Space case

In a recent post on Canada, Pinku-Sensei looked at the colorful background of that country's Governor General, Julie Payette, which includes two trips into space as an astronaut.  He ended by wishing that we in the US could have a former astronaut as President.

Bah.  Why think small?  We'll soon be able to elect a leader -- well, a Congresswoman -- who has actually been in regular contact with aliens and has even ridden in an alien spacecraft.

Miami Congressional candidate Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera (a Republican, naturally), claims that she was abducted by aliens at age 7 and that they have been in telepathic contact with her several times since then.  There were three aliens, "blond" and "big-bodied", who reminded her of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro (though I assume they weren't actually that "big-bodied").  Their spacecraft had "round seats" and some "quartz rocks" which "controlled" it.  Fellow bloggers PsiCop and Hackwhackers have posted about Rodriguez's claims.

Apparently these aliens spoke English, since Rodriguez reports that they gave her the following information:

- There are 30,000 non-human skulls in a cave in Malta.

- The world’s "energy center" is in Africa.

- "God is a universal energy".

- Florida's "Coral Castle" is an ancient Egyptian pyramid (it was actually built by a local eccentric less than a century ago).

Curious how the celestial wisdom imparted by advanced aliens sounds exactly like a series of National Enquirer headlines.  Also curious how their grasp of English includes the maddeningly nebulous New-Agey misuse of the word "energy" which is so common among scientifically-illiterate people these days.  One would expect aliens qualified to pilot a spacecraft to have a better knowledge of physics.

In fact, the whole story typifies the annoying inanity of the alien-visitation schtick as we've come to know it.  Rodriguez describes the aliens as essentially humanlike -- suspiciously like a child's concept of angels, in fact -- and most such tales do the same, or describe creatures like the "greys", just an unimaginative slight modification of the human form.  Considering the vast variety of forms of animal life which have developed here on Earth, it's vanishingly unlikely that evolution on another planet would produce a species so similar to ourselves.

Then there's the matter of those pearls of advanced knowledge which these superior beings convey to their contactees.  Like the examples above, what the aliens have to say is almost always dull, trite, tabloid stuff, often with religious undertones, reflecting the ignorance and foggy language of the contactees themselves, often linked to fads popular at the time.  They couldn't drop off some blueprints for a planetary anti-meteor defense system or a primer on their theoretical physics?  Even a few landscape photos of their home world would be nice.  In fact, none of these revelations ever contain any clear, testable information outside the (usually meager) knowledge of the contactee.

(Similar nonsense ruined the ending of what would otherwise have been one of the all-time great science-fiction movies, Contact.  After Earth spends hundreds of billions of dollars building an alien-designed machine to send Jodie Foster to Vega, all she gets to see is an alien disguised as her dead father who spends a couple of minutes reciting platitudes out of some mediocre psychobabble book from the "spirituality" aisle, then sends her home.  Worst return on investment ever!  Earth should have sued.)

One also wonders why beings advanced enough to have achieved interstellar travel would spend decades abducting random obscure people, reciting clichés at them, maybe inflicting a "probe" or two, and then returning them.  I'm fairly sure that if NASA became aware of an intelligent alien race technologically inferior to ourselves somewhere in the Solar system, this is not the procedure they would propose.

Oh, well.  I see no reason to doubt that Rodriguez can secure the Republican nomination and even be elected.  The scientific ignorance inherent in her story is nothing compared with that shown by global-warming denialism or creationism, both of which are pretty much mandatory for Republicans these days.  Where idiotic delusions in government are concerned, boring aliens are the least of our problems.

[Image at top from here.]