Heaven's Gate cult initiation tape

Heaven's Gate was a UFO cult famous for their 1997 mass suicide, in which 39 members quietly laid down in bunk beds with plastic bags taped over their heads and died. They believed that they would launch themselves onto a flying saucer trailing the then-visible Hale-Bopp comet. At the time, I was working at the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada, on the night shift. We had an excellent view of the comet from the top floor of the plant, where we'd pause on break and stare at the blurry speck in the sky, wondering what madness possessed these people.

Well, I've recently discovered the entire tape series of cult leader Marshall Applewhite's video speeches to the sect members on YouTube. So spend some time listening to this guy ramble and see if maybe he couldn't hypnotise you into cutting your junk off and killing yourself (with $5.75 in your pocket, gotta remember the fare!):

That's just part one. There's the whole series here.

Oh, and let us not forget that the original website, maintained by the cult members who financed themselves through web development, is still up for anyone to view. The creepiest touch is the expanding 'red alert' GIF at the top. Did the cult members check the page every day for this signal? And when it appeared, that was their "boarding call"?

The Klingon alphabet, in case you were wondering

From kli.org, the official Klingon language resource. I've known a couple Trek fans who were at least somewhat fluent. Apparently there's a whole Unicode block reserved in some fonts. Given the letter-to-letter translation from English, one could even fathom a Bash script that translates phrases using imagemagick to shoot out an image with the equivalent Klingon text.

What, don't look at me? I don't even speak it!

The totally cosmic dolphin cult is alive and well

Just in case you were thinking that the New Age hippies had backed off from the dolphins, this LiveJournal observer has bad news:

"I hadn’t realized that among a certain segment of profitable 'eco'-tourism it is a commonly-held belief that dolphins not only have achieved higher consciousness and are intimate with the secrets of life, but also use telepathy to transmit their teachings.

"My favorite interaction with a dolphin-oriented wingnut occurred at the dump. As we threw our trash in the big stinky dumpster, a woman pulled up in her SUV plastered with hippie/new age bumper stickers. Dressed in all white, she asked us, 'Have you seen the dolphins?'

"'Not today,' I answered.

"'They’re out there right now. Did you know that humans are the only animal that fears when it doesn’t need to? Dolphins only fear when they are in danger?'"

Penn 'n' Teller's Bullshit did a whole episode on dolphin New-Age-ism, BTW:

A few quotes from the lexicon of Francis E. Dec, crank

Francis E. Dec was a New Yorker who had a relatively normal life as an Air Force radio operator, Bachelor of Arts graduate, and lawyer, until he was overtaken by paranoid schizophrenia and drew out the remainder of his years as a harmless crank who wrote a series of documents detailing a vast conspiracy-theory worldview which he mailed out and otherwise shared. We're talking racism, sexism, homophobia, religious conspiracies, mind-control rays, the works.

That bein' said so, his ravings make for a fun little theme park of kooky whimsy.

He's since achieved underground cult status, with tributes popping up everywhere from the Church of the Subgenius to Discordianism to popular music, including fictionalized versions of his works and a whole fan site, seen here.

So, a few terms to know if you want to study Francis' worldview:

The Brain-Bank Cities:

Cities existing on the far side of the moon we never see and which house your moon-brain (your real brain) of the Computer God. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brainwash Radio inculcating conformist propaganda. As such, these cities and the moon-brains housed in them are a vital part of the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy.

The Computer Brain Machines:

These secret machines are used by the Gangster Government for the purpose of filling out all of its paperwork, such as taxes, forms, bills, etc.  The speed of these machines is 2000 words a minute and they actually do the work which is supposedly done by Government Employees.

Infrared Crusader Priests:

These troops, created by the Computer God, were several hundred years ago responsible for the conquering and degeneration of the Slovene People, as well as for the savage butchery and experimentation upon thousands of innocents in order to perfect the process of implanting Frankenstein Controls inside the human skull. The Crusader Priests wore black robes and armor, with night-vision plastic lenses built into their helmets. They also used weapons smeared with Poison Nerve Jelly and conducted mass-exterminations by burning vast fields dusted with inflammable poison nerve gas powder Prussic Acid. Their headquarters were specially designated, fortified monasteries. Their modern-day successors include both black-robed judges and black-robed priests.

Frankenstein Slavery:

The process during which one’s own body is remote-controlled by the Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God. Frankenstein slavery is usually most prevalent at night, when you are unwittingly operated upon by the Computer God Sealed Robot-arm Operating Cabinet. Sodomy and rape, performed upon you by your tormentors, is an added bonus.

Rumors abound of archival on Ubuweb, but I'll be hanged in Tarnation if I can find them.

The latest roundup of Scientology's weirdness

The Hole

Pictured above: "The Hole", a private prison run by the members of Scientology. This facility in Riverside, California, recently came to light thanks to an expose book by Lawrence Wright. A full story on the writing of this work is here. To quote:

"Wright’s investigations into “The Hole,” a hidden Scientology gulag in southern California where errant Church members are sent to perform menial tasks and take part in 'orgies of self-abasement,' led him to break the story of an FBI investigation—since aborted—into human trafficking."

There are also more detailed descriptions of The Hole activities at the Wikipedia page. It basically sounds like a concentration camp straight out of the Holocaust or Khmer Rouge.

The child labor camp in Australia

Here is an Australian news magazine special on the "RPF", the Rehabilitation Project Force, a sprawling complex in the middle of an Australian suburb.

Kaja Ballo

In 2008, a young girl in France who was reportedly happy beforehand voluntarily took a personality test handed out by the church of Scientology. When she got the results, they apparently devastated her and she committed suicide, leaping to her death. Some speculation has had it that the church's method of tearing people down to convince them that they'll need the church in their lives had some bearing here.

In fact, all of the above stories have the theme of "disconnection" in common, the act of severing all ties with the world outside the church, be they family, friends, or professional. This is a practice in common throughout all cults and attempts at brainwashing.

Meanwhile, this column in Esquire cautions us that none of us should be too smug; given a weak enough moment, any one of us could be sucked into Scientology.

I close with a plea: We're all more aware about the cult of Scientology and what a nasty mental virus it is - our awareness of it is growing by the day. That's a good thing. But what OTHER things could we be seeing grow more prominent today that could turn into tomorrow's cult? We should be looking at those things, too.

The day Joan Rivers tried to get through an interview with GWAR

Clearly, Joan was expecting the musicians to be themselves. But instead they rolled in wearing their costumes and did the whole show in character. Now the question is, who was more out of their depth?

Fire rainbows in the sky

The concept is called a "circumhorizontal arc". It's an atmospheric phenomenon in which sunlight strikes airborne ice crystals to produce a rainbow effect. Four things have to happen for this to be seen:

1. The sun has to be higher than 58 degrees above the horizon.
2. There has to be a mild haze, such as cirrus clouds, slightly overcast, a marine layer, etc.
3. The clouds must contain flat, hexagonal ice crystals.
4. You have to be standing farther than 55 degrees latitude away from either pole.

For these reasons, the rarity of the event causes it to only be visible from certain parts of the world at certain times of the year. In North America, it's most commonly observed inland and to the north during the colder months, although as long as there's ice in the clouds and you're standing in the right spot, it could happen anywhere.

Because of the rarity of the event and the strange cloud formations that sometimes occur in conjunction with it, the phenomenon could be mistaken for things like UFOs and other conspiracy-laden legends.

The Bizarre Images of the temple of Seti I, Abydos

Seti I was a pharaoh in the 19th dynasty of Egypt, the son of Ramesses I and father of Ramesses II. His temple is located in what is known today as the sacred city of Abydos, Egypt, which is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt. The walls are decorated with a host of inscrutable hieroglyphics, including a catalog list of the cartouches (symbols or seals) of every Egyptian pharaoh before him.

What grabs the attention of modern onlookers, however, is the uncanny resemblance between some of the symbols on the walls and modern inventions, including helicopters, submarines, and zeppelins:

This oddity has fed rumors of ancient aliens or time-travelers on the usual sites. However, there are perfectly mundane explanations for these figures, in that they aren't really detailed to begin with, have decayed several centuries, and could be depicting perfectly ordinary everyday objects of the time, or perhaps, like the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, been a particularly bright attempt at imaging the future. After all, our modern flying machines do indeed resemble natural flying creatures, and if any preindustrial artist would have been asked to imagine a man-built flying machine in the future, very few could argue against designing something that looks fairly like what devices we have today. You wouldn't imagine that an airplane shaped like a fish or turtle could fly, could you?

The complete diagram of the temple:

 Abydos became a popular necropolis in ancient Egypt, containing many temples and burial sites devoted to Egyptian royalty. This has also led to the general area becoming a focus for all sorts of cult and superstitious activity throughout the decades. More research into this intriguing historical area here.

First Men In the Moon

A movie poster from the film adaptation of H.G. Wells' work of the same title.

Notable to think how, in 1964, such speculation as this poster makes was still viable in the popular mind. Cities? Little moon men? Canals? Ray-gun fights? Sure, why not?

Made by the same stop-motion animator, Ray Harryhausen, who was also behind 20 Million Miles to Earth, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts.

In Lunacolor!

Flying Saucer Cult of the Day: The Aetherius Society

Who's "Really" inside the UFOs, indeed? Our benevolent interplanetary overlords, of course! The Aetherius Society is dedicated to working with our Cosmic Masters to use "mystical tools of white magic that can give you the spiritual power available only to advanced adepts centuries ago" in order to overcome the fact that "our world is accelerating into a world of selfishness and materialistic hedonism causing an increase in violence and terrorism around the world and a rapid depletion of Earth’s resources."

The Aetherius Society was founded by George King...

...a pretty serious-looking guy born in 1919 in Wellington, Shropshire, England. He puttered around at various labor professions including as a professional driver (of taxi cabs, limousines, and Jaguars which he test-drove), and also as a firefighter and a security guard. Then he got into Yoga, and from there just blundered into Eastern enlightenment teachings and from there - aliens!

From their FAQ:

Who Are The Cosmic Masters?

"The Cosmic Masters have visited Earth from time to time throughout history. It is the Cosmic Masters who have sent their emissaries to this planet throughout the ages. Beings such as Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Patanjali and others are part of this Cosmic and Solar Hierarchy and have been responsible for giving to humanity our knowledge of Spirituality."

Why Do Flying Saucers Blink In and Out at Times?

"Normally we cannot see their spacecraft as they are for the most part operating on higher frequencies of existence. The Cosmic Masters are able to lower the vibrations of themselves and their spacecraft down to the physical level at will. This is why flying saucers are often seen to blink in and out."

See, everything has a logical explanation.

What Are the Main Beliefs of The Aetherius Society?

"Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and other religious leaders were of extraterrestrial origin and came to Earth to help mankind. Unlike many UFO groups we believe that extraterrestrials are friendly and are here to help humanity in our development. The Mother Earth is a living breathing entity which is thousands of lives more evolved than we are."

...hey, wait a minute, I've never heard of a UFO group that didn't believe in benevolent aliens. Who are these "many UFO groups"?

Anyway, rock on, flying saucer people!

Bad Assumptions We Always Make About Extraterrestrial First Contact

Whenever I see a guide to what to do in case of first alien visitor contact (like this one), I always see the same stupid assumption made: the alien flew here in a big shiny ship, so obviously it's a highly advanced species compared to our own.

Bunk!

Then there's a section instructing you on how to scurry around trying to communicate with the aliens to show off how smart you are. You know, to prove we're sentient, and hence "worth getting to know".

Right there, there's some bad assumptions:

1.   Who says they wouldn't eat a smart species? Maybe they consider sentient species a rare delicacy.
2.   Maybe they actually aren't seeking out other sentient species. We humans, social animals, assume that the prime motivation for intergalactic travel is to party with some friends. Maybe the aliens want to think of themselves as the only sentient species in the universe, and they're just here to strip-mine the planet and leave.
3.   Maybe they're looking for slaves. If they're just out to snap a remote control onto your spine and make you do their bidding, extra IQ points just make you that much more useful.
4.   Maybe they met something else, like bats or dolphins, before they met you. And since it might turn out that bats or dolphins are smarter in their own way than humans are and if the aliens just happen to jive more with the other critters than they do with us, maybe all your showing off is for nothing.
5.   Maybe they rate intelligence on a different scale from us. Perhaps, like bees and termites, the aliens are born with instinct already in place so they intuitively grok math and engineering, but they judge intelligence based on how well you can juggle or how well you can sing in the 20-40 kHz range.
6.   Who's to say we don't scare the daylights out of them? There might be something about us that's horribly disturbing to them, like how we smell or the fact that we have hair. They'd be unable to see us as anything but hideous monsters and no matter how much smarts we show off, they'd just be consumed with the thought that anything as repulsive as us must die.
7.   You know how we humans have religions that make us expect crazy things to happen and react in bizarre ways? Now imagine aliens with some unfathomable dogma which dictates that Earth is Hell and everybody living on it is a demon. How do you P.R. your way out of that one?

We have to be lucky enough to have avoided all of those scenarios before we even have a chance of making a good first impression and having it do us any good. Now back to our first bad assumption: That the aliens, themselves, are advanced, or even sentient!

The first argument I usually find is "But they got here, so they obviously must be smart!"

Well, even an animal can float on water on a raft. Primitive tribe people rowed out to islands on boats. Maybe they got here by accident.

That's usually followed by "But they crossed interstellar space, so they must have invented faster-than-light travel!"

Please, if this was your first thought, sit down before you hurt yourself! Maybe the aliens have lifespans in the hundreds of millions of years, and so a trip of 17,000 years is just a relaxing nap to them. We humans have pathetically short lifespans, you know, even compared to many other species right here on Earth. It could turn out that we got stuck with the shortest lifespans of any sentient species in the universe, and so we are unable to conceptualize traveling to other stars without breaking the laws of physics in order to reach our destination before we die. Every other species can just launch a soapbox with a pile of TNT, pointed in the right direction, then patiently sit there waiting 17,000 years to reach their destination.

Or they could have a generation ship. Or they could just clone new bodies and use them for personal organ banks. Or maybe they've embraced technology to the point where they're cyborgs who effectively can just turn themselves off to save energy and have their extremely reliable electronics turn them on when they get here. Or maybe the big, shiny flying saucer is actually a scout ship built and launched from their space station out past Pluto.

See how humans have a hard time thinking outside of their tiny little frame of reference?

But beyond all of this, who says that we're talking to the smart alien race at all?

1.   Maybe we're actually talking to a robot. If you went across space with the responsibility of contacting aliens who, for all you know, might be hostile, would you rather send a robot avatar to test the water first, or just boldly charge out the hatch and risk becoming the first human victim of the disintegration ray?
2.   Maybe we're talking to an enslaved race, or the domestic pets of the race which built the spaceships. Same reasoning as the robots, and who says we're the first species the aliens have ever contacted? Maybe they've been setting up franchises all over the galaxy since before the tiny speck of dust we call home even formed?
3.   Since when do the engineers who designed the ship also become the ones assigned to drive it around? If an alien encounters your average human driving a car, should they assume that said human understands the intricacies of an internal combustion engine? You drive, but you have to take your car to a mechanic to be repaired (excepting those of you who are mechanics themselves), do you not?
4.   Think military: What invading army puts its head general at the front line? Maybe we're talking to the dumb grunts sent to scout us out for invasion and report back.
5.   We might be dealing with a hivemind. Like bees and ants, no individual member of a hivemind will have any noticeable intelligence; it's only together with its 100,000 sisters that it starts looking sentient.
6.   One more thing: Who says that anything built their ship at all? Maybe the ship itself is a life form, like a giant space turtle, or an asteroid covered in coral that steers it around. Maybe what we think of as the ship is actually the intelligent life form, and the beings we see riding on it are just parasites. We could go on all day here. It is impossible to think of every possibility - even our scientific exploration on Earth has rebuked us again and again with the stunning diversity of life and the unexpected ways it gets by!

I don't know what the rest of you have planned. Given all the unknowns, it may not matter at all what we do when that momentous first contact happens. The safest bet that I'm considering, should I be in the position of human race ambassador, is to turn the tables on them: make them prove their sentience to me first. I'll just start inspecting everything about them, and record and document everything I can. If they really are interested in meeting other smart species, they'll recognize this as a sign of my own sentience - maybe it will even be better to put them off-guard and feel a little intimidated, just in case they have hostile intentions.

But there is simply too much we humans assume about everything all the time to ever have the slightest idea what we should do when that moment comes.

Humans actually suck at trying to conceptualize in non-human ways. We have a hard enough time empathizing with our own next-door neighbor now.

Update: Over a year later, Why We'll Never Meet Aliens makes it to the front page of Slashdot. Note the backlash: I always see hate and ridicule from commenters when it's not starry-eyed utopia news. Apparently the Internet only reveres science if science is a big jolly guy handing out presents.

A Quick, Helpful Guide to Determining Whether You Were Abducted By Aliens

From the Alien Abduction Insurance website:

"Clear facts indicating that you have been abducted by aliens:

    You can hear voices in your head. This can probably be the sign indicating that you were abducted by aliens, but before claiming that fact make sure you don't have earphones on."

Interestingly, in the Wikipedia section on notable alien abduction claims, six of the eleven listed are from the USA. This means that either Americans are more interesting to aliens than anybody else, Americans are more prone to make a claim, or other countries are underreporting.

And don't forget to mark it on your calendars: March 20th is Alien Abduction Day. Along with making sure your bags are packed and your shots are current, that link will point you to many more helpful resources including hot spots for UFO watching and alien abduction safety (like, in case you want to refuse going, for some crazy unfathomable reason). The PDF pamphlet on "How To Refuse Alien Abduction" is solid gold, not to be missed.

Fall In Love With Marika Rokk's Interpretation Of Space Cabaret

Marika Rokk was a dancer and singer of German film. Unfortunately, she was at the height of her popularity right during the Nazi era, so she became indelibly linked with it. Nevertheless, as seen by the campy, original style of this production, she's worth a second look.

This film from 1958, titled "Mir Ist So Langweilig" (It means "I am so bored") shows a moon-woman spying an African tribe on Earth and blasting down to be frolic with them for the sheer novelty of it. Despite the racist overtone (she even draws her finger across the chest of one dark man to see if it would rub off, but is promptly laughed at for this), it's full of charming touches like the swaying astronauts and a cute rocket with a gyroscopic cockpit.

This was done after her pardon from her post-WWII professional ban. For a while there, they didn't let her perform because she was so associated with the Nazis, which, let's face it, is hardly her fault since she couldn't help who buys a ticket to her shows.

Quantum Levitation - Transportation will change in the future

Take a peek at what is being casually shown off at ASTC:

Now imagine a subway train using the same technology.

Quantum levitation utilizing superconductivity has been steadily developing. Find out more about it here.

The Universe People

The Universe People would like to remind you "just say 'no' to chip slavery!"

"We love you and we help you!"