UMMO: Harmless Prank or the Hoax of the Century?
By Scott Corrales

The early contactees emerged from the musings and lectures of metaphysicians of the 1950s, those who went beyond listening to the long messages dictated by trance-mediums or automatic writers to claim firsthand experiences with the “space brothers”.

Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology: UMMO: Harmless Prank or Hoax of the Century

67. Subterranean Dwellers

As a child I was always peeping from the stairs at the latest horror movie my mum and dad had hired. One such shocker was the 1972 Brit-flick ‘Deathline’, also known as ‘Raw Meat’, which concerned the horrific rumour that a race of cannibals were existing under the streets of London, and their acts of carnage taken out on all manner of victims such as tramps, drunks, city workers and pets. Author Michael Goss looked into the legend on several occasions and concluded that although primal or neglected humans may not be loitering in the underground, belief in such dwellers was indeed once rife.

The sewers and disused tunnels beneath the capital are a world away from the hustle and bustle of the city. As tourists flock to commercialism, workers rush to their towering blocks of business, and shoppers scuttle like rats to their next retail high, below their feet is alleged to exist a seedy, brutal world beyond the imagination of mundanity.

Londonist: The Saturday Strangeness

During the UFO waves of the 1940s and ’50s a new type of peculiar, possibly extraterrestrial or covert machine was mentioned, and often sighted in the murky oceans of the world. The USO, or Unidentified Submarine Object, just like the flying saucers and mystery airships of before, had begun to cause panic.

Were alien life forms monitoring our shores with their advanced technology and preparing for possible attack, or was the government conducting clandestine operations beneath the surface ? Or was another country secretly invading and spying on us ?

LAist: Weird Los Angeles: Weirdness In The Waters

Sovereignty and the UFO

Alexander Wendt / The Ohio State University
Raymond Duvall / University of Minnesota

Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.

Key Words: sovereignty • UFOs • state of exception • undecidability • epistemology of ignorance • Agamben

rigorousintuition.ca :: View topic - Strange Theory

Apocalypse Now

How a hologram, a blimp, and a massively multiplayer game could bring peace to the Holy Land.

By Joshua Davis

Yitzhaq Hayutman holds the key to peace on Earth - it’s on a floppy disk in his pants pocket. With his full white beard, bald pate, and well-pressed khakis, the 61-year-old Israeli cybernetics expert and tech investor looks like Moses done over for a Banana Republic ad. Right now, he’s showing me how he wants to position an airborne hologram over the Dome of the Rock, a gold-capped shrine that’s one of the most holy sites in Islam. “The blimp will go there,” Hayutman says pointing into the blue. “And eventually the Messiah will come.”

Hayutman is excited by the prospect - perhaps too excited. Twenty yards away, two flak-jacketed Israeli police officers finger their machine guns while four plainclothes members of the Islamic Trust - the Muslim force that protects Islam’s holy sites - move cautiously toward us. Violence has a habit of erupting here on the Temple Mount, the world’s most explosive plot of land.

Illustration by Kenn Brown Let there be light: The site is the sky above the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The project includes a laser-projected temple. The goal: to summon the Messiah.

For 1,500 years, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have fought for control of this 35-acre plateau in the heart of Jerusalem. The dispute remains one of the main obstacles to peace in the Middle East. Jewish teachings say that a temple must be built here - many say on the exact spot where the Dome now stands - in order to induce the arrival of the Messiah and the coming of peace on Earth. Fundamentalist Christians interpret this to mean the Second Coming of Christ and actively encourage Jewish building efforts. Muslims categorically oppose any encroachment on their holy site, from which they believe Mohammed ascended to heaven to receive the Koran.

All sides acknowledge that tensions on the hill have the potential to start a war, but Hayutman believes he has found a way to resolve the intractable conflict. “What most people see is that if the Muslims are here, surely there is no temple,” Hayutman says. “They do not understand that technology has given us the tools to realize the prophecy right now.”

He has two big ideas, two ways to engineer the apocalypse. The first: a hovering holographic temple. Hayutman wants to set up an array of high-powered, water-cooled lasers and fire them into a transparent cube suspended beneath a blimp. The ephemeral, flickering image, he says, would fulfill an ancient, widely revered Jewish prophecy that the temple will descend from the heavens as a manifestation of light. Hayutman hopes to finance the project with some of the proceeds from a $20 million patent-infringement suit he and his partners have filed against Palm.

The rest of that money would be poured into Hayutman’s second idea for jump-starting the end-times: a virtual temple within a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The goal is for thousands of people to join in its construction on the Web. Hayutman even wants to display progress reports in the floating hologram as a kind of apocalyptic scoreboard

Wired 12.04: Apocalypse Now

The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of “synthetic telepathy.” But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains:

The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

Army Funds ‘Synthetic Telepathy’ Research - Danger Room from Wired.com

The Willard Suitcases

Please click here for information about and exhibition dates of the Traveling Exhibit

When Willard Psychiatric Center in New York’s Finger Lakes closed in 1995, workers discovered hundreds of suitcases in the attic of an abandoned building.  Many of them appeared untouched since their owners packed them decades earlier before entering the institution.

The Willard Suitcase Exhibit Online

An Austin, Texas, firefighter has been fired after he made a pit stop at Burger King before responding to an emergency call from a 77-year-old woman in respiratory failure.

Michael Pooler’s snack attack postponed the Austin Fire Department’s emergency response by approximately two minutes and resulted in his termination by Fire Chief Jim Evans, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

In a memo, Evans said the fire crew leader had displayed “a shocking neglect of duty” when he stopped for a bite to eat before responding to the emergency call Jan. 4.

Firefighter stops at Burger King before saving woman

The latest arms race will take place entirely inside the human mind. So say top scientists with the U.S. military, who have gotten quite a bit of government funding to explore things like memory-enhancing drugs, mind-reading binoculars, and brain-computer interfaces. Today Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman reports on how the U.S. military’s greatest fear these days, at least as it looks to the future, is losing the brain enhancement race to other nations that are creating souped-up super-soldiers.

Writes Shachtman:

In a recent report, unearthed by Secrecy News, the [Pentagon science advisory team] JASONs are recommending that the American military push ahead with its own performance-enhancement research — and monitor foreign studies — to make sure that the U.S.’ enemies don’t suddenly become smarter, faster, or better able to endure the harsh realities of war than American troops.

Mega Defense: U.S. Soldiers Need Brain Enhancers, Say Defense Department Scientists

Adamski and the FBI

by Nick Redfern

Born in Poland in 1891, George Adamski had the distinction of being the most supported, celebrated and ridiculed of those who claimed direct contact with human-like extraterrestrials. The controversy largely began on 20 November 1952, when, along with six other people, Adamski claimed that he witnessed the landing of a UFO in the Californian desert and then made contact with its pilot.

UFOMystic - Adamski and the FBI.