Blue Sunshine and the Pyramids on Mars

A reader informed us that there's a new Doctor Who series coming called The Waters of Mars. Here's the scoop from the Wiki:

The story is set on Mars and the Doctor will be joined by a new companion named Adelaide, played by Lindsay Duncan, who is head of the Mars base. Producer Nikki Wilson described the character as "the Doctor's cleverest and most strong-minded companion yet." The most recent trailer shows a massive Terrarium of life on the planet's surface, and a mysterious alien which infects its victims using a water compound it creates.

This isn't the Doctor's first encounter with Mars, however. The Tom Baker Doctor (who appeared in 173 episodes) fought an incarnation of Set in The Pyramids of Mars in 1975, the first episode of which aired exactly nine months before the Viking Probe passed over Cydonia. In this adventure, it turns out that Set is actually Sutekh, the last survivor of an ancient alien race called the Osirians.

Strangely enough, The Pyramids of Mars aired around the same time that Gene Roddenberry was working with Andrija Puharich (of The Sacred Mushroom fame) and his channelers at Lab 9. How's that for a coincidence?

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On a more personal note, sometime during the mid-70s (though I'm very fuzzy on the timeline) we spent a week in a rented cottage in Egypt, Massachusetts. We being my mother, my sister and myself with the family we had essentially merged with for a time in the 70s. My mother was a nightclub performer and we led this kind of a gypsy lifestyle with all of the other performers and their families. One of the few things I miss from a generally miserable childhood. These were the same people we summered in Innsmouth Gloucester with, so I'm assuming that cottage was a timeshare.

The reason I bring it up is that I remember that I was very sick that week, with one of those chevron-summoning fevers. I spent the week in bed while everyone else spent it on the beach. I don't remember any interesting encounters, sadly. I do remember all of the girls listening to a George Carlin record- the one with the "seven dirty words" routine.

I had no idea until much later that part of Scituate was called Egypt. However, I did know that Lost in Space star Mark Goddard grew up there, speaking of classic camp sci-fi.

And speaking of hallucinations, Mark Goddard also starred in Blue Sunshine, one of the first films the missus and I rented when we got our first VCR. The film lent its name to the one and only album by The Glove, which Robert Smith and Steve Severin recorded in between Banshees albums. The Glove performed on Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1984 Alice In Wonderland BBC special, which boasted some very Doctor Who-type production values, as well as the usual semiotic (and drug-addled) insanity.

PS- I'm going to catch up with my comment responses sometime in the next couple of days, and I'm also trying to figure what to do with the other blogs. I've already merged the Seminar with the Satellite, but I'm still trying to figure how best to use an auxiliary blog without making myself crazy. For now, this is where the action is.

Dream Log: Room 128

Michael Rennie on The Invaders, a sci-fi spin on The Fugitive*

I was watching a black and white movie. It was about one of those people you've always known but who isn't a friend. I wondered if this was one of those movies that's actually an allegory for an alien abduction. I suddenly went from watching it in someone's living room to watching it in outside, lying in the grass outside my old grade school. The movie was now in color. It was about 1 AM, but the playground was well lit.

The movie was over. I went up the hill to turn the TV off, but it was inside the school and the door was ajar but chained. I found the florescent light coming in from the door somewhat nauseating. Then three teachers walked towards me, but I couldn't really see their faces in the shadows.

"You're not supposed to be in there," one of them said.

"The TV was on in Room 128," I replied, "It was on when I came by. I saw the light from the bottom of the hill."

"What were you watching?"

"It was that movie that they just remade. It had David Janssen," I offered, "I think it was The Man Who Fell to Earth."

"The Man Who Fell to Earth?," one asked. Why can't I see their faces?

Written on literal scraps, around 5:30 AM

"No, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie," I said, more confidently.

"What was the name? Was it the name or the film?," another asked.

"I don't know, It had something to do with owls," I said, annoyed. "It was one of those movies that was really about alien abduction, though that wasn't in the actual story."

"Well, you're not supposed to go in there," a woman said, "They're doing tests. It's dangerous."

* From the Fugitive wiki: The series premise was set up in the opening narration, but the full details about the crime were not offered in the pilot episode, which started with Kimble having been on the run for six months. Not until episode 14, "The Girl from Little Egypt," does the viewer finally get the full details of Richard Kimble's plight.

You can blame Mike Clelland at Hidden Experience for filling my head with these memes.

Week in Review: McKinnon, China's Ubermen in Space

ITEM: China has set some pretty tough standards for its astronaut corps:

No scars, no history of serious illness in the last three generations of your family, and no tooth cavities.

These are amongst the 100 health requirements for would-be astronauts vying to be part of China's next space team, the Yangtse Evening Paper reported on Saturday.

The selection process, which the paper said is for the second batch of Chinese astronauts, will disqualify those who have runny noses, ringworm, drug allergies or bad breath.

In case any of this sounds vaguely familiar, it echoes the rules laid out for SS initiates by Himmler:

Himmler insisted that the candidate be racially pure, that is being of good German stock and able to prove his Germanic roots back to 1800 (officers back to 1750). If it was later discovered that the candidate had Jewish ancestry then he would be thrown out of the Waffen SS. This sometimes infuriated Sepp Dietrich who complained that some first class soldiers were being expelled from his ranks. Also the candidate could have no criminal record, have no history of mental illness and be aged between 17 and a half and 22. Also he had to be the correct height (5 ft 11 inches) and build with perfect vision, even as far as no filled teeth! Alcoholism was a definite refusal of entry.

Not a comforting precedent, given China's growing military and economic power.

ITEM: Did Heinlein unwittingly create the Nazi UFO myth? The UFO Iconoclast gets to the bottom of it:

A very disturbing theme recurs from time to time in the UFO literature. Some maintain that Nazi scientists had perfected advanced aerial craft including "flying saucers" - both in Germany during WWII and as captured "Paperclip" scientists in the US. This supposed Nazi technology is seen by these "researchers" as the genesis of early man-made UFOs. Even now it is seen by some as the reason for today's state-of-the-art "Dreamland" flying machines- or even as the true cause of the Roswell crash!

The belief that secret Nazi UFO technologies existed during WWII -and that the US took these technologies to develop further- is as unsettling as it is untrue. "Nazi UFOs" have been proposed by some on numerous websites and in such books as "The Facade," "Pentagon Space Aliens," "The Hunt for Zero Point," "Man-Made UFOs" and "Hitler's Flying Saucers." They elevate Nazi scientific know-how to a level that it does not deserve.

ITEM: Scientists are working on flying saucer technology using plasma lasers. The results aren't terribly impressive so far. At least judging by this video.

ITEM: NAZCA NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper believed that UFOs are visiting the Earth.

ITEM: UFO hacker Gary McKinnon loses his final appeal:

The British computer hacker Gary McKinnon failed today in his latest legal attempt to avoid extradition to the US where he could face a sentence of up to 60 years in a high-security prison.

The high court dismissed two claims for judicial review, dismaying McKinnon's family and supporters. Janis Sharp, his mother, said: "We are heartbroken. If the law says it's fair to destroy someone's life in this way, then it's a bad law."

My guess? The US probably wants to put his skills to work in the Cyberwarfare Department. A good hacker is worth his weight in gold.

Midnight Movie: Dracula's New World Order

The great Bruce Timm created his own poster for the film

A secret occult society made of powerful figures from government, industry and the military? Unspeakable rites of blood sacrifice, death and resurrection? A secretive aristocrat at the head of a massive conspiracy involving mind-controlled sex slaves, a vicious death squad and a planned viral Apocalypse meant to bring about a new world order?

No, those aren't the minutes from the most recent Bilderberger meeting, it's the plot to Hammer's 1974 horror classic, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee, Grand Moff Tarkin and the recently deified Joanna Lumley.

The film has some brief nudity so is probably NSFW. Available for viewing and download Google here.

And in a related story:

Marshfield, Mass- James P. Riva, who he was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder for the killing of his disabled grandmother in 1980, said at the time that he was a 700-year-old vampire who needed to drink her blood.

That was in 1980. A year later, he was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder and arson. Tuesday, he is up for parole.

Riva’s mother, Janet S. Jones, was the first to hear his sordid confession.

Jones, in tears, testified during the trial that her son believed a 200-year-old vampire he met in Florida told him to paint the bullets he used for the murder gold. He also told her he tried to suck his grandmother’s blood, but could not because she was too old.

AstroGnostic: Imprisoned by the Luminoids

The planet Luminos: A minor planet, sultry and simmering. Incapacitated. Earth scientists have concluded that there could be no life on Luminos, that it is too close to its own sun, and that its inhabitants would be victimized by their own blighting atmosphere. But there is life on Luminos — life that should resemble ours, but doesn't.

Desperate life, suffering a great and terrible need. The Luminoids have begun to search the universe in an effort to gratify that need. They seek a planet on which life is healthy, vibrant, strong, and mobile. They need such people to do their work, to labor and slave for them, to manufacture their splendored dreams. The Luminoids need slaves, and they have chosen the planet off which their slaves will be abducted...

You really have to wonder about The Outer Limits sometimes. The show was very cheaply produced and the crude effects don't hold up to modern standards, but underneath it all are some pretty startling concepts and plot devices. We recently looked at "The Invisibles," which dealt with the control of secret societies over the highest levels of government, but there's plenty more where that came from, believe me.

Though not one of my favorite episodes, "A Feasibility Study" presents us with a 300-proof blast of Gnostic theology. A deformed race from a dying planet called the "Luminoids" (!) kidnaps entire neighborhoods from Earth to work as slaves. It's only when people unwittingly travel to the edge of their new reality that the illusion is shattered. And yeah, I think at least one of the witers of Dark City saw this episode once or twice..

We're going to be looking further into the Gnostic subtext of the original Star Trek shortly, but The Outer Limits predates it. In fact, many of the concepts that came to define sci-fi on TV and in film got a test-run during this series, as well as some of the more outre ideas we see in the Synchrosphere, UFOlogy, Fortean research, and even in some of the more radical precincts of theoretical physics.

As with the original Star Trek, the sci-fi conceit of The Outer Limits allowed the writers to explore concepts that would never be allowed on more conventional drama series. And it's remarkable even today to see how seriously it was all taken and presented. Again, the production values might dull the edge for younger viewers, but The Outer Limits packs a highly-weird and nightmarish punch that we wouldn't really see on TV again until The X-Files. Chris Carter has never been shy about singling the show out as a primary influence on his own work.

And though I've never heard him discuss it, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that The Outer Limits had an immense influence on the work of David Lynch. After all, The Outer Limits' combination of old-fashioned American values and surreal, nightmarish horror is a pretty good description of Lynch's own work, isn't it?

Non-US readers- if the vid doesn't load, track it down through other means. In fact, get a hold of the entire first season, if you can.

Eye (of Horus) in the Sky

This image provided by NASA this July 23, 2009 is a photo made by the Spitzer Space Telescope of the galaxy, called NGC-1097 (=17, CK), is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The 'eye' at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. - Yahoo

Out of Egypt

OK, this is interesting. This little bit of evangelizing starts with a cute premise, goes on a bit too long and then ends with a thud. The chap on the right bears a very striking resemblance to Marshall Applewhite circa the mid 70s (which merits a post in and of itself) but the central conceit of the skit- two angels weighing the virtue of the confessions of those seeking entrance into the Pearly Gates didn't sound anything like I was taught in Sunday School.

I know there are a couple metaphorical references to scales (judging the living, not the dead) in a couple of the later books of the Old Testament, but certainly nothing like this little skit.


This scenario is actually straight out of Egyptian theology, not Christian. Surely a coincidence, but there have been a lot of similar coincidences popping here and there (not the least of which is all of the Solar imagery popping up in church logos and icons.)

Some of you have probably seen quite a few depictions of the Weighing of the Ka in the Egyptian afterlife, where Anubis and Thoth weigh the heart of the dead to determine if they should join Osiris in the afterworld or be devoured by the demon Ammit. Here is a an excerpt from the writings of Setna (son of Rameses the Great) which dates to the 13th Century BC:

So each Ka passed through the doorway and in the Hall Thoth was waiting to receive him, saying: 'Come with me. Yet why hast thou come?'

'I have come here to be announced,' answered the Ka.

'What is thy condition?'

'I am pure of sin.'

Sounds a bit like modern Masonic ritual, no? The liturgy read by the hopeful applicant is now known as "Negative Confessions" from the Papyrus of Ani, aka The Declaration of Innocence which is included in The Book of the Dead.

But before the Weighing of the Heart, each dead man's Ka spoke in his own defense, saying: 'I am pure! I am pure! I am pure! I am pure! My purity is as that of the Bennu bird, the bright Phoenix whose nest is upon the stone persea-tree, the obelisk at Heliopolis...

...with the good man the Feather of Truth sank down and his heart rose up, and Thoth cried aloud to Osiris and the gods, 'True and accurate are the words this man has spoken. He has not sinned; he has not done evil towards us. Let not the Eater-up of Souls have power over him.

Surely a coincidence, right? But there's one little detail towards the end that caught my attention- when "Jesus" takes the humble do-gooder (a white male, of course) by the hand and leads him to God's waiting room. It turns out that this too has a precedent in Setna's account:

Then Horus took the dead man by the hand and led him before Osiris, saying, 'I have come to thee, oh Unnefer Osiris, bringing with me this new Osiris. His heart was true at the coming forth from the Balance. He has not sinned against any god or any goddess. Thoth has weighed his heart and found it true and righteous. Grant that there may be given to him the bread and beer of Osiris; may he be like the followers of Horus!'

"Followers of Horus" is the English translation of Shemsu Hor.

Is Acharya S in the house?

17 Pictures (UPDATED 7/28)

Well, the Secret Sun Picture Parade rolls on, taking a look at some of the recent images injected into the Memestream and their connections to recent topics on these blogs. A bit of lightness as we wind our way through the midsummer doldrums...

17s are popping up like mushrooms all over the news, though often in bummer stories like the recent Iranian planecrash or the LHC reboot. But we're also seeing the Magic Number assigned to more benevolent contexts, like this Yahoo(ccultismus) headline. The hidden chevron is thrown is as a bonus.

Soapie pointed out the faint 17 in the Henry Louis Gates arrest photo. The arresting officer was a Sgt. Crowley, believe it or not- that's him in the upper right. We don't see his chevrons, but the officer posing in front is kind enough to show us his.

I'm not sure what this controversy is all about, since I'm trying desperately not to pay attention to anything in the mainstream media. But I did hear that the charges were dropped and Barackobamun invited the parties to the White House for a brewski. Terrific, but how about getting the economy moving instead? Just putting that out there.

UPDATED 7/28: OK, we saw the other day that Barackobamun did his big science policy speech exactly 50 years after Gus Grissom was tapped for NAZCA NASA. Now he's invited "Gates" and "Crowley" to the White House to pop open a couple cold ones and bury the hatchet. This will all go down Thursday, July 30, at 1800 EST (that's 6 PM). Funny coincidence here:

The LM-10 Falcon, with astronauts Scott and Irwin aboard, undocked and separated from the Endeavor (CSM 112) with astronaut Worden aboard. At 6:16 p.m. EDT July 30, the Falcon landed in the Hadley-Apennine region of the moon 600 meters north-northwest of the proposed target. About two hours later, following cabin depressurization, Scott performed a 33-minute standup EVA in the upper hatch of the LM, during which he described and photographed the landing site.

So, the Falcon moon-buggy touches down on the Moon on July 30, 1971 around 6 PM. Then we have this meeting between King Tut, Gates and Crowley over some brewdogs 38 years later.

Huh. Interesting.

Hey, you know what else went down on the 30th? The first Masonic grand lodge was established in 1733. Where? In Boston, Massachusetts - just a stone's throw where all of the excitement with Gates and Crowley went down! You gotta love all of these zany coinkidinks! Speaking of which, Officer Crowley's favorite brewski is Blue Moon.


Bonus factoid: the Apollo 15 mission patch pictures three chevrons.

Lost in all the manufactured controversy hijinks was this wink-wink headline: "Hylas dumps Falcon." In case you don't get the joke, re-read this Space/Gods article. Then read this headline from January: "SpaceX erects Phallus Falcon 9 rocket." Dig these wacky numbers:

SpaceX says it took only 30 minutes to get the 17 foot diameter, 180 foot long rocket to stand stiffly at attention after mating the craft with a transporter erector system. That's a big improvement over older rockets which need considerably more time and effort to get up.

Over and over and over again. The Falcon 9 is launching from Cape Canaveral in January 2010. Anyone wanna bet it will be on the 27th? Or perhaps the 17th...

UPDATE 7/27: Check out "17 Names" over at the Satellite for some syncholicious 17-ery.

Of course, being a hopeless X-Files geek, the whole thing inappropriately flashed me back to this shot, where Fox Mulder meets a Man-in-Black (played by Alex Trebek, of all people). That's the way my brain works, everything ends up being back-referenced to the Mighty X. Of course, this humorous episode has a darker undercurrent; how the military manufactures fake UFO flaps to provide cover for black project chicanery. Don't know exactly what made me think of that...

The chevron was a part of my strange childhood supraconsciousness as were owls, which we discussed last week. And lo and behold Fergie shows up in the celeb sites this mind-numbingly tacky outfit.

Now I found this pic while poking around for information on Blondie, since the missus and I were talking about going to see Debbie and the boys in a couple weeks. This single is from Debbie's Koo Koo solo album, the art for which featured the ol' Egyptian/alien motif, courtesy of HR Giger, who also directed the video for this song (watch it with the sound turned down here).

So what's the connection between Fergie and Debbie, never mind Egypt and aliens? Well, the two singers dueted on "Call Me" for the Fashion Rocks benefit last September, which boasted a stage set eerily resembling the eponymous dimensional portals from the Stargate franchise, only sans chevrons.

"Call Me" was Blondie's hit from the soundtrack for American Gigolo, which launched Richard Gere (Mothman Prophecies) into superstardom. Bonus factoids: Fergie performed writhing on a new Chevy Camaro, the original model of which made its debut the same day John Cusack was born. You can see Beyonce, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and other Synchrosuperstars in a chorus line from FR here.

Back on the Egypt/Aliens meme, here's a quick grab from the Egyptian gallery from the kids at one of the schools that those creepy UFO-abduction drills were held at. Fascinating coincidence there.

Another similar Secret Sun meme showed up on Yahoo with this Apophis-looking character I'm not familiar with. So all you gamers out there, educate me.

Speaking of serpents, I found this Egyptian winged serpent charm while researching an upcoming Star Trek post. This is Wadjet and she is protecting Harpocrates, who some see as the archetype of this new aeon. What caught my eye, however, were the plants in the lower left- the look remarkably like opium poppies (in the front) and psilocybin mushrooms (in the back). Which speaks volumes about Egyptian religion, whether or not Uncle Zahi wants to hear it.

Speaking of Horus, the San Diego Comic Con is winding down as I write. I haven't been in a few years, 2004 to be exact. It was so brain-blastingly overwhelming I was frazzled halfway through Friday afternoon. San Diego used to be a wonderful Synchronicity hotspot, which may have inspired the Udjat logo there. Now it's just ShoWest south. Note the rays beaming over the skyline from that left eye. The left eye of Horus is the Moon...

...which recently obscured the Sun for the longest Solar eclipse we'll see for the next hundred-something years. The media got a lot of mileage blasting Asians- Hindus in particular- for their beliefs about the eclipse. Or at least some Hindus, we have no sense of what educated folks there think about it. Maybe this is inoculation for Western left-brainers troubled by an up-and-coming technological powerhouse that takes verböten topics like Astrology, UFOs and AAT seriously. Or maybe it's because our so-called "liberal" press is filled with racist assholes, I don't know. Either way the event came and went without incident, so whatever.

Speaking of the Moon, me and the missus just watched the remastered "Mirror, Mirror." I can't exactly tell what's so remastered about it, other than some superflous CGI establishing shots. But I was fascinated that this interdimensionally-themed episode had a "Barbara Luna" ("Foreign Moon") playing James Tiberius Kirk's ("Supplant the Roman Church") hottie-of-the-week, Marlena, a name derived from Mary Magdalene. Just more of the juicy Gnostic subtext in ST:TOS.

Speaking of spaceships, there's been a flood of daylight photos of strange objects flying around in the skies showing up on the UFO sites. This corresponds to the avalanche of UFO reports coming in, making 2009 already a banner year for sightings.

Couple interesting things about these photos. A lot of people are reporting that these objects- whatever they are- weren't visible when they were taking the shot but showed up when they looked at the pictures- most assumably digital.

Also, these pictures are often submitted to these sites anonymously and many sites are not identifying the photographers, putting lie to the usual dodge that these are just desperate people, who are simply seeking publicity or attention.

In fact, it's the skeptic/hoaxer types with their lame nightlights that are the ones desperately seeking attention, which the corporate media is all too happy to provide. Again, if the mainstream media (in the US, at least) covers a sighting, it's probably a setup. And if any so-called "UFO expert" says nightlights can't be faked, then ignore them too.

Are there any more of the the Stupendous Yappi's little boy wonders out there ready to yank any more cranks? Bet on it.

Maybe the skeptics and the media have a shared interest in keeping people's minds off more troubling objects in the skies, like these photos of unidentified craft spraying contrails. Who knows?

But we do know there is a tremendous amount of hardware being put up in the sky for purposes that aren't entirely clear, and perhaps if you embarrass enough people with over-hyped UFO hoaxes, they'll be too intimidated to pay any attention to it, never mind report it.

Ah, don't pay any attention to me- I've just watched too many X-Files reruns.

And for our 17th and last image, this is a closeup of a 170-foot wide crop circle from the UK that has this elaborate, seemingly uniform weave pattern. Whitley Strieber claims this is proof that some of these circles are definitely not man-made. I can't speak to that but it's worth taking a look at nonetheless.

Must-See TV: The Invisibles

What do you get when you cross Lovecraft's Chthulu mythos and Heinlein's Puppet Masters and throw in a dash or two of Darker Than You Think? You get this nail-biting episode of The Outer Limits. As detailed by Bruce Rux, The Outer Limits was created by Leslie Stevens, whose father was a US Navy Admiral, so the denouement of this episode has added resonance.

After a billion, billion years, the strange forces of cosmic energy have put together nameless nuclei that met and fell to Earth where, although deformed by the fall, they plan to rule by infesting the bodies of powerful and influential humans. These 'alien things' can grow into the body of a man who is useful to them, but form ugly growths and make sickness of the men they cannot use in their attempt to take over.

Luis Spain is planted by the Government Intelligence Agency to get inside the clique of once respected men who are still in positions of power although converted by the invisibles they carry in their systems.

My apologies if this video isn't available for non-US readers, but I strongly recommend you track it down. Grant Morrison obviously did. Here's the link for the (Cht)Hulu page.

Grissom/Obama meme going viral? (UPDATE 1920 EST)

In the past 36 hours this blog has been bombarded with thousands of hits, after a Drudge Report-type site linked to part one of the Gus Grissom/Barackobamun piece. There were the usual corny old jokes about "tinfoil hats" and all of the rest of the worn-out snark in the comments sections (along with some stunning displays of poor reading comprehension), but that represents only a tiny percentage of the traffic. Having been on the internet for the better part of the last two decades, I recognize defensive ironic distancing when I see it.

What's more, I'm noticing that other sites are picking up on the meme. It's too soon to say how resonant the meme will become, but it did get me looking at Obama's possible Grissom obsession again (and that's what I was writing about- not a conspiracy, per se.)

In the first few seconds of doing so, I found this speech to the National Academy of Sciences on April 27, 2009. Although it was a more general (read: "boring") gabfest on science and technology, Barackobamun spoke about his support for the space colonization program:

My budget includes $150 billion over 10 years to invest in sources of renewable energy as well as energy efficiency. It supports efforts at NASA, recommended as a priority by the National Research Council, to develop new space-based capabilities to help us better understand our changing climate.

And he even snuck in the Magic(k) Number:

America's young people will rise to the challenge if given the opportunity -- if called upon to join a cause larger than themselves. We've got evidence. You know, the average age in NASA's mission control during the Apollo 17 mission was just 26. I know that young people today are just as ready to tackle the grand challenges of this century.

So what's the big deal about this speech? Nothing, really. Except it took place of 5o years to the day after Gus Grissom was chosen by NASA for the Mercury Project.

So, is that really the Sun in the Obama logo?

Not being a round decade interval, Obama didn't mark the Liberty Bell 7 mission in any noticeable way. But he did cut $1.7 Billion from the F-22 program, a move the fastidiously-ethical Grissom would have applauded.


UPDATE 1920 EST - Interesting Timing Dept.:

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has failed to declare the presence of 30 ancient tombs on his land, according to newly published recordings said to be of him.

The recordings allege Mr Berlusconi told escort Patrizia D'Addario of 30 Phoenician tombs at his Sardinia villa.

The tombs date from 300BC, a man said to be Mr Berlusconi was heard saying. - BBC

Hey, guess what else? Berlusconi is a P2 Mason!

UPDATE: Tommy looks at the decline of Fark and the kneejerk reactions to the post. I'm not surprised by any of it. If the post was truly nonsense, they wouldn't have spent any time on it. But it obviously got under their skins- that is, those few who read above a 8th grade level. I've seen this process over and over again. But it ties into a wider issue...

We're in a period of reaction following long years of political dominance by forces tied to the religious right. Now we're seeing a kind of dyspeptic, dogmatic materialism and radical adherence to scientistic authority become the default setting not only for the Left, but also for the marginal types looking for bandwagons to hop. It's a temporary thing- I've seen these kind of mass memes come and go on the Web at an increasingly brisk pace. But these movements always overstep their bounds, because they inevitably attract non-thinkers with their own axes to grind. And soon even people within the cult become bored and frustrated by the declining quality of discourse and the Great Wheel turns yet again.

Unwisely, the skeptic/atheist crowd have tied their wagons to Obama and the Democrats (ie., the left wing of the Neo-Feudal oligarchy) in a big way, but are forced to watch them disintegrating at an only slightly-slower pace than the Republicans. If Obama continues to fail, not only will the Fundamentalist forces be re-emboldened (and cut loose from the slight bonds of politesse that the GOP insisted upon), so will very angry types in the Libertarian and Patriot undergrounds. All of these people not only supremely resent the kind of mocking and dismissal that they have to deal with from the Left, but a lot of them are being squeezed economically -- and are also armed to the teeth. Not a good situation for anyone, and we've already seen the horrible results of this recipe.

Now, anyone who spends more than five minutes on this blog knows I'm not some wild-eyed hysteric. But the very word "Freemason" is a red flag to some non-thinkers, who have no concept of the history or continuing influence of the Craft or affiliated groups, all of whom are very well represented in Washington and other capitals. And there is so much hysteria about Masonry - a lot of which I believe is self-generated- that no one can discuss the topic without inspiring knee-jerk reactions.

This blog looks at esoteric themes primarily in the entertainment sphere, and there's no arguing the increasing prevalence of these themes. Believe me, if the Michael Schermers and Phil Plaits of this world had their way, there would be a skeptic/atheist version of the Hays Commission, policing and censoring esoteric and supernatural content in TV, video games and movies. And soon after, America's entertainment industry would collapse.

But as Frank Zappa said, politics is the entertainment wing of the Military-Industrial Complex. Perhaps when we see politicians toying with esoteric iconography (or worse, the shenanigans at Bohemian Grove and the like) we're subconsciously confronted with the unreality of our political clownshow, which millions of people- liberal and conservative- regard with the utmost seriousness.

To acknowledge the power of secret societies is to doubt the American myth of the sovereign citizen, and to acknowledge the possibility that these groups may wield some unexplained power mortally challenges the scientistic myth of the primacy of the conscious, left-brain mind and the illusion that the scholars and scientists are born to rule.

Ironically enough, the last two were the original mandate of the Illuminati, before they entered into the mythic realm.

Mindbomb: OK, this is completely insane (UPDATE)

UPDATE: Speechless. Thanks to Eleleth and everyone who caught this.

In my most recent Solar Seminar extravaganza (yes, I know it's been a while since I updated but I've been busy), I asked this impertinent question:

Is creativity a form of shamanic communion with forces beyond our ordinary experience? Are there certain individuals who are able to tap into the deepest recesses of consciousness where the gods are waiting? Does visionary experience allow one to see traces of reality unbound by time and space? There are the questions that lie at the heart of my own work and have led me to obsess further on an already long-standing obsession- the American godfather of the modern superhero, Jack Kirby.

Longtime readers are familiar with the eerie prescience of the late King of Comics, such as this issue of a comic (that was drawn in 1959 but not published until mid-1966) that depicted a strange foreshadowing of the Monolith and Stargate of 2001: A Space Odyssey...

...or this startling depiction of a nuclear-armed jet slamming into a skyscraper 17 years before 9/11...

...or this prescient allegory of the Gulf Wars and the arrest of Saddam Hussein in OMAC (drawn 17 years before the Gulf War), written contemporaneously with a story about a Stargate in another Kirby comic, Kamandi.

Drawn 17 years before the Viking mission

OK, if you haven't read those stories, be sure to check them out. But let's rewind to Moonday, where we were looking at the various theories on the Apollo Hoax meme that the media was shoving down our throats:

Now, let me go on record as believing the Apollo landings were real (they were too ritually important not to be), though perhaps not quite what we saw on TV. However, there's another possibility here that the media is not shoving down your throat- the landings were real but some of the photos and film from them were faked.

Why? Possibly because the real nature of and equipment used in the Apollo missions are highly sensitive and not meant for public consumption...As as I said before, some researchers like Chris Everard believe that there are still active alien bases on the Moon.

Then Jay Weidner posted a long article presenting his theory that Stanley Kubrick helped fake the Apollo mission footage to hide the true mission, which used Nazi saucer technology. This project was worked on simultaneously with production of 2001:A Space Odyssey, according to Weidner. There was some discussion of that story on The Solar Satellite.

But in pondering the third option in the Apollo controversy, I asked this impertinent question about the Apollo 11 crew's quite bold pronouncements that NASA forget about the Moon and focus on Mars:

I wonder if that has anything to do with the strange explosions and flaming debris we've seen falling from the sky over the past few months or the fact that June began and ended with two jetliners mysteriously dropping into the sea.

OK, to recap: Jack Kirby, Apollo 11 hoax controversy, Stanley Kubrick, war in space...

In 1976, Jack wrote and drew Captain America's Bicentennial Battles, in which Cap encounters a sorcerer named Mister Buda. The mini-Magus sends Cap on a trip through time and space, revisiting some crucial moments in America's history such as the Civil War, the White Sands Atomic Test (the same date as the Apollo 11 launch, incidentally) and the Great Chicago Fire. Cap encounters notables such as Adolf Hitler, John Brown and Benjamin Franklin, and winds up in some pretty interesting locations...

...such as the Moon, where he discovers "it isn't as dead as it seems to be," and in fact is the setting for a major firefight...

...between forces Cap can't identify. "But this is impossible," Cap thinks to himself, he's heard nothing about this in the corporate media! How could it possibly be happening?

But no sooner does he try to get a hold on what's happening than he ends up in one of Buda's psychic time portals. Kirby's description of Cap's voyage is almost identical to the language he'd use describing another astronaut's unexplained voyage...

...in Jack's other 1976 Treasury Edition comic, his adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just as with OMAC and Kamandi, another strange link between two contemporaneous Kirby comics.

Because sure enough, Cap finds himself back on Earth, smack dab in the sights of a camera lens. Given the You Are There conceit of Bicentennial Battles, it must for a newsreel, perhaps the Hindenberg disaster or something. After all, Astro-Cap is the "truth-seeker" in this story...

...no, Cap goes from the unreported secret war on the Moon, through a Kubrickian Stargate, and straight into a movie studio.

The Phoenix Has Landed: A Picture Story

You know how it goes- click pics for the story behind the imagery.

Space/Gods: Mars, Moonshots and Masonry (UPDATED 1400 EST)

Check out the Telegraph's gallery of Apollo UFO imagery

OK, I've got a lot of ground to cover here - I'm going to try to cover some of the weirdness aspects of Apollo 11, as well as all of the varying theories and controversies over it. But I did want to hit this story. Some have claimed that the reason we've not returned to the Moon is that there are alien bases there, and we've been warned off. Sounds crazy, some might say.

But those who subscribe to that theory might find Buzz Aldrin's attitude about going back there quite interesting:

In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Thursday, Aldrin wrote that "a race to the moon is a dead end," and that "the moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things.” Instead, Aldrin argues not only for a manned mission to Mars, but for a long-term program to build a human colony on the planet in order to research whether it once supported—or currently supports—life.

"Its hostility to all living things." Fascinating.

Aldrin had put forth his proposals at a Mars summit in Plymouth, England, a fact which definitely caught my attention. For some reason, Plymouth and Mars seem to be very intimately linked. I uncovered this strange connection back in December:

Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has finally spotted rocks on the Red Planet that bear carbonate minerals....

It turns out that this crucial mineral was discovered at the Nili Fossae, named for - you guessed it - The Nile River:

The results were presented Thursday at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco and will appear Friday in the journal Science.

Scientists planning the next Mars landing — the Mars Science Laboratory — initially considered Nili Fossae as a potential landing site, but it did not make the final cut.- AP

So this was announced on Thursday the 18th, which is the 388th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth... And how were the sacrifices of those brave and dedicated Christian pilgrims commemorated?

That obelisk is in Plymouth, England but it has a cousin in Massachusetts. The cornerstone of that obelisk was laid in an elaborate ceremony, involving a Naval regatta and the President of the United States. Oh, I forgot to mention- it was an elaborate Masonic ceremony:

“In the name of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts I now proclaim that the corner stone of the structure to be here erected has this day been found square, level, and plumb, true and trusty, and laid according to the old customs by the Grand Master of Masons..."

The carefully planned ceremony had begun early in the morning of August 20, 1907 when the presidential yacht Mayflower, with President Theodore Roosevelt aboard, sailed into Provincetown Harbor around 10 o’clock. As it rounded Long Point and entered the harbor, it passed down a passage created by eight battleships composed of two squadrons.

And guess what else happened on August 2o? Well, in 1975 the Viking Mars Probe was launched.

How many of you think that the selection of Plymouth for this Mars Summit was coincidental? Yeah, me neither. Bonus factoid: Aleister Crowley was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, who also brought us the Rapture craze and Dispensationalism.

Speaking of which, apparently for some "For some, the first Moon landing in 1969 was “almost a religious experience”

Forty years later, Debbie Rogers of Hingham vividly recalls the thrill of watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 – and not just because one of the astronauts, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, was a friend.

“It was almost a religious experience,” Rogers said this week.

Of course, the media was hitting those nefarious "conspiracy theorists" pretty hard this past week, "debunking" all of their dangerous theories about the Moon landings being faked. Yet all of the various news agencies spent so much time frothing at their collective mouths about it that it set my hidden agenda detector a-pinging.


CNN covered the story in a fairly impartial manner, and ABC correctly headlined its rebuttal story "Refuting the Most Popular Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Theories" rather than the presumptuous "debunking," but several other outlets offered debunkings, such as the so-called Mythbusters, who already have decided that that the theories can be "busted" even before they even gather any new evidence.

Now, there's a whole cottage industry of so-called skeptics whose behavior is remarkably similar to petulant adolescents and whose attitude towards contrary evidence is indistinguishable from the Iranian Ayatollahs. Whatever kind of "punk" attitude these people present to the public, the fact is that they are all essentially shills for the Establishment.

That being said, I was still extremely puzzled by all the attention paid the Moon hoax crowd, which even in the relatively marginal conspiracy theory world, is a pretty small constituency.

And just to add to the cognitive dissonance, we also hear stories that an iconic photograph from the Spanish Civil War was itself a hoax and that NASA erased the original Apollo tapes and used a Hollywood production house to restore copies. You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to sense some weird psyop agenda at work here.

Now, let me go on record as believing the Apollo landings were real (they were too ritually important not to be), though perhaps not quite what we saw on TV. However, there's another possibility here that the media is not shoving down your throat- the landings were real but some of the photos and film from them were faked.



Why? Possibly because the real nature of and equipment used in the Apollo missions are highly sensitive and not meant for public consumption. There are theories out there that there are ancient artifacts on the Moon, exactly the kind that the Brookings Institute recommended be kept secret in 1958 in their report on UFOs to NASA. As as I said before, some researchers like Chris Everard believe that there are still active alien bases on the Moon.

By pushing the Apollo hoax theme to death and then letting all of the skeptic mediawhores throw their tantrums at the theorists, the media is effectively shutting down any other speculation on the Apollo missions and why they suddenly stopped. Two prominent astronauts- Edgar Mitchell and the late Gordon Cooper- are both on record as believing that UFOs are real. And Aldrin's cryptic comment about hostility to all life might be interpreted by some as a coded warning or at least a Freudian slip.

And after a lot of noise made about the Constellation missions when Barackobamun took office, there are reports coming in that the future of the program is in doubt. And now the Centaur rocket will be bombing the Moon in October, allegedly to gauge the presence of water crystals.


I wonder if that has anything to do with the strange explosions and flaming debris we've seen falling from the sky over the past few months or the fact that June began and ended with two jetliners mysteriously dropping into the sea. It surely doesn't have anything to do with this summer's blockbuster hit which features humankind drafted into a war between alien factions.

Which, come to think of it, is the basic storyline in the new Star Trek film as well.

UPDATE: Wow, those Apollo 11 chaps are riding the Mars-not-Moon meme hard today:

Two of the astronauts who took part in the first Moon landing 40 years ago have called for renewed efforts to send a manned mission to Mars. At a rare public reunion of the Apollo 11 crew, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins said Mars instead of the Moon should be the focus of exploration.

Those who believe that mankind has been warned away from the Moon won't be exactly dissuaded by Michael Collins' remarks today:

Mr Collins, who circled the Moon alone while Mr Armstrong and Mr Aldrin walked on it, said Mars was more interesting than the Moon.

"Sometimes I think I flew to the wrong place. Mars was always my favourite as a kid and it still is today."

He urged further exploration, saying: "I worry that the current emphasis on returning to the Moon will cause us to become ensnared in a technological briar patch needlessly delaying for decades the exploration of Mars - a much more worthwhile destination."

And also a hell of a lot farther away. What do these guys know about Mars that we don't?

Those who believe that the Apollo missions were faked to boost national morale won't be discouraged by Neil Armstrong's remarks either:

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, said the race to get to the Moon had been the ultimate peaceful contest. He said it was an "exceptional national investment" for the US and ex-USSR. Mr Armstrong told the audience: "It was the ultimate peaceful competition: USA vs USSR. "I'll not assert that it was a diversion which prevented a war, nevertheless it was a diversion."

And those who believe that the Cold War was itself a hoax meant to mask an ongoing globalist agenda won't be discouraged by these cryptic remarks by Armstrong:

"Eventually, it provided a mechanism for engendering co-operation between former adversaries. In that sense, among others, it was an exceptional national investment for both sides."

Both sides? I missed something- what cooperation was there in the Apollo program?

Apollo 17 skipper Gene Cernan offered a dissenting voice, of a sort:

"We need to go back to the Moon, we need to learn a little bit more about what we think we know already, we need to establish bases, put new telescopes there, get prepared to go to Mars. The ultimate goal, truly, is to go to Mars," he told journalists.

UPDATE: Remember those noctilucent clouds linked to both the Tunguska event and the space shuttle explosion? Well, it turns out they are becoming mysteriously more common:

“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”

Nobody knows for sure, but most of the answers seem to point to human-caused global atmospheric change.

Of course they do. The media decided that before they even heard of the phenomenon. Never mind the fact that they were observed after shuttle launches or that 2009 is already a banner year for UFO sightings.

I'm sure there's no connection.

Walter Cronkite 1916-2009

Walter Cronkite was an American icon, whose reporting of the death of JFK made him an American institution. It was a bit before my time and probably a lot of yours, but he seemed to be at the center of the action for some crucial moments in what many would see as the loss of American innocence- the various assassinations in the 60s, Viet Nam and Watergate and all the rest of it.

Interesting conjunction of events, what with the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 next Mo(o)nday. Never having watched him- and not being particularly nostalgic for corporate monopoly media- I have nothing in particular to say about the man, other than his passing seems a bit of a coda to a vision of America that's long since been lost.

Nine Eleven Ten Thirteen: Addenda

Reader Horselover Phat chimes in with these astonishing X-Files factoids, vis a vis 9/11:

Just for openers...there is a span of exactly 3333 days between the first bombing of the WTC 1993 to the lights going out on the WTC memorial...those lights were on for a span of 33 days. Why are the premiere of "X-Files" and September 11, 2001, the same number of days apart as the birth dates of the two lead actors, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson? Why was Gillian Anderson 33 years and 33 days old on September 11, 2001? Why were there 33 years and 33 days between David Duchovny's birth and the premiere of "X-Files"?

Maybe the answer is that The X-Files is the key to all of life's great mysteries. Or at least that the key to all of life's great mysteries lurk within The X-Files. Who knows? Syncs like this swarm like genetically-modified bees all over the show, believe me. Maybe they are there so you'll pay attention to what the show has to say, certainly in respect to the Mythology. Maybe there's something that was using that show as a conduit for deeper messages. Again, who knows?

Click on the Chris Carter/X-Files tag and catch up with past musings on the Mighty X and related programs. I still haven't posted my X-Egesis of the last movie, but I guarantee it will blow your minds. Fans complained the story wasn't about alien abduction and colonization? That's all that it was about.

There'll be plenty of Ten Thirteen material in my Moon Landing extravaganza, which will be posted sometime on Mo(o)nday, including a stunning Gus Grissom/HAARP connection hidden within a standalone's storyline.

More on XF/911 here and here.

Owls

I had mentioned in the comments section of my Mothman post that my mother was obsessed with owl imagery when I was growing up. An anonymous commenter mentioned something that I had forgotten; that in alien abduction literature, owl imagery is often implanted into abductee's memories as kind of diversionary screen image. I do remember reading about that in either Communion or Intruders.


Here's just a small sampling of the owl imagery I grew up surrounded by. That's me, in a corner of the dining room, probably sometime around 1972 or 1973. Most of the imagery was in the living room- there was a kind of alcove set into the wall that my dad used as a bar and then my mother used as a kind of shrine, with all kinds of owl figurines there. Later we put the TV there.

Now, I have no reason at all to believe that my mother was an alien abductee, but there is one particular story I remember her telling me. She said that just before I was born she put my sister down for naps and then would often take one herself. But she would have this recurring nightmare that a "witch" was on the porch and was trying to come into the house while my mother was asleep on the sofa.

That was the same exact spot I had the leprechaun hallucination you're all so sick of hearing about.

I sometimes wonder if the neighborhood was once an old Indian burial mound. A couple years back a dolphin beached itself in the river right down the street. A fresh water river, mind you.

But what the owl discussion really reminded me of was my dad's Mustang Mach I. One of these days I'm going to get me a Mustang. Maybe when the midlife crisis hits.


UPDATE: Obligatory Ten Thirteen reference.

Transformers, part 2: Ultraterrestrials

Angels=alien androids

John Keel's work has been floating around in my head in a oblique way, as I continue to process all of the Keelian weirdness that's gripping the world. In particular, I've been thinking about Keel's "ultraterrestrial" theory. Ken Korczak wrote about Keel's UT theory in an excellent column from 2006:

People who support the Ultraterrestrial theory, such as authors Jacques Vallee and John Keel, point out that supernatural beings seemingly superior to humans have been reported throughout history. In previous eras they were called gods, angels, ogres, fairies, brownies, little people, demons, and more.

The Bible is filled with references to supernatural creatures, including giants, “wheels” flying in the sky out of which incredible creatures emerge, and more.But references to flying disks were recorded centuries before the texts of the Bible. Cave drawing dating to 30,000 B.C. depict disks floating around in the sky, remarkably similar to modern UFO photographs.

In the wake of the monster success of the new Transformers film, I've been thinking more and more Bruce Rux's theories that stories about the so-called "Greys" seem to describe androids rather than EBE's. And of course, this ties back to what I wrote about here back in March, dealing with the Igigi of Sumerian mythology:

AAT scholar Jason Martell notes that the Anunaki had a servant class called the Igigi, whom he believes could actually be the Greys of UFO lore. These creatures have been described as a kind of wetware, biologically-engineered androids:

Today's modern UFO's and Alien Contacts being reported have a strong similarity to the Ancient descriptions of the "anunnaki" Android Beings. When we look at the descriptions of our modern "grey alien", we can clearly see that they do not look like us, or the anunnaki. Rather, they look like the ancient humanoid depictions of Figurines. The majority of Abduction cases usually have a similar story to them in that the Aliens abducting them will perform medical examination and sometimes experiments having to do with human reproduction.

Is it possible that the Greys were created by the anunnaki as "Watchers" to oversee their experiments here on earth?- xfacts.research

This makes a lot of sense. Maybe the Greys are not from somewhere else- they were left here to keep an eye on the Project when the Anunaki were called back home. This would explain why these types of beings are in the world's folklore and mythology.

Maybe we're not projecting a technological viewpoint on elves and fairies and leprechauns after all. Maybe the folklore is the filter on a reality we had no framework for before we had technology (or maybe the Greys like to play dress-up and mess with people's heads)

Food for thought, and ties into Charles Fort's theory in Book of the Damned (1919) that the world is a UT plantation:

Why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea—which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes made in selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African chief to someone's old silk hat from New York or London?

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?

Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?

I think we're property.

I should say we belong to something:

That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:

That something owns this earth—all others warned off.

Hmm, not a cheery guy, that Charles Fort. Now hypothetically, if that is truly the case the owners wouldn't just leave us unattended while they were off doing their godly business elsewhere. Could all of the strange discs and orbs and all of the rest of it could be highly-advanced versions of the cameras and drones and satellites our earthbound overseers are putting up to keep an eye on their own subjects?

I mean, as above so below, right?

Well, who knows. Maybe all of the hardware that people have been seeing up there for tens of thousands of years is all a big misunderstanding. But the UT theory makes a lot more sense to me than a bunch of humanoids jetting to and fro from the Pleiades. And it certainly sheds a new light on the abduction literature as well.

One thing I will say, though. It's fascinating to me that the American and Jordanian militaries- as well as the Egyptian government- were so keen to cooperate with the production of this film. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that the military was also closely involved with the Stargate series as well.

Interesting times we live in.

TO BE CONTINUED

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."