By Tom Horn & Chris Putnam
“L.U.C.I.F.E.R., which stands for “Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research,” is a chilled instrument attached to a telescope in Arizona. And yes, it’s named for the Devil, whose name itself means “morning star” [and which] happens to be right next to the Vatican Observatory on Mt. Graham in Tucson”
It was approximately 11: AM (PST) as we rounded the final bend and saw just ahead the towering edifices housing the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), an optical telescope for astronomy and currently one of the world’s most advanced systems. Near it was the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) or as it is also known, the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope building, a “state-of-the-art single-dish radio telescope for observations in the sub-millimeter wavelength range… the most accurate radio telescope ever built.” [ii] And last but not least about a block away from them we observed our primary reason for trudging to the top of this peak—the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope or VATT.
Of course we had read the official story from the Vatican Observatory Website before making the trip, how VATT truly lives up to its name:
“Its heart is a 1.8-m f/1.0 honeycombed construction, borosilicate primary mirror. This was manufactured at the University of Arizona Mirror Laboratory, and it pioneered both the spin-casting techniques and the stressed-lap polishing techniques of that Laboratory which are being used for telescope mirrors up to 8.4-m in diameter. The primary mirror is so deeply-dished that the focus of the telescope is only as far above the mirror as the mirror is wide, thus allowing a structure that is about three times as compact as the previous generation of telescope designs.”
Such technical language aside, the “Observers” who are approved to operate VATT and what they are using it for these days is what would take us through the looking glass. This was confirmed minutes later by the Jesuit Father on duty that day (whom we got on film) who told us that among the most important research occurring with the site’s Vatican astronomers is the quest to pinpoint certain extrasolar planets and advanced alien intelligence. He then proceeded (as did our guide) to show us all around the observatory—from the personal quarters of the Church’s astronomers—where they ate, slept, relaxed, studied—to the control rooms, computer screens and systems, and even the telescope itself. While we were given complete and unrestricted opportunity to question how the devices are used and what distinctives set each of the telescopes on Mt. Graham apart, we had not expected the ease with which the astronomers and technicians would also speak of UFOs!
This was especially true when we walked up the gravel road from VATT to the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), where we spent most of the day with a systems engineer who not only took us to all seven levels of that mighty machine—pointing out the LUCIFER device and what it is used for (which he lovingly referred to as “Lucy” several times and elsewhere as “Lucifer”) as well as every other aspect of the telescope we tried to wrap our minds around—but who also stunned us as we sat in the control room, listening to him and the astronomers speak so casually of the redundancy with which UFOs are captured on screens darting through the heavens.
Our friendly engineer didn’t blink an eye, nor did any of the other scientists in the room, and we were shocked at this, how ordinary it seemed to be.
But as much as the commonality of UFO sightings on Mt. Graham’s telescopes intrigued, this was not the primary reason for our being there. We had come with deeper questions concerning high-level Vatican astronomers and what they had been leaking to, and discussing with, media in recent years. Captivating comments from Jesuit priests like Guy Consolmagno—a leading astronomer who often turns up in media as a spokesman for the Vatican who has worked at NASA and taught at Harvard and MIT and who currently splits his time between the Vatican Observatory and laboratory (Specola Vaticana) headquartered at the summer residence of the Pope in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, and Mt. Graham in Arizona.
Over the last few years, he has focused so much of his time and effort in an attempt to reconcile science and religion in public forums specifically as it relates to the subject of extraterrestrial life and its potential impact on the future of faith that we decided to contact him. He agreed to be interviewed from Rome, and over the numerous exchanges that followed he told us some things that seemed beyond the scope. He even sent us a copy of a private pdf, a literal goldmine of what he and the Vatican are considering regarding the ramifications of astrobiology and specifically the discovery of advanced extraterrestrials… in which he admits how contemporary societies will soon “look to The Aliens to be the Saviours of humankind.”
To illustrate the theological soundness of this possibility, Consolmago argues that humans are not the only intelligent beings God created in the universe, and, he says, these non-human lifeforms are described in the Bible. He starts by pointing to angels then surprises us by actually referencing the Nephilim:
Other heavenly beings come up several times in the Psalms. For example, look at the beautiful passage in Psalm 89 that calls out, “Let the heavens praise your wonders, 0 Lord, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord? … The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it -you have founded them.” Likewise, God asks Job (38:7) if any human can claim to have been around at the creation, “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy .”
Are these “heavens,” “holy ones,” those “in the sky,” the “morning stars … and heavenly beings” more references to angels? Or do they refer to some other kind of life beyond our knowledge?
…And these are not the only non-human intelligent creatures mentioned in the Bible. There’s that odd, and mysterious, passage at the beginning of Genesis, Chapter 6, that describes the “sons of God” taking human wives. With it is a frustratingly oblique reference to “The Nephilim …the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown .”
Most Biblical scholars suggest that the Nephelim and the Sons of God in Genesis can be explained away as a left-over reference to the creation stories of the pagans who surrounded ancient Israel, that they were written by the kind of people whose culture saw anyone Not Of My Tribe as being unspeakably alien. Likewise, the references to heavens and stars singing and praising the Lord can be seen simply for the beautiful poetry that it is.
But whether you interpret these creatures as angels or aliens doesn’t really matter for the sake of our argument here. The point is that the ancient writers of the Bible, like all ancient peoples, were perfectly happy with the possibility that other intelligent beings could exist.
Read that again, then ask yourself: Did the Vatican’s top astronomer actually mean to use the story of the Nephilim from the Bible as an example of the kind of “space saviors” man could soon look to for salvation? This incredible assertion is only topped by what he says next. In quoting John 10:16, which says, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd,” Consolmago writes: “Perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to see the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, Who was present “In the beginning” (John 1: l), coming to lay down His life and take it up again (John 10: 18) not only as the Son of Man but also as a Child of other races?”
Do Vatican scholars actually believe Jesus might have been the Star-Child of an alien race? Does Consolmagno and/or other Jesuits secretly hold that the “Virgin Birth” was in reality an abduction scenario in which Mary was impregnated by ET, giving birth to the hybrid Jesus? As incredible as that sounds, you should prepare for the unexpected answer as this series unfolds.
All this would seem impossible theology if not for the fact that other high ranking Vatican spokespersons—those who routinely study from the “Star Base” (as local Indians call it) on Mt. Graham—have been saying the same in recent years.
This includes Dr. Christopher Corbally, Vice Director for the Vatican Observatory Research Group on Mt. Graham until 2012, who believes our image of God will have to change if disclosure of alien life is soon revealed by scientists (including the need to evolve from the concept of an “anthropocentric” God into a “broader entity”), and the current Vatican Observatory director, Father Josè Funes who has gone equally far, suggesting that alien life not only exists in the universe and is “our brother” but will, when manifested, confirm the “true” faith of Christianity and the dominion of Rome.
When the L’Osservatore Romano newspaper (which publishes nothing that the Vatican doesn’t approve) asked him what this meant, he replied: “How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere? Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation” and believing in the existence of such is not contradictory to Catholic doctrine.
Such statements are but the latest in a string of recent comments by numerous Vatican astronomers confirming a growing belief (or inside knowledge?) that disclosure will be made in the near future of alien life, including intelligent life, and that this encounter will not challenge the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
From the 70s through the 90s, it was Monsignor Corrado Balducci—an exorcist, theologian and member of the Vatican Curia (governing body at Rome) and friend of the Pope—who went perhaps furthest, appearing on Italian national television numerous times to state that ETs were not only possible but already interacting with Earth and that the Vatican’s leaders were aware of it.
Furthermore, speaking as an official demonologist, he said that extraterrestrial encounters, “are not demonic, they are not due to psychological impairment, and they are not a case of entity attachment, but these encounters deserve to be studied carefully.” He even disclosed how the Vatican itself has been closely following the phenomenon and quietly compiling material evidence from Vatican embassies (Nunciatures) around the world on the extraterrestrials and their mission [later in this research we will disclose the secret alien files the Vatican has been collecting since the 1950s].
For example, at a forum concerning the enormous UFO flap in Mexico, he stated, “I always wish to be the spokesman for these star peoples who also are part of God’s glory, and I will continue to bring it to the attention of the Holy Mother Church.” Whatever you make of his claims, Balducci was a member of a special group of consultants to the Vatican, a public spokesperson for Rome on the matter of extraterrestrial life as well as UFO and abduction phenomenon, and his assertions have never been contradicted by the Church.
Still, perhaps most intriguing was Catholic theologian Father Malachi Martin who, before his death in 1999, hinted at something like imminent extraterrestrial contact more than once.
While on Coast to Coast AM radio in 1997, Art Bell asked Martin why the Vatican was heavily invested in the study of deep space at the Mt Graham Observatory we visited. As a retired professor of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Martin was uniquely qualified to hold in secret information pertaining to VATT. Martin’s answer ignited a firestorm of interest among Christian and secular UFOlogists when he replied, “Because the mentality…amongst those who [are] at the…highest levels of Vatican administration and geopolitics, know…what’s going on in space, and what’s approaching us, could be of great import in the next five years, ten years”.
Those cryptic words “what’s approaching us, could be of great import” was followed in subsequent interviews with discussion of a mysterious “sign in the sky” that Malachi believed was approaching from the north. While this could have been an oblique reference to an end time portent, the Catholic prophecy of the Great Comet, people familiar with Malachi believe he may have been referring to a near-future arrival of alien intelligence. (Interesting note from the authors: When we asked Father Guy Consolmagno what he thought of Malachi’s claims, he seemed actually miffed by the man, saying, “I have heard stories about the late Malachi Martin which make me rather suspicious of statements that come from him. I was at the Observatory in the 1990s, and he never visited us nor had anything to do with us.”
This reaction seems consistent with how many other Catholic priests despised Malachi’s willingness to disclose what Rome otherwise wanted buried, especially the Satanic cabal within the Jesuit order Malachi wrote about in his best-selling books.)
Yet, if ET life is something Vatican officials have privately considered for some time, why speak of it so openly now, in what some perceive as a careful, doctrinal unveiling over the last few years? Is this a deliberate effort by church officials to “warm-up” the laity to ET disclosure? Are official church publications on the subject an attempt to soften the blow before disclosure arrives, in order to help the faithful retain their orthodoxy in light of unprecedented forthcoming knowledge?
Writing for Newsweek on Thursday, May 15, 2008, in the article “The Vatican and Little Green Men,” Sharon Begley noted that “[this] might be part of a push to demonstrate the Vatican’s embrace of science…
Interestingly, the Vatican has plans to host a conference in Rome next spring to mark the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution. Conference organizers say it will look beyond entrenched ideological positions—including misconstrued creationism. The Vatican says it wants to reconsider the problem of evolution ‘with a broader perspective’ and says an ‘appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.’”
The “appropriate consideration” Begley mentioned may have been something alluded to by Guy Consolmagno three years earlier in an interview with the Sunday Herald. That article pointed out how Consolmagno’s job included reconciling “the wildest reaches of science fiction with the flint-eyed dogma of the Holy See” and that his latest mental meander was about “the Jesus Seed,” described as “a brain-warping theory which speculates that, perhaps, every planet that harbours intelligent, self-aware life may also have had a Christ walk across its methane seas, just as Jesus did here on Earth in Galilee.
The salvation of the Betelguesians may have happened simultaneously with the salvation of the Earthlings.” This sounds like a sanctified version of panspermia—the idea that life on Earth was “seeded” by something a long time ago such as an asteroid impact—but in this case, “the seed” was divinely appointed and reconciled to Christ.
The curious connection between the Vatican’s spokespersons and the question of extraterrestrials and salvation was further hinted in the May, 2008 L’Osservatore Romano interview with Father Funes, titled, “The Extraterrestrial is My Brother.” In the English translation of the Italian feature, Funes responds to the question of whether extraterrestrials would need to be redeemed, which he believes should not be assumed. “God was made man in Jesus to save us,” he says. “If other intelligent beings exist, it is not said that they would have need of redemption. They could remain in full friendship with their Creator.”
By “full friendship,” Funes reflected how some Vatican theologians accept the possibility that an extraterrestrial species may exist that is morally superior to men—closer to God than we fallen humans are—and that, as a consequence, they may come here to evangelize us. Father Guy Consolmagno took up this same line of thinking when he wrote in his book, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist:
So the question of whether or not one should evangelize is really a moot point. Any alien we find will learn and change from contact with us, just as we will learn and change from contact with them. It’s inevitable. And they’ll be evangelizing us, too.
But hold on, as this disturbing rabbit hole goes much deeper…
In a paper for the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti—an Opus Dei theologian of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome—explains just how we could actually be evangelized during contact with “spiritual aliens,” as every believer in God would, he argues, greet an extraterrestrial civilization as an extraordinary experience and would be inclined to respect the alien and to recognize the common origin of our different species as originating from the same Creator.
According to Giuseppe, this contact by non-terrestrial intelligence would then offer new possibilities “of better understanding the relationship between God and the whole of creation.” Giuseppe states this would not immediately oblige the Christian “to renounce his own faith in God simply on the basis of the reception of new, unexpected information of a religious character from extraterrestrial civilizations,” but that such a renunciation could come soon after as the new “religious content” originating from outside the Earth is confirmed as reasonable and credible.
“Once the trustworthiness of the information has been verified” the believer would have to “reconcile such new information with the truth that he or she already knows and believes on the basis of the revelation of the One and Triune God, conducting a re-reading [of the Gospel] inclusive of the new data…” How this “more complete” ET Gospel might deemphasize or significantly modify our understanding of salvation through Jesus Christ is discussed in the exotheology section of our upcoming investigative book “ExoVaticana”, but former Vatican Observatory vice director, Christopher Corbally, in his article “What if
There Were Other Inhabited Worlds” may have summarized the most important aspect when he concluded that Jesus simply might not remain the only Word of salvation: “I would try to explore the alien by letting ‘it’ be what it is, without rushing for a classification category, not even presuming two genders,” Corbally said, before dropping this bombshell:
While Christ is the First and the Last Word (the Alpha and the Omega) spoken to humanity, he is not necessarily the only word spoke to the universe… For, the Word spoken to us does not seem to exclude an equivalent “Word” spoken to aliens. They, too, could have had their “Logos-event”. Whatever that event might have been, it does not have to be a repeated death-and-resurrection, if we allow God more imagination than some religious thinkers seem to have had. For God, as omnipotent, is not restricted to one form of language, the human.
That high-ranking spokespersons for the Vatican have in recent years increasingly offered such language acknowledging the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence and the dramatic role ET’s introduction to human civilization could play in regard to altering established creeds about anthropology, philosophy, religion, and redemption is set to become more future-consequential than most are prepared for.
And then there is that LUCIFER device at Mt. Graham, which the Vatican denies being connected to but we shall illustrate otherwise later in this series. LUCIFER is curiously described on the Vatican Observatory website as “NASA AND THE VATICAN’S INFRARED TELESCOPE CALLED [LUCIFER]—A German built, NASA and The Vatican owned and funded Infrared Telescope… for looking at NIBIRU/NEMESIS.”
Why has the Vatican Observatory website allowed this caption to remain? Nibiru and Nemesis are hypothetical planets that supposedly return in orbit close to the earth after very long periods of time. They have been connected in modern myth with “Planet X” and most darkly with the destruction of planets that some believe occurred during a great war between God and Lucifer when the powerful angel was cast out of heaven.
In the book of Job where the prophet details how God destroyed the literal dwelling places of the angels that made insurrection against Him (Job 26:11-13), it specifically mentions the destruction of Rahab, a planetary body also known as ‘Pride,’ from which God drove ‘the fugitive snake.’”
Are Rome and other world powers using the LUCIFER device to observe something the rest of us cannot see—something they believe represents this ancient war (or worse, keeping eye on approaching end-times angelic transportation devices/UFOs, something Father Malachi Martin hinted at)?
The latter theory is interesting in light of the demonic name of the infrared device. Infrared telescopes can detect objects too cool or far away and faint to be observed in visible light, such as distant planets, some nebulae and brown dwarf stars. Additionally, infrared radiation has longer wavelengths than visible light, which means it can pass through astronomical gas and dust without being scattered.
Objects and areas obscured from view in the visible spectrum, including the center of the Milky Way, can thus be observed by LUCIFER’s infrared technology. But what UFO researchers have fascinated about for some time now is how infrared technology can also be used to spot and track Unidentified Flying Objects in the heavens that cannot be seen with other telescopes or the naked eye.
In fact, some of the most astonishing UFOs ever caught on film have been recorded with infrared. What this has to do with the arrival of Petrus Romanus and especially the global leader he will celebrate is beyond disturbing and ultimately imminent.
