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In our increasingly worldaround world, it is a rare, if not obsolete, occurrence for two wildly disparate and equally sophisticated cultures to meet for the first time. That's probably for the best, of course, because when it did happen in spades, during the centuries on Earth before instantaneous global communication, all bets were off, and what went down was almost always marked with catastrophe (as with the indigenous people of North America) or powderkeg-and-a-match mutual distrust (as with the first United States naval expeditions to Japan in the 1850s, a cultural collision that is beautifully explored in Charles and Ray Eames' 1972 film The Black Ships).

There are, of course, exceptions to this grim surmisal. When such a meeting takes place on a smaller scale, and is filtered through the lens of a profound -- and autonomous -- common interest, only good can come of it. This is a roundabout way of getting at the nucleus of my new favorite book, Jacques Vallée's UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat, which documents the first meetings between Soviet and Western UFO researchers at the dawn of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, a period of transparency in Soviet politics which effectively lifted the Iron Curtain from decades of underground paranormal research and samizdat dissemination of literature.

This is what happened: In 1990, one of the world's most respected and most rigidly scientific ufologists -- Vallée -- was invited by a Soviet press agency, Novosti, to visit the USSR in the wake of one of the country's most controversial waves of UFO activity, the infamous Voronezh sightings. On arrival, Vallée discovered a rich community of well-organized researchers, the ironic result of censorship itself forcing Soviet ufology into unofficial underground networks, where it flourished. On this unusual result of the Iron Curtain, Vallée is almost nostalgic: "It was obvious that knowledge was revered here to a degree that our information-saturated world had forgotten...Russia has never had a distribution system...ideas percolated among students, scholars, and private groups who created a verifiable cult around the books that influenced them."

Whether or not you buy into UFO research, particularly Vallée's especially tinfoil strain of non-extraterrestrial hypotheses ("I am a heretic among heretics," he is known to lament), this book is a fascinating cultural document. Before glasnost, the broad-reaching and colorful world of Soviet UFO research was completely isolated from the West, forced to depend on non-institutional research bodies, catalogued with a uniquely Russian strain of manic order, and often effectively shut down by the government or by prevailing cultural opinion. At this moment in 1990, however, ufologists were free to pontificate at will to Vallée, a Western scientist, about Tunguska explosion of 1908, the Voronezh incidents, the rampant UFO activity in the Perm region of Russia, and about the widespread Soviet technique of "biolocation," kind of biological-field dowsing -- all this for the first time. Before Vallée's trip to Moscow, no Soviet ufologists had ever compared notes with a Western scientist or researcher. I mean, imagine the mind-fuck that this represents, especially when someone from the West says to you, "yes, we have reports of alien abductions, too." This accidental control group created by Soviet isolation seems, at face value, like a solid corroboration that we are really in the midst of legitimate visitations.

Vallée's speculations about the Soviet scene are intimate and fascinating. He often reflects on the abject cultural misery of the USSR, its inescapable sense of pervading gloom; he is also struck by the tenacity and vibrancy of its paranormal research. After a roundtable conference with Muscovite scientists, he notes, "the Soviets...still regard the future with the somewhat naïve passion of a Jules Verne or an H.G. Wells," an observation that resounds strongly when you consider the average Soviet witness'
description of an extraterrestrial being: 10 feet tall, silver boots, three eyes.

This, incidentally, is one of the most interesting aspects of the cross-cultural summit: that the Russians, unbeknownst to the West, have been experiencing the same kinds of crazy unexplainable phenomena as we have, forever, totally isolated from our singular conception of the extraterrestrial or paranormal as being necessarily "grey" or "little green man" in persuasion. The result is a manifestation of the unknown that is perhaps more fantastic than Vallée might have anticipated, and certainly as alien -- pun wholly intended -- to our worldview as these phenomena themselves.

The big question, of course, remains unanswered. While the Soviet data is replete with well-documented sightings, none of them bear any resemblance to the Western data. Instead of saucers, we see glowing spheres; instead of almond-eyed gangly creatures, we encounter robots and headless giants. Does this mean that UFO phenomena are simply irrational experiences heavily filtered through our cultural conceptions? Are we even talking about the same thing? With so many varieties of manifestation, the UFO problem becomes almost semantic, especially in the case of this glasnost-fueled conference, for we lack a common language.

I'm tempted to read this as a version of the kind of cultural catastrophe that usually results from the communication of two formerly isolated groups; with a lack of shared language, and the only common ground being a commitment to the fantastic and conspiratorial, the Soviet-Western ufology conference might have spelled a death knell to the whole movement. Vallée is more hopeful, however, and that is the eternal asset of the UFO movement: "These developments," he concludes, "give us hope that a fruitful, long-term dialogue might be opening at last between researchers in the Soviet Union and their Western counterparts...it is only through such dialogue that the UFO mystery will eventually be solved."

HAPPY 90th BIRTHDAY,
ARTHUR C. CLARKE!

I'm personally indebted to Mr. Clarke for so many reasons: his profound optimism, particularly about our race as a unified system and our inevitable future contact with extraterrestrial life, has bolstered my ability to think globally; his unshakable commitment to the popularization of science and the dry elegance of his books have always left me echoing with dewy wonder. I pretty much consider the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when David Bowman proclaims, ""The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars!" to be a seminal moment in my relationship with science fiction as an intellectual commitment, and as a genre. Happy Birthday, Arthur; may your own rendezvous with Rama not take place for many more years.

Celebrate this day, Internauts. Learn something new about space today. Watch Arthur C. Clarke's musings on turning 90 (above), which he bookends with a startling quotation from Kipling: "If I have given you delight/ By aught that I have done,/ Let me lie quiet in that night/ Which shall be yours anon." After that, head over to the Sri Lankan Astronomical Association's special Clarke-Birthday-Blog and wish the great man some good tidings of your own!

I'm surprised that I haven't come across this before: a Google-maps rendering of UFO sightings in the US, dynamically updated as-it-happens. Preliminary perusal seems to indicate that UFOs tend to stay away from the landlocked mountains, preferring to pop by the Pacific Northwest, the California coastline, and, in droves, the East Coast and the area immediately around the Great Lakes. For those of us who "believe" that even a fraction of these sightings may be the real deal, this map is an interesting asset and may tell us some valuable things about our visitors; for those of us who don't, this is a powerful illustration of human folly, and that's pretty compelling, too.

"We are one planet. We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?"

-- Carl Sagan

Long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with my tenderness for the Unarians, a UFO cult-cum-Renaissance science foundation that has been based in El Cajon, California since the 1960s. In 2006 I made something of a pilgrimage to their compound and left with a profound sense of mystified pity, or pitiful mysticism, which was ultimately a kind of admiration for the pastel dreamscape of their cosmology.

In any case, I occasionally receive the "Unarius E-Flash," an enlightened e-mail newsletter. In its better moments it makes glowing pronouncements about the Unarius public-access television production studio going HD or the re-release of "Infinite Perspectus" on MP3. Today, I received the email I've been waiting for since my El Cajon visit: a flyer advertising the much-awaited Unarian celebration, "The 24th Interplanetary Conclave of Light." If I weren't otherwise occupied in the month of October, I would be there with my turquoise sweat-suit on. Is there anyone I can wrangle into a little investigative reporting?

If you have any doubts, this pictorial tour of the 2005 conclave and video (sorry, Realplayer) of the dove release (FROM A UFO) into the blazing San Diego sky might change your mind.

I once said that 2007 on Universe would include many new features, one being an occasional review of a work of science fiction. Hello!

The Black Cloud is a 1957 science-fiction novel written by British astronomer Fred Hoyle. Like the novels of Carl Sagan, and, often, Arthur C. Clarke, it's something of an extrapolation of the author's deeply-held scientific conceptions. Because it was written by a scientist, further, it's almost overwhelmingly dry at times; the narrative often gives way entirely to pages full of mathematical formulae, diagrams, and lengthy expository footnotes.

The premise is such: teams of scientists around the world simultaneously discover the presence of an inexplicable mass moving steadily through the solar system, seemingly dead-set on hitting the Earth. After some pontification, it turns out to be a highly dense dark cloud, unlike any cosmic dustball ever observed. Cue a panic attack and the deft warning of heads of state.

As the cloud's erratic behavior proves to be impossible to predict scientifically, the scientists -- British stodgies at Cambridge, Americans lolling around Cal Tech and Mount Wilson -- realize the cloud might be some kind life-form in itself. Terrified that the being will block the Earth from the Sun's rays, unwittingly or otherwise, they attempt to communicate with it, a venture which, to their surprise, proves to be successful.

The black cloud turns out to be a startling, non-organic superorganism that is -- and this is an excellently clever turn of events -- completely surprised by the existence of life-forms other than itself. The cloud even claims to have always existed; "Wait until the Big Bang hears about that!" one of the scientists exclaims.

Our author, Fred Hoyle is an interesting character: he was the director of the Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge, but rejected the Big Bang theory because he found the idea of the universe having a beginning, and thus a cause, philosophically troubling. He was a notable feminist, pioneered the steady state theory, and even went against the commonly-held theory of chemical evolution, arguing rather that life on Earth was seeded by a steady influx of bacteria arriving from outer space on comets.

It's no surprise, then, that The Black Cloud is such an interesting, and fundamentally marginal, book. I originally picked it up because Hoyle's ideas -- particularly about the nature of life and its cosmic origins -- kept popping up in my reading: in footnotes, in passing, in complexity theory, particularly lauded by cosmic eschatologists like Freeman Dyson, who really do believe human life might evolve into conscious, interstellar dust clouds.

In a terrifyingly topical example of science imitating art, an international team of physicists have literally just discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust (like that making up Hoyle's "black cloud") can become organized into corkscrew-shaped structures, which, under the right circumstances, can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and, ahem, (holy shit!) life itself.

These helical strands behave in a totally counterintuitive way, like attracting like, and can perform biological feats usually reserved for primordial stew: they can divide and form copies of identical structures, or "evolve" into more complex systems, for example. According to the researchers, who just published their finding in the New Journal of Physics, (an interesting action in itself, since the NJP is an open-access, online journal) nonorganic life is a definite possibility, and clouds of interstellar dust can likely self-organize, intuit, reproduce, and evolve.

The relationship between reality and fantasy in the realm of science fiction is in a constant state of evolution. Things which seem fantastic in 1957 can become scientific reality decades later; who are we to say if any speculation is too outlandish?

To quote the literary critic Robert Scholes, whose mid-1970s books on science fiction are among the rare few intelligent critical analyses of the genre, "because we know that the unexpected happens continually in the history of science itself, fiction...has a license to speculate as freely as it may, in the hope of offering us glimmers of a reality hidden from us by our present set of preconceptions."

Occasionally, a friend or associate tips me off to a particularly interesting manifestation of the word "Universe." Some are more interesting than others; some are really in line with what this manifestation of Universe is all about, and those blow me away the most. This one -- all shadowy polygons, flowers, and color fields -- comes from Greg Davis, who once discovered a rare old Unarius film completely independently of me, and at the same time. Thanks, Greg!

The Explorer's Club is an American Institution founded in New York City in 1904 by the survivors of Frederick Cook's 1894 arctic expedition. Although its members are infamously eccentric (L. Ron Hubbard, for example, who carried the Club flag with him on several yachting expeditions) they have been responsible for some of Exploration's greatest firsts: the summit of Mount Everest, the deepest point in the Ocean, the surface of the moon. Of the 202 Club flags which have journeyed into the world, some have flown at both poles, the lunar surface, and the highest peaks on Earth. It is perhaps one of the least-known, best-traveled symbols in the world.

The flag's color-coding is fairly obvious: the red band represents courage, and the blue fidelity. The club's initials (E.C.) and a compass rose adorn the white median, representing the institution's worldwide influence. Of course, this association was most ideologically powerful when there were parts of the planet still left to be explored; these days, the EC mostly sponsors field research and projects which advance the "ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore."

What does Exploration mean today? Sure, there's NASA's "New Vision," the roar of commercial space-travel, the wild card that is the Internet, the new-psychedelia revival's emphasis on inner travels. I don't know how much these things really represent Exploration, that spirit of penetrating into a place that has never before been experienced. There's an altruism and purpose inherent in the idea that perhaps these modern adaptations lack.

I think real Exploration now has a lot to do with "dépaysement," a French word that I like and that doesn't have a clear English translation. Literally, it means "dis-country-ment;" it's the feeling of being outside of your own country, or shifted slightly outside of a recognizable place. What's interesting about dépaysement is that it doesn't necessarily refer to being literally outside of your own country, only that you have a completely new understanding of a familiar place. For example, every time I look at the photographs that Voyager 1 took of the other side of Saturn, I can't even deal with the idea of living on a street, in a house. It's all context. AsFrank O'Hara wrote, "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."

Maybe we should be bringing the Explorer's Club flag with us to the supermarket and into our own bedrooms, or at least be making an effort to recontextualize our habitual environments, even if it's just by watching BBC's The Planets. Even if we're in the same place as we always are, or even doing the same old things in a different place, we should be aware that there's more than one way to experience our immediate environment.

Interestingly, albeit totally irrelevantly, the Explorer's Club flag bears a striking similarity to the French flag. The similarities end there, however, since the tricolore's scheme has something to do with the old Parisian coat of arms (red and blue) overpowering the traditional color of the monarchy (white).

In this spirit, I propose two auditory dépaysements. The first is an excellent lecture by Brian Eno (that I found thanks to the always topical Momus blog) on Steve Reich, slow music, ribbons around the Earth, and the Long Now. The second experience is another first for Universe: an mp3 mix compiled by "yours truly" of music that is completely incongruous with my current environment, which is a very crisp and wintry Paris. It's also a little present for you, reader. You can download it here (26 MB and about 28 minutes, for what it's worth). Here is the tracklist:

Any discourse on the state of human Exploration, how to succeed with your own versions of dépaysement, or a good place for an Explorer's flag is welcome.

This just in from the NASA news wire: 11,000 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, a massive galactic snake is slithering across the Universe. Of course, it isn't a real lizard (the appellation is just some weird NASA Halloween humor) but the core of a sooty cloud larger than a dozen of our solar systems, which happens to be shaped sort of like a snake. Disappointing, I know; it would be nice, for once, to have something more interesting than dust, gas, and cold rocks bobbing around in the great beyond.

What if, maybe, outer space just isn't where the action is? The human race has been glued the stars for centuries, eagerly seeking out radio bursts, blobs of light, and little green dudes; most of us feel the inevitability that if anything ever happens, it will come from the cosmos. This makes sense, of course: for all our textbooks about neutron stars and dark matter, we basically know diddlysquat about space, besides that it's completely unlike anything we have down here.

In my daily research, I have recently come across a whole underworld of conspiracy theorists and alternative knowledge gurus who are convinced that outer space is so ten years ago. No no, they argue, in quest of the answer to the age-old question (Are We Alone?) we must not look to the outer reaches of the Universe, as we have been conditioned to do, but rather into the belly of our own seemingly benign planet. Space, they propose, is a 'classic magician's distraction.' The real higher intelligence ain't sending flying saucers from Zeta Reticuli or using its advanced star maps to navigate to Earth and mind-probe us; rather, it lives under the Earthen surface, in thousands of miles of underground tunnels, caverns and cave systems that date back from dinosaur-times.

Who are these higher beings? Not skinny, almond-eyed, bobble-headed aliens, which, incidentally, are referred to as 'Greys' in the Ufology community. They're not little green men, Space Brothers, Venusians, Nords, or Pleiadeans, either. They are, according to a staggeringly large subset of the conspiracy theory Universe, reptilian humanoids. Right: intelligent, supernatural, and highly developed reptile-human hybrids, or Reptoids, which are capable of shape-shifting and allegedly control all the major secret societies, royal bloodlines, and governments on Earth.

Fuck space, right? Seven foot-tall subterranean-dwelling lizards are a galaxy more interesting.

The main proponent of this theory, or at least the most colorful one, is the impressively deadpan David Icke, who is somehow both a former professional soccer player and the former head of the UK Green Party. Icke, in a slew of books, speaking tours, and videos, claims that reptoids are the driving force behind a Da Vinci Code-style worldwide conspiracy that controls humanity. Not one to just dip his toe in the pool, he takes the concept all the way to the deep end, contending that everyone from George W. Bush (most believably, really) to the British Royal family are blood-drinking lizards with extra-terrestrial origins. Sure, it isn't a huge stretch to imagine the entire Republican Party as a scaly crew of reptilian bastards (actually, it's kind of fun), but the Queen of England as a minion of the lizard lords? Come on, the woman is not exactly a party animal.

Icke, for whom the reptoid/reptilian thing is only part of a much larger world view involving global conspiracies, borderline anti-Semitism, CIA mind-control, Masonic rituals, and general New-Age philosophy, claims he put together this theory after people world-around confided to him their experiences witnessing powerful political figures morph into lizards and back again. In a particularly lengthy and in-form interview, Icke declares, "I keep meeting people who tell me that they've seen people shape-shift into bloody reptiles."

The second important subset of Reptoid Research falls under the jurisdiction of the slightly more moderate conspiracist John Rhodes, who was the first to seriously investigate and publicly present claims of reptilian-humanoid sightings by founding the Reptoids.com (seriously, check it out) Research Center in the late 90s. Rhodes contends that these cryptozoologic mysteries are not extra-terrestrial in nature, nor do they have anything at all to do with world governments. That kind of talk is just some knee-jerk collective fear of the current global political climate. His lizard men, rather, are evolved from dinosaurs. Yeah! Think about it: if any dinosaurs somehow survived the supposed meteorite impact that doomed their species, and if evolution were for real, then wouldn't these survivors have evolved into something else? OK, forget about how birds are allegedly evolved from the dinosaurs. Imagine if they became bipedal humanoid intelligences instead! Imagine they still live in ice caves far from human contact! Can you wait until the polar ice caps melt? There will be a whole generation of dinosauroids wandering around, needing refugee housing. What a hell of a drain on the economy: we better call in the seven-foot blood lizard lords to take care of things. Come to think of it, we might as well just stick to the stars, right?

Still, on a sincere note, I know it's easy to poke fun at the lizard men. I research these things as though they were fiction -- it makes it easier, searching for the most salient points -- and write about them as though they were truth, earnestly trying to get the point across. Still, I know it's bullshit: I believe that the world is a feelingless rock with energies and the Universe is a ground for infinites, and nothing more. Sometimes, though, when I'm doing other things, I'm blindsided by the thought that some people really do believe in lizard people, for example, and that for them the world is a darkly malevolent, but purposeful place. This is what devastates me the most.