The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Forteana”
Wikileaks: Soviet UFO Investigations
The rumors about upcoming Wikileaks concerning UFOs seem to be true: In a newly released cable published in a Norwegian newspaper, the chairman of the intelligence service of the former Soviet Republic of Belarus revealed that during the time of the Soviet Union, there were extensive funds for investigating the UFO phenomenon. Read the story […]
“Tell me how you really feel about your flying saucer”
“Along with his freely and evenly hovering attention which enables the analyst to listen simultaneously on many levels, he needs a freely roused emotional sensibility so as to perceive and follow closely his patient’s emotional movements and unconscious fantasies.” Paula Heimann When I first came across this quote about a psychoanalyst’s “freely and evenly hovering […]
The Martians’ Horrific Geometry
“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
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 […]
A Control System (The Right to Bear Experience, Part Deux)
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 […]
UFOs and the Midlife Crisis
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”
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
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
“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
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 […]
