Cue the Eighties Soundtrack.

Is the endless Seventies tapeloop finally over? Are we reliving the early Eighties again now? Was Stranger Things somehow a harbinger of the changeover of the selections in the Replay Machine?

Comics Are Magic: Intruders in the Skies

As you get older, it's all too easy to get lost in routine, to anesthetize yourself with ritual and television. It's why creative work is so often the province of the young. 

Psychic Survival Strategies on Aeon Byte

This is one of my favorite podcast appearances. Miguel Connor is a great conversationalist with a wide range of interests and we both spent a lot of time preparing for this talk. 

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.  

Did You Hear? UFOlogy is Dying. Again.

New York Magazine spends the slow weeks of midsummer declaring "The End of UFOs!" The title is a major misnomer, as the article in question is actually about the latest death of UFOlogy (or UFOOLogy, as it's alternately known). 

Schizoid Steve Ditko, Maestro of Paranoia

There's a running joke in comics fandom that Rohrshach from Alan Moore's Watchmen is not based on Steve Ditko's Charlton character The Question but on Ditko himself. 

Doctors, Doorways and Dimensions, Part One

One of the main tenets of my research is that our most resonant pop culture is a kind of lucid dreaming, in which the creator acts as a guide for a shared visionary experience with the audience. 99.9% of the crap out there is immune to this process and is produced for reasons that are entirely mundane or cynical. 

Mindbomb: Break on Through to the Inner Side

 From 2001: A Space Odyssey #2

I realized I left this series hanging and didn't adequately wrap it all up. Seeing as how Synchronicity insisted I do so- in its own inimitable way- here's the coup de grace for what was an unexpectedly popular breakthrough series.

Dream Log: Ghosts and Rockets

I wanted to keep the latest installment of Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins above the fold because the feedback it inspired was so fantastic I didn't want to stem the flow, but I needed to write an addenda while the information was still fresh.

Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins

I don't get asked much who my favorite superhero is, but the answer's a no-brainer: it's Doctor Strange. 

Talking with Jesse Moynihan, creator of Forming

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.

Jack Kirby, Mindbomb: Prophecies of a AstroGnostic

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. 

Jack Kirby, Mindbomb: Rocket to the Tombs

We looked at Jack Kirby several times in the past here, most notably in his startlingly accurate yet 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 is Supernature: Jeff Kripal's Impossible World

Jeff Kripal is doing yeoman's work in getting the mystical geek gospel out to the mainstream. 

The Magical Art of Being Alone

This is a great analysis of Hollywood's

creative bankruptcy- go read it after you read this

It's been a difficult year for me in many regards, but at the same time a very magical one. I'm beginning to think that's the way it works. 

Brains, the Final Frontier

I've thought for years that conscious attention is only a tiny fraction of our consciousness. Turns out I may be right. 

Check out this article on the decision making process.

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought. 

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice. "We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. 

"But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Ockham, the Occult and the Ultraterrestrials

Ockham's Razor is one of those famous dictums that people use in arguments and often do so incorrectly. 

Jack Kirby, Stanley Kubrick and the SynchroSpace Odyssey

The first installment of this series dealt with the plasticity of memory, centered on the fact that my most vivid memories from my childhood were either nightmares or hallucinations, many of which had strands of commonality with abduction experiences.

My Favorite Nightmares

Self-portrait, 1985

I came to a stunning realization over the weekend; my most vivid memories are of nightmares that I had as a child. 

thought_experiment_001: the_apple

Back sometime in halcyon days of the 1990s (you know, back when everyone had "jobs" and "money") comics superstar Grant Morrison was staring down the dreaded cancellation barrel on his opus The Invisibles, the comic he claimed Tibetan aliens were channeling through him (more or less).