Another case is what is called the Donation of Constantine. Constantine the Great is the Emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The city of Constantinople (now Istanbul), for over a thousand years the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was named after him. He died in the year . 335. In the ninth century, references to the Donation of Constantine suddenly appeared in Christian writings; in it Constantine wills to his contemporary, Pope Sylvester I, the entire Western Roman Empire, including Rome. This little gift, so the story went, was partly in gratitude for Sylvester’s cure of Constantine’s leprosy. By the eleventh century, popes were regularly referring to the Donation of Constantine to justify their claims to be not only the ecclesiastical but also the secular rulers of central Italy. Through the Middle Ages the Donation was judged genuine both by those who supported and by those who opposed the temporal claims of the Church.
Lorenzo of Valla was one of the polymaths of the Italian
Renaissance. A controversialist, crusty, critical, arrogant, a pedant, he was attacked by his contemporaries for sacrilege, impudence, temerity and presumption, among other imperfections. After he concluded that the Apostles’ Creed could not on grammatical grounds have actually been written by the Twelve Apostles, the Inquisition declared him a heretic, and only the intervention of his patron, Alfonso, King of Naples, prevented his immolation. Undeterred, in 1440, he published a treatise demonstrating that the Donation of Constantine is a crude forgery. The language in which it was written was to fourth century court Latin as Cockney was to the King’s English. Because of Lorenzo of Valla, the Roman Catholic Church no longer presses its claim to rule European nations because of the Donation of Constantine. This work, whose provenance has a five-century hole in it, is generally understood to have been forged by a cleric attached to the Church’s curia around the time of Charlemagne, when the papacy (and especially Pope Adrian I) was arguing for unification of church and state.
Assuming they both belong to the same category, the MJ-12 documents are a cleverer hoax than the Donation of Constantine. But on matters of provenance, vested interest and lexicographic inconsistencies, they have much in common.
A cover-up to keep knowledge of extraterrestrial life or alien abductions almost wholly secret for forty-five years, with hundreds if not thousands of government employees privy to it, is a remarkable notion. Certainly, government secrets are routinely kept, even secrets of substantial general interest. But the ostensible point of such secrecy is to protect the country and its citizens. Here, though, it’s different. The alleged conspiracy of those with security clearances is to keep from the citizens knowledge of a continuing alien assault on the human species. If extraterrestrials really were abducting millions of us, it would be much more than a matter of national security. It would affect the security of all human beings everywhere on Earth. Given such stakes, is it plausible that no one with real knowledge and evidence, in nearly 200 nations, would blow the whistle, speak out and side with the humans rather than the aliens?
Since the end of the Cold War NASA has been flailing about, trying to find missions that justify its existence – particularly a good reason for humans in space. If the Earth were being visited daily by hostile aliens, wouldn’t NASA leap on this opportunity to augment its funding? And if an alien invasion were in progress, why would the Air Force, traditionally led by pilots, step back from manned spaceflight and launch all its payloads on unmanned boosters?
Consider the former Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, in charge of ‘Star Wars’. It’s fallen on hard times now, particularly its objective of basing defences in space. Its name and perspective have been demoted. It’s the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization these days. It no longer even reports directly to the Secretary of Defense. The inability of such technology to protect the United States against a massive attack by nuclear-armed missiles is manifest. But wouldn’t we want at least to attempt deployment of defences in space if we were facing an alien invasion?
The Department of Defense, like similar ministries in every nation, thrives on enemies, real or imagined. It is implausible in the extreme that the existence of such an adversary would be suppressed by the very organization that would most benefit from its presence. The entire post-Cold War posture of the military and civilian space programmes of the United States (and other nations) speaks powerfully against the idea that there are aliens among us – unless, of course, the news is also being kept from those who plan the national defence.
Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and ‘unscientific’ even to contemplate the issue. I once helped to organize a public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the proposition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distinguished physicist, whose judgement in many other matters I respected, threatened to set the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this madness. (Nevertheless, the debate was held and published, the issues were a little better clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew.)
A 1969 study by the National Academy of Sciences, while recognizing that there are reports ‘not easily explained’, concluded that ‘the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings’. Think of how many other ‘explanations’ there might be: time travellers; demons from witchland; tourists from another dimension – like Mr Mxyztplk (or was it Mxyzptlk? I always forget) from the land of Zrfff in the Fifth Dimension in the old Superman comic books; the souls of the dead; or a ‘noncartesian’ phenomenon that doesn’t obey the rules of science or even of logic. Each of these ‘explanations’ has in fact been seriously proffered. ‘Least likely’ is really saying something. This rhetorical excess is an index of how distasteful the whole subject has become to many scientists.
It’s telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about which we really know so little. This is especially true of the more recent flurry of alien abduction reports. After all, if true, either hypothesis – invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or an epidemic of hallucinations – teaches us something we certainly ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong feelings is that both alternatives have such unpleasant implications.
Aurora
The number of reports and their consistency suggest that there may be some basis for these sightings other than hallucinogenic drugs.
Mystery Aircraft report,
Federation of American Scientists
20 August, 1992
Aurora is a high-altitude, extremely secret American reconnaissance aircraft, a successor to the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird. It either exists or it doesn’t. By 1993, there were reports by observers near California’s Edwards Air Force Base and Groom Lake, Nevada, and particularly a region of Groom Lake called Area 51 where experimental aircraft for the Department of Defense are tested, that seemed by and large mutually consistent. Confirming reports were filed from all over the world. Unlike its predecessors, the aircraft is said to be hypersonic, to travel much faster, perhaps six to eight times faster, than the speed of sound. It leaves an odd contrail described as ‘donuts-on-a-rope’. Perhaps it is also a means of launching small secret satellites into orbit, developed, it is speculated, after the Challenger disaster indicated the shuttle’s episodic unreliability for defence payloads. But the CIA ‘swears up and down there’s no such programme’, says US Senator and former astronaut John Glenn. The principal designer of some of the most secret US aircraft says the same thing. A Secretary of the Air Force has vehemently denied the existence of such an airplane, or any programme to build one, in the US Air Force or anywhere else. Would he lie? ‘We have looked into all such sightings, as we have for UFO reports,’ says an Air Force spokesman, in perhaps carefully chosen words, ‘and we cannot explain them.’ Meanwhile, in April 1995 the Air Force seized 4,000 more acres near Area 51. The area to which public access is denied is growing.
Consider then the two possibilities: that Aurora exists, and that it does not. If it exists, it’s striking that an official cover-up of its very existence has been attempted, that secrecy could be so effective, and that the aircraft could be tested or refuelled all over the world without a single photograph of it or any other hard evidence being published. On the other hand, if Aurora does not exist, it’s striking that a myth has been propagated so vigorously and gone so far. Why should insistent official denials have carried so little weight? Could the very existence of a designation – Aurora in this case – serve to pin a common label on a range of diverse phenomena? Either way, Aurora seems relevant to UFOs.