Hi, aliens!

Saturday 12th December, 2020

We thought the only thing outlandish about the outgoing US President Donald Trump was his tonsorial choice, but now a top Israeli scientist, who is widely considered the father of the Jewish State’s space capabilities, tells us that Trump has had extraterrestrial connections, all these years.

A startling claim mady by Israel’s ex-space security chief, Prof. Haim Eshed, who served in that position for three decades, has taken the world by storm; he has been quoted by a vernacular Israeli newspaper as saying the US and Israel have been associating with aliens for a long time, and a ‘galactic federation’, of which the US is a member, has prevented Trump from blabbing. The story has been picked up by wire services and disseminated across the globe.

Cynics may ask whether it was on aliens’ advice that Trump suggested, much to the horror of medical professionals on earth, that injecting disinfectants might help treat COVID-19, and whether aliens had a hand in his superfast recovery from the disease. They may also wonder how on earth Trump got beaten at the recent presidential election despite being in the exalted company of his super intelligent alien allies, for whom manipulating an election in his favour should be child’s play. He was accused of securing the coveted presidency with the help of the Russians in 2016. Is it that aliens are not as skillful as Russians, or are they more democratic than Trump and, therefore, let the Americans determine the outcome of the recent election?

Prof. Eshed’s claim reminds us of the storyline of Dan Brown’s unputdownable novel, Deception Point. Among those who think Prof. Eshed has gone a bit too far is the Chairman of the Israel Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel. NASA has said, in a media statement, presumably in response to inquiries being made about Prof. Eshed’s claim, that one of its key goals is to find life in the wider universe, but it has yet to find signs of it.

Unbelievable, if not bizarre, as the Israeli professor’s claim may sound to the scientific community engaged in space exploration, it is very likely to go down well with the Americans as well as their counterparts elsewhere. Laymen will find it hard to dismiss Eshed’s much-publicised claim as a figment of the imagination of an ageing scientist or a publicity stunt to sell his book, The Universe Beyond the Horizon. As for Americans, there is still no consensus on who really killed JFK, and conspiracy theories about his assassination, witnessed by thousands of people, abound. Besides, an Associated Press-GfK poll revealed, in 2011, that about 77 percent of adult Americans believed that ethereal beings called angles were real. About 34 percent of Americans surveyed in an AP-Ipsos poll, in 2007 said they believed in ghosts and UFOs. In September 2019, many UFO enthusiasts went on pilgrimage, as it were, to Area 51, which has become famous owing to rumours about UFO sightings and alien life. We, in this country, have our share of believers in supernatural forces; many are the claims that heavenly beings emitting streaks of bright light have been sighted above some places of worship. So, Prof. Eshed’s claim may be received well here as well.

What would Prof. Stephen Hawking have said if Eshed had made the claim at issue a few years ago, when the former was alive? Hawking believed that there could be life in other parts of the universe, and asked humans to be wary of trying to contact extraterrestrial being as reaching out to them could endanger this planet; he famously likened a possible encounter between humans and aliens to the historical one between Native Americans and Christopher Columbus, which he said, ‘did not turn out so well’.

Those of us living in this part of the world have more than our fair share of problems to contend with and, therefore, may not give a tinker’s cuss about aliens or ‘galactic federations’. We can only hope that threats, both real and perceived, to this planet from aliens, asteroids, solar storms, etc., will make the powerful nations fighting for global dominance and stockpiling nukes for that purpose realise that humans, regardless of their geographic dispersion and man-made distinctions, have a shared future. Coronavirus has already exposed the helplessness of humankind as never before, but, perhaps, only the arrival of some evil aliens, viewing earthlings as a future food sources, may bring humans together.