Are there intelligent beings on other planets? And will we ever have an encounter, close or otherwise, with them?

"Just as there is a multiplicity of life on Earth," he said in an interview, "so there could be other beings created by God" on distant worlds. This involves no contradiction to Christian faith, Funes said, "because one cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God."

Many other thinkers have concluded that the existence of a Creator implies other inhabited worlds. For instance, Thomas Paine wrote that "the Creator made nothing in vain," and therefore other worlds must be inhabited.

But the skeptical Paine drew a conclusion he saw as a blow to Christian doctrine: "And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is ... called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of deaths, with scarcely a momentary interval of life."

On the other hand, astronomer Funes suggested that other worlds may never have fallen into sin, and thus need no redemption. We'll leave that debate to the theologians. But most religious thought seems at least compatible with the notion of life on other planets.

Mormon theology, for instance, has long been hospitable to the idea of distant worlds inhabited by intelligent beings.

Many -- both of religion and of science -- have concluded that with billions of galaxies, each with billions of suns, intelligent life must have evolved somewhere else besides here. In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake estimated that our galaxy alone had 10,000 advanced civilizations based on the probability of just the right kinds of stars being orbited by just the right kinds of planets with just the right chemical compositions.

But will we ever encounter them? Perhaps some of us have.

This week the British government began releasing its files on unidentified flying objects. Most appeared to be like the UFOs on TV and in movies: saucers with blinking lights. The Defense Ministry had explanations for 90 percent of the sightings, including airplanes, clouds and planets. "Venus is popular," one official said.

The other 10 percent, however, remain unexplained. Some of the reports are from Air Force personnel, civilian pilots and air-traffic controllers, all of whom are trained observers of events in the sky and people we expect are sober most of the time while doing their jobs. They are also leery of reporting a UFO for fear of ridicule, which means the reports they did make likely rise to a significant level of seriousness.

But how probable is it that anyone could journey here? By Earth standards, not very. The nearest planet we know of that might conceivably harbor life is about 20.5 light years away -- 120 trillion miles. Traveling at today's rocket speeds, a creature would need 500,000 years to get here. And most of the few other known planets found outside our galaxy are many times farther away.

Maybe more advanced technologies exist. Extraterrestrials -- especially those who haven't "fallen into sin" -- may have spent less time fighting and more time advancing their civilizations. Earthbound scientists have even established the theoretical possibility of faster-than-light travel. And if that's possible, so, perhaps, is movement through a black hole -- who knows?

Here the cynics will pipe up that if an extraterrestrial species were smart enough to invent interstellar or even intergalactic space travel, why would they bother visiting us? Good question. Perhaps we're interesting creatures, if only in a clinical sense.

Of course there are the spoilsports who doubt that life exists anywhere else. Scientists Peter D. Ward and Donald C. Brownlee in their book "Rare Earth" point out the odds against the formation of another planet that can support life. But what do they know? Their whole thesis is based on life as we know it, and there may be alternatives.

So let's cut to the chase. If we were visited by beings from another planet, what would we say to them?

Vatican astronomer Funes suggests an answer. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'?"

Sure, why not? It even has a certain Utah ring to it: "Welcome, Brother E.T.; would you like some green Jell-O with carrots?"

"Meflikitronk sloggledor!"

ZZZAAAAP!!

We'll take the laser liquidation as "no thanks."

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What do you think?