Here's why you may have heard that scientists predict an alien landing
The interesting lesson hidden within silly claims like this are HOW and WHY they came to be believed.
Please stay with me here… this is a post that’s very easy to scroll past, because obviously no educated person actually believes the aliens are landing in mere weeks, or that “scientists” are warning us to prepare; and by the same token, it’s hardly worth anyone’s time to “debunk” something so obviously made-up.
But take a moment to look at the headline in the image, and the (partial) text from the original Facebook post from a woo account cunningly called “Anonymous”:
The countdown has begun — only 53 days left until what scientists say could be an important moment in space exploration. 👀
53 days. That’s all.
Keep looking up — the universe might be about to share another secret.
Maybe—just maybe—the universe is getting ready to finally show us we’re not alone in this vast cosmos… that aliens might truly exist. 👽
As the cliché goes, there’s a grain of truth to everything. I don’t mean there’s any truth to the aliens coming down — that’s not physically possible — but rather that this post, and its associated belief, is cobbled together from a few things that actual human people have said. “Anonymous” and the others posting similar claims did not make it up out of whole cloth.
(Incidentally, the term “made up out of whole cloth” came to represent deception when tailors, beginning centuries ago, would claim that a garment was made from whole cloth, i.e., a single piece of cloth, thus guaranteeing consistency — a claim which was often untrue. Garments were often pieced together from scraps instead.)
Here are the three basic scraps of reality that (so far as I can tell) this claim is pieced together from:
A 20th-century prophecy that aliens will land in 2025
A popular astrophysicist’s assertion that objects in space are probably alien mother ships
One such object will pass close to Earth just about when the original Facebook post’s 53 days are up.
Let’s take them one at a time.
1. A 20th-century prophecy
The late Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga made lots of goofy predictions that her believers have stretched into matches for actual events — such as her prediction that “Kursk [the Russian city] will be covered with water and the whole world will weep over it.” In 2000, a Russian submarine called the K-141 Kursk sank when one of its torpedos exploded. Is that a match? Well, nobody claimed that she ever made such a prediction until after the sinking — most of her predictions were never documented during her lifetime — so you tell me.
It's been said that she predicted the End of Times in 2025, and some in the UFO community have used this as evidence that the aliens will finally land, or that disclosure will finally happen, or — basically, whatever.
They don’t seem to mind that the standard canon of her claimed predictions includes a much more specific one that humans will make first alien contact in 2130.
2. Scientists say objects in space are alien mother ships
No scientist says this (that I know of), but one former scientist does: Harvard’s crown jewel, the degreed astrophysicist Dr. Avi Loeb, who abandoned science several years ago in order to extract money from Tech Bro rubes who pay him (through his Galileo Project nonprofit) to publicly declare that aliens actively visit the Earth. His thing is identifying every interstellar object (meteors, etc) that passes through the Solar System as an alien mother ship, doubtless responsible for the Navy UFO videos. Since he has “Harvard astrophysicist” appended to his name, he is every news outlet’s go-to guy for whenever they want someone with Bona Fides to say something sensational.
And he does deliver. He recently told the UFO-friendly tabloid news outlet New York Post that comet 3I/ATLAS, currently decorating our skies, “is a technological artifact, and furthermore has active intelligence.” He described it as “a massive mothership” and moreover, claims to know its mind: “Two possibilities follow. First, that its intentions are entirely benign and second, they are malign.”
3. Comet 3I/ATLAS will pass close to Earth
And so it will, and pretty darn near its claimed “53 days” after October 10 when the Facebook meme was published. How close?
About 1.8 AUs. An AU (Astronomical Unit) is the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is about 150,000,000 km. 1.8 of those comes out to 270,000,000 km. So, not super close. Nothing you need to lie awake worrying about at night.
And if the aliens plan to leap from the comet to the Earth as it passes, well, they’re going to need something a little more zesty than Matt Damon’s Iron Man suit.
And so we have an urban legend
Take a somewhat interesting comet, combine it with a grifter who says whatever Tech Bros pay him to say, and mention the fact that a dead Bulgarian mystic probably had schizophrenia; and then we can say YES: Scientists warn humans to prepare for our impending alien first contact in early December!
The urban legend itself is never the interesting part of the story… How the story came to be always is.