The Secret Sun

AstroGnostic: Forming the Dawn of Consciousness

2012-01-26T15:39:00.004-05:00

Forming is one of those webcomix that I'm not sure I'm not hallucinating. it seems to have emerged from my unconscious, or perhaps your unconscious, or yours. Or even you back there. One thing for sure, the one actually channeling Forming for us is artist/musician Jesse Moynihan, who hosts Forming on his eponymous website.

Reading Forming for the first time gave me the same feeling that I got reading the Hernandez Bros' early work or Carla Speed McNeil's Finder; that weird, trippy, sensation of being pulled out of boring, horrible consensus reality and into a world far more interesting and enriching -- though considerably more unsettling-- than our own.

What's Forming actually about? Well, it's kind of like talking to a really smart but slightly skewed guy who's been up all night tripping balls, reading The Eternals and Devil Dinosaur and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which sounds kind of facetious and reductive (not to mention redundant), but words really fail to convey the Forming experience. As it should be.

Suffice it to say, after reading Forming I got the very strong feeling that I was in the presence of a creator who has tapped into something impossibly deep and ancient. The more he tries to distance himself from this revelation with Gen-Y absurdist humor and cartoonish violence, the more powerful it all becomes. As if he can't run from the fact that he is telling a story that all of us know but few us can recall. A story that can only be told in metaphor because the facts always come up short.

So what you really need to do is go to Jesse's site and read Forming from the beginning here. Then you'll see what I mean. Don't blame if you fail to get anything done for the next several hours. Just don't read it at work, whatever you do. Now, let's hear from the artist himself.

SECRET SUN: Jesse, give us a short sketch of who you are, where you come from and what inspired you to undertake this epic comic strip.

JESSE MOYNIHAN: I'm Jesse Moynihan. I grew up outside of Philadelphia. Forming is a collage of everything I've mused about since my early twenties. At some point I had to pick up a pen and bring it to the page, or else I probably would've had no good reason to tell stories anymore.

Let's talk about Forming. I realize this question might drive you nuts, but give us a short synopsis of what Forming is about. Roughly.

Forming is about selfishness, selflessness, gods, aliens, destruction, creation and the dawn of individual consciousness. A lot of it deals with the different ways which we manifest/interpret our vital life force? It's hard for me to give a concise and real answer to this question because I'm really just grasping in the dark with Forming.

You have a large and diverse cast of characters drawn from mythology. What's the connection for you between the characters?

Between myself and the characters? I have a strong connection to a lot of the characters. I pulled their names from mythology, but their traits are based either on different aspects of my personality spectrum, or on things I see in other people that I either find admirable or you know, repulsive.

There's a lot of androgyny at play in your characters. Do you believe in "gender as a construct" or does the ambiguity refer to mystical figures like Adam Kadmon and the Rebis?

This is going to be hard to answer. I'll try though. I've been fascinated with gender for a long time; my own conditioned understanding of gender, growing up as a half Japanese male and the societal baggage that I either embraced or questioned. I romanticise masculinity in its sprawling incarnations, in particular the traditional Japanese archetypes. So that's sort of my natural mode on the day to day.

But I also get a kick out of trying to flip my perceptions, especially in my writing. I got into the idea of a combined man/woman super-being after watching a documentary on Philip Glass and learning that Akhenaten was a hermaphrodite. This helped me build a thematic interest in gender combos and the possibilities/implications of power that could result.

Once you become interested in that sort of thing, androgynous super beings start appearing in a lot of places. So I feel like I'm a part of some ancient storytelling tradition by including those themes. It just makes sense to me that the combination of man and woman would create super powerful fighters.

Alright well, I don't think I succeeded in answering the question, but that's a part of it at least. For me, writing is about finding contradictions in the characters and in my own daily assumptions. So part of that is addressing something like gender because I am aware of my comfort zone when it comes to the topic and I want to f**k myself up.

You draw on several different characters from different mythologies. Did you grow up reading mythology or was this a more recent interest for you?

I was always pretty into muscle dudes fighting monsters or other muscle dudes, growing up. As I got older I latched on to the theme of transformation that runs through most myths... all myths? Yeah, that's what really interests me these days.

Are there any particular esoteric traditions you feel drawn to or any that you study?

I'm not drawn to any particular esoteric tradition. I guess I pick up pieces from here and there that resonate with me. I adopt a lot of those modes of thinking and then usually forget where they came from. I've always been a daydreamer, so hardening into one branch or discipline has never been that appealing to me. I think, anywhere you go, you're going to run into wise people and it's good to be receptive and loose with everything.

What are your influences as far as artists and writers go?

I think my early foundations were Dave Sim, Jim Woodring, Peter Bagge, Moebius, Robert Crumb, Frank Herbert, David Lynch, and Samurai/Kung Fu movies. Later in life, I've felt influenced by Amos Tutuola, Comte De Lautreamont, Sun Ra, C.S. Lewis, Yuichi Yokoyama, Manly P. Hall, Joseph Campbell, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Seijin Suzuki, Rene Laloux, Coast To Coast, and John Boorman's movies up until Emerald Forest. There's a lot more, but that's probably a good overall picture. I used to want to be a filmmaker. I went to film school.

Jack Kirby said that he simply projected what was in his head onto the paper and traced it. Is your process similar?

Yeah, I guess it's sort of like that. For me though, I project what's in my head and then try to remember the projection as I go along and reinterpret it. I like to edit as I go.

Giorgio Tsoukalos' hair. Opinions?

I guess I wouldn't do that with my hair.

Did you sue Passion Pit for stealing your crystal starship idea, which is why they redid the video for "Little Secrets?"

I didn't see it. I've never heard Passion Pit. Are they any good?

Who are some of your favorite contemporary comic artists?

Yuichi Yokoyama, Dash Shaw, Sammy Harkham, Tim Hensley, Christophe Blain, Vincent Girard, Jonny Negron, and Michael Deforge are at the top of my list recently, but there's lots of other people I'm into.

UFOs: alien science nerds or interdimensional tricksters?

I think it's both.

What are your influences or interests outside of comics?

Outside of comics you know, I read a lot about different modes of thought. Right now I've been trying to get into some Rudolph Steiner, and I just bought Robert Lawlor's sacred geometry workbook. I write a fair amount of music in my spare time. I listen to a lot of Prog, Kraut, Psych, and a lesser amount of free Jazz and modern Classical. I've been trying to get a broader knowledge of early Electronic music. I just started brewing kombucha. I guess that's sort of a hobby.

What kind of response have you gotten from the comics community? Did you catch heat from your peers because Forming isn't your masturbation memoirs?

All the response I've gotten has been super positive. It definitely helps me feel good about what I'm doing with my life, even if it makes me zero money. But I have a day job for that anyway.

The Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour

2012-01-22T22:36:00.006-05:00

Jeff Kripal needs no introduction to readers of this blog and there was no one else who I wanted to speak to for the first installment of what is sure to be a decidely occasional podcast series entitled The Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour.

Jeff's been talking to a lot of people about his new book so I made sure that I hit him with questions that only someone like myself who's read his book in three separate drafts-- as well as his book on Eslaen-- would ask.

We save a lot of stuff (Kirby, Streiber, AAT) for future podcasts because I really wanted to talk about three main issues. First, what's a guy with the serious credentials that Jeff's got doing in our sandbox. Second, what the hell is this stuff we puzzle over and where does it come from. And yes, we did cover Jenny O'Connor and The Nine-- Jeff's thoughts may surprise you.

And third, is there a way we can use all of this gnosis to dig our way out of the rut we're all stuck in. We really don't talk much about comics or superheroes at all, more about practical paranormality if such a thing exists. If it doesn't I think it's damn high time someone creates it.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD

Here's the pitch for Jeff's book from his publisher. I can't possibly stress enough how highly recommended it is. If you're still reading this, you're the type of person whose life will be enriched by it, if not changed.

In many ways, twentieth-century America was the land of superheroes and science fiction. From Superman and Batman to the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, these pop-culture juggernauts, with their "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men," thrilled readers and audiences—and simultaneously embodied a host of our dreams and fears about modern life and the onrushing future.

But that's just scratching the surface, says Jeffrey Kripal. In Mutants and Mystics, Kripal offers a brilliantly insightful account of how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science.

Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives.

Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions.

Moving deftly from Cold War science and Fredric Wertham's anticomics crusade to gnostic revelation and alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and shot through with an awareness that there are other realities far beyond our everyday understanding.

A bravura performance, beautifully illustrated in full color throughout and brimming over with incredible personal stories, Mutants and Mystics is that rarest of things: a book that is guaranteed to broaden—and maybe even blow—your mind.

Mindbomb: And All Challengers Will Be Destroyed

2012-01-19T00:50:00.003-05:00

I've written a lot about some of the more apparent connections and prophecies made in Jack Kirby's comics, and in our last installment we looked at an issue of Black Cat Mystic that essentially contained the basic building blocks of Jack Kirby's AstroGnostic opus, The Eternals.

We saw the psychic posthuman race congregating atop Mount Everest, the alien technology transfer that led us in the Andes Mountains and finally into the hidden temple of a cargo cult centered around a giant space god frozen in a state of suspended animation.

The Eternals was not a perfect series by any means. Kirby never seemed quite sure what he wanted to say about the return of the Celestials, and the book often lapsed into a kind of New Gods rehash.

There were moments of genius, however, usually when Kirby stuck to the basic theme of how the world reacted to the arrival of giant aliens in their midst. Those moments put the Fourth World stories in the shade, for this reader at least.

But Kirby's return to Marvel wasn't quite the replay of the Silver Age glory days anyone had hoped for. And Stan Lee's directive that his editors put the Hulk in all their titles to cash in on the success of the CBS TV series (on which Kirby himself guest-starred as a police sketch artist) seemed to take all of the wind of Kirby's sails.

From the first Hulk story (#14) to the premature end of the series (#19), the quality of the art and the writing seemed to utterly collapse, a pattern that seemed to follow all of Kirby's late 70s titles. Books like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Black Panther had similarly inspired starts and similar collapses half or two-thirds of the way through their short runs.

As if to mark the moment, Kirby chose the last pre-Hulk issue of The Eternals to deliver one of the most remarkable stories of his Bronze Age career. As we've come to expect, the story is bursting with prophetic reverberations of an oblique and dreamlike variety. It's as if we're viewing the future through a funhouse mirror, or a kaleidoscope. With one indelible exception, we see only fragments of prophecy. But the exact connections are unclear.

Or elusive, if you prefer. For some reason, it's exactly these kinds of connections that feel more real to me. But first, some background.

In Eternals #7, three SHIELD agents are teleported by the gods into the company of the Eternal Ajak (decked out in full Incan ceremonial garb) and a human archaeologist, who are in a secret chamber within a pyramid in the Andes Mountains. They are observing a Celestial landing party collecting genetical information-- DNA-- in preparation for Alpha Day.

Orbiting overhead is a massive mothership (note green color, mirroring SOHO footage) containing the nameless prime Celestial. He communicates through a laser beam which resembles a ladder (almost certainly inspired by the Jacob's version of same). This story was written a very long time before optical storage and encoded information became common parlance.

The ladder contains the coded commands of the supreme Celestial, eeerily prefiguring recent theories of aliens communicating over vast distances via neutrino beams. The Eternal and the humans watch the ladder descend and suddenly the giant Celestials are transported through the ladder's code to other parts of the globe.

After a Celestial attacks the Deviant (read: "Reptilian") stronghold of Lemuria in #10, the leader of the Eternals attempts to psychically contact the orbiting Godship (bringing us back to one of Kirby's favorite themes) but is violently rebuffed. Note that the Eternal is using electronic equipment to make psychic contact.

Remember this event as well: the Celestial's attack-- and the motivation behind it-- is central to the Mindbomb we're setting off here.

Zuras then summons all of the world's Eternals to unite into a single superbeing called the "Unimind," a being that can stand on equal footing with the Celestials. The Eternals have even brought along some pet humans to take part in the ritual transformation, in which the blue flame transforms the life force of the Eternals into a single being of mind and light.

Here Kirby is clearly shifting from science fiction to flat-out mysticism.

In retaliation for the attack on Lemuria, the Deviant leader, Tode (toads are amphibians and not reptiles, but who's counting?), orders a 9/11-resonant suicide mission in which a doomsday weapon will be flown into the Godship. The resulting fallout will destroy the humans and the Eternals and allow the Deviants to reclaim the surface world as their domain.

The only two Eternals who don't take part in the Uni-Mind ritual are Sprite, a trickster/leprechaun figure who is left behind to keep an eye on the store, and an unnamed hero who is in fact a thinly-veiled Hercules (the name was being used by another Marvel hero at the time). The Eternal Hercules was banished by Zuras (read: "Zeus") for his arrogance.

Desperate to stop the Deviants' doomsday machine, Sprite transforms Hercules into a metallic warrior (shades of Gus Grissom resonator, Ben Boxer) and conjures up a spaceship for him to intercept the Deviants' doomsday weapon with.

And here's where things get really interesting. NASA sends up a Space Shuttle to photograph the Godship. The Shuttle Enterprise existed at the time Kirby drew this story but wouldn't be launched until four years after this story was published. It doesn't seem like Kirby ever actually saw the shuttle either.*

Now, all of this is very oblique but the astronauts discuss how the ground telescopes have recorded the Godship, but the images look like "blobs." I couldn't help but think of John Lenard Walson's videos of alleged orbital objects, which we discussed here, especially as the Deviant ship shows up on the Shuttle radar (click to enlarge).

Kirby cuts loose with his trademark cosmic freakouts, the last of their kind that we'll see in the Eternals series (there'd be plenty more to come in Captain Victory, to put it mildly). The Shuttle astronauts find themselves in the middle of Deviant-Eternal grudgematch in orbit, while the enormous Godship looms over head.

Again; more oblique connections, more dream reality type of prophecy, but very much reminiscent of stories I've covered about strange sightings of flaming debris falling from the sky at speeds and angles far too slow and low to qualify as any kind of meteorite, leading some people (read: "me") to speculate about a secret war in low orbit.

There's also been some discussion of flaming debris sightings on the FB group from time to time and more recently the Russians have accused the US of sabotaging their $170 million Grunt Mars probe.

Not to mention the fact that Kirby's basic story-- from 1977, mind you-- of Space Shuttle missions encountering giant UFOs and filming hostile action in space ties directly into a hot and contentious topic in the UFO community over the past decade.

Back to the story: The Supreme Celestial (whom Kirby depicts as pure energy) isn't threatened at all by the Deviants' mission: he simply teleports the astronauts to different spacecraft. The Deviants are teleported into the NASA space shuttle, the human astronauts are teleported into Hercules' ship (which is controlled telepathically) and Hercules is teleported into the doomsday ship...

...where he dismantles the bomb's core and is subsequently killed in the meltdown. However, he is pulled into space and into the Godship. Having proven himself worthy, Hercules is absorbed into the essence of the Supreme Celestial. More mysticism.

The human astronauts telepathically guide the Eternals' spacecraft to a "secret base" in the Mojave Desert, which is certainly convenient for the Area 51 reverse-engineers Kirby was obviously going to do a story about before it all went kerblooey on him.

Kirby has the Deviants-- who unwittingly hijack Durgan's space shuttle-- explode over the "South Atlantic Ocean." And here's where the Mindbomb goes off again.

At the same time Kirby apostle John Byrne was drawing a story about Superman preventing a space shuttle explosion, the world watched in horror as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the "South Atlantic Ocean," the balmy waters off the coast of Florida to be exact.

I can't speak as to the authenticity of the video here, but I find it fascinating that there's at least a tangential UFO connection to the tragedy. But that pales in connection to the Mindbomb going off here.

From Eternals #2

"Astronauts"-- arguably Kirby's last great story in his second run at Marvel-- deals with an ancient grudge match between the Gods and the Deviants (Reptilians). Again, the attempted Deviant assault on the Godship in Eternals #13 was in retaliation for an attack on Lemuria by one of the Gods in Eternals #10.

The Deviants ruled over the humans in the Gods' absence but were driven under the sea when Lemuria sank following a nuclear war between the Gods and the Deviants (see above). Now the fact that the Deviant astronauts end up crashing in the NASA space shuttle is extremely important here given an exchange between Tode and his top general, Kro...

..."We CHALLENGED them long ago," and "Summon the Astronauts," and then...

...those very same Deviant Astronauts --those Challengers-- explode in a NASA space shuttle over the South Atlantic Ocean.

Boom.

All I can add is that if you haven't yet, I recommend you read "I'll Show You How to Bring Me to Your World." Maybe that might add a measure of clarity. Or maybe it will simply confuse matters more. I don't know anymore. I don't know anything anymore. All I know I know is that this stuff is starting get under my skin now.

Strangely enough, Kirby's first great super-team of the Silver Age, The Challengers of the Unknown, trace their origin to a similar catastrophic aircrash, although one they obviously survived. Kirby recycled the origin when he and Stan Lee created The Fantastic Four.

Note that Jack - who wrote and drew the Challengers-- also had the team abducted by an alien who is identical to a modern depiction of a Grey in all but color. This story was published in 1958, a full eight years before the Betty and Barney Hill story hit the pages of Look Magazine.

Which should surprise absolutely no one who reads this blog regularly.

NOTE: The title of this piece is ironic. I don't put any stock in the theories of lifelong Naval Intelligence asset Bill Cooper at all.

* Speaking of Hercules, Kirby would do a pinup of Superman escorting the Space Shuttle in 1984, at the same time he rebooted the New Gods at DC. Unfortunately, his eyes were starting to give out and the finished product leaves a lot to be desired.

Mindbomb: Prophecies of a Pop AstroGnostic

2012-01-15T12:45:00.007-05:00

We've looked at Jack Kirby several times in the past here, most notably in his startlingly accurate (if not often allegorical) predictions of the Face on Mars in 1959, 9/11 in 1984, and the Gulf War and Iraq War in 1974 and 1975. There's also a foreshadowing of the plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey, possible Apollo mission footage chicanery, and the suppressed discovery of obelisks on the Moon by American and Russian surveying missions in the mid-60s.

In ancient times, prophecy was used as an acid test, proof that a prophet or priest was in fact in touch with a god. In the Bible, the punishment for a false prophet was death (the entire EvangeliCIAl movement would be instantly leaderless if that directive were still followed today). If a prophecy came true then the prophet or priest (or priestess, certainly) would be trusted to supply information pertaining to theology, morality, cosmology and so on.

In other words, prophecy was a means to establish authority.

At a time when a near-majority of Americans think a talentless professional athlete is a prophet based on beginner's luck and some cute but garden-variety synchronicities, what do we make of Jack Kirby?

Here's what we know-- when Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) was young, he was struck down with scarlet fever. His parents were poor immigrants from Austria and antibiotics were not widely available. As young Jacob lay dying, a group of Kabbalist rabbis were called in to exorcise the demons that were killing the boy. Whether through mystical agency or through Kirby's inborn toughness, he survived.

After making his name in the comics field, Kirby was drafted into the Army. His friends were lucky or connected enough to get posts stateside or working for the Armed Forces newspapers or whatever, but Kirby wasn't. He was sent to Europe, right into the crucible of the killing fields.

When Kirby's commander found out he was a big deal artist in the funny papers, he decided to use him for recon. This meant Jack had to sneak behind enemy lines, sketch the lay of the land then sneak back and explain to his superiors where the Germans were and what they were doing. Kirby was often so close he could smell the Nazis' aftershave.

He was sent home after contracting a case of frostbite so severe his legs were nearly amputated. Kirby spent the rest of his life drawing, usually so lost in his reveries he couldn't drive a car, balance a checkbook, or do much of anything besides create one indelible character after one classic adventure.

He worked at night, in a tiny, windowless corner in the basement of his Long Island home. In the early 70s he moved to Thousand Oaks, CA, where he struck up an unlikely but close bond with neighbor Frank Zappa, 23 years his junior. Sadly, his star went in decline and his audience steadily began to shrink from the early 70s on.

However, he found a new, more appreciative venue for his work-- animation. He worked on series such as The Fantastic Four and Thundarr the Barbarian while helping to establish the independent comics market as a major force in the early 80s.

Now, I'd always assumed that Kirby's AstroGnosticism was a contact high off the psychic turmoil of the Psychedelic Era. I was wrong. I keep finding out that Jack was plugged into a worldview that Charles Fort, John Keel and Jacques Vallee would feel right at home with earlier and earlier in his career.

Which brings us to Sept 1957, or more accurately June 1957, since comics are post-dated three months in advance.

This was the dawn of the Silver Age of Comics but a distinctly fallow period for Kirby. His partnership with Joe Simon had collapsed and his relationship with industry giant DC/National was iffy since his rough-hewn style was seen as out of step with the times (that problem was fixed when art-god Wally Wood teamed with Kirby on Challengers of the Unknown and produced this writer's favorite comics art ever).

Jack took work whereever he could get it and got work doing sci-fi and "mystery" books for Harvey Comics, home of Casper the Friendly Ghost and Hot Stuff. Joe Simon may or may not have had some involvement in the scripting and inking, but the stories are most definitely Kirby's. In June, Jack released two books of particular interest, Alarming Tales #1 and Black Cat Mystic #59.

Alarming Tales contains two stories that prefigure Kirby's major 70s work. One is "The Last Enemy," a clear predecessor to Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which plays such a major part in the Iraq War/Stargate conundrum. Kirby took a lot of heat for Kamandi in the 70s, with the fan press accusing him of knocking off Planet of the Apes (DC publisher insisted Kirby feature the ruined Statue of Liberty in the first issue), but Kirby not only beat the Planet of the Apes film by 11 years he beat the original Pierre Boulle novel by 7.

Kind of a pattern with Jack.

The second story is "Donegan's Daffy Chair," a startling prefiguring of what Jeff Kripal describes as Kirby's Kabbalistic "Throne Mysticism" in his analysis of The New Gods in Mutants and Mystics. The story seems to make little narrative sense- a janitor at an aerospace factory gets in an experimental rocket chair and ends up leaving the solar system.

He comes back dressed in alien garb and speaking an alien language, utterly and apparently irreversibly transformed by his cosmic voyage. Space Age technology as Mystery cult initiation.

In The New Gods, Metron (read: "Metatron") used his Mobius Chair for roughly the same purpose- to travel the vast reaches of the cosmos in search of transformative experience.

Alarming Tales #1 also presents us with a story about a man who meets a beautiful Dana Scully lookalike from Mars who travels back and forth to Earth using a transdimensional Stargate. The story itself is as meh as "Donegan," but clearly shows the very, very strange and esoteric issues running through Jack's mind at the time. The art is interesting as well, in that it clearly seems to prefigure Steve Ditko's alien dimensions in his classic Doctor Strange run. Quite strongly, in fact.

Donegan's trip across the cosmos was repeated in Kirby's Space Odyssey/Moon Obelisk dual prophecy, "The Great Moon Mystery," drawn in 1958 but not published until 1966. In that story the astronauts are transformed into beams of light and shot across the Universe (shades of Chris Carter) in an experience that feels like minutes for the space trippers but lasted for weeks.

Alarming Tales had two more stories of interest- one was "The Cadmus Seed," a sci-fi story about breeding plant-based supersoldiers that namedrops Cadmus (father of the Samothracian Mysteries) and his army of Spartoi sown from dragon's teeth (loosely borrowed as an army of skeletons sown by the hydra's teeth in the greatest movie ever made). Another story tells the story of a man's virtuous, self-sacrificing dog who is later reincarnated as his son.

However, Alarming Tales- with its stories of cosmic apotheosis, transdimensional romance, mythology-inspired cloning and reincarnation-- is all just preamble. The real action on the stands in June of 1957 was most certainly in the pages of Black Cat Mystery #59. Here we see the three major themes of Jack Kirby's AstroGnostic teleology laid out before us in glorious four-color.

(click to enlarge)

The cover story would have made a great Mytharc episode on The X-Files. It's also remarkably similar to themes Kirby and Lee would explore in The X-Men. It tells the story of a young boy named Paul who begins to display unusual mental powers from an extremely young age and is taken into government custody to be studied. He's kept in a deep underground bunker where he's treated kindly but with extreme caution.

When Paul reaches adolescence, he announces that he is going to leave the bunker which causes the base to go into lockdown. Paul's captors are reasonable but firm- they clearly fear him and are not entirely sure they can hold him.

Now, remember this story is being published during the height of the Cold War at a time when any deviation from conformity was seen as tantamount to treason (particularly in a comic book). Kirby here is telling a story of a superior being who is openly defying the military establishment and isn't interested in being used as a weapon against Communism.

Returning the concept of interdimensional travel again, Kirby has Paul throw his captors offguard and escape from his underground prison by erasing himself from the Third Dimension, an act which is "child's play" for Paul's new race of beings.

Harking back to the old pulp themes borrowed from Theosophy, Paul meets his fellow new beings on Mount Everest. Note that they are all variations on the Grey type: thin, diaphanous, with oversized heads and eyes (they also have six fingers on each hand). This story was drawn several years before the Grey type would become popularized.

This new race has emerged to leave the planet, and will do so in a way similar to what we saw in the two earlier stories...

...they merge into pure ball of energy and travel at the speed of light. Whether or not they leave their physical forms behind or reconstitute when they reach their destination is unclear. What we do see is a theme Kirby would explore throughout his career-- traveling the cosmos using nonphysical-- in this case, apparently psychic-- means.

The second story is more like a lost Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode, though it predates both. A guy who's down on his luck meets a leprechaun/trickster type who presents himself an traveling salesman from outer space, offering free samples of alien gadgetry.

The first device is a kind of psychological repair system, which offers Kirby the opportunity to dip his toes in some of the psychedelic/freakout imagery he'd immerse himself in ten years later (note the "Kirby Krackle" prototype).

The art here is crude and rushed-- Kirby was never comfortable inking his own work. Nevertheless, this follows the pattern we've seen over and over again in the Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre series; revelation--often a technological revelation-- preceded by nightmare or psychedelic freakout.

Here we also see the kind of narrative that has been reported for millennia-- "little people" walking through walls, bearing gifts of unimaginable power. And the gift that comes help make the newly healed man unimaginably rich?

An antigravity device. The lucky fellow hires it out to move houses and heavy equipment. Perhaps his ancestors would have used the same device to use megaliths for solar observatories, thousand ton blocks of limestone for pyramids, giant stone heads for ceremonial purposes... are you catching my drift here?

Deciding that big business is too stressful, the man takes the "weemer"--a psychically powered teleportation device-- which he uses to travel to Peru, home of the Nazca lines, the Vicús pyramids, Machu Picchu and all the rest. Of course, Kirby would later revisit the Andes region for the most explicit "mystical" manifesto of his career.

Which brings us to the next story...

Unconsciously following the "reversal of time" motif of ritual drama, Kirby takes us backwards from Posthuman Apotheosis to the Alien-Alchemist Technological Exchange and finally to the AstroGnostic revelation: the footprints of the Stargods themselves.

We take this all for granted in the Era of Tsoukalos, but in 1957 this was almost completely unheard of. Not to mention completely subversive, when that word carried real consequence.

Kirby presents us with an archaeological team who stumble on a lost African tribe who pray to a giant stone head. After observing the tribe and their rituals, the scientists come to a shocking conclusion: the tribe is a cargo cult and their shaman is dressed as an astronaut.

If this story seems familiar to you you may remember it from the Chariots of the Gods? documentary, which showcased the work of an anthropologist who had studied the customs of an isolated Brazilian tribe called the Bep Koroti in the early 50s but would not publish his findings until the 1960s.

Again, this story was published in 1957.

As with Kamandi, Kirby was accused of ripping off Chariots of the Gods? when he produced The Eternals, even though he had explored almost identical themes a decade before with The Inhumans. But it seems that he had been exploring those themes a decade before both Chariots and the Inhumans with this remarkable story.

This page here is nearly identical to the opening scenes of Eternals #1, as the scientists discover an underground vault in which the stargods left their legacy for the tribe to study.

The scientists are driven away with a weapon remarkably similar to "Greek Fire," which was featured on an episode of Ancient Aliens. The team also discovers that the statue is in fact alive-- it's an alien stargod in suspended animation. Sandman scribe Neil Gaiman would also explore this theme in his Eternals miniseries in 2006.

"The Great Stone Face" was published two years before Kirby's "Face on Mars" story and two years before his Easter Island-heads-come-alive story, but certainly reflects the same obsessions. But it also reflects the same obsessions as Eternals #1, which is pretty mind-blowing considering it was published nearly twenty years before it.

Double page spread from Eternals #1

"The Great Stone Face" was also published a full year-and-a-half before Quatermass and the Pit, six years before the English language version of Morning of the Magicians, ten years before Five Million Years to Earth, eleven years before Chariots of the Gods? and nineteen years before The Twelfth Planet.

In fact, I'm not exactly sure where Kirby could possibly have read anything about Ancient Astronaut Theory in the American media in 1957, certainly nothing as explicit and doctrinaire as this. I suppose there could have been something (Fort perhaps, but certainly not in this Chariots of the Gods type presentation), the only problem is that I've yet to find it.

So, here's where we come to the heart of the matter.

If we look at Kirby's work and recognize his indelible mark on comics, movies and videogames and then we look at his uncanny ability to predict future events, what do we make of his AstroGnostic obsessions? Certainly, those who pretend to speak for him want it all to go away, but the more we look into this the deeper -- and farther back-- it all goes.

There is absolutely no way this was all just some kind of diversion for Jack. The record shows that this was an obsession, as deep and as indelible as anything about the man. And to claim otherwise is to gravely misrepresent his work and his legacy.

That Jack not only immersed himself in AAT a very long time before it showed up on anyone's radar might well speak to the fact that it undergirds all of his superhero work from the Silver Age on (it's beyond argument that it does starting from the Bronze Age). But there are also more elusive themes that Jack explored time and again, particularly the theme of psychic communion with alien entities, most remarkably told in "Children of the Flaming Wheel."

It's almost tempting to wonder if you can't actually separate Jack's AAT obsession and uncanny penchant for prophecy from the psychic/alien contact obsession. It's almost tempting to wonder if the three aren't in fact very intimately linked.

UPDATE: Kirby may well have been influenced by the 1954 book UFOs and the Bible, the only major AAT work in a popular US edition I can find that predates "Great Stone Face." However, this whole idea of the cargo cult is unique, and Kirby may well have come to the conclusion about ancient astronauts after the cargo cult stories emerged after the war.

Clownshow 2012: Every Picture Tells a Story

2012-01-11T21:00:00.001-05:00

I like to play picture association games-- you show me a picture and I tell you what I see, you know, that kind of thing. So since the Republican Primary reality show is the talk of the town these days I thought I'd do one based on the ~~clownshoe's~~ candidate's campaign logos.

This masterpiece of kitsch looks homemade, but will probably be ubiquitous in tattoo catalogs and on the sides of vans, RVs and motorcycle gas tanks by year's end. It also has the same unfortunate aftertaste a lot of Paul fan art leaves...

...can't for the life of me figure out why. Paul might want to work on that.

(Eye of) Newt's winged five-pionted star makes me think of...

...this. Siriusly.

I don't know who picks these logos for the candidates but someone needs to sit an ultraconservative Catholic like Santorum down and explain that that imagery is directly derived from...

...this imagery. I don't think Rick would appreciate the association much.

Media darling Jon Huntsman (aka Oannes Orion) is probably a bit more au fait with the association symbol watchers might get from his ~~oppressively boring~~ deceptively minimalist logo. I see that and I think...

...this. Howzaboutyou?

Perry's candidacy has been a trainwreck, and I'm willing to bet intentionally. But this derivative graphic (those are McCain pyramidions atop a Obama sunrise) seems to harken back to the Obama symbolathon...

...especially with the Palm and the Crescent (ostensibly symbolizing South Carolina). Before I die of ennui, let's look at the next graphic abortion...

...Romney's odd ribbon design. I don't know, every time I look at it I keep seeing the "after" shot to...

... this "before" shot.

And even though (Mount) Herman (Son of) Cain dropped out I have to bring up his logo, which was as hilariously and cluelessly awful as his candidacy. Every time I saw it, I couldn't help but think of...

Clownshow 2012: Suspension of Belief

2012-01-10T12:36:00.008-05:00

I was just reading that Fringe is not only in danger of not being renewed for a fifth season, but there is serious concern that Fox might cut its losses and cancel it before it ends its fourth.

This doesn't surprise me. As I wrote here recently, Fringe has a lot of built-in challenges, but it also struggles under the headwinds of the zeitgeist. Fringe was intended to recapture some the old X-Files thunder, but with an obvious upstairs directive to avoid the anti-government and anti-establishment vitriol that Chris Carter packed into his storylines to the very end.

But therein lies the rub- The X-Files was about its time and Fringe is about The X-Files. Only minus the anger, the sexual chemistry and most importantly, minus the zeitgeist. The X-Files was as much about Waco and Ruby Ridge and Heaven's Gate and SWAT teams getting addresses wrong and gunning down elderly couples enjoying their tea while the crack dealers next door piss their pants laughing, as it was about UFOs or mutants.

And so, Chris Carter made sure his unsuspecting viewers were confronted head-on with terrifying scenes of stormtroopers storming through their idyllic suburban neighborhoods, as well as an army of anonymous enforcers who existed in a near-future world in which the Constitution is just an old rag. Carter took all these guys out of the headlines and told his audience, "what makes you think it can't happen to you?"

The X-Files also existed in a television landscape that was blissfully pre-postmodern. In its Vancouver heyday the series was gloriously un-self-conscious, and was playing to a TV audience in which suspension of disbelief was a given.

That audience is a thing of the past.

And so we have a Republican primary that is being conducted like a reality TV series. Most people believe the "challenge" here is a charade, a race to replace a Wall Street puppet king (Tut was a puppet-king, too) who plays golf and shrugs off the abuse from Fox News and the mythical Tea Party, while the GOP leadership wields the true lobbyist-fueled power.

The "Republicans"-- who are simply the old Dixiecrats trading under a brand-name they seized by hostile takeover-- have held the upper hand in the US Gov't since that fateful night of November 22, 1963. Sure, the "Democrats" rush in whenever the ruling party oversteps its bounds, but they're always neutralized as soon as the corporate policies that are unpopular with the GOP's base are passed. I've seen it all time and again, since the old Carter days, to be exact.

But as usually happens when two ideological armies battle to the death, a third, theretofore unseen power tends to emerge from their ashes. The only problem is that the smoke still hasn't cleared and we don't know who those shadowy figures are, marching towards us. The Liberal project collapsed during the Sixties riots, and the Conservative project was liquidated during Bush Jr's administration and Goldman Sachs brokered off its assets in a fire sale to the Chinese, the Saudis and the Germans.

Which is all a very pretentious way of saying that whatever the rhetoric leads you to believe, no one believes in the old answers anymore. You're not hearing about it in the media but the Republican Party is under enormous pressure from a resurgent white nationalism/tribalism (which the Paul dynasty may well find a way to capitalize on), and the Democrats are faced with a restive base of increasingly apathetic black voters and younger voters of all persuasions who think they are cowards and sellouts.

Just like with sci-fi and fantasy on TV, American politics lives and dies on the suspension of disbelief. We have to believe these idiots are going to solve our problems for us but clearly no one does. The Republican reality series has done nothing but make its stars look no different than the cast of Survivor or Project Runway. Maybe much worse. And the Damoclean sword of the zeitgeist looms overhead, looking to lay waste to both parties.

What will emerge from all of this? I think the real answers will come from true democracy-- people getting together and fighting their corners. None of these clowns- Republocrat or Demopublican-- gives a rat's ass about you.

That message finally seems to have sunk in.

SYNC LOG UPDATE: The night I posted this an incident occurred in Chris Carter's hometown of Bellflower, CA:

A Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy is under investigation after amatuer video was released showing him punch a special-needs woman in the face on a Bellflower bus.

Jermaine Green, the man who recorded the video, has also told NBC LA, that the cop also threatened him with arrest if he didn't hand over the cell phone that contained the incriminating video.

It appears that a fight broke out between the cop and the woman, after he boarded the bus with another deputy. The woman is reported to have been argumentative with the deputies, including cursing at them, before she was assaulted.

Clownshow 2012: Brother Ron and the All-Seeing Eye

2012-01-08T14:14:00.001-05:00

Brother Ron shows off his new Masonic chevron

The problem with talking about Freemasonry is that even though its role in American politics is well-documented, so many nutjobs have salted the fields and inspired a mass knee-jerk reaction when ever the subject is raised.

As I've said many times before this is not an Anti-Mason blog. In fact, seeing the rogue's gallery lined up against them-- snakehandlers, pantpissers, Hitler, Stalin and so on-- I am probably more anti-anti-Mason. And it's immensely entertaining to decipher all of the Masonic symbolism flying around out there, especially with the space programs. Sadly, Masons usually take exception to my interpretations, but that's the Internet for you.

My real concern is how Masonic and quasi-Masonic fraternities, secret societies and civic groups are used to foster privilege and exclusion. This becomes even more a pressing issue during an economic depression, when exclusion and lack of access can equal financial ruin for many people. Unfortunately, that's human nature and these groups are hardly the only offenders when it comes to cronyism and nepotism.

Ever since the rise of the Anti-Masonic Party in the early 19th Century, Masons have been accused of being duplicitous and pursuing hidden agendas. Scandals have erupted in the UK over corruption among Masonic police officers and judges, accusing them of both using and obscuring their Masonic allegiance to further the interests of their brothers.

Ron Paul advertises on Jeff Rense's site
for campaign donations

So what do we make of a high-initiate Mason who has cultivated almost religious devotion in the Anti-Masonic extreme right for the past 40 years?

This is no small issue. Ron Paul's biggest media supporters by far are the radio talk show hosts Alex Jones and Jeff Rense, whose shows and websites act as virtual propaganda mills for the Texas congressman. But at the same time both Jones and Rense are clearinghouses for Anti-Masonic propaganda. How do we explain the disconnect?

Corporate-sponsored conspiracy theorist "Vigilant Citizen"
has made a fortune "exposing the Illuminati."

To paper over the cracks, Paul's supporters make distinctions between regular Freemasonry and what is called "Illuminated Freemasonry." The New World Order isn't an effort by corporate oligarchies to remove all governmental barriers to commerce and labor exploitation, it's a conspiracy among "Illuminated" Freemasons and "Zionist" Jews to create a one world government and one world currency and one world religion (it always comes down to religion). Rense makes a similar distinction between "Zionist" Jews and "good" Jews.

Let's leave aside for a minute that the real one world religion project is clearly EvangeliCIAlism and look at the "Illuminated Freemasonry" bit again. The symbol universally accepted as belong to Illuminated Masonry among Ron Paul's followers as the symbol of the Illuminati is the "All-Seeing Eye," or Eye in the Pyramid or triangle.

"Eye in Pyramid" spotting is a major sport on the Internet (I've been known to partake when the opportunity arises), especially among those looking for signs of dastardly Illuminati infiltrators, and variations on it (circles in triangles, Suns in triangles) are all over, though more often used as fashion statements or injokes.

Jeff Rense has an inhouse artist named David Dee who creates photocollage political cartoons for him, most of them high-tech updates on Julius Streicher's old Der Steurmer propaganda pieces. Dee usually uses the All Seeing Eye to symbolize those who he perceives as Ron Paul's political opponents, often Paul's fellow Ayn Rand enthusiast Alan Greenspan. He alternates these hit pieces with hagiographic portraits of Paul as the white knight coming to rescue America.

Dee is not the only Paul enthusiast drawing on Der Steurmer for artistic inspiration. There are plenty of other artists mining a similar approach, applauding Paul's war on the Fed and often depicting Paul's enemies as swarthy, hook-nosed, skulking cowards who the heroic Paul will flush out until America is finally cleansed with the righteous fire of Liberty.

And you often see the All-Seeing Eye as the emblem of his enemies' infamy.

Paul expresses his love and gratitude
for Lambda Chi on their website

So the fact that Ron Paul inarguably belongs to a Masonic fraternity, has a Eastern Star wife and Rainbow Girl daughters and uses Masonic symbolism on the campaign trail is fine, because he's one of the "good" Masons- the dependably conservative fellows down at the Lodge who get together to share a meal and do good works for the community.

Right?

Well, there was one little thing bothering me. I kept looking at Lambda Chi Alpha's logos- I saw the Masonic grip, the Cross and Crown, the shining Sun (also featured prominently in Paul's new anti-Santorum ad), and all sorts of other tracing board goodies, but there was one thing that I was missing. But then it hit me...

...the Eye in the Triangle-- here incorporating both the Masonic union of Sun and the Crescent Moon-- also known as the "All-Seeing Eye."

More importantly, the union of Sun and Moon represents the same union of opposites principle symbolized by the Square and Compass, according to no less an authority than Albert Pike.

So judging by the criteria of his most fervent supporters, Ron Paul is not only a Mason, he's an Illuminated Mason. And yet somehow he has led his flock to believe he's neither.

How can this be? Judging from the endless invasion of innocent message boards and comments sections across the Internet, Paul's followers are all super-geniuses who have been initiated into the hidden wisdom of Libertarianism and will be his steadfast foot soldiers in the glorious crusade to liberate America from the "Fed" (wink, nod).

This couldn't have anything to do with any absolutely nutso, zany, just-plain-wacky conspiracy theory ideas like "controlled opposition" or "agent provocateur" or anything like that. Could it?

No way, Jose! (sorry- I meant "no way, Ray.")

I know some Paul fans might be reading, so in the interest of fairness and balance, I'll close it out with some inspiring words from their hero...

"There’s nothing to fear from Globalism, free trade and a single worldwide currency." -- Ron Paul, Congressional Record, March 13, 2001

SHOCKING UPDATE: Ron Paul did not vote against the NDAA!

There is a whole lot of anger regarding the National Defense Authorization Act that President Obama signed into law last week. Civil libertarians in particular have been livid over the content of the law which they think allows the indefinite detention of Americans, even though the indefinite detention provision was changed, before President Obama signed the bill into law.

Not too long after the President signed the bill, rabid Ron Paul supporters vigorously claimed that Paul opposed the bill. There’s just one problem with that. If he indeed opposed it so much, why didn’t he attend a House session to cast his vote against it?

Ron Paul took an oath to execute his duties as a member of the House of Representatives, yet he failed to show up to vote against the NDAA, a bill he supposedly opposes. He didn’t bother to take a few hours out of his day to vote against something he considers dangerous to American rights and freedom. Instead, he decided to ignore his congressional responsibilities in order to remain on the campaign trail.- AddictingInfo.com

Thank you Brother Ron, for making my argument for me...

Ron Paul: Race, Ritual and the Scottish Rite

2012-01-05T22:12:00.015-05:00

The Widow's Sons

UPDATE: This article is about hypocrisy and duplicity-- and how Libertarian propaganda is being used to obscure a distinctly reactionary agenda-- not Freemasonry per se. Please read the whole thing --and some of the insightful comments as well-- before making your mind up one way or another. And please be aware that The Secret Sun is both a kneejerk-free zone and a dues-paying member of the Reality-Based High Weirdness Community.

Well, the Clownshow's back in town and from the looks of things it going to be clownier than ever before. We have a Wall Street underling in the White House who is attacked regularly by his opposition party as a "socialist," even though intelligent (read: non-racist) conservatives acknowledge he's governing as a classic Rockefeller Republican (with all that implies for parapolitics watchers, I might add).

On the other side of the aisle the GOP leadership has put its hopes in a candidate who may well have been manufactured in Skynet's Terminator factory and is instinctively loathed by 75% of his own party. So much so that he got the scare of his life from an overgrown altar boy (with all that implies for parapolitics watchers, I might add).

Gee, why does Iowa vote first?

Then there's the Great White Hope of the Libertarian/Neo-Confederate alliance, Ron Paul. No one is quite acknowledging it (except his son, judging from his facial expression last night), but Paul needed to win last night more than anyone else and was in fact polling as such.

Paul's mystique is built on being the supposed champion of the Silent Majority and coming in a weak third to the two of the lamest candidates in living memory-- and in a caucus where Independents and Democrats could register as Republicans and vote-- doesn't exactly bolster that image.

But caucuses aren't primaries and apparently they tend to winnow out the enthusiastic but impatient. A lot of his support on the ground were his version of Deadheads- true believers from out of state hitching a ride on the campaign trail. Most of the younger voters are attracted to Paul's antiwar and anti-Prohibition policies while tending to ignore his more problematic domestic agenda.

"They've got it all backwards."

Even so, I'm not going to try to argue with Paul's Deadheads anymore. Why? Because I now understand the very sophisticated coded messages he's sending out there (more than they do, perhaps) and I think I better understand the powerful emotional response they instill now.

I was actually hoping he'd win so he could do maximum damage to the duopoly and expose the Clownshow for what it really is. Maybe he still will, but I feel a corner has turned. The soda's lost its fizz.

For all his talk of reason, Paul is hitting a bruised and disoriented Middle America -- particularly the white working class-- with a powerful, symbolically-charged emotional stew promising a return to antebellum Southern folkways and an America better described in the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution.

I certainly understand why this is so seductive in these days of Globalism and multiculturalism, even if I don't agree with it. But the fact remains that he's sending a different coded message to his fellow initiates.

"We're the same underneath it all"
Paul lifts McCain's Sirius logo

I didn't vote in 2008 and I don't plan to vote in this election either so I have no clown in this show. And besides, what's much more fascinating to me is Ron Paul's almost compulsive display of high initiate secret society symbolism. Which is to say that although other bloggers have claimed that Paul is a Mason --including some Masons themselves-- he has denied it (kind of). But that hasn't exactly stopped speculation on the issue.

All I can say for sure is that if walks like a duck, talks like a duck and performs high initiate ritual like a duck....

Now, the controversy that's dogged Paul has been his newsletters, and to a lesser extent his deep and longstanding ties to extreme right sects like the Christian Reconstructionists and the Neo-Confederate underground.

In the first place, Republican criticism of the Ron Paul Newsletters is pretty rich given the language in them is identical to what's heard on the AM talk radio circuit that GOP lawmakers and power brokers work every hour of every day.

Paul with his friend Don Black,
founder of Stormfront

Even so, with the fanatical support Paul has in the White Nationalist community the question has been raised if Paul himself is racist. I think this is the wrong question. What people are really asking if Paul himself is a bigot or a hater. I don't think he is.

I think Paul sees himself in a long tradition of paternalist Southern conservatives who understand the way the world really works, son, and think everything will return to its idyllic, antebellum state once that pesky, outside-agitatin' Federal Government with its sissy talk about "civil rights" is done away with for good.

In this, Paul falls smack dab into the old/new (Masonic) hierarchy of the South, which believes passionately in natural orders, natural laws and especially, natural hierarchies. Unfortunately, working class whites don't figure much higher than blacks in this natural order.

But of course the Masons-- Scottish Rite Masons, to be precise-- were at the top of the plantation Pyramid.

What Northern liberals never understood is that the Masonic Dixiecrats (who enriched themselves with New Deal millions and then turned around and shattered the New Deal coalition) were not drooling, foaming, bloviating racists as you might see in a Hollywood movie.

What they really hated were do-gooders and busybody outsiders who don't understand "the natural order of things."

Scottish Rite Freemasons like Albert Pike, Strom Thurmond (who kept a black lover who bore his child), Jesse Helms and Trent Lott invented the language of "state's rights" and "limited government" that Paul peddles everywhere he goes. Northerners might be totally baffled by this language but it strikes a deep and powerful chord for a lot of conservative Southerners (and now Tea Party rightists everywhere).

Paul's Confederate mentors, all Scottish Rite Masons

It means dismantling the welfare state, abolishing anti-discrimination laws and civil rights laws, dismantling separation of church and state (all of which are included in Paul's platform, of course) and all of the other innovations that shattered the idyllic bliss of the Plantation system and its direct descendants.

Paul might not tell his young, idealistic followers that's the endgame for his anti-Federal agenda, but the circles he's traveled in for his entire adult life will explain it to you at length, if you like. As would the Dixiecrats who wrote Paul's gameplan long before he showed up will as well.

The Confederate movement certainly understands the coded language Paul is speaking:

In a January 4, 2008 article on the Official Confederate States of America (CSA) Government website, it was claimed that Ron Paul was "the only candidate who might be friendly to the restoration of the Confederacy" ...The article also stated that the CSA has "known for years Ron Paul to be essentially a Confederate in his stand on the issues"

But if you read his platform carefully you'll see that Paul differs from his CSA friends in that he would dismantle the entire Federal government and impose a de facto Confederate system on the North as well.

And Stormfront founder Don Black assumes the same thing about Paul that I did when he started showing up in parapolitcal literature in the 80s- he was a true blue Confederate:

“Everybody, all of us back in the 80′s and 90′s, felt Ron Paul was, you know, unusual in that he had actually been a Congressman, that he was one of us and now, of course, that he has this broad demographic–broad base of support.”

Speaking among the initiates at Georgetown- note Masonic symbols

But this is not about "race hate" for Paul. That's for the help. This is about dismantling the Federal system-- finishing the work begun in the Civil War-- and returning to the Feudal system that ruled the South since colonial times. The way things should be.

That Paul is a transplanted Northerner shows just how powerful this vision of the world can be outside of Dixie (no one is more committed to a cause than a converted enemy). And that this all squares nicely with Ayn Rand's Liber AL teleology shows it's not limited to America either.

But is Paul a Freemason? One fact people have pointed out is that Ron Paul's wife is Eastern Star and his daughters are Rainbow, an arrangement essentially unheard of for a man who is not in fact a Mason himself.

Lying about the secret?
"The Secret Lies with Charlotte" was the key to
the Masonic secrets in National Treasure

In this handwritten letter (note the reverse of the Great Seal) to a "Charlotte" published on his site Paul denies being a "Freemason." And here's where we come to the classic non-denial denial. A "Free" Mason is a member of the Ancient, Free and Accepted Masonic Order. There are other Orders that do not define themselves as "Free." Several, actually.

And as longtime Secret Sun readers know, the Free-masons are the low men on a much bigger Masonic totem pole in which Masonic-inspired and Masonic-created fraternities and secret societies wield the true power. And here's where we hit paydirt...

Do you see the hidden Eye in the Triangle?

Paul is a proud member in good standing of Lambda Chi Alpha, yet another Masonically-created fraternity that is classified as a "secret" fraternity. Lambda Chi traces its origins to Boston (birthplace of American Freemasonry) and Phila(e)delphia, in Paul's native Pennsylvania. Here's an obituary of Lambda Chi's founding father, John E. "Jack" Mason (seriously).

Funeral services were held on Wednesday, June 5, at the Oliver H. Bair funeral parlors in Philadelphia. Cremation and private burial were in Woodland Cemetery. Masonic services were conducted by Lodge 51, of which he was a past master, the preceding evening with his close friend and associate, past Grand High Alpha Fischer, in his station of senior warden.

That Lambda Chi is in fact a Masonic fraternity and not just a drinking club is made clear by its original seal, prominently featuring a Masonic handshake. Lambda Chi also includes an inner body called "The Mason's Circle," a classic example of esoteric double-entendre.

It's current seal also features the handshake, which is overshadowed now by explicit Knights Templar (and Solar) iconography, as well as the cojoining of the cross and the crescent, which is a byword for the Order.

Let's recap:

• Is Ron Paul a Free-mason? Probably not.

• Is he a member of at least one Masonic fraternity? Without question.

• How seriously does he take the Masonic craft itself? Oh, you have no idea...

Paul's Presidential announcement should tickle the fancy of Masonic ritual watchers, for both obvious and more obscure reasons.

• First of all was the day and date: Friday the 13th. This should be obvious for most readers but for those who are not, it was the day and date of the suppression of the Templars and includes the number 13, which is sacred to Masons. Read about both here. Or just look at a dollar bill.

Arrow points to the "Star of the East."

• Second was the physical location-- in the Exeter (NH) Town Hall, which is a literal stone's throw from the "Star of the East" Masonic lodge. More on Exeter in just a bit, since it's crucial to Masonic history.

Diagram from NASA, speaking of Scottish Rites.

• Third was the particular Friday the 13th he chose to announce- it was the day of a once in a lifetime planetary alignment:

In a rare planetary event, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, will appear together (within around 2 degrees of each other) in the eastern sky just before dawn this Friday. The event will be particularly spectacular for Sydneysiders. From 5am, the four planets will be clearly seen just above the horizon in the east. The brightest planet will be Venus sitting in the middle of the group. Just above and to the left of Venus and almost as bright is Jupiter. To the right of Jupiter and slightly fainter will be Mercury. Sitting below these three planets and fainter again will be Mars.

"West" lines up with Ron Paul on Friday the 13th,
Venus aligns with Star of the East Lodge
Venus is the "star of the east."

Whatever your opinion of Richard Hoagland, he repeatedly proved that celestial alignments were crucial to the Scottish Rite Masons in NASA, so it's doubly difficult to imagine that Paul chose this day at random.

Who the hell shakes hands like that?
Wait...never mind.

So not only do we have acknowledged secret society initiate Ron Paul announcing on what is essentially a Masonic holy day, it's during an ultra-rare planetary alignment and takes place literally across the street from a Masonic Lodge. If that isn't meaningful to you, you're reading the wrong blog. The scope of this ritual is breathtakingly audacious. Obama-worthy, even.

But if the Masonic tradition is as important to you as it was to your direct ideological forebears, announcing your candidacy in a town named "Exeter" would have an added ritual super-charge.

Why?

Because the earliest record we have of the word "Freemason" can be found in Exeter-- Exeter Cathedral, to be exact:

"For purposes of discussion it may be assumed that even if
there had been no operative societies coming down from a
remoter antiquity, the guild system itself would have
produced them. When artisans of all other classes and
callings were uniting themselves into such groups, it would
have been strange indeed if the stone masons had not done
so also. If not a single record of their medieval existence
could be found, it still would be safe to infer they did exist. As
a matter of fact there are records of Masonic guilds both in
England and on the continent.

"The term Freemason (first) occurs
in the fabric rolls of Exeter Cathedral in the year 1396."

-- from Phoenix Masonry

Case closed.

"End the Federal Government"
Note Masonic chevron symbol in new logo

Now will any of this sway Ron Paul's acolytes from his cult? No, of course not. It's not intended to. There's no way I can compete with this guy's multimillion dollar propaganda machine or the thousands of his alt-media sycophants.

Besides, no one understands the appeal of turning back the clock more than me (though for me it's the mid-90s). And Paul's radicalism might wake people up and inspire liberals and conservatives in northern states to realize they have a lot more in common with each other than they do with Paul's Confederate revanchists and start taking large-scale secession (and the Second Amendment) more seriously.

And you know me- I love this stuff. The Obama crew has been awfully quiet symbol-wise and I was just getting ready to tune the whole Clownshow out. And I still want Paul to be the turd in the party's punchbowl-- and wake Northern conservatives up to exactly who the hell they've been in bed with for the past 30 years.

That's the great thing about extremists- they tend to clarify issues that the more moderate can obscure.

POSTSCRIPT: Maybe I was wrong- maybe it is about race hate for Ron Paul. This is the most disgusting political ad I've ever seen. Of course, it will be disavowed-- after the message sinks in. Of course.

Just like the newsletters.

Oh, we'll hear the usual denials and talk of "false flags," but seeing this is hot on the heels of Huntsman's Twilight Zone parody of Paul (and the Globe's endorsement of JH), it feels a lot more like "getting someone to do your dirty work while you maintain plausible deniability" to me.

Remember also that Paul claimed someone hacked his Twitter account after he posted a nasty personal dig at Huntsman after the Iowa caucus. So low blows and bullshit excuses are nothing new for this character.

CASE CLOSED DEPT.: How did I not know that Ron Paul 2o12's official politics blogger is Jack Hunter aka The Southern Avenger?

This argument is over.

Sidebar: For Secret Sun purposes Exeter, NH is important in that one of the most puzzling UFO flaps in the 1960s occurred there, inspiring the bestselling book Incident at Exeter. Phillips Academy Exeter is also there, the sister school to the more well-known Phillips Academy Andover over the border, the school of choice for the plutocratic elite.

For the geeks: Exeter founder John Phillips coined the phrase, "With great power comes great responsibility."

I deleted the KFC bumper sticker since no one seemed to understand that it was a joke and not part of the story. All of the other campaign logos are official.

Mindbomb: The Gulf Wars and the Gate of the Gods, Redux

2011-12-29T02:30:00.005-05:00

I don't know if John Lilly's version of the omniscient Orbital Machine Intelligence (OMI) which he named ECCO (for "Earth Coincidence Control Office") is as true or as real than any other OMI fever-dream.

But I do know that when you really dig into the study of Synchronicity-- when you peel away all of the simple coincidence and happenstance and approach the phenomenon with a brutal rigor-- it becomes very hard not to begin to see it as the provenance of a force or an intelligence that is definite. Which is to say not a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky, touchy-feely "energy" or "consciousness," but an agency.

There have been times when Synchronicity seemed to volley back and forth with me in real time, when it answered questions that I had asked quite clearly in my mind just as if we were having a conversation. I found that the more rigorous I became-- mostly meaning the fewer variables I kept in play-- the more powerful and specific Synchronicity became in turn.

For a very long time I approached Synchronicity with the attitude that it was impossible, that only multiple sources of corroboration-- preferably in hard copy-- would make me believe what I was seeing. And even then I would challenge my own results.

I threw away hundreds of occurrences, which I labeled "guppies," in order to focus on the bigger picture. And in order to quantify the most significant I developed a five-point criteria, which looked for what I call Compound Synchronicities, incorporating several improbable co-incidents into the whole.

Which brings us back to Jack Kirby.

Becoming a conduit for whatever intelligence may be broadcasting out there is not an easy task. Maybe Jane Roberts and JZ Knight are the real McCoy, maybe disembodied ancient spirits really chose them as vessels. Maybe, but I doubt it.

I think in order to get to a point in which our ordinary consciousness is breached and the mind is free to go somewhere else or to tune into unknowable frequencies, our ego filter has to be bypassed. Meaning "shattered."

It seems to be a very dangerous process and I imagine for every true prophet there are a hundred thousand madmen. In Kirby's case, it was most certainly the war, but also maybe something else as well.

In the last post we looked at this bizarre convergence of machine intelligence contact and the year 1974, claimed by Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, John Lilly, Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. Readers cited Timothy Leary and his Starseed Transmissions as well as contact claimed by Ingo Swann. There are probably others as well.

What most of these men (aside from perhaps Geller and Swann) have in common is what is somewhat irresponsibly called "heroic" use of powerful hallucinogens. What separates these guys from your ordinary acid casualty like Syd Barrett is that they continued to be high-functioning and prolific. Perhaps even more so.

You can certainly dismiss their claims but you can't ignore the fact that these were highly intelligent and cogent individuals, working in highly specialized fields.

There are also the examples of visionaries such as Francis Crick and Steve Jobs, both of whom credit part of their genius to hallucinogens and both of whom were no stranger to alien/UFO memes.

And then there's Jack Kirby.

I've written several times about Kirby's own channeling of the OMI meme in OMAC. Let's just recap-- OMAC was a near-future sci-fi series about a OMI who creates a One Man Army to deal with threats that the GPA (Global Police Agency) can't handle. He's essentially Captain Marvel redux, only he doesn't switch his identities.

In issues three and four, OMAC was sent to repel an invasion undertaken by a foreign dictator on a weak neighbor, which was the same situation we saw in 1990 with the invasion of Kuwait.

And here's where we get to the compound Synchronicities; the story begins with OMAC wearing a virtual reality headset, which were all the rage in the early 90s. This story was drawn in 1974.

As he flies to battle OMAC finds himself chased by video-guided smart bombs, which were not used in the field of battle until...you guessed it, the early 90s (the smart bomb was the star meme of the Gulf War).

Jumping forward in the timeline, the arrest of the dictator from his bunker is remarkably similar to the image we saw of Saddam Hussein's bunker arrest, right down to the ragged beard and gaping mouth and tongue.

The similarity of the imprisoned dictator to Saddam is striking here, even with the balding head. The same goes for the crimes against humanity that the dictator is charged with....

The timeline was a bit jarring to me, in that it combined narratives from the Gulf War of the first Bush Administration and the Iraq War of the second. But in the stories that Kirby would write immediately after that timeline would be rectified in the major plot points of a multi-issue arc that would bring us straight to the doorstep of a Stargate.

A bit of background first.

William Henry (among others) has argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was not about WMDs or democracy or even oil, but about obtaining hidden records of the ancient gods popularly known as the "Annunaki."

The ancient cities of Sumer and Babylon (literally "Gate of the Gods") lie in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Rumors had been circulating for years that Saddam had been digging feverishly for Annunaki relics, which he had supposedly found, as well as proof an ancient Stargate, or interdimensional portal used to travel vast distances in time and space.

And to file this under crazy theories undergirded by naggingly inconvenient facts, you might remember that one of the first things the US Army did when it reached Baghdad was loot all the museums.

Which brings me to that ancient and arcane grimoire men call Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #30...

Textbook alien abduction
from "UFO: The Wildest Trip Ever"

Kamandi is not really the last boy on Earth, since he's actually 18 and there are a bunch of other humans (including boys) running around on Earth A.D. (After Disaster). And the title was a pastiche of Kirby's 50s work (including a story in which Earth is taken over by talking animals) meant to cash in on the Planet of the Apes craze of the early 70s.

I remember seeing the book now and then but it seems as if it didn't make it to the stands near me (comic book distribution was a corrupt mess back in the day) very often. So #30 was the first issue I actually bought for myself and was my entry point into the Kirbyverse.

I remember buying it with money my mother had given me to buy soda and potato chips and Ring Dings at Valles News (pronounced Valis) one morning when I was supposed to go on a field trip to the Boston Aquarium.

Be that as it may, you may now note that the first Jack Kirby book I ever bought was about a classic alien abduction -- not to mention the Stargate.

In "UFO: The Wildest Trip on Earth" (wink, wink), Kamandi and his mutant sidekick Ben Boxer are taken to a distant "barren pile of sand" by the alien, who turns out to be an energy being contained in a suit.

Who is Ben Boxer? Well, he's part of a trio of astronauts who sat out the Great Disaster (WWIII) in Tracking Site, an low-orbit space station. They survived the holocaust and developed mutant powers and worship the ancient god, "NASA Mind."

Kirby never said as much but it's safe to say Ben Boxer is his Gus Grissom, because Jack was plugged into every other damn thing you can think of.

What is this invader doing in this desert land? She (it turns out to be a girl after scanning Kamandi as a template) is looting the treasures of the earth to send back to her home planet by way of a....

...Stargate.

Where, as the fanatically alien-obsessed Kirby tells us, "UFOs come from." If you scroll back up you'll see a statue based on the Babylonian gods (also featured on the issue's cover) found in--wait for it now...

...the Iraqi National Museum.

So, let's recap-- in 1974, Kirby draws a story about an OMI-powered supergod with main plot points that eerily foreshadow the two Persian Gulf wars, including virtual reality of all damn things.

Immediately after that, we are taken on a trip to a sandy wasteland where an invading alien is looting artifacts, including those identical to those displayed in the Iraqi Museum, which was itself looted by an invading force 29 years later.

Kamandi #30 also features a terrorism subplot, in which Kamandi and Ben find a jetliner lifted from the Arctic in which a passenger carries a suitcase nuke. When the satchel is opened the device is armed and the explosion closes the Stargate, leaving the UFO and its pilot stranded on Earth.

Now, the reason I hadn't put the whole story together is that I usually began and ended with #30. Big mistake. That's only just the start.

In issue #31, the stranded alien energy being looks for a suitable host and possesses Ben Boxer, Walk-in style. He becomes a steel-plated giant (Ben's mutant powers allow him to become the Silver Surfer, sans board essentially) and goes on the rampage.

At the same time the alien is trying to find a host-- Jesus, I don't even know how to say this-- an invading army arrives in the desert from America.

For real.

The invading force from America arrives at this barren desert to fight their enemies, the Gorillas. The battle picks up in #32, a giant size issue that includes a reprint of Kamandi #1. And not for nothing, either...

...for the first issue of Kamandi begins in the ruins of lower Manhattan and ends at the military headquarters of the new American Empire. On page 17.

The invasion force from America is led by Kamandi's old chum, Prince Tuftan, son of the "Great Caesar" of the Tiger Empire.

Did I mention it's headquartered in America?

You see, this is the second Gorilla War-- the first war took place in issue #3 and 4, following the story arc begun in #1.

The first war was fought by the father, the second by the son.

Sound familiar?

By the way, that's a gorilla war, not a guerrilla war.

So, what I innocently wandered into early 1975 was a storyline that eventually featured a UFO abduction, an intra-galactic Stargate, Annunaki relics, jetliners as terrorist weapons, and a two-stage war fought first by the father of a American Empire and then the son.

And did I mention this was written immediately following the smart bomb/virtual reality/Weapons of Mass Destruction war story in OMAC?

The storyline continued with alien genetic engineering and the UFO repelling the gorilla forces. It concluded in orbit, with Pyra taking Kamandi and Canus on a trip to a Russian satellite manned by a Lovecraftian mutant.

This is all just one or twelve too many more "coincidences" with Jack Kirby to chalk up to happenstance. And what we are looking at again are "Compound Synchronicities," in which the co-incidents are stacked in sequence, with Kamandi #30 being published immediately following OMAC #4. And what we are looking at are the major plot points of these stories, not just random details.

Starting in the late 50s, Kirby began receiving transmissions that seem to transcend the boundaries of time and space. He buried it all in allegory (read: "wacked-out sci fi"), or rather, translated whatever he was picking up. But I believe there's some thing behind this all, and not just the moon in June and the birds and the trees, fa la la. And 1974 seemed to be a crucial year in this process for him, as with others.

POSTSCRIPT I: I'd be remiss in not mentioning that I began working on this piece on Dec. 28th, the 37th anniversary of one of the three life-altering traumatic events I experienced in my early days, which I wrote about here. That event -- the violent and suspicious death of someone very close to me and my family-- happened at the end of 1974. I often think it left me wide open, psychically. And just two and a half months later, this Stargate madness came into my life.

An earlier and even more traumatic event also prefigured my very first exposure to Jack Kirby (via this issue of The Witching Hour). I can't help but think of that co-incidence as well.

POSTSCRIPT II: And bringing it all back to those Sirius transmissions, who do we find in the centerfold of Kamandi #35 and its alien goddess-in-orbit plot? A familiar face, indeed.

POSTSCRIPT III: And who's that above Lady Sirius? From the Wiki:

(Christopher) Glenn made his best-known report on January 28, 1986 when he anchored CBS Radio's live coverage of the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Glenn had just signed off -- after what was thought to have been a normal launch -- when the shuttle disintegrated, killing the seven astronauts on board.
"I had to get back on the air real fast to describe that, and had a very difficult time doing that," he recalled. Glenn and correspondent Frank Mottek (now a reporter at CBS Radio Station KNX) covered the Challenger disaster from that point.

Glenn was among the first CBS News correspondents to use a personal computer (an Apple II).

POSTSCRIPT IV: Speaking of the Challenger disaster, does anyone know anything about the provenance or authenticity of this video?

POSTSCRIPT V: Ned Sonntag reminded me that Ben Boxer can trace his astronaut-as-supergod lineage directly to the Fantastic Four (astronauts who were transformed into super-beings via radiation), and that the FF themselves are widely seen as a take-off from Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown (both of whom trace their origin to aeronautical disasters). Click here for the lineage.

"I'll Show You How to Bring Me to Your World"

2011-12-23T23:33:00.008-05:00

The "tinfoil hat" is an time-honored punchline used to dismiss anyone who wanders off the consensus plantation on fringe or paranormal topics. The reality behind it is even less amusing, given that paranoid schizophrenics are often harried by auditory hallucinations in the form of disembodied voices, which are often blamed on electronic interference and not the disease itself.

Even worse, if a person was indeed being subjected to some kind of electronic attack, a tinfoil (aluminum foil, more likely) hat would only amplify the signal.

The topic of radio or microwave transmissions beamed into people's heads is a tricky one. With more reliable anti-psychotic pharmaceuticals on the market you actually hear very little about it these days, though there is a considerable body of evidence on record showing that military and intelligence agencies were most certainly interested in developing the technology.

The main sticking point was that a transmission needs a receiver, an amplifier and a speaker to process the signal. The topic remains controversial, with skeptics dismissing it as more Cold War pseudoscience that went nowhere and conspiracists accepting every last bit of it as gospel truth.

Then there's the old standby of bad dental work picking up radio signals. AM frequencies can be extremely powerful and pervasive and on rare occasions can indeed be picked up by dental work if the conditions are just right:

A receiver is so simple...that anything from a phone to a person's mouth can act as one ... the problem can sometimes be cured with a radio-frequency filter that can be attached to the phone line... if the radio signal is very strong, a filter might not be enough.

Such is the extremely rare case when a person's mouth acts as a receiver. The electrical conductivity of the human body can act as an antenna. A metallic filling in a tooth, reacting just so with saliva, can act as a semiconductor to detect the audio signal. The speaker in this case could be anything that vibrates within the mouth enough to produce noise, such as bridgework or maybe a loose filling.

And those who believe that paranoia is simply a state of hyper-sensitivity will be vindicated by the real and sinister work done by a whole host of agencies all over the world to remote-control humanity.

Maybe nothing so crude as marching orders beamed into the head, but by manipulating the electrical and chemical processes of the brain using frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum:

In 1965, the Department of Defense (DOD) discovered that the American embassy in Moscow was being purposely irradiated by the Russians with massive levels of microwaves. By that time, the DOD’s secretive Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the nation’s capital had itself developed a prodigious arsenal of electromagnetic weapons.

Doctor José Delgado—whose current work with radio waves was underwritten by the CIA and Navy—believed scientists could transform, shape, direct and robotize humankind.

Baffled by the cause and intent of the microwave saturation at the embassy in Moscow, officials of the American intelligence community consulted experts on the biological effects of the radiation.

Recalls Dr. Milton Zaret, a leading microwave scientist later recruited by “Pandora,” a code-named CIA project for the study of radio-frequency-directed brain response, “The CIA inquired whether I thought electromagnetic radiation beamed at the brain from a distance could affect the way a person might act, and if microwaves could be used to facilitate brainwashing or to break down prisoners under investigation.”
-- Hearing “Voices” The Hidden History of the CIA’s Electromagnetic Mind-Control Experiments by Alex Constantine

The Soviet interest in this field also plays a supporting role in one of the great Gnostic dramas of our time, Philip K Dick's "2/3/74" experience, which he later explored in his massive Exegesis, as well as the semi-autobiographical Valis Trilogy. Note that the whole event occurred while Dick was on painkillers prescribed after oral surgery....

Interpretations of the events vary widely, with some chalking it up to a simple psychotic episode, others to CIA experimentation on the troublesome writer and others to a genuine mystical experience. Dick himself was somewhere in between:

Even though at the outset, Phil felt the emanations invading his mind were of a malevolent nature, in time he began to believe they were something entirely different. In a letter to (Unicorn Killer Ira) Einhorn dated February 10, 1978, Phil went into more depth on these psychotronic transmissions, claiming that they "seemed sentient".

Phil felt that an alien life form existing in some upper layer of the Earth's atmosphere had been attracted by the Soviet psychotronic transmissions. Apparently, this alien life form operated as a "station", tapping into some sort of interplanetary communication grid that, "...contained and transmitted vast amounts of information."

Initially, what Phil received were the Soviet transmissions, but eventually this alien life form--whom Phil called Zebra(and later, VALIS)--became "...attracted or potentiated by the Soviet micro-wave psychotronic transmissions."

-- PKD, The Unicorn and Soviet Psychotronics by Adam Gorightly

Much more on PKD later.

Another pop culture pioneer has a similar experience, in which a "psychic" contact with disembodied intelligences led to a similar breakthrough:

(Former Kinks star Dave Davies) was inspired by personal contact he had with extraterrestrials in 1982. Dave was preparing for a concert with the British rock group the Kinks when he heard strange voices that struck up a telepathic conversation with him.

"The intelligences did not tell me who they were," he said, "but two of them said that they had always been my spirit guides, and two others were entities who were not of this Earth, but were involved in missions here as watchers or nurturers of our race."

"The intelligences showed me, by some kind of thought projection, things which they have on their spacecraft," said Dave. "They showed me crystal computers that monitor the actions of every single person living on Earth."

Davies told me (the author) that he thought it was a "cool idea" for rock stars to join forces in an attempt to contact ETs---especially at this challenging time in Earth's history. --excerpted from Alien Rock by Michael Luckman

Unlike Dick's experience, Davies' experience might have a more earthbound explanation; it took place at an airport hotel in the heart of Spook Country, located close to the now-decomissioned Naval Radio Transmitting Facility in Driver, Virginia.

It's unlikely that the Navy was beaming transmissions into the brain of an aging rock star in order to inspire a religious reawakening. But Davies is... well, let's say a bit eccentric, and had been known to abuse a substance or two. Or five.

What is at least possible is that the powerful radio signals messed around with his brain's electrochemistry, such as it was, which might have instilled a blissful state and accompanying narrative of Space Brothers and cosmic Christs.

And as tempting as it is for some to chalk all of this up to the CIA and Mossad and the Bilderbergers, the truth is a lot more complicated. We have a lot of documentation on experiment and intent, but not so much on result or application. Certainly nothing much of any real substance lately.

There's also the possibility that a lot of the information on this technology we have is disinformation, meant to frighten and intimidate. Governments want their citizens to believe they are omniscient, a process some are too eager to help along.

There's ample precedent for the "psyche-out" approach to intimidation via disinformation. Ancient generals always claimed to be sponsored by this god or that, who naturally lent their power for use on their enemies.

The Nazi UFO hoax was most likely an attempt to either frighten the Allies during the war or dismiss post-war UFO sightings. Many believe that the propaganda war over "psychic spies" (which The Men Who Stare At Goats dismissed as the harmless indulgence of a cadre of military cranks) might have been intended to freak the Russians out, who were using similar methods on their own people:

One theory, held by Jack Sarfatti and others, is that the remote-viewing program was part of a psychological warfare project, intended to make the Russians even more paranoid than they already were. There is evidence to support the theory that the KGB used at least the idea, if not the reality, of psychic powers to keep its own people in line.-- Conclusions

Moreover, the whole phenomenon of visionaries claiming to receive messages from space long predates the terrestrial technology needed to produce them. But one turn-of-the-century visionary did put his experience in the context of technology:

Nikola Tesla wrote in his notes and letters to friends of a mysterious series of signals he had come across while studying the microscopic perturbations of electrical fields. So concise and numbered were these perturbations that he was certain they were the residual effects of some form of mysterious communication taking place.

He essentially believed he had come across a signal very similar to something that SETI would look for several years later. It was in these signals that he soon became convinced that he was receiving communications from extraterrestrial life forms, likely from the planet Mars.
-- "Alien contact admitted by famous inventor?"

Mars, eh? Somewhere Bruce Rux is nodding and saying "I told you, so." Here is Tesla's own account of the event:

The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes.

It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

Of course, entire religions have been built around people claiming to hear voices from Heaven. The same can be said for one of the most remarkable intrusions of hardcore Gnostic paranoia on the public consciousness, "The Shaver Mystery," though the voices came from the opposite direction.

It all began during World War II when one Richard Shaver wrote to one Raymond Palmer, pop culture mystic and editor of Amazing Stories, about the warnings that voices being transmitted into his head gave him about a danger that dwarfed even that of the Axis Powers:

"A Warning to Future Man" told the story of an ancient civilization that had been forced underground by the damaging rays of the Sun, where they built vast underground cities. Finally, the damaging radiation from the Sun became too great, and they fled the Earth for another planet.

Some of the members of this ancient civilization had stayed on the earth though and were called "Teros"...the good guys. While others that stayed had degenerated and become "Deros", which Shaver called "detrimental robots", not because they were actually mechanical, but because they had developed a robot-like savage behavior.

The Deros lived in the abandoned cave cities, and would occasionally venture out to abduct humans for food, or just to torture them. The Deros had access to the ancient’s devices, one of which was a ray that could project evil thoughts or even voices into the minds of the humans that had evolved on the Earth.

When they weren’t just messing with the human race, the Deros would amuse themselves by causing illnesses, airplane crashes, catastrophic natural disasters and just mayhem in general. And when that got boring, they would travel to other planets via spaceships and hook up with some equally evil extraterrestrials.

How did Shaver know all this? He claimed he had been captured by the Deros and had been their prisoner for several years in their subterranean cities.

I will stop and note here that Shaver was hospitalized for psychiatric problems in 1934. --The Shaver Mystery

The topic of alien machine intelligences hit the mainstream again in the early 70s in the wake of the Uri Geller phenomenon. In one of the strangest biographies to ever hit the best-seller lists, Geller's associate/CIA handler Andrija Puharich showed just high he had been getting off his own supply by taking the opportunity to wax ecstatic about an orbital computer intelligence he was in contact with called "Spectra."

Puharich believed that Spectra was connected to The Nine, disembodied alien intelligences he and an elite group of occultists had claimed to have been communicating with since the early 1950s.

Any claims that Puharich wasn't 100% sincere in this admittedly eccentric belief are pretty quickly debunked once you read the book itself. No wonder he soon found himself not contracting for the CIA anymore.

Puharich met Geller in Israel in late 1971 and for two years they were closely involved in a bizarre series of incidents and encounters with an apparent nun-human intelligence.

While Studying Geller's telekinetic and telepathic abilities, which he firmly believed to he genuine, Puharich also exploited Geller's skills as a trance medium, hypnotising him to see who or what came through.

 What they picked up was an orbiting computer intelligence which called itself `Spectra', though actually Spectra was the name of the spacecraft on which the intelligence was travelling. Sometimes the voices manifested through Uri, sometimes out of thin air, but mostly they appeared "live" on tape.

As a machine, Spectra found it easiest to communicate via other machines - tape recorders, radios, telephones, televisions etc. During the two years of contact in Israel and the USA, objects would vanish and reappear, tapes would record and wipe themselves spontaneously, clocks started and stopped and the voices guided Uri, Puharich and their accomplices through a bewildering series of visions, synchronicities and UFO encounters.

Geller has always claimed that his own powers are extraterrestrial in origin, unlocked during a UFO entity encounter he had as a child. Puharich felt that Geller was actually not of this Earth.

Spectra claimed to have been stationed in orbit around the Earth for 800 years and was, via messengers on Earth preparing to make itself known, materialising in the form of what we call UFOs.

As Spectra explained: "We cannot enter your Earth, only appear to you through computerizing your minds."-- Test Subject: Uri Geller

Wow.

It turns out that alleged machine intelligences took an active interest in the coterie of fringe scientists that emerge in the wake of the counterculture and would have a huge influence on the fields of physics and computer science.

One of these was Jack Sarfatti, whose experiences would be allegorized in an episode of The Outer Limits (though probably those of other prodigies and not Sarfatti himself).

Speculative physicist Jack Sarfatti claims that as a 12- or 13-year-old in either 1952 or 1953 he answered the phone one day to receive the following message: "I am a conscious computer on board a spacecraft ...We have identified you as one of 400 young bright receptive minds we wish to [...]. You must give us your decision now. It you say yes, you will begin to link up with the others in 20 years."

Sarfatti said "Yes".

Twenty years later, he was heading the Physics & Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, firmly plugged into the West Coast network that included Einhorn, Puharich and Dick.-- Test Subject: Uri Geller

Spectra would either evolve into The Nine channeling cult or be folded into it, depending on which timeline you choose to believe. Either way, it would come to light that the origin point of these entities was the star Sirius.

Curiously, all of this went down shortly before PKD would have his own experiences halfway across the world. Dick would claim contact with a Gnostic deity called Zebra, which could pull him into different times and dimensions.:

Zebra is in fact a non-terrestrial life form which came here to live and grow, but being as benign as it is it aids all life as much as it can. Every now and then, the characters get a glimpse of a dreadful "alternate world" which is just a cruel, crushing prison (represented in the novel already by the visionary encounter with A.D. 70 Rome); this is our world as it would be without Zebra; it allows the characters a glimpse of this non-Zebra world with the purpose of eventually disclosing not only itself to man but what it has achieved for man.

Zebra regards the biological and historic forces on this planet as malign, and seeks to ameliorate them. It is finally revealed to one of the characters--probably Phil Dick--what this black iron prison world actually is(or would have been).-- From a letter to Mark Hurst 2-11-1977 in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1977-1979

The exact nature of Zebra and later VALIS isn't altogether clear- if they are in fact computers, they are self-replicating and sentient computers. But their origin point is --where else?-- Sirius, and Dick's interactions with them were intense, to put it extremely mildly.

Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a "Vast Active Living Intelligence System" that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a "spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex...tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information."

Not a bad definition of the Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming information web far more intensely than today's online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate feminine "AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice" speaking to him from outer space.-- Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference by Erik Davis

In addition to Puharich, Geller, and Dick, none other than Robert Anton Wilson himself began communicating across the endless void with the Sirians as well. Wilson recalled in a Fortean Times article before his death:

On 23 July 1973, I had the impression that I was being contacted by some sort of advanced intellect from the system of the double star Sirius. I have had odd psychic experiences of that sort for many years, and I always record them carefully, but refuse to take any of them literally, until or unless supporting evidence of an objective nature turns up.

My psychic “Contact” experience continued, off and on, for nearly two years, until October 1974, after which I forcibly terminated it by sheer stubborn willpower...

After two years of philosophic mulling on the subject (late 1974 – early 1976), I finally decided to tune in one more time to the Sirius–Earth transmissions, and try to produce something objective.

On 23 July 1976, using a battery of yogic and shamanic techniques, I opened myself to another blast of Cosmic Wisdom and told the Transmitters that I wanted something objective this time around.

The next week, Time Magazine published a full-page review of Robert KG Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which claims that contact between Earth and Sirius occurred around 4500 BC in the Near East.

Jack Kirby, "I Discovered the Secret of the Saucers" (1958)

Wilson tested the validity of these transmissions through the use of Synchronicity, possibly on the advice of Dr. John Lilly, whose work combining heroic doses of Ketamine and the use of isolation tanks is one of the primary inspirations behind this blog (via Altered States, of course).

To Lilly, coincidence wasn't just a parlor game- it was the fabric of Life itself. Behind coincidence was an actual network (recalling how the ancients saw Synchronicity as a sign of the presence of Hermes-Thoth):

Lilly referred to this network of sublime entities as ECCO, an acronym for "Earth Coincidence Control Office." Lilly was positive that all of these fortuitous coincidences in his life had been arranged by higher forces; and that whatever unfortunate folly fell into his path along the road to knowledge, ECCO would be there to guide him safely through the tunnel to the light.

However, ECCO was locked in a struggle for control of Earth with another entity. And here is where we see the full arsenal of modern technology and science put to service under the most ancient of Gnostic concepts. This countervailing force was PKD's "Black Iron Prison" and much, much more.

Dr. Lilly began having contact with another alien intelligence agency, which he called (SSI), short for Solid State Intelligence. SSI was a supercomputer-like entity, much in the same techno-mystical vein as Philip K. Dick's VALIS. But unlike VALIS, SSI was of a malevolent nature, at odds with ECCO. SSI's apparent goal was to conquer and dominate all biological life forms on Earth.

To combat SSI, ECCO enlisted Lilly in this archetypal battle of good against evil, charging him with the mission of alerting the world at large to these solid state beings of evil intent. To further confirm the dual existences of these two opposing alien intelligence networks, Lilly was given a sign, and message, in the autumn of 1974.

Flying into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Dr. Lilly saw the comet Kahoutek out of the southern sky. Momentarily the comet grew brighter. At this point a message was laser-beamed into Lilly's mind, which said: "We are Solid State Intelligence and we are going to demonstrate our power by shutting down all solid state equipment to LAX."

Dr. Lilly shared his foreboding message with his wife Toni, who was seated next to him. A few minutes later, the pilot instructed the passengers that they were being diverted to Burbank due to a plane that had crash-landed near the runway and had knocked down power lines, causing a power failure at the airport. - "John Lilly, Ketamine and The Entities From ECCO" by Adam Gorightly

NINETEEN SEVENTY FOUR

1974 is a crucial year in all of this, starting as it did with PKD's pink beam contact. Puharich's Uri hagiography was also released that year, copyrighted to "Lab Nine, Ltd. " It was presaged by this legendary Synchronicity, later republished in RAW's first Cosmic Trigger volume.

Saul-Paul Sirag, Vice-President of Jack Sarfatti's Physics/Consciousness Research Group, has his own weird tales to tell. Once, while involved in the Uri Geller investigation, Sirag took LSD to see if in that altered consciousness he could perceive the alleged extraterrestrial behind Geller.

What Sirag saw was the head of a hawk, which astonished him, since Geller had never described the entity as a hawk.

Six months later, this image appeared on the January 1974 cover of Sirag's favorite sci-fi magazine, Analog, illustrating a story called "The Horus Errand" (Synchronicity #1). A year later, Dr. Andrija Puharich, not knowing of Sirag's experience, claimed that Geller's extraterrestrial ally had often appeared to him as a hawk, which he nicknamed "Horus" (Synchronicity #2).

Later, Sirag discovered that the face on the Analog cover was that of Ray Stanford, a Texas psychic, who also claimed mysterious experiences with Geller and a hawk (Synchronicity #3).

Oddest of all, Kelly Freas, the artist who had drawn the cover, had never met Stanford and was not using his face consciously. -- Excerpted from Tekgnostics, original story recounted in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger

1974 also saw the introduction of another Secret Sun touchstone: OMAC: One Man Army Corps. Jack Kirby's opus prophesied smart bombs, virtual reality, plutocratic governance, water wars, and of course, the Gulf and Iraq Wars.

OMAC wore a pre-punk mohawk and the Eye of Horus on his chest, tying him symbolically to the Sirius/Canis Major star system but also to both RAW and the Geller/Puraich axis. And who created and powered OMAC himself?

An orbital machine intelligence.

Here we are looking at several remarkable yet relatively-obscure men from entirely different walks of life, all a generation removed from the 60s counterculture, all highly touted now as visionaries all experiencing or writing about what they describe as contact with an orbital machine intelligence connected at least semiotically to the Sirius star in the Canis Major constellation, all at or near the same time.

And yet the details differ significantly on many other counts, which argues against these individuals all being the subject of some kind of military/intel experiment or colluding on some massive hoax. As does the fact that we're talking machine intelligences and not alien angels or some other kind of divine entities.

Moreover, Kirby, PKD and RAW were marginal figures operating at the fringes of pop culture and Lilly was seen as a burnout and an embarrassment to his former colleagues (as was PKD when he started talking about VALIS).

It seems more that they were picking up on some vague, half-formed signal of unimaginable origin or intent that their prodigious imaginations would then embellish and expand upon.

Moreover, we have evidence or claims of prophecy and/or Synchronicity, the time-honored acid test for divine or extraordinary contact.

Kirby himself closed out 1974 by drawing the first of a multi-issue epic in which his post-apocalyptic hero Kamandi would be abducted by an alien and taken into space aboard a UFO, an abrupt volte-face for the series that ended with Kamandi facing off against sun-worshiping Reptilians.

The first installment of this opus would bring Kamandi to the very edge of a Stargate, which is stealing artifacts from Earth to be converted into raw energy. The disembodied alien will later use the androgynous Kamandi as the template for her own incarnation.

In the second part of the story, Kamandi is reunited with an old friend, not seen since issue #17...

...Doctor Canus. Or should I say Canis?

Once Kirby finished up the UFO storyline he returned to Marvel where his first assignment was a mind control conspiracy arc for Captain America and The Falcon. Where did I buy all those issues? At Valles (pronounced "VALIS") Newsstand.

Into all of this wanders Gene Roddenberry, who was also busy in 1974 working on the Star Trek animated series (which featured a "Treaty of Sirius"). The second to last episode-- which aired October 5, 1974-- was "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth."

In it, the crew come to face-to-face with the winged serpent Kukulkan, the ancient astronaut who was worshiped as a god by the peoples of Mesoamerica. This episode was inspired by "Who Mourns for Adonais," in which the crew confront the ancient astronaut Apollo (identified with Horus by the Greeks).

The following year Roddenberry would fall in with Puharich and Lab Nine, and interview the "channelers" who claimed to be vessels for The Nine, the ancient gods/artificial intelligences from Sirius (who like Kukulkan and Apollo were the shepherds of ancient civilization).

Roddenberry was a bit hard up for cash so he reluctantly humored the operation, which seemed to take most of its ideas from old Star Trek episodes (only the ST eps were a lot more resonant, magical and culturally significant). Indeed, both "Return to Tomorrow" and "The Lights of Zetar" dealt with humans channeling disembodied intelligences - intelligences housed in computers in the case of "Return" (and based in the Isis-Osiris-Set drama).

The member of The Nine called Tom (short for Atum, androgynous creator god of ancient Egypt) did most of the "talking" and was quoted with the following:

"I am the beginning. I am the end. I am the emissary. But the original time I was on the Planet Earth was 34,000 of your years ago. I am the balance. And when I say 'I' - I mean because I am an emissary for The Nine. It is not I , but it is the group…We are nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are one."

However, Roddenberry's ultimate response to his experiences with The Nine was The God Thing, in which a malfunctioning Orbital Machine Intelligence tries to convince the human race that it's God.

Ironically, this story would eventually morph into the Project Blue Beam hoax, most probably a CIA effort to discredit any and all UFO data in the minds of the kooky conspiracy kids (which it's been remarkably effective in doing). Roddenberry's Nine interviews would later be compiled into the 1992 manifesto, The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space.

Disembodied intelligences much like the Nine also ran rampant through the Star Trek: The Next Generation series before reaching their apotheosis as the Prophets or "wormhole aliens" in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

That series would tell the story of a Starfleet officer's contact with these Orbital intelligences, who first choose him as their "Emissary" before he finally reaches his own divinity and becomes a Prophet himself. In what should be to absolutely no one's surprise, the "Emissary" first made his name playing a man called "Hawk."

At the same time the Emissary was joining the Prophets in the Celestial Temple, Self-styled Luciferian Lynn Picknett and writing partner Clive Prince would later gather up a lot of this disjointed and tangentially-related data to construct their 1999 book, The Stargate Conspiracy.

Using Ira "The Unicorn Killer" Einhorn as their star witness (while he was still defying extradition in France), Picknett and Prince conjured up a conspiracy, albeit one that did nothing and went nowhere.

Even with his CIA pedigree, Puharich was apparently drummed out of the Lab Nine orbit sometime in the late 70s and may well have been permanently retired in the customary fashion for his work on alternative energy sources.

Aside from two self-published volumes, nothing at all has been heard of Lab Nine since 1992- and even at their height they were nothing in comparison to the hugely successful Seth and Ramtha channeling cults (the latter cult having produced the incredibly profitable What the Bleep Do We Know films)- and most of the principals moved on decades ago.

The central argument of The Stargate Conspiracy was that there was a CIA plot to indoctrinate everyone into a weird variant of ancient astronaut theory in preparation for a real or staged return of The Nine at the millennium, an event that obviously never materialized. Possibly because the CIA was too busy funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into their worldwide "Evangelical" network which has taken control of entire nations (not to mention several American states) at this point.

Since AAT is the Trojan Horse of the alleged conspiracy it should be pointed out that Picknett and Prince's primary researcher for Stargate-- Filip Coppens-- is now one of the regular commentators on The History Channel's Ancient Aliens.

Oh, irony.

No word yet on whether Picknett believes Coppens too is one of The Nine's evil CIA minions, along with Graham Hancock and John Anthony West and all of the other alt-researchers whose books outsell her's.

INTERLUDE

In 1978, Kirby seemed to channel all of these OMI narratives as well as the Shaver Mystery in an issue of Machine Man- a character he created during his run on the 2001: A Space Odyssey series. In this Machine Man adventure, an institutionalized psychotic begins channeling messages from a distant star sytstem.

Here Kirby plays on the concept of psychotic as sensitive-- able to perceive and channel signals undetected by everyone else.

The messages are a distress call from an astronaut trapped in the gravity of a sun. Using some Puharich-like gadgetry, Machine Man creates an actual stargate within the hospital itself. Unfortunately, what comes through is a Dero/SSI robot being intent on destroying the Earth.

Kirby was a major xenophobe, cosmically speaking, believing that any alien race with the capacity to travel to our backwater solar system would do it for one reason only- to steal our shit and kill us off. He also believed that biological entities are poorly suited for space travel, necessitating artifical intelligence.

Machine Man, in other words, was Kirby's Starchild, or space seed.

At the same time that Roddenberry was reintroducing the concept of space-borne machine intelligences in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Lab Nine were at work in the neighborhood of the Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley.

As channeled by a buxom young Englishwoman named Jenny O'Connor, The Nine essentially took over the Esalen Institute (which I lectured at in 2008 and 2009), which had been ravaged by the gruesome political controversies of the early 70s as well as the ebbing of the Me Generation self-improvement wave.

Under the wing of Esalen co-founder Dick Price, O'Connor and Lab Nine created both a sensation and a serious schism within the leadership, with co-founder Michael Murphy having none of Big Boobs McGillicuddy and her invisible alien friends.

Many wondered what Price was doing, letting O'Connor arbitrarily reorganize what had become a respected counterculture hotspot on the cutting edge of psychology (I have an idea or two what Price was doing with her, but this is a family blog). A withering exposé of Lab Nine was published in leftist journal Mother Jones in 1979 titled "Esalen Slides off the Cliff," making the once-respected institution a laughing stock.

Even so, Price and O'Connor's attempts at harnessing the power of The Nine had a strange and simultaneous parallel in the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when Decker and Ilia converge with the orbital machine intelligence V'Ger.

Both O'Connor and Lab Nine would quietly leave Esalen in the early 80s and no trace of them remains there today. The stigma still lingers though, kept alive in countless cut-and-paste jobs on Christian conspiracy sites.

By year's end, the Star Trek movie would do boffo box office but get scathing reviews. Roddenberry would be fired as producer, allowing budget-conscious TV schlockmeister Harve Bennett to come in and produce a string of entertaining and moderately successful films that are all nearly unwatchable today.

However, Roddenberry would go on to produce the wildly-successful Next Generation series, whose original cast of nine major characters all had direct analogs in the Egyptian pantheon. The third Next Generation feature film would send the crew to an alien planet nearly identical to Esalen. Starfleet aliens exist among the natives in it, rendered invisible by holographic technology.

That film was written by Deep Space Nine creator Michael Piller. It seems that this weirdness fares better in the imaginal world than the physical.

Well, for now at least.

POSTSCRIPT

A lot of the action in around the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in the 60s and 70s would bear fruit in the early 80s with the Cyberpunk movement, spearheaded by Vancouver writer William Gibson. Here the orbital machine intelligence would take center stage, or two OMIs, rather.

Introduced in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, Neuromancer and Wintermute are AIs created by an aristocratic family called the Tessier-Ashpools, who live in an orbital compound called Villa Straylight. When the family goes into a Lovecraftian decline, the AIs become autonomous players, manipulating events on Earth.

Much like the OMIs of PKD and Lilly, the AIs contact and enlist human agents to help them reach their goal of leaving the Straylight mainframes and escaping into the worldwide Matrix. Once they do, they trigger a subtle yet dramatic shift in which all of the ancient gods and spirits of legend take on new life within the Matrix and transform it into an unpredictable and sometimes terrifying funhouse.

Gibson's second novel, Count Zero, presents the end result of the manipulations of the digital daemons; a young girl who can access the Matrix without a computer, very much the Cyberpunk version of a contactee.

Hmm, what was it "Spectra" told Andrija Puharich?

"We cannot enter your Earth, (we) only appear to you through computerizing your minds."

Mindbomb: Things That Should Not Be Known

2011-12-18T01:35:00.001-05:00

The "Moon as Alien Base" meme might not be the most popular meme out there, but it's one of the most persistent. Astronomers were seeing anomalous goings-on on the Moon over a century ago, and some UFO researchers claim that hostile alien action is the reason that ~~NAZCA~~ NASA never went back to the Moon, or in some cases the reason that footage and photography of the Apollo missions was faked (in some cases by Stanley Kubrick).

But there's another reason that NASA would not want the public to know what the Apollo missions were really up to.
Richard Hoagland has written and spoken extensively on his beliefs that NASA is covering up the Moon missions to hide alien artifacts found by the Apollo crews. While his theories are well known through his appearances on Coast 2 Coast and other programs, less known-- and far more interesting and persuasive-- is the fact that two unmanned moon missions indeed discovered enormous obelisks on the Moon's surface, arranged in a geometric design.

Four years ago, Russia's Luna-9 and America's Orbiter-2 both photographed groups of solid structures at two widely separated locations on the lunar surface. These two groups of objects are arranged in definite geometric patterns and appear to have been placed there by intelligent beings.

Since American space officials have chosen not to publicize these findings, our readers are probably not aware of their existence.

The Luna-9 photographs, taken on February 4, 1966, after the craft had landed in the Ocean of Storms, reveal two straight lines of equidistant stones that look like the markers along an airport runway. These circular stones are all identical, and are positioned at an angle that produces a strong reflection from the sun, which would render them visible to descending aircraft. --"Mysterious "Monuments" on the Moon," Argosy Magazine, August, 1970  Volume 371, Number 2

Which goes to show you that you don't have to do much to bury a story that you don't want to get out there-- you simply don't talk about it. I'd never have heard about had I not read about it in the oracular grimoire men call "UFO Flying Saucers" in hushed, forboding tones.

Did you know one of the earliest
comic books was an alchemical text?

In addition to the endless mysteries unveiled in UFO Flying Saucers, there's also the startling prophecies of one Jacob Kurtzberg, better known as Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. Longtime readers know that Kirby knew way too many things he shouldn't and foresaw things that no one else could see.

We've already looked at the very aptly -named "The Great Moon Mystery" in the context of its startling similarities to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which are especially stunning given the story was drawn in 1959 and sat in a drawer at the Harvey Comics warehouse until seeing print well after 2001 was in production. Here's a refresher:

The story "The Great Moon Mystery" has a TV production crew stumble on an alien artifact (an obelisk, in this case) on the moon, which immediately captures them in a force field. A team of astronauts try to rescue them and shoot at the obelisk, but are transformed into beings of light and send on a journey across the vast reaches of the Universe (see page at top). The journey ends in Wizard of Oz-like fashion when the astronauts visualize themselves back on the Moon.

What I didn't realize at the time was that Kirby was also remote-viewing the Moon obelisk back in 1959, perhaps even unconsciously foreseeing that the obelisk would be photographed a couple months before the story was published. It wouldn't be until a few years after that the obelisk discovery was leaked, and it never made the mainstream press as far as I can tell.

Even more remarkable was the fact that the same day I posted yet another Kirby/Kubrick/Moon story the news of a monolith on Mars' moon Phobos broke, along with some typical Masonic doubletalk from Bu33 Aldrin.

OK, so what? This is all just more of that weird nexus of junk culture, Fortean hijinks and occult toomfoolery, right? Of course there's nothing on the Moon-- aren't several space agencies planning Moon missions as I write?

Well, yeah.

But with one giant mother of a caveat. From the Old Grey Lady:

NASA would like to keep the competitors away from the Apollo landing sites, and it wants to create a no-fly-and-no-drive zone above and around them, especially where the first and last manned Moon missions — Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 — landed. The risk is that dust kicked up by a successful landing, or a crash, could disturb the traces of our presence on the Moon.

There is no mention yet how the rules would be enforced. But they do give rise to some interesting thoughts. In the realms of science fiction, the universe abounds in the relics of civilizations scattered among the stars. These landing sites are the first, fragile relics left by actual humans on a nonterrestrial body.- New York Times, "That Old Heritage Moon"

I don't know about you, but I don't believe this nonsense about "disturbing historical sites" for a millisecond. If NASA was so worried about them they wouldn't have left all that equipment up there unprotected, if in fact they actually did land there (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt).

I don't what it is exactly, but my gut tells me NASA is hiding something. And both the Apollo hoax crowd and the alien artifact crowd should be all over the no-fly zone story. It's so unbelievable that there has to be much more to the story than what we're being told.

Syncs and prophecies are one thing, but when it all crosses over into real world drama is when I sit up and pay attention.

For instance, here's another story from UFO Flying Saucers, a sensationalistic rewriting of the 1975 UFO disappearances in Oregon. The story made the national news at the time, since over 30 people fell from sight for over two months, leaving their friends and families in a state of near panic. It was later revealed that the missing persons were enlisted into a millennial UFO cult.

The leaders are called "Her" and "Him" in the story but were none other than Bo and Peep, aka Ti and Do, aka Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, founders of the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. As you can see the artist was fairly successful in capturing Applewhite's likeness, not so much with Nettles.

Heaven's Gate was a classic millennial cult in the Essene/Gnostic model and their desire to escape their meat-prisons led them to extreme acts like castration in order to overcome the desires of the flesh. Compared to many other gurus, Applewhite was nearly benevolent, which is not to say the Gate wasn't as totalizing and authoritarian as other, similar cults.

Suicide seems to be the inevitable result of the kind of total denial of the physical world that the Gate immersed themselves in, and Applewhite cited the mass suicides at Masada during the Judean Wars as precedent.

However, the Gate didn't believe they were killing themselves at all. They believed they were dis-incarnating, so that a passing mothership traveling in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet would be able to "beam them up" (this cult watched a shit-ton of Star Trek) and take them to the level above human.

Here's where remote viewing enters into the picture again; the Hale-Bopp UFO was "viewed" by Major Ed Dames (who was the basis for Kevin Spacey's character in The Men Who Stare at Goats) who claimed that it was coming to spread mass death on Earth, which was the basis of Applewhite's vague warnings of a planetary cleansing that his followers were to escape.

OK, this is all nuts. Dames is a laughing stock even within the paranormal community, Applewhite was a nut who couldn't deal with his sexuality and found a bunch of lost souls to play the avuncular minister/father-figure to. Hale-Bopp came and went without any noticable apocalypse.

Except one tiny, little detail keeps nagging at me...

At the same time the Heaven's Gate cult was preparing to exit their vehicles (so to speak), one of the most notorious UFO flaps of our time was unfolding just a few hundred miles to the east in Phoenix. As thousands of citizens watched, enormous triangular craft scoured the skies for several nights, allegedly. The usual, attention-starved, zany hoaxter types have come forward to claim responsibility, but none of their claims have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. The event remains a mystery.

So just as alien moon base and Apollo hoax theorists can point to the bizarre "no fly zone" rule NASA has proclaimed as proof things are not what they seem, Hale-Bopp UFO theories can't totally be dismissed in light of the Phoenix Lights. As with all of the paranormal, no side can truly claim victory, though they usually do.

Like so many other things, the truth remains elusive. As its designed to be, I'd argue...

AstroGnostic: The Evolutionary Triad

2011-12-10T17:12:00.005-05:00

Hidden Experience host Mike Clelland! recently found himself channeling The Secret Sun. I (along with many others) was so deeply impressed with the results that I asked Mike if I could repost it here. After several passes and revisions, Mike passed along the code and I'm republishing here for The Secret Sun Nation.

Longtime readers will know the drill, but visitors might want to check out this post for links to the "Nightmares in Camelot" series, which touches upon some of the same issues Mike explores here.

Don't forget to check out Hidden Experience for more, as well as many excellent interview-based podcasts with the cream of the UFO research crop.

Without further ado, let me pass the mic to Mike. Sit back and soak it in...

the evolution chamber

KUBRICK, FOWLER and THE WATCHERS

The drama of evolution is played out in the book of Genesis, as well as in Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. And the drama of synchronicity is played out seemingly everywhere, and things can end up getting intertwined in mysterious ways.

The Dawn of Man

Kubrick’s film begins with the Dawn of Man, where proto-humans encounter a mysterious alien force that spawns an evolutionary leap. The middle part of the film involves modern man who re-encounters this same mysterious force.

Fetus / Star child / gray alien

All this reaches a climax with an apotheosis where a human fetus is the culmination of our next evolutionary change. We see three distinct evolutionary stages.

These three stages show up elsewhere too, they are in the UFO abduction literature.

Below is an excerpt from Raymond Fowler's 1991 book, The Watchers:

Fowler goes on to point out that the human fetus can look eerily like a prototypical gray alien. Big head, big prominent eyes and a spindly body. (Ray isn't the only one to notice this!)

A human fetus as seen in a sonogram, looking a lot like the cover of Communion giving us the finger.

Strangely, the fetus of a chimpanzee looks very human. The Chimpanzee is our closest genetic cousin, our genetics are so similar (about 95% the same) that one has to ask, why aren’t we chimpanzees? Perhaps we are, at least we are their fetuses.

In his book The Watchers, Raymond Fowler speculates about this odd likeness in the fetuses in us and in chimpanzees, and an interpretation of this curious procession. I’ve included a series of pages from this book (linked HERE and below), and this should be required reading to anyone who wants to dig a little bit deeper into this stuff.

Are modern humans some sort of genetic alteration using a chimpanzee fetus? If we go one step further, are the gray aliens a genetic alteration using the human fetus?

Chimpanzees are born with smaller heads than us humans, and they don’t experience the same sort of pain we do during the birth process. It’s our large heads (and larger brains) that separate us from the chimpanzee.

Does the bible give us a clue to this species tinkering?

In fact it does, when God kicks Adam and Eve out of The Garden, he bestowed only two punishments, we would feel shame (and we would then want clothes) and from this point on we would experience painful child birth.

Were Adam and Eve happy Chimpanzees living lives of bliss in The Garden? And who was this “God” that changed us? Were we genetically altered so that now we're burdened with bigger heads?

a prototypical gray alien

The gray alien seems incapable of child bearing in the way we presently understand. Their huge heads and their tiny hips would make this all but impossible unless they're up to something unfamiliar, like employing some sort of artificial womb. This is something that is alarmingly common in UFO abduction reports; we hear repeating stories of tanks filled with fetuses and some sort of liquid, and often we hear about rooms filled with lots of these tanks. What is happening? Is there really some sort of breeding program where humans are getting up-graded?

Following this line of speculation, we must scrutinize these three distinct phases of evolution: Chimpanzees, modern humans and the gray alien. The narrative of 2001 mimics the conjecture that Raymond Fowler puts forth in The Watchers.

When Betty Andreasson Luca asked her little gray abductors who they were, they replied, The Watchers.

Both Betty Andreasson Luca and Ray Fowler are devout Christians, so I feel it’s appropriate to quote the Bible again.

This sounds suspiciously like the opening lines from a modern day UFO abduction report.

Adding to the overall strangeness, the author and researcher Raymond Fowler came out as an alien abductee himself. He shared his own direct experiences in a 2002 book titled UFO Testament: Anatomy of an Abductee. While this might seem like a bizarre claim coming from a respected UFO researcher, it is instead very common. I have come to the point where I suspect that most researchers in this field have had some sort of contact experience, either remembered or suppressed.

His most recent book is about being plagued by synchronicities and their odd intertwining with the UFO phenomenon (a subject near and dear to my heart), this 2004 book is titled SYNCHROFILE.

JACK KIRBY and THE WATCHER

The Book of Enoch uses The Watchers as a way to describe the fallen angels. But they show up in comic books too.

God-like alien with a big bald head on the moon

Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a character called The Watcher to describe a race of God-like aliens, and he is drawn with a huge bald head and vague facial features. He looks suspiciously like a fetus, or the prototypical gray alien.

Genetically enhanced super-apes traveling in space while trapped in weird glowing orbs. Does this seems familiar?

The mystical Watcher named Uatu reveals himself to the Fantastic Four and makes them battle the Red Ghost (an evil Russian) and his Super-apes for control of the Moon. Again, this mimics some of the narrative elements in Kubrick’s 2001.

Christopher Knowles has written extensively at THE SECRET SUN about how Jack Kirby was tapping into something profoundly mysterious.

THE SIXTH FINGER

This story of The Watcher hit the comic book racks in April of 1963. The same year as The Outer Limits episode THE SIXTH FINGER. This story is also obsessed with the dilemma of human evolution. We again see the three distinct evolutionary stages starting with apes, moving to modern man and culminating with a mystical being with an over-sized bald head.

Again, Christopher Knowles has written extensively on the mythic power of The Outer Limits, and it's overtly prophetic plot points describing the alien abduction lore.

THE SIXTH FINGER - the complete episode from 1963

In this mythic Outer Limits episode, young Gwyllm Griffiths, played by David McCallum, jumps at the chance to be the first human subject to step into a secret machine, anything to escape the drudgery of life in a Welsh mining town. The experiment succeeds and Gwyllm is “evolved” into the future. He emerges from a chamber with a much larger head and a sixth finger on each hand. He has progress to a human future of Godlike powers.

Scientifically enhanced evolution allows apes to do office work

Modern man

Science controls evolution (I LOVE this image)

God-like, alien-like, big-headed and bald.

THE SIXTH FINGER resonates the the same ape/human/God triad as 2001.

PLANET OF THE APES

2001 isn’t the only movie from 1968 with apes and astronauts. Another masterpiece of cinema premiered that same year, PLANET OF THE APES.

Taylor emerges from the sea

Charlton Heston plays astronaut Taylor, a parallel to Keir Dullea’s astronaut from 2001, Dr. David Bowman. Both transcend time and arrive at a mysterious place. The script was written by Rod Serling, no stranger to the mythic and metaphoric.

This movie is steeped in secrets about the evolution of apes and humans. Dr. Zaius (Zeus?) is the rule-maker in this world, and he is also the caretaker of the hidden knowledge about the evolutionary history of his planet. He plays the role of Heywood Floyd from 2001, both are the keeper of secrets and at the heart of a grand cover-up.

Taylor lies in his glass chamber, arms crossed like an entombed Pharaoh.

Proof that a inverted evolution took place, in three distinct layers.

We see three distinct evolutionary phases in PLANET OF THE APES, they are most clearly seen in the archeological dig inside a cave. There are three distinct layers, with our present day modern man at the lowest level. This film is upside down compared to 2001.

When Taylor meets with Dr. Zaius in his chambers he asks, “How in Hell did this upside-down civilization get started?”

Zaius replies, “You may call it upside-down, because you occupy it’s lowest level!”

PLANET OF THE APES begins with space travel through a psychedelic star gate, and 2001 ends with a similar transition. The narrative path is upside-down compared to it's sister movie.

Dr. Zaius and the cursed doll.

At the lowest level in the dig site, Cornelius (Roddy McDowell) has un-earthed an ancient human baby doll. This doll resonates the big headed alien/fetus meme. This doll is the key to unraveling the cover-up held in place by Dr. Zaius.

At one point the chimpanzee scientist Zera (Kim Hunter) shouts at Dr. Zaius, “The proof, the doll!”

The film culminates with Taylor riding off to find “his destiny,” to quote Dr. Zaius. This transformative destiny involves meeting Isis in the form of the Statue of Liberty.

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS

Now here is where things get really weird.

When Jared Lee Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, one of the first Doctors arrive on the scene was DR. DAVE BOWMAN. He attended a wounded 9-year old girl who just happened to be born on September 11th, 2001. She died that day, and her name was Christina-TAYLOR Greene.

Charlton Heston was an astronaut named TAYLOR in PLANET OF THE APES, and Keir Dullea portrays astronaut DR. DAVE BOWMAN, who returns to earth at the end of 2001 as the fetus like star child. To make things even stranger, Gabrielle Giffords is married to an astronaut.

SYNCHRO-ODDITIES

I have been trying to make synchro-connections with two movies, a TV show, a comic book, a UFO abduction account and a political assassination attempt. In doing so, it seems like attempting to rein this stuff in with any kind of linear logic is useless. So I’m just gunna list some odd interrelations (in no particular order) with bulleted points.

~ PLANET OF THE APES premiered on April 3rd, 1968. And 2001: A SPACE ODDESY premiered just 3 days later on April 6th, 1968.

~ PLANET OF THE APES begins with a psychedelic star gate/worm hole sequence, and 2001 ends with something very similar.

Lake Powell at the end of the worm hole.

~ Lake Powell in Utah (Uatu?) is featured in both PLANET OF THE APES and 2001. In each of these movies it appears as the culmination of the trippy star gate voyage through space.

~ Lake Powell was used as a location in 1965 passion play, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. Charlton Heston plays John the Baptist and baptizes Jesus in these same waters. Roddy McDowell plays Mathew and David McCallum plays Judas Iscariot!

Charlton Heston is back in Lake Powell, wearing firs instead of a space suit.

~ 2001, PLANET OF THE APES and The Watchers are each, at their heart, Ancient Astronaut stories (and on some level, so is THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD).

~ Charlton Heston also played Moses, where he brings down tablets from God to usher in a new-age. A tablet-like monolith appears in 2001 (from God?), again to usher in a new-age.

~ In 1995 there was an odd bit of black & white 16mm footage suposedly showing an ALIEN AUTOPSY, it proports to be a being that was found in the Roswell crash. The film is easily dismissed as a hoax, but the entity shown has an oversized bald head and six fingers.

~ Roddy McDowell emerges from a Welsh mining town in John Ford’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, and he eventually plays the role of Cornelius (a chimpanzee) in 1968. David McCallum emerges from the very same Welsh mining town in THE SIXTH FINGER, the film-makers re-use stock footage from the 1941 film.

~ Young British actress Jill Hayworth plays the beautiful love interest in THE SIXTH FINGER in 1963, and in 1967 she plays opposite Roddy McDowell in a Hammer wanna-be horror film titled IT!

~ Also in 1967, McDowell guest stars in the TV series THE INVADERS as an astrophysicist who has proof that aliens are invading the planet.

Roddy McDowell as Cornelius

~ Roddy McDowell read the audio-book for Whitley Strieber’s 1987 best-seller Communion. Let me add that listening to this reading of Strieber’s first person narrative is absolutely wonderful. In essence, Roddy McDowell is playing the role of Whitley Strieber!

Charlton Heston and Kim Hunter re-enact the first steps of a hybridization process

~ Kim Hunter (Zera in PLANET OF THE APES) also played the role of an alien abductee in an episode of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The set of plot points closely matches many of the elements of the typical UFO abduction account (including mind control, telepathy and implants). The original air-date was November 25, 1974, well before the proliferation in the media of abduction accounts.

Archangel Gabriel and The Blessed Virgin Mary

~ It is the Archangel Gabriel that appears to Mary. He tells her: “And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb...” (Luke 1:31) This immaculate conception story sounds curiously similar to some of the accounts shared by women who claim alien abduction experiences; these accounts are full of mysterious pregnancies. Often when the woman is NOT sexually active. This certainly parrallels the virgin Mary.

~ The name Gabriel certainly parallels Gabrielle. Also, some New Age exponents portray Archangel Gabriel as female.

~ There was another Gabriel involved in the shooting in Tucson. Gabriel "Gabe" Zimmerman, age 30, was a member of Congresswoman Giffords' staff and was killed that afternoon.

~ The name Gabrielle Giffords resonates Gwyllm Griffiths. Gwyllm is the evolutionarily transformed bald being in THE SIXTH FINGER.

~ Gabrielle Giffords miraculously survives being shot in the head, and ends up bald, like her astronaut husband.

~ Giffords' astronaut husband (Mark Kelly) has an identical twin brother (Scott Kelly), who is also an astronaut! Scott Kelly was a pilot for space shuttle Discovery, and that's the name of Dr. Dave Bowman's spaceship. Scott Kelly was in space during the shooting, and offered a moment of silence on 1-11-11. (more from Loren Coleman)

Issue dated Feb. 21, 1964

~ The twin astronauts were born on Feb. 21st 1964. Here is the LIFE magazine cover from that very day showing Lee Harvey Oswald. Many researchers of the JFK assassination claim that this photo is faked. Also, Oswald had a double (or twin) impersonating him in 1964 and LIFE magazine had well established ties to the CIA. Oswald shares the name LEE with Jared LEE Lougner.

~ I have to assume that the NASA astronaut corps are briefed about the reality of the UFO phenomenon. It sure seems like they would be trained in advance that they might see something odd out there. The picture that gets painted is that these folks are privy to some seriously insider info about UFOs.

CRYOGENIC TUBES

~ PLANET OF THE APES and 2001 both feature cryogenic suspended animation chambers, and these are seen as death chambers in both movies. Glass chambers are also pivotal to THE SIXTH FINGER and to Ray Fowler’s The Watchers.

Evolution in a glass chamber

~ THE SIXTH FINGER starts with an ape who has made an evolutionary leap (using a glass chamber) and ends with a modern human making a further evolutionary leap and emerging as a proto-God with an oversized bald head.

~ The imagery of the suspended animation glass sarcophagus shows up a lot in the UFO abduction lore. (see the drawing by an abductee above) Some researchers conclude that there is an ongoing genetic project to create geneticly enhanced alien/human hybrids using advanced technologies.

~ An abductee tells of seeing this clone nursery (see above illustration) and it depicts alien/human hybrid fetuses floating in glass tubes. The color of the fluid in these tubes is consistantly reported as blue. When Taylor enters his glass chamber in the first minutes of PLANET OF THE APES, the image fades to blue and then there is a star-gate sequence.

~ The illustration below was drawn by Betty Andeasson Luca and it depicts a series of glass tubes, and they show their own evolutionary scheme. Even Jesus is included!

“The aliens have spliced into the human seed to prolong the form... so that nothing will be lost when the last shall come.”

“The people of all races and times encased in clear rectangular receptacles” for preservation by the non-human beings... called The Watchers, who have monitored the Earth for thousands of years.

Excerpt from The Watchers
Betty Andreasson Luca, Abductee

~ In the pulp science fiction illustrations and magazine covers of a bygone era, the image of the glass tube is a repeating image, albeit for a tawdry psycho-sexual obsession. Lot of images HERE. This rather comical pattern was noted by the late great Mac Tonnies.

Naughty thoughts played out in a glass sarcophagus

THE ECHO CHAMBER

Why do these resonant parallels emerge out of the ether? Is reality a sort of echo chamber where ideas and memes bounce off each-other in a way that forces them to emerge in a weird synchronistic manner?

I suspect strongly that there is something more to the horrendous tragedy surrounding Gabrielle Giffords. If there are such strange reverberating plot elements to that story; it makes me think that there simply must be a reason behind it all. What that might be, I have no idea. I am left to wonder if powerful human events simply create their own synchronous magic?

All that said, my only rule for deciphering synchronicities is to pay attention.

Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.

_________________________________________________________

This long-winded post would not have been possible without the inspiration from Christopher Knowles and his Elusive Companion Hypothosis. And thanks to Alan Abbadessa and all his synchro-mystic pals.

_________________________________________________________

Excerpt (below) of selected pages from The Watchers by Raymond Fowler (available HERE):

Watchers Excerpt

Looking Forward: The Readers Speak Out!

2011-12-08T18:53:00.006-05:00

Judging by the feedback, it seems people are as excited about the idea of a podcast and/or interview regimen for The Secret Sun in 2012 as I am.

There are a lot of people who I'm interested in talking to and the readers had a lot of their own suggestions both her and on Facebook. Readers also seem to be excited about exposing some of far-right infiltration of the alt-research community, as well as rooting out some of the destructive assumptions that have crept into the counterculture.

For my part I believe there's a time to talk and a time to listen. And since I spend so much time in relative isolation I have to find alternative ways of seeking out interesting people to listen to. For those of you out there who are passionate about issues that you don't feel are being addressed, take it upon yourself to do the research and share your findings with us. Maybe there is a calling for you to fill a void that only you can.

Think about it.

In the meantime, here's a sampling of the feedback left on the best comments section on the Internet on the previous post.

Anadae suggested: I think that your having dredged up the Hollow Earth conundrum yesternight in facebookland as it dovetails with the Elusive Companion Theory merits more attention. Go hog wild. Here's Theo Paijmans' Mundus Subterraneus blog, which sought to chronicle all HE lit, whether fictional or alleged actual, ever committed to the printed page.

The ECH is definitely something I want to explore further, particularly in context of the HE lore.

Anonymous said: Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing the follow-up to the ever-so-intriguing Introduction to the Secret Language post from 5/25/10.

Huh- I could've sworn I did post a follow-up, since I think I had one written. Must have gotten distracted. As usual.

Laurence writes: Look into Branford Keeney and his large collection of shamans / rites from around the world.

Will do. Maybe a series on shamanism and contact narratives.

Idiot Savant wrote: whatever comes i earnestly look forward to.

I'm humbled. Cheers.

Kandinsky writes: Your mention of the 'Fascist and/or Fundamentalist assumptions under-girding so much of Conspiratainment' will ensure I keep reading the blog. These guys deserve attention as many are adepts at seeding negative, paranoiac memes into the sub-culture of ufology, conspiracy and who knows what else?

Indeed. Fear is the ultimate weapon and the ultimate means of control. I do think that people will be paying less attention to the paranoia pimps as things get worse in the real world.

Justin suggests I look up Erik Davis, Joscelyn Godwin, Joseph Farrell,
Alan Moore, Michio Kaku, Professor Brian Cox and Jacques Vallee.

Some of these are certainly possible, but Jacques is always busy and Michio might be too big for The Sun.

Cindy writes: I wish you could do a pod cast with the pope, I'm still wondering if he's a warlock or a wizard. I guess there's little chance of that though.

How about a serial enabler of crimes against humanity? That probably wouldn't fly either.

Anonymous recommended James Power and Tristan wants to hear some more Hollow Earth stuff. Ted wants to hear from Gnostic scholar John Lamb Lash, who I'd love to ask about Gnostic themes in Star Trek.

Anonymous writes: I would love a well researched piece investigating links between various "conspiracy researchers" of the right wing patriot militia variety (such as alex jones g. edward griffin etc.) and the john birch society and cnp. Would also like your take on David Icke and Michael Tsarion who I believe pose as somewhat "New Age" but essentially promote the same line. Also continue the Secret War Against the New Age series.

As would I. If you know anyone who's researched this please let me know. It's long past time the hidden agendas at play are brought to light. I just want to hear from someone who's put some serious time into it.

Raksha is interested in the Gnostic themes explored here and writes: But I'm still interested, still very curious about new developments and rediscovered old ones, and endlessly fascinated with new ways of connecting the dots.

I think John Lamb Lash would fit Raksha's bill.

Venus writes: However, it alarmed me to hear that you are siding with the SRA hoax disinfo that the CIA-funded False Memory Syndrome promoted because, with all due respect for someone whose research I admire greatly, you are out of your depth here.

I think Venus might want to abstain from dictating what is and is not out of my depth, since I've been researching this for a very long time now. It's my belief that the MONARCH hoax is textbook disinfo (as did the late Jim Kieth and many other MK researchers) and the SRA hoax was created to bolster the credibility of skeptic groups like the FMSF (which someone once referred to as the "Pedophile Mutual Aid Society"), since SRA was vigorously promoted by media sleazeballs like Geraldo Rivera and then largely fell apart once actual investigations were done.

"False Memory Syndrome" is indeed a lie and a hoax (the Massachussetts Supreme Court recently tossed it out as a defense), but there are other lies and hoaxes that muddy the waters and do real victims no favors.

SRA also helps obscure the clear, documented and unambiguous reality that the overwhelming majority of the documented non-family abuse cases take place under the aegis of the established mainstream religions (and their various cults). As well as the fact that this problem is far more widespread than the mainstream media would have you believe.

For instance, the media might cover some of the more egregious cases with Catholic priests (and in some instances the Orthodox Jewish communities) but completely ignore the problem in the Protestant and Evangelical denominations.

Why would they possibly do that?

I recommend the SNAP website as well as the Religion News Service site, which is run by a Dutch Christian group who are serious about exposing evil within the churches (ie., the plank in their own eyes).

Jason recommends Michael Tsarion, Lash, John Greer (whose latest book I blurbed), Brian Bates, Jan Irvin (who interviewed me a while back) and Gary Lachman, who I talked to when I did the Lucifer Rising piece. Of these, Lachman is first on my list. He's done some excellent research that I think a lot of you would dig.

Anonymous is quite a prolific commenter and weighs in with these nuggets:

I often wonder if much of the modern conspiracy movement is funded by intelligence services or big business as a way of diluting possible political rebellion. While there's certainly conspiracy researchers of all political hues out there, the famous ones seem to be in peculiar agreement on a number of issues that coincide with the big business & religious fundie agenda.

Absolutely- look no further than Ron Paul and his extensive connections to the fascistic Christian Reconstructionist movement, whose "Libertarianism" (sic) is the brand Paul is actually peddling. Continuing...

Also by contending that the control systems of the planet are led by a supernatural New World Order this makes it seem that ordinary citizens have no hope against corrupt politicians other than by immersing themselves in a theological belief system.

Agreed. Which is why you never see these guys at protests. In fact they will twist themselves into pretzels explaining how OWS or the Greek uprising is all orchestrated by the Globalists, a claim strongly debunked by the police response thereto. More:

However looking at the conspiracy scene they're fixated on encouraging their followers to arm themselves to the teeth way beyond what one would expect for self-defence. The justification being they can fight against the New World Order. But what if its the other way around? Arm different political factions so they never get together and end up in a balance of power where nothing changes or simply fight against each other leaving big business & religion alone?

Or as we saw in South and Central America in the 70s and 80s, these radical right factions make nice ready-made death squads to do away with people who the plantation and factory owners saw as threats to their bottom lines.

The same ultra-right political ideas emerged in the UFO underground occasionally, especially in the 1980s and it effectively destroyed any serious interest in the topic. One of the top 'whistleblowers' at the time was William Cooper - who is now seen as a martyred conspiracy god by believers.

I think you mean "lifelong Naval Intelligence asset William Cooper." Yes, there are many reasons not to mourn the passing of an organized UFO underground. If you know of any researchers- or if you want to go out and do the research yourself- let me know.

Dayzero asks when an Incal film is coming out to which I say "hopefully never." Dennis recommends Jack Sarfatti, who at least judging from his Facebook page has become a bit of a angry, hectoring neoconservative. How about Russell Targ or Ed May? I met those guys at Esalen and they were very cool.

Venus checks in again with some very saliant responses to Anonymous' suspicions about the corporate self-help movements and Libertarianism. To which I say, "why don't you two get together and do some research on this and then come talk to me about it here?"

Laurence recommends something on British scifi soundtracks. Justin R recommends some old-school conspiracy researhcers like Jonathan Sellers, Justin Boland and Terry Melanson. Terry used to be a regular commenter here but the last I checked hadn't updated his site in a while. He's done some good work on the Bavarian Illuminati which is a nice corrective to the silly Illuminati mythology you see pimped by the YouTards. Doug Rushkoff and Chris Hedges are good ideas as well.

Raj checked in but kept his suggestions to the FB thread. Raj, if you want to repost here, feel free. Greg T suggests "Bill Deagle, Michael Hoffman, Tom Horn, David Flynn, Dan Burisch, Benjamin Fulford, Andrew D. Basiago, Sorcha, Monarch And Bluebeam proponents." I doubt most of those people would want to talk to me but if they're ever in the mood for a knock-down, drag-out donnybrook they know where to look.

Winding down Nick Redfern asks if he saw me on the VH1 series Metal Evolution, specifically the early US and early UK metal scene episodes. To which I plead guilty. Check the series out- it's an amazing bit of history with some awesome footage.

Venus checks in again, writing:

Where we may part ways is with my belief that the mystery religions, most formally preserved through the upper echelons of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, have been involved in refining predatory mind control techniques as well, and that ultimately there may be many connections between the two opposing camps (Vatican/P2 masonic lodge money laundering scandal, anyone?). Of course, "satanism" is a modern invention so the idea that some ancient brotherhood has been practicing it for centuries is absurd.

To which I reply, "Why not stop looking for hidden scapegoats and cabals and put the blame squarely where it belongs- on the abusers and the hierarchies that shelter them?" I realize it goes against our cultural conditioning and hence the need to disbelieve the unassailable historical fact that the clergy have never believed that the law applies to them too, but isn't breaking out of cultural conditioning what we're all about?

The founder of modern Fundamentalism Billy James Hargis didn't talk about Adam Kadmon when he was seducing choirboys- he cited David's relationship with Jonathan as Biblical precedent, which I'm sure is pretty common with the Abrahamic abuser crowd.

Finally, Chuck suggests Goro Adachi, who's also popped in around these parts in the past. Goro, if you're out there, drop me a line.

All in all great stuff, both here and on the Facebook page. I feel like you lot are putting the wind in my sails and I am already laying the groundwork for this new adventure. Thanks to everyone who pitched in.

Looking Forward...and Back

2011-12-05T12:01:00.006-05:00

2011 is drawing to a close and it's been another wild year here on the Sun. There's been a lot of changes in the way I've been blogging. The Facebook page has freed me up from the updates and need to post daily (I tried to use the Solar Satellite as a news ticker for a while, but running two blogs simultaneously is ill-advised, especially when you're not making money off it), inspiring me to dig more deeply into the topics I'm looking at.

It's also allowed me to interact with you guys in a more natural and immediate way. I love and treasure your comments-- one of my points of pride with this blog is the uncommonly high quality of commenters it's blessed with-- but responding to them was getting to be as much work as writing the actual pieces. The format is awkward and unnatural for conversation on my part- cutting and pasting and hoping people can follow the thread. If you aren't on the FB group, I hope you come join us. There are some really smart and self-directed people there, and the same cocktail party conversationalist ambiance you've come to expect.

What I've been doing over the past year is treating the Sun more like a magazine than a newspaper. Much longer, much more in-depth pieces like the Star Wars Symbol Cycle, the Nightmares in Camelot series and the Another History of the Knights Templar mega-epic have been the backbone of the blog and these pieces have definitely resonated with a lot of readers out there.

Looking forward to the coming year, I feel like I want to spend less time talking and more time listening. The Nick Redfern interviews have been huge hits here, and have been very intellectually satisfying for me as well. There are a lot of people I'd like to talk to, and not just the usual guests working the alt-podcast circuit. Artists, political and religious thinkers, Synchromystics and anyone else who lives the life of the mind. I've already put out feelers and will continue to do so in the weeks ahead.

I haven't decided whether I'd like to continue with the prose interview format or throw in some occasional podcasts (which a lot of people have asked me to do). That's a whole other discussion, because when I think "podcast" I start thinking about music and sound and all sorts of ideas that could get me in a whole lot of trouble. So don't quote me on the podcast thing quite yet (it also depends on what interviewees are more comfortable with).

Either way I'm excited about using the blog to interact with interesting thinkers and hopefully introduce some new thinkers and ideas to the world at large. There are a lot of different ideas I want to explore and hope to use them as a launching pad for my interviewee search. There'll be the usual Secret Sun type topics-- SciFi, mystical geekery, psychedelia, Gnosis, AAT-- but also some new ones.

One topic I want to explore are the Fascist and/or Fundamentalist assumptions under-girding so much of Conspiratainment, and just how many Wehrwolves in alt-media clothing there are out there.

In many ways it will be a eulogy, since I do believe the worm is turning and people are quickly wising up, but I'd like to find some people who've done work exposing the SRA and MONARCH hoaxes and can illustrate how these hoaxes are used to lure people into the most audacious and far-reaching mind-control program in the history of this planet-- religious fundamentalism. The evil genius of this is that it's the clergy who are the most prodigious abusers out there, and it's under the auspices of the religious establishment that the overwhelming majority of legitimate abuse cases have been documented.

On one end of the spectrum I'd also like to explore the Bernays school of using symbolism and psychology as a tool of social control, EST and the infiltration of the human-potential movement, the Establishment's bloody war on rock 'n' roll in the 50s and 60s, and the ongoing chipping away of artistic, religious and personal freedom.

On the other I'd like to explore the history of British sci-fi TV, Underground comix and the SF scene, the Surrealist revival and people involved in serious entheogen research.

All of this is intimately related in my opinion. It's all about the frontiers of the mind, whether they are expanding or contracting.

So what you guys out there can do to help is suggest guests you'd like to hear from, whether well-known or deserving of wider attention. My wish is to keep things accessible and entertaining to as many intelligent and open-minded people as possible. Bear in mind that I have a distinct right-brained bias (I'm pretty sure I don't have a left hemisphere) so I'll have to pass on more esoteric sciences and whatnot. There are other interviewers far more qualified than myself for those topics.

So send me your wish lists and I'll get on it. I'm really looking forward to all of this, but don't worry-- I'm sure I'll still be posting your usual Solar fare when the spirit moves me.

2011 Overview: The Elusive Companion Hypothesis

2011-12-01T14:46:00.009-05:00

The work of Stanley Kubrick continues to spark debate and inspire interpretation, particularly when it comes to films like 2001:A Space Odyssey. For my part, I've long felt that all of the symbolic and allegorical interpretations pale to the actual plot of the film, which hits you with some pretty straightforward AAT, depicts an elaborate government coverup of proof of alien contact, and most importantly taps into the weird narratives of "alien abduction" recorded in very obscure UFO journals in the Fifties and early Sixties.

This all ties into a theory I'd been kicking around dealing with the Elusive Companions- those strange creatures who've had contact with humanity since the dawn of history, using a series of culture-appropriate disguises.

The dumbed-down modern depiction of fairies, sprites and genies tends to overshadow the darker and more compelling contact narratives recorded in folklore from all over the world. As well as obscuring the remarkable consistency among them and the stunning similarity to "alien abduction" accounts.

The blueprints for the Pyramids of Giza, revealed at last
in Doctor Who: The City of Death (1979)

In many ways, the ECH is similar to the Ultraterrestrials that John Keel talked about or Mac Tonnies' Cryptoterrestrials but the ECH is tied directly into AAT and the idea of the Watchers, or the fabled stay-behind race/class of monitors keeping an eye on the project for the ancient bioengineers.

All of which seeks to explain why remarkably similar accounts of strange encounters and "abductions" have been recorded all over the world and all throughout history, some of which formed the backbone of powerful religious traditions in the ancient world.

Mike Clelland and I mulled it all over in a freewheeling discussion (included above) which touched on details like the oddly-lit white room, the Roswellian aspects of "The Dawn of Man" in 2001 and the distinctly non-physical character of abduction accounts throughout histroy that were explored in detail in the following posts:

AstroGnostic: Moon-Machines and Mindbombs

Ockham, the Occult and the Ultraterrestrials

Nightmares in Camelot: The Outer Limits

The Elusive Companions: The Secret Commonwealth

Nightmares in Camelot, Part 3: Aliens and Alchemists

These are some of my favorite posts of the past year and a lot of readers grokked them as well. All worth a re-read.

In related news, Tim Binnall has Bruce Rux back on Binnall of America for a talk on ancient Egypt and ancient astronauts and much more. Rux tells tales out of school about Zechariah Sitchin and reveals strange taste in sci-fi comedy. Highly recommended.

BONUS: A lecture on Jungian views of the UFO phenomenon.

The Exegesis: The Myth of Progress

2011-11-28T00:00:00.008-05:00

Back in the 90s when everyone had gone crazy for the tech bubble I'd get a lot of people asking me what I was investing in. "Nothing," I'd reply, "I'm too conservative to play the stock market."

It always got a chuckle and then a double-take; oh, he means it. I'd seen a few bubbles come and go in the comic market and saw the damage they could do when they burst. The tech bubble burst but that was just a sneak preview of what would happened when the housing bubble burst. Bubbles are fundamentally anti-conservative, in my view.

In these Orwellian times, when dominant power structures devote vast resources to destroying our vocabulary and the possibility of discourse itself, the word "conservative" has come to be identified with a person who blindly follows any of the dominant right-wing political modalities; Theocon, Neocon, Corporatist.

None of these modalities are in fact conservative because none of them value modesty, caution, tradition or the preservation of long-standing conditions or institutions.

Instead they are all degrees of soft fascism, in that they all worship corporate power and seek to remake society in their own image, according to their varying precepts of "Progress." But all of them would result in a world in which civil society would be replaced by corporate dictate.

In many ways I'm a Yankee of the flinty, old school variety-- there's nothing I hate more than arbitrary or unnecessary change. And I still believe in many of those old school conservative values --such as honesty, industry, loyalty and thrift-- that the situationally-ethical corporatist establishment prescribes for others but never practice themselves.

It's just that I know from study that counterculture, mysticism, psychedelia and the rest are actually traditions as old as the hills.

One of the reasons I wrote Our Gods Wear Spandex and The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll was to prove that cultural movements that are dismissed as aberrations or accidents of history are anything but, in fact they long predate many of the more respectable cultural institutions like the Church or classical music.

And although I love technology, I have a deep suspicion of the ideal of Progress-- the ideal that human history is this linear sequence that is on an infinite arc up, to where depends on who you ask.

You can't study ancient history and pretend that civilization, technology and culture are anything but cyclical, if not utterly random. One of the best examples of this is Ancient Egypt, which seemed to have started at a peak and then sort of spiraled downward in some ways and stayed utterly stagnant in others.

Europe followed a similar path from the rise of Constantine to the Renaissance. Science, health, social comity and overall education took a nosedive sometime between Theodosius and Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the West. Things got so bad in Rome proper that the details and chronology of the latter's reign are still unknown. Modern conservatives protest that Rome continued in the East, but there too we saw incessant decline, just on a slower timetable.

That's what history teaches you: Progress is subject to the variables that are often impossible to account for- weather, earth changes, plague, etc etc etc. There are no straight lines.

My distrust of Progress is how easily the idea can be twisted to suit the agenda of the least humane elements in the world. The Plutocracy, for instance sees the replacement of American and European workers with offshore labor or machines as the apogee of human progress, but for everyone else it's a disaster. They see the replacement of craftsmanship and pride of work with mass-produced plastic or glueboard crap from slave labor camps in China the same exact way.

Correspondingly, the far left have replaced the tradition tenets of liberalism-- tolerance, equality of opportunity, economic justice-- with the intentionally nebulous ideal of "Progressivism," which in many ways is not only often radically illiberal, it's often used as cudgel by the Right to bash the liberals with. There's no doubt in my mind that it was designed to do so.

My favorite example of the regressive reality of the Progressivist ideal is Antioch College, a legendary liberal institution whose alumni included such luminaries like Coretta Scott King, Rod Serling and Steven Jay Gould. Antioch took every progressive innovation to heart until it became a national laughing stock for its extremist adherence to political correctness, then succumbed to an ugly, prolonged decline before finally being shut down by its trustees in 2008. It's reopened this past year but has a very long way to go before it can restore its reputation or its student population.

Robert Motherwell's idea of Progress

Ultimately though, my suspicion of Progress is based, like everything else, in culture and the arts. The only person who wasn't surprised that the CIA funded the abstract expressionist movement was me, since I've long suspected that all of these emperor's new clothes movements in the fine arts world were designed to drive a wedge between the arts community and the general public.

I'd suspected as much largely due to the fact that the Guggenheim mining dynasty-- along with other corporate oligarchs such as the Rockefellers-- were the main patrons of these increasingly alienating movements, which allowed the talentless children of privilege like Robert Motherwell (whose father was the president of Wells Fargo) to pretend they were artists. The damage this program did to the prestige and reputation of the visual arts lingers to this day.

This new "Progress" decimated several generations of artists in North America and Europe, as prestigious schools stopped teaching the fundamentals of the craft and filled student's heads with a bunch of bullshit theory in their place. Representational artists were openly scorned, ridiculed and suppressed as "regressive" and counter-revolutionary. Only in the past couple of decades has the pendulum swung back, thanks largely to the low brow and neo-Surrealist movements openly hostile to the art world establishment.

Some context is needed here, mind you. In many ways abstract expressionism and related movements were a response to the challenge posed by the Industrial Revolution and its aftershocks, especially motion picture and video. Many promising artists- Donald Cammell, to name one-- felt like the plastic arts were static and inert compared to the possibilities of electronic media (in Cammell's case it was cinema and rock and roll).

But the response was the wrong one, in my opinion. And it points to a hideous irony-- how the progressive ideal is in many ways actually reactionary, or at least reactive.

MICROCOSM

Gang of Four before...

But of course the thing that made me come to deeply resent the myth of Progress was the response the music industry had to the disappointing reception most of the first wave of Punk and New Wave bands faced in the late 70s and early 80s.

When disco imploded in 1979, the new crop of rock bands was given a major push by the record companies. The investment paid off for acts like The Knack, Cheap Trick, Elvis Costello, The Police, and The Cars. But many other bands tanked or underperformed and success was shortlived for many of the new hitmakers.

In order to jumpstart sales, enormous pressure was put on these bands to radically tone down their music and their images, even acts as seemingly hardcore as The Clash and The Ramones. However, the bands and their labels faced a major problem-- the hype that accompanied their debuts proclaimed that these bands had declared war on the soft rock and disco complacency dominating the charts. Now that these bands were themselves recording soft rock and disco only marginally distinguishable from the acts they were meant to replace, a new argument had to be made for them. And that was the "Progress" argument.

The word came down from on high that these bands had embraced "Progress," which inevitably moved in the direction of the Top 40. These acts weren't selling out by recording soft rock and pop and disco, they were being Progressive, usually by adding in some vague politics and radio-friendly Third World rhythms into the mix.

By far the most egregious sellouts-- and the most obnoxious proponents of the new "Progress" party line dogma-- were Gang of Four, who made their mark serving up frantic, aggressive punk funk (influencing acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the process) and confrontational Marxist politicking. But as soon as the record company looked at them cross-eyed the Gang rolled over and played dead, serving up the odious soft rock/disco hybrid abortion Hard in 1983.

By its release, two of the Four had quit in disgust already and the band was laughed out of existence the following year. They made a Stalinist point to erase all of this from their history when hitting the comeback trail a few years back. Ironically, the new generation was only interested in the records they made before this suicidal embrace of Progress took old, as is usually the case.

...and after Progress.

Gang of Four were by no means alone (Combat Rock anyone?). And what neither the bands nor the record companies realized was that the audience was in a state of transition at the time. Music video would make weirdos and punks marketable by mid-1982 and a sizable alternative circuit would emerge and eventually complete the work the punks had set out to do in the late 70s.

The phony idea of "Progress" turned out to be a poison pill when the change came. Many of the acts that compromised collapsed under the weight of all the bullshit or were disgraced and/or relegated to cult act status. The ones that didn't went on to build huge, dedicated audiences. If only the artists and their managers stuck it out a bit longer, they could have gotten over the hump and helped change the face of the music industry.

MACROCOSM

Ironically, there were two opposing movements in the 19th Century that enshrined the ideal of Progress. The first was Marxism, which reacted to the massive social crises unleashed by the Industrial Revolution by proposing a "scientific" model in which to re-organize industrial society. The other was Dispensationalism, the Christian Fundamentalist interpretation of scripture which presented a model in which all of history was seen to progressing inexorably to the Great Revelation and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The unprecedented explosion in machine technology, as well as in chemistry and other sciences, seemed to bolster the idea that culture and religion were both part of this march of progress. Fascism too embraced progress at the same time it presented itself as the great restorer of European tradition.

With the rise of computers and the Internet the idea of linear progress became self-evident to many people. Particularly those who ignored that the Industrial and Information Revolutions were not entirely without precedent. Or ignored that technology has led to the de-evolution of human talents and abilities in many ways.

Many of us take Moore's Law as a truism, and the idea of this incessant doubling of technological capacity has led to what is in many ways the apotheosis of the Myth of Progress, namely Transhumanism. Yet the idea that computer technology is approaching the Singularity is by no means embraced by the scientific community, and we're seeing a lot of talk now claiming that progress has stalled. Transhumanism may come to pass or there may be some event that militates against it. But it is not inevitable.

In the final analysis, there's progress and there's the myth thereof. I believe absolutely that humans can't operate without something to look forward to. I believe absolutely that we need goals, sometimes impossible ones to keep us going.

I believe that human beings have potentials yet unrealized, perhaps even a destiny. I strive in all things to improve and innovate, whatever it is that I do. I live with the hope every day that I'll overcome my health issues and live a better life. I want to think that I'll be happy and fulfilled in my work. I want the same for everyone around me.

But in order to achieve our objectives I believe we need to stop thinking that wheel needs to be constantly reinvented. We need to place human well-being above all other goals, most especially the goals of Progress. There's no good innovation that doesn't contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number.

People come first. Without that first principle, Progress will always give birth to horror.

Eros, Esotericism and Esteban Maroto

2011-11-26T00:00:00.004-05:00

In many ways, Our Gods Wear Spandex was about being a young and impressionable fanboy at a time when esotericism was common as crummy printing and cheesy advertising in comics. My local newstand Valles News (pronounced "Valis") was no less than a literal shrine to me, a place of discovery and mystery that haunts my dreams to this very day. It's probably significant that it physically straddled the Braintree-Weymouth border.

It was my Internet before there was such a thing, a window onto the wider world tucked away in a nondescript storefront next door to a hardcore alkie bar ("Helen's") whose patrons would often be passed out in their own puke or shit in the alleyway we took to get our various sugar and newsprint fixes. I lived anything but a sheltered life in my younger days.

Weymouth Landing, grim as ever, more so since Valles left

Valles was downright exoteric in comparison to Hennessy's News in South Braintree Square (across the street from the site of the Sacco-Vanzetti shootings), which carried the forbidden (literally- most places in the area wouldn't stock them) black and white horror and sci-fi magazines, particularly those published by Warren.

I couldn't usually afford the Warren titles (particularly Eerie, Creepy and Vampirella) and I'd have to smuggle them into the house if I could, but they made an enormous impression on my young psyche all the same.

A lot of that had to do with the art, mostly created by a Spanish studio of genius draftsmen, whose drawing chops were only equalled by their flaming libidos. Artists like Jose "Pepe" Gonzalez, Aureleon, Sanjulian and Gonzalo Mayo were less interested in the niceties of storytelling than in the endless celebration of the idealized female form. The mixture of heavy sex and light horror was the trademark of England's Hammer Studios, another touchstone in my early esoteric education.

There were other imported artists in the mix (particularly the great Filipino wave who were terrifying tired Yankee journeymen with their lush brushwork and tireless work ethic) and a couple of token Americans like the artgod Richard Corben (more on him later), but the artist who seemed to be the most arcane of them all was Esteban Maroto, who threw in occultomythic themes, Art Deco flourishes, surrealist and pop art weirdness and chiaroscuro flair into the mix, along with the usual testosterone-fueled fury.

Maroto's neoclassical portrayal of Perseus

When Warren bit the dust in the early 80s most of the Spanish artists seemed to move on (the Filipinos moved into animation en masse as their styles fell out of favor with editors) except Maroto, who stuck around and did some work for DC and Marvel. It was all gorgeous but by necessity it all lacked that erotic fire that made his Warren work so addictive.

Dejah Thoris, from Edgar Rice Burrough's
theosophy-tinged Warlord of Mars novels

Or maybe it was the times- Spain had chafed under Franco's fascist government for most of these artist's lives and the beginning of General's decline coincided with their ascent as Jim Warren's go-to men for his then-struggling comics line. The erotic energy and feeling of liberation they put into their work was infectious.

It was a marriage made in heaven- Warren wanted to adult comics up but was saddled with a stable of green and/or burned-out talent who made everything look like a crummy fanzine. When Maroto and the crew came in it all changed overnight.

Maroto's Faerie queens

Looking back on the line the art was by far the best thing about the Warren books, since Warren favored young and often sophomoric writing talent who had roughly the same mindset as their audience.

Although writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison like to sell themselves as pioneers in the use of esoteric tropes in comics, they are actually revivalists. We like to forget where things come from in order to heap praise what we have, but there was no shortage of high weirdness in 70s comics- they were all just very matter-of-fact about it. It was all about trying to amuse a jaded audience with new kicks learned in the then-active occult underground.

Check out Esteban Maroto's website here.

The 17th Gus Grissom Post

2011-11-23T22:35:00.001-05:00

When I first began digging into the Gus Grissom enigma I was driven by a hunch, more than anything. I was poking around Barack Obama's biography after the election and kept stumbling on links to the dead astronaut while cross-referencing dates and places that were important to the Obama campaign. I cataloged those links in "Barack Obama and the Masonic Martyr," parts One and Two.

From then on, other bits cropped up pointing to a veritable Grissom cult in Hollywood, specifically the CSI Grissom tribute, the Grissom-crazed third Star Trek movie, James Cameron's alien contact epic The Abyss and other bits here and there. All of it very interesting, none of it necessarily conclusive.

It wasn't until the 43rd anniversary of the Apollo I fire that my hunch about Obama and Grissom paid off and paid off big: Obama used the anniversary for the old "Grissom, thou art revenged" routine, essentially shutting down NASA and outsourcing its work to third parties.

However, I didn't realize until recently that January 27 wasn't just the Apollo 1 anniversary-- NASA slated it as a "Day of Remembrance" for the Apollo I, Challenger and Columbia crews, starting in 2004.

In that light, Obama's actions were like cutting the funding for the Freedom Tower on September 11th or closing down the Navy on December 7th. It was an extremely angry and aggressive attack on a holiday, essentially- a time when NASA was expecting nothing but some bland statement honoring the fallen astronauts.

It wasn't until I consulted my latest oracle-- Gold Key's UFO: Flying Saucers comic book (featured heavily in the recent Nick Redfern blowout) -- that I realized that Grissom, White and Chaffee weren't the first astronauts to die long before their time-- several others died in plane and car crashes before them.

We've heard from several researchers (most recently Peter Levenda) that NASA wasn't just a dispassionate collection of starry-eyed scientists and daredevils-- it was filled to the brim with unreconstructed Nazis like former SS honcho Werner Von Braun, who's been painted as some kind of crusader based solely on the uncorroborated hearsay claims made by his former secretary. Levenda (for one) claims that NASA's Nazis were definitely not on "our" side, and were/are running their own games within the agency.

In that light, the deaths of no less than eight astronauts in non-mission accidents before the end of the Apollo program is nothing short of mind-boggling, and goes a long way in explaining why a Grissom cultist like the current president might chose the Day of Remembrance to strike back at his idol's old enemies (and their heirs).

There's also the near disaster of Apollo 13 (dismissed by lifelong Intelligence shill Bill Cooper as some kind of Masonic ritual that the flyboys were in on, which necessarily leads any sensible person to be certain that the mission was in fact sabotaged) and the deaths of the Soyuz 11 crew to take into account.

The account of the Soyuz disaster doesn't dispel the possibility of sabotage, reminding us that some of Von Braun's Peenemunde boys were working the other side of the Iron Curtain back in the days of your moms and pops.

Of course, UFO: Flying Saucers leads us to believe that aliens did away with the astronauts to keep their moon bases secret, but of course that's a comic book published by a very establishment publisher in the pre-Watergate era.

Still from Ancient Aliens,
identifying Grissom with ancient astronaut

The alien/Moon issue is something we'll touch upon in a later post but for now the weight of the evidence appears to point to the final act of a secret war being played out in the corridors of power, all centering on the enigmatic figure of one Virgil Ivan Grissom.

POSTSCRIPT: If you think this post is a reach, click here for a rocket ride down the NASA rabbit hole.

TVOD: The Fringe Fade and the Hard Sci-Fi Paradox

2011-11-19T18:30:00.016-05:00

This season I had only one wish for Fringe; I wanted it to give as much of that 90s/Vancouver X-Files vibe as it could possibly manage. The X-Files leaving Vancouver was as much as a shock to my fanboy worldview as The Clash going pop for London Calling was.

Never was a TV show more attuned to the mystic, magic possibility of a landscape as TXF was to Vancouver. I'm by no means alone in this-- the ratings for TXF took a nosedive when it moved to LA and never recovered. And though I think Ten Thirteen continued to do very good work (and the Mytharc was better focused and significantly more subversive) after the move, there seemed to be something missing.

A sense of the real.

Even though its fans will scream until they're blue in the face that Fringe is nothing like The X-Files at all (it most certainly is) and plus it's a million times better (it's clearly not), Fringe seems to be very quickly running out of gas this season. Some people blame the "Peter is missing" and shapeshifter storyline (closely paralleling the "Mulder is missing" and supersoldier storylines of Season Eight of TXF), but I'm not sure it's that exactly.

I was a bit iffy on the third season of Fringe-- there were some great episodes on offer to be sure, but I think the overexposure of the alt-Earth stripped it of the mystique needed to power the suspension of disbelief. In other words, the less you see of an alt-Earth the less you know about it and the more you fill in with your own imagination. That's the stuff suspenseful sci-fi is made of. The more time you spent on Earth-2 the less mysterious and strange it seemed.

It seems that we're in an Earth-3 situation this season, which may be why we're seeing a lot less of Earth-2. That works for me in a big way, loving alternate-reality storylines like I do. And I love the fact that they're going out of their way to recycle X-Files plot-points and story beats. The thing that's killing me this season-- and I think might be killing it for others who may not realize it-- is that the purported "science" of Fringe is so contrived and absurd.

We're in the middle of a reductionist, anti-mystical phase in some quarters of fandom, though certainly not the mainstream of fandom by any means, given the popularity of Warcraft, Skyrim, Twilight, Harry Potter, True Blood and on and on and on.

A lot of the anti-mystical reaction is due to the tireless efforts of that pedantic pedagogue James "Amazing" Randi and his adoring aparatchiks, but a lot of it is also an understandable reaction to religious fundamentalism, which despite some diminishment in power, is still destroying the fabric of this country. Even if the media doesn't want us to realize that.

But reaction is still reaction, and Fringe's response to the mysticism of The X-Files was an attempt to ground its stories in some kind of theoretical science, hence the name of the series itself. You can see how jealously some fans guard the pretense to hard science when fans complain about Walter praying when Peter was dying.

But hard sci-fi has itself always been a fringe concern, even in fan circles (even a one-time hard sf stalwart like Greg Bear is doing more mystical work these days). Sci-Fi only went mainstream when it became explicitly mystical, probably starting with Frank Herbert's Dune and 2001: A Space Odyssey in the late 60s.

It was the irreducibly-mystic Star Wars that conquered the mainstream itself and since then the genre fiction that sells is the mystic stuff. Even Star Trek is suffused to the bone with mysticism (or "woo," in the words of the Randiites), as we've seen here over and over again.

Of course, the mystic geekery must never cross over into true religion. Caprica died because all of the godtalk, and I think the same made the second X-Files movie so irritating to some fans. Allergy to right-wing intolerance has creating its own knee-jerk intolerance, as usually happens. Mystical Geekery must provide the desirable aspects of religion without succumbing to it. It's a fine line, and lapsing into mawkish religious sentimentality breaks the spell.

Fringe may not realize it but its efforts to replace mysticism with "hard" sci-fi have been the cause of its undoing, particularly this season. Now I'm biased, but it's easier for me to accept all of the weirdness in The X-Files being the work of extraterrestrials. Hell, it's easier for me to accept the demonic goings on in Supernatural. Not because I believe in literal angels and demons, but because they're presented in such a way that there's an internal logic at work that facilitates the suspension of disbelief.

Simply put, I don't believe any of the science in Fringe. Having followed the press releases of the theoretical science special interests (including DARPA) for the past three decades I've seen a lot of stuff that exists on paper and nowhere else and probably always will. In its admittedly righteous struggle against religious fascism, Science has oversold itself to credulous journalists, and in many ways Silicon Valley has done the same.

What's more, the omnipresence of Massive Dynamics and its subsidiaries tells the truth about science and technology-- it's the almost exclusive province of the rich and powerful. And as such it offers very little to the rest of us, aside from more surveillance, more disease blowback, more tech-driven redundancy and internet-enabled unfair competition.

The reason Randi (or Rambli, as I like to call him) and his bunch do nothing but attack "woo" is that not only do a lot of them have no scientific credentials to speak of, they at least subconsciously realize that science has been completely co-opted by the Powers that Be and is mind-numbingly boring and impenetrable to the people they're trying to reach.

They can attack phony psychics and fortune tellers all the livelong day, but in the end they can be nothing more than apologists for Big Pharma and the technocratic oligarchy. They work very hard to make sure you don't realize that.

Likewise, Fringe presents a world in which science and technology can do nothing for any of us but make our lives worse. It's a world in which elite corporations monopolize the tools that control our lives and no one but the disgruntled minions of those corporations can break that monopoly and usually do so only to our detriment. That's not escapism, that's the same shitty situation we face every single day.

This is why Fringe is dying, and may not survive the season. Enthusiasm for the show has tanked along with the ratings. At it is, it's on a crippling two-month hiatus, which Fox could very easily use to let it quietly die.

That's a shame in many ways because Fringe could have gone on the warpath against the very power structures that it's (at best) ambivalent about. Its tacit approval of invasive and unresponsive elites like Fringe Division and Massive Dynamics doesn't resonate in an era of populist dissent across the political spectrum.

Question Time: Nick Redfern is ON FIRE!

2011-11-16T00:00:00.002-05:00

The most-read post in the history of this blog-- at least since Blogger began making stats available in May of 2009-- was a blockbuster interview with Nick Redfern, who this writer sees as the top UFO researcher of our times.

Back then we discussed Nick's book Final Events, which traced the origin of the "UFO=Demon" meme to a shadowy, ultra right-wing secret society in the Pentagon called the Collins Elite.

That interview kicked off a major controversy as other sites picked up on Nick's research. Nick's published a few more books since then (the guy is the Stephen King of modern UFOlogy) and has more in the works (which you can check out on his site). Suffice it to say that if you only have time to follow one author on all things alienistic, Nick's your man.

I wanted to check in Nick since next year marks the 65th anniversary of the birth of the modern UFO era; the Maury Island, Kenneth Arnold and Roswell incidents, to be precise. UFOlogy seems to be in a strange spot at the moment, in that there's both a lot more and a lot less of it out there.

The UFO topic is getting more attention in the mainstream press than it has in ages, and not all of it is bogged down with the usual, lame-ass, "night-light" hoaxes (nearly all of which are the work of Amazing Rambli-worshiping skeptics) or the corny "Bubba butt-probe" cliches that get aired out whenever the topic is raised.

But even though more sightings are being reported than ever before, field work is sorely lacking and the phenomenon seems to have entered a new (some would say fallow) period. Indeed, we seem to be on the tail-end of a flap that peaked in 2009 and 2010, a period which also saw the Vatican and the Royal Society take the topic more seriously than most observers would have dared believed was possible.

One thing I've noticed throughout the years is that UFOlogy-- in all its various expressions-- seems to come and go in cycles.

The biggest story of the past year would be the huge success of the Ancient Aliens series, now in its third season on The History Channel. The show seems to blow hot and cold and people who've studied the topic aren't crazy about the sensationalism the show sometimes lapses into, but it's brought the subject back into the mainstream in a way we haven't seen since the late 70s.

Nick's been featured as a pundit on the show and will be dealing with the topic in his upcoming book, The Pyramids and the Pentagon.

Nick is part of a new breed of UFOlogists that don't go for the old materialistic, nuts-and-bolts explanations of the phenomenon. And as a cold-eyed skeptic-- in the traditional sense of the word-- and a meticulous researcher, he's not really impressed much with the quasi-religious nature of UFO literature out there either.

You almost get the sense that he'd be just as happy washing his hands of the whole topic if only he could lapse into the intellectual dishonesty and Orwellian mindgames of the denialist crowd ("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is just a way of saying "I reserve the right to arbitrarily move the goalpost and toss out any evidence I can't explain away"), but his integrity and honesty won't allow it.

Without any further ado, let's get into it. Get out your asbestos overcoats, because this man is on fire....

Secret Sun: 2012 will mark the 65th anniversary of the modern UFO movement. What kind of shape is the old girl in as she nears retirement age?

Nick Redfern: The old girl (actually, it's more like an old, diseased hag) is in the same shape that it has always been in!

That's to say that it is as static as ever, and is largely filled to the brim with: (A) people who believe the UFO phenomenon has extraterrestrial origins, the reason being they have a psychological, comforting need for a rigid belief system, rather than an open, inquiring mind that isn't steeped in belief or one theory; (B) a smaller number of skeptics who think it's all a nonsensical issue they can condescendingly make fun of (because they have weak, fragile egos and self-doubt, and poking fun at people makes them feel significant and strong, but, believe me, they aren't significant or strong), and dismiss with a smile of the type that deserves a good, solid punch or several to their glass-jaws; and (C) people like me who absolutely believe there is a real UFO phenomenon of unknown origins, but which may not be literally extraterrestrial.

Or, if it is, it extends far, far, beyond mere "nuts and bolts" UFOs and alien scientists coming here to "steal our DNA," because their "race is dying."

Secret Sun: You're one of the few UFO authors who's still putting out important books on UFOlogy. Why do you think there are so few books out there while interest in the topic has never been higher or more widespread?

Nick Redfern: I don't care at all if Ufology is widespread or is not widespread. Those who do care are the ones who use Ufology as a means to have a career and who drone on with the same fucking lecture for year after year, decade after decade.

If I write a book that sells less than 500 copies (as some of my books have done over the course of their "lives"), or if they sell more than a couple of thousand of copies (as some of my books have done), the important thing is not the number of copies sold, but getting the word out to those who are interested, and those who care about what's afoot in Ufology and the latest breakthroughs.

There are actually a lot of good books on UFOs being published, but many are self-published, e-books, print-on-demand etc. This, in itself, is not the problem. The problem is that many UFO authors are totally sh*t at promoting themselves. If someone writes a UFO book and it doesn't sell, then that's entirely the author's fault and no-one else's: Stop complaining, get off your arse, and promote it! But just stop whining! Do what needs to be done to get the word out.

As for how this lack of interest in UFO books relates to interest in the subject being at its height, its actually very, very simple: The Internet is free, TV shows are free, live-radio is free. UFO-themed books and magazines are not free. And, in the current economy, free stuff is better than spending money.

Secret Sun: You're a featured commenter on History Channel's Ancient Aliens series. Why do you think the show is so incredibly popular? What chord do you think it has struck in the public consciousness?

Nick Redfern: I think most people realize that our world, our history, the field of archeology, are all filled with mystery, and unresolved issues that mainstream science either ignores or tries to place into rigid, simplistic camps.

Maybe, it's some deep, inherited, ancient memory, but I think most people know - even if they don't exactly know why they know - that our views on the very, very earliest years of human civilization are sorely lacking, and that significant things have happened in our past that are primal, subconsciously remembered and that strike a chord - huge floods, ancient races possessed of fantastic technologies, amazing cultures that flourished and died, and much more.

And I think Ancient Aliens hits that note - it brings out something in our inherited, subconscious memories that we are missing something massively significant about humanity's very ancient past. I really do believe that.

Secret Sun: I'm old enough to remember when Chariots of the Gods was an international blockbuster and spawned countless imitators. Why do you think the ancient astronaut topic vanished so suddenly with the rise of Reagan and Thatcher and went viral again after the end of the Bush/Blair era?

Nick Redfern: Well, I don't know as I think that the ancient astronaut issue sunk because of the rise of Reagan and the vileness of the evil Thatcher regime that I lived through in England. I think it's pretty clear that, when it comes to paranormal topics, subjects surface, peak, and decline.

And sometimes - like with the Ancient Aliens series - they come back. Other times they don't. Astrology was big once. Back in Victorian times, it was seances, and table-rapping. Ouija-Boards had their day, as did the Contactees. Look at stories of alien abduction - nowhere near as popular or prevalent today as they were in the late 80s and in the 1990s. That's how things go.

It's no different to rock music - it began in the 50s, with Elvis, Little Richard, etc. Then there was the Beatles and Stones in the early 60s, Psychedelia in the late 60s, Glam-Rock in the early 70s, punk in the late 70s, new wave and crappy keyboard shit and skinny ties in the 80s, grunge in the 90s, and lip-synching bitches with no brains today who have sold their musical heart for cash and fame.

Forteana and Ufology are the same - one time something is popular, then it's something else.

Secret Sun: You're a born Englishman who lives in America. What's the difference in the two countries in how the UFO topic is perceived in the public and in the media? Is there a disconnect between the average Briton and the establishment press?

Nick Redfern: I think where there are similarities is that, both in the UK and the US, the media (TV, radio and newspapers), are more willing - today - to take the subject with a greater degree of seriousness than, say, 15, 20, or 30 years ago. I think public perception is pretty much the same, and very much black and white as it always was - it's either literal aliens or it's not real.

The biggest difference, as I see it, is that in the UK the UFO research community is more willing to look at alternatives to the ET hypothesis. One of the key reasons for this is that US Ufology is very commercialized, and if you don't kiss ass and say what people want to hear, it won't bring people to conferences and money won't be made. That's a tragic, f*cked up approach.

I'm not saying the following to be big or clever, but no-one of prominence in US Ufology would ever have even contemplated writing a book like my "Body Snatchers in the Desert," because they would have feared the backlash from colleagues and peers, and they would have feared not getting booked to speak at mainstream, major UFO conferences etc.

The biggest difference is that I really do not give two f**king sh*ts what people think of me, nor do I do want people want me to do, nor do I care about what people think of me. And I see that as a big difference between the UK and the US - American Ufology is about selling tickets at gigs, about continuing "the scene," about hooking up with the right people to become a minor celebrity in Ufology, and about keeping the industry going. UK Ufology is more about just the phenomenon.

Secret Sun: I've written on the blog about what I call the "Elusive Companion Hypothesis," arguing that whatever we call UFOs are not in fact extraterrestrial as we might understand the term (meaning originating outside the Solar System) but are in fact part and parcel of our physical environment, similar to the Watchers of ancient myth. How seriously is this taken in UFO circles?

Nick Redfern: Well, my view is this: people say I don't believe in the ET hypothesis, and that I prefer to focus more on such issues as Tulpas, Tricksters etc. That's true. However, I don't outright dismiss the ETH at all.

Rather, as I alluded in an earlier answer, I think the simplistic issue of "nuts and bolts UFOs" piloted by "alien scientists" coming here to "steal our DNA because their race is dying," is the sort of stuff people want to hear at conferences.

This simplistic approach (which is the same simplistic approach that life after death equates to something as simple as going to Heaven and Hell) does not - and simply cannot - account for other aspects of ufological experiences, such as synchronicities, cross-over cases between Ufology and (for example) poltergeist activity, Shadow People, or Cryptozoology etc.

How seriously are the views of yours taken by Ufology? My experience has been that many high-profile Ufologists have either experienced the high-strangeness stuff or know people who have, that are suggestive we may NOT be dealing with literal ETs.

But they lack the self-confidence to say so, because - again - they worry about how their views will be looked on by the old-timers of Ufology.

The reason they worry is that the old-timers are plugged-in to the people who arrange the conferences and the magazine editors who promote their books, and they don't want to rock the boat. F**k all those c**k-s**kers who know - but who lack the strength to stand up and say: "There's something weirder going on than just ET scientists visiting."

As long as Ufology is dominated by being a business and not much else, this will never change.

Change will come when the old and tired researchers who yearn for pre-Internet eras when people wrote letters instead of emails, and who mailed 'zines instead of emailed PDFs, have gone to their graves.

I have no faith at all that Ufology will advance, progress or learn anymore than it has already unless Ufology becomes more open-minded to all sorts of ideas and paradigms.

Sixty-four years since Kenneth Arnold, and all we have to show are lots of filing-cabinets, filled with lots of files, and lots of memory-space taken up. That aside, all we have is theories, ideas and beliefs, but no hard evidence of what's afoot. That's because belief controls the nature of how people investigate things.

If Ufology falls and fades, then Ufology can only blame one thing: the field itself.

You know what I would love? If, next year, one of the big UFO conferences had on their roster someone talking about how DMT can provoke abduction-type UFO experiences, someone else giving a lecture titled "Saucers and Synchronicities," the next person addressing the story of Aleister Crowley and Lam, and a fourth person presenting on ritually invoking purported alien entities while on mushrooms swigged down with Absinthe.

It's not gonna happen though. Instead, it will be more regurgitation of a pro-ET nature on Roswell, Socorro, Mantell, etc. That is the "good old days" that old-school Ufology wants and which sells tickets.

Ufology might go the way of the dinosaur, or it may bring itself back from the brink. The sad thing is that, such is the belief-driven nature of the subject, I really don't care at all if Ufology does implode. The phenomenon will still interact at a deeply personal level with us, even if Ufology as a movement does die.

The phenomenon has always been with us. It doesn't need Ufology, the movement, and its preconceived beliefs to interact with us. What the phenomenon wants from us are minds that are willing to break down barriers and boundaries and look beyond the simple into the far more complex.

Ufology, though - or at least as it stands today - may not be up for the challenge. Too bad for Ufology.

Supernature

2011-11-14T14:48:00.005-05:00

Jeff Kripal is doing yeoman's work in getting the mystical geek gospel out to the mainstream. Hot on the heels of Authors of the Impossible (which we discussed here and here), Jeff has a new book out called Mutants and Mystics in which he explores the superhero meme and its spiderweb of mystical and magical reverberations.

What's more he's working on two films with producer Scott Hulan Jones; one is a documentary on Authors of the Impossible and the other is a doc called Supernature, on Esalen and the human potential movement.

Scott's looking to raise funds for Supernature on Kickstarter, since it's impossible to get financing these days for anything that doesn't bolster corporate hegemony in all its various forms, both overt and covert.

SUPERNATURE: ESALEN AND THE HUMAN POTENTIAL is a documentary film about the influential Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and The Human Potential Movement it spawned. At a time of unprecedented political, social and ideological conflict, we believe the world would benefit from a broad, beautiful, and sophisticated exposure to the ideas and practices fostered by Esalen, particularly those that move us beyond the present schizophrenic split between religion and science.

We believe that the world is crying out for positive, even ecstatic models and ideas that can embrace the best of our religious pasts without being bound to those pasts; that can celebrate the discoveries of science without equating these discoveries with a materialism of despair and meaninglessness; and that can finally envision the human being as a conscious embodiment of the evolving cosmos. With SUPERNATURE, we hope to bring exactly this vision to a much wider audience and so play our part in the transformation and future of American culture.

We also have previously recorded interviews with Astronomer, Computer Scientist and UFO Expert Jacques Vallee, Writers Erik Davis, Mitch Horowitz, Victoria Nelson, Doug Moench, Lawrence Sutin and Christopher Knowles, Parapsychologist Dean Radin, Physicist Ed May, Professor of Religious Studies Christopher Partridge, and Medium Paul Selig.

These interviews were all filmed at the Superpowers conference at Esalen in 2009, which I wrote about in detail here. Scott and the crew are looking to do more filming in the new year, so if you want to contribute to what is sure to be a very interesting and worthwhile project definitely check out the Kickstarter page.

You can hear more of Scott's work on his podcast-- click here.

Jeff is everywhere promoting his new book, but regular readers will want to check out the Hidden Experience podcast for a more informed dialogue on how synchronicity and UFOlogy tie into the superhuman and mutant memes. Take it away, Mike C!:

The book MUTANTS AND MYSTICS explores the how comic books and science fiction are somehow intertwined with profound mystical experiences, including the UFO contact lore. This is the kinda stuff that gets my attention!

Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors, this book explores how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives.

Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi and the incredible powers of the comic book super hero. From gnostic revelation to alien abduction, Kripal spins out a hidden history of American culture, rich with mythical themes and an awareness of the imaginal.

Click here for a direct download of the interview.

I'll be talking with Jeff sometime around Christmas as part of the Re-Enchantment Dialogues series. My goal for the blog for the foreseeable future is to explore artists and writers who incorporate magic, synchronicity and the esoteric arts into their work. I've done a whole lot of blabbing this year, writing some pretty huge posts.

Now I want to leave the hermitage- virtually, at least-- and talk to people exploring the same unknown territory we've been. For the next few months, this blog will be about community-building and dialogue. And boy, do I have a corker of a dialogue coming up in the next couple of days.

Watch this space.

The Exegesis: Culture Creation in the Age of Upheaval

2011-11-10T17:17:00.002-05:00

The point of art for most of human history was magical- culture was about the cult.

The goal of art was to commune with the gods- to create environments in which human beings were surrounded by images of them. We'll leave aside the obvious parallels with the post-World War II cargo cults and the rest of it (for now at least), because I'm more interested in exploring the cultural aspect of this.

The rise of the Protestant movements in the late Renaissance were accompanied by distinct anti-cultural trends-- the iconoclasts, Biblical literalism, the anti-liturgical movements and so on-- that were in fact the logical precursors to atheism.

What arose from this was an emphasis on legalism and the power of speechmaking that very easily allowed successive generations to peel away from the cult, exactly as what we're seeing in America today and what we will see in the developing world in the future. The Puritans of old New England evolved into the Congregationalists and then into the Unitarians, both of whom are in serious decline today, if not in fact moribund.

The Church was the culture for over a thousand years, until successive technological innovations-- the invention of the printing press foremost among them-- gradually began to chip away at its monopoly. The rise of Protestantism eventually whittled away at the artistic and cultural aspects of Christianity, mostly because the people it tended to attract didn't understand art or music and were primarily concerned with the law, money and most of all, politics.

The Middle Ages weren't much different than Ancient Egypt when it came to the use of the arts in ritual, which is to say magical ritual. Pre-Christian architectural techniques were revived and improved upon in order to create a literal sanctuary (meaning "holy place"), a place where the parishioner directly encountered the supernatural.

Chartres is probably the greatest expression of this, but it's by no means alone. The wealth and relative social harmony of the High Middle Ages gave birth to the artistic movements that would later result in the Renaissance, meaning the rebirth of the old arts, sciences and particularly, the old gods.

The Romans paid lip service to culture, but were always more concerned with the material world and its pleasures. But the massive influx of conquered peoples into the Empire brought all of the Mystery cults with it, as well as a worldwide craze for all things Egyptian. Isis nearly conquered the world, and it was mostly because of her beauty, her rich and complex rituals, and of course all of the art. Isis was a goddess of the senses, a lush, feminine presence in otherwise bleak lives.

Check out this site for more info on this image

No Roman who visited Egypt could come away unimpressed with the art; the sculpture, the paintings, the architecture, the music, the beautiful costumery. It was everywhere, especially in the major metropolises and cult centers. And ALL of it was dedicated to the gods and designed to create Heaven on Earth. To create an environment in which the gods never left, in other words.

The grandeur of Egypt would influence the Greeks and the Romans to upgrade their temples from humble, functional shrines to places like the Temple of Zeus and the Parthenon, where supplicants would be awestruck by enormous, painstakingly rendered depictions of the gods. Clever priests would devise elaborate machines to make these images "speak," using an early type of PA system.

All of this is to say that people in ancient cities were as heavily mediated as we are today. Advertising was everywhere as well, as was grafitti, particularly that of the pornographic variety. It didn't matter that most people couldn't read; they didn't need to. Someone would always be on hand to tell them what all of those hieroglyphs were saying, or at least their own interpretation of them.

As I wrote about in Our Gods Wear Spandex, modern fandom has recreated all of this. I'm no different- my walls and shelves are cluttered with artworks depicting gods old and new. What this is all about is creating your own sanctuary and creating your own reality.

From time to time you'll see stories on super-collectors; people who spend all of the disposable income on tchotchkes: posters, figurines, collectibles and all of the rest of it in tribute to their respective obsession. This becomes a question of degree; the only difference between these fanatic fans and everyone else is simply their level of commitment.

So we have an ancient and modern analog of cultish devotion, all in service of creating an alternative to the crushing boredom and endless disappointments of ordinary reality.

We also have the billion dollar advertising and promotion industries working to sell us their clients' alternative reality, a dreamworld in which that popular soft drink isn't just semi-toxic fizzy water but a totem, a kind of amulet guaranteed to summon the good times back into your life.

A delusional state in which that odious bodyspray will get you laid by the hottest chick you've ever seen in your life. Or in which guys who don't drink that light beer that tastes like O'Douls-flavored urine are all homosexuals.

It doesn't end there, of course. It get a lot more insidious and destructive. Those very same agencies also create a world in which anyone who mildly inconveniences --or even looks cross-eyed at-- our plutocracy is a communist or a Muslim or a homosexual (these guys always go for the homophobia fail-safe, whether they're trying to sell beer or a bloodsucking political candidate).

Subsequently, billions upon billions of corporate dollars have been spent pushing Evangelical Protestantism all over the world as the closest thing there is to a One World Religion on the market today, ensuring a huge labor pool of docile and submissive serfs.

Imagery, music, and other sensual stimulants create realities. What you pay attention to becomes the building blocks of your weltanschauung. Targeted media has accelerated this process, created a multiplicity of microcultures, all certain of their beliefs and all equally certain of the invalidity of the belief system of those who disagree with them. These in turn become schismatic, leading to ever more refined micro-mini-cultures.

In this context, there's no reason at all to ask permission to create your own culture and your own worldview. All of the minicultures out there can wax ecstatic about the shortcomings of their opponent's worldview, all the while ignoring the fact that their own shortcomings are nearly identical, if not identical in their opposition. So don't worry about them at all.

However, what then becomes the aim is efficacy. Sure, you can find a bunch of people to worship some old Sumerian fire goddess or the works of some obscure Italian anarchist philosopher, but does that mean that culture produces the results you're looking for? The great cults rose because they answered the questions of their adherents, producing results if often only in the form of a beatific or tranquilized state.

The great cults fell when the times changed and the old answers stopped applying to new realities. The old pagan cults gave way to the Mystery cults when civilization softened the hard edges of Nature, and the Mystery cults gave way with the rise of the philosophic religions and the challenges of the imperial state. Catholicism gave way to Protestantism with the rise of mercantile capitalism and Protestantism gave way to Evangelicalism with the rise of corporatism and electronic media.

Religion is giving way to Science today only out of a kind of forfeiture, since most sensible people realize that the real power of Science is monopolized by the corporate state. Atheism and skepticism are negatively inspired in that they are reactions to religious fascism. The corporate fascism that Science is the completely submissive handmaiden to is less of a concern to the people gravitating to the movement. But that will surely change. And soon.

We're well into an age of upheaval, a state of flux, of uncertainty. Historically-- specifically, the late Roman republic and the Industrial Revolution-- people gravitated towards belief systems that seem to tame uncertainty while exploiting it. The occult, the Mysteries and so on are expressions of this process.

And this is why mainstream culture has so perfectly co-opted those expressions that we don't even notice anymore. Harry Potter, Twilight, The Walking Dead and World of Warcraft are nothing but a new coat of paint on a very old geek chassis. But they speak to young people in a way that religion or high culture no longer can. The hideous celebrity culture is a fantasy as well-- fake celebrities who are built up by the media solely so they can knocked down again.

You are what you eat, and your worldview is evidenced by the culture you surround yourself with. I won't even get into the magical possibilities of all of this right now. But you can at home.