#flying horse ufo

[cryptid-quest]

Cryptid of the Day: Flying Horse UFO

Description: According to the Daily Mail, a UFO that resembled a horse was seen next to an active Mexican volcano, Colima, was seen and captured on a webcam. UFOlogist Eufrasio Carrasco claims volcanos attract UFOs. There might be flying horses among us. 

[lgrtz]

Range 4 Harry

[potholefullofsoup]

it’s a ufo. it’s a flying saucer. it’s a ten gallon hat. it’s a lens. it’s an eye. it’s a stingray. it’s a raincloud. it’s a jellyfish. it’s a sand dollar. it’s a camera obscura. it’s an angel. it’s an alien. it’s a horse. it’s a lampshade. it’s a cuttlefish. it’s a halo. it’s a coin. it’s a chimpanzee. it’s a record. it’s a film reel. it’s an acoelomate. it’s a balloon. it’s a wild animal loose on the set of a family show. it’s the past catching up to you. it’s the other shoe dropping. it’s a viewer. it’s an unwilling spectacle. and above all it’s a jean jacket.

[see-arcane]

OJ and JJ: Why Jean Jacket Let the Haywoods—Especially OJ—Get Away with More Than Anyone Else in “Nope”

I’ve seen Nope twice now. While everyone I saw it with enjoyed it, I heard a few cries of foul when it came to OJ and the others’ improbable good luck with all their near misses interacting with our favorite terrifying gulch-haunting UFO. I call foul back and say plot armor had nothing to do with it. Some luck, yeah, otherwise we’d have no protagonists. But that was hardly all.

Spoilers for Nope below

To be clear, I am absolutely not painting this as the same delusional ‘friendship’ Jupe assumed he had with Jean Jacket. Neither he, nor OJ, nor anyone else is a miraculously endowed animal/alien tamer with an automatic ~*~special bond~*~. It’s one of many points Nope goes out of its way to illustrate. You can only train (or disrespect) an animal so far before they lash out, especially predators, and especially island-sized UFOs with the munchies. But, insomuch as there is any ‘safe’ way to coexist in close proximity with something like Jean Jacket, OJ Haywood is shown to have pulled it off with flying colors. And he did so almost entirely unaware to begin with by dint of his character traits.

That and a combination of Jean Jacket’s own instincts are what likely put him and the people around him in the tiiiny pocket of special allowance JJ deigned to give them over the course of the movie.

Let’s roll back to the first scene with the Haywood Ranch and the death of Otis Sr. A death by falling nickel that happened six months before the present-day events of the film. Just before this, father and son were curious about the screaming in the clouds—a fresh snack of hikers about to be squelched—followed by the rain of inedible bits. We can assume this was Jean Jacket’s first time flying in the gulch, and he chose the Haywood Ranch as The Spot for Purging; just like the hills next to the ranch were chosen for his ‘nest’/hiding place/resting spot.

While Jupe was methodically feeding JJ fresh horses and imagining the big guy trusted him, Jean Jacket kept going home to his actual favorite spot right next to OJ and his horses—a man and his big juicy animals out training in broad daylight, day after day, without ever pestering them. No missing horses. No missing OJ. Despite JJ clearly having opportunity and a taste for both species by that point. Why?

The obvious answer is that OJ kept his head down. Literally. Eyes always on his work, under the shade of his hat bill, maybe glancing at the clouds now and then…but always too far away to agitate. For all that time, he was unconsciously respecting Jean Jacket’s rules. Plus, he was in JJ’s purging/nesting territory first; yes, Jean Jacket was calling dibs on the whole gulch, but if the locals already there aren’t bothering him, fine, sure, they can stay.

The place’s importance to Jean Jacket, OJ’s head-down habits, and the amount of time spent coexisting with each other sans trouble all combined to put OJ and the alien into as close to a neighborly setup as could ever be expected. Don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you.

Then things start picking up. Too much activity, too many new skyward glances from OJ, too many hackles raised with the Star Lasso Experience. And yeah, JJ did almost vacuum OJ up—he infringed on their ‘arrangement’ and looked! The nerve! And after JJ let him get away with hiding under a roof the night he stared up at the dust devil that took the fake horse! How ungrateful!

…A move that, in hindsight, plays almost like a Strike 1 offense, paid back by slurping up the actual horse. OJ’s staring at the Star Lasso arena was likely Strike 2. After snapping at OJ and causing the accidental knockout against the ceiling, JJ flies off without him or Lucky.

Off JJ flies to the Haywood Ranch again, full of screaming people and detritus and huffy extraterrestrial chest-pounding. And what does JJ do? He drops a big bloody purge waterfall directly onto the Haywoods’ house—OJ’s territory-within-JJ’s territory—like the giant alien version of an animal hiking its leg and marking all over a lower-tier animal’s spot.

This is a warning. This is my place. I rule here.

Then, as if holding onto the statue for last (hell, that may have been the real Strike 1), he moves his big flying Roomba self over to OJ’s truck—which I’d bet JJ definitely recognizes after six months—and just hovers. Hovers. Hovers.

Making sure OJ is paying attention. Then he hacks the statue out like a bad loogie right into the windshield. Assuming it didn’t kill his ‘neighbor,’ it would be a fine lesson:

You are on thin ice. Do not cross me again.

Come morning, what do we find out? Not only is Jean Jacket smart enough to know the humans will react when he moves enough to let the electricity fizzle back on, he immediately moves back overhead to stare down at OJ. My guess? It was a test.

You know better, neighbor. What do you do when I am here? What very smart thing have you done in all our quiet time side by side?

And thank God, it does dawn on OJ in time. Do Not Look. No Eyes On JJ.

So he ducks his head. And, even though he caught a very obvious peripheral glimpse, Jean Jacket still lets that slide. Jean Jacket lets OJ, his sister, and Angel—probably his family/pack in JJ’s POV—scurry away in their silly rolling box. We can’t even say it was because Jean Jacket was still full; the big guy looks like he has whole miles of gut to chow down with.

No, he lets OJ and company off with a few warnings, because the arrangement renewed. And off he goes to settle in his cloud again.

Cut to the run.

I sincerely believe that if it had been any other person on the horse, any other person goading Jean Jacket along the run, they would not have lasted a minute. No, not even with their head down. We’ve seen by now just how fast JJ can move, how quick he can flip from zero to I-Will-Knock-You-Back-Like-a-Shrieking-Tic-Tac. And nobody can say they didn’t clench up when they, like OJ, realized Jean Jacket was hovering right behind him like the world’s most ominous frisbee. Ditto the part where JJ slurped up the TMZ jerk barely a yard away from him and Lucky.

Thiiis close to sucking him up. But no. The dust devil got Mr. TMZ with the precision of a straw.

Then we get to the run—OJ on horseback, JJ being JJ, going fast…but almost at his version of a canter. A brisk walking pace.

That much might be owed to the fact that, unlike all his other prey, the people/horses have gotten a good look at Jean Jacket, then turned to run. With OJ’s staring hoodie, he’s retreating while still looking at/challenging JJ. That’s new! That implies Jean Jacket’s neighbor has his hackles up even as he moves away!

So Jean Jacket gives a comparatively leisurely chase. Then, just when he gets fed up and goes for the vacuum maneuver—surprise! Flags everywhere! Jean Jacket freaks out as expected, twisting away rather than risk gulping up another bad meal. What the hell, OJ, why didn’t you warn JJ you were a statue this whole time?

And, finally, the climax.

OJ looks at Jean Jacket dead on, still sitting on the flag-strung Lucky. This is when Jean Jacket has completely unfolded into what looks like a full intimidation display. These tiny two-legged things have turned into a big flag-covered, barbed wired headache for Jean Jacket. Perhaps even a threat. It’s down to a fight for the territory in JJ’s perspective. Someone has to go. And OJ, the one he ‘knows’ best, the one that had respected and been respected by Jean Jacket most, like two sullen predators in the same cage mutually agreeing not to bother the other, is the one metaphorically baring his teeth first.

Even as he flexes all his freaky jellyfish anatomy, Jean Jacket hesitates.  

Does he think this is OJ warning him away? Or is he really instigating a fight to the finish? …Is there a chance OJ could win?

Even when, finally, OJ does begin drawing him along, away from Em’s bike, we never see JJ strike out with his appendages or make another dust devil. He’ll match OJ’s staring contest, he’ll creep closer, but he does not lash out.

It’s only when Em revs up and takes off for Jupiter’s Claim that Jean Jacket gambles on pursuing what he (mis)takes for the less worrisome Haywood. Simply because she looked at him and fled? Because JJ wants another warning to spit up for OJ later? No way to know.

All we see is that OJ, by a mix of hair-thin good fortune and animal training experience, managed to live with, counter, and psych out Jean Jacket enough to earn the man-eating megafauna’s tolerance and enough respect that it edged near worry.

tl;dr: No, OJ was not a magical horse/alien whisperer. But he did gain enough of Jean Jacket’s esteem to give him the best odds of survival, cohabitation and manipulation, simply by being himself, being respectful of the ‘rules’ once he knew them, and being cool as hell while everyone else fell apart or got slurped.

[marrkopolo]

A Wise Man Once Said

Precious lost its ring in the scrap yard with no metal detector the lavender pussywillows hide the trolls

Hong Kong wheel of fate UW spinned it first Knights of Templar slaughtered at a mass concert of bloody crimson tide

Tithe on a full moon for 2x the glee The crash of waves against the rocks, like bodies slapping against each other during sex blood shooting through veins Hot heat, sticky, in Iceland together I too, know of these lands

Tax season says the King! blue knots on a tent red food buckets hung like death #four crosses in a foreign land alone is no place to exist

An underwater welder lying on the blue tarp, is like a union of troops led by a zebra.

Flying flags at Disney welcome to the world of water failed regret, emptiness and betrayal tattered flags get left to rot sew it in with the others together and the quilt becomes strong and scintillating

Crush you with your own history headless horseman and halo hair dark horse donuts This is as good as it gets!

Red-lipped lipstick cracked porcelain face You can't hold a candle to this

King of the Hill My pool stick is clean now true Kings swim in the swimming pool together King of the Hill Jack of Spades went with the stolen crown and robots learn to volunteer.

Pledge to a sanitizer salute to a gong beat your chest it's loud and strong Love at first sight or sounds like a good idea Wisdom of the crowd or individual motivation?

A rabbi with the yachts Fortified lamps sees all UFOs, telekinesis and even explosive lingerie. One denarius for a days work Why they get more? Stand while another sits. Then switch roles and you'll see why.

What sees with three eyes? The melatonin-like parental bond, third eye awoken, Moksha.

Insane Luke has a scar red dots that kill. Baldie takes biosphere crown the bald animal is cutting loose again Is doraphilia still fun to you?

I attempt to transform but the tea is too strong my hands have small heart Lying down a tiny raindrop falls into my ear swirling into the cochlea My whole world has changed!

Eczema stealing make-up twice North Face go north Racks of weapons are not enough this time

My mask is old but gold bars had paved my fortunate path …a fortunate path(whispering)

Tik Tok vault one exit is enough The eagle has docked into spray-painted madness. Not to fret I hear a falcon cry Jump when the law is bent it will help you fly

Six shooter Six pack 3 sewers 3 fires Twin-spirit 1 spacesuit

Mountain top king of the hill climb Nepal Hajj pilgrimage princess climbs like a pirate piggyback down the wedding aisle

Opposites attract

One fell to its doom down the abyssal void towards the bottom and a ghost ship lost in the Bermuda Triangle with Pandoras Box Lazarus

Gunpowder in shoes Footprints in the sand Jesus did not tap

Short and tall fat and thin Lookalikes Soundalikes Smellalikes the hunt of touch and taste What double currencies create the ultimate Yin Yang effect? AI said to cure pride and competition, exchange abacus rubik-cubed calculators instead of cash.

Echoes and reverberation voices become lightning WATTS= AMPS X VOLTS

Float your payloads into the troposphere with skinny vertical structures of contained saltwater Heat a planet with a satellite asteroid belt

A call for help QR codes morse code gun flare smoke signal what are your coordinates? R-E-B-O-R-N

Some ancients say gunpowder only made flee then gun made to kill Oil spills from bronze age to silicon chips flood the market cut the mall castle cake in half Zangief on a segway You win.Perfect.

Lawrence Groves copyright©2024

[jupejumble]

you wanna hear me talk about my favorite live action movie? of course you do here we go (0 notes)

just a quick nope infodump cuz i have nowhere else to dump my thought about this movie -- i put it under the cut cuz i know some people dont like horror or scary stuff, and some people are planning on watching it and dont want spoilers :]

first this is my thing of how i finally got to watching nope, it can be skipped, the actual infodump starts at the pink text

ok so first of all, nope had caught my attention when i first saw some trailers for it,, then i forgot about it until i saw some fanart for the gordy scene, and i thought it looked so good. so i looked in the comments and people kept talking about that scene. me, being curious, looked up the scene on youtube. and it scared me so bad.

later in the year (2022) i went to universal studios in a family trip. i really enjoyed it but the one part that was my favorite was the studio tour, i love animation and film and cinematography so it was right up my alley. but at the very end of the tour, we went to the new exhibition of it. Jupiter's Claim.

the very same jupiter's claim from the movie (not really just a recreation). they did a whole thing with the aliens and it freaked me out. very fun but i did not expect it so it was alarming to see a set piece from a movie i had little knowledge on and was scared of.

so i did what i usually do to keep my nerves down, started researching it. watching trailers, actor interviews, cinematography etc.

i wanted to see what the movie was about, so i looked it up and read the plot on wikipedia, it did get me less scared of it, but it also really peaked my interest.

when the synapsis described jean jacket's final form, i hadnt imagined it was so big. in my head i thought it was smaller than a person and that it looked like a jellyfish. i was only half right. then once again, i forgot about the movie entirely.

until almost a year later. when i saw a "everything great about" video on nope. i thought, well they usually cut up the movie, and talk through it, so itll basically be like watching the movie.

it was really interesting, so i decided to watch it. now onto my infodump thing im mostly going to be talking about the themes and stuff

HERES THE MOVIE PLOT WHICH I JUST PULLED FROM WIKIPEDIA CUZ I DONT WANT TO WRITE THE ENTIRE THING -- you can skip this if youve watched tho movie, or just skip it if you want idc

[In Agua Dulce, California, the Haywood family trains and handles horses for film productions. One day at the Haywood ranch, small metallic objects violently fall from the sky. One of these objects, a nickel, ends up killing Otis Haywood Sr.

Six months later, his children, Emerald "Em" Haywood and a depressed Otis "OJ" Haywood Jr., are fired from a set after their horse, Lucky, reacts violently to its own reflection in a chrome ball utilized for visual effects. To raise money, OJ has been selling some of the Haywood horses to Ricky "Jupe" Park, who operates a Western theme park called Jupiter's Claim. Jupe exploits his past traumatic experience as a child actor on the set of a family sitcom that costarred a chimpanzee named Gordy. During filming of an episode, Gordy reacted violently to the sound of popping balloons and attacked at least two of his human co-stars, but ultimately left Jupe completely unharmed, before being fatally shot by police.

One night, the Haywoods notice their electricity fluctuating and their horses violently reacting to an unknown presence. They discover an unidentified flying object (UFO) that has been taking their horses and spitting out the inorganic matter, which OJ concludes to have caused their father's death. The siblings decide to document and sell evidence of the UFO's existence, and recruit electronics store employee Angel Torres to set up surveillance cameras. The UFO arrives and abducts a horse as well as a plastic horse Em stole from Jupiter's Claim for use as a decoy.

The next day, Em attempts to recruit famed cinematographer Antlers Holst to help them record the UFO. Holst declines, telling Em that chasing wealth and fame is a "dream you will never wake up from." Angel then arrives and reveals that a cloud in the valley never moves; OJ suspects this is the UFO's hiding place before theorizing, based on the UFO's flight patterns, that it isn't a ship at all.

Jupe introduces a live show in Jupiter's Claim where he plans to use Lucky as bait to lure out the UFO. For months Jupe has been offering the UFO the Haywood's horses for shows. The UFO arrives earlier than expected and devours Jupe and everyone in attendance for the show (including his family and staff), ultimately leaving only Lucky alive. OJ, attempting to retrieve Lucky, confirms his theory that the UFO is actually a territorial, predatory organism. After the creature showers the Haywood household with the detritus and regurgitated remains of the Jupiter’s Claim crowd, OJ realizes that it only attacks those who look directly at it. He devises a plan to record it. Em and Angel are hesitant until Em receives a call from Holst, who now agrees to help. OJ names the organism "Jean Jacket", after a horse that Em as a child was promised to train.

To circumvent Jean Jacket's effect of shutting down all electronics nearby, Holst brings a hand-cranked IMAX film camera. The group plans to bait Jean Jacket with a field of electrically-powered tube man props to deduce its location in the sky. However, a TMZ paparazzo trespasses onto the field and is thrown from his electric motorcycle when it shuts down near Jean Jacket, which devours him. Though Holst captures footage of Jean Jacket, his obsession with "the impossible shot" results in him being devoured alongside his camera, forcing the remaining three to flee. Angel survives an attack from Jean Jacket by being wrapped in a tarp and barbed wire, causing the creature to unfurl into a new, larger form.

OJ intentionally looks directly at Jean Jacket, allowing Em to use the motorcycle to rush to Jupiter's Claim. There, she untethers the park's large helium balloon mascot of Jupe, the large eyes of which attract Jean Jacket's ire. Jean Jacket attempts to feed on the balloon while Em uses an attraction's analog camera to photograph Jean Jacket as it feeds. Its attempt to eat the perceived threat results in the balloon exploding, destroying Jean Jacket. With the picture as proof of the creature's existence and reporters arriving nearby, Em sees an unharmed OJ and Lucky standing outside of Jupiter's Claim.]

WOOO NOW ONTO MY THOUGHTS ON THE MOVIE

we know that 6 months before the events of the movie, oj and em's dad was killed from a nickel that came from the sky and hit him in the eye and went into his brain. in the beginning of that scene we hear a radio news broadcast about some missing hikers. SINCE LATER WE FIND OUT THAT JEAN JACKET SHOOTS OUT THE METAL THINGS HE CANT EAT THAT COIN HAD COME FROM THE HIKERS

ohoho jupe, he's such a well written character. he is so complex. he was traumatized as a child with the gordy incident. he was the only cast member (as far as we know) to come out completely unscathed,,, physically. ----- when oj is trying to set up a path of buying the horses back, jupe says "yeah yeah we can do that" (HE IS A LIAR). and while oj is talking to jupe about that, em interrupts asking about the gordy incident. -- JUPE'S REACTION IS SO INTERESTING, HE TAKES THEM INTO A ROOM WHICH IS DEDICATED TO THIS INCIDENT BUT HE DOESNT ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT THE INCIDENT, INSTEAD HE TALKS ABOUT THE SNL SKETCH!!! HE HAS TURNED HIS TRAUMA INTO ENTERTAINMENT!!! the way i saw it is that he subconciously thinks that entertainment is a purpose, and if he can turn that incident into something that can be consumed by others then what happened wasnt for nothing. what he went through wasnt just a pitiful event in his life. it was something to be consumed. it was a spectacle.

JUPE BELIEVED HE WAS SOME KIND OF CHOSEN ONE, first gordy didnt harm him (which was because of the tablecloth not their so called connection) SO HE THOUGHT HE ALSO HAD A CONNECTION WITH JEAN JACKET

in the opening scene we see the first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture, the jockey riding the horse is oj and em's great great great grandfather, AND IN COMPOSITION OF THE CLOSING SCENE, OJ IS FRAMED LIKE IT

aaauughh i just love that jean jacket was named after the horse that em was supposed to train, cuz it ended up being her who conquered and killed the alien in the end

I LOVE THAT ANGEL WAS JUST SOME RANDOM STORE EMPLOYEE WHO JUST DECIDED TO BE PART OF THE GANG, LIKE HE DIDNT KNOW THEM BEFOREHAND AND JUST DECIDED TO JOIN THEM ON THEIR SILLY LITTLE ADVENTURE

i feel like holst was a counterpart to jupe, cuz while jupe wanted to exploit jean jacket for money and clout, holst wanted to exploit jean jacket for his art,, and clout,,,, so they were both selfish but it does show that even when you dont exploit or take advantage something for money and just do it for art ITS STILL EXPLOITING

THE THING WITH THE TMZ GUY OUGH I LOVED THAT SCENE. OJ JUST TRIED TO HELP BUT THAT GUY WAS JUST FOCUSED ON GETTING THE CAMERA, AND THEN OJ'S EYES REFLECTED WHICH CAUSED JEAN JACKET TO NOTICE THEM OUUGHHHH

i love how jean jackets forms differentiate for the circumstances, when she's just the disk its just chillin, just feeding and leaving, but once all the stuff happens against it it starts to get more aggressive. so like most animals he makes themself appear bigger, making for a really good shots in the movie

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN GORDY AND JEAN JACKET ARE ALSO INTERESTING, BECAUSE JEAN JACKET ISNT THE VILLAIN, JUST THE ANTAGONIST,, JEAN JACKET IS AN ANIMAL WHO IS JUST EATING, GOING THROUGH THE NATURAL MOTIONS THAT COME WITH BEING ALIVE. AND SO WAS GORDY, GORDY WAS JUST REACTING TO THE SCARE THAT THE BALLOONS POPPING GAVE HIM

I NEED SOME AFTERMATH CONTENT NOWWW, LIKE WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE NEWS STATION? DID THEY CLEAN THE HOUSE? HOW DID EVERYONE COPE??? DID THEY GET THE FAME THEY WANTED!?? I NEED TO KNOW

ok ok so jupes made up aliens? the viewers? THEIR DESIGNS ARE ALSO ROOTED IN HIS TRAUMA,, THE HEADS LOOK LIKE THE CAMERAS USED IN THE FILMING OF THE SITCOM AND THE BODIES RESEMBLE THOSE OF A MONKEY

i would put a picture of gordy on here but it has blood and dont wanna have that here,,, so uhhh if you wanna see him just look up gordy nope

and now some shorter things i really liked

the day for night filming IS SO GOOD

the themes about spectacles and human nature

oj and em's relationship (the siblings ever)

JUPE'S WHOLE DEAL

LIKE HOLY CRAP HE LEAD ALL THOSE PEOPLE TO THEIR DEATH!???

the cinematography is just mmm chef's kiss

all the characters are just so genuine

,, yeah these are obviously not all my thoughts on this movie cuz i think about this movie a LOT,, but i didnt want to overload this thing

[satureja13]

~ Chapter 23 ~

The Expedition

Where

the Boys and Rubyn follow mysterious Professor Callahan's Interactive Clue Hunt through the Jungle of Selvadorada

they fly in an UFO

the Bond tries to take over Vlad to kill the others ö.Ö'

Jack and the Bond have an epic Insult Light Saber Sword Fight

they find a new astromechanical friend for Jack

they receive a message from another timeline/paralel world from another Jeb and Jack

Ji Ho and Jeb work on Ji Ho's Siren's Songs

they make a vow

they find the Ship!

Mami and 'the Boys™' try to snatch the horses ö.Ö'

we are having a proposal!

'You're making me go - Then making me stay Why do you hurt me so bad? It would help me to know, do I stand in your way Or am I the best thing you've had? Believe me, believe me I can't tell you why But I'm trapped by your love and I'm chained to your side'

Pat Benatar - Love Is A Battlefield

Chapters: 1-6 ~ 7-12 ~ 13-16 ~ 17-22 ~ 23-28

From the Beginning  ~  Underwater Love ~  Latest

[doshmanziari]

A Phenomenology of Gazes || Nope

“Nope” is almost aggressively defined by gazes. Anyone who has seen it will remember Daniel Kaluuya’s character, OJ, not so much deducing as intuiting, within a life-or-death scenario, that the movie’s flying saucer — really, more of an Unidentified Feeding Object — consumes anything which grants (or appears to grant, as the movie’s climax demonstrates) it attention. This recalls a pivotal scene from “Get Out” wherein the protagonist, also played by Kaluuya, avoids falling under hypnotic suggestion by stuffing his ears with cotton. In both scenes, the person is in direct contact with the threat and nullifies it by an autonomous denial, the preservation of a crucial sensory faculty.

But a quick review of the rest of the film reveals that the gaze is everywhere, from the eyes-on-you gesture shared between OJ and his sister, Em (Keke Smith); to the moment when a chimpanzee “animal actor”, Gordy, having just exceeded his limit for being a captive and gone violently berserk on set, locks eyes with a surviving boy actor, Jupe (Steven Yeun); to what becomes a shared concern, or obsession, among OJ, Em, Angel (an electronics store employee, played by Brandon Perea), and esteemed filmmaker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to film or photograph the UFO.

As with OJ’s intuition and aversion, the gaze here is also defined by its avoidance or negation: when OJ, who has inherited a horse ranch from his father, brings one of his horses to the set for a commercial, he tilts his head down and away from the reach of the rest of the irksome crew; OJ’s father is killed when miscellanea is ejected at blistering speed from the UFO’s oral-anal hole and a nickel enters his brain through his right eyeball; a recapitulation of the scene involving Gordy, as viewed from different cameras and moments before the assault, stresses the chimpanzee’s presence by his absence by keeping the focus solely on the humans (this ocular exclusion is also an effective technique for invoking an expectant anxiety).

What to make of all this? Locating a theme only tells us that the theme is there, or that it may be interpreted as being there. What I’ve omitted to mention so far is that OJ is black, as are his sister and father.

In certain ways, “Nope” is as much a UFO movie as it isn’t. Although Jordan Peele’s screenplay engages with contemporary incidents and aspects, both reputable — Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean’s NYT article of 2017 is mentioned — and disreputable — Angel’s namedrop of Ancient Aliens prompted a ripple of knowing laughter among the theater’s audience — , its narrative is ultimately a divergent appropriation of the UFO phenomenon. The only black-eyed humanoids here are costumed folks playing a prank on OJ, while the UFO turns out to be an aerial life form, a sort of enormous, sky-bound variant of oceanic siphonophores. Its interiors are not curvilinear metallic chambers containing operating tables but a network of puffy, ribbed digestive tracts, an inflatable funhouse from a thrumming nightmare.

That these divergences might disappoint some people (including myself, to a degree) is beside the point that “Nope” is the first major UFO movie I can think of which so prominently foregrounds black people, to say nothing of Jupe or Angel. While it racially implicates the film industry and the uses of photographic technology, this foregrounding also evokes the notable lack of black Americans’ accounts of, or engagement with material concerning, UFOs. Barney and Betty Hill’s experience still stands out today, not just because of its situating as the United States’ first widely publicized, domestic account of alien abduction, but also because of Barney’s blackness. So obvious and pervasive is this lack that when Patricia Avant produced a short film featuring her own footage, she was compelled to entitle it like a corrective assertion: “Black People Do See UFOs.”

Undoubtedly, black people do see UFOs. The phenomenon is worldwide, relentless, and seemingly nonselective (excepting an understudied intergenerational pattern). Yet when one examines, at least as far as the United States goes, the details of authorship, reports, and cults, one does find a dearth of black people. Anthony Lane’s review for The New Yorker is keen to illustrate a difference between OJ and Richard Dreyfuss’ character in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”: “Both guys lean out to see what’s happening. Roy gets flashed and scalded for his pains, and, as the encounter ends, he is left panting and shuddering in shock. O.J., on the other hand, opens the driver’s door, glances upward, and then, with unforgettable aplomb, slowly closes the door again. He contents himself with uttering a single word: ‘Nope.’”

OJ’s utterance is the equivalent to “I don’t fuck with that,” and the retraction of his gaze is as self-assured as it is self-preserving. But we needn’t only look forty-five years ago to Spielberg’s movie to find a difference of attitude: during “Nope”’s final confrontation with the UFO, Antlers removes himself from shelter for the sake of a money shot and is gobbled up. Although the movie’s internal context might sooner prompt one to consider Antlers’ decision as being informed by a suicidal-romantic commitment to True Art, for me it recalls the cavalier attitude of modern contact-pursuing cults like Steven Greer’s, wherein everything that is dangerous about UFOs has been sidelined by an underlying arrogance. It is just as unsubstantiated and reductive to suggest that black Americans may generally avoid talking about UFOs because of some uniform, trauma-informed cautiousness as it is somehow unsurprising to know that Greer is white, as were practically all of the UFO cult leaders mentioned by Jacques Vallée in his 1979 book, Messengers of Deception.

Antlers’ hand-cranked film camera, like all cameras, is an eye with its own type of gaze: directive and reflective, but not affected. Its antique form calls to mind an early scene, wherein Em joins OJ on the commercial’s set to give the background for the ranch’s business. Referring to one of photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s later chronophotographic sequences depicting a black jockey upon a horse, Em explains that this “nameless” jockey, in contrast to Muybridge’s renown and the horse having a recorded name, is actually identifiable (a fiction of the movie’s) and her family’s thrice-great-grandfather. Expanded to a fuller context, the centrality of the camera here, and elsewhere, speaks to its real-world powers as an arbiter of history, reality, and humanization, or dehumanization. OJ and company’s fixation on the cameras they install on the ranch to film and thus prove the UFO’s existence is simultaneously reasonable and unprecedentedly modern. Objectivity, as it were (with all the ways by which the camera objectifies), has priority over empirical reality. The subject is made or unmade by the lens’ presence.

So there is an irony to Em’s historical pride, not lost, I think, to the movie: a dimension of her and her family’s racial, cultural, and vocational lineage has been legitimized by a prototype of the same technology which has been used to invisiblize them. The fact that we are, in many respects, more beholden to the camera, and its industries, than it is to us is suggested by a feature of the shapeshifting UFO’s final form: an angular, green projection containing a sort of inscrutable mouth and, with each of its undulations, producing a whipping sound. Here is the green screen placed behind actors, ready to tame and overpower them, and future audiences, with a consuming spectacle. Naturally, this implicates “Nope” itself, to a degree.

The movie’s simultaneous engagement with and disengagement from the UFO phenomenon, and its fixation on the gaze’s powers and vulnerabilities, also aligns it — unintentionally or not — with a commonality among abduction reports. The main pop-cultural legacy of Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story, published in 1987, may be the crude, shameful reduction of Strieber’s trauma to a sort of prison-rape “joke”; but its secondary legacy is surely its disturbing cover: a painting of an almond-eyed being who looks at us with a sort of unknowable, arresting placidity. Accordingly, one finds within the literature (John E. Mack’s and David M. Jacobs’ books being exemplary) descriptions of a being staring into the abductee’s eyes. The abductee, who has little to no control over their body, has the profoundly naked impression that they are being mentally infiltrated, that nothing about their inner or outer life can be kept secret from the gaze. These experiences are caught between the aforementioned mean-spirited joke, New Age sentimentality determined to see the phenomenon only as a drawn-out protocol for spiritual guidance, and scientific disciplines which categorically refuse to study them even from the angle of a collective, subconscious fiction with psychosomatic effects.

If the phenomenon is the product of human minds, then it would seem to be meta-fiction rather than fiction, in the sense that dreams are also sorts of demon-strative fictions with, nevertheless, a psychic (and then physical) reality. This reflective quality of meta-fiction brings us back to the fact that to examine aspects of UFOs is to also examine aspects of ourselves and the ways of the world (and perhaps universe). In cattle mutilations are resonances of our meat industry; in crafts’ killing of the verdure they land upon are resonances of the effects of our vehicles and airplanes; in their effects upon witnesses’ skin, hair, and internal organs are resonances of our scientists’ acquiescence in developing weapons of biological warfare; in the beings’ remorseless forcing of humans to be medical subjects are resonances of productions such as Unit 73, or our experiments upon “lower” animals.

It is the Otherness of the phenomenon which simultaneously readies a gazeful cognizance of its horrors and a blindness to our own capacity for even greater heights of “inhumanity” — a nice word that allows us to believe evilness is the corruption of an inherent gentility. That the threat of “Nope”’s UFO centers around its voracious nature and violent excretions (an inversion paralleling the camera’s inversion of an image) is not, then, only symbolically indicative of socioeconomic or sociocultural hegemony but its phenomenological nearness to us, a horrific immanence settled below a constructed normality. This nearness is never more powerfully illustrated by the movie than in its thunderstorming scene where the UFO hovers right above the ranch house, dumping a deluge of blood and phantasmic screams upon its exterior. It is this scene above all others where one may reconsider whether or not this is truly “just” a hungry creature, and not also the revenge of the unconscious, or the anima mundi.

When OJ asks Em, after having first seen the UFO, “What’s a bad miracle?”, the answer to his question might be a miracle, all the same. Sophocles’ tragic observation, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse”, is as applicable to the invention of the magical camera (now so common as to have had its obviously magical qualities regularized and diminished) as it is to the emergence of the magical UFO phenomenon. Prior to the camera, there was the camera obscura, the “dark chamber.” We can literalize and metaphorize this term for a statement: the camera obscures as it reveals. And is not the same thing true of UFOs, those cameras, vaulted chambers, of the sky? To gaze upon the miraculous, the wondrous, is to receive all of its afflictions.

[horrormoviemonstermakeout]

MONSTER RATING: Jean Jacket (Nope)

Nope (2022) is the third movie from writer and director Jordan Peele, and the inaugural review of this blog because I cannot stop thinking about this movie. It’s a horror movie. It’s a western. It’s about the cruel, dehumanization of spectacle. It’s about the erasure of black voices in Hollywood. It’s about what it means to really see something for what it is. There’s so much to even think about, it’s so dense and laden with ideas that you could probably write a thesis paper about it.

The plot boils down to this: OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) runs a horse ranch and rental service for film sets out in the Californian desert, with help from his sister Emerald “Em” Haywood (Keke Palmer). After the unusual death of their father (Keith David) by way of a coin falling from the sky and piercing his brain, the ranch is beset by money troubles and OJ is forced to sell many of his horses to the theme park next door, run by former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who is currently commercializing the tragic massacre of “Gordy’s Home,” in which a frenzied chimpanzee killed two of the cast members and disfigured one of them, for fame and profit.

Things start getting weird when an unidentified flying object - which the Haywoods later name Jean Jacket after Em’s horse - begins appearing around the ranch, abducting their horses and causing all electronic equipment to fail around it. We later discover this UFO is actually a giant, living organism that had been lured into the area by Jupe in hopes of taming it and turning it into an attraction for his theme park. This inevitably gets him, his entire family, and most of the park staff and guests eaten and digested by Jean Jacket.

The Haywoods, along with the eccentric electronic store employee Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and the film director Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), begin planning a way to get photographic evidence of this creature so that the nightmare will end and their ranch will be saved from money troubles.

That plot synopsis covers the jist of what occurs but, in all honesty, feels like it only scratches the surface of what is really occurring. Take the Gordy’s Home incident for example, what I would consider one of the thematic throughlines of the entire film. So thematically central, in fact, that the movie starts on the scene of a bloodied chimpanzee among the corpses of its co-stars. Actually, the movie starts with a Bible quote, Nahum 3:6 - “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle,” which I feel sums up one of its major themes and ties back again to the massacre; the inherent dehumanization of spectacle.

Jupe, at that point a child actor, is the only actor that manages to survive unscathed from the incident. When we first get introduced to Jupe, we see his room filled with memorabilia from the show, as well as numerous references to the massacre which he plays off with jokes. He’s clearly traumatized from the incident, and yet he charges people to come into this room and gawk at what happened. For fame, money, or just to suppress his trauma, he allows himself to become spectacle and lets himself be dehumanized by the people who laugh at his trauma.

And it is this desire for spectacle that gets him killed by Jean Jacket. Jean Jacket is the ultimate unknown, a bewildering, fantastical creature that Jupe knows will wow his audience. However, Jean Jacket refuses to be a spectacle. As OJ learns, the thing that most enrages the flying saucer is direct eye contact. If you look into it, you will die. It’s ironic, Jean Jacket is the most spectacular creature in this movie, central to so many horrific but extraordinary sights, but no, you cannot look at them. You will not dehumanize this creature. The only time it gets its photo taken, the only time the public finally sees it, is when it dies. It will cast an abominable spectacle upon you, but the moment eyes are set on it, it will die. The same way Gordy was turned into spectacle, both on the show and when it went on a rampage, before being killed by the police. You cannot look directly at it.

I have to go on to rate this monster but you can see what I mean when I say I can’t stop thinking about this movie right? Jean Jacket as a monster represents so many things and if I went into each and every thing the review would be ten pages long. I insist, watch this movie, you won’t regret it.

- MONSTER RATING - JEAN JACKET -

CREEPINESS: 9/10 - Genuinely, it is rare for a movie to get me this fucking tense while watching it. So many things about Jean Jacket just elicit pure fight-or-flight instinct from me as it depicts some of the most horrifyingly ingenious ways to create a terrifying monster.

Where to begin? The fact that we constantly hear it screaming, and that we later find out that the screaming is not actually coming from it but from the people trapped inside begging to be released? The fact that it’s the size of several school buses, a kaiju in its own right, but travels completely silently, hiding itself behind clouds? The way its disruptive electromagnetic field shuts down all electronic equipment, plunging the area into an extremely tense silence, only to be broken by its echoing clicks and moans?

Jean Jacket makes you feel unsafe. The movie effectively conveys how this creature is a predator, silently stalking behind clouds so that it can pounce on you the moment you’re disarmed. The vore scene, which I will discuss later, drills into your head the mortifying fate which is set out for you the moment you are captured - you will be eaten, and digested alive. Jean Jacket reduces you to prey; insignificant prey, like a mouse completely unaware of the eagle that has already set its sights on it a mile in the sky. You were already dead the moment you stepped into its territory.

I’ve never felt more terrified for the fate of the characters, I nearly screamed when Angel was almost consumed by Jean Jacket. Jordan and the animation team behind Jean Jacket deserve phenomenal praise, this is by far one of the more horrifying movie monsters ever thought up. I’ve seen posts discuss how, after seeing the movie, they’re suddenly afraid to stand underneath the sky. Do you understand how terrifying something has to be in order to make someone scared of the fucking sky? What a wonderful monster, I love it to bits.

WETNESS: 8/10 - We need to talk about the vore scene. The brief thirty second moment in which we see all the park attendees travel through Jean Jacket’s digestive system. The claustrophobic space in which we see the innocent park goers - men, women, and children all - become trapped inside its intestines as its guts pulsate, sending them further and further inside. Wailing, crying, retching and vomiting echo throughout as Jupe’s wife bumps up against the viscous, partially digested remains of a horse, and screams. None of these people make it out alive, they die in one of the cruelest ways imaginable.

I need you to understand something: I’ve always said that being digested would be the most horrifying way to die. Trapped inside this dark, fleshy pocket with absolutely no means of escape, no way to survive. To be slowly eaten away painfully by digestive enzymes as you scream in futility, knowing that you will die this way. This scene warped my face into sheer abject terror and it is absolutely fucking killer. The phenomenal sound design comes out in full force again as you hear every squelch and throbbing of Jean Jacket’s intestines, and the horrified screams of all the park attendees. You can practically feel yourself getting drenched in foul smelling intestinal fluid and stomach acid; the stench of vomit and rotting partially-digested flesh violating your nostrils.

Let’s not forget the scene in which Jean Jacket torments the Haywood ranch by vomiting the hundreds of gallons of park goer blood all over the house. You can see it traveling down the window panes, this viscous, almost congealed red goop of viscera and intestinal bile. These scenes are one of many that made the movie, and this goes without saying: extremely wet! We’re just a little ways away from perfect wetness as I do not believe the exterior of Jean Jacket is all that wet, in fact I would think it would be not too dissimilar from shark’s skin - coarse and rough, perhaps a bit rubbery. But make no mistake - when Jean Jacket eats you, you will know wetness.

DATEABILITY: 2/10 - Listen, I could talk about the insane head Jean Jacket could give you, I am painfully aware of the powerful suction force behind that mouth. I am also aware of how gorgeous its final form is, its dress could make anyone at the Met Gala jealous. Good for a one night stand but I’m here to talk about its compatibility as a romantic partner, and I doubt the relationship could go far with most people.

Let’s talk about the biggest deal breaker: the lack of eye contact. Sure, this is not an insurmountable hurdle, I’m sure the charismatic among you could woo a monster without making eye contact. However, responding to eye contact with horrific consumption and digestion feels like taking things a little too far. Jean Jacket has a lot of boundaries that need to be respected, and you should be ready for the consequences should you break them even once. To some, that’s already way too much baggage to deal with, but let’s say you do successfully manage to get with this flying cephalopod, what then?

I hope you like sitting and waiting, because this creature is an ambush predator, and spends most of its free time hiding inside a cloud digesting its food. Hobbies, interests? Throw them out the window, the only thing Jean Jacket needs in its life is a horse to eat. You might feel a lot of distance between you and the UFO, not only does it communicate very infrequently, but you might feel left behind when it travels into the upper atmosphere to hunt an exploitative theme park owner. Let’s just say that a relationship with this monster would not be a very rewarding one, and as beautiful as this beast is, I would suggest finding someone that doesn’t put so much distance between you two.

FINAL RATING: TOO PRETTY FOR PICTURE / 10

[abadmiracle]

So I guess I'm gonna start doing movie reviews to hone my writing skills. (I also love film).

I wanna start with one of my top 3 favorite movies of all time. NOPE, by the one, the only Jordan Peele.

Bros, i f*cking love this movie. I believe it's genuinely a work of art, and one day, it'll be considered one of the classics next to movies like Pulp Fiction and jurassic Park. I got the chance to see it opening weekend for my birthday in '22, and it genuinely changed how I view the film industry and life as a while (that's corny, ik). Everything about the movie, from the costume design to the colors and set design, are like pieces to a painting worthy of the Louve. NOPE is the 3rd movie in Jordan peele's catalog (4th if you count Candyman, but I don't count that one), following US and GET OUT. The film follows 2 siblings, OJ and Em, living on a dying horse ranch in the valleys of Agua Dulce, CA; a place where the environment is not what it seems. Whether you're looking up at the sky or looking down into the area of Jupiter's claim, there are so many questions that may or may not be answered throughout the movie. OJ and Em are trying to save their ranch from going under through any means necessary after their father mysteriously passed away. After a UFO(UAP), sighting on the ranch and the stealing of one of their horses by said UAP, they seize their opportunity to get footage of the flying object and get those big bucks from selling the footage to save the ranch. But things take odd and terrifying turns all through the movie, turning the hunters into the hunted.

If you haven't already seen the movie, I urge you to go to Amazon or walmart (im a targer guy, myself) or something and buy it. Some people say it's one of the weaker movies in Jordan Peeles catalog, but I think they just can't see the beauty in it. I would have a segment where I critique stuff in the film, but I genuinely can't find anything that is bad in it.

Idk how to end this review. So I'm giving NOPE a 10/10 on the "you should go watch this" score chart (name pending).

Also, lmk how i can improve these reviews in the future. I want to make this an enjoyable read and a little fun. Thank you, and have a great day

[cryptid-quest]

Cryptid of the Day: Flying Horse UFO

Description: According to the Daily Mail, a UFO that resembled a horse was seen next to an active Mexican volcano, Colima, was seen and captured on a webcam. UFOlogist Eufrasio Carrasco claims volcanos attract UFOs. There might be flying horses among us. 

[imthepunchlord]

i see the wave of nope posts. did you watch the movie? I rmb liking the movie and would love to hear about your thoughts if you did watch them. on that note, any horror movie recs? 👀

I did watch Nope, it's one of the few horror films I wanted to watch, and I was waiting for my sister and dad to be available to watch it with me, which was last night.

And it was good. It is definitely my sort of horror film, where it is a horror movie, but that horror isn't in the forefront. It's like a roller coaster, where it will go through the horror scenes, but then move on to focus on something else. And for me who isn't a big fan of horror, that is just how I like it. I can do with feeling scared or dread in segments, but I don't want to sit through a whole film feeling that.

It's actually why a lot of Mike Flanagan's shows I can watch and look forward to them, they are horror shows and have horror elements, but it's not the forefront, it's the people and the setting.

Which is the same for Nope, it being more about the people, the struggles of working with Hollywood, while also dealing with that dangerous mystery. Which, for anyone who hasn't watched it yet but wants to, spoilers ahead.

The idea that the UFO being a living creature and sucking up living beings is interesting, and they wound up having a very interesting design in the end, kinda jellyfish vibes, which is fitting as jellyfish are terrifying. Like, if it ever came to it, I'd rather swim near a great white shark than a jeyllyfish. So it becoming something like a jellyfish was fitting in terms of visuals and quality of terrifying for me. I also really liked the detail of it spitting up blood, cause you see it spitting up metal, and blood has iron in it, so makes sense it can't digest blood.

And oh man, getting that scene of the people inside of it, getting to see them being swallowed up and gradually digested, I think that scared and shook me the most in the whole film. Even though you couldn't see in full detail what was happening to them, I had to look away. It's one of the two scenes that genuinely scared me, and it was so haunting that when JJ flies around, you can still hearing all those people screaming. And it clicks for you then that when you hear it in the distance and it sounds like people screaming, that tells you that it had eaten more people. And man, that scene stuck with me enough that when I went to bed, I had to fight my thoughts from circling back to it cause I didn't want to risk dreaming about it.

The other aspect that scared me in this film was when they circled back to Gordy. Chimps are terrifying, I hope to never get near one cause I know how brutal they can be. And this is one of the few movies that addresses it, and Hollywood's relationship with using animals. So, yeah, Gordy was terrifying, and I felt for Jupe in those scenes. I can just imagine how terrifying it is to be there, getting to see what this chimp did to the people you work with, an animal you didn't think could hurt a fly. And well... And man, it also hits the last terrifying effect of Gordy when you got to see his surviving co star and what Gordy had done to her.

Yeah, Gordy and seeing the inside of JJ were the two most terrifying aspects of this movie for me.

I do love though that this movie made me laugh, OJ was great as a lead, I loved the scene of him in the car, and peeking out to see JJ above and he just closed the door with a "Nope". And gosh, he's a brave man. Em was a lot of fun, and I really liked Angel, and I'm glad all of them survived. Also, Lucky was well named, cause damn, that is one lucky horse. The only one to not get swallowed with every encounter with JJ. Kudos Lucky.

As for horror recs, I don't have a lot for you cause I don't go out of my way to watch horror. And most recs I have are most likely already seen, but I'll share my small list just in case.

Anything made by Mike Flanagan is good.

Jurassic Park, and for World, the most horror of it was Battle at Big Rock (you can watch on Youtube, it's scary), and s3 of Camp Cretaceous.

Alien and Aliens was really good.

Primal has some scary episodes, be aware though that it's a very gore heavy show.

And of course Stranger Things has some good horror elements to it.

And... at this time, I can't think of anything else I've watched that really counts as horror or has horror elements. Out of all genres it is the one I watch the least.

[frank-olivier]

John A. Keel (1930 - 2009) was an American Journalist and influential UFOlogist

Book excerpt from "Operation Trojan Horse":

[..] There is another type of experience which I call time compression. Here the witness undergoes a sequence of events which seem to consume a specific period of time. Later he or she discovers that only a few minutes had actually passed, even though the whole sequence seemed to consume hours. Time compression is common among contactees who think they have been taken on visits to other planets.

I do not believe that any of these people are suffering directly from clinical insanity. Rather, the evidence seems to indicate that their minds are manipulated by an exterior influence and that sometimes their intellects are unable to digest the information they are given, and their emotional structure is unable to retain its stability in the face of these experiences. So some of these people crack up under the strain, or at best, they greatly misinterpret these events. Induced confabulation produces memories of experiences which are convincingly real, and a chain reaction of emotional responses creates irrational fanaticism. These people abandon their jobs and devote all of their time and thought to spreading the gospel of the space people. Their family relationships disintegrate because all of their energies are channeled into one direction. They become martyrs to their cause, be it the eminent arrival of the Big Brothers or the Second Coming of Christ; or, as in the case of the run-of-the-mill hard-core UFO enthusiasts, trying to convince the world that flying saucers are real and are extraterrestrial.

What all this really means is that SOMEONE or something actually has the power to completely possess and control the human mind. Human beings can be manipulated through this power and used for both good and evil purposes.

[..] Now perhaps we can better understand RAF Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard's remarks: "The astral world of illusion, which is greatly inhabited by illusion-prone spirits, is well known for its multifarious imaginative activities and exhortations. Seemingly some of its denizens are eager to exemplify principalities and powers. Others pronounce upon morality, spirituality, Deity, etc. All of these astral exponents who invoke human consciousness may be sincere, but many of their theses may be framed to propagate some special phantasm... or simply to astonish and disturb the gullible for the devil of it."

These "illusion-prone spirits" are responsible for nearly all of the UFO appearances and manipulations. The flying saucers do not come from some Buck Rogers-type civilization on some distant planet. They are our next-door neighbors, part of another space-time continuum where life, matter, and energy are radically different from ours. Ancient man knew this and recognized it. The original Biblical texts employed the word "sheol", which meant invisible world. Somehow, the translators turned this into "hell" and gave it an entirely different meaning.

After spending more than a decade investigating and researching the UFO phenomenon, an engineer named Bryant Reeve published this statement in 1965: "...We began to see that vehicles in outer space were not really the important thing. They were merely an indication of something vastly greater, of earthman's awakening to a tremendous new awareness."

[..] It had taken Mr. Reeve many years to arrive at a conclusion which had apparently been reached in the halls of Washington long before. In January, 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency collected together a group of leading scientists to review the flying saucer evidence compiled by Captain Edward Ruppelt and his Air Force Project Blue Book teams.

[..] The panel agreed generally that this mass of poor-quality reports containing little, if any, scientific data was of no value. Quite the opposite, it was possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in "nocturnal meandering lights." The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or might be potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for deemphasization made itself apparent The panel suggested a program for "debunking" UFOs and systematically destroying the mystique which had grown up around the subject.

[..] As part of a plan for deemphasizing the sightings, the Air Force files were closed to newsmen and researchers for several years, and military personnel were forbidden to discuss UFO material with outsiders. This move inspired the cries of "Censorship!" which are still bandied about in the cultist circles.

[..] Since the phenomenon is partly reflective, it had played the censorship game in earnest and had worked to manipulate the cultists into believing that some great official conspiracy was under way. Mystery men appeared in flap areas and warned, even threatened, witnesses into silence. Some of these men appeared in Air Force uniforms, and when fragments of these stories reached the cultists, they howled even more about "suppression of the truth."

[..] For years many of the UFO cultists have believed that these men in black were CIA and Air Force agents, just as they believed that the government was tapping their phones and censoring their mail.

[..] The real truth is that the UFO cultists have been played for suckers for years, not by the government, but by the phenomenon. Mischievous, even malicious rumors and nonsense have been passed on to them through the contactees, and they have accepted this rubbish as fact. Other classic UFO stories had their beginnings as clearly labeled fiction in cheap men's magazines.

[..] Situations have been engineered by the phenomenon to make the UFO cultists suspicious of the government and even of one another. The in-fighting between the various groups deserves special study by itself. Many cultists are living in genuine terror. Some no longer trust their own families. Several have suffered nervous breakdowns.

Ironically, the UFO organizations have, themselves, suppressed and censored more UFO reports than the Air Force. When the National Investigation Committees on Aerial Phenomena received a report from one of their members on the sighting of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, in which they suffered extraordinary effects after they saw humanlike figures in the window of a UFO, they hid the full report in their office. The whole story would never have become public knowledge if author John Fuller had not stumbled across the Hills years later during his own independent UFO investigations.

The demonological events discussed in this book have so baffled and confused the UFO organizations that they have dismissed most of them as hoaxes without any kind of investigation. In many cases, they have publicly branded the witnesses liars, publicity nuts, and mercenaries trying to exploit the subject.

There's no doubt that the UFO cultists themselves have thwarted effective research into these matters, and their antics have created the atmosphere of ridicule which surrounds the subject and makes qualified professionals wary of becoming involved.

By early 1967, I had decided that the evidence for extraterrestrial origin was purely circumstantial, and I began to hint in print that perhaps a more complex situation was involved. To my astonishment, my rejection of the outer-space hypothesis focused the wrath and suspicion of the UFO cultists on me.

[..] No responsible government could really attempt to explain this bizarre situation to the general public. Our military establishment has therefore been forced to follow a simpler policy, denying the reality of the phenomenon without trying to explain it. If flying saucers are a cosmic hoax, then it follows naturally that many of man's basic beliefs may be based on similar hoaxes. No government is willing to expose these beliefs or become involved in the terrible controversies that would result from such exposure.

The Air Force studies of the early 1950's, and my own recent independent investigations, proved that when the sighting data alone is reviewed quantitatively, it automatically negates itself. The individual sightings are not part of a whole but are part of something else. They form the point of the needle which the ultraterrestrials choose to show us. There are undoubtedly many objects in the sky which we never really notice, but which are a part of all this: strange clouds, weird birds and winged creatures, conventional-looking airplanes. They constitute the real phenomenon. And there are other objects, invisible to human eyes, but discernible, on occasion, to radar and to those people who are more attuned to receiving the signals from those unknown electromagnetic radiations around us.

Sir Victor Goddard pointed out that he believed that most UFO sightings were made by people with psychic abilities, and by nonpsychics who were standing in the auras of the real percipients and were, therefore, temporarily tuned in. There seems to be some merit to this hypothesis, incredible though it may seem.

However, it would be very dangerous for us to exclude the possibility that a very small residue of sightings may be very real. Most scientists agree that there is a chance that there may be billions of inhabitable planets within our own galaxy, and there is always a chance that living beings from those planets might have visited us in the past, are visiting us now, or are planning to visit us in the future. To regard all UFO sightings as illusions, hallucinations, and paraphysical manifestations would expose us to a potentially volatile situation — an invasion from another world.

There have been many apparently physical sightings and landings which produced markings on the ground and other evidence that the objects were solid machines. But if those events represent the presence of true manufactured spacecraft in our atmosphere, then the overall evidence suggests that they are following a long-range plan — a covert military-style buildup — which will culminate in hostile action.

In psychic phenomena and demonology we find that seemingly solid physical objects are materialized and dematerialized or apported. There are many baffling cases of houses which appeared and disappeared mysteriously. In religious demonic possession, well documented by attending priests and doctors, the victims regurgitated impossible quantities of stones and even sharp steel needles. Apparently these foreign objects materialized in their bodies. Some victims have levitated to the ceiling and had to be forcibly tied to their beds to keep from floating away.

Ufologists have constructed elaborate theories about flying-saucer propulsion and antigravity. But we cannot exclude the possibility that these wondrous "machines" are made of the same stuff as our disappearing houses, and they don't fly — they levitate. They are merely temporary intrusions into our reality or space-time continuum, momentary manipulations of electromagnetic energy. When they "lower their frequencies" (as the contactees put it) and enter a solid state, they can leave impressions on the ground. But to enter that state, they need some atoms from our world—parts of an airplane, an auto, or blood and matter from an animal or human being. Or, in some cases, they need to drain off energy from the human percipients or from power lines and automobile engines. This may seem like a fantastic concept, but we have wasted twenty years trying to simplify all this, trying to find a more mundane explanation. The fact is, all of the evidence supports our fantastic concepts more readily than it supports the notion that we are receiving visitors from Mars or Aenstria.

But if we want to be properly cautious and objective, we find ourselves facing a double-barreled dilemma. On the one hand, all the real facts of the situation, the manifestations and physical effects of the phenomenon, seem to point to a negative, paraphysical explanation. The UFOs do not seem to exist as tangible, manufactured objects. They do not conform to the accepted natural laws of our environment. They seem to be nothing more than transmogrifications tailoring themselves to our abilities to understand. The thousands of contacts with the entities indicate that they are liars and put-on artists. The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon. Officaldom may feel that if we ignore them long enough, they will go away altogether, taking their place with the vampire myths of the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, suppose that some other world, either from another planet or from a region composed of different frequencies and a different kind of physical matter, had designs on this world. Suppose that their time cycle was radically different from ours, and they could launch a plan for take-over which could require thousands of our years to complete? While they were making preparations for this invasion, it would be necessary for them to divert us, just as we planted all kinds of false evidence to convince Adolph Hitler that the invasion of Europe was going to take place far from Normandy. It would then be logical for them to instrument a plan of psychological warfare to keep us confused and even to convince us that flying saucers don't really exist at all. The few thousand people who took a real interest in the UFO reports could be deftly diverted by contacts which assured them that the flying saucers were really being operated by "nice guys," by Big Brothers from outer space who had our best interests at heart.

[..] Having been trained in psychological warfare during my stint as a propaganda writer for the U.S. Army, I have been particularly conscious of this double-barreled threat and particularly concerned over the obvious hoaxes and manipulations apparently designed to foster both belief and disbelief in the reality of the flying saucers. I have tried objectively to weigh all of the factors, pro and con, throughout my investigations and in this book. Frankly, I have gone through periods when I was absolutely convinced that those Trojan horses were, indeed, following a careful plan designed to ultimately conquer the human race from within. The physical Trojan horse concept seemed alarmingly valid to me for a long time.

But I am now inclined to accept the conclusion that the phenomenon is mainly concerned with undefined (and undefinable) cosmic patterns and that mankind plays only a small role in those patterns. That "other world" seems to be a part of something larger and more infinite. The human race is also a part of that something, particularly those people who seem to possess psychic abilities and who seem to be tuned in to some signal far beyond our normal perception.

Perhaps the U.S. government was equally concerned with the Trojan horse possibility in the 1940's, and perhaps that explains the peculiar official machinations of the early years. Nobody in Washington has been inclined to confess to me that this is so, but at a press conference in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told reporters that flying saucers were hallucinatory and existed only in the minds of the observers. In 1966, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called them illusions. So it seems probable that, after a period of paranoia in the 1940's and early 1950's, the government settled upon a negative hypothesis based, undoubtedly, on the same kind of material I have outlined here.

If intelligent beings actually do exist on Ganymede or Andromeda, it is even very possible that they, too, have been observing and wondering about the same kinds of unidentified flying objects which haunt our planet. Our astronauts and cosmonauts have frequently sighted mysterious objects deep in space — objects which appeared and disappeared just as enigmatically as the things flitting about the highways and farmfields of earth. The UFO phenomenon may be universal. And it may be unsolvable.

Finally, we come to the problem: How do you investigate something that doesn't exist?

The answer is that you investigate and study the people who have experienced these things. You don't investigate them by checking their reliability. You study the medical and psychological effects of their experiences. This cannot be done by teenagers with telescopes and housewives with tape recorders. It must be done by trained professionals.

We need to know much more about the human mind and how it is linked up to the greater source. We must study the process of confabulation (falsification of memory) which produces the majority of our UFO landing and contact stories and demonological events.

[..] The elementals or ultraterrestrials are somehow able to manipulate the electrical circuits of the human mind. They can make us see whatever they want us to see and remember only what they want us to remember. Human minds which have been tuned into those super-high-frequency radiations, described early in this book, are most vulnerable to these manipulations. Discovering and understanding this process should be given top priority.

The symptoms of the contactee syndrome usually appear in early childhood, even though overt contact may not be established until many years later. Many contactees, like Howard Menger, have a long sequence of experiences with the paraphysical entities before their real UFO encounters formally begin. Some contactees begin to receive telepathic messages sporadically years before they have overt contact. Those whose minds misinterpret the information (or the signal) often begin to suffer weird forms of psychic attack. Once they untangle the misinterpretations, the attack ceases, and they become silent contactees and remain in almost constant communication with the source. I do not mean to imply that any of these people are insane. Far from it. But many are driven insane when their minds are unable to translate the signal properly. They fall prey to the negative aspects, and their mental confusion attracts induced hallucinations, visits from Oriental gentlemen in dark suits and black Cadillacs, and they can eventually suffer total deterioration of personality. I had to find this out the hard way, only to discover later that Dr. Meade Layne had worked it all out in the early 1950's, but nobody would listen to him.

Dr. Layne tried to express his ideas in occult terminology. He called the ultraterrestrials the Etherians and thought in terms of "ultrasonics" as well as electromagnetic frequencies. In 1955, he published a concise (and time has proven it valid) appraisal of the situation in which he stated: "It is possible that some persons may be less affected by supersonic frequencies than others; this may account for the selection of certain persons by the Etherians. It is also possible that some such persons are now showing signs of amnesia and other physical and mental deterioration."

If Dr. Layne was aware of these factors fifteen years ago, then it is almost criminal that no suitable psychiatric program has been instituted to study and understand this phenomenon. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people all over this planet are being directly affected. My mail is filled with cries for help. I have watched helplessly as witnesses fell into hopeless personality deterioration and went insane or even committed suicide. For some time now I have been working closely with a small group of psychiatrists, but our efforts can be compared only to the proverbial drop in the bucket. The whole UFO subject has been so widely ridiculed and denounced that most qualified men are reluctant to enter into it.

Not all ultraterrestrial contacts are evil and disastrous, of course. But there are many people throughout the world who are deeply involved in all this without realizing it. They have entangled themselves through other frames of reference and, in many cases, have been savagely exploited by the ultraterrestrials in the games being played. These games have been thoroughly documented and defined in the literature of the various frames of reference. The psychology of the elementals or ultraterrestrials is well known and fully described in the fairy lore of northern Europe and the ancient legends of Greece, Rome, and India. In fact, we know almost everything there is to know - about the entities and their games. Unfortunately, most of the valuable information has been buried in the beliefs of the various frames of reference and clouded by obscure terminology. It will take teams of accomplished and objective scholars to wade through all the literature and distill all the facts. This job should be begun immediately, for the game seems to be headed for some kind of grand climax.

Everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient scriptures of the Orient, and the records of early Egypt to the modern messages of the psychics and contactees and the thousands of inspired books indicates that mankind was directly ruled by the phenomenon for many centuries. The god-king system established a universal theocracy which enabled ultraterrestrials posing as gods and superkings to supervise human events. Remnants of this system prevailed until the early 1800's when the United States established a political structure which separated the church from the state. More than fifty major revolutions were staged in Europe in 1848, breaking the back of the god-king system for all time. The phenomenon simply shifted to new frames of reference, notably spiritualism and a new cycle of minor religions based upon the teachings of prophets who were contacted by angels and elementals. Even Abraham Lincoln was a spiritualist and openly admitted that he based some of his decisions upon information and advice he received at seances.

Rapid industrialization and technological development in the Western cultures apparently led to further restructuring of the phenomenon's frames of reference. The inundation of airships in 1896-97 marked the beginning of the modern UFO phase. Although the phenomenon experimented with the "outer space" frame of reference as early as 1866, it did not attempt to advance this concept on a worldwide scale until 1946. By 1950, it had, in a mere four years, firmly established the extraterrestrial visitants idea as a humanly acceptable frame of reference for the flying objects and manipulations.

The study and interpretation of all this belongs in the hands of historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and theologians. However, physical scientists can also make a contribution by applying standard scientific methods to the wealth of data and preparing statistical studies of the events themselves.

[..] It is probable that manifestations are dependent upon unknown conditions which have an electromagnetic basis. When specific individuals (people with latent or active psychic abilities) are in specific places (window areas) at specific times (flap periods when the undefined electromagnetic conditions exist), the phenomenon is able to manifest itself in one of its many forms.

These events are staged year after year, century after century, in the same exact areas and often on the same exact calendar dates. Only the witnesses and the frames of reference used are different.

The phenomenon can be extremely dangerous, since the objects move through frequency changes which can produce deadly gamma and ultraviolet rays.

[..] This is not a subject for teenagers and wild-eyed believers. It demands a cautious, comprehensive, well-financed investigation by independent, objective professionals unhampered by the petty causes of the cultists and the political machinations of the government agencies.

Somebody or something somewhere is trying to tell us about all this. Our skies are filled with Trojan horses and always have been. They are operating on a mysterious timetable, deliberately sowing confusion and nonsense in their wake. The believers and cultists have been crying for us to throw open the gates of the city and wheel the Trojan horse in. But the governments of the world, and the churches, have been trying to nail the gates shut. The Vatican has repeatedly warned that spiritualism is "evil" and the "work of the Devil." When seemingly authentic religious miracles occur today, and there have been many, the theologians and churches approach them with great caution and try to play down their significance. The Bible warns us that during "the last days" this planet will be overrun with wonders in the sky and false prophets and performers of miracles.

There are now many cases in which the voices of deceased persons have seemingly called up their loved ones on the telephone, just as the metallic-voiced space people have been phoning researchers and reporters around the world.

[..] As Sherlock Holmes used to say, the game is afoot. It is happening on every level of our society, manifesting itself in countless ways. The year 1968 was comparable to the year 1848. Great changes are taking place on our college campuses, in our churches, and in the halls of government. The demons of old are marching among us again.

In 1966, I was a lifelong atheist raised in the hard school of objective journalism, skeptical but hopeful that I could somehow validate the enthusiasts' speculations about extraterrestrial visitants. The extraterrestrial hypothesis then seemed to me to be the only acceptable explanation. But my experiences over the past few years have changed both me and my outlook, just as similar experiences have changed so many others. I have stood on many a windy hilltop staring in amazement at the multicolored objects cavorting about the night skies. I have dealt with thousands of honest, sincere witnesses by mail, phone, and in person. My skepticism has melted away, and I have turned from science to philosophy in my search for the elusive truth. The late Wilbert Smith, the Canadian scientist who chased UFOs in the 1950's, apparently followed a similar course. "The inevitable conclusion was that it was all real enough," Smith said in 1958, "but that the alien science was definitely alien — and possibly even beyond our comprehension. So another approach was tried — the philosophical — and here the answer was found in all its grandeur...."

All of the various ologies represent the famous blind men trooping to Cathay who encountered an elephant. Each ology has been examining a different part of the elephant and giving it a different interpretation. It is time now for us to gain the total vision necessary for viewing the elephant as it is, not as we would like it to be.

We all seem to be embarked on some new adventure. Our little planet seems to be experiencing the interpenetration of forces or entities from some other space-time continuum. Perhaps they are trying to lead us into a new Dark Age of fear and superstition. Or perhaps they will be guiding us upward to some unexpected destiny. I am not a scientist, theologian, or philosopher. I am only a reporter. My business is asking questions, not answering them.

-- John A. Keel, Operation Trojan Horse (1970)

[valkxrie]

The Fool: What is the stupidest thing your muse has ever done?

The Magician: What would your muse draw if given paper and markers?

The Moon: Has your muse ever had something unexplained happen to them? If so, what?

The Fool: Both verses of Brunn have done innumerable stupid things. As the saying goes "if you're going to be stupid, you better be tough". She's pretty tough; it's basically the whole reason she's alive.

The Magician: Valkyrie B would draw a horse this time. Human B draws another Middle School S.

The Moon: Valkyrie Brunnhilde basically is something unexplained. She is an actual being from myth who can move through time and space. So, even if she encounters something she can't explain - that's fine. She acknowledges that the inexplicable is possible - beautiful, even. It makes life more interesting. It makes the universe more wonderful - knowing there is magic.

Human Brunnhilde... she has heard a lot of pilot stories about planes losing time or appearing in random places. Bermuda Triangle stuff. Twilight Zone blurring of space and time. Ironically, it's never happened to her (despite her alternate verse). There's also alien stories and weird UFO sightings; but most of the time it's just Brunnhilde test flying top secret tech. She did once hear the Northern Lights though. Everyone says they're silent, but Brunn believes, with her whole being, that they sound like bells.

[gravityofforteana]

*Operation Trojan Horse*

Keel: Whatever "it" is, it is often inimical (tending to obstruct or harm. ~Joe) to the human race, & the manifestations range from childish mischief to acts of horrifying destruction. The phenomenon has driven many people mad; but it has also produced miraculous cures.

A cosmic system of checks & balances seems to be an actual fact. There are now well-documented cases of people being seriously injured, even killed, by flying saucers. But there are equally well-documented events in which the mysterious objects and their enterprising occupants have interceded directly in human affairs and thwarted disaster. Many flying saucers seem to be nothing more than a disguise for some hidden phenomenon. They are like Trojan horses descending into our forests & farm fields, promising salvation and offering us the splendor of some great super-civilization in the sky.

But while the statuesque long-haired “Venusians” have been chatting benignly with isolated traveling salesmen and farm wives, a multitude of shimmering lights & metallic disks have been silently busying themselves in the forests of Canada, the Outback country of Australia, and the swamps of Michigan. Before we can find any answers, we must first find the right questions to ask. We must understand the exact nature of these visitors, and of ourselves.

I also believe that this same phenomenon is flexible to an unbelievable degree. It can create and manipulate matter through electromagnetic fields above and below the range of our perceptions and our own technical equipment. The phenomenon is mostly invisible to us because it consists of energy rather than solid earthly matter. It is guided by a great intelligence and has concentrated itself in the areas of magnetic faults throughout history. It makes itself visible to us from time to time by manipulating patterns of frequency. It can take any form it desires, ranging from the shapes of airplanes to gigantic cylindrical spaceships. It can manifest itself into seemingly living entities ranging from little green men to awesome one-eyed giants. But none of these configurations is its true form. The UFO sighting data confirm this theory, but we lack the necessary technology to prove it conclusively.

There are thousands of microscopic life forms in a drop of water. You can’t see them, feel them, or taste them because they are too small. A teenaged boy with a cheap microscope can peer into that drop of water and invade the privacy of those microbes. But the microbes don’t know he is there. They swim about in their liquid environment totally unaware that their tiny world is actually an insignificant part of a much larger, and very different, whole. Our world may also be part of something bigger, something beyond our senses and abilities to comprehend. That bigger something is undoubtedly made of energies, too. But energies of a different frequency, forming atoms radically different from the atoms of our own world. These energies could coexist with us and even share the same space without our becoming acutely aware of them. The evidence we have outlined in this book does clearly point to this unperceived coexistence, and now we must come to terms with "it" or "them" or the Great Whatzit in the sky.

This intelligence is able to manipulate energy. It can, quite literally, manipulate any kind of object into existence on our plane.

Let us assume that UFOs exist at frequencies beyond visible light but that they can adjust their frequency and descend the electromagnetic spectrum - just as you can turn the dial of your radio and move a variable condenser up and down the scale of radio frequencies.

When a UFO’s frequency nears that of visible light, it would first appear as a purplish blob of violet. As it moves farther down the scale, it would seem to change to blue, and then to cyan (bluish green). In our chapter on meteors we note that they most often appear as bluish-green objects. I have therefore classified that section of the color spectrum as the UFO entry field. When the objects begin to move into our spatial and time coordinates, they gear down from the higher frequencies, passing progressively from ultraviolet to violet to bluish green. When they stabilize within our dimensions, they radiate energy on all frequencies and become a glaring white.

In the white condition the object can traverse distances visibly, but radical maneuvers of ascent or descent require it to alter its frequencies again, and this process produces new color changes. In the majority of all landing reports, the objects were said to have turned orange (red and yellow) or red before descending. When they settle to the ground they "solidify," and the light dims or goes out altogether. On takeoff, they begin to glow red again. Sometimes they reportedly turn a brilliant red and vanish. Other times they shift through all of the colors of the spectrum, turn white, and fly off into the night sky until they look like just another star.

Because the color red is so closely associated with the landing and takeoff processes, I term this end of the color spectrum the UFO departure field. The great mass of observational data fully supports these hypotheses. Our glowing objects change color, size, and form, and this fact indicates that they are comprised of energy which can be manipulated to temporarily simulate terrestrial matter. Such energies must be somehow collected together at the invisible frequencies, and then frequency changes are brought about to 'lower' them into the visible spectrum. Once they become visible, they can then organize themselves into atoms and produce any desired form. Barney and Betty Hill, the couple who were allegedly taken aboard a UFO in New Hampshire in 1961, first observed a brilliant moving “star.” As it drew closer, the brilliance faded and it became a seemingly material flying saucer occupied by small men in uniforms. Brazil’s Villa-Boas, who claimed he was taken aboard a UFO in 1957, first saw a reddish object which then became a grounded saucer. When it took off again, the object first surrounded itself with a red glow. The glow intensified, and the reddish object sailed off into the stars.

Those who have tried to investigate the UFO phenomenon in purely physical terms have speculated on the possible mechanics of such objects. The general consensus has been that the UFOs utilize an antigravity device which surrounds them with a magnetic field, and this magnetism ionizes the nitrogen in the air around the object, causing it to glow. On the surface, this has seemed like a plausible theory. But in reality it is not workable.

A tremendous amount of magnetism would be required to produce the magnetic effects blamed on the objects, such as the stalling of automobiles. The Ford Motor Company, working with the UFO-investigating group @ Colorado U., discovered that simple magnetism could not stall an auto engine encased in the protective steel body of a car. A field strong enough to accomplish this would also be strong enough to bend the car itself & possibly affect the passengers as well.

There have been many bewildering accounts of shell-like objects with no visible means of propulsion, no signs of any kinds of technology. Contactee Reinhold Schmidt’s German-speaking ufonauts, who invited him aboard their saucer in Nebraska in 1957, didn’t walk but glided across the floor of their spaceship as if they were on roller skates. Other sober and baffled witnesses have described how the UFO occupants seemed to fly from the ground to their waiting saucers. Still others have claimed that the ufonauts simply walked through the sides of their craft like ghosts.

In story after story we have testimonial proof that the objects and their occupants are not made of normal substances. The hard (seemingly solid) objects are another problem. Bullets have been fired at them and have ricocheted off. They sometimes leave imprints on the ground where they land. If they are the product of a superior intelligence with an advanced technology, they seem to be suffering from faulty workmanship.

Since 1896 there have been hundreds of reports in which lone witnesses have stumbled onto grounded hard objects being repaired by their pilots. In flight, they have an astounding habit of losing pieces of metal. They seem to be ill-made, always falling apart, frequently exploding in midair. There are so many of these incidents that we must wonder if they aren’t really deliberate. Maybe they are meant to foster the belief that the objects are real and mechanical.

In the foregoing I have tried to demonstrate how the soft objects seem to be directly related to the electromagnetic spectrum. This is hardly a new theory. Not only have the occultists, spiritualists, and religionists been telling us about frequencies, vibrations, and the color spectrum for centuries, but modern researchers such as Dr. Meade Layne worked all of this out years ago.

Dr. Layne evolved a theory of mat' and 'demat; (materialization and dematerialization) of extradimensional objects. His findings were privately published and not very widely circulated. Others, such as British ufologist Harold T. Wilkins, also worked this out and published books about it in the early 1950s. But the spectrum theory lacks the strong emotional appeal of the extraterrestrial thesis.

There is a rather curious entry in Project Blue Book Report No. 14 (1955) on page 295. In the section showing how various sightings are classified, "number 8 in Code 79-80 Final Identification is "Electromagnetic Phenomenon." This is crossed out (the report was reproduced by photo offset), and the now well-known classification of "Unknown" was substituted."

[limeinaltime]

With the news of a possible Nope sequel, I feel it is time to dump more insane ramblings at 1 in the morning. Specifically on an idea/possible theme(?) that’s been bouncing around with my head for a bit. Note that this is all just an idea I came up with personally; I’m sure that whatever Peele ends up serving up will slap.

What if Jean Jacket did have babies at some point before the film, or laid eggs or whatever before its death? What if all that aggression and territorial behavior wasn’t just self defense? And what does media eat up more than baby animals (and child actors)?

The general idea is that after the events of the movie, Jean Jacket’s corpse brings a lot of attention to the Haywood ranch, the photo ends up on Oprah, blah blah blah, the ranch’s business kind of improves but not entirely, but the photo makes enough money for OJ, Em and Angel to recover from the whole event without OJ having to jump back into running the ranch again. The three are ready to put all the UAP shit behind them, until the dead body sitting on their property attracts the attention of an infant UAP, the last piece of Jean Jacket’s legacy. It would also be a fun parallel to the events of Nope; Jean jacket kills OJ and Em’s father, Em and OJ team up to kill Jean Jacket, leaving its baby on its own, round and round it goes.

This UAP lacks Jean Jacket’s aggression and hasn’t learned to attack and eat everything that perceives it, but is ultimately not something that should be kept as a pet anyway. It causes havoc around the ranch, but ultimately ends up endearing itself to the main cast in its own unsettling baby murder roomba way. Coined “Jorts” or something related to jeans, OJ, Em and Angel are basically stuck playing stand-in nanny until Jorts can fly off on its own and find its own turf without domesticating it, and keeping the hungry eyes of the network from sniffing out what they deem as just another piece of media to be consumed.

Maybe some scattered Jean Jacket history would be thrown in as well, like some weird parallel to the Haywood siblings with legacy and stuff (I personally think it’s a descendant of the Roswell UFO that was killed or just died, similar to how the Haywoods are descendants of the black jockey on the horse). The hypothetical sequel would probably have some unsettling but kind of cute moments as the main trio tries to wrangle Jorts and keep it from becoming another spectacle for the press to eat up. Maybe a whole bunch of UAPs see Jean Jacket’s now-free territory and think “it’s free real estate” and start wrecking the gulch again. Maybe we’ll get Star Lasso Experience 2: Electric Boogaloo UAP Dinner Party Edition. The trio ultimately ends up releasing Jorts back into the wild where it belongs. Nature is cruel and cannot be tamed, but it still has its moments of beauty.

I’m honestly okay with either outcome of whether or not Peele does make more movies about the Nope universe. Each potential setting opens the door for another interesting way to explore the potential terror the UAPs can bring down upon humanity, but if he chooses to expand on the main story, then I’m down for that, too. I am thinking about an AU/event in another part of the world involving my own UAP, Blackjack, so I’m not one to talk.