The Secret Sun

You Don't Need Their Permission Anymore, Part 1

2012-02-15T22:03:00.004-05:00

The final collapse of American popular culture-
Nicki Minaj at the Grammy Awards

I hadn't time to fully process Whitney Houston's death when I first posted on it. I knew it marked a major turning point in my own life and in that of the nation, but I wasn't quite sure why. I'm still working on it, but the event seems to grow in my mind.

First, the obvious: Whitney's death came on the eve of the Grammy Awards, which is in no way a mere coincidence. I've my own feelings on this conjunction, other people their own as well. But following on the heels of Madonna's Pax Romana imperialist ritual at the Super Bowl and Nicki Minaj's equally grotesque tribute to The Exorcist (a film and novel that I've come to see as the apologia of a psychotic priest after the rape, torture and murder of an adolescent child of indeterminate gender) on Sunday, how can we escape the departure of a performer who didn't need the vulgar distractions of pseudo-occult ritual to hypnotize the entire world?

Equally despicable and depressing were the flurry of tweets from the media-brainwashed ditz-brigades of America, gleefully declaring they'd "let Chris Brown beat me any time." The fact that Brown is not only still a star but a bigger star than ever tells you pretty much all you need to know about where we stand in the 21st Century, with all of our technology and social media bullshit.

But the message is clear-- spectacle and manufactured outrage are what will be sold now. True talent is too hard to package, too hard to control. With the battery of electronic effects these singers are drenched in now, they don't really need to know how to sing at all anymore. Just ask Madonna.

And so the death of Whitney Houston-- the greatest singer of her generation-- acts as the milestone for this dark, cold new age.

Whitney in happier times, Robyn Crawford on right

The exact truth behind Whitney's relationship with Robyn Crawford still seems to be radioactive, with the press only covering claims made by British gay militant Peter Tatchell (reduced to recycling made-up quotes attributed to Jaz Coleman back in the 80s before Whitney died) that Whitney's sham marriage to Bobby Brown was the beginning of her long, ugly downfall. For her part, Crawford wrote a heart-rending open letter that detailed her history with Whitney without addressing the exact nature of their relationship.

But the public record is crystal clear- Whitney started going off the rails when she married Brown and went off the deep end when Crawford departed her life in 2000. How ironic that professions of bisexuality --real or (mostly) imagined-- are essentially a prerequisite for today's new pop stars like Nicki Minaj.

Happy now? Persephone in the Underworld

But that's only part of the story. Whitney's other problem was that she wasn't "real." She was too perfect, too beautiful, too talented, too flawless. In the militant late 80s, she was known as "Whitey Houston." She was seen as music for export, the "Prom Queen of Soul," not street, not credible. Many saw her marriage to Brown not only as a way to establish her straight credentials, but to establish her black credentials. I don't think anyone ever realized how far it would go.

I tuned it all out. My interest in Whitney Houston had less to do with her music or career and more to do with a specific moment in time. But I always recognized her incredible gifts and believed- and I still believe-- in redemption. I still believe in the power of the work to overcome the kind of struggles Whitney Houston faced, that brought her so low.

I believed until the very end that one day she would walk away from other people's expectations and retake control of her life and rediscover the gifts that stunned the world in the 80s.

I believed in Act Three.

Demeter Rising: the elemental Tina Turner

I saw Tina Turner- who I cite as an avatar of Demeter in The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll-- as an example for Whitney, who I saw as Persephone (with Brown as a particularly malevolent Hades and cocaine as the pomegranate seeds). Tina Turner became too "white" for the militants in the late 60s, as hard as that is to believe. So rather than submit to the passing fads of the day, she stuck to what she knew and what she felt.

After leaving the abusive Ike, Tina relocated to Europe (where she remains a superstar of the first order) and later reconquered America with one of the most amazing storybook comebacks in pop history. But there would be no escape for Whitney-- what the world saw and fell in love with was some kind of woundedness, a vulnerability, despite the hardass bitch image she projected on reality TV.

Persephone, in other words.

But Tina Turner made her comeback in another America, another world. Not the America of the shattered attention span and cheap cynicism. Not the America where "transgression" is embarrassingly mainstream. Not the America in which an Internet connection is like a Harvard PhD; it instantly confers on its owner ultimate authority. An America in which everyone becomes an authority simply by claiming to be so and then petulantly demands that their authority be recognized. An America that demands the world be its mirror.

Tina Turner's America that wasn't that much different, mind you, but it was still an America in which certain things still mattered; talent, experience, paid dues, authenticity, knowledge. Not to everyone, mind you, but to the right people. Tina paid her dues and paid them hard, and people responded to that. That kind of thing used to matter. Not anymore.

The last weekend-- a symbolic rebirth on the Saco River, 1984

Whitney Houston appeared in my life as an anomaly. My response to her was visceral, probably hormonal, and was based in the fact that she had one of the most powerful voices I have ever heard and was astonishingly beautiful to boot. In a parade of instantly forgettable music video-- which was inescapable in the mid-80s, it was playing everywhere you went-- she stood out. But as I said before there was this signal. I realize now it wasn't necessarily coming from her, though I now realize she was certainly part of it.

But this was a time when I was kicking furiously at the doors of consciousness and discovering that Synchronicity wasn't just a disappointingly commercial album from The Police. It was a unsettlingly interactive force that seemed to correspond with all of the weirdness of my early life (which some people would call "paranormal" but I never did back then) and tied into all of the mind-expanding and mystical totems I was exploring at the time.

It's funny that Whitney Houston-- the mainstreamiest of the mainstream-- was the anomaly in all of this insanity. But she was mezzo like my mom and looked like an idealized version of my high school girlfriend (who I met at a Clash concert, of all places), so a mixture of the two was certain to be potent in my new life. This would all come back when Whitney died two days after I posted on Max Ernst, who kicked my ass and kicked it hard at the same exact point in time.

Two other things happened to me, in the midst of all that ferment; I discovered the occult (the Paranormal) and conspiracy (the Parapolitical). The first wandered into a den of iniquity my friends and I were renting at the foot of the New Jersey Skylands in the form of a Deadhead, who was an esoteric dilettante in the very best possible way. To him all of the various magical modalities were equally valid, equally interchangeable. It was all one big magickal candy store.

He'd introduce me to a host of new concepts and street-level magi, hiding in the margins of the Jersey hinterlands. He'd even attempt to initiate me as a warlock in the woods (I'm still stunned how he built a full-tilt stone altar literally overnight) in the next town over from where Whitney Houston lived for 20 years, though I must say my reaction was more bemusement and anticlimax than transcendence.

Conspiracy would come in the form of another friend who did way too much acid in high school but chose to listen to The Residents and Captain Beefheart than The Dead. He was also a Subgenii and almost terminally paranoid, but in an extremely cheerful way (he'd regale you with stories of how the government would one day just stop sending food and fuel to suburbs like Ledgewood and make it sound like a two priests and a rabbi joke). He was a hell of a storyteller and could decode the hidden agenda behind every news story. His methodology was contagious and stuck for life.

A lot of other people in our circle thought these two were just vaguely amusing weirdos, but I recognized that these were guys who spent all their time thinking. And their pharmaceutical adventures taught them new ways to think and maybe even turned on new synapses to think with.

I wouldn't quite realize it, but I subconsciously recognized that most other people didn't know how to think, and didn't want to. Even those people in the media or politics or the academy. They simply learned thought-replacement techniques, something you'll see everywhere if you know how to look for them.

But where I sit I see a situation in which everyone who's supposed to be responsible, who's supposed to minding the store, has not only failed us all and failed us all badly but is essentially out there masturbating in public, so to speak. Who are any of them to tell me how to think about the Paranormal or the Parapolitical?

If you look you'll find that those who do not truly know how to think are those who are the most eager to discourage others to truly think. If you stop and think about it, you'll see how these people have perfected this nearly-simian technique of having you beg for their permission to think a certain way. That they have perfected these apelike signals to discourage independent thought, thinking outside of their tiny little boxes.

It's by no means limited to those in quote-unquote authority. Just as often, it's these ridiculous assclowns who set themselves up as authority, without having any accomplishments or credentials. Without having done anything authoritative, in other words.

It's time to knock these motherfuckers off their pedestals and knock them off hard.

TO BE CONTINUED

Fallen to Earth, Again (UPDATED)

2012-02-13T12:37:00.004-05:00

This morning it seems so perfect, so fitting. In Archonic America, where devolution is the ultimate virtue and everything that once made Americans proud and unique must first be defiled and then destroyed, it seems inevitable that Whitney Houston is taken off the boards.

I remember being completely hypnotized by Whitney's videos back in 1985. I had zero interest in that kind of music but I had immense interest in her. I was so smitten that I started telling my friends that she was some kind of signal, some kind of harbinger of some new, X-Men-like race that would emerge from the ashes of humanity. That she was singing these frothy pop songs to reach as many people as possible and trip this switch in their brains and kick off the New Age.

Whitney's decline was tragic but her rise was breathtaking, a moment that caught everyone's attention, whether they cared for her brand of slick R&B or not. That wasn't the point.

The point was that everyone stopped for a moment to bask in her lean, graceful beauty, her infectious, megawatt smile and her stunning vocal range that made you stop and listen, no matter what your musical taste.

In ancient times, emperors would build temples to her all across the world, and roses would be thrown at her feet wherever she walked. Even the humblest cobbler or beggar would think that surely this was a goddess come down to Earth; Hathor, Aphrodite, Inanna.

Whitney descends the spiral staircase in "Greatest Love of All" video

But this is the modern world, where even a goddess is reduced to a commodity. I'm not sure exactly what brought Whitney Houston back down to earth, but I'm sure the unrelenting pressure of superstardom had a lot to do with it, when your every move is scripted, recorded, and critiqued. And in America we put these people up on pedestals, shine the light of interrogation on them and then eat them alive when they flinch.

In that world, you are faced with an itinerary that creates a need for the stimulants that the sharks swimming around you are all too happy to provide. The rise of the superstar paralleled the rise of cocaine culture and the crushing schedules of in-demand stars like Houston made the lure of the leaf all that more inviting.

Whitney as Isis, in The Bodyguard

The flipside of stardom is how it all becomes a grinding monotony, how the business always takes the art away from you and how an artist ends up having to support a large and often parasitical corporation; people whose livelihoods rely on keeping the machine running, whether the muse has flown or not. It's an ugly, ugly business. "Evil" might not be too strong a word. And the drugs often become the artist's only escape from the devils.

And there's another narrative at work here, something spoken in whispers (or louder, later) for many years. I had heard from people on the New York music scene even before Whitney became a superstar that she was not straight, that she'd often be seen walking arm in arm in the Village with a woman who'd later work as her assistant. Whether she was gay or bisexual seemed to be a favorite subject of debate and she later married singer Bobby Brown, an act which seem to seriously dim her luster.

But given the toxic homophobia that's become nearly a religion in some quarters since the rise of Hip Hop, I think the pressures of staying in the closet could be yet another millstone that brought this goddess crashing down to the shitpile the rest of us slog through. In the 21st Century, a person's sexuality shouldn't even be an issue, but it is.* And it will continue to be as long as the harsh realities of the post-industrial economy leave a constant need to find untermenschen to feel superior to.

I wish I could leave you with some benediction here, some happy ending. But I don't see one. I see a woman who embodied the very best of us --in such a fashion as to perhaps be not of us-- dragged down below us and then destroyed. I see The Man Who Fell To Earth play out in real time before our eyes once again. Karen Carpenter redux.

I see yet another point put up on the Archons' scoreboard. I see an artist who people across the world could all agree was something special taken away from us. The only hope is that the work will live on, and that that signal continues to be broadcast until enough receivers get switched on.

PS: I should add that Whitney Houston came to my attention at the same point time I started obsessing on Max Ernst, who we discussed in the previous post (my tastes have always been pretty eclectic). A strange and kind of disturbing sync for me.

UPDATE: The Jackals feast on the Lioness' bones.

It was business as usual less than three hours after the sudden death of pop icon Whitney Houston at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Saturday, as hundreds of high-profile celebrities worked the room at the annual Clive Davis Grammy party.

But in a suite just four floors above, police were conducting an investigation into the death of the Grammy-winning singer. While Houston’s body remained in the room, her teen daughter stood outside fighting with authorities to see the body. This while a "crime lab" van stood out among the black limousines and SUVs escorting celebrities to and from the event.

In light of the stark contrast between the tragedy of her death and the celebration at the star-studded soiree, for those in attendance at the party, the backlash is burgeoning.

Kim Kardashian (whose ex-boyfriend Ray J was Houston's on and off again beau, and reportedly in the hotel trying to gain access to the room) was photographed smiling alongside the likes of Jane Fonda and Britney Spears, while Diana Ross and Barry Gordy hammed it up for the cameras. Stars like Ne-Yo, Kelly Rowland, Sir Richard Branson, Mary J. Blige and Jon Voight also attended.

I mean, it's perfect. The System destroyed a goddess and then partied atop her corpse. Take a good, long look at American culture, people. The cancer has subsumed the host. Research credit to SSFB member Chris Parker.

UPDATE: Paul Weston wrote: "Can't help feeling that this event is so near in time to the Madonna Superbowl "ceremony" that we are being invited to intuit a greater unity. FFS, if you had a dream that began with Isis Cleopatra Madonna on her throne and ended with Whitney dead underwater you'd know it was screaming meaning that needed to be understood but this actually happened. Come on Chris! Go for it!"

To which I responded: "Being invited is precisely the reason not to go for it." Where does it end up, after all? With Nikki Minaj's ridiculous performance and brainwashed dimwits tweeting that they'd "let Chris Brown beat them any day." And the meaning that I feel needs to be understood has already been spelled out in this piece.

*Yet another interesting lesson from the ancient world, ancient priestesses- who became the divas of their time in their roles as temple singers- were often forbidden to marry or to "know men." The Vestals were the most well-known of these, the direct parallel to modern nuns, but there are also the priestesses of Bast, well-known for their musical performances.

The priestesses of Inanna- goddess of music and dance- are another. Given the highly charged eroticism of their rites it's safe to assume these women were not celibate, even if forbidden to "know men." None of this impacted the role these women played in society or the adulation they received. Hard to imagine in these times when, as with religion, sexuality has become politics by proxy.

In the ancient world, gifts such as Whitney's would act as a signal that she was not meant for the kitchen and the nursery but to serve the people by using her talent to bring them closer to the gods. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the divas of the ancient world were predominantly lesbian.

Of This Men Shall Know Nothing

2012-02-09T00:01:00.009-05:00

Max Ernst, The Twentieth Century, 1955

Every 10 years or so a new wave of enthusiasts gets all excited about UFOs. It's often preceded or accompanied by a hit movie or TV show, which in turn inspires a clutch of imitators. That brings outs out a new wave of UFOlogists, and rekindles interest in the works of elder statesmen in the field. The topic gets a lot of play in the media, there are a lot of sightings and rumors of sightings and all kinds of expectations arise and all sorts of prophecies are made.

The problem is that the UFOs themselves never seem to care much. The flaps die down. Sometimes there are major hoaxes or accusations of hoaxes and nothing ever seems to go anywhere. Then all of the new, young UFOlogists turn around and declare UFOlogy 'dead' and competition breaks out to see who be the most militant born-again debunker or have the most dramatic skeptical conversion epiphany.

Max Ernst, Two Foolish Virgins, 1947

The problem is that UFOlogy still remains an "ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) or bust" proposition, with all of the attendant messianic/rapture displacement grafted on thereto. The aliens are coming to save us from ourselves, just you wait. The religious aspect of this changes form from boom to bust to boom to bust, but the impulse is roughly the same.

While I certainly think it's possible---even probable-- that ETs have sent probes here and possibly manned (or more likely, robotic) missions here throughout the past what we call the UFO phenomenon is way, way too familiar and intimate with us to be anything truly alien.

Max Ernst, The Dark Gods, 1959

My ETH enthusiasm peaked first with the series premiere of The X-Files and then again with the release of the first X-Files film. After that I found myself looking at all the usual data and finding myself at the all of the usual dead-ends. It took some time to sort out but I later found that UFOs minus the ETH (namely, the Elusive Companion Hypothesis) worked quite well when I plugged them into all of the obsessions I plunged myself after dealing with those impasses; Synchronicity, High Weirdness, deep symbology, and so on.

In fact, the ECH was the missing puzzle piece that kept eluding me when dealing with those topics.

I also soon discovered that the ECH was lurking in the shadows of nearly every single obsession-- and often every mystery or conundrum-- in my life without me ever realizing it. I discover fresh examples of this all of the time and share them with you here.

Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence, 1943

The latest is Max Ernst (1891-1976), the great German Dadaist-Surrealist whom I like to call the "Punk Rock Picasso." My obsession with Ernst began in my late teens and was deep, immediate and entirely instinctual. Something about his work spoke to me on a profoundly personal level.

Max Ernst, The Angel of Hearth and Home, 1937

Much of his work is filled with humor and energy, but much of it also depicts a world in chaos, a world in which meaning is forever inverted and negotiable. A world in which menace and violence is either implicit or explicit, but somehow always absurd. But more importantly, his work is a riot of hidden meaning, double meaning, meaninglessness, or beyond meaning. Strange and frightening yet strangely familiar characters insinuate themselves from hidden corners. Landscapes and creatures that can only be described as "alien."

In other words, it's the work of a man who was intimately familiar with the secret world.

It was only much, much later that I found out that Ernst was an Alchemist and was believed by his fellow surrealists to be a genuine magician. From the 2001 book, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth By M. E. Warlick

Alchemical philosophy offers many symbolic parallels to surrealist thought...Ernst played a significant role because of the knowledge of Freudian theory that he brought to the surrealist group early in its development, and because of his contributions to the sexualized nature of surrealist art. Throughout his career, Ernst fused male and female imagery into cohesive hybrids, similar to that most pervasive symbol of perfection, the alchemical Androgyne. Analyzing these aspects of his work reveals the pervasive alchemical symbolism it contains...
The construction of Max Ernst as the magician of the surrealist movement began early in his career.
By the 1930s, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, René Crevel, and Hans Arp all described Ernst as possessing magical powers of transformation. In (his autobiographical writings), Ernst clarified his indebtedness to hermetic traditions, citing alchemy as a model for his working processes and claiming Cologne's occult past as his artistic heritage.
Chemical Nuptials, 1947
His first hermetic images appeared during the Cologne Dada period...his interests in psychology, alchemy, and other occult phenomena paralleled similar explorations among the early surrealists. Their search for psychic automatism, visits to clairvoyants, group séances, and walking tours of the alchemical haunts of Paris are described as a backdrop for the evolution of Ernst's art throughout the 1920s and 1930s...In "Au delà de la peinture," he described alchemy as the perfect metaphor for his working processes."

Unfortunately, "Alchemy" has become one of those buzzwords that poseurs throw around when they want to sound like they're edgy and profound. As a concept it's become defanged all too often, stripped of its inherent insanity. But we don't fall for that kind of thing here. We look at the aspect of Alchemy that some want to run away from-- the Elusive Companion aspect of it.

As Jacques Vallee puts it in Passport to Magonia:

Throughout medieval times, a major current of thought distinct from official religion existed, culminating in the works of the alchemists and hermetics. Among such groups were to be found some of the early modern scientists and men remarkable for the strength of their independent thinking and for their
adventurous life, such as Paracelsus. The nature of the beings who mysteriously appeared, dressed in shiny garments or covered with dark hair, and with whom communication was so hard to establish intrigued these men intensely.

And again, as Robert Anton Wilson explained these kinds of contacts in depth in the first volume of Cosmic Trigger, quoting Timothy Leary:

Interstellar ESP may have been going on for all our history, Tim (Leary) went on, but we just haven't understood. Our nervous systems have translated their messages into terms we could understand.

The "angels" who spoke to Dr. Dee, the Elizabethan scientist-magician, were extraterrestrials, but Dee couldn't comprehend them in those terms and considered them "messengers from God." The same is true of many other shamans and mystics.

And as I added before:

Indeed, these contacts-- whether actual or aspirational --lie at the heart of Alchemical enterprise. All of the great masters were primarily concerned with contact with --and harnessing the power of-- "angels."

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Sedona, Arizona 1947

Max Ernst left his native Cologne for Paris but left for America during the Nazi takeover. Ernst eventually settled in Sedona, Arizona, where he lived with his second wife, the painter Dorothea Tanning. Ernst's work became considerably more playful and almost cartoonish during this time, but the Arizona landscape obviously had a profound influence on his work, as did the art and culture of the Hopi Indians.

Maybe other parts of the Sedona landscape did as well. Sedona is known as an energy vortex location, as well as UFO hotspot. So I got to thinking- did Ernst ever paint any UFOs?

You tell me.

Aside from this stunning piece (The Almost Late Romanticism, 1960) typical Ernstian foliage with what looks like a classic glowing cigar-shaped UFO, Ernst's work is littered with tantalizingly explicit references to touchstones in the high weirdness canon. Along with the endless parade of alien beings dancing through alien landscapes under alien suns.

Yet Ernst isn't painting science fiction here-- his alternate reality is blithe, perfectly matter of fact. You take it or leave it. He's not trying to sell you on its reality. He's spent far too much time there to waste time with that.

Plus, he doesn't really care what you think about his reality, in the end. Alchemists never do.

This Sedona era piece (Tribute to Yves Tanguy, 1955) pictures the red rock mesas, along with what looks for all the world like the Millennium Falcon, or at least its prototype. Take it or leave it. It's all the same to Ernst.

Then there's this little green man (Old Man River, 1953), who sits among the deserts where the Anasazi once roamed, with a curiously familiar elongated skull. Yet at the same time, that strange bubble around him is oddly reminiscent of the Star Child from 2001.

But Ernst's flirtations with High Strangeness- or any kind of strangeness for that matter-- didn't start in Sedona. There's this collage, from his classic 1929 collage-based graphic novel The Hundred Headless Woman. The numinous power of it is like a punch in the gut and more powerful than any photograph. And strangely, more validating. Ernst's unconscious testimony trumps any photo, which after all, can be hoaxed.

And this, which almost seems to depict a classic abduction scenario over an industrial city.

Or this ziggurat-shaped flying saucer. Remember all of this is almost 20 years before Kenneth Arnold and Roswell.

From the same book, we see a version of Ernst's alter ego, "Loplop, Bird Superior," looking for all the world like the Mothman. He's even drawn to the streetlights, like a moth.

From 1934's A Week of Kindness we see a kidnapping (read: abduction) committed by man with the head of an Easter Island Maoi pasted over him. Now that we're finding that some of the Maoi have entire bodies buried beneath the soil, the Ancient Aliens boys must be champing at the bit to get a camera crew down there.

Of course, Ernst was working in the context of Alchemy and magic and not UFOlogy, but that's exactly my point. Strangeness seems to be the expressway to what is really going on behind UFOs, and what has been going on for a very, very, very long time.

Arthur C. Clarke is widely quoted for his maxim that any science sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. And god knows there's way too much mindless chatter about magic out there. Even so, maybe our magic is their science after all.

But every time I look at UFO photos and read about recent sightings or abductions I get trapped in the letters and the pixels like I'm encased in amber. When I start to look at UFOs through the prism of Synchronicity, Symbol and Strangeness, it all opens like a flower and thousands of puzzle pieces start falling into place like a Tetris game played by an invisible hand.

And then things start to happen. In this consensus space-time. Lots of things. Lots of really strange, sometimes impossible things.

But that's a whole other discussion. And maybe you need to find that out for yourself anyway.

UPDATE: Confirming the very foundational thesis of The Secret Sun, the Fortean Times explains how UFOs were the catalyst behind the Sixties counterculture in England, and how Ernst's ziggurat UFO played a talismanic role in that revolution.

UPDATE: Loren Coleman explains in a story on the death of Ernst's onetime lover Leonora Carrington how Ernst may have summoned a Mothman-like entity to Cornwall.

The Owlman story began when paranormal researcher Tony “Doc” Shiels was approached by a man, Don Melling, who had been visiting the area on holiday from Lancaster. Melling said that on April 17, 1976, his two daughters, 12-year-old June and her 9-year-old sister, Vicky, were walking through the woods near Mawnan church when they saw a large winged creature hovering above the church tower. The girls were frightened and immediately ran to tell their father.

Shiels has suggested himself that surrealism may hold the key. Sixteen days before the first recorded sighting of the Owlman the surrealist artist Max Ernst died (April Fool's Day, 1976- CK). In 1937 Ernst had visited the area with friends (apparently including Carrington according to photographs from that time) and performed rituals to invoke the appearance of all sorts of mysterious creatures. One of these may have been Nightjarman, half bird, half human.

Kirby's Cauldron (Updated w/ Extra Kirby Prophecy)

2012-02-08T17:05:00.002-05:00

From Raj Sisodia. Enjoy.

A new group has been excavating the Maoi at Easter Island and it turns out that some of them are not just heads and busts but actually have entire bodies buried beneath the ground. Explaining away the logistics behind this massive undertaking has gotten that much harder for the increasingly tedious orthodox history crowd.

And who was there first? Jack Kirby, of course. In 1959.

The Mother of All Modern Rituals

2012-02-07T09:54:00.001-05:00

You can keep your Mandonna EgyptoRoman war is peace rally. Nothing will ever be as over the top -- or as revealing-- as the opening of the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai in 2008.

Take some time to watch these videos. It will change the way you look at the world, and more importantly, look at all of the struggles to control the Persian Gulf. All about oil?

No, I don't think so.

Now remember, the fireworks display was meant to be seen from space. In fact, it made very little sense to anyone on the ground. How about that?

Madonna NeFiLim 2012 (UPDATED 2/7)

2012-02-07T00:30:00.001-05:00

Here's the halftime show if you haven't seen it yet. I've been down this road so many times and all of this imagery is so embedded into the culture, I don't think I can say much I haven't said a million times before.

Our Lady of Sirius

But here again we're seeing ancient ritual motifs taken not from the "Mystery Schools" (sic) as some historical illiterates might have you believe, but from their opposites; the elite cults of state, with their pomp and circumstance and their regimentation and militarism. This is straight out of the Temples of Jupiter and Juno on Vatican Hill, and the meaning, message and desired outcome behind it is exactly the same. "World Peace," indeed. More like "Pax Romana."

Never mind Madonna's runaway narcissism, identifying herself with all of these symbols: is she the "High Goddess of Pop" now?

Conquered people always dance suggestively for their new masters during the high holy days, going back thousands of years. Well, the women do. The conquered men kill each other off in the arenas.

The Black Sun

I've been doing some research on who "Vigilant Citizen™" is-- or rather are-- whose interests they represent and who they in fact work for and I'm nursing this crazy, nutty thought like maybe they were hired on as consultants for this grotesque display. Zany, right? Well, given what I'm learning-- never mind all of the Fortune 500 companies that bankroll their various sites with advertising-- maybe not so zany. Notice their sites have been rather quiet lately.

Winged Sundisk

I've taken some screenshots for when the vid gets yanked.

Notes: This was a replay of the 2008 New York Nefilim- New England Patriarchs game with yet another 17 in the score. The area code of Lucas Oil Stadium? 317. I kid you not.

In case you were puzzled by the admixture of Roman militarism and Egyptian religion, don't be-- that's as old as the seven hills. It just shows whoever designed this display knew all about Roman Egyptomania. Which probably proves it wasn't the Vigilant Citizen™ cabal after all.

UPDATE: Here's a photo gallery on The Daily Mail if you haven't the patience to sit through 15 minutes of woefully inept lipsynching and puzzlingly doubletracked live vocals. Yes, it's exactly what you'd expect it to be.

UPDATE: Knowles' Law has it that whenever a controversy erupts over symbols in the media it's meant to distract from a deeper symbolic narrative. Like, oh, androgynous EgyptoRoman militarism:

Middle finger 'malfunction' mars Super Bowl halftime show

Rapper M.I.A. provided a middle finger salute to network cameras Sunday night during the 12-minute extravaganza, when she joined Madonna during a performance of the latter's new single, "Give Me All Your Luvin'."

The apologies from the NFL and the broadcaster, NBC, came quickly -- they blamed each other.

UPDATE: Ikea and Activision join Time Warner, Visa, McDonald's, Ford, Chrysler, Dunkin' Donuts, Sears, MetLife and many, many others as proud sponsors of the Vigilant Citizen™ family of websites.

UPDATE 2/7: Was the Montreal-based music industry internet viral marketing agency that many have said is the real force behind corporate-sponsored conspiratainment site Vigilant Citizen™ involved in the Madonna halftime special after all? The producers of record are Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil and Moment Factory. I've traced Vigilant Citizen's™ servers to Sherbrooke, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal. That's one hell of a coincidence.

Anyone with information on this, please let me know.

Stanley Kubrick and the Reality Stargate, Revisited

2012-02-04T02:12:00.016-05:00

Read the original installment of this series here

Jay Weidner made quite a splash with his documentary Kubrick's Odyssey, in which he argued that Stanley Kubrick was shanghaied by NASA to help create a cinematic and photographic simulation of the Apollo missions for public consumption.

Weidner argues that 2001: A Space Odyssey was essentially Kubrick's R&D project for a much bigger-budget production set to be filmed within the gates of Nellis AFB's Area 51 and that his wildly unfaithful adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining was his cinematic mea culpa, confessing to the con.

Contrary to what some have assumed, Weidner is not arguing that the NASA did not land men on the Moon, but that the Apollo missions were a cover for a secret space program. Having reviewed a lot of Apollo skeptics' arguments I have to say I find them all pretty compelling on one level; the footage and the photos are problematic, to say the very least.

The Establishment's response to Weidner and the more radical skeptics who insist that human spacecraft have never left low-earth orbit has been weak; the usual mix of of outrage, dismissal and ridicule. I found it particularly rich that The New York Times lambasted Weidner for his conspiracy theorizing, given that their own conspiracy theorizing helped start the Iraq War.

But looking at the Apollo hardware I can't shake the feeling it's all Hollywood. I can't imagine three adult men spending any amount of time in that flimsy looking stuff, never mind all the life-support gear and moon buggies and all of the rest of it.

And given the highly specialized and regimented nature of a giant bureaucracy like NASA, the only people who needed to be in on the scam would be the high echelon in Mission Control and the astronauts themselves.

We all know there is a secret space program; the only question is how deep it all goes. My assumption has always been that there were two missions, showtime with the Apollo and a real mission, using much more serious military hardware that's a lot bigger, heavier and much less telegenic. I doubt very much that the real mission involved much golf playing or picture taking.

One of the most dangerous myths of our time is that the government can't keep secrets. The whole notion that the government can't keep secrets is a comforting conceit for delusional folks who still believe we live in an open society. Having grown up with a grandfather who worked as an engineer for MITRE I know that the government can in fact keep secrets, and has a whole kitbag of punishments for people who can't.

Besides, a lot of people seem to feel that the Apollo 1 fire and the subsequent deaths of other astronauts and NASA personnel was a pretty good motivator for any potential whistleblowers to keep their concerns to themselves.

THEY'RE WATCHING US

But there is a major stumbling block for Apollo skeptics; this was during the Cold War. The Russians and the Chinese were watching NASA's every move, and had the expertise, the technology and most certainly the motivation to call bullshit on any chicanery.

I have no doubt that every intelligence agency in the world was poring over every frame of imagery being released from these missions, since the idea of establishing missile bases on the Moon had a lot of currency at the time.

Exposing a faked Moonshot would be a propaganda coup like no other, especially given the fact that all of this was going on during the height of an extremely unpopular war that was in danger of making the USA an international pariah. Add the assassinations, the race riots and the general civil unrest, and a scandal over a faked Apollo mission might well have been a tipping point for a revolution in this country.

And yet, most people who aren't totally beholden to whatever received authority wants them to think (meaning non-skepdicks) can at least look at all of the evidence gathered by the Apollo debunkers and think there might something to it all, right? If that's so, then what would have motivated the Soviets et al to go along with the charade?

To try to answer that question, I want to return to 2001: A Space Odyssey and share with you again my interpretation of what Kubrick is putting onscreen. I realize there has been a parade of writers telling us what Kubrick was "really trying to say" in the film. But as before I'm going to stick as close as I can to the actual narrative of the film itself, since what's actually onscreen is a lot more subversive than any symbolic rendering of the text.

Well, with one major exception, that is. And that's where we'll start.

THE DAWN OF ROSWELL

Weidner's thesis is that Kubrick's technical acumen in dealing with military hardware in his 1964 antiwar satire Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb first brought him to NASA's attention. From a review by Andrew Griffin:

Dr. Strangelove, notes Weidner, “made fun of the Pentagon, the generals and their various war plans” and while this irritated the Defense Department, they were more amazed that Kubrick had pieced together what a B-52 looked like on the inside by looking at pictures in military magazines.

Because the U.S. Government, through NASA, was hellbent to get a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960’s, as President Kennedy had promised, and because they wanted to prove to the Soviet Union that the U.S. was going to win the space race, they had to have some insurance – a way to prove, at least to the public and the world – that the U.S. had the technology and wherewithal to get to the Moon.

That’s where Kubrick comes in. Impressed with his work on Dr. Strangelove, Weidner speculates that Kubrick made a deal with the U.S. Government to fake the Apollo Moon landings – with Apollo 11 ultimately being the first one to land in July 1969.

Weidner himself argued in 2009 that JFK's race to the moon was inspired less by Sputnik and more by shall we say more exotic technology:

Soon after seeing the flying saucer technology JFK made his famous speech asking NASA to land a man on the moon before the decade was out. Many insiders believed that this was a ploy by JFK to get NASA and the secret government to release their saucer technologies.

Since it was obvious to everyone that standard rocket technology could not get man to the moon and back, JFK may have thought that NASA would be forced to release the knowledge of the flying saucers in order to get to the moon by the end of the 1960's. JFK's ploy was therefore intended to free this advanced technology from the insidious hands of the shadow government.

Adding yet another log into our wacked-out conspiracy theories undergirded by inconvenient facts bonfire, I'll point to this 2011 bombshell.

Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens? Secret memo shows president demanded UFO files 10 days before death

An uncovered letter written by John F Kennedy to the head of the CIA shows that the president demanded to be shown highly confidential documents about UFOs 10 days before his assassination.

The secret memo is one of two letters written by JFK asking for information about the paranormal on November 12 1963, which have been released by the CIA for the first time.Author William Lester said the CIA released the documents to him under the Freedom of Information Act after he made a request while researching his new book 'A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier.'

Now Weidner argues that Kubrick was essentially given the keys to the candy store when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey. His writing partner was of course Arthur C. Clarke, (original author of the story the film was ostensibly based on) who was plugged into all kinds of spooky networks- science, military, intelligence, you name it. Weidner also claims that Kubrick and Clarke were given access to the NASA inner circle-- including the Paperclip boys-- and told all kinds of interesting stories.

I would argue-- and argue quite strongly-- that Kubrick's primary interest in the making of this film was telling tales out of school as cleverly as he could about all of the juicy UFO and 'ET' stories he was told. Not much of a stretch given the film's plot, but as I explained on Mike Clelland's Hidden Experience podcast some time ago, there's a major piece of the puzzle people are overlooking.

Anyone who studies parapolitics for any period of time becomes familiar with the various methods and techniques used to deal with an exposed secret in a broadband media environment. Disinfo, misinfo, red herrings, water-muddying, shills, ridicule, intimidation, denial, misdirection and so on and so forth are used to create such an atmosphere of total confusion that most people find it to be too much trouble to sort through the rubble to get to the truth.

And so it's been with the UFO issue. Most people assume that it all popped in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold, but in fact UFOs and all of the attendant phenomena have been a constant feature of the human condition as far as back as you can go in the historical record, and much before that besides.

Even so, the alleged crash at Roswell is a particularly contentious episode in modern UFO lore. I've heard all of the pros and cons, the debunkings and the responses, the backs and the forths. I've heard all of the theories about Project Mogul (and before that Skyhook before someone realized Skyhook didn't exist at the time), but the plain fact of the matter is that I simply don't find them convincing, given what we know about the military's frenzied response to the original incident.

And as I've written here, if there was a crash of an exotic craft (as regular readers know I do not subscribe to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, rather a variation on the ultraterrestrial hypothesis I call the Elusive Companion Hypothesis) it might go a long way not only in explaining all of the extraordinary lengths the military has gone to to deny the whole thing ever happened, but also the sudden and unprecedented explosion in sophisticated electronic technology we saw in the postwar era.

Let's save the arguments about the reality or unreality of Roswell for later, because as with everything we discuss here, I'm more interested in what people believe is true than what may actually be true (which is subjective, after all).

What really interests me here is the possibility that Kubrick and Clarke may well have been told by their sources that yes, one fine morning a flying saucer did indeed crash in the desert sands of Corona, NM and was taken to the Roswell Army Air Base, where it was taken up the chain of command and back-engineered by America's finest black project boys.

The gimcracks and doodads that the fellas at Nellis and Skunkworks were able to figure out gave Uncle Sam a huge boost in the struggle against godless Communism, in fact quite a few of the goodies they were able to work out are being used as we speak by the NASA boys and ain't that just something?

Well, that's all fine and good, but do we see any evidence for it in the film itself? Let's go to the tape.

Let's remember that Kubrick left us with the distinct impression in Dr. Strangelove that he didn't think much of the Military Industrial Complex. It's not much of a stretch--given the warlike behavior we see these apes engage in-- that these monkeys too are Kubrick's caustic allegory of Cold War-era America.

What's even more interesting to note here is that these apes-- jungle creatures, if I'm not mistaken-- are sitting out in the middle of the desert.

And lo and behold, they wake up one fine morning and discover alien technology in their midst.

The narrative has it that the Monolith is inspiring the protohominids to use bones as weapons-- tools-- which helps kickstart evolution. That is radical enough, and would be completely beyond the pale if our ape friend here was given to spray-on tans and excessive use of hair gel.

But I would argue that the bone here has a double meaning, and that Kubrick's jumpcuts with the Monolith are identifying the bone with the Monolith itself. That will be made clear in a moment, but let me spell it out for you in no uncertain terms.

The pile of bones the Moonwatcher is picking through symbolize this...

...and I will absolutely go to the mat on that one. The next sequence makes the connection absolutely clear...

...when Moonwatcher throws the bone into the air and it becomes what? A spaceship.

So "The Dawn of Man" sequence works on two separate levels. First, Kubrick is saying that human beings were engineered by an alien (or what we call "alien," it's actually anything but) technology.

Second, Kubrick was probably passing on the stories he heard, not only about Roswell but also apocryphal tales about German and Russian engineers reverse-engineering crashed UFOs and using them as the basis for the spacecraft that respectable scientists only a generation before thought were absolutely impossible.

Now, remember: I'm not saying those stories are necessarily true, I'm saying that Kubrick is retelling them in a very clever and allegorical fashion.

click to enlarge

The coup de gras is this parallelism: the apes fighting over the watering hole (representing the Cold War) and Heywood Floyd's chilly meeting with his Soviet counterparts in the Space Station lounge, the 21st Century "watering hole" (or Well, if you prefer).

The two allegories are linked by that bone/spaceship. The spectacle of apes screaming over a watering hole is transparently Kubrick's commentary on the Cold War; the scene in the "watering hole" on the station makes that inarguable.

And with the crashed saucer technology from Roswell the USA seems to have the upper hand, which of course it seemed to as the Space Race proceeded in the late 60s. And here's where the story moves into the second phase.

As I've said before, I see Heywood Floyd as a distinctly sinister character and I very much believe that Kubrick did as well. Kubrick was a rebel; though I don't believe the stories that Eyes Wide Shut got him killed (the 50 years of chainsmoking is a more likely culprit), I do believe that he did want to expose what he saw as the dehumanizing decadence of the ultrarich in that film (and it's not as if other films haven't covered similar ground).

After 2001, he made A Clockwork Orange, an anti-mind control tract, and subversive and anti-authoritarian themes were a constant throughout his work. In other words, Kubrick was one of us.

So it's interesting to me that Clarke saw Floyd as an idealized version of himself in 2010 and Kubrick clearly saw him as bagman, an bully and a hush-up artist. I believe the Clavius discovery is yet another allegory for the same event allegorized in "The Dawn of Man," which is more of a generic contact with a concrete alien technology.

In other words, Kubrick is messing with the chronology but it's all the same event he's telling us about. And in his talk at Clavius we hear Floyd spout the same lines included in the 1960 Brookings Institute on extraterrestrial contact at the same time not-so-subtly remind his disgruntled underlings they're to keep their god-damned mouths shut.

The cover story of a plague means that everyone is stuck there, and when asked how long the discovery will be kept quiet Floyd responds with typical bureaucratic aplomb. Of course, we learn later in the film that eighteen months after the discovery of the Monolith no one has told anyone anything, a situation that leads to the death of the crew sent out to discover the origin of a signal transmitted by the artifact.

So in the second part of the film we are clearly dealing with a government cover-up of the reality of alien contact. That's Heywood Floyd's role in all of this; to facilitate the cover-up.

None of this is discovered until the last surviving astronaut of the Jupiter mission dismantles the onboard AI and triggers a recorded message from Floyd revealing the true objective of his mission. I can't help but think of the Apollo One fire and all of the astronauts and NASA employees killed in freak accidents. Prophecy? Inside knowledge? Simple coincidence? All three?

And of course, after the disastrous Jupiter mission, the film entirely changes track again. Up until now we've been dealing with the nuts and bolts aspect of the UFO enigma, as well as the mysteries of Ancient Astronaut Theory. Whether or not you buy into my theory that "The Dawn of Man" is in fact about recovered saucer technology as well as AAT --and of course, I think you should-- we're still dealing with alien hardware (the Monolith) as all sorts of human spacecraft.

As we saw in the original installment, Kubrick not only takes through an "alien abduction," he takes us through the most mind-blowing, psychedelic, initiatory version of one ever depicted onscreen.

The Stargate is a completely internal journey. We hear a signal at the beginning of it all and then the light show begins. Certainly Kubrick would have been familiar with psychedelics at this point in time, and I'm reasonably certain that NASA and other agencies may well have been experimenting with them to test the endurance and mental toughness of the flyboys (never mind the darker corners of the trade like MK Ultra).

But certainly the identification with aliens was novel in the mid 1960s when this film was being produced.

Food of the Gods: note mushroom motifs during ascension to space

Novel in mainstream culture, at least. The Beatniks were magic mushroom enthusiasts, and pilgrimages to Mexico became popular stops on the circuit. Was Kubrick experienced? I really wouldn't be surprised. Neither would I be surprised if he hadn't some contact experiences himself.

Which brings us back to the white room. I made the connection in the previous installment and since then have been furiously looking for examples, though most of the ones I've found have been post-2001, like the Travis Walton case I mentioned in the first piece.

But as UFOs: The Psychic Dimension puts it, "Abductees typically find themselves in a strange, brightly-lit room, often filled with sophisticated equipment." The oddly-lit white room features in the Barney and Betty Hill incident from 1961, which wasn't published until 2001 was in production, but given the way the film was made, Kubrick could well have added the scene in to accommodate the new information.

But the Villas Boas abduction from the late 50s also featured the oddly-lit "white room":

Now he found himself inside a small square room, bare of furnishings, brightly lit—"the same as broad daylight"—by recessed square lights in the smooth metallic walls. Suddenly an opening appeared, from the seamless wall, and Boas was led into another room. "The only furnishings visible was an oddly shaped table that stood at one side of the room surrounded by several backless swivel chairs (something like barstools). They were all made of the same white metal.

I can't help but wonder how many tales Kubrick and Clarke might have heard from their sources that we will never know about, not only about crashed saucers and the rest of it but those mysterious, oddly-lit white rooms.

And finally, Bowman's trip through the Stargate and exit through the white room results in his apotheosis, of sorts. His exposure to the Monolith and the pure, undiluted experience of otherness results in NASA's and the Brooking Institute's worst nightmare; a new, evolved stage of humanity.

Let's review this step by step:

• An "alien" intelligence makes itself apparent to humanity.

• Those in power use this contact to their own advantage.

• The authorities then work to cover up knowledge of this intelligence.

• The cover up backfires and ends in disaster.

• The intelligence reaches out directly to humanity.

• Humanity's self image is destroyed because of this.

• Out of the ashes comes a new humanity.

Sounds pretty much like a Stanley Kubrick film, no?

So to answer the original question; why might the Soviets looked the other way at faked moon photos and footage. It may well be that they were partners in the secret space program, which had nothing to do with the Cold War and everything to do with figuring out what the hell those UFOs are and where they are coming from. Like, maybe the Moon, perhaps. That would be something of mutual interest to both parties, right?

Do you catch my drift here?

How much does 2001: A Space Odyssey have to do with was really going on on the Moon? Probably not much, outside of the cover-up. What exactly I don't know, but since this is the government and NASA, I'm sure something somewhere was being covered up. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the Moon footage and photos? We can only guess, but damn, those are some fine pictures for a bunch of flyboys with chest-mounted cameras to be taking. Then there's always this...

What I can say for sure is the more the scoffers scoff and ridicule and stomp and scream and refuse to actually engage the evidence at hand and present a compelling counterargument, and the longer we go without sending anyone back up there even with all of our ultra-roswellian computertech and the rest of it, the better people like Jay Weidner start to look.

Mindbomb Addenda: False Flags and Blue Beams

2012-01-30T17:24:00.004-05:00

One thing I had failed to realize about The Eternals was that Kirby's depiction of the Deviant invasion of Manhattan wasn't quite the exercise in 50s nostalgia I had originally taken it for. In fact there are interesting to parallels to one of the most popular posts in the history of this blog, the interview with Nick Redfern concerning his book, Final Events, dealing with efforts of the real-life secret society within the Pentagon called the Collins Elite to portray the postwar UFO wave as the work of demons.

The Elite's propaganda war was wildly successful and continues to bear fruit today. However, their ultimate goal of usurping the Constitution and establishing an Old Testament-styled theocracy was unsuccessful, so far at least.

As discussed before, Kirby saw humanity accompanied by two races of elusive companions: the Eternals (the Nordics of UFO lore, roughly), who lived on distant mountaintops waiting for the time in which they would act as servants of the space gods known as the Celestials (roughly analogous to Lloyd Pye's "Terraformers") and the Deviants, the Reptilian former masters of Earth whose home of Lemuria was sent beneath the Pacific Ocean when they defied the will of the Celestials.

The Third Host of the Celestials ended the Deviant rule over humanity and since that time only fleeting contacts have been made between humanity and its cousins. These contacts were ultimately passed down in folklore as encounters with fairies, gods, demons, angels, gremlins, and other such supernatural creatures. The tyrannical rule of the Deviants remains locked in human memory, and the shapeshifting, reptilian Deviants continue to haunt the dreams of humanity in the form of devils and demons.

The Deviants are ruled by Tode (almost certainly based on Kirby's old DC nemesis Mort Weisinger, famously described as a "malevolent toad") and their forces are led by Anton LaVey lookalike General Kro (who rivals the Eternals for longevity, and was most likely the inspiration for the biblical Satan). After failing to prevent the Eternals from lighting the Cosmic Beacon that will guide the Celestials to Earth, Kro(wley?) then devises a strategy straight out of the Collins Elite playbook.

Realizing that the entire world is terrified of the looming Celestial motherships, Kro stages the ultimate false flag invasion. Using his shapeshifting skills, Kro grows himself an enviable set of horns and assembles a Deviant squad of USOs (posing as spaceships, mind you) and stages his own 9/11 writ large. His plan is that the nations of the earth will see the Celestial motherships -- and hopefully the Eternal strongholds-- as the source of the space-demon invasion and launch their nuclear arsenals at the Celestials. If nothing else, the resulting fallout will do away with those pesky humans for good.

The whole scenario also recalls another Secret Sun greatest hit- the Project Blue Beam debunking. Was The Eternals another source for whomever was feeding disinfo to Monast? Doubtful. But I'll tell you, I was wondering just recently if the Collins Elite were themselves the authors of the Project Blue Beam hoax, seeing how its main target was the illusory "New Age one world religion" chimera. From what Nick Redfern has told us about them, they certainly were ideologically compatible with Monast, if nothing else.

One thing I did find interesting however was that the Eternals' Unimind ritual-- described as just that, a ritual-- was centered on a blue beam. Coincidence? Well, only so much as it co-incides with all of the rest of this madness.

Man, I really wonder where Kirby would have taken this book had not it all collapsed around him after the "Astronauts" mindblower...

AstroGnostic: Forming the Dawn of Consciousness

2012-01-26T15:39:00.004-05:00

Forming is one of those webcomix that I'm not sure I'm not hallucinating. it seems to have emerged from my unconscious, or perhaps your unconscious, or yours. Or even you back there. One thing for sure, the one actually channeling Forming for us is artist/musician Jesse Moynihan, who hosts Forming on his eponymous website.

Reading Forming for the first time gave me the same feeling that I got reading the Hernandez Bros' early work or Carla Speed McNeil's Finder; that weird, trippy, sensation of being pulled out of boring, horrible consensus reality and into a world far more interesting and enriching -- though considerably more unsettling-- than our own.

What's Forming actually about? Well, it's kind of like talking to a really smart but slightly skewed guy who's been up all night tripping balls, reading The Eternals and Devil Dinosaur and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which sounds kind of facetious and reductive (not to mention redundant), but words really fail to convey the Forming experience. As it should be.

Suffice it to say, after reading Forming I got the very strong feeling that I was in the presence of a creator who has tapped into something impossibly deep and ancient. The more he tries to distance himself from this revelation with Gen-Y absurdist humor and cartoonish violence, the more powerful it all becomes. As if he can't run from the fact that he is telling a story that all of us know but few us can recall. A story that can only be told in metaphor because the facts always come up short.

So what you really need to do is go to Jesse's site and read Forming from the beginning here. Then you'll see what I mean. Don't blame if you fail to get anything done for the next several hours. Just don't read it at work, whatever you do. Now, let's hear from the artist himself.

SECRET SUN: Jesse, give us a short sketch of who you are, where you come from and what inspired you to undertake this epic comic strip.

JESSE MOYNIHAN: I'm Jesse Moynihan. I grew up outside of Philadelphia. Forming is a collage of everything I've mused about since my early twenties. At some point I had to pick up a pen and bring it to the page, or else I probably would've had no good reason to tell stories anymore.

Let's talk about Forming. I realize this question might drive you nuts, but give us a short synopsis of what Forming is about. Roughly.

Forming is about selfishness, selflessness, gods, aliens, destruction, creation and the dawn of individual consciousness. A lot of it deals with the different ways which we manifest/interpret our vital life force? It's hard for me to give a concise and real answer to this question because I'm really just grasping in the dark with Forming.

You have a large and diverse cast of characters drawn from mythology. What's the connection for you between the characters?

Between myself and the characters? I have a strong connection to a lot of the characters. I pulled their names from mythology, but their traits are based either on different aspects of my personality spectrum, or on things I see in other people that I either find admirable or you know, repulsive.

There's a lot of androgyny at play in your characters. Do you believe in "gender as a construct" or does the ambiguity refer to mystical figures like Adam Kadmon and the Rebis?

This is going to be hard to answer. I'll try though. I've been fascinated with gender for a long time; my own conditioned understanding of gender, growing up as a half Japanese male and the societal baggage that I either embraced or questioned. I romanticise masculinity in its sprawling incarnations, in particular the traditional Japanese archetypes. So that's sort of my natural mode on the day to day.

But I also get a kick out of trying to flip my perceptions, especially in my writing. I got into the idea of a combined man/woman super-being after watching a documentary on Philip Glass and learning that Akhenaten was a hermaphrodite. This helped me build a thematic interest in gender combos and the possibilities/implications of power that could result.

Once you become interested in that sort of thing, androgynous super beings start appearing in a lot of places. So I feel like I'm a part of some ancient storytelling tradition by including those themes. It just makes sense to me that the combination of man and woman would create super powerful fighters.

Alright well, I don't think I succeeded in answering the question, but that's a part of it at least. For me, writing is about finding contradictions in the characters and in my own daily assumptions. So part of that is addressing something like gender because I am aware of my comfort zone when it comes to the topic and I want to f**k myself up.

You draw on several different characters from different mythologies. Did you grow up reading mythology or was this a more recent interest for you?

I was always pretty into muscle dudes fighting monsters or other muscle dudes, growing up. As I got older I latched on to the theme of transformation that runs through most myths... all myths? Yeah, that's what really interests me these days.

Are there any particular esoteric traditions you feel drawn to or any that you study?

I'm not drawn to any particular esoteric tradition. I guess I pick up pieces from here and there that resonate with me. I adopt a lot of those modes of thinking and then usually forget where they came from. I've always been a daydreamer, so hardening into one branch or discipline has never been that appealing to me. I think, anywhere you go, you're going to run into wise people and it's good to be receptive and loose with everything.

What are your influences as far as artists and writers go?

I think my early foundations were Dave Sim, Jim Woodring, Peter Bagge, Moebius, Robert Crumb, Frank Herbert, David Lynch, and Samurai/Kung Fu movies. Later in life, I've felt influenced by Amos Tutuola, Comte De Lautreamont, Sun Ra, C.S. Lewis, Yuichi Yokoyama, Manly P. Hall, Joseph Campbell, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Seijin Suzuki, Rene Laloux, Coast To Coast, and John Boorman's movies up until Emerald Forest. There's a lot more, but that's probably a good overall picture. I used to want to be a filmmaker. I went to film school.

Jack Kirby said that he simply projected what was in his head onto the paper and traced it. Is your process similar?

Yeah, I guess it's sort of like that. For me though, I project what's in my head and then try to remember the projection as I go along and reinterpret it. I like to edit as I go.

Giorgio Tsoukalos' hair. Opinions?

I guess I wouldn't do that with my hair.

Did you sue Passion Pit for stealing your crystal starship idea, which is why they redid the video for "Little Secrets?"

I didn't see it. I've never heard Passion Pit. Are they any good?

Who are some of your favorite contemporary comic artists?

Yuichi Yokoyama, Dash Shaw, Sammy Harkham, Tim Hensley, Christophe Blain, Vincent Girard, Jonny Negron, and Michael Deforge are at the top of my list recently, but there's lots of other people I'm into.

UFOs: alien science nerds or interdimensional tricksters?

I think it's both.

What are your influences or interests outside of comics?

Outside of comics you know, I read a lot about different modes of thought. Right now I've been trying to get into some Rudolph Steiner, and I just bought Robert Lawlor's sacred geometry workbook. I write a fair amount of music in my spare time. I listen to a lot of Prog, Kraut, Psych, and a lesser amount of free Jazz and modern Classical. I've been trying to get a broader knowledge of early Electronic music. I just started brewing kombucha. I guess that's sort of a hobby.

What kind of response have you gotten from the comics community? Did you catch heat from your peers because Forming isn't your masturbation memoirs?

All the response I've gotten has been super positive. It definitely helps me feel good about what I'm doing with my life, even if it makes me zero money. But I have a day job for that anyway.

The Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour

2012-01-22T22:36:00.010-05:00

Jeff Kripal needs no introduction to readers of this blog and there was no one else who I wanted to speak to for the first installment of what is sure to be a decidely occasional podcast series entitled The Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour.

Jeff's been talking to a lot of people about his new book so I made sure that I hit him with questions that only someone like myself who's read his book in three separate drafts-- as well as his book on Eslaen-- would ask.

We save a lot of stuff (Kirby, Streiber, AAT) for future podcasts because I really wanted to talk about three main issues. First, what's a guy with the serious credentials that Jeff's got doing in our sandbox. Second, what the hell is this stuff we puzzle over and where does it come from. And yes, we did cover Jenny O'Connor and The Nine-- Jeff's thoughts may surprise you.

And third, is there a way we can use all of this gnosis to dig our way out of the rut we're all stuck in. We really don't talk much about comics or superheroes at all, more about practical paranormality if such a thing exists. If it doesn't I think it's damn high time someone creates it.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD

Here's the pitch for Jeff's book from his publisher. I can't possibly stress enough how highly recommended it is. If you're still reading this, you're the type of person whose life will be enriched by it, if not changed.

In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men," thrilled readers and audiences—and simultaneously embodied a host of our dreams and fears about modern life and the onrushing future.

But that's just scratching the surface, says Jeffrey Kripal. In Mutants and Mystics, Kripal offers a brilliantly insightful account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science.

Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives.

Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions.

Moving deftly from Cold War science and Fredric Wertham's anticomics crusade to gnostic revelation and alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and shot through with an awareness that there are other realities far beyond our everyday understanding.

A bravura performance, beautifully illustrated in full color throughout and brimming over with incredible personal stories, Mutants and Mystics is that rarest of things: a book that is guaranteed to broaden—and maybe even blow—your mind.

Mindbomb: And All Challengers Will Be Destroyed

2012-01-19T00:50:00.003-05:00

I've written a lot about some of the more apparent connections and prophecies made in Jack Kirby's comics, and in our last installment we looked at an issue of Black Cat Mystic that essentially contained the basic building blocks of Jack Kirby's AstroGnostic opus, The Eternals.

We saw the psychic posthuman race congregating atop Mount Everest, the alien technology transfer that led us in the Andes Mountains and finally into the hidden temple of a cargo cult centered around a giant space god frozen in a state of suspended animation.

The Eternals was not a perfect series by any means. Kirby never seemed quite sure what he wanted to say about the return of the Celestials, and the book often lapsed into a kind of New Gods rehash.

There were moments of genius, however, usually when Kirby stuck to the basic theme of how the world reacted to the arrival of giant aliens in their midst. Those moments put the Fourth World stories in the shade, for this reader at least.

But Kirby's return to Marvel wasn't quite the replay of the Silver Age glory days anyone had hoped for. And Stan Lee's directive that his editors put the Hulk in all their titles to cash in on the success of the CBS TV series (on which Kirby himself guest-starred as a police sketch artist) seemed to take all of the wind of Kirby's sails.

From the first Hulk story (#14) to the premature end of the series (#19), the quality of the art and the writing seemed to utterly collapse, a pattern that seemed to follow all of Kirby's late 70s titles. Books like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Black Panther had similarly inspired starts and similar collapses half or two-thirds of the way through their short runs.

As if to mark the moment, Kirby chose the last pre-Hulk issue of The Eternals to deliver one of the most remarkable stories of his Bronze Age career. As we've come to expect, the story is bursting with prophetic reverberations of an oblique and dreamlike variety. It's as if we're viewing the future through a funhouse mirror, or a kaleidoscope. With one indelible exception, we see only fragments of prophecy. But the exact connections are unclear.

Or elusive, if you prefer. For some reason, it's exactly these kinds of connections that feel more real to me. But first, some background.

In Eternals #7, three SHIELD agents are teleported by the gods into the company of the Eternal Ajak (decked out in full Incan ceremonial garb) and a human archaeologist, who are in a secret chamber within a pyramid in the Andes Mountains. They are observing a Celestial landing party collecting genetical information-- DNA-- in preparation for Alpha Day.

Orbiting overhead is a massive mothership (note green color, mirroring SOHO footage) containing the nameless prime Celestial. He communicates through a laser beam which resembles a ladder (almost certainly inspired by the Jacob's version of same). This story was written a very long time before optical storage and encoded information became common parlance.

The ladder contains the coded commands of the supreme Celestial, eeerily prefiguring recent theories of aliens communicating over vast distances via neutrino beams. The Eternal and the humans watch the ladder descend and suddenly the giant Celestials are transported through the ladder's code to other parts of the globe.

After a Celestial attacks the Deviant (read: "Reptilian") stronghold of Lemuria in #10, the leader of the Eternals attempts to psychically contact the orbiting Godship (bringing us back to one of Kirby's favorite themes) but is violently rebuffed. Note that the Eternal is using electronic equipment to make psychic contact.

Remember this event as well: the Celestial's attack-- and the motivation behind it-- is central to the Mindbomb we're setting off here.

Zuras then summons all of the world's Eternals to unite into a single superbeing called the "Unimind," a being that can stand on equal footing with the Celestials. The Eternals have even brought along some pet humans to take part in the ritual transformation, in which the blue flame transforms the life force of the Eternals into a single being of mind and light.

Here Kirby is clearly shifting from science fiction to flat-out mysticism.

In retaliation for the attack on Lemuria, the Deviant leader, Tode (toads are amphibians and not reptiles, but who's counting?), orders a 9/11-resonant suicide mission in which a doomsday weapon will be flown into the Godship. The resulting fallout will destroy the humans and the Eternals and allow the Deviants to reclaim the surface world as their domain.

The only two Eternals who don't take part in the Uni-Mind ritual are Sprite, a trickster/leprechaun figure who is left behind to keep an eye on the store, and an unnamed hero who is in fact a thinly-veiled Hercules (the name was being used by another Marvel hero at the time). The Eternal Hercules was banished by Zuras (read: "Zeus") for his arrogance.

Desperate to stop the Deviants' doomsday machine, Sprite transforms Hercules into a metallic warrior (shades of Gus Grissom resonator, Ben Boxer) and conjures up a spaceship for him to intercept the Deviants' doomsday weapon with.

And here's where things get really interesting. NASA sends up a Space Shuttle to photograph the Godship. The Shuttle Enterprise existed at the time Kirby drew this story but wouldn't be launched until four years after this story was published. It doesn't seem like Kirby ever actually saw the shuttle either.*

Now, all of this is very oblique but the astronauts discuss how the ground telescopes have recorded the Godship, but the images look like "blobs." I couldn't help but think of John Lenard Walson's videos of alleged orbital objects, which we discussed here, especially as the Deviant ship shows up on the Shuttle radar (click to enlarge).

Kirby cuts loose with his trademark cosmic freakouts, the last of their kind that we'll see in the Eternals series (there'd be plenty more to come in Captain Victory, to put it mildly). The Shuttle astronauts find themselves in the middle of Deviant-Eternal grudgematch in orbit, while the enormous Godship looms over head.

Again; more oblique connections, more dream reality type of prophecy, but very much reminiscent of stories I've covered about strange sightings of flaming debris falling from the sky at speeds and angles far too slow and low to qualify as any kind of meteorite, leading some people (read: "me") to speculate about a secret war in low orbit.

There's also been some discussion of flaming debris sightings on the FB group from time to time and more recently the Russians have accused the US of sabotaging their $170 million Grunt Mars probe.

Not to mention the fact that Kirby's basic story-- from 1977, mind you-- of Space Shuttle missions encountering giant UFOs and filming hostile action in space ties directly into a hot and contentious topic in the UFO community over the past decade.

Back to the story: The Supreme Celestial (whom Kirby depicts as pure energy) isn't threatened at all by the Deviants' mission: he simply teleports the astronauts to different spacecraft. The Deviants are teleported into the NASA space shuttle, the human astronauts are teleported into Hercules' ship (which is controlled telepathically) and Hercules is teleported into the doomsday ship...

...where he dismantles the bomb's core and is subsequently killed in the meltdown. However, he is pulled into space and into the Godship. Having proven himself worthy, Hercules is absorbed into the essence of the Supreme Celestial. More mysticism.

The human astronauts telepathically guide the Eternals' spacecraft to a "secret base" in the Mojave Desert, which is certainly convenient for the Area 51 reverse-engineers Kirby was obviously going to do a story about before it all went kerblooey on him.

Kirby has the Deviants-- who unwittingly hijack Durgan's space shuttle-- explode over the "South Atlantic Ocean." And here's where the Mindbomb goes off again.

At the same time Kirby apostle John Byrne was drawing a story about Superman preventing a space shuttle explosion, the world watched in horror as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the "South Atlantic Ocean," the balmy waters off the coast of Florida to be exact.

I can't speak as to the authenticity of the video here, but I find it fascinating that there's at least a tangential UFO connection to the tragedy. But that pales in connection to the Mindbomb going off here.

From Eternals #2

"Astronauts"-- arguably Kirby's last great story in his second run at Marvel-- deals with an ancient grudge match between the Gods and the Deviants (Reptilians). Again, the attempted Deviant assault on the Godship in Eternals #13 was in retaliation for an attack on Lemuria by one of the Gods in Eternals #10.

The Deviants ruled over the humans in the Gods' absence but were driven under the sea when Lemuria sank following a nuclear war between the Gods and the Deviants (see above). Now the fact that the Deviant astronauts end up crashing in the NASA space shuttle is extremely important here given an exchange between Tode and his top general, Kro...

..."We CHALLENGED them long ago," and "Summon the Astronauts," and then...

...those very same Deviant Astronauts --those Challengers-- explode in a NASA space shuttle over the South Atlantic Ocean.

Boom.

All I can add is that if you haven't yet, I recommend you read "I'll Show You How to Bring Me to Your World." Maybe that might add a measure of clarity. Or maybe it will simply confuse matters more. I don't know anymore. I don't know anything anymore. All I know I know is that this stuff is starting get under my skin now.

Strangely enough, Kirby's first great super-team of the Silver Age, The Challengers of the Unknown, trace their origin to a similar catastrophic aircrash, although one they obviously survived. Kirby recycled the origin when he and Stan Lee created The Fantastic Four.

Note that Jack - who wrote and drew the Challengers-- also had the team abducted by an alien who is identical to a modern depiction of a Grey in all but color. This story was published in 1958, a full eight years before the Betty and Barney Hill story hit the pages of Look Magazine.

Which should surprise absolutely no one who reads this blog regularly.

NOTE: The title of this piece is ironic. I don't put any stock in the theories of lifelong Naval Intelligence asset Bill Cooper at all.

* Speaking of Hercules, Kirby would do a pinup of Superman escorting the Space Shuttle in 1984, at the same time he rebooted the New Gods at DC. Unfortunately, his eyes were starting to give out and the finished product leaves a lot to be desired.

Mindbomb: Prophecies of a Pop AstroGnostic

2012-01-15T12:45:00.007-05:00

We've looked at Jack Kirby several times in the past here, most notably in his startlingly accurate (if not often allegorical) predictions of the Face on Mars in 1959, 9/11 in 1984, and the Gulf War and Iraq War in 1974 and 1975. There's also a foreshadowing of the plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey, possible Apollo mission footage chicanery, and the suppressed discovery of obelisks on the Moon by American and Russian surveying missions in the mid-60s.

In ancient times, prophecy was used as an acid test, proof that a prophet or priest was in fact in touch with a god. In the Bible, the punishment for a false prophet was death (the entire EvangeliCIAl movement would be instantly leaderless if that directive were still followed today). If a prophecy came true then the prophet or priest (or priestess, certainly) would be trusted to supply information pertaining to theology, morality, cosmology and so on.

In other words, prophecy was a means to establish authority.

At a time when a near-majority of Americans think a talentless professional athlete is a prophet based on beginner's luck and some cute but garden-variety synchronicities, what do we make of Jack Kirby?

Here's what we know-- when Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) was young, he was struck down with scarlet fever. His parents were poor immigrants from Austria and antibiotics were not widely available. As young Jacob lay dying, a group of Kabbalist rabbis were called in to exorcise the demons that were killing the boy. Whether through mystical agency or through Kirby's inborn toughness, he survived.

After making his name in the comics field, Kirby was drafted into the Army. His friends were lucky or connected enough to get posts stateside or working for the Armed Forces newspapers or whatever, but Kirby wasn't. He was sent to Europe, right into the crucible of the killing fields.

When Kirby's commander found out he was a big deal artist in the funny papers, he decided to use him for recon. This meant Jack had to sneak behind enemy lines, sketch the lay of the land then sneak back and explain to his superiors where the Germans were and what they were doing. Kirby was often so close he could smell the Nazis' aftershave.

He was sent home after contracting a case of frostbite so severe his legs were nearly amputated. Kirby spent the rest of his life drawing, usually so lost in his reveries he couldn't drive a car, balance a checkbook, or do much of anything besides create one indelible character after one classic adventure.

He worked at night, in a tiny, windowless corner in the basement of his Long Island home. In the early 70s he moved to Thousand Oaks, CA, where he struck up an unlikely but close bond with neighbor Frank Zappa, 23 years his junior. Sadly, his star went in decline and his audience steadily began to shrink from the early 70s on.

However, he found a new, more appreciative venue for his work-- animation. He worked on series such as The Fantastic Four and Thundarr the Barbarian while helping to establish the independent comics market as a major force in the early 80s.

Now, I'd always assumed that Kirby's AstroGnosticism was a contact high off the psychic turmoil of the Psychedelic Era. I was wrong. I keep finding out that Jack was plugged into a worldview that Charles Fort, John Keel and Jacques Vallee would feel right at home with earlier and earlier in his career.

Which brings us to Sept 1957, or more accurately June 1957, since comics are post-dated three months in advance.

This was the dawn of the Silver Age of Comics but a distinctly fallow period for Kirby. His partnership with Joe Simon had collapsed and his relationship with industry giant DC/National was iffy since his rough-hewn style was seen as out of step with the times (that problem was fixed when art-god Wally Wood teamed with Kirby on Challengers of the Unknown and produced this writer's favorite comics art ever).

Jack took work whereever he could get it and got work doing sci-fi and "mystery" books for Harvey Comics, home of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Hot Stuff. Joe Simon may or may not have had some involvement in the scripting and inking, but the stories are most definitely Kirby's. In June, Jack released two books of particular interest, Alarming Tales #1 and Black Cat Mystic #59.

Alarming Tales contains two stories that prefigure Kirby's major 70s work. One is "The Last Enemy," a clear predecessor to Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which plays such a major part in the Iraq War/Stargate conundrum. Kirby took a lot of heat for Kamandi in the 70s, with the fan press accusing him of knocking off Planet of the Apes (DC publisher insisted Kirby feature the ruined Statue of Liberty in the first issue), but Kirby not only beat the Planet of the Apes film by 11 years he beat the original Pierre Boulle novel by 7.

Kind of a pattern with Jack.

The second story is "Donegan's Daffy Chair," a startling prefiguring of what Jeff Kripal describes as Kirby's Kabbalistic "Throne Mysticism" in his analysis of The New Gods in Mutants and Mystics. The story seems to make little narrative sense- a janitor at an aerospace factory gets in an experimental rocket chair and ends up leaving the solar system.

He comes back dressed in alien garb and speaking an alien language, utterly and apparently irreversibly transformed by his cosmic voyage. Space Age technology as Mystery cult initiation.

In The New Gods, Metron (read: "Metatron") used his Mobius Chair for roughly the same purpose- to travel the vast reaches of the cosmos in search of transformative experience.

Alarming Tales #1 also presents us with a story about a man who meets a beautiful Dana Scully lookalike from Mars who travels back and forth to Earth using a transdimensional Stargate. The story itself is as meh as "Donegan," but clearly shows the very, very strange and esoteric issues running through Jack's mind at the time. The art is interesting as well, in that it clearly seems to prefigure Steve Ditko's alien dimensions in his classic Doctor Strange run. Quite strongly, in fact.

Donegan's trip across the cosmos was repeated in Kirby's Space Odyssey/Moon Obelisk dual prophecy, "The Great Moon Mystery," drawn in 1958 but not published until 1966. In that story the astronauts are transformed into beams of light and shot across the Universe (shades of Chris Carter) in an experience that feels like minutes for the space trippers but lasted for weeks.

Alarming Tales had two more stories of interest- one was "The Cadmus Seed," a sci-fi story about breeding plant-based supersoldiers that namedrops Cadmus (father of the Samothracian Mysteries) and his army of Spartoi sown from dragon's teeth (loosely borrowed as an army of skeletons sown by the hydra's teeth in the greatest movie ever made). Another story tells the story of a man's virtuous, self-sacrificing dog who is later reincarnated as his son.

However, Alarming Tales- with its stories of cosmic apotheosis, transdimensional romance, mythology-inspired cloning and reincarnation-- is all just preamble. The real action on the stands in June of 1957 was most certainly in the pages of Black Cat Mystery #59. Here we see the three major themes of Jack Kirby's AstroGnostic teleology laid out before us in glorious four-color.

(click to enlarge)

The cover story would have made a great Mytharc episode on The X-Files. It's also remarkably similar to themes Kirby and Lee would explore in The X-Men. It tells the story of a young boy named Paul who begins to display unusual mental powers from an extremely young age and is taken into government custody to be studied. He's kept in a deep underground bunker where he's treated kindly but with extreme caution.

When Paul reaches adolescence, he announces that he is going to leave the bunker which causes the base to go into lockdown. Paul's captors are reasonable but firm- they clearly fear him and are not entirely sure they can hold him.

Now, remember this story is being published during the height of the Cold War at a time when any deviation from conformity was seen as tantamount to treason (particularly in a comic book). Kirby here is telling a story of a superior being who is openly defying the military establishment and isn't interested in being used as a weapon against Communism.

Returning the concept of interdimensional travel again, Kirby has Paul throw his captors offguard and escape from his underground prison by erasing himself from the Third Dimension, an act which is "child's play" for Paul's new race of beings.

Harking back to the old pulp themes borrowed from Theosophy, Paul meets his fellow new beings on Mount Everest. Note that they are all variations on the Grey type: thin, diaphanous, with oversized heads and eyes (they also have six fingers on each hand). This story was drawn several years before the Grey type would become popularized.

This new race has emerged to leave the planet, and will do so in a way similar to what we saw in the two earlier stories...

...they merge into pure ball of energy and travel at the speed of light. Whether or not they leave their physical forms behind or reconstitute when they reach their destination is unclear. What we do see is a theme Kirby would explore throughout his career-- traveling the cosmos using nonphysical-- in this case, apparently psychic-- means.

The second story is more like a lost Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode, though it predates both. A guy who's down on his luck meets a leprechaun/trickster type who presents himself an traveling salesman from outer space, offering free samples of alien gadgetry.

The first device is a kind of psychological repair system, which offers Kirby the opportunity to dip his toes in some of the psychedelic/freakout imagery he'd immerse himself in ten years later (note the "Kirby Krackle" prototype).

The art here is crude and rushed-- Kirby was never comfortable inking his own work. Nevertheless, this follows the pattern we've seen over and over again in the Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre series; revelation--often a technological revelation-- preceded by nightmare or psychedelic freakout.

Here we also see the kind of narrative that has been reported for millennia-- "little people" walking through walls, bearing gifts of unimaginable power. And the gift that comes help make the newly healed man unimaginably rich?

An antigravity device. The lucky fellow hires it out to move houses and heavy equipment. Perhaps his ancestors would have used the same device to use megaliths for solar observatories, thousand ton blocks of limestone for pyramids, giant stone heads for ceremonial purposes... are you catching my drift here?

Deciding that big business is too stressful, the man takes the "weemer"--a psychically powered teleportation device-- which he uses to travel to Peru, home of the Nazca lines, the Vicús pyramids, Machu Picchu and all the rest. Of course, Kirby would later revisit the Andes region for the most explicit "mystical" manifesto of his career.

Which brings us to the next story...

Unconsciously following the "reversal of time" motif of ritual drama, Kirby takes us backwards from Posthuman Apotheosis to the Alien-Alchemist Technological Exchange and finally to the AstroGnostic revelation: the footprints of the Stargods themselves.

We take this all for granted in the Era of Tsoukalos, but in 1957 this was almost completely unheard of. Not to mention completely subversive, when that word carried real consequence.

Kirby presents us with an archaeological team who stumble on a lost African tribe who pray to a giant stone head. After observing the tribe and their rituals, the scientists come to a shocking conclusion: the tribe is a cargo cult and their shaman is dressed as an astronaut.

If this story seems familiar to you you may remember it from the Chariots of the Gods? documentary, which showcased the work of an anthropologist who had studied the customs of an isolated Brazilian tribe called the Bep Koroti in the early 50s but would not publish his findings until the 1960s.

Again, this story was published in 1957.

As with Kamandi, Kirby was accused of ripping off Chariots of the Gods? when he produced The Eternals, even though he had explored almost identical themes a decade before with The Inhumans. But it seems that he had been exploring those themes a decade before both Chariots and the Inhumans with this remarkable story.

This page here is nearly identical to the opening scenes of Eternals #1, as the scientists discover an underground vault in which the stargods left their legacy for the tribe to study.

The scientists are driven away with a weapon remarkably similar to "Greek Fire," which was featured on an episode of Ancient Aliens. The team also discovers that the statue is in fact alive-- it's an alien stargod in suspended animation. Sandman scribe Neil Gaiman would also explore this theme in his Eternals miniseries in 2006.

"The Great Stone Face" was published two years before Kirby's "Face on Mars" story and two years before his Easter Island-heads-come-alive story, but certainly reflects the same obsessions. But it also reflects the same obsessions as Eternals #1, which is pretty mind-blowing considering it was published nearly twenty years before it.

Double page spread from Eternals #1

"The Great Stone Face" was also published a full year-and-a-half before Quatermass and the Pit, six years before the English language version of Morning of the Magicians, ten years before Five Million Years to Earth, eleven years before Chariots of the Gods? and nineteen years before The Twelfth Planet.

In fact, I'm not exactly sure where Kirby could possibly have read anything about Ancient Astronaut Theory in the American media in 1957, certainly nothing as explicit and doctrinaire as this. I suppose there could have been something (Fort perhaps, but certainly not in this Chariots of the Gods type presentation), the only problem is that I've yet to find it.

So, here's where we come to the heart of the matter.

If we look at Kirby's work and recognize his indelible mark on comics, movies and videogames and then we look at his uncanny ability to predict future events, what do we make of his AstroGnostic obsessions? Certainly, those who pretend to speak for him want it all to go away, but the more we look into this the deeper -- and farther back-- it all goes.

There is absolutely no way this was all just some kind of diversion for Jack. The record shows that this was an obsession, as deep and as indelible as anything about the man. And to claim otherwise is to gravely misrepresent his work and his legacy.

That Jack not only immersed himself in AAT a very long time before it showed up on anyone's radar might well speak to the fact that it undergirds all of his superhero work from the Silver Age on (it's beyond argument that it does starting from the Bronze Age). But there are also more elusive themes that Jack explored time and again, particularly the theme of psychic communion with alien entities, most remarkably told in "Children of the Flaming Wheel."

It's almost tempting to wonder if you can't actually separate Jack's AAT obsession and uncanny penchant for prophecy from the psychic/alien contact obsession. It's almost tempting to wonder if the three aren't in fact very intimately linked.

UPDATE: Kirby may well have been influenced by the 1954 book UFOs and the Bible, the only major AAT work in a popular US edition I can find that predates "Great Stone Face." However, this whole idea of the cargo cult is unique, and Kirby may well have come to the conclusion about ancient astronauts after the cargo cult stories emerged after the war.

Clownshow 2012: Every Picture Tells a Story

2012-01-11T21:00:00.001-05:00

I like to play picture association games-- you show me a picture and I tell you what I see, you know, that kind of thing. So since the Republican Primary reality show is the talk of the town these days I thought I'd do one based on the ~~clownshoe's~~ candidate's campaign logos.

This masterpiece of kitsch looks homemade, but will probably be ubiquitous in tattoo catalogs and on the sides of vans, RVs and motorcycle gas tanks by year's end. It also has the same unfortunate aftertaste a lot of Paul fan art leaves...

...can't for the life of me figure out why. Paul might want to work on that.

(Eye of) Newt's winged five-pionted star makes me think of...

...this. Siriusly.

I don't know who picks these logos for the candidates but someone needs to sit an ultraconservative Catholic like Santorum down and explain that that imagery is directly derived from...

...this imagery. I don't think Rick would appreciate the association much.

Media darling Jon Huntsman (aka Oannes Orion) is probably a bit more au fait with the association symbol watchers might get from his ~~oppressively boring~~ deceptively minimalist logo. I see that and I think...

...this. Howzaboutyou?

Perry's candidacy has been a trainwreck, and I'm willing to bet intentionally. But this derivative graphic (those are McCain pyramidions atop a Obama sunrise) seems to harken back to the Obama symbolathon...

...especially with the Palm and the Crescent (ostensibly symbolizing South Carolina). Before I die of ennui, let's look at the next graphic abortion...

...Romney's odd ribbon design. I don't know, every time I look at it I keep seeing the "after" shot to...

... this "before" shot.

And even though (Mount) Herman (Son of) Cain dropped out I have to bring up his logo, which was as hilariously and cluelessly awful as his candidacy. Every time I saw it, I couldn't help but think of...

Clownshow 2012: Suspension of Belief

2012-01-10T12:36:00.008-05:00

I was just reading that Fringe is not only in danger of not being renewed for a fifth season, but there is serious concern that Fox might cut its losses and cancel it before it ends its fourth.

This doesn't surprise me. As I wrote here recently, Fringe has a lot of built-in challenges, but it also struggles under the headwinds of the zeitgeist. Fringe was intended to recapture some the old X-Files thunder, but with an obvious upstairs directive to avoid the anti-government and anti-establishment vitriol that Chris Carter packed into his storylines to the very end.

But therein lies the rub- The X-Files was about its time and Fringe is about The X-Files. Only minus the anger, the sexual chemistry and most importantly, minus the zeitgeist. The X-Files was as much about Waco and Ruby Ridge and Heaven's Gate and SWAT teams getting addresses wrong and gunning down elderly couples enjoying their tea while the crack dealers next door piss their pants laughing, as it was about UFOs or mutants.

And so, Chris Carter made sure his unsuspecting viewers were confronted head-on with terrifying scenes of stormtroopers storming through their idyllic suburban neighborhoods, as well as an army of anonymous enforcers who existed in a near-future world in which the Constitution is just an old rag. Carter took all these guys out of the headlines and told his audience, "what makes you think it can't happen to you?"

The X-Files also existed in a television landscape that was blissfully pre-postmodern. In its Vancouver heyday the series was gloriously un-self-conscious, and was playing to a TV audience in which suspension of disbelief was a given.

That audience is a thing of the past.

And so we have a Republican primary that is being conducted like a reality TV series. Most people believe the "challenge" here is a charade, a race to replace a Wall Street puppet king (Tut was a puppet-king, too) who plays golf and shrugs off the abuse from Fox News and the mythical Tea Party, while the GOP leadership wields the true lobbyist-fueled power.

The "Republicans"-- who are simply the old Dixiecrats trading under a brand-name they seized by hostile takeover-- have held the upper hand in the US Gov't since that fateful night of November 22, 1963. Sure, the "Democrats" rush in whenever the ruling party oversteps its bounds, but they're always neutralized as soon as the corporate policies that are unpopular with the GOP's base are passed. I've seen it all time and again, since the old Carter days, to be exact.

But as usually happens when two ideological armies battle to the death, a third, theretofore unseen power tends to emerge from their ashes. The only problem is that the smoke still hasn't cleared and we don't know who those shadowy figures are, marching towards us. The Liberal project collapsed during the Sixties riots, and the Conservative project was liquidated during Bush Jr's administration and Goldman Sachs brokered off its assets in a fire sale to the Chinese, the Saudis and the Germans.

Which is all a very pretentious way of saying that whatever the rhetoric leads you to believe, no one believes in the old answers anymore. You're not hearing about it in the media but the Republican Party is under enormous pressure from a resurgent white nationalism/tribalism (which the Paul dynasty may well find a way to capitalize on), and the Democrats are faced with a restive base of increasingly apathetic black voters and younger voters of all persuasions who think they are cowards and sellouts.

Just like with sci-fi and fantasy on TV, American politics lives and dies on the suspension of disbelief. We have to believe these idiots are going to solve our problems for us but clearly no one does. The Republican reality series has done nothing but make its stars look no different than the cast of Survivor or Project Runway. Maybe much worse. And the Damoclean sword of the zeitgeist looms overhead, looking to lay waste to both parties.

What will emerge from all of this? I think the real answers will come from true democracy-- people getting together and fighting their corners. None of these clowns- Republocrat or Demopublican-- gives a rat's ass about you.

That message finally seems to have sunk in.

SYNC LOG UPDATE: The night I posted this an incident occurred in Chris Carter's hometown of Bellflower, CA:

A Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy is under investigation after amatuer video was released showing him punch a special-needs woman in the face on a Bellflower bus.

Jermaine Green, the man who recorded the video, has also told NBC LA, that the cop also threatened him with arrest if he didn't hand over the cell phone that contained the incriminating video.

It appears that a fight broke out between the cop and the woman, after he boarded the bus with another deputy. The woman is reported to have been argumentative with the deputies, including cursing at them, before she was assaulted.

Clownshow 2012: Brother Ron and the All-Seeing Eye

2012-01-08T14:14:00.001-05:00

Brother Ron shows off his new Masonic chevron

The problem with talking about Freemasonry is that even though its role in American politics is well-documented, so many nutjobs have salted the fields and inspired a mass knee-jerk reaction when ever the subject is raised.

As I've said many times before this is not an Anti-Mason blog. In fact, seeing the rogue's gallery lined up against them-- snakehandlers, pantpissers, Hitler, Stalin and so on-- I am probably more anti-anti-Mason. And it's immensely entertaining to decipher all of the Masonic symbolism flying around out there, especially with the space programs. Sadly, Masons usually take exception to my interpretations, but that's the Internet for you.

My real concern is how Masonic and quasi-Masonic fraternities, secret societies and civic groups are used to foster privilege and exclusion. This becomes even more a pressing issue during an economic depression, when exclusion and lack of access can equal financial ruin for many people. Unfortunately, that's human nature and these groups are hardly the only offenders when it comes to cronyism and nepotism.

Ever since the rise of the Anti-Masonic Party in the early 19th Century, Masons have been accused of being duplicitous and pursuing hidden agendas. Scandals have erupted in the UK over corruption among Masonic police officers and judges, accusing them of both using and obscuring their Masonic allegiance to further the interests of their brothers.

Ron Paul advertises on Jeff Rense's site
for campaign donations

So what do we make of a high-initiate Mason who has cultivated almost religious devotion in the Anti-Masonic extreme right for the past 40 years?

This is no small issue. Ron Paul's biggest media supporters by far are the radio talk show hosts Alex Jones and Jeff Rense, whose shows and websites act as virtual propaganda mills for the Texas congressman. But at the same time both Jones and Rense are clearinghouses for Anti-Masonic propaganda. How do we explain the disconnect?

Corporate-sponsored conspiracy theorist "Vigilant Citizen"
has made a fortune "exposing the Illuminati."

To paper over the cracks, Paul's supporters make distinctions between regular Freemasonry and what is called "Illuminated Freemasonry." The New World Order isn't an effort by corporate oligarchies to remove all governmental barriers to commerce and labor exploitation, it's a conspiracy among "Illuminated" Freemasons and "Zionist" Jews to create a one world government and one world currency and one world religion (it always comes down to religion). Rense makes a similar distinction between "Zionist" Jews and "good" Jews.

Let's leave aside for a minute that the real one world religion project is clearly EvangeliCIAlism and look at the "Illuminated Freemasonry" bit again. The symbol universally accepted as belong to Illuminated Masonry among Ron Paul's followers as the symbol of the Illuminati is the "All-Seeing Eye," or Eye in the Pyramid or triangle.

"Eye in Pyramid" spotting is a major sport on the Internet (I've been known to partake when the opportunity arises), especially among those looking for signs of dastardly Illuminati infiltrators, and variations on it (circles in triangles, Suns in triangles) are all over, though more often used as fashion statements or injokes.

Jeff Rense has an inhouse artist named David Dee who creates photocollage political cartoons for him, most of them high-tech updates on Julius Streicher's old Der Steurmer propaganda pieces. Dee usually uses the All Seeing Eye to symbolize those who he perceives as Ron Paul's political opponents, often Paul's fellow Ayn Rand enthusiast Alan Greenspan. He alternates these hit pieces with hagiographic portraits of Paul as the white knight coming to rescue America.

Dee is not the only Paul enthusiast drawing on Der Steurmer for artistic inspiration. There are plenty of other artists mining a similar approach, applauding Paul's war on the Fed and often depicting Paul's enemies as swarthy, hook-nosed, skulking cowards who the heroic Paul will flush out until America is finally cleansed with the righteous fire of Liberty.

And you often see the All-Seeing Eye as the emblem of his enemies' infamy.

Paul expresses his love and gratitude
for Lambda Chi on their website

So the fact that Ron Paul inarguably belongs to a Masonic fraternity, has a Eastern Star wife and Rainbow Girl daughters and uses Masonic symbolism on the campaign trail is fine, because he's one of the "good" Masons- the dependably conservative fellows down at the Lodge who get together to share a meal and do good works for the community.

Right?

Well, there was one little thing bothering me. I kept looking at Lambda Chi Alpha's logos- I saw the Masonic grip, the Cross and Crown, the shining Sun (also featured prominently in Paul's new anti-Santorum ad), and all sorts of other tracing board goodies, but there was one thing that I was missing. But then it hit me...

...the Eye in the Triangle-- here incorporating both the Masonic union of Sun and the Crescent Moon-- also known as the "All-Seeing Eye."

More importantly, the union of Sun and Moon represents the same union of opposites principle symbolized by the Square and Compass, according to no less an authority than Albert Pike.

So judging by the criteria of his most fervent supporters, Ron Paul is not only a Mason, he's an Illuminated Mason. And yet somehow he has led his flock to believe he's neither.

How can this be? Judging from the endless invasion of innocent message boards and comments sections across the Internet, Paul's followers are all super-geniuses who have been initiated into the hidden wisdom of Libertarianism and will be his steadfast foot soldiers in the glorious crusade to liberate America from the "Fed" (wink, nod).

This couldn't have anything to do with any absolutely nutso, zany, just-plain-wacky conspiracy theory ideas like "controlled opposition" or "agent provocateur" or anything like that. Could it?

No way, Jose! (sorry- I meant "no way, Ray.")

I know some Paul fans might be reading, so in the interest of fairness and balance, I'll close it out with some inspiring words from their hero...

"There’s nothing to fear from Globalism, free trade and a single worldwide currency." -- Ron Paul, Congressional Record, March 13, 2001

SHOCKING UPDATE: Ron Paul did not vote against the NDAA!

There is a whole lot of anger regarding the National Defense Authorization Act that President Obama signed into law last week. Civil libertarians in particular have been livid over the content of the law which they think allows the indefinite detention of Americans, even though the indefinite detention provision was changed, before President Obama signed the bill into law.

Not too long after the President signed the bill, rabid Ron Paul supporters vigorously claimed that Paul opposed the bill. There’s just one problem with that. If he indeed opposed it so much, why didn’t he attend a House session to cast his vote against it?

Ron Paul took an oath to execute his duties as a member of the House of Representatives, yet he failed to show up to vote against the NDAA, a bill he supposedly opposes. He didn’t bother to take a few hours out of his day to vote against something he considers dangerous to American rights and freedom. Instead, he decided to ignore his congressional responsibilities in order to remain on the campaign trail.- AddictingInfo.com

Thank you Brother Ron, for making my argument for me...

Ron Paul: Race, Ritual and the Scottish Rite

2012-01-05T22:12:00.015-05:00

The Widow's Sons

UPDATE: This article is about hypocrisy and duplicity-- and how Libertarian propaganda is being used to obscure a distinctly reactionary agenda-- not Freemasonry per se. Please read the whole thing --and some of the insightful comments as well-- before making your mind up one way or another. And please be aware that The Secret Sun is both a kneejerk-free zone and a dues-paying member of the Reality-Based High Weirdness Community.

Well, the Clownshow's back in town and from the looks of things it going to be clownier than ever before. We have a Wall Street underling in the White House who is attacked regularly by his opposition party as a "socialist," even though intelligent (read: non-racist) conservatives acknowledge he's governing as a classic Rockefeller Republican (with all that implies for parapolitics watchers, I might add).

On the other side of the aisle the GOP leadership has put its hopes in a candidate who may well have been manufactured in Skynet's Terminator factory and is instinctively loathed by 75% of his own party. So much so that he got the scare of his life from an overgrown altar boy (with all that implies for parapolitics watchers, I might add).

Gee, why does Iowa vote first?

Then there's the Great White Hope of the Libertarian/Neo-Confederate alliance, Ron Paul. No one is quite acknowledging it (except his son, judging from his facial expression last night), but Paul needed to win last night more than anyone else and was in fact polling as such.

Paul's mystique is built on being the supposed champion of the Silent Majority and coming in a weak third to the two of the lamest candidates in living memory-- and in a caucus where Independents and Democrats could register as Republicans and vote-- doesn't exactly bolster that image.

But caucuses aren't primaries and apparently they tend to winnow out the enthusiastic but impatient. A lot of his support on the ground were his version of Deadheads- true believers from out of state hitching a ride on the campaign trail. Most of the younger voters are attracted to Paul's antiwar and anti-Prohibition policies while tending to ignore his more problematic domestic agenda.

"They've got it all backwards."

Even so, I'm not going to try to argue with Paul's Deadheads anymore. Why? Because I now understand the very sophisticated coded messages he's sending out there (more than they do, perhaps) and I think I better understand the powerful emotional response they instill now.

I was actually hoping he'd win so he could do maximum damage to the duopoly and expose the Clownshow for what it really is. Maybe he still will, but I feel a corner has turned. The soda's lost its fizz.

For all his talk of reason, Paul is hitting a bruised and disoriented Middle America -- particularly the white working class-- with a powerful, symbolically-charged emotional stew promising a return to antebellum Southern folkways and an America better described in the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution.

I certainly understand why this is so seductive in these days of Globalism and multiculturalism, even if I don't agree with it. But the fact remains that he's sending a different coded message to his fellow initiates.

"We're the same underneath it all"
Paul lifts McCain's Sirius logo

I didn't vote in 2008 and I don't plan to vote in this election either so I have no clown in this show. And besides, what's much more fascinating to me is Ron Paul's almost compulsive display of high initiate secret society symbolism. Which is to say that although other bloggers have claimed that Paul is a Mason --including some Masons themselves-- he has denied it (kind of). But that hasn't exactly stopped speculation on the issue.

All I can say for sure is that if walks like a duck, talks like a duck and performs high initiate ritual like a duck....

Now, the controversy that's dogged Paul has been his newsletters, and to a lesser extent his deep and longstanding ties to extreme right sects like the Christian Reconstructionists and the Neo-Confederate underground.

In the first place, Republican criticism of the Ron Paul Newsletters is pretty rich given the language in them is identical to what's heard on the AM talk radio circuit that GOP lawmakers and power brokers work every hour of every day.

Paul with his friend Don Black,
founder of Stormfront

Even so, with the fanatical support Paul has in the White Nationalist community the question has been raised if Paul himself is racist. I think this is the wrong question. What people are really asking if Paul himself is a bigot or a hater. I don't think he is.

I think Paul sees himself in a long tradition of paternalist Southern conservatives who understand the way the world really works, son, and think everything will return to its idyllic, antebellum state once that pesky, outside-agitatin' Federal Government with its sissy talk about "civil rights" is done away with for good.

In this, Paul falls smack dab into the old/new (Masonic) hierarchy of the South, which believes passionately in natural orders, natural laws and especially, natural hierarchies. Unfortunately, working class whites don't figure much higher than blacks in this natural order.

But of course the Masons-- Scottish Rite Masons, to be precise-- were at the top of the plantation Pyramid.

What Northern liberals never understood is that the Masonic Dixiecrats (who enriched themselves with New Deal millions and then turned around and shattered the New Deal coalition) were not drooling, foaming, bloviating racists as you might see in a Hollywood movie.

What they really hated were do-gooders and busybody outsiders who don't understand "the natural order of things."

Scottish Rite Freemasons like Albert Pike, Strom Thurmond (who kept a black lover who bore his child), Jesse Helms and Trent Lott invented the language of "state's rights" and "limited government" that Paul peddles everywhere he goes. Northerners might be totally baffled by this language but it strikes a deep and powerful chord for a lot of conservative Southerners (and now Tea Party rightists everywhere).

Paul's Confederate mentors, all Scottish Rite Masons

It means dismantling the welfare state, abolishing anti-discrimination laws and civil rights laws, dismantling separation of church and state (all of which are included in Paul's platform, of course) and all of the other innovations that shattered the idyllic bliss of the Plantation system and its direct descendants.

Paul might not tell his young, idealistic followers that's the endgame for his anti-Federal agenda, but the circles he's traveled in for his entire adult life will explain it to you at length, if you like. As would the Dixiecrats who wrote Paul's gameplan long before he showed up will as well.

The Confederate movement certainly understands the coded language Paul is speaking:

In a January 4, 2008 article on the Official Confederate States of America (CSA) Government website, it was claimed that Ron Paul was "the only candidate who might be friendly to the restoration of the Confederacy" ...The article also stated that the CSA has "known for years Ron Paul to be essentially a Confederate in his stand on the issues"

But if you read his platform carefully you'll see that Paul differs from his CSA friends in that he would dismantle the entire Federal government and impose a de facto Confederate system on the North as well.

And Stormfront founder Don Black assumes the same thing about Paul that I did when he started showing up in parapolitcal literature in the 80s- he was a true blue Confederate:

“Everybody, all of us back in the 80′s and 90′s, felt Ron Paul was, you know, unusual in that he had actually been a Congressman, that he was one of us and now, of course, that he has this broad demographic–broad base of support.”

Speaking among the initiates at Georgetown- note Masonic symbols

But this is not about "race hate" for Paul. That's for the help. This is about dismantling the Federal system-- finishing the work begun in the Civil War-- and returning to the Feudal system that ruled the South since colonial times. The way things should be.

That Paul is a transplanted Northerner shows just how powerful this vision of the world can be outside of Dixie (no one is more committed to a cause than a converted enemy). And that this all squares nicely with Ayn Rand's Liber AL teleology shows it's not limited to America either.

But is Paul a Freemason? One fact people have pointed out is that Ron Paul's wife is Eastern Star and his daughters are Rainbow, an arrangement essentially unheard of for a man who is not in fact a Mason himself.

Lying about the secret?
"The Secret Lies with Charlotte" was the key to
the Masonic secrets in National Treasure

In this handwritten letter (note the reverse of the Great Seal) to a "Charlotte" published on his site Paul denies being a "Freemason." And here's where we come to the classic non-denial denial. A "Free" Mason is a member of the Ancient, Free and Accepted Masonic Order. There are other Orders that do not define themselves as "Free." Several, actually.

And as longtime Secret Sun readers know, the Free-masons are the low men on a much bigger Masonic totem pole in which Masonic-inspired and Masonic-created fraternities and secret societies wield the true power. And here's where we hit paydirt...

Do you see the hidden Eye in the Triangle?

Paul is a proud member in good standing of Lambda Chi Alpha, yet another Masonically-created fraternity that is classified as a "secret" fraternity. Lambda Chi traces its origins to Boston (birthplace of American Freemasonry) and Phila(e)delphia, in Paul's native Pennsylvania. Here's an obituary of Lambda Chi's founding father, John E. "Jack" Mason (seriously).

Funeral services were held on Wednesday, June 5, at the Oliver H. Bair funeral parlors in Philadelphia. Cremation and private burial were in Woodland Cemetery. Masonic services were conducted by Lodge 51, of which he was a past master, the preceding evening with his close friend and associate, past Grand High Alpha Fischer, in his station of senior warden.

That Lambda Chi is in fact a Masonic fraternity and not just a drinking club is made clear by its original seal, prominently featuring a Masonic handshake. Lambda Chi also includes an inner body called "The Mason's Circle," a classic example of esoteric double-entendre.

It's current seal also features the handshake, which is overshadowed now by explicit Knights Templar (and Solar) iconography, as well as the cojoining of the cross and the crescent, which is a byword for the Order.

Let's recap:

• Is Ron Paul a Free-mason? Probably not.

• Is he a member of at least one Masonic fraternity? Without question.

• How seriously does he take the Masonic craft itself? Oh, you have no idea...

Paul's Presidential announcement should tickle the fancy of Masonic ritual watchers, for both obvious and more obscure reasons.

• First of all was the day and date: Friday the 13th. This should be obvious for most readers but for those who are not, it was the day and date of the suppression of the Templars and includes the number 13, which is sacred to Masons. Read about both here. Or just look at a dollar bill.

Arrow points to the "Star of the East."

• Second was the physical location-- in the Exeter (NH) Town Hall, which is a literal stone's throw from the "Star of the East" Masonic lodge. More on Exeter in just a bit, since it's crucial to Masonic history.

Diagram from NASA, speaking of Scottish Rites.

• Third was the particular Friday the 13th he chose to announce- it was the day of a once in a lifetime planetary alignment:

In a rare planetary event, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, will appear together (within around 2 degrees of each other) in the eastern sky just before dawn this Friday. The event will be particularly spectacular for Sydneysiders. From 5am, the four planets will be clearly seen just above the horizon in the east. The brightest planet will be Venus sitting in the middle of the group. Just above and to the left of Venus and almost as bright is Jupiter. To the right of Jupiter and slightly fainter will be Mercury. Sitting below these three planets and fainter again will be Mars.

"West" lines up with Ron Paul on Friday the 13th,
Venus aligns with Star of the East Lodge
Venus is the "star of the east."

Whatever your opinion of Richard Hoagland, he repeatedly proved that celestial alignments were crucial to the Scottish Rite Masons in NASA, so it's doubly difficult to imagine that Paul chose this day at random.

Who the hell shakes hands like that?
Wait...never mind.

So not only do we have acknowledged secret society initiate Ron Paul announcing on what is essentially a Masonic holy day, it's during an ultra-rare planetary alignment and takes place literally across the street from a Masonic Lodge. If that isn't meaningful to you, you're reading the wrong blog. The scope of this ritual is breathtakingly audacious. Obama-worthy, even.

But if the Masonic tradition is as important to you as it was to your direct ideological forebears, announcing your candidacy in a town named "Exeter" would have an added ritual super-charge.

Why?

Because the earliest record we have of the word "Freemason" can be found in Exeter-- Exeter Cathedral, to be exact:

"For purposes of discussion it may be assumed that even if
there had been no operative societies coming down from a
remoter antiquity, the guild system itself would have
produced them. When artisans of all other classes and
callings were uniting themselves into such groups, it would
have been strange indeed if the stone masons had not done
so also. If not a single record of their medieval existence
could be found, it still would be safe to infer they did exist. As
a matter of fact there are records of Masonic guilds both in
England and on the continent.

"The term Freemason (first) occurs
in the fabric rolls of Exeter Cathedral in the year 1396."

-- from Phoenix Masonry

Case closed.

"End the Federal Government"
Note Masonic chevron symbol in new logo

Now will any of this sway Ron Paul's acolytes from his cult? No, of course not. It's not intended to. There's no way I can compete with this guy's multimillion dollar propaganda machine or the thousands of his alt-media sycophants.

Besides, no one understands the appeal of turning back the clock more than me (though for me it's the mid-90s). And Paul's radicalism might wake people up and inspire liberals and conservatives in northern states to realize they have a lot more in common with each other than they do with Paul's Confederate revanchists and start taking large-scale secession (and the Second Amendment) more seriously.

And you know me- I love this stuff. The Obama crew has been awfully quiet symbol-wise and I was just getting ready to tune the whole Clownshow out. And I still want Paul to be the turd in the party's punchbowl-- and wake Northern conservatives up to exactly who the hell they've been in bed with for the past 30 years.

That's the great thing about extremists- they tend to clarify issues that the more moderate can obscure.

POSTSCRIPT: Maybe I was wrong- maybe it is about race hate for Ron Paul. This is the most disgusting political ad I've ever seen. Of course, it will be disavowed-- after the message sinks in. Of course.

Just like the newsletters.

Oh, we'll hear the usual denials and talk of "false flags," but seeing this is hot on the heels of Huntsman's Twilight Zone parody of Paul (and the Globe's endorsement of JH), it feels a lot more like "getting someone to do your dirty work while you maintain plausible deniability" to me.

Remember also that Paul claimed someone hacked his Twitter account after he posted a nasty personal dig at Huntsman after the Iowa caucus. So low blows and bullshit excuses are nothing new for this character.

CASE CLOSED DEPT.: How did I not know that Ron Paul 2o12's official politics blogger is Jack Hunter aka The Southern Avenger?

This argument is over.

Sidebar: For Secret Sun purposes Exeter, NH is important in that one of the most puzzling UFO flaps in the 1960s occurred there, inspiring the bestselling book Incident at Exeter. Phillips Academy Exeter is also there, the sister school to the more well-known Phillips Academy Andover over the border, the school of choice for the plutocratic elite.

For the geeks: Exeter founder John Phillips coined the phrase, "With great power comes great responsibility."

I deleted the KFC bumper sticker since no one seemed to understand that it was a joke and not part of the story. All of the other campaign logos are official.

Mindbomb: The Gulf Wars and the Gate of the Gods, Redux

2011-12-29T02:30:00.005-05:00

I don't know if John Lilly's version of the omniscient Orbital Machine Intelligence (OMI) which he named ECCO (for "Earth Coincidence Control Office") is as true or as real than any other OMI fever-dream.

But I do know that when you really dig into the study of Synchronicity-- when you peel away all of the simple coincidence and happenstance and approach the phenomenon with a brutal rigor-- it becomes very hard not to begin to see it as the provenance of a force or an intelligence that is definite. Which is to say not a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky, touchy-feely "energy" or "consciousness," but an agency.

There have been times when Synchronicity seemed to volley back and forth with me in real time, when it answered questions that I had asked quite clearly in my mind just as if we were having a conversation. I found that the more rigorous I became-- mostly meaning the fewer variables I kept in play-- the more powerful and specific Synchronicity became in turn.

For a very long time I approached Synchronicity with the attitude that it was impossible, that only multiple sources of corroboration-- preferably in hard copy-- would make me believe what I was seeing. And even then I would challenge my own results.

I threw away hundreds of occurrences, which I labeled "guppies," in order to focus on the bigger picture. And in order to quantify the most significant I developed a five-point criteria, which looked for what I call Compound Synchronicities, incorporating several improbable co-incidents into the whole.

Which brings us back to Jack Kirby.

Becoming a conduit for whatever intelligence may be broadcasting out there is not an easy task. Maybe Jane Roberts and JZ Knight are the real McCoy, maybe disembodied ancient spirits really chose them as vessels. Maybe, but I doubt it.

I think in order to get to a point in which our ordinary consciousness is breached and the mind is free to go somewhere else or to tune into unknowable frequencies, our ego filter has to be bypassed. Meaning "shattered."

It seems to be a very dangerous process and I imagine for every true prophet there are a hundred thousand madmen. In Kirby's case, it was most certainly the war, but also maybe something else as well.

In the last post we looked at this bizarre convergence of machine intelligence contact and the year 1974, claimed by Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, John Lilly, Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. Readers cited Timothy Leary and his Starseed Transmissions as well as contact claimed by Ingo Swann. There are probably others as well.

What most of these men (aside from perhaps Geller and Swann) have in common is what is somewhat irresponsibly called "heroic" use of powerful hallucinogens. What separates these guys from your ordinary acid casualty like Syd Barrett is that they continued to be high-functioning and prolific. Perhaps even more so.

You can certainly dismiss their claims but you can't ignore the fact that these were highly intelligent and cogent individuals, working in highly specialized fields.

There are also the examples of visionaries such as Francis Crick and Steve Jobs, both of whom credit part of their genius to hallucinogens and both of whom were no stranger to alien/UFO memes.

And then there's Jack Kirby.

I've written several times about Kirby's own channeling of the OMI meme in OMAC. Let's just recap-- OMAC was a near-future sci-fi series about a OMI who creates a One Man Army to deal with threats that the GPA (Global Police Agency) can't handle. He's essentially Captain Marvel redux, only he doesn't switch his identities.

In issues three and four, OMAC was sent to repel an invasion undertaken by a foreign dictator on a weak neighbor, which was the same situation we saw in 1990 with the invasion of Kuwait.

And here's where we get to the compound Synchronicities; the story begins with OMAC wearing a virtual reality headset, which were all the rage in the early 90s. This story was drawn in 1974.

As he flies to battle OMAC finds himself chased by video-guided smart bombs, which were not used in the field of battle until...you guessed it, the early 90s (the smart bomb was the star meme of the Gulf War).

Jumping forward in the timeline, the arrest of the dictator from his bunker is remarkably similar to the image we saw of Saddam Hussein's bunker arrest, right down to the ragged beard and gaping mouth and tongue.

The similarity of the imprisoned dictator to Saddam is striking here, even with the balding head. The same goes for the crimes against humanity that the dictator is charged with....

The timeline was a bit jarring to me, in that it combined narratives from the Gulf War of the first Bush Administration and the Iraq War of the second. But in the stories that Kirby would write immediately after that timeline would be rectified in the major plot points of a multi-issue arc that would bring us straight to the doorstep of a Stargate.

A bit of background first.

William Henry (among others) has argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was not about WMDs or democracy or even oil, but about obtaining hidden records of the ancient gods popularly known as the "Annunaki."

The ancient cities of Sumer and Babylon (literally "Gate of the Gods") lie in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Rumors had been circulating for years that Saddam had been digging feverishly for Annunaki relics, which he had supposedly found, as well as proof an ancient Stargate, or interdimensional portal used to travel vast distances in time and space.

And to file this under crazy theories undergirded by naggingly inconvenient facts, you might remember that one of the first things the US Army did when it reached Baghdad was loot all the museums.

Which brings me to that ancient and arcane grimoire men call Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #30...

Textbook alien abduction
from "UFO: The Wildest Trip Ever"

Kamandi is not really the last boy on Earth, since he's actually 18 and there are a bunch of other humans (including boys) running around on Earth A.D. (After Disaster). And the title was a pastiche of Kirby's 50s work (including a story in which Earth is taken over by talking animals) meant to cash in on the Planet of the Apes craze of the early 70s.

I remember seeing the book now and then but it seems as if it didn't make it to the stands near me (comic book distribution was a corrupt mess back in the day) very often. So #30 was the first issue I actually bought for myself and was my entry point into the Kirbyverse.

I remember buying it with money my mother had given me to buy soda and potato chips and Ring Dings at Valles News (pronounced Valis) one morning when I was supposed to go on a field trip to the Boston Aquarium.

Be that as it may, you may now note that the first Jack Kirby book I ever bought was about a classic alien abduction -- not to mention the Stargate.

In "UFO: The Wildest Trip on Earth" (wink, wink), Kamandi and his mutant sidekick Ben Boxer are taken to a distant "barren pile of sand" by the alien, who turns out to be an energy being contained in a suit.

Who is Ben Boxer? Well, he's part of a trio of astronauts who sat out the Great Disaster (WWIII) in Tracking Site, an low-orbit space station. They survived the holocaust and developed mutant powers and worship the ancient god, "NASA Mind."

Kirby never said as much but it's safe to say Ben Boxer is his Gus Grissom, because Jack was plugged into every other damn thing you can think of.

What is this invader doing in this desert land? She (it turns out to be a girl after scanning Kamandi as a template) is looting the treasures of the earth to send back to her home planet by way of a....

...Stargate.

Where, as the fanatically alien-obsessed Kirby tells us, "UFOs come from." If you scroll back up you'll see a statue based on the Babylonian gods (also featured on the issue's cover) found in--wait for it now...

...the Iraqi National Museum.

So, let's recap-- in 1974, Kirby draws a story about an OMI-powered supergod with main plot points that eerily foreshadow the two Persian Gulf wars, including virtual reality of all damn things.

Immediately after that, we are taken on a trip to a sandy wasteland where an invading alien is looting artifacts, including those identical to those displayed in the Iraqi Museum, which was itself looted by an invading force 29 years later.

Kamandi #30 also features a terrorism subplot, in which Kamandi and Ben find a jetliner lifted from the Arctic in which a passenger carries a suitcase nuke. When the satchel is opened the device is armed and the explosion closes the Stargate, leaving the UFO and its pilot stranded on Earth.

Now, the reason I hadn't put the whole story together is that I usually began and ended with #30. Big mistake. That's only just the start.

In issue #31, the stranded alien energy being looks for a suitable host and possesses Ben Boxer, Walk-in style. He becomes a steel-plated giant (Ben's mutant powers allow him to become the Silver Surfer, sans board essentially) and goes on the rampage.

At the same time the alien is trying to find a host-- Jesus, I don't even know how to say this-- an invading army arrives in the desert from America.

For real.

The invading force from America arrives at this barren desert to fight their enemies, the Gorillas. The battle picks up in #32, a giant size issue that includes a reprint of Kamandi #1. And not for nothing, either...

...for the first issue of Kamandi begins in the ruins of lower Manhattan and ends at the military headquarters of the new American Empire. On page 17.

The invasion force from America is led by Kamandi's old chum, Prince Tuftan, son of the "Great Caesar" of the Tiger Empire.

Did I mention it's headquartered in America?

You see, this is the second Gorilla War-- the first war took place in issue #3 and 4, following the story arc begun in #1.

The first war was fought by the father, the second by the son.

Sound familiar?

By the way, that's a gorilla war, not a guerrilla war.

So, what I innocently wandered into early 1975 was a storyline that eventually featured a UFO abduction, an intra-galactic Stargate, Annunaki relics, jetliners as terrorist weapons, and a two-stage war fought first by the father of a American Empire and then the son.

And did I mention this was written immediately following the smart bomb/virtual reality/Weapons of Mass Destruction war story in OMAC?

The storyline continued with alien genetic engineering and the UFO repelling the gorilla forces. It concluded in orbit, with Pyra taking Kamandi and Canus on a trip to a Russian satellite manned by a Lovecraftian mutant.

This is all just one or twelve too many more "coincidences" with Jack Kirby to chalk up to happenstance. And what we are looking at again are "Compound Synchronicities," in which the co-incidents are stacked in sequence, with Kamandi #30 being published immediately following OMAC #4. And what we are looking at are the major plot points of these stories, not just random details.

Starting in the late 50s, Kirby began receiving transmissions that seem to transcend the boundaries of time and space. He buried it all in allegory (read: "wacked-out sci fi"), or rather, translated whatever he was picking up. But I believe there's some thing behind this all, and not just the moon in June and the birds and the trees, fa la la. And 1974 seemed to be a crucial year in this process for him, as with others.

POSTSCRIPT I: I'd be remiss in not mentioning that I began working on this piece on Dec. 28th, the 37th anniversary of one of the three life-altering traumatic events I experienced in my early days, which I wrote about here. That event -- the violent and suspicious death of someone very close to me and my family-- happened at the end of 1974. I often think it left me wide open, psychically. And just two and a half months later, this Stargate madness came into my life.

An earlier and even more traumatic event also prefigured my very first exposure to Jack Kirby (via this issue of The Witching Hour). I can't help but think of that co-incidence as well.

POSTSCRIPT II: And bringing it all back to those Sirius transmissions, who do we find in the centerfold of Kamandi #35 and its alien goddess-in-orbit plot? A familiar face, indeed.

POSTSCRIPT III: And who's that above Lady Sirius? From the Wiki:

(Christopher) Glenn made his best-known report on January 28, 1986 when he anchored CBS Radio's live coverage of the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Glenn had just signed off -- after what was thought to have been a normal launch -- when the shuttle disintegrated, killing the seven astronauts on board.
"I had to get back on the air real fast to describe that, and had a very difficult time doing that," he recalled. Glenn and correspondent Frank Mottek (now a reporter at CBS Radio Station KNX) covered the Challenger disaster from that point.

Glenn was among the first CBS News correspondents to use a personal computer (an Apple II).

POSTSCRIPT IV: Speaking of the Challenger disaster, does anyone know anything about the provenance or authenticity of this video?

POSTSCRIPT V: Ned Sonntag reminded me that Ben Boxer can trace his astronaut-as-supergod lineage directly to the Fantastic Four (astronauts who were transformed into super-beings via radiation), and that the FF themselves are widely seen as a take-off from Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown (both of whom trace their origin to aeronautical disasters). Click here for the lineage.

"I'll Show You How to Bring Me to Your World"

2011-12-23T23:33:00.008-05:00

The "tinfoil hat" is an time-honored punchline used to dismiss anyone who wanders off the consensus plantation on fringe or paranormal topics. The reality behind it is even less amusing, given that paranoid schizophrenics are often harried by auditory hallucinations in the form of disembodied voices, which are often blamed on electronic interference and not the disease itself.

Even worse, if a person was indeed being subjected to some kind of electronic attack, a tinfoil (aluminum foil, more likely) hat would only amplify the signal.

The topic of radio or microwave transmissions beamed into people's heads is a tricky one. With more reliable anti-psychotic pharmaceuticals on the market you actually hear very little about it these days, though there is a considerable body of evidence on record showing that military and intelligence agencies were most certainly interested in developing the technology.

The main sticking point was that a transmission needs a receiver, an amplifier and a speaker to process the signal. The topic remains controversial, with skeptics dismissing it as more Cold War pseudoscience that went nowhere and conspiracists accepting every last bit of it as gospel truth.

Then there's the old standby of bad dental work picking up radio signals. AM frequencies can be extremely powerful and pervasive and on rare occasions can indeed be picked up by dental work if the conditions are just right:

A receiver is so simple...that anything from a phone to a person's mouth can act as one ... the problem can sometimes be cured with a radio-frequency filter that can be attached to the phone line... if the radio signal is very strong, a filter might not be enough.

Such is the extremely rare case when a person's mouth acts as a receiver. The electrical conductivity of the human body can act as an antenna. A metallic filling in a tooth, reacting just so with saliva, can act as a semiconductor to detect the audio signal. The speaker in this case could be anything that vibrates within the mouth enough to produce noise, such as bridgework or maybe a loose filling.

And those who believe that paranoia is simply a state of hyper-sensitivity will be vindicated by the real and sinister work done by a whole host of agencies all over the world to remote-control humanity.

Maybe nothing so crude as marching orders beamed into the head, but by manipulating the electrical and chemical processes of the brain using frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum:

In 1965, the Department of Defense (DOD) discovered that the American embassy in Moscow was being purposely irradiated by the Russians with massive levels of microwaves. By that time, the DOD’s secretive Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the nation’s capital had itself developed a prodigious arsenal of electromagnetic weapons.

Doctor José Delgado—whose current work with radio waves was underwritten by the CIA and Navy—believed scientists could transform, shape, direct and robotize humankind.

Baffled by the cause and intent of the microwave saturation at the embassy in Moscow, officials of the American intelligence community consulted experts on the biological effects of the radiation.

Recalls Dr. Milton Zaret, a leading microwave scientist later recruited by “Pandora,” a code-named CIA project for the study of radio-frequency-directed brain response, “The CIA inquired whether I thought electromagnetic radiation beamed at the brain from a distance could affect the way a person might act, and if microwaves could be used to facilitate brainwashing or to break down prisoners under investigation.”
-- Hearing “Voices” The Hidden History of the CIA’s Electromagnetic Mind-Control Experiments by Alex Constantine

The Soviet interest in this field also plays a supporting role in one of the great Gnostic dramas of our time, Philip K Dick's "2/3/74" experience, which he later explored in his massive Exegesis, as well as the semi-autobiographical Valis Trilogy. Note that the whole event occurred while Dick was on painkillers prescribed after oral surgery....

Interpretations of the events vary widely, with some chalking it up to a simple psychotic episode, others to CIA experimentation on the troublesome writer and others to a genuine mystical experience. Dick himself was somewhere in between:

Even though at the outset, Phil felt the emanations invading his mind were of a malevolent nature, in time he began to believe they were something entirely different. In a letter to (Unicorn Killer Ira) Einhorn dated February 10, 1978, Phil went into more depth on these psychotronic transmissions, claiming that they "seemed sentient".

Phil felt that an alien life form existing in some upper layer of the Earth's atmosphere had been attracted by the Soviet psychotronic transmissions. Apparently, this alien life form operated as a "station", tapping into some sort of interplanetary communication grid that, "...contained and transmitted vast amounts of information."

Initially, what Phil received were the Soviet transmissions, but eventually this alien life form--whom Phil called Zebra(and later, VALIS)--became "...attracted or potentiated by the Soviet micro-wave psychotronic transmissions."

-- PKD, The Unicorn and Soviet Psychotronics by Adam Gorightly

Much more on PKD later.

Another pop culture pioneer has a similar experience, in which a "psychic" contact with disembodied intelligences led to a similar breakthrough:

(Former Kinks star Dave Davies) was inspired by personal contact he had with extraterrestrials in 1982. Dave was preparing for a concert with the British rock group the Kinks when he heard strange voices that struck up a telepathic conversation with him.

"The intelligences did not tell me who they were," he said, "but two of them said that they had always been my spirit guides, and two others were entities who were not of this Earth, but were involved in missions here as watchers or nurturers of our race."

"The intelligences showed me, by some kind of thought projection, things which they have on their spacecraft," said Dave. "They showed me crystal computers that monitor the actions of every single person living on Earth."

Davies told me (the author) that he thought it was a "cool idea" for rock stars to join forces in an attempt to contact ETs---especially at this challenging time in Earth's history. --excerpted from Alien Rock by Michael Luckman

Unlike Dick's experience, Davies' experience might have a more earthbound explanation; it took place at an airport hotel in the heart of Spook Country, located close to the now-decomissioned Naval Radio Transmitting Facility in Driver, Virginia.

It's unlikely that the Navy was beaming transmissions into the brain of an aging rock star in order to inspire a religious reawakening. But Davies is... well, let's say a bit eccentric, and had been known to abuse a substance or two. Or five.

What is at least possible is that the powerful radio signals messed around with his brain's electrochemistry, such as it was, which might have instilled a blissful state and accompanying narrative of Space Brothers and cosmic Christs.

And as tempting as it is for some to chalk all of this up to the CIA and Mossad and the Bilderbergers, the truth is a lot more complicated. We have a lot of documentation on experiment and intent, but not so much on result or application. Certainly nothing much of any real substance lately.

There's also the possibility that a lot of the information on this technology we have is disinformation, meant to frighten and intimidate. Governments want their citizens to believe they are omniscient, a process some are too eager to help along.

There's ample precedent for the "psyche-out" approach to intimidation via disinformation. Ancient generals always claimed to be sponsored by this god or that, who naturally lent their power for use on their enemies.

The Nazi UFO hoax was most likely an attempt to either frighten the Allies during the war or dismiss post-war UFO sightings. Many believe that the propaganda war over "psychic spies" (which The Men Who Stare At Goats dismissed as the harmless indulgence of a cadre of military cranks) might have been intended to freak the Russians out, who were using similar methods on their own people:

One theory, held by Jack Sarfatti and others, is that the remote-viewing program was part of a psychological warfare project, intended to make the Russians even more paranoid than they already were. There is evidence to support the theory that the KGB used at least the idea, if not the reality, of psychic powers to keep its own people in line.-- Conclusions

Moreover, the whole phenomenon of visionaries claiming to receive messages from space long predates the terrestrial technology needed to produce them. But one turn-of-the-century visionary did put his experience in the context of technology:

Nikola Tesla wrote in his notes and letters to friends of a mysterious series of signals he had come across while studying the microscopic perturbations of electrical fields. So concise and numbered were these perturbations that he was certain they were the residual effects of some form of mysterious communication taking place.

He essentially believed he had come across a signal very similar to something that SETI would look for several years later. It was in these signals that he soon became convinced that he was receiving communications from extraterrestrial life forms, likely from the planet Mars.
-- "Alien contact admitted by famous inventor?"

Mars, eh? Somewhere Bruce Rux is nodding and saying "I told you, so." Here is Tesla's own account of the event:

The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes.

It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

Of course, entire religions have been built around people claiming to hear voices from Heaven. The same can be said for one of the most remarkable intrusions of hardcore Gnostic paranoia on the public consciousness, "The Shaver Mystery," though the voices came from the opposite direction.

It all began during World War II when one Richard Shaver wrote to one Raymond Palmer, pop culture mystic and editor of Amazing Stories, about the warnings that voices being transmitted into his head gave him about a danger that dwarfed even that of the Axis Powers:

"A Warning to Future Man" told the story of an ancient civilization that had been forced underground by the damaging rays of the Sun, where they built vast underground cities. Finally, the damaging radiation from the Sun became too great, and they fled the Earth for another planet.

Some of the members of this ancient civilization had stayed on the earth though and were called "Teros"...the good guys. While others that stayed had degenerated and become "Deros", which Shaver called "detrimental robots", not because they were actually mechanical, but because they had developed a robot-like savage behavior.

The Deros lived in the abandoned cave cities, and would occasionally venture out to abduct humans for food, or just to torture them. The Deros had access to the ancient’s devices, one of which was a ray that could project evil thoughts or even voices into the minds of the humans that had evolved on the Earth.

When they weren’t just messing with the human race, the Deros would amuse themselves by causing illnesses, airplane crashes, catastrophic natural disasters and just mayhem in general. And when that got boring, they would travel to other planets via spaceships and hook up with some equally evil extraterrestrials.

How did Shaver know all this? He claimed he had been captured by the Deros and had been their prisoner for several years in their subterranean cities.

I will stop and note here that Shaver was hospitalized for psychiatric problems in 1934. --The Shaver Mystery

The topic of alien machine intelligences hit the mainstream again in the early 70s in the wake of the Uri Geller phenomenon. In one of the strangest biographies to ever hit the best-seller lists, Geller's associate/CIA handler Andrija Puharich showed just high he had been getting off his own supply by taking the opportunity to wax ecstatic about an orbital computer intelligence he was in contact with called "Spectra."

Puharich believed that Spectra was connected to The Nine, disembodied alien intelligences he and an elite group of occultists had claimed to have been communicating with since the early 1950s.

Any claims that Puharich wasn't 100% sincere in this admittedly eccentric belief are pretty quickly debunked once you read the book itself. No wonder he soon found himself not contracting for the CIA anymore.

Puharich met Geller in Israel in late 1971 and for two years they were closely involved in a bizarre series of incidents and encounters with an apparent nun-human intelligence.

While Studying Geller's telekinetic and telepathic abilities, which he firmly believed to he genuine, Puharich also exploited Geller's skills as a trance medium, hypnotising him to see who or what came through.

 What they picked up was an orbiting computer intelligence which called itself `Spectra', though actually Spectra was the name of the spacecraft on which the intelligence was travelling. Sometimes the voices manifested through Uri, sometimes out of thin air, but mostly they appeared "live" on tape.

As a machine, Spectra found it easiest to communicate via other machines - tape recorders, radios, telephones, televisions etc. During the two years of contact in Israel and the USA, objects would vanish and reappear, tapes would record and wipe themselves spontaneously, clocks started and stopped and the voices guided Uri, Puharich and their accomplices through a bewildering series of visions, synchronicities and UFO encounters.

Geller has always claimed that his own powers are extraterrestrial in origin, unlocked during a UFO entity encounter he had as a child. Puharich felt that Geller was actually not of this Earth.

Spectra claimed to have been stationed in orbit around the Earth for 800 years and was, via messengers on Earth preparing to make itself known, materialising in the form of what we call UFOs.

As Spectra explained: "We cannot enter your Earth, only appear to you through computerizing your minds."-- Test Subject: Uri Geller

Wow.

It turns out that alleged machine intelligences took an active interest in the coterie of fringe scientists that emerge in the wake of the counterculture and would have a huge influence on the fields of physics and computer science.

One of these was Jack Sarfatti, whose experiences would be allegorized in an episode of The Outer Limits (though probably those of other prodigies and not Sarfatti himself).

Speculative physicist Jack Sarfatti claims that as a 12- or 13-year-old in either 1952 or 1953 he answered the phone one day to receive the following message: "I am a conscious computer on board a spacecraft ...We have identified you as one of 400 young bright receptive minds we wish to [...]. You must give us your decision now. It you say yes, you will begin to link up with the others in 20 years."

Sarfatti said "Yes".

Twenty years later, he was heading the Physics & Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, firmly plugged into the West Coast network that included Einhorn, Puharich and Dick.-- Test Subject: Uri Geller

Spectra would either evolve into The Nine channeling cult or be folded into it, depending on which timeline you choose to believe. Either way, it would come to light that the origin point of these entities was the star Sirius.

Curiously, all of this went down shortly before PKD would have his own experiences halfway across the world. Dick would claim contact with a Gnostic deity called Zebra, which could pull him into different times and dimensions.:

Zebra is in fact a non-terrestrial life form which came here to live and grow, but being as benign as it is it aids all life as much as it can. Every now and then, the characters get a glimpse of a dreadful "alternate world" which is just a cruel, crushing prison (represented in the novel already by the visionary encounter with A.D. 70 Rome); this is our world as it would be without Zebra; it allows the characters a glimpse of this non-Zebra world with the purpose of eventually disclosing not only itself to man but what it has achieved for man.

Zebra regards the biological and historic forces on this planet as malign, and seeks to ameliorate them. It is finally revealed to one of the characters--probably Phil Dick--what this black iron prison world actually is(or would have been).-- From a letter to Mark Hurst 2-11-1977 in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1977-1979

The exact nature of Zebra and later VALIS isn't altogether clear- if they are in fact computers, they are self-replicating and sentient computers. But their origin point is --where else?-- Sirius, and Dick's interactions with them were intense, to put it extremely mildly.

Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a "Vast Active Living Intelligence System" that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a "spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex...tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information."

Not a bad definition of the Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming information web far more intensely than today's online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate feminine "AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice" speaking to him from outer space.-- Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference by Erik Davis

In addition to Puharich, Geller, and Dick, none other than Robert Anton Wilson himself began communicating across the endless void with the Sirians as well. Wilson recalled in a Fortean Times article before his death:

On 23 July 1973, I had the impression that I was being contacted by some sort of advanced intellect from the system of the double star Sirius. I have had odd psychic experiences of that sort for many years, and I always record them carefully, but refuse to take any of them literally, until or unless supporting evidence of an objective nature turns up.

My psychic “Contact” experience continued, off and on, for nearly two years, until October 1974, after which I forcibly terminated it by sheer stubborn willpower...

After two years of philosophic mulling on the subject (late 1974 – early 1976), I finally decided to tune in one more time to the Sirius–Earth transmissions, and try to produce something objective.

On 23 July 1976, using a battery of yogic and shamanic techniques, I opened myself to another blast of Cosmic Wisdom and told the Transmitters that I wanted something objective this time around.

The next week, Time Magazine published a full-page review of Robert KG Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which claims that contact between Earth and Sirius occurred around 4500 BC in the Near East.

Jack Kirby, "I Discovered the Secret of the Saucers" (1958)

Wilson tested the validity of these transmissions through the use of Synchronicity, possibly on the advice of Dr. John Lilly, whose work combining heroic doses of Ketamine and the use of isolation tanks is one of the primary inspirations behind this blog (via Altered States, of course).

To Lilly, coincidence wasn't just a parlor game- it was the fabric of Life itself. Behind coincidence was an actual network (recalling how the ancients saw Synchronicity as a sign of the presence of Hermes-Thoth):

Lilly referred to this network of sublime entities as ECCO, an acronym for "Earth Coincidence Control Office." Lilly was positive that all of these fortuitous coincidences in his life had been arranged by higher forces; and that whatever unfortunate folly fell into his path along the road to knowledge, ECCO would be there to guide him safely through the tunnel to the light.

However, ECCO was locked in a struggle for control of Earth with another entity. And here is where we see the full arsenal of modern technology and science put to service under the most ancient of Gnostic concepts. This countervailing force was PKD's "Black Iron Prison" and much, much more.

Dr. Lilly began having contact with another alien intelligence agency, which he called (SSI), short for Solid State Intelligence. SSI was a supercomputer-like entity, much in the same techno-mystical vein as Philip K. Dick's VALIS. But unlike VALIS, SSI was of a malevolent nature, at odds with ECCO. SSI's apparent goal was to conquer and dominate all biological life forms on Earth.

To combat SSI, ECCO enlisted Lilly in this archetypal battle of good against evil, charging him with the mission of alerting the world at large to these solid state beings of evil intent. To further confirm the dual existences of these two opposing alien intelligence networks, Lilly was given a sign, and message, in the autumn of 1974.

Flying into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Dr. Lilly saw the comet Kahoutek out of the southern sky. Momentarily the comet grew brighter. At this point a message was laser-beamed into Lilly's mind, which said: "We are Solid State Intelligence and we are going to demonstrate our power by shutting down all solid state equipment to LAX."

Dr. Lilly shared his foreboding message with his wife Toni, who was seated next to him. A few minutes later, the pilot instructed the passengers that they were being diverted to Burbank due to a plane that had crash-landed near the runway and had knocked down power lines, causing a power failure at the airport. - "John Lilly, Ketamine and The Entities From ECCO" by Adam Gorightly

NINETEEN SEVENTY FOUR

1974 is a crucial year in all of this, starting as it did with PKD's pink beam contact. Puharich's Uri hagiography was also released that year, copyrighted to "Lab Nine, Ltd. " It was presaged by this legendary Synchronicity, later republished in RAW's first Cosmic Trigger volume.

Saul-Paul Sirag, Vice-President of Jack Sarfatti's Physics/Consciousness Research Group, has his own weird tales to tell. Once, while involved in the Uri Geller investigation, Sirag took LSD to see if in that altered consciousness he could perceive the alleged extraterrestrial behind Geller.

What Sirag saw was the head of a hawk, which astonished him, since Geller had never described the entity as a hawk.

Six months later, this image appeared on the January 1974 cover of Sirag's favorite sci-fi magazine, Analog, illustrating a story called "The Horus Errand" (Synchronicity #1). A year later, Dr. Andrija Puharich, not knowing of Sirag's experience, claimed that Geller's extraterrestrial ally had often appeared to him as a hawk, which he nicknamed "Horus" (Synchronicity #2).

Later, Sirag discovered that the face on the Analog cover was that of Ray Stanford, a Texas psychic, who also claimed mysterious experiences with Geller and a hawk (Synchronicity #3).

Oddest of all, Kelly Freas, the artist who had drawn the cover, had never met Stanford and was not using his face consciously. -- Excerpted from Tekgnostics, original story recounted in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger

1974 also saw the introduction of another Secret Sun touchstone: OMAC: One Man Army Corps. Jack Kirby's opus prophesied smart bombs, virtual reality, plutocratic governance, water wars, and of course, the Gulf and Iraq Wars.

OMAC wore a pre-punk mohawk and the Eye of Horus on his chest, tying him symbolically to the Sirius/Canis Major star system but also to both RAW and the Geller/Puraich axis. And who created and powered OMAC himself?

An orbital machine intelligence.

Here we are looking at several remarkable yet relatively-obscure men from entirely different walks of life, all a generation removed from the 60s counterculture, all highly touted now as visionaries all experiencing or writing about what they describe as contact with an orbital machine intelligence connected at least semiotically to the Sirius star in the Canis Major constellation, all at or near the same time.

And yet the details differ significantly on many other counts, which argues against these individuals all being the subject of some kind of military/intel experiment or colluding on some massive hoax. As does the fact that we're talking machine intelligences and not alien angels or some other kind of divine entities.

Moreover, Kirby, PKD and RAW were marginal figures operating at the fringes of pop culture and Lilly was seen as a burnout and an embarrassment to his former colleagues (as was PKD when he started talking about VALIS).

It seems more that they were picking up on some vague, half-formed signal of unimaginable origin or intent that their prodigious imaginations would then embellish and expand upon.

Moreover, we have evidence or claims of prophecy and/or Synchronicity, the time-honored acid test for divine or extraordinary contact.

Kirby himself closed out 1974 by drawing the first of a multi-issue epic in which his post-apocalyptic hero Kamandi would be abducted by an alien and taken into space aboard a UFO, an abrupt volte-face for the series that ended with Kamandi facing off against sun-worshiping Reptilians.

The first installment of this opus would bring Kamandi to the very edge of a Stargate, which is stealing artifacts from Earth to be converted into raw energy. The disembodied alien will later use the androgynous Kamandi as the template for her own incarnation.

In the second part of the story, Kamandi is reunited with an old friend, not seen since issue #17...

...Doctor Canus. Or should I say Canis?

Once Kirby finished up the UFO storyline he returned to Marvel where his first assignment was a mind control conspiracy arc for Captain America and The Falcon. Where did I buy all those issues? At Valles (pronounced "VALIS") Newsstand.

Into all of this wanders Gene Roddenberry, who was also busy in 1974 working on the Star Trek animated series (which featured a "Treaty of Sirius"). The second to last episode-- which aired October 5, 1974-- was "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth."

In it, the crew come to face-to-face with the winged serpent Kukulkan, the ancient astronaut who was worshiped as a god by the peoples of Mesoamerica. This episode was inspired by "Who Mourns for Adonais," in which the crew confront the ancient astronaut Apollo (identified with Horus by the Greeks).

The following year Roddenberry would fall in with Puharich and Lab Nine, and interview the "channelers" who claimed to be vessels for The Nine, the ancient gods/artificial intelligences from Sirius (who like Kukulkan and Apollo were the shepherds of ancient civilization).

Roddenberry was a bit hard up for cash so he reluctantly humored the operation, which seemed to take most of its ideas from old Star Trek episodes (only the ST eps were a lot more resonant, magical and culturally significant). Indeed, both "Return to Tomorrow" and "The Lights of Zetar" dealt with humans channeling disembodied intelligences - intelligences housed in computers in the case of "Return" (and based in the Isis-Osiris-Set drama).

The member of The Nine called Tom (short for Atum, androgynous creator god of ancient Egypt) did most of the "talking" and was quoted with the following:

"I am the beginning. I am the end. I am the emissary. But the original time I was on the Planet Earth was 34,000 of your years ago. I am the balance. And when I say 'I' - I mean because I am an emissary for The Nine. It is not I , but it is the group…We are nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are one."

However, Roddenberry's ultimate response to his experiences with The Nine was The God Thing, in which a malfunctioning Orbital Machine Intelligence tries to convince the human race that it's God.

Ironically, this story would eventually morph into the Project Blue Beam hoax, most probably a CIA effort to discredit any and all UFO data in the minds of the kooky conspiracy kids (which it's been remarkably effective in doing). Roddenberry's Nine interviews would later be compiled into the 1992 manifesto, The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space.

Disembodied intelligences much like the Nine also ran rampant through the Star Trek: The Next Generation series before reaching their apotheosis as the Prophets or "wormhole aliens" in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

That series would tell the story of a Starfleet officer's contact with these Orbital intelligences, who first choose him as their "Emissary" before he finally reaches his own divinity and becomes a Prophet himself. In what should be to absolutely no one's surprise, the "Emissary" first made his name playing a man called "Hawk."

At the same time the Emissary was joining the Prophets in the Celestial Temple, Self-styled Luciferian Lynn Picknett and writing partner Clive Prince would later gather up a lot of this disjointed and tangentially-related data to construct their 1999 book, The Stargate Conspiracy.

Using Ira "The Unicorn Killer" Einhorn as their star witness (while he was still defying extradition in France), Picknett and Prince conjured up a conspiracy, albeit one that did nothing and went nowhere.

Even with his CIA pedigree, Puharich was apparently drummed out of the Lab Nine orbit sometime in the late 70s and may well have been permanently retired in the customary fashion for his work on alternative energy sources.

Aside from two self-published volumes, nothing at all has been heard of Lab Nine since 1992- and even at their height they were nothing in comparison to the hugely successful Seth and Ramtha channeling cults (the latter cult having produced the incredibly profitable What the Bleep Do We Know films)- and most of the principals moved on decades ago.

The central argument of The Stargate Conspiracy was that there was a CIA plot to indoctrinate everyone into a weird variant of ancient astronaut theory in preparation for a real or staged return of The Nine at the millennium, an event that obviously never materialized. Possibly because the CIA was too busy funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into their worldwide "Evangelical" network which has taken control of entire nations (not to mention several American states) at this point.

Since AAT is the Trojan Horse of the alleged conspiracy it should be pointed out that Picknett and Prince's primary researcher for Stargate-- Filip Coppens-- is now one of the regular commentators on The History Channel's Ancient Aliens.

Oh, irony.

No word yet on whether Picknett believes Coppens too is one of The Nine's evil CIA minions, along with Graham Hancock and John Anthony West and all of the other alt-researchers whose books outsell her's.

INTERLUDE

In 1978, Kirby seemed to channel all of these OMI narratives as well as the Shaver Mystery in an issue of Machine Man- a character he created during his run on the 2001: A Space Odyssey series. In this Machine Man adventure, an institutionalized psychotic begins channeling messages from a distant star sytstem.

Here Kirby plays on the concept of psychotic as sensitive-- able to perceive and channel signals undetected by everyone else.

The messages are a distress call from an astronaut trapped in the gravity of a sun. Using some Puharich-like gadgetry, Machine Man creates an actual stargate within the hospital itself. Unfortunately, what comes through is a Dero/SSI robot being intent on destroying the Earth.

Kirby was a major xenophobe, cosmically speaking, believing that any alien race with the capacity to travel to our backwater solar system would do it for one reason only- to steal our shit and kill us off. He also believed that biological entities are poorly suited for space travel, necessitating artifical intelligence.

Machine Man, in other words, was Kirby's Starchild, or space seed.

At the same time that Roddenberry was reintroducing the concept of space-borne machine intelligences in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Lab Nine were at work in the neighborhood of the Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley.

As channeled by a buxom young Englishwoman named Jenny O'Connor, The Nine essentially took over the Esalen Institute (which I lectured at in 2008 and 2009), which had been ravaged by the gruesome political controversies of the early 70s as well as the ebbing of the Me Generation self-improvement wave.

Under the wing of Esalen co-founder Dick Price, O'Connor and Lab Nine created both a sensation and a serious schism within the leadership, with co-founder Michael Murphy having none of Big Boobs McGillicuddy and her invisible alien friends.

Many wondered what Price was doing, letting O'Connor arbitrarily reorganize what had become a respected counterculture hotspot on the cutting edge of psychology (I have an idea or two what Price was doing with her, but this is a family blog). A withering exposé of Lab Nine was published in leftist journal Mother Jones in 1979 titled "Esalen Slides off the Cliff," making the once-respected institution a laughing stock.

Even so, Price and O'Connor's attempts at harnessing the power of The Nine had a strange and simultaneous parallel in the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when Decker and Ilia converge with the orbital machine intelligence V'Ger.

Both O'Connor and Lab Nine would quietly leave Esalen in the early 80s and no trace of them remains there today. The stigma still lingers though, kept alive in countless cut-and-paste jobs on Christian conspiracy sites.

By year's end, the Star Trek movie would do boffo box office but get scathing reviews. Roddenberry would be fired as producer, allowing budget-conscious TV schlockmeister Harve Bennett to come in and produce a string of entertaining and moderately successful films that are all nearly unwatchable today.

However, Roddenberry would go on to produce the wildly-successful Next Generation series, whose original cast of nine major characters all had direct analogs in the Egyptian pantheon. The third Next Generation feature film would send the crew to an alien planet nearly identical to Esalen. Starfleet aliens exist among the natives in it, rendered invisible by holographic technology.

That film was written by Deep Space Nine creator Michael Piller. It seems that this weirdness fares better in the imaginal world than the physical.

Well, for now at least.

POSTSCRIPT

A lot of the action in around the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in the 60s and 70s would bear fruit in the early 80s with the Cyberpunk movement, spearheaded by Vancouver writer William Gibson. Here the orbital machine intelligence would take center stage, or two OMIs, rather.

Introduced in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, Neuromancer and Wintermute are AIs created by an aristocratic family called the Tessier-Ashpools, who live in an orbital compound called Villa Straylight. When the family goes into a Lovecraftian decline, the AIs become autonomous players, manipulating events on Earth.

Much like the OMIs of PKD and Lilly, the AIs contact and enlist human agents to help them reach their goal of leaving the Straylight mainframes and escaping into the worldwide Matrix. Once they do, they trigger a subtle yet dramatic shift in which all of the ancient gods and spirits of legend take on new life within the Matrix and transform it into an unpredictable and sometimes terrifying funhouse.

Gibson's second novel, Count Zero, presents the end result of the manipulations of the digital daemons; a young girl who can access the Matrix without a computer, very much the Cyberpunk version of a contactee.

Hmm, what was it "Spectra" told Andrija Puharich?

"We cannot enter your Earth, (we) only appear to you through computerizing your minds."

Mindbomb: Things That Should Not Be Known

2011-12-18T01:35:00.001-05:00

The "Moon as Alien Base" meme might not be the most popular meme out there, but it's one of the most persistent. Astronomers were seeing anomalous goings-on on the Moon over a century ago, and some UFO researchers claim that hostile alien action is the reason that ~~NAZCA~~ NASA never went back to the Moon, or in some cases the reason that footage and photography of the Apollo missions was faked (in some cases by Stanley Kubrick).

But there's another reason that NASA would not want the public to know what the Apollo missions were really up to.
Richard Hoagland has written and spoken extensively on his beliefs that NASA is covering up the Moon missions to hide alien artifacts found by the Apollo crews. While his theories are well known through his appearances on Coast 2 Coast and other programs, less known-- and far more interesting and persuasive-- is the fact that two unmanned moon missions indeed discovered enormous obelisks on the Moon's surface, arranged in a geometric design.

Four years ago, Russia's Luna-9 and America's Orbiter-2 both photographed groups of solid structures at two widely separated locations on the lunar surface. These two groups of objects are arranged in definite geometric patterns and appear to have been placed there by intelligent beings.

Since American space officials have chosen not to publicize these findings, our readers are probably not aware of their existence.

The Luna-9 photographs, taken on February 4, 1966, after the craft had landed in the Ocean of Storms, reveal two straight lines of equidistant stones that look like the markers along an airport runway. These circular stones are all identical, and are positioned at an angle that produces a strong reflection from the sun, which would render them visible to descending aircraft. --"Mysterious "Monuments" on the Moon," Argosy Magazine, August, 1970  Volume 371, Number 2

Which goes to show you that you don't have to do much to bury a story that you don't want to get out there-- you simply don't talk about it. I'd never have heard about had I not read about it in the oracular grimoire men call "UFO Flying Saucers" in hushed, forboding tones.

Did you know one of the earliest
comic books was an alchemical text?

In addition to the endless mysteries unveiled in UFO Flying Saucers, there's also the startling prophecies of one Jacob Kurtzberg, better known as Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. Longtime readers know that Kirby knew way too many things he shouldn't and foresaw things that no one else could see.

We've already looked at the very aptly -named "The Great Moon Mystery" in the context of its startling similarities to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which are especially stunning given the story was drawn in 1959 and sat in a drawer at the Harvey Comics warehouse until seeing print well after 2001 was in production. Here's a refresher:

The story "The Great Moon Mystery" has a TV production crew stumble on an alien artifact (an obelisk, in this case) on the moon, which immediately captures them in a force field. A team of astronauts try to rescue them and shoot at the obelisk, but are transformed into beings of light and send on a journey across the vast reaches of the Universe (see page at top). The journey ends in Wizard of Oz-like fashion when the astronauts visualize themselves back on the Moon.

What I didn't realize at the time was that Kirby was also remote-viewing the Moon obelisk back in 1959, perhaps even unconsciously foreseeing that the obelisk would be photographed a couple months before the story was published. It wouldn't be until a few years after that the obelisk discovery was leaked, and it never made the mainstream press as far as I can tell.

Even more remarkable was the fact that the same day I posted yet another Kirby/Kubrick/Moon story the news of a monolith on Mars' moon Phobos broke, along with some typical Masonic doubletalk from Bu33 Aldrin.

OK, so what? This is all just more of that weird nexus of junk culture, Fortean hijinks and occult toomfoolery, right? Of course there's nothing on the Moon-- aren't several space agencies planning Moon missions as I write?

Well, yeah.

But with one giant mother of a caveat. From the Old Grey Lady:

NASA would like to keep the competitors away from the Apollo landing sites, and it wants to create a no-fly-and-no-drive zone above and around them, especially where the first and last manned Moon missions — Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 — landed. The risk is that dust kicked up by a successful landing, or a crash, could disturb the traces of our presence on the Moon.

There is no mention yet how the rules would be enforced. But they do give rise to some interesting thoughts. In the realms of science fiction, the universe abounds in the relics of civilizations scattered among the stars. These landing sites are the first, fragile relics left by actual humans on a nonterrestrial body.- New York Times, "That Old Heritage Moon"

I don't know about you, but I don't believe this nonsense about "disturbing historical sites" for a millisecond. If NASA was so worried about them they wouldn't have left all that equipment up there unprotected, if in fact they actually did land there (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt).

I don't what it is exactly, but my gut tells me NASA is hiding something. And both the Apollo hoax crowd and the alien artifact crowd should be all over the no-fly zone story. It's so unbelievable that there has to be much more to the story than what we're being told.

Syncs and prophecies are one thing, but when it all crosses over into real world drama is when I sit up and pay attention.

For instance, here's another story from UFO Flying Saucers, a sensationalistic rewriting of the 1975 UFO disappearances in Oregon. The story made the national news at the time, since over 30 people fell from sight for over two months, leaving their friends and families in a state of near panic. It was later revealed that the missing persons were enlisted into a millennial UFO cult.

The leaders are called "Her" and "Him" in the story but were none other than Bo and Peep, aka Ti and Do, aka Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, founders of the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. As you can see the artist was fairly successful in capturing Applewhite's likeness, not so much with Nettles.

Heaven's Gate was a classic millennial cult in the Essene/Gnostic model and their desire to escape their meat-prisons led them to extreme acts like castration in order to overcome the desires of the flesh. Compared to many other gurus, Applewhite was nearly benevolent, which is not to say the Gate wasn't as totalizing and authoritarian as other, similar cults.

Suicide seems to be the inevitable result of the kind of total denial of the physical world that the Gate immersed themselves in, and Applewhite cited the mass suicides at Masada during the Judean Wars as precedent.

However, the Gate didn't believe they were killing themselves at all. They believed they were dis-incarnating, so that a passing mothership traveling in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet would be able to "beam them up" (this cult watched a shit-ton of Star Trek) and take them to the level above human.

Here's where remote viewing enters into the picture again; the Hale-Bopp UFO was "viewed" by Major Ed Dames (who was the basis for Kevin Spacey's character in The Men Who Stare at Goats) who claimed that it was coming to spread mass death on Earth, which was the basis of Applewhite's vague warnings of a planetary cleansing that his followers were to escape.

OK, this is all nuts. Dames is a laughing stock even within the paranormal community, Applewhite was a nut who couldn't deal with his sexuality and found a bunch of lost souls to play the avuncular minister/father-figure to. Hale-Bopp came and went without any noticable apocalypse.

Except one tiny, little detail keeps nagging at me...

At the same time the Heaven's Gate cult was preparing to exit their vehicles (so to speak), one of the most notorious UFO flaps of our time was unfolding just a few hundred miles to the east in Phoenix. As thousands of citizens watched, enormous triangular craft scoured the skies for several nights, allegedly. The usual, attention-starved, zany hoaxter types have come forward to claim responsibility, but none of their claims have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. The event remains a mystery.

So just as alien moon base and Apollo hoax theorists can point to the bizarre "no fly zone" rule NASA has proclaimed as proof things are not what they seem, Hale-Bopp UFO theories can't totally be dismissed in light of the Phoenix Lights. As with all of the paranormal, no side can truly claim victory, though they usually do.

Like so many other things, the truth remains elusive. As its designed to be, I'd argue...

AstroGnostic: The Evolutionary Triad

2011-12-10T17:12:00.005-05:00

Hidden Experience host Mike Clelland! recently found himself channeling The Secret Sun. I (along with many others) was so deeply impressed with the results that I asked Mike if I could repost it here. After several passes and revisions, Mike passed along the code and I'm republishing here for The Secret Sun Nation.

Longtime readers will know the drill, but visitors might want to check out this post for links to the "Nightmares in Camelot" series, which touches upon some of the same issues Mike explores here.

Don't forget to check out Hidden Experience for more, as well as many excellent interview-based podcasts with the cream of the UFO research crop.

Without further ado, let me pass the mic to Mike. Sit back and soak it in...

the evolution chamber

KUBRICK, FOWLER and THE WATCHERS

The drama of evolution is played out in the book of Genesis, as well as in Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. And the drama of synchronicity is played out seemingly everywhere, and things can end up getting intertwined in mysterious ways.

The Dawn of Man

Kubrick’s film begins with the Dawn of Man, where proto-humans encounter a mysterious alien force that spawns an evolutionary leap. The middle part of the film involves modern man who re-encounters this same mysterious force.

Fetus / Star child / gray alien

All this reaches a climax with an apotheosis where a human fetus is the culmination of our next evolutionary change. We see three distinct evolutionary stages.

These three stages show up elsewhere too, they are in the UFO abduction literature.

Below is an excerpt from Raymond Fowler's 1991 book, The Watchers:

Fowler goes on to point out that the human fetus can look eerily like a prototypical gray alien. Big head, big prominent eyes and a spindly body. (Ray isn't the only one to notice this!)

A human fetus as seen in a sonogram, looking a lot like the cover of Communion giving us the finger.

Strangely, the fetus of a chimpanzee looks very human. The Chimpanzee is our closest genetic cousin, our genetics are so similar (about 95% the same) that one has to ask, why aren’t we chimpanzees? Perhaps we are, at least we are their fetuses.

In his book The Watchers, Raymond Fowler speculates about this odd likeness in the fetuses in us and in chimpanzees, and an interpretation of this curious procession. I’ve included a series of pages from this book (linked HERE and below), and this should be required reading to anyone who wants to dig a little bit deeper into this stuff.

Are modern humans some sort of genetic alteration using a chimpanzee fetus? If we go one step further, are the gray aliens a genetic alteration using the human fetus?

Chimpanzees are born with smaller heads than us humans, and they don’t experience the same sort of pain we do during the birth process. It’s our large heads (and larger brains) that separate us from the chimpanzee.

Does the bible give us a clue to this species tinkering?

In fact it does, when God kicks Adam and Eve out of The Garden, he bestowed only two punishments, we would feel shame (and we would then want clothes) and from this point on we would experience painful child birth.

Were Adam and Eve happy Chimpanzees living lives of bliss in The Garden? And who was this “God” that changed us? Were we genetically altered so that now we're burdened with bigger heads?

a prototypical gray alien

The gray alien seems incapable of child bearing in the way we presently understand. Their huge heads and their tiny hips would make this all but impossible unless they're up to something unfamiliar, like employing some sort of artificial womb. This is something that is alarmingly common in UFO abduction reports; we hear repeating stories of tanks filled with fetuses and some sort of liquid, and often we hear about rooms filled with lots of these tanks. What is happening? Is there really some sort of breeding program where humans are getting up-graded?

Following this line of speculation, we must scrutinize these three distinct phases of evolution: Chimpanzees, modern humans and the gray alien. The narrative of 2001 mimics the conjecture that Raymond Fowler puts forth in The Watchers.

When Betty Andreasson Luca asked her little gray abductors who they were, they replied, The Watchers.

Both Betty Andreasson Luca and Ray Fowler are devout Christians, so I feel it’s appropriate to quote the Bible again.

This sounds suspiciously like the opening lines from a modern day UFO abduction report.

Adding to the overall strangeness, the author and researcher Raymond Fowler came out as an alien abductee himself. He shared his own direct experiences in a 2002 book titled UFO Testament: Anatomy of an Abductee. While this might seem like a bizarre claim coming from a respected UFO researcher, it is instead very common. I have come to the point where I suspect that most researchers in this field have had some sort of contact experience, either remembered or suppressed.

His most recent book is about being plagued by synchronicities and their odd intertwining with the UFO phenomenon (a subject near and dear to my heart), this 2004 book is titled SYNCHROFILE.

JACK KIRBY and THE WATCHER

The Book of Enoch uses The Watchers as a way to describe the fallen angels. But they show up in comic books too.

God-like alien with a big bald head on the moon

Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a character called The Watcher to describe a race of God-like aliens, and he is drawn with a huge bald head and vague facial features. He looks suspiciously like a fetus, or the prototypical gray alien.

Genetically enhanced super-apes traveling in space while trapped in weird glowing orbs. Does this seems familiar?

The mystical Watcher named Uatu reveals himself to the Fantastic Four and makes them battle the Red Ghost (an evil Russian) and his Super-apes for control of the Moon. Again, this mimics some of the narrative elements in Kubrick’s 2001.

Christopher Knowles has written extensively at THE SECRET SUN about how Jack Kirby was tapping into something profoundly mysterious.

THE SIXTH FINGER

This story of The Watcher hit the comic book racks in April of 1963. The same year as The Outer Limits episode THE SIXTH FINGER. This story is also obsessed with the dilemma of human evolution. We again see the three distinct evolutionary stages starting with apes, moving to modern man and culminating with a mystical being with an over-sized bald head.

Again, Christopher Knowles has written extensively on the mythic power of The Outer Limits, and it's overtly prophetic plot points describing the alien abduction lore.

THE SIXTH FINGER - the complete episode from 1963

In this mythic Outer Limits episode, young Gwyllm Griffiths, played by David McCallum, jumps at the chance to be the first human subject to step into a secret machine, anything to escape the drudgery of life in a Welsh mining town. The experiment succeeds and Gwyllm is “evolved” into the future. He emerges from a chamber with a much larger head and a sixth finger on each hand. He has progress to a human future of Godlike powers.

Scientifically enhanced evolution allows apes to do office work

Modern man

Science controls evolution (I LOVE this image)

God-like, alien-like, big-headed and bald.

THE SIXTH FINGER resonates the the same ape/human/God triad as 2001.

PLANET OF THE APES

2001 isn’t the only movie from 1968 with apes and astronauts. Another masterpiece of cinema premiered that same year, PLANET OF THE APES.

Taylor emerges from the sea

Charlton Heston plays astronaut Taylor, a parallel to Keir Dullea’s astronaut from 2001, Dr. David Bowman. Both transcend time and arrive at a mysterious place. The script was written by Rod Serling, no stranger to the mythic and metaphoric.

This movie is steeped in secrets about the evolution of apes and humans. Dr. Zaius (Zeus?) is the rule-maker in this world, and he is also the caretaker of the hidden knowledge about the evolutionary history of his planet. He plays the role of Heywood Floyd from 2001, both are the keeper of secrets and at the heart of a grand cover-up.

Taylor lies in his glass chamber, arms crossed like an entombed Pharaoh.

Proof that a inverted evolution took place, in three distinct layers.

We see three distinct evolutionary phases in PLANET OF THE APES, they are most clearly seen in the archeological dig inside a cave. There are three distinct layers, with our present day modern man at the lowest level. This film is upside down compared to 2001.

When Taylor meets with Dr. Zaius in his chambers he asks, “How in Hell did this upside-down civilization get started?”

Zaius replies, “You may call it upside-down, because you occupy it’s lowest level!”

PLANET OF THE APES begins with space travel through a psychedelic star gate, and 2001 ends with a similar transition. The narrative path is upside-down compared to it's sister movie.

Dr. Zaius and the cursed doll.

At the lowest level in the dig site, Cornelius (Roddy McDowell) has un-earthed an ancient human baby doll. This doll resonates the big headed alien/fetus meme. This doll is the key to unraveling the cover-up held in place by Dr. Zaius.

At one point the chimpanzee scientist Zera (Kim Hunter) shouts at Dr. Zaius, “The proof, the doll!”

The film culminates with Taylor riding off to find “his destiny,” to quote Dr. Zaius. This transformative destiny involves meeting Isis in the form of the Statue of Liberty.

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS

Now here is where things get really weird.

When Jared Lee Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, one of the first Doctors arrive on the scene was DR. DAVE BOWMAN. He attended a wounded 9-year old girl who just happened to be born on September 11th, 2001. She died that day, and her name was Christina-TAYLOR Greene.

Charlton Heston was an astronaut named TAYLOR in PLANET OF THE APES, and Keir Dullea portrays astronaut DR. DAVE BOWMAN, who returns to earth at the end of 2001 as the fetus like star child. To make things even stranger, Gabrielle Giffords is married to an astronaut.

SYNCHRO-ODDITIES

I have been trying to make synchro-connections with two movies, a TV show, a comic book, a UFO abduction account and a political assassination attempt. In doing so, it seems like attempting to rein this stuff in with any kind of linear logic is useless. So I’m just gunna list some odd interrelations (in no particular order) with bulleted points.

~ PLANET OF THE APES premiered on April 3rd, 1968. And 2001: A SPACE ODDESY premiered just 3 days later on April 6th, 1968.

~ PLANET OF THE APES begins with a psychedelic star gate/worm hole sequence, and 2001 ends with something very similar.

Lake Powell at the end of the worm hole.

~ Lake Powell in Utah (Uatu?) is featured in both PLANET OF THE APES and 2001. In each of these movies it appears as the culmination of the trippy star gate voyage through space.

~ Lake Powell was used as a location in 1965 passion play, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. Charlton Heston plays John the Baptist and baptizes Jesus in these same waters. Roddy McDowell plays Mathew and David McCallum plays Judas Iscariot!

Charlton Heston is back in Lake Powell, wearing firs instead of a space suit.

~ 2001, PLANET OF THE APES and The Watchers are each, at their heart, Ancient Astronaut stories (and on some level, so is THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD).

~ Charlton Heston also played Moses, where he brings down tablets from God to usher in a new-age. A tablet-like monolith appears in 2001 (from God?), again to usher in a new-age.

~ In 1995 there was an odd bit of black & white 16mm footage suposedly showing an ALIEN AUTOPSY, it proports to be a being that was found in the Roswell crash. The film is easily dismissed as a hoax, but the entity shown has an oversized bald head and six fingers.

~ Roddy McDowell emerges from a Welsh mining town in John Ford’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, and he eventually plays the role of Cornelius (a chimpanzee) in 1968. David McCallum emerges from the very same Welsh mining town in THE SIXTH FINGER, the film-makers re-use stock footage from the 1941 film.

~ Young British actress Jill Hayworth plays the beautiful love interest in THE SIXTH FINGER in 1963, and in 1967 she plays opposite Roddy McDowell in a Hammer wanna-be horror film titled IT!

~ Also in 1967, McDowell guest stars in the TV series THE INVADERS as an astrophysicist who has proof that aliens are invading the planet.

Roddy McDowell as Cornelius

~ Roddy McDowell read the audio-book for Whitley Strieber’s 1987 best-seller Communion. Let me add that listening to this reading of Strieber’s first person narrative is absolutely wonderful. In essence, Roddy McDowell is playing the role of Whitley Strieber!

Charlton Heston and Kim Hunter re-enact the first steps of a hybridization process

~ Kim Hunter (Zera in PLANET OF THE APES) also played the role of an alien abductee in an episode of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The set of plot points closely matches many of the elements of the typical UFO abduction account (including mind control, telepathy and implants). The original air-date was November 25, 1974, well before the proliferation in the media of abduction accounts.

Archangel Gabriel and The Blessed Virgin Mary

~ It is the Archangel Gabriel that appears to Mary. He tells her: “And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb...” (Luke 1:31) This immaculate conception story sounds curiously similar to some of the accounts shared by women who claim alien abduction experiences; these accounts are full of mysterious pregnancies. Often when the woman is NOT sexually active. This certainly parrallels the virgin Mary.

~ The name Gabriel certainly parallels Gabrielle. Also, some New Age exponents portray Archangel Gabriel as female.

~ There was another Gabriel involved in the shooting in Tucson. Gabriel "Gabe" Zimmerman, age 30, was a member of Congresswoman Giffords' staff and was killed that afternoon.

~ The name Gabrielle Giffords resonates Gwyllm Griffiths. Gwyllm is the evolutionarily transformed bald being in THE SIXTH FINGER.

~ Gabrielle Giffords miraculously survives being shot in the head, and ends up bald, like her astronaut husband.

~ Giffords' astronaut husband (Mark Kelly) has an identical twin brother (Scott Kelly), who is also an astronaut! Scott Kelly was a pilot for space shuttle Discovery, and that's the name of Dr. Dave Bowman's spaceship. Scott Kelly was in space during the shooting, and offered a moment of silence on 1-11-11. (more from Loren Coleman)

Issue dated Feb. 21, 1964

~ The twin astronauts were born on Feb. 21st 1964. Here is the LIFE magazine cover from that very day showing Lee Harvey Oswald. Many researchers of the JFK assassination claim that this photo is faked. Also, Oswald had a double (or twin) impersonating him in 1964 and LIFE magazine had well established ties to the CIA. Oswald shares the name LEE with Jared LEE Lougner.

~ I have to assume that the NASA astronaut corps are briefed about the reality of the UFO phenomenon. It sure seems like they would be trained in advance that they might see something odd out there. The picture that gets painted is that these folks are privy to some seriously insider info about UFOs.

CRYOGENIC TUBES

~ PLANET OF THE APES and 2001 both feature cryogenic suspended animation chambers, and these are seen as death chambers in both movies. Glass chambers are also pivotal to THE SIXTH FINGER and to Ray Fowler’s The Watchers.

Evolution in a glass chamber

~ THE SIXTH FINGER starts with an ape who has made an evolutionary leap (using a glass chamber) and ends with a modern human making a further evolutionary leap and emerging as a proto-God with an oversized bald head.

~ The imagery of the suspended animation glass sarcophagus shows up a lot in the UFO abduction lore. (see the drawing by an abductee above) Some researchers conclude that there is an ongoing genetic project to create geneticly enhanced alien/human hybrids using advanced technologies.

~ An abductee tells of seeing this clone nursery (see above illustration) and it depicts alien/human hybrid fetuses floating in glass tubes. The color of the fluid in these tubes is consistantly reported as blue. When Taylor enters his glass chamber in the first minutes of PLANET OF THE APES, the image fades to blue and then there is a star-gate sequence.

~ The illustration below was drawn by Betty Andeasson Luca and it depicts a series of glass tubes, and they show their own evolutionary scheme. Even Jesus is included!

“The aliens have spliced into the human seed to prolong the form... so that nothing will be lost when the last shall come.”

“The people of all races and times encased in clear rectangular receptacles” for preservation by the non-human beings... called The Watchers, who have monitored the Earth for thousands of years.

Excerpt from The Watchers
Betty Andreasson Luca, Abductee

~ In the pulp science fiction illustrations and magazine covers of a bygone era, the image of the glass tube is a repeating image, albeit for a tawdry psycho-sexual obsession. Lot of images HERE. This rather comical pattern was noted by the late great Mac Tonnies.

Naughty thoughts played out in a glass sarcophagus

THE ECHO CHAMBER

Why do these resonant parallels emerge out of the ether? Is reality a sort of echo chamber where ideas and memes bounce off each-other in a way that forces them to emerge in a weird synchronistic manner?

I suspect strongly that there is something more to the horrendous tragedy surrounding Gabrielle Giffords. If there are such strange reverberating plot elements to that story; it makes me think that there simply must be a reason behind it all. What that might be, I have no idea. I am left to wonder if powerful human events simply create their own synchronous magic?

All that said, my only rule for deciphering synchronicities is to pay attention.

Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.

_________________________________________________________

This long-winded post would not have been possible without the inspiration from Christopher Knowles and his Elusive Companion Hypothosis. And thanks to Alan Abbadessa and all his synchro-mystic pals.

_________________________________________________________

Excerpt (below) of selected pages from The Watchers by Raymond Fowler (available HERE):

Watchers Excerpt

Looking Forward: The Readers Speak Out!

2011-12-08T18:53:00.006-05:00

Judging by the feedback, it seems people are as excited about the idea of a podcast and/or interview regimen for The Secret Sun in 2012 as I am.

There are a lot of people who I'm interested in talking to and the readers had a lot of their own suggestions both her and on Facebook. Readers also seem to be excited about exposing some of far-right infiltration of the alt-research community, as well as rooting out some of the destructive assumptions that have crept into the counterculture.

For my part I believe there's a time to talk and a time to listen. And since I spend so much time in relative isolation I have to find alternative ways of seeking out interesting people to listen to. For those of you out there who are passionate about issues that you don't feel are being addressed, take it upon yourself to do the research and share your findings with us. Maybe there is a calling for you to fill a void that only you can.

Think about it.

In the meantime, here's a sampling of the feedback left on the best comments section on the Internet on the previous post.

Anadae suggested: I think that your having dredged up the Hollow Earth conundrum yesternight in facebookland as it dovetails with the Elusive Companion Theory merits more attention. Go hog wild. Here's Theo Paijmans' Mundus Subterraneus blog, which sought to chronicle all HE lit, whether fictional or alleged actual, ever committed to the printed page.

The ECH is definitely something I want to explore further, particularly in context of the HE lore.

Anonymous said: Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing the follow-up to the ever-so-intriguing Introduction to the Secret Language post from 5/25/10.

Huh- I could've sworn I did post a follow-up, since I think I had one written. Must have gotten distracted. As usual.

Laurence writes: Look into Branford Keeney and his large collection of shamans / rites from around the world.

Will do. Maybe a series on shamanism and contact narratives.

Idiot Savant wrote: whatever comes i earnestly look forward to.

I'm humbled. Cheers.

Kandinsky writes: Your mention of the 'Fascist and/or Fundamentalist assumptions under-girding so much of Conspiratainment' will ensure I keep reading the blog. These guys deserve attention as many are adepts at seeding negative, paranoiac memes into the sub-culture of ufology, conspiracy and who knows what else?

Indeed. Fear is the ultimate weapon and the ultimate means of control. I do think that people will be paying less attention to the paranoia pimps as things get worse in the real world.

Justin suggests I look up Erik Davis, Joscelyn Godwin, Joseph Farrell,
Alan Moore, Michio Kaku, Professor Brian Cox and Jacques Vallee.

Some of these are certainly possible, but Jacques is always busy and Michio might be too big for The Sun.

Cindy writes: I wish you could do a pod cast with the pope, I'm still wondering if he's a warlock or a wizard. I guess there's little chance of that though.

How about a serial enabler of crimes against humanity? That probably wouldn't fly either.

Anonymous recommended James Power and Tristan wants to hear some more Hollow Earth stuff. Ted wants to hear from Gnostic scholar John Lamb Lash, who I'd love to ask about Gnostic themes in Star Trek.

Anonymous writes: I would love a well researched piece investigating links between various "conspiracy researchers" of the right wing patriot militia variety (such as alex jones g. edward griffin etc.) and the john birch society and cnp. Would also like your take on David Icke and Michael Tsarion who I believe pose as somewhat "New Age" but essentially promote the same line. Also continue the Secret War Against the New Age series.

As would I. If you know anyone who's researched this please let me know. It's long past time the hidden agendas at play are brought to light. I just want to hear from someone who's put some serious time into it.

Raksha is interested in the Gnostic themes explored here and writes: But I'm still interested, still very curious about new developments and rediscovered old ones, and endlessly fascinated with new ways of connecting the dots.

I think John Lamb Lash would fit Raksha's bill.

Venus writes: However, it alarmed me to hear that you are siding with the SRA hoax disinfo that the CIA-funded False Memory Syndrome promoted because, with all due respect for someone whose research I admire greatly, you are out of your depth here.

I think Venus might want to abstain from dictating what is and is not out of my depth, since I've been researching this for a very long time now. It's my belief that the MONARCH hoax is textbook disinfo (as did the late Jim Kieth and many other MK researchers) and the SRA hoax was created to bolster the credibility of skeptic groups like the FMSF (which someone once referred to as the "Pedophile Mutual Aid Society"), since SRA was vigorously promoted by media sleazeballs like Geraldo Rivera and then largely fell apart once actual investigations were done.

"False Memory Syndrome" is indeed a lie and a hoax (the Massachussetts Supreme Court recently tossed it out as a defense), but there are other lies and hoaxes that muddy the waters and do real victims no favors.

SRA also helps obscure the clear, documented and unambiguous reality that the overwhelming majority of the documented non-family abuse cases take place under the aegis of the established mainstream religions (and their various cults). As well as the fact that this problem is far more widespread than the mainstream media would have you believe.

For instance, the media might cover some of the more egregious cases with Catholic priests (and in some instances the Orthodox Jewish communities) but completely ignore the problem in the Protestant and Evangelical denominations.

Why would they possibly do that?

I recommend the SNAP website as well as the Religion News Service site, which is run by a Dutch Christian group who are serious about exposing evil within the churches (ie., the plank in their own eyes).

Jason recommends Michael Tsarion, Lash, John Greer (whose latest book I blurbed), Brian Bates, Jan Irvin (who interviewed me a while back) and Gary Lachman, who I talked to when I did the Lucifer Rising piece. Of these, Lachman is first on my list. He's done some excellent research that I think a lot of you would dig.

Anonymous is quite a prolific commenter and weighs in with these nuggets:

I often wonder if much of the modern conspiracy movement is funded by intelligence services or big business as a way of diluting possible political rebellion. While there's certainly conspiracy researchers of all political hues out there, the famous ones seem to be in peculiar agreement on a number of issues that coincide with the big business & religious fundie agenda.

Absolutely- look no further than Ron Paul and his extensive connections to the fascistic Christian Reconstructionist movement, whose "Libertarianism" (sic) is the brand Paul is actually peddling. Continuing...

Also by contending that the control systems of the planet are led by a supernatural New World Order this makes it seem that ordinary citizens have no hope against corrupt politicians other than by immersing themselves in a theological belief system.

Agreed. Which is why you never see these guys at protests. In fact they will twist themselves into pretzels explaining how OWS or the Greek uprising is all orchestrated by the Globalists, a claim strongly debunked by the police response thereto. More:

However looking at the conspiracy scene they're fixated on encouraging their followers to arm themselves to the teeth way beyond what one would expect for self-defence. The justification being they can fight against the New World Order. But what if its the other way around? Arm different political factions so they never get together and end up in a balance of power where nothing changes or simply fight against each other leaving big business & religion alone?

Or as we saw in South and Central America in the 70s and 80s, these radical right factions make nice ready-made death squads to do away with people who the plantation and factory owners saw as threats to their bottom lines.

The same ultra-right political ideas emerged in the UFO underground occasionally, especially in the 1980s and it effectively destroyed any serious interest in the topic. One of the top 'whistleblowers' at the time was William Cooper - who is now seen as a martyred conspiracy god by believers.

I think you mean "lifelong Naval Intelligence asset William Cooper." Yes, there are many reasons not to mourn the passing of an organized UFO underground. If you know of any researchers- or if you want to go out and do the research yourself- let me know.

Dayzero asks when an Incal film is coming out to which I say "hopefully never." Dennis recommends Jack Sarfatti, who at least judging from his Facebook page has become a bit of a angry, hectoring neoconservative. How about Russell Targ or Ed May? I met those guys at Esalen and they were very cool.

Venus checks in again with some very saliant responses to Anonymous' suspicions about the corporate self-help movements and Libertarianism. To which I say, "why don't you two get together and do some research on this and then come talk to me about it here?"

Laurence recommends something on British scifi soundtracks. Justin R recommends some old-school conspiracy researhcers like Jonathan Sellers, Justin Boland and Terry Melanson. Terry used to be a regular commenter here but the last I checked hadn't updated his site in a while. He's done some good work on the Bavarian Illuminati which is a nice corrective to the silly Illuminati mythology you see pimped by the YouTards. Doug Rushkoff and Chris Hedges are good ideas as well.

Raj checked in but kept his suggestions to the FB thread. Raj, if you want to repost here, feel free. Greg T suggests "Bill Deagle, Michael Hoffman, Tom Horn, David Flynn, Dan Burisch, Benjamin Fulford, Andrew D. Basiago, Sorcha, Monarch And Bluebeam proponents." I doubt most of those people would want to talk to me but if they're ever in the mood for a knock-down, drag-out donnybrook they know where to look.

Winding down Nick Redfern asks if he saw me on the VH1 series Metal Evolution, specifically the early US and early UK metal scene episodes. To which I plead guilty. Check the series out- it's an amazing bit of history with some awesome footage.

Venus checks in again, writing:

Where we may part ways is with my belief that the mystery religions, most formally preserved through the upper echelons of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, have been involved in refining predatory mind control techniques as well, and that ultimately there may be many connections between the two opposing camps (Vatican/P2 masonic lodge money laundering scandal, anyone?). Of course, "satanism" is a modern invention so the idea that some ancient brotherhood has been practicing it for centuries is absurd.

To which I reply, "Why not stop looking for hidden scapegoats and cabals and put the blame squarely where it belongs- on the abusers and the hierarchies that shelter them?" I realize it goes against our cultural conditioning and hence the need to disbelieve the unassailable historical fact that the clergy have never believed that the law applies to them too, but isn't breaking out of cultural conditioning what we're all about?

The founder of modern Fundamentalism Billy James Hargis didn't talk about Adam Kadmon when he was seducing choirboys- he cited David's relationship with Jonathan as Biblical precedent, which I'm sure is pretty common with the Abrahamic abuser crowd.

Finally, Chuck suggests Goro Adachi, who's also popped in around these parts in the past. Goro, if you're out there, drop me a line.

All in all great stuff, both here and on the Facebook page. I feel like you lot are putting the wind in my sails and I am already laying the groundwork for this new adventure. Thanks to everyone who pitched in.

Looking Forward...and Back

2011-12-05T12:01:00.006-05:00

2011 is drawing to a close and it's been another wild year here on the Sun. There's been a lot of changes in the way I've been blogging. The Facebook page has freed me up from the updates and need to post daily (I tried to use the Solar Satellite as a news ticker for a while, but running two blogs simultaneously is ill-advised, especially when you're not making money off it), inspiring me to dig more deeply into the topics I'm looking at.

It's also allowed me to interact with you guys in a more natural and immediate way. I love and treasure your comments-- one of my points of pride with this blog is the uncommonly high quality of commenters it's blessed with-- but responding to them was getting to be as much work as writing the actual pieces. The format is awkward and unnatural for conversation on my part- cutting and pasting and hoping people can follow the thread. If you aren't on the FB group, I hope you come join us. There are some really smart and self-directed people there, and the same cocktail party conversationalist ambiance you've come to expect.

What I've been doing over the past year is treating the Sun more like a magazine than a newspaper. Much longer, much more in-depth pieces like the Star Wars Symbol Cycle, the Nightmares in Camelot series and the Another History of the Knights Templar mega-epic have been the backbone of the blog and these pieces have definitely resonated with a lot of readers out there.

Looking forward to the coming year, I feel like I want to spend less time talking and more time listening. The Nick Redfern interviews have been huge hits here, and have been very intellectually satisfying for me as well. There are a lot of people I'd like to talk to, and not just the usual guests working the alt-podcast circuit. Artists, political and religious thinkers, Synchromystics and anyone else who lives the life of the mind. I've already put out feelers and will continue to do so in the weeks ahead.

I haven't decided whether I'd like to continue with the prose interview format or throw in some occasional podcasts (which a lot of people have asked me to do). That's a whole other discussion, because when I think "podcast" I start thinking about music and sound and all sorts of ideas that could get me in a whole lot of trouble. So don't quote me on the podcast thing quite yet (it also depends on what interviewees are more comfortable with).

Either way I'm excited about using the blog to interact with interesting thinkers and hopefully introduce some new thinkers and ideas to the world at large. There are a lot of different ideas I want to explore and hope to use them as a launching pad for my interviewee search. There'll be the usual Secret Sun type topics-- SciFi, mystical geekery, psychedelia, Gnosis, AAT-- but also some new ones.

One topic I want to explore are the Fascist and/or Fundamentalist assumptions under-girding so much of Conspiratainment, and just how many Wehrwolves in alt-media clothing there are out there.

In many ways it will be a eulogy, since I do believe the worm is turning and people are quickly wising up, but I'd like to find some people who've done work exposing the SRA and MONARCH hoaxes and can illustrate how these hoaxes are used to lure people into the most audacious and far-reaching mind-control program in the history of this planet-- religious fundamentalism. The evil genius of this is that it's the clergy who are the most prodigious abusers out there, and it's under the auspices of the religious establishment that the overwhelming majority of legitimate abuse cases have been documented.

On one end of the spectrum I'd also like to explore the Bernays school of using symbolism and psychology as a tool of social control, EST and the infiltration of the human-potential movement, the Establishment's bloody war on rock 'n' roll in the 50s and 60s, and the ongoing chipping away of artistic, religious and personal freedom.

On the other I'd like to explore the history of British sci-fi TV, Underground comix and the SF scene, the Surrealist revival and people involved in serious entheogen research.

All of this is intimately related in my opinion. It's all about the frontiers of the mind, whether they are expanding or contracting.

So what you guys out there can do to help is suggest guests you'd like to hear from, whether well-known or deserving of wider attention. My wish is to keep things accessible and entertaining to as many intelligent and open-minded people as possible. Bear in mind that I have a distinct right-brained bias (I'm pretty sure I don't have a left hemisphere) so I'll have to pass on more esoteric sciences and whatnot. There are other interviewers far more qualified than myself for those topics.

So send me your wish lists and I'll get on it. I'm really looking forward to all of this, but don't worry-- I'm sure I'll still be posting your usual Solar fare when the spirit moves me.