Meh, it wouldn’t be much of an installment of Coast to Coast without that kind of statement. The show is all about confirmation bias and wishful thinking and delusions, after all. And I said out loud, as I pulled the car into the driveway and switched off the radio, “Oh, yeah, that incident in New York that everyone is talking about and that has made such huge headlines. Right.”

So then yesterday I get the following email from my sister:

What the hell was over NY last Wednesday?  I didn’t even know this had happened.  The site below has an 8 minute raw footage video shot by CBS.  It looks and sounds legitimate to me.  Fox reported that this UFO sighting was predicted by a former air defense officer in a book that he wrote.  He predicted that a fleet of UFOs would be seen over the world’s main cities on 10/13/10.  I gotta research that one.

Okay, weird, so apparently the guy I heard on George Noory — and please don’t get the idea that I tune into this show every night; I was just hitting radio buttons on the way home from the movie — is the same one referenced in my sister’s email.

Here’s the video:

I don’t know what to make of that. They look like balloons to me, but they seem to be moving oddly for balloons. Some of the odd movement is apparently an artifact of camera panning and zooming, but not all of it. So, odd, interesting, and, to me, thoroughly unconvincing.

I wrote back to my sister:

Clearly, if some guy said there would be lights in the sky and then there were lights in the sky, earth is being visited by extraterrestrial space craft. There is no other conceivable explanation.

(Don’t worry; I’m her older brother. She’s used to the snotty tone.)

Well, then my brother chimes in with the following:

Very Weird!  Make sure dad see’s this.

 

We were in Parker at [my nephew's] football game and watched 4 of these things for about an hour.  Looked just like that but not grouped that tightl

Turns out my Dad saw something similar just a couple of weeks ago. Then my brother sent me a link to this video:

At this point, I’m starting to feel like a character in the opening scenes of a science fiction movie. In the following scenes, the aliens would show themselves unambiguously either by attacking or by landing in front of the White House and asking us to joint the Galactic Union or whatever.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) it seems we never seem to get to those subsequent scenes.

So meanwhile…let’s do another survey!

Very cool. And another reminder of how mch we have to learn about how things work.

Via Jim Elvidge.

Very cool. And another reminder of how mch we have to learn about how things work.

Via Jim Elvidge.

Man, that’s hard to say!

Man, that’s hard to say!

UPDATE:

Well, maybe there’s more here than I realized. Look at the highlighted area of the image….

And now look at this extraordinary photograph from Mars…

It appears we have another astounding Mars connection!

Growing up, my favorite book was Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein. The subject of Red Planet? It’s an adventure story set of the planet Mars.

We stayed in the city of Sedona, located at the bottom of Oak Creek Canyon, about 20 miles south of Flagstaff. The area is famous for its dramatic red rock formations. I took several hundred pictures, none of which begin to do the subjects justice. Here’s the second-best picture I took of Cathedral rock.

Interestingly, the best picture I got of Cathedral Rock was before sunset at a place called Red Rock Crossing, and it isn’t actually a picture of the rock. At least not directly. Its reflection in Oak Creek begins to capture some of the mystery and grandeur of the place.

While I have no problem (in my sort of half-baked poetic mode) ascribing mystery and grandeur to the Sedona red rocks, there are those who will credit them with a good deal more than that. Sedona is home to a cottage industry of explaining, teaching about, and generally helping people to tap into the mystical powers of the rocks. A few select spots are believed to be intense centers of mystical energy. In the New Age parlance of the region, such a place is called a “vortex”:

These vortexes are swirling centers of subtle energy coming out from the surface of the earth. This energy is not exactly electricity or magnetism, although it does leave a slight measurable residual magnetism in the places where it is strongest. There are four main energy vortexes in Sedona. The subtle energy that exists at these locations interacts with that which is inside every person. It resonates with and strengthens the Inner Being of each person that comes within about a quarter to a half mile of it.This resonance occurs because the vortex energy is very similar to the subtle energy operating in the energy centers inside each person.

Well, okay, sure. Or maybe we can all agree that they’re pretty, anyhow?

On the other hand, there is a longstanding tradition of believing the rocks to be sacred. Our first full day in Sedona, we visited the Palatki ruin just west of town, where we saw what’s left of a Sinagua Indian village. The Sinagua were a pre-Columbian civilization who lived in the region over a period from 500 to 1,500 years ago. They are believed to be the ancestors of the Hopi tribe. The rocks were sacred to the Sinagua, as they are to the Hopi and all other tribes in the region. There is no clear explanation as to why the Sinagua abandoned their longstanding villages, but the Wikipedia article linked above makes the intriguing assertion that the Hopis believe their ancestors left for religious reasons.

The Sinagua people lived in simple two-story brick structures which used a cliff wall for backing.

The Palatki ruin is home to a mysterious grotto featuring petroglyphs and other etchings created over several thousand years. The earliest of these are very simple geometric patterns, criss-crossings etched in the stone that could be as much as 10,000 years old. Obviously, these pre-date the Sinagua by a considerable margin, and if they go back that far would have been left by some of the earliest people in North America. Over time, we see more sophisticated images left by the Sinagua as well as by the people who came before and after them.

What’s interesting is that people kept coming to this same spot, a few walls at the base of a particular cliff, and leaving their artwork. The ranger/guide at the ruin told us that it was believed that the original criss-cross patterns may relate to imagery associated with religious ceremonies. If so, and even if those etchings are “only” 5,000 – 6,000 years old, we can conclude that these rocks have been considered sacred for a very long time, indeed.

So who knows? Maybe just saying they’re “pretty” isn’t quite enough. We did visit another place, a short distance to the north and west of Sedona, which defies both description and photography. If I have ever beheld sacred land in my life, I think the Grand Canyon would have to be it:

Even the geographic features of the canyon have been given religious names. There is a Temple of Isis, a Temple of Osiris, a Temple of Shiva, and a Temple of Zoroaster (there may be more; those are the ones I saw.) Below is a shot of one of the “temples” — I’m not sure which, but it’s definitely not Isis, which has a more dramatic dome.

Whether sacred or not, there is definitely something deeply moving about these sites. It’s no wonder that we have dubbed them cathedrals and temples.

Scientists at The University of Manchester have created a virtual computer world designed to test telepathic ability.

The system, which immerses an individual in what looks like a life-size computer game, has been created as part of a joint project between The University’s School of Computer Science and School of Psychological Sciences.

Approximately 100 participants will take part in the experiment which aims to test whether telepathy exists between individuals using the system. The project will also look at how telepathic abilities may vary depending on the relationships which exist between participants.

Via Slashdot — check out the fun comment thread.

BTW, in that premonition I had? This thing didn’t work.