John Keel, the Mothman and Me

Things have been pretty hectic around here and it's all I can do to keep on top of the blog. So when John Keel died I didn't write about it, since I was processing what Keel's work meant to me. Most of this is through osmosis, since I've only read The Mothman Prophecies, which I loved. This was following repeated viewings of the deliriously unfaithful 2002 film adaptation, but the book hit me with a strange kind of numinosity. But you can't poke around the World of Weird without running into Keel time and again. and his work has certainly had its effect on me.

So in that spirit, let me pay tribute to the late John Keel by pulling out some amusing Mothman syncs from my personal files. All of this kind of crept up on me when I was doing research on the topic when the 2002 film was released. I had only a passing familiarity with the topic before but found that in a semiotic sense at least, ol' Mothie and I seem to travel in similar circles.

Let's start with what is considered the first solid eyewitness account of the Point Pleasant Mothman from 1966:

November 14, 1966 - A gentleman by the name of Newell Partridge was home watching television one night around 10:30 P.M. when the TV picture turned to static and a loud whining noise started. Bandit, Newell Partridge's German Shepherd, was on the porch when he began howling towards the barn. Partridge shined his flash light towards the barn and picked up the glow of two red pulsating eyes like bike reflectors. The dog ran towards the eyes snarling and Newell went inside and locked his door. He was very shaken and terrified.

The next morning, Newell went outside to find Bandit, but all he saw of the dog were a lot of tracks that looked as if the dog had been chasing his tail, something the dog had never done before. Bandit was never seen again.

This story caught my eye back when I was researching all of this because Newell is a variation on Knowles, the partridge was traditionally a symbol of Christ, and I was born in 1966. And from then on Mothman connections would show up at pivotal points throughout my career, such as it is...

My first job in what you might call the entertainment business was working as a store manager and house artist for New England Comics. When I worked there it was just a hole in the wall in the Patriot Building in Quincy, across the street from the "Church of the Presidents," the Unitarian Church were John and John Quincy Adams were buried.


NEC started a publishing line a few years after I worked there and their cashcow was The Tick, created by future TV producer Ben Edlund. And, of course, The Tick's sidekick was a moth-man.


Edlund quit comics for the greener pastures of TV, landing a gig on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (as well as co-writing the atrocity men call Titan AE with John "The Nines" August). After leaving Buffy, Edlund signed on the Fox series, Point Pleasant. However, this was a different Point Pleasant (set in Secret Sun stomping-ground New Jersey) and featured the brain-meltingly gorgeous Elisabeth Harnois as a Manga-eyed devil's daughter (Harnois also appeared in the Strangers with Candy movie and her next project is as an alien in Mars Needs Moms, an animated adaptation of Berkeley Breathed's 2007 children's book).

When I finally did my own comic series, Halo: An Angel's Story (published by Sirius), I was smart enough to get myself a lawyer at the time, the incredibly awesome Jeff Rose. One of Jeff's other clients was Doug Tennapel, creator of the Earthworm Jim video game. Doug actually did a movie called Mothman, released in 2000 but filmed (in Point Pleasant) around the time I was working on H:AAS.

I met Doug in 1997 at the San Diego Comicon when I was pitching my new comic series, Rivets & Ruby. Doug and his team were stunned when I showed them the pitch material because they had been working on a character almost identical to Rivets. I'm not sure if he ever saw the light of day. Doug also does comix for Top Shelf, who published Comic Book Artist when I was working on it.

As mentioned before, this string continued when Crossroads jerked me around for a few months with the H:AAS film project. Crossroads' ad superstar Mark Pellington later directed the film of The Mothman Prophecies, which is more an X-Files adaptation than a John Keel one (funnily enough, TMMP co-star Will Patton played an "Ox Knowles" on Ryan's Hope in one of his earliest roles). There are some scattered syncs thoughout the TMP movie but I won't bore you with those.

Anyhow, all of the Mothmany goodness came to a head with the publication of Our Gods Wear Spandex, since my editor (and friend) on that project, Brenda, is actually from Point Pleasant, WV and remembers not only the Mothman flap, but the Silver Bridge collapse quite well. Brenda also landed me the X-Files book gig, which of course has its own Mothman (and MIB) tie-in.

And the cherry on top of the Mothman sundae is the frequent guest appearances on this blog by the esteemed Loren Coleman, a good friend of Keel's and the inheritor of his neo-Fortean mantle.

So what does it all mean? Well, let's just say it's all grist for the mill and incorporating (or at least considering) some of Keel's theories has been a major boon to my own research. Keel is one of a generation of Forteans who became exasperated with the UFO phenomenon, since whoever's up there doesn't really care much about our theories about them. But a few theories Keel put out there have become increasingly important to my own speculations, which we'll be looking at in the future...



PS- Heh. Well, I just went upstairs to take a little break and picked up my copy of Bruce Rux's Architects of the Underworld and it opens up to page 153, which ends with this sentence "what are we to make of such creatures as the 'hairy dwarves' or the infamous Mothman?" Then as I came back into the office that little fella you see in that photo (taken with my crummy old cellphone) flew in with me. Synchromysticism on demand- you gotta love it...

Why is the Press Ignoring Hollywood's Alien Blitz?

One thing about the entertainment press- they love to spot trends. They love to take a few scattered films or books or records and lump them together as some new sort of cultural phenomenon. You hear the word "boom" thrown around a lot. So we've seen breathless articles in the past about the Latin pop boom (mostly because Ricky Martin had a couple Top 40 hits), the fantasy movie boom, the superhero movie boom, the independent movie boom, the vampire movie boom, the religious movie boom...you name it. More often than not, most of these booms turn out to be busts, or cover story mountains made out of marginally successful molehills.

Heh.

So why aren't we seeing any stories in the press about the alien movie boom? After all, this year we've seen or will see Star Trek, Race to Witch Mountain, Monsters vs Aliens, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Alien Trespass, Knowing, Avatar, Battle for Terra, Planet 51, District Nine and Aliens in the Attic, as well as Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Atlantis, Fringe and a remake of V on television. I'm sure you guys will fill me in on any others I've overlooked.

At what point does this qualify as a boom?

I don't know about you but I haven't seen anything in the press pointing out Hollywood's unprecedented and inexplicable obsession with aliens this year, most especially films dealing with alien contact.

Or to be more specific, films dealing with human/alien coexistence.

I can understand why most media outlets are ignoring the hundreds of UFO sightings so far this year (and not just the lame, lights-in-the-night sightings) but why are the trend-spotters not paying attention to this absolute flood of alien/UFO-themed films?

And what's the impetus behind these films being released this year in the first place? It's really verging on overkill. It's certainly not like the mid 70s or the early 90s when the UFO meme was strongly resonating in the collective unconscious. Most people seem pretty blase about the topic, even if they are gobbling it up in droves at the movies.

Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?

PS- Check out part three of Tim Binnall's interview with Bruce Rux...

PPS- Aliens in the Attic star Ashley Tisdale hails from Deal, NJ, right in the shadow of the old Fort Monmouth of Project Diana fame.

PPPS- From IMDb's top-grossing films of 2009:

250,234,554		Up (2009)
246,331,182		Star Trek (2009)
200,077,255		Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
195,984,055		Monsters vs Aliens (2009)

Must-See TV: Hangar 18 (MASSIVE UPDATE 7/9)

I'm catching up with work after my sick day so I thought I'd pass this old UFO classic that Bruce Rux chats with Tim Binnall about onto you all. From Wikipedia:

Hangar 18 involves a U.F.O. coverup following an incident aboard the space shuttle, whereas an unidentified object is hit by the satellite which the orbiter was tasked with launching into a higher orbit. The space collision kills a fellow astronaut who was in the bay at that time, however, the entire incident is witnessed by astronauts Price and Bancroff.

Upon returning to Earth, both men slowly investigate what they know happened in space — and which the government authorities try their best to hide. The damaged spacecraft however, has been recovered after it is observed making a controlled landing in the Arizona desert...

On board the craft, the technician team makes three discoveries. The first is an unknown woman who awakens in the back of an ambulance screaming (leading moviegoers to believe she may have been an abductee)...

Here's an interesting factoid for you X-Files and Transformers fans...

...symbols found on certain control panels are the same as symbols which reside here on Earth, albeit in ancient places.

Now, here's a fascinating bit of trivia for those of you sensing the story behind the story in some of my recent posts:

Hangar 18 was one of the very few American films to be shown in the Soviet Union, premiering on the 1st TV channel on the New Year night of 1982. Because of general unavailability of films with elements of science fiction and action genre, it achieved enormous popularity among Soviet youth.

Metalheads like Megadeth and Yngwie dug Hangar 18, too

UPDATE: I can't get that last factoid out of my head. Remember, 1982 was when the Cold War began to heat up again and the Soviet government was very much in the control of KGB hardliners like Yuri Andropov, who became Premier that year. I can understand their banning jingoistic American action films, but why exactly Hangar 18 passed muster is a mystery to me.


We've all heard the theories that the UFO business was just a Cold War psyop, meant to create hysteria back and forth across the Iron Curtain or that they were just experimental aircraft invented by the Nazis (the debunkers neglected to tell the cavemen that, though). I've even heard theories that Roswell was cooked up to fool the Soviets into thinking the US got its hands on alien technology.

If any of this was true, then why would the one US action movie the Soviets aired on state TV disseminate that exact same US/ET meme into the minds of impressionable young people? Surely, it would have also inspired UFO hysteria there too, causing security problems in the Soviet police state at a very dangerous time in world history.


But guess what? It wasn't just the Politburo that approved of Hangar 18, it also seems to have received the blessing of NAZCA NASA. The space agency allowed their name, logo and a model of the Space Shuttle to be used in the film. Remember they didn't extend the same courtesy to Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey or for several other films, such as Red Planet.

It turns out NASA is quite picky as to which films they choose to become involved with. From a December 2008 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, written by John Mangels:

Sometimes the question of whether a scientific enterprise should cooperate with Hollywood comes up. NASA gets lots of requests - most often from documentary filmmakers - and tries to be as helpful as possible, said Bert Ulrich of the space agency's public affairs division.

NASA was happy to cooperate with Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys," which depicted three elderly astronauts returning to duty, and went along with the fanciful "Armageddon," where Bruce Willis and two teams of space shuttle astronauts save Earth from an asteroid.

NASA is protective of its famous round red-white-and-blue "meatball" logo, and only allows it to be used in movies whose plots are "feasible fiction," Ulrich said. "If somebody's doing a movie about aliens coming to Earth and attacking the agency, if it's 'out there,' we don't participate," Ulrich said.

That policy must have been devised after the filming of Hangar 18. But there was one particular would-be blockbuster which saw NASA and Hollywood reach an unprecedented level of coziness...

An action adventure due out in March 2000, "Mission to Mars" enjoys a closer partnership with the agency than any film in history, thanks to a new pact the agency has made with Hollywood. The "Space Act Agreement" allows filmmakers to consult astronauts, design experts and scientists – and even use NASA launch facilities – depending on the individual contract.

Jacobson went to NASA four years ago, even before Disney approved the film. Soon after that first meeting, he and the scriptwriters went to NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston to meet with Mars experts.

The producer consulted famed astronauts Story Musgrave and Joe Allen, who worked with the actors to show them how an astronaut works in space. Kathleen Clark, NASA’s senior scientist for the International Space Station, helped the production team decide how the ISS might develop over time.

"We took the design of the International Space Station and then we added to it our own design," Jacobson said.- Space.com

Now, bear in mind that Mission to Mars makes Erich Von Daniken look like a biblical inerrantist in comparison. Very strange film for NASA to have worked so intimately on. But then again, similar in some ways to Hangar 18, isn't it?

New logo of Sunn Classic, unrelated to original company, but still...

Oh, by the way- being made by an independent studio (Sunn Classics, owned by Wilkinson Sword, based in Utah, of all places), this film may not have the best production values, but its script - particularly its methodical depiction of a ruthless political cover-up - is pretty sound. However, UFOs and AAT were a tough sell in the increasingly conservative America of 1980, which saw the religious right on the march, conducting not only book-burnings in the Bible Belt, but record, tape, VHS and Betamax burnings as well.

But the film certainly found an appreciative cult audience- and hit it big in Mother Russia. It just did poorly with those groups singled out by the Brookings UFO report in 1958....

But wait- it gets even stranger. There's a "Hangar 18" on the site of the Flight of Fear roller-coaster, which is located in two different amusement parks, King's Island in Ohio and King's Dominion in Doswell, Virginia, home of the recent UFO-slash-smoke ring brouhaha.

Now that's what I call Synchronicity!

Transformers: Ra vs. Apophis (Part 1)

Grabs courtesy of James Ratte at Accumulating Gravity

OK, I finally saw it. In optimal conditions, no pun intended. It was the 10 PM showing on July 4th, so we literally had the theater all to ourselves. Got a parking spot right outside the front door. The environment is usually very important to me when I'm watching a movie - and this was definitely a movie where I wanted to pay close attention - so the absence of NJ knuckleheads was appreciated.

SPOILER ALERT

Now, I didn't go into this film expecting a masterwork of modern cinema. I've seen all of the bad reviews, so my expectations were low. But the reviews haven't stopped people from swarming into the multiplexes, given that it's earned almost $300 million domestically and twice that worldwide. It's Crystal Skull all over again- everyone busts on it but can't help but see it. More on that later.

I understand a lot of the criticism this film is receiving and I'm not going to argue with it. I will say, however, that it seems to me Michael Bay was going for a live action Anime/Manga approach with this film, particularly with all the kineticism and hyper-goofiness and jerky transitions, as well as the multiplicity of characters running on and off screen without any introduction or exposition. This is the same kind of ADHD storytelling that makes most Anime completely incomprehensible to anyone born before 1990 or so. Perfectly appropriate to the subject matter (in theory, at least) but not necessarily to the live-action format.

The missus and I both agreed that the animation on the robots was truly awesome, and would have been a lot more effective had they kept their damn mouths shut. But they also would have been a lot more frightening, which may have kept younger kids away. But when the Transformers were fighting, the effect was pretty damn impressive.

The film really set off some subconscious bells and whistles. One of my earliest 'secret sun' dreams from my childhood actually had a giant robot stomping through my old neighborhood, and I caught some of that vibe throughout the film. But so much of this movie seemed plucked from my subconscious- and was filled with some pretty startling personal syncs here and there. More on that later, too.

Back to the complaints- I really didn't care for the sound design. Given their size, the Autobots should have had disturbingly mechanical voices drenched in reverb, particularly Optimus Prime. All of the voices were too cartoonish, and made zero sense in the environments these characters were living in. During the battles I also had a hard time keeping track of who was who. It would have been nice to see some color design on the Decepticons, since they all tended to look the same.


OK, enough of that. What about the symbolism? Well, it's as in-your-face as the rest of the movie is. A movie about fighting robots from outer space (especially one that starts out in New Jersey and ends up in Giza) is not going for subtlety. The whole plot revolves around this struggle between the Fallen and Optimus Prime, with a whole host of characters revolving around that. But the conceit of it all centered on resurrection, not only of the Fallen but Optimus himself.

Did I mention this all takes place at Giza?


The whole thing is a Jack Kirby Eternals comic come to life* with the Primes bearing a very strong resemblance to the Celestials, the only difference being that the Celestials would sooner incinerate your solar system than turn into a stupid truck, buddy. Certainly the Tomb of the Primes at Petra strongly resembles the Tomb of the Celestials in my beloved Eternals #1 . None of this should be surprising at all, given that a good chunk of the Transformers' original backstory was worked up at Marvel Comics in the early 80s.

So before we look at the ritual drama lurking just below the surface narrative, let's look at our cast of major characters and their mythic parallels. Of course, I'm going to give the game away (hell, I did with the post's title) but the devil is in the details, isn't it? Be advised that the roles jump around a bit in the film- exactly as they do in the ancient mythology.

• Sam Witwicky plays the part of Osiris (yes, Osiris) before his encounter with the Doctor, and plays the part of Horus thereafter.

Megan Fox, before all of the surgery

• Mikaela plays the part of Hathor in California, Isis in New Jersey and then Hathor again in Giza. Confused? Good.

• Leo Spitz plays the part of Thoth/Hermes.

• Alice (don't ask) plays the part of Nephthys in her role as seducer.

• Seymour Simmons plays the part of Anubis.

• Optimus plays the part of Ra in life, Osiris in death and Ra again when resurrected.

• Megatron plays the part of Set in his post-unification role as the destroyer of Osiris (Prime).

• Jetfire (or "Set-Fire," as I like to call him) plays the part of Set, the ally of Ra.

• Finally, the Fallen plays the part of Apophis, the great serpent who swallows the Sun.

The Fallen- note reptilian appearance and cobra-like hood

Got all that? Well, from there it's simple- The Fallen wants to consume the Sun to power the Decepticons and Optimus Prime and his gang aren't having any of that. Like Apophis, the Fallen is primeval being who exists only to destroy. He battles Optimus Prime, who like Ra is also one of the original gang of space gods. The battle hinges on the Matrix of Leadership, a totem that both revives Optimus and powers the Sun Harvester (and reminds us of the Udjat's role in the battle against Apophis).

The crucial player in the drama is Jetfire, a Decepticon who changes sides and joins the Autobots. This mirrors Set's role (which prefigures the expulsion of the Hyksos, whose primary god was Set) in the battle againt Apophis, albeit a bit retroactively. The voice actor who portrays Jetfire is British, which is usually Hollywood's shorthand for "gay bad guy," but gives him a working-class British accent, which usually signals a good guy.


Sam is Osiris who is seduced by Alice (an android working for Megatron) but is then ritually embalmed (the Doctor tries to pluck his brains out through his nose in the Egyptian style) and then rises again as Horus, who is trying to resurrect the fallen Osiris Prime (who is killed by Megatron). Orion's Belt is a key plot point in the story, as are the pyramids themselves.

Sam and Mikaela in front of a UFO Egyptian thingy

Mikaela flies to New Jersey to be with Sam just as Hathor left Dendera to be with Horus at Edfu and we see them confess their love at Giza (and in between there's the obligatory seduction by an imposter). Leo is the information gatherer like Thoth and Seymour runs a meat shop reminding us of Anubis and his role in the dressing of the dead and the weighing of the organs on the Scales of Justice. He also protects the Giza necropolis by ordering the air strikes.

OK, OK, just your average monomyth, hero's journey, whatever, go back to sleep. But this Aphopis thing is grabbing my attention, especially since the Apophis asteroid was first spotted 5 years and 5 days before Revenge of the Fallen opened in the US. Add to that the killer asteroid movie Michael Bay did a few years back. And there is all of that "17,000 BC" stuff in there which follows the X-Files' mytharc in more ways than I previously realized. And lo and behold this is Spielberg's second AAT blockbuster in as many years.

What's up with that?

TO BE CONTINUED

* I don't know if Kirby was aware of the Transformers, but if he was I'm sure he would have been kicking himself for not thinking it up himself. I'm sure there are dozens of similar concepts in his comics that I'm not recalling at the moment - and there was an animation concept for Ruby Spears called "Cary Becomes a Car."

U2 call upon ISiS (UPDATED)

Don't forget the posts on U2 ("Utu") and Harpocrates and U2 and Mithras.



UPDATE: Well, well- here are the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, featuring a flying, metallic "ship of light." Not quite a "flying saucer," but close enough, Bono. Check out Citius' link to the '92 opening ceremonies, where Hercules creates the Meditterrenean (with the help of the Sun) and a mock naval battle is staged, with one of Chthulu's cousins on the receiving end of the tridents.

Astronaut Theology: Pets (UPDATED 7/3 - 1017 UST)

When you start to look for evidence of a subliminal alien agenda at work in the media, you begin to find it in the most unlikely places.

Last year we looked at this extreme strangeness, where a "UFO" landed at the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics. I'm not exactly sure what the point of it all was, and I'm not sure a lot of the visiting athletes- many of whom come from extremely conservative traditional societies- appreciated it either.

So that was the in-your-face symbolism. Most people laughed it off and chalked it up to the Hollywood angle, probably not thinking that the announcer framed the ceremony in magical terms, immediately calling to mind a mass-scale version of the Amalantrah Working for those well-versed in their occult history.

But for my money, the closing ceremony from Sydney is a lot more disturbing, and even more tinged with some of the deep, hidden esoteric symbolism we've been trying to decipher around these parts.

The exoteric presentation is your typical Olympic pomp- you have the usual militarism and one-worldism on full display - not to mention the obelisk and the Eternal Flame - all presided over by the precocious little Aryan girl singing "We'll Be One," which offers up praises to unity and submission. Leni Reifenstahl must have been gnashing her dentures with envy. I'm not sure if little Nikki wrote the lyrics herself or if they're simply translated from the original German, but the syntax throughout is very strange:

When nations join to be a better world, So let's reach up to the stars, Together we'll get hope and joy, To walk the world

Reach up to the stars for what? The only reason I ask is that that gigantic Olympic torch looks a little more like a prop from the '84 Olympics in some of the angles, where Nikki sings her heart-warming paean to the dissolution of borders and national sovereignty. Check it out around the three-minute mark. And the whole bit where Nikki is raised into the air reminds me a lot of the Mithraic liturgy, if not something a bit more sinister. Make sure you make it to the end- there's an interesting little surprise waiting.

And call me crazy if you like, but the entire display can't help but remind me of this old Alt-Rock classic...

...particularly in light of all the color guard routines and the athleticism and such. Watch both videos together and see if they don't start to blend together in your imagination. They certainly do in mine.

Nikki sings to the Atlantean ruins

Nikki made a go of it as a pop star in the wake of the Olympics, and made a few interesting videos. One of which has an explicit alien/UFO angle, one is set to clips from Disney's Jungle Book, and yet another not only features an explicit Atlantis subplot, but also has her snuggling with a suspiciously Lovecraftian cephalopod.

After a break from recording that saw her star in an Australian production of The Wizard of Oz, she's back and all grown up and looking and sounding suspiciously like Britney Spears in her brand new single, "Devilicious." Quite a comedown from her Olympic days.

UPDATE: Yikes! Lunatrope points us to this wackiness - Christine Anu (ANU!) performing in front of an obelisk that transforms into a solar phallus. Wow.

UPDATE 7/3: Holy crap! Thrace points out that just before the three minute mark a piano chimes in with the five-tone alien signal from Close Encounters of the Third Kind! Listen closely starting around 2:45 or so. Not having been to Australia, I can't say I understand the connection with aliens and Oz...oh, wait. Never mind.

Remember that the Olympics were originally created to honor (and to make sacrifices to) the gods of Greece, so why should we surprised if today they still pay tribute to strange, superior creatures in the sky? Mr. Panda notes in the comments that "Maybe they're like an audition for joining the galactic order. "Look how advanced we are space people."

Which is another way of saying, "we'll make great pets."

And didn't anyone note the weird flyover at the end of the "We'll Be One" video?

UPDATE 1o17 UST: Let's not forget that Sydney hosted another bizarre spectacle on New Year's Eve as well.

UPDATE 1945 UST: More of the same, this time from Beijing.

So, who's seen Transformers 2?

We're tried to go last night but there was literally a line wrapped around the block. Anyone have a review, or a particularly juicy batch of syncs? Let us know, especially if there are any Secret Sun riffs being played.

The Russian Roswell

The Tunguska event on June 30, 1908 has come to be known as the "Russian Roswell," with almost as many wild theories circulating about it as about the 1947 incident. Like this one:

Dr. Yuri Labvin, president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, insists that an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908.

Most scientists think the blast was caused by a meteorite exploding several miles above the surface. But Labvin thinks quartz slabs with strange markings found at the site are remnants of an alien control panel, which fell to the ground after the UFO slammed into the giant rock.

Of course, scientists scoff at this kind of thing but still have no definitive theories as to what caused it, only their own speculations. The latest speculation is making the rounds today, as we see in the Space.com headline, "Space Shuttle and Strange Clouds Key to Mysterious 1908 Explosion:"

New evidence from an unlikely source -- water vapor in the exhaust plumes of space shuttles launched a century later -- points to a comet. The potential solution comes courtesy some strange clouds that scientists have only recently begun to understand.

Noctilucent clouds are brilliant, and visible only at night. Made of ice particles, they are Earth's highest clouds...in fact, space shuttle launches have been found to cause or enhance the formation of noctilucent clouds.

The article goes on to add that scientists have been able to observe these clouds during a shuttle mission:

Noctilucent clouds were tied to the launch of Endeavour (STS-118) on Aug. 8, 2007. And high-altitude clouds were detected over Antarctica shortly after the fateful launch of Columbia, which along with its crew was lost during re-entry. Columbia's plume was 650 miles long and 2 miles wide and reached Antarctica in three days.

OK, help me out here, I'm not a scientist. We're being told here that the Tunguska event was the result of a comet and not an exploding spaceship.

And what are we being offered as the observable evidence of this theory?

An exploding spaceship.

AstroGnostic: You're Not Who You Think You Are

I've been getting these weird emails from Genebase telling me about these people whose DNA profile most closely matches my own (the Y-chromosome, at least). Strangely, their names are all almost stereotypically Irish, first and last. It's been an odd experience, although my once-hidden Irish heritage was slowly unveiled over the years, first by my paternal grandmother (at my wedding, no less), and then as family members worked out genealogies, and finally when I did the DNA profile.

I'm sure this will mean nothing to most of you, but the point here is that I grew up believing (and being told by my aforementioned Nana) that the Knowles family were a bunch of stolid Mayflower WASP holdouts in a sea of Irish Catholic usurpers. But it turns out we were not who we thought we were. It sounds insane in retrospect, but these things used to matter in New England.

There's also a deeper meaning here: so much of what I spend my time puzzling over has to do with our genome. To get these strange genetic messages contradicting the family mythology I grew up with can't help but seem like a synchronistic microcosm of the bigger issues at hand. Especially when those issues- DNA, genetics, human identity- are becoming such a fraught issue as we blindly stumble to a posthuman future.

Maybe that's the ultimate message of this blog: "You're not who you think you are."

That's also the conceit of The Nines, starring the Irish-Canadian hearthrob Ryan Reyonolds. The film is 200 proof astroGnosticism, though you may not see that in the trailer and I won't give the film's ending away. But if you're a regular reader of this blog I can't possibly recommend it highly enough. Its unrelenting immersion into mundane reality is as meticulous as its metaphysics are whacked out. Which is a good a description as any of where my head is at most of the time.

The film is written and directed by John August, who's Tim Burton's favorite screenwriter. Given the direction my research has been pulling me, it's worth mentioning that John August's first feature film was Go, which centered on a hallucinogenic drug deal. August explains that he came up with the idea for The Nines when he began to dissociate while acting as showrunner for an aborted TV series. Me being a huge fan of Go (Katie Holmes at her pre-Xenu cutest), I wonder if he had some kind of augmentation for that process.

Since I am an obsessive nutcase, I'd been watching the film over and over the past couple weeks, picking out syncs that are mainly of a personal nature. It's one of those films in which searching for hidden meanings is redundant, since the entire film is about hidden meaning. But I had an interesting experience at the doctor's office on Thursday when I saw the new Entertainment Weekly, which had Reynolds doing a strange spin on The Nines, with four covers picturing him in three different roles. Quite the coincidence, I thought.

The Nines is built around the Leibniz* aphorism, "This is the best of all possible worlds." It's divided into three distinct chapters, "The Prisoner," "Reality Television" and "Knowing." The three different roles Reynolds plays are a dippy actor under house arrest, a gay TV writer featured on an Project Greenlight-type documentary, and an earnest husband/father who finds himself in an encounter with the hippie-chick from hell. Reynolds is brilliant in all three roles, as are co-star Melissa McCarthy, the hauntingly-precocious Elle Fanning, and most especially, the virtuoso character actress, Hope Davis.

It's in the second chapter that Davis- and The Nines- scares the shit out of me. Davis plays Susan Howard, the d-girl (development executive, a post usually filled by women) from hell. August's dialogue is so scintillatingly perfect it could only be written verbatim from painful memory.

I met too many Susan Howards in the advertising racket, fast-talking lib-art grads who are constantly second-guessing everything, because they've bullshitted their way into jobs they're completely at sea in. They use all of the latest SWPL jargon and will play the nurturer role to the hilt, but will pin the blame for all of their f*ckups on you, even when they don't have to. Davis becomes Susan Howard...no, that's not right. She becomes all of the Susan Howards to ever walk the face of the earth. All of my LA readers will know exactly what I mean.

Some longtime readers might remember I had my own Hollywood adventure ten years ago, when I got a lot of interest in a graphic novel I'd written for Sirius Entertainment called Halo: An Angel's Story (this was way before the Halo videogame). The first bite came from Crossroads Films, a production house that specializes in advertising but dabbles in indie film. They called me in December of 1996 and it seemed like Project Greenlight city. I was told that they wanted me to write a treatment and then a screenplay and they'd start looking at actors and directors in January. They told me I would need an agent and I should replace my lawyer with someone specializing in film. Everything was smiles and handshakes and looking forward to working with you's.

I was assigned to report to a producer there (let's just call her "Susan Howard") and for reasons I think I've repressed it all got totally screwed up (my lawyer said Susan did something she wasn't supposed to but being an idiot I had no idea what the hell he was talking about) and I was unceremoniously kicked to the curb, just like Ryan Reynolds in The Nines. There's no feeling of rejection quite like the one the movie industry can hand you, which is why that chapter is particularly painful to me. But I had other bites (which all made that first experience seem like ice cream in the park) and Crossroads later hooked me up with a lot of storyboarding work, so no harm, no foul.


But here's where it gets weird. One of Crossroads' top ad directors is Mark Pellington (born 3/17, we also have friends in common), director of The Mothman Prophecies. His first feature film was Arlington Road, which co-starred none other than Susan Howard herself, Hope Davis (it also co-stars Joan Cusack, sister of John "Horus" Cusack, Superstar).

And weirdest of all, Arlington Road opens with a harrowing scene of a boy who's been maimed by a bomb. The boy is played by Mason Gamble...

...who I was just hanging around with at Esalen. The gyre is constantly widening, isn't it, Bob?

Now, I'm constantly struggling against becoming the Carlos Castaneda wannabe I once was, but I wonder if August has had some serious experience with psychedelics. And the kind of stress he was under not only generates the kind of dissociation he portrays in the film, but often very weird syncs. Like the Mothmen, the syncs notice you noticing them and tend to follow you around.

But for some reason, the syncs we see inside films like The Nines or The Number 23 never seem to be as arresting as the syncs we see in the Synchrosphere, or in our own lives. Movies are great at generating Synchronicity, but not usually as good at portraying it.

I think there's a reason for it, two reasons, actually. First, the brutal pace of film and TV writing and rewriting and production tend to keep you in your illusory self, reliant on your reptilian brain. Second, as we see August portray so painfully in The Nines, the Susan Howards of the world look at metaphysics the way an Ostrogoth looked at a fine Roman salon in the Fifth Century.

UPDATE: Loren Coleman picks up the ball and runs with it, as only he can.

UPDATE II: OK, this is interesting. The Elle Fanning character in The Nines is named Noelle ("Christmas"), which is the spelling of Katie Holmes' middle name.

* Another Nine sync- Leibniz and I share a birthday.

Astronaut Theology: I'm sorry, what was I just saying?

I was just saying this:

The US defense budget is larger than every other country on Earth combined. It was in the US that computers and microchips and transistors and all of the rest of it appeared almost overnight after...well, after the Roswell incident, whatever that was. Who are we preparing to fight? The Chinese, who manufacture everything for our Wal-Marts? The Russians, whose space program we've essentially merged with? The Arabs, who have little else but oil to sell to the world and fifth-rate militaries? All of them are keeping our warfare economy afloat.

Nothing makes sense anymore, if you follow conventional wisdom. The world economy is in recession, but we're spending billions - maybe trillions - on space hardware (and extremely sophisticated electronics for consumer use). And when you really stop to think about it, we've no real evidence that the defense budget is actually preparing us for war with Russia or China.

Now read this BBC story:

Russia and Nato have agreed to resume co-operation on security issues, after nearly a year of difficult relations.

The deal came at a meeting in Greece of foreign ministers from the two sides.

Ties deteriorated sharply in 2008 after Russia's brief conflict with Georgia. Nato chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said differences over the issue remained.

But he said Nato and Russia would nonetheless resume co-operation on issues such as Afghanistan, drug trafficking and piracy.

OK, fair enough. But what the hell kind of logo is that NATO-Russia Council? Note how both the NATO star and the Russian two-headed eagle are distinctly subordinate to the big blue ball there. And I'm not getting the star map connection to either Russia or NATO.


But I'm sure as hell getting an interesting connection here...

UPDATE: More extremely strange symbolism in Russia here and here.

Remembering George Carlin

The older I get, the more sense George Carlin makes. We lost him this week last year, and boy, we could use a dozen or so more where he came from. Carlin's genius was in deconstruction- he took apart all of the bullshit we tell ourselves to get through the day and threw it back in our faces. He carved up our pretensions like a turkey on Thanksgiving. I think about his methodology all of the time and I hope that a new generation of big-hearted cynics discover his work and blow all of the Dane Cooks of the world off of the stage forever.

This UFO bit is classic, but this extremely NSFW bit on the Gulf War is one of the greatest revelations you will ever hear. I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted with most of you, but if you aren't familiar with Carlin's flamethrower wit, take some time to check out his videos on YouTube. Especially his bits on politics.

When motion pictures were first invented, some theorists said that death had been conquered- at least some kind of immortality could be achieved on celluloid. George Carlin left an enormous body of work that is available at your fingertips in the Digital Age, and in that way he will live forever. Genius never truly dies.

Sync Log: Michael Jackson

(Note: I had intended to post the second part of the John Cusack story today-
I've added onto the original post- scroll down for the full posting).

When I heard Michael Jackson had died, this page from Nexus #4 suddenly popped into my head, out of nowhere. But it was appropriate, because I wouldn't shed any tears for Michael Jackson, only for his family and fans - and his victims.

The story, called "The Ziggurat," is about with a floating pyramid that's powered by an alien sun. It was written by Mike Baron and drawn by Steve Rude.

I then went online to find out details about the Jackson incident and heard that the supervising LAFD paramedic on the scene was named Steve Ruda.

Tears aside, I thought this was as good a eulogy as any for the role Michael Jackson played in the golden age of American pop...

John Cusack, Superstar: 2012 and the Age of Horus (CONCLUDED 6/26)

Well, the full trailer for 2012 is here. And as to be expected from a Roland Emmerich film, it's chock-full of mass destruction and genocide. The guy certainly has a knack for it, doesn't he?

Apocalyptic film seems to have an added appeal during times of malaise like this one- it's the ultimate fantasy of the global reset button. Of course, no one watching pictures themselves amongst the piles of dead the dogs are picking at, they see the blood and fire through the eyes of the stars (John Cusack in this case, re-teamed with Martian Child co-star Amanda Peet) reaching that brand new day on the other side of it- the "Morning After" Maureen McGovern warbled about all those years ago.

So, what is this 2012 thing all about? I never heard about it until Jose Arguelles and the Harmonic Convergence hit the news. My gut tells me it's going to come and go just like Y2K, even if it was prophesied as the date of the final invasion in the X-Files mythos (which Peet is part of herself now, being the Mythos' latest Nephthys stand-in). But my gut's been wrong plenty of times before and certainly weirdness is on the march as never before.

Maybe December 21, 2012 will be the dawning of the Age of Horus, popularized by Aleister Crowley in The Book of the Law. After all, that new age doesn't necessarily need to coincide with the Age of Aquarius, which no one can seem to decide the start of. And these times certainly feel more Crowleyean than Aquarian, don't they?

Maybe the presence of John Cusack is the giveaway here. Because for reasons as yet unknown to me, Cusack has played characters bearing startling symbolic similarities to Horus and/or Osiris in more than a few films.


The man's career has been a rich and full one, mining that inborn Irish charm for fun and profit. And then there are the symbols, most importantly the ones we looked all those months ago in the context of Pushing Tin, which also featured Ka-Hathor-Ein/Eloah-Isis Blanchett, Billy Bob (Crown of) Thornton, and Angelina Jolie, the Megan Fox of the 90s.

The opening credits featured this stunning image, with Ali/A Li floating enigmatically over the bisected twin towers. A lot of wags commented that 9/11 was like a Roland Emmerich film come to life, so the symmetry is quite compelling here. But we only scratched the surface all those months ago, so in our next installment, we'll go back and pick out a few more compelling details that might illuminate Cusack's overall symbolic role in this collective fever dream that is manifesting in our culture...


PART II: WELCOME TO HIS SKY

Horus was originally known as "Lord of the Sky"

To recap: John Cusack and his Martian Child co-star Amanda Peet are the leads in Roland Emmerich's latest genocide-fest, 2012. The date most famously comes to us from the Mayan calendar, which is especially fascinating to Graham Hancock as well as people involved in AAT research.

Horus decapitated Isis during his battles with Set

I've been watching John Cusack's career for at least 10 years, ever since seeing Pushing Tin, which at plays like a note-for-note allegory of the old Osiris-Horus myths. Let me just say that not knowing the writers or producers of this film, I can't speak to their motivations. But let me also say this: I find it almost impossible to believe that the symbolism in Pushing Tin is not intentional. On someone's part, at least. Knowing what we know about Hollywood, the person credited for a screenplay is not always the true author of the final product.

What exactly the meaning of it all is a matter of pure speculation. Well, maybe not quite so pure- the evidence is certainly building up around these parts, it's just that it's leading in some pretty strange directions.

OK, we've looked at some of the interesting Osiris symbolism in Pushing Tin, so let's backtrack and look at the mythic narrative parallels. Anyone familiar with the film and the myth will be stunned to discover how closely the two hit the same exact plot points:

OK, Nick Falzone (Cusack) is in a rivalry with Russell Bell (Billy Bob Thornton). Nick meets Bell's sexpot wife Mary (Angelina Jolie) at a family cookout and then runs into her while she is weeping at a supermarket.

Here we see what Mary is shopping for- vodka and lettuce. Alcohol was identified with Isis, Hathor and Nephthys in Ancient Egypt. But for our purposes here we should remember that Isis was "the Lady of Beer," since Nephthys dressed as Isis to seduce Osiris (himself also identified with alcohol). The lettuce must be for Russell, since it was the favorite food of Set.

Interesting statement here - a double entendre? From the grocery store, Nick and Mary set out to a very festive Italian restaurant, which parallels the drunken party where Nephthys and Osiris hooked up.

There, Mary and Nick get drunk together and the viewer gets an eyeful of the elemental eroticism that made Angelina Jolie a superstar. As she suggestively plies her full, wet lips with her forefinger, Mary tells Nick that she grows plants. Here is our smoking gun. From Plutarch:

“Whenever, then, the Nile overflows and with abounding waters spreads far away to those who dwell in the outermost regions, they call this the union of Osiris with Nephthys, which is proved by the upspringing of the plants.”

Nick's little death amongst the stars

So right on cue, Nick then follows Mary home where she invites him in for a little "union." Nick's shirt is another interesting detail here.

The dying-rising Osiris amongst the stars

Remember that Osiris is a space-dwelling god, and damn, if that shirt doesn't look like a starry night sky. Remember, the sky belongs to Nick- he tells us so in as many words.

The hits just keep coming- Nick returns from his tryst with Mary and Connie his wife Connie (Cate Blanchett) holds up her drawing of JFK. Killing of the Divine King, anyone? It's Osiris' tryst with Nephthys that brings about his assassination, and here we see recent history's most famous slain king.

How about that?

In the mythology, Set tricks Osiris by inviting him to a dinner party. And sure enough we see the Bells and the Falzones return to the restaurant where Nick and Mary hooked up. Russell dazzles the crowd with "Muskrat Love" (of all songs) and even Mary is seduced by his inexplicable charms.

Here's the very next scene: Nick meets Mary on the banks of the Hudson, where she tells Nick she confessed to Russell about their tryst. The river is self-explanatory, but the rain reminds us that Osiris was identified with all forms of moving water.

Inside the car, Nick refers to being murdered by Russell adding a cryptic reference to eyes. This could either refer to Russell's riveting stare or to the fact that Set had a thing for plucking out eyeballs....

Soonafter there is a death in the family. Now, is this the funeral of Connie's father or of her husband? Nick also inexplicably changes his hairstyle just at the point in the symbolic narrative where he transforms from Osiris to Horus. His struggles with Russell now erupt into open warfare.

Like in this scene, where Nick and Russell wrestle for dominance while ATC is emptied during a bomb scare. Note they are wrestling over Russell's feather- the Ostrich feather was the symbol of Osiris' role of judge, as we see in his mitre.

Nick is forced out of his job and sits at home wearing dark glasses. On an ordinary symbolic level, this speaks to his blindness- he can no longer see the planes in his mind's eye. On a deeper level, this reminds us again that Set tore out the eyes of Horus during their battles. Russell has taken his position as top controller just as Set took the throne of Osiris away from Horus.

So the culmination of their battle takes place on a runway, a nice metaphor for the Nile. Afterwards, Russell and Nick lie together and share a laugh, not unlike Set and Horus during their own contendings. Note the wound beneath Nick's right eye.

WHO ARE THE REAL AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS?

So yet again, ancient symbolism and high tech colliding on the silver screen. What could possibly be the connection? We've seen this strange pull that all of the Egyptian iconography has had on people involved in the arts and sciences (and politics), particularly those most intimately involved with ultra-high technology. It seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it? The connection of a sky god and an air traffic controller is especially fascinating here. To a point...

I mean, I love mythology and all, but all of this symbology seems rather archaic in this day and age. It also can get more than a little tedious, unless there is some compelling meaning behind it all. And certainly with Pushing Tin the meaning of it all has always escaped me.

Until yeterday, that is.

Let's take a look at a little visual detail in the film, something that I never really paid attention to until yesterday, strangely enough, even though I've watched this film over a dozen times...

Look at this very strange establishing shot. Tucked away on the lower left is the Bell's house, where Mary is seducing Nick, just as Nephthys seduced Osiris. Maybe the key to it all is here as well- the key to this inexplicable obsession with ancient mythology, to this incessant linking of ancient symbols to ultra-high tech (and flight, especially) that we see over and over and over beneath the surface in big-budget Hollywood films (though with the new Transformers film, the linking is now in your face).

With Diane ("Path of the Moon Goddess") Lane. That dog has star quality...

We're not done with John Cusack by a long shot- we've still barely scratched Serendipity and The Martian Child, but perhaps Pushing Tin gives us a clue to why he's been chosen to be the hero (again, a word derived from Horus) for Hollywood's big 2012 blowout.

But just a clue, mind you.

Astronaut Theology: Transforming the World (UPDATED)

Let's recap: NASA is launching moon probes and alien hunters, Fox News is showing UFO footage released by the Mexican military. Europe has a space freighter ready to go. We haven't had any strange, fiery debris falling mysteriously from the sky recently, but it's only a matter of time until the next event, certainly. Moon bases are in the planning stages, and a new film called Moon is being released to familiarize audiences with that coming reality. Never mind the research being done on warp-drive technology at NASA.

What's happening on the ground? We have an ineffectual new President who seems to be in office purely for some strange ritual purpose the rest of us can only guess at. All across the world, economies are being battered and millions put out of work. It was only a mere ten years ago a permanent prosperity was being predicted.

We are looking at the possibility of a stunning revolution taking place in Persia, one of the world's oldest civilizations, presently caught in the deathgrip of a cabal of insane Theocrats. There's a continuing American occupation going on across the border, which may or may not have something to do with contacting unknown entities once present at the dawn of civilization.

The US defense budget is larger than every other country on Earth combined. It was in the US that computers and microchips and transistors and all of the rest of it appeared almost overnight after...well, after the Roswell incident, whatever that was. Who are we preparing to fight? The Chinese, who manufacture everything for our Wal-Marts? The Russians, whose space program we've essentially merged with? The Arabs, who have little else but oil to sell to the world and fifth-rate militaries? All of them are keeping our warfare economy afloat.

Nothing makes sense anymore, if you follow conventional wisdom. The world economy is in recession, but we're spending billions - maybe trillions - on space hardware (and extremely sophisticated electronics for consumer use). And when you really stop to think about it, we've no real evidence that the defense budget is actually preparing us for war with Russia or China.

Timothy Good- as well as others- have told us that the US was essentially at war with UFOs in the 40s and 50s. This was front page news all over the world: Roswell, the Battle of Los Angeles, the Invasion of Washington. Lucky for the government, an army of cranks came out of the woodwork telling ridiculous stories about anal probes and blonde-haired Aryan queens from Venus. Along with them were an even larger army of debunkers, using every psychological warfare gimmick in the book to harass and ridicule anyone who took a second look at some of the incidents that defied easy explanation.

The pace of technology is now quickening exponentially, almost as if someone was losing patience the doubling of it every 18 months. Now, don't forget that before Roswell you had a gradually but slowly increasing curve of technology following the Industrial Revolution. You had wireless radio and television in the 20s and 30s, and computers, first Babbage's Difference Engine and then ENIAC during the 40s. But these things were enormous and cumbersome and less powerful than the digital calculators you see embedded in ball point pens.

Before that, technology had been essentially static for thousands of years, at least since the Roman Era. The printing press was not the breakthrough it seemed- even before Chinese block printing, you had lithographic printing blocks in Sumer.

Strangely enough, when technology truly became the center of the human story in the 19th Century, a whole host of weirdos started talking about contact with alien tutors (most commonly known as the "Secret Chiefs"), who were guiding this process. Crazy, right? After all, most of the literature these people produced was a bunch of babble, cobbled together from various esoteric sources.

But at the same time, you have this strange collision of fringe beliefs and ultra-high technology. In other words, weird beliefs are a dime a dozen but when you start to see extraordinary results arise from them, it's worth paying attention. You have all of this bleeding into the media sphere, which we look at here all of the time. And recently we had the two political parties fighting over control of the Sirius glyph (Sirius being the center of the occult universe) and the winner being initiated as the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian king in the customary setting of a tomb on prime time news. Weirdos like us blow our stacks in shock while the rest of the world shrugs. Just like they shrug at the busy, busy skies overhead.

So what is this new world order all about? Regular readers know I only have questions. But I can't help thinking about this new Transformers movie, which presents this scenario of Earth being caught in the middle of an ancient grudge match between alien machine intelligences. We have this Sam character, coincidentally played by Shia LaBoeuf who just happened to appear in the X-Files episode produced just before the one that his new movie is ripping off. I hate to keep harping on that, but that simply cannot be coincidence as we understand it.

UPDATE: No, I don't think it is- I think my original theory that someone involved in the writing of that movie reads this blog might be a better explanation, especially given the Egyptian links between Transformers and The X-Files are my interpretation and not part of the surface narrative.

The giveaway may be that the Transformers film opens in 17,000 BC.

Some determinists desperately want to assign human agency to these kinds of coincidences, but the more they metastisize the harder that gets. And I'm willing to bet that a lot of you out there have cataloged your personal synchs to the point that you realize that there's no way some secret cabal are orchestrating them. At least not one that we can understand.

UPDATE II: As I wrote in a comments section, I hope regular readers of this blog will begin to start synching their own lives, so you can see the latticework of connection that defies external agency.

And it's at that point that things get interesting. I can only speak for myself, but I've always thought something is going on that we just can't grasp. I know all of the common theories, but I find them all light on evidence and long on vitriol. Maybe we're being prepared for something we can imagine but can't begin to grasp. And maybe that has to do with the unimaginably huge US defense budget, and those busy skies overhead.

UPDATE: Check out the Hidden Agendas for a massive video presentation by UFO researcher Robert Dean.

Secret Solstice (UPDATED!)

Oh reverse-engineered alien Technology, you are the blogger's friend. Saturday was not the Solstice, but don't tell our friends on the West Coast that. I would think the fact that the Solstice was on a Sunday would be irresistible, but it might also have terrified any remaining Sun worshippers of the officially-sanctioned variety in the environs out of their wits. As if the sight of tens of thousands of folks on the street dancing and carousing and carrying on in ways indistinguishable from ancient Solar cults would not. Note: if you look closely you can see a suspiciously Lovecraftian cephalopod there.

Speaking of ancient Solar cults, Gus Grissom made an inexplicable appearance in Santa Barbara...

Fremont's parade suffered in comparison to Santa Barbara's, since the feeble Washington sun is no match for its Californian cousin, not to mention all of the lithe, Pilates-addicted California girls. But they made up for the deficit with their elaborate, pseudo-Aztec costumery. As far as I know, there weren't any hearts ripped out of chests at the parade's end and offered up to the Sun to delay the Earth's final destruction.

Well, in place of that, we had the nudist bicyclists providing the horror...

Our English friends gathered around Stonehenge for their Solstice blowout, apparently a record turnout. I guess it helps when the head of your state church is himself a Druid. Not sure what connection congas have to ancient Celtic culture, but everyone looks suitably inebriated.

I was in Phila(e)delphia yesterday and saw posters for their own Solstice festival, but the idea still seems pretty isolated to hippie/boho enclaves. It's all good fun but I'm not sure I see these kinds of festivals piercing the Heartland. Too much of a hippie, weirdo tinge to it all. Americans still prefer their Sun worship rituals to be dressed in more familiar religious garb.

Which we'll look at in great detail here on the September Equinox....

UPDATE: Kozmikon Tommy points us to NAZCA NASA's "astronomy picture of the day"- The Solstice Sun rising over the Parthenon.


UPDATE II: Stargurl gives us this scoop- the theme of the Fremont parade was "Phoenix Rising," and "Also Sprach Zarathustra" was the musical overture. Check out her amazing post on Phoenix syncs here. Go to The Satellite for Phoenix-a-licious synchitude.

Jack Sarfatti on UFO propulsion physics

Renegade physicist Jack Sarfatti talks about a meeting he attended that took place under the aegis of a major defense contractor. The topic was UFO propulsion and the military's interest in same. According to Sarfatti, the technology behind UFOs is understood, but not yet in the application stage. Very interesting conversation here- this is a guy with a very serious resume who has never been shy about peeking under the skirt of the mundane reality consensus.

Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre, pt. VII: Transformers

If you've been in a cave the past few weeks, you've probably missed the thousands of images of Megan Fox relentlessly posing at various premieres of the new Transformers movie. This film is obviously a very big deal for the wizards of Hollywood, even bigger than the new Star Trek movie. Why? It's based on a toy/cartoon line that is of importance solely to young males who encountered it at a very early age. What's the mass appeal here?


I'm way too old to have been bit by the Transformers bug, but I'm not too surprised to see it delving deep into the murky waters of our Collective Alien Dream. I remember seeing the toys it was based on in the early 80s at the old Million Year Picnic in Cambridge and the cartoon hit the airwaves right around the same time I began to get serious about my own inner explorations. So I do feel a connection to the franchise in a strange way.

And I've always been amused by the name, since it was also the title of the classic Lou Reed album that contained the tranny-chasing anthem, "Walk On the Wild Side." That album was produced by David Bowie, that eternal resonator of androgynous alien occult identity. In that light, I'm sure the meme of transformation this film is broadcasting into our collective consciousness will have deeper implications than the mere mechanical shape-shifting we see in the movie already.

But again, the film is lifting themes lock, stock and barrel from The X-Files as well. The whole idea of an alien artifact infecting our brains with a new language would not be lost on Bowie and Reed's hero, William S. Burroughs, but here I'm thinking more along the lines of Terence McKenna's theories on hallucinogenic fungi as an intentional conduit for alien communication and the "Stoned Ape" concept of human transformation that McKenna preached. Put it all together and it's clear that McKenna had put his own spin on AAT.

It's interesting that Shia LaBoeuf (fresh off his Indiana Jones AAT opus) begins his own alien dreaming when he goes to college (Princeton, in this case) since that's the time that many young people have their first encounter with hallucinogens. Likewise, we also see Mulder searching for the alien gnosis that "Doctor Sandoz" possessed at American University (it's at college that some young people also begin to manifest symptoms of schizophrenia, too).

Unlike Transformers II, the new fratboy-centric revision of Star Trek is essentially hostile to subtext, perhaps in reaction to the cumbersome esotericism the franchise had taken on. Deep Space Nine, for instance, is essentially the story of the Emissary of the Prophets transforming from man to god. The series is so laden with deeply subversive text (never mind subtext) I don't even know where to begin, but the mytharc also delved into the same themes of alien dreaming and alien identity that we'll be seeing the hermetically-seductive form of the newly-minted bisexual Megan Fox being utilized to put over into the adolescent group mind at the end of the month.

In "Rapture," Sisko encounters an Bajoran artifact that erases the last vestiges of skepticism left in his psyche. He gets a double dose of the alien gnosis, and as in Transformers and X-Files it not only leads to the revelation of alien identity but to the brink of brain damage as well. The revelation Sisko receives comes in the form of a lost city (that hoary favorite of occult fiction) that shows that the Prophets helped shape Bajoran civilization, just as the Godship in "Biogenesis" did for our own. AAT is everywhere in the Star Trek Universe, with our Federation friends sometimes playing the part of the Anunaki.

The funny thing is that when Sisko gets zapped it's clear that he's on an artificially-induced trip, and we see him alternating between a blissed-out state and a tumultous, psychic one. The impetus for this episode probably came from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which seems to have inspired McKenna's alien dreaming theories as well, with the Mushroom in place of the Monolith. But I'm fairly certain at this point in time that something else inspired Kubrick's vision, other than the somewhat dull Arthur C. Clarke story it's allegedly based on. Maybe not the same thing that inspired Jack Kirby's- we're talking something more in the Cary Grant sphere.

So watch these opening credits for A Man Called Hawk featuring the Emissary himself. Really fascinating symbolism here, about as subtle as a kick in the balls. Soak it in. And strangely enough, the Emissary teaches now at a New Jersey university (the Mason Gross School at Rutgers), though not the one we see in Transformers. But even so, a fascinating conjunction there.

I'll end this with a repeated confession- those symbols that Sam sees in Transformers trailer? I see ones very much like them - a lot - when I close my eyes. First they appear in linear fields and then they morph into circular patterns that rotate too quickly for me to write them down. It's been going on for a few years now. Why am I mentioning them again? Well, I'm listening to a Terence McKenna lecture presently in which he describes DMT elves whose speech is expressed visually.

I've never tried DMT, but I think I'm pretty familiar with those elves.

Star Trek: Charlie is 17

For a concept created by a self-confessed atheist, there are a hell of a lot of gods in Star Trek.

I've been watching selected episodes of Deep Space Nine in a state of utter disbelief (the show is unvarnished religious drama of a very strange variety) but the very same themes we see in that show are abundant in the original series as well. As well as in TNG, as we looked at in great detail last year.

I've been watching a whole lot of Star Trek and am nowhere near putting it all together (the connections are too complex and enormous). But I am seeing patterns emerge that are remarkably consistent over the franchise's 43-year history. I have a copy of Brad Steiger's 1976 book Gods of Aquarius, that has a dual interviews with Roddenberry and none other than the author of The Sacred Mushroom, Andrija Puharich, taken while Roddenberry was working with Lab-9.

In it, Roddenberry referenced the two episodes, "Charlie X" (the second episode of the series, originally titled "Charlie is God") and "Where No Man Has Gone Before," (the second pilot) starring none other than 2001: A Space Odyssey's Gary Lockwood, as well as Sally Kellerman and the painfully gorgeous Andrea Dromm. Both episodes are about humans that acheive godhead through the agency of alien overlords.

Really fascinating stuff:

During his career, especially after Star Trek's cancellation, Roddenberry gave many lectures to supplement his income. Those speeches may be lost in time, but thankfully he also discussed UFO's and psychic phenomenon in a book called "Gods Of Aquarius" by Brad Steiger. In a chapter discussing the phenomenon of UFO's and developing psychic powers in children, here's what Roddenberry said:

"We wrote a couple of episodes about individuals who had such unique talents. As a matter of fact, our second pilot - and the one that sold the series - was on that subject when Gary Lockwood began to find out that he could, after having undergone a strange experience in space, accomplish things like moving a glass of water without touching it. And then he developed more and more power... It was too much power to put into the hands of an unprepared person."

"Being 17 is more than how many years you've lived, it's a whole other thing."

Truer words have never been spoken.