Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Spoofing and Secrecy
Renaissance. A controversialist, crusty, critical, arrogant, a pedant,
he was attacked by his contemporaries for sacrilege, impudence,
temerity and presumption, among other imperfections.
After he concluded that the Apostles' Creed could not on
grammatical grounds have actually been written by the Twelve
Apostles, the Inquisition declared him a heretic, and only the
intervention of his patron, Alfonso, King of Naples, prevented his
immolation. Undeterred, in 1440, he published a treatise demonstrating
that the Donation of Constantine is a crude forgery. The
language in which it was written was to fourth century court Latin
as Cockney was to the King's English. Because of Lorenzo of
Valla, the Roman Catholic Church no longer presses its claim to
rule European nations because of the Donation of Constantine.
This work, whose provenance has a five-century hole in it, is
generally understood to have been forged by a cleric attached to
the Church's curia around the time of Charlemagne, when the
papacy (and especially Pope Adrian I) was arguing for unification
of church and state.
Assuming they both belong to the same category, the MJ-12
documents are a cleverer hoax than the Donation of Constantine.
But on matters of provenance, vested interest and lexicographic
inconsistencies, they have much in common.
A cover-up to keep knowledge of extraterrestrial life or alien
abductions almost wholly secret for forty-five years, with hundreds
if not thousands of government employees privy to it, is a
remarkable notion. Certainly, government secrets are routinely
kept, even secrets of substantial general interest. But the ostensible
point of such secrecy is to protect the country and its citizens.
Here, though, it's different. The alleged conspiracy of those with
security clearances is to keep from the citizens knowledge of a
continuing alien assault on the human species. If extraterrestrials
really were abducting millions of us, it would be much more than a
matter of national security. It would affect the security of all
human beings everywhere on Earth. Given such stakes, is it
plausible that no one with real knowledge and evidence, in nearly
200 nations, would blow the whistle, speak out and side with the
humans rather than the aliens?
Since the end of the Cold War NASA has been flailing about,
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