Ex-CIA official corroberates Roswell

Chase Brandon, an ex-CIA operative has been making the usual media rounds sounding off about a plain black box he discovered in a warehouse.  He has appeared on Coast to Coast with George Noory twice  and has had numerous other sound bites in conventional media and the internet.

"I took the box down, lifted the lid up, rummaged around inside it, put the box back on the shelf and said, 'My god, it really happened!”
        -Brandon

He also goes on to talk about the virtue of the CIA and their non-affiliation with the Kennedy assassination.  But he doesn't discuss Roswell beyond the depth of the above quote.  He also reminds the audience that his new book is out, "The Cryptos Conundrum" and while it is fiction, if you read between the lines, you can figure out Roswell.

A good marketing campaign if I ever saw one.

But I doubt you can trust anything a CIA operative tells you, one way or another. They have life-long gag orders attached to them. The Central Intelligence Agency has two explicit jobs.  It gathers information, and it disseminates misinformation, to achieve the American government's goals.  This has been apparent in many operations from Grenada to the Korean War to the war in Afghanistan.  So there's no reason to assume that if Roswell did happen, the CIA would adopt a different MO.

If that is the case, then for over 50 years the CIA has enjoyed orchestrating this kind of data swarm to confuse people.  They could not outright destroy the evidence, but what they could do is encourage the most implausible conspiracy theories to the point where they were as credible as the truth.  The more crackpot ideas you nurture, the less likely the real witnesses would be taken seriously and the less likely the truth could be unquestionably revealed.  Text book year 1 law school.

National Cannibal Month

What have we got?  Face eaters in Florida.  Heart eaters in Maryland.  I even heard of a guy chewing the lips off a kitten in Jersey.  You can't make this stuff up people!   So in recognition of National Cannibal Month I decided to  defend something about zombies.

I recently read an article in a particular popular sci-fi/fantasy magazine about a guy who doesn't like zombies.  In fact he doesn't like horror period.  And he goes on for pages talking about how zombies and horror are stupid and how much he goes out of his way not to read the trash.  Fine.

Here's my thing.  Aren't you a fantasy writer?  Aren't fantasy and horror two different things?  In an age where we maybe give too much authority to the opinion of Authority in the first place it seems some people don't have enough opinion to fill their heads.

I am not a fantasy writer.  Just because the local library lumps horror and fantasy together to more effectively manage the budget of both does not give you the authority to judge my field.  I don't go to fantasy conventions and yell "fairies suck!"  just as I don't go to romance conventions and shout "well developed pectoral muscles suck!"

I don't like the genres because I don't understand them.  They deserve props all the same.

The point is, we shouldn't let anyone make us feel bad with their judgements.  Now matter how loud he is he can't mask the fact that he doesn't know what the hell he's talkin' bout.

Happy Father's Day!

I wanna go to Friendly's!

Vatican Absolves Aliens

In May of 2008, Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes, The Pope's cheif astronomer stated that it is acceptable to believe in aliens and that it in no way contradicts their view of God.

This includes, Funes asserted in an interview for the Vatican official newspaper, intelligent creatures free from original sin. 

"God became man in Jesus in order to save us. So if there are also other intelligent beings, it's not a given that they need redemption. They might have remained in full friendship with their creator," he said.

To paraphrase, the Catholic church, easily in the top 5 most conservative institutions in the entire world, the one that, over the ages, decried the heliocentric view of the universe,who waged many wars with disbelievers, costing countless lives, and fought Darwinian evolution vehimently up until this century, has told its parishioners that aliens are friends.

Quite an unlikely progressive leap for the organization to even voluntarily bring up the subject.  But somehow, for some reason they felt the time was right.  But there you have it, Catholics:  Aliens probably exist.  And they don't need to follow any version of your religion.  The social axiety aliens have for so long sufferred by the abject denial of existence is finally corrected.  Single parents, contraceptive users, jews, muslims, gays, there's still hope for you yet.

In addition to the Vatican's admission, world governments have begun to take unprecidented steps in disseminating previously classified information about UFO sightings and alien contact.  Including searchable public websites run by the French government and efforts by other Western governments (not U.S. so much) to do the same.  Russia, as well, is due to release substantial case studies this year.

If I didn't know any better, I could say the synchronization of these events prologues something in the near future.  I invite you to make what you will of it, however.

O...M...G...

That's about all I can say about these developments.  I may be a bit of a kook or whatever, and I love conspiracy theories more than most, but I'm writing this book as a work of complete fiction for the fun and benefit of all.  But I'm afraid  I might not get the chance to even publish it.

Why?

Because reality may be beating me to the punch.

Here is a map with the global location of all repotorted "Booms" that have been occuring since 2010.  You may have heard of them in passing on the news.  They're not really a big deal, they don't spend much time on it, and it's certainly not as big as the election and Syria and Trayvon Martin are.  But these mysterious sounds are everywhere!  Low, gutteral, grinding, metallic.

This boom phenomenon is all over Youtube.  Just search for "strange sounds" and see for yourself.  Watch a little of this compilation to get the gist if it.

Lots of different explanations have been given "officially"  for what is happening around the world but it is strange that the explanations are nowhere near as homogeneous as the phenomenon itself.  The Weather Channel calls it lightning storms, the United States Geological Society calls it shallow earthquakes,  the Russian government calls it underground explosions.

Hey, I'm a musician.  You mean to tell me that a multitude causes would just happen make so many of these booms occur at or near the same pitch, give or take dopler shift?

Unofficially, people outline a number of possible theories for the mechanical sounding noises.  But alas there is nothing that satisfys me as to the cause of this outbreak.  I just want to put it out there that we ARE in 2012 now and there has been an unprecidented amount of seismic activity going on.  Not to mention tornadoes just ripped through Texas like no one's business.  Trumpets herald a lot of events in the bible.  None I can think of are too savory.

I just want to leave you with this thought.  If you still aren't a believer  watch this video.  Try to watch it in its entirety but if you have to go soon, definitely don't miss the hysterical phone call near the end from 1997.  A scared man  purports to be an ex Area 51 employee.  He's called into a local talk station to add his 2 cents into the conversation.  I have to warn you.  If you find the recording credible, what he has to say is DISTURBING.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFRKJ6PZZ3c&feature=fvwrel

God speed, everyone.

UFO's in Art

Whether you think it's strange that people describe their supposed UFO encounters so eerily similar since the Roswell incident in the 40's, or you think it's just Hollywood-induced mass hysteria, you'll find this interesting...

This first image comes to us all the way from Tanzania, Africa, estimated to be about 29,000 years old.  It depicts a bit of a scuffle between four "men" over a female.  Notice also the boy in the box on the right.

A rock painting found in Sego Canyon Utah looks to have originated from about 5,500 B.C.

A Japanese print from about 900 A.D. depicts a sighting of what they called a "burning wheel" in the sky.

Citizens of central Europe once described a massive battle in the sky.

Obviously we get closer to modernity with this one, about 1400's, depicting a loyal paladin celebrating the coming of a star.  Notice the detail on the object in the sky.

Mary and her new baby.

The same fresco blown up, the detail is painstaking.  Notice the man and his dog witnessing it.  Circa 15th century.

Things actually don't change all that much.

Doomsday Preppers

Tuesdays at 9 on Nat Geo.  A quirky trip into equal parts ingenuity and paranoia.  Check it out.

Anatomy of an alien

One of the funnest things about coming up with fictional alien races is that there are so many possibilities to play with, yet challenging if you want it to feel plausible.  Scientists believe that, observing species on earth, there are similar structures that appear on animals time and time again, dispite being separated by billions of years of evolution.  Take the dolphin, which at one point its ancestors had legs, now looks more fish than anything, complete with a dorsal fin.  In similar environments, similar structures occur practically by necessity.

Super-intelligent species would almost certainly occur on land, never in liquid.  This is due to the limits of energy discovery that they would inevitably have to conquer in order to build spaceships to invade Earth later on.  Fire doesn't work very well in water.  And would probably be a disaterous idea in a methane lake of some sort.  But fire is the start of it all.  Fire unlocks energy and is the next logical step to the discovery of fossil fuels: easily found sources of energy that need no refining.  Then later on you can get into nuclear energy and ion drives and anti-matter engines once you learn that all mass has potential energy, but fire is that first crucial step.  Therefore their old world has to be a lot like ours.  A planet rich with oxygen to let fire burn.  Oxygenating organisms that are plentiful like our plants and algae.  And of course water which can be broken down by these organisms into hydrogen and oxygen.

We already have a lot in common.  But why would the aliens find fire useful in the first place?  The big answer is warmth and defense.  This tells us even more about them.  They are vulnerable, just like us.  In humanity's case walking on two legs makes us slow and travel more difficult.  Our ancestors made semipermanent camps because walking sucks.  Fire helped us on cold nights.  We also had trouble evading enemy species and again fire was our savior, scaring the tigers off.  Same with the aliens.  They are physically not the most formidable species on the planet (and frankly if they are that smart I'd hate to see what kind of dangers populate their planet).  If they were the perfect species they wouldn't have any reason to manipulate the environment in their favor and thus grow smarter.  Sharks, perfect survival machines, have remained more or less the same for eons and they are dumb as nails.  That said, once the aliens start manipulating genes and circumvent evolution altogether, all bets are off.

Here's a common depiction of a gray.

Nice big brain for complex data calculation.  Thin, frail body.  But what intrigues me the most are those eyes.  What kind of specialization goes into eyes like that?

Some say it's just  an exoskeleton manufactured for each one for space travel, so the eyes were made in a lab.  But if the eyes derived from evolution it's yet another piece of the puzzle.  Those eyes let in gigantic amounts of light compared to our own.  They may even see in infrared or ultraviolet.  Indicative, I think of their homes originating in a dying solar system, where the star has degenerated into a red giant, or even a white dwarf star which emits little light energy.

Poor guys.  No wonder they're loitering in our solar system.