I'm very pleased to see that my short story, "Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology," has been chosen for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Recommendation list this year! The story first appeared in Darrell Schweitzer's SHADOWS OUT OF TIME anthology released by PS Publishing. If you want to check out Datlow's complete list, click HERE.
PRAISE FOR CRYPTOSCATOLOGY:
From Matthew Phelan's 11-28-24 DAILY MAIL article entitled "Mysterious Lights Over Capitol Hill Sparks Fears of UFOs in Washington DC":
An ominous quartet of gleaming lights above the United States Capitol building have left some afraid the alien invasion has finally arrived.
The photo — taken at night just outside of Congress, with the dome of Capitol Hill in full view – was taken by US Air Force veteran Dennis Diggins who now works as a licensed tour guide in the Washington DC area, as well as a professional travel director.
The eerie triangular formation of lights that Diggins captured in his photo seems to hover just feet over the 'Statue of Freedom' at the top of the Capitol dome.
'That’s absolutely insane,' one spectator said of the strange glowing orbs, which looked like landing lights on some otherworldly craft.
The image comes just weeks after a pair of stunning public hearings in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives, where lawmakers probed current and retired Pentagon officials over the state of intelligence on what used to be called 'flying saucers.'
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Kushi Patel's 11-28-24 TIMES NOW article entitled "UAP Or UFO? Object Sighting At Manchester Airport Sparks Speculation":
A round blue object was spotted at Manchester Airport this week, sparking speculation about it being an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) or a UFO. While authorities are yet to issue a formal statement about the sighting, several social media users posted videos of the object.
Reacting to the videos one person tweeted that a spherical object was spotted from inside the cockpit of a plane. They added that it took off when a security vehicle approached.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Tom Sanders' 11-27-24 METRO article entitled "UFO Expert Says Aliens ‘Weren’t Involved’ in Famous Rendlesham Forest Incident: Britain’s Most Well-known UFO Sighting May Have Been Caused by a Bout of Electromagnetic-fuelled Psychosis, a Top Researcher Has Claimed.":
The Rendlesham Forest incident, where members of the US Air Force stationed at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, reported seeing unexplained lights and a craft in the forest in December 1980, has left people puzzled for decades over what the cause of the lights could have been.
Witnesses,
including high-ranking officers, described seeing a glowing, metallic,
triangular object hovering and emitting strange beams of light.
Yet
despite official investigations by the U.S. and U.K. militaries, no
conclusive explanation was found, fueling decades of speculation and
conspiracy theories ranging from alien encounters to secret military tests.
It remains one of the most well-documented and controversial UFO cases in British history, and now one UFO expert believes he has the answer.
Philip Mantle, the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and an author, said he is convinced something happened over those fateful nights in 1980 – but doesn’t necessarily think aliens were involved.
‘If you look at what those involved said to begin with, the only concrete info was that they saw some strange lights in the forest. That’s what we start off with,’ he told Metro [...].
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Matthew Phelan's 11-26-24 DAILY MAIL article entitled "The Three-word Warning Message UFOs Are Trying to Send Humans, According to Top Air Force Vet":
A retired Air Force Captain — who claims to have witnessed a UFO deactivate 10 nuclear missiles in 1967 — believes its 'alien' occupants have a simple, three-word message for humanity: 'WTF!?'
'I'm sorry. Did I say something wrong?' Captain Robert Salas joked after delivering the blunt opinion to Congresswoman Nancy Mace during an episode of the podcast Total Disclosure.
At the height of the Cold War, a then 26-year-old USAF Lieutenant Salas was underground while overseeing Malmstrom Air Force Base's nuclear equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in Montana.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Below you will hear Manly P. Hall, 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Freemason and author of such important books as THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES (1928) and THE SECRET DESTINY OF AMERICA (1944), delivering a lecture at The Philosophical Research Society on November 22, 1987....
Manly P. Hall: Things to be Thankful For (Thanksgiving 1987):
Prominent UFO researcher Christopher O'Brien (author of STALKING THE HERD, THE MYSTERIOUS VALLEY, and several other books) passed away Sunday morning after being involved in a car accident in Sedona, Arizona. Loren Coleman posted further details about this tragic news earlier today on his CryptoZooNews blog. (Click HERE to read Coleman's obit entitled "Christopher O’Brien, Author, Mutologist, and Good Guy Dies Suddenly.")
One could no doubt spend hundreds of hours listening to the numerous interviews conducted with O'Brien over the years, but the two presentations below serve as excellent jumping off points.
Listen to Christopher O'Brien and writer/journalist David Perkins discuss cattle mutilations, UFOS, mystery drones, and all manner of High Strangeness on INTO THE FRINGE:
Listen to O'Brien deliver a 1-16-18 lecture regarding the cattle mutilation phenomenon to the UFO & Paranormal Research Society in Los Angeles. Of particular interest is the segment in which O'Brien (quoting directly from the synopsis provided by UPARS) "presents startling new evidence linking many of these animal deaths to a covert environmental monitoring process perpetrated by a shadowy group with access to high technology":
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Apparently, Elon Musk is opposed to helping all the poor expectant mothers out there in desperate need of sage advice. Whenever I try to post a link to THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK Amazon page on Twitter/X, this warning pops up...
The link you are trying to access has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with X's URL Policy. This link could fall into any of the below categories:
Ignore this warning and continue
What follows is an excerpt from Alan Moore's 10-26-24 GUARDIAN article entitled "Fandom Has Toxified the World":
Never having sought a pop celebrity relationship with readers, I withdrew by stages from the social side of comics, acquiring my standing as a furious, unfathomable hermit in the process. And when I looked back, after an internet and some few decades, fandom was a very different animal.
An older animal for one thing, with a median age in its late 40s, fed, presumably, by a nostalgia that its energetic predecessor was too young to suffer from. And while the vulgar comic story was originally proffered solely to the working classes, soaring retail prices had precluded any audience save the more affluent; had gentrified a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood. This boost in fandom’s age and status possibly explains its current sense of privilege, its tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create. I speak only of comics fandom here, but have gained the impression that this reflexive belligerence – most usually from middle-aged white male conservatives – is now a part of many fan communities. My 14-year-old grandson tells me older Pokémon aficionados can display the same febrile disgruntlement. Is this a case of those unwilling to outgrow childhood enthusiasms, possibly because these anchor them to happier and less complex times, who now feel they should be sole arbiters of their pursuit?
There are, of course, entirely benign fandoms, networks of cooperative individuals who quite like the same thing, can chat with others sharing the same pastime and, importantly, provide support for one another in difficult times. These healthy subcultures, however, are less likely to impact on society in the same way that the more strident and presumptuous fandoms have managed. Unnervingly rapidly, our culture has become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in. Our entertainments may be cancelled prematurely through an adverse fan reaction, and we may endure largely misogynist crusades such as Gamergate or Comicsgate from those who think “gate” means “conspiracy”, and that Nixon’s disgrace was predicated on a plot involving water, but this is hardly the full extent to which fan attitudes have toxified the world surrounding us, most obviously in our politics.
Elections that decide the fate of millions are conducted in an atmosphere more suited to evictions on I’m a Celebrity …, in which contestants who are insufficiently amusing are removed from office. Saleability, not substance, is the issue. Those who vote for Donald Trump or Boris Johnson seem less moved by policy or prior accomplishment than by how much they’ve enjoyed the performances on The Apprentice or Have I Got News for You.
To read Moore's entire article, click HERE.
From Zach Rabiroff's 10-21-24 COMICS JOURNAL obituary for Bernie Mireault, creator of THE JAM and the artist of such important graphic novels as GRENDEL: THE DEVIL INSIDE (written by Matt Wagner):
It is bittersweet that as quintessential an outsider in comics as Bernie Mireault should be so widely and sincerely mourned. Mireault’s work had always projected the passionate fascination of someone standing just outside the comics mainstream without ever totally entering it. The Jam, Mireault’s magnum opus and the work which occupied the better portion of his career, was like an outsider art interpretation of Jack Kirby – Marvel Comics by way of a prodigiously talented cargo cult. Mireault, to be sure, was never the sort of artist likely to make the front of a Previews catalog, but it is wholly possible to imagine the sort of alternate world where he might have been, and where anyone with verve, talent and tenacity for the art form might do the same.
That this future, and all of Mireault’s futures, are confined to the realm of the hypothetical is now a tragic fact. On Sept. 2, 2024, Bernie Mireault died at age 64. His death, announced in a Facebook post by his lifelong friend and fellow comics artist Howard Chackowicz, revealed the cause to be suicide. The flood of remembrances was immediate and heartfelt: from collaborators, publishers, and colleagues who knew him; from elder industry statesmen like Paul Levitz who didn't; from fans, stunned and saddened by the loss of an artist most of them — of us — had long taken for granted. It was, in a real and ironic sense, as close to the center of the comics field that Mireault and his work had ever been.
To read the entire obituary, click HERE.
In December of 2022, Mireault's work was featured on Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg’s CARTOONIST KAYFABE YouTube show:
I have a sneaking suspicion that you've spent a great deal of time during the past two weeks ruminating over the devastating effects of disinformation far more than usual. Synchronistically, an anonymous team of mystically attuned minds have now published an entire tome that analyzes the very subject of disinformation from every philosophical angle possible, and the name of said grimoire is... THE EXPECTANT MOTHER DISINFORMATION HANDBOOK!
The committee of advanced scholars who composed this tome can, with utter honesty, offer you an ironclad guarantee that reading this weird book will NOT reverse the effects of the past two weeks in any appreciable way. In fact, plowing through the 400 pages of this HANDBOOK will no doubt amount to nothing more than an extraordinary waste of what little energy you have left. Nonetheless, peals of existential laughter might be the only true balm in a world of increasing madness. If the tintinnabulation of unhinged cackles drifting down the labyrinthine corridors of Ward Eleven seem like a welcome respite compared to staring off into space in complete and utter despair, you might want to give a seven-percent-solution of TEMDH a fighting chance.
The dutiful wardens at Madness Heart Press thank you for your time and attention.
What follows is a brief excerpt from Charles Darwent's 7-30-24 GUARDIAN obituary for Shiels:
In May 1977, Shiels, who has died at 86, was standing below Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands when a creature appeared in the water. It was, Shiels said, glossy and muscular. He managed to take two colour photographs of it, the clearest pictures of the Loch Ness monster then available.
The world of Nessology erupted. But excitement gave way to annoyance when Shiels hinted that the shot had been staged, using a Plasticine model he had made. The subject of his photos was now dubbed “the Loch Ness muppet”. That Shiels later recanted his recantation cut no ice. Monster-spotters had a sense of having been toyed with.
Shiels was unrepentant. He was an artist, and the role of the artist was to bring pleasure. This he had undoubtedly done. A Plasticine monster was no more fake than a painting: hoaxing was in the eye of the beholder. Seen in this way, Shiels’s work was a piece of performance art [...].
Whether you believed in Shiels’ magic was neither here nor there. He remained, at heart, a Surrealist, his showmanship akin to that of Salvador Dalí, his necromantic beard a variant of Dalí’s waxed moustache. This was not understood by his Cornish neighbour, the painter and occultist Ithell Colquhoun. “I told her that I was a charlatan and she denied it,” Shiels cheerily recalled. “‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You have real powers’, and all that nonsense. I said ‘no more than anyone else, my dear’.”
All this overshadowed his importance as a painter. Shiels had arrived in Cornwall a fully fledged French abstractionist. By 1963, he had reintroduced the figure to his work in canvases such as Four Frightened Bathers. Artists including Roger Hilton took note, and followed suit. Shiels’ influence was acknowledged in an exhibition called Creative Tensions, held in Penzance in 2019 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Penwith Society.
If you want to read the entire obituary, click HERE.
You can watch MAKING MARKS, Ben MacGregor's award-winning short documentary about the life and work of Shiels, by clicking HERE.
From Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand and Kristen Holmes' 11-15-24 CNN article entitled "Trump’s Team Skips FBI Background Checks for Some Cabinet Picks":
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.
Trump and his allies believe the FBI system is slow and plagued with issues that could stymie the president-elect’s plan to quickly begin the work of implementing his agenda, people briefed on the plans said. Critics say the intrusive background checks sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.
The discussions come as Trump has floated several controversial choices for high-level positions in the US government – including Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
Ultimately, the president has the final authority on who he nominates and decides to share intelligence with, regardless of the established protocol set in the wake of World War II to make sure those selections don’t have unknown foreign ties or other issues that could raise national security concerns.
But circumventing background checks would be bucking a long-established norm in Washington. It also reflects Trump’s deep mistrust of the national security establishment, which he derides as the Deep State. Sources say he has privately questioned the need for law enforcement background checks.
Dan Meyer, a national security attorney in Washington, DC, said the incoming Trump administration “doesn’t want harmony.” They “don’t want the FBI to coordinate a norm; they want to hammer the norm,” he said.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Luke Broadwater's 11-15-24 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Johnson Says He Will Object to Release of Ethics Report on Gaetz":
Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday said he planned to object to the release of a damaging bipartisan investigative report on the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican whom President-elect Donald J. Trump wants to be attorney general.
Mr. Johnson said it would be a “terrible breach of protocol” for the House Ethics Committee, which investigated Mr. Gaetz over sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other allegations, to make public its findings because Mr. Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress.
Mr. Gaetz abruptly resigned this week after being tapped by Mr. Trump, effectively ending the investigation just days before the committee had planned to vote on releasing its conclusions.
“I’m going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report,” Mr. Johnson told reporters on Friday at the Capitol, adding that he would contact the chairman of the panel, Representative Michael Guest, Republican of Mississippi, to make his wishes known.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Richard Rubenstein's 11-15-24 COUNTERPUNCH article entitled "'It’s the System, Stupid!' The Underlying Causes of Trump's Victory":
In 2016 Steve Bannon told Donald Trump that if he played his cards right, he could become “the Roosevelt of the Right.” That is, he could create a coalition of ultra-wealthy capitalists, small entrepreneurs, and discontented workers and bind them together under the flag of cultural nationalism. The key to doing this was to campaign against “the System” – not the system of capitalist oligarchy, of course, but the structures of administrative regulation, relatively free trade, and military commitments abroad that defined what Trump and Bannon called the “Deep State.” The key to their electoral success was to cast MAGA as the movement of systemic change and the Democrats as the party of the status quo – a trap into which the supporters of Biden and Harris easily fell [...].
[T]he problem is not that liberals fight for the rights and interests of historically oppressed groups. It is that, by accepting the zero-sum rules of the existing oligarchical system, they declare less oppressed groups to be “privileged” and lump them in with elite oppressors. Not surprisingly, this threatens and alienates groups that are only relatively privileged, and who are actually potential allies against the oligarchy and its political camp followers [...].
[T]o be white rather than Black, male rather than female, straight rather than gay, gives straight white males only relative advantages over the members of more oppressed groups. It clearly does not relieve them of oppression by far more powerful elites. In fact, their relative superiority over other groups is part of a sleazy divide-and-conquer game used by those with oligarchical power to keep them in line [...].
What is vicious about this is not merely that elite power makes a farce of democracy, but also that it continually generates solution-less problems. Thus, we export weapons of destruction as if there were no possibility of converting military production into a program to produce goods and services to satisfy basic human needs. We fight over immigration as if there were no such thing as a planned economy capable of remedying our labor shortage without lowering wage rates and bankrupting social services. And we choose sides in disputes between relatively oppressed and less oppressed identity groups as if there were no way to reduce competition between them for unnecessarily scarce resources and economic opportunities.To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Mark Daniell's 11-15-24 TORONTO SUN article entitled "Sylvester Stallone Hails Donald Trump as 'Second George Washington,' Compares President to Rocky":
Sylvester Stallone praised President-elect Donald Trump and hailed him as the “second George Washington” at a speech Thursday night in Palm Beach, Fla. [...].
“We’re in the presence of a really mythical character,” Stallone said to a roomful of cheers in a video shared on X by C-SPAN. “I love mythology. And this individual does not exist on this planet. Nobody in the world could have pulled off what he pulled off, so I’m in awe.”
He also likened Trump to Jesus and his boxer character Rocky telling the crowd his screen creation was “a chosen person … Something was going to happen. This man was going to go through a metamorphosis and change lives, just like President Trump.”
He continued on by celebrating Trump as a commander-in-chief akin to America’s first president George Washington, whose leadership altered the course of U.S. history.
“When George Washington defended his country, he had no idea that he was gonna change the world. Because without him, you could imagine what the world would look like. Guess what? We got the second George Washington” [...].
Back in 2021, Stallone shut down QAnon followers, after some of the adherents believed the actor was signaling the group when he posted a photo of himself sporting a cap with the letter “Q” alongside the caption: “Heading into the Storm…”
“For those incredibly inquisitive individuals, let me state unequivocally that the Q on this hat stands for Quantum of Solace, the name of the boat I was on, not anything else, OK?” he wrote on Instagram.
“Relax…So folks, the moral of the story is…enjoy your lives and let other people enjoy theirs…So keep punching.”
One of the central beliefs of the followers of the anonymous prophet named “Q” is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against Trump during his term in office.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Colleen Long and Dan Merica's 11-12-24 PBS article entitled "What Trump Has Said He Will Do on Day 1":
Donald Trump has said he wouldn’t be a dictator — “except for Day 1.” According to his own statements, he’s got a lot to do on that first day in the White House.
His list includes starting up the mass deportation of migrants, rolling back Biden administration policies on education, reshaping the federal government by firing potentially thousands of federal employees he believes are secretly working against him, and pardoning people who were arrested for their role in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” he said of his Day 1 plans.
When he took office in 2017, he had a long list, too, including immediately renegotiating trade deals, deporting migrants and putting in place measures to root out government corruption. Those things didn’t happen all at once.
How many executive orders in the first week? “There will be tens of them. I can assure you of that,” Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News on Sunday.
Here’s a look at what Trump has said he will do in his second term and whether he can do it the moment he steps into the White House...
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Peter Savodnik's 11-6-24 FREE PRESS article entitled "'We Blew It, Joe!'":
[I]n the midst of shedding its loyalty to the working and middle classes, the [Democratic Party] has transformed itself into a corporatized, single-cell organism. It no longer appears to represent a true coalition of interest groups—the way parties normally do. It is made up of platform surfers building their social media audiences on the backs of the very people they claim to bleed for: marginalized peoples, birthing people, Gazans, whoever.
They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans’ very honest, if flawed, conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Leo Sands' 11-5-24 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "Elon Musk Promotes Video Referencing QAnon in Support of Trump":
Elon Musk shared a video in support of Donald Trump that appeared to include references to the extremist QAnon ideology and footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, elevating the radicalized movement on the evening before millions of American voters cast their ballots on Election Day.
The billionaire owner of X has become one of Trump’s most vocal backers in the closing weeks of the campaign, and he has shared a blizzard of misinformation about the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Musk has frequently appeared at campaign rallies alongside the Republican nominee, while giving over $118.5 million to his own pro-Trump group.
The one-minute video, a mashup of campaign footage and archival video set to audio of Donald Trump speaking, features the letters “PATRIQTS” flickering on-screen and phrases used online by QAnon devotees [...].
The video, which was already circulating online before Musk amplified it on the eve of Election Day, also included what appeared to be imagery from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when pro-Trump rioters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in support of his baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
According to X’s own metrics, the video had garnered more than 23 million views by the early hours of Election Day [...].
Musk has boosted far-right memes and bogus theories in the past, winking to QAnon prophesies [...].
Far-right activists and conspiracy theorists have spent the years since the last presidential election shoring up an online infrastructure to spread false claims about election fraud — an effort supported by Musk in the run-up to Election Day.
In that period, American voters have grappled with an avalanche of misleading claims about nearly every aspect of their lives — from health care and education to immigration and the weather.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From 10-28-24 DAILY DOT article entitled "QAnon Crowd Explodes After Trump Says He and Matt Gaetz Have a ‘Little Secret’ That Will Swing the Election":
QAnon supporters are convinced that their wildest fantasies will soon come true after former President Donald Trump alluded to a “little secret” during his rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday.
Shadow of Ezra, a prominent QAnon promoter on X, highlighted the remark the following day before asking his more than 543,000 followers to guess what the secret was.
“Donald Trump teased that he and Matt Gaetz share a ‘little secret’ that’s set to give Republicans an edge, saying, ‘Our secret is making waves… We’ll reveal it once the race is won.’ What’s the secret?” wrote Shadow of Ezra.
Conspiracy theories flooded the replies, many revolving around the core QAnon belief that Trump will jail and execute all of his political enemies once power has been regained.
“They’ve been running a sting operation for the last 8 years and the hammer comes down after Trump wins,” the user RedPillPatriot said.
“The reveal is going to be filled with perp walks,” another added.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Molly Olmstead's 7-29-24 SLATE article entitled "QAnon’s Victims":
According to some estimates, tens of millions of Americans have bought into QAnon, whether they know it or not: A 2021 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that roughly 30 million Americans believed “a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation” control “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S.” That number grew slightly in 2022, making QAnon as popular as some religions.
We are still in the process of understanding just how much the movement has poisoned our politics. We are still learning the ways in which the beliefs born from an internet movement have reshaped the ways Americans interact with the information they encounter. We are still struggling to understand the disastrous repercussions this movement had in contributing to a mass death event in a global pandemic. But there’s another legacy of QAnon that can be equally hard to account for: the countless private tragedies of loved ones becoming paranoid, obsessive, cruel, and unrecognizable [...].
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From John Anderson's 11-7-24 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "'Investigation Alien' Review: Extraterrestrial Extrapolations on Netflix":
George Knapp, the scrappy host of the six-part “Investigation Alien,” could be a false prophet, or a stealth evangelist, but his strong suit is a serious career in journalism—his Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, a lengthy tenure in Las Vegas TV news and a clinical approach to the evidence. He is not a crackpot, which is how the doubters—or the fearful—traditionally try to write off the true believers in other-than-Earthly life. Mr. Knapp has explored the subject long enough to be convinced that we are not alone in the universe, though he seems open to other explanations.To read the entire article, click HERE.
