NASA was given a $1 million grant to prepare the world’s religions for alien contact, declassified papers reveal.
“A $1 million NASA project is preparing the world’s religions for the possible discovery of extraterrestrial live forms…”

Officially speaking, we’ve not met aliens yet. As far as astronomers are concerned, the only planet in the entire universe with life is Earth. Although we’ve discovered 4,201 (confirmed as of writing) exoplanets to date, and many more are awaiting confirmation, only our planet has been found to support life as we know it.

We ponder about the possibility of life on Mars and on distant moons in our solar system, but evidence of it has been nonexistent, at least so far.

The recent Perseverance rover mission to Mars may help us understand whether there is or was life on Mars at some point in the distant past or even now.

Future missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may help reveal the probability of life emerging on distant moons in our solar systems.

Whether life existed outside of our solar system is a whole other ballgame. Although we’ve discovered many exoplanets that are eerily similar to Earth and orbit their star in the so-called habitable zone, our technology can’t reveal whether these planets are inhabited or if there ever was past life on their surface at one point in their history.

Recently, astronomers started speaking again about an interstellar object that zoomed through our solar system in 2017. Dubbed ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar object was first described as an asteroid, then a comet, and at one point, even an alien spaceship.

The latter theory was soon dismissed, because what are the chances of finding aliens, right?

Now, a study published by Harvard professor Avi Loeb describes the why’s and how’s of ‘Oumuamua being a potential piece of alien technology. You can read more about it here and here.

And while we continue to discuss all of the potential places where we might encounter aliens, NASA has been–quietly–doing their job in preparing the world for the day we DO MEET ALIENS.

In fact, a federal project even granted NASA $1 million to prepare our world’s religions for alien contact.

NASA, Religion, and Alien Contact

Hoping to cut huge federal budgets, back in 2017, US Senator Jeff Flake published a document called Wastebook: PORKémon Go (a play on the then-popular mobile game Pokémon GO), listing several examples of what he believed to be unnecessary spending money.

Before Congress, he highlighted one in particular that included $1,000,000 to NASA. The money was meant to help the United States space agency prepare world religions for the impact that the discovery of extraterrestrial life forms would have.

In June 2020, the guys over at The Black Vault submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting the files pertaining to this project to be released to the public.

Below you can find the link to see what they received from the US government (34 pages, 21MB, in PDF).

Here’s a small preview of what the document reads.

“The result is that 25 senior scholars and 15 young scholars in the Humanities have been in residence at the Center in a sustained conversation with visiting astrobiologists on the implications of their work for society and humanity’s future,” the paper reads.

The most significant achievement of the grant in support of this symposium series is, therefore, the creation of a cohort of 40 prominent and promising scholars in the Humanities who have now worked at the highest level on the societal and humanistic implications of the current science in the multi-disciplinary field of astrobiology,” the document reads.

“They have eschewed speculation about extraterrestrial civilizations for the demanding interdisciplinary exercise of understanding the latest research on the potential of the universe to harbor life beyond Earth. They have been among the pioneers of what we may now rightly call the new interdisciplinary field of the astrobiological humanities.”

Source: ASTROBIOLOGY, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY: A SYMPOSIUM SERIES
TO SUPPORT RESEARCH ON THE SOCIETAL IMPLICATIONS OF ASTROBIOLOGY