Conspiracy number da da da

As a scientist, I'm both fascinated and astonished by the deluge of questions from people who are genuinely frightened and, apparently, unable to distinguish astronomical fact from fiction. They're watching YouTube videos and visiting slick Web sites with nothing in their skeptical toolkit, or to quote Carl Sagan no "baloney detector." Now a blockbuster disaster film called "2012" is set for release in the summer of 2009, and the commercial enterprise is clearly trying to cash in on people's concern (perhaps contributing to their fear as well).

We're all gonna die from Planet X. Boy, now that's a complex name.

So, if you read on Nibiru and the aliens, sorry Scientologists, you're still wrong even with aliens, you'll found out we will be conquered. again.

Supposedly aliens popped on over to Earth when it was closer and grabbed some homo-erectus and fused alien DNA making -- homo sapiens. Why? They needed a work force to dig for gold.

Now, let me get this straight: apart from the obvious, it's wrong factor, let me go logically

aliens have the capability of much-easier than we do planetary travel. They are skilled enough with genetics to impart smartness onto the dumber primates. They can't build probes and robots?

Dumb old humans can send probes to Mars to take soil samples and analyze them. We can build machines and robots to dig deep into our own planet. We can't manage interplanetary travel and we don't know enough about genetics to do much more than tinker with bio-luminescence. Where is the logic in superior beings who can't make machines?

I'm thinking the conspiracy theorists are getting dumber.