By
Robbie Graham
Just as you thought the Ancient-Astronaut-inspired Prometheus couldn’t get any more
‘UFOey,’ a new featurette for the movie reveals that the alien planet to which
the human characters travel to meet their makers is none other than Zeta(2)
Reticuli.
In the featurette, director Ridley
Scott says: "The planet where they go is called Zeta(2) Reticuli, and what they
find there is an establishment that is not what they expected it to be,” adding,
"this story kind of walks around the truth of what there may be out there... It
presents some big questions."
Zeta Reticuli, as
any self-respecting UFO buff knows, is a binary star system in the constellation of Reticulum located
approximately 39 light-years from Earth. The UFO buff knows this because Zeta
Reticuli is also thought by many to be the home system of the so-called “Grey”
aliens – an idea that has its roots in the 1961 Hill abduction incident in
which Betty and Barney Hill were allegedly taken aboard an extraterrestrial
spacecraft in rural New Hampshire and subjected to medical tests. It was the
first UFO abduction account to gain widespread media attention and led to
several books (the most recent of which is Stanton Friedman and Kathleen
Marden's Captured!), a TV
movie and innumerable film and TV
references.
When the Hills underwent
regression hypnosis a couple of years after their abduction experience, Betty
recalled being shown a star map by the ETs, which she later sketched from memory
at the urging of her psychiatrist. That star map was later interpreted as a
depiction of the Zeta Reticuli star system and quickly entered UFO lore. Zeta
Reticuli would also be cited in later years as being home to the Greys in
connection with Project Serpo and by Area 51 “whistleblower,”
Bob
Lazar.
 |
| Betty Hill’s sketch
of the star map. She says she was told that the heavy lines
on the map marked regular trade routes, while the broken lines showed various space expeditions. |
With the release of Prometheus this June, Zeta Reticuli
is set to break out of the often unfathomable worlds of science and UFOlogy and
burst like an alien from a blood-soaked chest into global
pop-culture.
