The aliens aren’t coming. They’re already here.

So say 20,000 (and increasing every day) “esoterics” gathering near the village of Bugarach, France. According to one of them, a former teacher named Jean (pronounced, in that irritating way the French have, Zhawnh) who lives in a yurt in the forest (you read it here first), the aliens are inside Pic de Bugarach, a sacred mountain near the village. Esoterics reportedly believe that the mountain is home to a race of alien beings who (a) like to sail their spaceships on a huge interior mountain lake and (b) will emerge to rescue the gathered humans and transport them to a new civilization.

Just so you know, here is the mountain in question:

(Photo by Thierry Strub, 14 November 2007. Used under the terms of Wikipedia’'s Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but it all has something to do with the fact that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, and certain people have decided that the end of the world will occur on that date. I mean, the Mayans have never been wrong before, have they??

Here (3:14) is a segment that aired on CNN.

“The apocalypse we believe in is the end of a certain world and the beginning of another, a new spiritual world,” Zhawnh said, refusing to give his last name because of the increasing local controversy. “The year 2012 is the end of a cycle of suffering,” he said, adding that Bugarach is “one of the major chakras of the earth, a place devoted to welcome the energies of tomorrow.”

As Bill Cosby once said in a skit about Noah when God told him it was going to rain for 40 days and 40 nights, “Riiight.”

The next step will be up to the aliens.