NASA, Priests, and Aliens
- Admin
- Apr 10, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: May 20, 2022
Today I wanted to really see what I can take from a news item forwarded to me about a recent claim from International Business Times that “NASA hiring priests to prepare humans for alien first contact”.
I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice some skepticism, critical thinking, debunking and fact checking skills, and apply them in a break down of teachable moments below.
I’m keeping this discussion strictly based around the contents of what I was given, it’s always good to stay on track and really address what is at hand rather than shift the goalposts onto other tangents which themselves also require a 1000 document to go into, before returning to this one.
Expand sections:
Patchwork Video of Sensationalism
A random, typical UFO sensationalist video at the top of the page first, which is unrelated to the headline. Just playing on peoples interests and desires for there to be alien life. Most enthusiasts like to present UFO investigations as proof of aliens, and far from being specific about facts or contributing meaningful information to the subject of the article, this just stirs the pot of unfounded excitement. They also treat ‘UFO’ as synonymous with ‘aliens’, which is not and has never been the case.
The video references the AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) as suggesting evidence for aliens, but this is a perfectly ‘grounded’ and real concern, to keep on top of potential military or spy phenomena. If a phenomenon is unidentified then we can’t say it’s not a threat, therefore we must know.
This is a brilliant podcast episode where the SETI institute scientists discuss fair and real takes on the need to survey the skies and track UAPs as a means to identify threats, but more excitingly identify natural phenomena which have yet to be explained and may lead to new discoveries.
The video is constantly indirectly hinting at alien contact, always alluding to some form of incredible alien discovery with a nudge of the elbow and a wink. But never is that connection made with any compelling evidence to suggest so; and never is a plausible mechanism for the conclusions they allude to mentioned.
Vague statements which tell us nothing valuable are made, but which are meant to spark assumptions. Claims of ‘former employees’ never named, cited or sourced. There is zero meaningful information in that video, just hints and undercurrents of ‘make your own mind up.’ Essentially, it relies entirely on confirmation bias.
Bait and Switch
Starting fairly and factually:
“Space agencies like NASA and ESA have long been searching for extra-terrestrial life in other distant nooks of the universe.”
Opening statement sets you up with a reasonable and correct premise. There is nothing even suggestive about this statement, but the follow up is completely the opposite:
“However, until now, neither of these space agencies have succeeded in finding strong evidence of alien life.”
This would be correct also, if not for two operating words: ‘until now’. This flips the meaning of the sentence from a negative to a positive. It is effectively saying there is strong evidence of alien life. No mention of what that evidence is though, which would be crucial to this piece in my opinion, especially if you’re just going to go and drop that bomb on us!
We’re therefore left, after the suggestive UFO video at the top of the page, to fill in the blanks. I can guess what conclusion a lot of people would draw from that. For UFO enthusiasts (who already believe or want to believe aliens are here or visiting), it is the next logical step that the UFO video becomes the aforementioned ‘evidence.’ However, this video is far from evidence of anything, let alone alien life visiting Earth, and all we have so far is a bold claim of evidence, not actual evidence.
But no, they just skim over that and move onto the next point:
“And now, NASA is apparently hiring priests to make human beings prepare for a possible alien first contact in the future.”
Given the lack of source for this claim which reads like a third party account, I couldn’t comment on the context or seriousness of this claim. It’s no better than hearsay and therefore should be treated as such.
Terrible journalism
I’m unsure whether to consider this even journalism, I think clickbait trash is more fitting. Let’s break down this sentence:
“According to reports, NASA is apparently hiring 24 theologians as part of a plan to work out how different religions will react when humans make their first contact with aliens.”
First of all, this is a third hand account: not the original source (would be NASA), not second hand (‘reports’) but third hand as in this piece. The ‘reports’ are not mentioned – reports by who? Is there even a report? This clearly also sounds as though they did not speak to NASA directly or obtain the transcript or source from NASA, otherwise that would be referenced as well.
Use of the word ‘apparently’ – again unsure language, NASA may or may not have said this.
Now while I am quite sure that there indeed are several hypothetical and philosophical projects relating to answering questions like ‘how would or should humans react to intelligent life should that meeting ever occur’, it’s the part which says ‘…will react when humans make their first contact…’ which bugs me.
This is loaded language again, with presumptions that we definitely will meet intelligent life, or that it is already planned. It’s misleading and difficult to pick up on for a lot of people, to use this kind of language. It reads like we’re penned in already for dinner at 7pm and a red carpet roll-out for the aliens, when the truth as far as anybody can throw right now, is that we don’t know if we will ever encounter any extra-terrestrial life. Crucially, the majority of astrophysicists would bet against meeting intelligent life.
More Visual Stimulation
I absolutely love the ‘Representational Image’ curtesy of Pixabay stock images website. It’s fun and all, but it does nothing to add any credibility to the already failed piece in my opinion. It just pads out an already tiny effort to write something of substance, while feeding the enthusiasts excitement and imagination.
Appeal to Authority
Here’s where some fake token credibility is clumsily inserted. A supposed quote by Carl Pilcher, NASA astrobiologist:
"Consider the implications of applying the tools of late 20th [and early 21st]-century science to questions that had been considered in religious traditions for hundreds or thousands of years,"
No confirmation of what the question was, the context, or even the rest of the quote.
This looks copied and pasted; cherry picked from somewhere. In relation to this piece, it just sounds like unrelated pseudo-profound jargon. It could mean a lot of things in its correct context, but it doesn’t support the explanation for NASA (apparently) hiring theologians.
It seems the writer may be using Carl Pilcher as authority for something he may or may not have said, and cherry picking lines out of context, from an uncited source and an unstated date.
On the subject of Carl, this short interview from the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science is quite a nice insight/overview into his career path. You’ll notice no mention of intelligent life, but instead the (equally profound) discovery that there may be evidence that life existed on Mars (again not jumping the gun with intelligent life or human-like beings), was the sort of thing his role in astrobiology revolved around.
Sources Check – The Original Article
This was really fun and revealed a lot of my previous suspicions of the IBT article were pretty warranted. As I thought that the Carl Pilcher quote looked lifted from somewhere else, I copied and pasted it into Google and found both the original article (The Times) and a simplified copy of it (The Mirror). This IBT version is a grotesquely contorted derivation of the latter, turned into sensational clickbait.
Let’s dive into the Times article. It was a paid article (I got it on a free trial) so I’ve copied it all into a word document here.
To summarise from the original Times article, it becomes clear that NASA are not preparing for some imminent meeting with intelligent extra-terrestrials. Nor are they personally hiring theologians to ‘make human beings prepare for a possible alien first contact in the future.’
Instead, the project is a NASA-sponsored project (not a NASA project) at the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI), to assess how the world’s major religions would react to news that life exists on worlds beyond our own, microbial (implied), or more advanced (hypothetically).
Nothing about an implied imminent or existing discovery, and every time life is mentioned in the article it is of the possibility that we find microbial life or otherwise. It becomes clear that astrobiology is much more about understanding the origins of life on Earth, the possibility of life on other planets and how that could form, and the habitats of other planets having once been home to microbial life or maybe still are.
The Times piece is focused on religious world views and given the ever improving technology we have to search for life (in this case the new James Webb Space Telescope) – microbial or otherwise, how they would accommodate for the fact that life does or has existed beyond Earth in their creation stories, and how might they accept it into their views.
Sources Check – The Mirror Article
I have to mention, that even once removed (The Mirror) the article took a few serious lazy language compromises. For example:
“A British priest and theologist is helping advise the American space agency about what they should do if alien life is found.”
Nope! They are not helping advise what they should do; this implies that NASA are asking for advice on how they should manage a discovery and frankly, theologians wouldn’t have a say in that. NASA were sponsoring a CTI programme which is asking the hypothetical question of how prominent religious world views would handle and accept the possible discovery of life not only originating from Earth.
Making it sound like NASA need help on what to do, makes it sound a bit like they’re expecting to contact alien species capable of communication, or expecting to have to ‘take action.’ So, the Mirror already made a respectably written article sound like a breeding ground for misleading extrapolations in my opinion.
Cherry Picking & False Equivalence
I see now that having read the full version of the article, the phrases the writer has chosen to lift from the original are ambiguous in the sense that put into his own context, all sound to positively lean towards his own narrative of intelligent life either already being here or being here imminently. He’s also ambiguous enough that he still has plausible deniability in that he didn’t actually say that’s what he was getting at. In other words, he has conditioned the reader to accept the ambiguous quotes as meaning what he wants it to.
He also gives some false balance to the conspiracy side of it (why even include this in an article about the CTI project) in naming Haim Eshed. Haim has some unfounded views (unclear whether to sell his books or if he genuinely fell down the rabbit hole at some point). He espouses claims of the existence of a galactic federation, an underground base on Mars used by American astronauts to collaborate with aliens, and claims of how aliens prevented potential nuclear disasters, including an unspecified nuclear incident during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
These claims are just too far out there to entertain, without some serious evidence: the more radical the claim, the higher dose of skepticism is warranted in the absence of evidence. Again, no mention of any tangible evidence is ever presented to support those claims.
The Carl Pilcher Quotes
The full quote from earlier in its correct context is as below:
“Carl Pilcher, who was head of Nasa’s Astrobiology Institute until 2016, said Nasa was now investigating profound questions about the origins of life and its place in the universe and wanted theologians to “consider the implications of applying the tools of late 20th [and early 21st] century science to questions that had been considered in religious traditions for hundreds or thousands of years”.”
It seems a lot less profound now that we can see that Carl was speaking of reconciling the implications of scientific discoveries with religious worldviews, still of the big questions in life but not in a way which suggests or singles out alien contact. Further to this:
“He said it was “inconceivable” that the Earth is the only place in the universe to harbour life, noting: “That’s just inconceivable when there are over 100 billion stars in this galaxy and over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”
Which is a view held by lots of scientists and me too; and is not making any claim outside of what the chances of the numbers tell us about the probability of other life. It doesn’t even scratch the surface of whether other life could or will ever reach us though.
More Source Checks – The Clickbait Writer & IBT
Having looked at the writer’s profile here, I also discovered several other citation free and lazy clickbait articles by them. I wouldn’t rely on this guy’s future posts, and it doesn’t look good on the IBT website either.
On further reading about the IBT, it has been repeatedly criticised for its business model of a ‘content farm’ by investigative reporters and former employees:
“Ex-journalists told The Guardian in 2014 that at times they seemed to operate more as "content farms" - demanding high-volume output - than a source of quality journalism. At least two journalists were allegedly threatened with firing unless readership to their articles increased sharply.”
This is also true for a lot of online news generators today – when income generated depends on clicks and web traffic, the quality of journalism plummets while the quantity of crap takes over. I still judge the piece as an individual article, but considering I was already well aware of the manner of the lazy writing it doesn’t look good that this appears to have been a trend at some point, for IBT.
Personal Conclusions and Summary
It’s clear that off the back of a much more detailed and nuanced discussion, the IBT article did a really lazy cherry picked job of piecing together a sensational click bait trash news article. This is typically the way it goes with pretty much any topic, that a legitimate piece of science journalism is taken out of context and bastardised, making it something more profitable to certain websites via click-through traffic.
These twisted versions of articles then receive more attention online, are shared more frequently and as a result rumours are easily spread, whatever the content.
It was twisted to imply that NASA is perhaps secretly preparing humanity for visitation by intelligent life, or hiding a profound alien discovery. In reality, the actual story is more interesting to me – but not necessarily good for drumming up web traffic.
After previously thinking that there were probably no original reports, I now think it more likely the original reports and sources were purposefully omitted to prevent them fact checking their own piece and shatter the illusion. It obviously makes it a lot less exciting when you read the original piece. If I’m being charitable to the writer, I’d say it’s possible that rather than purposefully stir up excitement with misleading articles, he simply didn’t do his due diligence and was pressured for time, as the kind of pressure mentioned above to increase readership is absolutely a plague on online journalism.
The clickbait article is building a picture with sensational implications; the original article is asking hypothetical questions with interesting societal and social implications in mind, not much more than a thought experiment.
The only links found at all in the clickbait article were to yet more UFO clickbait links by the same site. No sources and citations. No external links or references.
During my investigation I came across the fact that it is the week of the James Webb Space Telescope, a massive occasion for astronomy as it is replacing the Hubble Space Telescope and will hopefully allow us to learn lots of new things about the universe. This might have implications on our search for life forms, and this might be where this clickbait article has been inspired.
On a side note - This is a link to a short podcast about the telescope, which I found really interesting. It’s available on Spotify without signing in.
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