Hey -- The Anomalist is hiring!

After many years of dedicated service, Richard Hendricks, the daily news editor of The Anomalist, is stepping down. Would you like to become the next Matt Drudge of this weird world? Want to contribute to what people are calling "the best strange news site on the internet"? Are you willing to search all corners of the web for stories on the unknown, the unexplained, and the unexpected? Does being the first one to know about a frog fall in India make your day? Do you have a passion for such strangeness? Are you internet savvy and not put off by the terms html and ftp? Would you like your work to be read by thousands of people every day? Then step up and volunteer! (There are benefits, of course.)

I'd go for it, but my Internet time is already spoken for.

From a good-spirited profile at Ray's X-Blog:

Mac Tonnies lives (or did live) in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. He hates the suburbs there.

An understatement, of course.

And it appears Ray has read my first book, a skimpy (and best forgotten) short-story collection called "Illumined Black":

One story that intrigues me is punishment by virtual reality: a criminal serves his sentence within his mind, five seconds passing as 500 years.

Actually, I kind of like that one too.

About that UFO conference: Looks like the cat's out of the bag.

Which cryptoterrestrial hybrid is your favorite?

Art brings steam power to the digital revolution

For this is the Steam Powered Internet Machine: the latest deeply eccentric project from Turner-prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller and his collaborator Alan Kane. "We were thinking about something that connects the industrial revolution and the digital revolution," said Deller. Kane added: "They are worlds apart but there's also a proximity. The steam age and the digital age are not so far apart."

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

Detailed Look at Europe's ExoMars Rover

In one typical example of the rover's autonomous operation, ground controllers might radio up a high-level command telling it to drive to a scientifically interesting spot anywhere from 500 to 2000 metres away and conduct science operations, such as drilling beneath the surface to sample soil for life signs. But the vehicle would handle the details of the move on its own.

Plus it just looks cool!

I'm considering publishing a collection of science fiction short-stories, most of which are either already written or else in need of retooling. (Although I generally loathe self-publishing, you can't beat free).

Meanwhile, I'm making progress on "The Cryptoterrestrials." And it looks like I'll be speaking at a UFO conference in a few months. More on that later.

Dishes in the sink
The TV's in repair
Don't look at the floor
Don't go up the stairs
I'm achin'
I'm shakin'
I'm breakin'
Like humans do

--David Byrne, "Like Humans Do"

World's first 3-D crop circle found in English field

"The move from a two-dimensional square into a three-dimensional cube might indicate that these patterns emanate from a dimension of reality we cannot access.

"Of late the crop circles seem concerned with the moving of one dimension into another. This is perhaps one of the most striking and overt expressions of that idea to date."

Yeah, whatever. Personally, I think crop glyphs (it seems silly to call them "circles" anymore) are gorgeous examples of participatory art. I see little reason to ascribe them to unknown forces; holding alien intelligences accountable is like refusing to accept that ancient Egyptians could have built the Pyramids.

U.S. WEAPONS POISON EUROPE

After the "Shock and Awe" campaign in Iraq in 2003, very fine particles of depleted uranium were captured along with larger sand and dust particles in filters in Britain. These particles traveled in seven to nine days from Iraqi battlefields as far away as 2,400 miles.

The radiation measured in the atmosphere quadrupled within a few weeks after the beginning of the 2003 campaign, and at one of the five monitoring locations, the levels twice required an official alert to the British Environment Agency.

In addition, according to Busby, the Aldermaston air monitoring data provided a continuous record of depleted uranium levels in Britain from other recent wars.

(Via Unknown Country.)

What goes around . . .

Another meteorite hits Norway

A meteorite weighing around two kilos landed right in the yard outside Bjørn Herigstad's home in coastal Jæren, western Norway, over the weekend. It's the second meteorite-landing in Norway in a month, and experts are calling the incident sensational.

(Via The Anomalist.)

Here's my cat Spook engaged in some indecipherable feline activity.





She looks on the verge of dissolving into an inky mist, to drift wraith-like through her new home in search of treats.

An Alien Abductee Shares Proof That We are Not Alone

Craig Jacocks' Aware of Their Presence is set to be the first major book about alien abduction since Whitley Streiber's [sic] best seller Communion. But, Jacocks has something even Streiber did not: proof.

Uh-oh! Watch out -- the guy's got proof! "Implants," no less. And we all know how rigorously alleged implants have been pursued by ufologists . . .

A Riot of Rockets

Last week saw the successful launch of the Space Shuttle, but this week may see something far more relevant to the future of space travel: the launch of a prototype piece of a future orbiting hotel. It comes amid an expected flurry of private launches of small, innovative, and reusable rockets that will make 2006 a watershed year for privately financed rockets.

Taken together, these expected launches could usher in an era of relatively inexpensive space travel. "Even as the shuttle sweeps overhead, we have new items on the real road to practical spaceflight -- private market development -- popping up," says Boston-based aerospace engineer and consultant Charles Lurio.

I hate the Space Shuttle. I really do. And I'm the quintessential "space enthusiast," the kind of person NASA tries -- futilely -- to rope in with its tired orbital antics.

However, I've noticed an unfortunate schism develop between proponents of manned space exploration and pure science ventures. The pure science gang wants to forego crewed spaceflight altogether, viewing it as wasteful, dangerous and of little scientific merit. And if they were referring specifically to the Shuttle, they'd be absolutely correct. Fortunately, the Shuttle doesn't epitomize the exploratory spirit; of NASA's own admission, the current manned spaceflight program is essentially a mistake in dire need of revision.





Pure science pundits casually lambaste the Moon-Mars initiative (such as it is) as yet another excessively expensive endeavor -- and with the Shuttle program's history of excess and failure as a timely straw man, their arguments can even sound convincing.

But they fail to realize that the act of getting off the planet -- and staying off the planet in meaningful numbers -- is nothing less than imperative to the survival of our species.

Yes, we could choose to spend less and learn more about the universe through volleys of probes and orbiting telescopes . . . but how much longer will we be around to do so unless we take up the long-overdue task of establishing beach-heads on the Moon, Mars and beyond? Do we dare assume Earth is a permanent haven, magically immune to cataclysm, when the available evidence strongly indicates otherwise?

If we're ever to deduce the Cosmos' origins, we must first rise to the challenge of becoming a multi-planet species.

Supernova Leaves Behind Mysterious Object

A deep, continuous 24.5-hour observation has revealed something far more complex and intriguing, however. The team, from the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica (IASF) of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Milan, Italy, has found that the emission from the central source varies with a cycle that repeats itself every 6.7 hours. This is an astonishingly long period, tens of thousands of times longer than expected for a young neutron star. Also, the object's spectral and temporal properties differ from an earlier XMM-Newton observation of this very source in 2001.

Choices, choices . . .

Warming Climate Plays Large Role in Western U.S. Wildfires

In the most systematic analysis to date of recent changes in forest fire activity, Anthony Westerling, Hugo Hidalgo and Dan Cayan of Scripps Oceanography, along with Tom Swetnam of the University of Arizona, compiled a database of recent large western wildfires since 1970 and compared it with climate and land-surface data from the region. The results show that large wildfire activity increased "suddenly and dramatically" in the 1980s with longer wildfire seasons and an increased number and more potent wildfires.

The new findings, published in the July 6 issue of Science Express (the advance online version of the printed journal Science), point to climate change, not fire suppression policies and forest accumulation, as the primary driver of recent increases in large forest fires.

I suffer the dreams of a world gone mad
I like it like that and I know it

--R.E.M., "Leave"

Kate Moss . . . pole-dancing? In black-and-white? How did I miss this?

Heads up: This is the first time I know of that astronomer/ufologist Jacques Vallee has specifically addressed the "Singularity." And he emphasizes the critical, all-too-often neglected, distinction between "saving the planet" and saving ourselves.

As George Carlin has observed, the planet is fine -- the people are fucked!

Mother ship over Phoenix . . . next to plane???

The give-away is the dots of light. When a camera takes a photo in the dark of night, the shutter stays open for a significant time. When an airplane passes through the camera field of view, the steady-on lights of the plane create a smeared "bar" of light. However, the flashing or strobing navigation and safety lights create a repeating dot pattern in the photo. The reason the smear in this photo is fairly short is because of the rather bright lights of the city below. The camera shutter stayed open too long to "stop" the plane's motion, but not long enough to produce a streak across the entire sky.

I like Kyle King because he doesn't "want to believe." His blog is consistently provoking and proves that skepticism by no means entails an atrophied sense of wonder.

Where Do Rusty Rockets Go When They Die?

And it's not just decommissioned satellites. According to Australian Government astronomer, Dr. James Biggs, other types of debris have appeared over the years due to, well, our rather cavalier approach to space activities. Biggs says that extra-vehicular activity (EVA), repairs to spacecraft, nuclear testing and crude anti-satellite technology tested during the 80s and 90s have all contributed to the rocket casings, fairings, nuts and bolts, flecks of paint, gloves, tools and other potentially lethal bits of shrapnel currently orbiting the Earth.

And when one of those objects succumbs to Earth's gravity well and crashes somewhere, leaving a trail of smoke across the sky -- bam! -- we've got another "Roswell incident."

NASA UFO Hacker May End Up in Guantanamo

UFO hacker Gary McKinnon is to be extradited to the US by Great Britain, according to a decision handed down by British Home Secretary John Reid. Mr. McKinnon is accused of hacking into NASA and US military computers in search of UFO evidence. According to what he told Dreamland listeners, he did not hack into anything, but simply entered computers on insecure networks that had no firewalls and were not password protected. Mr. McKinnon faces a virtual certainty of a long prison sentence in the US, and almost no chance of receiving a fair trial.

I'm inclined to accept McKinnon's claim that he didn't "hack," but accessed insecure networks. As I briefly relate in the introduction to "After the Martian Apocalypse," I phoned a scientist working at JPL in 1998 after finding his number in what was ostensibly an "internal" directory. I don't remember his name, but he was friendly enough and curious how I got his number.

Here's the Victorian mansion (now a tourist site) across the street:





At one point in the house's history it functioned as a mental asylum; lobotomies were performed on the top floor.





I like turning my car around in the driveway, from which you can see lots of Gothic trimmings defying the surrounding suburban conformity.

I just finished reading British ufologist Jenny Randles' "Alien Contacts and Abductions," an overview of close encounters published in the early 90s. Accessible and even challenging, Randles' book helps illustrate the divide between British ufology -- for which the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is still a hypothesis -- and its American counterpart, which is brash and mostly obnoxious in comparison.

("Alien Contacts and Abductions" contains lots of case-files relevant to my own Indigenous Hypothesis, which maintains that the UFO/contact phenomenon is neither extraterrestrial nor paraphysical -- at least as usually envisioned.)

Solar Shade to Reverse Global Warming

Instead of trying to reduce the greenhouse gasses, what if you could block out the light from the Sun? Dr. Roger Angel from the University of Arizona has calculated that a solar shade 2000 km (1,250 miles) across would block enough radiation from reaching the Earth to reduce the warming effects of carbon dioxide emissions back to industrial levels.

It's surreal watching obscure theoretical concepts like this quietly plant roots in the mainstream.

You Are Batman

Billionaire playboy by day. Saving the world by night. And you're not even a true superhero. Just someone with a lot of expensive toys!

What Superhero Are You?

But I don't wanna be Batman!

Is Australia in the midst of a UFO wave? Stay informed!

Peter Gersten's been taking photos of reality-altering vortices amid the red-rock scenery of Sedona, Arizona. (I've been there, and it's almost this weird.)

I'm confused. Is it kitsch? Erotica? Surrealism? All of the above?

Photos of things other than UFOs:

China harvesting Falun Gong organs, report alleges

China is harvesting organs from live Falun Gong prisoners without consent and destroying their remains, says a report from a former Liberal MP and a Canadian human rights lawyer.

(Via The Anomalist.)

Shades of Michael Marshall Smith's excellent novel, "Spares."

For some time I've tried to persuade readers of this blog of the reality of my erotically charged encounters with women from distant planets. Some, perhaps reasonably, assume I'm kidding. Now the "debate" is over.

I have succeeded in photographing the outside of one of the spacewomen's vehicles in unprecedented -- indeed startling -- detail. Preliminary photographic analysis by an independent laboratory offers powerful, if circumstantial, evidence of the reality of my experiences.

See for yourself:





Experts assure me that to hoax such a photo would require enormous funds and access to optical technology known only to a handful of researchers. Moreover, the distinct "portholes" visible in the photo are congruent with my prior descriptions of the spacewomen's vehicles, forcing the reasonable-minded to conclude that my extraterrestrial contacts have been reported with the utmost veracity.

Meme Therapy has posted an interview with science fiction/horror author John Shirley that I helped with:

Science Fiction Author John Shirley

In a general thematic sense and in some specifics, my novels Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra and Eclipse Corona (currently from Babbage Press) were pretty accurate and I'm afraid are becoming more so every year. I predicted a move toward theocracy in the United States, and a kind of disguised neofascism--that seems to me to be coming about. I predicted this would be predicated on global military turmoil--the equivalent was 9/11. I failed to predict the loggerheads quality of our relationship with the Muslim nations but I did predict that there would be something along the lines of a "New Soviet" in Russia, becoming increasingly nationalistic and belligerent and that seems to be in the offing. I predicted that news media would not be reliable in the age of computer animation and the globalization of news information and this is proving out too.

Adorable!

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

U.S. vulnerable to 'cyber Katrina'

The United States is poorly prepared for a "cyber Katrina," with no coordinated plan for restoring and recovering the Internet after a major disruption, according to a new Business Roundtable report, released yesterday.

Despite efforts to address the problem, the federal government and private sector have not developed a coordinated plan for restoring the Internet and maintaining confidence in financial markets following a major breach in functioning.

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

I'm back! My apartment is a mass of computer cable, but at least I'm online. More to follow.

Desert Varnish Might Be a Clue for Life on Mars

The research, published in the July edition of the journal Geology, reveals that the dark coating known as desert varnish creates a record of life around it, by binding traces of DNA, amino acids and other organic compounds to desert rocks. Samples of Martian desert varnish could therefore show whether there has been life on Mars at any stage over the last 4.5 billion years.

I have an intuitive certainty that there's life on Mars now. If only giant Transformers would quit stomping our rovers!

"If only gay sex caused global warming."

:-D

'Bionic' limb breakthrough made

The breakthrough, developed by researchers at University College London, allows the prosthesis to breach the skin without risk of infection.

This is a heartening step in the right direction, not merely for amputees but for anyone with "augmentation" aspirations. Perhaps some of our first off-world colonists will sport high-powered, vacuum-resistent limbs . . .

I'm moved in and waiting for a modem to be delivered, hence the relatively infrequent posts. PB should resume in its regular capacity by the end of the week. Thanks again.

Katrina shocks New Orleans visitors 10 months on

Some are puzzled, angry or indignant at the lack of progress. Insurance money has begun flowing but direct aid to homeowners is not expected before the fall, and views of government's leadership vary sharply among residents.

Thailand-based relief worker Tom Kerr recalled tsunami devastation in Aceh, Indonesia, when he saw the Ninth Ward. "It looked a lot like Aceh when we visited six months after the storm," he said, asking why the United States had not done more.

"Most of the area could be improved very quickly, but it is deserted," said Somsook Boonyabancha, a colleague who is director of the Thai relief group. "If I was the government, I couldn't sleep at night."

Nevertheless, it somehow manages.

I've had to continually revise my criteria regarding climate disasters and governmental responsibility. Initially, I stupidly assumed that climate change would only become a political issue when large numbers of people started dying . . . and then I realized that had already happened. So my new prediction is that climate change will only become relevant to the political mainstream when large numbers of white people start dying.

But I'm still probably way off-base. Another revision is likely in order -- and I probably don't have too long to wait.

First of all, I'm aghast that "Transformers" is actually a movie. But if you're going to base a high-budget flick on a line of retro action figures, at least get a few technical details right. In the movie's trailer (doubtlessly more substantial than the actual film) we're shown a NASA Mars Exploration Rover and told it's the Beagle 2 -- the European Space Agency's failed attempt to detect life on the Red Planet. From there it only gets worse.

Whatever. It's out of my hands. All I can do is wait for Richard Hoagland to make sense of it all.

Uber-Cheap Decorating, Part One





Turn your pad into the set from an Ed Wood movie! Nothing says "kitschy astro-punk" like an up-lamp with five (count 'em!) flexible multicolored extensions! Like, groovy!

Price: $20

I found out today that, due to general incompetency, the modem being delivered to my new apartment (which I move into tomorrow) won't arrive until Wednesday of next week. This throws a wrench into my online schedule, so I'm declaring Posthuman Blues "on hiatus" (a vacation it isn't) until I'm able to resume as normal.

Thanks for your patience.