Please Double Check My Latin

 

So this is the new seal for the division of the Pentagon that will be investigating UFOs. Now, we, the people, invested in SETI for decades, listening to anything we could hear and trying to make it into intelligent life trying to contact us--without success. Then Congress defunded it, and they found some rich millionaires to dump their money into. (Good for them!) But now we have to start the UFO thing again. Let's ignore the fact that no actual documented UFOs occurred until after the 1950s when we, the people, had invented all sorts of airplanes. Let's also ignore the fact that the videos of "UFOs" that were "declassified" all look like film anomalies to me. I'm sorry. I couldn't stop myself from rolling my eyes while I watched. 

But this post isn't about any of that really. This post is about the seal of the Pentagon's new "UFO division." That's right--your taxpayer dollars back at work trying to figure out why these trained filmographers--or rather trained pilots or army guys or whomever else turned on the camera--managed to capture some weird specks of dus...I mean UFOs on their film. This is about Latin.

Now the seal says at the top: "universum mutao est." No capital letters, but definitely a period at the end. I took the image from the official government website. I have seen Latin in all capitals (sometimes with a dot floating in the middle of the line for a period or even between words, and with normal capitals and end punctuation, but I have never seen it with all lowercase AND a period at the end?!

Now, universum is easy--that means sort of a neuter universe. But what in the world (or in the universe) is mutao est???!!! I think they were trying to do "is changing???" But, and I admit my Latin is a little rusty, I think it should be "universum mutatur" because I am pretty sure there isn't a present continuous in Latin. 

The second part is extremely screwy. It has two "est"s and they are both spelled the same way. I mean "vita nostra" is "our life" because both nouns end the same so we know they need to be together modifying each other. The endings of the words, which should tell us their place in the sentence and which make Latin a whole lot clearer than English, are inexplicably confusing!?!? Now, I have not cheated and tried to look up what they thought they were saying, but I can't for the life of my figure out what the second "nostra" is supposed to be modifying either. Cogitationes is a verb that means "we thinking" as it is written, but they seem to be using it as a noun? Facere is "to do", so that gives me "our life" and then "is that we thinking our to do is" if I translate the rest of the words in order. If I follow the endings, technically, the second "our" should also be at the front because there is no other noun I can find that it could modify? Our our life is that we thinking to do is." 

The universe might be changing, but I am pretty sure the wording on the seal really needs to change. I usually do not have trouble reading Latin, even though I am a little rusty, but this makes no sense to me. Maybe there is a Latin teacher out there somewhere who could explain it.