The Black Knight satellite is one of many tantalizing so-called true tales that are circulating on YouTube and various cable outlets like the History Channel. I say so-called true tales because many believe stories about aliens are total nonsense. But not everyone believes so. A National Geographic survey says 77 percent of all Americans believe there are signs that aliens have visited Earth. A Harris poll says 68 percent of all Americans believe that Jesus is the son of God. A HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that 45 percent believe in ghosts and 64 percent believe in life after death. A 2009 CBS poll said 78 percent believe in the afterlife. I could go on, but it is all in the same general range.
Thousand of movies of all kinds have played with our imagination on these subjects. Steven Spielberg is one of the most famous filmmakers to deal with these subjects both as a director and a producer. Here is a list of some of the movies and TV shows that Spielberg has been involved with: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all of the Indiana Jones movies, Poltergeist, Young Sherlock Holmes, All the Transformer movies, Extant, Falling Skies, all the Men in Black movies, Terra Nova, Cowboys and Aliens, Super 8, Hereafter, The Lovely Bones, Monster House, Taken, Casper, Always, batteries not included, Amazing Stories, War of the Worlds and Night Gallery. That’s just one person’s output on ghosts and aliens. It is a topic that is endlessly dealt with. And with the current climate of internet blogging, there is an endless amount of material that was not easily available before, like the Black Knight satellite. That’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. So many movies are dealing with this information. Transformers is a perfect example, with depictions of robot bases on the moon and alien robots precipitating the mass extinction event of most species on Earth 68,000 years ago. The last Superman movie, Man of Steel, showed an ancient rocket ship buried in the North Pole. This stuff isn’t new. H.P. Lovecraft wrote a story called In the Mountains of Madness nearly a hundred years ago that led to stories like The Thing, which has been made into a movie three times so far (although a recent faithful big-budget adaption stalled because of giant ego clashes).
There are almost too many stories to run down to even begin to start recounting them all. Let’s start with the Black Knight satellite that I mentioned in the title above. Numerous newspaper stories were written about it going back to St. Louis Post in 1954. No man-made satellite had yet been launched. It was discussed later in a 1960 Time magazine story which discussed its polar orbit and a highly erratic and inconsistent path. There has been talk of the famous Nicola Tesla picking up alien radio signals from the satellite back in 1899 from his high-voltage complex in Colorado Springs. Numerous photographs were released by NASA which accidentally showed the strange ship. Grumman Aircraft Corporation took official photographs back in 1960. In 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing the object from his NASA capsule. A ham radio operator decoded a series of signals that supposedly revealed the craft was 13,000 years old and was sent from the Epsilon Bootes Star System. On August 23, 1954, Aviation Week and Space Technology published a story, and the Pentagon blew its stack. This is some scary stuff, boys and girls. It’s some crazy, wacky stuff, but there are now literally thousands of alien-related stories to run down. Are you one of the 77% that believe? I am, but I don’t have the advantage of having had a close encounter of the first, second, or third kind. I’d love it if I did.
Ripped from the headlines this week is the possible discovery of a Level 2 civilization. (Earth is a Level 0 civilization, by the way.) It is theorized that a Dyson Sphere (a structure that surrounds a star) has been found around sun KIC 8462852 in the Cygnus constellation approximately 1480 light years away. There is so much to discuss. I just want to start the discussion. We are a pale blue dot in an endless dark infinity. That’s a little scary, but take heart. More and more scientists and general experts including the Vatican are starting to admit that alien life is a statistical certainty. We all hope that Spielberg’s friendly little alien from ET is the one who will finally make contact.
