Islands in the Clickstream
The Dark Side of the Moon and Beyond
The following are excerpts from Islands in the Clickstream by Richard Thieme. No longer in physical print. Taken from Chapter 9, The Dark Side of the Moon and Beyond. Republished with permission.
Table of Contents: UFOs and the Internet 1997 Delusions of Grandeur 1997 Interpretation 2001 The Silence of the Lambs 2001 On the Dark Side of the Moon 2001
UFOs and the Internet
July 8, 1997
“We are convinced that Roswell took place. We’ve had too many high-ranking military officials tell us that it happened, that told us that it was clearly not of this earth,” said Don Schmitt, co-author of “The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell,” in an interview on the Internet
That interview with a “real X-Filer” can be found on one of the hundreds of websites—in addition to Usenet groups, gopher holes stuffed with hundreds of files, and clandestine BBSs where abductees meet to compare “scoop marks”—that make up the virtual world of flying saucers.
The UFO subculture or, for some, the UFO religion on the Internet, is a huge supermarket of images and words. Everything is for sale—stories, pictures, entire belief systems. But are we buying a meal? Or a menu?
When Schmitt uses the word “Roswell,” he is not merely identifying a small town in New Mexico that put itself on the map with a terrific UFO story. He uses it to mean the whole story—the one that says a UFO crashed in 1947 near the Roswell Army Air Field, after which alien bodies were recovered and a cosmic Watergate initiated.
That story is scattered on the Internet like fragments of an exploding spaceship. Do the pieces fit together to make a coherent puzzle? Or is something wrong with this picture?
Stalking the UFO Meme on the Internet
Memes are contagious ideas that replicate like viruses from mind to mind. On the Internet, memes multiply rapidly. Fed by fascination, incubated in the feverish excitement of devotees transmitting stories of cosmic significance, the UFO meme mutates into new forms, some of them wondrous and strange.
“The Roswell incident” is one variation of the UFO meme.
On the Internet, Schmitt’s words are hyperlinked to those of other UFO sleuths and legions of interested bystanders fascinated by the psychodynamics of the subculture as well as the “data.”
Before we examine a few fragments, let’s pause to remember what the Internet really is.
Copies of Copies—or Copies of Originals?
The Internet represents information through symbols or icons. So do speech, writing, and printed text. But the symbols on the Net are even further removed from the events and context to which they point.
The power of speech gave us the ability to lie, then writing hid the liar from view. That’s why Plato fulminated at writing—you couldn’t know what was true if you didn’t have the person right there in front of you.
The printing press made it worse. Now digital images and text are on the Net. Pixels can be manipulated. Without correlation with other data, no digital photo or document can be taken at face value. There’s no way to know if we’re looking at a copy of an original, a copy of a copy, or a copy that has no original.
In addition, certain phenomena elicit powerful projections. Because projections are unconscious, we don’t know if we’re looking at iron filings obscuring a magnet or the magnet.
Carl Jung said UFOs invite projections because they’re mandalas—archetypal images of our deep Selves. Unless we separate what we think we see from what we see, we’re bound to be confused.
Hundreds of cross-referenced links on the Web create a matrix of credibility. In print, we document assertions with references. Footnotes are conspicuous by their absence on the Web. Information is self-referential. Symbols and images point to themselves like a ten-dimensional dog chasing its own tails.
Are there “eight firsthand witnesses who saw the bodies,” “many high-ranking military officials who said it was not of this earth,” or “550 witnesses stating that this was not from this earth?” Schmitt makes all of those statements in the same interview. He uses the word “witness” the way Alice in Wonderland uses words; to mean what she wants them to mean.
Tracking down the truth about the “Roswell incident” is like hunting the mythical Snark in the Lewis Carroll poem. The closer one gets to the “evidence,” the more it isn’t there.
There is, in fact, not one “witness” to the Roswell incident in the public domain, not one credible report that is not filtered through a private interview or privileged communication.
There are, though, lots of people making a living from it—makers of the Ray Santilli “autopsy film,” guides for tours of the rival crash sites in Roswell, television producers, and book publishers. It all gets very confusing.
Is any of the confusion intentional?
Ready For a Headache?
Are government agents using the subculture to manipulate public opinion? To cover up what they know? Are UFO investigators spies, “useful idiots” (as they’re known in the spy trade), or just in it for the buck?
An online adventure illustrates the difficulty of getting answers.
A woman in Hamilton, Montana, was speaking to Peter Davenport, head of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle about a UFO she said was above her house. She said she heard beeps on the radio when it was hovering. As they spoke, some beeps sounded.
“There!” she said. “What is that?”
I recorded the beeps and posted a message on a hacker’s Internet group asking for help.
I received an offer of assistance from the LoD, the Legion of Doom, a well-known hacker name. I e-mailed the beeps as an audio file to them. They examined the switching equipment used by the Montana telco and reported that the signals did not originate within the system. They could say what the signals were not, but not what they were.
In another e-mail, a writer said he had heard similar tones over telephone lines and shortwave radio near White Sands Missile Range. He said friends inside the base had given him “some info that would be of great interest. He wrote:
“The documentation and info that I am getting are going to basically confirm what a member of the team has divulged to me [about UFO occupants]. They are here, and they are not benign.”
Without corroboration, that’s as far as the Internet can take us.
Words originate with someone—but who? Is the name on the e-mail real? Is the account real? Was the White Sands source who he said he was? Were his contacts telling the truth? Or was he a bored kid killing time?
The UFO world is a hall of mirrors. The UFO world on the Internet is a simulation of a hall of mirrors. The truth is out there... but how can we find it?
Plato was right. We need to know who is speaking to evaluate the data.
The Bottom Line
A number of years ago, I volunteered to be Wisconsin state director of the Mutual UFO Network in order to listen firsthand to people who claimed to have encountered UFOs. I brought sixteen years’ experience as a counselor to the project. I listened to people from all walks of life.
My interest in the phenomena had quickened in the 1970s during a conversation with a career Air Force officer, a guy with all the “right stuff.”
A fellow B47 pilot told him of an unusual object that flew in formation with him for a while, then took off at an incredible speed. The co-pilot verified the incident. Neither would report it and risk damage to their careers.
That was the first time I heard a story like that from someone I knew well. I remember how he looked as he told that story. Usually confident, even cocky, he looked puzzled, helpless. That was the first time I saw that look, too, but it wouldn’t be the last.
I have seen that look many times since as credible people—fighter pilots, commercial airline pilots, intelligence officers, and just plain folk fishing on an isolated lake or walking in the woods after dark—recounted an experience they can’t forget. They don’t want publicity. They don’t want money. They just want to know what they saw.
Data has been accumulating for fifty years. Some is on the Internet. Some is trustworthy. Much of it isn’t.
Are we hunting a Snark, only to be bamboozled by a boojum? Or are we following luminous breadcrumbs through the forest to the Truth that is Out There?
The Net is one place to find answers, but only if our pursuit of the truth is conducted with discipline, a rigorous methodology, and absolute integrity.
Delusions of Grandeur
November 7, 1997
We had quite a time coming to believe that meteorites were real.
Told that two Harvard professors suggested that was the case, Thomas Jefferson exclaimed, “I would rather believe those scientists are crazy than believe that rocks fall from the sky.”
When lots of rocks fell from the sky on a single French village and the notables sent them to Paris accompanied by affidavits. The Academy of Science replied that they couldn’t help but look with pity at the spectacle of an entire village seized by such a delusion.
When I spoke last year at DefCon, the Las Vegas celebration of computer hacking, I talked about “Hacking as Practice for Trans-planetary Life in the 21st Century.”
That title was a pretty safe bet.
Hacking is best understood as an expression of the irrepressible desire to explore, the curiosity that drives the most passionate scientists and explorers. And we are already trans-planetary. We have been to the moon and have lived in space for years. Robots have landed on Mars and mapped Venus and will land in 2004 on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. We are orbiting Jupiter and will orbit Saturn. We are colonizing “near-earth space.”
Electronic communications, including the Internet, are essential to planetary exploration. McLuhan reminds us that Columbus was a map maker before he was an explorer. Making maps and internalizing the possibilities they disclosed transformed his stance toward the world.
Our interaction with the structures of our information technologies transforms how we hold ourselves in the world as possibilities for action.
Images of colliding galaxies, gravitational lenses, and luminous nurseries of stars disclosed by the Hubble Telescope, netcast images of Mars from the recent rover, change how we think of ourselves and our place in the universe. We are already reaching the edges of our exploration of near-earth space and are being challenged by the seeming impossibility of going trans-galactic.
This from a species that less than a century ago laughed at ideas of heavier-than-air flying machines and nuclear energy.
So why is it so difficult to grasp that we are not the only species in a universe teeming with life? Wherever life can happen, life does happen, much of it wondrous and strange, even on earth. Why are we so resistant to the possibility that older civilizations have broken through barriers we perceive as absolute?
Why do we insist on thinking those villagers are lying, when they tell us that rocks are falling from the sky?
There is a story this morning on the front page of the Wall Street Journal mocking Chinese scientists for believing in UFOs. In the West, UFOs are “the stuff of Hollywood pulp and supermarket tabloids,” while the scientific establishment of China (snicker, snicker) is trying to figure out how they fly those things so fast.
Setting aside for the moment that it is possible for non-American scientists to make significant discoveries, let’s think about what is really being said.
I have written about the craziness of the digital world of UFOs on the Internet (“Stalking the UFO Meme,” first published in Internet Underground and anthologized in Digital Delirium). Many UFO stories on the web sound like the tale of the gnome that showed a mortal who had captured him where gold was buried in the forest. The man tied his scarf around the tree and went to get a shovel, making the gnome promise not to untie the scarf. He returned to find that the gnome had kept his promise but had tied scarves around every tree in the forest.
A forest of disinformation (intentional cover stories acknowledged by intelligence agencies) and confusion based on mistakes (meteorological phenomena, military operations, perceptual error, etc.) means that most of the scarves on UFO websites are on trees where there’s just no gold.
But the WWW is also a space in which real people connect with real events. How can we know which rocks are really falling out of the sky?
The attitude expressed in the Wall Street Journal underscores the fear of ridicule that has kept many people quiet or off the record for years. We hesitate to say what we know or believe because others have had careers disabled or reputations destroyed merely for voicing the possibility.
Still... I have had enough off-the-record conversations over the years to know there’s gold under one of those trees.
I have been told by intelligence officers, USAF career officers, fighter pilots, and commercial airline pilots, as well as plain people uninterested in publicity that UFO phenomena are real.
I have compared notes with serious researchers, some of whom network in the “invisible college” defined by J. Allen Hynek a generation ago. Our conclusions differ in details but generally agree about the big picture of the last fifty years.
Hacking is practice for trans-planetary life. The digital world contracts spacetime in ways that make it feasible to extend ourselves beyond our island earth.
So why are we human beings so resistant not only to new data, but to new possibilities? I guess we’re just too frightened to acknowledge that we’re not who we thought we were. But then, we never are, and the explosion of the Internet in just a few years’ time ought to be a statement that nothing stays the same, least of all our tentative conclusions about what’s real in the universe.
Maybe two million years at the top of the food chain on our home planet has deluded us into thinking we have the same status in the universe. When power people enter the Net for the first time, they learn they cannot exercise power in a web by dominating and controlling, but by contributing and participating. Maybe it’s the same, as we enter the web of larger life spun throughout the universe.
It is not the Beginning of the End but the End of the Beginning.
Interpretation
April 13, 2001
When living systems—including people like us—spontaneously reorganize themselves, we call it hierarchical restructuring. Systems seem to be hardwired to do this when they become overwhelmed or baffled. It’s as if life itself provides a Zen koan that confronts our reasoning with a puzzle that reasoning cannot solve. Some begin the process of restructuring but never complete it; some psychotic breaks, in fact, may be incomplete “conversion experiences” in which the fragmented psyche never finds a new center. But when it works, we discover ourselves reborn, aware, and intact.
We have smaller, more evolutionary epiphanies too.
Forty years ago, I was standing waist-deep in cold Lake Michigan water at a beach in Chicago on a hot day. I was a summer counselor for a neighborhood club but my full-time work was getting a degree in literature, and I had been reading “Huckleberry Finn.”
When I was young, I believed what I read in a primary, immediate way. The landscape of a novel was as real as the landscape of the city. Standing there in the water, I saw suddenly that the story of Huck and Tom was a myth, and that myth was a lens through which we understood ourselves. Instead of living immersed in the myth, however, I saw the myth from outside, in relationship to the machinery that generated our constructions of reality. I glimpsed the engines of the technology of consciousness.
Another epiphany happened in a philosophy class when I heard that Immanuel Kant had said: “Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.” In other words, whatever is “out there” is intelligible only when it connects with our concepts, our beliefs; and, if our senses detect something that, literally, doesn’t compute. We don’t see it, we don’t hear it, we don’t believe it.
I think of those insights—how our myths filter experience, how we can see only what we believe—when I investigate reports of Unidentified Flying Objects.
No other domain, in my experience, includes so many of the puzzles that confront 21st-century humanity as we try to locate ourselves in the cosmos and understand what’s real. Investigating UFO reports begins with listening closely and deeply to the person telling their story, just like counseling. But that’s just the beginning. The psychology of perception, the structure of myths and beliefs, the influence of UFO subcultures, knowledge of meteorology and astronomy, chemistry and physics, current aerospace technologies, all come into play. But as one studies the history of the “modern era” of sightings that began in 1947, one also enters a force field that turns all that data, so carefully collected and cross-referenced, into a hall of mirrors.
The United States changed after World War II. The culture of secrecy, disinformation, and propaganda that had been deemed appropriate to wartime was extended into the Cold War era, and even though that era has supposedly ended, the culture has a life of its own. Senator Daniel Moynihan is eloquent in his critique of the culture of secrecy, showing how truth is much less likely to emerge from a process of data-gathering and deliberation that is isolated, constrained, and hidden. His book on government secrecy is a vote for the open-source movement as a model for life.
In our brave new world, the design of myth and belief is highly intentional. It’s called propaganda in the public sector, PR in the private, but the tools and techniques are the same, and the digital world only makes it easier. One cannot explore the history of UFO phenomena without exploring deception and disinformation, because it becomes clear that the playing field is not level. It’s like playing poker with someone who tells you what cards he holds rather than showing them, then rakes in the pot.
“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu said. But he also said, “The most important factor in war is moral influence, by which I mean that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders.”
Contemplating the concentration of global media in fewer and fewer hands, the many points of contact between media and corporate and state intelligence, and the naïveté with which we believe what we see on a digital screen, we find ourselves in a difficult position: the deception that Sun Tzu said must be directed at an enemy has been directed for two generations at “we the people,” the ones who ought to be in harmony with their leaders. By practicing deception on their troops and treating us as the enemy, our leaders undermine our allegiance.
There are no ultimate truths, only interpretations, noted Nietzsche, saying in a way what Kant had said, that whatever is out there is filtered through our senses and our schemas. Percept and concept alike in the digital world are subject to manipulation and design. Both sense data and schemas must be deconstructed if our interpretations are to mean anything.
In the absence of truth, we make it up. We fill the void with outlandish projections, guesses, and fables. The Internet is full of them, especially in the realm of UFOs. But we can also take ten steps back to the basics of how we know what we know, how we gather data, establish patterns, come to conclusions. We may be left with only an interpretation, but it’s one that plays by the rules and shows its cards.
I have learned in that hall of mirrors what Moynihan learned in the halls of the Senate; that without disclosure there is no truth, and without truth, no accountability. That’s only an interpretation, of course, but it’s all I’ve got.
The truth isn’t “out there,” it’s hiding in plain sight.
As a civilization, we’re poised for a hierarchical restructuring. In full possession of the facts, “we the people” get it right more often than not. We are worthy of being trusted. The enemy is not the truth that sets us free, the enemy is a general who deceives his own troops and holds the truth for ransom in that labyrinthine hall of mirrors.
For Joe K, my e-mail pal, and Terry Hansen, author of “The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up”
The Silence of the Lambs
May 8, 2001
“I always thought I was a cynic,” author and journalist Gary Webb told me, “but my colleagues insisted I was an idealist.”
We were talking about the power of the national security state which has evolved since World War II and had punished Webb for exposing the links between drug trafficking by the CIA, illegal funding for the Contras, and the introduction of crack cocaine into American cities. Webb was attacked by newspapers long connected to the intelligence establishment and his career derailed after his newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, retracted the story. He has since expanded his articles into a book, Dark Alliance, with additional documentation.
When the CIA acknowledged that it had used drug dealers and, in fact, had a dispensation to do so through the Department of Justice of the Reagan-Bush administration, the response in a more perfect world might have been an outcry. In a more perfect world, the newspapers that unfairly attacked him might have apologized. There might have been a little noise.
Instead, there was silence.
The silence of the lambs.
A cynic, Webb illustrates, is a disappointed idealist. Realists are never disappointed. Realists choose reality to be exactly as it is. When it turns out to be that way, well... what’s the question?
We’re disappointed only when there’s a gap between the way it is and the way we believe it can be. But there are assumptions hidden in there; that we can do something about the way it is; that consciousness is not merely a mirror, but an engine of transformation, and that our energy, directed by will and intention in accordance with our highest values, really can alter the field on which humankind works and plays.
“I had no illusions,” Webb said. “I knew what they would do. These are people who lie for a living and think they’re above the law. They’re professionals at neutralizing enemies.”
Webb was attacked for things he never said, but when it turned out that he was right, nobody seemed to remember.
Intentional forgetting is not accidental. One of the illusions we still hold is that “history” is not designed, despite the sophisticated creation of pseudo-environments that wave our minds like flags aligned in a strong wind. Short-term memory is filled to the brim with irrelevancies and the time, inclination, and discipline to do the work that uncovers the truth is in short supply.
Two recent books, The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up by Terry Hansen and UFOs and the National Security State by Richard M. Dolan, illuminate from the specialized perspective of UFO studies how effective, thorough, and well-executed the national security state has become in managing memory and forgetfulness, creating false memories called “history,” and teaching the sheep to heed their masters’ voice.
I once interviewed a woman I know well about a UFO sighting. Publicity or gain was far from her mind. Like most witnesses, she would speak only behind closed doors. She described an unconventional flying object hovering over a power plant on a back road in North Carolina in the 1970s. The physical details of her description were familiar—there were many sightings like it at the time—but I was fascinated by the way her mind negotiated with its own experience.“I couldn’t have seen it,” she said. “But I did. I know what I saw. I couldn’t have seen... but I saw... well I saw a flying saucer.”
That’s the way the human mind negotiates with its experience when it doesn’t want to believe it. When our experience has been the subject of ridicule, debunking, and threats of career-ending punishment for fifty years, it’s difficult to find our public voice. As a commercial airline pilot told me, “We talk about it among ourselves, but no one makes reports. We know what happens when you say something in public.”
The doctor who first defined battered child syndrome would speak to medical groups and afterward, there was always silence. No one asked questions in public. But later in the hallway, someone would approach him and say, “You know, I saw something like that in the ER. Do you suppose...?”
Once we begin to ask the right questions, we are on the trail of the truth. Those who determine our models of understanding determine the questions that we ask. Then they don’t have to worry about the answers.
When I allude to UFO phenomena in a speech, a member of the audience often waits until others have left, then says, “I want to tell you what happened to me.” They often sound ashamed, having been taught that what they experienced happens only to crackpots and charlatans. They sound like people who were battered but still feel responsible for their abuse.
When secrecy is used to maintain the power of those holding the secrets, we inevitably develop a black market in truth. We may pay a higher price for reality but at least we know the goods are the real thing.
Stephen Northcutt, a computer security professional, told me the “open source” society of hackers gives them a leg up. Habituated to sharing knowledge with one another, the hacker community learns more and faster than the “professional” security community that hasn’t learned how to share information.
Hacking, in its essence, is the ability, will, and intention to gather scraps of knowledge in the shadows and knit them into coherent scripts so a small trusted community can become a network of real power. That’s a model for building the truth in the shadow of the national security state. That’s really the only defense we little lambs have when our shepherds believe they can manage our lives better than we can and keep us behind electric fences on digital reservations.
The truth is hiding in plain sight. But the truth is not a tender little lamb, it’s a tiger crouching in the jungle, eyes glowing, waiting for its prey.
On the Dark Side of the Moon
May 22, 2001
A note from Richard: I received a call from Joel Garreau, an author and columnist for the Washington Post. He asked about my work which he was going to mention in a column on “out of the box thinking” in the Washington Post. He used the names of large companies I had worked for as evidence of my stature, but did so in order to ask... Just how far out there can someone go and still be considered reasonably sane?
I’ve been lucky. Mentors and friends have shown up at critical moments of my life to offer conversations that help me find my way. You’re never too old, I guess, to receive some balance and perspective from a wiser elder.
Even when the conversation sounds a little wild.
The talk at the coffee shop this morning was about the price of gas and the Milwaukee Bucks winning the semi-finals. In contrast, our conversation might have sounded, well, highly unlikely. Some might have said it sounded crazy. But then, that anything at all even exists is highly unlikely, and what passes for sanity today will sound crazy in a few years.
The dialogue started when I mentioned a conversation with one of the heads of the remote viewing program conducted by the CIA. Remote viewing is clairvoyance executed through structured protocols that build in feedback and accountability. Some remote viewers have remarkable results. On a recent trip to Washington I spoke with an executive whose company had evaluated the program for the CIA.“The results may not be strictly quantifiable,” he said, “but there’s definitely something there.”
Remote viewing was practiced by the NSA as well. One of their targets was the dark side of the moon.
“Why would you target the dark side of the moon if you were not looking for an alien presence?”
Not so fast, said my mentor with a smile. There are other reasons for wanting to know what’s happening on the dark side of the moon.
There are weapons platforms in space, he explained, that need to be stealthy. They’re often disguised as junk. The trick is to hide the platform. The farther out it is, the better. The dark side of the moon would be a good place to look for hidden weapons.
But let’s connect some dots and go out a little further, he said.
He mentioned a physicist with a government contract to explore faster-than-light propulsion systems and exotic forms of energy. He’s working on black hole physics, he said. Now, think about it. Five, ten years ago, we didn’t even know if black holes were real. Now they’ve been observed, we’ve seen event horizons with the Hubble, the physics is no longer theoretical. But because of some of the potential applications, you won’t hear much about it.
Applications like what?
Like Stargate might be closer than you think.
We don’t have to go the speed of light, either, although my friend thinks that we can, inside the bubble. When people describe some unconventional flying objects, they talk about this kind of stretching-out experience—you see the vehicle and it doesn’t just disappear, it elongates like a rubber band and then it’s gone. It looks like it approaches the speed of light. There’s serious research going on in that direction. We’re looking for the windows in the black holes. They may be periodic, they may not be stable for a long time, they may come and go, but by virtue of what shines through those unstable areas—we’re starting to map them now, our radio telescopes are mapping different parts of the galaxy to determine what’s shining through. A higher civilization would have better maps, of course. Then we’ll have a fingerprint. More advanced civilizations will have better fingerprints. They’ll say, “Oh, that’s that planet,” and position something near the hole. And then—they’re here.
He repeated:
They’re here.
Which means we can go there.
So where would you park a weapons platform in space if you wanted to make it stealthy? Remember, we’re working on quantum communication for the battlefield that takes advantage of non-locality. When two particles are entangled, what happens to one happens to the other, whether they’re ten feet or ten galaxies apart. That means left spin right spin—dots and dashes—communication that can’t be jammed or intercepted. Just like remote viewing, which suggests that consciousness, too, is non-local.
We’re looking at parking weapons platforms a couple of galaxies away. We’re looking at how they get here so we can go there. We’re looking at how to look.
He sipped his latté with obvious relish.
“This conversation,” I said, “would make an interesting column.”
Go ahead, write it, he laughed. They’ll just say it’s the feverish dreams of an overworked imagination. Someone wandering too long in the digital wilderness. You know how effective ridicule is when you can’t provide cover for an operation because too many people know about it. It’s worked with UFOs for fifty years. What does it matter when thousands of people report the same thing if they’re all categorized in the public mind as loonies?
Deception works best when it moves in directions that people already think. Well, people don’t want to think about this. There’s a big psychological protective shield around human beings. It’s almost as if ‘ants don’t know dogs exist’ and don’t want to know. It’s hard to break through that.
Few cultures have successfully engaged with a higher technological civilization and not been undone by it. Aztecs thought the Spanish were some kind of godly, affecting their ability to fight them. The Japanese are the only modern culture I know of that was not advanced technologically but was able to mediate their contact with the West and learn quickly without being destroyed or taken over. It’s the best model we have.
He drained his latté and wiped the froth from his upper lip.
“Be sure to put everything in your column: black holes and particle physics, going faster than light, remote viewers targeting the dark side of the moon, weapons platforms in deep space, alien civilizations and how they got here. Don’t leave anything out.”
They won’t have to use ridicule, he smiled. You’ll do the job for them.
When he paused, the conversations humming around us resolved into sharper focus: the conference finals, a toddler’s first steps, the blossoming lilacs, the buzzing of twitching antennae processing local reality.
Ants happily not knowing that dogs exist.
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