The Solar Satellite

AstroGnostic: Earthling/Not Earthling

2013-04-12T11:40:00.002-04:00

Classical Gnosticism taught that human beings were celestial entities trapped by the insane, sadistic Demiruge on a prison planet, simply to soothe his wounded ego. The entities were emanations from the Pleroma, or the Fullness, and were cast out due to a terrible cosmic abortion.

Christian Gnostics taught that Christ was a purely spiritual being who was sent to liberate the prisoners of the "Blind Idiot God" and his Archons by bringing them the knowledge of their true nature and identity.

AstroGnosticism teaches us that human beings were the result of alien consciousness- itself a vastly potent spiritual energy- grafted through whatever means onto the biology of advanced primates. That human beings are trapped on a planet to which their intelligence and consciousness is not merely maladaptive but in fact anti-adaptive, since trying to exist in an admittedly beautiful yet unimaginably destructive biosphere leads to depression, insanity, mass murder and habitat destruction.

The most potent vehicle for the AstroGnostic narrative seems to be the unassuming, usually low-budget sci-fi film. A classic early example is the Mormon sci-fi opus The People, starring none other than Captain Kirk and Ka-Hathor-y Lee Hecate. This story, based on the Zenna Henderson novels, is deeply informed by LDS folk mythology, of a people whose natural superiority (based on the fact that they are stranded aliens) made them targets for persecution from their shaved ape neighbors.

A more successful AstroGnostic franchise are the Witch Mountain films, the two made in the 1970s and the recent, rather overblown remake. Those films are centered on the danger the two fallen angels face from a national security state intent on exploiting the children's powers towards their own ends. The remake didn't seem to resonate the way the original Escape film did, precisely because its expensive bells and whistles distracted from the quiet intimate realism of the original.

Audiences- and most certainly, producers- have become extremely literal-minded, maybe another thing to blame on George Lucas. Now that Hollywood is controlled by accountants and not storytellers (many of the old-time moguls were genuinely in love with movie magic, whatever else their faults) there's no room left for the subtle, insinuating narrative. Everything must be literal, explicit and immediately explained.

Which is why yet another classical AstroGnostic narrative, John August's The Nines, went straight to video, despite having Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy as its stars. The Nines might be one of the most potent AstroGnostic narratives out there, as well as one of the most explicitly Christian Gnostic variants thereof.

"You're not who you think you are" is also the message of Earthling, a lost classic Outer Limits episode in all but name. Judith, a young high school teacher, experiences a devastating accident (and miscarriage) coinciding with a mysterious cosmic event that also effects a space shuttle mission.

Upon returning to work Judith meets a precocious new student named Abby, who takes on the hippy /free spirit persona, complete with old Volkswagen van. Abby is also a sexually aggressive lesbian, or presents herself as such, and attempts to seduce Judith while drinking with her extremely creepy father (played by Peter Greene, best known as Pulp Fiction's Zed) at a bar frequented by her teachers.

While raw erotic tension crackles in the air like a Wimshurst generator, Abby begins to reveal her and Judith's true nature, and the true horror of their predicament. They don't belong here, they are trapped here and Judith is the one they are all counting to set them free. The documentarian intimacy of the scene gives it a dark rush, since we're not sure if any of this is true or Judith is alone in the middle of nowhere with a dangerous psychopath.

Abby plunges Judith into a netherworld filled with insanity and murder and pregnant children, which puts Judith at risk of losing her job and her husband. As with any effective AstroGnostic narrative, the protagonist is unsure whether her revelators are telling her the truth or that they are all murderous lunatics caught in the grip of a collective delusion.

Judith watches in horror as Abby attempts to murder a girl she tries to seduce. She sees Abby's father and another "alien" bury an apparent murder victim at their remote farm compound. But Judith soon develops horn-like tumors on her head as the others have, a sign that their host bodies can't handle the alien presence inside them.

Concurrently we see the devastating mental breakdown of the sole remaining survivor of the shuttle mission, the attempts to break through his amnesia with creepy hypnosis techniques, and his strange family (his father is played by William Katt, veteran of another AstroGnostic drama, The Greatest American Hero)

It all gets pretty graphic, but at the same time it all reminds me very much of classic Outer Limits as well. I don't know if writer-director Clay Liford was consciously channeling classic Stefano-era TOL, but if he wasn't then Earthling is all the more remarkable for doing so. Earthling captures the desolate mood of old-time Outer Limits in a way the X-Files obsessed 90s revival never did.

The very premise of the film draws directly back to Stefano's subversive Cambridge Five allegory, "The Invisibles," without that episode's rather unsubtle anal-rape analogs. We have settings recalling episodes like "Architects of Fear", "Man Who Was Never Born, and "The Mice". And of course we have the dangerous sapphic chemistry of "Bellero Shield" and "Forms of Things Unknown" (though today that's not nearly as shocking as it was in the early 60s). We even have the Allyson Ames-styled random radiance in the form of Jenny Shakeshaft's tragic character.

Some videogame damaged fanboys complained about the no-budget effects in Earthling, but that's yet another link to classic Outer Limits, as is the abstruse, modal soundscaping.

It's unfortunate that films like this seem to fall between all of the cracks and end up going over the heads of pretty much everyone. But at the same time it makes their existence all the more valuable in that people who get it really get it. There's a growing body of these little undiscovered treasures out there, maybe it's up to the people who understand what is being communicated to educate those who don't but should.

Bowie and the Last Rock 'n' Roll Album

2013-03-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

Yes, it is that good.

The reviews almost scared me off- well, that's not exactly true, I was going to buy it sooner or later. But my experience with the opinions of critics has usually acted as a disincentive. The singles didn't really hit me at first, which I now realize was a function of their pretentious, "transgressive" videos greatly distracting from their rich and layered melodies. Both tracks improve by leaps and bounds on their own terms, "Where Are We Now?" being a gorgeous, atmospheric ballad in the tradition of "Life on Mars" and "Slip Away."

At first listen I thought the production was a bit on the spare side, lacking in the rich atmospherics of classic Bowie/Visconti (or Bowie/Eno, in the case of Outside). A case of a misleading first impression- subsequent listens reveal a host of harmonic undulations that Visconti cannily subdues in the mix, particularly a number of rich vocal arrangements. In these, Bowie's longtime secret weapon Gale Ann Dorsey shines, her meaty, soaring alto bouncing brilliantly off her boss's usual armory of baritones and falsettos and Anthony Newley impersonations.

Bowie's musical director Gerry Leonard also brings a lot to the table with his catalog of postpunk atmospherics, which again Visconti tastefully mixes, avoiding Edge-like histrionics. The backbeat and the lead vocal stand front and center here, with all of the embellishment supplementing and subordinate to the rhythm and melody. All-stars like David Torn and Earl Slick check in with signature riffs.

This is Bowie in Bowiemode, referencing his own catalog and influences, rather than whatever is trendy at the moment.

The fact that nothing is trendy in the old school sense anymore, that everything you hear these days is almost punishingly unoriginal, serves Bowie well. At 66 years of age, he no longer feels that midlife crisis need to hop on someone else's bandwagon, realizing now that the trend trains always go off the rails in extremely short order. Bowie now accepts that he is a genre unto himself, that his borrowings have congealed into something entirely original. The rest of us realized that in 1979, but it's always easier to judge from a safe distance.

Of course, I'm no one to talk, since two of my favorite Bowie albums are two of his most-notorious "me too" bandwagon hoppers- the Industrial-derived Outside and the jungle-inspired Earthling (remember jungle? I didn't think so). But what made those albums work- even if the superficialities put some people off- was the rich vein of classic Bowie songcraft hiding beneath the electronic bleeps and blargs. Trent Rezor's remix of "Afraid of Americans" was dreadful, stripping away the insistent, slinky groove that was the entire point of the song, but it still got Bowie some cred he'd lost and struggled to recover ever since Tonight.

If Heathen was Bowie's sequel to Hunky Dory, with its dreamy sentiment and soaring choruses, then The Next Day is certainly his Scary Monsters redux. I'm sick to death of hearing about that 1980 classic too, but the same thesis of consolidation and reflection is at work here as well.

Scary Monsters was Bowie taking all of his lifts, cops and borrowings of the previous ten years and boiling them down to a coherent statement. The Next Day does the same, only there are a lot more years to consider, as well as a serious health scare reminding Bowie that he too is mortal, even if a cursory review of his biography would lead you to believe he was superhuman. Certainly his daily cocaine intake in the 70s would have killed a platoon of Marines.

Then factor in that he subsisted on a diet of glasses of milk and the occasional raw egg while sustaining a touring and recording schedule that would cripple a normal human being and you start to wonder if The Man Who Fell to Earth wasn't entirely fictional.

But the four-pack-a-day habit of noxious French cigarettes eventually caught up with Bowie in 2004, leading to an onstage coronary event. That brush with the grave informs every note on The Next Day. He was touring Reality that year, a rushed and OKish follow-up to Heathen and the ten-year lapse between albums leads you to believe that he'd learned a deeper lesson that fateful night, that building a legacy was more important than releasing a record simply to wrest some touring funds from his paymasters.

The subsequent collapse of the record industry is another ghost in the room here. Bowie doesn't need any more money but he's also canny enough to realize that the days of Tonight's and Hours's and Reality's are long since past. Attention is at a premium so you'd best save the filler for leaked MP3s.

But the upshot of this is that Bowie has now entered his sixth decade of releasing important music, an almost-unparalelled feat. His contemporaries- The Stones, the remaining Beatles, Elton John, etc- have resigned themselves to victory laps, touring their indelible catalogs and charging exorbitant prices for their upscale, aging audience.

Bowie still matters- his concept of artifice as authenticity still resonates with younger artists, and certainly the spectacle-driven displays stars like Madonna, Beyonce and Katy Perry come right from Bowie's playbook via the network of largely gay stylists and Svengalis who use these singers as disposable, scale-model Barbie dolls. Cult sci-fi series Fringe borrowed Bowie's real name and alien alter-ego for two of their dimension-hopping villains, a tribute to a man who spent his life fucking with boundaries. Vintage style Bowie tees are de rigeur accessories for young hipsters, even if they never heard his records.

But boundaries are hardening once again and perhaps Bowie's prestige is one last look at a time when you could still fuck with barriers.

Bowie looked at the borders of dichotomy- rock/disco, gay/straight, white/black, left/right, lowbrow/highbrow- and crossed them. In the early 70s it was the Right that was outraged by this transgression and now it's an even more vindictive and totalizing liberal ascendancy filling the inquisitor offices. He first broke through on the scene as a bisexual spaceman but the new inquisitors insist now that no such thing can possibly exist since bisexuals and spacemen are entirely mythical creatures.

Rock and Roll was reborn in the late 40s after a two-thousand year slumber but it was Bowie's peers- postwar English kids chafing at the vestiges of Victorianism that defined what we now see as classic rock. They disdained the soppy fake rock of Cliff Richard and rediscovered the roots of their passion, Blues and R&B journeymen who enjoyed revivals thanks to the patronage of fans like Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page.

Bowie did the same, but added a whole kitbag of influences to the mix- mime, high fashion, high art, avant garde electronic music and perhaps most crucially, occultism. It's perhaps no accident that the two artists who picked up the pieces of the Aquarian crash and burn and created a music that was a mythology unto itself- Jimmy Page and Bowie- were both serious students of British occultism, Crowley in Page's case and Dion Fortune and Austin Osman Spare in Bowie's.

Bowie was also a serious UFOlogist from an early age and many of his most passionate songs - 'In Memory of a Free Festival', 'Starman', 'Loving the Alien', 'Looking for Satellites'- are paeans to UFOnauts, who Bowie sees essentially as spiritual intruders, not anthropologists from Zeta Reticuli.

This album was heralded by the video for 'Stars', directed by Floria Sigismondi who also gave us Katy Perry's 'ET' video. The ignorant will see it as a comment on celebrity or some such other tediousness but those in the know see the tell-tale hallmarks of the numinous intruders. But don't tell anyone- I don't want to rouse the army of the new inquisitors from their Cheez Whiz and their galleries of junior high school upskirt jpgs.

Taking ten years off was an excellent idea, since he avoided the contamination of one of the most depressing and culturally-dead periods of modern times. But he also took the time to assemble top-flight material. Hopefully he won't mitigate the effect with a hasty follow-up of lesser material.

So what does it sound like? Well, it's impossible to do justice to music with words but suffice it to say The Next Day offers a rich palette of melody, songs that will stick in your head, particularly after a few careful listens. And those melodies are all brought home with top-rate playing and production. This isn't work- it's a party. It's not "challenging" Bowie, it's Bowie at his most accomodating.

It might be the last true rock 'n' roll album you will ever hear.

Christopher Lee, Drive-In Heirophant

2013-03-12T11:32:00.000-04:00

Christopher Lee's filmography is rather immense by anyone's standards, but even so there's quite a heaping helping of heavy duty High Weirdness to be culled from it, particularly from the late Sixties and through the Seventies. We already explored Henry Lincoln's occult thriller The Crimson Cult, with its puzzling and too-extensive-to-be-pure-coincidence connections to UFO and abduction lore, but that's just the shot across the bow.

Aside from The Wicker Man, a film which speaks whole libraries for itself, Lee made a Fu Manchu (created by occult adept Sax Rohmer) film and De Sade adaption adaption with Spanish horror maestro Jesus Franco, and made several Dracula films for Hammer and Franco, at least two of which are very highly charged with extreme weirdness and deep parapolitics, Taste the Blood of Dracula and The Satanic Rites of Dracula.

Lee starred in weirdness-infused horror offerings like Scream and Scream Again and Raw Meat, Horror Express--the AAT-charged reworking of Murder on the Orient Express, the Dennis Wheatley adaption To the Devil a Daughter, and an obvious Ewan Cameron stand-in in the mind-control grinder The Keeper (shot in Vancouver).

Lee kept it up in the later years of the 70s, starring in the cheapo but highly weird UFO thriller Starship Invasions, Sirius-linked kiddie sci-fi sequel Return to Witch Mountain, and rounded out the decade with Steven Spielberg's Battle of LA inspired 1941 and New Age parody Serial, in which he played a corporate headhunter who moonlighted as a rampaging gay biker named Skull.

That's just a small sampling of Lee's film history- even within the decade in question- but a particularly resonant one nonetheless.

Then there's this extremely odd B-movie from 1977 End of the World, which wasted an OKish cast (including Kubrick's Lolita Sue Lyon) in some of the worst direction and production values I've seen this side of Dragon*Con TV. But don't let all that fool you- it's packed with High Weirdness and the deepest occult UFOlogy imaginable.

In End, a celebrated astronomer (played by Kirk Scott) begins detecting coherent signals emanating from deep space and being received at a convent in Southern California. The monsignor at the convent is none other than Lord Summerisle, so you know how this story goes.

The movie is padded and the action is slow but it's all worth the effort when you get to the payoff. Suffice it to say, anyone who's been following the ExoVaticana series on Raider News Updates is going to get an extra jolt from this obscurity.

What puzzles me is what Lee was doing in half of these movies- particularly Starship and End- with their bottom-drawer production values and zero marketplace visibility. Surely he had the cache to mine the obligatory English/WASP bad guy motherlode in Hollywood. Several of his peers have gotten filthy rich- and worked nonstop for decades- filling Hollywood's endless need for scary white guys with toff accents.

And yet Lee often found himself in prestige-free, yet boundlessly resonant, drive-in and grindhouse fodder, of which his passion project Wicker Man was just another example of back in the day.

It really makes you wonder.

As the College of Cardinals gathers, this film seems especially resonant. Particularly when you factor in the latest apocalyptic hysteria, this time surrounding the Prophecy of the Popes. The themes here tie into the drama over the Vatican's stance on ETs and the mysteries of their powerful astronomical project as well.

Sometimes a bad movie can say a lot more about our predicament than a great one.

MIB-UFO: Virtual Reality and Reality Tunnels

2013-02-19T11:55:00.000-05:00

This is my contribution to an upcoming book on the Men in Black by Nick Redfern.

Imagine that you've built a time machine. Imagine you enter that machine and abduct English-speaking pilgrims from the rocky shores of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Imagine you take the brightest citizens you can find and show them your television and your cellphone and Google Earth, things we all take for granted. How would you explain any of it? How would you explain satellite feeds and wireless internet?

How could you begin to explain these things to people- separated by a mere moment in geological time- who have no concept of electricity, never mind microchips? Can you imagine the terror, the confusion, and the myths they would create to explain such an experience? No matter how hard you tried to explain these wonders, your poor abductees would have no context at all to process any of it. Even the most serene sounds and images would seem to mock their entire conception of reality.

You wouldn't necessarily need a time machine. There are still isolated tribes in the Amazon, the great heartland of Mother Earth, Stone Age peoples who have been sheltered by millions of square acres of impassible jungle. There have been flyovers of film crews, which surely has caused a great deal of confusion among the tribes. What context do they possibly have for a helicopter or airplane in their conception of the world? These surreptitious flybys must be utterly magical and mysterious. Or more likely, demonic.

And then there are the cargo cults of the South Pacific, who came face to face with technological society during the Second World War. Cargo cults have become a bit of a cliche in UFO circles, but they and the isolated tribes serve as a more effective metaphor for those of us who subscribe to heretical ideas on flying saucers.

We breathe the same air these tribes do but we live for all intents and purposes in two entirely separate worlds. But would we- do we- behave any differently when confronted with a bewildering superior technology?

I'm one of those handful of weirdos who believe flying saucers are real physical objects guided by intelligence but do not believe they are filled with spacemen from another planet. I believe these things for the very same reason- too many people have been witnessing these things for too long for a truly reasonable individual to dismiss them all as illusions. But the fact that so many people have seen so many UFOs for such an incredibly long time effectively rules out extraterrestrial vehicles, at least to me.

I love Star Trek more than anyone but the distances between stars are huger than we can imagine. And even if an advanced civilization has mastered the warp drive I don't think they'd come here and behave anything like flying saucers have since prehistory.

Let's go back to those poor abductees from Plymouth. If we were to try to explain our technology to them we would have to use their modes of language, and here we would inevitably lapse into symbol, simile and metaphor; "It's all kind of like this... or it's as if.. or it's like that, you see." It wouldn't be easy. And you can be certain they would initially see it all as the Devil's work.

Human beings fill in blanks with imagination, and when faced with superior force those blanks are invariably painted black. As much as we want to believe in angels, I think most of us are afraid that those higher powers are exclusively demonic. This speaks to the fragility of the human condition. In the end, this world kills us all.

Because the mind-killing virus of Fundamentalism (spiritual or secular) still infests the world of the paranormal and Conspiratainment spheres, too many people who don't dismiss the UFO phenomenon out of hand paint it all black. This is an inevitability based in ignorance and fear. Fear is an important evolutionary mechanism and fearing what we don't know is based in our survival instinct. But it can also metastisize into religions of fear. Even the starry-eyed crystal-kissers seem increasingly likely to lapse into these kneejerk fear responses these days, thanks in large part to David Icke.

But based on what we know, it's hard to justify these fear projections, even following the liberal rules of evidence in UFOlogy. Only the most extreme- or gullible- UFO researchers can argue that the phenomenon has caused any physical damage to human beings- certainly nothing even remotely approaching the mass murder, oppression and slavery that human beings have always inflicted on each other.

A skeptic would argue this is because the UFO phenomenon only exists in the human imagination. And perhaps they'd be half right.

Just as I can't find any compelling evidence that UFOs are interplanetary vehicles, neither can I find compelling proof of recent physical contact with physical "aliens" as we would commonly understand such a thing. The fact that there's been such of variety of creatures reported in these accounts- particularly before the Grey archetype took hold in the media- argues against the literal, physical reality of these experiences.

But there is compelling evidence that something else is going on and has been for a very, very long time. Most people familiar with UFOlogy know that Men in Black showed up before, if not in a different context, particularly in America. You have a long tradition of encounters, told in the most sober of fashions, with beings good, bad and indifferent as angels, demons, fairy folk, and on and on and on. Local cults would spring up commemorating these encounters in pre-Christian times.

There is an ancient key that can unlock this puzzle. "Abductees" and "Contactees" have often described their encounters as terrifying, but I've yet to see any compelling evidence of real physical harm. But these contacts do remind me of ancient contacts that were enshrined into the Mystery religions of the ancient Mediterranean, so much so that terrifying initiates in order to prepare their minds for contact with divine beings became common practice in many cults.

Even a cursory read of the ancient Mithraic Liturgy of the Paris Codex-- which tells of an abduction into a metallic flying disk filled with strange beings who take the initiate on a tour of the heavens-- shows that these encounters long predate the science fiction trappings of extraterrestrial contact that dominates the conversation today.

This is no small thing: this liturgy belonged to the most powerful cult of its day, a severe warrior cult that commanded the rulers of the known world and whose liturgy was instrumental in Carl Jung's conception of the Collective Unconscious.

There are of course other explanations for this phenomena-- night terrors, sleep paralysis and so on-- but even without those cases you still have an interesting corpus of contact. You may be familiar with the many parallels between fairy lore (fairy being a catch-all phrase here for any number of supernatural but non-divine beings) and modern abduction accounts- the focus on sexuality and reproduction, the hybrids.

Some might use these parallels to dismiss it all, but I see it as confirmation that contact is taking place in an artificial environment that behaves a lot like our modern conceptions of Virtual Reality. How predictable that the gods of the ancient Mysteries insinuated themselves into our modern conception of Virtual Reality from the start: witness the Loa and Orisha manifesting themselves in Cyberspace in the work of SF novelist and VR theorist William Gibson.

Or note that the most popular VR narrative of our time- The Matrix- also features MIBs as the heavies (as does its prototype, Dark City). Both films are also drenched in Mystery symbolism as well. One day we might see it all as a return to first principles.

There are greater mysteries though, ones which the Men in Black phenomenon raise. Our concept of physical reality is a reductive, artificial construct, created to facilitate a common consensus that allows the day-to-day responsibilities of life to be seen to. There are conscientious objectors to this construct though, ones you can't lynch or toss in prison.

Throughout history we've seen accounts of beings and objects which appear and disappear at will, often in front of large groups of ordinary citizens, sometimes in front of cameras. They don't care whether or not anyone believes in them or can explain them. They do what they want and don't worry much about the consequences.

The UFO isn't so easy to explain away, though not for lack of trying. But these anomalous beings are a different story. I've encountered a couple of them myself, and the lingering question in my mind is still "what the fuck was that?" But the fact that other people across time and geography have had identical experiences leads me to believe it was not my imagination.

One thing people who have these experiences can speak to is how random, and well, totally irrelevant these encounters can be. They usually explain nothing, they accomplish nothing, and they confirm or deny no deep-seated need; they just are. Dreams can usually be traced to psychological urges, hallucinations less so but still seem to fit into some larger psychic context. Encounters with what UFO heretics call "Ultraterrestrials" usually make no damn sense at all.

And then there are Men in Black. There are a whole host of explanations that can easily explain the phenomenon as gov't agents, pranksters, or simple hoaxes. But what matters is not the encounter so much as the result. What was the result of this encounter? If it radically changed the course of a person's life, chances are pretty good that something important is at work. If they scare people, they just as often as not scare them into a heightened awareness of deeper realities than the shampoo commercial reality the snitches and debunkers demand we all be forced to live in.

I'd go even farther- I think we'd sooner trust the reality of a demonic encounter than an angelic one. We tend-- and with good reason-- to dismiss stories of angelic encounters, whether in their Biblical or Space Brother incarnations. In fact, a lot of people are inclined to interpret angels as devils in disguise; leading their victims to disaster by hypnotizing them with pretty promises. In contrast a Man in Black seems to be a WYSIWYG proposition.

But ask yourself: are these MIBs doing God's or the Devil's work? Warning a witness not to talk about their sighting, not to pursue the matter at all; well, to some people that can be seen as a nasty business. But those of us who've seen how UFOlogy can consume or destroy lives, by becoming a career-killing and wallet-draining obsession, aren't quite so sure. Reporting a UFO or abduction experience can open a person up to constant abuse and ridicule, which paradoxically often deepens the UFO obsession.

Would a devil really try to steer a poor soul away from that road? The more I read the lore, the more I'm reminded not of devils, but of those stern-faced angels in Sodom, darkly warning the populace of the hellfire about to rain from the Heavens.

If you really take the time to see past the skeptic-believer dichotomy, the UFO phenomenon takes on the feeling of theatre- a high theatre in the skies. The high weirdness of the entire UFO drama, the juicy bits that the fading nuts-n-bolts crowd dismiss out of hand, starts to feel less anomalous than typical the more you really look at it. If you dispense with the pulp sci-fi trappings and set your sights before 1947 on the timeline, what seems bizarre and ridiculous starts to make a lot more sense.

Many of the old UFO legends- the men like Kenneth Arnold and Aime Michel, not to mention John Keel and Jacques Vallee- dispensed with the invader from Zeta Reticuli mythology and came to realize that UFOs and their aftershocks have been our intimate companions since we lived in trees and caves. But this exegesis is a lot less comforting than the idea of space saviors to the believer, and heart-stoppingly terrifying to the Debunker.

We all have a normality bias. In fact, for nearly 25 years I dismissed what I now see as a classic UFO encounter as a "swamp gas" sighting with weird after-effects. And for good reason; I happened to be driving through the Great Swamp of New Jersey (immortalized in Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast). But it wasn't until I actually researched swamp gas (or foxfire or Will o' the Wisp or faerie fyre or take your pick) that I realized there's no way it could have been swamp gas.

I was my own debunker: I latched onto some weak, lameass excuse, one that didn't hold up to serious scrutiny and set it all in stone. I realize today I did so because the experience was pretty unsettling, and not unlike any number of Man in Black encounters.

It happened one night when my wife, myself and our infant son were driving Great Swamp Road to the 24-hour Pathmark supermarket. We kept weird hours at the time. We had a Volkswagen Rabbit convertible, and since it was warm we probably would have had the top down.

At some point I noticed three stars in formation over the tree line; a bit on the bright side, similar to Venus on a good night, but nothing out of the ordinary. They weren't blinking so they probably weren't planes or choppers and it would be years before anyone around heard of Chinese lanterns.

The trees were in full bloom and blocked out the sky on much of the drive, but every time we came to a break in the treeline I noticed the positions of the stars changed. And noticeably so, from a straight line to a triangle to an inverse triangle and so on. I wasn't thinking about UFOs at the time, so I don't remember exactly what I thought it was. Just weird.

It got weirder.

After shopping, we were getting ready to leave and a strange man approached us in the nearly deserted parking lot, very much intruding into our personal space. He was no Man in Black. Actually, he looked more like a typical CSICOP debunker-type; big and bloated, late middle-aged, bespectacled and unkempt.

He spoke in a Eastern European accent, feeding us some bullshit story that he had some baby furniture he was trying to get rid of. I didn't believe it for a second. I seem to remember he wanted us to follow him to his house to pick it up- it was getting close to midnight. And my wife recently reminded me he also offered his services as a sitter.

Yeah. Brrrr.

As I loaded the groceries I spotted a slovenly older woman watching all of this, obviously his wife. She was leaning on a beat-up old Ford LTD wagon, her arms stiffly folded at her chest looking like a woman watching a nightmare she didn't have the will to stop.

I wasn't having any of it. I physically placed myself between the man and my own wife and dismissed him with clenched-teeth pleasantries. I'm six foot five and was pretty fit at the time, so the guy backed off and returned to the car. As we were getting ready to leave I noticed him sitting in his darkened car, smoking and staring at us very intently. His wife's face still looked etched with a mix of anger, fear and humiliation, even in the dark.

To some abduction researchers this might sound like a typical screen memory of an encounter- a young family driving down a dark, deserted country road, strange lights in the sky, an anomalous encounter with a creepy stranger speaking in a foreign accent.

To Debunkers, always eager to rationalize any kind of predatory behavior directed at young children, I'm making something of nothing. A Debunker would also double down on the setting of the sighting and kick and screech and foam that it just had to have been swamp gas, Mommy!

It's immaterial because what really interests me here is the synchronicity and symbol that accompanies so many encounters with UFOs. We were driving through a landmark featured in one of the pivotal events of 20th Century UFOlogy and my wife's name --Elizabeth Knowles-- is etymologically identical to Elizabeth "Betty" Hill, who had her own world-changing encounter with the hidden world one balmy evening. Facts I was unaware of at the time, I might add.

To others this might confirm the demonic nature of UFOs; a sighting followed by a confrontation that sounds like something out one of those horrible "true crime" magazines. But I don't see it that way myself. At the time I was under the illusion that the world was conspiring on my behalf and nothing bad would ever happen to me again; you know, the stupid shit that kids in their early 20s like to believe. But maybe if the utter weirdness of the light show in the sky hadn't interrupted my reverie, I might have bought this character's bullshit story and paid a terrible price for my naivete.

Even if we rightfully mistrust Space Brothers and Fairy Godmothers, we still operate under the assumption that pleasant events help us and unpleasant events hurt us. For my money that's a dangerously naive view.

Encounters with Men in Black or the like might be scary, but if they lead to a more holistic view of reality-- maybe even a more cautious or skeptical one, if you will-- then perhaps we should think about these things a bit differently.

Meister Eckhart taught that the devils in Purgatory were actually angels, who were tearing away our attachments to the physical plane to allow us to move on to the next. Whatever tears away our attachment to the politically-motivated fiction we call consensus reality-- no matter how unpleasant it might be at the time-- can't but help but be a blessing in disguise.

I tend to agree with the view in High Weirdness circles that nothing entities like Men in Black say or do should be trusted or taken at face value. But I also believe that these entities could be directed by something else entirely for reasons it's up to us to figure out.

If these encounters are frightening or intimidating that only means we should treat these experiences all the more seriously. It could well mean that somebody- or something- is trying to get your attention. The least you can do is pay it.

The Invaders as Metaphor

2013-01-01T12:23:00.001-05:00

We talked on The Sun about Roy Thinnes and his role in the proto-X-Files TV movie The Norliss Tapes, produced by the late, great Dan Curtis. Here he is another proto-X-Files, Larry Cohen's UFO invasion drama, The Invaders.

It's not hard to see the roots of Fox Mulder in Thinnes' deadpan-cool David Vincent or The Invaders' melding of political conspiracy, procedural crime drama and sci-fi. Take this, the occult detective conventions of Kolchak and the sexual chemistry of Steed and Peel on The Avengers TV series and you pretty much have a good elevator pitch for TXF.

Thinnes was cast on The X-Files as Jeremiah Smith for the two-parter 'Talitha Cumi'/'Herrenvolk', made while Chris Carter was literally working around the clock on both X-Files and Millennium. Perhaps sensing a missed opportunity, Carter brought Thinnes back for the pivotal Season Eight ep, 'This is Not Happening', a much better use of the character.

The Organization in the episode is nothing like the Mafia, it's on another level entirely. It's more like the secret society in Cohen's masterpiece God Told Me To, and the subtext and symbolism at work is remarkably similar as well. There's a violation at work here, genre boundaries aren't the only thing being fucked with in The Invaders. Another foreshadowing of The X-Files there.

But that's not what the fans want, is it? Most online X-Files fans gravitate towards the simple and distinctly unchallenging stuff- the monsters and the comedies. The stuff that is very comfortably unreal.

This impulse has only deepened in the days since 9/11- Lost and Battlestar Galactica might have had pretensions on top of their pretensions, but in the end they were both pure escapism. As reassuringly distant and safe as Gilligan's Island and well, the original Battlestar Galactica.

As with The X-Files mytharc, the aliens of The Invaders are simply metaphors for very, very real dangers, for forces that have only grown more powerful since the 1960s. There's no comfort in this series, which was its real downfall. The tension is unrelieved. For all its bows to mainstream TV convention, there's a dissonant note beneath the crescendoes, one that never quite goes away.

Note: This episode features an absolutely stunning performance by character actor JD Cannon.

The Man from Planet X, or Postcards from Nibiru

2012-12-12T22:32:00.001-05:00

Well, here we are- the big countdown. 2012 hysteria seems to have collapsed under its own weight, despite all of the hucksters who've been laboring tirelessly to cash in on it. I have to say I was always a bit bemused by the 2012 thing, since the first I heard of it was when Jose Arguelles and crew were pushing the Harmonic Convergence, an event that catalyzed the emerging New Age movement at the same time it dumbed it down to its present state.

Even so, people took the y2K thing a lot more seriously than y2012K, which was helped along by its higher degree of plausibility (and the dark passions of a somewhat more sinister huckster, theofascist Gary North), but the day I received my new credit cards in 1998, all sporting the dreaded "2000" on their faces, I had a feeling the bullet would be dodged.

One of the stranger 2012 theories out there had it that Planet X (aka Nibiru) was going to collide with Earth or the Moon, or experience a catastrophic near-miss. According to Wikipedia, this theory was popularized by one Nancy Lieder, who claimed that Reticulan Greys had warned of the coming collision (Lieder obviously never read John Keel, for surely she would realize that those pesky Greys are notorious pranksters).

Wiki's source for this source seems to the Amazing Randi's former right-hand man Phil Plait†. The Bad Astronomy scold never tires of probing the bowels of the Interwebs for the fringiest strawmen, in order to discredit anyone who deviates a whisper of a hair away from the corporate dictates of the "Science" wing of the Military Industrial Complex.

But you don't need a full-time skepdick to tell you that if Nibiru were coming to ruin our Christmas that it would have shown up already. Amateur astronomers would have spotted it years ago, even with rudimentary backyard telescopes. Or with the naked eye, at this stage of the game.

All of this ultimately serves to shut people up about the mysteriously crowded Transplutonian reaches of the Solar System by associating free inquiry with Space Brother silliness. There was certainly a concerted effort to lay all this y2012k hysteria at Zechariah Sitchin's doorstep, which led an obviously-annoyed Sitchin to publicly denounce it all.

But speculation about a Planet X- or even a dwarf star- lurking out beyond our reach is nothing new. It's a hoary old past-time for starwatchers. And it's not just the Reticulan pen-pals who wonder what's out there; NASA and other space agencies are looking too.

Pluto wasn't discovered until fairly recently (1930, to be precise), and an even larger body dubbed Eris was discovered in 2003, practically yesterday in Astronomical terms. The discovery of Eris seemed to lead to Pluto being stripped of planet status a couple years back, a move that may be justifiable in some circles but seems somewhat suspicious in the context of the endless arbitrary changes being forced down our throats from every corner of the power structure.

All of which is to say that if you're smart you'll take everything that the so-called scientific establishment says with a grain of salt. As mentioned before, all the silly geek hype these days obscures the fact that scientists are nothing more than waterboys for the transnational corporate elite, and fraud and deception in establishment science has now reached epidemic levels.*

But whatever the facts may be of whatever lurks out there beyond Pluto, my question is the same as always: "Yes, but does it make for good science fiction?" In that spirit, I'd offer up this 1951 obscurity for your consideration, The Man from Planet X, a very fine serving of sci-fi indeed.

It's more a gothic horror film than a sci-fi romp, actually, with the alien in the role of vampire or sorcerer. There's plenty of what Chris Carter called "the Sherlock Holmes," meaning a misty, mysterious ambiance, specifically that of the Scottish moors. We not only get a Planet X flyby in this 1951 thriller, there's that pesky mind-control subplot which was later recycled for Invaders from Mars.

Bruce Rux has argued that MK Ultra wasn't inspired by reports of Soviet and Chinese brainwashing during the Cold War like we've been lead to believe, but from then-classified reports of alien contacts, specifically daylight encounters in Europe in the early 1950s. The evidence for Communist MK was rather thin actually, simply a bunch of statistics showing that Allied POWs in Korea had very low escape-attempt numbers. There's such a string of alien MK stories in movies preceding the Betty and Barney Hill brouhaha that you can't help but wonder sometimes.

The Man from Planet X also has strong foreshadowing of Night Slaves as well as politically incorrect depiction of a scientist performing acts of torture and sadism. All in all it's a terrific example of Cold War sci-fi as well as an early entry in the alien-occult narrative synthesis. I think it had a powerful influence on the producers of Doctor Who, since it strongly anticipates the appearance of the Cybermen at the end of William Hartnell's tenure. Old-school Whofans will definitely see what I mean.

There were some brilliant alien-themed sci-fi movies in the 50s and 60s as well as the 70s, films that resonate on levels the endless remakes of War of the Worlds we're bombarded with never could. It not only speaks to a stronger skillset among earlier writers but perhaps something more interesting and problematic as well. We won't be seeing anything of this caliber from Hollywood anytime soon, but there's no reason motivated independent filmmakers couldn't bring the brains back to the medium...

POSTSCRIPT: From the Secret Sun notice- "I can't quite explain why but these ostensible science-based narratives feel downright magickal to me, and reach into deep and strange reaches of my brain in a way that so much of the paranormal huffing and puffing out there can't begin to equal. It feels as if there's a parallel communication going on just beneath the surface here, a phenomenon I've been attempting to understand since 2001: A Space Odyssey blew my brains out."

† Randi must have mentored the younger Phil Plait in the arts of misdirection quite well, seeing as Plait manned the helm at the JREF (co-founded by convicted fraudster "Carlos," aka Jose Alvarez aka Deyvi Pena, a man who is curiously absent from the Randi and JREF wiki entries). Whether Plait will initiate his "adorable" young "friend" - a 13 year old YouTuber- into the Randiian dark arts remains to be seen.

*One day, future scientists will look on this current crop with the same disdain that the legions of scientists who enthusiastically plied their trade for the Nazis or the Soviets are regarded today, the eugenicists and phrenologists, the Stalinized scientists and so on.

The Culture of Surrender, or Cheeto-Eating Surrender Zombies

2012-12-08T21:12:00.001-05:00

The Walking Dead has been one of the great success stories in Geekdom. It's been racking up huge ratings on the AMC Channel (a one-time clearinghouse for Hollywood inventory that was repurposed as the boutique basic cable channel, with shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad) and record sales for its comic and trade paperback collections. It's made its creator Robert Kirkman fantastically rich, in an age when the millionaire comics auteur is largely a thing of the past.

The Walking Dead is essentially a serialization of George Romero's first two zombie films, 1968's ground-breaking Night of the Living Dead and its 1980 sequel Dawn of the Dead. Zombies have long been a fixture of pulp entertainment, but were always also-rans in the popcult sweepstakes. Romero's low-budget films were cult classics, but the 'Zombie Apocalypse' theme that he essentially created didn't truly resonate with the mass audience until The Walking Dead brought it all into the mainstream.

It all dovetailed with zombie chic, which has been all the rage in Geekdom, with zombie parties, zombie raves, zombie parades, you name it. Curiously, the horror subculture which birthed the Zombie Apocalypse fetish is pretty much dead in the water; vampires have been 'tweened to death, torture-porn, the post-Ringu remake craze and the mockumentary fad all played out their string, and monsters and slashers and Alien-clones fell victim to changing tastes and the inherent narrative limitations of the form.

So why are zombies so hot these days?

When I was young and alienated I used to have zombie nightmares. Looking back I see it as a kind of egocentric terror, that I was the only thinking human being in a world filled with undead automatons. I remember having these dreams around the time of Reagan's election, an obviously upsetting time for a young punk rocker. But that was a case of projection- kids today want to identify themselves as zombies, at the same time immerse themselves in paranoid fantasies like The Walking Dead.

I was an early fan of the comic, attracted by Tony Moore's art. But I soon grew tired of it, since the power of the zombie apocalypse narrative tends to lose its power as it drags on. I never thought it rose to the level of the original Dawn of the Dead, or even the remake. I've seen bits of the TV series and I'm sure it's all very well-produced and all the rest of it. But like nearly everything else on TV, I found I simply didn't want to suspend my disbelief long enough to watch an entire episode. The zombie myth is a hopeless, defeatist fantasy and I don't need any more of that shit in my life.

And I believe that it's precisely the defeatism that is so appealing to today's beaten down America. As with all apocalyptic fantasy, people who watch it always imagine themselves as one of the plucky survivors, not one of the poor bastards who gets ripped in two before the station break. The popularity of the series shows that there is no vision out there, no concept of the future. Aside from the crippling inequality that is putting all of us who aren't hedge fund pirates under enormous stress, the dominant intellectual fashion these days is a straining towards utter nihilism.

Out of a misguided reaction to the symbiotic relationship between religious fundamentalism and corporate hegemons, it's all the rage for young geeks to run around bigging up "Science" as a substitute religion, even though at its core, true science is simply a form of measuring physical phenomena through a process that reduces everything to its component parts.

Yet, those same hegemons control the application of science in its near-totality, and are using it to help establish broad-spectrum dominance that will be beyond all challenge. The same figures who are waved around like Medieval saints by gullible geeks are in fact all bought-and-sold-and-paid-for whores for the corporate elite. They have no choice at all if they want a living wage, an audience and access to a well-appointed laboratory.

Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when those same vassals run around preaching the Bankster worldview, albeit a politically correct variant thereof. Life is meaningless, the Universe has no purpose and nihilism is the only sensible philosophy. In other words, back to the Existentialist suicide culture that rose with the most recent triumph of the "Rational." That this is the worldview often espoused by sociopaths, tyrants and serial killers seems to escape everyone's notice.

So why should we be surprised by the popularity of the zombie, given that it's an inevitable by-product of the surrender culture being pushed by the Nihilist revival?

Defeatism is fool-proof. You can't control a positive outcome, but you can ensure a negative one simply by giving up and surrendering. Thus the ego is protected. Once the Skeptics feel they've done away with the paranormal (or dreamed up enough plausible denial to keep the Geeks on the plantation) and the Atheists feel they've destroyed Christianity (or until the Fundamentalists begin a serious pushback), the next step is destroying any kind or Science or technology that promises a different future than the Stalinist gulag state that the A+ crowd so desperately strains towards. It's already happening, with the Peak Oil crowd and the crypto-Luddites in obscure academic posts who are unilaterally deciding the limits of science, trying to harsh the mellow of Starfleet Academy applicants everywhere.

Just as the skeptics and debunkers were seen as passe and old-fashioned by the Nu Atheists, so to will the atheists be seen by the inevitable rise of the Nihilist, the terminus of the culture of defeat. Central to the Nihilist worldview is that all human endeavor is pointless. And soon the Nu Atheist movement will be controlled by the same elements that took over the New Left in the 70s, which will inevitably to the same internecine warfare that is the true passion of the Nihilist. That process has started in earnest already.

While these people sit around and destroy each other, don't expect the Right to sit idle and watch. As we've seen in Greece and Hungary, the Right often has a habit of taking electoral defeat as permission to move ever further to extremes. Although ever-optimistic liberals in America still believe the Republicans will come to their senses and fall in line with Obama's (read:Wall Street's) agenda, already we are seeing a movement to a new kind of ethnic nationalism, one that will dispense with the niceties of the Bush Era. How will the PZ Myers' and Bill Maher's respond once the debating ends and fists and bullets start flying? Whose side do they think the cops will take?

Hmm, come to think of it, maybe The Walking Dead isn't sci-fi. Maybe it's some kind of allegory for America's inevitable future under the false dichotomies that dominate political conversation, the pissing matches between elites carried over from the dorms of Choate and Andover. If those who don't subscribe to the Punch and Judy show don't start speaking up, it may yet come to pass.

The Delicious Subversion of Burn, Witch, Burn

2012-12-06T16:19:00.000-05:00

Contrary to what most people today might think, the current wave of skepticism and atheism is nothing new. It's not even unique to our recent history. In fact, the dominant voice of the Establishment and the media in the mid-20th Century was a cold, reductionist one, which had declared the final triumph of science and technology over every aspect of our lives and the environment. To the status quo it was just a matter of time before we lived in a Jetsons kind of world and all expressions of passion and irrationality would be erased from the human experience by the inevitable march of Progress.

Aside from the Evangelical enthusiasts- who were being managed quite skillfully by the National Security State- even the dominant religions were given over to an arid kind of ethical navel-gazing, and the 'Death of God' movement had taken hold in the seminaries, easing once-rabid denominations into a staid, company-man kind of Unitarianism, utterly stripped of any supernatural component at all.

By the early 60s, Rock n' Roll had been thoroughly defanged, with its stars either marginalized or sidelined; drafting Elvis(h) Presley into the Army was a definitive statement of intent on the part of the Establishment. Some rock stars like Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran conveniently met very early deaths in plane crashes and automobile accidents, as did Rebel Without a Cause star (and icon of youthful rebellion) James Dean. Inert folksingers like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary were all the rage on campus as was a kind of pseudo-existentialist intellectualism. Ayn Rand was being pushed by the CIA and other agencies as a modern-day guru, and she gratefully celebrated the modern CEO as the highest expression of Creation.

Freemasonry had been stripped of its esoteric and revolutionary impulses and had become an old boys club for ladder climbers. Even the though the parade of alien invasion films of the time would have you believing otherwise, UFOlogy was effectively quashed by the mid-50s and the FBI was monitoring the few groups and researchers left standing. Groups like Jack Parsons' OTO branch in Pasadena had wilted under the growing surveillance state, as did the nascent Wiccan movement in the UK.

But the esoteric and the irrational were not dead, they'd simply been shut out of the conversation by both the dominant consensus and a brow-beaten mass media. Just as it seemed the new Rationalism would triumph for good, counter-cultural energies would explode back into the mainstream and shake the world to its core. The pressures of a suffocating conformity, the escalating militarism of the Cold War and the sheer, oppressive boredom of mainstream entertainment - along with trickster elements like LSD-25- shattered the staid rationalism of the Establishment and opened more Pandora's boxes than you can count.

Burn, Witch, Burn (UK title Night of the Eagle) is a perfect foreshadowing of this explosion. Based on the Fritz Lieber novel Conjure Wife, the story presents an insufferably smug college professor who dances on the grave of Irrationality, not realizing that its occupant is merely sleeping. It will soon wake up from its slumber and shatter his orderly world to pieces.

Department S star Peter Wyndgarde is a revelation as the professor, and it's impossible not to see a young Richard Dawkins in his haughty, prissy performance. But he soon realizes to his horror that all of his career triumphs and victories were actually conjured by his doting wife, through the casting of spells. Janet Blair made her mark as a comedienne but is absolutely perfect in her role as the domestic sorceress.

The film argues, quite subversively, that Reason cannot survive without unreason and the irrational, because life itself is profoundly irrational. Which is why the Existentialists eventually came around to realizing that the only truly rational question that can be asked is whether or not you should commit suicide. Because as Evolution has proven time and again, only the irrational seem to survive in this insane, fallen world. The rationalists inevitably erase themselves. It's important to note here that the Existentialists gave way to the Occult Renaissance in Paris- Being and Nothingness passed into the endless night and the inevitable Morning of the Magicians.

Try as they might, the Rationalists have never quite managed to put the genie back in the bottle. And Burn, Witch, Burn is a brilliant foreshadowing of the rebirth of magick and the Irrational, using the very tools and technologies that the forces of Reason were once convinced would ensure the triumph of Enlightenment thinking.

Present demographic trends may well doom the Enlightenment to the dustbin of history and Burn, Witch, Burn brilliantly documents both its high-water mark and its inevitable self-immolation. The Dawkinses and the Randis are fighting a rear-guard action, and they know it. Only honest Rationalists like the late Christopher Hitchens will speak that truth out loud, and their barren legions will most likely spend their dotage attended to by stern-faced nurses in burqaas.

PS: If you get a chance, try to catch the American release of this on Netflix. It opens with an authentic sounding banishment ritual.

Marathon Weirdfest on The Hidden Experience

2012-12-03T23:04:00.006-05:00

Mike Clelland and I got down to it for a marathon, three-hour podcast on some of the mind-bending movies we've been digging into lately. From there the discussion travels down some very strange roads and covers some very weird ground.

Many people recognize the 1970s as the Golden Age of American Movies, but fewer realize that it was also a golden age for the cinema of the strange. The Internet has unearthed some long buried gems and Mike and I are there with our treasure map to help you discover some of these resonant, rewarding and downright magickal movies.

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From Hidden Experience:

There is an almost forgotten genre of film-making that emerged in a narrow chapter of the early 1970's. Within this sub-set is a messy blending of creepy occult, ancient aliens and UFO abduction, and many of these were made for TV movies. Something weird emerged that seems quite evocative looking back on it now.

We talk about The Stranger Within, The Cage (and lots of other Star Trek episodes), The Crimson Cult, Hangar 18, Night Slaves, Stephen King's Tommyknockers, Simon King of the Witches, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, In Search Of, the evangelical documentary Ancient Aliens De-Bunked, a series of 70's UFO documentaries with Rod Serling, the Stargate series, Mission from Mars, author Bruce Rux, the complicity of NASA in this weird mess, The Outer Limits, Night Slaves, Jeff Kripal, Jacques Vallee, remote viewing, Russel Targ, The Norrlis Tapes, The Invaders, Quinn Martin, The Mephisto Waltz, God Told Me To, Bedeviled with Louis Jourdan, Bill Cooper, Jack Webb's Project UFO and the genesis of the X-Files. (Whew!)

The Real Satanists and the Golden Age of Human Sacrifice

2012-11-29T19:48:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid there was a barber in Braintree Square we called the 'Satan Barber', because he left a lot of reading material in the waiting area with "Satan" emblazoned in the titles. No, he wasn't a disciple of Anton LaVey, he was a born-again Fundamentalist Christian and the books and pamphlets were the usual moronic garbage spewed out by hucksters like Hal Lindsey, Bob Larsen and Jack Chick.

But it spoke to a truth about the Fundamentalist movement- that it glorified Satan and Satanism far more than a thousand LaVeys could ever dream of.

Satan was everywhere in the Fundamentalist imagination, he was all-powerful and all-seeing and his minions were the rich and pretty people who ruled the world. His followers were privileged, well-connected, intelligent and glamorous and you were not. Satan knew your thoughts and your desires and was waiting around every corner to steal your soul.

God and Jesus were strangely impotent in the face of all this devilry, so much so that serious questions need to be raised over whom exactly this movement was/is worshiping. You don't need to necessarily love a deity to worship him- you think the ancient Greeks loved Zeus? You do need to live in awe of his power and accept him as lord of the world, which the Fundamentalists most certainly do.

What's more the modern movement itself was created by corporate titans and intel ghouls with one goal in mind- to empower the very same merciless, Social Darwinist, take-no-prisoners political and economic agenda that Ayn Rand, Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey made the central focus of their teachings. Not only do most Fundamentalists subscribe to those philosophies- in direct defiance of the Gospels- many now are openly championing the radical selfishness of Ayn Rand herself.

Allegedly a "Christian" book

The Satanic panics of the 70s and 80s were not entirely unjustified- they were fueled with great aplomb by Hollywood, which created a sense of paranoia with their endless stream of lurid films about Satan and Satanic cults, particularly in the wake of the success of Rosemary's Baby. People whose ability to distinguish between myth and reality was tenuous at best couldn't be faulted for thinking that the stories of omnipotent satanic cults behind every bush weren't true, given that they experienced that vision so powerfully with the movies. The most influential by far of these was The Exorcist, a movie based on the William Peter Blatty novel.

Blatty is a most interesting fellow- he was trained by Jesuits from kindergarten to college and considered becoming one himself. He entered the military instead and became head of the Air Force's Psychological Warfare unit. Quite an accomplishment.

He then wrote a novel stinking strongly of MK Ultra work in mental hospitals that was memorialized in two separate films, Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane and The Ninth Configuration. He went to work for the USIA before making it big in Hollywood.

Gee, that's quite an interesting resume, don't you think? Maybe you should read how about The Exorcist incorporated subliminal techniques developed by the CIA here.

And The Exorcist- which some might interpret as the twisted apologia of the torture and rape of a child by a priest, especially in light of Killer Kane- was instrumental in creating the religious paranoia that helped fuel the Religious Right. But it wasn't alone. There was a sub-genre of films that sowed the seeds, though probably inadvertently; the Pagan Revanchist film.

The Witches aka The Devil's Own (1966) was a kind of proto-Wicker Man- a story about a pagan cult in the English countryside which still practices human sacrifice. There's a whole genre of these films, including the American TV movie Dark Secret of Harvest Home, based on the Tom Tryon novel. These films also helped fuel satanic panic, though that wasn't necessarily the intent of the stories.

This film was originally written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, but got rewritten in production and uh, didn't come out so well. But it's an interesting historical curiosity- the same year saw the release of the similarly-themed Eye of the Devil, which launched Sharon Tate into stardom. The Witches stars another great 60s beauty- perennial Vogue cover girl Ingrid Brett, and my, is she easy on the eyes.

It's fascinating to me that these rather placid films sold themselves as horror films simply based on the fact that they revolved around human sacrifice. Why? Because Fundamentalism has worked very hard to revive the practice of human sacrifice, under the aegis of "exorcism" and "faith-healing" and "witch-hunting."

In many ways, this is a new golden age of human sacrifice. Every year hundreds of innocent children are murdered- often by their parents- in order to "glorify" Yahweh (or Allah). It could be an adult man beating out the devil in a small infant with his fists, a mother cutting off her baby's arms on Yahweh's orders, newly minted Christians burning young African orphans as "witches" or the devout parents depriving children of simple medical procedures that would save their lives.

When you allow or cause another human being to die to further the cause of your religious beliefs, you are engaging in human sacrifice. Period. Those who apologize for these practices are almost as guilty as the killers themselves.

The child who dies in agony because his parents believe dialysis is "against God's will" is no less dead than a child burned at the altar of Molech. In fact, his death was infinitely more cruel and unnecessary (and often even more agonizing), since children were usually only sacrificed in pagan times during periods of grave social crisis, such as droughts or plagues. The ancients didn't know any better- people today have no excuse.

Will our culture ever wake from this fever dream? Perhaps. But never underestimate the sheer venality of the human animal, who is always willing to project his own sins onto someone else so he can shed blood with a clean conscience.

The genius of the Fundamentalist movement was to take all that evil and sprinkle a few Bible quotes over it in order to make it more socially acceptable. There's not a sin or perversion that isn't indulged in within the walls of some "church" somewhere, all with the veneer of respectability and moral rectitude.

If there's a better description of Antichrist, I haven't heard it.

Telling Tales Out of School: Ritual of Evil

2012-11-26T21:47:00.003-05:00

Ritual of Evil (1970) was the second of two pilots for an unproduced series called Bedeviled. Inspired by the success of Rosemary's Baby, the films featured Louis Jourdan as an psychiatrist named David Sorrell who moonlights as an occult detective. They were also remarkably well rendered, all the more so considering they were TV movies. The first dealt with an occult secret society within a cutting edge laser research lab and the second dealt with kinky cults and the idle Hollywood rich.

Ritual is by far the more interesting of the two, all the more so given that its plot is ripe with parallels to the Manson Family case, though none of the details that people might normally focus on. Instead, it seems to be encoding details about Sharon Tate, the Process Church and the bad news party scene on Cielo Drive, all those details that didn't begin to surface until Ed Sanders' muckracking expose, The Family was published in 1971, a year after this film aired.

In Ritual, a rich young woman named Aline ("Alien") Wiley is discovered dead on a beach, and investigation into her death reveals that a satanic cult called Capricorn has been making the rounds in LA, spicing up the orgy scene with mock human sacrifices and black masses. At first suspicion falls on a folk singer (played by Georg Stanford Brown) who is lodging on the Wiley estate, especially since he recently spent time in prison on a drug rap.

Sorrell is treating Aline's younger sister who has the same childish, sing-songy malevolence we saw with Charlie's "angels"; Squeaky Fromme, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and the rest. She is plagued by dreams in which she becomes Aline, which couldn't help but remind me of Mansonisms like "By killing you, I'm killing me," and all of the rest of his beatnik-convict hooha.

It should also be noted that the Family chalked all of their activities up to "black magic" in the days immediately following the killings, an explanation that was later obscured by Charlie's race war theorizing.

But Sorrell soon learns that Aline was mixed up with Capricorn and used to bring hippies to her parties and subject them to nasty, satanically-tinged S/M games. These games then climax in the ritual sacrifice of a poor bearded hippie- that is to say, a Charles Manson-lookalike as sacrificial lamb (patsy?)- and Aline's own death. All of the mayhem is orchestrated by other parties, however, who use these dabblers and hippie wastrels as puppets. Oddly familiar somehow...

The patsy angle is only reinforced by the appearance of several Manson Oswalds. Whoever wrote this thing knew their Weirdness. And their semiotics: naming a satanic cult "Capricorn" would do nicely if you wanted to create a Process Church analog, considering that they worshiped Christ and Satan in equal measure. Christ was born in the sign of Capricorn.

All of which has eerie parallels to the bloody goings-on the previous summer in the real Los Angeles. Bobby Beausoleil had told British journalist Barney Hoskyns that like the fictional Aline, 'Sharon Tate and that gang . . . picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them', while Dennis Hopper told The LA Free Press that Tate and her circle fallen into "masochism and bestiality" and that they recorded it all on videotape.

Hopper also claimed that three days before the murders twenty five people were invited to a mass whipping of a Sunset Strip dealer who'd given them bad dope. I can't quite find the exact scene but I seem to remember that 25 people attended the black mass referred to in Ritual of Evil.

Producer Terry Melcher - son of aging Hollywood sweetheart Doris Day- who had rented the house on Cielo Drive- hinted that Tate and her circle were dabbling in Satanism and had presumed the murders "had something to do with Rosemary's Baby." Like Hopper, Melcher reported that the new tenants shot homemade S/M porno movies with Hollywood players in starring roles. Likewise, the goings-on in Ritual of Evil take place in the home of an aging Hollywood star, played by Ann Baxter.

Some had speculated that Manson was seeking revenge on Melcher, who tried to record some demos of Charlie's songs. The folksinger here is black and Manson of course is a racist paranoid, but damn if the songs Brown's character don't remind us a lot of Manson's own meandering, preachy compositions. And Brown is shown recording demos in the aging movie star's guest house in the film.

The links between Brown's character and Capricorn aren't as direct as those between the Process Church of the Final Judgment and Charles Manson, but they're there nonetheless. Gary Lachman wrote in Fortean Times:

They set up a church at 407 Cole Street. Their neighbour at 636 Cole was someone who would cause them a lot of grief in a year or so. His name was Charles Manson, soon to become the head of the Family responsible for the gruesome Tate-Labianca murders in August of 1969. At that time, Charlie was still an ex-con petty thief, strumming a guitar among the debris of the flower children, languishing amidst the ruins of the Summer of Love. By the end of the decade he was one of the most famous people alive, a cause célèbre in the counter-culture, Satan incarnate for the Establishment. For the Process he spelled doom.

Similarly, Brown's character lives adjacent to the leader of Capricorn and is the linchpin in their undoing. As with The Process, we see that the male leader of Capricorn is merely a figurehead for the real power behind the throne. Harking back to Hopper's bestiality claims, there is also a strange and somewhat oblique relationship to a dog in Ritual of Evil. We learn that the dog attended all of Aline's parties (nudge, nudge).

The dogs are yet another Process Church signifier- Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston were well-known for their love of formidable-looking dogs, and Mary Anne later reinvented the Church as the Best Friends Animal Society, specializing in dog rescue.

I'm willing to bet that the producers of The X-Files were fans of this film as well, since as you'll see that some of the central plot points- those that aren't hidden Manson allegories- showed up in a second season episode of the show. I won't spoil it for you, but Philes will certainly see the homage here.

As always, details and clues I didn't catch are always sought after in the comments section. Click through the links on the video or visit the YouTube link to watch the entire episode.

Oh, I nearly forgot- one of the witches is portrayed by the late Diana Hyland, who was best known as John Travolta's lover at the time of her death in 1977. Given the connections with the Process to Scientology, that seems to have added resonance in this context.

Saturday Matinee: The Crimson Cult (UPDATED)

2012-11-26T11:45:00.000-05:00

Although The Wicker Man is the best-known- and the best overall, I'd argue- it was only one example of an entire genre of British occult thrillers, many of which starred the estimable Christopher Lee. Many of these films also featured thinly-veiled Aleister Crowley analogs, the best of these being 1957s Night of the Demon (based on the M.R. James short story, 'Casting the Runes'), which featured a brilliant performance by Niall MacGinnis as the malevolent manchild of a sorcerer, "Julian Carswell."

The genre wasn't limited to Britain- one of my favorite films of all time is Quinn Martin's (of Invaders fame) adaption of Fred Mustard Stewart's The Mephisto Waltz, which is not only an absolutely brilliant piece of writing on its own, but has the added bonus of a young and impossibly gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset in the lead role.

But more often than not, Hollywood lapses into stripmall Satanism of the Anton LaVey variety, rather than more nuanced and resonant black magic of the Crowley stripe (maybe Tinseltown execs are required to pay more explicit tribute to their Lord and Master, and have a quota to fill). The wretched abortion that resulted when they consumed the Hellblazer franchise and then shat out Constantine is just one painful example of this dumbing-down tendency.

After seeing Neil LaBute kick The Wicker Man to death and piss on its corpse, I shudder to think what they'd do with Crimson Cult aka Curse of the Crimson Altar. This sparkler of a Swinging Sixties scarefest not only features Christopher Lee warming up for his Lord Summerisle role, but throws in Boris Karloff to sweeten the deal. Of course, there's also plenty of nubile British flesh dancing around to the kind of corny, movie soundtrack pseudo-rock that no Mod or hippie of the time would be caught dead in earshot of.

The story is as muddled and confusing as any Hammer horror. Mark Eden (looking eerily like a refugee from an early period Guy Ritchie film) plays an antique dealer who goes looking for his brother, who was last heard from in some provincial backwater. Eden then discovers all kinds of Dionysian debauchery and carrying on and makes the classic old horror movie mistake- he accepts the lodging invitation of the creepy lord of the manor (Lee). Things go predictably awry from there.

But what fascinates me about this film (aside from the obvious) is the incongruous parallels to UFOlogy. I'm sure they'd go over the heads of nearly everyone who sees the film, but in several points in the film characters are transported into a netherworld which bears not only a startling similarity to the more compelling "abduction" narratives I've read (and more specifically, my interpretation thereof), but also to their ancient forerunners in the Mysteries. Drugs seem to be the common denominator, but as we see in the final shot nothing is as it seems.

There are also the strange incongruities of Livinia having green skin (more appropriate to an alien than a Druidess) and her throne looking as if it's made of three-stage Saturn rocket models. Just to make things even more tantalizing, one of the characters is menaced by a classic MIB type (pale skin, black clothes/dark glasses, mute) following one of his abduction experiences. I won't give it away but underneath all the drama is a classic Walk-in subplot as well.

Heady stuff, though I'm sure it all went under the radar of anyone who isn't as obsessed with this stuff as myself.

But perhaps the screenwriter here will give us a few clues- it's none other than Henry Lincoln. Yes, that Henry Lincoln of Holy Blood, Holy Grail fame. What a lot of people don't realize is that aside from being one of the authors of the most lucrative occult conspiracy theory in publishing history (albeit when hijacked by Dan Brown), Lincoln was also a very successful actor and screenwriter.

Lincoln's CV includes a stint for the Doctor Who franchise (Lincoln created the Lethbridge-Stewart character) , and he's credited with three Troughton-era serials (17 episodes in all), two of which were Bigfoot/Yeti-themed and one of which was an alien-invasion potboiler.

It should be pointed out that the original Doctor Who pilot episode was essentially an abduction narrative as well.

You can watch The Crimson Cult in its entirety right here on The Satellite (or on Netflix if you prefer). There are a lot worse ways to spend a chilly November Saturday. Please share any notes or clues I missed.

POSTSCRIPT: This writer (and others) argues that the film is a loose adaptation of Lovecraft's 'Dreams in the Witch House'. It's so loose I didn't see it myself (there's no Brown Jenkin in sight) but it certainly adds another log to our bonfire...

UPDATE: Mike Clelland spent time with the film and offers up these scintillating bullet points. It seems there's enough to make a fair assessment that there are two stories being told here- one for the rubes and another for those in the know. Remember that this was made in 1968, when abduction reports were still being classified and the Betty and Barney Hill story was still a novelty.

~ Our protagonist, Richard Manning, said: "I had the strangest dream... It was so real, like it was really happening... It was like no other dream I've ever had..." This is exactly how almost every UFO abductee will describe their own experiences.

~ Lying naked on a table and unable to move is well established.

~ Waking up in an unknown place, with no idea how you got there.

~ Finding scars or marks on your body after waking with no idea how they got there.

~ I found it curious that the protagonist was put in the "GRAY" room.

~ Our protagonist saw a man with antlers. It very commonly reported that people will see a deer, and it will seem out of place, this turns out to be a screen memory.

~ People will often report a long needle like instrument as part of their alien medical examination. There is an antique needle like dagger is featured in the plot. A similar needle like instument was featured in The X-Files.

~ UFO reports (as well as other paranormal events) are reported along ley lines and near ancient ritual sites. The village and the ritual reenactments of the witch burning seem to fit.

~ Curiously, fear of closet doors shows up in the research. The gray aliens are noted to emerge from this door as if it were a portal. (The movie MONSTERS INC. comes to mind). Or, the aliens will simple emerge through the bedroom wall. The secret door in the home certainly seem to parallel this concept of a portal.

~ The use of hypnosis is ever present in UFO abduction research.

~ There is certainly a focus on family lineage within the abduction phenomenon.

~ There is weird sex involved in UFO abduction reports.

~ Gaelic or Celtic ancestry is noted as statistically higher in the UFO abduction lore.

Night Slaves and the Magonian Subgenre

2012-11-22T12:13:00.002-05:00

Thanks to the blessings of YouTube and Netflix, I've discovered this strange Magonian subgenre of old movies, dealing with UFOs and so on in a way infinitely more interesting and sophisticated way than the brain-dead garbage Hollywood pukes out these days. Some of them even showed up as made-for-TV movies in the 70s, strangely enough.

Mike Clelland has been obsessing on a TV movie version of Richard Matheson's short story 'Trespass' called The Stranger Within, with former TV djinn Barbara Eden (seriously, does it get any more semiotically loaded than that?) a production I have to admit punched me in the side of the head with a couple frighteningly specific personal syncs. There's also Alien Lover, which introduced a fresh-faced young Kate Mulgrew to the public.

Then there's Night Slaves, an offering that Stephen King simply pasted together with Quatermass and the Pit and made millions re-selling to the public as The Tommyknockers. Watch both movies and you'll see exactly what I mean- a more blatant example of caution-to-the-wind plagiarism has rarely seen print.

Night Slaves features the king of 70s corn James Franciscus playing a distinctly unconvincing dropout, a pre-parody Leslie Nielsen exuding simian menace, Lee Grant at the peak of her gorgeous elegance, Witch-King Andrew Prine, and an irresistible alien cupcake played with giddy aplomb by the doe-eyed Tisha Sterling. And it was all produced by Bing Crosby's outfit, of all people.

In other words, it's absolute godhead.

Unlike all the endless War of the Worlds knockoffs, these Magonian films will insinuate themselves very quietly into your unconscious and stay there. After watching, my mind is given to strange flights of fancy, pondering on how the Signal seemed to reach more minds before the airwaves were crammed to capacity with electromagnetic junk. Or wondering if the entire cell network-- phones, iPads, you name it-- is all operated at a massive financial loss in order to intercept the Signal and keep us trapped in ape-mode forever. Crazy stuff like that.

Crawling From The Wreckage

2012-11-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

It's not every day you live through a Superstorm. And even though we didn't get the flooding that the coastal areas received, it doesn't mean we didn't get hammered hard by Sandy. Apparently, we were one of the hardest hit outside the Shore.

Interesting to note that the Superstorm was given an androgynous name. I keep picturing it as a Rebis-Kraken hybrid, tear-assing across Jersey looking for the shit- and that it all was foreshadowed by a major solar blowup just a week before.

Having lived now through Irene, Sandy and the Halloween blizzard (by far the most terrifying for me personally, listening hopelessly as trees and branches exploded like fireworks), I can say with total confidence that we're completely at Mother Nature's mercy.

More accurately, it feels to me as if Mother Earth and Father Sun are going through a rough patch in their relationship, and as usual the kids take the brunt of it. All of which is to say that there were superstorms long before carbon credits, so I wouldn't pull the hairshirt out quite yet. Climate change is here, but it's simply making an encore appearance.

Some might say a political agenda obscures the role of solar activity in climate change, but I say it's just as much a function of hubris- if we're causing it, it means we are the masters of our dominion and we can stop it. Good luck with that. I've said all along this planet is an extremely dangerous place- maybe some people are starting to realize that now.

Living with chronic pain gives you a different POV on human omnipotence- rather, pretensions thereto. The superstorm kicked my ass up and down the street - we painsters live at the mercy of the barometer- and just to rub salt in my trigger points, Athena (the newly dubbed Nor'easter) came along added a few more days of sheer bloody hell to my life. 2012 has been a particularly rough patch of a year, though I'm starting to wonder if Jersey's insane-ass climate will force me out of the state for good.

We lost power for more than a week, and other than it being cold as balls at night, I didn't exactly miss it. I got a strange adrenaline rush from the superstorm- it was one of the most surreal events of my life- that lasted most of the week until it crashed hard with Athena. The recovery was much longer than the rush.

Seeing your landscape transformed will do that- the destruction just within walking distance of my house was like nothing I'd see outside of a particularly pessimistic 70s drive-in movie. I must add that we saw ball lightning dancing the street during the storm, just because this neighborhood isn't weird enough already.

We've been sold a wired future, but what happens when the wires are ripped from their settings every six months or so? We've already had three major blackout events in less than 18 months here, and when the power goes out our entire economy goes with it. That's an untenable situation. But the reality is that putting wires underground is extremely expensive. Rock, meet Hard Place.

Kevin Kelly never warned me of this eventuality back in 1993. He didn't warn me about fistfights over gasoline, empty shelves - at Walmart, at all places, and the entire local economy stopping in its tracks for more than a week as transmitters littered the streets like roadkill.

Of course, I believe in signals from transmitters as yet unknown and I can't help but think of the timing here. I put The Secret Sun on hiatus the Thursday before Sandy, having no clue what was coming until my doctor told me the next day I should take special care because a Nor'easter was on the way. He said nothing about a superstorm.

So I put The Sun on hold in order to concentrate on other pressing matters, one of which was getting my drawing chops back in shape. Actually, getting my chops in the best shape of their life. I was distraught because as I mentioned on The Sun, I simply can't sit at a table and draw- it puts too much pressure on my trigger points.

But an old lapboard with a cushioned underside showed up while we were moving stuff around (you gotta do something when the juice is off) and I discovered it was quite ergonomical to use in bed or on a couch. I also found a file of old sketches that I had been working on in hopes of developing a new style from a few years back. So with fuckall else to do I spent a lot of time- mostly at night- with a reading light, a lapboard, some recycled paper and a bunch of markers. It was just what the doctor ordered.

Funny how that works sometimes.

Now I'm wracking my brains trying to figure out how to bring it all together. I haven't yet, but I love drawing as much as writing, if not more. So I'd better think of something, sooner rather than later.

Another reason I put The Sun on hiatus was that after five years I was running out of things to write about that I felt were truly exceptional, that really channeled The Signal. There's no shortage of wannabes, and no shortage of pseudo-occult media, but I've been there and done all that a long time ago.

So until the Mystery Hour is up and running, this will be our new interface. I've repurposed this blog to be an outlet for the endless shitstorm inside my head, as well as to do more actual writing as opposed to writing at the end of endless hours of research. I'll be writing about things I think about but felt fell outside The Sun's mandate, something I was diligent in following. Politics, culture, science/tech, and more secular matters like that, as opposed to mystical explorations.

Ironically, I wrapped up Secret Sun v.1.7 feeling more confident in my theories and theses than ever. But at the same time I really wanted to return to some of the deep-sea diving I was doing into the Mysteries before I was worried about having to explain everything to an audience.

I was keenly aware that every piece I wrote was someone's first Secret Sun experience, and that anchored me in a way I feel is counterproductive at this point in my journey. I want to return to exploring these topics on my own and hopefully I'll be better able to communicate them in the future.

At the same time, I also plan to do some Secret Sun for Beginners posts. I'm often told the blog archives are too huge and intimidating so I thought it was a good idea to break in newbies- I just have to figure out how best to do that. I haven't yet but I will.

I can't make any promises as to posting frequency- I'm going to write when I have something to say. Just keep your eyes peeled and I promise to post notifications on the Facebook page as well.

Until next time.

Peter Steele crosses over...

2010-04-15T21:09:00.001-04:00

Rest in peace, brother...

Restoration Revelation: Goddess of the North

2010-04-10T15:01:00.002-04:00

It looks as if the Druids are rising once again in the British Isles:

Work is to start on a giant sculpture of a naked woman which is to be carved into the Northumberland landscape.

The "Goddess of the North" will be made from 1.5 million tonnes of earth from the Shotton mine, near Cramlington.

It will stand 34 metres - 10 metres higher than the Angel of the North - and will be 400 metres long.

Once developed, it is believed it will be the largest human form to be sculpted into the land, in the world.

UFO on the M5

2010-04-10T12:52:00.005-04:00

From The Sun:

TWO fighter jets are filmed whizzing over the M5 - apparently in pursuit of a UFO. A mystery cameraman took footage of the military aircraft chasing the shiny orb. The 30-second clip is believed to have been taken from a West Midlands service station car park.

Expert Nick Pope, who probed UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "This is one of the best videos I've seen. It could be a new drone - that might explain the military jets.

It certainly could be, but Pope notes that this isn't the time or place to test a drone, and we still haven't seen any confirmed drones with no external architecture, such as stabilizers and antennae.

Fringewatch: S2 Ep 17

2010-04-09T19:11:00.003-04:00

This was a good solid ep, if not a bit on the serviceable side. We start out expecting a standalone and end up back in the Mythology. The Jacksonville motif seems increasingly creepy in light of the of the scandals emanating from the Vatican, not to mention the daycare scares of the 80s. That being said, I'd like to see Olivia begin to manifest some interesting powers herself, aside from the vision thing.

The real treat this week (aside from the hypnotic Vancouver ambiance) was an uncredited guest appearance by Diane Kruger of Troy and National Treasure fame (and Joshua Jackson's GF, the lucky bastard). Sadly, it looks to be a one-off...

Non-US readers click here.

Malcolm McLaren 1946-2010

2010-04-08T23:00:00.002-04:00

Malcolm McLaren, the man who irreversibly changed the face of British music as manager of the Sex Pistols, died yesterday, aged 64.
He had suffered from cancer for some time and, despite a recent period of good health, his condition had deteriorated rapidly in recent days, according to his spokesman. He died in Switzerland yesterday morning and his body is expected to be flown home to be buried in Highgate cemetery, north London.
Those paying tribute to him last night included John Lydon, who poignantly signed his statement in the name of Johnny Rotten, the nom de guerre that the one-time enfant terrible used during his Sex Pistols days.

In the Strangest Places, pt. 3,419

2010-04-06T09:58:00.004-04:00

Asia was a punchline in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, but they were made up of some heavy duty prog vets from Yes, ELP and King Crimson who decided to to forget all of the wonky time-signature stuff and play the Top 40 sweepstakes. Matt from X-Files Lexicon sent along this video, with some fascinatingly incongruous Ishtar/Kali/Sekhmet destroyer-goddess imagery...

Dying, Rising

2010-04-04T14:58:00.003-04:00

I don't agree with Acharya S on any number of topics you can name, but I do appreciate her astounding research skills. She's revealed the complexity and diversity of indigenous European mythology, a topic that's usually dumbed down to the point of tedium. But for me the point is not to bash Judeo-Christianity as it is to unveil the rich heritage of indigenous European mythology and religious traditions, which has been hidden away from us by the collusion of the corporate, religious and academic power structures.

You can't truly control a people until you steal their gods and Europe's native gods were stolen almost 1700 years ago. But such is their power that they eventually colonized the colonizers and created a rich and dynamic culture throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And even today this process continues to evolve, as I wrote about in Our Gods Wear Spandex and in my upcoming book.

And now we see the old gods entertaining millions in movies, comic books, TV shows and video games in both their old guises and in new, which is as it should be. Bloodthirsty tyrants like Theodosius and Justinian didn't realize it at the time, but by relieving the gods of their cults and their priests and all of the whining supplicants they set them free, and allowed them to fight and fuck and fly across the imagination of billions of people across space and time.

The old gods were tired and worn out by the time of Caesar- the Church rendered them truly immortal.

Stations of the Sun, Redux Aeternus

2010-04-04T12:57:00.003-04:00

A classic song that still languishes in Bootlegville.

First line: "It was spring, so call it Easter.."

The Saturn Award

2010-04-03T21:11:00.001-04:00

The New Outer Limits won three of these for best anthology series. Fascinating design, don't you think?

TVOD: Fringe Rules, or The Sacred City of Sci-FI

2010-04-03T12:39:00.004-04:00

There's been a countless parade of X-Files imitators over the past 17 years, but only one show has risen to the level of the original. And have done so by peeling away all of the elements they borrowed from the X-Files in the first season. But also by undoing- reversing, really, The X-Files' great and tragic mistake by picking up stakes and moving the show up to Vancouver, the Sacred City of the Ongoing Sci-Fi Revelation.

Gratuitous Anna Torv eyecandy

The X-Files' ratings folded like a cheap suit after leaving Vancouver, a downward slide that stabilized only during the epochal Season Eight but then collapsed again after Fox forced a ninth season. I know Fringe's exodus was down to budgetary concerns, but it seems the old spirits of X-Files' past were waiting for Abrams and company there, and have inhabited the fledgling show like the XF Mytharc's Walk-Ins.

Keep it coming, guys. Non-US readers, click here to soak in the latest revelation.

Strangest NASA mission posters

2010-04-02T02:01:00.003-04:00

Here's a nice treasure trove of inhouse imagery from ~~NAZCA~~ NASA, which doubles as an interesting peek into their psyches. Seems that geekery is well-represented there, but then again geekery is becoming so dominant it may need to be called something else. Check out the gallery here.