Causality

The older I get, the more I start to feel the Universe spitting at me. For instance, every night on my way home I pass by my grandmothers house. It is a huge house, and most of my immediate family calls it home. Every night, as I walk by on my way to my apartment, I find the gate open. Open gates are a bad thing. My grandfather, when he was alive, made sure the gate was shut at all times. It's not about not letting stray dogs in, etc. It's about keeping the good in and the bad out. Maybe it makes sense only to me and my superstitious clan, but it works. So, every night, I close the gate.

I close it and then I head on home.

But tonight, as I was approaching the last step up to the gate, I fell. I fell hard. Even as I am typing this my knee is throbbing. This is karma. This is what I get for giving attitude to people for that past few days because of my own disdain over what has become my life. Just like the other day when I helped a woman find her credit card and she likened me to an angel. I pretended not to acknowledge the compliment. And then 20 minutes later, as I was at the Harvard Square station, waiting for the train, I spotted a girl with cute pink sandals.

I told her they were nice. She ignored me. Karma.

Maybe I'm just becoming one of those disenchanted people who see everything as a slight against their existence, but honestly, I've always seen people get what they give. I gave out negative energy, and in return I am at home nursing a bum knee.

Causality.

Maybe next time I'll wear knee guards.

One for the books?

We've all heard the old 'UFO abducts COW' story. We've seen photoshopped pictures of a poor, unassuming cow dangling precariously in the air, under the invisible field of a flying saucer. But a car? A UFO just picking up a random car and dropping it as if to say, " Hey, Cleeclix, I think we have the wrong vehicle. The Earth-made gps is off..." And then dropping it like a hotcake.

Two New Hampshire teens claim a UFO lifted their car and then dropped them about 180 feet away. I have no idea why a UFO would behave in such a manner, so I am not going to dismiss this story based on what I DON'T KNOW. You can read the entire report here.

Steve Firmani, the New England State Director for MUFON is on the case so there could be something here
after all.

The Perfect Addition to an important Argument

Deirdre, over at The Interstellar Housewife besides being incredibly awesome, has some valid points to make regarding the argument of the week...

Which you can catch up on here and here.

Visitors Welcome!

I've been watching NASA (UFO) footage most of the morning, and I've come to
three conclusions...

1) There are various different kinds of craft and they all seem to be 'aware' of each other.
This, in my opinion, means that every other (possible) species in the universe knows of each
others existence. We are the only ones in the dark.

2) These are, for the most part, some very large craft. Very large as in, travelling longer distances
with more people on board. Which leads me to conclusion number 3...

3) They appear to hover near Earth and the moon. They seem entirely interested in our planet and
our species. Why are they there, and what do they want? Considering the size of their crafts, I'd
say they have NO home to go to, and that perhaps there aren't any more planets as habitable and
life sustaining as earth.

It's very possible that something happened that destroyed more than a few homeworlds, but somehow
earth was spared. Maybe these beings stick around for the water and the fresh air. They leave
their crafts occasionally, but in the end, they are refugees/moochers and they are following some
code that prevents them from just coming down and taking over.

Maybe whoever owns this planet is still around and carries a big stick.

...curiouser and curiouser....

Bill and Nancy Birnes @ BOA

Wrapping up our big return, BoA:Audio unleashes a 2nd episode this week which centers purely on the esoteric. First, we'll have a special dual-guest conversation with Bill and Nancy Birnes, of UFO Hunters & UFO Magazine. Envisioned as a fly-on-the-wall look at the UFO power couple, dubbed "Dinner with the Birnes," we find out about the demise of UFO Hunters, the pair's entrance into Ufology with The Day After Roswell, their perspective on today's world of UFO studies, and a whole bunch more as we travel down a number of sideroads that include Jamie Shandera, TWA Flight 800, strange Ufological "sources," the Birnes family's remarkable history in the entertainment world, and the duo's cameo in the recent Dwayne Johnson film Race to Witch Mountain. It's both a carefree and fascinating glimpse behind the curtain with two of Ufology's biggest players.

Pic of the day!

Over at Mysterious Universe, Micah Hanks related a story regarding a conversation he had with
one of my all-time favorite people, Brad Steiger. The topic: Giants. Anyone who's visited my blog at least once
before knows about my fascination with Giants...

The picture above is of a Mother and Child found in the Yosemite Valley in the 1800's. The woman was about
seven feet tall, and holding an infant in her arms. The way in which they were buried shows that someone took
the time and the care to make sure the dead were respected. This was surely a tribe of intelligent and incredibly
tall people. What happened to them, only time and really careful research will tell, for as Steiger relayed to
hanks, when you delve into this kind of mystery, it only leads to trouble.

Straight to the point...

Bruce Duensing has my brain in a tizzy. In a good way. You can read his entire post " Does Ufology Have A Future When It's Non-Existent?" at INTANGIBLE MATERIALITY.


So much is wrong with Ufology right now. In fact so much was wrong at the dawning of Ufology.
When I was a kid, I wanted to discover other civilizations, in the farther reaches of space. To
do that I knew I needed to devote my entire life to such a pursuit. I knew the chances of me ever
leaving Earth were slim-to-none. I knew that in all likely hood, I wouldn't succeed.

But I didn't care.

I didn't want to be famous. I didn't want anyone erecting any statues of me in a spacesuit, shaking
hands with some extraterrestrial. I just wanted to look into the void, see the things I could only
speculate about, and then move on.

That's the mentality of people who really want to find the truth. You work to support your 'hobby'...
your side passion. You know it's not a legit career. And why not? Because the world isn't like an
Indiana Jones movie. You can't go making your way through lost cities, tempting the unknown forces
of the Universe and expecting to be rewarded for it.

Because the world we live in just isn't that cool. There are no prehistoric monsters in the skies and
there are no Super Villains skulking in doorways, waiting for the opportunity
to take over the world. We have confused reality with imagination. Fact with fiction.

This is why Ufology fails. Because we let the fantastical, ridiculous things creep in and slowly mix
and congeal with the possible. The fact that people are seeing the same things they've been seeing
for thousands of years means nothing to mainstream science if the only people speaking out are
the clinically insane.

In essence, the world doesn't care about the Hybrids tapping your phone if a) The Hybrids don't
look like the 'Observers' from Fringe, b) Some 'famous' Ufologist isn't involved in your experience
in some way, and c) You aren't getting any special information about the Universe, Weapons of Mass
Destruction, or why Justin Bieber sounds like a girl. If it isn't 'Hollywood', no one's interested.

And at worst, if it isn't 'Scientifically' possible, then it's bunk. Even though Science is the business
of the Impossible. But who's keeping score?

If you want to find proof that UFO's/Extraterrestrials/Ghosts/Bigfoot/Mermaids/Nessie/Zombie Elvis
exist, don't go looking for the answers thinking you're going to headline a TV show on SYFY, a book deal
and be the major guest speaker at all the KOOK-Conventions. That's not the reality of the Quest for the Truth.

If you want to find proof because you believe that life is not just about waking up and going to work, worrying
about bills, watching countries blow each other up, people kill each other and children starve...if you believe
looking into the void gives you a purpose and some meaning...then by all means, do your thing. Just don't
go expecting any fame and fortune along the way.

And as for those who came before, who are still eking an existence out of this 'pursuit' of the truth we all hold so near and dear...keep on keeping on...but if you destroy what's left of Ufology with greed, ignorance and ego, try not to fuck it up for the rest of us.

I still wonder about this one...

!BLOOP!

Moon bases for alternate races

I found this piece at io9. The 60's was the era of space based thinking. Many of the illustrations accompanying the article were made in 1969 for the SCIENCE JOURNAL. The depictions made sense at the time. Because if you think about it, even though an artist can have some vague (yet imaginative), realization of something, when it comes to the actual finished product, the imagination rarely if ever compares.

But that is the beauty of concept art.

But therein lies the problem. For example: My generation was hoping for flying cars. We read about them. We saw movies depicting a society that relied on them. We saw them in cartoons and we dreamed about our very own vehicles on the wind. And now, we are all grown up and what do we have to compare our imaginations to? Nothing. Concept cars. Electric cars. Hybrids. No flying machines that would make the Jetsons look prophetic. So, seeing these artistic interpretations of Moonbases that even today, don't exist is humbling in a way. Because it says that even if we can't make it so when we want, we will eventually, so long as we keep dreaming it up.


I still want my flying car.

50-mile wide corridor of carnage...

That outta be a movie title, 'Corridor of Carnage'. Hungry aliens come to earth to feed. No, but seriously,
this is very intriguing. UFO hunters (probably the only hunters in the world who never bring any bacon
home, but I digress), have figured out that the reddish lights, dissecting sheep in the U.K., are moving
along an exact pattern.

Go here for more.

The Large Hadron Collider (for individuals who have no clue what Particle Physics has to do with American Idol and other American pasttimes...)

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: April 2, 2010
(Via the New York Times)

For those whose physics knowledge was a bit rusty, the news about the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics machine, might have been puzzling.
Related

European Collider Begins Its Subatomic Exploration (March 31, 2010)
Yes, the collider finally crashed subatomic particles into one another last week, but why, exactly, is that important? Here is a primer on the collider - with just enough information, hopefully, to impress guests at your next cocktail party.


Let’s be basic. What does a particle physicist do?

Particle physicists have one trick that they do over and over again, which is to smash things together and watch what comes tumbling out.



What does it mean to say that the collider will allow physicists to go back to the Big Bang? Is the collider a time machine?


Physicists suspect that the laws of physics evolved as the universe cooled from billions or trillions of degrees in the first moments of the Big Bang to superfrigid temperatures today (3 degrees Kelvin) — the way water changes from steam to liquid to ice as temperatures decline. As the universe cooled, physicists suspect, everything became more complicated. Particles and forces once indistinguishable developed their own identities, the way Spanish, French and Italian diverged from the original Latin.

By crashing together subatomic particles — protons — physicists create little fireballs that revisit the conditions of these earlier times and see what might have gone on back then, sort of like the scientists in Jurassic Park reincarnating dinosaurs.

The collider, which is outside Geneva, is 17 miles around. Why is it so big?

Einstein taught us that energy and mass are equivalent. So, the more energy packed into a fireball, the more massive it becomes. The collider has to be big and powerful enough to pack tremendous amounts of energy into a proton.

Moreover, the faster the particles travel, the harder it is to bend their paths in a circle, so that they come back around and bang into each other. The collider is designed so that protons travel down the centers of powerful electromagnets that are the size of redwood trunks, which bend the particles’ paths into circles, creating a collision. Although the electromagnets are among the strongest ever built, they still can’t achieve a turning radius for the protons of less than 2.7 miles.

All in all, the bigger the accelerator, the bigger the crash, and the better chance of seeing what is on nature’s menu.


What are physicists hoping to see?



According to some theories, a whole list of items that haven’t been seen yet — with names like gluinos, photinos, squarks and winos — because we haven’t had enough energy to create a big enough collision.

Any one of these particles, if they exist, could constitute the clouds of dark matter, which, astronomers tell us, produce the gravity that holds galaxies and other cosmic structures together.

Another missing link of physics is a particle known as the Higgs boson, after Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, which imbues other particles with mass by creating a cosmic molasses that sticks to them and bulks them up as they travel along, not unlike the way an entourage forms around a rock star when they walk into a club.


Have scientists ever seen dark matter?

It’s invisible, but astronomers have deduced from their measurements of galactic motions that the visible elements of the cosmos, like galaxies, are embedded in huge clouds of it.


Will physicists see these gluinos, photinos, squarks and winos?



There is no guarantee that any will be discovered, which is what makes science fun, as well as nerve-racking.


So how much energy do you need to create these fireballs?

At the Large Hadron Collider, that energy is now 3.5 trillion electron volts per proton — about as much energy as a flea requires to do a pushup. That may not sound like much, but for a tiny proton, it is a lot of energy. It is the equivalent of a 200-pound man bulking up by 700,000 pounds.


What’s an electron volt?

An electron volt is the amount of energy an electron would gain passing from the negative to the positive side of a one-volt battery. It is the basic unit of energy and of mass preferred by physicists.



When protons collide, is there a big bang?

There is no sound. It’s not like a bomb exploding.

In previous trials, there was an actual explosion.

All that current is dangerous. During the testing of the collider in September 2008, the electrical connection between a pair of the giant magnets vaporized. There are thousands of such connections in the collider, many of which are now believed to be defective. As a result the collider can only run at half-power for the next two years.


Could the collider make a black hole and destroy the Earth?

The collider is not going to do anything that high-energy cosmic rays have not done repeatedly on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. There is no evidence that such collisions have created black holes or that, if they have, the black holes have caused any damage. According to even the most speculative string theory variations on black holes, the Large Hadron Collider is not strong enough to produce a black hole.

Too bad, because many physicists would dearly like to see one.

An earlier version of this article misstated that the Earth began to cool in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

***A version of this article appeared in print on April 4

Loren Coleman, Nick Redfern and Giants

I can't help it. I have a fascination with giants. So these two books are going to sit side by side
on my bookshelf...if I ever put them down ;)

True Giants: Myth, Legend, Folklore and Fact (By Loren Coleman and Mark A. Hall)

The American Goliah (Edited by Tim Beckley, with contributions from Nick Redfern)

Strange pic of the day!

Cape Verde, MARS...

Is it just me, or is something serpentine (with eyes), staring out at the Rover?