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[statecryptids]

Another book review!

The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees

Written and Illustrated by Don Brown

The ongoing Syrian civil war is a fight against the entrenched dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and splintered rebel factions. The destruction and massacres of the war have led to a flood of refugees to other countries. The Unwanted is the story, told through graphic novel, of these people who have lost their homes, and often everything else, as they try to survive.

Some Syrians fled to Europe on boats provided by smugglers. Others found rest in shanty towns and apartments in Lebanon and Turkey where conditions are so crowded that sometimes 15 people must share a small apartment.

Brown’s illustrations are sharp and sketch-like, as if taken directly from the artist’s notebook made right in the middle of a camp. And some of them likely were, as Brown visited several camps in Greece to get a better understanding of the refugee’s lives. This deliberately rough style actually helps the reader empathize with the refugees. This is not a collection of maudlin stories to tug at the heart-strings- a tactic that can backfire and turn away readers who feel like it’s emotional manipulation. Instead it is more like a news report. A description of the refugees’ lives and what they go through daily. Brown himself explains: “I decided The Unwanted would focus on the refugee experience and disregard information beyond that constraint except when necessary for context. I was determined to keep the attention on the refugees.” He shows young children who must become the sole breadwinners for families where the adults are sick or dead. He shows opportunists who seize on the refugees and the conflict for their own interests, such as ISIS jihadists who use the instability to seize territories, and predatory smugglers who take people’s life savings as payment for passage.

He also shows the backlash refugees face from the citizens of host countries as services like food, electricity, and water become strained and displaced people become convenient scapegoats for the country’s anxieties.

Yet there are also moments of resilience and adaptation in the worst circumstance, such as the Zaatari refugee camp in the middle of the Jordanian desert which has become a permanent settlement with its own growing economy. Or families who have settled in other countries and adapted to new ways of life while still finding ways to hang on to their own culture.

An extensive bibliography at the end provides opportunities for further reading.

The Unwanted is an important book during these times of increased global hostility towards refugees from all countries. It seems obvious to say that refugees are people too, but it is all too easy to see them as the faceless Other polluting their host countries without reminders like this book.

[statecryptids]

It is my great delight to inform you that it is once again Flat Fuck Friday.

Flat Fuck Friday on a Sunday.

Have a couple animatronic Diplocaulus from the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island.

[statecryptids]

Got some cool postcards from The Planetarium Projector Museum in Big Bear Lake, California.

Haven’t been to the museum myself yet, but someday.

[statecryptids]

dinosaur sanctuary vol. 2 by itaru kinoshita

[statecryptids]

ROSWELL ALIENS- NEW MEXICO

Finally finished all 50 State Cryptids! Time to start putting them together into a book!

I always have a bit of a quandary whenever I showcase an alien as a “State Cryptid”. For many people the term “cryptid” typically refers to unknown Earthly animals. But over time this blog has evolved into more of an overall tour of speculative creatures in American pop culture and folklore where the lines between “natural animal”, “supernatural entity”, and “extraterrestrial” become very blurry. I’m also much more interested in the history behind these sightings than the classification of each creature, or even whether it plausibly exists at all. Plus I’ve already featured several extraterrestrials already such as the Pascagoula creatures, the North Dakota Meccano-Mummy, and the Grays that allegedly abducted Barney and Betty Hill.

June 14, 1947- Rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel and his son were driving on their property 80 miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico when they came upon “a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper, and sticks.” What was it? They had no idea.

 Initially unsure about what to do with the strange find, Brazel collected some of the debris a few days later and drove it into Roswell to give to Sheriff George Wilcox. The sheriff, equally perplexed, contacted the nearby Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th Composite Group. They sent a team out to the desert to collect the remaining debris and ascertain what it was. A few days later Major Jesse Marcel made a statement to the local paper about the incident. Though he didn’t explain exactly what the object was, headlines claimed the army had captured a “flying saucer”.

Flying saucers were in the news a lot that year. On June 24th, 1947 amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing an airborne, disk-shaped vehicle near Mt. Rainier in Washington. Later, Navy seaman Harold Dahl claimed he had seen a whole group of the strange objects on June 21st near Puget Sound. Soon people were sighting flying saucers everywhere. Much of this hysteria was fueled by fears of the growing power of the Soviet Union and worries about what secret experiments they might be conducting. Paranoia about unknown Russian flying vehicles soon turned upwards beyond the boundaries of Earth as people began to speculate that flying saucers actually came from other worlds. These mysterious objects were labeled UFOs- Unidentified Flying Objects- by the US military and the term quickly caught on in popular culture. Though UFO originally just meant an unknown aerial object, with no indication of origin, it became synonymous with extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Eventually the army explained that the debris found near Roswell had come from a downed weather balloon. But such a prosaic explanation did not stick with the public. The idea that creatures from outer space had crashed on Earth had firmly taken hold, and a good number of people believed that this “weather balloon” story was just a flimsy cover-up. It certainly didn’t help that the government was tight-lipped about many of its programs out of fear that the Soviets might get wind of them.

 It turns out, though, that the weather balloon story was actually close to the truth. In the late 1940s the government began Project MOGUL, in which massive balloons equipped with sensitive detection instrument were launched high into the ionosphere to look for signs that Russia was testing nuclear weapons. One of these balloons had fallen out of the sky, crashed on Brazel’s ranch. Not wanting to reveal their secret project, military officials had felt it was better to let the “alien spacecraft” idea percolate in the popular imagination instead.

A decade later In the 1950s rumors cropped up that people had seen government agents collecting alien bodies in the New Mexico desert. These stories were soon conflated with the Roswell crash legend, leading to conspiracy theories about frozen alien corpses preserved in secret government hangers. For many years any secretive government sight was rumored to have “aliens in the freezers”. Eventually accusations settled on Area 51, a classified military base in the Nevada desert.

 These reports too had a more down-to-Earth explanation, though. Investigations revealed that the “alien bodies” had actually been special crash dummies fitted with sensors and dropped from airplanes by the Airforce to test the effects of high-altitude parachute drops. Like Project MOGUL, these tests had been hidden behind a thick veil of secrecy which did little to dispel the rumors.

As for Area 51, though the government denied its existence for decades despite clear evidence that it existed, it was officially confirmed in 2013 as a base for testing experimental aircraft such as the U2 spy plane, the Archangel-12, the SR-71 Blackbird, and others. No word on frozen alien corpses, though. By the way, the name “Area 51” is more of a pop culture term. The base is typically just called “Groom Lake”, “Homey Airport”, or simply the “Nevada Test and training Range” by the CIA.

The Roswell Aliens story gained a major surge in popularity in the 90s with shows like “The X-Files” and “Dark Skies”, movies like “The Arrival” and “Independence Day”, and comic books like “Roswell, Little Green Man” by Bill Morrison. There was even a 1995 psuedo-documentary called “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” produced by the Fox Network and hosted by Star Trek actor Jonathon Frakes. It allegedly showed vintage footage of the dissection of an alien corpse from the Roswell crash.  This video was eventually revealed to be a hoax, with the corpse actually a rubber dummy stuffed with jam and animal organs from a butcher.

For my depiction of the Roswell aliens, I wanted to get away from the typical images of corpses lying on dissection tables or floating in preservative-filled tubes. I also wanted to avoid the trope of aliens as malicious, terrifying invaders like in Independence Day or any number of B horror movies.

Instead, I chose to portray them as normal beings adapting to a new life on Earth.   Here we see one of the aliens recovered from their crash with the help of a wheelchair and prosthetics. I’ve imagined them setting up a new life for themselves in New Mexico, just trying to keep to themselves. They’ve taken a keen interest in their new home, evident in their collection of local plants like ocotillo and yucca. They’ve also made friends with many locals, including Indigenous communities, evident here in the “Singing Mother” figure on the table. These figures were first created in 1964 by artist Helen Cordero of the Pueblo de Cochiti, a community of the Keres Pueblo peoples.

As immigrants themselves, the Roswell Aliens also feel a kinship with the many other people that have moved to New Mexico from other countries. This is reflected in the alebrije they got from a Oaxacan-born artist.

REFERENCES

The Roswell UFO Festival!

A Smithsonian article on the crashed MOGUL balloon

An article from History.com about the Roswell incident

An article from the Chicago tribune about the high-altitude dummies that were mistaken for alien bodies.

A Space.com article about Area 51

An article about the infamous "Alien Autopsy" pseudo-documentary

Another article about the "Alien Autopsy" film

[statecryptids]

@nathanwpyle

I literally love this.

I couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes.

No joke.

[statecryptids]

https://gofund.me/303be4c9

Yo, help a cool trans author recover from cancer!

[statecryptids]

Occasionally I slink out of the hole I’ve dug in the darkest corner of the basement and skitter up to my ancient, dust-caked laptop to post a few words into the howling void.

occasional posts from users

[statecryptids]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[statecryptids]

“If you have time to watch Netflix you have time for a side hustle” my side hustle is relaxing so that my body and brain can heal from by this nose-to-the-grindstone bullshit. I refuse to feel guilty for being a human with the need to relax sometimes. my side hustle is no.

[statecryptids]

[statecryptids]

[statecryptids]

“I’m doing some extra credit today!”

*walks around downtown all day looking for fossils in the limestone walls of all the buildings*

geology students will literally say shit like “my dirt class was cancelled today” or “the professor for my class on sand gave us homework about worms” like we’re 8 year olds on the playground inventing new terms for playing in the grass during recess

[statecryptids]

Watterson pulled no punches

[statecryptids]

Sneep snorp!

every time I look up anything about annelid worms I end up learning about some ridiculous creature that I now cannot imagine life without. this is a freshwater worm called Pristina that looks like a sock puppet mixed with a moray eel

[statecryptids]

Oh lord, he coming!

Rehydrated

[statecryptids]

I feel a little hypocritical saying it when I haven't gone all the way with this method yet, but I highly suggest everyone at the very least learn how to buy/use DIY HRT so they're prepared in case official means are no longer acccessible to them. it is obviously not ideal compared to official means to accessing HRT, and we need to defend trans healthcare. do not interpret this as me advocating for "giving up". but when the healthcare system fails us, DIY is an option that everyone has, and it's important to me that people understand that they have options. spending an afternoon reading up on how you'd go about DIY is free and affirming even if you don't need/want to DIY right now.