NEW YORK POST: "NYC UFO sightings in 2020 are up 283% from 2018"

From Dean Balsamini's 12-12-20 NEW YORK POST article entitled "NYC UFO sightings in 2020 are up 283% from 2018":

"UFO sightings across the city are up 31% from last year — 46, compared with 35 — and an eye-popping 283% from 2018’s measly dozen, according to the National UFO Reporting Center [...].

Two of the more memorable intergalactic incidents happened in the summertime, on Staten Island and in the Bronx.

In the wee hours of July 21, an Islander spotted — and stared at — at an “oval” aircraft that “looked and sounded like a helicopter. Then, the mysterious flying machine “sent a surge of heat/radiation through my body!”

The Islander “honestly thought it was the government putting something into the air with everything going on during these times and I thought I would wake up and find it all over the news or on Instagram.”

Late on June 8, a Bronxite watched 30 objects “flying in a perfect line, in perfect synchronicity” that “looked like a bunch of moving stars.”

The observer insisted, “I don’t drink, or take any drugs whatsoever. I’m not a UFO conspiracy theorist.”

An eerie episode can happen any time, anywhere.

On the night of Sept. 15, a Brooklynite stuck his head “out the bathroom window of my 2nd floor home” and saw “orange/metallic” orbs “standing still over the Canarsie/Jamaica Bay area.”

Reported the stunned stargazer: “By the time I called my son, they were gone. I could not believe my eyes.”

ETs can also put on a show. On Feb. 21, a Manhattanite reported six UFOs dancing at the Statue of Liberty on Feb. 21.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

"The Festival" by H.P. Lovecraft

Courtesy of HorrorBabble and Ian Gordon comes this reading of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival," a nightmarish Christmas story that originally appeared in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales....

"The Festival" / Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos

 

"It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the Stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see. But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone above with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and corruption."

Guy N. Smith, R.I.P. (1939-2020)

The website of prolific horror writer Guy N. Smith, author of such infamous novels as NIGHT OF THE CRABS (1976), KILLER CRABS (1978), THE ORIGIN OF THE CRABS (1979), CRABS ON THE RAMPAGE (1981), and CRABS' MOON (1984), posted the following announcement earlier today:

It is with great sadness, especially at this time of year, that we have to report that after a spending short time in hospital following a fall, Guy passed away this morning (24th Dec 2020). Guy had tested positive for COVID-19. We are all in shock at the moment and will put more information here when we have it available. Our thoughts go out to his wife Jean and his four children.

Guy had some titles in production and we suspect these will be published in the new year....

To read the full announcement, click HERE. 

And to read Smith's 3-27-20 blog post about the connection between the coronavirus and his 1978 novel, BATS OUT OF HELL, click HERE.

"Crabs enjoy nothing more than a nice rampage, so for them it's an excellent bonus to discover that someone has brought their favorite food to the party: human guts. Don't mind if I do, say the crabs, although in their language it sounds more like clickety-click-click, as they start with the tramp platter.

"As the crabs topple our bridges, it seems that humanity has no choice--mankind is on the menu. Yet King Crab has made one fatal miscalculation. He has eaten Professor Cliff Davenport's favorite nephew. Now it's personal."

--Grady Hendrix, PAPERBACKS FROM HELL, 2017

Manly P. Hall's "When the Invincible Sun Moves Northward: The Solar Chistmas" (Reprise)

Take a brief break from the holiday festivities and explore the mindscape of Manly P. Hall via his classic lecture "When the Invincible Sun Moves Northward: The Solar Christmas" delivered at The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles on December 16, 1984:

 

"Each year the sun comes back to the world. Each year the world is just a little different. Each year the sun performs a slightly different service, and over the period of ages, these services vary greatly.

"The sun is the cleanser, the purifier, and the eliminator. It will come every time to carry on this particular task. Sometimes it will find a dark world waiting for it, heavily burdened with its own errors. Sometimes it will come to a better world where things seem right. But always the sun in its cycle is working toward the one great end and that great end, of course, is the final illumination of all that exists, that all things in, by, and for themselves shall be fulfilled or be perfect in their needs and in their operations.

"As the sun produces the symbol of the sprouting of the seed, so the light within ourselves produces the ripening of all the inner values of consciousness. And the sun which brings the harvest to the earth brings a light to the minds and hearts of human beings so that they may have the harvest of their years and have a great and wonderful future.

"The astronomical Christmas is based on the old solar mythology. The (Soular) solar deity is born at the winter solstice and substitutes for the three broken spokes of the wheel. It attains victory over darkness at the vernal equinox. The Christ principle performs a Pentecostal mystery by bestowing its powers upon the twelve disciples who personify the signs of the zodiac. While most of this esoteric meaning of the annual birthday of the sun is no longer remembered, it constitutes justification for the study of astronomy. Some day it will dawn upon the conventional astronomer that he is involved, not merely in a scientific project, but one of the sacred sciences dealing with the mysteries of birth, life, death, and resurrection."

--Lecture #333 "WHEN THE INVINCIBLE SUN MOVES NORTHWARD: THE SOLAR CHRISTMAS"

Santa Is a Psychedelic Mushroom

From Greg Taylor's 12-17-20 DAILY GRAIL post entitled "SANTA IS A PSYCHEDELIC MUSHROOM: WERE MODERN CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS INFLUENCED BY SHAMANIC FOLKLORE?":

In his book The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia, Paul Devereux recounts the theory that imagery and folklore about Santa Claus may have been influenced by the shamanic history surrounding the psychedelic mushroom, Amanita muscaria....

To read Taylor's entire post, click HERE. 

If this topic piques your interest, you might want to check out Grant Morrison and Dan Mora's graphic novel, KLAUS, in which Santa Claus is reimagined as a psychedelic shaman. As I said in my 2015 "Cryptoscatology Top Ten" post, "If L. Frank Baum and Terence McKenna had collaborated on a comic book script, it might have read like this. 'Nuff said!"

Rocketman Returns (Again)

From Tyler Rogoway's 12-23-20 TheDrive.com article entitled "Video Taken By Pilots Of What Could Be The Elusive Los Angeles Jet Pack Guy Emerges":

When it comes to weird stories that keep getting weirder, the elusive "Jet Pack Guy" of Los Angeles pretty much takes the cake. After multiple reported sightings from airline pilots on more than one occasion of a guy in a jet pack flying around at thousands of feet near Los Angeles International Airport—some of the most congested airspace on earth—as well as ongoing FAA and FBI investigations into the matter, we now have credible video of what seems to be the flying object in question.

The footage doesn't come to us from some random Reddit board or YouTube channel, either. It was taken during an instructional flight from Sling Pilot Academy in the training area off Palos Verdes. We reached out to the flight school, which is based out of Zamperini Field, in Torrance, California for additional details.

One of the pilots involved in the bizarre incident told The War Zone that they were flying along their route in the practice area between Palos Verdes and Catalina Islands when they caught what appeared to at least resemble a guy in a jet pack flying towards them in the opposite direction at about 3,000 feet. The object passed along the right side of their aircraft and kept going until it was out of sight.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Capella Space

From Dan Robitzski's 12-16-20 FUTURISM article entitled "A New Satellite Can Peer Inside Buildings, Day or Night":

A few months ago, a company called Capella Space launched a satellite capable of taking clear radar images of anywhere in the world, with incredible resolution — even through the walls of some buildings.

And unlike most of the huge array of surveillance and observational satellites orbiting the Earth, its satellite Capella 2 can snap a clear picture during night or day, rain or shine.

“It turns out that half of the world is in nighttime, and half of the world, on average, is cloudy,” CEO Payam Banazadeh, a former system engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Futurism. “When you combine those two together, about 75 percent of Earth, at any given time, is going to be cloudy, nighttime, or it’s going to be both. It’s invisible to you, and that portion is moving around.”

On Wednesday, Capella launched a platform allowing governmental or private customers to request images of anything in the world — a capability that will only get more powerful with the deployment of six additional satellites next year. Is that creepy from a privacy point of view? Sure. But Banazadeh says that it also plugs numerous holes in the ways scientists and government agencies are currently able to monitor the planet.

“There’s a bunch of gaps in how we’re currently observing Earth from space — the majority of the sensors we use to observe earth are optical imaging sensors,” he said. “If it’s cloudy, you’re going to see the clouds, not what’s happening under the clouds. And if there’s not much light, you’re going to have a really hard time getting an image that is useful.”

By contrast, Capella can peer right through cloud cover, and see just as well in the daylight as in total darkness. That’s because instead of optical imaging, it uses synthetic aperture radar, or SAR.

SAR works similarly to how dolphins and bats navigate using echolocation. The satellite beams down a powerful 9.65 GHz radio signal toward its target, and then collects and interprets the signal as it bounces back up into orbit. And because the satellite is sending down its own signal rather than passively capturing light, sometimes those signals can even penetrate right through a building’s wall, peering at the interior like Superman’s X-ray vision.

“At that frequency, the clouds are pretty much transparent,” Banazadeh told Futurism. “You can penetrate clouds, fog, moisture, smoke, haze. Those things don’t matter anymore. And because you’re generating your own signal, it’s as if you’re carrying a flashlight. You don’t care if it’s day or night.”

Capella didn’t invent SAR. But Banazadeh says it’s the first U.S. company to offer the technology, and the first worldwide to offer a more accessible platform for potential customers to use.

To read the rest of the article, click HERE.