BENGALURU: Allow me to make a confession which I bet will sound strange. In 1986, a particular book which I had read had a profound effect on me. Fortunately, that effect was temporary, but the effect was profound all the same. It was a book written by an author who had a distinguished career as a reporter, correspondent, and syndicated columnist in Washington, DC, but who subsequently veered off into a career as a psychic, authoring a number of books on metaphysical and New Age subjects.
That author was Ruth Shick Montgomery, who died on June 10, 2001 – a day short of completing 89. Her book that cast a profound effect on me was Aliens Among Us, which promised a ‘dazzling new testimony that extraterrestrials (ETs) are on Earth – about to usher in the New Age’.
Let me explain here what that profound effect on me was, which lasted just a few months, and probably threatened to get me admitted to an asylum had it persisted any longer. The book is about ‘dramatic new evidence’ of ETs ‘who are already among us’, and ‘how they will guide us through the New Age about to dawn at the end of this century’ (This book was published in 1985). You may have guessed... the profound effect on me was that I suspected almost every stranger to be an ET who had come to Earth with a mission as described by Ruth Montgomery. It didn’t end there. I even dared, for a while, to think that I was among them too, and what a great thing it would be if it were true!
She writes about Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the night sky, which is about 36.7 light-years from Earth, and the brightest star in the northern constellation Boötes. She writes about meeting ‘several fascinating people who are said to have come directly to Earth life from that star’, and who reportedly wrote to her: “We have lately been to Arcturus and can tell you quite a lot about the influence that it has on the souls seeking advancement there.
It is a leavening star, a force for good, and it is used for honing character and instilling in those who tarry there a desire to return to their respective planets and tell everyone what they have discovered: that each of us is something of God, and that we are all one. Together we form God, and it is therefore essential that we help each other, so that all may advance together.”
Well-intentioned, no doubt. But for such extraordinary, extraterrestrial visits to be proven would require fool-proof scientific evidence, without which ‘profound effect’ is the only thing left behind on minds largely left unconvinced. It’s exciting to think of the possibility that Montgomery’s narratives were true – but how, is what remains to be answered.
In 1907, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed the panspermia hypothesis, which suggests that life exists throughout the Universe, and is distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, and planetoids. It explores the possibility of life having come to Earth by one, some, or all, of those means. But even over a century later, there is no scientific closure to the argument on how life originated on Earth. There is bound to be no closure on Montgomery’s narratives either. Imagination does make a good home sometimes.
But one thing is sure: aliens do exist among us. Those are aliens that we have created from among us, not the ET variety of aliens. When humankind alienates humankind, it is but natural that the human mind craves for help – from Arcturus possibly? – to arrive here like the ‘close encounters of the third kind’ and vindicate all those sci-fi movies which give a thumbs-up to ETs among us. We can always wait to meet one...
(The writer’s views are personal)