Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week’s mission through the murky tunnels of Hidden Reality will show us 3d-printed guns & Peruvian geoglyphs, the ancient mother tongue & communication between plants. And as we try to uncover the rumors of a secret quantum Internet developed by the US government, we’ll analyze the recent release of three women who were kidnapped & presumed dead for a decade, and how this affects the credibility of psychic abilities. This Sunday Americans celebrate Mother’s day –something we Mexicans do on May 10th– so I guess we should all pay our respect to the mother of us all: the pod tank farm.

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Meow.

Our first stop is a follow-up to a news we’ve been covering for a while: a group of Texan Libertarians whose objective was the development & open-source distribution of a 3d-printed gun’s design. Last week the 3d-printed cat was officially out of the bag:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Forbes reports that “the U.S. government has been working feverishly to remove design files from the Internet, but not before they were downloaded over 100,000 times. [emphasis mine]” Ironic to think these guys named their little plastic gun ‘The Liberator,’ when most likely it will eventually help to erode the liberties of the American people –even those who were never interested in download and/or print this weapon in the first place!

There are no such thing as a ‘free lunch,’ amigos. Whenever you win something, you lose something in return.

9 3d printing technology can be an incredible tool for creativity. For example, last year’s film ParaNorman employed 3d printers to create thousands of different facial expressions for their stop-motion characters, allowing them to cut off on production costs & time.

But back in the all days stop-motion artists had to rely on nothing but the most basic tools: clay, rubber, wire, & lots of patience. And monster creator Ray Harryhausen had that & more: sheer unadulterated talent. With that talent, Harryhausen managed to create cinematographic icons like Mighty Joe Young, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad & –one of my favorite movies of all time– Clash of the Titans. The Jewish rabbi who created the Golem of Prague in the XVIth century could have learned a trick or two from him!

Ray Harryhausen died on May 7th at the age of 92. His career inspired a plethora of artists & film-makers –along with one or two Cryptozoologists I’m sure– who continue to carry the torch to create fantastic new worlds, populated by strange creatures come from the depths of human imagination. Good luck on your voyage to the land beyond beyond.

8 Before a scientist seeks to unravel a mystery of Nature, the scientist first needs to be inspired by an artist. Thus, artists are the cartographers of Human Potential.

Think for example of space exploration. If humans managed to put a man on the Moon, it was because two imaginative young men –one named Werner von Braun, the other Robert Goddard– were captivated by their lecture of H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. But unlike most young men, who eventually must renounce their silly fantasies in order to make a living, von Braun & Goddard devoted their lives to the fulfillment of a common dream: launching a rocket to the planet Mars.

Just in #space #walking #yolo #Swag.

Today the governments of the world are suffering from imaginative stagnation: the pace of the space program does not match the expectations of the public, and so 44 years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the Sea of Tranquility, the most exciting thing you’ll se modern astronauts nowadays is fixing leaks on the ISS.

Since governments are not willing to pick up the pace, then private citizens are aiming to fill in that void. On the Red Pills of the Year we mentioned the Mars One project, the ‘American Idol meets Robinson Crusoe on Mars’ idea to kickstart the colonization of the Red Planet by promoting it as a Reality TV show. The project seeks to initially send 4 brave volunteers who will forever cut ties with their homeplanet –i.e. it’s a one-way trip, yo– and for $40 dollars anyone can submit their application on the Mars One website, something 78000 people have done already! Most imaginative Ponzi scheme in history, or is there really a chance we’ll see humans setting foot on the red sands of Mars in the first half of the XXIst century?

Ars Technica posted a few profiles from some of the people hoping to be among those 4 original Martians. Part of me thinks all these men & women are either going to be scammed, or at worst will be sent to a gruesome death. But another part of me see this is a sign that the human race is facing a crossroads: we know we need to leave the cradle of our comfy blue world in search of new horizons. These Mars One applicants are feeling the call of the Cosmos, and I’m sure they’re not the only ones.

And if we fail, if the Void proves to cold & incommensurable for us? Then we’ll join the dinosaurs knowing that at least we tried.

7 When Humanity finally branches out to other worlds, those colonizers will no doubt seek to preserve some of the traditions & festivities they enjoyed here on Earth. But I’m sure that eventually each new human outpost will develop their own rituals & celebrations, the way our forefathers did when they faced new lands, new climates… and new people.

The next Pill has to do with a festivity that traces its origins to the time before Europeans set foot on the Americas: the famous Día de Muertos, with its colorful mixture of the merry & the macabre, is a fine example of Mexican culture that has taken root wherever my countrymen have chosen to seek fortune.

That’s why I and many other bloggers were so enraged when we learned that the Disney company was seeking to trademark Día de Muertos, a move intended to consolidate the company’s privilege on the merchandising of DoD products, since it is rumored a future Pixar project is directly inspired by the Mexican festivity.

Fortunately the viral outrage stirred on the social networks has forced the House of the Mouse to back down. But still, this kind of douchebag move forces the question: since when can Culture be treated as a commodity?

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From Mexico’s calaveritas we now divert our attention to another land full of wonderful history & tradition: Peru. In this Andean nation archeologists have discovered a remarkable astronomical alignment, between a pyramid at Cerro del Gentil, two stone lines about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east-southeast from the pyramid, and the setting sun during the winter solstice:

“When viewed in 3D models, these lines appear to converge at a point beyond the horizon and frame not only the site of Cerro del Gentil [where the pyramid is], but also the setting sun during the time of the winter solstice,” the research team wrote in a poster presentation given recently at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Honolulu.

Thus someone viewing the sunset from these lines during the winter solstice would have seen the sun setting directly behind, or sinking into, the adobe pyramid,” they write. “Thus the pyramid and the linear geoglyph constitute part of a single architectural complex, with potential cosmological significance, that ritualized the entire pampa landscape.” (The word “pampa” stands for plain.)”

These astounding alignments, found everywhere in antiquity, are timeless reminders that Man has always tried to link himself to the Universe through the power of his ingenuity, thus joining the Macrocosmos of the world at large, with the Microcosmos of our minds. “As above so below”, as the sages say.

5 Peru shares the Atacama desert with the neighboring countries of Chile, Bolivia & Argentina –and according to Dr. Steven Greer, with extraterrestrial interlopers who have visited since at least a hundred years, as allegedly revealed by the enigmatic mummified humanoid he’s shown on his recent documentary, Sirius.

Sirius & Ata have been the matter of ample discussion not only on this column, but at the Mysterious Universe website at large. As I explained on April 27th I made the effort to watch the film in its entirety, and was surprised to learn about Dr. Nolan & Dr. Lachman’s conclusions, arrived through DNA & X-ray analysis, that ‘Ata’ had reached an age of 6-8 years before he died –I say ‘he’ because the analysis also proved the mummy’s gender was male.

Over at io9 George Dvorsky has also followed the Sirius saga –although from a distinctively skeptic approach– and last Thursday he posted an article focused on the opinion of Paolo Viscardi, a natural history curator at the Horiman Museum in London. According to Viscardi, Ata’s impossible age can be explained due to the natural mummification process it endured on the hot sands of the Atacama desert, which shrunk the soft tissue & exerted pressure on the bones, thus increasing their density –the bone density was the factor with moved Nolan & Lachman to conclude the specimen was not a foetus –high bone density, Viscardi explains, are typical of mummified specimens.

As you can see in the comments I posted on the io9 thread, at first I was against Viscardi explanation, since (a) I’m sure he has not done any direct analysis with Ata; and (b) I’d assumed either Nolan or Lachman would have taken the mummification process into consideration during their study –perhaps using other mummies as controls. But now I’m not sure if io9 user ParticleNoun is not right, and perhaps Nolan & Lachman suffered from ‘specialization tunnel vision’, since neither of them is an expert in Osteoarcheology. Maybe they were just too focused on following Greer’s obsession into proving (or disproving) the ‘hypothesis’ of the specimen’s non-human origin, that they failed to see what was right in front of them.

So in light of this I must admit that my previous support to Ata’s biological uniqueness have diminished. How about you?

4 The fact that Nolan’s study showed Ata’s DNA was human –or closer to human than that of chimps– didn’t bother me that much, since the idea of a common ancestry between UFOnauts & Earthlings has crossed my path on more than one occasion.

The fact is that the Past fascinates me. And as I’m sure is the same with many Forteans, the older the better –specially when the Past is mixed with myth & religious tales.

Take for instance the New Testament account of the tyrant king Nimrod, who tried to build the mighty tower of Babel in order to compare himself to Jehovah. Those who went to Sunday class know full well how the story went, and as we grew up we learned that the story was nothing but a myth, inspired by a few kernels of truth –the tower of Babel was probably a ziggurat, a step pyramid raised by the people of Mesopotamia, and Babel was probably derived from the ancient city of Babylon –although perhaps we should look to the ancient complex of Baalbek to the find the roots to the legend of Babel.

“Come at me bro” – King Nimrod

But what of the myth of the common tongue? A new study published on May 6th in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  shows a list of words which hint at a common origin for the language used by hunter gatherers on Europe & Asia 15000 years ago.

“We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Using biological evolution to try to identify the phonetic sounds that would be more resistant to change –those that are used to depict social relationships  & family– Pagel & his team “could predict what 23 words, including “I,” “ye,” “mother,” “male,” “fire,” “hand” and “to hear” might sound like in an ancestral language dating to 15,000 years ago.”

So not only we may all share a common tongue, but also according to a new study showing the genetic links between modern Europeans, we are all more closely related to everyone else than we previously thought. Gives a whole new weight to that seemingly cliched term ‘human family’, doesn’t it?

3 But it seems that communication is not an exclusive trait of our species. Modern scientists are suspecting that plants can ‘talk’ to each other using acoustic signals, thus boosting inter-species symbiosis –the Chorus of Life, yo!

“What’s that? You want me to kill everyone?”

Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton of the University of Western Australia conducted a series of experiments using chili peppers & basils. They found out that chili peppers responded positively to the presence of basils, even when the basils were sealed off by plastic bags, which should discount the influence of released chemical signals.

“We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell which allow rapid communication between nearby plants,” Gagliano said in the news release.

So there you have it, Aaron: now you don’t have any excuse not to increase your vibrations, and maybe some day you’ll get illuminating insights from a turnip.

2 The idea of different biological species sharing information between each other is very cool. Almost as cool as the idea of one day enjoying the power of our computer networks sharing information through the entangled properties of a quantum system.

It’s the internet because it’s purple.

The day of a quantum internet is not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy: it may already be here. According to MIT’s Technology Review, the Los Alamos National labs have been running a quantum internet network for the last 2 years. The main appeal for such systems is their security warranties, since the very act to snoop on a quantum signal will invariably change its properties –i.e. the famous ‘observer effect’ which is a matter of acid debate between physicists & New Agers.

The Technology Review article is a little hard to follow, but it seems that the team at Los Alamos designed their system around a central hub, which is the only server equipped to receive quantum signals. The hub is then equipped to re-transmit the message in a conventional way to a second terminal, thus decreasing the complexity of the system.

As common citizens are increasingly worried about the surveillance of their on-line communications, I wonder how disruptive these new quantum cryptographic technologies will be, as we all progress from LOL Cats to Schrö Cats.

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Very few people understand the mechanics of the quantum world, and yet you can’t hardly find a New Age post or magazine that doesn’t end invoking such terms as ‘entanglement’, ‘non-local’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’ –what more cynic individuals would feel inclined to dub ‘Chopra-ing’…

But there’s no denying that to the layman person, the beauty in quantum mechanics lies in its suggestion that everything is deeply interconnected –not only humans with other humans, or even with other living beings, but the interconnection runs as far back as the Big Bang.

Can quantum mechanics explain things like ESP or Remote Viewing? Perhaps, as suggested by scientists like Russell Targ, who have been studying these phenomena for many years –even if they have failed to come up with a solid model to describe them:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But for every Russell Targ or Ingo Swann, there’s always some spineless con-man (or woman) willing to pray on the suffering of people in order to gain undeserved notoriety. Such is the case of Sylvia Browne: This week three women in Cleveland were saved from their captivity thanks to the bravery of some pretty unlikely heroes –a Dominican immigrant & McDonald’s fan– but the reason this story is mentioned on the Pills is because Sylvia Browne, a ‘professional psychic’ that has enjoyed the spotlight for far too long, told 10 years ago to the mother of one of these women that her daughter was dead –a devastating blow from which the poor lady never fully recovered.

And the problem with Browne is that her resume is plagued with these kind of ‘misses’, as is reported by my esteemed friend & mentor Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail:

I’m not an easy person to anger, but this list of cases gets my blood boiling, and here’s why: the incorrect calls I could live with, if it was offered privately just as a “I’ve got a feeling, but I could well be wrong”. But to go on TV, and tell these people outright the fate of their children in public – sometimes even rebuking them when they throw doubt on what you’re saying – is just wrong on so many levels. Perhaps some readers of this blog are Browne fans; I can’t apologise for my opinion. If there’s one skill I have, it’s being able to pick a person’s character very quickly, and Browne has always sent a shiver up my spine (for all the wrong reasons). The growing list of cases where she hurt families with misinformation only confirms my gut feeling.

We followers of the Fortean enigmas often blame the skeptics & debunkers for the lack of credibility in the topics we care about. But we should always be mindful that it is the rotten apples in our own orchard, the ones who cause the most damage to the crop.

Maybe it’s time for some pruning.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, reminding you that Mother is the name for God in the lips & hearts of all children.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week’s batch of red pills will bring us lake monsters & near-crashes with UFOs, ancient metallic spheres & tiny modern robots, super bionic ears & gravity-defying anti-matter. And as we scoop small pieces of the famous Tunguska blast in Russia, we’ll also acknowledge the efforts to bring about UFO disclosure in America. Now listen up, crew! My mom turns 70 on May 5th, and because of that she’s coming in for a little R&R, so you’d better shape up & clean the cabins in the Nebuchadnezzar –and for God’s sake, pick up Trinity’s underwear from the main deck!!

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This week we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first Internet portal. I remember how in the mid 90s I was in college & I heard some of my schoolmates talk in a new strange jargon, using words like like ‘FTP’, ‘Gopher’ & ‘Newsletters’. I was mysteriously drawn tho these arcane terms, and when I discovered I could use a terminal in the school’s computer lab to access a whole new dimension of instant information, and that with the use of a keyboard I could befriend people all around the world, I instantly knew I’d found something that would change me forever. Today I could simply not understand my life without the freedom of interconnectedness, and for that I’m forever thankful.

But with light there also comes the dark, and interestingly enough we also just commemorated the 20th anniversary of the infamous Waco massacre, a tragedy that somehow seems to have rippling repercussions even to this day.

Things like these remind me that our survival as a species is by no means guaranteed, and that perhaps the lot of advanced civilizations is to forever walk on a razor’s edge. So we’d better learn to keep our balance.

9 Today I rented Cloud Atlas, which I failed to see when it was still on the theaters. I must say that I was greatly impressed by it, even though I’m fully aware most people would find such a film completely nonsensical.

Cloud Atlas deals a lot with the problem of domination in the relationships between humans. The domination can go to such extremes as to be expressed in the form of slavery, or even worse: cannibalism. Nowadays we’d think of cannibalism as a dying practice only preserved by a pocket of primitive tribes, isolated in some faraway island on the Pacific; but the fact is that the act of consuming human flesh has surfaced time & time again in the Western world, when the primordial instincts of self-preservation overcome the domain of social conventions.

An example of such practices can be found in the oldest European settlement in North America: Jamestown. During the harsh winter of 1609-1610 which is currently known as the Starving Time, the colonists had exhausted all their provisions; and after eating out the horses, dogs, cats, rats & even the leather of their shoes, there was no alternative but to rely on the last source of sustenance available –the corpses of the dead.

Social status was of little concern, as was discerned by the archeologists after analyzing the skeletal remains of a young girl, which had evident traces of dismemberment & defleshing through the use of cutting tools. Even the brain was extracted, since it’s a great source of high protein –just ask Hannibal Lecter.

8 But cannibalism was not just a matter of mere survival among ancient cultures. It was a ritual practice intended to imbue the consumer with the essence of the person being consumed  –giving a rather peculiar interpretation to the common phrase “eat me!”…

One culture that was very fond of ritual cannibalism was the Celts, who left a lasting influence in most of the British isles, including Ireland. Speaking of Ireland, a new Youtube video shot by some students in lough Foyle which seems to show a large aquatic creature, has stirred up a great deal of controversy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The students were visiting the lake while filming a short film project entitled ‘Fishing with David Lynch’, when they captured what looks like a large creature breaking through the water. The “creature” swims along the surface of the lake, rather uninterested in the gasping onlookers, and then disappears under the water and out of sight.

The footage was released by Conall Melarkey [emphasis mine] from Moville, Donegal in Ireland, and has already amassed over 100,000 views in a very short while, stirring up loads of controversy at the same time.

The Fortean fact that these guys would have managed to capture a monster while shooting a short film centered around David Lynch is just the kind of WTF thing that would incline me to pay more attention to it. Unfortunately, I think my mentor Loren Coleman is right in pointing out the ‘word-game’ involved in this clip, and that this ‘Melarkey’ is quite possibly ‘all con.’

7 If lake monsters are real, then it would only make sense to insure your vessel in case of some unexpected collision. That’s just what a cruise line in loch Ness has just done, BTW.

But, is that enough? what if the famous Scottish lake also happens to be a subaquatic alien base? then shouldn’t the boats sailing its murky waters likewise seek to protect themselves against crashes with alien craft, rising from the bottom of the lake? Do you reckon Reptilians get a nice discount with Geico?

Silly ideas? Quite possibly, and yet serious UFOlogical researchers like Leslie Kean are still trying to raise awareness to the reality of the UFO phenomenon, by warning of the possible risks these objects pose to commercial aircraft. Risks like the one experienced just recently by an Airbus A320 just when it was approaching the Glasgow airport.

The A320 was flying with its landing lights on, in clear conditions and at an altitude of about 4,000ft above the Baillieston area of Glasgow, when the pilot and non-flying pilot saw an object “loom ahead” at a range of about 100m.

The object passed directly beneath the aircraft before either of the crew members had time to take avoiding action or had “really registered it”.But they both agreed that it appeared to have been blue and yellow or silver in colour with a small frontal area, but “bigger than a balloon”.The pilot asked the controller at Glasgow Airport if he was “talking to anything in the area” as he had “got quite close” to a blue and yellow aircraft, travelling in the opposite direction, which had passed just below him.

The controller stated that he was not talking to anyone else in that area and that nothing was seen on radar.

However, some people are trying to ascribe a terrestrial –or rather, maritime– explanation to this strange object, by claiming it was just a flying r/c shark. I don’t know if I buy this explanation though, since this aerial fish doesn’t show a lot of yellow in its skin. What do you think?

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In order to avoid collisions with anomalous aerial phenomena, commercial pilots would benefit tremendously if they were endowed with enhanced senses, like say X-ray vision or super-hearing.

Well, despite what you were promised by your favorite comic book, X-ray vision is nowhere in sight –no pun intended. Super-hearing however, seems just around the corner, thanks to this 3D-printable bionic ear which can ‘hear’ radio frequencies far beyond normal human hearing; a remarkable merging of biology with modern electronics.

I wonder if Vincent Van Gogh would find any consolation in that.

5 Another reason to upgrade to super-bionic ears? So you can hear the tiny robotic insects swarming near you, before they start recording your every move!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Keep your aluminum foil AND flypaper handy at all times, my brethren!

4 Okay so maybe I am being a little paranoid here. I’m sure there are lots of positive applications for the development of tiny little robot drones: Pollinating crops once bees die off –using Monsanto’s proprietary software, of course– dropping smart bombs on cockroaches, and maybe even investigating ancient Mexican temples.

Scientists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology have been studying the hidden chambers beneath the temple of Quetzalcóatl (the feathered serpent) at the Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan, using a robot named Tlaloc II-TC after Mexico’s ancient god of rain. While they hope to pinpoint the location of the tombs belonging to some of Teotihuacan’s rulers, they have come accross a fascinating mystery: hundreds of mysterious yellow orbs made out of pyrite, for which they currently have no explanation.

Well I may not have a degree in Archeology, but I do have a degree in Japanese Anime, and to any seasoned Otaku the answer should be clear as rain:

Mystery solved! Can I make my wish then?

3 I’m pretty sure that dragon balls are not made of anti-matter, otherwise the moment Goku laid his hands in one of them, he would have exploded, tail & all!

Antimatter has the opposite charge & spin than regular matter. Does that mean that antimatter particles would then fall upward due to Gravity? As crazy as that might sound, that’s exactly what physicist Joel Fajan & his colleagues at the Alpha experiment at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab tried to measure. The tricky part of the experiment? trying to do any measurements without annihilating your measurement device.

Scientists get around this predicament by building traps for antimatter made with magnets, which force antimatter particles to stay in a certain area. As soon as the magnets are turned off, the antimatter falls onto the walls of the trap and eviscerates.

But which direction does it fall toward?

To find out, the researchers studied the flashes of light created when antiparticles annihilated matter particles in the walls of the trap after its magnets were turned off. The location and time of the flashes depend on the initial position and velocity of the antimatter atoms, and the path they take when they fall.

Unfortunately the results are inconclusive, so Fajan says more tests would be needed to find out whether antimatter is the secret to unlocking antigravity.

2 The contact between particles of matter & antimatter create the most energetic explosions in Nature, which is why some people have suggested that the mysterious Tunguska blast of 1908 was caused by a small antimatter comet –or an alien ship with a faulty Warp drive engine.

But now comes news that the first meteorite fragments of the Tunguska blast have been discovered, which may finally close the file on this 105-year-old mystery…unless the fragments were part of the alien vessel’s cargo.

1 Over the years I’ve heard the rumors that Stalin was very interested in the Tunguska event, and that after word got out about the Roswell crash, he sent out an expedition in order to retrieve the fragments of whatever it was that caused the explosion. I also read that over the years the Soviets gathered quite a collection of alien saucers in their own version of Area 51.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do the governments of the world have knowledge of an extraterrestrial presence on our planet? That was exactly the premise of Steven Bassett’s Citizen Hearing of Disclosure, which took place at Washington’s Press Club last week. Over the 5 days the hearing lasted, Huff Post’s Lee Spiegel did a yeoman’s work live blogging the highlights of the event, with day 4 dedicated to UFO events all around the world, and day 5 showing the testimony of commercial and military pilots who had close encounters with unidentified objects. Former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer’s statement closed the event, expressing his belief that “(there) are different species and, consequently, may have different agendas. I don’t think we can say that they all have the same agenda any more than we can say that the United States, China and Russia have the same agenda. Our real interests may be similar, but as of now, our perceived interests are still quite far apart.”

“My interest is in about 95 to 98 percent of full disclosure — I know of one or two things that I’m not sure should be in the public domain, at least yet. They will be someday, I’m sure. But just as children survive the idea of the tooth fairy and Santa Claus when they become adult, I think the taxpaying citizens are quite capable of accepting the new and broader reality that we live in a cosmos teeming with life of various sorts.

“The fact that some other civilizations are more advanced than we are may be humbling. But that could be a necessary step in our survival.”

But aside from Spiegel, the mainstream media barely bothered to notice the proceeding, and only to highlight the spotty trajectories of the former members of Congress who were invited to attend, the fact they were being paid to attend, and also to take photos of the more um, colorful members of the public present at the Press Club.

Gee Steven, was it too much to ask to put a sign by the entrance saying “leave your mind-altering Lemurian bling outside”?

So, was it all a waste of time (and money)? It seems that the conclusion reached by the panel was that the next step was to try to raise the issue of UFOs before the United Nations, and for that you need at least one member country to make a formal petition.

“All we would need is one country, but I think that we have several countries from South America, and certainly, this group here might have enough influence to get their government to go on record, and to field a resolution creating an agency of the United Nations…specifically with the goal to organize a global conference — not a hearing — of the scholars and scientists that would come together and fund it — both from public and private sources — so that, within a couple of years, we could convene a conference that would command the attention of the world.”

But with the global economy in such an state of disarray, I find it highly unlikely that the UN would be willing to spend its straining resources in things like flying saucers. Which is more important: trying to find a way to feed the 1.22 billion humans living in extreme poverty in the developing world, or trying to prevent humans from being abducted by aliens?

The irony, of course, is that if we had incontrovertible proof of a non-human presence meddling from time to time on the affairs of our planet, then perhaps that would be the greatest incentive to put an end to our infantile differences, so we could then try to mature enough in order to establish a relationship with the ‘big boys’ out there.

It seems They –whoever or whatever they are– have the next move. As always.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, reminding you that we don’t need an official endorsement to find out the things that matter.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! As we now embark on our 2nd year of exploring the wonders of the Fortean Matrix, we’ll discover fireballs in Ireland along with lewd graffiti on Mars. We’ll study the impact of fake Twitters & fake bomb detectors. And as we make use of robotic probes to uncover the secrets of ancient civilizations, we’ll conclude by giving our Steven Greer’s SIRIUS documentary & his now famous (or infamous) Atacama humanoid. You know? there’s something I haven’t yet figured out: If Cypher was so desperate for a good dinner of steak & red wine, then why didn’t he ask Mouse to write a program simulation with a decent Italian restaurant?

10 Here at The Pills we rarely mention UFO videos, mainly because (a) it’s so easy to hoax them with current over-the-count computer software; and (b) because Youtubers almost never bother to include detailed information concerning the sighting, which might then help serious researchers to gather more valuable evidence about a given case.

Nevertheless I admit that this ‘recent’ clip of a group of fireballs seemingly flying over an Irish neighborhood is interesting:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, the lack of audio is a big red flag, and video’s quality is crude. But I for one am not so sure those lights could be explained as simple ‘Chinese lanterns’, which seem to be the trending explanation for every video of strange lights nowadays. That said, I’m the first to admit that a single video doesn’t constitute conclusive proof of anything.

Feel free to share your own thoughts about the video on the comment section.

9 “If UFOs represent an advanced technology from an extraterrestrial civilization,” ETH proponents are fond to say, “then clearly they’ve solved the problem of interstellar travel.” A warp drive then  should be theoretically feasible, no matter how impossible it seems from our current perspective.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In order to go beyond our current paradigm, we’ll need to be guided by visionaries who are not afraid to fail. Visionaries like Elon Musk, who not only wants us to colonize Mars, but has already placed his sight on other star systems.

“There’s some potential, even though it sounds science-fictiony, for warp drive to work,” Musk said on Tuesday during a Google+ Hangout to publicize “After Earth,” Smith’s upcoming movie. “Technically, to warp space such that you’re traveling at the speed of light, but you’ve warped space so that space is actually traveling.”

I hope other dreamers join in, so we can accomplish our destiny as a space-faring civilization.

8 And when we finally accomplish the dream of countless generations, and set foot on world lit by a faraway sun, what will our brave space-faring descendants do then?

Did Obama draw this giant erect phallus on Mars?

Why, draw a massive penis on the surface, of course!

A big phallusy, you say? then check out the artistry of NASA’s rovers! I think it’s only fair –after all, they say “Men are from Mars”, don’t they?

7 And now it’s time to address a different kind of dick: None other than atheist superstar Richard Dawkins, who unsurprisingly managed to insert his foot firmly on his mouth thanks to the restrictions of Twitter. On this occasion, the author of The God Delusion’s vitriol was aimed towards British journalist Mehdi Hasan, who happens to be a Muslim. Dawkins was quick to mock the Muslim belief that the prophet Mohammed ascended the heavens riding a winged horse –which would probably make him some sort of visionary Brony– but unfortunately for Dawkins, his Twitter barbs ended up backfiring. He tried to make amends by way of comparing Hasan’s ‘silly’ beliefs in Islam to Arthur Conan Doyle’s equally silly beliefs in fairies –which famously made him fall prey to the notorious hoax of the Cottingley fairies– and so Dawkins’ argument was constructed by finding amazement in how brilliant & talented individuals can nonetheless succumb to idiotic belief systems.

100% real fairies made out of paper.

I hope no-one is rude enough to point out to Mr. Dawkins how sir Isaac Newton –arguably the most important scientific mind in all history– spent more time writing about Alchemy & the Bible than about ‘natural philosophy’ –i.e. what we know call ‘Science’– and I also equally hope no one mentions in his presence how Francis Crick, the co-founder of the DNA helix strand, was a firm believer in directed panspermia. While we’re at it, I hope no one discloses to Dawkins the ethimological roots of the words Chemistry & Algebra (hint: they are both Arabic).

And even though Richard Dawkins is well aware of how many illustrious members of the scientific pantheon had nonetheless religious or unorthodox beliefs, he probably considers it as some sort of sad tragedy, as surely these intellectual luminaries would have profoundly benefited from an atheistic/materialist attitude.

Well, I propose that perhaps the ‘idiotic’ belief systems of these giants was in a big way a contributors to their accomplishments, rather than a hindrance. Consider that, Mr. Dawkins, while you keep campaigning on how religion is the source of all evil in this world.

6

A man whose voice was replaced by a box of gravel

But there are dicks on all sides of the spectrum. Last week we discussed how Alex Jones didn’t bother to wait until more information of the Boston bombings was released before he started to blame it all on the New World Order. But now new information has surfaced which seems to add a new dimension of irony to the whole matter: turns out Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother killed by the police & likely the mastermind behind the attacks, was an Infowars fan –quite the Conspiracy Ouroboros, as my friend Greg Taylor put it.

“I’ve seen this before,” Jones said. “The federal government trying to connect me to tragedies. That’s the media and the government’s own conspiracy theories.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fuck indeed.

Does that mean I wished Jones to be censored? Not at all. The fact of the matter is that people blaming him for the tragedy are as simplistic & pathetic as conservative Congressmen blaming Marilyn Manson for Columbine. The way I see it individual human behavior is unpredictable, because it relies on a whole plethora of factors & cultural input.

5 Yet there are still conspiracy theorists adamant to regard the Tsarnaev bros as the new Sirhan Sirhan. We live in extremely interesting times, in which a large sector of the population is now hardwired NOT to trust any official explanation.

In a world full of lies, trust is the ultimate commodity.

Seems legit

And some people are more than aware of this. Consider what happened last Tuesday, when hackers took control of the Associated Press Twitter account, warning about 2 explosions in the White House, which had caused the injury of president Obama. Before the deception was uncovered, the hoax sent the stock markets into panic mode, resulting in a US$136.5 billion loss. With powerful hedgefunds in control of top-of-the-line computer systems, it’s not unrealistic to assume somebody became immensely rich overnight this week.

Should we continue to depend on an economic system so vulnerable to rumors & hearsay? Should we shed lies in order to move to our next step in evolution?

4 Lies. I sometimes think we Homo Sapiens acquired sentience in order to call out our tribe member’s bullshit. What would become of us if we managed to accurately learn when someone is not being truthful?

Twat

In such a world someone like James McCormick would not be able to create a multi-million-dollar company selling ‘bomb detectors’. McCormick has been found guilty of fraud, but not before he sold his dowsing doodads to countries like Georgia & Iraq.

Should you wish to learn more about my opinion on such devices, please read “The Eagle & the Snake Oil.”

3

Dude your eyebrow is a friggin’ lizard!

If you want to dig out land mines & drug shipments, you might as well hire the services of some Maya brujo instead of forking thousands of dollars in a worthless sensor. Speaking of the Maya, new evidence unearthed by archeologists suggest the origins of this Mesoamerican civilizations is far more complex than what was previously thought.

For decades academicians have debated whether the Mayas were culturally descendant from the older Olmec culture –the ones who left us those big-ass stone heads that kinda resemble Africans– or they perhaps arose independently in the jungles of what is now Central America.

A new analysis of items from a long-buried ceremonial structure in central Guatemala supports a third hypothesis, researchers reported Thursday — that lowland Maya culture grew out of an amalgam of influences from nearby settlements.

“The origin of Maya civilization was more complex than previously thought,” said Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and lead author of a study detailing the analysis in the journal Science.

In his view, the culture that went on to dominate Mesoamerica until the arrival of Europeans got its start during a power vacuum that lasted for about 200 to 350 years in a period of Olmec rule. That allowed the people who built the ceremonial structure at a site known as Ceibal to interact with others from nearby areas and begin forming a new culture. They probably had influences from as far away as Chiapas and the Pacific Coast, both about 200 miles away.

The problem I have with these theories is that they fail to consider the fact that these cultures could have developed an important sea-faring tradition. I’ve read of Columbus’ accounts of how he glimpsed giant rafts during his trips to the Antilles, & I think historians have not taken into account how the monumental stones of the Olmecs are said to have been transported using canoes –especially if you acknowledge the fact that each of these sculptures weigh several tonnes!

2

I’m ashamed to confess that despite my nationality I haven’t yet visited many of the Maya archeological sites –with the exception of Tulúm. One site I have visited several times, though, is Teotihuacán, which is not too far from Mexico city –if you ever come to visit us, drop me an e-mail & I’ll be more than happy to act as a tour guide.

Teotihuacán, despite its popularity & affluence of tourists, still holds a lot of mysteries –heck, we don’t even know the true name of the city!– but thanks to modern technologies there’s a chance we’ll be able to solve some of its riddles. With the use of a remote-controlled robot (developed by Mexican engineers, I might add) archeologists have discovered 3 ancient burial chambers in the temple of the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcóatl). The academicians have been utilizing mechanical probes since 2010, with the hopes of finding the burial chambers of the monarchs of this great urban complex, built by one of the greatest civilizations in the Americas. If they are successful, this will surely be one of the greatest news of the decade.

Stay tuned!

1 Teotihuacán is the name the Aztecs gave to these ruins. It means ‘the land where men became gods,’ which shows how they would have probably agreed with Arthur C Clarke’s 3rd law: “any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.”

Were the builders of Teotihuacán supreme beings, then? If we found the remnants of their rulers, would we be amazed by their morphological differences?

This week we saw the release of Steven Greer’s documentary SIRIUS, amid a lot of preemptive controversy surrounding the so-called ‘alien humanoid’ he (did not) uncovered in the Atacama desert of Chile.

With this in mind, I decided to watch it anyway, and even though there was a lot of ego stroke & Greer’s  body-guard’s proclivity to show his deltoids crept me out a bit –not to mention how I cringed when I saw the inclusion of the Jerusalem Temple UFO vids & the equally controversial film of a supposedly crop circle in the making– I must nonetheless conclude SIRIUS is a film worth watching.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Despite my personal distaste for Greer’s self-promoting, I can’t say I’m intrinsically against some of the things he promotes. Yes, the appropriation of Tibetan paraphernalia seems New-Age-y, but that doesn’t mean the concept of a unified field of consciousness permeating the whole of Creation is necessarily wrong. I don’t know if there’s a deliberate attempt to withhold free-energy technologies which would free us from our dependency from fossil fuels, but I’m quite certain our current paradigm encourages most of the populace to think of such ideas as pure nonsense.

Muy Picante ~ E

As for ATA, the DNA results obtained by Dr. Nolan & Dr. Lachman are exactly as ambiguous as I’m accustomed to obtain from the UFO phenomenon. Nolan admits that Ata is, if not fully human, at least as closer to humans as chimpanzees. And if you think about it, that’s exactly what so-called Contactees & abductees have been telling us since the 1950s –that the ‘Space brothers’ have been fooling around with our DNA for a looong, long, time.

In fact, ATA’s analysis made me think of Whitley Strieber’s old theories about ‘neotenization‘, or how the aliens might be using undeveloped human fetuses to  procreate, in which case looking for substantial genomic differences between them & ourselves is a rather moot exercise –the irony here is that Strieber has currently criticized Greer & his documentary, which is not too surprising if you’ve studied his continuous ambivalence…

Bottomline is, the SIRIUS documentary & the Ata DNA results are permeated with the same kind of ambiguity that lets you project your desired expectations into the UFO phenomenon. If you think aliens are our Space Brothers, our just a bunch of hooey, then it’ll give you just that.

One thing we shouldn’t oversee though, is the fact that according to Dr. Nolan & Dr. Lachman this weird humanoid lived to be 6 to 8 years old –think about it: a 13-cm humanoid being able to breathe & eat without the need of modern medical care– and that no known genetic syndrome is able to explain ALL the apparent malformations present in this specimen –which makes it a one-of-a-kind by default.

Watch it, and reach your own conclusions.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, encouraging you to live with a high degree of uncertainty… about EVERYTHING.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! On our weekly sojourn of the Fortean Matrix we’ll encounter transparent brains & universes created ex-nihilo. We’ll travel to Puerto Rico to investigate new reports of the chupacabras, and we’ll also revise the age of Stonehenge. And as we try to apply Moore’s law to the evolution of life in the Cosmos, we’ll rejoice in the discovery of 3 new exo-planets, including the closest one resembling a second Earth discovered so far. This week The Red Pills are celebrating its 1st year of existence on Mysterious Universe, so grab a chair & a beverage, because this party is just getting started!

10 Alas, even happy anniversaries can be tarnished with sad news, like the infamous bombings committed in Boston by a pair of young men of Chechen origin. As is usually the case, people with a militant attitude are quick to exploit such tragedies to further their particular agenda, like conspiracy blabbermouth Alex Jones yelling “false flag!!” without bothering to wait for the dust of the explosions to settle down,  and even professional skeptic Benjamin Radford condemnation of psychics, for ‘failing to predict the attack’ –of course, if a psychic had in fact warned about the bombs, I’m sure he or she would have been accused by the likes of Radford of negligent scare-mongering.

The most annoying voice in radio.

But the thing that impressed me the most about this incident, is how the online social media played such a predominant role during its whole dramatic unfolding. On Twitter people were quick to retweet the messages issued by the Boston police, as well as offering aid & shelter to anyone living near the blast sites. But a somewhat disquieting development was the rise of what I choose to call ‘armchair vigilantism’, with members of Reddit determined to use their open-source collaboration to pinpoint & identify any would-be suspect –and by ‘suspect’ Redditors apparently meant any non-white attendee carrying a big backpack…

Only one day after the events, the Find Boston Bombers subreddit was formed to collate and analyze photos of the crime scene, expanding to more than 3,000 users in less than half a day. Some of them had interesting observations to make, others had clearly just watched too much CSI and thought that circling vaguely Arab-looking faces in bizarre diagrams made them super sleuths. The only evidence that the real police had at the time of the subreddit’s creation were the remains of one or two pressure cookers and a dark nylon backpack or duffel bag, which has led to innocent bystanders with “saggy backpacks” finding themselves the victims of Facebook witch hunts.

Are criminal investigations bound to become the new Farmville?

9 Fortunately the last surviving suspect has been apprehended, no thanks to the Find Boston Bombers subredddit I might add. But don’t feel bad guys, for you can still use your CSI expertise to find a much more elusive target: Bigfoot.

A search which could turn up to be quite profitable: Olympia beer, a Washington state brewer, is offering the tant-ale-lizing sum of $1 million dollars to anyone who can provide irrefutable evidence of the existence of the hairy Houdini.

“We have been sharing the same backyard for over a century and we believe it’s time to do what has never been done, and that is to offer a one million dollar reward to anyone who can ensure the safe capture of Bigfoot,” the company said on its website.

But you’d better put down the shotguns Bubba, because the brewers are adamant that Sasquatch must be treated humanely –and that means killing is a No-No.

This is certainly not the 1st time that a big reward has been offered to provide evidence of Bigfoot. And meanwhile new ‘Blobsquatch’ videos keep uploading on Youtube, and the subject is still considered a laughing stock among most scientists & biologists. If a body finally surfaces we’ll all have to make a big toast with a pint of Olympia beer –and I’m buying!

8 My 1st introduction to the fascinating world of Cryptozoology was a Spanish version of Tim Dinsdale’s book, Loch Ness Monster, which I found in my uncle Fernando’s library. Every time I stayed with my cousins during the summer or winter holidays, I’d seek out that old book to re-read it one more time.

A gate way drug for Red Pill Junkie.

Now I’m a middle-aged red pill junkie, and my views concerning the most famous monster in the world have changed quite a bit. I’m more skeptic of the plesiosaur theory to explain the creature –although the sightings of long necks and small heads are still my faves– and with the famous Surgeon’s photo debunked, and even the suggestive underwater photos taken by Robert Rines in 1972 called into question, it has become increasingly difficult to remain open to the possibility of large aquatic creatures inhabiting the Scottish lake.

This year will mark the 80th anniversary of the first modern sighting of the beastie –Mrs Aldie Mackay, April 1933–  and because of this the BBC was forced to re-visit the monster history & ask: is Nessie’s legend just a big tourist trap? Mrs Mackay was, after all, a hotel manager…

So was Mrs Mackay motivated by cynical thoughts of her bank balance?
(Marine biologist Adrian) Shine believes not.

“She was far from a self-publicist. It was her husband who told the water bailiff, and she stayed anonymous in the newspaper report.

“She didn’t say anything for two reasons. Firstly, because she thought she would be seen as self-advertising.

“But also because they used to say for people who had seen something in the loch “take more water with it”… suggesting they were drunks.”

There’s no denying that locals have profited from the enthusiasm of weekend monster hunters eager to catch a glimpse of the furtive creature, but even the most skeptical investigators concede that people reporting the sightings are not driven by profit, but genuinely believe to have observed something anomalous. So here’s hoping that we don’t have to wait another 80 years to solve the riddle of loch Ness.

7 Nessie & Bigfoot are classic cryptids, but a relative new comer has tried to steal their popularity. I’m talking of course of the infamous chupacabras, who made a big splash in the BBS forums & newsletters of the early Internet in the mid 90s.

RPJ rides to work on this every day.

Since those bygone years the chupacabras has suffered an interesting mutation in the collective imaginarium: instead of a bipedal reptile with huge red eyes & a spiky back, people now associate the Spanish word with mangy hairless canids roaming the deserted roads of the south-western United States. But now word has come that the chupacabras has returned to the jungles of Puerto Rico, and the witnesses are once again reporting the original features of the goat-sucking monster. Hey, even cryptids have the right to feel homesick, vatos!

6 To my knowledge the only DNA analysis of an alleged chupacabras showed it was a coyote, and we all know Dr. Melba Ketchum’s attempts to legitimize her study of Bigfoot DNA. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to rely on her exclusively to study the DNA of a real living fossil: researchers have just sequenced the genome of the coelacanth, a deep-sea fish which was thought to be extinct for 65 million years, until it was discovered in 1938.

Hello.

The study is important because it can help us learn more of the evolution of land animals. In fact, the paper revealed that is the lungfish & not the coelacanth, the fish more closely related to the 1st 4-legged creatures which decided to venture out of the water.

Professor Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, from the University of Uppsala in Sweden and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the US, said: “What we can see is that while the genome as whole changes, the protein-coding genes – that make the living fish – are much more stable and much more unchanging.

“And if you think about it, this might be correlated to the fact that the coelacanth lives in a rather extreme and stable environment.

“It lives several hundred metres down in the ocean, and it may also be in an environment where it doesn’t have a lot of competitors. So maybe it adapted to that environment a long time ago and it doesn’t have a huge need for change.”

If the bottom of the oceans are so stable, it makes you wonder if other types of living fossils are still thriving down there –Megalodon, anyone?

5 DNA sequencing can help us learn a lot about biological species, but it has its limits. Fortunately, scientists are always coming up with new ways to peer into the mysteries of life, and reveal things which have remained obscured… until now.

Take for instance this new method, which can make a rat’s brain transparent –& I do mean COMPLETELY transparent! The revolutionary technique does not involve any spell taught in Hogwarts, but relies instead on a meticulous replacement of the brain’s lipids with a hydrogel, which are later turned into a rigid polymer (plastic) that conserves the intact inner structure of the cerebrum. Then it’s only a matter of rinsing the lipids & Voilá! see-through rat brain, which can then be painted with chemical markers to reveal astonishing details, with a lot more accuracy than an MRI scan.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4 Observing an ancient archeological site is  a way of peering into the minds of those who built them, hundreds or thousands of years ago. For our next Pill we now must travel to one of the most famous prehistoric sites in the planet: Stonehenge.

A new study has revealed that Stonehenge was occupied by humans at least 5000 years earlier than previously thought. Mind you, this does not mean the famous stone circle is that old, but it proves that the 1st monument built at Stonehenge, consisting of large wooden poles, was erected in the Mesolithic period, circa 8500-7000 B.C.

Open University archaeologist David Jacques and friends started to survey the previously-unlooked at area around a mile from the main monument at Stonehenge, when they were still students in 1999.

The site contained a spring, leading him to work on the theory that it could have been a water supply for early man. He said: ‘In this landscape you can see why archaeologists and antiquarians over the last 200 years had basically honed in on the monument, there is so much to look at and explore.

‘I suppose what my team did, which is a slightly fresher version of that, was look at natural places – so where are there places in the landscape where you would imagine animals might have gone to, to have a drink.’My thinking is where you find wild animals, you tend to find people, certainly hunter-gatherer groups, coming afterwards.

Stonehenge is also the site of numerous anomalous phenomena, including UFO sightings & crop circles. Could this spring of water be a clue into all those other mysteries?

3 In Great Britain you can not only find some of the most ancient human settlements in the world, but also some of the world’s greatest scientific minds. Such is the case of Stephen Hawking, arguably the most famous scientist alive today –his voice is certainly the most easy to recognize.

Just hanging out, you know… IN ZERO G.

What?

But possibly one of the reasons of Hawking’s popularity is due to his open atheism, which was once again clearly evident during his latest public appearance, in which he lay the case for a Big Bang without divine intervention:

He noted that many people still seek a divine solution to counter the theories of curious physicists, and at one point, he quipped, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

After going through some of the leading cosmological theories, & telling yet again his famous anecdote about the pope John Paul II, he concluded by asserting how Richard Feynman’s ‘M-theory’ –which posits how there’s a myriad of different universes with different physical laws & cosmological constants, and we just happen to inhabit the one particular universe with the right kind of laws & constants that favor the rise of stars & intelligent creatures, bent on torturing themselves by asking how they got to be here anyway– is the most consistent with observational data.

All well & good, Mr. Hawking, but something tells me the reason you find ‘M-theory’ appealing, is because it tries to solve the Anthropic principle by drowning it with infinite possibilities. Maybe it just me, but saying the Universe always was & always will be is not so different from explaining things with “God did it.”

2 We all know that when it comes to alien life out there, Hawking’s view is closer to Independence Day than Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. Even if they don’t agree with him, most scientists are willing to accept that we’re not alone in the Universe, merely on account of probability basis –and the fact that the Universe is quite ginormous.

But a new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health has reached an amazing conclusion: that life arose in the Universe some 9.8 billion years ago. The basis for such a bold claim? Moore’s law.

A Scholar’s mate old boy? HAH! Rookie move.

Moore’s law, coined after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, is more a prediction than an actual scientific law, yet so far it has proven very reliable when it comes to calculate the advances in process speed of new computer chips. What NIH geneticist Alexei Sharov and theoretical biologist Richard Gordon did, is apply Moore’s law to biological evolution in order to explain the accelerated complexity of organisms; but instead of the 18 months observed in the doubling of micro-processors’ speed, Sharov & Gordon posit that complexity in genomes double every 376 million years.

“What is most interesting in this relationship,” the researchers write “is that it can be extrapolated back to the origin of life. Genome complexity reaches zero, which corresponds to just one base pair, at time ca. 9.7 billion years ago… ±2.5 billion years.”

The authors then extrapolate from these figures that ours is probably the 1st civilization to emerge in the Universe, which is kind of a drag –13.5 billion years of effort, and THIS is the best the Cosmos can offer??– Then again, the paper’s thesis is pretty much unfalsifiable as far as I can estimate, but it’s interesting speculation nonetheless.

What I find appealing about all this is how we keep comparing complex natural phenomena with complex computational problems –”code is code”, as Terence Mckenna liked to point out, whether it’s information embedded on a computer chip or a nucleic acid strand– and these ideas kee fueling my suspicions that the basic building blocks in the Universe are not Energy & Tie, but Consciousness & Information.

But getting back to the issue of complexity, it’s important to point out that genomic complexity is NOT indicative of overall complexity in an organism –consider this: the lungfish’s DNA is 40 times bigger than ours! If we return to computational analogies, the lungfish is like an old IBM of the 1960s, while we humans are the iPads of the animal kingdom.

1 The moment all these ideas about life in the universe will stop being purely academic, is when we finally find other examples of organisms outside the boundaries of our own planet. That day maybe closer than we think, thanks to the discovery of new exoplanets orbiting inside what we call the ‘habitable zone’.

In my opinion, they are most likely death worlds, full of carnivorous plant life and deadly stinging insects. ~ E

NASA’s Kepler space telescope has just found 3 new exoplanets fitting that criteria, including one that is the most Earth-like planet discovered to date.

That most intriguing one is called Kepler-62f, a rocky world just 1.4 times bigger than Earth that circles a star smaller and dimmer than the sun. Kepler-62f’s newfound neighbor, Kepler-62e, is just 1.6 times larger than Earth, making the pair among the smallest exoplanets yet found in their star’s habitable zone — the just-right range of distances where liquid water can exist on a world’s surface.

These 2 planets are thought to be water worlds, with a single global ocean covering their whole surface. The other new planet, Kepler-69c is 1.7 times the size of Earth, BUT it orbits a star very similar to our sun. Bottomline is they day we find a new Earth 2.0 is literally just around the corner.

Stephen Bassett, who is leading the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, thinks a new paradigm will be reached by ending the ‘Truth embargo.’ I however think that the paradigm shift will more likely be achieved outside UFOlogy, and finding conclusive evidence of life on other planets will probably prove to be far more useful in changing the public’s perception about alien life, than all the hearings & documentaries & UFO conferences put together.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, hoping we can continue to enjoy the wonders of the Fortean Matrix for many more years to come.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week the Fortean Matrix has in store for us archeological discoveries, mysteries of Time & Space, along with wonders of the natural world. We’ll encounter dark lightnings, time machines and ancient stone structures submerged in the lake of Galilee. And as we try to wiggle a rat’s tail with nothing but the power of our minds, we’ll visit the subcontinent of India in search of a real-life X-Men mutant. So sit in your designated chairs & prepare to say good-bye to Kansas.

10 Our first stop deals with NASA’s plans for the near future, specifically their intention of bagging an asteroid –something so wacky it was initially mistaken for an April Fools joke!

Coitus in SPAAAAACE.

But defending our planet from cosmic collisions is no joke, no matter the inevitable comparisons with the film Armageddon. That’s why they plan to allocate a portion of their proposed $17.7 billion budget to send miniature robotic probes to a small asteroid, which will then drag it into an orbit around the moon so that human astronauts can then pretend to be wimpier version of Bruce Willis –they will not try to destroy the asteroid, but instead bring back samples to Earth. Something that will probably not earn them the right to be excused of taxes in perpetuity.

In the wake of a meteor exploding over Russia in February and a football-size asteroid whizzing by the earth just hours later, NASA’s latest strategy, dubbed by some proponents as “planetary defense,” seems designed to generate broad public support as well as a favorable response on Capitol Hill.  NASA officials say the asteroid to be moved could be about 30 feet long and weigh roughly 500 tons. If all goes well, astronauts could be orbiting around it as soon as 2021.

On the one hand I like this idea, because perhaps NASA is considering this plan to be in par with the objectives of private enterprises seeking to exploit the natural resources of asteroids. Space mining could then turn into the United States’ most profitable industry in the XXIst century & beyond. But let’s not kid ourselves here: what the public has been dreaming with is of a human mission to Mars & a return to the Moon; those are the kind of plans that inspire younger generations to seek a career in Science & Engineering. NASA & future administrations needs to keep that in perspective if they want to preserve their leadership in space.

9 From NASA we now turn to NAZCA, and the famous giant geometric shapes scattered around the desert in southern Peru. Thanks in part to Erich Von Däniken’s questionable ideas, the lines were designated as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1994. Unfortunately, that hasn’t earn them any kind of protection against the senseless greed of a Peruvian mining company, which has already destroyed several of these millenarian glyphs in order to extract limestone.

Don’t run huge mining equipment over ancient sites please. Signed, The World.

“We have witnessed the irreparable destruction to a set of lines and trapezoids that existed in the area…

The limestone firm responsible has not been sanctioned or supervised by the authorities of the Regional Directorate of Culture of Ica, despite being in this great archaeological reserve.

The company argues that the land where the plant is installed is private property and that the owner can do whatever he wants on his land, but this is not so.”

Alas, this kind of douchebaggery is all too common in Latin America, where weak government agencies dare not to interfere with the commercial interests of multinational companies –and more often than not officials in those agencies are easily bribed. Such was the case of the recent scandal uncovered by The New York Times with regards to the shady deals behind the construction of a Walmart store near the archeological site of Teotihuacan –the Mexican government uttered a collective “Meh” and paid not attention to it.

Perhaps using a social media community like Avaaz would be helpful into bringing the Nazca situation to the public at large, so that those responsible of defiling the landing pads of the ancient astronauts are made to pay –or maybe the Annunaki will take care of these a-holes once they finally return.

8 Like Peru, Israel has a great archeological heritage, the product of a continuous habitation ever since our ancestors walked out of Africa. Recently archeologists announced the discovery of a massive stone structure at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee –which is not an actual sea, but the largest fresh-water lake in the Holy Land– that has a lot of people scratching their heads, since its age & purpose are not at all evident.

You know what’s more exciting than giant underwater rocks? Everything.

The mysterious structure is cone shaped, made of “unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders,” and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons the researchers said. That makes it heavier than most modern-day warships.

Religious folks will no doubt recognize the Sea of Galilee as one of the most frequented sites of Jesus & his apostles, which prompted me to elaborate my own theory about this stone structure: it was built by the J-man himself, to pull out the famous ‘walking on water’ trick.

7 *Phew!* So fortunately God has a good sense of humor & no lightning stroke me after writing such a blasphemous pill. Speaking of which, scientists have discovered the black sheep of thunderstorms: Dark lightning, a previously unknown burst of powerful gamma radiation that  occurs naturally on planet Earth. The reason this is so mind-bending is because gamma rays are commonly associated with space particles accelerated by stellar explosions –a.k.a. cosmic rays– and this might pose an unknown threat for airline passengers, even though to this day it’s unknown whether anyone has been actually hit by a dark lightning, and their energy dissipate very quickly in all directions.

I find this news very cool because we’re finding a new phenomenon in one of the most common of natural occurrences. So who knows what else we might find in events we think we already know well.

6 Thunderstorms are so unpredictable, that the only way we could know for certain where a lightning will strike is if we had a time machine –the advantages of thinking four-dimensionally, Marty!

And yet the building of an actual time machine is exactly the claim made recently by Ali Razeghi, a 27-year-old Iranian scientist. But instead of a bitchin’ DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor, Ali’s machine is more akin to the device envisioned by Philip K. Dick in his short story Paycheck, in that instead of physically transporting you into a different time-line, it would manage to “produce a print-out detailing any individual’s life between five and eight years in advance after taking readings from the touch of a user. ” Not the sexiest time machine if you’re planning a Hollywood blockbuster, but even that would give any nation or corporation a considerable advantage against its enemies.

…If the story is true, of course. Iranian flying saucer, anyone?

UFOs – Brought to you by Iran.

(I’d recommend listening to Russell Targ’s interview on The Paracast, where he gave an interesting recipe on how remote viewing can be used to predict the stock market & play black jack in a Vegas casino)

(5)  As you can well imagine, the ‘Iranian time machine’ story gathered a lot of ridicule among the skeptical community. But if there’s something skeptics hate more the wild claims coming from Persia, is the popularity of near death experiences. One of the most recent news to trigger their ire was a lady named Crystal McVea making an appearance in the TV show ‘Fox & Friends’ in which she recalled the incredible heightened state of sensorial perception during her NDE –which was insultingly promoted by Yahoo! News as “Woman claims she smelled God”, triggering a deluge of cheap mocking among skeptics who wondered whether the scent of the Almighty would be like Old Spice or Axe deodorant.

The fact of the matter is that the mention of an increased level of awareness is universally consistent with the NDE accounts found in the literature, strengthened with a recent scientific study which discovered how NDE experiences are perceived as more vivid & real than actual memories of real events. But for the skeptical mindset no amount of evidence will be sufficient to convince them that there’s more to NDEs than mere neurochemical activity. They will readily point out to several studies in which SOME aspects of NDEs and/or OBEs have been recreated, which in their minds settle the matter fully. They made me wonder whether when they go out to a bar & order a drink of vodka, they will be fully satisfied if the bartender serves them instead a glass of water –after all, water shares some of the characteristics of vodka, right? water it’s transparent, wet, it’s served in a glass…

I for one would rather miss the more enjoyable qualities of a good shot of Moskovskaya. Nostrovia!

4 The fact of the matter is that modern medical techniques have significantly raised the number of people who’ve been literally resuscitated from the land of the dead; something doctor Sam Parnia, head of intensive care at the Stony Brook University Hospital in New York, knows only too well.

And yet he thinks those numbers could be increased if hospitals were just willing to upgrade their obsolete resuscitation techniques, something he explores in his book The Lazarus Effect: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. He believes that conventional non-expensive procedures could save the lives of 40,000 Americans a year.

That is hardly the extent of Parnia’s beliefs mind you, after a whole career of dealing with the blurry frontier between life & death. When asked about his personal investigation of NDEs he responds:

“When I first got interested in these mind/body questions, I was astonished to find that no one had even begun to put forward a theory about exactly how neurons in the brain can generate thoughts,” he says. “We always assume that all scientists believe the brain produces the mind, but in fact there are plenty who are not certain of that. Even prominent neuroscientists, such as Sir John Eccles, a Nobel prizewinner, believe that we are never going to understand mind through neuronal activity. All I can say is what I have observed from my work. It seems that when consciousness shuts down in death, psyche, or soul – by which I don’t mean ghosts, I mean your individual self – persists for a least those hours before you are resuscitated. From which we might justifiably begin to conclude that the brain is acting as an intermediary to manifest your idea of soul or self but it may not be the source or originator of it… I think that the evidence is beginning to suggest that we should keep open our minds to the possibility that memory, while obviously a scientific entity of some kind – I’m not saying it is magic or anything like that – is not neuronal.”

3 Parnia wants more people brought back from death so they can share the tale of whatever it is they experienced. Researchers of entheogenic substances, and the benefits they could provide in the treatment of depression & other illnesses, wish for a similar thing.

Unfortunately to them, their investigations are considered an anathema to our modern view of psychotropic substances. Something professor David Nutt would know more than most: Back in 2009 he was fired as UK government’s chief drug adviser after showing criticism on the British policies on cannabis –he said the government’s stance was against scientific evidence– and now in 2013 his research on the benefits of psylocibin has been critically damaged, since even though the study was properly approved and granted the necessary funds, Nutt has been unable to acquire the ‘magic mushrooms’ necessary to conduct the trials.

A scientific representation of “magic mushrooms”

Under the law, academic researchers are not allowed to manufacture their own Class A drugs and must obtain them from external sources. Companies that could supply the drugs have to go through “regulatory hoops” to obtain the necessary Home Office licence, said Prof Nutt. This could take up to a year and triple the cost, he maintained.

Other major hurdles were the EU guidelines on Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), which set daunting standards for potential suppliers, and rules on storage.

Only four hospitals in the UK currently have a licence to hold psilocybin, making it difficult to roll the drug out as a prospective treatment, said Prof Nutt.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again: at (nearly) 40 years of age, I no longer expect to witness the fabled ‘Disclosure’ of an alien presence in our planet –sorry Stephen– but I however, wish to be alive when the nonsensical repression against mind-altering substances are finally abolished. Then we might find ourselves into a better position to understand the mysteries of the human mind –which could very well solve UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, & the whole caboodle as a bonus…

2 It seems almost as if the whole purpose of modern civilization is the effective control & regulation of human behavior. To keep us like trained rats, pursuing the unattainable cheese while we slave ourselves running amid the economic maze. Our scientist might not yet be able to control the thoughts of men, and not even the thoughts of rats, but a new interface developed at the Harvard Medical School can allow a human wearer to mentally control the motion of a rat’s tail, without the need of wires or surgical electrodes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To me it’s impossible not to think of the controversial subject of ‘alien implants.’ Dr. Roger Leir, who has made a career in Ufology out of extracting & studying strange objects, which were allegedly introduced into the bodies of his patients by alien interlopers, speculates that the function of the implants is to monitor the physiological & metabolic changes in the abductees, as a means to supervise the genetic evolution of our species on a long-term basis. But what if that’s not the case? If the implants are real, and not just mundane foreign materials stuck in the abductees’ bodies during a long-forgotten accident, what if they are used to control the behavior of the abductees?

Not the most comforting of ideas, is it?

1 This edition of the Pills has been mainly devoted to study the mysteries of the Mind. So it’s only fair we conclude with a young Indian girl named Nandana, who suffers from acute autism. Like some autistic individuals, Nandana is what you’d call a ‘savant’ or prodigy child; but instead of performing incredible feats of memorization, like playing Mozart sonatas on the piano after listening them for the first time, Nandana’s talent is far more impressive: She is said to be able to read her parents’ thoughts!

Click here to view the embedded video.

“I used to feel strange when she would come to me and say the name of the food I was thinking of preparing for her. The same way, if my husband and I had decided to take her somewhere, she would know about it without being told about it and would start reacting to it.”

It’s important to point out that Nandana’s feats are accomplished without direct physical contact with her parents –discounting a typical variation of ‘cold reading.’– and her case has already attracted the attention of Dr Darold A. Treffert, considered the grandfather of autistic research & consultant for the film Rain Man:

“So I would clearly classify Nandana as a savant with a very rare skill among savants. In my savant registry of 319 savants, one percent reported ‘paranormal’ abilities such as ESP (extra sensory perception) and Psi (parapsychology). However none reported telepathy or mind reading of the type Nandana exhibits.”

To be fair, it doesn’t seem as if Treffert has had any direct contact with Nandana & her parents, which make some people question the scientific validity of his assertions. Regardless, it seems as if this is not the first case of autism with the exhibition of ‘paranormal’ abilities Treffert has heard of, which seems to strengthen the case that savants elicit special mental talents that lie dormant in the majority of us.

So, while we wait for further evidence to support this extraordinary case, I guess the only thing left to do is come up with a proper X-Men name for Nandana –Kaligirl? Professor N? Submit your suggestions in the comment section.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, inviting you to keep exploring the infinite worlds of inner space.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! After a small Easter break in which the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar interpreted our own version of the Passion –instead of a cross we use a tentacled chair– we resume our explorations of the Fortean Matrix. This week we’ll encounter cursed rings & 3D-printed skeletons, life-size dinobots & alien ‘Mini-Mes’. And after we peel the skin off the new poll revealing the growing interest of American voters in Reptilian politicians, we’ll look for hidden alien messages in the unlikeliest of places: inside us.

If there’s something we here at The Pills hate more than black-suited agents & killer sentry robots, is the daylight saving system!

10 Our 1st pills takes us back to one of our favorite topics in this column: Dark matter. Last February we informed of an upcoming historical announcement, aimed to confirm that the enigmatic stuff that constitutes 85% of the known universe had finally been identified. And this week new ‘teasers’ were published on the news alluding to a $2-billion-dollar experiment that has apparently hit the cosmic jackpot:

The detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), measures cosmic-ray particles in space. After detecting billions of these particles over a year and a half, the experiment recorded a signal that may be the result of dark matter, the hidden substance that makes up more than 80 percent of all matter in the universe.

Specifically what the Spectrometer detected was about 400,000 positrons (antimatter) which they think were created when particles of antimatter collided with each other and self-annihilated. So, in the end scientists have NOT detected dark matter, but the effects of dark matter which behave according to the current model of what dark matter is supposed to be –weakly interactive massive particles, or WIMPs. These WIMPs pack quite a punch if you ask me!

People like Neal deGrasse Tyson think that since we now require such costly & energetic experiments to detect exotic matter, that this confirms we have a pretty good grasp of the laws of Nature –hence there’s no way there could be aliens hidden undetected below our radar. But then the egg-heads keep telling us that the Multiverse is composed of extra-dimensions that we can’t neither detect nor interact with; so which one is it, docs?

Click here to view the embedded video.

9 From dark matter we now turn our attention to the dark language of Mordor, and a series of lines every self-respecting Tolkienist should know by heart *Googles it*.

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

A recent news article about a ‘cursed’ Roman ring seems to bring together Fantasy with Reality. According to the story, this gold ring –with inscriptions in Latin, with an image of the goddess Venus & linked to a ‘curse tablet’– is said to have been the source of inspiration for the One ring in Tolkien’s novels. Its discoverer, archeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, is said to have discussed the ring with the famous author & to have sought his help.

The ring has been linked to a curse tablet found at the site of a Roman temple dedicated to the god Nodens in Gloucestershire.

Tolkien worked on the etymology of the name Nodens and repeatedly visited the temple.

His fantasy novel The Hobbit was published in 1937. The “One Ring”, which plays a central role in Lord of the Rings, is also gold and contains an inscription in a fictional language called the “Black Speech of Mordor”.

The only caveat I have with this story is that in The Hobbit, Gollum’s ring is not yet given the central role it would later gain in the LOTR trilogy. Then again we do know that Tolkien didn’t view his books as just the fruits of his fertile imagination, and that he genuinely believed the events in the War of the Ring could be safely placed in a remote historical context, during the European Bronze Age. So in the end I have no problem with a scholar absorbing information that will be allowed to brew inside his mind, to be later distilled in the form of possibly the greatest work of Fantasy of all time.

8 But of course, we must ALWAYS remember that magic & non-human beings more advanced than us is merely the domain of children’s fairy tales. Ours is a world of matter, Science & hard-cold verifiable data that don’t rock the boat too much –those are the only ideas worth spreading…

It is time to review the latest chapter in the sad deterioration of the TED brand: Not happy with relegating Graham Hancock & Rupert Sheldrake to the ‘naughty corner’ of their website, the TED establishment has now decided to  remove the license of TEDx WestHollywood, just as they are about to launch their planned event “Brother Can You Spare A Paradigm?”,  because they had the gall of inviting people like Russell Targ to speak about things like Remote Viewing –of which he has amassed a considerable amount of scientific evidence during his long career. For the love of Entropy, TEDx WestHollywood, weren’t you thinking of the children???

But for all you despicable Woo woo people, you’ll be happy to know that the West Hollywood event will be celebrated with or without the TED endorsement. No doubt you’ll be more than eager to help Suzanne Taylor promote the streaming program, which will be aired live on April 14 –I don’t know how you can live with yourselves, you anti-Science doe-eyed believers of nonsense…   /end sarcasm mode

7 When it comes of matters of Faith vs Doubt, few artifacts can elicit such polarizing views  as the shroud of Turin. If you’re a skeptic then it’s a no-brainer: the long piece of cloth is nothing but a medieval forgery concocted to fool the ignorant masses; and if you’re a devout Catholic the issue is equally simple: the shroud is the single, most important evidence of the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Since the media looooves to exacerbate such quarrels –specially when the news flow slows to a crawling halt during the Easter holidays– the British newspaper The Telegraph published an article regarding an upcoming book co-written by Giulio Fanti, a professor of mechanical and thermal measurement at Padua University, & journalist Saverio Gaeta. The book is intended to document the tests performed by Fanti & his colleagues on the fibres of the sindone –using infra-red light and spectroscopy– which date it to ancient times, a few centuries before or after the death of Christ.

The experiments were carried out on fibres taken from the Shroud during a previous study, in 1988, when they were subjected to carbon-14 dating.

Those tests, conducted by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona, appeared to back up the theory that the shroud was a clever medieval fake, suggesting that it dated from 1260 to 1390.

But those results were in turn disputed on the basis that they may have been skewed by contamination by fibres from cloth that was used to repair the relic when it was damaged by fire in the Middle Ages.

Mr Fanti, a Catholic, said his results were the fruit of 15 years of research.

Skeptics reading the last line would say “Aha!”, but may I remind them that even people they admire, like Richard Dawkins for example, is not immune to intellectual bias –which is why after Graham Hancock’s invitation to try an entheogenic substance, he was a priori sure the experience would not amount to anything but brain-generated hallucinations.

As for me, the famous (or infamous) shroud will always remain what I think it’s been its intended purpose all along: a puzzling “what if…” which can be either used to cement your established belief system, or propel you to search for new answers.

6 The most interesting ideas behind the ‘photographic negative’ imprints in the shroud of Turin, is that they were the result of a powerful burst of energy, which affected the molecular integrity of the fibers at a very microscopic level. Our modern science is now familiarized with the implementation of electromagnetic radiation to help us illuminate –no pun intended– the regions of the human body which are shrouded –again, pardon the pun– by the opaque tissue of our flesh & skin.

Thus MRI scans have been used to observe cancer tumors, skeletal abnormalities, blood clots, and sexual organs during intercourse –wait, WHAT??

Click here to view the embedded video.

I decided to omit the usual NSFW warning, because SERIOUSLY: if you happen to work in an office where this kind of monochromatic blobs result offensive, then you definitely need to think about getting yourself a new job, pronto!!

5 As was seen with the previous pill, MRI can be either used or abused, to pursue either useful or silly endeavors. And while watching a penis  & a vagina doing the horizontal mambo –at least I think they did it horizontally?– might help advance our knowledge of anatomy, taking X-rays of an alleged tiny alien mummy is much MUCH more questionable.

The UFO community seems to be in a state of eager anticipation with the future release of Dr. Steven Greer’s documentary Sirius, in which he intends to uncover the multinational cabal that’s depriving the world of free energy, by blocking the knowledge learned after analyzing the wreckage of recovered alien craft. Oh, and he also found a teenie weenie alien munchkin on the Atacama desert in South America, too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some weeks ago I listened to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode in which he had Greer as guest, where the good doctor briefly discussed his alien Oompa Loompa. I must admit that the show left me with a nasty taste on my mouth, after enduring all the ‘me me mes’ Greer spouted to the microphone. The man has an ego the size of an alien mothership, which is funny considering how he’s gonna use an economy-size doll cadaver to sustain his arguments about the inefficacy of an oil-based economy –which are not that senseless if you think about it.

That said, I’m not so sure the world is ready for free energy. I mean, look at the things we spend energy in right now! With a zero-point alien core drive I fear that we’d only find quicker ways to download porn :-/

4 If Greer’s movie becomes a blockbuster –and mind you, that’s a BIG ‘if’– would he then choose to sell miniat– um, I mean life-size replicas of his alien mummy? With the new 3D-printing technologies we’re so fond of reviewing in this column, it wouldn’t be such a difficult endeavor.

So those wacky 3D-printing enthusiasts have done it again: now their latest accomplishment is the polymeric re-creation of the skeleton of a living, breathing animal –a rat, as is usually the case.

Doney used several freeware programs to convert data from CT scans into a format that could be read by a 3-D printer. As a proof of principle, he and colleagues printed a rat skeleton in white plastic and printed a removable set of lungs in green or purple. They also printed out a rabbit skull.

Mi parents still keep a small clay imprint of one of my sisters’ hands. I wonder if this 3D-craze will result in a boon of morbid memorabilia –would you want to have a plastic model of your significant other’s skull as a Valentine present in 2014?

3 One of the cool advantages of 3D-printing is easy to foresee, is that even modest museums will now be able to afford life-size replicas of dinosaur skeletons. And maybe 3D printers will also help Aussie billionaire Clive Palmer’s crazy/genius plans of a real-life Jurassic Park into fruition.

(Yes, this is the same dude who wants to build a replica of the Titanic. Props for thinking big)

Palmer ordered 117 animatronic dinosaurs in order to create what is being called a Jurassic Park-style attraction at the resort on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, according to Australian Associated Press.

“We’ll have the world’s biggest dinosaur exhibit, with 165 animatronic dinosaurs,” Palmer said, according to the Agence France-Presse.

The dinosaurs, some of which will be over 20 feet tall and weigh more than a ton, will move their tails, heave their chests and even blink their eyes, reports note. It looks as if Palmer’s grand vision isn’t far from becoming a reality. The animatronic dinos are scheduled to arrive by the end of April.

Would a robotic version of the Velociraptor be more dangerous than the real thing? I bet Kurzweil didn’t foresee THAT outcome for the Singularity –unless all those pills he takes are intended to make him run faster.

2 What’s scarier than 20-foot-high lizards? the answer is 6-foot-high lizards that can pass as normal humans. The recent results of the Public Policy Polling on the impact of conspiracy theories on the U.S. public –I guess they grew tired of playing Sudoku while they wait for the next big campaign– got a lot of websites & media channels jumping in to conclude that ZOMG! 12 million Americans believe Reptilians are running the world!! I’m sure David Icke feels incredibly flattered.

Knew it.

You can download and read the results for yourself here (H/T to Doubtful News) and personally the one thing I found odd about this poll is how few Americans believe aliens exist –which might be a result of how the question was phrased. Would Seth Shostak be comforted to know he’s a member of a minority?

1 I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Seth Shostak has never read any book by David Icke, or maybe even Erich von Däniken’s. He may have, I’m sure, read quite a lot of novels written by the late Arthur C. Clarke.

In Clarke’s short story The Sentinel –which was later adapted as a longer script for the seminal movie 2001: A Space Odyssey– human astronauts discover a message left by an incredibly advanced alien civilization, in the form of a mysterious black monolith. The rationale is that by hiding it on the Moon, our alien overlords would ensure that we humans would only get our hands on their legacy until we were wise enough to comprehend it.

But there are people who think that the similar result could be achieved, if the message was preserved & multiplied in the very essence of our being: our genetic code. Such is the idea proposed by Vladimir I. shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A. Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, who  conceived the concept of Biological SETI –the search for Extraterrestrial intelligence not in the form of radio signals diffused amid the void of space, but encoded as a non-randomly intelligible signature left by a superior race of extraterrestrial Gepettos –who would be inclined to leave their craftsmanship signature for reasons we Pinocchios cannot yet elucidate.

To pass the designer label test, any patterns in the genetic code must be highly statistically significant and possess intelligent-like features that are inconsistent with any natural know process, say the authors.

They go on to argue that their detailed analysis that the human genome (map here) displays a thorough precision-type orderliness in the mapping between DNA’s nucleotides and amino acids. “Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.” They say this includes the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the use of the abstract symbol of zero. “Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing,” they assert.

Naturally these kind of ideas don’t sit well with the Western scientific establishment, who are deeply averse of anything merely resembling the facade of an intelligent designer –whether an idle astronaut or a careless deity. I for one have encountered such arguments many times, most recently in the highly recommended book The Other Side of Truth, penned by the incomparable Fortean raconteur Paul Kimball:

This brings me back to Michio Kaku and the example of the e-mail he used in answer to my question about a galactic conversation. He might have had it right, but perhaps he applied it in the wrong way. Yes, there could indeed be a message, and the information in the message is broken up into all sorts of little pieces, just like we do with e-mails. The mistake that Kaku might have made, however, is in seeing the message as something for us, or about us, or beyond us, when it may well be the  message is us [emphasis mine]. Perhaps we are the information, and slowly, over the course of time, the message is being re-assembled into its whole.

But I don’t expect Paul giving a TED talk about his ideas anytime soon.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, advising you to imagine at least six impossible things before breakfast.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week the Fortean Matrix will show us parallel universes beneath the oceans’ crust, along with submersed technological wonders –both ancient & contemporary. We’ll meet shape-shifting agents of the Secret Service, along with well-toned Bigfoots working out in the Georgia woods. And as we peer into the night sky in search of more fiery heralds of change, we’ll cross the chasm of infinity to glimpse deep into the beginning of Time itself. Spring has finally arrived, so I guess it’s time to discard those heavy trent coats in favor of something lighter –the shades stay, of course.

10 Put on your diving suits & fins, my friends, because for our first Pill we’ll take a dive deep into the bottom of the sea, where Danish biologists have found an entire ecosystem flourishing in the cracks of the oceanic crust, so detached from the rest of the planetary biosphere they are calling it a ‘parallel universe’.

If you aren’t excited by rocks, you should be! Rocks!

These microorganisms depend on chemical reactions –chemosynthesis– to survive, and the way the biologists made this startling discovery was by collecting rock samples from the the Juan de Fuca Plate, about 120 miles off the coast of Washington –some 1.5 miles below the ocean’s surface and beneath another 1,000 feet of sediment– and then proceeded to simulate the conditions of their natural environment, and study the samples for 7 whole years –which would make these scientists prime candidates for adoption of a pet rock…

Biogeochemist Everett Shock of Arizona State University, also not involved in the research, isn’t yet ready to rule out multicellular life. “My bet is on fungi,” he said, “but there are other possibilities, including things that may be quite unfamiliar.”

Indeed, such findings sparkle the imagination. And even though Verne’s fans might be deprived to find some hidden mastodons or dinosaurs living beneath our surface, is it so preposterous to conceive that some form of complex multi-cellular beings are currently thriving, near the warmth  of our planetary core?

9 It’s startling to conceive that we currently know more of what lies beneath our atmosphere, than what hides beneath our oceans –and I’m not only talking about weird natural ecosystems or the occasional elder god snoring inside its submarine coffin.

Cthulu by Shadow-net on DeviantArt

Take for example one of my favorite OOP objects ever found: the Antikythera mechanism, discovered in 1901 by sponge divers and relegated to some dark corner of a museum’s basement, until our Science was mature enough to understand its incredible significance.

Last year we announced that a new expedition was being prepared, seeking to go back to the same underwater shipwreck where the ancient computer had been originally found, and now the initials results of this project have finally been publicized:

You have to “urn” a living some how… I got jokes.

The largest item recovered was a huge lead anchor stock. It was lying on a semicircular object that might be a scupper pipe, used to drain water from the ship’s deck. If so, the ship may have gone down as she was sailing with the anchor stowed. The team also raised an intact storage jar (amphora), which matches those previously recovered from the wreck. DNA tests may reveal its original contents.

Most intriguing are dozens of irregular spherical objects sprinkled across the wreck site. They look like rocks but contain flecks of green, suggesting small bronze fragments, corroded and encrusted in sediment after thousands of years in the sea. This is just what the Antikythera mechanism looked like when it was discovered. Then again, they could be collections of ship’s nails.

Then again… they could be something more interesting…

8 In a way, the oceans act like the storage vault of Humanity, jealously guarding the treasures of civilizations both old & not-so-old. Fortunately for us, there’s always bold individuals willing to pick the lock & peer inside.

One of those bold fellows is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who decided to use his considerable wealth to recover the Saturn V rocket engines that carried the first men to the moon in 1969, which were thought to be irretrievably lost deep beneath the Atlantic ocean. Glad to know all those sales of 50 Shades of Gray were finally put to good use!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet I can’t help to feel mad about all this. C’mon Jeff! you have the capacity to go to the bottom of the Atlantic freaking ocean, but you still can’t ship my copies of Nick Redfern’s newest books in less than 3 weeks??? Priorities, dude. PRIOR-EH-TIES!

7 Saturn V’s engines are a valuable testament of the bygone days of space exploration, when men were sent to do a robot’s job. Now sadly, the rover’s get all the fun.

We now return to planet Mars, where Curiosity has crushed a rock dubbed ‘Tintina’ (?) with its 1-ton weight –evidently robots loathe Slim Fast shakes– and revealed a bright white interior, indicative of the Red Planet’s wetter infancy.

Erosion is a slow process.

“The first time we tried to take the image [of Tintina], it saturated the detector, because we had no idea we’d have something so bright,” said Jim Bell, from Arizona State University in Tempe.

That’s kinda cool & creepy at the same time, realizing that we’re finding stuff on Mars that our best minds weren’t prepared for (more on that up ahead).

6 Speaking of finding things we weren’t expecting, this week many news outlets were oh-so eager to announce that the aging probe Voyager 1 had finally left our solar system –something regular readers of this column would prompt to exclaim “wot, again?.”

In fact after the hasty announcement, some NASA spokesmen rushed to explain the general consensus is that Voyager has not yet exited the boundaries of our stellar neighborhood. And all this suddenly made me recall one of my favorite explanations of the infamous Fermi paradox: the Zoo hypothesis  –the idea that advanced civilizations would keep the Earth quarantined as some sort of wildlife preserve, the same way vast regions of the African savannah are devoted to the conservation of endangered animals.

“Oh and in case I don’t see ya…”

I have my own version of the Zoo hypothesis, which I call the Truman Show hypothesis: the idea that humans are the unwilling cast in some sort of reality TV show, for the entertainment of a bored transdimensional audience. In which case I’m half-expecting something like THIS to happen with our little V’ger wannabe:

Click here to view the embedded video.

5 If we exist solely to amuse a crowd of hyper-advanced tricksters, then it’s not so far-fetched to assume that once in a while our overlords might fancy to ‘beam down’ and interact with their creations, the same way we interact with synthetic individuals on computer videogames.

That’s the conclusion some might reach after watching this strange video taken during president Obama’s speech at the AIPAC conference in 2012, where a member of his Secret Service’s security detail has been declared to be a shape-shifting alien by the Youtube poster jane trivum:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I for one can hardly blame the Obama administration for hiring Reptilian shape-shifting aliens –I bet they cause far less scandals abroad, and are sure to pay in full for the services of local prostitutes.

4 Reptilians seem to be as phobic to cameras as North America’s favorite cryptid, Bigfoot. The Interwebz & the Youtube are choke-full of boring ‘blob-squatches’ that force die-hard Bigfooters to squint their eyes in front of their computer screens, trying to discern the rear from the end in some vague clump of brownish pixels.

Well, the rear is more than evident in this new image allegedly taken in the forests of Georgia, as reported by our comrades of the Who Forted? webzine. As in the legendary Patterson-Gimli footage, this new photograph distincts itself from your usual guy-in-a-suit fake, clearly shows the musculature  behind the hair of what looks like a bipedal anthropoid figure.

“I like Bigfoots & I cannot lie!”

If the image is real, that is.

To be honest, it’s hard not to feel suspect of this new photo, which could be either a small action figure posed in front of a forest background, or an elaborate suit composed of several felt patches. But a small part of me still wishes this image to be the real deal, and that it might foster a new batch of Bigfoot enthusiasm –even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

3 The curvy shape of another interesting character has been the subject of most debate amid many scholars. I’m talking about the legendary pharaoh Amenophis IV, better known as Akhenaten, whose effeminate features & bulbous abdomen has caused Egyptologists to ponder whether the ancient ruler suffered from some genetic disorder –and among the less orthodox it is the clear evidence of extraterrestrial hybridization.

Akhenaten – Hot alien dude or just weird looking human dude?

The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that Akhenaten’s religious views were revolutionary, in that he discarded the traditional pantheon of his forefathers in favor of one supreme deity: the Sun (Athen). Because of this, I think there’s a prevalent inclination among both scholars & profane to idealize this ancient king, and think of him as a progressive ruler ahead of his time.

Sadly, that might not be the case at all. New diggings at the commoner’s cemetery of Amarna –the short-lived capital of Egypt that Akhenaten ordered built in honor of the sun-god– provide tantalizing evidence that the monotheist pharaoh’s kingdom was no paradise on earth for his lowly subjects (both adults & children) whose skeleton remains show the effects of hard labor & severe malnutrition.

So next time an Ancient Aliens fan starts to tell you about Akhenaten & his extraterrestrial ascendency, point him or her to this article to show that, alien or not, the dude was still a major douchebag.

2 Some of the most beautiful examples of Egyptian jewelry are made of a mysterious type of yellow glass, that’s been a matter of debate for many years. To the conservatives the material was formed by the impact of a meteor or a cometary body, and to the more unorthodox thinkers it is evidence of nuclear detonations in ante-diluvian times.

If we follow the rationale that big meteor impacts occurred during the Anthropogenic era –i.e. when our ancestors were walking about– then it would help us understand the ancients’ widespread preoccupation with astronomy, and the detailed tracking of celestial bodies –something even in our modern age of iPads & Game of Thrones should worry us as well…

We were recently reminded of our fragility on February 15th, when a big fireball made worldwide headlines after it was seen crossing the skies of Russia, and ended up causing considerable material damage. Astronomers were quick to reassure us that the Russian meteoroid had nothing whatsoever to do with the asteroid 2012 DA14, which ALSO made a close flyby on that same day –even after reports from another fireball had come out of the Cuban province of Cienfuegos prior to the Feb. 15th incident.

Well, guess what: ANOTHER large (green!) fireball was spotted last Friday 22nd crossing the skies over the eastern coast of the United States. Have we suddenly moved to a slightly more dangerous spot of galactic real estate?

And it’s not that I wanna go all Chicken Little on y’all, but maybe we should start to seriously consider establishing an international effort to track & deflect all the hazardous pebbles zipping past our heads.

1 No matter how much we think we know about outer space, the Universe is always eager to beat the arrogance out of us. Of the things that keep cosmologists awake at night, one of the most dreaded is what they call the ‘Axis of Evil’. But unlike Bush & Cheney, who used the term to exploit the public’s ignorance for their own benefit, cosmologists coined the term to illustrate their own ignorance.

In the simplest laymen’s terms, the axis of evil refers to a seeming orientation in space, provided by the way hot & cold spots aligned against the cosmic microwave background (CMB). So where’s the evil in that, you might ask? The answer is that out current models of the Big Bang assume that the Universe’s origin was governed by complete random events, which would mean that during its initial stages, the Universe should display a perfectly homogeneous pattern. Should, yet it didn’t in 2005 when the CMB was first measured by Kate Land and João Magueijo at the Imperial College in London.

Dat Perfect Universe

The problem, most cosmologists concluded, would be surely solved once they obtained more detailed readings, which would no doubt erase that obnoxious axis once and for all. Such readings would be obtained thanks to the new Planck space telescope, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA), which was launched in January 2012.  Alas, the recently released findings of the telescope –which are 3 times more accurate than the initial data Land & Magueijo had in 2005– reveal that the Axis of Evil is still there, laughing at the face of modern Cosmology, and threatening to discard some of our more treasured ideas of how the Universe came to be.

So odd to think that in our Brave New World of the XXIst century, knowledge is still considered… demonic

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, wishing you never fear to learn that you might be wrong.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week we’ll investigate rumors of black-ops cetaceans & theories of night-vision Neanderthals. We’ll review the skepticism surrounding the new life forms discovered at lake Vostok, along with the apocalyptic overtones accompanying the election of the new Pope. And as we return once again to the planet Mars to study its potential for habitability in the past, we’ll learn about an amazing discovery which might shatter all our preconceptions about life in the universe. St Patrick’s is celebrated this weekend, so after our mission’s over let’s all jack into an Irish pub to have a few pints of Guiness!

10 For our first pill we’ll need to return to lake Vostok in Antarctica, which we visited just last week due to the claim that new forms of bacteria had been discovered beneath its ice cap. Well, as it’s often the case with extraordinary claims in the realm of Science –something we’ll discuss at length in this issue– a bunch of doubting Thomasses think the biological samples were contaminated.

The worst place in the world – Lake Vostok

But don’t put down your flamethrower just yet –the team in lake Vostok are already trying to obtain pure water samples for a new analysis, which unfortunately won’t be ready until next year.

9 The winter days in Antarctica have only a few hours of light, and in those conditions night vision would come in pretty handy. And  night vision brings us to one of our favorite topics here at the Pills: our extinct cousins the Neanderthals.

When one compares the skull of a Neanderthal right next to a modern Homo Sapiens skull, one will notice they both show almost the same brain volume. But a new study suggests that in their case of our cousins, most of that brain capacity was devoted to seeing in the dark –an evolutionary advantage for the long nights of Europe during the last Ice Age, but a very taxing attribute that came in the way of adapting to changes in their environment.

If you were Neanderthal this would be a beautiful garden, alas, you are not.

Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthals, and found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets.

“Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking,” she told BBC News.

Hmm… larger eye sockets and the capacity to see in the dark. Am I the only one thinking this is somewhat reminiscent of the alleged nocturnal habits of Bigfoot?

8 Most marine life forms have evolved to depend less on vision, which is of little use in the murky depths of the oceans. That is why dolphins are equipped with such a great sonar –and according to a very popular story this week, a group of dolphins in the Black Sea are also equipped with deadly weapons attached to their foreheads.

This elite cetacean commando were trained by the Ukrainian Navy for war-like missions like the laying or hunting of mines, or even “attacking enemy frogmen using “knives or pistols” attached to their heads.” And now the menacing sea mammals are on the loose & surely up to no good –What do you know: Karl Pilkington was right once again!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now don’t be fooled by all the updates saying this news was a hoax. It’s all part of the Reptilian/Cetacean New (Sea) World Order conspiracy!

7 Even without sex-crazed gun-carrying dolphins, the sea can be extremely dangerous. A fact the survivors of the 2011 tsunami in Japan know only too well…

In what is a clear example of how societal stigma varies from culture to culture, many of the Japanese survivors are being haunted by visions of the people who died during the terrible tragedy. Modern medicine deems these problems as the result of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) And since Japanese society are wary of people suffering from mental problems, the survivors are turning instead to exorcists to help them cope with the anxiety.

We all know that in Western society the tables are turned, and people who claim to see ghosts are the ones labeled as in need of psychiatric (or even psychotropic) attention –even if they don’t want it. But WHY are we so quick to judge these as merely mental problems? Perhaps seeking the service of a so-called ‘exorcist’ you find in the Yellow Pages might not be the best course of action, but neither is IMO to think that non-ordinary visual stimuli is the the exclusive result of hallucinations, which can be remedied by ingesting a magic pill.

Perhaps in the future we’ll come to acknowledge that life-threatening experiences alter human perception, and render survivors of disasters more sensitive to other planes of existence –if only for a brief period of time in most cases.

6 For most people, religion offers the only acceptable outlet to the belief of paranormal phenomena. And despite all the backlash it has received in recent years, Catholicism remains one of the strongest religions in the whole world, with about 1.2 billion followers spread through the 5 continents –that’s why penguins in the South Pole look like nuns & viceversa.

So I guess only people in a coma –or who are still hiding inside their bunker because their radio went dead and haven’t learned the world didn’t end last December– are about the only ones who haven’t heard the news that a new Pope was elected on the auspicious date of 13-03-13 –to learn why I say it’s auspicious, read this entry on my personal blog.

I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie
to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop
the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat

A lot of things has surfaced & been said about Jorge Mario Bergoglio (a.k.a. Pope Francis) ranging from interesting –he only has one lung, he’s a HUGE Soccer fan & likes to use public transportation– to inflammatory –activists accuse him of not fighting the military regime in the 70s– to the utterly batshit crazy –Venezuelans say Hugo Chávez influenced on Bergoglio’s election from heaven! Aye Carumba…

As a former Catholic myself, I’m experiencing a mixed range of feelings with this election. On the one hand, I’ve always felt admiration toward the Jesuit order, whom I not only acknowledged as the intellectual elite of the church, but also thought of them as ecclesiastical badasses ever since I watched The Exorcist & The Mission.

I also hope that Bergoglio is going to try to remind the Church of their oft neglected responsibilities with the poor of the world. Having said that, I’m also all too well aware of his (new) holiness stance re. gay marriage & abortion, so whoever is expecting the Church to change their policies on those topics is probably going to be sorely disappointed.

But I still think electing a man from Latin America was a step in the right direction. The only problem is that now Argentinians are going to be even more insufferable than they already were –didn’t they have enough with having the best football player in the world??

Lionel Messi, appearing a golden ball as part of his magic show in Vegas

5 Would the new Pope be asked to state his position on the ‘god particle’? Though that’s somewhat unlikely, the truth is that scientists at CERN are now pretty confident that what they found last year is ‘a’ Higgs boson.

ConCERN dissipates as Higgs Bronson emerges from his metallic tunnel hidey hole

Why the ‘a’ distinction you might ask? because although the new particle behaves in much the same way as what the legendary Higgs boson is supposed to, the physicists are not yet sure it’s exactly the type of particle the Standard Model predicts. And that level of accuracy demands more data than what the scientists have collected so far, which won’t be available until the LHC is fired up again in 2015.

So I guess Mr. Higgs will just have to wait a couple more years to collect his Nobel prize?

4 If you think the CERN dudes are taking their sweet time to make things all nice & official, that ain’t nothing compared to the time NASA has taken to confirm what is by now pretty obvious even to a ten-year-old: that Mars had the conditions to harbor life in the past.

Robot porn

The issue of habitability is “in the bag,” said John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and the mission’s lead scientist, during a press briefing announcing the results on Tuesday.

The minerals in the tiny, gray, ground-rock sample exposed by Curiosity’s drill speak of abundant standing water, conditions neither too acidic or too alkaline for life, and the minerals that would have provided a ready energy source for microbes, if any had been there

COME ON, NASA!! Dontcha think this acclimatization gig has taken way too long? We can take it, just show us some damn Martian microbes already!

3 With or without Martian microbes, sending human missions to the Red Planet is a question of when. We know there’s a rich guy who wants to send a married couple in the not-so-distant future, and of course –humans being humans– it’s not so unreasonable to imagine the happy couple would be eager to enjoy a few ahem, recreational activities during the long journey.

Well, it turns out that in keeping with their long tradition of acting like killjoy know-it-alls, some eggheads fear that sex in space could be really hazardous to your health. *Sniff* All my Barbarella fantasies are fading before my eyes :’-(

Dirty little…

Co-researcher Dr Youssef Chebli said: ‘Thanks to the facilities at the European Space Agency I was able to determine how hypergravity and simulated microgravity affect the intracellular trafficking in the rapidly growing pollen tube

We chose pollen – the carrier of the male sperm cells – as our model because of its pivotal role in plant reproduction and agriculture and because of its extraordinarily rapid growth, meaning we could observe the effects of the hypergravity within seconds.’
The researchers stained specific structures within the cells which revealed how the components move around and how the cellular transport logistics responds to the changing gravity environment.

Dr Chebli said: “We found intracellular traffic flow is compromised under hyper-gravity conditions and both hyper and microgravity affect the precisely coordinated construction of the cellular envelope in the growing cell.

‘This allows us not only to understand general principles of the reproductive mechanism in plants but, more importantly, how the intracellular transport machinery in eukaryotic cells responds to altered gravity conditions.

Translation: What’s bad enough for plant nookie, is probably bad enough for us too.

And yet this sort of fear to the unknown has been present in space exploration ever since scientists wondered whether the human heart would be able to pump blood on zero g.  And time & time again those fears have been proven overrated.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Damn right! Light the candles and let’s get ready to boldly come where no one has come before.

2 There’s probably one thing that humans fear more than the unknown, and that is dangerous ideas & the heretics that propose them. The easiest way to stop the spreading of ideas you’re not comfortable with is labeling them as pseudo-science –and when that fails, then it’s time to light the torches & start the witch hunt.

Such appalling witch-hunting has unfortunately reached the heart of the TED talks, which were once the paragon in the dissemination of inspiring ideas & novel theories. But now the managers of TED have shown their true colors by yielding to the harassment of debunking atheists, and proceeded to delete the videos of the talks given by Rupert Sheldrake & Graham Hancock.

Hancock on stage

When Hancock & Sheldrake’s fans cried foul, TED did a bit of backpedaling & re-posted the 2 videos on their blog, BUT they were now private videos relegated to a dark corner in their website. The moment Hancock himself put TED’s curator Chris Anderson to task for this decision and demanded tangible evidence that showed his talk was ‘unscientific’, Anderson gave a weak-ass reply –“sorry, can’t talk right now, BRB. Also, Wikipedia sez U suck!!”

As to be expected in these sort of cases, the usual suspects have jumped in to attack Graham & Rupert while applauding TED’s dick move:

Concerns that the once-prestigious TED brand was being diluted and contaminated by sloppy scholarship and bad science grew so loud that in December 2012, TED representatives issued a letter to TEDx affiliates about it.

The letter noted that as “TEDx organizers, your audience’s trust is your top priority, over and above any other personal or business relationship that may have brought this speaker to your attention. It is not your audience’s job to figure out if a speaker is offering legitimate science or not. It is your job. [emphasis mine] 

The consequence of bad science and health hoaxes are not trivial. As an example, Andrew Wakefield’s attempt to link autism and vaccines was exposed as a hoax last year. But while his work was being investigated, millions of children went without vaccines, and many contracted deadly illnesses as a result. We take this seriously. Presenting bad science on the TEDx stage is grounds for revoking your license.”

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity of asking a question to the late writer Carlos Fuentes, concerning the proliferation of questionable information on the Internet. His answer was that he didn’t see this as a problem, because the alternative –the censoring of ideas– was so much worse. I agree with Fuentes, so thanks TED, but I’d rather think by myself –and if allowing the ideas of Sheldrake, Hancock & other heretics to spread means we also have to put up with Creationism & Holocaust deniers, then so be it.

The alternative IS worse.

1 Continuing with the attacks against heretical ideas, and one idea which has walked the blurry line between heresy & orthodoxy is Panspermia. The idea that the building blocks for life are abundant in the Universe, and that life on Earth was kickstarted by some sort of microorganism hitching a ride aboard a comet or meteorite is not so unorthodox in the XXIst century, but still to say you have found actual fossilized microorganisms inside a space rock is something is a claim that will certainly not go unchallenged.

Zoom.

That claim has been made by a group of astrobiologists at Cardiff University in the UK, who took electron-microscope images of fragments of what they think was a small cometary body, which crashed in Sri Lanka in December 2012.

The results of these tests, which the Cardiff team reveal today, are extraordinary.  They say the stones contain fossilised biological structures fused into the rock matrix and that their tests clearly rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination.

The Bad Astronomer begs to differ, the same way he did when we first mentioned this story in January. In his opinion the Cardiff team made some very crass errors –”They don’t establish (the samples) were from the claimed meteor event over Sri Lanka in December 2012. And perhaps most telling, they don’t eliminate the possibility of contamination; that is, diatoms got into the samples because those rocks were sitting on the Earth where diatoms are everywhere.”

The way this is going, I’m afraid that meteorites won’t be allowed to contain fossilized microorganisms until we actually send a space mission to the asteroid belt and find them in situ. And even then I’m sure someone will dismiss it all as Earthly contamination. *Sigh* how right was Max Planck when he said that Science advances one funeral at a time…

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, reminding you that NO ONE should do your thinking for you –which also means you can also disregard this advice as well.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! On this week’s mission we’ll explore miracle cures & black-op diseases, drone invasions & zombie outbreaks, celebrity sightings of UFOs & unknown civilizations on the desert. And as we discover the secrets of Europa’s hidden oceans, we’ll learn how alien life can be found right here on our own planet. A note of warning to all Springbreakers joining us: Wet-shirt contests are STRICTLY forbidden aboard the Nebuchadnezzar!

10 We start our trip with very good news from the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta: Dr. Deborah Persaud, a virologist of the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, announced that a baby girl with HIV had been fully cured using conventional drugs, which could mean that a treatment for infants suffering from the disease in its early stages could be developed.

Science – Curing babies of AIDS like BOSSES

With this baby the doctors opted for a more aggressive treatment than usual, which seemed to have taken the virus out of the girl’s blood system before it could take refuge in her body. Thus, she’s now been declared ‘functionally cured’, and her treatment opens a window of hope that in the not-too distant future we’ll be able to eradicate the so-called ‘plague of the XXth century.’

9 Unfortunately we still have along way to go in order to cure cancer, which claims the lives of millions of people world-wide regardless of their status or position. Such is the case of Hugo Chávez, the dicta– um, I mean ‘president for life’ of Venezuela, who succumbed to his 2-year-long battle with cancer last week.

You! NO, YOU!

A controversial figure all his life, it’s no wonder that his death has managed to spark a few conspiracy theories: from his political heir –now interim president– Nicolás Maduro blaming the American government & the CIA for the untimely death of the leader of the Bolivarian revolution, to some pundits speculating whether Chávez had been secretly flown to Cuba & died there instead of in Venezuela.

Personally I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t have a chance to have a REAL conspiracy theory a-la ‘Moon Over Parador’ style:

Click here to view the embedded video.

8 Maduro has recently announced that his beloved Comandante will be embalmed & his body preserved on a glass sarcophagus for all posterity… or until Chávez rises from the grave –thanks to a secret Amazonian ritual– to exact his revenge on the Yanqui empire. Damn! too bad Oliver North does not direct horror flicks…

While an attack of Communist mummies doesn’t seem of particular concern to the American government, a zombie outbreak seems to be a different matter, in light of FEMA’s planned ‘zombie UFO crash’ disaster drill which will be taken place in Nevada next April, which leads me to believe there are some serious fans of Half Life working on that agency.

But David Lory VanDerBeek, candidate for governor of Nevada, is sure no fan of Gordon Freeman nor FEMA for that matter, an in a recent statement on his website condemning the lack of transparency re. the drill, he made a rather head-scratching remark:

“Personally, I do not believe in UFOs or zombies and neither does anyone in the federal government. It is quite likely that our government has a created a bio-chemical weapon that can induce zombie-like behaviors in humans and therefore assist in a mass murder event to promote global depopulation without taking the blame.”

I say silly things in public.

Wait, WHAT?? A military zombie gun? Has VanDerBeek been privy to classified information or is he just wooing (Ha!) the tinfoil hat-wearing vote?

7 Speaking of tinfoil hats, a 35-year-old man from Louisiana wearing one –to deflect microwaves entering to his head, of course– was arrested after threatening to burn down 4 schools. A mugshot of this fella makes me think he’s burned a lot of stuff all right –possibly after rolling it with paper.

Pfft! Amateurs… EVERYBODY knows you need to keep your tinfoil hat on the outside for maximum efficiency, as shown by this gentleman and his feline handler.

6 But no amount of tinfoil is gonna protect you from a drone, which seem to be proliferating like a damn locust plague right out of the Old Testament. Right now the FAA is investigating a possible drone sighting reported by both a passenger and the pilot from an Alitalia flight as the plane was making its final approach to the John F. Kennedy airport in New York.

RPJ is watching…

“We saw a drone, a drone aircraft,” the pilot said, according to audio posted on the website LiveATC.net, which aggregates air traffic communications.

The pilot reportedly spotted the unmanned aerial vehicle as he was preparing to land at 1:15 pm Monday, but was able to touch down normally and did not have to take any special measures to avoid it, CNN reports.

Details about this alleged unmanned vehicle have not surfaced on the news that I’m aware of, but the fact that this ‘drone’ was spotted at an altitude of 1,500 feet would lead us to suspect this is not your typical RC toy plane. It’s possible that in the future, as drones become more common, blocking mechanisms will be installed which will prevent them from reaching the altitudes used by commercial flights.

…But what if it wasn’t a terrestrial drone?

5 Until the FAA determines the exact origin and nature of the object observed over New York, it technically remains a UFO. Another UFO story which provoked a lot of comment this week was started by the famous Kiwi actor Russell Crowe, when he (or someone using his account) uploaded a ‘time-lapse’ video –in reality a timed exposure– made with photographs he took on Woolloomooloo –not enough ‘o’s with that name IMO– 4 years ago.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alas, before we could start theorizing that perhaps aliens have fetish for places with silly names –mount Popocatépetl, for instance– some skeptic gladiators were quick to debunk the video, which seems to be nothing more than the reflection of a boat passing by. Better luck next time, Russell –you still kicked ass with your performance of Javert, mate!

Click here to view the embedded video.

4 Another ‘celebrity’ –this one from the realm of alternative history– who has been constantly attacked & ridiculed for his ideas is Egyptologist John Anthony West, ever since he proposed that the Sphinx is thousands of years older than what is commonly accepted, and was built by an advanced civilization that predated the Egyptian dynasties.

Orthodox historians were quick to ask: “where’s the evidence for these more ancient civilizations?” because back then they were still under the assumption that, before Egypt & Mesopotamia, there were nothing but tribes of hunter gatherers too busy trying to stay alive to waste time building megalithic constructions. But then came the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and all those cynic voices were forced to stay silent.

Now a new discovery of an advanced civilization which inhabited the Arabian peninsula more than 9000 years ago is forcing us to reconsider our theories of animal domestication. Among the objects unearthed in the remote region of Al Magar is the statue of a horse –or to be more precise, the ancient relative of our modern horses.

According to Ali bin Ibrahim Al Ghabban, vice-president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, DNA and carbon-14 (radiocarbon) tests are continuing. But initial evidence suggests that the artefacts date back 9,000 years.

“These discoveries reflect the importance of the site as a centre of civilisation,” he told BBC News.

“It could possibly be the birthplace of an advanced prehistoric civilisation that witnessed the domestication of animals, particularly the horse, for the first time during the Neolithic period.”

What more surprises will we find in the desert sands, left long ago by these mysterious horse lords? a Neolithic version of Helm’s Deep perhaps?

3 Getting back to John Anthony West, his famous documentary Mystery of the Sphinx dabbled a little bit in the enigmatic relationship between ancient Egypt & the planet Mars –the word Cairo after all, is derived from Al Qahir, the Arabic name for Mars…

Mars was in the news once again this week when it was announced that new 3D radar reconstructions of the Elysium planitia –a geographical region along Mars’ equator– show buried flood channels, furthering the evidence for a more wetter period in the Red Planet’s past.

But the reason I found this news so interesting, which was obviously not mentioned in the mainstream channels, is that before the finding of these channels the Elysium planitia was already famous for some other formations: the Elysium pyramids.

Even Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos wrote that the pyramids deserved closer scrutiny. And how auspicious that in the same region where possible evidence of a Martian civilization is located, we now find evidence that this region was also rich in water –precisely what a civilization would need to survive!

2 With liquid water life is not only possible: it is almost inevitable. Using the Keck II telescope and the Osiris spectrometer in Mauna Kea –yet another Egypt synchronicity– astronomers have detected what lies beneath the ice sheet of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons: a huge ocean of salt water. According to Mike Brown, a scientist at Caltech who co-wrote a paper on the Jovian satellite, Europa’s oceans would be a lot like ours. Thus, the only ingredient needed for the evolution of life would be some sort of energy source –likely an active volcano heating the water & provoking the creation of complex chemical compounds.

Today’s technology gave researchers their best image yet of the moon’s chemical fingerprint. There’s salt, sulfur and possibly even magnesium — all chemicals found on Earth.

Outside of landing a microphone on the surface and listening for whales below, Brown joked, landing something on Europa for a soil sample is the best option.

“We have the technology to do it,” Brown said. “Europa just sticks out like a sore thumb, with this place with huge amounts of water.”

1 The best place to test the technologies for a future mission to Europa would be the polar regions of our planet. In this regard, the Russians seem to be ahead of everybody else, now that they have successfully drilled into the interior of lake Vostok, taking back samples of water that had remained isolated for millions of years. And what did they find? ALIENS –or at least, the closest a scientist has come to finding life different to what we already know on Earth:

“After excluding all known contaminants, bacterial DNA was found that does not match any known species in world databases,” Sergei Bulat of the St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute told RIA.

“If it (the bacteria) had been found on Mars, then without a doubt we would have said there is life on Mars – but this is DNA from Earth,” he said. “We are calling this life form unidentified or unclassified.”

Pozdravlyayu, Sergei! But just a word of caution, tovarishch: keep an eye on the dogs, and keep your flamethrower close –because you never know…

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out. Remember what I said about wet shirt contests, bros? Well that ALSO stands for mud-wrestling contests too, dammit!!

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! On this week’s journey through the Fortean Matrix we’ll find spinning black holes & 3d printed cars, telepathic rats & NDE movies. And as we take a look at the Russian version of the X-files, we’ll open a bottle of champagne for that lucky couple who’ll enjoy a romantic trip to the planet Mars & back. You know, the Nebuchadnezzar also offers special trips for newlyweds, so you might wanna consider us in your honeymoon arrangements –what’s more romantic than a trip through the abandoned sewer system of a ruined megalopolis? After fleeing a sentinel attack, NOTHING in your marriage will appear too hard to handle.

10 Our first pill takes us close to the Cosmic version of the Leviathan monster: a black hole. For the first time scientists have been able to calculate the spin rate of a super-massive black hole, and were surprised to find out it was spinning at 84% the speed of light, which would be as fast as the laws of physics would permit. And just think that this galactic behemoth is 2 million miles in diameter, and its YOUR head the one that’ll start spinning uncontrollably.

God is the ultimate DJ, yo!

9 Another thing that’s also fast-pacing, although on a metaphorical sense, is human ingenuity. And one field that promises to increase its pace even further is 3-D printing. We’ve often discussed this fascinating technology on the Pills, and now we unveil its latest development: Urbee 2, the 3-D printable automobile.

Designed by engineer Jim Kor, Urbee’s light-weight polymer chassis is as tough as steel, and the whole car takes around 2500 hours to be printed in a large-scale printer. Granted, that’s not very efficient; but still, think of the possibilities: limitless customization, cheap replacement of worn-down or broken parts without the fear that your local shop has to order the piece & You have to take a cab to work until its delivered. Not only that, but 3-D printing would give car makers the freedom of producing the cars with fewer parts, translating in a reduced price tag.

Personally, I can’t wait until the Urbee is available for sale.

8 But sometimes the price of human ingenuity is paid by other species. Take for example lab rats: Egg-heads have spent quite a lot of time endowing them with super-musculature, enhanced brain power, or even an extended life span. But not happy with that, now the egg-heads have gone one step further, and granted the rats the ability to ‘telepathically’ communicate with each other, thanks to microscopic electrodes implanted into their brains.

For the love of Shepard, you people: STOP giving super-powers to vermin! This is a trend that’s not going to end well for humanity.

7 Then again, those lab rats are treated far more humanely than how Nazi criminals treated the members of our own species inside their concentration camps. This week the New York Times reported on a new study, conducted by a group of historians who made a shocking discovery: The Nazis had around 42,500 ghettos & camps spread all around Europe, a figure so high many academicians did a double take when the group presented their findings during a forum at the German Historical Institute in Washington in late January.

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

An estimate of 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned or exterminated inside these camps. Proof that no matter how much we think we knew about the brutality of Hitler’s minions, there is still much to be dug out and preserved, so that never again our culture falls into such levels of inhumanity.

6 In the XXth century even people who would have been shocked by the crimes committed by the III Reich did nevertheless share some of their beliefs concerning what is usually known as Social Darwinism: the idea that ‘survival of the fittest’ should be applied to society in order to ‘cull down’ those members deemed a burden to the rest of the group.

Those ‘undesirables’ vary depending on the values of a given community: people with mental problems, those who displayed ‘sexual deviancy’, or in the case of James ‘the Amazing’ Randi, those addicted to illegal substances. At least that’s what one might infer from a post written by Randi on his blog, in which he expresses his personal disdain for “those individuals who were stupid enough to rush into the arms of the mythical houris and/or Adonis’s” and who would do well to just drop dead for the benefit of the rest of us.

That quote, and another one provided by Randi to author Will Storr during an interview, has been the subject of a little controversy now that Storr’s book The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science has been published. In the book Storr writes that when he confronted Randi with the quote of his blog, instead of backing up Randi expounded on his thoughts:

“I’m a believer in Social Darwinism. Not in every case. I would do anything to stop a twelve-year-old kid from doing it. Sincerely. But in general, I think that Darwinism, survival of the fittest, should be allowed to act itself out. As long as it doesn’t interfere with me and other sensible, rational people who could be affected by it. Innocent people, in other words.”

So it would seem that the founder of the JREF, an institution which promotes itself as the champion of helpless victims in danger of being hoodwinked by charlatans & hucksters –because according to them, ALL people who claim to have psychic abilities are either charlatans or self-deluded– doesn’t think the same of drug addicts, who –in his own words– are “stupid people. And if they can’t survive, they don’t have the IQ, don’t have the thinking power to be able to survive, it’s unfortunate; I would hate to see it happen, but at the same time, it would clear the air.”

Last Friday Sharon Hill posted a response from the JREF foundation with regards to Storr’s book:

“The statement “I’m a believer in social Darwinism,” did not come from me. In fact, I had to look up the expression to learn what was being referred to. This attack appears to be calling me a Nazi, nothing less. I demand that Mr. Storr refer me to the original sources to which we assume he has referred. Until then, I’ll only say that he has carefully selected phrases and statements out of context, not the sort of referencing that I would have expected from him.”

So now the response of several members of the skeptical community was to suspect Storr of quote-mining, or even libel against one of their most respected leaders. Unfortunately for them, skeptic blogger Hayley Stevens interjected when she wrote that she herself had heard Storr’s original tape, and the tape disproved Randi’s recent allegations:

I listened to the interview being played to me over the phone and I heard James Randi talk about how he believed that those addicted to substances should be allowed to “do themselves in“. He then said ‘I’m a believer in, if you call that Social Darwinism, I would have to generally agree”. There’s a pause and then Storr points out that many would consider such a belief to be a right wing view of other people. The conversation continues.

So by Saturday the JREF had to do some damage control. On the comment thread in Sharon’s page Randi wrote:

Until just recently, I did not recall having spoken with Mr. Storr years ago about certain comments posted on randi.org, and I barely recall that event, even now This is an understandable lapse, since I’m constantly being interviewed, and often under circumstances that call for my attention to be otherwise directed, Also, some interviews occurred during a time of my life in recent years when my health – and thus my cognition – were not at their best. The unfair suggestion that Mr. Storr tried to provoke me, or that he’s a “bad guy,” is something I must dismiss, since I believe I would have remembered that sort of behavior. In any case, I now know much more about the described encounter, and I maintain that I would never have said I was a Social Darwinist, since I only recently learned in detail what that term really means, and in fact I was quite ignorant of the history of the movement organized around that false idea. I’ve been surprised that this was not obvious to people discussing the matter, but I accept that the conversation with Mr. Storr went just as described. No problem with that.

Go to the webpages and read all the statements by yourself. After you finish you might find yourself thinking –as am I– that the skeptic community is uncomfortably conceding that one of their most notable spokesperson is nevertheless holding to some rather antiquated –and, more to the point, unscientific– ideas, and that said ideas and the recent controversy are the result of his advanced age –Randi is an octogenarian– & declining health. You can go to Doubtful News & The Daily Grail to read my personal stance on this situation as well, but I’ll finish by only asking you this: what does it say to you when the founder of a famous educational institution claims that up until now he didn’t know what Social Darwinism is?

5 On his reply at Doubtful News Randi asked that the JREF & himself  were not treated as targets, and yet Randi himself has made a career of treating people who hold ideas antagonistic to his as veritable bulls-eyes.  One of the skeptic/atheist movement’s favorite scape goat is NDE research, and that’s why that after the publication of Dr. Eben Alexander’s best-selling book Proof of Heaven, has been the subject of many scathing criticisms written by some of the most prominent spokespersons in that community.

Those folks are probably not too pleased to learn that Universal has acquired the movie rights of Alexander’s book, a decision which will no doubt will bring the controversial claims of this neurosurgeon to an even bigger audience. What can I say, guys? even with that corny title, Proof of Heaven sounds like a much more fun movie experience than The God’s Delusion.

4 Admit it: We *all* cried the 1st time we watched Titanic, even if now we can’t stand Celine Dion’s song & think that old lady was a selfish bitch for throwing the jewel into the ocean. And even though James Cameron is no doubt planning several sequels to Avatar, the possibility to a Titanic II coming to your nearest Multiplex is rather unlikely –unless it was a ghost movie or something.

But, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a Titanic II in real life. And that’s exactly Australian billionaire Clive Palmer’s vision, as he plans to unveil the replica to the world’s most famous ship by 2016? And you know why I think this is gonna work? Because by then there won’t be any freaking icebergs left in the ocean. Thank you, global warming!

3 Unlike Titanic,which gets tiresome after one view, I’ll never get tired of watching the original Star Wars trilogy. I’m sure I’m not the only mid-aged nerd who once dreamed of having a furry 7-foot-tall sidekick who would rip the arms off my school enemies.

And now that alleged screen-shots of the controversial Erickson project have leaked into the Internet, I believe a new Fortean meme should be coined: Chewbasquatch.

The Erickson project is currently linked to the Melba Ketchum DNA study. I’m no Jedi, but I’ve gotta bad feeling about all of this…

2 Just as the Star Wars movies kindled my geeky passion in the 80s, the X-Files TV series appealed to my Fortean sensibilities in the 90s. And speaking of the X-Files, a very interesting article was published last week on Pravda, concerning the disclosing of a secret project carried out during the Soviet era, whose goal was to get in contact with alien intelligences.

Yes, I’m fully aware that Pravda is not exactly the most reliable news source in the world, but still I must admit that the contents of the article make a lot of sense to me. The retired senior officers of the Soviet Ministry of Defense explained how they ‘lured’ UFOs by increasing the activity on a certain missile testing ground –something that reminds me of the famous Rendlesham case in the UK.

The main project of the unit was a state program on the discovery of intellectual human resources. The goal of the program was to identify ways to make the human brain work in a special regime of super-powers, making a person a superhuman. The Scientific Council of the program was led by an Academician Natalya Bekhtereva, who until her death served as a scientific director of the Institute of Human Brain of RAS.

Over two hundred highly skilled professionals from across the country participated in the program. “In the process of research, we came to the conclusion that a human was an energy and information system that receives information from outside. This is precisely why a human can manifest paranormal abilities,” said Alexey Savin. In order to identify this external source of information, three groups were created. One group was formed from scientists, another – from military, and the third one was composed of women.

The group of women made the most significant progress in the research. Savin explained that they “wanted to make a contact with representatives of other civilizations. And we did it.” According to him, a special method has been developed that allowed the human brain to tune into a contact. “We had to tune energy-contour of the human brain to a particular wave, like a radio,” Alexey Savin explained.

To anyone moderately versed in the UFO phenomenon, none of this should be particularly shocking. The US military’s experiments with remote viewing also yielded somewhat similar results. And on top of that, reading the Pravda article also reminded me of our friend Nick Redfern’s book Final Events.

No hypnosis, drugs, or other similar methods were used in the course of the experiment. A special system of testing was also developed to separate the incoming reports from hallucinations and insanity of the experiment participants. The experimental results were impressive: six participants were given a chance of physical contact, and two of them even managed to visit an alien ship. According to Savin, representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations revealed themselves gradually, giving away the information as they saw fit.

In particular, they talked about their government structure and education system. No information on the military could be obtained. The only thing they agreed to share was a scheme of the equipment for the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases. The head of the experiment explained that humans were like small children to them. “Our civilization is too young to be of interest to them as a subject for a dialogue. Because we are also a part of the universe, we may harm ourselves and other civilizations with our foolish actions, so they are looking out for us. “

That last quote is particularly tantalizing, considering how one of my favorite explanations for the Fermi paradox is the Quarantine hypothesis.

1 My cosmic compadre Micah Hanks has publicly stated that in his opinion there’s still no reliable evidence pointing out to an extraterrestrial explanation for the UFO phenomenon. While I tend to agree with him, I would nevertheless point out that there a handful of interesting exceptions to that claim. One of those exceptions is the famous disappearance of the Soviet probe Phobos II, which before going silent managed to capture a rather enigmatic shadow cast by a gigantic object on the surface of the Martian moon.

Whether or not there’s an extraterrestrial intelligence patrolling the orbit of Mars is something that hasn’t stopped our efforts of establishing a human presence on that planet –although perhaps it has delayed them. And the big news this week was the announcement made by Dennis Tito, the 1st space tourist in the world, of sending a couple of humans –a man and a woman, preferably married and past their reproductive age– to a 501-day fly-by trip to Mars.

“Inspiration Mars reminds me of Apollo 8 in 1968, going around the moon,” software billionaire Charles Simonyi, who spent tens of millions of dollars buying two flights to the International Space Station, said in a Twitter update. “Inspiration is a goal for humans, science should be left to the rovers.”

I wholeheartedly concur, and even though many space pundits are expressing their skepticism that Tito’s project will be ready in time to take advantage of the brief 2018 window –an event that repeats every 15 years when the Earth & Mars align & distances are considerably shorter– I for one wish him the best of luck.

May I suggest nonetheless that instead of sending a heterosexual couple to consider conjoined twins as the 1st human visitors to the Red planet? After all, these are folks guaranteed to tolerate each other during a cramped year-and-a-half long space trip.

I mean if you’re already taking advantage of nature to ensure your plan is successful, then go the distance, dude! Just sayin…

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, wishing you Siamese dreams tonight.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week the Fortean Matrix has in store for us a veritable cornucopia of news almost too fantastic to believe. We’ll find cybernetic limbs & augmented reality gadgets, UFOs over volcanoes & ape-men on ice. And as we learn of Obama’s plan to unravel the secrets of the human brain, we’ll find another project intended to confirm the reality of one of our favorite mysteries, using the allure of a big price in cash. I don’t know about you, but I could certainly use all that dough;  the Nebuchadnezzar would look nicer with a new coat of paint –and a jacuzzi, definitely a jacuzzi.

10 Our first Pill takes us to Oklahoma, where the Sheriff of Sequoyah county James Lockhart is finding no conventional explanation for the death of Danny Vanzandt, a 66-year-old who died in a fire at his residence last Monday.

Lockhart said the remains were in the kitchen and there was no other damage in the home. The sheriff says there was no apparent source of the fire.
“This is a case that I’ve never seen before,” Lockhart told KFSM-TV.

A possible theory the local authorities are considering: that Mr. Vanzandt spontaneously combusted.

“I think there’s only about 200 cases worldwide, and I’m not saying this happened. I’m just saying that we haven’t ruled it out,” Lockhart told KFSM.

We’ve previously covered another case of SHC here at the Pills, and I’m still undecided on which form of death is more terrible: spontaneously combusting with no prior warning or being mauled by a hungry tiger. When it comes to leaving this mortal coil, Mother Nature *loves* variety, doesn’t she? Sadistic bitch…

9 Come to think of it, there’s a form of death which IMO is far more terrible than being mauled by a tiger or being crushed by a snow avalanche, and that is Alzheimer’s. I have personally witnessed the mental deterioration caused by this illness on a family member, and seeing how the person you used to love & know is  slowly fading away right in front of you is an agony in itself, especially because you know there’s nothing you can do about it.

That might someday come to change though, thanks to a decade-long scientific project planned by the Obama administration, seeking to follow on the footsteps of the historic Human Genome Project of the 90s. But instead of decoding our DNA, the Brain Activity Map project will seek to unravel the mystery & complexity of the human brain.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

The thing that makes this project so important, is because it has the incredible potential of becoming a watershed moment not just for Science, but for the entire Human civilization. Like many of you reading these lines, I disagree with the current materialistic paradigm which posits that the brain is the sole generator of consciousness, and just like the Human Genome Project’s gave way to more questions than answers, I think it’s very likely that the Brain Activity Map project will find there’s much more to consciousness than the firing of electrochemical signals between neurons.
Then again, I could be wrong. And that too could result in a ground-breaking moment in our modern culture, as religions across the world would have to face the results of this bold study.

8 Obama’s project could also pave way to unforeseen advances in the field of A.I. While we wait for the arrival of our cybernetic overlords, we might as well upgrade ourselves in preparation for the big battle. One possibility to cyborg-pimp yourself is with this new bionic hand that lets the wearer ‘feel’ whatever it is the hand is touching –car keys, bosoms, lightsabers, you name it.

The wiring of his new bionic hand will be connected to the patient’s nervous system with the hope that the man will be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receiving touch signals from the hand’s skin sensors.

But if you don’t like the idea of intrusive wiring into your skull in order to control your mechanical hand, fret not: Temporary tattoos will soon let you not only control the new artificial limbs in your body, but it might also allow you to control drones, move things around your house just with your thoughts, and even communicate with your friends without any kind of smartphone or gadget. Just so you know Apple, I already copyrighted the term iPatch, k?

7 A Brave New World is on the horizon. How will it look like? The folks of Google wanted to answer that question, and gave us a glimpse of their newest project: Google Glass.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Will you be able to sidle up next to a Google Glass wearer and say “ok glass, show me midget porn” or are they tied to wearer’s voice?”

Indeed, the future looks Trollising.

6 Imagine just how many more videos of the Russian meteor we would have by now, if the Google Glass was already on the market. Still, it probably wouldn’t help dissipate the mistrust about a considerable portion of the Russian population, who don’t believe the ‘official’ explanation given to the fiery bolid that exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk with the energy of 30 Hiroshima bombs. Ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky has exploited the event by claiming it was a weapon test by the Amerikinsky, and the daily Noviye Izvestia conducted a survey showing that barely half its readers believe the meteor explanation.

Some commentators at io9 alluded this culture of mistrust to the fact that the Age of the Enlightenment had skipped Russia. I, along with some others, think this is the result of the way Soviet regimes manipulated the news with propaganda. Let’s just remember the way the Kremlin behaved during the first weeks of the Chernobyl incident in the 80s.

And while we’re at it, let’s also think of the current state of events on the other side of the pond, with an increasing number of American citizens who don’t believe in the explanations given by their own government. IMO Washington is also to blame for hazardous state of mistrust infecting our culture in the XXIst century –magic bullet anyone?

5 Speaking of conspiracy theories, remember those guys who wanted to sue CERN because they feared the Large Hadron Collider would create a black hole that  would then swallow the Earth? Well, maybe they were into something after all! Turns out that now that particle physicists have (most likely) discovered the Higgs boson, its calculated mass has just the right value to permit the creation of a giant fast-spreading bubble –another universe, actually– that will end up obliterating our old one. So money well spent, CERN!

Then again, the folks in India have been telling us pretty much the same thing with their concept of Brahma’s dream. So I guess we should have gotten over it by now.

4 But Because the CERN dudes shouldn’t hog all the limelight, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is teasing with some soon-to-be-released groundbreaking news concerning one of the biggest mysteries in modern physics: the enigmatic dark matter.

“We are so excited because we believe we are on the threshold of a major discovery,” said Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, at an annual conference.
“On the cosmology side we now understand that this mysterious dark matter holds together our galaxy and the rest of the universe,” said Turner.

While I’m pretty sure the answer is not gonna be dust or the meatballs of the giant spaghetti monster, the news nonetheless has the potential to revolutionize the world of Science. Stay tuned!

3 The field of cryptozoology has mysteries of its own. One of them deals with the famous Minnesota ice man, a carnival attraction that managed to stir a great deal of controversy when it received the endorsement of 2 of the most respected researchers in the field –Ivan T. Sanderson & Bernard Heuvelmans– only to disappear amid allegations of forgeries & secret acquisitions. A true detective story worthy of Sherlock Holmes, or at least Fox Mulder.
This week the Charles Fort Institute reported that the (alleged) original Minnesota ice man was being offered for sale on eBay.Alas, the latest updates indicate that the big-ass rubber doll has already been sold by an anonymous buyer, so it looks like we’re no closer to solving this case than we were 40 years ago. Bummer…

2 Cryptozoology has always fascinated me, but my greatest love has always been UFOlogy. Months ago we commented on a videoclip taken near mount Popocatépetl (Mexico) which seemed to show a cylindrical object plummeting into the mouth of the crater.

Well, guess what? Another video has appeared showing yet another long luminous object flying over the famous volcano.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sure, the grainy b/w video isn’t too compelling in itself. But, as I’ve already stated, it’s the cumulative aspect of all these weird anomalies near mount Popo the thing I find incredibly interesting. Do you agree?

1 Then again, even people I respect in this field (like Jason McClelland & Maureen Elsberry) showed a lot of skepticism with the first mount Popo video, and I can understand that; one person’s incontrovertible evidence is another one’s phony hoax.

Solid evidence to the reality of the UFO phenomenon has always been hard to come by. Is there a way to change that? James Fox seems to think so. Over at the Huffington Post Alejandro Rojas reported that the famous filmmaker will organize a reward of $100,000 to anyone who can provide “the best proof that some UFOs are alien spacecraft.” The announcement will be officially made during the International UFO Congress in Arizona next week, as part of Fox’s promotion for his next documentary project The 701, a reference to the cases project Blue Book wasn’t able solve with conventional explanations.

“701 is the number the government doesn’t want you to know about. The U.S. Air Force had a serious problem, starting in the late 1940s. Technological devices were invading our airspace with total impunity. Glinting, metallic discs, which could accelerate and maneuver in ways hard to imagine, were being seen in incredible numbers by reliable witnesses. Many of them were pilots.”

The problem I have with this idea is that, in the few blogs where this has been discussed, there seems to be the notion that ‘evidence’ & ‘proof’ are interchangeable terms, and IMHO they are not. Evidence –from the Latin Evidentia, which implies for anyone to see– doesn’t necessarily mean you have found what you’re looking for, but it may mean you’re on the right track. Proof on the other hand means you can stop looking, for you have found the answer to your query –even though it may not be the answer you were waiting for.
Evidence is compelling. Proof is conclusive.

That’s why I still think that even though we don’t yet have conclusive proof of the unconventional nature of the UFO phenomenon, the cumulative effect of the available evidence hints to a non-human intelligence behind some of the sightings. But I would be the first to admit we don’t still have conclusive proof –and this may have something to do with the self-denying nature of the phenomenon itself.
So even though I wish the best for James Fox & his documentary project, I don’t have much hope for it becoming the thing that will turn the tide in the UFO discussion.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, hoping you yourselves have found compelling evidence that you’re on the right path –I sure have

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week our training session will show us zombie outbreaks & cyborg murders, flying squids & pyramids of fire. And as we assess the risk our civilization faces from space meteors, we’ll try to uncover the real reasons behind the Pope’s resignation. You know, the members of the Zion council can’t resign their position –also, there’s far less pederasty scandals down there. Just sayin’…

10 After De. 21st came & went, a huge chunk of the population became hugely frustrated because the Mayas had deprived us of the Zombie apocalypse we’ve all had hoped & prepared for –and by ‘prepare’ I mean playing long sessions of WarZ & renting The Walking Dead on Netflix.

But this week citizens of Montana got the chance of feeling inside of a George Romero movie, thanks to hackers who interrupted a Monday’s afternoon broadcast on local station KRTV (a CBS affiliate) with a male voice telling viewers that “Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from the grave and attacking the living.” The voice warned not “to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous.”

The Zombiemergency didn’t cause any kind of panic outbreak reminiscent of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio transmission of War of the Worlds. Is the American populace less gullible nowadays, or was it all a REAL zombie threat which was subsequently white-washed by the secret government? Share your thoughts on the comment section.

9 The dead rising to wage war on the living seems like too fantastic a scenario for many of us, but what about cyborgs bent on enslaving the rest of the un-enhanced human population? A disquieting news from South Africa had a certain tinge of the Terminator movies when it was reported that Oscar Pistorius, the famous South African amputee athlete with prosthetic legs –who was recently mentioned at the Pills for defeating a horse– is now the prime suspect in the murder of his girlfriend, supermodel Reeva Steenkamp.

It is sad to see how Pistorius, who was not only a symbol of perseverance & determination to people with special abilities, but also a sort of precursor of the type of cybernetic enhancements to the human body we’re likely to witness in the decades to come, now finds himself embroidered in a sordid judicial procedure a-la O.J. Simpson. If found guilty, it would go to show that there’s a difference between an ‘enhanced’ human, and a ‘better’ human.

8 Speaking of trials, the court of on-line public opinion is cracking hard on Melba Ketchum, who has finally published her long-awaited Bigfoot DNA paper on the peer-reviewed scientific journal DeNovo. The good news quickly turned sour once a group of inquisitive skeptics began to raise questions about the credentials of this seemingly new journal, whose ONLY publication so far has been Ketchum’s paper. Add to the fact that the paper is not freely available (access costs $30) and suddenly every skeptic in the Internet began to cry foul.

If it turns out that Ketchum decided to bypass proper peer-review by launching her own journal, then it certainly raises a lot of valid red flags on the validity of her claims. Not only that, but now it seems that Ketchum has gained full control of the equally controversial Erickson Project, who have been teasing about alleged incredible footage of live Sasquatch up-close, and suddenly it all has the tone of a carnival circus – Specially in light of the most recently leaked ‘Matilda’ footage. Sleeping Bigfoot or (as Ben & Aaron say) a discarded 70′s rug? You decide.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I hate to say it but at this point I’m siding with the skeptics. Even if Ketchum & her team have incredible evidence of large undiscovered primates living in North America, her story is becoming a casebook example of what NOT to do when trying to bring controversial data to the attention of the scientific community.

7 People prone to conspiracy theories like to argue how the REAL reason why Bigfoot is not accepted by mainstream media, is because it would disrupt the business of logging companies, who would found themselves restricted from exploiting the natural resources of these creatures’ habitat. Hence it’s much more convenient if Bigfoot is regarded as only a myth.

Speaking of natural resources, news come from India that a red glowing UFO was observed over the world’s largest oil refinery in Jamnagar, Gujarat. 3 days later the object returned & several photographs were taken.

Due to its important strategic nature –and because the refinery is so close to the Pakistani border– the sightings were reported to the government, which in returned put the Air Force, Navy & Coast Guard have been put in high alert. Let’s just hope the events aren’t explained away as simple Chinese lanterns, as it was the case with the sightings that took place at the India/Tibet border at the end of 2012.

6 You’ve heard of UFOs, and even USOs, but have you heard of UFCs? That’s my acronym for Unidentified Flying Cephalopods, and now scientists have conclusive proof that squids can come out of the water & glide for a few moments, using a powerful jet of water ejected from their mouths while they spread their tentacles & fins to attain a more aerodynamic shape.

Well D’oh! here in the Matrix we already knew squids could fly, egg-heads! Now clear away while I fire up the EMP rifle on these critters.

5 Having a group of flying squid would be an interesting acquisition for any aquarium in the world, but that’s because we don’t feel much remorse in keeping lower forms of life entrapped for our collective amusement. Our sense of ethics kicks in when humans with malformations or rare diseases are the ones being exhibited.

Things were different in the XIXth century, when Julia Pastrana was paraded all over Europe as a carnival attraction. Pastrana, a Mexican woman suffering from hypertricosis & gingival hiperplasia which gave her a grotesque appearance, was taken out of Mexico by her unscrupulous husband who not only exhibited her as the ‘ape woman’ in front paying audiences, but kept her under lock during must of her life, until she died due to childbirth complications.

Unfortunately her story didn’t end there: To add insult to injury, her remains were kept in a warehouse at the University of Oslo in Norway, as a morbid testament of an age when the Western world was more interested in scientific advancement than showing empathy toward the races of the undeveloped nations. But then some Mexican authorities started the diligences necessary to repatriate Pastrana to Mexico, and last week she was finally put to rest after the celebration of a Catholic mass,  in her hometown of  Sinaloa de Leyva.

Bienvenida, Julia.

4 From Sinaloa we now head south to Central Mexico, where the ancient city of Teotihuacán is located. By the time the Aztecs arrived to these lands, the city was an ancient ruin, and yet its buildings were so magnificent the Aztecs concluded that it hadn’t been built by ordinary men. Thus they named it ‘the city where men turned into gods’.

The Aztecs also assumed that the largest pyramid in the city had been erected to honor the sun, and the smallest one to honor the moon, and to this day the modern inhabitants of Mexico still refer to these monuments as the ‘pyramid of the Sun’ & the ‘pyramid of the Moon.’

But a ground-breaking discovery could re-write our preconceptions about Teotihuacán. Archeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology & history report that at the top of the pyramid of the Sun they discovered a statue depicting Huehuetéotl, the elder god of Fire who was revered by several cultures in Mesoamerica. The new finding would seem to indicate that the pyramid was consecrated to this traditional deity, who later diminished in importance among the new tribes that inhabited Mexico’s central valley after the fall of the Teotihuacán empire.

But, if the large pyramid was built in honor of the fire-god, then what of the smaller one? Some archeologists are now theorizing that perhaps it was built to worship the goddess of water, who was subsequently replaced by Tlaloc, the god traditionally associated with water & rain that was still revered by the Aztecs when the Spaniards arrived.

I for one find fascinating how ruins that are so well-known can still surprise us with novel findings. What other mysteries remain buried in ancient Teotihuacán? Stay tuned…

3 Speaking of buried mysteries, fans of Lovecraft are well aware of the short story The Color Out of Space, in which a meteor crashes near a small isolated town, unleashing a terrible infection that kills everyone in the vicinity –not before turning them insane.

And now in a rare twist of life imitating art, a Canadian miner is claiming that a meteorite he found infected him with an extraterrestrial life form. Daniel Sabo, a Yukon miner specializing in precious metals, says he discovered the meteorite in 1986, and after storing it in a variety of places inside his home he moved to Arizona where he unsuccessfully attempted to sell the space rock. And here’s where the story turns curioser & curioser:

“Sabo believes Arizona’s warm, arid climate induced a change in the meteorite because a “green crust” started growing along the rock’s natural seam. Unable to legally sell the meteorite, Sabo decided to return to Canada. The National Post explains, “As he drove home with it, sometimes balancing it in the crook of his elbow, he developed a terrible rash up and down his arm. He believed he had been infected by some extraterrestrial life form, and was mightily scared.””

The story is not devoid of some classic conspiracy scenarios, as Sabo gave the rock for analysis to scientists working for the Geological Survey of Canada in 1999. When he tried to get his meteorite back –this despite his fears of extraterrestrial infection– he accused the geologists of removing the portion with the green crust. Not only that, he now claimed the meteorite was completely replaced, and sued the GSC, but the court found no evidence of foul play.

I for one think someone should check Mr Sabo’s ears, just to be on the safe…

2 Space rocks plummeting out of the sky are bad enough, even without the threat of extraterrestrial infections –Just ask the dinosaurs.

But, since we humans just can’t seem to be able to learn valuable lessons these days without the aid of good audiovisuals, last Friday the entire world was amazed by the footage of a bolid crossing through the skies of Russia, in the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The meteor explosion, which caused the collapse of a roof at a zinc factory & injured close to a thousand workers, was so powerful that it sent shockwaves ‘heard’ (by instruments) all around the world. New estimations give the meteor a size of 17 meters (55 feet) which is still not enough to be detectable with our current instruments –hence the lack of warning. The impact took place hours before Asteroid 2012 DA14 made a close flyby at a distance of 17,200 miles, even though NASA scientists were quick to point out that the 2 events were completely unrelated. Citizens of Cienfuegos in Cuba are excused not to share NASA’s confidence, as another meteor is reported to have crashed near that region last Wednesday –an event not devoid of synchromystical resonance, since Cienfuegos literally means ’100 fires’ in Spanish.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m sure that by now Russian citizens are wishing we allocated more funds into the detection of dangerous asteroids. Because as Joe Rogan astutely commented on Twitter, “That Russian meteor footage is a nice reminder that we’re flying through the universe in an organic spaceship with no roof.”

1 Russia had an interesting role in the life of the late Pope John Paul II. Not only there’s ample reasons to suspect the KGB was involved in the attempt to assassinate him on May 13th 1981, but afterward he became personally convinced that the Virgin of Fatima interceded to save his life. Because of this, he tried to fulfill the Virgin’s wishes –as they were transmitted by Lùcia dos Santos, the surviving member of the 3 young shepherds who were involved in the famous Fátima sightings on 1917– of consecrating Russia to her immaculate heart; something he finally fulfilled in 1984, and is understood by the Catholic faithful as the reason why the Soviet empire quickly crumbled less than ten years later.

As everyone on planet Earth knows by now, John Paul’s successor Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation last Monday –the 11th of the month, giving credence to the numerological idea that 11 represents deep change. Many outside the church were quick to see in his decision a failure to solve the many scandals soiling the image of the Church, from child abuse accusations to misappropriation of funds & corruption in the running of the Vatican bank.

But his message during the Ash Wednesday homily might offer more clues about his decision, when he called for an end to rivalries within the church:

“I am thinking in particular of the sins against the unity of the church, of the divisions in the body of the church,” he said. “Overcoming individualism and rivalry is a humble and precious sign for those who have distanced themselves from the faith or who are indifferent.”

His words clearly hint to a severe schism within the higher echelons of the Catholic church, and by stepping down Ratzinger is expressing his inability to correct the divisions. Which shouldn’t surprise us, since his career as an academic theologian more comfortable with books & canonical concepts than with issuing orders to men of flesh & blood, didn’t probably equip him with the necessary perspicacity to deal with the suffocating power struggles inside the Vatican walls.

And now that the cardinals are rushing to arrange the future conclave which will decide the election of the next successor to St. Peter’s throne, is hard not to think of the famous prophecies of St. Malachy, and how according to him –or rather, according to how WE now interpret his prophecy– the Church has only one last Pope left, until the final judgement of God Almighty –who might or might not have had something to say a few hours after the historic announcement…

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, now heading to Zion where no divine lightning strikes tend to fall down.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week our virtual mission will reveal ancient kings buried in parking lots, and Illuminati conspiracies in football stadiums. We’ll investigate shiny anomalies on Mars & fossilized monsters on Siberian lakes. And as we study the first laws banning the creation of chimeras, we’ll wonder at the invention of the first bionic man (sorry, Steve). To all the people suffering from Nemo’s chilly weather, come down to Zion where it’s still warm!

10 Our first Pill takes us back to a story we covered back in September of last year, when we announced the archeological discovery of what was thought to be the remains of Richard III, last English monarch of the Plantagenet line. This week the finding was finally confirmed, and we also found out that Richie was not a good-looking chap after all.

With the discovery a wave of revisionism towards the famous king was erupted, with academics & historians stepping forth in defense of the hunchback sovereign, whose illustration as a cold-blooded tyrant in Shakespeare’s play has forever shaped his place in history in the public’s imagination. One wonders what future historians make of our current leaders based on how we portray them today –though I sincerely hope they don’t assume a vampire was actually in charge of the nuclear launch codes…

9It’s no wonder people are showing such interest & admiration for good ole Richie III. After all, he’s been dead for 500 years –if he were alive today people would assume that, since he’s a member of nobility, he therefore is a Reptilian shape-shifting member of the Illuminati.

Speaking of the Illuminati, did y’all watch the Superbowl last weekend? I didn’t because (a) I don’t like sports on TV; and (b) I was too busy playing Mass Effect 3. But if I had bothered to at least see the half-time show with stunning Beyoncé, I would have had the chance to witness the curious blackout that occurred just after her performance, which has naturally managed to spark a plethora of wacky conspiracy theories all around the interwebz.

It all makes sense, right? After all we ALL know Lady Gaga is the darling of the Illuminati, and Beyoncé was once featured in one of her videos. Bum! enough condemning evidence to the eyes of any self-respecting tinfoil hatter. We’re on to you, girl! We’re gonna ring the alarm.

8 You might think I came down too hard on the conspiracy crowd, and you might be right. On the one hand I think it’s important to be aware that governments & institutional authorities are subject to abuses of power & corruption, and so will resort to lies & deception to cover their asses. But on the other hand, I fear that we might soon end up in a world where NOTHING that is endorsed by our leaders will be believed by common citizens –how could a civilization be able to sustain itself at that point, when mistrust becomes so dangerously entrenched?

Consider for instance a recent survey made in the United States which reached the conclusion that approximately two thirds of American population believe in some type of conspiracy theory. Here’s why I found this survey significant:

In general, the survey found, the more conspiracies a person believes, the fewer current events questions they are able to answer correctly. Forty-seven percent of individuals who believed in no conspiracy theories answered all four current events questions correctly. Meanwhile, only one-percent of individuals who believed in three conspiracy theories managed to run the table on the current events questions. In addition, belief in conspiracies tended to be slightly higher among black Americans than among white Americans.

So apparently the more conspiracy theories are part of your personal belief system, the more disconnected to reality you become. Which brings me to the next Pill of the week, dealing with an alleged 9/11 truther who defaced the famous painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix, by painting AE911 on it with a black marker. AE911 would stand for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group of construction professional who have raised suspicions on the official explanation on how the WTC was destroyed on 2001.

The snarky tone of the comments at Gawker left me with a bad taste in the mouth. The intention of Max Read, who wrote the article, was rather clear: to portray the entire AE911 movement in a bad light, based solely on the stupid actions of ONE deranged individual –Attacking fringe ideas using the lowest common denominator has become exceedingly common on mainstream media as of late.

If you find yourself somewhat confused with where I’m going with all this, then you’re not alone –I myself am unsure as to my personal stance on the issue of conspiracy theories. I guess it boils down to not becoming too personal invested with your belief system, and ALWAYS question just why you happen to believe what you believe in: is it because the available evidence points out to that conclusion, or because it makes you feel better?

Or perhaps we should all just adopt Robert Anton Wilson’s Maybe logic. Sure seems much more healthy than wasting time & energy defending your position on Internet discussion wars…

7 When it comes to conspiracy theories, 9/11 can’t hold a candle to the grand-daddy of them all: Roswell. Considering how many hours have been devoted to discussing whether an alien ship crashed on the New Mexico desert or not would be a very tedious (and pointless) task.

Chase Brandon and his story of the Roswell box he found on the CIA headquarters were part of the Red Pills of the Year. And now the former head of the CIA (also former Defense secretary) Robert Gates has gone on the record, and in rather ambiguous although polite terms has discounted Brandon’s allegations:

Backstage at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall on Tuesday morning, Gates said he hadn’t heard about Brandon’s claims. When presented with those verbatim assertions, Gates remained poker-faced. But he didn’t challenge Brandon head-on, either.

“I’ll respond in this way,” he said. “As director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, I think I have had every security clearance that there is available in the United States government. I first joined the government 46 years ago and I have never seen one shred of evidence or one report of any kind of UFO or remains or cadavers or anything.”

De Void: Is there a way to reconcile that story?

Gates (quickly): “No.”

And yet Brandon is still free to spread his Roswell story on mainstream media & the Internet, with no apparent consequences or legal repercussions. Something stinks here worse than a Reticulan carcass, folks.

6 So getting back on the issue of conspiracies, perhaps the single most damaging effect of ascribing to the conspiranoid mentality is not knowing who or what to trust. And this is particularly true when it comes to the UFO field, where phony documents & phony photographs abound.

And with Youtube & the widespread availability of affordable CGI software came an invasion –see what I did there?– of phony UFO videos, which keep getting better & better. How better, you ask? Take a look at this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Okay, so you weren’t fooled by the obvious ‘Sci-Fi’ look of the UFO & the mother ship. Also, the craft look way too sharp & focused, and the engine roar sounded fake. But what if I told you that not only the UFOs were CGI, but in fact EVERYTHING in the video –the sky, the road, even the interior of the freaking car!– were all digital models, painstakingly assembled by a group of artists lead by Aristomeni ‘Meni’ Tsirbas, director of the 2007 animated film Battle for Terra, among other Hollywood projects?

“The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing,” Tsirbas told Wired. ”Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real.”

A very clever deception, and I can’t help thinking that if Tsirbas had opted for a more ‘traditional’ aesthetics on the design on the UFO –a domed saucer, ending with a cigar-shaped mother ship– mixed with some buzzing sounds & a few well-timed expletives thrown in for good measure, a great deal number of so-called UFO experts would have been fooled by his little prank.

So the moral of the story is rather simple, boys & girls: Don’t trust ANY Youtube clip from now on. Ever!

5 Another great source of distraction for the conspiracy crowd is all the raw data of photographs taken by the rovers on Mars, which are subsequently uploaded by NASA are analyzed by a team of enthusiastic amateur collaborators. One such collaborator, an Italian woman by the name of Elisabetta Bonora, detected a rather strange shiny object which seems to crop out of the Martian bedrock.

In the past these types of discoveries have been dismissed by NASA as simple pieces of the rover itself which tend to fall down from time to time –a somewhat strange compliment to the people behind the construction of these complex machines, which apparently can go without a few screws lost here & there. Yet one can plainly see this is not the case with this new finding, so it will surely pique the imagination of Richard Hoagland & his minions.

Me? it’s rather obvious what this object is: a fossilized partial denture of a senior Martian –yes, guys: I do keep a couple of tinfoil hats around, just in case.

4 If Martians needed prosthetic denture, then it goes to reason they eventually withered & died. Maybe the same thing happens to lake monsters, as seemed to indicate by the next follow-up on a story we covered on September 22nd –you see, Sharon? some of us *do* try to follow-up on these Fortean news – when we discussed how a team of Russian scientists were trying to find out evidence of an aquatic beast said to live on lake Labynkyr. The team of researchers claim that with the help of an underwater sonar they located the “jaws & skeletal remains of a large animal”. With any luck photographs of these fossilized remains will be published soon but… how will we know if the photographs are real? DAMN YOU, PHOTOSHOP!!!!

3 The skeleton of a real lake monster would be cool to see, but then again I think we all would prefer if they found a living specimen. The sight of a large unknown animal swimming next to you would probably test the nerves of most seasoned scuba divers.

But imagine if instead of some long-necked plesiosaur the diver encountered a real mermaid? That would probably be even more scary, because it would challenge all your preconceptions re. the differences between Fantasy & the real world!

Yet that apparently is what happened in Zimbabwe, that exciting land of wonder where one can find not only exploding goblins, but also hostile mermaids who like to scare off the workers of a local water reservoir:

Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, the Minister of Water Resources, reportedly told a parliamentary committee that terrified workers were refusing to return to the sites, near the towns of Gokwe and Mutare due to an infestation of dangerous (and evidently thirsty) half-human, half-fish

And even thought ritual offerings of beer have been considered to appease the mythological entities, authorities will still have a lot of trouble convincing the terrified workers that it’s safe to return to the reservoirs. Forget the beer guys: offer them mergirls some Margaritas! Problem solved.

2 And because some Southerner law-makers in the US have some serious issues with mermaids & other types of chimeric beings, recently in Mississippi Rep. William Tracy Arnold, R-Booneville has introduced a bill that would punish any would-be Dr. Moreau with a hefty fine, should he or she try to create any human-animal hybrid. According to the new bill, a manimal is defined thusly:

• Embryos that contain human and nonhuman cells, nuclei or chromosomes.
• Embryos that were created by fertilizing a human egg with animal sperm, or vice versa.
• A nonhuman life form “engineered” with a human brain.

I weep for the geeks living in Mississippi, for they’ll forever be denied of their dream of having a hot Nekomimi girlfriend.

1 If Representative Arnold is so antagonistic toward chimeras, I wonder how he’d respond to the idea of bionic humans. The day when most of our organs can be replaced by their synthetic counterparts might not be that far away, as evidenced by the unveiling of Rex: the world’s most complete bionic man –who kinda looks like Moby if you ask me, and come to think of it, that seems rather fitting also…

With Rex, researchers have been able to replicate 60 to 70% of the human body, at just the bargain price of $1M –things probably looked more expensive in the 70s– and even though we’re still pretty far from the day when one could order a new bionic heart via Amazon, the new advancements in prosthetics & artificial organs raise some fascinating ethical dilemmas:

[Social psychologist Bertolt Meyer] said there would be ethical issues surrounding prostheses if they began to outperform human body parts. “Should I be allowed to cut off my real hand and replace it with something, does that gives me an unfair advantage over people who cannot afford this? I’m not saying that is going to happen but these are questions that should be on the table before that technology becomes available.”

As I think I’ve stated in the past, our technology advances far more rapidly than our legal systems, hence we humans seem to be adapting to our discoveries ‘on the go’. Because of this, even though I’d like to see the day when we lived in a world as portrayed in Ghost in the Shell, the way things are going I’m afraid we’ll only end up with Repo Men.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out. I liked how this week we kinda came full circle: we started with the molded face of a 500-year-old dude, and finished with the molded face of a futuristic bionic dude –the Matrix *does* run in cycles!

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! This week our trip down the rabbit hole will bring us vintage crop circles in England and 3d-printed bases on the Moon, serial killer felines & Iranian space monkeys. And as we marvel at the image of a thought being formed inside a brain, we’ll say farewell to the most prominent pioneer in remote viewing. February 2nd is when we in Mexico celebrate ‘día de la Candelaria’, so that means one thing: hot tamales for everyone aboard the Nebuchadnezzar!

10While some geeks still like to argue how giving Superman the power to fly is what inevitably began to ruin the character –personally I think the red underwear was more of a hinder– now scientists are discovering that what made the Man of Steel an invincible douche could influence regular Joes to become more altruistic.

The study consisted on using a VR helmet with a group of 30 male & 30 female students: half the students were given the power to fly over a foggy city –controlling flight by moving the arms, the way we all did when we were children & nobody was watching– while the other half were given the simulation of being transported over the same city aboard a helicopter.

Afterward, each student was told to sit while a lab assistant put away the VR equipment, and then “accidentally” knocked over a jar of 15 pens. The virtual fliers were quicker to help pick up pens and picked up more of them than the virtual passengers, and all six students who didn’t help at all were from the passenger group. There was no notable difference between the fliers who were given a mission to deliver insulin to a lost diabetic child and those who were told to just explore the city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Explaining the results is still for debate. While some believe that being given the (virtual) powers of Superman will coax you to follow the boy-scout stereotype as well, others on the other hand theorize that the simple act of being given control over the simulation encouraged the volunteers to have a more participant attitude, instead of merely being passive observers.

Personally I support the former explanation, which might be the reason why I can only play as a good guy on an RPG like Mass Effect 3 –yesterday  I saved both the Quarians & the Geth, Woohoo!!– and at the same time I think that if we could experience the same elation in a lucid dream, instead of using the technological crutch, we might observe a positive change in our mood & behavior during our waking hours. I know that one of the best dreams I ever had was when I could zip across the streets of New York like Spiderman, and by the time I woke up I felt like a million bucks.

9 Superman or Batman? Even without Nolan’s masterful cinematic rendition, the answer to me has always been a no-brainer: the Dark Knight’s sublimation of his personal loss & anger to help the citizens of Gotham, while walking the thin thread which could turn him into the very thing he’s trying to fight, is a much more interesting dynamic than an alien demigod becoming the steward of his adopted world.

I still hope Nolan himself can prove me wrong later this year, though!

And it seems that some folks over at the infamous Area 51 share my sentiment as well, as can be implied by the recent sighting of a weird experimental aircraft that is oddly reminiscent of the Batplane –*if* the video is authentic of course, because nowadays we can never be 100% certain.

But if the video is real, perhaps we shouldn’t be that surprised that Mr. Wayne is hanging out in the Nevada desert –after all, out there the best toys come in black…

8 Anne Hathaway as the new Catwoman? MEEEEEOW!!! Only caveat: That Nolan chose not to portray her as a cat hoarder, like in Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

But the fact is that many people all around the world are fond of felines, and that has become a very serious ecological problem: Because cats never get rid of their killer instincts, they end up decimating millions of birds, rodents & insects; and according to a new report, the numbers are actually higher than we had ever expected –something Matthew Inman had tackled on in his popular webcomic The Oatmeal.

“To maintain the integrity of our ecosystems, we have to conserve the animals that play integral roles in those ecosystems,” said Dr. George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy. “Every time we lose another bird species or suppress their population numbers, we’re altering the very ecosystems that we depend on as humans. This issue clearly needs immediate conservation attention.”

So what’s the solution? Telling cat lovers to control their pets seems rather pointless, because people will always choose their pets over wild fauna. Perhaps we could engineer the cats to diminish their hunting instincts with the help of DNA modification –but if Science starts to do that, then we all know what comes next: Bubastis.

7 We’ve kept cats on our households for thousands of years, so by now they’ve become a familiar sight in our lives. The same could not be said of the famous crop circles that appear on the English country side each year. Their origin is a cause of confrontation between true believers & skeptics, but most of them might at least agree that the circles are for the most part a modern manifestation.

Or are they? An Australian amateur historian by the name of Greg Jefferys claims that using Google Earth’s new 1945 overlay –which allow users to observe the landscape as it was 68 years ago– he has managed to locate distinct crop circle formations in the English Black country, which would prove they are not a modern hoax launched by ‘Doug & Dave’, those jovial pensioners who have been used by skeptics to explain away the entire phenomenon –this despite the fact that circles appear in several other countries aside from England.

The b&w photos are somewhat difficult to discern, but even if the circles are genuine formations present in the landscape of yesteryear, is that proof that they were created by extraterrestrials? Jefferys is careful not to enter into wild speculations, and simply enunciates 2 points that he’s trying to prove with his work:

“Firstly, I believe that the claims of various ‘artists’ to have created them all is patently false,” he says.

“That is itself probably one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the scientific community, and I think that my 1945 Google Earth work does this.

“Secondly, there is a significant body of evidence that indicates high frequency electromagnetic energy is involved in the creation of crop circles.

“What is not clear is what generates that energy and organises it into circular patterns. This is one of the questions I hope to answer, at least partially.”

While the 1st point might be evident with his photographical analysis, the same cannot be said on the 2nd, since there’s still too much controversy surrounding the alleged energetic disturbances observed in the stems of the plants inside the circles. Regardless, even before Jefferys’ work we already had some evidence that crop circles might be much older than previously thought –I’m talking of course about the famous Mowing Devil woodcut.

6 If aliens are indeed behind some of the crop circles, do they use some sort of ‘energy beam’ in order to create the geometric agroglyphs? What used to be the domain of science fiction is quickly entering the realm of science fact, and the popular tractor beams are no exception: A group of scientists from Scotland and the Czech Republic claim they can move around tiny objects –microscopic tiny– using nothing more than a beam of light, by taking advantage of a weird physical effect called the ‘radiation pressure’ of electromagnetic energy. Basically, photons do exert a minuscule force on matter, so what do you get if you reverse the effect and crank up the juice? Voilá! a Federation-class tractor beam.

That is, if scientists can figure out how to prevent the energy of the beam from accelerating the molecules of the object, which is the basic principle behind heating stuff. But given what we know about the famous ‘Fire In the Sky’ abduction case of Travis Walton, in which a UFO shot up a beam of light which first paralyzed & then hurled Travis several feet into the air, perhaps a working tractor beam will be feasible in the future.

5 By the time the original Star Trek TV show was airing and the Enterprise crew started to explore the final frontier on a weekly basis,  the American audience were also being marveled by the achievements of their own real-life space program. One of the more publicized phases in NASA’s plans to send men to the Moon was the use of chimpanzees to test the effects of microgravity in living beings, and now the Iranians are claiming the same with the announcement that they successfully launched & retrieved a Rhesus monkey using a capsuled dubbed Pishgam, which means “pioneer” in Farsi.

Or should the capsule be named Fishscam instead? Some skeptics think there is some weird monkey business with the photographs provided by Iran’s space agency, and that the Iranians were pulling a switcheroo because the poor animal died in the mission. The Iranians responded by saying there had been some confusion with the photographs sent to the international press, but assured the doubters that a monkey had been in fact been sent on a rocket & retrieved safely.

I however think the Iranians are hiding the horrible truth, and the truth is they found out what happens to monkeys when they’re sent into space: they turn super-intelligent.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4The plan looked SO easy back then:

• Send chimps to space
• Send men into orbit
• Send men to Moon
• Build base on Moon
• Conquer the Universe

2001 came & went, and things are still a little behind schedule –and by a little I mean we’re screwed on this rock, y’all.

But wait! Things are starting to get pretty exciting in the ‘build-a-lunar-base’ department: We have previously mentioned the plans of using 3-D printing technology to speed up the process of building habitats on the lunar surface using regolith –a.k.a. moon dust– but now comes news that Sir Norman Foster is interested in helping design the 1st abode of mankind in our natural satellite.

For those of you who have never heard of him, Foster is one of the most prominent architects in the world –some might even say *the* most prominent– responsible for iconic buildings like the famous 30 St Mary Axe skyscraper in London –a.k.a. the Gherkin, which kind of looks like a Reaper’s version of a sex toy! amirite ME fans?– so to have him on-board in trying to come up with ways to build a feasible 3-D printed lunar base is like having Enzo Ferrari to help you design a new car.

Foster is already a Starchitect, but will he become the first Lunarchitect (h/t Grimerica!)  in the world? Stay tuned…

3 After we establish permanent settlements all around the Sol System, we might want to try our luck somewhere else –preferably where we can enjoy some of the comforts of our own home world, like not-too-extreme climate & abundance of liquid water. We used to think that organic life everywhere would use the same guidelines, so scientists came up with what is known as the Goldilocks zone, to determine whether an alien planet’s orbit was placed in the right sweet-spot distance to its home star in order to facilitate the development of life.

But now scientists are redefining the habitable zone, which means that some planets which were once considered too inhospitable might now viewed as worthy candidates for the search of alien life:

The new definition isn’t radically different from the old one. For example, in our own solar system, the boundaries of the habitable zone have shifted from between 0.95 astronomical units (AU, or the distance between Earth and the sun) and 1.67 AU, to the new range of 0.99 AU to 1.7 AU.

“It’s a surprise that Earth is so close to the inner edge of the habitable zone,” said astronomer Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, who was not part of the team behind the redefinition.

Surprising indeed. And yet again it makes one wonder whether in the distant past Mars was once a much more suitable place for the appearance of organic life forms.

2 Imagine what Mars would have looked like millions of years ago, when it had a thicker atmosphere that allowed the accumulation of liquid water. Imagine the rivers crossing the red valleys & the cloud formations raining over the Martian canyons. Where *is* that image that you can clearly see with your mind’s eye?

The answer to that metaphysical question might be closer to be answered than we think, thanks to the work of a group from Japan’s National Institute of Genetics, who have managed to capture the first images of a thought being formed inside the brain of a zebra fish –alas, the thought was not “what the f#$k are these guys doing with my brain??” but instead it was something akin to “LUNCH TIME!” since at the time the zebra fish was contemplating its next meal.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1 According to the current materialistic paradigm, thoughts are nothing but electro-chemical signals exciting our neurons, hence they are dissolved with the death of the brain. But what if our thoughts exist independently of our physical cerebrums? would that imply that Consciousness can transcend the barriers of life & death?

This are the kind of ideas that several pioneering researchers intended to pursue when examining the feats of an incredible individual: a painter by the name of Ingo Swann, who later lay the foundations of what eventually came to be known as remote viewing –our current PC term for what was usually referred to as clairvoyance in the more esoteric circles.

Swann’s active participation in parapsychology research began in 1969 when he was 36 years old. During the next twenty years he worked only in controlled laboratory settings with scientific researchers. Although he lectured widely on the importance of psychic faculties and potentials, he has never publicly demonstrated his abilities. Because of his participation in hundreds of thousands of experimental trials, author Martin Ebon wrote of him as “parapsychology’s most tested guinea pig,” and Psychic News and other media often refer to him as “the scientific psychic.”

Sadly we must report that last Friday (Feb. 1st) Ingo passed away into the great beyond. During his long & fruitful career he never tried to become a celebrity with the help of his extraordinary abilities, the same way the likes of Uri Geller would later end up soiling the reputation of the entire field of ESP. May he now continue to explore the infinity of the Cosmos, the same way he used to do while he was still bound –but not constrained– to a physical form.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, wishing you a happy exploration of the Matrix.