AstroGnosis: The Terrible Burden of Truth

I'm finishing up some work here at Secret Sun Central, but in the meantime it's summer and that means it's time for The Outer Limits. Unfortunately You Tube pulled their TNOL collection so you'll have to hit Hulu if you're in the US or check your local streaming service if you're outside the US.

This is a pure dose of AstroGnosis, and the paranoid brand thereof. Joey Pants (of Matrix fame) plays a Howard Stern clone who witnesses an alien walk-in exit a host and finds himself involved in a deeper conspiracy. It's the kind of thing The X-Files would have handled much better, but you take what you can get.

But at the same time it goes for a deeper shade of weird when dealing with these walk-ins and how they communicate and travel (harking back to the very first Outer Limits episode, which also dealt with radio), whereas Chris Carter's aliens were always just stand-ins for the dark forces of the Military Industrial Complex. There's also a deeper metaphor at work here...

What the text doesn't say outright is that even if he doesn't consciously acknowledge it, Joey Pants' character is really asking for a dose of Instant Gnosis. And he gets it. He spends his time poking at the hornets' nest and then tries to put the swarm back in the hive when it comes gunning for him.

I often wonder if so-called 'debunkers' are doing the same thing right now-- whacking at Pleiadian pinatas in hopes that one day they'll find a real alien nest in disguise.

Chris Carter certainly thought so- the Dr. Barnes character of 'Sixth Extinction' fame was probably inspired by the shoddy reception he received at a CSICOP meeting back in the 90s. Carter's an insightful guy-- he would quickly realize what the debunkers were really after.

Think about it: why would they bother spending all their time looking at UFO videos if they weren't secretly hoping that one day they'll find one that will finally break through the phony cynicism and disenchantment?

Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of topics I don't believe in or think are valid. Do I spend all my time writing about them? No. Why?

Because I don't believe in them and I don't think they're valid. Doing so would be a total waste of my time. So what's their story?



'Alien Radio' also deals with a similar theme explored in X-Files episodes like 'Conduit' and its sequels 'Tempus Fugit' and 'Max'- and that's the terrible burden of truth. We always tell ourselves we want to know the "truth," to know all the secrets and mysteries that lie beneath the facade of everyday life.

Do we really?

Forget about aliens and science fiction and the rest for a minute-- how much do you want to know? How deep do you want to dig? I'm not trying to discourage anyone in their personal quests, I'm simply trying to tell you that my own experience has taught me that the truth hasn't always been something I wanted to hear. And it can never be unlearned, either.

The truth doesn't always set you free. Sometimes it saddles you with a burden you can never escape. So choose very carefully where you decide to start digging and what dragons you choose to slay. Prepare to be taken places you never wanted to go. Gnosis isn't always a flower-- sometimes it's a sword. Maybe more often than not.

And sometimes the truth is a lie. Most often when it's spelled with a capital T.



UPDATE: Well, I had forgotten The Outer Limits did an episode directly addressing the issues raised in this post. This should be available for region-free viewing .

Funnybook Prophecy: Spectacle and Control

Madonna should really lay off the steroids.

I wrote recently in "Fool Me Twice" that I'm increasingly uncomfortable in covering some of the spectacle being broadcast out there, just as it was during Bread and Circuses era of the Roman Empire. Why? Because it gets to the point where you start to feel like an accomplice. That's not a feeling I enjoy.

That era was recreated during the Super Bowl halftime show, as Madonna and a cast of hundreds revisited the Egyptomania of Classical Rome, as well as the ancient ritual of having subservient peoples dance suggestively for their masters. Last night, the British Empire looked back on its glory days during the Olympics ceremony, which was also sprinkled with the increasingly ubiquitous quasi-Masonic symbolism that even the dumbest YouTard can spot a mile away these days.

I haven't been quite been able to put it into words yet, but I almost wonder if we're not seeing a new quasi-Masonic civic religion being rolled out, with stunning parallels to the roll out of Constantine's church in the early Fourth Century. It sounds absolutely crazy, but history is full of crazy.

And here's some crazy- Constantine made his move roughly 300 years after the birth of Christ, even though Christianity was based on religious ideas that had been circulating for much longer. Freemasonry was officially born about 300 years ago, even though it was based on esoteric ideas that had been around for much longer.

Constantine too faced a empire in crisis and sought to consolidate it with a one-world religion his predecessors saw as a breeding ground for conspiracy, witchcraft and sedition. But it became alluring to an oppressed people with its promises of eternal life, just as "Illuminism" is so utterly fascinating to so many people with its promises of a life of privilege, pleasure and hidden knowledge.

Even the people who profess to oppose it. Hell, especially the people who profess to oppose it. The so-called exposés are just part of the sales pitch; viral marketing at its finest. And what's a soul, really, in these days of poverty and economic collapse?

But there's a simple explanation for why I don't blog much on that stuff anymore: I'm sick of it. I'm sick of looking at those symbols, I'm sick of the stories and I'm sick of the game. I've been studying this stuff since before a lot of you were even born. It gets old.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers 10

But I also know my history too well. Sure, we're talking about an extreme possibility. But I've seen a lot of extreme possibilities become dreary, everyday realities. And cartoonists trade in extreme realities-- oh dear, I meant to write "extreme possibilities." Check out this story from 1984 and look at the spectacle and how that spectacle is the mask behind which the iron face of control hides.

Sure, a lot of this kind of thinking was in the air back then too. But something about this story seems especially prescient to me. How about you?

UPDATE: I should explain what I mean by "civic religion," since it's not exactly the kind of religion that Constantine's church evolved into, concerned with personal salvation and the rest. A civic religion is largely ceremonial and largely involved with rituals of state, like oh, the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

It's about unifying disparate peoples under a commonly understood yet not particularly tightly-held system of symbols, rituals, codewords, oaths (the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance) and public works and monuments. I don't know if the Romans invented it, but they perfected it.

This is why I pointed out that Madonna's ritual was straight out of the Temples of Jupiter and Juno- not the "mystery schools" (sic) as some gross historical illiterates would have you believe. America once had a civic religion based on the various national anthems and the mythology of the Founding Fathers, but that is being phased out to make ready for a new model.

So why do so many huge transnational corporations- McDonalds, Visa, TimeWarner, Microsoft, GM, etc etc etc- stuff so much money into the pockets of Vigilant Citizen? I don't know. But maybe it's because that site is doing more to initiate the uneducated into the rites and rituals of the new civic religion than any lodge could ever dream of doing.

UPDATE: How do old religions die? Like this:

Ronald William Brown of Largo, Florida, the 57-year-old proprietor of “Puppets Plus,” has been charged with the possession of child pornography and of conspiring with another man to kidnap and then eat a child.

The Christian Television Network kids program Joy Junction regularly featured Brown and his ventriloquist dummy “Marty,” who would warn about things like… pornography.

Brown, an active member of the Gulf Coast Church in Largo, and an accomplice, Michael Arnett, were planning to abduct a specific child who was a member of the church and who took part in Brown’s “Puppet Ministry Kidz Zone” youth ministry program.

Homeland Security agents who searched Brown’s home and tool shed yesterday discovered images of bound and gagged kids, photographs of dead children and a flier for a missing child.

According to a Tampa Bay Examiner blogger:

Brown and Arnett chatted about murdering children as young as two. In one chat Arnett described to Brown what it is like to drown a little girl and what different body parts taste like if roasted or fried in a pan.

Brown revealed to Arnett in another chat regarding the little boy at Gulf Coast Church that he would enjoy strangling the child to death.

Not even the most powerful organization can withstand too many stories like this. You'll never see this on Christian propaganda sites like Alex Jones or Vigilant Citizen or any of the other mouthpieces for the so-called "right wing" of the status quo like WND or Drudge, but stories like this can't be quashed in the age of email and Facebook.

Dark Knight of Our Soul, or The New Ambulance Chasers

Most people have a stereotype of "conspiracy theorists" as wild-eyed hysterics, who theorize first and maybe-- maybe-- ask questions later. Unfortunately, there's an entire population of conspiratainers and their followers who are hellbent on proving that stereotype right, and then lowering the bar as far as possible.

Conspiracy research- as opposed to conspiracy entertainment-- is largely dead. In some ways the tools of the trade were adopted by mainstream journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. But the deluge of Evangelicals and New Agers into the conspiratainment sphere during the Bush years has ravaged the notion of questioning the reworded press releases the mainstream news media feed us as reporting. Gee, you'd almost think it was planned that way.

Social media has created a noise machine, in which unsourced rumors are taken as fact and old Neo-Nazi fever dreams are taken as established history. The end result has been a growing backlash-- especially among most geeks and other hipster types-- that looks on all conspiracy thinking as the province of pantpissing trailer trash.

Nowhere is the lack of a serious class of conspiracy researchers more conspicuous than in the aftermath of the increasingly frequent mass shootings we're seeing. No serious conspiracy researcher would start unleashing--within hours of an event-- a series of videos claiming that a shooting was a "false flag event" and would definitely never repeat the easily disproven claim that these shootings are staged to hasten draconian gun laws that by some dint of coincidence never materialize.

Even if a serious researcher has a strong suspicion, he or she would wait until the hysteria died down and then calmly and methodically begin sifting through witness statements, police reports, personal histories, and on and on and on before presenting a theory. And only when a mountain of corroborating evidence was attached.

Because a serious researcher would be very much concerned with their credibility and reputation, something that never keeps the new breed of conspiratainment shills up at night.

CONSPIRITIANITY

But of course what we are seeing now is a religion, that delivers freedom from accountability in place of salvation. The game to disempower the individual as much as possible so the believer can never feel responsible for the conduct of their lives. It's to create as many scapegoats to blame as possible, so the goalpost can be moved at will. It's the religion of surrender.

Half of the theorizing about the Aurora shooting that I'm seeing is religiously based and the other half is based in NRA paranoia. Jones must have some incredibly powerful people pulling his strings because he continues to push the gun law theory and is never, ever called out when he is wrong (just as I did when he was insanely wrong on Prometheus).

The UN treaty -- which needs a 2/3rds majority and not the simple majority Jones has implied-- is not about domestic gun rights. But Jones has spun the same exact story (see this, this, this, this and this) so many times that only the religious could believe it.

Jones and others have also claimed that Holmes couldn't have obtained body armor since he would need a Federal permit and a lot of money to do so. However, 30 seconds on Google produced a cornucopia of body armor, that Holmes could easily have obtained without maxing out a single credit card. And the line about the Federal law is total bullshit.

Remember Kevin Smith maxing his credit cards out to make Clerks? That netted him $27,000 dollars back in 1992. Holmes could have armed himself for a fraction of that.

Right now the only thing we do know about this guy was that he was extremely intelligent and very skilled at chemistry. That would explain the gas (most people who didn't read the labels before cleaning the floor know how to make tear gas) and the improvised IEDs.

And longtime Secret Sun readers are surely getting an Amy Bishop vibe off of this case. I've always said that the line between genius and madness is nearly invisible. And any first year psych student knows that catastrophic mental illness often emerges in one's early 20s (Amy Bishop committed her first murder when she was 21).

As we've seen in the past initial media reports are notoriously unreliable (and getting worse, thanks to our dumbed-down media) and the new ambulance chasers of Conspirastan always lose interest once the hit counter cools off. Because that's the only thing they care about- pumping the hit counter in order to fill their pockets.

Now, here's the deal: I don't know what motivated this guy. I don't know what is behind all this because we don't have enough information (and deliberately false information is being fed into cyberspace). I don't know if he had an accomplice or not. I don't know what is going on because he's not talking and the police have clamped down on leaks. We don't need to look any further than The Gangster Squad trailer-released in May-- for inspiration behind the act.

The information we have right now doesn't necessitate any kind of "false flag" scenario yet-- if you're a cogent, reasonable individual. I do know he has a look in his eyes that chills me to the bone. What's behind that, I don't know yet. I'm not going to form an opinion on the matter until I can look at the evidence. I will say that the fact that his brains weren't sprayed around the parking lot on the way to a police cruiser strongly argues against Holmes being a patsy. Because no one would have lost any sleep if they were.

DARKNESS, DARKNESS

I do know that is just more bad news attached to a Christopher Nolan film. This is a guy who puts forward psychopaths as his protagonists (Following, Memento, The Prestige) and cast a guy previously best known as Bateman, the American Psycho as Batman. He also seems especially fascinated with mindfucking as we've seen in Inception and the first Batman film (how people led Inception slide is beyond me). I do know this is a guy who revels in fascist, brutalizing imagery and themes in his work.

I do know that he deliberately created a brand new archetype with his Joker, the real protagonist of The Dark Knight. A figure of pure, wanton destruction- the killer that every Jugalo would love to be when they grow up. This was pure psychological manipulation of the worst kind, and has had terrible real world results.

Of course no one wants to think about that because a lot of the same people who immerse themselves in Conspiratainment want to play their ultra-violent video games and watch their torture porn. And their Batman movies.

They want to be unaccountable, in other words.

So Jones' kneejerk theories-- backed up by nothing but folklore and a few random Tweets-- lets them off the hook. They're not contributing to a culture of cruelty and dehumanization themselves, it's some phantom G-men who themselves are never caught and held accountable because they usually don't exist.

Face the facts- a gun-soaked culture serves the powers that be, which is why America works so hard to export it. Even the Obama Administration.


UPDATE: Video has emerged of Holmes from a science fair. Given that his obsessions dovetailed eerily with the plot of Inception, it's very much worth a look. Click here.

UPDATE: There is a much larger conspiracy at work in this case. It's one I've been aware of for several years now and has potentially devastating effects for all of us. It's one that the Alex Joneses of the world will never talk about, either. Click here.

UPDATE: Theorize first, ask questions later. Or never. The forum members of Alex Jones' Prison Planet decided the Amy Bishop shooting was a false flag event too.

UPDATE: Many of the same mind control claims made about James Holmes were also made about Amy Bishop, though we soon learned she was a lifelong psychopath. I haven't seen any retraction of those obviously false claims.

Fool Me Twice (UPDATED)

I guess if you live long enough you see reruns of everything. And these days that's not much of a feat, since the nostalgia cycles have gotten shorter and shorter. This summer is giving me major 2008 flashbacks- the Olympics, the Elections and new Dark Knight film, all loaded not so much with bad mojo, but with bummer mojo.

This blog has changed a lot since 2008 and it's changed because I chose to follow my research where it led me, not the other way around. I really don't care much what "they" are doing anymore because I really don't believe in the Christian Fundamentalist myth of a worldwide occult elite that so many non-fundamentalists seem to have internalized in place of the authoritarian deity they no longer really believe in.

That's not to say I don't see the elites as black magicians, but they're black magicians of a more mundane type, steeped in the grimoires of Bernays, Strauss, Rhodes and Hegel, using the occult tools of currency and market manipulation, media mindfucking, brute force, and when all else fails, fundamentalist religion.

I'm actually more of a "conspiracy theorist" than ever before, but not the hyperventilating/hysteric/working-on-my-first-coronary-event Alex Jones type of theorist, but more along the lines of a prosecuting attorney, who in the real world files charges of conspiracy every day. To me, there's nothing arcane or magical about conspiracy, it's just plain old corruption. And then I start to wonder if all of the nonsense with the occultism is Barnumism, meaning it's all part of the shill.

It goes something like this: lift someone's wallet and you're just a common creep. Rattle some chicken bones and scatter some boneyard dust while you're at it and you're a juju man, a dark mystery to be solved.

Stage magicians- simple deceivers- are really nothing but experts at the arts of distraction. If those no-hopers- with their bad comb-overs and stained teeth- can figure it out, who's to say an army of MBAs and corporate lawyers can't adapt those same principles to their own Vaudeville acts?


I must say it's gratifying to finally hear people acknowledge that yes, we do have elites and yes, these elites serve their own interests first. It seems that four years ago people would look at you like you just farted if you pointed out that there was a permanent ruling class. But this has all happened despite the fearporn pimps, not because of them.

In other words, all of this "Illuminati" bedwetting didn't diminish the esteem of the ruling class, it burnished it by painting them as invincible wizards and not simply corruptible workaholics.

All of that is why I'm more than a bit hesitant to spend any time trying to "decode" the Dark Knight, the Election or the Olympics this time around. I've no doubt there are all kinds of sulfurous easter eggs to be found, but are they worth sticking my head in someone else's psychopathy to find them? Because at the end of the day, all of the crap you see planted out there, all of the so-called "Illuminati "(sic) symbolism is nothing but a waste of your time.

Maybe some of the phony conspiracy sites out there--which are bankrolled to the hilt by the same exact people they pretend to "expose"-- gave the game away, or maybe people caught on to the fact that this shit is a distraction, that it never gets you anywhere.

Because it's all designed to steal your attention. It's like any provocation; the point is to focus your attention on the provocateur, who underneath whatever ideological drivel they paint over it all, are just exhibitionists and narcissists, using other human beings as mirrors.

From what I've seen and read about the Dark Knight, it seems as if the fascism has been cranked up to 11 and shoved in your face in three dimensions, but we're all so hungry for spectacle that even the most cloying liberals are giving it a pass. I wonder if it will be the same as the first two; hypnotizing spectacles that fade from memory like the DTs.

It's gotten so extreme that fanboys are actually sending death-threats to critics who aren't fawning over the movie, which is especially disturbing to me since I'm convinced that these same fanboys probably won't be able to tell you a single plot point in the film come Halloween.


We're also having an (alleged) Election here in the US, which is starting to feel less like a 2008 rerun and more like a remake of the 2004 Election, with Mitt Romney in the John Kerry out-of-touch zillionaire patsy role. It seems less like a race than one of those dance marathons from the previous Depression, where entrants danced 'til they dropped. No one is excited about these two shills, no one believes either can undo the damage the aforementioned elite ruling classes have done to the economy.

Then there's the Olympics, which I can't quite put my finger on. It's almost like there was some strange agenda planned but it's all gone pear-shaped. Again, there's that weird belief/wish that "They" are infallible (ever notice how only evil is infallible to some people?), but something seems off. Like something is going very wrong.

The fact that England is getting hammered by torrential rains may have a lot to do with it (I'm sure London is lovely, but it never seemed a good fit for the Olympics for this very reason), but there's something else going on that seems a bit on the infallible side as well. I know I'll get my Super Illuminati-Fighter secret decoder ring repossessed for saying so, but right now I don't see anything happening in London but dreary, obsolete sporting events and sogginess.

But at the same time, I must say that I've always had my own agenda when looking at these events, one that's usually a lot different than the paranoia pimps. But at the same time even that got to the point where I felt like an accomplice, like I was dragooned into some secret crowdsourcing ritual. And that's pretty much why The Secret Sun 2012 is a lot different than The Secret Sun 2008.

But the good news is that there are a lot more of you reading now than then, so I'm obviously not alone.

Bateman, The Dark Knight.

UPDATE: From death threats to mass murder. I had a bad feeling - Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight workings have unleashed a host of bummer vibes, increasingly becoming more fascist, brutal and dehumanizing. Even the mainstream media was starting to notice it. The problem with those kind of signals broadcast over so many wavebands is that once in a while they reach the wrong target...

We've been talking a lot about this on the group recently (the films are semi-officially known as the "Dark Knight Workings" in Sunese) but everyone was shocked by the shootings in Aurora, CO, apparently by a nutcase dressed as Bane. As per usual there will be the usual baseless theorizing, because we live in a culture where absolutely no one can ever -must never- be held accountable for their own actions anymore (I wish I could convey how deeply that infuriates me).

But by the same token, Nolan has been playing with fire for some time now. His films--not just his Batman films-- are slick, decadent celebrations of dehumanization, sadomasochism and totalitarian control. This week started with death threats on his behalf and now this. Maybe some other factors will be at play- undoubtedly they will.

In the meantime, read this piece from 2009, where I talked about the strange, hypnotic spell Nolan conjured with The Dark Knight, and how the audience's reaction was remarkably like a post-hypnotic trance (the aforementioned "media mindfucking"). Interesting given his breakthrough film was about a guy who can't form memories....

UPDATE: I posted James Howard Kunstler's review of The Dark Knight on The Solar Satellite. Excerpt:

The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.

Please Stand By

The Secret Sun's been on summer hours while I try to keep a roof over my head. I've been working morning, noon and night but soaking in all kinds of information while I do so, thanks to the modern miracles of podcasts and YouTube.

Summer also seems to be the time of year when I cast my neural net as far as it can go, and this year's no exception.

I've been mulling over a big pile of contradictions, looking for the common denominators. I've been taking UFOs more seriously at a time when growing numbers of people are not, precisely because I've dispensed with the extraterrestrial hypothesis entirely (so to speak, you always want to keep that trapdoor open). As someone a lot smarter than me once said: "We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us."

It's exactly that symbiotic relationship that seems to me to be the common denominator. And then there is also the question of light- starlight, particularly- and why that was such a all-consuming fixation to so many ancient peoples. How this might tie into the endlessly deceptive goings-on at CERN and Fermi has been bouncing around my brain as well.

When I can, I've been reading thought criminals like Vallee, Keel, Hansen, and now Andrew Collins' new book. It's gotten me to go back and look at UFO videos I once dismissed out of hand with new eyes. Paradigm shifts tend to give you those.

This all really started-- even before I wrote Our Gods Wear Spandex-- as a conundrum; what did all of these ancient secret societies really believe? It certainly got lost somewhere down the line (though recent advances in physics may well have put their descendants back on the scent) but somehow it was connected to the OOPARTS and the megaliths (geology itself seems to be of central importance in all of this) and the rest of it.

hint, hint, hint

I won't give too much away but the work done with the shafts and the stellar alignments in the Great Pyramid was the first and final key to this mystery, I just didn't realize it until I had the other pieces of the puzzle in hand.

I could write some insubstantial posts to keep the counts up but I hope most of you are least looking at the Facebook group. I've been using it as a microblog, dropping in links and minirants during my breaks. As to the next post here- please stand by. I hope to have it up this week, but it's still a work in progress. I want to make sure it crushes skulls before it goes up.

Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins: On the Lam

Click here for Part One and Part Two

Most UFO researchers point to the Barney and Betty Hill event in September of 1961 as the start of the modern "alien abduction" era, the same way that occult researchers point to Aleister Crowley's 1918 Amalantrah Working as the first appearance of a classic (or near-classic) Grey-type in the modern era.

But what if I told you that the two events are connected in a direct and tangible way, as well as through some stunning semiotics? And what if I told you that Jack Kirby was picking up on all of this on whatever alien frequency he spent his life tuned into?

First, let's cover the basic facts....

From Lee Spiegel's Huffpost column we read "Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction Story Commemorated On Official N.H. Highway Plaque":

Late at night on Sept. 19, 1961, they were driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, returning from a Canadian vacation to their home in Portsmouth when they spotted an object in the sky with lights, which at first seemed like an airplane. But when the "airplane" began to rapidly descend in their direction, they quickly continued driving south along Route 3.

Just south of the Indian Head resort, the Hills stopped in the middle of the road and said the silent, cigar-shaped craft hovered above their car. Through binoculars, Barney claimed to see several "strangely not human" figures at the object's windows. Fearing they were about to be captured, Barney quickly drove away.

The next thing the Hills remembered was that they were 35 miles farther along on their journey and approximately two hours had passed which they couldn't account for.

This amnesia continued to bother them, leading to physical and mental disorders until finally, three years after the experience, time-regression hypnosis was used to extract the lost information. Under separate hypnotic sessions, the Hills produced details of a reported kidnapping by aliens on board a spacecraft.

Eventually, a well-known psychiatrist and neurologist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, used a technique called regression hypnosis to help unlock the Hills' forgotten memories. Through many separate hypnotic sessions, the Hills recounted a tale of being abducted by alien beings into the UFO and given physical examinations before being returned to their car with their memories erased.

A plague concerning the event at the Indian Head Resort reads as follows:

On September 19, 1961, while driving on US Rt 3 to their home in Portsmouth, NH, the Hills observed a large, silent, hovering disk-shaped object. The Indian Head resort is the last property they remembered prior to becoming aware that they were 35 miles south of Lincoln and of a two-hour period of "missing time." ... Their claim generated much interest in the scientific community as it was supported by collaborating evidence. The Hills' experience has become a vital part in the public's consciousness regarding the UFO phenomenon.

In another Spiegel article, the appearance of the Hills' captors was described:

"As far as appearance, we described them as four-and-a-half to five feet tall, humanoid-like, very large eyes that slanted upward, very flat nose, just a thin slit for a mouth, a grayish complexion, and that they were all dressed alike. I don't think I was really prepared for their appearance -- I was terrified," Betty recalled.

Based on the descriptions from the hypnotic sessions and a sketch provided by Barney an artist named David Baker created a sketch and explained his understanding of the creatures and noted large, slanted eyes, oversized heads, weak, pointed chins, immobility of facial expressions, lack of hair and ears and an inability to distinguish male from female.


In other words, the classic Grey prototype, which has been reported for several thousand years. Echoes of the Greys have appeared in art and pop culture over the past hundred years or so, but they've been largely absent since ancient times. It was with the Betty and Barney Hill episode that the archetype burst back into the collective consciousness in a major way.

Of course, they did so with Aleister Crowley's Lam contact in a minor way 43 years earlier. And as we'll see in future installments Jack Kirby seemed rather obsessed with the archetype in the 50s as did Outer Limits mask maker Wah Chang in the early 60s.

Skeptics seized on the Grey archetypes on that landmark show to discredit Barney Hill's testimony, only because they were too lazy and smug to research how far back in history that Greys have been reported and depicted in art. They're not quite so smug now.

Here were see Baker's depiction of the Hills' captors and Crowley's sketch of Lam. Neither are as evolved as the Greys we see on the cover of Communion, for instance, but the basic architecture is the same. It's also roughly the same as the captive-taking Talosians from "The Cage" and any number of aliens in the more credible sci-fi of the 50s and 60s.

So we know the Hills' basic story- what about Crowley's? From Ian Blake's story on the Amalantrah Working from the late, lamented Excluded Middle:

At the outbreak of WWI, Crowley set sail from his native England aboard the Lusitania, bound for the USA....he returned to New York and moved into furnished rooms on Central Park West. Roddie Minor, a married woman living apart from her husband, joined him there circa September/ October 1917 and together they set about exploring the wilder shores of magica sexualis.
Under the influence of hashish and opium, (Minor) described to Crowley a series of archetypal visions involving (among others) a king, a small boy and a wizard who introduced himself as "Amalantrah"--who delivered exhortations to "find the egg."...the details are unclear, but it seems that some stage during the proceedings he underwent a form of contactee experience involving a large-headed entity now known to occultists as Lam.

The egg has since been interpreted by some observers as a UFO, which makes sense given the fact that Lam looks like a Grey. Though this working has become legendary in recent years, I can't find any evidence that any record of it was widely published until Kenneth Grant's The Magical Revival in 1972, and I don't believe the portrait of Lam was republished until several years after that.
In other words, there's not much chance that Crowley's drawing had much of an effect on the culture at large, and certainly no evidence the Hills ever saw it.
Grant then devised his own Lam liturgy called The Lam Statement, which seemed for all intents and purposes to be a contactee ritual in the tradition of the Mithraic Liturgy. Note also the banishing ritual, an occult tradition in which the entities summoned are believed to be sent back to their native realms:

The Mode of Entering the Egg may proceed as follows. Each votary is encouraged to experiment and evolve his own method from the basic procedure:
1) Sit in silence before the portrait.
2) Invoke mentally my silent repetition the Name.
3) If response is felt to be positive...enter the Egg and merge with That which is within, and look out through the entity's eyes on what appears now to the votary an alien world.
4) Seal the Egg, i.e., close the eyes of Lam and await developments.

Grant also warned his followers to be patient, which might makes sense given the 43 years between the first Lam sighting the Hill case:

It may take years to accumulate significant evidence of contact with Lam, and - if Lam is the Gateway - with Those who lie Beyond. It may be that communion with the dikpala lies through congress with a Priestess chosen by Lam, or with one who possesses certain characteristics peculiar to this office, in which case new procedures will have to be devised.

OK, you might be saying-- your typical Thelemite occultism. Nothing new there. What does it have to do with Betty and Barney Hill?

Left: Kirby's Dr. Droom Right: The Great Beast 666

Well, two summers before he undertook the Amalantrah Working, Aleister Crowley was living-- and performing rituals and encountering weird phenomena-- in New Hampshire:

In 1916, while living near Bristol, New Hampshire, Crowley promoted himself to the rank of Magus through a ceremony of his own devising. According to Richard Cavendish, in History of Magic and The Powers of Evil in Western Religion, Magic, and Folk Belief (both currently out of print), this involved baptizing a toad as Jesus of Nazareth, then crucifying it.

Though OTO purists protest Cavendish's claims as to Crowley's ritual activities, one thing is for certain; Crowley wrote a letter to The New York Times (of all places) complaining of a strange visitation in the form of ball lightning:

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I do not know whether globular lightning is a sufficiently
rare phenomenon in this country to merit remark. Yesterday a
globe of fire with an apparent diameter of about a foot burst on
the floor of the middle room of a cottage here and within a few
inches of my right foot. Curiously enough, no damage of any
kind was done.

ALEISTER CROWLEY.
New Bristol, N.H.,
July 13, 1916

Crowley wasn't there alone; he was the guest of a famous astrologer. One who traced her lineage back to two presidents born in my old neck of the woods:

Between 1913 and 1918, Evangeline Adams owned the Jonathan K. Pike House, which was built around 1803 as a parsonage for the village church next door. This is the cottage where Crowley stayed during the summer of 1916. Although Crowley refers to the dwelling as “a cottage on the shores of Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire” (Confessions, p. 806), it really isn’t on the shore. Indeed, Crowley clarifies this fact a few pages later in his Confessions when he writes that the distance between the cottage and “the water's edge…was barely a hundred and fifty yards in all” (p. 812).

Adams was an occultist whose fame overshadowed that of Crowley's, in America, at least:

Related to two United States presidents, Evangeline Adams capitalised on an upscale image to serve such clients as J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, Tallulah Bankhead and Joseph Campbell.

In 1914, Adams was tried for fortune telling in New York, but was acquitted of all wrong-doing. (Adams) utilised the cycle of Uranus in the US chart and said "the signs point to a war .... for religious, racial and political reasons, in 1942, 1943 and 1944". (She) also warned of impending financial difficulties: "In 1928 and 1929... it behooves everyone to be extremely cautious in investment and money matters, and be prepared for this threatening configuration of planets".

Adams worked on a book with Aleister Crowley in the teens; gossip has it that they were also personally involved. After they separated, however, Crowley published an attack of Evangeline's astrological skills and business methods, calling her "a grey-haired old woman of exceedingly shrewd expression".

While summering with Adams, Crowley wrote an occult detective story called "The Pasquaney Puzzle" with a subtle abduction subplot.

And as you can see from the map, Crowley was less than an hour's drive from where the Hills reported to have been abducted by beings almost identical to the creatures Crowley would claim contact with in New York in just over a year and a half.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the highway that links Crowley's stomping grounds with the Hills' abduction spot is Interstate 93: 93 being the holiest of holies in Thelemite gematria:

The number 93 is of great significance in Thelema, a religious philosophy founded by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley in 1904 with the writing of The Book of the Law (also known as Liber AL vel Legis)

The central philosophy of Thelema is in two phrases from Liber AL: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" and "Love is the law, love under will." The two primary terms in these statements are "Will" and "Love", respectively. In the Greek language, they are Thelema (Will) and Agape (Love). Using the Greek technique of isopsephy, which applies a numerical value to each letter, the letters of both of these words when added together equal 93.

Boy, the Collins Elite would love all of this, eh?

It gets better- the accounts have it that the Hills claimed

The next thing the Hills recalled was being frightened by the unusual flying object, and the occupants inside of it. Barney scurried back to the car where Betty was waiting. They jumped into the car, and raced down the highway. Looking for the object, they found that it was now gone. As they drove on, they began to hear a beeping sound... once, then again. Although they had been driving only a couple of minutes, they were 35 miles down the road!

35 miles down the road would have ensured that the Hills would have woken up in the very same town in which Crowley was actually living- it was Hebron, not Bristol.

Adams’s cottage was located in the village of Hebron, NH, ten miles north of Bristol. According to Musgrove, “Hebron village is situated very pleasantly on a plain near the northwest shore of the lake. It contains a church, town hall, schoolhouse, a store, and several dwellings”




Of course, Interstate 93 was Route 3 back when the Hills were driving it, and who knows what when Crowley was there. But it gets better-- the next town over from Bristol? Hill.

Note also that the exit which the the Hills would have taken off of Route Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law is Exit 33, just to add the cherry on top.

If Crowley had intended this as a working, he couldn't have possibly arranged it more brilliantly. Why? Well, shortly before decamping to Bristol/Hebron he took over the Ordo Templi Orientis, the occult order whose highest degree is the 11th. Hill, NH is bordered on the south by Route 11.

But Crowley didn't seem to have intended this as a working, otherwise we'd never hear the end of it. And the Amalantrah Working itself never seemed to rate on his personal best list. It's only since the Hill abduction drama and the rise of alien abductions that the Working became an internet meme.

Kirby's Black Magic comics and Crowley's Moonchild share a shot in 

Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother

But the links here are tantalizing: even though I'd argue that Crowley's role in the UFO era has been greatly overblown (it was well underway before the Amalantrah Working and all sorts of people were claiming contact), the connections between Lam and the Hills' captors are undeniable.

The fact that Crowley was literally right down the road from the later Hill drama not long before his alleged contact certainly adds new pieces to the puzzle, if nothing else.

But I'll see your Great Beast and raise you a King...

Amazing Adventures #4 is cover-dated September 1961, the same month that the Hills claimed to have experienced their abduction.

This magazine wasn't actually released in September- comics are dated three months in advance for some crazy reason. Jack Kirby actually published not one but friggin' two stories dealing with alien abductions in September (cover-dated Dec. 1961), but for our purposes, let's deal with this issue.

Because-- believe it or not-- it's the hidden glue between Crowley and the Hills.

In "What Lurks Within?," our bald mystic friend Aleister Crowley Doctor Droom (who we met in the first installment of this series) is called to a rural community because a UFO has landed in the middle of a field. The colorist seems to have thought the spaceship looked like a jack o'lantern, but it's not totally unlike an egg-shape either, is it?

And then something rather remarkable happens: rather than cast spells or shoot rayguns at the aliens, Doctor Droom goes into a mystical trance and communicates with the aliens through telepathic means. Yes, just like Crowley and the Amalantrah Working.

Cover-dated the same month as the Hill abduction.

And here we see Droom's own kind of banishing ritual, complete with knocks provided from a derrick, or on loan from the Babalon Working, depending on your point of view. And damn, if that UFO still doesn't not look like an egg, an egg with teeth.

And now we're back where we started- with the Doctors. I'm starting to wonder if a certain British cousin wasn't in fact inspired by all of these American magi, which given the timeline might not be as far a stretch as it seems. As given recent episodes of Doctor Who, I get the very strong feeling the writers of that series most definitely read this blog. Well, I'll try to give them some new ideas to work from in the next installment...

TO BE CONTINUED

From Sidon to Cydonia: David Flynn on Mars

Once upon a time, "occult" didn't mean sorcery or black magic, it referred to a corpus of ancient hidden knowledge whose meaning had been lost to the sands of time. It embodied alchemy, astrology, gematria, numerology and other symbolic sciences.

Rome's one world religion suppressed this knowledge after a bloody series of purges, massacres and book burnings in late antiquity and passed edicts forbidding its study, which lent it the forbidden mystique it still enjoys today.

Today, "occult" is a misnomer. There's no such thing. There is no body of hidden knowledge mouldering away in some basement. What there is is a race of amnesiacs, of bloated narcissists mindlessly thumbing away at their touchscreens. What's hidden is the ability to understand anything but the basest impulses, which is why the work of a David Flynn is needed more than ever today.

I began following David Flynn's work so many years ago I can't remember exactly when anymore. I didn't always agree with his interpretations, but I was always dazzled by his intellect.

In fact, it was Flynn who first got me started doing this kind of work in public (I spent years doing it privately and through email) when I got so frustrated by waiting for him to update his Having Mulder's Baby website that I decided to do it for him. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Flynn was taken from us at the beginning of the year that informed so much of his work. That's life in this Archonic Hell, but in the meantime I hope you'll enjoy this vintage vid, Flynn's first public appearance. It's a tour de force, and I'm sure you'll be struck by his modesty, scholarship and honesty. This stuff troubled him- it challenged his Evangelical worldview and he wasn't afraid to admit that.

The man is gone too soon but the work remains. Dig into this one of a kind body of work-- it will give your own study and research a boost, believe me.

Alex Jones, Prometheus and the Death of Sci-Fi

SPOILER ALERT

Superheroes have taken pole position in the tentpole box office derby, in front of the sci-fi blockbuster. Even an ostensible sci-fi film like Avatar was actually a classic superhero origin narrative. I bet that John Carter would have been a success had it been marketed as a superhero story (which in fact it is) than a sci-fi extravaganza, which modern audiences are a bit weary of.

I saw Prometheus and it was exactly what I knew it was going to be all along- a slick, well-made, and utterly emotionally-empty experience. It was a dazzling display of the latest technology that left me as soon as I took off my 3D glasses. It was rife with X-Files lifts, not surprising given its cowriter. All of the characters were unlikable, with the female lead being only somewhat less unlikable than all of the others.

The mission ends in tears, as all such incursions into the halls of Olympus must. The ultimate message of the film- which I'll get to at the end of this piece- is in fact the ultimate letdown, though it might have escaped most people's notice.

The takeaway of the film is the disappointment and the inevitable backlash it inspired. The film was a hit, but nowhere near the mega-hit you'd expect given the avalanche of hype that preceded it. The danger in the kind of massive pre-release pimping we see these days is that you'd better deliver. If people are left anything less than breathless, you're dead in the water. Read this:

20th Century Fox's "Prometheus" earned $51 million over the weekend with the help of a social media campaign that featured content not appearing in the film -- but the online chatter took a turn for the worse once people actually got a chance to see the movie. Facebook users largely called the movie a disappointment, raising concerns that early social buzz might have created unrealistic expectations for the movie. "You can't build the hype too much. Some fans were so excited about 'Prometheus' that nothing could live up to the movie they already directed in their heads," said Phil Contrino of BoxOffice.com.

The fact that the film has been attacked from every piss-stop on the modern ideological superhighway proves that the reaction to the film is a symptom of a kind of existential malaise, once that can be laid at the doorstop of the movie moguls themselves.



PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CAMERA

Hollywood destroyed the magic of movies by making us all a bunch of mini-moguls. We know now how all the illusion is created before the film is ever released so we unconsciously search for the seams. We go online and check the weekend grosses and determine the value of a film, a near-Kabbalist ritual once the exclusive province of agents, producers and studio heads.

With comedies and romances and kid movies, it doesn't really matter. But with science fiction movies-- the most vulnerable to the laser-beam focus of the overeducated movie-goer-- it makes all the difference in the world. We've lost our innocence and even the most impressive films never leap from the screen and into our lives, like they did in the pre-Internet, pre-hype overload days.

Sci-Fi faces an uphill struggle anyway- its books are hard to write, its films are hard to make and no one believes in Tomorrowland anymore.

Sci-Fi fandom is atomizing into sects, driven by identity politics and scientistic fundamentalism. A lot of the more prominent SF writers escaped into the more forgiving precincts of Fantasy, while are others are toiling away doing movie adaptions or writing for video games. TV sci-fi is a mess, a cultish world of silly X-Files and Lost ripoffs with little or no cultural cache left in the chamber.

Of course, Ridley Scott had the temerity to remind moviegoers that the Alien franchise- like almost every single major sci-fi franchise on Earth-- is based in Ancient Astronaut Theory. This isn't news of course, it was established a couple sequels ago. But you're not supposed to say such things out loud anymore.

"Skeptics" pretend to dismiss AAT but in fact they are terrified of it (and don't believe any different). It's been almost 50 years since it first raised its head in the popular consciousness with Morning of the Magicians, and skeptics are still struggling to explain away all of the growing gaps in the Victorian-era theories of evolution and archaeology they vociferously defend on YouTube but never actually study.

And since being a "Skeptic" is a popular as super-sizing and exercise avoidance with Millennial geeks, reminding them that everything they love is AAT propaganda was not going to go over well.



A MAN CALLED JONES

Scott's little faux pas might have fed into the backlash, but I think the uninspiring script he was saddled with deserves the lion's share of the blame. But born-again Bill Cooper imitator Alex Jones did his best to ignite a preemptory backlash against the film, though I'm not sure he was quite certain why he wanted to do so.

Maybe he wasn't certain if he wanted to do so, or was simply trying to bolster his declining audience by hitching his wagon to a well-publicized Hollywood horse. Given Jones' unfortunate reversion to revival-tent hyperventilating in the past year or so, there are only two possible conclusions we can draw from his Prometheus rant; he either didn't actually read the script as he claimed or he's pimping some other agenda we can only guess at.

Jones thoughtlessly assigns "occult" motivations to the scientific overclass, who have been downright Maoist in their drive to annihilate any thought contagion outside of their rationalist/reductionalist orthodoxy, and have been using fronts like CSICOP (with its links to the international pedophile underground) and the JREF (whose co-founder was recently convicted of fraud in Federal court) to stamp out any traces of occultism since the early 70s.

Jones also dredges up old USENET chestnuts like "Revelation of the Method", an imaginary doctrine invented out of whole cloth by a neo-Nazi of distinctly contemporary vintage, "Illuminati mystery religion", (a ridiculous misnomer given the only significant group we can confidently identify as having called itself the Illuminati professed rationalism) and "Externalization of the Hierarchy", a scare-term from the 70s-vintage conspiracy-theory catalog inspired by the toothless Lucis Trust.

I can't help but wonder who is really pulling Jones' strings these days, because at the same time he's fulminating against that all-powerful, sexy, sorcerous, quite-enviable Illuminati (who has nothing in common with the miserable, workaholic materialists pulling the Globalist stops) he's pimping pure, unalloyed Ancient Astronaut Theory, making special care to let his Fundamentalist Christian fanbase know the Bible itself is ripe to bursting with ancient astronauts (which, of course, it is).

Jones also fails to dismiss or debunk AAT, a major no-no with his predominantly religious following.

He then goes on to let his followers know that those rich, powerful geniuses from the glory days of the British Empire bought into AAT whole cloth, a dubious claim if ever there was one. If this isn't a classic case of reverse psychology, it sure looks like one.

Do androids crap their electric pants?

UNFORTUNATELY...

However, the problem is that this movie is typical anti-elitist, anti-scientist Hollywood popcorn fodder, just like previous blockbusters such as Avatar, Scott's Blade Runner, and the Jurassic Park films. The message is that man's attempt to play God will always end in ruin.

The "Illuminati" is embodied here in the person of Peter Weyland and David, his android son (why Weyland would use a middle-aged man as the model for an android rather than a 20 year-old is a mystery to me). Of course, they are instantly and unceremoniously dispensed with once they meet the sole surviving Engineer, their reward for spending all their time and treasure in search of their alien makers.

The sole survivor of the mission is the good Christian girl, who's next order of business is zoom to the Engineers' homeworld and kick some ancient astronaut ass.

So Jones's so-called "Illuminati" are shown to be fools and dupes, whose goal to equate themselves with the gods is that oldest of sins, hubris. And just as you see in the old Greek tragedies, nothing is more offensive to the gods than hubris. David deigns to speak the language of the gods and has his head ripped off as punishment for his presumptuousness (something many Frenchmen dream of when confronted with American tourists, surely).

Weyland-- who Jones features so prominently-- dies in utter despair. His biological daughter, Meredith Vickers, is crushed under the crashing Engineer spaceship. It's the working class heroes-- one black, one Asian, one played by an actor of Middle Eastern descent-- who destroy the Engineer's ship.

An interesting bit of symbolism, given that the Engineer's are white as ivory.

So everything that Jones is claiming about the film's message is totally debunked; not by me, not by a skeptic or atheist, but by the actual movie itself.

HIGH TECH EXORCISM

The other religious objection to Prometheus is the scene in which Elizabeth performs a caesarean section on herself to extract a xenomorph that her infected boyfriend had impregnated her with. That scene went viral with this news story:

A man named Jorge who attended a recent showing of Prometheus got a politically charged spoiler alert from the employee who was tearing his tickets. "I have to warn you," Jorge recalls the employee telling him and his guest. "Halfway through the movie, the main female character will perform a self-induced abortion."

This happened at Regal Cinemas Thornton Place Stadium 14 in Seattle. "I asked some other people entering the same auditorium if the same guy had warned them about the contents of the movie, and they said he did," says Jorge, who asked that we not use his last name.

Of course, what we are really seeing in the film is not an abortion- the xenomorph was viable and grew to monstrous proportions later in the film-- but a high-tech exorcism.

Elizabeth's boyfriend was possessed with the demon seed which he implanted in her womb. She cast the demon out, and enjoyed a remarkably quick recovery-- but the demon then remained to haunt the "house" (Vicker's sumptuous private pod) of the film.

FINALLY...

What needs to be said about the film is that what's being put onscreen isn't Ancient Astronaut Theory per se, but simply directed panspermia, a considerably more respectable theory.

This distinction goes a long way in explaining why the Engineers want to destroy humanity- they want the planet for themselves. That's the message of the film being told onscreen, despite whatever other interpretations you want to draw from the film.

They seeded it with life for their own purposes and the rise of the human race was probably an unfortunate development in the terraforming process. We are basically the Asian carp in their Mississippi River and the xenomorphs are a kind of antibiotic for the infestation.

I know that interpretation doesn't really lend itself to late night contemplation, but I have to credit Lloyd Pye with putting the idea in my head- and quite possibly the makers of Prometheus' heads- in the first place.