What lies beyond Earth and inside of Pandora's box?
He’s the Albert Einstein of our time. Even more blasphemous, Albert’s superior in many ways. His deformed atrophied body, the shell of a normal man, houses perhaps the greatest mind in the short history of the Homo sapien.
There he is: Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist and genius. In all of his brilliance he’s making a profound statement. He’s saying that we should think twice before attempting to talk to other life forms in the heavens. In fact, his tone is extremely wary in this area.
To this day, we’re still enamored with what lies “out there.” It secretly drives our probing into space. Like children looking to please their parents, we try to do the right thing and be peaceable by sending out songs from the Beatles. We talk in mathematics, the language of the universe. Our clunky machines sail aimlessly to the outer rim with the hopes of our Whoville-type society telling someone, or some thing, that we are here. Yes, we are here.
As we explore, Hawking just sits – compact and scrunched by ALS. His statement about communicating with others in the vast universe is akin to “do not open Pandora’s box”. Anyone else would only garner a nod, a snicker, or a snort of contempt. However, Stephen Hawking is someone we actually stop and listen to. What is he afraid of? What can that supercomputer of a mind really be thinking?
Most humans have no idea that the Earth is a very noisy planet. Our televisions and radio waves, to say nothing of our cell phones and communication arrays, spill an untold amount of static into the galaxy. Even if we wanted to remain quiet and heed Hawking’s warning, we are far too late. Like noisy neighbors having a beer bash well into the wee hours, we have been chattering away for far too many decades.
SETI Institute literally scans the cosmos in search of a hiccup or a cough, anything that denotes sentient life. Our mining for gold has turned up very few specks of evidence, yet we continue to listen.
What is Stephen Hawking afraid of? Klingons, The Borg, Wraiths, or Minbari? My humble opinion tells me it may be something subtler. My judgment, my heart, tells me that Hawking simply feels the “children” are not ready for what we might find or what might find us. In our egocentric way, we fancy ourselves as the Universe’s perfect computers, the ultimate machines, guided by an organic computer whose limit we have yet to realize, but is that really the case? Are we really at the top of the intellectual food chain?
What if there is something more out there? What if there is something so superior, we would be reduced to mere shadows that stretched under the feet of cosmic gods? What if these gods were not benevolent?
What does a wild animal imagine when a rope is flung around its feet and a cloth is thrown over its head? I don’t think we ever really want to know, but we might be able to relate if our efforts at communicating go awry. Our benevolent and fuzzy images of Ewoks or Yoda would be gone and replaced by something quite different. The current hierarchy in our world and in the universe would be irreversibility changed. Our innocence and a whole lot more would leave us forever.
I have a feeling Stephen Hawking already knows what might be in store for us and I fear he may be correct.
It was circa 1972 when I heard my father say that for the first time. As a kid, I would watch the very British television show, UFO, with my dad and when the moment struck he would utter those two words. This was the fuel for my fantasies. If my father could believe that we were not alone in the universe then what chance did a six year old have in denying that train of thought?
What came next seemed only natural. Being a comic book hound, super heroes that lived on Earth suddenly became humans reaching for the stars.
Everyday before school, I’d pass a large photograph of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin. They sat in their bulky space suits and held their helmets as if they were just coming back from battle. The moon sat like a throne behind them, gray and silver. Majestic.
I would stay awake until the sun came up, dreaming that we were being watched by some benevolent race, maybe even being chuckled at like parents who watch over their children at the playground. Still the years rolled on. My love for sci-fi grew as my dreams for “out there” spread into my every day life.
Then it happened. It was a hot summer night (aren’t they all) and I was out in the backyard embracing the inky black that was night. The sky was indigo against the tree line and I was just like any other teen soaking in his summer vacation – savoring my freedom from the rigors of high school and all that entailed.
Unexpectedly, a blood-red streak flew through the sky. It wasn’t the 4th of July and this streak made no sound. It wasn’t linear in its arc. Rather, it streaked at a series of 50 to 70 degree angles. It also moved at a fantastic rate. At the risk of sounding Star Wars-ian, the streak and the three others that followed were not random, but very precise. Meteorites? Maybe, but these were heading up into the atmosphere, not downward. It all happened in less than 10 seconds. There was no fanfare. No portentous musical prelude. Just the event itself, barren and devoid of any magnified salutation.
I never reported the occurrence. I wasn’t even sure that what I saw wasn’t my version of a “weather balloon.” Still, decades have passed and I continue to look to the sky. It doesn’t have to be the oppressive heat of summer or the paralyzing cold of winter. I always count the stars until I’m bored. It gives the vastness of space before me even more scope.
We can’t comprehend what we can’t touch. Tangible is our personal universe. Quantum physics puts other beings and mirror images of what we are in other dimensions. These aren’t concepts for the faint of heart. Yoda would tell us, “stagnant you have become,” as we occupy our thoughts with little league, PTO meetings, and identity crisis when our best pair of jeans don’t fit anymore. I went outside again tonight on the first real spring-like evening of the year. The red streaks have never appeared again and chances are they probably never will.
Somewhere, out there, second star to the right and straight on till morning…I still believe.
Sharon reports from Cleveland on the Lake Erie shore
Over a week of continuous sightings of a strange light over Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio was brought to my attention just yesterday by my friend, Sharon. Upon looking into this further it’s obvious that word is not getting out of the local area.
Lucky for Believe It Tour that Sharon lives in Cleveland and was able to report on the “Cleveland UFO” for us. Unfortunately, the weather conditions over Lake Erie last night were far from favorable, which created an unfit setting for capturing any video of the strange light.
“It was 33 degrees and the sleet and hail was pelting down! My lips were frozen! We drove to the lake shore and the visibility was poor! The cloud cover was so thick we couldn’t see more than 1/4 mile. We drove along the shoreline hoping to find a break in the clouds, but to no avail. I will return again nightly until I can capture something,” Sharon reported.
If you are at all curious, like the people commenting on our YouTube video, Cleveland UFO Report, you’re wondering why there isn’t more media attention on this. Why, after more than a week of curious crowds gathering to watch this nightly occurrence on the Lake Erie shore, are there are no authorities documenting this mysterious light?
Has the Balloon Boy incident ruined all believability for any future phenomenon?
Whether there’s a plausible explanation, it’s a hoax, or it’s true evidence of aliens visiting from outer space, we’ll try to stay with this story to bring you more information as it happens. Be sure to check back here at BelieveItTour.com for updates.
Special thanks to Sharon for taking the time away from her Bigfoot field reporting to brave the elements for us out there in Cleveland.
On July 22, 2009, Chinese scientists and students captured on film something mysterious flying in the skies over China during the recent solar eclipse. From the few photographs being released it’s fairly safe to say it wasn’t a bird, plane, or even Superman.
Scientists from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing are puzzled over what they saw and the resulting images that were obtained by the scientists and students observing the solar eclipse. Researchers will spend the next year analyzing the 40 minutes of footage and numerous photographs to try to determine what the object was. The observatory’s director, Ji Hai-sheng, has stated that scientists will not publically speculate on what the unidentified object might be until they have analyzed all data. The July event was just the latest in a series of unidentified sightings that have been reported in China.
The question remains as to what was seen in China? Was it an anomoly caused by the solar eclipse, a commercial airplane that had an unusal refection due to the solar event, or something truly unidentified that might indicate life exists elsewhere?
It must be fate… I haven’t logged on in a while, and Diana’s posting from today on the printed word goes hand-in-hand with the stuff currently rattling around in my head.
Recently I have been getting back to an old love of mine and reading a lot of science fiction – running the gamut from current (like Reed and Reynolds) to classics (like Asimov and Dick). A couple of reoccurring extraterrestrial concepts have started intriguing me as I dig into these sci fi stories.
The first concept has to do with the almost unimaginable vastness of time and space. It blows my mind when I really start thinking about the monster distances between all the objects in the universe and the time it would take to travel between them. Realistically, given all that time and all that space, it is pretty unlikely that “us” and “them” will ever actually come face to face – even if we both are trying really, really hard to make it happen. I wholeheartedly believe there are other beings out there, the hard part is making the ET high-five actually connect (on a side note, I heard the other day that the trick to never whiffing a high-five is to watch the other guy’s elbow, not the hand…).
The second concept is one of recognition. Are we even looking for the right signs? We only know what we know, right? Maybe you have come face to face with ET hundreds of times in your life and just were not equipped to recognize the contact. ET could be too small, too big, on the wrong wavelength, or in the wrong dimension for your senses to pick up. And, ET could be having the same problem when “staring” back at you. This “sensory malfunction” idea is basically an extension of the “guy walking a dog” joke — if an extraterrestrial pulled up in his ship and looked down on a guy walking a dog on a leash (and picking up his poop!), he would (rightly) assume the dog was in charge and check in with the pooch first.
Don’t get me wrong, I find none of this discouraging. If anything, the inherent difficulties in connecting with extraterrestrial life, just makes the search more exciting. Keep looking people.
In the next week or two Believe It Tour will be offering something new and exciting for its fellow believers. We will be starting a monthly literature review where books that explore topics like cryptozoology, the paranormal, extraterrestrials, folklore, or monsters will be featured and reviewed. Our hope is that through the reviews it will be a good way for you to learn about new authors or interesting topics you’ve never explored before. This might be a good introduction for you if you’ve only been exposed to the paranormal or extraterrestrial worlds, but have always wondered about Bigfoot or lake monsters.
We know you’ll be so excited at this new feature we’ll even make it easy for you to get your hands on a copy of the books by providing some easy to use links. We’re also open to suggestions from readers since one of the concepts behind Believe It Tour is about meeting new folks and sharing information. If there is a book you’ve been curious about or a great author you’d like to share feel free to send an e-mail to diana@believeittour.com with your suggestions.
It’s Halloween and the original Believe It Tour feels like it was so long ago. Since our return from that trip we have been hard at work planning how we would continue the project. With Halloween being a favorite time for most of our friends, it was fitting to launch this new blog today to mark the beginning of the next phase of the Believe It Tour and ask all of you to explore life like you did as a child.
The original site has been archived and new pages are taking its place. I don’t want to spoil all the surprises we have in the works, but if you want to keep informed with everything new please sign up for the Believe It Tour enewsletter. As always we welcome any comments and/or suggestions. This next phase is about building a community of believers and people interested in sharing and learning more about our five main categories: paranormal, extraterrestrial, cryptozoology, monsters and folklore.
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In the next week or two Believe It Tour will be offering something new and exciting for its fellow believers. We will be starting a monthly literature review where books that explore topics like cryptozoology, the paranormal, extraterrestrials, folklore, or monsters will be featured and reviewed. Our hope is that through the reviews it will be a good way for you to learn about new authors or interesting topics you’ve never explored before. This might be a good introduction for you if you’ve only been exposed to the paranormal or extraterrestrial worlds, but have always wondered about Bigfoot or lake monsters.
