Thursday, November 28, 2019

Ray Bradbury's "The Screaming Woman"

One of the most memorable thrillers ever aired on SUSPENSE (a radio drama that ran from 1940 to 1962) was the November 25th, 1948 episode entitled "The Screaming Woman," scripted by a young Ray Bradbury. Bradbury later adapted his original radio play into the now classic 1951 prose story of the same title, which can be found in his 1966 collection S IS FOR SPACE. This might make for appropriate listening today, since the story unfolds over the course of Thanksgiving dinner....



Chicken Dinner Possessed By Satan

From Khaleda Rahman's 11-14-19 Newsweek article entitled "Man Who Strangles Sister to Death Believed His Chicken Dinner Was Possessed by Satan":

A man strangled his sister to death after believing his chicken dinner was possessed by the devil, a court has heard.

Khalid Ashraf, 32, choked his sister Sarah Ashraf to death after she came to visit him at his apartment in Tower Hamlets, London, in January, London's Metropolitan Police said. He later told police that he had killed his 35-year-old sister because he had been told to do so by Satan and his Buddhist leader.

The court heard Ashraf became depressed after being diagnosed with HIV in 2011, Metro reported. Prosecutors said he had worked as an auditor at KPMG for eight years until October 2018, according to the newspaper.

Police said his sister had come to stay with him in his two-bedroom flat after she became concerned about his mental health, although he had not been diagnosed with an illness.


According to Metro, Sarah Ashraf told her boyfriend about her concerns after Ashraf told her "that the chicken on his plate had been talking to him," the court heard.

Prosecutor James Mulholland said Ashraf later told police he had killed his sister and said: "Satan whispers into people's ears and he used manipulation and lies to commit acts," the website reported.


To read Rahman's entire article, click HERE.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Ultima Thule

An excerpt from Issam Ahmed's 11-12-19 Phys.org article entitled "NASA Renames Faraway Ice World After Nazi-link Backlash":

 
Ultima Thule, the farthest cosmic body ever visited by a spacecraft, has been renamed Arrokoth, or "sky" in the Native American Powhatan language, following a backlash over the previous name's Nazi connotations.

The icy rock, which orbits in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt about a billion miles beyond Pluto, was surveyed by the NASA spaceship New Horizons in January, with images showing it consisted of two spheres stuck together in the shape of a snowman.

Its technical designation is 2014 MU69, but the New Horizon team nicknamed it Ultima Thule (pronounced Tool-ey) after a mythical northern land in classical and medieval European literature described as beyond the borders of the known world.

That name sparked an angry reaction as it was co-opted by far-right German occultists in the early 20th century as the fabled ancestral home of "Aryan" people—the term they used to describe proto-Indo-Europeans.

Members of Thule Society founded a political party that evolved into Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, and the term remains popular in alt-right circles.

It is, for example, also the name of a Swedish white-power rock group.

The new official name, which was chosen by the New Horizons team and ratified by the International Astronomical Union, was announced in a ceremony at NASA headquarters Tuesday.

A NASA statement made no mention of the controversy. 


To read the rest of Ahmed's article, click HERE.

The Works of Charles Fort: The Most Baffling Books Ever Written

Micah Hanks reflects on the importance of Charles Fort and his works (both published and otherwise) in a 11-14-19 Mysterious Universe article entitled "Of X, Y, and Z: The Search for the Lost Works of Charles Fort":

In 1919, something strange was afoot. An idea, unknown before that time, had been gestating; it slipped from the womb, stumbled, and began its eerie march through the public consciousness of post World War America.

That idea had been the culmination of several years of work by a man, one Charles Hoy Fort, who had banished himself to long periods in libraries, both in New York and in London, where he went in pursuit of arcane knowledge.

Frogs, fish, snakes, and other things which fell from the sky; occasional chunks of flesh–hair still attached–sprinkled down with droplets of blood. Weird lights, torpedo-shaped mechanical “Monstrators,” and other emissaries of the uncanny which occasionally lined the pages of periodicals, science journals, and other sources would all be collected by Fort, who furiously jotted notes about them onto scraps of paper he stuffed into his pockets before each investigative sojourn.

That stumbling thing which had been born out of all this had been Fort’s masterpiece, The Book of the Damned, arguably one of the most interesting, and at times most baffling books ever written.

To read the entire article, click HERE

New Laser Tech Mimics Human Speech

What follows is an excerpt from Todd South's 7-19-19 Military Times article entitled "Pentagon Scientists Are Making Talking Plasma Laser Balls for Use as Non-lethal Weapons":

Instead of beaming a flashing light or shouting over a loudspeaker to keep people away from sensitive areas, new technology being developed could allow troops to fire a laser that can form a “plasma ball” that talks to the potential intruders.

The Laser Induced Plasma Effect program is part of the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate program to find ways to deter, stun, basically stop adversaries short of killing them.
Use of directed energy, or lasers, includes heating up a target’s skin to extremely uncomfortable levels without burning them, blasting confusing noises or giving voice commands such as, “Stop or we’ll be forced to fire upon you.”
It can pass through glass into a building but not yet penetrate other solid barriers, so in its initial stages, the technology would be best used to protect static areas such as forward bases or permanent installations.
But with the right power source setup, a device could be mounted to a small vehicle and make for mobile crowd control or another tool for vehicle patrols to keep people away from convoys.
Researchers such as Brittany Lynn, a scientist with Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, are fine tuning how to pass sound waves through the laser and they recently completed another round of testing in June.
Part of that involves tweaking algorithms to create human speech in the right wavelengths.
The next steps, said Dave Law, chief scientist with the directorate, is to push distances out of the short range of a laboratory setting to 100 meters, then to multiple kilometers. Law gave an optimistic timeline of about five years before the tech could be through readiness levels and passed on to troops.
This past year, Lynn told Military Times, they’ve been adjusting high and low frequencies to mimic human speech.
To read the entire article, click HERE.

The Satanic Temple

What follow are the first three paragraphs of Ed Cara's 11-5-19 Gizmodo article entitled "Canadian Therapist Gives Up License After Satanists Expose Her 'Mind Control' Talks":

Activists with The Satanic Temple say a now-former therapist in Canada has been pushing conspiracies about globe-spanning, mind-controlling cults for years. And after they exposed some of her professional talks to her licensing board, she voluntarily gave up her psychology license.
In June, a representative of The Satanic Temple sent a complaint about retired therapist Alison Miller to the College of Psychologists of British Columbia, the organization responsible for licensing psychologists in the province. Though Miller retired from practicing therapy in 2018, the complaint accused her of causing harm by spreading “the dangerous notion that satanic cults engage in ritual abuse of children” in her public speeches and published books. 
The presentations highlighted in the complaint—including one titled “Working Through Your Traumatic Memories and Destroying the Mind Control”—were given by Miller at a 2017 conference hosted by Survivorship, an organization billed as a support group for victims of ritual abuse. The president of Survivorship, a Massachusetts-based licensed mental health counselor named Neil Brick, claims he is a ritual abuse survivor who was “programmed” by the Illuminati into becoming a killer and spy.
To read Cara's entire article, click HERE.

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2020 they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing--to destroy our literary creations that way! It summoned us out of--what? Death? The Beyond? I don't like abstract things. I don't know. I only know that our worlds and our creations called us and we tried to save them, and the only saving thing we could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping Earth might overweight itself with these scientists and their doubtings; but now they're coming to clean us out of here, us and our dark things, and all the alchemists, witches, vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at all but exodus."

--Edgar Allan Poe speaking to the ghosts of Charles Dickens and Ambrose Bierce in Ray Bradbury's short story "The Exiles" (collected in THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, 1951)


Monday, November 25, 2019

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS: THE STAGE PLAY!

If you live anywhere near Southern California, I highly recommend visiting the Maverick Theater in Fullerton and seeing Brian Newell's adaptation of SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, the infamous 1964 film directed by Nicholas Webster.

*SEE* Torg the Technical Wonder stride across the stage! 

*GASP IN AMAZEMENT* as realistic flying saucers whiz directly overhead! 

*MARVEL* at the unbelievably exotic sounds of the Martian "Pshhhhhh" Door! 

If you're persistent enough, you might even persuade Torg the Mechanical Wonder to pose for a photograph with you (see below).


In 2016, the Los Angeles Times wrote, "A Fullerton holiday tradition began as an incredibly bad movie. Not even that so-bad-it’s-good kind of thing. Just plain bad. Maybe it’s the spirit of Christmas, but decades later, one little community theater has embraced the awfulness of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and turned a lump of coal into a present that just keeps giving.

"'I don’t know how this became a success,' said [Brian] Newell. 'I had to beg actors to do it. They thought it was a suicide show.'"

And if you want to see this "suicide show" for yourself, you have until Monday, December 23rd. Tickets can be ordered right HERE

In the meantime, check out Nicholas Webster's original film (featuring Fritz Hansen's *Astounding* Martian Furniture) directly below....



Friday, November 22, 2019

Cryptoscatology's Essential JFK Assassination Books!




The Second Oswald by Richard H. Popkin (1966):


MacBird! by Barbara Garson (1966):


Were We Controlled? by Lincoln Lawrence (1967):


Winter Kills by Richard Condon (1974):


The Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby (1977):


Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart (1978/1994):


Conspiracy by Anthony Summers (1980):


Sherlock Holmes in Dallas by Edmund Aubrey (1980):


On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison (1988):

 



 
The Man Who Knew Too Much by Dick Russell (1992):


Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott (1993):


Columbo: The Grassy Knoll by William Harrington (1993):


NASA, Nazis & JFK: The Torbitt Document & the Kennedy Assassination by Kenn Thomas and William Torbitt (1996):


Dr. Mary’s Monkey by Edward T. Haslam (2007):

 


Thursday, November 21, 2019

"A Scarcity of Angels" in SELENE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE

The latest edition of SELENE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE (Volume 2, Issue 3) features Part One of my pulp-inspired short story "A Scarcity of Angels." Also included in this issue are stories and poems by the likes of Nick Sweeney, Tanya Warnakulasuriya, DJ Tyrer, and Annie Percik. If you want to buy this issue, simply click HERE!