Yet another scientist says brace for alien contact

A prominent Russian astronomer announced to delegates at a conference in St. Petersberg this week that alien contact will likely happen within the next 20 years. Since the topic of the conference happened to be the likelihood of alien contact in, say, the next 20 years, this is hardly surprising news, and it's not like Professor Andrei Finkelstein was going to show up and tell everybody to stop being silly and go home.

"The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms... Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years," the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute said, adding, somewhat fancifully, that he expects otherwordly lifeforms to look like us (but not fish, or birds, or insects, or aardvarks, or jellyfish, or...)

Finkelstein joins a growing list of prominent brainiacs who are uncloseting themselves as Want to Believers. Chief among these is half-man, half-chair Stephen Hawking, who created a stir last year when he suggested that our efforts at contact would probably end very badly, especially if you've seen any science fiction movie from about 1950 onwards.

Factor in NASA's on-again, off-again love affair with Martian microbes, and false alarms like the probably-not-actually-there, life-supporting exoplanet Gliese, and one could be forgiven for feeling a little fatigue over the hunt for ET. Equally, there was something extremely entertaining about a story that showed up in the UK's Telegraph last year stating that the UN had appointed an ambassador "to greet alien visitors."

The story turned out to be a hoax, but the name of the putative Ambassador, who really does work for the UN, was interesting - Mazlan Othman. Or M. Othman, if you will.

Mothman. Geddit?

Fans of the paranormal will recognize the sneaky reference to one of the great enduring mysteries of recent time. Fans of Richard Gere will also remember the shitty movie based on John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies In a nutshell, Keel reported on the bizarre apparitions and events that descended on Point Pleasant, Virginia, in the mid '60s.

Multiple witnesses saw Mothman, a man-sized thing with wings and glowing red eyes given to chasing pesky kids, ambulances transporting human blood, and menstruating women. Others encountered a strange, grinning, foreign-looking man named Indrid Cold. Others saw UFOs. Others still were visited by Men in Black. All the activity ceased after a year, when the Silver Bridge collapsed in 1967, killing 46 people.

With stories like that, there's something a little stuffy about Andrei Finkelstein and his SETI-type ilk looking for three-dimensional bipeds running radio equipment in outer space. Stories like Mothman point to a much stranger reality already present in our world, popping in and out of dimensions we can't perceive, like Lovecraft's Old Gods, flicking us once in a while with their tentacles. And that Telegraph story points to how stupid the press is.