The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Archive for 2009

Daddy’s Forbidden Closet of Mystery: UFOs and the Holographic Hypothesis

Sunday, 6 December, 2009

[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 (September 29, 2006). I had […]

Belittling Ufology

Tuesday, 17 November, 2009

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). Or the vaguely comedic spin […]

SETI, UFOs, and the Scientific Sublime

Monday, 16 November, 2009

What Dreams Really Are

Wednesday, 11 November, 2009

[edit 1/10/09 — The original post is now clarified and expanded in my article “Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness“] Every few months a psychologist—or now, more often, it is a neuroscientist—aggressively promotes their new theory of why we dream, and it gets picked up in the press as […]

Manifesto of Extraterrestentialism

Monday, 2 November, 2009

The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence […]

Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Right to Bear Experience

Tuesday, 8 September, 2009

I’ve been writing here lately about UFOs, which is something of a departure for me. But for a long time I’ve been interested in things Fortean—amazing or paranormal experiences, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, or fringe-science topics like extraterrestrials and Bigfoot—in short, things that transcend the humdrum and everyday. Part of the reason is, […]

“You see, Earth, it’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we just don’t care.”

Monday, 7 September, 2009

In his writings on contemporary culture, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to invoke a concept borrowed from psychoanalysis, “the subject presumed to know.” Basically, we often project onto specific other people and institutions a sense that they hold the answers about us. It is derived from a patient’s inner conviction that his therapist really holds […]

“They” Are Not “Them”: A Hybrid View of the UFO Presence

Sunday, 6 September, 2009

For many years I was skeptical of the UFO phenomenon. I was persuaded by SETI pioneers like Carl Sagan: It’s pretty certain that the universe is full of intelligent civilizations, but the vast interstellar distances and the vast timescales involved in traversing them made the notion of an alien presence in our skies seem (to […]

Hirshhorn floor

Tuesday, 23 June, 2009

So E and I went to the Hirshhorn this weekend. It’s my favorite DC gallery, but I hadn’t been in a few years. For some reason, I totally fell in love with the way the pinkish green floor looked in my iPhone camera. Then I got mesmerized by the marble floor on the upper level. […]

Secrecy and Truth

Sunday, 14 June, 2009

Call me crazy, but I think that the age of open, free publication has done something to debase or weaken the domain of thought in the West. Where are the really powerful and amazing ideas? I want to Prague in 1990 because I was in love with the idea of samizdat, of an underground culture […]