The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “UFOs”
Seeing and Knowing: UFOs and the American Religion
“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of […]
Required Reading
Finally a serious journalist has been able to garner some mainstream legitimacy for the subject of UFOs. Leslie Kean’s great new book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On The Record is on the bestseller lists; and more importantly, the author is getting major media airtime (including MSNBC and the Colbert Report a few […]
Being Seen Seeing: A Paranoid Thought Experiment
The second time I observed an aerial object that I could not identify was in the evening of August 3, 2009, on the Mall about four blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, DC. I was camped out with friends, part of the crowd attending the weekly “Screen on the Green,” and this evening the […]
UFOs and “Psychic Phenomena”: A TMS Hypothesis
“We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions.” –Jacques Vallee I’d be the first to admit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. But of […]
Daddy’s Forbidden Closet of Mystery: UFOs and the Holographic Hypothesis
[Note (3/13/10): In the first version of this post, I began by proposing–I thought somewhat originally–that UFOs were like the laser pointers used to entertain cats. A reader pointed out, however, that that the UFOs-as-laser-pointer idea was offered a couple years ago by Mac Tonnies on his blog Posthuman Blues (September 29, 2006). I had […]
Belittling Ufology
How many times in the history of ufology has flip derision been the media’s or the government’s reaction? Arizona Governor Fife Symington’s farcical, dismissive news conference after the Arizona Lights incident, for example (as shown in James Fox’s terrific documentaries Out of the Blue and I Know What I Saw). Or the vaguely comedic spin […]
Manifesto of Extraterrestentialism
The time has come for a new Copernican Revolution. Such a revolution would be, not merely a realization and understanding of our place in the order of things, but a true coming-to-grips which painfully and profoundly reorders our thinking. The realization must be this: Humans are not the apex of sentience or consciousness or intelligence […]
Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Right to Bear Experience
I’ve been writing here lately about UFOs, which is something of a departure for me. But for a long time I’ve been interested in things Fortean—amazing or paranormal experiences, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, or fringe-science topics like extraterrestrials and Bigfoot—in short, things that transcend the humdrum and everyday. Part of the reason is, […]
“You see, Earth, it’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we just don’t care.”
In his writings on contemporary culture, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to invoke a concept borrowed from psychoanalysis, “the subject presumed to know.” Basically, we often project onto specific other people and institutions a sense that they hold the answers about us. It is derived from a patient’s inner conviction that his therapist really holds […]
