Golden Fire

    The expanse of the universe
    from one burning star
    to another
    waiting for the impossible,
    watching the revolution
    from grief and suffering
    to comfort

    The entire collection of angels
    past, present, future
    singing funeral hymns
    soothed into silence

    Thoughts turn to golden fire

Topics for Discussion – Prophecy Club – Meeting May 14

    The European Union has ten member states, now eleven. Count the number of stars in the flag if you don’t understand. The Prophecy Club has all this information. We know the identity of the all-seeing eye.

    JFK’s assassination was a Masonic symbol enacted in life – or death, rather. Strike him on the left breast. Strike him on the neck. Strike him on the head. Dead.

    Remember the exploding teeth of the 19^th century? Metal fillings generated a galvanic effect, filled with hydrogen and exploded like a gunshot.

    Ground penetrating radar was used to discover subterranean rooms and chambers in a ‘boat like’ geologic anomaly in the mountains of Turkey. Ron Wyatt found it and nearly a hundred other Biblical artifacts. Explain that one if you can.

    The Parthenon of Greece has forty-six pillars. The human body has forty-six chromosomes. Do you see it yet? It’s all there if you know how to see. If you know how to count. 

    The James Webb telescope is already discovering galaxies that should not exist. Aren’t you even curious as to why?

    Pale as a ghost and dressed in black, the rulers of darkness know only the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. Lawless and loveless.

    We are concerned how the prosperity of the community will be affected by the proposed construction of a Muslim cemetery. It will bring unwanted traffic into the neighborhood – traffic that puts school children at risk. Sign the petition to keep the dead Muslims out of our community.

    The secular humanist misunderstands biology so that he can better misunderstand theology. History, the same. Mathematics too. Precept upon precept, it all adds up. But he refuses the call of Wisdom.

Astronaut

Alien Shores Revisited

Alien shores revisited

Alien Shores

Rocket One to Triangulum!

It took thirteen years for Voyager 2 to travel from earth to the outer reaches of our little solar system. We learned about Voyager 2 back in George Hale Jr High. Thirteen years, the entire span of my life. It took what would have been the entirety of my life to that point for that unmanned interstellar record player to travel the smallest fraction of what ROCKET TEAM ONE crossed in six short weeks. But I really don’t mean to disparage that noble craft. It was brave to set out into such huge distances even at such a slow speed. Especially at such slow speed. It was an action of hope to launch that probe into the void.

And Voyager 2 carried Blind Willie Johnson into space. Imagine that: Blind Willie Johnson out among the stars. Blind Willie Johnson, who couldn’t see the stars, was being carried (or at least his music was) into the ethereal silence of interstellar space. Glorious.

The Triangulum Galaxy is approximately 3 Million Light Years from Earth within the constellation Triangulum. It is one of the most distant objects that can be seen from Earth by the naked human eye. It was discovered in the 1600s by an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Battista Hodierna. He described it as “a cloud-like nebulosity near the Triangle on either side.” It’s a pinwheel shaped galaxy, smaller than the Milky Way.

The constellation Triangulum was mentioned in an ancient Babylonian star compendium, the MUL.APIN. The Babylonian astrologers called it the “Plough Star.” They said that the angry goddess Ishtar, spurned in her romantic and sexual advances, went to her father, Anu, to demand that he create a Bull of Heaven (Taurus) to kill the hero Gilgamesh. Anu obliged her vengeful notions and created this bull for her, and it is this bull that pulls the Plough Star across the heavens.

Why did the generals at NASA choose Triangulum as the destination? Why not something closer? Why not another solar system within our own galaxy?

According to some conspiratists on the net, that galaxy was chosen based on designs found in the hieroglyphics on the walls of the great pyramids of Giza. Triangulum – pyramids are made of triangles – the connection is obvious, right? According to these tinfoil-hatters, the central star-shaft of the great pyramid points toward the Triangulum galaxy, and that this was the home of the alien race that visited Egypt in 10,500 BC.

Crazy, right? Those shafts point towards Orion, not Triangulum. The fact that the three major pyramids at Giza replicate the position of the three stars in Orion’s Belt should have been an obvious clue that the shaft is oriented towards Orion, not Triangulum. The Great Pyramid at Giza is interesting – but not for the reasons those nutters suggest.

A similar proposition was made for the arrangement of the megaliths at Stonehenge, but there’s even less support for this crackpot theory. Still another conspiracism suggests that Triangulum was marked in top-secret star charts found in the wreckage of a crashed alien vehicle as a strategic location, both rich in resources and important in controlling interstellar movement.

Perhaps their choice of Triangulum was predicated on the fact that the largest observed black hole is found in the Triangulum galaxy. Discovered in 2007 and known as M33 X-7, this black hole has 15.7 times the mass of our sun. The military value of that black star is incalculable.

So why did they pick Triangulum? Why not something closer? Why not, perhaps, the system of seven planets found orbiting the star Trappist-1, three of which were in that “Goldilocks” habitable zone around that Red Dwarf star having the potential for liquid water – and was only 40 short light years from earth? (And 40 light years is still over 235 trillion miles…) Or any of the other hundreds of exo-planets discovered by long range telescopes? Why did they pick Triangulum as their destination of choice? Who can say? Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time? 

Dark was the night, and cold the ground
on which the Lord was laid;
His sweat like drops of blood ran down;
in agony He prayed.

“Father, remove this bitter cup,
if such Thy sacred will;
if not, content to drink it up
Thy pleasure I fulfill."

Dark and cold is the space through which the Voyager probes and ROCKET TEAM ONE traveled. Why do we venture out into such cold, dark distances? Why do we risk mortal agony and death to travel into the void? Who can say? It just seems like a good idea. We are restless wanderers, always wondering if the next stop will be better than the one before.

And we’re being told (by some of those same egghead scientists who objected to the impossibility of ROCKET TEAM ONE’s trip) that the universe is nothing more than an elaborate hologram projected into sentient consciousness by some unknown agency. If this is true then we are brains in a vat and life is but a dream, a dream within a dream. But maybe that’s why we can travel the 3 Million Light Years to Triangulum in less than six weeks – because those 3 Million Light Years are an illusion. Triangulum is an illusion. Earth is an illusion. There is nothing there. There is nothing here. There is no here nor there. It’s all Dark Energy, and we are left alone in the dark, like blind musicians to sing for hope and comfort against the terror and agony of a cold, lonely night.

Creation Not Exactly Ex Nihilo

I once set out to create the universe in my backyard. Tonight I tried again in the dining room.

Children of a Lesser Apocrypha

I woke up, eventually, in a hospital with hoses pumping fluids into me and tubes spilling fluids out of me, a respirator forcing air in and out of my lungs and an entire Radio Shack worth of sensors and wires taped to my head, chest, arms, fingers, spine… There were machines of various sorts softly whirring, and pinging, and hissing, performing a sort of biomechanical fugue. Bach for the sleeping Aesculapian.

The newsscreen mounted on the wall opposite me was running a story about a computer programmer from NASA named John Corvino who’d been missing since 1999. He’d become frightened by his calculations. Corvino predicted that the Comet C/1999 H1 (Lee) – a wild, non-periodic comet - would impact upon the Earth’s surface. “It’s erratic!” He shouted at his coworkers. “It’s a lawless rock,” he said.

He told anyone and everyone who would listen about how Comet C/1999 H1 (Lee) would strike in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, creating massive tidal waves, tsunami over 200 feet high. But unable to convince anyone to take action, Corvino left his job, and left his family, and ran to the hills. Or, more accurately, ran beneath the hills. He took a tent, bedroll, camping supplies, dried food, and over a dozen handguns and rifles down into a cave in southern Ohio. And he’d been there since 1999.

He emerged from his apocalyptic hidey-hole, bearded and blinded, believing that he was the sole survivor of a catastrophic event. When he saw that the world had gone on without him, that Comet C/1999 H1 (Lee) had not struck the Earth, had not even come close to the Earth (not even close by cosmic standards) he took his guns and retreated back down into his cave.

My recovery roommate laughed and laughed at the story. He howled with laughter until the nurses came and gave him a powerful sedative. He told me later that while he had been in the hospital for a CAT scan of his brain, he’d lost all of his psychic abilities. Before entering the hospital he had been able to read people’s auras and see a few hours into the future. He told me that he’d also once hypnotized a jaguar. But after the scan, those abilities were completely suppressed. He was planning to sue the hospital, the doctor and the technicians who’d operated the CAT scan machine. His lawyer told him that he had a solid case.

The last thing he said to me before he left the hospital was: “We are lost and occasionally found, found shining among the stars.” Then he leaned close to me and whispered, “We are children of a lesser apocrypha.” Then he popped his knuckles and laughed and laughed. He laughed all the way out the door.

Listening for the Etheric Vibrations of Treason

It’s no secret that U. S. Intelligence agencies had military trained psychics using ESP to monitor the crew members of ROCKET TEAM ONE. (Don’t say that they “spied on the crew,” of course. The U. S. Government does not spy on its citizens.) Even though the crew kept in constant, round-the-clock radio contact with the ground control team at Cape Canaveral, and each of them recorded regular video updates for consumption by the general public through the scandalrags and other news media, the CIA – in rare cooperation with the NSA, the DIA, and the FBI – maintained a team of a dozen psychics in a dimly lit room, in an abandoned building along the shore of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio.

These government issued clairvoyants peered through the ether of space to assure their leaders that the crew of ROCKET TEAM ONE was not being controlled or otherwise directed or manipulated by hostile entities – be they foreign, domestic, or extraterrestrial. They didn’t want antagonistic groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, or enemy governments like the New Soviet Arab Alliance to subvert the mission. And the great mysteries of space were too unknown to trust that the crew wouldn’t come under the influence of beings, or life-forces, or demonic entities from other parts of the galaxy. 

So the psychics of PROJECT SUNSTREAK (officially begun in 1977 as PROJECT GONDALA WISH, closed in 1995, and reopened two years before the launch of ROCKET TEAM ONE) using remote viewing, tarot cards, and catoptromancy (that is the prediction of future events with a mirror) monitored (never spied upon) the crew. These secret agents, known as specularii, watched for unregulated use of communications equipment, suspicious secretive behavior, and erratic sleep patterns, and listened for etheric vibrations and other precursors that might indicate either treason by the crew or malicious interference by an outside entity.

It’s a shame that the specularii agents didn’t foresee the event that led to the death of Lt. Vanner Anderson, but other than that, their work was deemed successful and vital to the space program of the United States – even if independent scientific research agencies could not replicate their results and criticized their methodology[1].

About this time, the NSA also worked in a surprising collaboration with the Vatican’s Secret Police to track down a Defense Department satellite that had gone off course and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea. A report from the specularii indicated that rogue mental transmissions from ROCKET TEAM ONE, that is to say - paranoid psychic outbursts from one unidentified member of the crew, caused the satellite to break from its orbit. These psychic outbursts, the report said, took the form of a repetitive lyric:

“Ezekiel saw the wheel way up in the middle of the air. Ezekiel saw the wheel way up in the middle of the air. And the little wheel run by faith. And the big wheel run by the grace of God. A wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air…”

The specularii prognosticated that there would be a great conflagration erupting in the North West, July 15, 1976 – and of a great many bombs falling in that place – and that a Second American Civil War would break out when President Jimmy Carter was arrested. These predictions were taken as unsubstantiated “miss

---

[1]  The administrators of these independent scientific research agencies were subsequently committed to insane asylums by the IRS, forcibly committed in some cases.

What Is Out There?

So what is out there? Most of space is empty. Most of space is void. But there is something out there. There must be, or we wouldn’t be so compelled to go there again and again.  What is out there in the dark?

* A few half broken robot puttering around in circles on the surface of Mars, unable to complete their missions because of faulty hardware, unable to stop their peregrinations because of their programming.

* Asteroid mining roughnecks living between Mars and Jupiter – giving up ten years of their lives to drill and plunder space rocks for ice and nickel and iron in return for a substantial payout at the end of their contracted time. The risk is great, however: 37% of those space-miners die before the end of their contract. Their families or designated recipients receive a small, prorated portion of their payment.

* The gateway to hell. Several religious sects believe that the entrance to the infernal realm is found in the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. That anticyclonic storm has been raging continuously since it was first observed in 1830. The noise and roar of the turbulent storm, twice as wide as earth, actually raises the temperature of Jupiter’s atmosphere by 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Hell is hot and loud, drowning out the screams of the damned.

* Dark Matter and White Light, but not in equal proportions.

* Spinning saucer-craft piloted by either little green men bent on medical experiments of the perverse variety – namely the impregnation of God fearing American women, or buxom Venusian women intent on the seduction of virile, red-blooded, American men.

* Surfaces to exploit. There are always surfaces to exploit. There is always profit to be made.

* Ghosts and demons – malicious entities spreading their hatred through signals from television satellites. That’s how they get to us; television is the vector. They deceive our minds, put us into a subconscious hypnosis. These space demons use what is called the “flicker rate” (the flicker fusion threshold), the frequency of intermittent light stimulus to modulate our perception by superimposing subliminal messages on television programs. This is how they destroy our freewill, how they corrupt our minds – like an intergalactic virus, poisonous creatures infecting our spirits from a distance.

* The former President of the United States of America. Having been impeached and discredited, the previous POTUS fled the surface of the Earth and went into hiding in a bunker on the moon. He is plotting there, with a coven of his satanic high priests, to raise an army of demonized Bolsheviks. His plan is to storm the White House and to retake control of the nation.

What’s out there? Weird and dangerous stuff. Stars and wonder, passion and despair. Out there are all the things we fear and all the stories that we deny. Out there are the monsters that hid beneath our beds when we were children. Out there are shadows and dreams. Out there is wealth, or at least the potential for great wealth. Out there, in the depths of space is danger, fire, heaven, hell. Out there is blood and mystery. Space is filled with mystery.

Planet Christmas

In recent weeks I have shared some of the photographic results of my scientific research into the structures of Christmas at the subatomic level. Today I share with you something from the opposite side of the scope - instead of a high powered electron microscope, today I've been using a tightly focused telescope and have discovered a strange exoplanet within the Omega Nebula (in the constellation Sagittarius) at a distance of about 4,890 light years from planet Earth.

I give you: Planet Christmas - a minor planet (class B) with unique glitter rings.

Venus and Jupiter

My teenage son and I have been enjoying the new game No Man's Sky in which players are free to explore an open universe of over 18 quintillion planets (1.8 X 10¹⁹). It’s pretty amazing. But tonight we left the fictional planets of a digital universe to observe real planets in the physical universe which we inhabit. We went out to observe the conjunction of the planets Venus and Jupiter. 

This stellar event will not occur again until 2065.

There are some who believe that the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter may have been the “star” that the three wise men of Matthew’s gospel observed. 

Through the Wormhole

“The thing’s hollow-it goes on forever-and-oh my God!-it’s full of stars!”
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stars and Light Trails (Nov.3, 2015)

I went out to photograph the sky tonight. There was a chance that the Northern Lights would be visible even here in Iowa, but I did not see them while I was out. No worries, I saw a few shooting stars and took some decent pictures. A truck drove by as I took this one.

Where Were You when Wormwood Fell?

We were in the backyard, sipping coffee and listening to the crickets and the thrum of I-80, me reading another Stephen King novel and you working one of those sudoku puzzles, when great Wormwood fell. The third angel – third in a week, you said quietly – slipped gracefully through the third heaven with a silver trumpet in his hand. And he blew that accursed horn so loud it shook the whole heartland. 18-wheelers on the long haul shuddered and screamed, skidding to a halt, burnt rubber tracks and tire shreds flying out in smoke behind them. Cars and minivans veered for the shoulders, dived into the ditches, their radiators steaming, engines ticking and little kids screaming in the back seat, crying with red eyes and snot bubbles under their noses.

We watched with slow wonder as that great star began its descent, falling from orbit, its signal lights twinkling normally at first, as if nothing was wrong, five-by-five on orbital path. Then suddenly faster and faster as it plummeted, plunged to the earth, down into the sea, somewhere in the North Pacific. A spray of mist came over us there in the yard, more than four thousand miles away. And that fine spray of mist was bitter – not the shock of ocean salt water, mind you, but bitter.

It was the bitterness of acrimony, the bitterness of despair. It was the bitterness of petty officials who get their way, not because they’re right, but because of an abstract authority, acting in spite and venom. It was the bitterness of stifled dreams. Of every whispered threat. Of anxious worries. The bitterness of wrongs left un-repented and unforgiven. A third of the waters of the Earth turned bitter like wormwood oil, and many people died because of its poison.

The Universe in My Backyard

I went out the other night to photograph the universe in my backyard.  Okay - it wasn't exactly my backyard - it was about 20 miles east of town. These pictures turned out very different from the time when I tried to create the universe in my actual backyard...

The Universe in my Backyard by Jeff Carter on 500px

Nyx or Nox, Come Find me Now

Nyx or Nox, come find me now;
send owls from shadows
and let me drink the wild honey.
I’ll sleep in oracle caves
on Venusian mountains
or distant frozen moons,
perchance I’ll dream
perfumed dreams.

Imaginary Pirate Radio Broadcast from KDFS (Space Music)

Every now and again I pretend to be the DJ of an imaginary pirate radio station - KDFS (You're listening to KDFS and that's oKay DoFuS!).  I do it to amuse and/or annoy my friends.  KDFS only plays the best (or worst, depending on your taste - we have none) in weird, obscure... terrible music. This week's broadcast is sponsored by the TMA-1, makers of quality Monoliths and Starchildren since 1968.

First up is a favorite around here, Space Lady, singing the classic Ghost Riders in the Sky.



We could do an entire week's worth of programming based on our next artist, but one song will have to suffice for today. Here's Klaus Nomi and his Rubber-band Laser.



The next song, Waltz in Orbit, was recorded by Ray Cathode - otherwise known as Maddalena Fagandini, pioneering female electronic musician.



Today's playlist has been space themed, in honor of our fine sponsors.  We include the following song because we assume that she is a "space" robot.



And the final song in today's broadcast goes out to Doctor Tarrec, wherever he's hiding.  This is one of his favorites.

Hotel Room Planet

I am away from home, in Omaha, Nebraska for the weekend - attending a series of meetings.  Last night I was just a bit bored so I located and photographed a planetary body inside my hotel room.

Hotel Room Planets by Jeff Carter on 500px

Full Moon in June (and Other Stock Rhymes)

A full moon in June makes me swoon and sing out of tune, blah, blah, blah...

Full Moon (6-2-2015) by Jeff Carter on 500px

Moon - 6/2/2015 from jeff carter on Vimeo.