Mysterious Universe

In the 2003 horror movie Willard, a lonely young man, played by Crispin Glover, develops an unusual relationship with the rats inhabiting his house. He trains them to obey his every command, ending up as the leader of his own “rat army,” which he uses to get revenge on his callous boss.

With their sharp teeth combined, his army of rats are a murderous force. Entertaining though the film is, what would have made it more exciting and gory is if the rats had been bigger – such as the size of the ones recently discovered in East Timor by a team of Australian archaeologists.

The giant species of extinct rat, the bones of which were unearthed in a remote cave, was forty times bigger than its modern relative, with a body weight of around 6kg, making it the biggest rat that ever lived. The finding was detailed earlier this week in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

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Seldom does so fertile a mind emerge from the crowd-consciousness of Terra Firma that its psychic influence resounds across cultures, generations, and in all likelihood, other worlds.Then again, to think anything less of a scribe and scholar the likes of Alan Moore, inventor of Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, would be outright heresy.

A gentle recluse of a man, to mention here that Moore resembles (far more than vaguely) a towering wizard ascending the steps of Sauron’s lookout is almost passe’; although in truth, there is far more magic behind Moore’s wizardry than merely what he commits to paper while envisioning fantastic universes… in fact, Moore claims to have had some limited contact with other realms–actual anomalous foreign states of being–in very real ways.

But before we detail Moore’s actual magical experiences, we must afford a brief lineage of his influence through art. Tremendous laud and praise has echoed the man’s exploits, especially since his magnum opus Watchmen helped initiate the Dark Age of comics (achieved in tandem with Frank Miller’s publication of another comic classic, The Dark Night). In Moore’s story, characters ranging from Dr. Manhattan, a glowing nudist embodying the atomic prowess of all the universe, to a poverty-stricken, schizophrenic conservative with a shape-shifting face mask called Rorschach, made an eternal mark on not only the comics industry, but also the way stories would be told in the genre forever after; departing from the conventional story lines of super-hero rags typical to the 1980s, offering instead what became some of the most mature Cold War commentary imaginable within the colored panels of a comic book.

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Aaron steps up for his first solo effort and gives a rundown on the highlights of last weekend’s Nexus Conference.

Ancient artifacts, new physics theories, a “Post Disclosure World” and more are discussed along with some audio treats from the conference floor.

We also have a new insectoid encounter and the start of a new two-parter from Jason Offutt.

Show notes and music after the jump.

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Of all the weird tales of alien contact I’ve come across, I remember reading a particularly strange article in Fate Magazine years ago titled “Phone Call From an Alien.” In the piece, the author recounted some bizarre and disturbing incidents where strange phone calls had been received under rather peculiar circumstances, with the voice on the other end amounting to little more than an angry-sounding incoherent mumbling, coming from an impatient someone–or something–on the other end of the line.

Something about the story, at the time, was very odd-sounding and even frightening in some respects; why on Earth (or in this case, why elsewhere in the universe) would aliens ever want to call somebody on the telephone?

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When it comes to esoteric books, nothing is stranger, more cryptic and incomprehensible than Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson: An Objective Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man (1950), written by the Greek-Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949).

At a whopping 1,238 pages and replete with invented words that defy pronunciation, such as “Heptaparaparshinokh” and “Almznoshinoo,” completing the book is no easy task – as I myself just discovered.

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