Aliens

I've been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrials for as long as I can remember. My first childhood dream was to become an astronaut, so I was deeply interested in space and space exploration. Strangely, these same books always had to have even the most casual reference to aliens. They weren't necessarily advocating the existence of aliens and that the government was covering them up, but they would speculate what aliens would look like on different planets. I distinctively remember one book showing what aliens would look like on Jupiter. They were interesting because it explained some basic characteristics that may develop due to gravity, temperature, and other factors. As with everything else, my mind is just naturally attracted to the fantastical.

So back in the early 1990's, cryptozoology was becoming a big pop culture hit with things like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and -of course- aliens. X-Files was really popular at the time too which purported the idea of the government covering up the existence of aliens. While I have never personally witnessed a UFO (or to be technical, nothing that seemed extraterrestrial like), the alien autopsy footage shown on Fox made us pause. Spoiler alert: it was obviously fake, but it wasn't deemed so immediately. I think Area 51 was still publicly denied by the government (even though it was easy to see) at this time too which only fueled the idea that the government may be hiding something.

Can you blame my younger self for fearing these?

Paradoxically, as much as I enjoyed reading about aliens, they were my childhood boogeymen. After watching the opening abduction scene from The X-Files, I was scared when going to sleep when the moon happened to be shining in my bedroom at night. The glow from the window made me check to see if there was a space ship outside. Nothing frightened me more than the movie Mars Attacks. I never saw the movie when I was kid, but the trailers truly freaked me out. I think I first saw it as a trailer preceding Space Jam whose aliens didn't quite frighten me in the same manner. Watching educational programs that further supported the idea of aliens (mostly the Drake equation) kept this fear in me for quite a while since the idea seemed very possible.

As I got older, the idea of aliens abducting me vanished and movies like Mars Attacks I was able to see as the comedy that it actually is. As I got more religious in my high school and college years, I actually became even more skeptical of the idea that aliens even existed. The basic premise of this idea is that if life was designed (by God), then life shouldn't exist anywhere else in the universe. There was no biblical reason for me to believe in extraterrestrials. In fact if aliens did appear, I would probably presume them to be literal demons of some sort.

Strangely, only one television show / movie -that I have seen- that has even addressed this idea of mine that is certainly more widespread than you would think. In 2009, a revamp of the show V aired. I think the show probably had bad ratings because it was hard to look up (only consisting of a single letter), but I thoroughly enjoyed the show up until its cliffhanger ending although it did get a little heavy handed with the aliens trying to search for the human soul. One of the main characters in the show was a Catholic priest who had a crisis of faith when the aliens first appeared and basically professed the exact same premise of mine. The priest even went so far as accusing them of demons which is what initially led him to believe that the V's may actually have malevolent intentions despite of all of the great miracles they were giving to humanity. While the show ended prematurely, there was no indication that the aliens were in fact demons by the way.

Aliens or angels?

While I may have had no biblical reason to believe in extraterrestrials, the Bible does have some extraterrestrial-like events in it. My first exposure was with the book of Ezekiel. Right in the first chapter, the prophet has a very strange vision of creatures in flying wheels. Slightly blasphemous, but the pillar of fire in Exodus that was leading the Jews through the desert could even be described as a UFO.

Other religions may allude to aliens as well. In Islam, there are references to the Djinn which has been anglicized to genie. I am not a subscriber to the Koran, but I did find it interesting that it makes references to another intelligent race that is neither angel or demon. Other theories suggest that ancient gods may have been aliens, and they were the ones who constructed all of the monoliths and the pyramids. Some Egyptian hieroglyphics do resemble flying saucers.

Today, I don't know if I would immediately jump to the demon conclusion, but my skepticism of aliens is entirely rooted in this idea at least as far as finding any life in the universe. I do find the possibility of aliens in other cultures to be fascinating, but ultimately it is the Fermi paradox that makes me most skeptical of Earth being visited by extraterrestrial life. Now there is an argument with Star Trek's Prime Directive (alien contact is avoided until interstellar travel is invented to allow a culture to grow naturally), but I still think we would have found something. The Wow! signal is the closest, and that has yet to be replicated. If alien life really has visited us in the past, why would they have stopped or have focused their attentions to isolated people?