The Pope: I'd Baptize Aliens If They Asked

The latest person to speak totally earnestly on the subject of aliens? None other than Pope Francis. Yup: He stated in his weekly homily Monday that Pope Francis would totally baptize aliens if they asked. Extraterrestrials were brought up as part of a wider discussion on acceptance and inclusion, during which Pope Francis said Catholicism was a church of "open doors." Clearly!

Pope Francis used a Bible story to illustrate his point. According to the Bible, Peter was criticized by the Christians of Jerusalem for making contact with a community of “unclean” pagans who wanted to convert to Christianity. Peter eventually persuades his followers to accept the pagans into Christianity, saying, "If then God gave them the same gift He gave to us when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be able to hinder God?"

Like Peter, Pope Francis believes that Christians should accept the Holy Spirit no matter how "unthinkable" and "unimaginable" it seemed:

That was unthinkable. If — for example — tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them... And one says, 'But I want to be baptized!' What would happen?"

Well, some baptism would happen, apparently. The pope's alien analogy may seem a bit odd in the context of the Catholic Church, but he's not the first public figure to have talked about aliens. In fact, many of the world's most prominent politicians have done more than use them as metaphors — some totally believe in them.

Bill Clinton

During an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in April, former President Bill Clinton told the host that he "wouldn't be surprised" if aliens existed. He also admitted that he had aides research Area 51, Nevada, "to make sure there was no alien down there." He asked for the investigation at the beginning of his second term, after Independence Day came out and as the 50th anniversary of the alleged UFO crash in Roswell, N.M., neared. "I had all the Roswell papers reviewed — everything," he told Kimmel.

President Clinton even got scientific: "In the last two years, more than 20 planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their suns and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life, so it makes it increasingly less likely that we’re alone."

Jimmy Carter

In 1973, then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter filed a report with aerial phenomena investigators that he had witnessed an unidentified flying object in 1969. Carter described the object as "self-luminous." He said, "[We were ]standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunchroom, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn’t have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was."

Some investigators believed that Carter had seen the planet Venus.

Ronald Reagan

A year after Carter filed his report, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan witnessed a similar flying object from a Cessna Citation plane along with three other passengers. The unusual object was a steady light which would elongate and go from a steady cruising speed to a rapid acceleration.

Reagan told The Wall Street Journal, "We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens." He, like Carter, would go on to become president of the United States.

Fife Symington

Ten years after witnessing the mass UFO sighting known as the Phoenix Lights in 1997, former Governor of Arizona Fife Symington detailed the experience to the press. "I witnessed a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona," he recounted.

I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen.... I now know that I am not alone. There are many high-ranking military, aviation and government officials who share my concerns.... We want the government to stop putting out stories that perpetuate the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth conventional terms. Investigations need to be re-opened, documents need to be unsealed and the idea of an open dialogue can no longer be shunned.

Dennis Kucinich

In 2007, former Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich was forced to address that time he allegedly saw an UFO near Shirley MacLaine's house in 1982 after the information came out in the actress's book Sage-ing While Age-ing. "It was an unidentified flying object, OK? It's, like, it's unidentified," Kucinich said during the Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia. "I saw something."

He then quipped, "You have to keep in mind that more — that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush's presidency." Burn!

Dwight D. Eisenhower

In 2012, a former government consultant spoke out to confirm the rumors that 34th president Dwight D. Eisenhower had three secret meetings with extraterrestrials. Timothy Good told Frank Skinner on his BBC2 program that the president had sent "telepathic messages" to the aliens to arrange the meetings at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

And to underscore the truthfulness of the story, Good added, "Aliens have made both formal and informal contact with thousands of people throughout the world from all walks of life." So in other words, Eisenhower's three meetings are really NBD.

Paul Hellyer and Simon Parkes

Last year, not one, but two politicians spoke about the existence of aliens. First, Canada’s former Defense Minister Paul Hellyer was caught on video talking about aliens with six American congressmen. Among his claims are that there are at least four types of alien species, and they have been visiting earth for thousands of years; two of the species are working with the United States; and a cabal formed by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, and The Trilateral Commission, the international banking cartel, the oil cartel, and select members of the military are planning to create one world government, and they are the ones who are keeping alien evidence a secret.

But if you think that sounds crazy, nothing beats Simon Parkes, a city councillor from the UK. Parkes claims to have been abducted on to an alien craft, that his "real mother" is a 9-foot-tall alien with eight fingers, and that he's fathered an alien child with an extraterrestrial he calls the Cat Queen.