




Some pretty amazing shots from a Dark Roasted Blend article about abandoned theme parks in Asia, here, found on Posthuman Blues.
An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drugstore safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind."
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wonderous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumberous green.
There he hath lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Tennyson, The Kraken.
The coming of the air kraken has utterly altered the relationship of mankind to his natural environment here on earth. Man, who became hunter, gatherer, farmer, city-dweller, and latterly the ingenious master of his carefully designed surroundings, must now experience again the primordial terror of all creatures who suffer the rapacity of a larger, more powerful, and diabolically ingenious predator. Our ancestors must have felt that terror most keenly in their very infancy, when their minds were meagre, scarcely reasoning things, and all the world was an inimical, predatory myriad of talons and jaws. That primordial terror was the first spur to all our cathedrals and sciences; perhaps in time the coming of the kraken will reawaken within us an adoptive ingenuity comparable to those glorious ascensions of the past. For the moment, there is only the fear. Though the attacks of the kraken are spread out over the entire globe, and particularly infrequent in the populous cities of the developed countries, we are nevertheless all of us prone to that sense, as we go about our days, that at any moment the air might be rent with their hideous clarion, and then in their packs they will set upon us from the skies.
A precise history of the coming of the kraken is at this point an impossible undertaking, for they surely existed in small numbers in our upper atmosphere for some period of time prior to anybody openly acknowledging their presence. Once the sightings began to occur from the ground, they were discussed for a long time before the general intelligence was compelled to acknowledge the reality of their existence. Many have noted the particularly high degree of strangeness which characterised the decades preceding the arrival of these unprecedented creatures. The global economy was for many years in a kind of terminal free-fall, and the Great Powers, little more than puppets to a vast complex of vested interests, merely dug deeper and deeper into a potentially catastrophic pit of abstract bail-outs and debts. Meanwhile, the ecology of the earth, ravaged for centuries by man’s ill-considered rapacity, was now responding in kind: floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, and natural disasters of all kinds increased in frequency and ferocity. The extreme fluctuations of the climate remained a perpetual concern.
How could one live in such times, and not feel some kind of cosmic apprehension? Even the most sedate and rational of souls were subject to private forebodings. Meanwhile, those individuals with an extra sensitivity to imaginary or highly theoretical symbolic orders implicit in the drift of history went into a paroxysm of prophesy and cosmic fervour. Channelers and mediums of higher entities and intelligences issued grim warnings, and promised the eleventh hour intervention of evolved and ethereal beings. Maverick historians and archaeologists pondered the architecture of ancient monuments, like medieval exegetes poring over the myriad significances of the Sacred Text. A new vogue emerged for the resuscitation and elaboration of ancient prophesy, particularly those contained in the cyclical cosmology of the Hopi Indians and the baroque calendars of the Mayans. As in all times of such tumultuous upheaval, the skies were alive with riddles and harbingers, and it seemed that scarcely a week went by without some Miracle of Fatima or Cross of Constantine appearing in the heavens, to provide colour interlude to the mainstream news medias, and fodder for the many connoisseurs of strangeness huddled about the internet.
Among those stories, one has been of particular interest to the historian of the air kraken. In January of 2009, a 290 foot wind-turbine was mysteriously mangled near Louth,
In support of the theory of terrestrial origin, it cannot be denied that the air kraken is in appearance and essential biology a cephalopod whose natural habit is the air and upper atmosphere. I do not deny that their resemblance to terrestrial varieties of cephalopods, particularly the octopus and the giant squid, is too remarkable to be coincidental. Nevertheless, to imagine a technologically unaided migration from the depths of the ocean to the very edge of space simply beggars evolutionary biology in its current state of knowledge; to further imagine such a migration occurring without our observing any of its intermediate stages beggars common sense. To those of the mystical persuasion, I would argue that the purely terrestrial cephalopod, with its billowing, elastic, and unlikely frame, its diabolical eyes, and its preternatural intelligence, is one of natures eeriest creatures, and its reoccurrence in our literatures is merely coincidental.
Anyway, those controversies aside, we can establish with total certainty that the modern age of the air kraken began in the latter months of 2013, when a group of U.S. Airforce pilots finally resolved to make a report to their superiors, regarding some very strange things they had witnessed at the edge of space.
To be continued.
Tzadkiel and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time indoors of late, owing to a combination of the bitter cold, and an increasing fondness on both our parts for opium. Itching to engage in some field work, my familiar struck upon a novel notion. While visiting friends in
It was Tzadkiel’s conceit that we might utilise these techniques to embark upon a fieldtrip to Google Earth, in order to explore the recent rash of UFO sightings therein.
-Mebbe it’s all just glitches, or that pareidolia, but mebbe, just mebbe…..
Tzadkiel’s tobacco seared baritone trailed off.
My last escapade into the astral realm had been an unmitigated disaster. Back in 1976, I was the lead guitarist, lyricist, and occasional bassoon player with a Lovecraftian prog-rock group called the Great Old Ones. In January of ‘78, we scored an unlikely top 20 hit with the edited version of Cyclopean Masonry (Dripping with Slime.) (I have often suspected that this bizarre success was due to some illegal machination on the part of our manager Chas Hendricks; I always maintained that Chas was a dubious character, though in fairness, the sole reason for my suspicion was his popular and doubtless affectionate nickname “The Hoxton Nonce.”) We spent most of ’78 holed up in the notorious Cavendish Manner, situated near the picturesque village of Chenies, about twenty miles outside London. A mere three miles away stood the very cottage where the blind bard Milton completed his mighty theodicy Paradise Lost, and began its worthy appendage Paradise Regained. (The necessity for a sequel emerged when
If the Manor were a person gifted with the faculty of cognisance and the ability to lift a pen, then it could have written a vast summa of scarcely credible anecdotes, such were the wild debauches that took place upon its environs, and the palpable air of legendry that hung like a dank and alluring stench about the place. In the early sixties, due largely to the dissipation of its erstwhile master the 2nd Earl of Amersham, the Manor had fallen into the hands of an amusement arcade entrepreneur called Ronnie Brixton, and his then partner Chas Hendrix, a little known skiffle impresario and all-around dabbler in unlikely money making ventures. What the pair initially used the Manor for is unknown, though there is much talk and innuendo. However, around ’64 or ’65, when London began palpably to “Swing”, it was well-known in certain circles that Ronnie and Chas were throwing frenetic sex parties in their posh gaff in the countryside. These early orgies were illicit and incongruous affairs, where crooked property tycoons and psychotic underworld figures rubbed shoulders with minor pop stars, where secretaries and typists cooed over actors, and a steady stream of “birds” were eagerly pursued, some winsome and youthful in the then-popular style of Twiggy, others, encapsulating the style which I have always found to predominate at organised sex parties, middle-aged, robbed of all illusion, and Rubenesque in proportion. I have myself betimes taken much comfort in these fleshy and gregarious creatures.
Where-ever the door is opened to pure sensation, its myriad forms soon follow in rapid succession. As the sixties progressed, Cavendish House became a kind of laboratory for the new hedonic technologies which were the printing press and telegraph- pole of that extraordinary decade. Soon the pungent aroma of marijuana became commonplace, and after that the befuddling sacrament of LSD. Black magicks of all kinds inevitably followed, and in its own strange macrocosmic way the Manor emulated the helter-skelter trajectory of the sixties to its own apocalyptic
In 1969, the 27 year old Stone was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. The coroner said “death by misadventure”, others alleged suicide; those who had been at the Manor in 1966 whispered that the past of Chas “Bigs”
By the time the Great Old Ones descended on Cavendish Manor, it had been staging its particular brand of madness for well over ten years. Alongside those like ourselves who merely sojourned at Cavendish, a sizable community had gradually come to live permanently there. They had gone native, so to speak. They had reached such pitches of ecstasy and unreality that they could no longer return to the grey patina of daylight reality. Like emaciated, sleep-deprived Peter Pans, they had plunged deeper into the schizophrenic realms of unfettered debauchery. Like all such people, they could occasionally resemble sages and the initiates of some higher truth; for the most part, however, they were the very gibbering and inchoate handmaidens of Luna. The singer Bryan Ferry was among their number at that time; clad in trademark tuxedo, he was said to have wondered the maze for a whole month on end, warbling erotic songs about valkyries and mermaids.
Thoroughly inoculated from the reproach of reason, the regulars had come to believe virtually every outré conjecture one could possibly entertain about an old house: that whole family trees were interred within its walls; that a myriad of ghosts walked its corridors, with the endless repetition of anachronistic habit and gesture which such creatures are said to possess; that a race of diminutive humans lived like mice in its nooks and crannies, staging daring midnight raids to steal victuals, and sometimes befriending imaginative little girls; that the very house itself possessed a soul, and the physical decay of the building mirrored the dissipation and decrepitude of their own spirits. I must confess that their madness was contagious. I myself witnessed the somnambulant peregrination of ghosts, and fancied they saw me also, perhaps as an exotic spectre impinging upon their own time. I conversed with the diminutive humans, and found them amiable in the main, albeit prone to prankishness, and a certain insular mentality, rather like the gypsies.
To be continued.
One of the preeminent cultural legacies of the Cold War in
In 1947, the
The truth of what happened in
Whatever the true nature of the black magic Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project unleashed upon the New Mexico desert in ’45, the region remains haunted to this day, and continues to be a focal point for the weirdest manifestations of hidden Americana: the seemingly entwined worlds of secret weapons testing, UFO’s, cattle mutilations, and alien abductions. During the 1980’s, a myth emerged of an underground facility in
Disinformation differs from regular propaganda, in that it is a far more subtle and underhand method of disseminating untruths. Propaganda, to a large degree, doesn’t hide its origins, and spreads itself through official channels. Disinformation, on the other hand, possesses a more fiendish ingenuity. Its method is to persuade certain groups that they have come upon privileged information which would otherwise be hidden, and thus turn the would-be truth seekers themselves into unwitting propagandists. The purpose of this activity is either to discredit those who had come too close to the truth, or to distract attention altogether from the reality of a particular situation. Since disinformation sometimes contains partial truths, it generally winds up producing endless Moebius strips of uncertainty: if a government openly acknowledges disinformation, does that constitute a further act of disinformation, thus rendering the initial information potentially true, and so on.
The extent to which the UFO mystery has been mired in disinformation is something which can probably never be accurately gauged. However, in 1955, the CIA started using the then-secret Lockheed U2 high-altitude airplane to perform “overflights” over
Paul Bennewitz was an apparently gifted physics postgraduate and inventor who ran a small electronics company called Thunder Scientific Corporation in
While carefully cataloguing and filming the unusual lights, which, in one of the many strange twists in the case, were apparently genuinely anomalous, Bennewitz encountered the psychologist and ufologist Dr. Leo Sprinkle. Sprinkle was one of the first academic figures to openly study the alien abduction phenomenon, and a pioneer in the highly controversial use of hypnosis to restore the memories of abductee encounters. In 1980, a patient of Sprinkle’s named Myrna Hanson claimed that she and her son had been abducted while driving home near a cow pasture at
Bennewitz believed Hanson’s story, and become utterly convinced that the cattle mutilations and underground facility must be connected to the lights he had been filming over the
Bill Moore was the head of APRO in 1980. As the co-author of one of the very first books exploring the
Here we find ourselves in thoroughly ambiguous territory. For the purposes of security and anonymity, Moore and his associate Jaime Shandera named this high level group the Aviary, giving each member a bird codename. According to Shandera: “We wanted the information, but didn’t want to reveal where we got our clues. To maintain anonymity, I give Bill’s source the codename “Falcon”, the next source we used was called “Condor” and so on, until we had 24 contacts from all levels of government. It was my idea to use bird names.” Shandera continued to give a brief description of individual members, in the same irresistible mixture of All the Presidents Men and the X-Files: “Hawk is a person well-connected in areas of study in ESP since the sixties, with impressive credentials. Blue Jay is person close to the President of the
The victim in all this, however, was the hapless and tragic Paul Bennewitz. Its now acknowledged that Bill Moore and Richard Doty subjected him to a sustained disinformation program. Rather than divest him of his delusions, the pair proceeded to feed him evidence with validated and intensified his suspicions. Sections of his notes reveal his increasing paranoia and panic: “Established constant direct contact with the alien….aliens on the ground in electro statically supported vehicles….charging beam weapons. The aliens are picking up and “cutting” people every night….whether all implants are totally effective I cannot predict…..Conservatively I would estimate that at least 300,000 people have been implanted in the US….at least 2 million worldwide….”At the same time, his conception of the aliens at Dulce base were acquiring the complexity of a personal mythology: “Their body metabolism is very high, estimated at 110 to 115 degrees. Elimination is through osmosis. Skin color of the ruling echelon varies from a jaundiced yellow or white. No hair of any kind. Their arms are long – near to knee level. They have very long hands and fingers. All of them look underfed. They have big heads and eyes. The humanoid types are generally light green. When in need of formula or dead they turn GREY. Many in this culture walk with a limp or shuffle their feet…”
Fearing the intrusion of his home by threatening energy balls, Bennewitz constantly surrounded himself with knifes and guns. Inevitably, he suffered a complete physical and nervous breakdown, and was finally placed in institutional care, and released from the quixotic courage and rigors of Project Beta.
The Dulce base and variations of it have gone into popular and conspiracy lore. In the 1990’s, the X-Files brought these kinds of ideas to Simpsons-levels of cultural dispersal, and made conspiracies the widespread fan-boy pastime they continue to be today. It is amusing to speculate that some of these florid scenarios may have originated in the imaginations of Airforce Intelligence spooks. Bennewitz died in 2005, a largely unknown victim of the extreme callousness of the National Security apparatus. Many, including Richard Doty, claim he never stopped believing in the alien threat revealed by Project Beta.