The farm of humanity.

I Chose To Believe

Monoliths and Lighthouses

Earthling Exceptionalism Improbable

The application of new exoplanet data to the Drake equation has added several exclamation marks to the Fermi paradox, the suggestion that we observe a problematic dearth of aliens around.  Either there are other intelligent civilisations already visiting, or we can expect our own civilisation to inevitably collapse very soon.  Possibly both.

Military-Industrial Complex Shares With Guitarist

Tom DeLonge, formerly of pop-punk band Blink-182, has written a novel with the help of a professor of Shakespeare, as well as "sources within the aerospace industry and the Department of Defense and NASA" (a statement apparently specifically approved by those sources). 

The premise of Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows is that the government has built alien reproduction vehicles from acquired alien technology.  Curiously, this closely matches the story given in the recent revival of The X-Files.

Eisenhower Eats

Ike's great-granddaughter recommends a diet not far removed from Cathar or Vedic practice to facilitate contact with sky beings.

This could prompt us to reflect deeply on the mysterious resonances between religious revelations spanning the centuries, or perhaps to enjoy an amusing piece of fluffy journalism with a condescending smirk on our smug faces.

Sun Ra: Showman or Shaman?

Dreams come true, I know they do
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above

Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too 
If you believe in love

Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again

Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too 
All you have to do is dream

-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra 

~~~

Sonny had a vision.  His body was transfigured.  Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn.  They told him to leave school, to speak through his music.  The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.

Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers.  Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.

~~~

Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra.  He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra.  With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters.  Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues.  Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.

His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.

Sonny was intense about discipline.  When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz."  There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos.  This was space jazz.

~~~

It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic.  Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal.  It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces.  This was music to change minds.

~~~

He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles.  As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.

In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.

~~~

He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve.  The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point.  It can be judged only in its possible effects.

Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing.  He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing.  He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.

What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name.  Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs.  The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive.  They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space.  This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.

He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could.  That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.

~~~

They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away

They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare

They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye

They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite

-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra

~~~

Further reading

Confessions of an Idiot

~~~

I had a prolonged, traumatic birth, as a terrible winter storm raged outside.  I eventually arrived on the leap day of 1984, with a scar on one cheek from the doctor's forceps. 

~~~

When I was a couple of years old, the neighbour boy knocked me unconscious with a lead pipe.  He was pretending to play baseball.  The stitches left a scar on my forehead over my third eye.

~~~

When I was six or seven, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  It was outside my window and behind some trees, but nothing about it looked like anything I'd seen before or since.  I thought it over, and couldn't see any good coming from discussing it with the adults.  The experience was never integrated, only occluded by being ignored.

~~~

When I was twelve or thirteen I began to develop a neurotic melancholia.  My brother was gone from the house, and my parents' marriage had started the slow and quiet march to dissolution.  I had gleaned from my social studies classes that my nation had no identity of its own, and it was increasingly clear that my education was a boring waste of my talents.  I had every opportunity to develop the bad cognitive habits and bodily environment for a pernicious and persistent depression.  These behavioural and biochemical ruts can be overcome, and the thought of quitting made a friendly gadfly, but any mental illness leaves a mark that never fully leaves.

~~~

I went to Trent University to learn how to be academically critical of my society.  The unheralded Semitic cynicism of the theorists on offer neglected the constructive responsibilities of philosophy.  We only destroyed.  It was understood but never justified that an egalitarian communist utopia would fill the resultant void.

I could only do well in philosophy and cultural studies by keeping them strictly delineated and compartmentalised in my mind.  Cultural studies selected from every discipline, but its critique was beholden only to pissy projection.

~~~

When I returned from Ontario in disgrace and confusion, and without Honours, my feeling of affinity for the moustache man and his project had become so acute that I took myself to have my head checked.  The NS Hospital was no help.  They deemed me sane.  This would be a valuable tether in the years to come.

~~~

Cannabis had made the existential ache endurable, so it had been no great leap to obey the cultural script and proceed to other psychoactive substances--only to discover how at-home they made me feel.  I learned the warp and woof of tryptamines and phenethylamines, of illumination and The Void.  On a summer off from school, down by the brook, on a bottle of cough syrup, some mushrooms, and a beer, I became aware of a consciousness greater than myself.  In the morning, I cast Him out as only chemical.

~~~

When those chemicals no longer had as much to teach me, I moved on to the hard stuff: exopolitics, the New Age, and conspiracy theory. 

I had exhausted my education; there were still too many missing pieces in my understanding before I would be able to make psychological and philosophical sense of those classes. 

I had exhausted entheogens; absent a proper initiation by a carrier of a wisdom tradition (or the time, security, stability, and supplies to rigourously develop my own tradition) neo-shamanism seemed to be a pie-eyed dead end, in terms of obtaining reliable and consistent information. 

Cultural studies had at least made me cognizant of our capacity for self-delusion, and of the cultural mediation of reality.  Psychedelics had made me aware of dimensions normally unseen.  With the hope that my philosophy classes in logic and reasoning were still working for me, it seemed the right time to cross my Rubicon--and try to learn profound things from the scary, dangerous, and untrustworthy Internet.  After all, those disreputable drugs hadn't been so bad!

I made vast strides into the unknown over a very short period.  In a flurry of cheap documentaries and questionable interviews, I caught up with ten years of paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, and batshit insane conversation.  Much of it was remarkable, most was incredible, and all of it was far beyond the pale of polite conversation.  I began to get comfortable with a constant consciousness of the limits of other people's realities.

There were certainly a lot of well-spoken people convinced of nefarious plots and epic cosmic battles.  They referenced the same undocumented fancies, and it was easy to get swept up in excitement over the imminent disclosure of alien life, and our imminent ascension into fluffy rainbows.  It was a strange time.

~~~

My pseudo-shamanic forays had finally begun to yield fruit.  My mystical readings had begun to cohere and come alive.  I was beginning to experience synchronicities.

I would hold conversations with an ethereal DJ.  It selected the songs in my extensive playlist that would answer with uncanny insight the question I was pondering.  First, the astonishment at such magic.  Second, the slow recognition of its ubiquity.

As the new year approached, I made a resolution to undertake an experiment.  It required a leap of faith.  I decided to take up the provisional acceptance of a series of dubious claims. 

If it was true that all existence is the fragmented consciousness of the One, all awareness must be made of the same stuff.  If we're all reaching higher levels of consciousness on our climb back to wholeness, there are probably intermediary conglomerations of awareness of which we can be a part.  If we're all connected through our common Source, it should be a simple matter to contact other intelligences by means of the very intelligence which seeks to make such a contact.

I resolved that in 2009 I would see a UFO.

~~~

I didn't step outside without looking up.  I didn't look up without asking to see.  Everywhere I went, everything I did, I held the thought in my mind that I wanted to make contact, I wanted to witness, I wanted to experience.  I asked in earnestness and humility.  I projected friendly compassion and curiosity.  I wanted to see a flying saucer and I meant it.

~~~

On the night in February when I signed for an apartment with my girlfriend, I walked to my warehouse night shift down a darkened road.  I was distracted from my feeling of relief and anticipation by a bright light in the sky straight ahead.

Before I had time to think about it, the word "angelic" popped into my mind.  This word wasn't really in my vocabulary, so it surprised me enough that I immediately took a closer look at the light.  It was too large and bright to be a planet, but it wasn't in motion except for a slight waver.  Something about the luminous shimmer convinced me that it was suitably angelic, and in a moment I found myself asking it in my head if it was a UFO.

The light gently winked at me in a seeming affirmation.

A pregnant pause; one-two-three.  A mugging double take wouldn't have been out of order.  That really happened, didn't it?  Another slow blink, after the same measure as the last question.  The light hovered still, now resolutely unblinking.

I tried to command it, telling it to do it again.  Instead, the light shrunk to the size of a faint star, and suddenly began moving to the right.  It quickly expanded to a large black shape with lights on it that passed almost overhead.  It was just enough like a plane that I could believe I had been fooled, and I spent the rest of the night laughing at the ambiguity of the sighting.

On further consideration, I couldn't remember a sound from an aircraft that came very close, nor a green light on the starboard side that faced me.

~~~

About a month after that first sighting, in a time of alienated despair, the floodgates were opened.  After noticing a series of strange aerial things one night, I saw a nearby flying object instantly reverse on its course without turning around--and there was no going back.

Over the course of 2009, forever to be remembered as That Year, I saw multiple daytime discs, luminous saucers, and glowing orbs, as well as countless suspicious lights that were surely almost all conventional.  Often enough, the more striking appearances seemed to interact with me and my expectations.  I found them to be playful, but also seemingly compassionate, sometimes responding to my emotional need to see them at a certain time or place, sometimes performing a novelty when I asked nicely.

It culminated in a pink saucer shrouded in mist going past my apartment window one afternoon like it was going for a Sunday drive.  This time our requisite exchange of recognition manifested as the orange-pink light of the object brightening responsively, and then the trail of vapour behind it got correspondingly longer.  Somehow this simple physical logic was too much.  Weird phantasms passing over populated areas are fine, but if they behave like they're real?  I had seen enough.

It was around this time that I was becoming preoccupied with my soul's mission, and beginning to suspect that my favourite singer-songwriter might be an evil sorcerer.  I had to grudgingly admit that it might be a good time to pause and reflect.

I reflected in retreat for years, exploiting the goodwill of friends and family to survive, struggling not to succumb to this new madness I didn't understand, or an old sadness I knew all too well.  I went back over everything; every experience, but also every fact and argument that led me there, and every one that followed from it.  I adopted more nuanced perspectives on secrets and mysteries.  I became more sure of some things and less sure of others.  Mostly I languished.

~~~

There is still no idiom sufficient to take account of reality.  Not science, not religion, not the left or right, not the high or straight.  Mostly there is insular confusion.  A vast spinning cosmos surrounds us, and we're too ridiculous to assume our inherent dignity and face that universe.

I have fled from my experiences even as I struggle to understand them.  The truth is that I have to let them be. I don't understand everything, and I have to let that be.  Most people are ignorant dumbasses without a shred of passion or curiosity, and I have to let that be.  There's too much to learn and teach and explore and discover to be held back by not knowing the destination, or not getting everyone to take the journey.

UFO truthers want to make Roswell an issue for 2016. Meet their lobbyist.

“He’s one of the most overly optimistic people I’ve ever met,” said Joseph Buchman, a fellow true believer. “I find that endearing, but I don’t know if it’s quite as close to happening as he thinks it is.”

The Economic Benefits of Alien Abduction

“We’re speculating based on our own cultural perspective,” Weinstock says. “It’s possible they are using modes of transportation that are not linear, that could involve the use of space structures, wormholes, which make travel much more efficient.”

Send aliens modern messages of Earth's equality and diversity, say scientists

There’s also the possibility that rather than an advanced alien race, our messages might find a civilisation slightly behind us. Sandberg said: “If we got a message from aliens in the 1930s it might have freaked us out a bit, but would it have crushed us? No. Unless we had received transmissions of Big Brother, perhaps.”

Chess President Claims Sport Came From Aliens

Is Ilyumzhinov telling the truth about his abduction and belief that chess came from aliens? Well, he’s running to replace Sepp Blatter as leader of an organization notorious for corruption, bribery and other nefarious behavior and he himself had a similar reputation as head of FIDE.

ET Go Home: Let’s Retire The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

"Presumptions have kept us locked in a vicious circle because most of us don’t even realize that we’re in it. It would be nice to crack this circle so that we can move into the larger world of logic, interesting ideas and fun speculation. We might even begin to meet the phenomenon of UFOs more on its own terms (or at least without us getting in our own way.)"

Fermi's phony paradox: Humans too arrogant and stupid to solve 'missing aliens' question

"Anthropocentrism not only implies a dehumanization of others here on our planet, it also points to the dismissal of the possibility of beings from other 'places'. From this very narrow point of view, that we're it - and that's it, and that is all that matters, we reduce our 'state of awareness' to the cosmic equivalent of a spoiled child. Even worse, when we don't acknowledge our true and objective position in the 'grand scheme of things', we become vulnerable and subject to the type of 'thinking' that permits some of the nations of our planet to dominate, if not outright destroy, others."

The Roswell Slides: Chronicle of a Mummy Foretold

"The deciphering of the placard showed what small groups, working together through the power of social networks can accomplish, and it could very well prove to be the model for a new UFOlogy in the XXIst century --moving from The Invisible College into The Open Source College."

The Roswell Slides That Aren’t!

"This event, in my opinion, has done more damage to UFOlogy than anything else, and those behind it should be questioned on what their true motives really are. To decline interviews because they aren’t paying, speaks volumes."

 "The biggest tragedy in this utterly sorry saga is that Roswell – in my view, anyway – is still a genuine enigma of very mysterious proportions. But, the slides have done nothing but utterly damage the investigation into what really happened on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. And, just maybe, the slides have damaged the investigation to a 100 percent, irreversible degree."

Rogue Microwave Ovens Are the Culprits Behind Mysterious Radio Signals

"As one might expect from a cosmological signal, fast radio bursts tend to show up rather randomly around the clock. But, perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect, the peryton data show those signals 'clustering near the lunchtime hour.'"

Mathematical Pattern Found in Enigmatic Radio Bursts, But It’s Not E.T.

"A strange mathematical pattern spotted in blasts of radio waves coming from deep space could be evidence of alien civilizations – or it might be nothing."

ETs for Hillary: Why UFO Activists Are Excited About Another Clinton Presidency

"Asked for clarification of Hillary Clinton's stance on UFO disclosure, a spokesman from her office responded via email. 'Our non-campaign has a strict policy of not commenting on extraterrestrial activity,' Nick Merrill wrote. 'BUT, the Truth Is Out There.'"

This Scientist Says He Keeps Finding Aliens in the Stratosphere

"I give these talks at meetings and no one tells us where we're going wrong. When I ask why they don't believe it, they say, 'because it can't be true.' There's been a lot of complete avoidance of the issues."