The Ushers of Shonberg

 If you've ever seen an early Roger Corman Poe film The House of Usher (1961), you've got to remember the wild, tripped out painting of old Usher ancestors. So fucking weird and great you just know that if Poe saw them he'd say "Damn, that's exactly the stuff I imagined Roderick Usher painting in my short story." In those exact words. Then he'd want to buy one, but be broke, so try to steal one while on an absinthe binge. Naturally it would be the one atop. Same one I'd want.

Check out Burt Shonberg's web site and, if you're like me, realize that yes, sometimes it would be great to have a lot of money, because then you'd be able to buy art like this.

The Perseus Mirror-Shield Refaction

Do I believe in God or am I an atheist? Exactly. What about aliens, real or imaginary? Totally, bro.

Well the answer is the same for all these things: look past duality, past the dichotomy of truth and fiction. The either/or is a trap set up by science and religion! Atheists all tend to be rebelling against some anthropomorphic conception of God instilled in them by a parent or Sunday School Teacher. Spiritual types like me rebel against those conceptions too, but we've experienced the pink light euphoria of spiritual awakening, a tapping into universal love and egoless consciousness. If you don't believe in that, you're not an atheist, just jealous. I didn't say ooh god reached out and delivered me, I just said I felt a pink light euphoria. If you got all uppity about needing to deny that experience is something I never even said it was, is that really atheism?

What does it say about atheists that they need to announce to the world they don't believe in God? Why bother? Do I go around announcing to the world know I don't watch football and that anyone who does is an idiot? Well, I do announce that, but only when visiting my family for Thanksgiving. It's tradition!

What does it say about skeptics that they go out of their way to ridicule their fellow man's beliefs or deny his experiences?

Are children really small... or just far away?

What proof, really, aside from a few specimens, do we have that the coelacanth still exists?

Why would I bother to dispute it, now that we found one?

Myth addresses all this. It is a direct tunnel down into our collective unconscious, where logic and linear space-time cease to exist and the cold gorgon truth of life is displayed in the only way we can perceive it, via Perseus mirror refraction of semi-fictionalization, which allows logic and the cold clarity of 'conscience' to let go of the burden of keeping chaos outside the door, and its anxiety falls away like a sawed-off strait-jacket.

For most of us, Americans especially, that's a scary thought. We want to know for sure: real or fake? Dream or 'waking reality'? Truth or illusion, as if the lines between them were fixed and immovable, and by knowing these lines we could know whether or not to be scared 'for real.' But fear dies in certainty; myth allows a freedom from having to 'know', from worrying whether religious, skeptic, or science zealots will shoot us withering glances if we step outside their intolerant dogma.

We who love myth know, however, that something is lost when science explains away the world. Once the monster is dragged into the light, the magic is over. The scientists label and name and relegate what was once a spectacular monster into an "irrawaddy dolphin." Can you imagine seeing this beast pop up around you while fishing in Lake Champlain or Loch Ness? You'd plotz! But if you had a bilogist with you, you wouldn't have time, once he named it - 'irawaddy dolphin' you'd just snap a pic (below) throw it a fish, pet its snout and bid it adieu.

That's why a part of me secretly hopes we never find out the truth about Bigfoot. Imagine the dismal depression if he's caught and is just a big ape and scientists say "aww we knew it all the time, and now we can study, name, capture, torture it with medical experiments, kill it, and then stuff it for the Natural History museum."

And of course, until then, until scientists can dissect his carcass to thus prove he's real, anyone who dares dream Bigfoot exists must be ridiculed!

That's why I really responded to the film THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. It understood myth and how to use it to create a buzz. I knew in advance when I saw it that the 'found videotape' angle was just a hoax, but it was a hoax in service of our being scared and thus it increased enjoyment of the film. Just thinking the 'found tapes' might be real, feeling it in my gut, made the film a dozen times scarier, to the point I designed a whole website around it, Frightened Male Monthly during the week when I was too freaked out to sleep - and this was in midtown Manhattan! I can only imagine living in the woods. The filmmakers enhanced the myth still further in not showing the witch, ever. by If the film ever started explaining things (why is the guy facing the wall?), it would no longer be as scary. So we never see her, it, whatever it she is... and that's why it maintains such power. The film is about how the power of the video camera ultimately cannot protect us, that the image destroys when it captures. But that which is beyond the image, myth, is even stronger than truth and illusion combined.

If you think you know the difference between myth and reality then let me ask you this: which part of your consciousness do you think this with? Can you point to the spot in your brain, and be sure that's where you are? Is there a single point inside your skull where you feel your 'self' looking out from? No, you're operating under an illusory pretense of wholeness. Half your body's functions aren't even in your conscious control (such as pain) and even mental are subject to things like self-sabotage, Freudian slips, and uncontrollable outbursts of temper.

But nonetheless, the 'you' that thinks you know the difference between reality and myth isn't even a reality. The fiction is that there is a single 'you' making decisions. It's what gets you through the day. None of it was invented with you. Your body has this shit down to a science after so many billions of years.

"You" are a higher-level organism on a single spinning rock spinning around a sun that's roaring through space and slowly preparing to freeze to death. You're unable to 'exist' for more than 16 or so hours at a stretch before you fall asleep and 'go' somewhere else. When your eyes are closed, all is dark; when your ears are plugged, all is quiet. Yet neither of these are true. You insist we have to measure the amount of time an alien would need to travel from point (a) to point (b) in the galaxy, and that in doing so we'll have an objective 'real' distance, but this measurement is based on your primitive conception of time/space and the universe, one totally anthropomorphized to fit your limited world view! You presume an alien can only be 'real' if you can sense it with at least three of your five senses, and it must be seen only in your waking life, both eyes open,, but even then you still need it verified by the TV before it's really real, even if you trust the witnesses and see the evidence firsthand.

My great great great great great great great great aunt on trial, Mary Easty of Salem

Most of our ideas about the universe are limited to what we can take in through our five senses. Even if we can 'imagine' and project and dream and analyze, it all must be translated back again to sensory data to form hypotheses about how the world works, which we can then test. This is science. But just as spirituality hardens into religion, which hardens into dogma which hardens into intolerance, and intolerance into persecution of new ideas that challenge hardened dogma, so too theorems and research harden into 'laws' which harden into the 'known,' which harden into intolerance and persecution of ideas that threaten the boundaries of this 'known.'

On the other hand, fiction skates away free from the need for scientific rigor, yet at the same time might contain just as much truth as the initial proposals that resulted in scientific 'fact.'  Nonetheless it remains free to travel far beyond fact, unbound by the dirty, tedious slog that is 'consensus.' If your fiction should 'come true' as it did for Phillip K. Dick, Edgar Caycee and William Gibson, then you are a prophet, if not, a madman; if both, an author.

Thus the motto of this blog, "where science fears to tread, art staggereth."

One of the big things that science doesn't ever fully admit or understand (outside the most radical psycho-pharmacological paradigms) is the way the mind can heal the body - and the way placebos actually work; that sometimes cancer just disappears overnight after the patient has a mystical encounter; or how pregnancies vanish without a trace. There's enough evidence for all of this to make science uncomfortable, so it scoffs, and huddles closer around the lamp of learning.

It's the same with Bigfoot: science doesn't dare condone belief in psychic phenomena, not just because there's no 'concrete' evidence that they can dissect (no body)--that normally wouldn't stop them from at least entertaining the idea--but because aliens and Bigfoot are too associated with crackpots, with myth and tall tales, fish stories. People sneer and ridicule those who believe or have seen something, because if not they, in turn, will be ridiculed. If they're not, and more come to fear and believe, it might make it real, like the placebo.

But part of this 'anti-myth' involves a mistrust of myth as a way to contextualize rather than label. Science seeks to explain where myth seeks to confound. It's no coincidence then that 'reality' never feels as true as myth, and fiction can seem merely trivial unless it incorporates mythic reality.

Beyond being fact or fiction, myth finds larger truths hidden in the unknowable realms of our deepest consciousness which has no clear boundary, no inside/outside. The collective unconscious has no clear barrier between in and out, which is why shamen can enter other people's dreams, and why indigenous tribes are smart enough to pay attention to each others' dreams and recognize signs and omens. When exploring the myths that captivate us, we can find a blueprint all laid out for our future, a guide to growth. When we ignore myth, we stagnate.

Here's one of my gurus, Joseph Campbell:



Whether they exist or not, the aliens smartly keep their existence a secret... sources from the insider table are pretty consistent in their reporting that being in the company of these aliens truly takes its toll on a human being's sanity. Like kids curious about where babies come from, it's okay for us to want to know, but better for our curiosity not to find out, at least not too early. We've been dealt a solid, perhaps, by those humans who 'play parent' and keep it enough of a secret to cast doubt over the alien presence, even while revealing most of the info through disinformation. As long as there's a grain of salt to help it go down, we can swallow just about anything. So it's not like the truth isn't out there, it's just heavily salted.

It's the equivalent of taking a psychedelic drug for the very first time. If you've never done them, you shouldn't chime in on the matter - yet the people who want them illegal generally never have. The terrified ego of the uninitiated 'straight' trembles at the thought of losing control in the land of "acid" - their superego paints the experience in broad comic strokes, to mask the fear. The ego knows it will essentially cease to exist, or at least be seriously undermined, once this process of illumination is undergone. Naturally this spooked ego will do anything it can to stay cohered, from damning the drug outright, to persecuting those who have tried it, the same way science majors sneer at crazy psychics. It is the classifying of drugs like the naturally growing mushroom or hemp plant in the same league as schedule one narcotics like heroin that shows just how close we are to the same mentality that led the Puritans to hang witches. Ridicule, dismissal, contempt prior to investigation, and outright hostility and violence says more about the person condemning than it does about the issue.

To a lesser degree, ridicule achieves this too (the idiot dick who 'fucks with' the mind of a tripper - 'ooooh you high yet, "man", whoa--- you're going through a tunnel," etc. - but the more the uninitiated try to laugh it off, the more a savvy Jungian will know they're afraid of losing what little illusion of control over self already have. Any Coast Guard, SEAL, or rescue diver knows this all too well. The thrashing, panicked downer will often try to drown their rescuer to stay above the waves for one more second, rather than letting go so the rescuer can lift them into the light forever.

For the dry academes who cannot 'let go and be lifted,' there is SETI to dismiss the crop circle as "mere chicanery," wondering why if aliens can beam crop circle patterns from on high they don't just call us on the phone! That "why don't they just land at the White House" rationalization is fine for the doubters, but we who have come to believe the evidence should realize that argument is ridiculous. (The aliens tried to land at the White House once, and we shot at them - see here). It's like saying dreams can't be important since they're hard to remember.

Science must know this pain too because arguers against Darwin cite things like "why haven't giraffes learned to talk by now?" never imagining that language might not be an evolutionary trait, speech the be all and end all, that language might be actually a drawback, a recessive gene, a virus or that evolution takes place over millions of years, not a few hundred months. In reality Giraffes evolve in ways far more relevant for their purposes: you can be damn sure their necks weren't always that long, they got longer and longer as the trees around them grew higher to escape their nibbling, and to get the leaves smaller necks could not reach - that's evolution.

But on its end, science is pretty bad, too, refusing to believe in things beyond what it can measure through its observations and mathematical abstraction, even while conceding their senses are limited, their abstractions based on the faulty limited POV of their perception.

Dogs, for example, have a vastly superior sense of smell to humans. Is the dog just faking to get attention? If we can't sniff out a trail, or measure with any accuracy the millionth part per parsec of smell or whatever then surely the trail doesn't exist! In other words, if we can't see the ghost, it's not there, so there's no such thing and anyone who says otherwise is a fake. Sometimes dogs and cats can see ghosts too. Maybe 99.99% of we humans can't, but we're sure the ghost still doesn't exist, even if the smell-trail does. We have to admit, the dogs found that missing shoe all right.

In order to grasp this fundamental problem, you must have some distance from your ego, via therapy, meditation, a spiritual practice, a heavy drug trip, mental illness, lack of sleep, medication, or just proximity to childhood. In more evolved countries like India this egocidal regiment is more pronounced, but their civilization is vastly older.

Imagine if you encountered reality and dreams at the same time, spilled over onto each other. You never needed to sleep because you were always asleep and always awake at the same time. You would be a schizophrenic, or Jesus, or an alien-human hybrid, or an acidhead. When we say "total consciousness" this is what we mean. People call this 'hallucinating' --but really, isn't the universe as we perceive it one big hallucination? Now that we have a telescope in space we can see more of the universe, but a) 'more' of the universe already existed before we could see it with the telescope and b) our eyes see the stars as little white dots, but that's not how they really look to someone with their eyes closed, or to someone right in front of one. So why are stars really 'dots' (answer: they're not, at least they're not to an astro-physicist, or an uneducated fundamentalist Christian).

We know from science that the perception of matter as 'permanent' is an illusion. Everything is either growing or decomposing. Nothing stands still --stillness is a myth. Vibration is the only constant. We know that plants grow and breathe too slowly for our eyes to register as movement, but with time-lapse they become alien life forms, blooming out for sunshine, recoiling into themselves at night, opening for the rain, and if seen fast and long enough all this would look like breathing. Voices must fall within our frequency range to be heard, but if they were sped up fast enough they wouldn't sound like anything but a mosquito hum, slowed down enough nothing but a low drone. And yet we believe automatically the ego's decree that all that is known we know.

I once took a shaman class at the Open Center and the lady who taught it got us all ready for journeying by walking around the circle (about 30 of us) to blow a tiny little burning sage bit and teensy pile of American Spirit tobacco into our faces... the equivalent of a sample spray of perfume at Macy's, to prepare us for power animal meeting and journeying. This is what happens when the ego co-opts the tools of the unconscious; it strips it of all mystery and therefore of all magic and power. The Open Center wouldn't allow the room to fill up with sage and tobacco smoke, or to light candles, so with neon blazing overhead, and the faintest wisp of sage in our nostrils, the only power animal I, at least, could find, was the dog of get me the fuck outta here.

The concept of mystery I'm getting towards is more than just a "weakness for superstition" that rationalist psychiatry would tell you. The limited positivist scientific viewpoint of reality is something that works to shrink the aperture, like the specially treated glasses that prevent a parent from seeing that their child is gay or alcoholic. Empiricism, Descartes, it all boils down to the measurable and other consciousness-based balderdash.

Why is acupuncture and other eastern medicine so downgraded by mainstream western science? Because it exposes academic grandiosity and egotism by operating on a completely different set of symbols, verifying a fundamental belief difference in how to look at the body that calls the certainty of western medicine into question. The AMA acts defensive like it has something to hide. The "measurable" results of eastern medicine don't factor in with western minds. The east sees the body in terms of energy flows, wind directions, organs as archetypes... their mythos is intact. The west slays, drains, and bleaches out the mythos. In the west one can study about the bible or Greek mythology but it must always be with the understanding that this stuff is not "real." 

The "literalization" of the bible's prime myths- Adam and Eve, Noah, etc. is what gets the Christians and the liberals fighting. Muslims too, for what the west doesn't quite get -- except amongst the urban tribal scene perhaps -- is the power of belief in supernatural forces. Just "believing" in anything gives power and meaning to one's life as shaped by that thing. The good parent or spouse knows that "effort" is needed to keep the family dynamic positive, to act 'as if' for the sake of the children, rather than lamenting and expressing worry in front of them. Each moment of a parent's life a child sees affects that child profoundly, this is myth in action - the parent is a living myth, a god, a role model one way or the other. The same way one meditates to help steer the compass towards a positive side after years of negativity, so too do we need miracles every day in the form of people "reawakening" out of old routines and self-centered grouchiness and into love and comprehension and compassion, in order to find the new living myths that fit our new older childhoods - from dad to Jim Morrison to Joseph Campbell to Krishna.

True compassion is very different from the maudlin co-dependence we see played across screens and headlines every day. There is a much ignored factor of compassion: that of death, of dying gracefully and with dignity - early, late, whenever. The western mind obsesses about time, about its short life, health, fitness, procreation; the superego ingeniously doles out dopamine only in "remembering" the happiness of past events. I'm really simplifying Lacan here, who speaks of the ego ideal and the objet petit a as a "trap of desire" -- where the desired object instantly loses value and meaning once it's attained -- a concept we can use to grapple with the truth about the existence of aliens and flying saucers.

Another good metaphor would be the situation where the wife is 100% sure her husband is cheating on her, but he won't admit it. The man is supposed to lie and the woman is supposed to KNOW he's lying but accept the lie. The thing is, will the woman be able to make decisions based on her knowledge of the truth irrespective of her husband's lie, or will she get all wrapped up in trying to get the "gory details" out of him? The spurned lover always has this masochistic obsession with the little details: "Tell me exactly what he did and where and for how long!" The UFOlogists and their skeptic remorae have this same masochistic obsession with the government --they want to hear from "the authority" that it was lying, to know what it was covering up. They can't just accept what's right there in front of them until they hear this from the big other.

Right there is the explanation of why this cover-up needed to happen and still does.

Authority, in its infinite wile, of course has never been really lying - the information is out there, just clouded in disinformation. Part of the job of authority is to spare us the terror of seeing it show genuine worry. For anyone ready to start to grapple with the existential HUGENESS of this issue though, the facts are there, as much as the government probably knows. Just as a child will pry at parental secrets but certainly not whine and stamp and demand the "real" answer (knowing unconsciously perhaps that the whole story all at once would be too much for them to bear) so too we pry at Area 51 for verification about the heavy dark secret, but we might think deep in our frightened hearts that what we don't know may be good for us. After all, when a president tells us the economy is doing bad but it's getting better, we know he's lying, but now we're mad at his lie not terrified of the truth. If we went on TV and started crying and raving that all was lost, that we were all doomed, then--and only then--would he be abusing his power.

Speculation is the shallow end of the deep, vast pool of the unknown truth. We indeed might panic, might stampede over the cliff were the whole vast, depressing truth be known without any recourse for the shelter of speculation. Is a sheep a happier sheep for knowing "the truth" about its slaughter house destiny?

From a Lacanian point of view, you can read the reason WHY all the US military agreed back in the atomic age to keep this stuff a secret in the dogmatically myopic letter from SETI, written in response to recent UFO and crop circle claims. Essentially, it's the same "if they're so smart, why don't they write us in English and come over and let us measure them," sort of thing that we hear from almost anyone dumb enough to believe What We Know So Far is the Be-All/End-All. These are the same people who jailed Galileo and Timothy Leary. They've made the mistake of identifying with their own frightened egos. Rather than being amorphous and open to the unknown they close up like turtles. These are the people who never remember their dreams, or else don't put any stock in them, and as a result, they end up in a car accident or some other last ditch attempt by the unconscious to get a word in edgewise. These are the people who teach our children and--unfortunately--these are our children. God knows I was like that for a long time. It takes a lot of weird experience in life--an experience that often results in low grades (because you're out tripping rather than studying)--to realize how little of the world you know. That's what a 19 year-old stoner brat and a 69 year-old professor have in common, neither will admit there's anything they don't already know, so there's nothing they can teach each other. Like two halves of a broken brain, they refuse to acknowledge the validity of each other's opinion. My joke about it in AA used to be, "Okay, I didn't before, but NOW I know everything...." and I'd learn something more.... "okay, NOW I know everything."

Last memory: on a family trip to some magical spot in Arizona, Sedona, visiting my bro over Xmas. Sedona is a slightly Woodstock-style town with nice vistas and allegedly nurturing magnetic vortices. It was a two-hour drive from Phoenix and by the time we got into the small town we were hungry. All along main street, i.e. the road through town, were quaint-looking diners, full of local landscape art, and no doubt quite charming, but then--at the end of the road and slightly up a hill, hidden behind some tall trees--was a Burger King. "Why this looks like just the place," noted my dad. I was too hungry to do my usual act of complaining and wanting to stop at the regular locally owned real-food diners. So we ate there, felt sick, walked around for a 20 minutes, got woozy and drove home.

SETI is like my dad in this instance, going on a wild adventure only to wave its mathematic myopathy around as if it’s the last word in evolution. "If these are good restaurants," would be my SETI dad in Sedona equivalent, how come they don't have franchises!" If there are vortexes, he said, woozy from three burgers, how come I didn't feel them (in my five minute walk)?

 Don't believe me that this us? Just watch an alien show on 'Science' channel! They 'investigate' stuff that's been debunked years ago, never even considered seriously by anyone in the real alien conspiracy world, and then proudly and snidely debunk it at the last minute, over and over again. If that's not picking the Burger King, I don't know what is.

Colonel Richard French - Confessions of USAF Debunker

Col. Richard French worked on Project Blue Book back in the 50s-60s, and here, finally he's come to set the record straight. He wasn't investigating UFOs, he was assigned to debunk them. Fascinating stuff, for avid followers of the UFO mystery these are awesome times, as the old codgers from the tops of corporate and military fields are coming forward to clear their consciences.

(Thanks once again to 'Anything UFO' which I've been following lately for my news -



Here he is discussing sighting an underwater UFO, with two aliens working on fixing it, visible in the clear water!

Recent Photographic Evidence: It just keeps getting Weirder

I'm really impressed by these photos of a tall alien coming right through a screen door. The photographer took many other pictures, all of which are hard to quite make out, leading me to wonder, presuming it's not a bizarre hoax, which it easily could be, and would explain the odd double exposure look. But I like to keep an open mind, for the sake of science and the person who took the pictures, who would need support were he not hoaxing. If he's not I think the photos are proof that these aliens exist in a corporeal / non-corporeal dimensional frequency, where they can adjust their molecular structure for walking through walls, etc., probably as easily as we can walk through water. Read the full post over on 'Anything UFO.'

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And of course the weirdest new tidbit is the one from acclaimed and trustworthy UFO researcher Steven Greer, the man responsible for the essential UFO book (as far as convincing skeptics), DISCLOSURE, with its many high ranking military depositions. So we can't dismiss him as crazy but holy moses, this tiny alien throws a whole new angle on everything. I'm thinking of all those TV sci fi stories (Outer Limits has a memorable one) with aliens who land on Earth threatening take over but then turn out they are more or less the size of preying mantises. "Whew" - but this thing, mythic or real or both, I'm not laughing!

The Deluded and the Divne - Space Distance, Occam's Razor, and Goatman

The History Channel and its conglomerates (H2, Destination America) are awash in cryptozoology and alien documentaries these days, and science is at last beginning to notice the 'alien stamp on DNA' (here) - and I for one couldn't be more tickled to death about it. However, I have to wonder just how much they are advancing the 'cause' of full disclosure vs. indicating we're still largely a clueless breed of bioengineered livestock, regularly harvested for our chi before we even know we have it, by crafty Archons with magnetic suction nets. What? Have I said too much!? I got my Chi sucked last year, and am getting justice anyway I can. I do believe the truth is in there - amidst the speculation and things ancient astronaut theorists contend.

HOWEVER

There is one channel that insults our intelligence by refusing to consider ANY of the mountains of evidence and worthy speculation regarding aliens: the Science channel, which is now attempting to compete with their own brand of alien-focused programming, with scientists speculating on what our visitors will look like when and if they ever drop by. They don't even address the vast history of eyewitness'accounts, and indeed ignore the entire field of UFO studies, to ponder instead what aliens may look like and how it would be impossible for them to travel to our planet over such long distances even at the speed of light.

If you take these Science channel shows at face value, you would think we'd yet to even see a single saucer. Clearly, until a scientist has a real, dead alien to dissect, the entire field of UFO research--which has libraries of convincing evidence for anyone who cares to investigate--is just a lot of hallucinations and misinterpreted swamp gas, EVEN THOUGH the scientists who initially started using the 'swamp gas defense', Alan Hynek, has admitted it was bullshit requested by the CIA and Air Force in order to diffuse mounting panic.

I've written in the past why I partially understand this approach. If you doubt the citizenry would panic over a full-on admission fo the existence of UFOs, just examine the fall-out after the Phoenix lights in 1997, or Roswell, when the media stormed the police and military phone lines and no one could get a call through to save their lives. The CIA saw this and realized enemy agents could completely cripple our defenses just by launching a phony craft, so they told the Air Force to begin the ridicule and swamp gas-labeling. And as often happens with insecure cliques, science eventually started believing its own cover story.

First of all a dead giveaway is when a supposedly up-to-date (on quantum mechanics) scientist starts rambling about how far away the nearest star is, and that it would take whatever million years to travel there. I can't help but think of, say, a Catholic priest in the Middle Ages scoffing at the idea you could sail 'around' a world that is flat--perhaps launching an investigation intent on 'clearing up' once and for all any foolish notions of circumvention; or a scientist in the 1700s exclaiming that 'flying' from New York City to California inside of a single afternoon will always be utterly impossible since how would you even get a horse and covered wagon into the air?

The things is, scientists didn't USED to be so narrow-minded. Ben Franklin, Jefferson, and the original founders of America all believed in alien visitations. Some of them had close encounters of all the various kinds. When George Washington had a visit from a mysterious glowing Nordic-style 'angel' at Valley Forge he wasn't ridiculed by his buddies. All the ridicule over saucer sightings really began as a defense against panic and security risks during the Cold War.

In some ways conventional science shows its become that which used to persecute it, i.e. provincial in the way it fears that reality and 'common knowledge' might get ahead of it. Therefore, if someone sees a vehicle traveling in the sky at a speed faster than science is ready to prove possible at that point in time, that witness is lying or misinterpreting a star. No one would question a witness seeing an object traveling at the speed of a modern jet today. If you go home to mom and say "I just saw this big jet streaking across the sky!" she wouldn't call you a liar and/or commit you to the sanitarium. But if you said you saw such a thing a mere 100 years ago, it would be quite a different story. Science wasn't yet ready to say such things were possible. And anyone who disagreed was an idiot or hoaxer.

For example science has recently discovered the possibility of millions of inhabitable planets in our galaxy alone, but Mr. Scientist, I assure  you those planets existed long before you discovered them. And if you think the distances between solar systems is too long to travel may I suggest two things --one, isn't space a vacuum? So why does it count as distance? You could probably collapse it with the right kind of gravitational engineering (and all the evidence of UFOs points to their operating on magnetic-gravitational manipulation) And two, imagine how much farther away those planets would seem if your spaceship was super small! Now gasp to realize that tiny aliens have visited our planet, as recently illuminated by Steven Greer:



Now, reverse it, imagine if your ship was millions of light years in diameter. Imagine not bringing a ship at all, why even need to lug bodies--with all their problematic needs--along? Why not work on just beaming our intelligence out into the stars and then find a suitable host once we reach a suitable planet, and begin evolving the life forms there into hosts for our non corporeal selves? Rather than traversing linear space we should be thinking about traversing dimensions, zones of conscious spatiality where size, distance, time, and depth all become meaningless concepts.

This idea becomes a fact of direct experience to anyone who's 'stepped out' into these dimensions, whether through abduction, meditation/spiritual awakening, and/or psychedelics, and that's why one feels so sorry for the Science Channel clinging to its deluded hypotheses about 'what alien life could be like' and wondering why no one watches their show. If they took more acid and stuff, maybe they wouldn't be so protective and fretful over their little corner of the known.

Instead of the Science Channel then, we're busy watching Ancient Aliens and UFO Hunters and now Alien Witness and Alien Mysteries, because, simply put, we believe our fellow man's own eyes, and in evidence even if its been stolen or confiscated. We trust the farmer who says he saw something in his field vs. the smug skeptic a hundred miles away who dismisses it all as swamp gas without even checking whether there's a swamp. We open-minded sorts--the TRUE skeptics--use a simple scientific Occam's razor which operates on the principle that when faced with a mystery, the most logical and obvious solution is usually the right one.  If you consider the size of the galaxy, the age of it relative to our brief span here on earth, the impossibility of us--even now--engineering something as giant and odd as the Great Pyramid, and our vast difference from all other life on this planet--then it begins to make sense that aliens exist and seeded us into being. It is simply logical. It is much, much MUCH more far-fetched to think every other inhabitable planet (and most scientists believe there are some out there, based if for no other reason on the sheer size of space) is deserted except for microbes, or patiently waiting for us to master inter-dimensional electromagnetic propulsion before they manifest into reality.

 HOWEVER -

I cannot nor do I wish too remove the comforting cloud of folklore from around these things.

My jaw dropped when I saw the latest episode of Monsters and Mysteries in America this weekend, a new show which deals more in cryptozoology than aliens, though I think they are connected in their ability to transcend space-time (see my Bigfoot Mystery solved post). The most recent episode had a section on a Satanic entity from the coal country of Kentucky they call the Goatman, who somehow possesses foolhardy local teens and leads them onto a very dangerous train trestle where they often meet their deaths. Apparently the acoustics of the valley where the trestle runs muffles the sound of approaching trains until they're right on top of you. Or maybe that's just Goatman mojo.

While I'd be the last person to openly dismiss such a claim I'm much more intrigued by the possibility of it being pure myth. Here, at last, in broad daylight, is living folklore fulfilling its highest function, to add mythic resonance to a foolish waste of life. Bored kids stuck in nowhere heartland America do this shit all the time - and often Discovery or History or MTV is there to catch it. When a kid dies for such a dumb reason as climbing a tressle to show off to his friends, the tragedy is such that one naturally wishes to make it less the kid's fault and more supernatural. What's interesting too is that these kids who die on the trestle are drawn there to SEEK the Goatman, so just the legend in and of itself draws kids to their deaths. 




This kind of urban myth-making is what every scientist and priest fears, of course, that we will return to this dark ages mindset - blaming unseen entitties for everything from our own crimes to bad harvests, wage cuts, and lost car keys... until, as it always does, this fear of the unknown and unseen spreads to accusing the weirder locals of being witches - and then the noose, and cross, and burning alive, and drowning. 

I'm not arguing whether or not he exists. In fact I spent a two-week summer camp stint in Maryland with a group of kids who did nothing but draw goat man pictures all day and shiver in our beds all night with fear he was walking around outside. (this version was a half-goat half-scientist who carried an axe).

ONE LAST THING
I'm always fascinated when someone is abducted by aliens, apparently randomly--being in the wrong place, wrong time --and then the trauma of their ordeal gradually leads to hypnotic regression uncovering a whole history of abduction experiences dating back through childhood. My thesis is that these memories did not exist prior to this 'first' abduction, the random one, but aliens can time travel  along the lines of human memory, in effect abducting the subject as he recalls the abduction--simultaneously!

This is only a theory of course, but if you imagine memory as a sound wave, or electromagnetic brain function, then the alien abductions could be an interdimensional radio broadcast that travels in both directions along time lines, examining the evolution of its subject forward and back once initial examination is made. Human researchers abduct animals in the wild, do quick examinations, then tag the animal with a tracking device before releasing them back into the wild. From then on they monitor their movements, and perhaps abduct them at a later date. BUT - what if after abducting them we could monitor their movements and rates of growth and change both  going forward AND backward? Would, in the days that followed the 'first' abduction, the subject--and even his family and other witnesses--begin to 'remember' abductions stretching back into childhood?

I've 'always' felt that being abducted is kind of like having a Nielsen box - you're representing humanity but who are you? I've never met a Nielsen subject OR an alien abductee, to my knowledge, and yet you represent me! I thank you for your service, and count my blessings.

Fractures from an Azetec Mirror

 

A Way to Win is to Not Play or is that Losing?
And either way, whatever.

My granny is cruising through her 90s in a warp that sucks me in by number.
All through the long visits I felt death pull me like gravity, like time pulls the meat off a chicken bone, like it pulls the planets along behind it as it sucks and roars along,
like stringed tin cans on a baptism-cum prom-cum wedding-cum-funeral car,
like Flash Gordon gradually fading into youtube
 and then all just raw conscious thoughtlessness - a dull roar of white static, in which you may at times think you hear the ocean, or vice versa... all voices that you hear are your own, you realize, in this 2001-Kubrick room of the self, and outside that, the serpent swimming through the blue veins of your aging relations, swimming both towards you and away, towards you and away...

I've been unable to leave the house, no matter where I go. (EK - 2008)

the fish and the net - A story of Pisces writers
The fish bring Jesus a TV sonar device. Jesus,, they say, you are a fishermen and we would have you catch us easier. The apostle fishermen and Jesus head out with the sonar device, following the fish to the middle of the Sea of Galilea. Then right as they’re about to cast their net, a commercial for Lite beer appears on the screen. Hypnotized, the apostles drop the net. They want to try these beers, so Jesus makes them appear and they drink and he bids them cast the net, but then a cigarette commercial comes on. And so on. The fish live happily ever after and Jesus ends up using all his miracles and the apostles become couch potatoes. You know the rest. It’s a metaphor for how the internet interferes with my ability to concentrate on finishing this story.

Deep into the psychosphere with Adam Scott Miller

 They're kind of dark, a little unhinged, but beautiful enough that you just want to crawl inside and dissolve into they ley lines. I'm speaking of course of the work of Adam Scott Miller, or Corpus Callosum at deviantart. Thanks to sites like deviantart there's more chances than ever to stumble across psychedelic greatness like this.

 I'd place his work somewhere between Alex Grey and the ayahuasca day-glo on black background paintings the amazon basin artists, with just a dash of black light poster 70s bad ass-ness. Tune in, tune out, tune back in and enjoy.