The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Archive for 2011

Grazia Toderi’s Alien Homeworlds

Saturday, 15 October, 2011

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 […]

NASA Acknowledges WTFs Near Space Shuttle

Thursday, 15 September, 2011

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. ***

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

Saturday, 27 August, 2011

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, […]

WTFology

Friday, 26 August, 2011

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? […]

Hermetic Astronomy

Friday, 19 August, 2011

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 […]

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

Sunday, 17 July, 2011

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 […]

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Thursday, 9 June, 2011

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 […]

UFOs and the Surreal

Saturday, 14 May, 2011

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 […]

The Immensity of Things

Monday, 9 May, 2011

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: ***

War of the Worlds One

Saturday, 9 April, 2011

Few people are aware that many of the best-attested, best-studied, and most astonishing UFO encounters have actually involved military confrontations. Encounters 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, […]