Alien: Covenant and the Cargo Cult, Concluded

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

Let's get this out of the way first - SPOILERS! 

Then this: Alien: Covenant is not a very good movie. It's not offensively terrible, in fact it goes out of its way to be as inoffensive as possible. Even the gore seems polite. 

Alien: Covenant and the Cargo Cult on Rune Soup

On the latest Rune Soup podcast, Gordon and I discuss the disappointment that is Alien: Covenant. Then we speculate about its place in the cargo cult worldview and the conditioning agenda prescribed in 1960 by the Brookings Institution. I've been working on a companion post for this discussion, which I hope to have up by tomorrow night at the latest.

Alien: Covenant and the Hollywood Cargo Cult, Pt. 1

Sir Ridley Scott's long-awaited prequel to Prometheus opened this week in certain countries and is set to open in America next week. For those waiting for a continuation of the storyline from the last movie- when crew member Elizabeth Shaw and the head of android David taking off to invade the Engineer homeworld- well, I hate to say it but you're out of luck.

Love Me Like a Reptile: Kyle Odom vs. the Sex-Crazed Martians

This story made the news on March 9th:

Idaho pastor shooting suspect arrested, expresses 'space alien' concerns 

An ex-Marine accused of shooting a prominent Idaho minister outside his church was arrested after he threw objects over the fence of the White House. police said. The U.S. Secret Service confirmed Kyle Andrew Odom's arrest to NBC News late Tuesday night. 

 

Enki's Playground: The Domed City of Dubai

The city-state of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, is one of the great puzzles of our time. Why did a sprawling metropolis that looks like like it stepped out of a Star Wars movie spring out of an obscure strip of sand in the Persian Gulf, practically overnight? Given that Dubai itself has little in the way of oil wealth, who paid for it all?

The Secret Sun Year in Review: 2014 Edition

I started blogging again after a ten-month break with the piece "These are Gnostic Times." This was a confession as much as an article, and I do try to make everything I post here read as much like a proper article as much as possible.

HP Lovecraft's Strange Travels

I've been thinking about the Lovecraft issue, and the curious simultaneity of Lovecraft and Bailey's parallel update on forty year-old Theosophical doctrine, which is especially strange at a time when the Theosophists themselves were locking crazy old Grandma Blavatsky up in the attic in order not to scare the rubes away from their chosen one, Krishamurti.

Secret Star Trek: Levels Above Human

PART ONE / PART TWO / PART THREE 

PART FOUR / PART FIVE / PART SIX 

PART SEVEN / PART EIGHT

If Star Trek is indeed inextricably linked to the human potential movement and a bizarre flying saucer cult, why is that so? What is the purpose of programming these strange themes into what is one of the most successful sci-fi franchises of our time?

Secret Star Trek: The Godfather

The connections between the secretive flying saucer/channeling cult known variously as The Council of Nine, Lab-9 or simply The Nine with both Star Trek and the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California have been known for many years. 

Secret Star Trek: Meet Your New Gods

Just as we learned that something very much like the Council of Nine predates Andrija Puharich's contact with them, so may the presence of the Nine inside Trek prefigure Gene Roddenberry's involvement with Lab-9 in 1975. 

Secret Star Trek: The Unknown Nine

In part one of this series, we looked at a strange clue embedded in the now-obligatory ancient astronaut/cargo cult sequence in Star Trek into Darkness, a clue that led back to one of the lesser entries in the franchise's nearly 50 year history, that being the ninth feature film. 

That film takes place on a planet nearly identical to the legendary New Age resort in California, Esalen. 

Secret Star Trek: California Dreaming

You've probably heard (or seen) that the teaser for the new Dawson's Trek movie has James van der Kirk trying to save the primitive people of "Nibiru," whose planet is about to be destroyed by a supervolcano.

Unified Weird Theory: An Introduction

Hey, you wanted weird...

Food preparation is both an art and a science. It's a science because it's about taking certain elements (ingredients) and subjecting them to various processes of measurement and mixing and exposing these to carefully determined levels of heat (sometimes cold) at determined intervals in order to achieve a desired outcome. 

The 2013 Ausurs®: Better Late than Never

Back in 2007 I started blogging about Jack Kirby in the context of synchro/datamysticism, and looking at the almost-unfathomable numinous power his work contained. 

The first series I did here looked at his 1983 miniseries Silver Star and its obvious influence on the then-popular/now-forgotten TV show Heroes.

Memento Mori: Filip Coppens

 Sadly, the Archons claim another bright spark...

Filip Coppens passed away in Los Angeles after fighting a rare form of cancer that was only merciful in that it did not prolong his suffering for too long. Some of you may now Filip from his appearances on Ancient Aliens but his work goes much deeper than that extremely reductionist presentation of AAT. 

Prometheus: "A Half-Billion Miles from Earth..."

In 1960, the powerful Washington think tank The Brookings Institute released a white paper which included a section on UFOs and ETs, outlining a number of various scenarios for poltical and military leaders should contact ever occur. 

Brookings was pessimistic about such an event, noting that societies don't tend to react favorably when confronted with a superior technological advancement. 

Mindbomb: John Carter, PKD and "The Face on Mars"

A lot of people know about Jack Kirby's 1958 "Face on Mars" story by now, but fewer have read it. And that's a shame, it's a fascinating story.

Prometheus and the Death of Science Fiction

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. 

John Cusack, Superstar: 2012 & the Age of Horus

To recap: John Cusack and his Martian Child co-star Amanda Peet are the leads in Roland Emmerich's latest genocide-fest, 2012. The date most famously comes to us from the Mayan calendar, which is especially fascinating to Graham Hancock as well as people involved in AAT research.

It's Not What You or I Believe, It's What They Believe

I've been rather busy this week trying to stay out of the poorhouse, but I've had two main themes that I've been mulling over, both of which stemmed from my reading.

I felt compelled to re-read the chapter on Jacques Vallee in Jeff Kripal's must-have Authors of the Impossible. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but there was something I had unconsciously remembered from my previous reading (which was a while back now) that I felt needed to be explored. The quote itself?