The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Martian Holocausts, Cosmic Paranoia, and the Surveillance Universe

Ever since the Viking orbiters photographed a curiously face-like mountain and oddly pyramidal features in the Cydonia Mensae region of Mars in 1976, many have liked to speculate that the Red Planet was once inhabited, either by human settlers in the distant past—the argument made by Richard Hoagland—or by an indigenous civilization that flourished many hundreds of millions of years ago, when that planet was blue and green. Mac Tonnies summarized the claims (and counterarguments) in his excellent 2004 book After the Martian Apocalypse; now a recent book, Death on Mars, provides an insider account of outsider Mars research, as well as offering a dark scenario about what might have befallen an ancient Martian civilization.

Based on various pieces of evidence including an anomalous excess of the isotope Xenon 129 in the Martian atmosphere, author John E. Brandenburg, a former NASA plasma physicist, makes the bold argument that the Red Planet’s inhabitants perished in a nuclear attack about half a billion years ago. He argues that they did not destroy themselves: Given the seemingly bronze-age technology of the Cydonia complex and other allegedly artificial features, Brandenburg argues that the bombs were lobbed from off-world—a possibility he finds chilling, since we have no idea of the motive for this holocaust, and whether we ourselves might be next.

The mind hates uncertainty, so it fills in the blanks with its own story, like a Rorschach inkblot, or like the frog DNA used to fill in the gaps of spotty dinosaur genome in Jurassic Park.

The evidence for nuclear detonation in Mars’s past is impossible for a non-specialist like me to evaluate, but the claims for the artificiality of the Cydonia face and its nearby “pyramids” is, unfortunately, highly tenuous at this point. Recent images of the “face” convincingly (to me) show a very un-face-like mesa. And the more anomalists claim to find “sacred geometry” and the like in the irregular angles of the nearby “pyramid complex,” the more I am reminded of other obsessive Forteans who somehow distinctly see Sasquatches in every forest shadow and orb-like spirits of the dead in the lens flare of their photographs.

Pareidolia is seeing patterns, meaningful information, in what is probably noise. It particularly haunts various anomalistic fields, because they concern mysterious phenomena for which data are patchy at best. The mind hates uncertainty, so it fills in the blanks with its own story, like a Rorschach inkblot, or like the frog DNA used to fill in the gaps of spotty dinosaur genome in Jurassic Park. For instance, while anyone could be forgiven for seeing a face in the original low-res Cydonia images taken by the Viking orbiters, many of ur-anomalist Richard Hoagland’s other “discoveries” on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, such as giant crystal domes and latticework he claims to see in Apollo lunar photographs, veer well into sad/laughable territory.

Brandenburg dwells too heavily on the Cydonia face and many lesser, even less convincing face-like features, but on the whole his argument is less outrageous than some of Hoagland’s conjectures. Other parts of his book, such as his discussion of the contentious evidence for microfossils in Martian meteorites, and even the personal narrative in which his argument is embedded, are actually quite interesting. So is his only somewhat paranoid-seeming argument why we should be distrustful of NASA’s contractor Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The argument will be familiar to readers of Tonnies’ 2004 book, but Tonnies was drawing there on Brandenburg’s earlier work.

JPL’s speciality has always been robotic exploration, thus it has a vested interest (Brandenburg claims) in promoting Mars as mainly an object of geological, not biological (let alone anthropological), interest. Discovery of life or, even more significantly, the remains of a civilization, would very quickly turn Mars into an urgent destination for human missions and thus challenge JPL’s monopoly on planetary exploration. It is noteworthy that the only Martian landers ever to carry actual life-detecting experiments were Vikings 1 and 2, and the results—which actually tipped in favor of the presence of microbial life—resulted in endless bitter contention among planetary scientists. Whether it is to avoid further insoluble disputes or really reflects the “dead Mars” preference of JPL, subsequent missions, including the Curiosity rover currently surveying the base of Aeolus Mons (“Mount Sharp”), have had no ability to test for life in the Martian soil.

When Viking’s low-res images were supplanted by higher-resolution images in the late 1990s that seemed to dispel the face’s faceyness, the Mars anomaly community claimed the images had been deliberately manipulated by JPL or its image subcontractor Malin Space Science Systems, as part of a coverup to keep the Red planet dead. While I would prefer to think any bias against detecting life has more likely guided JPL tacitly and institutionally rather than deliberately and conspiratorially, in 2004 Hoagland exposed a troubling case of what could only be called serious negligence if it was not indeed part of a coverup: The Opportunity rover photographed a feature looking very much like a terrestrial crinoid fossil (left), and instead of examining it more closely, promptly sanded the feature into oblivion with its “rock abrasion tool.” (The original before and after photos can be seen here.) The ways four decades of interplanetary exploration may have been shaped by specific scientific assumptions that just happen to keep JPL’s contract with NASA secure seem to be a possibly important story awaiting investigation by some enterprising (and unbiased) space science journalist.

Dead and Red: The Martian Imaginal

Paranoia and pareidolia go hand in hand. Mars anomalistics is only the latest phase in what could be called the Martian imaginal—the tendency to make the Red Planet into a projection screen for our hopes and, more frequently, fears (and, in JPL’s case perhaps, financial interests). It goes back to Perceval Lowell’s canals, HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, and numerous other lesser-known touchstones. Whether or not it is because of the planet’s symbolic past and astrological significance, war and death have often played a big role in this imaginal.

Brandenburg’s Herod-style slaughter of the Martian innocent “as an attempt to prevent the birth of Christ in this solar system” is the most creative motive I’ve read for interstellar genocide.

Brandenburg places his research on an ancient inhabited Mars and its subsequent death within the context of the Cold War and his own perspective as a physicist involved directly in researching energy weapons for possible use in missile defense. For him, the evidence of a Martian nuclear holocaust was a chilling warning, both that the Superpowers needed to end the insane arms race and that, as a human imperative, we urgently needed to launch a manned mission to Mars to investigate what happened on that planet. Although more cautious of the evidence for Martian inhabitation, Carl Sagan was a supporter of this vision. Indeed it was thanks to Sagan’s enormous scientific imagination that Mars and Venus, our neighboring worlds, became object lessons for the major Democratic causes of late- and post-Cold War America: nuclear disarmament and climate change, respectively. Venus’s rampant greenhouse effect showed us what Earth could turn into if we don’t rein in our emission of greenhouse gases; and Sagan used dust storms on Mars to illustrate the scary notion of nuclear winter, a frigid life-eradicating darkness that would ensue after multiple bomb detonations.

Much to Brandenburg’s credit, he does not harbor the antipathy to Sagan that many anomalists and Forteans do, reminding us that Sagan himself was open-minded about the possibility of an ancient Martian civilization, even if he appeared closed-minded on other areas with much better evidence, like UFOs. I’ve argued before that Sagan’s skepticism toward UFOs may have reflected his own kind of cosmic imaginal, which actually served a wise social/political agenda: A vast universe with distant intelligences and perhaps ancient relics of ET visitation on Mars or the Moon was a sublime vision that went hand in hand with taking responsibility for our cosmic fate and the fate of our planet, rather than expecting benevolent intervention by flying saucer brethren buzzing around our solar system in the here and now.

Brandenburg’s own Martian imaginal, although entertaining and based on some interesting evidence, is way too speculative to take very seriously. He also concedes it is grounded partly in his religious beliefs. Near the end of the book, he offers an admittedly “emotional conjecture” that “this Solar system may have been prophesied to be the home of the Christ by other species in space, and perhaps became a target because of it.” Brandenburg is not writing science fiction, but his Herod-style slaughter of the Martian innocent “as an attempt to prevent the birth of Christ in this solar system” is surely the most creative motive I’ve read for interstellar genocide. However, no less a mind than Stephen Hawking has also waxed alarmist at the prospect of ET aggression, suggesting we should make no attempts to advertise our presence lest we invite invasion or destruction. Are such fears realistic?

A Requiem for Alderaan

While it is often justified in religious terms, human aggression always boils down ultimately to competition for valuable resources and to self-defense. This fact itself is, I believe, one of the biggest counterarguments to most “hostile ET” scenarios.

All sci-fi scenarios for planetary destruction—including pure paranoid insanity—are predicated on an absence of the one thing I suspect the universe is actually full of: knowledge.

ET civilizations with the mastery of energy and matter on the scale required for extensive interstellar travel (i.e., Type I or Type II Civilizations, let alone higher) will have long since solved any resource problems that we or our planet’s (or even solar system’s) resources could help them with. Earth is truly, as Sagan underscored, a miniscule blue spec. Our minerals, our water, our meat, and our nice attractive real estate, dearly precious to us, will offer ETs nothing they can’t manufacture for themselves via sidereal and planetary engineering. Given the wild dissinchrony that will obtain between different intelligent races/civilizations/post-civilizations in our galaxy, anybody out there capable of becoming aware of us is in all probability already living in massive Dyson pleasure spheres, or has transcended physical reality altogether, if they are not long dead and gone. Whatever the case, they’re not in a position to want anything from us. Nor are they in a position to feel terribly threatened either by our presence or by our weapons (including our secret weapon, Jesus).

Yet the assumption that advanced ETs could simply be malicious or have some other nefarious or unfathomable motive to destroy young civilizations like ours is a widely held one, and is of course a sci-fi staple. For example, Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series is premised upon the discovery of civilization-destroying booby traps placed billions of years ago by an ancient race called the Inhibitors. Their purpose is to cull emerging civilizations throughout the galaxy in order to make galactic engineering easier when Andromeda and the Milky Way collide in another 3 billion years. Although I mostly love Reynolds’ imagination, this ancient agenda—sort of the opposite of that of the slabs in Arthur C Clarke’s 2001—falls flat. Not only does it seem like rather insane and pointless cosmic stewardship, it also (I assume unintentionally) calls to mind Douglas Adams’ comical scenario in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: destroying Earth to make way for a cosmic express route.

More worthy of consideration is the motive for preemptive genocide that serves as the premise of a bad-but-interesting 1995 novel called The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. A race of coldly logical alien octopi completely obliterate Earth and all human outposts in the solar system, without warning, using relativistic missiles—self-guided projectiles traveling at velocities edging toward the speed of light. The octopi’s motive is that they detect from our TV broadcasts (including Star Trek) that our species is on the brink of acquiring the technical capacity for relativistic spaceflight, so could potentially create a relativistic missile ourselves. Their attack is a preemptive strike just to be on the safe side.

Advanced ETs won’t look out into space the way we still do, seeing darkness and mystery and potential threats. Their technology will have created for them a cosmos of light, a noöverse.

The basic (and interesting) idea here is that relativistic spaceflight is itself the deadliest of weapons: An object accelerated to an appreciable percent of lightspeed would have kinetic energy well in excess of an equivalent amount of antimatter, and thus be practically the most destructive thing imaginable. Forget nuclear weapons; no warheads are needed. Also, such an attack would also be impossible to see coming. Applying this logic to SETI, the authors of The Killing Star suggest that the Great Silence (Fermi Paradox) may reflect not that civilizations destroy themselves but rather that they destroy each other: Specifically, whoever in our galaxy first acquired relativistic capability went ahead and suppressed all other newly arising civilizations with swift, planet-killing bullets to assure their own safety.

This is a distinctly Cold War logic, reminiscent of what was surely going through the minds of some strategists who were tasked with thinking the unthinkable: namely, preemptive strikes to eliminate the nuclear threat posed by Russia and China. It is an important argument to consider as an answer to the Fermi Paradox; but we also need to look at the geopolitical world that replaced the Cold War, and perhaps project newer (and ideally, future) realities onto the night sky instead of outmoded Dr. Strangelove fantasies. All the various sci-fi scenarios for planetary destruction, from the (weirdly) custodial motives of Reynolds’ Inhibitors to the purely survival imperative of Pellegrino and Zebrowski’s octopi—and even, pure paranoid insanity—are predicated on an absence of the one thing I suspect the universe is actually full of: knowledge, produced by ongoing active machine surveillance on a planet-to-planet level.

It’s a Noöverse, Folks

If ETs exist at all, the math dictates that “they” are already aware of us and were aware of us long before we started setting off nuclear warheads and long before they started receiving our broadcasts of Star Trek and I Love Lucy. ET surveillance drones could have been here before we stood upright on the savannah, and likely even before the primordial oceans bloomed with algae. This should not be a scary thought, but a reassuring one: A vast active drone intelligence system operating quietly across million- and billion-year timespans, which I have argued is probably the inevitable project of advanced civilizations, eliminates the kinds of scenario favored in space operas or cosmic paranoia scenarios like The Killing Star.

Klaatu is a myth we should, as thoughtful adults, grow out of. I’m here to tell you, though, that there are probably lots and lots of very unobtrusive Gorts.

Paranoia takes over in the absence of noös, knowledge and knowing. When you don’t know what’s out there, you fear it. Advanced ETs won’t look out into space the way we still do, seeing darkness and mystery and potential threats. Their technology will have created for them a cosmos of light, a noöverse, that they can inhabit virtually and that supplies them (or their machine proxies) with godlike prediction-and-control capacity. If, through a massive stealthy automated program of deep anthropology, you have complete predictive power over any and all ‘lesser’ species and civilizations, you—or really, your machine proxies—have ample warning to intervene in subtle, non-drastic ways to ensure your long-term safety. Emerging threats such as new spacefaring warlike civilizations and imminent supernovas (not to mention galactic collisions) will be foreseen long in advance, enabling easy steps to prevent calamity—rather like an ocean liner making a gentle, minor course correction ten miles away from an iceberg instead of a panicked course correction a half mile away. Swarming the galaxy with a neural net of autonomous Von Neumann probes capable of nuanced cultural intervention would require far less expenditure of energy and resources than accelerating projectiles to relativistic velocities. Surveillance and control in this subtle, long-duration sense will, I suspect, have largely replaced weapons and warfare for the universe’s more mature (and ancient) inhabitants.

The argument that the universe is really a noöverse can be made solely based on the Drake Equation and various mathematical models of interstellar expansion and Von Neumann probe propogation. Yet, two pieces of the UFO puzzle harmonize rather nicely with it: One is Vallee’s “control system” hypothesis—the notion that whoever/whatever is behind the UFO phenomenon, they seem to be steering us or nudging us somehow. Although Vallee favors a more local or interdimensional origin for these phenomena, a very long term project of subtle cultural course corrections coupled with a program of deep anthropology fits well with an ET drone hypothesis too, as I’ve argued previously. (Personally I suspect that the UFO phenomenon is actually multiple separate phenomena, including some ET component and a more local or interdimensional one, and that lumping them together contributes to our bafflement.)

The other puzzle piece is UFOs’ overt and well-documented interest in nuclear weapons, noted by various authors including Leslie Kean and evidenced by Robert Hastings’ impressive body of data on UFO encounters in the context of nuclear tests and at missile silos. The notion that ET is here to steer us away from using nuclear weapons has of course been a staple of UFO folklore and popular culture from the start—most famously, the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Just because it’s pop culture doesn’t mean it’s wrong. My only modification to this scenario is that ET “interest” in our military technology would be very long-term and would not at all be personal: Klaatu is a myth we should, as thoughtful adults, grow out of. I’m here to tell you, though, that there are probably lots and lots of very unobtrusive Gorts.

Postscript: Surveillance States

In the noöverse, we have no expectation of privacy. When our galactic antecedents could be millions or billions of years beyond us in technological capacity, being surreptitiously watched by them and even nudged culturally should be a reassuring prospect, not a disturbing one. What about affairs closer to home, when advanced technological states are, sort of similarly, light years beyond their citizenry in technological capacity? Considerations and reconsiderations of cosmic paranoia should force us to reflect on more immediate political realities.

If a paranoid military-government apparatus lacked the technological ability to listen to its citizens’ phone calls and read its e-mails, might it not feel compelled to engage in a more widespread pattern of imprisonment, torture, and assassination?

Much as I applaud Edward Snowden and others who are reporting on and fighting the encroachment of the modern secrecy/surveillance state, I think it is also useful to at least consider how a situation of pervasive surveillance might actually be preferable to certain alternatives in our current “archonic” terrestrial reality. Before you hurl tomatoes at me, listen: If a paranoid military-government apparatus lacked the technological ability to listen to its citizens’ phone calls and read its e-mails, might it not feel compelled to engage in a more widespread pattern of imprisonment, torture, and assassination of people even remotely fitting the profile of a subversive or terrorist?

In other words, state surveillance is worse than privacy, but it may be better than other possibilities we generally avoid thinking about—like a pattern of outright, stealthy killing and “disappearances.” While I suppose it could reflect a passive, cowardly cynicism about political structures and governments, part of me wonders whether high-tech state surveillance, by reducing state-level paranoia, might actually make make us safer from those governments, if not actually safer from ostensible external threats like terrorism. I don’t know the answer, but I put that out there for consideration and discussion.

About

I am a science writer and armchair Fortean based in Washington, DC. Write to me at eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.

32 Responses to “Martian Holocausts, Cosmic Paranoia, and the Surveillance Universe”

  • Regarding your assertion about government surveillance serving to reduce the paranoia of the state, and curtail its abusive behavior — I don’t believe human (or worse yet, organizational) minds could sufficiently process and correlate all that data to truly develop an understanding of it that would head off paranoia and appropriately target action. To do so would require either that the state rely on an array of highly advanced AIs that it trusts implicitly, or for the state to be such an AI.

    In the real world, I don’t believe the surveillance apparatus is substantively engaged in risk assessment at all. Rather it works to build a database from which data can be cherry picked to support whatever policy or prosecutions (initiated on more traditional, and often corrupt, bases) the controllers seek to support. It feeds and supports the pattern of ham-handed, paranoia-driven, profiling-based tyranny you describe, rather than supplanting it.

    And in the event AIs could be created that could apprehend such a breadth of data, I’m skeptical that they would be truly reliable or trustworthy. Wouldn’t they be as flawed as their programming in assessing the meaning and weighting of the data they analyze? Wouldn’t they be inclined to view 100 “false positives” as an acceptable price for saving 101 lives?

    I don’t fault your question as a thought exercise, but I think it ends up in the same trap as speculation about digitized law enforcement and justice generally — it presupposes a completeness and perfection in the collection and handling of information that is unattainable in the material world.

  • Umbriel, thanks for a great response. I especially like this:

    I don’t believe human (or worse yet, organizational) minds could sufficiently process and correlate all that data to truly develop an understanding of it that would head off paranoia and appropriately target action. To do so would require either that the state rely on an array of highly advanced AIs that it trusts implicitly, or for the state to be such an AI.

    In the real world, I don’t believe the surveillance apparatus is substantively engaged in risk assessment at all. Rather it works to build a database from which data can be cherry picked to support whatever policy or prosecutions (initiated on more traditional, and often corrupt, bases) the controllers seek to support. It feeds and supports the pattern of ham-handed, paranoia-driven, profiling-based tyranny you describe, rather than supplanting it.

    Really good points, all. But just to play devil’s advocate … even if the surveillance apparatus doesn’t actually provide useful information, couldn’t its mere existence have a psychological effect on human leaders, making them feel less insecure, and thus make them less paranoid?

  • The psychological effect has clearly been operating in the other direction. McConnell said we need MORE surveillance after a talk with a certain unnamed somebody with who knows what kind of real or faked evidence used to spook him. This is furthermore in support of something everyone knows is unconstitutional, i.e, against the law, in this country at any rate. I’d say your academic Ph.D. is showing a bit there.

  • The psychological effect has clearly been operating in the other direction. McConnell said we need MORE surveillance after a talk with a certain unnamed somebody with who knows what kind of real or faked evidence used to spook him.

    Point taken. The ultimate question for me, though, is whether there’s some kind of predictable ratio between the level of surveillance and the level of violence against perceived potential threats.

    For instance, would the Soviet state have executed or sent so many people to gulags if it had had the kind of surveillance capacity we now possess? Certainly, drone strikes and secret prisons seem like a counterargument to what I’m (only halfheartedly) suggesting, but do we know that the situation would not actually be worse or affect even more people if the level of state surveillance was more limited (whether by law or by technological capacity)?

  • I do not think any massive data set changes anything.
    Maybe just increases ambiguity, and layers of fact checkers.

    All the old spies know this stuff. And hackers.

    All this new tech is trending to increase the old game.
    Not so much what one knows, but what the others suspect.

    Even the oldest photos from the old wars have been changed.
    Truth does not sell, media rules.

    Politicians are marketing and optics.
    You know, data sets can experience a form of corruption, and trauma. That whole AI thing dancing on a pin.

    Of course, being exposed, and created, and searching for lost purity is called the human condition.

  • Interesting post!

    Regarding the “face on mars”, I highly, highly recommend the following, somewhat little known book:

    http://www.amazon.com/Stargate-Conspiracy-Extraterrestrial-Mysteries-Ancient/dp/

    Ignore the unfortunate use of “conspiracy” in the title, this book is fantastic, and possibly the best book written on the subject – very much recommended, and anyone interested in the topics of Hoagland, Graham Hancock, ancient Egypt, extraterrestrials etc – and doesn’t hold onto some perspective as if it’s dogma – will absolutely love this book!

    Manu

  • Thanks, Manu. I’ll check it out!

  • I think the Face issue is a bit more complex than you make it out to be here. NASA has played a lot of spooky games with bad images but the best and most recent image show actual- not sacred- geometry in relation to the face. What we see is a badly eroded edifice that displays a degree of symmetry not known in nature. I look at images all day for a living, I know what I’m talking about. Here’s a more balanced story on this topic.

    http://secretsun.blogspot.com/2008/06/astronaut-theology-face-facts.html

Christopher Knowles on June 10th, 2015 at 3:30 pm
  • Thanks, Chris. I’d seen your piece on Jack Kirby’s RV-ing of the face, but not this one. The (conventional) geometry argument is persuasive with respect to the overall feature, although I don’t see much in the “face” feature itself. I’m still on the fence.

    The main Martian feature that bugs me are the tubes: http://thenightshirt.com/?p=825

  • I’m currently about ½ way through Wright’s Going Clear, and thought about it in regards this post.

    If governors who get mass surveillance data are not inherently paranoid themselves, then more data might help them feel less threatened (although I think neal above brings up some good points). However, if the governors are already ensconced in a paranoid worldview, then I don’t think that more data, or even great control, would make them “less paranoid.” Think Josef Stalin, Richard Nixon, LRH, and his successor David M. Paranoia is not simply the worry that one doesn’t know all the important stuff; it’s a conviction that cherry picks observations that confirm the conviction, and re-interprets observations that might disconfirm the conviction.

    I’m at the point in Clear where Wright reports that D.M. is keeping 40-50 high organization executives in an unconditioned double-wide trailer in the desert, because he wants them to re-do the whole organizational chart of offices and responsibilities. They re-arrange and re-re-arrange the chart repeatedly, and D.M. never accepts that they “got it right.” This means that people are constantly being transferred between places and positions in a way that is essentially arbitrary, because there is no definition of “right.” How did the organization survive? (Don’t spoil it for me!)

    I bring this up in terms of paranoia, and both LRH and DM as described look plenty paranoid to me! They both have tons of people who have given themselves up fully to the organization – but LRH and DM really don’t seem to perceive it that way.

    …I first really bumped up against the powers of “big data” back in the late 1990’s (1999, in fact), and it was sobering. At the time, I took comfort in the thought that to really get stuff out of it, people would have to know how to ask the right questions, have all the data connected up correctly, and have sufficient computing power.

    I know longer take comfort in that. As neal pointed out, more information can actually add ambiguity. I think that, in the case of individuals, it’s not really that difficult at this period for someone who has a lot of data to infer pretty specific things about the individual. Someone coming from an actively paranoid position would probably still infer “threat.”

  • I’m currently about ½ way through Wright’s Going Clear, and thought about it in regards this post…

    Gripping read, isn’t it?! The documentary did a great job, I thought, but for the full (insane) backstory of LRH, the book is essential.

    If governors … are already ensconced in a paranoid worldview, then I don’t think that more data, or even great control, would make them “less paranoid.” Think Josef Stalin, Richard Nixon, LRH, and his successor David M. Paranoia is not simply the worry that one doesn’t know all the important stuff; it’s a conviction that cherry picks observations that confirm the conviction, and re-interprets observations that might disconfirm the conviction.

    You, Neal, and everyone else on here have persuaded me on this.

    I’m at the point in Clear where Wright reports that D.M. is keeping 40-50 high organization executives in an unconditioned double-wide trailer … How did the organization survive? (Don’t spoil it for me!)

    Well, spoiler alert, but someone on Twitter posted that the Brooklyn Scientology office saw a surge in new visitors following the documentary, which, if true, verifies that there’s really no such thing as bad publicity.
    I also think it has to do with the core appeal of Scientology, which is precisely that it’s an astro-Gnostic religion that promises (and, I’m convinced, actually delivers, to an extent) superpowers. There’s a huge built-in appeal there. And like all ‘cults,’ it seeks out and appeals to people who, due to whatever educational disadvantage, are not widely read and thus don’t realize that its ideas can be gotten for free anywhere. Except, you can’t buy an e-meter for any reasonable price, even on eBay (believe me, I’ve tried), even though the technology is simple for someone with basic electronics skills (which I don’t have, unfortunately). Even if “clearing body thetans” is BS, the advantages of a neurofeedback device for fast-tracking productive altered states are unmistakeable.

    …I first really bumped up against the powers of “big data” back in the late 1990?s (1999, in fact), and it was sobering. At the time, I took comfort in the thought that to really get stuff out of it, people would have to know how to ask the right questions, have all the data connected up correctly, and have sufficient computing power.

    Here on earth, and in our archonic times, I do agree. However, for truly automated Von Neumann science platforms scouring the universe and correlating data points (such as species behavior and verifiable threat), I don’t think there would be such a problem. That’s the ultimate theoretical advantage of true AI taking over the whole business of science (i.e., knowing what questions to ask, in a totally unbiased, because unsentient, way).

  • If there was nothing to hide NAZA wouldn’t pull the typical Nixonian tricks they have with it- the bleached-out shot from the weird angle, the CGI cartoons, the unannounced releases of actual imagery. Look closely at the diagram I created on a monitor, not a phone and remember the age of this edifice as well as the obvious damage it has sustained. There’s a lot of monkey business with Mars in general, even these recent missions.

Christopher Knowles on June 10th, 2015 at 5:00 pm
  • “Here on earth, and in our archonic times, I do agree. However, for truly automated Von Neumann science platforms scouring the universe and correlating data points (such as species behavior and verifiable threat), I don’t think there would be such a problem. That’s the ultimate theoretical advantage of true AI taking over the whole business of science (i.e., knowing what questions to ask, in a totally unbiased, because unsentient, way).”

    Exsctly. Depends on the motivations of those doing the data collecing.

  • If there was nothing to hide NAZA wouldn’t pull the typical Nixonian tricks they have with it- the bleached-out shot from the weird angle, the CGI cartoons, the unannounced releases of actual imagery. … There’s a lot of monkey business with Mars in general, even these recent missions.

    There’s a lot that appears fishy, I grant you that. I’m no expert on NASA, but in other areas unrelated to these, some of what looks to the rest of the world like coordinated government deviousness is in reality an effect of massive bureaucracy and out-of-touch-ness, so that makes me cautious on the idea of secret agendas, coverups, clandestine behavior, etc. Although it also admittedly depends on the mood I happen to be in that day 🙂

    Look closely at the diagram I created on a monitor, not a phone and remember the age of this edifice as well as the obvious damage it has sustained.

    I’m too old to look at pictures on phones, unfortunately, so no worries there. Some of the features you highlight are clearly symmetrical, such as the base, the internal square, and the ‘eyebrows/eye sockets.’ But as I see it the gap below the nose and above the mouth (which reads as the mouth itself in the original low-res photo) does not actually cut across the whole feature as your lines depict; it only goes 1/3 of the way across, which makes it less convincing to me that there’s a mouth there. Also you have placed the nose tip on the lower portion of what looks like a larger, flat, oval- or diamond-shaped feature. That feature, however, is central to the whole thing both vertically and horizontally, which to me better supports your symmetry argument. I’m persuaded that it’s odd, and definitely open-minded to its possible artificiality; more and more it looks to me sort of fortress-like in shape; but I’m not convinced of it being face-like. (I’d be curious to see a bigger version of the Surveyor image, though, if you can provide the link.)
    So here’s my question: Do you think Jack Kirby saw this feature itself, or did he instead precognitively view a future sci-fi/cultural meme?

  • It definitely gives the impression of a symmetrical image that has been damaged.

    As to the Kirby story, I think reading it will tell you a lot.

Christopher Knowles on June 11th, 2015 at 10:54 am
  • Yeah I was wondering about that animation.

Christopher Knowles on June 11th, 2015 at 2:26 pm
  • I had a little bit more to say about *Going Clear* after thinking about your reply above some more. However, I put it at
    http://thenightshirt.com/?p=1367
    because I felt like it fit better there.

  • Thanks, Chris. Yeah I agree, it is a pretty incredible story. Obviously it’s tantalizing to speculate that Kirby actually remote-viewed something on Mars and maybe events in its past, but I’m also interested in the possibility of artists tuning in precognitively to future events unfolding in their lives, and how their own emotional reactions to future events may carry information back in time. The real-life “face on Mars” was discovered and became a full-on meme, surrounded by speculations of Martian holocausts etc., within Kirby’s lifetime. Do we (you) know what his reaction was to all of it? Did he ever comment on his own ‘prophecy’ of it?

  • Brandenberg heard in an interview was extremely unimpressive after the bare facts of his discovery were mentioned. There are other possibilities for the high levels Xenon 129 discovered, but he was unwilling to even consider or discuss them. He was very evasive in answering every question asked of him – lots of words; no content.

    His religious motive for the destruction of Mars is reminiscent of a Jihad, so it can be argued that Brandenberg is sensitive to the new millennium fear of Islam as the new Anti-Christ now that Communism has fallen. Likely we’ll see more of this Jihadist motivation projected onto our notions of hostile aliens in the near future.

    The private exploration and exploitation of space will (hopefully) put NASA out of business. NASA’s mission has always had a large military component anyway and that military aspect is likely the main reason why a now very parsimonious Congress keeps funding the agency. Frankly, I don’t see NASA as having much of a future. Its glory days are long behind it. JPL had better be well down the road towards its Plan B. Life is exploitable (for starters, what do we all eat, after all?) so it’ s seems unlikely that private space exploration would have a bias against finding it in the big Out There.

    As for nukes and UFOs, how many covert security tests (ours and theirs) do you suppose were run against our nuclear facilities during the Cold War? How many of these secret exercises could account for the UFO/nukes phenomenon? That test data is sorely needed to make any definitive statement about UFOs having an interest in nuclear facilities, but it will probably be classified into the next millennium.

    As for me, I’m convinced the UFO phenomenon is real, but has no ET component. I say that as someone who’s seen a UFO. I suspect that these are random, spontaneous events, part of the natural fabric of the universe, that interfere with the functioning of the human brain, which accounts for their often high strangeness scenarios (created in our misfiring brains and not in the external world). Our science is simply not advanced enough to identify and define these phenomena.

    The biggest mistake of this age of big data is equating data with knowledge. As a biologist friend said to me, you can count how many times an animal shows its teeth and when and where it does so, but those numbers won’t lead to a true understanding of why the animal shows its teeth nor predict with 100 percent accuracy when it will do so again.

  • Kirby was oblivious to it all, as far as I can tell. And no one was pointing any of this out during his lifetime, certainly not his entourage or most of his fans. Jack was a working class guy at heart, which makes all this stuff all the weirder. It was almost entirely unconscious on his part.

Christopher Knowles on June 12th, 2015 at 8:33 am
  • It’s interesting: Having looked at Knowles’ “astro-theology face the fact” post, I’m more open than I was about the thing on Cydonia being artificial. If it were *just* the first and second picture, I’d be much more inclined to take it as paredoila. Add the third picture though, and “artificial” becomes much more compelling. Assuming CLK is correct about multiple imagings from multiple angles, it occurs to me that “gathering enough data to build a 3-D model” might be something that is going on.

  • Kirby was oblivious to it all, as far as I can tell. And no one was pointing any of this out during his lifetime, certainly not his entourage or most of his fans. Jack was a working class guy at heart, which makes all this stuff all the weirder. It was almost entirely unconscious on his part.

    So fascinating. Prophecy (or whatever it was) seems to always be unconscious.

  • Thanks for commenting, Purlie.

    The biggest mistake of this age of big data is equating data with knowledge. As a biologist friend said to me, you can count how many times an animal shows its teeth and when and where it does so, but those numbers won’t lead to a true understanding of why the animal shows its teeth nor predict with 100 percent accuracy when it will do so again.

    I agree with you, as long as big data is not matched by a commensurate analytical capacity. There’s little we can do with mountains of data, but this is the promise (and threat) of AI, as I see it. Prediction and control will never be 100 percent accurate, but it could be well beyond our current ability to fathom.

  • Great article. My mom has just two camera traps in her yard in Colorado and it’s a remarkably big job sifting through the photos and videos every day.

  • “There’s little we can do with mountains of data, but this is the promise (and threat) of AI, as I see it.”

    I demur. It looks like the Holy Grail of AI is to first duplicate human thinking and then improve on it. AI already appears to be the relentless pursuit of replacing humans with technology for the benefit of an ever smaller and smaller group of economic elite.

    All that big data won’t matter because the vast majority of us, in the end, won’t matter. We will be the powerless, impoverished dregs with no access to anything that could make us a danger to anyone other than each other.

    BTW, The Singularity is Kurweil’s psychotic dystopian view of a possible future that poorly socialized tech geeks have fallen in love with and hope to create — some because they simply don’t have the emotional intelligence to know better and/or some for self-enrichment schemes.

  • I demur. It looks like the Holy Grail of AI is to first duplicate human thinking and then improve on it. AI already appears to be the relentless pursuit of replacing humans with technology for the benefit of an ever smaller and smaller group of economic elite.

    I share the fear/expectation of increasing social disparity, but I don’t think AI is the only technology that could or will contribute to that. Partly because it has been oversold; it certainly won’t duplicate or improve on human thinking, and certainly won’t ever be “conscious” (despite Kurzweil et al.’s fantasies). It will instead be an astonishing tool for doing science. And science will continue to be used for both good and ill, as it always has been.

    All that big data won’t matter because the vast majority of us, in the end, won’t matter. We will be the powerless, impoverished dregs with no access to anything that could make us a danger to anyone other than each other.
    BTW, The Singularity is Kurweil’s psychotic dystopian view of a possible future that poorly socialized tech geeks have fallen in love with and hope to create — some because they simply don’t have the emotional intelligence to know better and/or some for self-enrichment schemes.

    No argument from me about Kurzweil and that version of the Singularity. Part of my shares your depressing vision of the future, but I don’t think it’s an inevitability or that technology per se will be the deciding factor, rather our attitude to/beliefs about that technology. I’d be curious your reaction to my post on precisely this question: http://thenightshirt.com/?p=1565

  • Hi Eric,

    Thanks for the excellent site and the interesting article. I am late to the party, and am only nitpicking but this got my antennae twitching:

    “… An object accelerated to an appreciable percent of lightspeed would have kinetic energy well in excess of an equivalent amount of antimatter, and thus be practically the most destructive thing imaginable…”

    I wondered about that…

    Big disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and have had too much coffee. Still…

    Using the basic kinetic energy equation (KE = (mv^2)/2) I get 4.4×10^16 joules for a 1 kg mass traveling at 0.99c. Again, with the simplest possible model (E=mc^2), for complete annihilation of 0.5kg matter and 0.5kg antimatter I arrive at 8.98 x 10^16 joules for the antimatter bolt-from-the-blue. I checked that via the wiki page on ‘Antimatter weapon’ and for what it’s worth and they cited an equivalent value (180×10^12 J per 2 grams).

    Of course all this ignores all the higher order effects like how well either would couple to the target, Einstein’s famous equation is for rest mass, etc.

    Again, minor quibble. The post itself and the wide ranging discussion that followed were much more interesting. ;]

  • Thanks for your comment, Mark. You’re more of a physicist than I am … I based that claim on the discussion of relativistic kill vehicles vs antimatter on some discussion forums, including this one on reddit. It’s clearly a question of how fast the lump of accelerated matter is going; at some point it surpasses antimatter, but I confess I don’t understand “Lorentz factors” etc. 🙂