Secret Cinema: Quatermass and the Pit

Before Chariots of the Gods, before The 12th Planet, before Gods of Eden, before The X-Files, before Stargate, before Battlestar Galactica, before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, before Transformers 2 ,there was Quatermass and the Pit. 

 Although popularized in the US with the Hammer version (see video above, retitled Five Million Years to Earth), Quatermass originally aired on the BBC in the late 50s as a serial. 

Alien Dreaming: I Want to Believe, Part 3

I Want to Believe got pummeled by the Dark Knight blitzkrieg, but I think it also fared poorly because it's too brutally unrelenting in its view of a cold, heartless, spiritually-dead America. It also presents us with heroes beaten down by that reality, which has certainly only become more stark since the film's release.

 

Astronaut Theology: The Nigel Kneale Tapes

 

I've spent my entire life obsessed with science fiction, but not in the ways some might expect. I don't sit and pore over blueprints of the various Enterprises, or spend all my time on message boards, nitpicking the ouevre of Joss Whedon. 

Dan Aykroyd on UFOs/ETs

 

Dan Aykroyd seems to be pursuing a second career as a UFO researcher. Or at least a UFO expounder, as Unplugged on UFOs documentary stems from a series of interviews taken by David Sereda, whose own ruminations we looked at a week or so back. 

Astronaut Theology: Shapes of Things to Come?

In one of the earliest posts I did on this blog, I looked at the mission logo for the Constellation program, with its hidden 3/17. What I hadn't seen then was the patch, which is triangular, rather than the usual circle.

 

Masonic Manhattan: Golden Lady

Synchronicity is a funny old thing. I've been knee deep in research this past week for my next book, reading about Cybele and her mind-bogglingly crazy cult. On Friday I had to drag my tired, old, aching carcass into Masonic Manhattan for a documentary interview. The location for the shoot was up in the air, but finally I was called up to the Empire Hotel near Columbus Circle.

Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre, Part 2

In the first installment of this series- which I had not intended to be a series- we looked at the book and film Altered States, and its references to the work of John C Lilly. The premise of Altered States dealt with a Harvard professor who believed that genetic memory was stored in our DNA, a theory that's gaining wider acceptance these days.