The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [46]
There are many cases in human history of a similar character -where a document of dubious provenance suddenly appears carrying information of great import which strongly supports the case of those who have made the discovery. After careful and in some cases courageous investigation the document is proved to be a hoax. There is no difficulty in understanding the motivation of the hoaxers. A more or less typical example is the book of Deuteronomy - discovered hidden in the Temple in Jerusalem by King Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reformation struggle, found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views.
Another case is what is called the Donation of Constantine. Constantine the Great is the Emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The city of Constantinople (now Istanbul), for over a thousand years the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was named after him. He died in the year . 335. In the ninth century, references to the Donation of Constantine suddenly appeared in Christian writings; in it Constantine wills to his contemporary, Pope Sylvester I, the entire Western Roman Empire, including Rome. This little gift, so the story went, was partly in gratitude for Sylvester’s cure of Constantine’s leprosy. By the eleventh century, popes were regularly referring to the Donation of Constantine to justify their claims to be not only the ecclesiastical but also the secular rulers of central Italy. Through the Middle Ages the Donation was judged genuine both by those who supported and by those who opposed the temporal claims of the Church.
Lorenzo of Valla was one of the polymaths of the Italian
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