!-Comment-!  More once again from the Vatican on this issue. Is this part of the ongoing public acclimation process with covert United Nations backing leading to the 2017 event?

VATICAN CITY - E.T. - phone Rome!

Four hundred years after locking up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth is the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for Catholicism.

“The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes of the Vatican Observatory.

Funes presented the results yesterday of a five-day conference of astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts discussing the budding field of astrobiology - the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere.