Sunday, November 07, 2010

Earth Intruders and the Manufactured Moon

A recent headline had it that Hollywood had no less than 16 alien invasion movies in the pipeline. But not all of the actual films in question follow the War of the Worlds template, and some of them are sequels or have only tangential connections to the meme (like Green Lantern).

  Roland Emmerich is filming a Blair Witch/Cloverdale spin on the meme, and Skyline (which is a classic WotW scenario with ostensible alien identity memery) is due this week. We've been tracking the continuing focus on alien themes here for quite some time, so it's not news around these parts. But there was one interesting sync in a news story these weekend that caught my eye:
Weinsteins Land Timur Bekmambetov's Surprise Alien Pic 'Apollo 18' Bob Weinstein met several times with Bekmambetov before making a deal that came after Bekmambetov presented film footage purported to have been shot by the crew of Apollo 18. 
That moon mission from the early 70s was officially canceled by NASA, but according to urban legend, it actually happened. Timur's footage shows signs of alien life, and the events of the mission are built into a thriller story line.
If footage of a secret Apollo mission sounds familiar, it's because we recently looked at some impressive yet, um, apocryphal film footage that also had a Russian connection:
Then there's this story (and accompanying video), which has been circulating in the underground for a couple of years now. It's about an alleged secret Apollo mission (a joint US/Soviet mission, it turns out) to investigate an enormous crashed alien ship on the Moon's surface. And once inside the spaceship, the astronauts reportedly discovered a mummified alien body.
Naturally, the sync demands that I'll be following this story, as well as the fascinating exomorphogenic memes that we see in the Skyline trailer. Definitely a new wrinkle for the old invasion workhouse.

And so, the alien drumbeat goes on. Aside from the Hollywood angle and all of the UFO and exoplanet stories in the news lately, we're well into the second season of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. 

To be honest, I find the series a bit frustrating. The first two hour special was one of the best documentaries on the subject ever made, but I feel as if they're stretching out the premise without using the time to really burrow into some of the issues. 

The recent episode on the gods had some interesting information but I kept waiting for them to really put it over the fence, and they kept bunting. I also think the whole topic is a lot more psychedelic than you can get away with on TV, though I can't quite explain what I mean by that. 

Speaking of psychedelia and ancient aliens, it looks as if the third X-Files movie is in preproduction. David Duchovny spilled the beans to a French TV magazine:
As Philes on Facebook have already pointed out, the English translation is, "It is being written. It looks just ahead of Fox, a little scalded by the relatively poor reception of the second component. The error comes, I believe that the authors had strayed too far from the very roots of the series. 
Moreover, the film was released in summer. The third will be much closer to what the public expects, with government conspiracies, etc..
Of course, Secret Sun readers know that X-Files 2 was about aliens and conspiracies, it just told the story in allegory. It also made the mistake of serving up a steak dinner when everyone was expecting a Happy Meal (plus there was the whole thing with the Dark Knight Working). Well, hopefully the next installment will be a bit more straightforward and offer up more explicit alien hijinks and tomfoolery.

I also need to read this book, though a spoiler-happy reviewer already gave away the ending. From an interview in New Dawn with author Christopher Knight:
ND: Your conclusion is there are more than enough anomalies about the Moon to suggest it is not a naturally occurring body and was quite possibly engineered to sustain life on Earth. How did you reach this conclusion? 
CK: Not only is the Moon an apparently impossible object, it has some unique benefits for us humans. It has been nothing less than an incubator for life. If the Moon was not exactly the size, mass and distance that it has been at each stage of the Earth’s evolution – there would be no intelligent life here. Scientists are agreed that we owe everything to the Moon. It acts as a stabiliser that holds our planet at just the right angle to produce the seasons and keep water liquid across most of the planet. Without our Moon the Earth would be as dead and solid as Venus.
The Moon is not only extremely odd in its construction; it also behaves in a way that is nothing less than miraculous. It is exactly four hundred times smaller than the Sun but four hundred times closer to the Earth so that both the Sun and the Moon appear to be precisely the same size in the sky – which gives us the phenomenon we call a total eclipse. Whilst we take this for granted it has been called the biggest coincidence in the universe.
Furthermore, the Moon mirrors the movement of the Sun in the sky by rising and setting at the same point on the horizon as the Sun does at opposite solstices. For example, this means the Moon rises at midwinter at the same place the Sun does at midsummer. There is no logical reason why the Moon mimics the Sun in this way and it is only meaningful to a human standing on the Earth.
I've heard this theory before. It might drive the orthodox types crazy, but fights in quite neatly to the overall mystery we're puzzling over here on The Secret Sun.