Forget 2012. A Rapture-like alien drive-by is days away!
Fear October 14th. Yeah, today.According to an Australian psychic called Blossom Goodchild, that’s the day when an intergalactic brotherhood of spacemen called the “Federation of Light” will finally make itself known to us Earthlings. Goodchild’s prophecy states that these blond, enlightened “We Come In Peace”-beings will land their spacecraft over Alabama in order to, “bring the downfall of those who have misintentions for the well being of your planet.” It will be, if you like, a spa day for Earth.The October 14th message is running wild on the Internet, popping up in more than 200 YouTube videos, countless UFO discussion boards, and spawning entire websites devoted to prepping the uninformed for the inevitable renewal of mankind at the cosmic hands of these extra-terrestrials, known as the Pleiadeans.Admittedly, I’m fascinated with the psychic predictions of people like Goodchild, but this sort of cultish and New Agey prognostication has a long history of being all talk with no deliverable.
If contact between the human race and any other form of life were ever to happen, I am betting that it won’t be as sensationalistic (and frankly predictable) as the October 14th prophecy portrays it. Communication with alien life would be complicated, mathematical, the product of some distant radio message. Think Contact.That’s why legitimate endeavors like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) exist. The Institute’s researchers, working on shoestring budgets and demeaned by almost all their scientific peers, are training their radio telescopes at the vast sky in a hunt for intelligent life in the cosmos that is rooted in science.So, I have come to debunk Blossom Goodchild. This isn’t the first time that peaceful aliens are scheduled to drop by Earth-and it certainly won’t be the last. Below are some Close Encounters-style predictions from the last decade or so that failed to pan out.Year: 1997Prediction: Peaceful aliens riding in the wake of Comet Hale-Bopp were going to pass close enough to pick up the hitchhiking souls of “enlightened” humans. The 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult thought they were the only ticketed passengers for this cosmic trip. They committed mass suicide in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Their bodies (or, as they called them, “vehicles”), at least, did not catch the comet.Year: 2000Prediction: The turn of the millennium inspired countless prophecies-some as outlandish as that subscribed to by the Morningland cult, which claimed that Christ would return in a UFO “the size of Texas.” The more common version was that the world will be destroyed on January 1st, 2000, and that a UFO would spare only those faithful to the group from this destruction (prophecies tend to be exclusive, rather than inclusive.) Most groups, like the Aquarian Concepts Community in Sedona, Arizona, dissolved shortly after Y2K passed without a peep.Year: 2001Prediction: According to the Unarius Academy of Science-a pseudoscience group founded in the early 1950s by Ernest and Ruth Norman, who claim to study the “interdimensional psychodynamics of the mind”-the so-called Space Brothers were to arrive in San Diego in a fleet of 33 spaceships, which would become the first of many light-filled institutions of higher learning. (The photos accompanying this piece are screenshots from a Unarius Academy movie called “The Arrival.”) By anticipating this arrival, mankind might be able to join the “Interplanetary Conclave of Light,” a cosmic United Nations.Year: 2003Prediction: Under the tutelage of Dr. Malachi Z. York, a black supremacist and convicted child molester who claims to be a native of the planet Rizq, the Nuwaubian Church believed that a spacecraft from the planet Illyuwn would visit Earth on May 5th, 2003, and take 144,000 people away and train them for a battle back on Earth a thousand years later against Devil worshipers, called Luciferians. All was quiet on the appointed date, which passed with Dr. York in jail on sex abuse charges.
