Keeping track of developments in topics I’ve written about can lead to odd places. In June, I wrote about the Nephilim, mysterious giants mentioned in the Bible. Subsequently, Republican Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri said the House Oversight Committee, on which he sits, should investigate whether the Smithsonian is hiding these giants’ bones.
In The New Republic, a publication that’s hit its stride after years of floundering, Jason Colavito connects this concern about oversized fossils to a broader antipathy on the American right toward the Smithsonian, with ramifications for ancient aliens and more. That seems likely, especially in light of a push by Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn to move the space shuttle Discovery from a Smithsonian facility to Houston (as I wrote here and here), which remains controversial and seemingly will require a barge, as the 747s on which shuttles once piggybacked are no longer in service.
While Burlison has been noncommittal on whether creatures have come to Earth from another dimension, he notes that quantum entanglement suggests there’s “something deeper than the existence we live on,” adding he believes angels exist. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, goes further, saying that lawmakers have seen evidence of “interdimensional beings.”
“I think that they can actually operate through the time spaces that we currently have,” Luna said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “And that’s not something that I came up with on my own. That’s based on stuff that we’ve seen. That’s based on information that we’ve been told.”
Luna added: “Based on testimony—that would be based on witnesses that have come forward. But what I can tell you is just we’re told that they were that, they’ve seen things. And what I can tell you without getting into classified conversations is that there have been incidences that I believe were very credible—people have reported that there have been movement outside of time and space.”
“Posterity will say we’re a horse’s ass,” is a line, as I remember it, from the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius, muttered by Herod Agrippa under his breath after a Roman politician says, “Posterity will envy us.” An internet quote has it as “Posterity will call you an ass, you idiot.” I turn to Stoic wisdom in times of societal turmoil and its social-media feedback loop. “Near is thy forgetfulness of all things; and near the forgetfulness of thee by all,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, Book Seven; aka: “Soon you will have forgotten all things; soon all things will have forgotten you.” Marcus advised not to worry about posterity’s opinion, as it might be no better-informed than that of one’s contemporaries.
Also back in June, I wrote about gravitational-wave astronomy, a field that subsequently reached the 10th anniversary, on September 14, of its first detection of such a wave; that milestone came shortly after researchers showed that a 54-year-old theorem by Stephen Hawking about how black holes grow was right, and also that black holes have “no hair,” meaning they destroy information and can be summed up just by their mass and spin.
The political quandary I noted, in which the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is threatened with budget cuts that would effectively cripple it, has not been resolved yet. It’s the sort of thing that, unfortunately, tends to fall between the cracks in media coverage, with most scientific publications wary of getting too much into politics, and most political publications not attuned to developments in esoteric science. Possibly, though, public and political interest in such research will take an upturn if the waves turn out to be useful for detecting alien starships, an idea that remains speculative.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky