The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Grazia Toderi’s Alien Homeworlds

If you want to see where they come from, and you happen to live in Washington, DC, check out the exhibition called “Directions: Grazia Toderi” at the Hirshhorn Museum.

Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist who does massive video projections built from collages of cities at night. Fragments of these vast vistas of light fade in and out to create gradually shifting technological landscapes, complete with flying orbs that materialize and dematerialize, fragment and coalesce, ascend and descend. I saw the installations this weekend and was flabbergasted – it’s just the way I imagine it – the place where our machine visitors come from. It’s candy for the UFO-lover’s imagination.

Alien worlds are not precisely what the artist says her work represents – there is no mention of other planets or intelligences or our own technological future. According to the text accompanying her installations, she is trying to “visualize the infinite” and was originally inspired by watching the simulcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. But her two installations at the Hirshhorn, “Rossa Babele” and “Orbite Rosse,” uncannily matched several spectacular UFO dreams I have had over the years, and look just like what I am positive Stanley Kubrick was going for in the final, “Beyond the Infinite” sequence of 2001: an ultra-advanced, ultratechnological alien planetscape.

I spent a long time silently immersing myself in Toderi’s works this weekend and I plan to go back. If you’re in the DC area, by all means, check it out.

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Interesting Film Project

A film producer named Nick Ronan (Chance of Fate Productions) just contacted me regarding an interesting “narrative documentary” film project for which he is currently seeking funding, about mysteries surrounding the Apollo program and the possible discovery of alien life. From his description:

Based on actual events, the film follows the story of DANIEL CONROY, a young documentary filmmaker who sets out to uncover the truth about his grandfather, James L. Conroy, an Air Force pilot and U.S. Astronaut. Colonel Conroy vanished mysteriously in the deserts of Nevada in 1970, six months after returning from a top-secret mission to investigate evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Here’s what we know: Daniel Conroy (25) disappeared while finishing this documentary. Most of the footage that will be used to assemble this film was taken from his home camera. The mystery of the Conroy family remains untold.

The teaser is here.

And here is the link to their Kickstarter page.

Check it out.

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NASA Acknowledges WTFs Near Space Shuttle

Four mysterious objects were detected and filmed near the space shuttle Atlantis, and uncharacteristically NASA acknowledged this encounter — and that such UFOs are witnessed frequently on shuttle missions. See the Fox news report here:

A report on another UFO sighting during Atlantis’s last mission is here:

Check it out.

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WTF in South Bend

Notre Dame stadium was evacuated during a football game on Saturday due to a particularly ominous thunderstorm. A news video of the storm over the stadium caught a fast-moving rod- or cigar-shaped something flying near a lightning strike. It’s a very compelling video:

The story is here.

Check it out!

[Edit: or is it a bug?]

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The Madness of White Bear — Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (pt. 3)

The various tricks artists and scientists through history have discovered for seemingly halting the motion of things—what Renaissance alchemists called “fixing the volatile”—and then reanimating the fixed under their own power have always seemed godlike; and the aspiration to exercise this power has always seemed arrogant or even blasphemous to some. We can only speculate, but it is worth asking whether some of White Bear’s kin (see previous post on Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams) were not so supportive of his work.

Consider: The walls of Chauvet Cave are not layered with imagery and symbols in the manner of a modern urban canvas such as a freeway underpass. Graffiti is as old as civilization, but in Chauvet Cave there is none of that exuberant transformation of blank surface into picture. There were only a small handful of artists who left their images in the cave over the many, many millennia that humans could have visited and used it, and only some sections of wall have images. This must make us wonder how important or central figurative pictures actually were to the culture of these people.

The answer could be that the inclination and the genius to create images may have been relatively rare, the product of a very unusual sort of person who may have been regarded with as much distrust or suspicion as admiration by his (or her) fellows. Art, even religious art, always has its detractors.

I am purely speculating, but could these Paleolithic melancholics, these cave Michelangelos living under the sign of Saturn, have represented a departure from the philosophy of the dark that governed the prevailing shamanic culture? Could White Bear and his fellow artists, scattered in time, have essentially misused the cave as a canvas for their madness, blasphemously bringing light into what was supposed to remain in perpetual night?

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WTFology

Does anybody else think that UFO is too sterile a term? That it fails to capture the emotion behind our quest, the astonishment that drives a witness of something “unidentified” to seek answers?

I’ve decided to, as much as possible, replace the term UFO with WTF. Because that really gets it better, don’t you think? “WTF was that?” “I don’t know WTF it was, but it was moving fast, and then just disappeared!”

“Look dad, it’s a WTF!!”

Changing the name of Ufology to WTFology is a long-overdue step. Who’s with me?

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Hermetic Astronomy

In Fortean Times there is a new, excellent article on the hermetic context of Renaissance astronomy and Galileo’s famous trial.

The rediscovery of ancient hermetic philosophy during the Renaissance was the most important influence on intellectuals of the period–from Copernicus to Shakespeare–yet few people nowadays are aware of it. As the authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince write, “the fact is that the Renaissance is impossible to comprehend without the Hermetic tradition. It’s like trying to write a history of the 20th century while ignoring Communism, on the logic that because it failed as an ideology, it could never have been really important.”

Among other things, the article provides a good background on my personal hero Giordano Bruno, a master of the Art of Memory and one of the first to claim that the universe was infinite and full of inhabited worlds.

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Slaying the Minotaur — Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Part 2)

For shamanic religions and the cultures that adhere to them, mystery is higher than knowledge. The irrational higher than the rational. Unknowing higher than knowing. (Is there even a concept of “knowing”? Is “knowing” an idea that has only arisen in after writing??) Paleolithic people, such as those who left their mark in Chauvet Cave 32,000 years ago (see Werner Herzog’s amazing new documentary), undoubtedly believed, as modern shamans do, in ready passage to other worlds, and in the ability of humans to become animals (and vice versa). They accomplished these feats via drugs and dreams and, probably, via the sensory deprivation provided by caves.

Vestiges of such practices are found throughout the shamanic religions that have survived into our own times. And they were well active in Ancient Greece, the earliest European civilization of which we have much written record. The mystery cults of Dionysus and other deities probably represent vestiges of prehistoric religions. Caves were viewed as the sanctums of gods, and venturing into the dark was a rite and a means of access to the other world.

But somewhere along the line, a profound shift happened in Europeans’ beliefs about the dark. We have long since stopped venturing into the dark for religious communion. Civilized humans have long since ceased to find little but fright, scientific curiosity, and for some, physical adventure in subterranean space. Plato, perhaps the first fully “modern” thinker, famously viewed the cave as a prison of ignorance, not a church. In his metaphor, the cave was a place were people were enchained, watching shadows of puppets projected by a light on a wall (an image uncannily similar to a movie theater—see previous post), and from which they had to be liberated and led out into the light…

Judeo-Christianity inherited the preference for light and reason over mystery. Consider the Medieval cathedral. It is dark, but it is dark the way a camera is dark: It is a space designed to let light in, via stained-glass windows whose secret formulas died with the alchemists of the period. A cathedral thus reveals the light in a new way. In Eastern religions, “enlightenment” happened via practices of meditation, similar to prayer, not via descent into caves.

Despite our tendency to view the organized religions familiar to us as “irrational” enemies of the scientific worldview, they were intended to enlighten, not obscure or distort reality. Thus they really go hand in hand with philosophy and science. Science could not have arisen in any other but the matrix of Christianity, Islam, and the other religions of enlightenment. (Modern scientific antagonists of religion would do well to bear this in mind.)

In this regard—the changing meaning of and attitude toward the dark—I wonder if it is significant that the sole apparently “mythological” and (semi-)human representation found in Chauvet Cave is a being with the lower half of a “Venus” and the upper body of a bull—painted ingeniously on a stalactite. Where else in our cultural memory does a half-human, half-bull creature appear? Obviously, in the great Greek myth of the labyrinth of Crete, and the Minotaur inhabiting it. The labyrinth in this story is widely thought to have been a cave, or symbolic of the cave. Could the bull-man be an ancient—incredibly ancient—symbol of something like the “spirit” of caves, or of the dark, that survived into Greek times?

Myths were never meant to be taken literally, and typically they weren’t. The ancients weren’t as credulous as we tend to think. Myths are stories that symbolically encode memories of great events and social, political, economic, and religious transitions—they are the form taken by oral history, the cultural memory of a people. For example, the legend of St. Patrick expelling all the snakes from Ireland symbolically encodes the memory of the banishing of Celtic pagan religion by the arrival of Christianity. (Snakes have always been symbolic of old superstitious cults. The serpent in Eden represented, for the Hebrews, the false, primitive, evil, sacrificial cults that surrounded them in the Levant.)

I cannot help but wonder whether the story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete could represent a cultural memory not unlike the story of St. Patrick: A symbolic encoding of the banishment of old mystery cults in favor of a newer, more Platonic view of the universe as something to be illuminated—the first inklings of a scientific worldview, the regime of logic and reason that even to this day is represented by Ariadne’s thread—a way out of the cave.

I’d welcome any response to this idea from experts in Greek mythology: What is the significance of the bull, and the bull-man? Is the Minotaur a cthonic symbol of darkness and mystery, one that could have its roots in a dim Paleolithic past?

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Aerial WTF in Norway

The “Hessdalen Lights” are probably the longest-studied and most predictable unidentified aerial phenomenon. Clearly very weird. Here’s a good Nat Geo video on the subject with clear footage:

And it turns out this sort of thing–regular, predictable appearance of aerial light phenomena that give every impression of being intelligently controlled/guided/whatever–occurs in the U.S. too:

Check it out–make up your own mind.

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Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The thing about the sublime as an aesthetic (or religious) emotion is that you can only take it in small doses before it turns into unease and even fear. At one point in Werner Herzog’s new, amazing documentary about the astonishingly realistic Paleolithic paintings in Chauvet Cave in France, the filmmaker notes that he and his film crew—as well as those who had first discovered and explored the cave—experienced an uncomfortable and uncanny sense of being watched by those who had painted the wild animals on its contoured walls some 32,000 years ago. Despite the beauty of what they were filming, all of the crew felt relief upon exiting. The way looking at light from millions- and billions- year-old stars evokes a sublime rapture of infinite space, appreciation of art made by incredibly distant ancestors who clearly were just like us—with our same talents and abilities and imaginations—evokes the sublime vertigo of history. The mind fills that vertigo with ghosts.

The people who first ventured into the bowels of Chauvet cave with flickering torches to create those animal images clearly felt a profound connection with the natural world and affinity with its creatures. As with most “premodern” cultures, they probably believed in the ability of humans to transform into animals and vice versa. The only possibly “human” representation in the cave is what appears to be the lower body of a woman (resembling the various “Venus” figurines uncovered throughout Paleolithic Europe) and the upper body of a bull. But that image is the single exception—every other image in the cave is of an animal—horses, lions, rhinoceri, mammoths, aurochs, even a butterfly. What did those animals galloping across the walls and out of its recesses represent?

Herzog suggests that the paintings in Chauvet are a sort of “proto-cinema.” The metaphor is clearly more than apt. Not only do the animal figures seem to move under shifting light such as would have been provided by torches (or, in the filmmakers’ case, the few safe cold film lights they could bring with them into the cave), but some of the animals are “multilegged” in what is evidently a deliberate attempt to depict motion.

The illusion of movement depends on a prior, more fundamental illusion, though: the illusion of stasis. The cave was as much a camera obscura as it was a cinema. So I’d add to Herzog’s metaphor and suggest that this Paleolithic cinema was not just a theater but also a philosophical tool—and its animals, object lessons—for examining permanence versus impermanence, the mystery of Time.

The arrested image is always dazzling and awe-inspiring for people who haven’t seen it before or who don’t see it everyday. In the 19th Century, people reacted to the first Daguerrotypes with surprise and delight. Viewers in the Renaissance reacted the same way to realistic pictures painted with the newly discovered techniques for showing space in perspective. We can readily imagine the mixture of joy, astonishment, and slight unease that a small Paleolithic community would have felt when their brilliant and eccentric cousin led them into a dark, sort of scary cave by torchlight to gaze on what he had been busy creating there on the walls. (“So this is what cousin White Bear has been up to!”)

The best indication that the above reactions were part of the intended reaction of the Chauvet images is that the latter are specifically and entirely (with the part-exception of the Venus-bull) of animals—the things in the painters’ world that were most constantly in motion. No vegetable life was depicted, no people (who have the power to stand still), and no natural or celestial features (the sun, moon, and stars, move only slowly). And this idea of stasis manifests itself on two levels. Amid the growth and motion, birth and death, of everything in those people’s environment, and of everything that they created, the paintings themselves were permanent, and this must have been a large part of their appeal and mystery. The world outside changed but in the depths of the cave was a sanctuary where things stayed the same, where Time stopped.

(In creating something permanent, the painters outdid themselves: The interior of the cave has changed “geologically” over the 32,000 years since the paintings were made—dripping mineral-rich water has sculpted the interior with stalagmites, stalactites, sparkling ribbon-like formations—but the images remain unchanged. Just try and wrap your head around art that has survived that long!)

But in this sanctuary of permanence, those fixed images, as Herzog notes, could be reanimated under flickering torchlight. Was this proto-cinema art for art’s sake—purely for aesthetic enjoyment or dazzlement—or did these still/moving images have, as archaeologists are always quick to say, some kind of ‘ritual function’? When you look at a Renaissance painting of the Virgin, it’s impossible to separate aesthetic enjoyment from religious sentiment—and certainly every individual viewer brings his/her own unique mix of these to the experience—so there’s probably no point in trying to make a definitive answer.

But maybe “religious” isn’t the best term—nor “aesthetic.” I think that if there is some content or purpose of the Chauvet images—beyond just “pretty pictures”—that it is philosophical. I don’t think it is coincidence that these cave images seem designed to walk a tightrope between stasis and motion and that the earliest philosophies of which we have written record are devoted precisely to understanding that very dichotomy, suggesting a continuity with prehistoric thought.

The sixth-century BC Chinese philosopher Lao Tze wrote of the flow of things, or the Tao. In fifth-century BC Greece, Heraclitus compared the constant flow of Time to a river; he is most famous for his aphorism that you can’t step in the same river twice. His main metaphor for the constant energy and motion of things, however, was “fire.” It’s tempting to link this philosophical and primordial fire to the firelight cast by Paleolithic torches on cavern walls, providing the illusion of motion to the creatures painted there.

Famously in opposition to Heraclitus was Parmenides (same period), who tried to convince his students that motion is an illusion, that the reality behind the appearances is stasis. His position would later be upheld and “proved” through the famous thought experiments of Zeno—for instance the arrow that, once shot, has to pass halfway to its target, but first halfway to halfway, and first halfway to halfway to halfway, and so on—so that in fact, it can never even start on its path let alone ever get to the end.

The notion that all movement is an illusion might seem silly, but consider memory, which despite the apparent flux of experience seems to hold snapshots, to preserve experience in amber. Art is a reflection of memory and depends on it. Part of what is so astonishing about the paintings in Chauvet is how incredibly realistic, lifelike they are despite the fact that they cannot have been painted from life, only from the artist’s memory. I assume that cave artists of the caliber represented in Chauvet would have to have honed their skills outside in the light—I suppose with a stick in dirt when watching their subjects up close, perhaps over many years.

It takes art to remove us from what we take for granted and show it to us in a new way, as a mystery. That separation and return can provide the sublime rapture that occurs when we push our thoughts to infinities. Time has always been one of the fundamental mysteries, because humans are not cognitively capable of understanding it. I can’t help but think that the awe of viewers of these painted bison, horses, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and lions, or even just the awe of the artist, arose from amazement at Time itself. And in a different way and for different reasons, it’s Time that is amazing about Chauvet cave, and Herzog’s film.

The filmmaker discusses his documentary here.)

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New Mars Anomaly

A very interesting object has been discovered on the Martian surface using Google Mars. David Martines posted the following video on YouTube. This does not look like an imaging artifact (which many so-called Martian anomalies are), and clearly looks artificial. What the hell is it?

I found Martines’ video via the site SightingUFO.com (via via the Anomalist).

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UFOs and the Surreal

Lately I’m interested in art as a window to thinking (visually, narratively) about the unknowable, for example surrealist depictions of posthumanity. Now, over on the great blog The Other Side of Truth, Paul Kimball has written a thought-provoking post on realism versus surrealism as modes of thinking about nonhuman intelligences.

… The problem is that with UFOs in particular, and non-human intelligence in general, we don’t know what is happening. All that we can do is guess… theorize… speculate… and imagine…
Which is why we should be looking to the surrealists, and the abstract artists, and anyone who has offered a view of the world, and of reality, that is open to myriad interpretations, as the artistic model for understanding any interaction we may have with a non-human intelligence. …

Check it out!

The Immensity of Things

Speaking of films that attempt to show the bigness of the universe, a new, anatomically accurate (that is, from actual star mapping) video by the American Museum of Natural History is truly sublime:

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War of the Worlds One

Few people are aware that many of the best-attested, best-studied, and most astonishing UFO encounters have actually involved military confrontations. Famous confrontations between air force jets and UFOs have occurred throughout the world, including Great Britain, Iran, Chile, Belgium, and the U.S. Many of these are described in detail in a couple of excellent recent books, Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, and John B. Alexander’s UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities.

But the first military confrontation with a UFO in modern history occurred on February 25, 1942, over Los Angeles. The real-life “Battle: LA” began about 3AM, when a huge object glided south toward the city from the Northwest. Being just after Pearl Harbor, this was naturally assumed to be some kind of Japanese airship, and the city was blacked out—later all of Southern California from the San Fernando Valley to the Mexican border was blacked out. As it drifted over the city and hovered there, warning sirens blared and anti-aircraft guns, designed to defend the vital aircraft and shipbuilding facilities beneath, began an initial barrage that lasted 20 to 30 minutes. The object then moved south to Long Beach and down the coast, still tracked by searchlights. Then it returned to LA and a second barrage began.

That night, over 1,400 shells were fired at the UFO, but it was impervious. The event was caught on film and in photographs, and it is an eerie sight: What appears to be a large oval object with a dome on top (very like a classic flying saucer), hard to see in the glare of numerous floodlights shining on it from all sides, is peppered continuously by bright blasts from anti-aircraft fire (the film is below). Eyewitnesses attested that there were several direct hits, but they clearly had no effect. Army fighter planes also attacked the object (these accounted for other “sightings” of lights in formation, which has always caused some confusion in the accounts), but their guns, too, had no effect on the object, and the planes were forced to turn away. Witnesses described the scene as being like the Fourth of July, only louder, and that the object itself was beautiful, like a magic lantern.

The air raid warden for the area, a woman named “Katie,” is one of the many who described what they saw in newspaper articles:

“It was huge! It was just enormous! And it was practically right over my house. I had never seen anything like it in my life!” she said. “It was just hovering there in the sky and hardly moving at all. It was a lovely pale orange and about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. I could see it perfectly because it was very close. It was big!”

Several people on the ground were killed during the one-sided “battle,” by falling shrapnel, in car accidents (distracted drivers), and by heart attacks from stress.

The possibility that the object was a blimp can largely be ruled out. It seems highly improbable that a blimp could withstand such a barrage, both from the ground and the air, for one thing. And it is known that the Japanese had already given up on the possibility of using blimps in warfare, due to the flammability of the gasses.

Bruce Maccabee has just posted an interesting photographic analysis of the iconic photo of the event (above), which appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on the morning of the 26th. Without knowing the exact location of the spotlights or the height of the object, there is no way to make a precise calculation of the object’s size. However, it would be nearly as big as the diameter of the illuminated area at the convergence of the lights in this photo, as the beams by and large do not continue past it. One estimate of the object’s altitude is 8,000 feet; if the angle of the spotlight beam from the right was 30 degrees, the object would have been roughly 330 feet in diameter. Whatever the exact measurements, the thing was, as the witnesses said, huge.

It’s an interesting bit of analysis. Check it out. Maccabee also reprints a number of news stories about this amazing event, which was quite possibly the first war of the worlds.

Here’s a video with the original CBS News report of the event. The footage is very cool:

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Ebert on the Universe

One day last week Roger Ebert turned is mind from film to contemplate the immensity of things:

… The universe is too large for me to comprehend how large that really might be. I’ve seen those animations where Earth shrinks to a pin point, and then the sun shrinks to a pin point, and then the Milky Way shrinks to a pin point. The whole map might as well shrink to a pin point, along with the horse it rode on.

None of this immensity is affected by what I think about it. It doesn’t depend on being thought about. If it is true that our galaxy alone might contain 30 to 80 million earth-like planets, and if every one of them were occupied by sentient beings, it doesn’t depend on what they’re thinking, either. It all simply exists. …

Read his piece, “The Quintessence of Dust.”

And while you’re at it, watch the the original animation of the immensity of things, Charles and Ray Eames’ wonderful short film, Powers of Ten:

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Two Futures

There are countless artistic visions of the near and far future, obviously, in literature, film, art. Many are realistic. Many are cool. But few have had as much impact on my imagination as that of two painters, whose work has little in common but for a shared interest in what we might now call post- or transhumanity.

I’ve touched a little in previous posts on the organo-mechanical somethingscapes of H.R. Giger. Most famous for his design work on the movie Alien, Giger’s dark, sinister “biomechanoids” show a vision of a humanity that has descended (or ascended?) into a state of fascistic, sadomasochistic machine-eroticism, a complete merger of human and machine that is both violent and sexual.

I’m not sure if the painter thinks of his art as depicting the future exactly, but to me his paintings show us a distinctly plausible future governed by what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (after the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) calls “jouissance.” I hate invoking a pretentious foreign word, but there isn’t a good analogue in our language for the extreme agony-in-pleasure, or pleasurable agony, that Zizek considers to be the sort of Satanic lifeblood of human existence, boiling just under the surface. I can’t imagine a better representation of this notion than Giger’s world: Machines and humans interpenetrate each other, genitally, orally, anally; “humanity” has become a hivelike heaven-hell of painful pleasure. The eyes of the figures are turned up, white, frozen in a gaze that is very much like that of an addict, or someone in the midst of orgasm.

It’s a vision of future humans (or posthumans) as lotus-eaters. When technology gives us the ability to escape into pleasurable dreams, will we have any more will to transcend our condition or continue with the human adventure—culture, law, technology, commerce, and the rest? Lotus-eating, a total turning-inward, is a distinct and perhaps (from our perspective) unpleasant possibility. But who knows, the “great silence” that famously bothered physicist Enrico Fermi, the fact that no signs of distant intelligences have been discovered (I’m bracketing the question of UFOs for now), could be the result of an overriding tendency of civilizations to turn inward, losing all interest in the “outside.” Who knows, it could be the inevitable trajectory of technological races. Stanislaw Lem mentions this possibility in his novel Fiasco.

From the outside, an earth crisscrossed with Giger’s mechano-organic canyons (that’s how I imagine the steep looming walls within which his deathly gray figures are embedded or from which they protrude) would be uncommunicative and silent—sort of a dark, terrifying inversion of Lem’s masterpiece, Solaris. Solaris is a white, watery intelligence that spans a planet and appears innocent and curious, almost like a baby that is learning to mimic but still can’t quite talk. A black posthuman Giger-Earth would be the opposite: a dark seething bio-machine, uncommunicative like an addict, lost in orgasmic pleasure that is the exact opposite of innocence.

But there is another vision of the future that I find equally plausible and equally beautiful—another vague, enigmatic picture of Future Man, but one that is instead optimistic and expansive, having little in common with Giger’s claustrophobic gray canyons.

You probably have never heard of Richard Powers, but you’ve seen his work. His surrealistic illustrations adorn countless covers of pulp sci-fi paperbacks from the 50s and 60s and 70s. They are iconic of a kind of retro-future that, even though they had nothing to do with the stories inside—it was courageous of publishers like Ballantine to depart from literalism on their covers—would have provided a kind of imaginary backdrop to the early readers of writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard. Sculpted surrealistic cities rising from deserts, curved glass structures hanging in misty space, lithe glassy beings that are not quite human and not quite machine. (I think the compassionate far-future robots at the end of Spielberg’s A.I. were lifted directly from Powers’ work.)

Like Giger’s art, Powers’ book covers depict a future in which the boundaries of humanity, architecture, and machine have vanished. But these future men are not lotus-eaters. One senses in his cityscapes and landscapes a world that continues to be a world of technology and society and exploration, but is somehow wise in a way the present world is not. Wise and remote. Philosophical somehow, mostly peaceful (sometimes not). It is a vision of future humanity, post-humanity, still seeking, not enclosed in itself.

I love Powers’ inspiring surrealistic vision as much as I love the fascinating silver-black heaven-hell of Giger. Both artists created gorgeous worlds that you can get lost in. Both painted visions of our future that are poles apart.

Which path will we take as a civilization and as a species?

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UFO Formation over Australia

Compare this circular formation of lights over Australia filmed on March 9 …

… to this circular formation of lights filmed from orbit by the crew of Space Shuttle Columbia during mission STS-80 in September, 1991 …

Just saying.

(The STS-80 footage is taken from a documentary; if anyone knows the identity of it, or of the narrator, please let me know! Ignore the narrator’s commentary, however: The apparent “transparency” of the UFOs is just a video artifact due to their brightness relative to the background.)

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Saganism

Carl Sagan was a hero to most of us who in one way or another like to watch the skies. The mellifluous-voiced, turtleneck-and-corduroy-wearing astronomer inspired my generation to care about space, about our planet, and about our future as a spacefaring civilization. He was not only a fashion plate but also a prophet of what I call the “scientific sublime”—a vision of the Cosmos and our own almost spiritual connection to it, the “spirit” being not God but our very own capacity for curiosity and awe. Sagan was able to do what few scientists have ever been capable of: make science something close to a secular religion.

Among the things to be awed by, Sagan always emphasized, was the overwhelming likelihood that we share the cosmos with countless other civilizations. Although the expression for which he is most famous, “billions and billions,” was actually spoken by Johnny Carson in parody of him, Sagan did love to stagger the imagination with large numbers, and large numbers were the basis of his faith that we are not alone. In 1962, Sagan gave a lecture at the American Rocket Society in Los Angeles, in which he dazzled his audience with the Drake equation, which divides the 100 billion stars in our galaxy by the number of main-sequence stars like our own, divided by an estimate of the number of life-conducive planets, divided by an estimate of the probability of life arising on them, and so on, arriving at a figure of more or less 1 million technological civilizations in our galaxy. Some of these are bound to be millions or, yes, even billions of years in advance of us.

Nevertheless, Sagan remains an ambivalent figure for ufology. Throughout his career he was publicly outspoken against belief that UFO sightings were connected to any of those million technological civilizations that statistics predicted. On the subject, he again and again said that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—and he asserted that the latter just did not exist for the UFO phenomenon. Sightings of craft were explainable as misidentified meteorological phenomena; abduction stories reflected superstitious and religious beliefs and the “madness of crowds.” In the search for extraterrestrial intelligences, Sagan’s money was solely on the SETI program—scanning the heavens for radio signals.

Yet Sagan did not deny that those civilizations broadcasting their existence in radio would also be spacefaring, and that they would have even come here, probably many times in our history:

Let’s say that each of these civilizations sends out one interstellar expedition per year,” he said. “That means that every star, such as our sun, would be visited at least once every million years. In some systems where these beings found life, they would make more frequent visits. There’s a strong probability, then, that they have visited earth every few thousand years. It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist or even that some kind of base is maintained, possibly automatically, within the solar system, to provide continuity for successive expeditions. Because of weathering and the possibility of detection and interference by the inhabitants of earth it would be preferable not to erect such a base on the earth’s surface. The moon seems one reasonable alternative. Forthcoming photographic reconnaissance of the moon from space vehicles—particularly of the back—might bear these possibilities in mind.

One would think that Sagan, who even thought it possible that there could be alien bases on the moon, wouldn’t be so hostile to the idea that maybe an alien technological presence could be behind some UFO sightings.

It has been suggested that Sagan’s dismissals of UFOs were only for public consumption and that his true beliefs on the matter were different. Paola Leopizzi-Harris, an Italian writer who worked with famous UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek in the early 80s, recently related the following in an interview: “My recollection is that Hynek said it was backstage of one of the many Johnny Carson Tonight shows Sagan did. He basically said (to Hynek) in 1984, ‘I know UFOs are real, but I would not risk my research (College) funding, as you do, to talk openly about them in public.’ ”

I’m not particularly trustful of this single account of a nearly 30-year-old conversation backstage at the Tonight Show. But I do think that, if not money, something besides the claimed “lack of evidence” (he must have been exposed to the voluminous evidence by people like Hynek) deflected the astronomer’s interest away from UFOs. I think that “something” was probably nothing else than the sublime faith he preached. “Once every few thousand years” is mysterious and awe inspiring. So is an ancient alien base on the moon. UFOs buzzing around our planet here and now isn’t—there’s something even cheap about it. It’s a radically different perspective.

This difference in perspective is important, because embedded in either state of affairs (they are far away, they are here) is an implicit ethics, a map for how humanity should behave going forward.

If there is any single monument to and symbol of Sagan’s viewpoint on the character of our non-aloneness, and of the ethics embedded in his sublime view, it is Voyager I. That probe, launched in 1977, yielded the most astonishing information to date of the gas giant worlds that dominate our solar system, and the most astonishing close-up pictures, but its symbolic role transcended its scientific function. For one thing, Voyager I bore a gold record containing greetings in numerous earth languages, as well as hundreds of photographs of our planet and our species. Sagan chaired the committee that assembled this material.

Certainly Sagan knew the likelihood that extraterrestrial audiophiles would happen upon that lp a million years down the road and sit down for a listen on their hi-fis was slim to none. That greeting to space was really a message to humans: that we are not alone and that our destiny as a species is to be part of the galactic community, to join ETs as players on the galactic stage.

Voyager renewed its symbolic role, in a slightly more profound way, when it finally left the solar system in 1990. At Sagan’s request, NASA swiveled the probe’s cameras back for a last photograph of Earth, from a distance of nearly 4 billion miles. Its “pale blue dot” photograph of a 1-pixel earth against the black backdrop of space served Sagan (and later Al Gore) as a powerful metaphor for how precious and vulnerable our world is. If we don’t set aside our differences, put childhood away as a species, and fix things, we might not survive. (Sagan’s favorite refrain was the qualification he attached to every promise of our interstellar future: “If we do not destroy ourselves…”)

The thing is, implicit in these paradoxical symbols of puniness and heroic striving is the fact that we, and only we, can achieve these things: save ourselves, save our planet, and evolve to the next stage in our social and technological evolution. A sense that our neighbors are distant in space and time motivates us to take responsibility for the human journey. Stick a little flying saucer or two into that picture, next to that dot, inspires a return to childhood. Although I am pretty convinced that (for better or worse), ETs are here (and have always been here), we can’t think of them as our parents.

Hoaxed?

Much as I was eager to believe in the authenticity of the recent series of very convincing videos of a UFO over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (previous posts), the growing feeling in the UFO blogosphere is that they’re probably fake, and the arguments are persuasive.

To the untrained eye, the videos look very real, but they are evidently well within the capabilities of anyone with even off-the-shelf special effects software. HOAXKiller1, who clearly knows his way around that stuff, has posted a series of videos on YouTube showing how even the subtle convincing details in the videos could easily have been achieved in Adobe AfterEffects, and showing some telltale signs that some of the videos probably were indeed made that way.

The possibility remains that only some of the videos are hoaxed–and according to Micah Hanks at the Gralien Report, there is at least one separate eyewitness account reported in an Israeli newspaper. But until more witnesses come forward, one eyewitness is not enough to tip the scales.

But again, stay tuned. More details are certain to emerge.

And a Fifth…

Rick Phillips (UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock) has found a fifth, intriguing video of the “Jerusalem UFO”:

Unlike the other videos, I’m slightly suspicious of this one on first viewing: It reminds me a bit of Cloverfield — people pretending to act totally real and spontaneous for a hand-held camera, but ever so slightly overdoing it. Of course, I can’t understand what the kids are saying, so that doesn’t help.

Are these videos real? Are they fake? Are some of them real and some of them technically adept copycats made for fun or to discredit the real ones?

If the whole thing is a hoax, it’s a brilliant (and very elaborate) one.

Ufology can be maddening sometimes!

[edit 2/5/11: Micah Hanks, at Mysterious Universe, discusses the viral marketing speculation surrounding these Jerusalem videos, with particular reference to this one. He mentions the videos "surfacing" on the web in advance of J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield, for example.]

Fourth Jerusalem UFO Video

[edit 2/5/11: The original version of this video had an audio track (voices, expressions of surprise, etc.), which has now been removed, and new added text explains that that audio track was fake and had been added to the footage as part of a UFO coverup plot somehow, to discredit it. I'm not sure what is going on. As these videos have gone viral, there is increasing debate about their authenticity/inauthenticity, etc. Someone named HOAXKiller1 has been showing how these videos could have been created using Adobe AfterEffects, and deconstructs this video with his own 'instructional how-to.']

Now a fourth video of Sunday’s Jerusalem UFO has surfaced. If the videos are authentic and not digitally manipulated, it is an unprecedented event because of the quality and number of videos that captured the object from different vantage points. Caution needs to be exerted — there are increasingly sophisticated hoaxed videos out there. But if this is part of a viral marketing campaign, it’s very, very elaborate. I’m no expert at video analysis, but I’m inclined at this point to agree with Rick Phillips over at UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock that this could be the real deal, in which case it would be very exciting indeed.

Again, stay tuned!

UFO over Jerusalem

If it isn’t an elaborate hoax, there was an astonishing UFO event in the Middle East this weekend that is generating a buzz on the UFO forums. At 1 am on January 28, a bright white orb was filmed by three witnesses directly over the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. After hovering high in the air, it descends slowly to just over the dome, hovers there for a while, then gives off two bright flashes and shoots rapidly upward.

Two witnesses filmed this scene from what looks like about a mile away. The clearest is this one:

The cell-phone video taken by the man visible in the first video is next. Overall the video is not in as sharp focus as the first.

In both of the above videos, a group of red lights are seen moving overhead after the white orb has disappeared.

A video then surfaced of the same event, filmed by tourists from a much closer vantage point:

It looks very convincing — and again, if it’s not an elaborate hoax, it’s pretty incredible. However the location of the event — over one of the most sacred places to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and hotly contested by all three — gives some cause for suspicion that the videos could be part of a viral marketing campaign. Stay tuned.

UFO Coverup Primer

In our busy world, who has the time to read a thick tome covering the evidence about UFOs? Historian Richard Dolan has written three of them (the latest, After Disclosure, in collaboration with Bryce Zabel) that amount to over 1,300 pages. It’s a stunning volume of documentation. Well, here’s the answer to your problems: A ten-minute summary of the some of the most compelling evidence for the U.S. coverup of the phenomenon:

(My only minor complaint is that his dismissal of Project Blue Book comes off as bare assertion because he skips over the evidence in that case — namely the experience of project member Allen Hynek, who came to realize the phenomenon was real and the group’s purpose was really to cover it up, not investigate. And I’m still not convinced we know what happened at Roswell. But … you can’t have everything in ten minutes!)

Watch it!

JFK, Marilyn, and UFOs

“Webb,” [Bill Clinton] had said, “if I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs.” Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting. (Webster Hubbell, Friends in High Places)

The 10-year-old part of me that loves UFOs and Bigfoot and conspiracy theories is constantly at war with the “respectable” and adult part of me that tries to appear normal and sensible and that resists seeing patterns in everything. Maybe it’s because my parents were psychologists, but I’m deeply fearful of being labeled a paranoid. But besides UFOs, there’s no bigger and more persistent conspiracy theory than that of “who killed JFK?” And thanks (or no thanks) to one of my favorite UFO scholars, Richard Dolan, I find it at least plausible that the latter whacky paranoid conspiracy is not unrelated to the former whacky paranoid conspiracy.

The idea held in certain not unrespectable corners of ufology is that Kennedy, sworn in on this day 50 years ago, might have been killed because of what he knew or was planning to reveal about extraterrestrials. He was apparently briefed on the subject by the CIA, and rumors hint at more extensive knowledge or involvement. See Dolan’s new post about JFK.

Now, there’s no smoking gun connecting UFOs to JFK’s assassination–just interesting speculation. But oddly enough, there does seem to be a smoking gun linking UFOs to Marilyn Monroe’s “suicide.” Dolan writes:

Then there is the controversial Marilyn Monroe UFO document, which came to light in 1992. This is a single page memo from the CIA dated August 3, 1962, one day before she died, almost certainly because she was murdered. The information on the document came from two monitored telephone conversations: one between the journalist Dorothy Killgallen and her friend Howard Rothberg, and another between Marilyn Monroe and JFK’s brother, the Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

The Killgallen-Rothberg conversation revolved around the fact that Monroe was telling secrets to select Hollywood insiders regarding her liaisons with the President, one of which was “a visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space.” The conversation between Monroe and RFK focused on her anger at the Kennedys, the sensitive information she had in her journals, and her willingness to give a “tell all” press conference. The document bears the signature of James Jesus Angleton, head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.

I wish I could ignore all this and just be respectable. But dammit, there’s something stranger here, and especially in Marilyn Monroe’s death, than meets the eye. Wouldn’t it be terrible (and awesome) if the assassination of both Norma Jean and JFK had to do with UFOs? I’m of divided mind about this, because I don’t want to go too far down that path of wishful paranoia, but there is some suggestive stuff out there. (The CIA memo is reproduced in various places online–do a Google search if you’re interested.)

[1/29 Edit: Dolan's collaborator Bryce Zabel produced a series in 1996 called Dark Skies, about a direct link between the UFO conspiracy and JFK's assassination. At that point it was pure speculation, but will it be proved fact?]

Read it here.

Noooooo!!! — An Open Letter to Ridley Scott

[Edit 1/18/11: Just two days after posting this entreaty to Mr. Scott comes an announcement that the great director has seen the light, and abandoned his Alien prequel project for a more original movie, tentatively called Prometheus. A reader (see comments) alerted me to an article in Hollywood Reporter that explains:

“While Alien was indeed the jumping off point for this project, out of the creative process evolved a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place,” said Scott in a statement. “The keen fan will recognize strands of Alien's DNA, so to speak, but the ideas tackled in this film are unique, large and provocative. I couldn't be more pleased to have found the singular tale I'd been searching for, and finally return to this genre that's so close to my heart.”

My faith is restored. ... So, as Rosanna Rosannadanna used to say, "Never mind!"]

The worst mistake a film (or any work of art) can make is to answer all the questions. “Prequels” are a particular hazard in this respect, because they tend to take away that wonderful feeling of being plunged into a world in medias res and then leaving it still with a few questions. Answering all the questions takes away the mystery.

This is why my initial excitement that Ridley Scott was making another Alien movie quickly turned to slight dismay when I learned it was going to be a prequel to the original series. If ever a story not only didn’t need a prequel but seemingly couldn’t have one, it is that of the original Alien—one of the best science-fiction movies ever made.

Consider that story: Listening posts on earth pick up an ancient alien warning signal, hinting at a serious biological peril. (If SETI ever finds a signal, I hope it’s something cool and frightening like that, not some dumb welcome message.) An amoral corporation sends a fuel-towing ship with a clueless and expendable crew to the neighborhood of the signal so it will have to investigate. The crew dutifully land on a planet, not having been told the signal is a warning, and they find that the source of the signal is an ancient, bizarre wrecked ship, inside of which is the giant “fossilized” corpse of an alien pilot (one of designer H.R. Giger’s “biomechanoids—fused to the machinery), and a hold full of eggs. Those eggs turn out to house an unspeakable biological horror, just as the Corporation had suspected and hoped. According to the Corporation’s plan, the ship heads back to earth bearing this infestation so they can turn it into a really scary bioweapon—because the xenomorph is something new under the sun, the ultimate scary threat from space, something we never knew about.

How could there be a “before” to this story?

So imagine my even greater dismay to learn that the prequel will actually be about the “star pilots” and that (according to leaked details from the script) they will cross paths with humans. And that somehow our beloved xenomorphs will naturally be involved. The vast, strange universe of Alien will now be much less vast and strange, because now it will turn out that, well, we’re all already acquainted.

Guess who made exactly the same mistake and ruined, with prequels, a really cool universe he had created? I’ll give you one guess.

George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels failed on multiple levels, but the worst offense for me—worse than Jar-Jar Binks even—was to tie up what had been an excitingly vast and rich universe into a constricted little ball where we learned that everybody already knew each other. I had loved being plunged, at the opening of “Episode IV” (ugh) into the middle of things, into a space battle over a random remote backwater planet. I loved not knowing where R2D2 and C-3PO came from (and that they didn’t really seem to know each other all that well), or where Darth Vader came from, or the Princess. I loved the randomness of meeting Han and his hairy sidekick in a bar. Like a real story, these were (mostly) unrelated disparate characters and random fate had brought them together to go on a journey. It was great. And the coincidences that were there actually wound up making sense (Obi-Wan being a neighbor of Luke, Darth being Luke’s father, etc.).

Then the awful prequels arrived, and we found out that R2-D2 was actually Obi-Wan’s old droid (so Obi-Wan’s seeming to not know the droid was just an act, apparently) and that C-3PO was coincidentally from Tattooine and was (doubly coincidentally) built by Luke’s dad Anakin. (So the droid’s bewilderment in the original movie at finding himself on that desert planet was just a big act too—or wait, was his memory erased? I can’t remember. I was probably averting my eyes.) We found out that Chewbacca not only knew Yoda but had actually fought beside him—he wasn’t just some random Wookiee. We found out that Jabba the Hutt was there when Anakin was a kid and even watched him race, er, pods. We found out that Boba Fett was once a normal kid and that he had a dad, and that they lived in a really boring little apartment. I really didn’t want to know any of this (least of all have to see the Fetts’ apartment).

It was cool just hearing fragments of past history in the original film trilogy—not having to know what the “clone wars” etc. were, but just letting the imagination run wild. I loved thinking of the Star Wars universe as vast and full of surprises. The prequels explained away all its mystery and made that galaxy far far away seem small—the narrow, comfy little world of a children’s story.

So please, Ridley, don’t do it. Don’t let the ancient star pilots out of their seats. For the love of god, don’t have them walk and talk (ugh, with subtitles). Don’t have them interact with humans. Just please don’t. It would ruin one of the most sublime visions I’ve ever seen in film—an ancient alien we’ll never learn anything more about, victim of an equally mysterious and ancient horror, entombed in an ancient ship on a lonely, desolate world far far away.