Lots of UFO news last week:
- Friday, Trump releases the Epstein distrac- I mean the ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ files: www.war.gov/UFO/. Lots of drone footage, sure, but also really weird things. I’d like to link to specific photos, but as you can tell from the URL, it’s is not a serious website meant for distributing real knowledge.
- Immediately, Kalshi users start a bet about whether the US government will confirm that aliens exist before or after 31/12/2026.
(both links via Tyler Cowen, who has more on the topic)
My bet? Yes, US gov will confirm alien life. Why? Read on, reader…
- On Saturday, this amazing The Specimen post (cactus.store newsletter) appears in my inbox, all about one of my favorite artists, Sun Ra!
One of the more delicious bits of Sun Ra’s mythic lore is the early visionary experience he had as a young man in Alabama. It was there in 1936 at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University that a young Herman Poole Blount (he would later legally change his name in 1952) was transported to the planet Saturn. In an oft-quoted passage from John Szwed’s seminal biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, Blount-later-to-be-Ra describes the event:
‘My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up… I wasn’t in human form… I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn… they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools… the world was going into complete chaos… I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.‘
- But that’s not all! The whole, well-researched post is worth a read. Come for the art, stay for the obscure articles:
‘We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events.’
Edward J. Steele et. al., Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Vol 136.
Yeah, take a minute to digest that. Retroviruses from outer space, say these authors, caused the Cambrian explosion. And they explain it very well. I used to be a panspermia sceptic, but I’m convinced now.
And, then, in Bar Cali in Nijmegen, a place I don’t live but was visiting this weekend and you should visit it too, my wife points out this poster to me:
Coincidence? I think not.