X-Files Reality, or We Can't Say We Weren't Warned

I've been going on and on about X-Files Reality (XFR) since I started this blog, but lately? Well, lately it's gotten so egregious that pointing out how X-Files our so-called reality is becoming almost seems beside the point. 

Virtual Reality: The Future is Not a Straight Line

Since Darwin, the ruling class of the West has clung on to a new myth to replace traditional Christianity; the myth of linear progress.

Go Watch Stranger Things

2016 has been a messed-up year.

I probably don't need to remind anyone of that but it bears repeating anyway. 

AstroWorld: There Will Be Giants on the Earth in Those Days

Oh, you KNEW this was coming.

So the other night some guy on Twitter was telling me how much my previous Astroworld piece sucked, but at least I didn't try to "desperately" shoehorn the Sibyl into my exegesis. I merely said "the night is still young" in reply.  

Eye Wanna Be Sedated

Bruce Rux, author of the absolute must-have foundational text Architects of the Underworld, had a very interesting take on the definitions of disinformation and misinformation. 

Disinformation, Rux argues, is when an official source feeds you false information. Misinformation, on the other hand, is when an entirely unreliable and disreputable source feeds you true information, which was usually fed to them.

Enjoy Your Specially-Curated Apocalypse Experience

The Sibyl Prophesies at the Temple of Mithras

Well, the day finally came and I made my way into see the Sibyl prophesy to the masses at the lusciously-appointed solar temple on the grounds of the world's largest open-air Mithraic temple in the New Rome. 

The Vegans Have Landed

Well, there's some loaded language for you. 

The New Normal is here. What does that mean? It means constant chaos and disruption as far as the eye can see. 

The Spirits of '79: Madness at the Movies

The ephemeral-yet-palpable strangeness of 1979 was well-documented in that year's cinematic offerings. Which is a bit curious, given that most of them would have been made in 1978. But 1978 was a pretty weird year too, just in a slightly different way. 

Stairway to Sirius: Dream of Californicating

When I wrote about my struggle with conscious and unconscious symbolism the other day, it was based on the season finale of the Showtime series Californication. 

The Birds Are Not What They Seem

Well, last week began with The Secret Sun delving into bird symbolism and UFO themes in the context of precognition, and ended with two major Presidential candidates inserting bird symbolism and UFO themes into the headlines all across the major media.

How about that?

Ancient Aliens Buries the Lead

"The Great Stone Face," 1957

Ancient Aliens is now in its seventh season. I DVR it, but don't really watch it that often. 

It's gotten to the point where it's not telling me anything I don't know already, and having been on the other side of the camera a number of times I know how the game is played. 

What is very clear with the Ancient Aliens style of interviewing is that the producers are looking for soundbites. They will prompt the speaker to repeat the question in their own words and then give the required answer. And anyone who's watched a number of episodes of Ancient Aliens probably can recite the answers along at home.

I've sometimes defended Ancient Aliens, not out of a great love for the show, but because so many of the people who've attacked it are doing so on behalf of the Fundamentalist/ Creationist/ Theocrat axis, a fact they fail to disclose to their audiences. But the fact of the matter is that I have a lot of problems with it, and only took down my critique of it when Filip Coppens passed away (I've since put it back up).

But I'm mature enough enough to realize that any criticisms I have of the show are irrelevant. It is what it is, as the people say. It wouldn't be on around the clock if people weren't watching it and it wouldn't have been renewed six times if it wasn't making money.

But compared to the original two-hour specials (which I do think were very well done), the show is running on fumes, content-wise. 

It makes for pleasant enough background noise from time to time, but hasn't told us anything new for a while (The Satanic Conspiracy episode, while misleadingly titled, did have some good information on the Watchers).

But this latest episode was something else. Not only did you have the stock answers that you could hear on any episode on any topic, they blew the lede here in a major way.

"Jacob Wrestles the Angel", portfolio piece, 1980 

As I've been writing about since this blog went live, comic book superheroes didn't just materialize from the ether like tulpas -- as the Ancient Aliens cast of regulars repeatedly suggested -- a good many of them were created or co-created by Jack Kirby. 

And the ones he didn't create or co-create, he had a hand in, like Iron Man and Spider-Man.

And Jack Kirby is a guy who was not only doing stories about ancient astronauts long before Erich Von Daniken (there's practically enough of those to fill a stadium by now), he was using AAT as the basis of the superheroes he was creating, beginning with The Inhumans in 1965.

Kirby was so obsessed with AAT that it consumed the latter part of his career; three of his titles for Marvel in the 1970s were built around the theme and he did a number of other AAT projects after he left comics for animation.

What's more, his prescient "Face on Mars" story from the late 50s showed a distinct Theosophical influence with its ancient extraterrestrial civilizations, demonstrating he may have been exploring the same material that inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs for his own Mars material.

But aside from Kirby, you also have Otto Binder, who was not only one of the great writers of the Golden Age of Comics, he was also a prolific sci-fi writer, editor of Space magazine, and the co-author of the classic AAT text, Mankind, Child of the Stars. 

Binder is not as well known as Kirby today but he worked on Captain Marvel, which at the time was Superman's #1 rival on the stands, selling upwards of a million copies a month and inspiring a number of spin-offs.

It's really too much to ask at this point; a tiger doesn't change its stripes. And in a way I'm glad Kirby wasn't drawn into the reductionist POV of Ancient Aliens, a show which does its best to make none of these old stories seem alien, as in god-damn-what-the-fuck-you've-got-to-be-kidding-me alien. 

You see, materialism doesn't lead to a nation of scientists, rolling up their sleeves and boldly pressing at the frontiers of human knowledge. 

It leads to a nation of YOLO hedonists, drinking Jäger shots from each others' navels while running the Visa bills into the red at Cabo and Ibiza. Materialism gives us Kardashians, not Carl Sagans.

The evolution of Giorgio into Internet laughing stock- cui bono?

I could be wrong, but Ancient Aliens comes across as a show for people who've never had an alien experience, for people who've never tripped balls and ripped at the coffin lid of infinity, or for people who've never had such an experience forced upon them.

It's just the same old, same old; mind-blowing mystical experience (which nearly all of those ancient texts describe) reduced to a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon.

It comes across as a show for people who haven't had their worldview shaked and baked and then been thrown back and had to pick up the pieces again. As a show that takes the magical and makes it mundane, that takes the psychotronic and makes it pseudo-scientific.

I want to defend Ancient Aliens, really I do. But I won't. This was a golden opportunity- a major architect of today's pop culture who was also obsessed with ancient astronauts- and they blew it. Just blew it. 

I'm sure their comics guests told them about Kirby. But what do we get? The same soundbites you hear on every episode.

Go back and watch all the AAT documentaries from the 70s, with Rod Serling and William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and so on and so forth. Even if you don't believe a word of it, that stuff still holds up and still kicks ass. And you definitely get the feeling that those motherfuckers were experienced.

Note: I know it's spelled "lede", but it looks weird as a headline.

Need more Knowledge?  

Come enroll at the Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism.  

Inner Space Capsule

First of all, let me apologize for the extremely infrequent updates here. I've been working seven days a week, anywhere from 12 to 17 hours a day. Whatever downtime I've had has been spent with my family. 

Songs of the Siren on the River Styx

Jeff Buckley's family is producing a bio-pic on the late singer's life, provisionally entitled Mystery White Boy. 

Entrainment Watch®: Speaking of Trial Balloons....

A recent, apparently-hoaxed story had it that the American Psychiatric Association- last seen trying to surreptitiously normalize pedophilia- was trying to declare religious belief a disease. The question I have is is that a hoax story or a trial balloon. 

The Secret Sun 2010 in Review Extravaganza

Yeah, yeah, yeah- we've seen it all before...

Well, my 2010 kind of sucked. How about yours? 

Yellowstone Apocalypse, or What Worries Me Most

There is so much going on out there, so much mischief and madness being thrown at us, so many toys coming out of those DUMB labs and archonic think-tanks that I can hardly keep up with it all. Then there's nightmare in Austin that seems to have risen like Cthulhu from the deep, dragging a gaggle of potent symbols in its wake like tin cans behind a newlyweds' Studebaker.

My X-Files Top 10

I wrote this list back in the early 2000s and I can't remember exactly where I originally posted it. It's before I got the DVD sets and was watching (and taping) the shows on TNT.

...But Secret Sunification is Interested in You.

As always, there's way too much going on out there. I've fallen a bit behind on my semiotics and pseudo-science, but here's a small sampling of stories from the World Secret Sunification desk...

From Ecto-Genesis to Transgenic Revelation

Ladies and Gentlemen we are floating in space

For over 50 years, researchers have been screaming into the wind that a massive conditioning program has been underway in order to acclimate people to UFOs, aliens, exoplanets and the rest of it. 

According to this line of thinking, this is precisely why we've been carpet-bombed with movies, books, comics, toys and TV shows beating the alien/UFO/AAT drum.

Alien Dreaming: Don't Pay the Ferryman

In our last installment, I mentioned how I've watched I Want to Believe about 40 times (give or take) and found some new easter egg each time. Well, shortly after writing that I took another pass at the film, and lo and behold, found more hidden symbolism. And this stuff is quite juicy....