The Nephilim visit Miami

If you needed further evidence that whoever is controlling the simulation we're all trapped in has gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us, today we have: giant shadow aliens visiting a mall in Miami.

The event in question took place over a month ago, so I have to apologize for being a half a measure behind the rest of the orchestra, here.  On the other hand, since then the story has taken on a life of its own, and has grown way beyond the original claim, which was bizarre enough.  Apparently on January 1, some rowdy teens started a large brawl at Bayside Marketplace, so the police were called in.  This isn't anything unusual for Miami, so you'd think it'd have passed for business as usual, but then someone -- no one seems quite sure who -- got on social media and claimed that the police weren't there to handle some teenage brawlers, but to deal with "eight to ten foot tall shadow aliens."

This would be eye-opening even by south Florida standards.  Oddly enough, despite the fact that everybody and his dog now has a phone capable of taking high-quality photographs, no one seems to have snapped a pic of these aliens.  So of course, very quickly people realized that it was just a stupid rumor, there were no aliens, and everyone calmed down and went home, chuckling about how silly they'd all been.

Ha-ha, just kidding!  Of course that's not what happened.  What happened is that the rumor exploded that the police had prevented people from photographing the aliens, even resorting to confiscating and/or destroying people's phones.  Or that the aliens were "interdimensional space beings" who could not be photographed.  Possibly both.  The Miami Police Department issued a statement that it had "just been an altercation between about fifty juveniles," adding, "There were no aliens, UFOs, or ETs.  No airports were closed, and there were no power outages," and followed it up with the facepalm emoji.

Which accomplished exactly nothing.  Because why would the police be denying it if it weren't true?

Inescapable logic, that.

After that, there were only two things left to figure out; why were the police suppressing information about the aliens?  And who exactly were these tall, shadowy beings that mysteriously could not be photographed? 

I think we can all agree that given the evidence, there's only one possible conclusion: we are seeing the return of the Nephilim, as hath been foretold in the Bible, and the police are under orders from the Illuminati to make sure that no one finds out.

You may think I'm making this up, but this claim went off on social media like some hundred-megaton stupidity bomb.  "Let's talk about these creatures that supposedly are UFOs," said one TikToker.  "If you're a Christian you should already know.  These UFOs are fallen angels.  Remember, the devil's main goal is to make sure you don't believe he is real, and that Jesus is also not real.  This is just a warning that time is running out, and you better get close to Jesus."  One guy calling himself "the Apostle Preston," who on the video appeared to be tuning into God via an earpiece, said, "I hear you, Lord.  Tell the people there will be sightings of giants.  Giants that have been in hiding.  There will be sightings of them.  He said, 'But tell my people also not to fear.  Because what's going to happen is that when these giants are sighted, there will be great fear among men, and many of you will forget who your God is.'  This is why you need to be in a place of preparation."  A TikToker called -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "endtimelady" did a long video about how the aliens in Miami are actually Nephilim but they're also demons, and they're going to come out and terrorize us.  Oh, and we should be careful to control our thoughts, because they're telepathic.  "This is going to get more and more common," she said.  "Because we're in the End Times."

I guess if your handle is "endtimelady" you gotta bring that up somehow.

My favorite, though, is the guy who kept saying, "Why is nobody talking about this?" when, in fact, every lunatic on social media seems to be doing nothing but talking about this.

It's been a month and a half since the incident took place, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.  You'd think that questions like, "Where have the giant aliens been hiding since January 1?" and "If the powers-that-be are so desperate to prevent anyone from finding out about this, how are there videos and posts by the tens of thousands all over the internet, and no one's doing anything about it?" would come to people's minds.  Not to mention, "Why am I paying any attention to the crazed ramblings of people who obviously have a pound and a half of Malt-O-Meal where the rest of us have a brain?"

But this is social media, where everything's made up, and logic and evidence don't matter.

Anyhow.  You might want to keep an eye out for giant shadowy aliens.  Seems like they'd be hard to miss, but you never know.  I'm going to place my three dogs on High Red Alert Mode, usually reserved for Extreme Danger Situations like the arrival of the UPS guy.  So we'll all be watching for new developments.  If "endtimelady" is right and these are the End Times, I'd actually be thrilled, because I live in rural upstate New York and it's kind of boring around here.  The arrival of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and the Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Crowns would be a welcome relief from the monotony.

On the other hand, if my initial take is correct and none of it is real and it is the result of superintelligent beings messing around with the computer simulation we're in, y'all just need to stop.  In the last few years the weirdness dial has already been turned up to eleven, and I think that's about all we can cope with, down here.  So y'all just sober up and simmer down, okay?

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Angels on ice

I guess it's natural enough to ascribe all sorts of bizarre stuff to places we don't know much about.  And top of the list of places we don't know much about is Antarctica.

The first recorded landing on the shores of Antarctica by humans (you'll see why I added "by humans" in a moment) was in 1821, when the American seal-hunting ship Cecilia, under Captain John Davis, anchored in Hughes Bay, between Cape Sterneck and Cape Murray along the west coast of the continent.  There's a possibility that the Māori discovered it first, perhaps as far back as the seventh century C.E., but that's based only on their legends and at this point is pure conjecture.

Since that time, there's been a good bit of exploration of the place, but there's a ton we still don't know.  The reason for this is not only its inaccessibility, but its ridiculously cold temperatures; the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was on July 21, 1983, when in Vostok Station, Antarctica it reached just this side of -90 C.  (For reference, carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 C, so some of the white stuff on the ground there was dry ice.)

The mystery and inhospitable conditions just invite speculation, not to mention outright invention.  Perhaps the most famous story set in Antarctica is H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," in which a team of explorers finds the remnants of monumental architecture that predates the earliest humans by a good hundred million years -- at which time Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.  (What's most fascinating about this story is that Antarctica was a tropical rainforest at one point, when the continent was a great deal farther north, and that Lovecraft had conjectured this a good forty years before plate tectonics was discovered.)  Of course, being a story by HPL, it wouldn't be complete without monsters, and the unfortunate explorers discover that the place is still inhabited, and by the time it's over most of them have been eaten by Shoggoths.

Interestingly, this leads us right into the story that spawned today's post, because although most people know that Lovecraft's stories and others of their type are fiction, there are some for whom that distinction has never really taken hold.  I found out about this because a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that had popped up on Ranker called "These Fallen Angels Might Have Been Imprisoned in Antarctica," about a fellow named Steven Ben-Nun who claims that according to the Book of Enoch (a Jewish text dated to somewhere between 200 and 100 B.C.E., which is considered apocryphal by most Christian sects) when the angels fell, they didn't go to hell, they went to Antarctica.

Which, I suppose, is hellish enough.

Ben-Nun (and Enoch) give a great many details.  Apparently there were a bunch of angels called the Watchers, who became enamored of humans, and not just of watching, if you get my drift.  They came down to Earth and immediately taught humans "unholy ways" that apparently involved lots and lots of sex.  This resulted in lots and lots of babies, who were half-angel and half-human, and these are the Nephilim, about whom the conspiracy theorists still babble, lo unto this very day.

If this nineteenth-century marble statue of a fallen angel by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs is accurate, you can see why humans were tempted.  I wouldn't have said no either.

But new and fun sexual diversions weren't the only thing the angels taught humans.  According to the article:

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, taught men to make tools for war and women to make themselves more attractive with jewelry and cosmetics.  Shemyaza taught magical spells; Armaros taught the banishment of those spells; the angel Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel gave humans knowledge of astronomy; Chazaqiel taught them about weather; Shamsiel gave humans knowledge of the sun cycles; Sariel taught them the lunar cycles; Penemuel instructed humanity to read and write, and Kashdejan gave humanity the knowledge [of] medicine.

Well, all this was unacceptable to the Old Testament God, who above all seemed to resent it whenever he saw humans learning stuff or enjoying themselves.  So he and the unfallen angels (who presumably were just fine with humans not knowing about astronomy and weather and reading and writing and sex) waged war, and the Watchers were defeated.  At that point, Ben-Nun says, God looked about for the worst place possible to put them, and decided, understandably enough, on Antarctica.

And there they still reside, frozen underneath Wilkes Land.  Why specifically Wilkes Land, you might ask?  Well, it's because that's where the Wilkes Land Gravitational Anomaly is, the conventional explanation for which is that it's the site of an impact crater from a meteorite that hit about 250 million years ago.

But you can see how that explanation leads directly to the conclusion, "... so there must be a hundred fallen angels frozen under here somewhere."

Other than that, the claim doesn't have much going for it, and I don't think the scientists need to worry about waking up a bunch of Watchers.  The Lovecraftian cyclopean architecture is kind of a non-starter, too.  Too bad, because otherwise, most of Antarctica seems like nothing much more than rocks and ice.  It could use a few Shoggoths or hot-looking scantily-clad angels to liven thing up a bit.

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View from the fringe

Call me masochistic, but every so often I like to check in and see what people like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones are saying.

Those two, and various others I could name, always have seemed to me to be seated right at the triple point between true belief, crass commercial pandering, and outright batshit craziness.  Far be it from me to make a determination between the three; I think both of them have some measure of all three.  (Okay, with Jones, there's a bigger proportion of craziness, but still.)  As evidence, let's see what our two pals have been up to this past week.

Rush Limbaugh went on record as saying that President Obama's latest scheme to overturn life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was unleashing hordes of lesbian farmers on the midwest.  The midwest, Limbaugh claims with some degree of accuracy, is the last bastion of the solidly conservative Republican core in the United States (although you might make the same argument for much of the southeast).  So naturally, given a largely right-leaning region, what else should someone like Obama do but search and destroy?

And what better weapon than lesbian farmers?  I guess that "learning to use heavy equipment" is now officially part of the "gay agenda."

Don't believe me?  Here's the quote:

They are trying to bust up one of the last geographically conservative regions in the country; that’s rural America … So here comes the Obama Regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up … apparently enough money it make it happen, and the objective here is to attack rural states.

So there you have it.

But that's small potatoes compared to the latest from Alex Jones.  He interviewed Steven Quayle (the guy who thinks that HAARP is still operational, and is what is currently creating hurricanes in the south Atlantic, because that doesn't happen every year or anything) and Gary Heavin (conservative activist and founder of the Curves fitness center chain) to discuss how the descendants of fallen angels are currently running the world.

I kid you not.  Here's the conversation:

Quayle:  Donald Trump, in my opinion, is God’s prosecuting attorney.  He’s laying out the evidence.  It’s like everything evil is swarming upon him.  I think the fascinating thing about this is that, you probably heard this, I gave a word that I really thought was an answer to prayer, God said, "Before I allow America to be destroyed by the Russians and the Chinese, now this is hard to take, I’m going to reveal the sins of America’s leaders to the people and the people’s sins before a Holy God."

Jones:  Doesn't that always biblically happen, that before a country goes under judgment, they're given warning after warning, then one really big warning? 

Quayle:  The big warning is coming.  I believe the ultimate warning is coming. 

Heavin:  Let me just...  Steve's taught me a lot about this.  You know, there's no aliens; there's demons.   And Steve has a great explanation, you know, he's taught me about this.   Where these demons come from.  We know that fallen angels rebelled against god, came down to Earth, and we know they had sex with human women.   We know that the offspring were these entities that Steve will talk about... 

Jones: That's in the bible. 

Heavin:  It's all biblical. 

Jones:  So that's why the elites intermarry, to try to keep that bloodline. 

Heavin:  Absolutely.  The idea is, Satan knew that if he could contaminate the human DNA, he could prevent the coming of Jesus, because Jesus had to be of pure DNA.  A lot of the really awful things that happen in the bible, entire cities being wiped out, driving out the bad guys, was to cleanse the DNA so that Jesus, Satan could not prevent Jesus from coming.

So there you have it.  While the militia composed of lesbian farmers attacks the country's midsection, the elite people with angelic DNA will be having lots of sex to create progeny that will go back in time and prevent Jesus from being born.  Unless Donald Trump does something to avoid the evil swarming upon him, and stop all of that from happening.

Don't forget: you heard it here first.

Anyhow.  I can totally understand why people still listen to Limbaugh and Jones; it's the undeniable attraction of listening to someone who might without provocation say something that's loony enough to be funny.  It'd be nice to get them off the air, though -- the last thing this country needs is to have more people spreading around conspiracy theories.  But since listeners = sponsors = money, it's unlikely to happen any time soon.  I can only hope that the majority of the people paying attention to what they say are not leaning back and thinking, "My god!  That makes total sense!"

Although that would explain a lot about how we get the elected officials we always seem to end up stuck with.