Close Encounters With The TruthHe is reported as saying that there's no question there's Life as we know it out in the universe because we have indeed have what J. Allen Hynek has described as a "close encounter of the third kind". It's a coincidence that just this past weekend I had watched the Steven Spielberg movie by the same name. This comes, by the way, after it was announced that the Mars rover Phoenix has discovered evidence of the existence of water on the planets soil.
I had seen the 1977 movie as a child so there's a 31 year gap between the first time I saw it and last Sunday. Can I just tell you how incredibly impressed I am with Steven Spielberg's early work? I can't understand the "Spielberg hate" among academic and intellectuals. I was entering college in the 1980s and I remember vividly how "not cool" was it to watch anything written, directed or produced by Steven Spielberg because he was "too commercial".
Well, the movie may be famous for it's alien musical conversation scene, but in my book, the movie is worth every single ounce of your attention for it's first 10 minutes.
I heard somewhere that you know a movie is going to be good in those first 10 minutes. I completely agree. Not only does Spielberg establishes this movie as a modern fairy tale by wrapping the set in a cloud of dust. The movie is very much about how humans protect themselves from that which we cannot explain easily.
In those first 10 minutes, an alien contact is being recorded by the radar of an air traffic control room in the local airport. The back and forth between the people in the room and the airplane pilots is amazingly action packed even though what we're seeing is the conversation and some blips on the radar. The pilots "survive" the something that almost hits their airplanes and yet, when the air traffic controller asks "Do you want to report a UFO", the pilots all decline with a terse "No". In the end he too concedes and decides not to report what had just happened. As a defense mechanism against that which they couldn't explain, it is understandable. You can see that telegraphed on the faces of everybody in that air traffic control room.
Which makes me wonder ...
The last 8 years we've had an administration that had secret prisons and secret memos condoning and encouraging the use of torture and secret strategies for illegally wiretapping civilians. You've got to wonder what with all the news coming in of yet another cover-up or yet another "untruth" involving our foreign policy if instead of scoffing at Dr. Mitchell's claims of a cover-up about alien life if people are making a double take and actually considering them plausible. After so many lies about real tangibles happening here on Earth why shouldn't we believe his comments may indeed have more than an ounce of truth.
I mean, if we've been lied about the reasons for going into a war in the Middle East, wouldn't the government lie about contacts with alien life?
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Oh, I agree with the utmost of skepticism on that count!! The USGOV has no reason to give "truth" to the masses. Nor any government even close to the size of ours. No, no, no. Assuming that would be a silly mistake. They lie about just about every damn thing they talk about in public.
Though lately all this stargazing we're doing seems not much more than a desperate wish to escape the mess we are creating here on Earth.