Extraterrestrial life and, erm, chess

"I have decided to write a book about my contact with extraterrestrials, and it will be published in the United States in 2011. In it, I will speak of my personal experience communicating with extraterrestrials and my view on the question of extraterrestrial civilizations".

David Ike?

Nope. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the President of the World Chess Federation! He thinks chess was given to humans by aliens, too ...

While on ET, NASA are holding a News Conference on an Astrobiology Discovery, tomorrow (December 2nd), and the line up looks pretty impressive. Exciting!

However, before you start practicing your Vulcan hand sign, in other news a scientist claims that UFO sightings can be explained by "ball lightning" and other atmospheric phenomena.

I once theologised about aliens, in dialogue with Kung's book, Der Anfang aller Dinge, here. But another thought springs to mind: Moltmann wrote: ‘[c]reation is not yet finished ... man is not the meaning of evolution’ (Gott in der Schöpfung, 204, 205). So, is it a surprise if anything has ‘out-evolved’ us Homo sapiens elsewhere in the universe? Of course, if NASA has found a pile of bacteria on some rocks, we are not necessarily looking at a civilisation that could help me refine my chess opening repertoire.