Saturday, February 21, 2015

Secret Star Trek: "Demons of Air and Darkness"


It might be tempting to mock the Heaven's Gate and Solar Temple's ambitions to soul-travel to the stars without their bodies, despite the fact that such beliefs go back in human history many thousands of years. 


The Egyptians believed that the souls of their dead kings traveled to the stars to spend Eternity with Isis and Osiris. And where Heaven's Gate may have been influenced by an X-Files episodes on walk-ins (which in turn seems to be referencing the Solar Temple) they didn't get a chance to see the episodes which explained that these walk-ins traveled the vast reaches of space via starlight. Alice Bailey would be proud.

Such beliefs might seem especially ridiculous in the so-called New Space Age. But I've not seen any vacation spots open up on the Moon yet, how about you? Perhaps the collapse of the world's manned space ambitions a simple matter of biological necessity. Maybe we won't be doing much star trekking until we upload, Kurzweil-style, into robot bodies:
Report: Human Body Not Prepared For Life In Outer Space
The report, which was first published in the New York Times, cites multiple negative effects of outer space on the human body, including the swelling that occurs in the human head – due in part to the fact that humans did not evolve outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. 
“Your head actually feels bloated,” Mark E. Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut who flew in space four times, was quoted as saying. “It kind of feels like you would feel if you hung upside down for a couple of minutes.”
Brittle bones, insomnia, loss of appetite and radiation poisoning – which could lead to cancer – were all cited in the report as health complications suffered by former astronauts or that could plague future recruits.
The lack of gravity is also said to negatively affect the body’s neurovestibular system, leaving astronauts with a weakened ability to, literally, determine which way is up. Dizziness is also an issue, according to those who have endured it.

If indeed the human body is so unfit for outer space, this may well explain why a major aerospace firm has cornered the market on serious UFO research. It's a question of simple market research. 

Rumor has it that Bigelow has been consulting with Jacques Vallee, who surely will advise them on alternative modalities of transport than taking on the cold, perilous and deadly reaches of the Void. 

Is there a department in Bigelow dedicated to fairy R+D?
Physically, they have very light and fluid bodies, which are comparable to a condensed cloud. They are particularly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will.  
The old people said they didn't know if fairies were flesh and blood or spirits. They saw them as men of more diminutive stature than our own race. I heard my father say that fairies used to come and speak to natural people and then vanish while one was looking at them. Fairy women used to go into houses and talk and then vanish.
Ever actually read 2001: A Space Odyssey? You really have to wonder if Kubrick and Clarke weren't reading fairy lore and simply trying to answer the questions it posed. Because if Magic is indeed just technology we don't yet understand, then this kind of tech would make you a god on the battlefield. 


Most of you realize that Star Trek, the Sacred Lore of Heaven's Gate, is really just a metaphor for American neo-imperialism. The various alien races are stand-ins for other nationalities. It's why it never quite translated outside America with the same impact. 

But from time to time we see stories about aliens and citizens of Magonia intrude into the narrative, most often the discarnate beings that stand in for The Nine.

But 'Contagion',  a TNG episode co-written by Jack Kirby's Thundarr the Barbarian collaborator Steve Gerber (creator of Howard the Duck) and co-produced by Mike Gray (of Wavelength fame)  essentially set the stage for a major 90s sci-fi franchise, Stargate.

And I say 'major' only in the sheer volume of material it produced (a feature film and three cable series, one of which lasted 10 seasons). Its impact on the culture at large is marginal to the point of being invisible. None of the spinoffs had the impact or gravitas of the original feature film, and seem to exist in another universe altogether (a soggy British Columbian universe with especially shoddy costume design).

Stargate SG-1 garnered ratings that would have sunk it in a week on any broadcast network, but its status as a cable franchise- and the patronage of the United States Air Force- ensured its longevity.

Either way, 'Contagion' presented the concept of the stargate in 1989, and the Iconians, a now-dead race, used their own version of an artificial stargate to travel anywhere in the universe and to appear and disappear like ghosts. It wasn't a unique innovation in the annals of sci-fi, but it's probably where the creators of Stargate first encountered it.

The fact that the stargate aliens exist as stand-ins for UFOnauts is made clear during this exchange between Captain Picard and Wesley Crusher:
  WESLEY
It's about the Iconians, sir.
I'd always heard that they were
just a myth.

PICARD
China was thought to be only a
myth until Marco Polo travelled
there. No, the Iconians were
real. We know that three
systems in this sector have a
number of cultural similarities.
Similarities which can be
explained only if there had been
a single unifying force.

WESLEY
The Iconians colonized those
worlds?

PICARD
Probably conquered.

WESLEY
So they were warlike?

PICARD
Perhaps. Ancient texts refer
to them as the Demons of Air and
Darkness, but that could have
so many different interpretations.

WESLEY
Air and darkness?

PICARD
Legend has it that they travelled
without the benefit of spaceships.
Merely appearing from thin air
on distant planets.

WESLEY
That sounds like magic.

PICARD
Wouldn't we seem magical to a
stone-age people?

It's hard to tell who contributes what to Trek scripts (the credits often have nothing to do with who actually produced the script), but I can't help but wonder if there's a hidden hand at work here. 
Because this is straight out of Medieval folklore, via Jacques Vallee.
The Hebrews used to call these beings who are between the Angels and Man Sadaim, and the Greeks, transposing the letters and adding but one syllable, called them Daimonas. 
Among the ancient Philosophers these demons were held to be an Aerial Race, ruling over the Elements, mortal, engendering, and unknown in this century to those who rarely seek Truth in her ancient dwelling place, which is to say, in the Cabala and in the theology of the Hebrews, who possessed the special art of holding communion with that Aerial People and of conversing with all these Inhabitants of the Air. 
In Europe, the archives of the Roman Catholic Church are full of such incidents, and it cannot be doubted that many accusations of witchcraft stemmed from the belief in strange beings who could fly through the air and approached humans at dusk or at night. Occasionally, these "demons" were seen in full daylight by many people.
I've never been able to stomach much Stargate, mostly out of my dislike for its fannish/LARPy dialogue and my extreme dislike for McGyver's endless smirking and mugging, so I can't really say if they ever worked these same veins at the same depth. 

But the basic concepts were the same, which makes the Air Force's patronage of the franchise extremely curious:
4. The show’s producers maintained a close working relationship with the US Air Force. Two Air Force Chiefs of Staff, Generals Michael Ryan and John Jumper (right) made cameos on the show. In 2004, Richard Dean Anderson received a special award by the Air Force rarely given to civilians in order to thank him and the other people behind Stargate SG-1 for their very positive portrayal of that organization. Anderson was declared an honorary Air Force brigadier general. 
This is rather hilarious: 
5. But that didn’t stop the Air Force from executing some script control. At one point, the writers had O’Neill joke about aliens at Area 51 in the episode “Touchstone”. The Air Force insisted that this wasn’t true and that it was unacceptable for Stargate SG-1 to even joke about it. 
Yeah, sure. That's why they couldn't joke about it. Absolutely.


Then of course there are projects like CERN, massive supercolliders whose ostensible purposes seem a bit sketchy (the whole Higgs Boson thing has had a weird smell about it, no one is behaving quite the way they should given such a momentous discovery, and there's no shortage of innuendo and accusation that the discovery may have been a fraud). 

I'm not even remotely qualified to comment on any of that, I'm simply reporting the facts. But there's a parallel body of theorizing that the real purpose of CERN in particular is piercing the dimensional veil, or in another words, acting as a stargate. 

Those theories aren't exactly dissuaded when the establishment propaganda mill National Geographic publishes headlines like that, even for a photo contest. It's always the little things.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the theorizing concerning the Iraq War and the sacking of the Baghdad Museum (which seemed to top the to-do list once US troops entered the city) and the search for the Anunaki Stargate. 

William Henry, a Stargate enthusiast to be sure, pinpoints the search to a particular image that may reveal the location of the ancient stargate, and argues that the search for it was at least one of the driving factors behind the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Baghdad.
An independent archaeologist that discusses a direct link between the ancient ET presence in Sumer (southern Iraq) and current US focus on the regime of Saddam Hussein, is William Henry. Henry's main thesis is that there existed in Sumerian times a technological device which he describes as a 'Stargate', that the Anunnaki/Nephilim used to travel back and forth from their homeworld and the Earth, and also how they travel around the galaxy.

Depictions have been found that show divine beings flanking a temple entrance and holding up poles to which ringlike objects are attached. Rather than a simple temple scene involving the chief Anunnaki of the Sumerians, Anu and his two sons, Enlil and Enki, Henry proposes that the above scene represents a transportation device used by Anu and others from the elite Anunnaki. 
One thing is beyond argument- the Baghdad Museum was sacked and several thousand ancient texts went missing, never to be seen again. The US Army released a series of PR announcements a couple years after  the sacking, claiming that the materials had been recovered and the looters had been punished but as it happens, the vast majority of antiquities are still missing. 

Someone seems to be looking for something in those ancient texts and doesn't want the rest of the world to see it.
Ten years after Iraq's national museum was looted and smashed by frenzied thieves during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, it's still far from ready for a public re-opening. Work to overcome decades of neglect and the destruction of war has been hindered by power struggles, poorly-skilled staff and the persistent violence plaguing the country, said Bahaa Mayah, Iraq's most senior antiquities official.
 The museum was once the showcase for 7,000 years of history in Mesopotamia, birthplace of some of the first cities and one of the first writing systems — cuneiform — and home to a succession of major civilizations, including the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian, through to a flourishing Islamic empire. 
The museum was left a wreck the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops on April 10, 2003. Ancient clay scrolls and pottery littered the floor. Looters made off with everything from gold bowls and ritual funeral masks to elaborate headdresses. The U.S. was sharply criticized for not protecting the museum 
Because the museum's inventory was never completed, it's uncertain how many pieces were stolen, but the number is estimated at 15,000 pieces. More than a quarter have been retrieved, said Mayah, who has overseen the museum formally since 2012 but has been involved in its renovations for the past five years. 
It's part of a broader problem of preservation of antiquities in Iraq. There are over 12,000 registered archaeological sites in Iraq but they are mostly not protected, allowing for widespread, ongoing looting, Mayah said.
Indeed, the looting continues to this very day. Now it's ISIS/ISIL/whatever who are doing the looting, and someone in the shadows is paying them a lot of money for do it. And as before, it's those tablets, which would seem to have marginal monetary value, that seem to be the hot property on the black market.
 According to new information released by the Guardian, trafficking “conflict antiquities,” or artifacts that are looted, smuggled, and sold to illicit dealers, has been the source of tens of millions for ISIS. They even stole $36 million worth of artifacts from one site in Syria alone. 
The terrorist group benefits from all other steps in the process too, from trafficking the goods to selling them at a sprawling black market in the ISIS stronghold of Tell Abyad, a town of the Syrian Turkish border. 
Over the past several years, smuggled Iraqi antiquities have traveled as far as France, Switzerland, and even California, where the F.B.I. recently seized a series of ancient Mesopotamian tablets.
Someone in California, ground zero of the new Digital Gold Rush, is after Mesopotamian tablets? Why? Whatever for?

It should also be noted that one of the largest collections of Sumerian texts is at the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelpia. Remember the 2008 Presidential Election, and Obama's excess of interest in the City of Brotherly Love?

There's also the curious detail of Sumerian cuneiform being used in the John Carter film, which also featured stargate technology and presented the Therns as "demons of air and darkness."

The film offered stargate technology in place of the astral projection of the novel, A Princess of Mars. But in Carter's case it wasn't just the astral body that traveled to Mars, it was the physical body as well. If there were still active John Carter fan communities today surely they'd be arguing over the existence of some kind of teleportation device that Burroughs is implying but never makes explicit:
As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron. 
My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness. 
I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.
As it happens, the discovery of the so-called Face on Mars may have been directed by a kind of astral projection as well, in this case remote viewing experiments that took place before the Viking probe was launched. 

From Joseph Farrell's Giza Death Star:
Almost 20 years before Bauval and Gilbert's book The Orion Mystery argued persuasively that certain aspects of the Giza compound and the Great Pyramid were deliberately meant to align to Orion, Hurtak 'was exploring a possible correlation between the Giza pyramids and Orion's beltl in 1973. 
We found that this was not the only time he has been ahead of the game.', Indeed, long before the Viking I orbiter took that now famous picture of the Face on Mars on July 25, 1976, Hurtak had "predicted the existence of a Sphinx image on Mars in 1975." 
Moreover, accordingly to Hancock and Bauval, Hurtak also predicted that various other structures would be discovered on Mars and that they "would be linked to the Giza monuments in a giant cosmic blueprint." Was Hurtak's prediction the result of remote viewing experiments in which be and others, like Lambert Dolphin, were involved?

This kind of thing is taken for granted by Secret Sun readers, given Jack Kirby's late 50s viewing of Face on Mars, which was accompanied by a story detailing the nuclear annihilation of Martian civilization, an idea that seems to be gaining currency in alt. circles these days. 

Either way, the concept of travel beyond the confines of space-time using the mind or astral body may not be entirely fantastic. In fact there may be some science behind it. A lot of you are probably familiar with Dr. Rick Strassman's work with DMT. 

This article details why Strassman ended the trials being done in a hospital setting. The implications are rather unsettling if you're married to a naturalistic worldview:
 Long-term benefits were meager, and adverse effects were adding up. The frequency with which volunteers reported contact with other-dimensional beings was unexpected and personally disorienting to Strassman. 
I've heard that Strassman found the reports to be disturbingly consistent, so much so that he began to believe he was opening a portal for adverse influences from other dimensions to enter our own. Terence McKenna spoke of these influences- indeed, magicians throughout history have encountered them. Strassman began to test for these influences, and the results led to the end of the New Mexico trials.
I tried and discarded various levels of interpretation until I finally just figured I'll just start to do an experiment assuming that what people are undergoing is real and that indeed they are experiencing or making contact with real, externally verifiable, discrete, freestanding sorts of beings. This is what they're saying and this is what they're doing and this is what is going on between them and the volunteer.
Certainly if they can come in, one day we can figure how to go out. There are sporadic reports of Marshall Applewhite possessing paranormal abilities, one has to wonder if his "nervous breakdowns" were a result of struggles we can only guess at. 
The Gate were obsessed with the malign influence of "Luciferian" extraterrestrials, who were constantly sabotaging their spiritual progress. Perhaps this is just the typical religious paranoia of a cult but the details are disturbingly similar to those that the Collins Elite also ascribed to "demons of air and darkness."
We can breezily throw around quotes like "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but how far are you willing to go to actually believe such a thing?