Alien!

Genesis: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 27  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

For thousands of years, man has gazed into the night sky and wondered what those lights were. Ancient civilizations saw gods and monsters in those patterns of light.

The Chaldeans, who lived in what is now Iraq, developed one of the original forms of astrology as early as 3000 BCE, and the Chinese were practicing astrology by 2000 BCE. Other varieties formed in ancient India and among the Maya of Central America. They saw that certain astronomical bodies, particularly the sun, affected the change of seasons and the success of crops. Based on these observations, they developed a broader system by which the movements of other bodies such as the planets affected or represented additional aspects of life.

By the 500s BCE, astrology had spread to Greece, where such philosophers as Pythagoras and Plato incorporated it into their study of religion and astronomy. Astrology was widely practiced in Europe through the Middle Ages; many scholars viewing astrology and astronomy as complementary sciences until about the 1500s, when at that time, the discoveries made by such astronomers as Copernicus and Galileo undermined some of the foundations of astrology. Since then, few scientists have accepted astrology as a science; but then few scientists accept Spiritual Healing, alternative therapies, and Spiritualism!

There is an Inuit saying that says, “Those lights are windows into the Spirit world through which our ancestors watch our lives here on earth.”

Today we know that those lights are suns, just like our own – some are bigger, some are brighter – but they are suns; but how many are there? Except for the comparatively few stars visible to the naked eye, stars are named by numbers according to the various star atlases and catalogs issued by astronomical observatories. The first such star catalog was compiled by the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE. Called the Almagest, it listed the names and locations of over 1,000 stars. The first modern star catalog, issued in 1862 by the observatory of Bonn, Germany, contains the locations of more than 300,000 stars. In 1887 an international committee began work on an elaborate star catalog. The charts were compiled from photographs taken by about 20 collaborating observatories and comprised some 21,600 individual plates. From these photographs an exhaustive catalog listed between 8 million and 10 million stars. More recently NASA scientists pointed the Hubble Telescope on a section of space that was thought to be empty. When the photographs were examined they showed that the supposedly ‘blank’ part of space was actually filled with hundreds of galaxies – not individual stars, but whole galaxies. Before this discovery, astronomers estimated that there were about 50 billion galaxies in the universe. The Hubble photograph increases that number even more.