Dear friends-collectors, Dear collectors-friends,
Allow me to talk once again about this pareidolia that forms a giant crab on Mars. This symptomatic illusion allow us to broaden out the reasoning to what we decide to believe.
Throughout the years, with a considerable speeding up in the 50s thanks to the UFO phenomenon, and without being necessarily noticed by anyone, the belief in the possibility of an extra-terrestrial life became the most widely shared conviction on Earth and this before all religions and ideologies. As sociologists say, this belief “transcend divides”. Therefore, we can believe in Jehovah or in Allah, and even claim to be an atheist and believe in “the little green men” too. We found much traces of it in the feverish speech of scientists searching for exoplanets, for hypothetical unknown dimensions of our world, for parallel universes.
But also in what is now called paleo-astronautics that consists in revisiting the history of art and civilizations in order to find traces of UFO and extra-terrestrial.
It even became the raison d’être of a new religion –the Raëlism- that opportunely bustled about connecting people of this crowd of new believers between them (Religion comes from religere in Latin that means to connect, to link together)
It reminds me of a little anecdote about Cézanne… In 1900, the art critics unanimously judged his paintings as unfinished, lousy and scandalous. Thirty years later, Cézanne was considered as the major European painter! His paintings did not “become better” in the meantime! It is the way we looked at them that has changed!
All lies in our way we look at things! The paleo-astronaut sees flying saucers in 17th-century frescos or in Quattrocento paintings and this is the same phenomenon when a Quattrocento peasant was catching sight of something strange in the sky and thought it was some witches’ flight.
Does David Vincent, the hero of the famous television program of our childhood “The Invaders” fight “Alien beings from a dying planet” or does he suffer quite simply from severe paranoia?
Knowing that our senses are betraying us, not always, but often, is a good start to acquire the knowledge of anything. Believing shall not consist in forgetting our critical sense in favour of an artificial marvellous trait.
Now, I formerly found the best argument (I do not say the best proof!) against the idea of an extra-terrestrial life in the reading of Salvador Dali’s confidences to Louis Pauwels (see Dali told me)
“I can’t admit pluralities of inhabited worlds. If we reply that the galaxies’ swarming make this hypothesis conceivable, my supreme argument is that what is unconceivable has more chances to be true. On the cosmos scale, only what is fantastic has some chance to be possible. And this fantastic trait would be, just so, that only one world, among thousand and thousand millions of worlds, would have been inhabited.”
Disturbing, isn’t it?
Would the marvellous truth not be the fact that we could be ALONE?
ALL ALONE
Pierre de Mougins
Traduction: Agathe a.edmondmariette@gmail.com