The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Category “Uncategorized”

The Rashomon Brain: Hunting Duck/Rabbits, Seeing Multiple Realities

Sunday, 1 March, 2015

“A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a coconut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and picks them up. She gets very sad of course and cries heart […]

The Passion of Einstein: Light, Spacetime, and the Holy Grail

Sunday, 8 February, 2015

In David Lindsay’s bizarre Gnostic allegory A Voyage to Arcturus, space travel is accomplished by means of “back light”—light rays that strive to return to their origin. A bottle of back light gathered through a telescope aimed at Arcturus is used to pull a small ship and its passengers from an observatory in Scotland up […]

UFOs and Animals

Monday, 21 October, 2013

Mac Tonnies, a UFO lover and a cat lover, saw a connection between how UFOs behave and how we behave around our animals. He noted that UFOs behave an awful lot like laser pointers, and their effect on us is similar to our toys’ effect on our pets. I couldn’t help thinking of this last […]

I Heart Megalithia (review of The Megalithic Empire)

Thursday, 4 October, 2012

Anyone with even a passing interest in Stonehenge or prehistory in general “knows” that the megaliths that pepper the British Isles (and to a lesser extent parts of Continental Europe and the Mediterranean) were probably religious in nature—sites for rituals, probably having to do with solstices, etc. “Ritual purposes” is the standard explanation for archaeological […]

Grazia Toderi’s Alien Homeworlds

Saturday, 15 October, 2011

If you want to see where they come from, and you happen to live in Washington, DC, check out the exhibition called “Directions: Grazia Toderi” at the Hirshhorn Museum. Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist who does massive video projections built from collages of cities at night. Fragments of these vast vistas of light fade […]

Unbelievably Cool Identified Flying Object

Monday, 29 November, 2010

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.

Seeing and Knowing: UFOs and the American Religion

Sunday, 5 September, 2010

“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of […]

Secrecy and Truth

Sunday, 14 June, 2009

Call me crazy, but I think that the age of open, free publication has done something to debase or weaken the domain of thought in the West. Where are the really powerful and amazing ideas? I want to Prague in 1990 because I was in love with the idea of samizdat, of an underground culture […]

In Denmark, No One Can Hear You Scream (or, Is Beowulf a Forgery?)

Sunday, 31 May, 2009

M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural […]

The Experiment

Tuesday, 4 September, 2007

I was walking to Whole Foods to get lettuce, and just after I rounded the corner onto P Street I saw some bills on the ground: $12. My first thought was that it was a practical joke: a couple of those fake bills you put on the ground to seduce and disappoint passersby. So I […]