowing (2009) where aliens assume a positively angelic role. Enemy Mine (1985) was a landmark of the spiritual approach with a man and an alien marooned on an inhospitable planet during an intergalactic war. They have to make a tentative peace and finally become firm friends, the man benefiting greatly from the alien's spirituality. Alien Nation (1988) also depicted humans learning about spirituality from non-humans.
But running parallel and overtaking these optimistic treatments were the films returning to the theme of hostile invaders, probably allegorising perceived growing military and/or political threats on Earth. Thus we had the Alien and Predator series, Independence Day, and Signs – although all of these suggested that gung-ho humans could win the day.Such movies underline the irony that, to many people on our planet, spirituality has become much more alien than any possibility of intelligent space beings. If we ever do have a "close encounter of the third kind", we may just discover a new kind of spirituality, and find ourselves able to invest in the unknown, the alien, instead of avoiding it.