The media's 'Silly Season' begins: Aliens and Jesus and the Nibiru invasion.

As the sun is coming out so the collective media's mind turns to mush. As the stories they deem 'silly' are pushed to the front. Often they can take a trival look at something really quite important, or aggrandise a piece of nonsense into a 'serious; piece.

Today, you've probably noticed Aliens (and Jesus) are everywhere. Here's my favourite 3 stories today:

1) The Vatican believes life could exist on other planets

Peoples opinions of the existence of Aliens can be plotted as a Bell Curve. The edges of which are full of awesome, crazy people. People who really, really believe in aliens end up like number 3 in this list (which you must watch). The people who really, really don't never seem to have an understanding of the scale of the universe we are in (With 10^11 stars in the average Galaxy, and about 10^11 Galaxies we've a lot of roll's of the dice).

The BBC is running a story about how Vatican says aliens could exist. And they are being really rather sensible about it. This is the kind of Religious viewpoint Scientists should be debating, not Nut Job Creationists or The Pope's favourite Exorcist. I have a lot of sympathy for the Vatican Observatory it is stuck in a strange place between the fields of religion and as such has an important role to play. Even if they do get stuck debating whether aliens will have 'original sin' sticking to them thanks to a metaphorical woman eating a metaphorical apple a while back.

What's even better is according to the BBC

To strengthen its scientific credentials, the Vatican is organising a conference next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin.

The Creationists in the USA love the Pope, so hopefully this can help stem the coming of the second dark ages by another month or so..

2) A bunch of British UFO files have been released
This happens quite often actually, and each time you can be sure that Nick Pope will pop up out of the woodwork and pop onto every media show to talk about how he used to work for the MoD on UFOs. It's been a while since I properly kept in touch with the UFO scene (as a kid my love of the paranormal is what turned me into a scientist and skeptic) - but as far as I can remember Nick Pope has an excellent ability to tailor the ridiculousness of what he says to the audience that are listening.

Still most of the stories don't make it clear where you can get access to all these files. So if you want to see for yourself the data is here. I haven't looked at it myself yet - but I'm sure there will be some entertaining stuff in there.

3) In less than 8 hours the world will end - Nibiru invasion, Masons and CERN.
OK not quite in the mainstream media, but I can't resist. The cranks thinking that the LHC will kill us all are amazing. With less than 8 hours till apocolypse this guy is the best I've seen. Seriously even if you only watch the first two minutes you be so convinced that you'll want to give up your Mason's card.



I was going to talk about all the best bits he says, but there are too many classics too mention. He's amazing. Nibiru is my new favourite place. This is the best example of Poe's Law I've seen this year.

Thanks to Gia for sending it in.