On November 11, 2009 – now 10 years ago – Jesuit Catholic Priest Jose Gabriel Funes, then the Director of The Pontifical Observatory of the Roman Catholic Church, publicly announced that: “In light of the now-on-going discovery of more and more Exo-planets, right here in our Milky Way Galaxy, it is now clear that our human family is going to be discovering the existence of ‘life’ elsewhere in our universe much sooner than this had ever previously been expected. For this reason, the time had now arrived for our human family to begin the very serious discussion of the philosophical and theological questions that will be posed to our human family by the discovery of ‘life’ elsewhere in our universe.”

Shortly after this public statement, issued from The Vatican’s Official Press Office with the full official consent of The Roman Catholic Church, the former General Counsel of the United States Jesuit Order’s NATIONAL OFFICE OF SOCIAL MINISTRY in Washington, DC, Harvard-trained Attorney Daniel Sheehan (the 1994 Legal Counsel for Dr. John Mack, the Chairman of Harvard University Medical School’s Department of Clinical Psychiatry who wrote ABDUCTION: HUMAN ENCOUNTERS WITH ALIENS) before a Harvard University Board of Inquiry, met with Father Funes and confirmed that The Church, in Father Funes’ November 11th, 2009 Official Statement, was referring to what he identified as “another highly-intelligent and highly technologically developed – but distinctly NON-human – species right here in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Upon that notice, Attorney Sheehan founded THE NEW PARADIGM INSTITUTE, (now The New Paradigm COLLEGE on the shores of 18-mile-long Clear Lake in North-Central California, 100 miles north of San Francisco), where he will be engaging Astro-Physicists & Astro-Biologists, Public Scholars, Academicians;
Political Scientists, Sociologists, Social Psychologists, Church Officials, Political Office-Holders, Journalists, Businesspersons, and just Average People, to undertake and to participate in this requested “serious discussion of the philosophical and theological questions that will be posed to our human family by the discovery of ‘life’ elsewhere in our universe” …as well as the Public Policy, Sociological, Social Psychological, and Socio-Political questions that will be posed by this “discovery.”

THIS very discussion will commence in Attorney Sheehan’s Workshop that he will be hosting at the 2020 Session of CONTACT IN THE DESERT. But he will, in his Public Presentation at Contact in the Desert, set forth the outlines of this discussion and provide an update on the status of these discussions at this
time, inviting those who are interested in participating in this discussion to join him in his later Workshop.