Deceptivley Alive Artificial Strangeness from Outer Space

Artificial exploration of space is something mankind has been doing, essentially, from the moment we put our first satellites into orbit. Far safer and currently more effective then launching a living being into space, it will forever be a cornerstone of our journey into the final frontier. With this however comes the question, if we're doing it, what about other civilizations out there? This is precisely the subject explored in a paper published in the International Journal  of Astrobiology a couple months ago.

Titled "Slingshot Dynamics, for Self-Replicating Probes and the Effect on Exploration Timescales" it tackles the subject of extraterrestrial robots exploring the universe while using gravity from planets and stars to propel themselves. Voyager I and II, two of our own space probes, while not self replicating, did use the gravitational pull of objects in our solar system to propel themselves beyond it, so reasonably we could assume other civilizations might use the same technique. However this is merely our own human assumption based on our own limited technology, and I was thinking about the same concepts a few weeks before I read about the above paper, albeit assuming there was a more advanced form of traversing space.

Arthur C. Clarke proposed that a sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be like magic to those who haven't reached that level of technological know how. Would not artificial alien intelligence appear alive then? Take for instance our modern day UFO phenomenon. Countless people have seen objects they can't explain, objects that do things no living being would be able to survive if they we're piloting them. Artificial alien intelligence's however could do them without trouble and assume a variety of unusual forms (especially if utilizing nanotechnologies), from simple flying probes to advanced androids capable of appearing alive.

This hypothesis I think can explain many of the eccentricities of UFOs and associated phenomenons. Bizarre, erratic, impossible flight patterns? Artificial alien intelligence. Strange, emotionless beings taking people in the night for what appears to be biological study? Artificial alien android intelligence. Heck even the more human looking aliens, such as the Nordics, could be nothing more then computer generated holograms running programs designed to communicate with us after careful study of our species.

I won't say definitively that this is what is happening or that it explains all UFO sightings, because the reality is that it could be anything, or a mix of biological e.t.'s and artificial, but perhaps it should be explored more people within the UFO field. Not to mention it would appear to be magic, or at least deceptively "alive" and way more advanced.

August 3rd UFO in Forest Grove, OR

August is Perseids Meteor Shower month and being fans of this, my wife and I while camping out in our backyard with our kids, niece, and nephew, kept an eye on the night sky. Being August 3rd it wasn't the peak of the event, but pretty close so we occasionally would catch a glimpse of one of the Perseids. Hiding amongst the shooting stars and the non-shooting one were also the occasional satellite and plane. Satellites and planes are always easy to tell apart because satellites have no blinking lights and planes do and may also be accompanied by noise.

We had seen several satellites and planes by the time the event occurred. My wife had asked me if something was a satellite then immediately said "Looks like a beam just came out of it." Promptly I turned around to see what she was talking about. What I saw resembled a high level plane or satellite, and I figured it was the later because there wasn't a normal blinking light of a plane. I followed it visually to the northwest and was about to dismiss the beam my wife saw as nothing but some fluke when suddenly it flared up a brilliant white/blue in color. It was so bright that I almost thought it had turned towards us, but it faded back to the same faintness as before as it continued on the same trajectory it had been on. Once more it repeated the flare up, but not quite as bright (probably because it was slightly farther away) and I began to walk toward the front of my house which faces roughly north, trying to keep a visual on it. As it neared the limit of my view from the front yard it did the flare up once again and then disappeared from my sight. 

There was no noise accompanying the object, it never wavered from it's course, and there was no regular time between the flare ups. Any lingering thought of it being a satellite I've wiped from my mind, and I have no doubt that it was not a plane. Closest thing that I'm able to compare it with is the way I've seen some meteors flare up in video footage, but this was moving way to slow to be one, and had no trail coming off of it. 

Immediately after the sighting I reported it to the Mutual UFO Network or MUFON for short, in the hope that someone else might find our sighting in their database that may have seen what we saw. 

Ghost child in the hallway

Trying to get back into blogging regularly is hard after having slowed down so much. It drives me insane because I want to get back into it so badly, but I have a hard time trying to get going again. As I type this I have several blog posts just waiting to be finished and published sitting on my hard drive, but I digress.

My main reason for writing this post is not to complain about my over abundance of blogging procrastination, but to share a tale of otherworldly proportions that happened roughly two weeks ago.

Our two story apartment, which is more town home than apartment, has a fairly large landing/hallway section upstairs. It's roughly 6x8 feet or within a foot or two of that and has three bedrooms and a bathroom on that floor.

On that night about midnight I woke up to my youngest daughter crying, so I got up and went into her room which is directly across the hall from mine, calm her down, close her door, and head back to my room. As I started to lay down I clearly saw a child about my sons height (3 1/2 to 4 ft) run from where my sons room is to the bathroom. Sitting up in bed I expected to see the bathroom light turn on and to hear my son using the facilities, neither of which happen and so I sat there perplexed for a second then proceeded to get up to check on him.

As I walked into the hallway I noticed that both my son's and daughters' doors are closed. Turning the light on in the bathroom and checking behind the shower curtain revealed no on in there. Upon checking both the my son's and daughters' rooms I find all three sound asleep.

Fearing a possible break in I decide to check downstairs where I find everything secure, with no intruders. At that point my wife and I are a bit freaked, but not horribly so. We've had other weird experiences here in our apartment which was built around 1979. While we don't think it is truly haunted we on occasion have heard sounds and seen other things that have no explanation. Usually we pass them off as typical apartment noises, thin walls and what not, but when you hear someone running down the stairs and see them run into your kitchen only to find nobody there, something strange is going on, but what exactly remains a mystery.

My guest blog post is up!

A week or so ago I mentioned that I had done a guest blog post for the author Renee Pawlish. Today when I checked my e-mail I found that she had published my guest post over at her blog. So head on over there and check it out!

http://tobecomeawriter.com/nephilim-anunnaki-nibiru/

We are your Gods!

Stephen Hawking, the famous cosmologist, astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and other things ending in ist, has been noted as saying, "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans," meaning that the history of an advanced civilization meeting a less advanced one isn't pretty. The civilization on the lesser end of things might face anything from being taken advantage of to being nearly wiped out for the sake of “progress” of more advanced one. This very scenario has been played out time and time again throughout history and been explored more times then one can count in film. Today I found myself thinking about this very subject and also the fact that some scientists think it would be a bad idea for us to send signals into the black void we call space, all for the very reasons above.

The fact is, unfortunately we've already unintentionally been advertising our presence since the creation of the radio. While it might not be the biggest billboard in the world, we send all sorts of signals besides radio into space that increase it's size significantly. Advanced intelligences from other worlds could be listening to our music, monitoring our communications, or even watching our television shows. It was this that got me to wondering, could they be watching our programs on “them”, whether it be science fiction like Star Trek or documentaries like the History Channel's Ancient Aliens? In the case of the later, could that show or others on ancient astronaut theory be used to their advantage if they happened to harbor some not so friendly intentions? What better way to gain the favor of an unassuming, less advanced species then to come down claiming to be their gods of old despite the fact they aren't? We're essentially giving them a prepackaged cover story.

Perhaps I'm thinking to much into it, then again perhaps I'm not. We could for all we know been unintentionally shooting ourselves in the foot all those signals we unintentionally send into deep space. Blaming ourselves however is really worthless, after all, we have no reason to even assume that that's the case, and from what I know of the UFO phenomenon, things in the end are probably a lot more complicated then we may truly know. However before future scientists decide to fire up a new fangled super strength communication method, perhaps they need to stop and ask what might happen if it works to well.

Ancient Astronauts and the Tao

Readers of my blog probably know by now that I have a fascination with ancient astronaut theory, the idea that aliens had some sort of influence in humanity's past. Theories range anywhere from aliens creating us to them merely intervening and influencing our civilization through the ages. Evidence supporting these theories is said to exist in many places, from ancient ruins, artifacts, bizarre hieroglyphics and images, and religious texts (i.e. the Bible and the Vedas ). It was while reading one of these texts, the Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (info on the person) a Taoist master, that I found something that may have been overlooked by ancient astronaut theorists.

In the first section of his works called "Free and easy wandering" there is a section where the character Chen Wu tells another character:

"He said that there is a Holy Man living on faraway Ku-she Mountain, with skin like ice or snow, and gentle and shy like a young girl. He doesn't eat the five grains, but sucks the wind, drinks the dew, climbs up on the clouds and mist, rides a flying dragon, and wanders beyond the four seas. By concentrating his spirit, he can protect creatures from sickness and plague and make the harvest plentiful. I thought this was all insane and refused to believe it."

Ordinarily a person probably would have written this off as highly imaginative fiction, however I find it quite interesting. First off is the description of the Holy Man, "...with skin like ice or snow, and gentle and shy..." which bears in my opinion a similarity to the classic gray aliens, minus the large black eyes aspect. Then we come to the fact that, he doesn't eat normal food, and rides a dragon which could be an aircraft of some kind, described in terms familiar to the ancient Chinese. Finally we have the possibility of highly advanced or evolved mental powers in the "...concentrating his spirit..." portion. Overall it screams ancient alien to me.

There is also the possibility that it could even be connected to the Dropa stones story, where a supposed race of alien beings landed near the Chinese-Tibetan border and were unable to leave due to some sort of misfortune. After realizing their predicament, they settled in a system of caves and tried to fit in the natives of the region only to have been all, but wiped out by them. In the end they left behind hundreds of stone discs that show signs of advanced engineering.

All this is of course conjecture, but I feel the account in Chuang Tzu's writings make for compelling evidence of possible alien contact in ancient China and perhaps lends more credence to the Dropa story. Maybe the "Holy Man" is even a Dropa?

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The excerpt from the Complete Writings of Chuang Tzu is from an online translation by Burton Watson.

Two gnomes are better then one

My gnomes

Garden gnomes are one of my bad habits. I collect them, at least slowly. I currently have 5 that I have collected over the last couple years, but I have to say I like them a lot. Every time I go somewhere that just might have gnomes, I go on a search for them to see if I can get in one at a good deal. Usually they end up being on clearance or small sized ones, but that works fine for me since I don't have much room to decorate my desk with the larger ones.

One of the first things that comes to my mind when I look at my small, but growing collection is obviously the tales of Icelandic elves and hidden folk tales or the infamous "Argentina gnome" videos.

Having already discussed those rather tired subjects, I figured I'd share and interesting thing I heard from a former coworker. This also isn't one of those traveling gnome stories (from Travelocity got the concept for their Roaming Gnome) and it doesn't have anything to do with garden gnome liberationists. In fact it's more of a question about whether what my coworker said has any basis or not. As far as I can tell by what he said, it is technically an urban legend, either way it fits quite well here, so here we go.

Let's say you own only one garden gnome and well, you decide it's lonely and needs a friend, so you go out and purchase it one. You get home, introduce the two fluffy bearded friends, and go about your business. That night you hear weird noises in your garden or wherever you keep your gnomes. The next day you awake to find things out of place or even trashed. You figure your cat did and ignore it, but then happens again and again in the same area the gnomes reside. Deciding to catch the cat in action you place a camera the area so the culprit can be caught on film.

The next morning things are in disarray like always and you load up the video and watch it. What you see shocks you. Your two garden gnomes appear to come to life and mischievously fool around right before your eyes. Afraid due to the sheer strangeness of it all you dispose of your gnomes and life resumes it's normal course.

My coworker never actually had this happen and I've never found any reports of this happening before. He swore up and down though that if you place two garden gnome figures together that they would come to life at night and cause mischief. Whether he was pulling my leg or simply passing down an urban legend I don't know, but the idea is certainly interesting. Doesn't surprise me that he associated it with gnomes either; after all they are creatures of myth and not just lawn or desk ornaments.

What do you think, is it an urban legend? Or was he simply assuming I'm gullible enough to believe something he made up?

Sleep paralysis and alien abduction

One of the skeptical world's favorite alien abduction debunking devices is that of sleep paralysis, which all of you are probably quite aware of. If you don't know what sleep paralysis is however, the simplest explanation is that it is a malfunction in the dream cycle during sleep. More precisely it is a malfunction that occurs when you wake from a dream, but your body fails to fully leave the physical dream mode. Victims often wake up immobilized by a safety mechanism designed to keep you from acting out your dreams. People, although they may be conscious, will still experience some other dream like symptoms, such as feelings of someone being in the room, or bright lights that aren't really there.

Since it is similar in description to alien abductions, it's no wonder skeptics like to cling to this as a reason why abduction is not real. What if they were right, at least in the sense that the abduction phenomenon is connected to sleep paralysis, but in a totally different way then the skeptics believe.

It has been thought that while you dream you sometimes can have things happen to you physically. For instance, I've had dreams where I'm falling then suddenly find myself awake with and my leg jumps as if I've landed on it. A little bit more extreme is the idea that dreams can take you to other real worlds/dimensions. Perhaps the aliens committing the abductions only physically abduct people a few times and the rest of the time use dreams and/or sleep paralysis to their advantage, using the so called "implants" found in some abductees to initialize the abduction experiences and doing what they do in a dream world.

Throwing out the more far fetched ideas of that theory however, aliens could perhaps be aware of the sleep paralysis phenomenon and simply use it as a cover for abductions. Triggering it to make abductees believe they are simply experiencing this ordinary phenomenon when in fact they are unaware they are being taken by alien beings. Just another arsenal to hide their actions just like screen memories.