http://thenightshirt.com Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:41:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en “If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=454 Finally a serious journalist has been able to garner some mainstream legitimacy for the subject of UFOs. Leslie Kean's great new book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On The Record is on the bestseller lists; and more importantly, the author is getting major media airtime (including MSNBC and ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=449 [caption id="attachment_396" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="UFOs over Capitol, 1952 -- USAF image"][/caption]The second time I observed an aerial object that I could not identify was in the evening of August 3, 2009, on the Mall about four blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, DC. I was camped out with friends, ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=379 I have just paused Blade Runner: The Final Cut. It has taken me, what, two years, to watch this version, I guess because I’m so attached to The Director’s Cut that I was afraid of being disappointed. But this version is better (so far). The changes are very subtle, almost ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=360 When Magritte painted a picture of a pipe with the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”) underneath it, he was trying to get the viewer to be clear, philosophically, about what a picture is. It is a picture, not a pipe. It’s not such a ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=346 My last post was partly about the impossibility of psychic phenomena -- especially telepathy. That is, the impossibility of thought to travel between minds in any other way than by a physical signal receivable and readable ultimately by the private machine language of the brain. In other words, I was ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=256 "We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions." --Jacques Vallee I’d be the first to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=192 The weird and sort of shady neighborhood of the blogosphere I haunt was lately abuzz (a-twitter?) about a new book called The Big Brain, by neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s an account of the evolution of the large human neocortex. ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=159 [Note (3/13/10): In the first version of this post, I began by proposing--I thought somewhat originally--that UFOs were like the laser pointers used to entertain cats. A reader pointed out, however, that that the UFOs-as-laser-pointer idea was offered a couple years ago by Mac Tonnies on his blog Posthuman Blues ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=145 How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington's farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox's terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). ... http://thenightshirt.com/?p=130