Owls

I had mentioned in the comments section of my Mothman post that my mother was obsessed with owl imagery when I was growing up. An anonymous commenter mentioned something that I had forgotten; that in alien abduction literature, owl imagery is often implanted into abductee's memories as kind of diversionary screen image. I do remember reading about that in either Communion or Intruders.


Here's just a small sampling of the owl imagery I grew up surrounded by. That's me, in a corner of the dining room, probably sometime around 1972 or 1973. Most of the imagery was in the living room- there was a kind of alcove set into the wall that my dad used as a bar and then my mother used as a kind of shrine, with all kinds of owl figurines there. Later we put the TV there.

Now, I have no reason at all to believe that my mother was an alien abductee, but there is one particular story I remember her telling me. She said that just before I was born she put my sister down for naps and then would often take one herself. But she would have this recurring nightmare that a "witch" was on the porch and was trying to come into the house while my mother was asleep on the sofa.

That was the same exact spot I had the leprechaun hallucination you're all so sick of hearing about.

I sometimes wonder if the neighborhood was once an old Indian burial mound. A couple years back a dolphin beached itself in the river right down the street. A fresh water river, mind you.

But what the owl discussion really reminded me of was my dad's Mustang Mach I. One of these days I'm going to get me a Mustang. Maybe when the midlife crisis hits.

Transformers, part 2: Ultraterrestrials

Angels=alien androids

John Keel's work has been floating around in my head in a oblique way, as I continue to process all of the Keelian weirdness that's gripping the world. In particular, I've been thinking about Keel's "ultraterrestrial" theory. Ken Korczak wrote about Keel's UT theory in an excellent column from 2006:

People who support the Ultraterrestrial theory, such as authors Jacques Vallee and John Keel, point out that supernatural beings seemingly superior to humans have been reported throughout history. In previous eras they were called gods, angels, ogres, fairies, brownies, little people, demons, and more.

The Bible is filled with references to supernatural creatures, including giants, “wheels” flying in the sky out of which incredible creatures emerge, and more.But references to flying disks were recorded centuries before the texts of the Bible. Cave drawing dating to 30,000 B.C. depict disks floating around in the sky, remarkably similar to modern UFO photographs.

In the wake of the monster success of the new Transformers film, I've been thinking more and more Bruce Rux's theories that stories about the so-called "Greys" seem to describe androids rather than EBE's. And of course, this ties back to what I wrote about here back in March, dealing with the Igigi of Sumerian mythology:

AAT scholar Jason Martell notes that the Anunaki had a servant class called the Igigi, whom he believes could actually be the Greys of UFO lore. These creatures have been described as a kind of wetware, biologically-engineered androids:

Today's modern UFO's and Alien Contacts being reported have a strong similarity to the Ancient descriptions of the "anunnaki" Android Beings. When we look at the descriptions of our modern "grey alien", we can clearly see that they do not look like us, or the anunnaki. Rather, they look like the ancient humanoid depictions of Figurines. The majority of Abduction cases usually have a similar story to them in that the Aliens abducting them will perform medical examination and sometimes experiments having to do with human reproduction.

Is it possible that the Greys were created by the anunnaki as "Watchers" to oversee their experiments here on earth?- xfacts.research

This makes a lot of sense. Maybe the Greys are not from somewhere else- they were left here to keep an eye on the Project when the Anunaki were called back home. This would explain why these types of beings are in the world's folklore and mythology.

Maybe we're not projecting a technological viewpoint on elves and fairies and leprechauns after all. Maybe the folklore is the filter on a reality we had no framework for before we had technology (or maybe the Greys like to play dress-up and mess with people's heads)

Food for thought, and ties into Charles Fort's theory in Book of the Damned (1919) that the world is a UT plantation:

Why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea—which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes made in selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African chief to someone's old silk hat from New York or London?

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?

Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?

I think we're property.

I should say we belong to something:

That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:

That something owns this earth—all others warned off.

Hmm, not a cheery guy, that Charles Fort. Now hypothetically, if that is truly the case the owners wouldn't just leave us unattended while they were off doing their godly business elsewhere. Could all of the strange discs and orbs and all of the rest of it could be highly-advanced versions of the cameras and drones and satellites our earthbound overseers are putting up to keep an eye on their own subjects?

I mean, as above so below, right?

Well, who knows. Maybe all of the hardware that people have been seeing up there for tens of thousands of years is all a big misunderstanding. But the UT theory makes a lot more sense to me than a bunch of humanoids jetting to and fro from the Pleiades. And it certainly sheds a new light on the abduction literature as well.

One thing I will say, though. It's fascinating to me that the American and Jordanian militaries- as well as the Egyptian government- were so keen to cooperate with the production of this film. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that the military was also closely involved with the Stargate series as well.

Interesting times we live in.

TO BE CONTINUED

John Keel, the Mothman and Me

Things have been pretty hectic around here and it's all I can do to keep on top of the blog. So when John Keel died I didn't write about it, since I was processing what Keel's work meant to me. Most of this is through osmosis, since I've only read The Mothman Prophecies, which I loved. This was following repeated viewings of the deliriously unfaithful 2002 film adaptation, but the book hit me with a strange kind of numinosity. But you can't poke around the World of Weird without running into Keel time and again. and his work has certainly had its effect on me.

So in that spirit, let me pay tribute to the late John Keel by pulling out some amusing Mothman syncs from my personal files. All of this kind of crept up on me when I was doing research on the topic when the 2002 film was released. I had only a passing familiarity with the topic before but found that in a semiotic sense at least, ol' Mothie and I seem to travel in similar circles.

Let's start with what is considered the first solid eyewitness account of the Point Pleasant Mothman from 1966:

November 14, 1966 - A gentleman by the name of Newell Partridge was home watching television one night around 10:30 P.M. when the TV picture turned to static and a loud whining noise started. Bandit, Newell Partridge's German Shepherd, was on the porch when he began howling towards the barn. Partridge shined his flash light towards the barn and picked up the glow of two red pulsating eyes like bike reflectors. The dog ran towards the eyes snarling and Newell went inside and locked his door. He was very shaken and terrified.

The next morning, Newell went outside to find Bandit, but all he saw of the dog were a lot of tracks that looked as if the dog had been chasing his tail, something the dog had never done before. Bandit was never seen again.

This story caught my eye back when I was researching all of this because Newell is a variation on Knowles, the partridge was traditionally a symbol of Christ, and I was born in 1966. And from then on Mothman connections would show up at pivotal points throughout my career, such as it is...

My first job in what you might call the entertainment business was working as a store manager and house artist for New England Comics. When I worked there it was just a hole in the wall in the Patriot Building in Quincy, across the street from the "Church of the Presidents," the Unitarian Church were John and John Quincy Adams were buried.


NEC started a publishing line a few years after I worked there and their cashcow was The Tick, created by future TV producer Ben Edlund. And, of course, The Tick's sidekick was a moth-man.


Edlund quit comics for the greener pastures of TV, landing a gig on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (as well as co-writing the atrocity men call Titan AE with John "The Nines" August). After leaving Buffy, Edlund signed on the Fox series, Point Pleasant. However, this was a different Point Pleasant (set in Secret Sun stomping-ground New Jersey) and featured the brain-meltingly gorgeous Elisabeth Harnois as a Manga-eyed devil's daughter (Harnois also appeared in the Strangers with Candy movie and her next project is as an alien in Mars Needs Moms, an animated adaptation of Berkeley Breathed's 2007 children's book).

When I finally did my own comic series, Halo: An Angel's Story (published by Sirius), I was smart enough to get myself a lawyer at the time, the incredibly awesome Jeff Rose. One of Jeff's other clients was Doug Tennapel, creator of the Earthworm Jim video game. Doug actually did a movie called Mothman, released in 2000 but filmed (in Point Pleasant) around the time I was working on H:AAS.

I met Doug in 1997 at the San Diego Comicon when I was pitching my new comic series, Rivets & Ruby. Doug and his team were stunned when I showed them the pitch material because they had been working on a character almost identical to Rivets. I'm not sure if he ever saw the light of day. Doug also does comix for Top Shelf, who published Comic Book Artist when I was working on it.

As mentioned before, this string continued when Crossroads jerked me around for a few months with the H:AAS film project. Crossroads' ad superstar Mark Pellington later directed the film of The Mothman Prophecies, which is more an X-Files adaptation than a John Keel one (funnily enough, TMMP co-star Will Patton played an "Ox Knowles" on Ryan's Hope in one of his earliest roles). There are some scattered syncs thoughout the TMP movie but I won't bore you with those.

Anyhow, all of the Mothmany goodness came to a head with the publication of Our Gods Wear Spandex, since my editor (and friend) on that project, Brenda, is actually from Point Pleasant, WV and remembers not only the Mothman flap, but the Silver Bridge collapse quite well. Brenda also landed me the X-Files book gig, which of course has its own Mothman (and MIB) tie-in.

And the cherry on top of the Mothman sundae is the frequent guest appearances on this blog by the esteemed Loren Coleman, a good friend of Keel's and the inheritor of his neo-Fortean mantle.

So what does it all mean? Well, let's just say it's all grist for the mill and incorporating (or at least considering) some of Keel's theories has been a major boon to my own research. Keel is one of a generation of Forteans who became exasperated with the UFO phenomenon, since whoever's up there doesn't really care much about our theories about them. But a few theories Keel put out there have become increasingly important to my own speculations, which we'll be looking at in the future...



PS- Heh. Well, I just went upstairs to take a little break and picked up my copy of Bruce Rux's Architects of the Underworld and it opens up to page 153, which ends with this sentence "what are we to make of such creatures as the 'hairy dwarves' or the infamous Mothman?" Then as I came back into the office that little fella you see in that photo (taken with my crummy old cellphone) flew in with me. Synchromysticism on demand- you gotta love it...

Why is the Press Ignoring Hollywood's Alien Blitz?

One thing about the entertainment press- they love to spot trends. They love to take a few scattered films or books or records and lump them together as some new sort of cultural phenomenon. You hear the word "boom" thrown around a lot. So we've seen breathless articles in the past about the Latin pop boom (mostly because Ricky Martin had a couple Top 40 hits), the fantasy movie boom, the superhero movie boom, the independent movie boom, the vampire movie boom, the religious movie boom...you name it. More often than not, most of these booms turn out to be busts, or cover story mountains made out of marginally successful molehills.

Heh.

So why aren't we seeing any stories in the press about the alien movie boom? After all, this year we've seen or will see Star Trek, Race to Witch Mountain, Monsters vs Aliens, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Alien Trespass, Knowing, Avatar, Battle for Terra, Planet 51, District Nine and Aliens in the Attic, as well as Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Atlantis, Fringe and a remake of V on television. I'm sure you guys will fill me in on any others I've overlooked.

At what point does this qualify as a boom?

I don't know about you but I haven't seen anything in the press pointing out Hollywood's unprecedented and inexplicable obsession with aliens this year, most especially films dealing with alien contact.

Or to be more specific, films dealing with human/alien coexistence.

I can understand why most media outlets are ignoring the hundreds of UFO sightings so far this year (and not just the lame, lights-in-the-night sightings) but why are the trend-spotters not paying attention to this absolute flood of alien/UFO-themed films?

And what's the impetus behind these films being released this year in the first place? It's really verging on overkill. It's certainly not like the mid 70s or the early 90s when the UFO meme was strongly resonating in the collective unconscious. Most people seem pretty blase about the topic, even if they are gobbling it up in droves at the movies.

Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?

PS- Check out part three of Tim Binnall's interview with Bruce Rux...

PPS- Aliens in the Attic star Ashley Tisdale hails from Deal, NJ, right in the shadow of the old Fort Monmouth of Project Diana fame.

PPPS- From IMDb's top-grossing films of 2009:

250,234,554		Up (2009)
246,331,182		Star Trek (2009)
200,077,255		Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
195,984,055		Monsters vs Aliens (2009)

Must-See TV: Hangar 18 (MASSIVE UPDATE 7/9)

I'm catching up with work after my sick day so I thought I'd pass this old UFO classic that Bruce Rux chats with Tim Binnall about onto you all. From Wikipedia:

Hangar 18 involves a U.F.O. coverup following an incident aboard the space shuttle, whereas an unidentified object is hit by the satellite which the orbiter was tasked with launching into a higher orbit. The space collision kills a fellow astronaut who was in the bay at that time, however, the entire incident is witnessed by astronauts Price and Bancroff.

Upon returning to Earth, both men slowly investigate what they know happened in space — and which the government authorities try their best to hide. The damaged spacecraft however, has been recovered after it is observed making a controlled landing in the Arizona desert...

On board the craft, the technician team makes three discoveries. The first is an unknown woman who awakens in the back of an ambulance screaming (leading moviegoers to believe she may have been an abductee)...

Here's an interesting factoid for you X-Files and Transformers fans...

...symbols found on certain control panels are the same as symbols which reside here on Earth, albeit in ancient places.

Now, here's a fascinating bit of trivia for those of you sensing the story behind the story in some of my recent posts:

Hangar 18 was one of the very few American films to be shown in the Soviet Union, premiering on the 1st TV channel on the New Year night of 1982. Because of general unavailability of films with elements of science fiction and action genre, it achieved enormous popularity among Soviet youth.

Metalheads like Megadeth and Yngwie dug Hangar 18, too

UPDATE: I can't get that last factoid out of my head. Remember, 1982 was when the Cold War began to heat up again and the Soviet government was very much in the control of KGB hardliners like Yuri Andropov, who became Premier that year. I can understand their banning jingoistic American action films, but why exactly Hangar 18 passed muster is a mystery to me.


We've all heard the theories that the UFO business was just a Cold War psyop, meant to create hysteria back and forth across the Iron Curtain or that they were just experimental aircraft invented by the Nazis (the debunkers neglected to tell the cavemen that, though). I've even heard theories that Roswell was cooked up to fool the Soviets into thinking the US got its hands on alien technology.

If any of this was true, then why would the one US action movie the Soviets aired on state TV disseminate that exact same US/ET meme into the minds of impressionable young people? Surely, it would have also inspired UFO hysteria there too, causing security problems in the Soviet police state at a very dangerous time in world history.


But guess what? It wasn't just the Politburo that approved of Hangar 18, it also seems to have received the blessing of NAZCA NASA. The space agency allowed their name, logo and a model of the Space Shuttle to be used in the film. Remember they didn't extend the same courtesy to Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey or for several other films, such as Red Planet.

It turns out NASA is quite picky as to which films they choose to become involved with. From a December 2008 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, written by John Mangels:

Sometimes the question of whether a scientific enterprise should cooperate with Hollywood comes up. NASA gets lots of requests - most often from documentary filmmakers - and tries to be as helpful as possible, said Bert Ulrich of the space agency's public affairs division.

NASA was happy to cooperate with Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys," which depicted three elderly astronauts returning to duty, and went along with the fanciful "Armageddon," where Bruce Willis and two teams of space shuttle astronauts save Earth from an asteroid.

NASA is protective of its famous round red-white-and-blue "meatball" logo, and only allows it to be used in movies whose plots are "feasible fiction," Ulrich said. "If somebody's doing a movie about aliens coming to Earth and attacking the agency, if it's 'out there,' we don't participate," Ulrich said.

That policy must have been devised after the filming of Hangar 18. But there was one particular would-be blockbuster which saw NASA and Hollywood reach an unprecedented level of coziness...

An action adventure due out in March 2000, "Mission to Mars" enjoys a closer partnership with the agency than any film in history, thanks to a new pact the agency has made with Hollywood. The "Space Act Agreement" allows filmmakers to consult astronauts, design experts and scientists – and even use NASA launch facilities – depending on the individual contract.

Jacobson went to NASA four years ago, even before Disney approved the film. Soon after that first meeting, he and the scriptwriters went to NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston to meet with Mars experts.

The producer consulted famed astronauts Story Musgrave and Joe Allen, who worked with the actors to show them how an astronaut works in space. Kathleen Clark, NASA’s senior scientist for the International Space Station, helped the production team decide how the ISS might develop over time.

"We took the design of the International Space Station and then we added to it our own design," Jacobson said.- Space.com

Now, bear in mind that Mission to Mars makes Erich Von Daniken look like a biblical inerrantist in comparison. Very strange film for NASA to have worked so intimately on. But then again, similar in some ways to Hangar 18, isn't it?

New logo of Sunn Classic, unrelated to original company, but still...

Oh, by the way- being made by an independent studio (Sunn Classics, owned by Wilkinson Sword, based in Utah, of all places), this film may not have the best production values, but its script - particularly its methodical depiction of a ruthless political cover-up - is pretty sound. However, UFOs and AAT were a tough sell in the increasingly conservative America of 1980, which saw the religious right on the march, conducting not only book-burnings in the Bible Belt, but record, tape, VHS and Betamax burnings as well.

But the film certainly found an appreciative cult audience- and hit it big in Mother Russia. It just did poorly with those groups singled out by the Brookings UFO report in 1958....

But wait- it gets even stranger. There's a "Hangar 18" on the site of the Flight of Fear roller-coaster, which is located in two different amusement parks, King's Island in Ohio and King's Dominion in Doswell, Virginia, home of the recent UFO-slash-smoke ring brouhaha.

Now that's what I call Synchronicity!