Tagaliens

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life Forms That Eat Stars

Maddie Stone reports for Vice Motherboard:

Dr. Clement Vidal, who’s a researcher at the Free University of Brussels, along with Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick, futurist John Smart, and nanotech entrepreneur Robert Freitas are soliciting scientific proposals to seek out star-eating life. Vidal, who coined the term starivore in a paper he wrote in 2013, is the first to admit how bizarre it sounds. Yet he insists that some of the most profound scientific discoveries have come about by examining natural processes through a radically different lens.

“Newton did not discover new gravitational bodies: He took a different perspective on a phenomena and discovered new things exist,” Vidal told me. “It might well be that extraterrestrial intelligence is already somewhere in our data. Re-interpreting certain star systems as macroscopic living things is one example.”

Full Story: The Search for Starivores, Intelligent Life that Could Eat the Sun

The strange building in the Mojave desert designed by an alien

Integraton

I think this probably counts as psychetecture. The New York Times reports:

Three miles south of Giant Rock, across a scrubby expanse, you will find an even more extraordinary sight: a circular, dome-topped building, 38 feet tall and 55 feet in diameter, constructed by Van Tassel over the course of nearly two decades in accordance with the instructions of his extraterrestrial architectural patron. A sign above the gated entrance to the property proclaims the name that Van Tassel gave to his time machine: the Integratron.

“It’s the most amazing structure I’ve ever seen,” says Joanne Karl, who bought the building 14 years ago with her sisters Nancy and Patty. In fact, the Integratron is a sort of time machine, or at least a time capsule. It is an immaculately preserved artifact of midcentury modernist design, and a totem of 1950s U.F.O.-ology culture — the mixture of Cold War paranoia and occult spirituality that drew true believers to remote reaches of the Desert Southwest in search of flying saucers and free-floating enlightenment. Under the ownership of the Karls, it has become a unique tourist destination: perhaps the oddest spot in a very odd corner of the world, a magnet for new generations of spiritual questers and for the just plain curious. “Nobody comes to the Integratron and just shrugs,” says Joanne. “You don’t leave and say, ‘Oh, that was nothing.’ ”

Full Story: New York Times: Welcome to the Integraton

(via Jen Fong-Adwent)

See also: the work of Paul Laffoley.

Did Aleister Crowley Communicate With Grey Aliens?

lam

Well maybe, but he never seemed to have thought so:

The idea that Crowley believed Aiwass and Lam to be the same entity, or that either were extraterrestrials from Sirius, is only the speculation of Kenneth Grant and those who have based their research on source material written by Grant. Additionally, very little can be said about the inspiration for the Lam portrait or what Aleister Crowley thought about it. […]

At least to the present author, this description of a kingly, tall, dark man in his thirties does not fit the Lam drawing. More importantly in relation to the subject of this post, the description does not match up at all with that of a “grey alien,” which many people relate to Lam.

The next important piece of information to take from Crowley’s depiction of Aiwass is that he never actually saw Aiwass at all. He only heard the voice of Aiwass from over his left shoulder, and from the furthest corner of the room. Not once did he actually look at Aiwass. His physical descriptions are only impressions.

So here we have a character description based only on non-visual impressions, and which doesn’t seem to correspond with the pictured Lam or grey aliens at all. This is the only known written description of Aiwass by Aleister Crowley.

Crowley himself never wrote much of anything at all about Lam, where the figure came from, or his ideas/thoughts about the subject in the drawing. What he did write was limited to a short, two sentence commentary in The Voice Of The Silence, which will be discussed later in this article.

Full Story: Blasted Tower: misconceptions about aleister crowley, lam, aiwass and alien contact

(via Brainsturbator)

See also: A Media History of Gray Aliens

This illustration of HG Wells’ tale of human evolution, “The Man of the Year Million,” is one of the oldest depictions of the “big headed genius” trope:

The concept is based on Lamarckian evolution, specifically the idea that body parts we use frequently will grow larger but parts we use less frequently will atrophy. Wells took this to the logical extreme, postulating (with tongue in cheek) that we would eventually grow gigantic brains and hands but tiny legs and torsos.

No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite

wickramasinghe_meteorite.jpg.CROP.original-original

Phil Plait writes:

I read the paper, and really it’s more of the same as from the first paper. In some ways, it’s even shakier; they provide lots of technical data that gives their work a veneer of credibility, but when you look a bit deeper you find they didn’t do a lot of critically necessary tests to establish the veracity of their claims. All the technical stuff obfuscates the fact that they missed the boat in some very basic ways.

In a nutshell, they don’t establish the samples they examined were actually meteorites. They don’t establish they were from the claimed meteor event over Sri Lanka in December 2012. And perhaps most telling, they don’t eliminate the possibility of contamination; that is, diatoms got into the samples because those rocks were sitting on the Earth where diatoms are everywhere.

There’s more, too, including some unusual methods if you’re trying to establish a paradigm-overthrowing claim: They don’t consult with outside experts (including those in the fields of meteorites and diatoms), they don’t get independent confirmation from an outside lab, and they published in a journal that is, um, somewhat outside the mainstream of science.

Full Story: Bad Astronomy: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite

This isn’t the first time these guys have made this sort of claim. The new paper is here if you want to have a look.

Estimate: There are 50 Alien Civilizations in Our Galaxy That We Could Communicate With

In the 1960’s, U.S. astronomer Frank Drake started the first real search for alien radio signals being beamed across the Universe. Off the back of this work, he came up with an equation that is at best, an educated stab at the number of civilizations in our Galaxy with which we might actually be able to communicate right now. […]

So this is the exciting bit, plug those numbers all in to the equation and you come up with… (drum roll please) …50!

Is that really it?

The number of contactable civilizations in our Galaxy, right now, that we might communicate with, is just 50… fifty? It’s estimated that there is around 400 billion stars in our Galaxy and, according to my numbers (which, by their nature are educated guesses), there are just 50 alien civilizations that we could communicate with.

Discovery: How Many Intelligent Aliens Are Out There?

SETI Temporarily Shuts Down One of Its Telescope Arrays

Allen Telescope Array

Due to a loss of both state and federal budget cuts at the University of California Berkley, the university had to withdraw some of its support of the The Allen Telescope Array used by SETI scientists to monitor signals from outer space SETI principal investigator Franck Marchis revealed on his blog. According to CNN, the array will go back up in 2013, and it’s not the only array that SETI uses to collect transmissions.

(via Anthropunk)

1 in 5 believe aliens exist and live among us disguised as humans

John Jones Manhunter from Mars

Speaking of aliens:

Aliens exist and they live in our midst disguised as humans — at least, that’s what 20 percent of people polled in a global survey believe.

The Reuters Ipsos poll of 23,000 adults in 22 countries showed that more than 40 percent of people from India and China believe that aliens walk among us disguised as humans, while those least likely to believe in this are from Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands (8 percent each).

eitb: 1 in 5 believe aliens exist and live among us disguised as humans

(via Capn Marrrrk)

A Media History of Gray Aliens

man of year one million

Above is a illustration from the December 23, 1893 edition of the Ottawa Journal‘s reprint of HG Wells’s article ” The Man of the Year Million.” It may be the first visual representation of the famous “Greys.” The first description, however, may belong to Kenneth Folingsby, who wrote about a race of evolved beings in Meda: A Tale of the Future.

Iron Skeptic: A Media History of Gray Aliens

This makes an excellent companion to my Evolution of the Mutant in Popular Culture.

I will echo the comment from the bottom of that page that points out that there were many other representations of aliens in popular culture. The Grey-esque images the author links to sound relatively obscure compared to other portrayals by the time Grey sitings became popular.

A few questions:

1. Are there any older portrayals of “Grey-esque” creatures – in, for example, ancient tribal art?

2. When did accounts of Greys become particularly popular?

3. What is the likelihood that the earliest reporters of Greys had seen stuff like Amazing Tales covers?

FWIW, I like Douglas Rushkoff’s hypothesis from Playing the Future: the archetypal image of the Greys comes from the human fetus, and both their appearance and alien abduction phenomena correlate with the increased public debate over abortion.

Alien Abductions and Aleister Crowley: Magick or UFOs?

Phenomena Magazine:

In January through March of 1918 Crowley began a series of magickal workings called the Amalantrah Workings in furnished rooms in Central Park West, New York City. These were a performed via Sexual & Ceremonial Magick (his spelling) with the intent to invoke certain “intelligences” to physical manifestation. In actuality, the workings typically manifested as a series of visions and communications received through the medium-ship of his partner, Roddie Minor.

Phenomena Magazine: Alien Abductions and Aleister Crowley: Magick or UFOs?

(via New World Disorder).

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