The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Extraterrestrials”
Saganism
Carl Sagan was a hero to most of us who in one way or another like to watch the skies. The mellifluous-voiced, turtleneck-and-corduroy-wearing astronomer inspired my generation to care about space, about our planet, and about our future as a spacefaring civilization. He was not only a fashion plate but also a prophet of what […]
JFK, Marilyn, and UFOs
“Webb,” [Bill Clinton] had said, “if I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs.” Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting. (Webster Hubbell, Friends in […]
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 […]
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 […]
NASA’s Low-Hanging Fruit
Bryce Zabel, coauthor of A.D.: After Disclosure, has a great reaction to today’s much-hyped NASA nerd-fest about hardy terrestrial microbes: Today we heard about some microbes that can exist in the extremely salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that’s known as Mono Lake. … Because Mono Lake is such an inhospitable environment […]
Cool Old Documentary
A classic, cool UFO documentary from the 1970s, UFOs Are Here!, has just been made available online. It features Jacques Vallee, Kenneth Arnold, J. Allen Hynek, and others–even Steven Spielberg. Skip past the sorta cheesy new tacked-on preamble by Stan Deyo (first 10 minutes).
Un phenomenon psychologique
Late this past May I attended a symposium called “Alien Abduction Experiences: Normal Science or Revolutionary Science?” at a conference of scientific psychologists in Boston. The speakers included eminent abduction researcher Budd Hopkins and abduction ‘debunker’ Susan Clancy—two polar opposites in the whole abduction question. As both a member of the psychology organization hosting the […]
Childhood’s End … and the End of Camping, Too
To me, the most haunting image in Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel’s new book A.D. After Disclosure is this paragraph (p. 86): There is … a story offered by a high-level intelligence official about a UFO briefing President Carter received in June 1977. It was unknown to the source what specifics were discussed, only that […]
The Good Kind of Ass Out of You and Me: Toward a Post-Fortean Ufology
Like looking at the sun, you can sometimes get blinded by a topic of you stare right at it. For six decades, those interested in paranormal and Fortean phenomena have been blinded by the subject of UFOs. It’s not that there’s too little information. It’s that there’s too much—too much conflicting evidence and not enough […]
