an alien invasion warning with a mayan spin

When it comes to the current doomsday craze of 2012, the latest in a long history of apocalyptic predictions, we’re been hit with just about ever scenario for how the world should end. There are solar flares, alignments of celestial objects that suddenly turn deadly, rampaging planets, rogue brown dwarfs knocking us into our parent star, tectonic upheavals, and if all else fails, some bizarre manifestation of New Age Consciousness that will change the world as we know it. And now, add to that an alien invasion as highlighted by one of the many ufologists at that sprawling network of localized online tabloids called the Examiner. We’ve gotten more than our fair of gems from the Examiner’s staff of conspiracy theorists before, including another warning of a looming invasion from the dark side of the Moon, and promises that the government would reveal its long, secretive history of working with alien creatures, but whereas the past ufological tall tales just pounded on the conspiracy drum, this contribution to web-based nonsense manages to work in the 2012 angle. I’ll give it points for creativity, but that’s about the extent of anything positive I have to say about this slice of inanity.

Now, of course, there’s no law of physics that would prevent a space faring alien species from building a few huge interstellar spaceships and making their way to Earth either by design or by chance. However, since we were given the coordinates of the supposed trio of alien ships, we know that if this really is the invading army of extraterrestrial marauders that will exterminate humanity, they’re the slowest alien armada ever assembled and sent to another world. After running the relevant numbers, the Bad Astronomer tells us that to really be a fleet of spacecraft, these objects would’ve been about 100,000 kilometers away in the mid-1990s when they were captured on film for the NASA image archive. To arrive on December 21, 2012 as per the article, our new alien overlords have to be moving at just over 0.67 km per hour, also known as the blazing pace of a lethargic snail on sodium pentothal. Since they’re only 11,764 kilometers away, you could spot them yourself using just about any telescope. Or not, since the mysterious spacecraft only showed up on one filter plate and vanished on the others. That’s right. We got an oblong, mysterious shape on a blue filter, but the red and infrared plates applied to the same patch of sky yield absolutely nothing at all. Must be their cloaking devices at work. Or just some lint and dust on a plate that wasn’t caught when the image was being uploaded to the repository.

So I guess we’re either facing a small fleet of invisible alien warships struggling to cover just a little less than a quarter of the average American’s daily commute to work in the same time span while our satellites whiz by at 27,400 km per hour in low Earth orbit below and 11,068 km per hour in geosynchronous orbit overhead, or the Examiner gave column space to an astoundingly ignorant twit who quotes a fictional SETI astrophysicist who no one at SETI knows, and who doesn’t seem to exist at any university or publish any papers, for proof of an impending alien invasion. You know what? I’m going to go with the latter since I really don’t think it’s even a remote possibility that an object could be traveling at 670 meters per hour in medium Earth orbit. Our planet’s gravity should be pulling it down at thousands of miles an hour, even if it’s just a rock. And this really isn’t the only thing that Andrew Wozny, Examiner’s ufology “expert” who brought us this 2012 alien invasion story, has been peddling. In the usual half-hushed hints and JAQ-ing around favored by so many fans of dark alien and New World Order conspiracies, he also talks about Phobos being an abandoned alien spacecraft carrying some sort of mysterious monolith made by another civilization, with undated and out-of-context clip of Buzz Aldrin on a news show talking about an odd image of Phobos as his key source. Do I even need to explain all the problems with using fuzzy, raw images and selective clips from news shows as proof of anything? Then again, that’s usually all the conspiracy theorists tend to have…