More and more things in the media have to do with contact with other intelligences. If you’ve seen my movie and you track my posts you’ve been exposed to a lot of it. What is going on? As I ask in my film, “Are we being prepared for contact?”

The latest has to do with the prestigious Royal Society, in England, “a Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists that is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.”

This is from The Guardian, a mainstream British paper:

UN should co-ordinate plans for dealing with extraterrestrials – and we can’t guarantee that aliens will be friendly

Here’s how the newspaper article starts:

World governments should prepare a co-ordinated action plan in case Earth is contacted by aliens, according to scientists.

They argue that a branch of the UN must be given responsibility for “supra-Earth affairs” and formulate a plan for how to deal with extraterrestrials, should they appear.

The comments are part of an extraterrestrial-themed edition of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published today. In it, scientists examine all aspects of the search for extraterrestrial life, from astronomy and biology to the political and religious fallout that would result from alien contact.

This publication is a fascinating compendium of serious papers that were presented at a meeting of the Royal Society in October entitled, “Towards a scientific and societal agenda on extra-terrestrial life.” Here are a few titles:

That they held this meeting is mind-blowing. But also of interest is how the newspaper handled it. You’ve seen the headline about aliens possibly not being friendly. That was the subject of only one of the 17 papers presented at the meeting. The newspaper piece used 4 of its 12 paragraphs to deal with that one: Predicting what extra-terrestrials will be like: and preparing for the worst.

This skew picks up on a thread running through the amped up stream of ET buzzing which most notably includes the scare put out by Stephen Hawking.

From “Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking”:

…a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.

With us knowing nada about “them,” there was lots of flap over Hawking pulling that opinion out of thin air and arbitrarily putting the world on a fear setting. Then again, this is the stuff that appeals to the news media, and thus his opinions got widespread coverage. So, as my colleagues in matters extraterrestrial say, the fact that Hawking was dealing with the possibility of ET life was a step forward — like Signs, the movie, pointing to scary aliens as the source of crop circles, where a lot more people found out from that movie about the very existence of the circles and it also was good in that they weren’t attributing them to hoaxers. Two steps forward, one step back.