Remembering Mac Tonnies
Art by Isoban
Via Technoccult:
Mac Tonnies was a ufologist, the author of After the Martian Apocalypse and The Cryptoterrestrials, and the blogger behind Posthuman Blues. He died on October 19th, 2009 due to heart complications.
The Cryptoterrestrials was released posthumously on March 15th, 2010. Fortunately, Mac gave numerous interviews on the subject of his book prior to his death, including this one with the Ballardian and an interview on Coast to Coast AM.
Since his death, a dedicated community of friends and readers has been working to preserve his legacy. Blazingbetta (aka Sarah Multiverse) has started a Mac Tonnies tribute site, and Capn Marrrk has been hard at work archiving Posthuman Blues. I talked to both of them via instant message.
Aliens Land In Russia
From Pravda:
Residents of the city of Perm, in Russia’s Ural region, say that they could see a strange object in the sky. The object, eyewitnesses said, was hanging in the air above the city, scanned the area with a beam of light and even let off several “passengers.” The people did not specify what kind of passengers they were exactly and how they disembarked from what seemed to be a spaceship.
A woman saw a strange object in the window at about 2-4 o’clock a.m. She woke up her daughter and asked her to take a look at the strange sight. The two women could see a disk-like object sending three glittering beams of light on the ground…
Royal Astronomer: ‘Aliens May Be Staring Us In The Face’
By Heidi Blake for the Telegraph:
Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen, said the existence of extra terrestrial life may be beyond human understanding.
He made the remarks shortly after hosting the national science academy’s first conference on the possibility of alien life.
“They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognise them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology,” he said.
“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”…
[continues in the Telegraph]
…
Master Shaman Jose Vargas’ Alien Encounters (Video)
Master Shaman Jose Vargas describes his telepathic communications with alien beings in another dimension where time moves more slowly, for Reality Sandwich:
Beware the ‘Flying Toblerones’: Reports of Scottish UFOs Released
The BBC reports:
Reports of “flying Toblerones” and objects travelling at 1,100 mph across the Scottish sky have been released by the Ministry of Defence. The files detail how unidentified objects have been witnessed flying over a range of locations across Scotland.Among them were one from a senior air traffic controller at Prestwick Airport who reported seeing a fast-moving UFO on the airport radar.
While four fishermen spotted a flat, shiny object hovering off the coast. The Scottish accounts are among the thousands of reports made of close encounters with UFOs across the UK which have been released in a joint project between the MoD and the National Archives.
For five years the people both you and I represent have witnessed a phenomenon in the area that has been left unexplained The Prestwick airport…
SETI Opens All Data and Coding to the Public
Ole Ole Olson writes on News Junkie Post:
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) just announced that it is releasing all information to the public. SETIQuest.org was launched on Wednesday to facilitate the release and help coordinate an ‘army of citizen scientists’ to help search for anomalies in interstellar microwave patterns.
The New Scientist reports, “SETIQuest is the product of astronomer Jill Tarter’s TED Prize wish. After being awarded the TED Prize last year, Tarter was given the opportunity to make a single wish before an auditorium full of the top names in technology and design. Tarter wished that they would “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.”
All Humans Are ‘Aliens From Outer Space’
Humans are all aliens who came to earth from outer space, a leading British scientist has claimed. Andrew Hough reports in the Telegraph:
Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe, of Cardiff University, said new research “overwhelmingly” supported the view that human life started from outside our Earth. The Astrobiologist said the first “seeds of life” were deposited on our plant from space 3,800m years ago.
He claimed microbes from outer space arrived on earth from comets, which then “multiplied and seeded” to form human life.
His said his evidence, published in Cambridge University’s International Journal of Astrobiology, showed humans, and all life on Earth, came from aliens brought to the earth by comets hitting the planet.
“Yes, we are all aliens – we share a cosmic ancestry,” Prof Wickramasinghe said. “Each time a new planetary system forms…
Hubble Detects Mysterious Spaceship-Shaped Object Traveling at 11,000 MPH
Jesus Diaz writes a very thought-provoking article on Gizmodo:
Hubble has discovered a mysterious X-shaped object traveling at 11,000mph. NASA says that P/2010-A2 may be a comet, product of the collision between two asteroids. Or a Klingon Bird of Prey. Either way, UCLA investigator David Jewitt is excited:
This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets. The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.
OK, David, we will believe you until Jerry Bruckheimer finish his next movie, in which a “comet” suddenly stops, turns to Earth, and starts firing anti-matter rays…
Grad Student Uses Alien-Seeking Math to Explain Why He Can’t Find A Girlfriend
Frank Carnevale writes on news.au.com:
A student used the Drake Equation, used to calculate chances of alien life, to prove why he was single. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, took on his own dating woes in “Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK.”
In describing the paper online, he wrote “the results are not encouraging”, MyFox reports. “The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.”
Mr Backus, 30, found that of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would be suitable girlfriends for him, according to Click Liverpool.
Digital Revolution Makes Us Invisible To Aliens
The Telegraph is reporting that satellite television and the digital revolution is making humanity more and more invisible to inquisitive aliens on other planets:
That might be good news for anyone who fears an “Independence Day” – style invasion by little green men. But it is also likely to make the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by Earthly scientists harder, Dr Frank Drake believes.
Dr Drake, who founded the
SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) organisation in the US 50 years ago, said the digital age was effectively gagging the Earth by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space.
At present, the Earth was surrounded by a 50 light year-wide “shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions, he said.
But although the signals had spread far enough to reach many nearby…
Do You Speak Alien?
Stephen Battersby writes in New Scientist:
The cosmos is quiet. Eerily quiet. After decades of straining our radio ears for a whisper of civilisations beyond Earth, we have heard nothing. No reassuring message of universal peace. No helpful recipe for building faster-than-light spacecraft or for averting global catastrophes. Not even a stray interstellar advertisement.
Perhaps there’s nobody out there after all. Or perhaps it’s just early days in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and we’re listening to the wrong star systems or at the wrong wavelengths.
There is another possibility, says Douglas Vakoch, head of the Interstellar Message Composition programme at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, which ponders the question of how we should communicate with aliens. “Maybe everyone’s listening but no one is transmitting. Maybe it takes an audacious young civilisation like ours to do that.”
So should we start sending messages into the void? And if so, how can we make ourselves understood to beings we know nothing about?
Aliens Are Likely To Look And Behave Like Us
Richard Alleyne reports for the Telegraph on a leading scientist who claims that alien life, if it exists at all, is likely to be just like us. He also believes aliens would also share our human weaknesses for greed, violence and the exploitation of others:
Professor Simon Conway Morris at Cambridge University will tell a conference on alien life that extraterrestrials will most likely have evolved just like “earthlings” and so resemble us to a degree with heads, limbs and bodies.
Unfortunately they will have also evolved our foibles and faults which could make them dangerous if they ever did visit us on Earth.
The evolutionary paleobiologist’s beliefs mean that science fiction films such as Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life.
Prof Conway…
Scientist Says We Should Search For Aliens Here On Earth
The Telegraph reports that the search for alien life forms should be conducted here on Earth rather than in outer space, according to a leading scientist:
Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona University will tell a meeting at the Royal Society that the best way of proving that extra-terrestrial life exists elsewhere in the universe is to use evidence from earth. The meeting at the Royal Society, which will include representatives from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer space Affairs marks the 5th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme. Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society will also lead one of the sessions.
Prof Davies said: We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach.”
He suggested that the search could focus on deserts,…
Our Solar System May Have Millions of ‘Twins’
Brian Handwerk writes in National Geographic News:
Of the billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, 15 percent may host “twins” of our solar system, a new study says. While that might not sound like much, the find suggests that several hundred million star systems look a lot like the one we call home, the study authors say.
The research is based on surveys of stars with gas giant planets — similar to Jupiter and Saturn — that orbit far from their stars.
As in our solar system, vast distances stretch between these stars and their gas giants. This creates ample room for rocky planets to thrive in the stars’ habitable zones, the regions where liquid water can exist.
And that boosts the likelihood that other Earths, and maybe even other forms of…
Nikola Tesla: ‘We Have a Message from Another World’
On the fascinating site Letters of Note:
In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as ‘counting codes’. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, ‘The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another’.
The next year, Tesla was asked by the Red Cross to predict man’s greatest possible achievement over the next century. The letter below was his reply.
A much-needed transcript follows.
Read Nikola Tesla on Letters of Note
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Stephen Colbert Talks Aliens with Vatican Astronomer
Matt Tobey writes on CC Insider:
Are there aliens out there? And if there are, do they have their own Martian Jesus or do they all just automatically go to hell until they come to Earth and accept ours? I don’t know, but it’s nice to see the Catholic church is finally catching up with the Scientologists. Our operating thetans need all the help we can get in the battle against Xenu.
The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist?
Rebecca Sato & Casey Kazan write on Daily Galaxy:
Are we the lone sentient life in the universe? So far, we have no evidence to the contrary, and yet the odds that not one single other planet has evolved intelligent life would appear, from a statistical standpoint, to be quite small. There are an estimated 250 billion (2.5 x 10¹¹) stars in the Milky Way alone, and over 70 sextillion (7 x 10²²) in the visible universe, and many of them are surrounded by multiple planets.
Meanwhile, our 4.5 billion-year old Solar System exists in a universe that is estimated to be between 13.5 and 14 billion years old. Experts believe that there could be advanced civilizations out there that have existed for 1.8 gigayears (one gigayear = one billion years).
The odds of there being only one single planet that evolved life among all that unfathomable vastness seems so incredible that it is all but completely irrational to believe. But then “where are they?” asked physicist Enrico Fermi while having lunch with his colleagues in 1950…
UFO Chaser: Aliens Involved in Mysterious Colorado Calf Mutilations?
On Fox News:
SAN LUIS, Colo. — A creepy string of calf mutilations in southern Colorado has a rancher and sheriff’s officials mystified.
Four calves were found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks. The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed.
But rancher Manuel Sanchez has found no signs of human attackers, such as footprints or ATV tracks. And there are no signs of an animal attack by a coyote or mountain lion. Usually predators leave pools of blood or drag marks from carrying away the livestock.
Two officers from the Costilla County Sheriff’s Office have investigated the mutilations but say they don’t know what’s killing the calves.
“There’s nothing really to go…
