This is a long way from Galileo!

There have been some bizarre guesses, often involving little green men. Consolmagno recalls that a British group calling itself the Catholic Truth Society once asked him if he would write a book about the official Church teaching on aliens. “But we’ve never found any,” he says. “How could we have any teaching about them?” (He did eventually write a forty-eight-page pamphlet for the society, in which he tackled the question “Is Jesus Christ’s redemptive sacrifice sufficient for the whole Universe?”) Another time, the Chicago Tribune referred to the Mount Graham astronomers as “Vatican astrologers.” Consolmagno jokes that he still isn’t sure if that was a typo, or if they really thought he and his colleagues were casting horoscopes for the Pope.