Born of an illicit affair between a Catholic priest and a housemaid outside Sydney, Australia, Serghetti was filled with shame as a child, according to former Vanity Fair contributor Jay Peckman in his unauthorized biography The Nike Nun: She Just Does It. "She grew up among sordid whispers and hated her father, who denied his patrimony to the end and died a drunkard," Peckman claims. "She silenced the whispers by pledging sexual purity at age 12, excelling in her study of linguistics, and joining a convent at 15. In short, she became a supersaint."

During those years the young, glamorous nun made a lifetime’s worth of enemies in the petroleum, timber and biomedical industries — anyone whom she says "puts profits ahead of people, animals or the environment."

Such was the case in the late 1990s when she successfully helped local Aymara tribes in Bolivia stop Dr. Conrad Yeats, the controversial American archeologist, from dragging the bottom of Lake Titicaca in search of a lost city. She had accused him of "raping the land" and desecrating sacred sites "for the sake of his personal obsession."

Her stellar rise within the Catholic Church came to an abrupt end two years ago, however, when she renounced her vows after the Vatican refused to pay its water bills, prompting the world press to dub her “Mother Earth.”

Now Dr. Serghetti is on a mission to determine if American military activities in Antarctica are posing a threat to the environment and thus violating the international Antarctic Treaty. Ironically, it is Dr. Yeats and his foster father, USAF Gen. Griffen Yeats, who are spearheading the American expedition.

But members of the archeological community in the Near East point out that Serghetti is also one of the Vatican’s top linguists and often does pro bono work for her former employer. That leads some to believe that Rome doesn’t buy the U.S. explanation that it is salvaging a Mars module lost during an ill-fated training mission in the late 1960s.

Serghetti first made waves as a linguist in the late 1990s when she presented a universal translator software application at a United Nations Earth Summit. Building on the work of Bolivian mathematician Ivan Buzman de Rojas, Serghetti used the ancient Aymara language of the Andes to translate English into more than 26 languages.

Since then the U.S. National Security Agency has been trying to get its hands on Serghetti's system, according to one codebreaker from Britain’s MI-6 intelligence branch who tried and failed to recruit Serghetti. “The Aymara language is so pure that the NSA suspects it didn't just evolve like other languages but was constructed from scratch,” the MI-6 source said.

In fact, the earliest Aymara myth says that after the Great Flood, strangers attempted to build a city on Lake Titicaca—Tiahuanaco with its great Temple of the Sun—but suddenly abandoned it and disappeared.

According to legend, they came from the lost island paradise of "Aztlan," the Aztec version of Atlantis. "In other words," said one Meso-American linguist, speaking on condition of anonymity, "Sister Serghetti may well know the language of the Atlanteans."