Truth is out there?

Yesterday, it was reported that an Apollo 14 astronaut went on a radio show in Australia and said that it was a fact that aliens existed and he had been privileged enough to have sat in on government/NASA briefings where he learned about their existence. He said Roswell was real and that the governments around the world have indeed been covering this up for decades. He also said that they were not aggressive, and that their technology was so far advanced that if they were aggressive, we would no longer be here--pure and simple.

NASA said they disagreed with his position (of course) but to me it was not a very strong statement. Maybe they just don't want to discredit one of their heroes, a man who walked on the moon (supposedly) for over 9 hours. However, only one of them can be right. Either this astronaut is going loony in his old age, or NASA is really covering things up. I've never been one to believe in aliens, or at least to give it a whole lot of thought, but it seems to me this guy isn't loony.

So, what if he's right? People all over the world have had credible sightings for centuries, probably for millenia, and that just seems like a little too much evidence not to be true. So, if it is true, what does this do to the millions of people who are Christians? Does this make the Bible outdated? Or does it actually prove the Bible is true? I searched the internet for websites of people who believed that aliens were talked about in the Bible. I was surprised by the sheer volume of websites that existed, but not surprised by the amount of certifiable crazies out there who think demons and angels are aliens and that God is the head alien, who manufactured our world through his knowledge of technology. (Actually a growing number of people actually believe this, even those who aren't religious and don't believe in God in the traditional "all-powerful" and "omniscient" sense; just read The Bible Code and you'll see what I'm talking about at the very end.)

However, there were a few interesting websites that argued that aliens are referred to in the book of Revelation and also in Daniel and a couple other "prophetic" type books. Some of what they said made logical sense, and for all I know it's true. Maybe aliens are real, and they will openly invade earth someday, and we'll unite as a world to fight back against them and we'll actually defeat them. (Wait, isn't that Scientology?) Then, we'll be so grateful to the world leader who defeated the aliens that we'll give him power over the world, and of course he's the Antichrist, and then he'll become this powerful dictator who will try to destroy Israel and anyone who believes in Jesus. This is all in the Bible, so it must be true, right? The problem with this is, you can take any prophecy about end times, and insert pretty much any scenario and voila! If it fits, it must be true. But many scenarios fit, and not all of them can be true. Of course, if they're sufficiently scary or outrageous, then you can market it as "fiction/future non-fiction" and call it the Left Behind series, set it for seven books then change it to like 10 or 11 because they're making so much money, hallelujah, and then set up a website called the Bible Prophecy Club and charge people $19.95 to become members with the promise of revealing prophecy secrets to them. Really?? Charging people to understand the Word of God?? To me, that's no different then going to a fortune teller.

Okay, so I've gotten a little off the topic. I guess what I want to say is, if aliens exist, it doesn't change my view that God exists, but I guess it would change some of the meaning in the Bible. For so long, we thought we had to be the only creatures in the universe, I guess because God couldn't possibly be so omniscient and omnipresent that he could run more than one world at a time. There's still so much about God and the universe that we don't know, and I'm to the point where Christians should preach about Jesus and shut up about everything else, at least everything that has to do with science. We keep getting embarrassed time after time by taking dogmatic stances on things like flat earth, earth being the center of the universe, evolution...and now maybe aliens?

I don't know whether aliens are real...maybe this Apollo 14 guy is just old and senile...or maybe he was paid by Chris Carter to say that so people would go see X-Files this weekend. Hmmm... the truth is out there.