"Saucers,
UFO's and Other Chariots of Fire" Print document 
Sermon, Sunday, April 27, 2008
Keene Unitarian Universalist Church
Rev. Olivia Holmes
Opening, Closing Words, Meditation
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Keene Unitarian Universalist Church
Rev. Olivia Holmes
Last Announcement
Miles Walter will actually be playing an excerpt from the second movement of
Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata as our musical interlude this morning.
Opening Words (#530 Robert T. Weston, not Barbara Pescan)
Out of the stars we have come, up from time
Time out of time before time
in the vastness of space, earth spun to orbit the sun
Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn,
The boiling of the seas,
Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight:
This is our home,
[let us rejoice, and give thanks; come, let us worship together]
Closing Words (#530 Robert T. Weston)
Life from the sea, warmed by sun, washed by rain,
Life from within, giving birth, rose to love.
This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space;
Out of the stars swung the earth, life upon earth rose to love.
This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder, sing that we live.
Benediction (Richard Gilbert, In the Holy Quiet, p. 35)
O God of order and neatness, we give thanks for all that is good.
We are grateful for manifold blessings bestowed upon us.
O God of chaos and disorder, be with us also when life is messy.
Bless, [O Sacred Spirit] our coming in and our going out from this day forth.
Meditation (Richard Gilbert, In the Holy Quiet, p. 26)
We live
In between festivals of gratitude and joy,
In between seasons of contrasting color,
Between floods of brightness
And seas of whiteness.
We live
On a remote island outpost in fathomless space,
Between stars and moons and planets and void,
Surrounded by meteors, comets, rays, and nothingness
In which there is no right or left, up of down –
Only betweenness.
We live
Not quite at the apex of joy,
Nor in the nether of sorrow,
But in the moving space between,
Uncertain of our location
(pause for joys and sorrows)
We live
Walking from city of birth to death,
Hoping along the way
To see something of beauty,
To touch hands with those we love,
To give more than we get,
To make some sense of it all.
We live in betweenness.
“Saucers, UFOs and other Chariots of Fire”
Sermon, Sunday, April 27, 2008
Keene Unitarian Universalist Church
Dedicated to Eugene Mellish
Rev. Olivia Holmes
I want to begin by thanking Gene Mellish for the extraordinary experience thinking about and writing this sermon has been for me. It was Gene who gave good money to KUUC for the offer I made of writing a sermon on any subject of the buyer’s wish. I pray this effort may be worthy of Gene’s investment.
Gene gave me a copy of his book, UFO’s and The Origin of Man,” and said, more or less, write on this. In his book, Gene offers synopses of 13 authors of books on UFOs and theories of extraterrestrial life. Then he offers his own summary of the evidence these books offer, and his conclusions.
Briefly Gene believes the evidence supports the theory that extraterrestrials exist and have visited earth. When I began thinking of this sermon, I did what I always do; I created a file, and began pitching ideas into it. One idea I pitched in was my own memory of the story of Betty and Barney Hill. Some of you may remember it. Betty was a white woman, a social worker whose family had lived in Portsmouth, NH for at least several generations. Barney was an African American, who married Betty in 1960 and moved to Portsmouth about a year later, when he was able to work out a transfer from his job as a postal worker in Philadelphia.
Betty and Barney set out on a long-awaited honeymoon trip from Portsmouth, NH, to Montreal on September 17, 1961, taking Delsey, their dog, with them. On the 19th, they had planned to find a hotel that would accept Delsey in Montreal and spend the evening enjoying what the city had to offer. They got lost, weren’t getting lucky on motels or hotels, and on hearing a radio announcement that tropical storm Esther was “whirling its way up the east coast toward New Hampshire,” with 130 mile-per-hour winds, they decided to just drive on home.
They were on route 93, just north of Indian Head when Betty saw a shooting star, no, she thought, a satellite, and no again; “it” flew toward the moon, then stopped. Barney tried to stay cool to reassure Betty, and it worked until the thing, whatever it was, hovered silently some 80 to 100 feet above their car. Barney stopped the car and grabbed the binoculars. The thing shifted in the sky, and Barney could see “a group of humanoid figures moving about with the precision of German officers. The craft…began to descend toward them…Barney had the immediate impression that he was in danger of being plucked from the field. Overcome with fear, and with all of the courage that he could muster, he…raced back to the car…near hysterics, he told Betty that they needed to get out of there or they were going to be captured.
“As Barney rapidly accelerated down the highway…[the craft] shifted directly overhead. Suddenly, rhythmic “buzzing” tones seemed to bounce off the trunk of their vehicle, and they sensed a penetrating vibration. They drove on without speaking until somewhere down the road, they heard a second series of buzzing sounds. Vague memories of encountering a roadblock, of seeing a huge, fiery red-orange orb resting upon the ground, and feeling a need for human contact preoccupied their thoughts. They looked for an open restaurant to no avail, so they drove on through Concord, picked up Route 4, and made a beeline to Portsmouth, expecting to arrive at approximately 3 a.m. The Hills were surprised to notice that, as they crossed into Portsmouth, the dawn was streaking the sky in the east.”
Later, in the days and weeks, months and years to come, Betty and Barney tried to reconstruct what had happened. When they got home it was actually 5 a.m. They felt clammy; took showers, and left their clothes outdoors on the porch. After doing their best to sleep, they agreed to separately draw what they thought they had seen. Their drawings were nearly identical. They discovered strange markings on the trunk of the car. They phoned Pease Air Force Base, ultimately convinced they had been abducted.
Betty’s niece, Kathleen Marden has recorded in detail the extraordinary and varied facts of evidence in the case in the 2007 book she and Stanton Friedman wrote about the whole amazing affair. I remember this story. I would have been 16 when it happened, but it didn’t get into the media until some time after that. However old I was when the story came out, I was fascinated. Betty and Barney believed they were taken aboard the space ship and medically examined. They remembered being very kindly treated, and they believed that the extraterrestrials were trying to figure out whether mating with earthlings would be possible.
Working on this sermon I thought about this bi-racial couple living in Portsmouth in the early 1960s, and I wondered to myself, could they have been Unitarian Universalists. A little googling proved that they were, indeed, members of the Portsmouth UU church. So I called the minister there and asked her, “Does the congregation remember this story?” She said, “Not really, people refer to it as a curiosity in our history…the congregation has pretty much turned over since that time.”
As we were talking about the Hills, however, she suggested I might want to talk to a UU named Steve Dick, who was a member of her congregation when she served in Sterling, Virginia. I googled Steve Dick, and discovered he was the Historian for the Naval Observatory, and had written on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. In an article of Steve’s I found in cyberspace was a reference to my beloved ancestor, Sherlock Holmes, who said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
I emailed Steve, explaining that I had to write a sermon on UFOs and the origins of man and would love to mine his intelligence on the subject To my delight, he wrote right back, emailing me two articles he’d written.
In his summary, Gene refers to the work of Zecharia Sitchin, who argues that there was a planet called Marduk from another solar system which collided with a star (or sun, I think, it’s not clear to me) called Tiamat, splitting it and thus forming the Earth and its moon. The way the story goes, Marduk became a member of the solar system, with an elliptical orbit taking 3600 years to orbit the sun.
I first encountered Marduk and Tiamat at Harvard Divinity School . When I got there I was dying to know what belief systems existed before the Bible. I learned the mythology of the Enuma Elish, written down some 3,500 years ago. In the Enuma Elish Tiamat is described as the great universal mother. Everything, the entire universe and everything in it lived in her tummy. Apsu was her husband. Tiamat and Apsu symbolized the waters of life, and when they commingled, they gave birth to silt. Silt gave birth to the horizon, which gave birth to heaven and earth, which gave birth to storms and agriculture, which gave birth to wisdom, which gave birth to Marduk. All were male and female together until Marduk; he was definitely male.
Marduk had siblings, and they were all roiling around in Tiamat’s tummy, keeping Apsu up late at night. So he complained to Tiamat, suggesting she should kill the kids. Marduk got wind of this, got mad and killed both his father and his mother. He gouged out Tiamat’s eyes, and they became the Tigris and the Euphrates. Her breasts became the mountains, her…well her body hair became the forests. Her tail became the Milky Way.
Marduk became the God whose job it was to organize the humans on earth into work parties to meet the needs of all the other gods. Marduk thus became the God of humanity.
I ran this story of creation past Steve Dick, and he very politely said something like, hmmm, I’ve not heard that story before and evidence is everything in my field.
We changed the subject.
Steve Dick, a Unitarian Universalist deals in his day job with questions like this:
Is the universe physical, biological, or cultural? Is it a physical universe that ends with galaxies, stars, and planets? Is it a biological universe, that ends with the life forms that can evolve only within a physical universe? Or could it be a cultural universe; one that has the possibility to evolve into intellectual forms beyond needing a physical or a biological universe.
Steve writes that science believes this universe we live in is 13,500,000,000 years old, give or take. Gene Mellish agrees. They both argue, I think, that we homo sapiens types are Johnny-come-latelys on the scene of universal life. Gene says that if we have evolved from hunting and gathering homo sapiens to homo technologicus in something around 35,000 years, what could older civilizations of superior intellect have done in more than 10 billion years? Steve Dick makes the same argument.
I might as well tell you at this point, because it makes the whole discussion more fun, that Steve Dick is now the Chief Historian for NASA. This is one UU with a lot of credibility for his historical perspective on the possibility of estraterrestrial life.
Steve posits that in something between a few hundred and a few thousand or maybe a few million years, give or take a year or two, the sun will become so bright that it will make life on earth impossible as we know it. If we do not evolve culturally beyond needing flesh and bones, we will be annihilated.
Steve and Gene both bring our attention to the idea that the whole enterprise of the universe, or multiverse, as Steve refers to the probability of many universes coexisting may be for the development of intelligence. Today we know that the universe is ever expanding, and life is ever evolving. Stars are born and stars die in massive stellar explosions. Could it really be that the whole purpose of life is to evolve to the point wherein we can live beyond the death of our star; where intelligence can thrive without either a physical or a biological multiverse?
Steve Dick writes of the popularity of interstellar science fiction in the last quarter of the last century: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, ET. He says, “star trekkers and X-Files fans around the world represent a phenomenon that is more than just entertainment. These stories of mythic proportion broaden our horizons; they force us to consider our place in the universe; they make us wonder whether the universe is full of good, as in ET, or evil, as in Alien. And, they make us realize that terrestrial concepts of God and theology are only a subset of the possible.”
Back in life before ministry I was a consultant to Mattel Toys. GI Joe was one of their biggest brands. But when Star Wars came out, all the little Luke Skywalkers and Princess Leas, R2D2s and Wookies did significant damage to GI Joe market share. So Mattel said to me, figure out what product we can introduce into the market to compete with Star Wars.
I did a lot of market research with mothers about the kinds of toys they would want their little boys to play with. What they said was that they knew little boys had aggressive tendencies. They believed it was a good thing to give children toys that would allow them to express these tendencies as part of learning how to cope with aggression, competition, the winning and losing of life. BUT, they wanted to be sure that the toys clearly represented fantasy. No guns, no grenades, no land mines, no earthly war games, please. So it was that Masters of the Universe was Mattel’s response to Star Wars.
What will we give our children to play with if extraterrestrial life is real, if over 10 billion years life forms from just about anywhere in the multiverse have evolved beyond flesh and blood, beyond time and space?
And what do we do with Steve Dick’s question about God? Near the end of our conversation Steve said he had just finished another paper, not yet published, in which he argues that there is ample evidence of design in the evolving multiverse. Let me say that again. There is ample evidence of design in the evolving multiverse.
Astounded, I said, “Do you mean intelligent design?” Steve said, “No, no, if you mean Intelligent Design of the Christian Right. But if you mean intelligent design, small i, small d, then yes, that’s exactly what I mean.” Steve’s point is this, I think. A supernatural God, outside and beyond the natural world does not exist and did not design the multiverse, humans or anything else. BUT, a natural intelligence, evolving in and through the multiverse could well be fine tuning the multiverse for the purpose of achieving ever higher intelligence. I have a pet name for this natural intelligence. I am going to call it E.T. I am going to call it E.T. because I want, so badly, to believe that this natural intelligence is a good force in the multiverse.
Betty Hill died of metastasized cancer in 2004. Here is how the book describes the story of her death. “Often acquaintances half-joked, half-wished for extraterrestrial intervention.” The night she died, “Betty’s daughter reported that Betty had retired on the living room sofa, the only comfortable location considering the fact that she had sustained a fracture to her upper humerus and a hairline fracture of her right wrist that afternoon. She was not able to recline without enduring excruciating pain from her cancerous tumor, so she slept in an upright position. Her daughter, an extremely light sleeper, who normally awoke whenever she heard Betty stir, retired to the adjacent bedroom with the door open, so she had direct sight of Betty.
“Without an apparent explanation, Betty’s daughter slept soundly throughout the night, rising 1 ½ hours later than usual. The first thing she noticed when she checked on Betty was the absence of her splint and sling. The previous night the splint, held in place by an Ace bandage, had been tightly wrapped around Betty’s forearm and hand. Now they were neatly placed on a chair 10 feet away…an impossible task for Betty to have accomplished. The Ace bandage was still intact around the splint, as if they had been removed from Betty’s arm without being unwrapped. The sling was neatly folded and placed on top of the splint.
“At this point in the progression of Betty’s disease, she was paraplegic with additional paralysis in her right arm. It would have been physically impossible for Betty to have removed, rewrapped, and folded her devices.”
Betty had died peacefully in her sleep. Maybe, just maybe, E.T. really was there.
