According to a new study, six in 10 now believe it’s only a matter of time before Earth becomes the target of an alien invasion. “UFO sightings are rising, along with belief in an alien presence,” says Nick Pope, the former head of UFO investigation for the British government’s Ministry of Defence [featured in upcoming documentary THE GREAT DELUSION], in a statement. “On World UFO Day, and with a report on UFOs having been sent to the U.S. Congress, the topic has well and truly come out of the fringe and into the mainstream. Until recently, people who believed in UFOs were regarded as conspiracy theorists. With pilots, radar operators and intelligence community personnel coming forward and speaking about their experiences, the subject is now being taken seriously within the government,” Pope continues. “We should remember that the sceptics have to be right every single time, whereas the believers only have to be right once. Are we alone or not in the universe? Are we being visited by aliens? These are some of the biggest and most profound questions we can ask, and now we’re closer than ever to getting answers…

Welcome to a new religion. As many observers have noted, staying safe has become a religion. “Safetyism,” as it is sometimes called, like all religions, places what it values — in this case, being safe — above other values. Safetyism explains the willingness of Americans to give up their most cherished values — including liberty — in the name of safety for the last year and a half. Millions of Americans not only gave up their right to go to work, earn a living, attend church or synagogue, and visit friends and relatives, but they even gave up their right to visit dying relatives and friends. One can assume that nearly every person recorded as having died of COVID-19 died without having a single loved one at their bedside from the moment they entered a hospital until their death. The acceptance of such cruelty — irrational and unscientific cruelty, one might add — can only be explained by the failure of generations of schools and parents to teach liberty, while successfully teaching the worship of safety. If your father had to die alone, it was worth it for the sake of safety; if your mother had to be in what amounted to solitary confinement in a nursing home for more than a year, that, too, was worth it for the sake of safety. And, of course, if political leaders…

You don’t have to be Southern to love fried chicken, buttered biscuits, sausage gravy, sweet tea or any of the other fried and fat- or sugar-laden foods typical of this American region. But a new study found eating a steady diet of traditional Southern food can make you 46% more likely to die from a sudden cardiac death — that’s when the heart suddenly stops — than people who don’t often eat those foods. Sudden cardiac death is a common cause of death and “accounted for 1 in every 7.5 deaths in the United States in 2016, or nearly 367,000 deaths,” according to an American Heart Association statement. When this type of heart attack occurs, the AHA says, death typically comes within an hour. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, also examined the impact of eating a Mediterranean-style diet on the risk of sudden cardiac death…

It is important for Christians to know and understand the image of God for three distinct reasons. First, the image of God has been among the most consequential ideas in all of human history. Even atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche or the modern-day philosopher Luc Ferry, have acknowledged that our ideas about human dignity, human equality and human value were not present across cultures and civilizations, but were introduced to the world in Christianity. Why? Because of its core belief that humans were made in the image and likeness of God. Second, the image of God is central to a truly Christian worldview. Scripture has been given to us in a grand, sweeping narrative: the story of creation to new creation, from the heavens and earth to the new heavens and new earth. And one of the central characters in the Christian story is the image of God. We see this right away in Genesis 1, in which God creates the heavens and the earth; then He creates His image-bearers to rule over them in His place and for His glory. Finally, the image of God is critical if we are going to understand the issues and challenges of our day. The most significant challenges we face in our culture are…

An engineer and amateur codebreaker believes that he has cracked the final two scrambled messages of the Zodiac Killer, one of which appears to reveal his identity. In the late 1960s, heading into the early 1970s, a serial killer going by the pseudonym “Zodiac” murdered at least five people in California. During his spree, the killer sent taunting messages to the press written through a cipher, where letters are substituted for different letters or numbers (or in the case of the Zodiac killer, a series of symbols). The first letters were sent to three papers in the Bay Area, each containing a different part of the cipher. The papers printed the ciphers (or cryptograms) as Zodiac threatened to kill again if his instructions weren’t followed…