Wackosynthesis

Well, once again we have someone who has blenderized several woo-woo ideas to make a brand new fusion-cuisine of looniness.  The most recent perpetrator of this process, which I like to call "wackosynthesis," is a gentleman named Timothy Green Beckley.  In an article just released a couple of days ago, entitled "Legacy of the Sky People: Was Noah's Ark a Strange Vehicle From Mars?", Sean Casteel (regular writer for UFO Digest) gives a highly laudatory review to Beckley's new book, also called Legacy of the Sky People.   Beckley's book costs $20 (plus shipping and handling), which I absolutely refuse to spend, because just from the review, it sounds like a fine example of woo-woo lunacy.  Beckley uses the following ingredients:

• UFOs
• Ancient Astronauts
• Noah's Ark and the biblical flood story
• The monolith on Phobos
• The Roswell Incident
• CIA conspiracies and coverups

He then stirs well and bakes at 350 degrees for forty-five minutes, and comes up with the following idea:

Noah wasn't an ancient Israelite.  He was a superintelligent Martian that was bringing the last remnant of his civilization to Earth, using a spacecraft, which unfortunately crashed on Mount Ararat.  Noah and his Martian pals then genetically engineered the primitive, Bronze-Age humans they found here, and thus was born the human race in all of its nobility.

What proof does he have, you may ask?  Well, besides the incontrovertible evidence of the Book of Genesis, which we all know to be completely scientifically and historically accurate, we also have:

• cave paintings with some bits that look like UFOs.  Interestingly, the one link that Casteel gives to a cave painting website shows some cave paintings that have nothing whatsoever UFO-like on them.
• the ongoing foolishness that there's an alien monolith on Phobos.  The "monolith" is almost certainly a large rock, but that still hasn't stopped all of the people who think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a historical documentary from blathering endlessly about it on the internet.
• an allegation that there has been an "anomalous object" discovered on the side of Mount Ararat.  As far as I could follow Beckley and Casteel's logic, the "object" isn't made of "gopher wood," which leaves only one conclusion: it is the wrecked remnants of a spaceship.

Beckley and Casteel also cite some references, which read as a veritable cast-list of woo-woo.  These include:

• Erich von Däniken, who is still making money writing books about the "god(s) are ancient aliens" idea
• Zecharia Sitchin,  who started the whole "Annunaki" business
• Giorgio Tsoukalos,  who publishes Legendary Times, co-produces the series Ancient Aliens, and who has really amazing hair
• Tim Swartz, editor of Conspiracy Journal
• Brinsley LePoer Trench, who besides having a name that's a lot of fun to say, was a member of the British House of Lords, and was one of the first real UFO enthusiasts.  He famously started a debate on the floor of Parliament, and pushed the Members to vote on whether they thought aliens had visited the Earth.  (The result:  "No.")
• Nick Redfern, of Bigfoot fame, and contributing editor of Phenomena magazine
• George van Tassel, one of the most renowned alien abductees

Well, I think we can all agree that with a star-studded list of references like that, we have no other choice but to believe everything Beckley and Casteel are saying.

If, unlike me, you still want to purchase Beckley's book, the link I posted above has Beckley's contact information and all the information you need about price.  There is also price and purchase information on Beckley's other books, which include The American Indian Starseed Connection, Other Tongues Other Flesh Revisited, Ancient Secrets of Mysterious America: Revealing our True Cosmic Destiny, and Alien Space Gods of Ancient Greece and Rome: Revelations of the Oracle of Delphi.  So I think you can see that if you're so inclined, there's a wealth of reading material, here.

As for me, I think I'll pass.  The review was enough to give me a general flavor for Beckley's "theories," and I already think I'm going to need more coffee to get the taste out of my mouth. 

The monolith on Phobos, and why the aliens are avoiding us

In Stanley Kubrick's seminal science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Earth astronauts discover a monolith on the Moon that turns out to be a signal transmitter to a super-powerful race of aliens.  Uncovering it alerts the aliens that we have become sufficiently advanced that we have made it into space -- letting them know that we had achieved a high enough technological level that we were ready to take the next step, which turned out to be spending twenty minutes watching psychedelic colored lights and the main character's eye blinking.

Well, according to a new claim, based upon NASA photographs, Kubrick's vision may have been prophetic -- he just got the location of the monolith wrong.

Take a look at this photograph of the surface of Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars:

The stick-in-the-mud, dry-as-dust scientists at NASA say this is just a tall, vaguely rectangular boulder.  This ignores the truth, which is that it is a structure placed there by a highly advanced alien species, of unknown motives, so we should proceed with caution.  After all, three separate probes have all disappeared on or near Mars -- the 1988 Phobos-2 spacecraft, the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter, and Beagle-2 in 2003.

Oh, and also: Phobos is hollow, and is actually a spacecraft launched in 1876 that is peopled by aliens whose job is to monitor what we're up to here on Earth.

By this time, you're probably wondering who dreamed all of this up.  It will come as no surprise to hear that this is the brainchild of: Richard C. Hoagland.

Yes, Hoagland again, he of the Face on Mars, the faking of the Moon landing, hyperdimensional super-energy inside the dormant volcano Mauna Loa, the crop circles on Saturn, NASA being a thinly-disguised cult that worships the Egyptian god Osiris, and the idea that the universe is being controlled by a Giant Radioactive Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy.  Okay, I made the last one up, but it would be hard to tell, frankly, because a lot of Hoagland's ideas leave me thinking that where most people have a brain, he has a half pound of Malt-o-Meal.

So, anyway, given Hoagland's track record I'm voting for the "big boulder" hypothesis regarding the Monolith on Phobos, boring as that may be.  But this isn't the only news from the skies -- we also should mention the claim last week, by Russian astronomer Sergey Smirnov, that the aliens aren't landing on Earth and making contact because they think we're "childish idiots."

"They don’t really like the way we are polluting our planet," Smirnov told reporters.  "Obviously, they warned all the space inhabitants to avoid contacts with the Earth, because our civilization is dangerous and all the secrets they might reveal to us will be used for constructing a new super bomb or poison."

So, basically, we're sort of the interstellar version of the creepy guy on the subway who hasn't bathed in weeks and looks like he might mug you if you get too close.

Anyhow, that's our news from the world of space research.  And maybe Smirnov's right; perhaps the take-home message is that it really would be better if we just stuck around on Earth until we learned how to clean up our act, both literally and figuratively.  This goes double if Hoagland is right about what's on Phobos.  After all, look at all the trouble the guys in 2001 got into when they started investigating the monolith.  Their computer went bonkers, a bunch of them died, and one of them got turned into an Enormous Floating Space Baby.  And lord knows, we wouldn't want that to happen.