Despite my reservations about taking on more freelance work, I decided that the chance to interview people who had purportedly seen "glowing beings" who were probably not but might be quasi-immortal "gods" returning to society from "somewhere" was not something I could pass up. I wrote back to Mark, the guy who had initially contacted me about the job, indicating as much, but I told him that before committing completely, I had some questions, also. 
Specifically, I wanted to know more about where these gods were supposedly coming back from and how his organization distinguished reports of gods from those of ghosts, aliens, and other "paranormal activity." 
"That's a good question," he wrote back, "and as you can imagine, it's very difficult to make these kinds of delineations with absolute certainty. It's one of the reasons we hire people like you to conduct interviews, to make distinctions and to ascertain credibility. If you ultimately decide to work with us, we can give you a much more intensive orientation into the theories -- and I use the plural because there are many and they are all obviously speculative -- about where the gods once lived, where they went (and why), and where (and why) they might be coming back. For now, I can give you the short version, which is that, in many of the oldest writings in the world -- the kinds of books and scrolls that have been found in the pyramids and are kept in secret, locked rooms under the Louvre, the Vatican, or the Library of Congress and so forth -- there are references to superhuman 'people' who resembled mortals but who, in addition to living exceedingly long and possibly immortal lives, exuded a kind of luminescent glow. You can imagine a flower petal in the sun, is one way I've heard it described, translucent to light but not so translucent that you could see someone's organs or what have you. You can probably imagine what I'm talking about. Anyway, what's interesting is the consistency of these descriptions across ancient cultures ranging from Greece to Egypt to China to South America and so on. Traditionally, most modern observers have attributed the stories and 'myths' in which the gods appeared to any number of imaginary factors: 1) the personification of weather events or emotions, 2) the desire to attribute other inexplicable phenomena (death, disease, seasons, the stars, the growth of crops, etc.) 3) the attempt to memorialize the exploits of a human (so-and-so killed two men in a battle, which over a few generations evolves into a godlike warrior destroying hundreds with his bare hands or whatever. (I'm sure you get the idea.) But the thing about these 'myths' -- when you look at them in sum -- is that they're incredibly detailed and complicated: to give you one example, there are something like four thousand (4000) Greek 'gods' spanning some twenty generations. This level of detail and complexity has led some to speculate that the myths were not fabricated -- not even in a collective sense -- but instead reflected something real. From what I understand, most people who support this theory think that the 'actual gods' did not live with the Greeks (or the Egyptians or whoever else) but actually lived in an even earlier society that predates any of the ancient cultures with which we're familiar, a society in which gods and mortals co-existed until -- for reason that are not exactly clear -- the gods decided to leave, at which point the mortals spread out all over the world and started their/our own societies/cultures, which tended to be still infused with the idea of the gods (relative to our current situation) for the simple reason that they were closer in time to the actual gods. Then, as time passed, you also have the rise of monotheism and 'God' and science, which all makes the idea of immortals seem pretty outlandish, to say the least, so that there's a tendency to look back and say 'these cultures were less evolved because they believed in gods' which might or might not be the case if the belief was grounded in reality. (Whether that even matters is a philosophical discussion we can save for later.) And now there's the fact that, in recent decades, increasing numbers of people, as I've already told you, have described seeing or (in some cases) talking to 'people' who seem to have this same glow, which has led others to speculate that they are coming back from wherever they went fifteen thousand years ago. I should mention that many of these eyewitness accounts -- or at least the ones we're interested in -- come from people who do not in any way identify as 'pagans' or have any part of their identity wrapped up in proving the existence of gods. (Because those people exist, too, but -- no judgment -- just don't make for credible witnesses for obvious reasons.) I hope that answers your questions to some extent, with the understanding that there's a lot more to say." 
I agreed that this was a good start. I also thought about the spring crocus I had seen this morning on my weekly run through Fort Tryon Park. Could people really glow in the same way? What about cats? (I thought about Clio walking through the sun.) 
I did have one other serious question. 
I wanted to know why Mark and his organization were so interested in the gods. What exactly was their 'agenda'? 
"That's also pretty complicated," he said, "but in broad strokes: 1) if the gods aren't 'real' -- which I think is a fair assumption, because we have no proof to the contrary -- the increasing numbers of reports raises questions about why. Is it because people are 'losing faith' in society? Do people want to believe in 'something'? Is it that the traditional/mainstream religions are losing their appeal? Or is that governments and corporations are somehow creating perceptions of belief among people, manipulating them (us) for their own (let's just say nefarious) reasons. Whatever's going on, we want to figure it out, because accurate knowledge is the foundation of political change and resistance; or 2) if these immortal beings are 'real,' we want to know where they are, and figure out if there's a way to communicate with them. Right now there's a lot of 'cutting edge' science surrounding the genetics of aging/immortality -- gene editing and so forth -- so it's pretty easy to imagine what would happen if the wrong people got their hands on one of these gods. We've all seen ET: there would be labs and experiments and a lot of misery for purposes that would probably be unclear at best and at worse could be highly undemocratic and lead to 'immortality' or longevity applications/treatments that -- if the recent trajectory of medicine is any indication -- would be available only to those who can afford it. There's already a growing correlation between income/wealth and life spans around the world: can you imagine what would happen if people can 'pay' to extend their lives? Again, I'm going to cut myself short but there are social, ethical, and political ramifications to the science of longevity that we believe should be discussed in a reasonably democratic manner." 
I told him that everything he said made sense to me. I could relate to the desire to believe in 'something' -- even if I couldn't quite define it -- just as I could understand how the profit/power motive of governments and corporations seemed to have reached an imbalance that was destabilizing our society in ways that advances in science and medicine might exacerbate if used improperly. 
If anything it made me more interested in the project, because I hadn't considered the larger ramifications, although they seemed obvious enough in retrospect. 
I asked him what would happen next in terms of my involvement in the project. 
He said that he was going away for a few weeks but that he would be in touch when he got back so that we could 'discuss a plan.' In the meantime, he suggested that I continue to read or re-read through the materials he had sent to me a week earlier, with the expectation that I would begin to recognize certain 'flags' or similarities between these stories (or inconsistencies, as the case might be). 
I told him that I was looking forward to hearing more in due course. 
I was always going on a short trip to Florida to visit my parents, and I didn't expect to have much time to think to study or think about the gods. 
"You should keep your eyes open," he told me. "You never know what you're going to see." 
I agreed. 
After what he told me, it would be hard to keep them shut. 
