Review of Steven Greer’s (You Can’t Be) Sirius Film

Cris Putnam sent me a link to his review of Steven Greer’s film – Greer’s latest effort to cast himself as an avatar for “ET Relations.” Cris noted in the email:

It’s amazingly incoherent that Greer claims to be in contact with the ETs but at the same time the problem with the world is that government is hiding the ET technology…. If he’s telling the truth ET should just give it to him.

Uh . . . yeah. But that’s Greer. Tell everyone you’re an MD till many are convinced that makes you an authority on issues outside of medicine, make lots of noise on the web, then produce content that’s about as logical as a square bowling ball.

Source: http://michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions/

REAL: DNA Tests Prove Six-Inch Creature is

Humanoid2013 04 24
By Lee Speigel | HuffingtonPost

RIC Editor’s Note: The media has gone to great lengths to downplay the importance of this discovery. They’re calling it ’human’ to diminish the discovery, pointing out that it’s not identifiably ’alien’. In fact, this finding is amazing.
The professor of microbiology and immunology, Gary Nolan, who did the research by extracting bone marrow and running DNA tests stated the lifeform was ’closer’ to human than chimps are. But being ’close’ to humans genetically doesn’t MAKE one human - just ask the chimps!
Some speculate that this hominid is a ’perfect storm’ of genetic malfunctions and mutations, but that is only a speculation at this point. Technically, it has not been proven that this isn’t a different type of hominidae. More research must be done before the gloves can be taken off. 

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’Sirius’ Documentary Reveals DNA Test Results On Ata, The ’6-Inch Alien’

The mummified remains of what looks like a 6-inch space alien has turned "Sirius" into the most eagerly awaited documentary among UFO enthusiasts.

The findings, however, might come as a disappointment.

In early publicity, filmmakers claimed the documentary would reveal that the DNA of the creature with an oversized alien-looking head couldn’t be medically classified.

In fact, the film, which premiered Monday in Hollywood, features a scientist who concluded the little humanoid was human.

"I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human -- closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born,"said Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California.

"The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allows us to determine, in very short order, whether, in fact, this is human," Nolan, who performed the DNA tests, explains in the film.

"Sirius" focuses on the remains of the small humanoid, nicknamed Ata, that was discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert 10 years ago and has, literally, gone through different hands and ownership since then.

The film also explores an ongoing grassroots movement to get the U.S. government to reveal what it reportedly knows about UFOs, extraterrestrials and the availability of advanced alternative energy technologies that could greatly benefit everyone on Earth.

The primary force behind "Sirius" is Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and The Disclosure Project.

[...]

One of the leading theories going into the DNA testing was that Ata may have been an unborn fetus. But, even that turned out to be incorrect, according to Nolan’s surprising (or not, depending on your point of view) conclusions of his investigation.

"The sequence that we got from the mitochondria [energy factories of cells] tells us with extremely high confidence that the mother was an indigenous Indian from the Chilean area. The other thing that immediately fell out of the analysis is that it’s male. It probably died in the last century, if I were to make a guess."

Nolan concedes he entered this study thinking that DNA was the answer, but then realized there were other biology questions about Ata that still needed to be understood and answered. He plans to eventually publish his findings after more analysis.

[...]

Read the full article at: huffingtonpost.com

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The humanoid was first discovered in 2003 in the remote Atacama desert region of Chile

Scientists say DNA tests have revealed the ususal remains to be close to human.

Scientists are puzzled as the being is ’human’, yet it has nine ribs

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Sirius Trailer

’Sirius’ documentary has premiered, now available to view or buy

Academic unearths new lead to fabled Babylon Gardens

2013 04 17By John Henzell | TheNational
Ever since the peak of the Hellenic empire, visiting the seven wonders of the ancient world has been the way to pay homage to the early achievements of human civilisation.

But there was one catch for those who wanted to see them all. The farthest one from Athens, the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in what is now central Iraq, existed in reports but its exact location had never been definitively proven.

Of the other six, the pyramids of Giza remain relatively intact and there are ruins or at least traces of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the lighthouse of Alexandria.

Finding traces of the Hanging Gardens became a kind of ultimate goal for archeologists and antiquarians but every investigation of the site of Babylon, near the modern Iraqi town of Al Hillah, came up short. Some postulated that the gardens might have been legendary rather than real.

This is where Dr Stephanie Dalley comes in.

Her academic speciality is early Mesopotamian civilisations: she is an expert in ancient Babylonian language and has taken part in archeological excavations in the fertile crescent where human civilisation began.

Now retired from the University of Oxford, she is visiting Abu Dhabi and giving a lecture tonight about her theory that the Hanging Gardens existed but that an ancient misunderstanding led the Greeks who compiled the original seven wonders to site them in Babylon, when the gardens were really in the neighbouring Assyrian empire.

Next month the Oxford University Press will publish The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, Dr Dalley’s account of her exhaustive 20-year pursuit of the truth about the gardens.

According to antiquarian reports, the Hanging Gardens were built in the citadel of the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II, who ordered the recreation of the mountainous homeland of his homesick wife, Amytis of Media.

By all accounts, it was a true wonder, with a raised garden at the very top of the citadel that was big enough for full-size trees to grow.

Built on a series of arches as a quadrangle with sides four plethra (123 metres) long, surrounded by walls six metres thick and with passages wide enough that "four-horse chariots can easily pass each other".

Nebuchadnezzar II ruled the city-state of Babylon on the Euphrates River between 604BC and 562BC and the gardens were supposed to have been destroyed by earthquakes sometime in the 2nd century BC.

But although there were numerous reports of the Hanging Gardens by later Greek and then Roman writers, they all quote from an earlier text by Berossus, a Babylonian priest. Berossus’s original work has never been found. However, Dr Dalley came to question the accuracy of those reports, beginning a kind of CSI Mesopotamia to unravel the truth from the fiction.

One factor that triggered her suspicions is that the gardens are not mentioned in other earlier texts in which Nebuchadnezzar II had recorded in detail his other building projects in the city state.

Other writers who visited Babylon during the era when the Hanging Gardens were believed to exist, such as Herodotus, Xenophon and Pliny, also made no mention of them.

An extensive and painstaking 19-year excavation of Babylon by German archaeologists at the start of the 20th century had also failed to produce anything to corroborate the Hanging Gardens’ existence.

At the time, the local building style was mud brick, which would not have survived centuries of use supporting an irrigated garden. And the garden also predated the invention of the Archimedes screw irrigation method.

There were two main civilisations in ancient Mesopotamia in that era: the Babylonians in the south and the Assyrians in the north, centred on Nineveh, near what is now Mosul.

The two were often confused in biblical and classical writings, such as the Old Testament book of Judith which calls Nebuchadnezzar the king of the Assyrians and said he lived in Nineveh, when in reality he lived in Babylon. Arab writers describe an earlier ruler, Sennacherib, as being based in Babylon when he actually ruled from Nineveh.

All this raised the question: are the reports of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon actually mistakenly describing a feature in Nineveh instead?

[...]

Read the full article at: thenational.ae

New and Surprising Discoveries about Mysterious Easter Island Statue: Origin of the Birdman Cult

By Catherine Griffin | Science World Report

Archaeologists have made some new and surprising discoveries about the mysterious statue from the Easter Island. Using the latest in digital imaging technology, they were able to find a little bit more about the religion that precipitated the downfall of these giant statues.

The Easter Island statue Hoa Hakananai’a is impressive to look at. Standing at about eight feet high, its solemn expression stares out onto visitors in the British Museum in London. While its front is smoothly carved, though, its back is another case entirely. It’s grooved and pitted with multiple depictions of birdmen, figures which arose during a time when the people of Easter Island gave up worshipping statues and instead turned to the birdman cult.

Hoa Hakananai’a: Rear of head showing central bird figure

Around 1600 AD, the Rapa Nui, the people inhabiting the Easter Islands, faced an ecological crisis. They stopped worshipping their iconic statues and instead turned to the new birdman religion. This cult included a ritual that was based around collecting the first egg of migrating terns from a nearby islet. The first swimmer who was able to gather the egg and bring it back safely would achieve sacred status for a year.

In fact, Hoa Hakananai’a most likely represents a time when the Rapa Nui were slowly adopting the new religion. Its back is carved with images that reveal some insights into the cult. Yet before now, researchers have had trouble deciphering the depictions.

The researchers took hundreds of photos of the statue from different angles. They then created a fully textured computer model of the statue, capable of rotating 360 degrees. Then, they used a virtual light source which was moved across the surface of the digital image of the statue. This allowed the researchers to view unseen details.

So what exactly did the researchers find? They noted that two birdmen on the back of the statue were actually marked as male and female. This allowed them to unlock an entire narrative story relating to the birdman cult. The scene shows a male chick leaving the nest, watched by its half-bird, half-human parents. The female birdman is matched by the female komari on the right ear of the statue, while the male birdman is matched on the left with a paddle--a symbol of male authority.

[...]

Read the full article at: scienceworldreport.com

The Atacama Mummified Human Fetus … er, Alien

 April 12th, 2013 |  Author: Michael S. Heiser Ph.D

Yesterday I blogged about the upcoming Citizen’s Hearing for Disclosure. Trust me when I say I’m hoping something substantive comes of it. Stephen Bassett has assembled a lot of people I’d consider credible (but I wouldn’t say that about everyone on the witness list).

Also fast approaching (April 22) is the Sirius world premier that is the centerpiece of Steven Greer’s “Sirius Disclosure” project. Greer is a high profile researcher. There are some high profile people in ufology who I trust to be forthright and objective, and there are those I don’t trust that way. Dr. Greer is in the latter category. He’s controversial even within the ufological camp.¹ My most current reason not to trust Greer is his touting of the “Atacama Alien” pictured below.

This “discovery” is not new; it’s actually a few years old. The specimen has also been examined by several specialists. No word on whether any of them will be featured in Greer’s film, though I wouldn’t expect that given the conclusions drawn prior to this world premier. (No doubt Greer will have his own “expert yes men” for the film). Here’s an excerpt from the report linked above:

“The second transcribed document is a forensic medical report written by Dr. Francisco Etxeberria Gabilondo, a professor of Legal and Forensic Medicine in the Basque Country University, and specialist in Forensic Anthropology with the Complutense University, who wrote the study at the bequest of the IIEE (probably for a fee, although that is not mentioned). Dr. Etxeberria wrote that, “it’s a mummified body with all typical the characteristics of a fetus. The body has a length of 14 cm and displays all the structures and anatomical links normal for the head, trunk and extremities. . . .

Taken as a whole, the proportions of the anatomical structures (skeleton and softer parts), the level of development of each one of its bones and its macroscopic configuration, allow us to interpret it without any shadow of doubt as a completely normal mummified fetus … Both based on the total length of the body as well as the length of the bones, it can be estimated that it’s a fetus in an approximate gestation period close to 15 weeks.”

Bummer.

This of course isn’t exciting enough for a world premier, so don’t expect to hear anything about it in the movie. The whole thing reminds me a bit of the bogus “nephilim skulls” that are out there. I blogged about that over on my PaleoBabble site many moons ago, complete with a picture from a medical supply catalog of these “amazing” skulls – the medical supply company has several models so their medical students can learn about human cranial deformities (which is good, so they don’t have to rob the Smithsonian of one of their hidden specimens from the late 1800s). Sad to say, I’ve seen these models at Christian conferences to promote various nuggets of nephilim nonsense (I normally hate alliteration, but I’ll let that one pass – truth be told, I was tempted to add “nattering nabobs” to that from the Aladdin movie).

It also reminds me of a book I’ve read . . . that had unscrupulous people using doctored human fetuses to create alien remains. . . . Oh yeah, that was my novel, The Facade. Funny.

Of course there will be those who think that because the specimen has a skeleton that it must be alien. To all you Einsteins out there on that point – a human fetus has a skeleton, too. All 206 bones of the human being are present by the end of the fifth week. (Please note that the 5th week would fall before the 15th week noted in the quotation above).

This whole world premier thing illustrates the poor thinking of many who want desperately to have aliens explain everything in world history and our origins (i.e., who want that as a religion). Just Google it. Or better yet, look at the name of Greer’s project: “Sirius Disclosure. The title plays off Robert Temple’s iconic but demonstrably bogus “Sirius Mystery.” Think about it. Let’s say this six-inch specimen isn’t human — how the Zeta do we know it’s from Sirius? Because that’s a narrative Greer likes – it “connects” (in the Land of Non Sequitur) to cool things like ancient Egypt (Temple had the image of Akhenaten on the cover of his Sirius Mystery book – we all know he was an ET, despite what the recent DNA research on the mummies in his lineage says).²

So where does this leave us? Well, if you’re like me who’d like to see serious people do serious thinking about a subject as serious as whether we’re alone in the universe, you’re embarrassed by this latest stunt (by the way, that sound rhyming on “Sirius” is called assonance – oh, crud, I ruined the aural subliminal). You all know that, if there are such things, I’m on the side of the public having a right to know (i.e., at least confirm the idea if it’s real – I do allow for legitimate national security issues). Stuff like this generates cash and sets tongues to wagging, but doesn’t really help credibility.

1. For some of those, click here, here, here, and here. ↩
2. See here as well. But what about the alien fetuses in King Tut’s tomb, Mike? We won’t leave them out of the post. Click here.

UN chief hails Pope Francis as a global spiritual leader

VATICAN CITY - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday hailed Pope Francis as "a spiritual leader of the world" and emphasized goals of social justice shared between the Vatican and the United Nations.

"It is very important to meet a spiritual leader of the world," Ban said at the start of his meeting with the Argentine pope, who last month became the first non-European leader of the world's Catholics in nearly 1,300 years.

"The Holy See and the UN share common goals and ideas," said Ban—one of the first world leaders to be received at an audience by the new pontiff.

Francis has called for the Roman Catholic Church to be closer to ordinary people and help the needy, as well as to reach out to people of different religions and non-believers.

"We discussed the need to advance social justice and accelerate work to meet the Millenium Development Goals," Ban said after the meeting.

The international community has undertaken to meet goals including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and reducing child mortality by 2015.

"Pope Francis is a man of peace and purpose. He is a voice for the voiceless," he said.

Ban said he also invited the pope to visit the United Nations "at his earliest convenience."

The UN leader also commented on the pope's choice to name himself after St Francis of Assisi, saying this was "a powerful message for the many goals shared by the United Nations."

"It speaks loudly of his commitment to the poor, his acute sense of humility, his passion and compassion to improve the human condition," he said.

Ban gave the pope a large book with the Charter of the United Nations in six languages.

The pope, who only spoke in Italian, gave Ban a mosaic of Rome. — Agence France-Presse

Mysterious Stone Structure Discovered Beneath Sea of Galilee

A giant "monumental" stone structure discovered beneath the waters of the Sea of Galilee in Israel has archaeologists puzzled as to its purpose and even how long ago it was built.

The mysterious structure is cone shaped, made of "unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders," and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons the researchers said. That makes it heavier than most modern-day warships.

Read the full story Here