Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, aliens and the quest for an alternative creator

The first episode of the "Ancient Aliens" cable-TV series promised to show that the growth of intelligent life on this planet had help that came from the stars.

The Prometheus Entertainment summary in 2010 asked: "If ancient aliens visited Earth, what was their legacy, and did they leave behind clues" that still exist?

The bigger question, nearly 200 episodes later, is whether aliens provided the building blocks of life itself. That's the kind of subject -- both theological and scientific -- that surfaces whenever there are debates about whether extraterrestrial life exists.

It's one thing for a recent U.S. national intelligence report -- "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena"-- to discuss incomplete technical data and the possibility of hostile spy drones. It was something else to say that experts had no scientific explanations for 140-plus reported "UAP" episodes.

The summary noted that 18 mysterious objects "appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion."

This raised familiar questions for those who have followed decades, even centuries, of debates about these mysteries: Who created these objects? Who created the beings who created them? Should this planet's religious leaders worry?

"The logic is that many people assume life is special, that human beings are uniquely purposed and created in God's image and that this life -- life made in God's image -- cannot exist anywhere else," said Stephen C. Meyer, who has a doctorate in the philosophy of science from Cambridge University.

In the end, was journalist Tom Wolfe 'cool' or not? Well, he sure was proud to be a heretic

Once upon a time, there was this era in American life called the Sixties. As the old saying goes, if you remember the Sixties, then you really weren't part of them -- which kind of implies that the only people who remember the Sixties were Baptists, or something like that.

Anyway, lots of things in the Sixties were "cool." Some things were even "groovy," although I thought -- at the time -- that no one who was actually "cool" would have fallen so low as to use the word "groovy."

Whatever the word "cool" meant, journalist Tom Wolfe was "cool," while at the same time being "hot." If you dreamed of being a journalist in the late Sixties and early 1970s, then you knew about Wolfe and you looked at his writing and thought to yourself, "How does he DO that? That is so cool."

Revolutionaries were "cool" and traditionalists were "not cool."

So with that in mind (and as an introduction to the content of this week's "Crossroads" podcast), please read the following quotation from a 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Wolfe. The key is to understand why, at one point, he calls himself a "heretic." This is long, but essential:

RS: I believe it was in the New Republic that Mitch Tuchman wrote that the reason you turned against liberals is that you were rejected by the white-shoe crowd at Yale.

WOLFE: Wait a minute! Is that one by Tuchman? Yeah, oh, that was great.

RS: He talked about your doctoral dissertation.

WOLFE: Yeah, he wrote that after The Painted Word. It went further than that. It was called "The Manchurian Candidate," and it said in all seriousness that I had some-how been prepared by the establishment, which he obviously thought existed at Yale, to be this kind of kamikaze like Laurence Harvey -- I think that's who was in The Manchurian Candidate, wasn't it? -- to go out and assassinate liberal culture. I loved that.