The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Archive for 2010

The Martians’ Horrific Geometry

Tuesday, 28 December, 2010

“He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong…” H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” A surprising number of features on Mars show qualities at least somewhat suggestive of having been sculpted not […]

STS-80

Thursday, 23 December, 2010

Several compelling pieces of visual evidence for UFOs come from videos taken in orbit by Space Shuttle crews. NASA typically doesn’t comment on these videos, and when they do, they explain them as dust, space junk, or ice coming off the orbiter. They are surely right in many cases—numerous such videos posted on YouTube as […]

Beautiful Moons

Tuesday, 14 December, 2010

The horizon of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with the ringed moon Titan in the background, shot by the Cassini probe. The plumes are geysers. See story and full-size image at the Planetary Society website.

A Control System (The Right to Bear Experience, Part Deux)

Thursday, 9 December, 2010

A theme running through all of Jacques Vallee’s writings, and expressed beautifully in my favorite of his books, The Invisible College, is that UFOs seem like a control system, a kind of thermostat that, through recorded history, has periodically kicked in to regulate the human psyche. His study of patterns of UFO waves revealed to […]

Go SpaceX

Thursday, 9 December, 2010

Sweet launch and POV video of yesterday’s Falcon 9 flight: (If you want to skip ahead to the separation of Stage 1–everyone’s favorite part!–it happens about 4 minutes in.)

UFOs and the Midlife Crisis

Wednesday, 8 December, 2010

I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about UFOs in the last couple months—duh—so out of a sense of blogging duty I thought I should get out my DVD of Close Encounters and watch it again, and perhaps comment on it. It has been a couple years. I totally disagree with Spielberg’s overt premise—that ETs are […]

“Strange Days Indeed”

Wednesday, 8 December, 2010

It’s the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Few people know that in 1974, the former Beatle, his then-lover May Pang (he was separated from Yoko at the time), and many other New Yorkers watched a huge flying saucer hover for several minutes over the East River, near his apartment on 52nd Street. Subsequently Lennon felt […]

Vallee on Salon

Tuesday, 7 December, 2010

The always fascinating Jacques Vallee has just published (with Chris Aubeck) a catalogue of 500 historical accounts of unexplainable aerial phenomena, going back as far as ancient Egypt. Salon interviewed him this week about the book. Like so much of the new research coming about about the UFO phenomenon in our own times, Vallee’s work […]

UFO Wars

Monday, 6 December, 2010

“In the land of Languedoc, a big star and five small ones were seen in the sky. These, as it seemed, attacked and sought to fight the big one, which they followed for half an hour.” (1395 account, reproduced by Jacques Vallee, Wonders in the Sky) Back before I started questioning the extraterrestrial hypothesis in […]

No Matter How You Slice It, It Comes Up Peanuts

Sunday, 5 December, 2010

They either come from here or they come from elsewhere. Most people favor the latter view. Lately I’ve been riffing on the former. But both the cryptoterrestrial hypotheses and the extraterrestrial hypothesis have major problems—gaps in logic, on the one hand, and data on the other. The big argument against the ETH as I see […]