Suddenly, UFOs are back in the news.  Not because there's been a game-changing sighting, but because the US government and its agencies seem to want to initiate a new era of transparency around this much-clouded subject.  One could argue that there has been an information war over UFOs which the US government won years ago.  They didn't win it because they were necessarily right (because, frankly, who knows?) but rather because they managed to debase the subject to the level of complete ridicule.  If you spotted a UFO, you were clearly drunk, on drugs or stupid; because everyone knows it's nonsense. The media got into the habit of presenting what looked like an open-minded documentary, before pulling the rug from under the witness's feet with a throw-away piece of fact-less debunking at the end. The debate became highly polarised, with scientific debunkers displaying an entrenched attitude and lambasting the 'believers', often depicted as overly credulous fools.

It was so different back in the '40s and '50s when this subject first emerged as a significant issue in the public sphere.  At that time, serious scientists and military top brass took the whole subject extremely seriously.  Taxpayers' money was poured into the official investigations, culminating in the accepted notion that while most UFO sighting could be readily explained, a certain percentage (around 5-10%) remained stubbornly inexplicable.  Sceptics argued that if more facts were known about these mysterious cases, they too would have a prosaic explanation.  Yet, many remain unresolved to this day.  Many of the strongest UFO sightings involved trained observers, with physical trace evidence or radar reports to back them up.

After decades of interest and study, I too became disillusioned, but for a slightly different reason.  For me, the issue was how conspiracy theory had taken on a more overtly political presence in the West, likely stirred by nefarious forces in the old Eastern bloc.  NBC recently noted this:

"In a deeply polarized country where conspiracy theories have ripped apart American politics, belief in a UFO cover-up seems relatively quaint and apolitical." (1)

My 'quaint' opinion that UFOs and an alien presence in our skies was (is) a reality had become associated with a political hatred and distrust of the federal government 'over the pond'.  I became uncomfortable with that association.  Even my study of ancient aliens and Planet X was affected, as utterly baseless nonsense on the subject seemed to be promulgated from Russian sources wishing to provoke panic.  Planet X became a subject about how Western governments were lying about a forthcoming cataclysm:  A cataclysm which had no evidential basis, and whose date was continuously being set back.

The problem with these disinformation campaigns, whether waged by government agencies or unfriendly foreign powers, is that any real evidence becomes lost in the ensuing murk.  Which, of course, is fine if you're wanting the subject to be stamped out, or used to sow internal political dissent. 

As mentioned, the additional problem with UFOs is that Allied armed forces no longer receive the kind of crucial intelligence they need to adequately monitor and protect our skies.  In the age of drones, that becomes a very serious issue, especially in the skies around sensitive military establishments.  It may well be that this is the reason for the current sea-change in policy in Washington.  The decades-long disinformation war against UFOs has been so effective that useful reporting of foreign intrusion in our skies has been stymied. The only way to correct that seems to be to let in a chink of light about UFOs, and to reduce the stigma around reporting.  But not too much, naturally...

If this was the case, you would naturally think there would be strong evidence for this enormous impact on Earth.  The problem is that the Earth crust is incredibly mobile (with respect to geological time periods), and continental drift and the shifting of tectonic plates have eradicated any evidence left from the scene of the crime 4.5 billion years ago.  But...could chunks of the impactor remain hidden below the crust in the next layer down - the mantle?  And, if so, how could we possibly find out?

One of the most controversial aspects of Zecharia Sitchin's ancient alien hypothesis is that human being were, at one stage, genetically altered to become a productive slave workforce.  The idea goes that the gods spoken about by the ancient Mesopotamians (and other civilisations) were actually real people who had colonised Earth from another planet (1).  Finding hominids on this world provided these visitors with the ready-made biological 'clay' from which to fashion more intelligent and thus useful humans. 

Whether you buy into this idea or not, it has some incredibly interesting philosophical repercussions.  All creatures adapt to their environments, science tells us, through natural selection.  This developmental process can be helped along by selective breeding, something humans have long done with crops as well as domesticated animals and livestock.  We're also starting to tinker with DNA to modify biology through genetic engineering, although these procedures often remain controversial.  It's clear that there is enormous potential going forward with these techniques.  So it will not come as any surprise that scientists are also pondering how humans can be better prepared to endure long periods of time in spacecraft, or even colonising other worlds.  We're pretty well adapted to conditions on Earth.  In zero gravity - not so much.

In many ways, this modern science shines a kind light upon Zecharia Sitchin's ideas, published in the late 1970s - long before the emergence of DNA sequencing and genetic engineering.  However, the concept of alien intervention remains anathema to scientific thinking:  A great heresy.  But the idea of gene editing humans to create effectively an exoplanet-friendly new species is a hot topic, it seems. 

So much so that Genetics Professor Chris Mason has recently published a book (2) about how we can make ourselves biologically ready to live on alien worlds.

The scientist's blue sky thinking envisions colonising the Moon and Mars first, before heading, via Saturn's moon Titan, towards the stars and habitable Earth-like exoplanets scattered among them (4).  The ultra-long voyages involved provide an opportunity to develop more honed humans through in-flight genetic modification.  Tailor-made astronauts built for spaceflight are going to be different to the tailor-made colonisers of alien worlds, after all.

So, how does this compare with the ancient alien concept?  Well, the alleged alien colonisers of Earth, the Anunnaki, weren't thought to have been genetically altered themselves (to better cope with Earth's unique environment).  Instead, it's the lowly creatures of Earth - already genetically honed by nature - that have the gods' editing tools applied to them.  It's more or less what we did with wolves through selective breeding, you might say. 

Even if there is any truth to this ancient mythical tale, we are kept in the dark about whether the descending gods adapted themselves to our climes.  That's not in the cuneiform text, it seems.  Still, the principle applies well enough.  To colonise an alien world, intelligent beings can either adapt the alien environment using advanced technologies (biodomes, terraforming, etc), or adapt themselves to the exoplanet's environment. 

After all, evolution takes a ridiculous amount of time, so why not take a few short-cuts?

1) Zecharia Sitchin "The Twelfth Planet" Avon Books 1976

  The Twelfth Planet

2) Christopher Mason “The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds” MIT Press 2021

  The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds

3) Rozina Sabur “Humankind could live on Mars — in 500 years’ time” 18^th July 2021

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