Ray's X-Blog

This would be just another day in the week for me but most places were closed today and the few friends I have were busy with family and friends.  Sometimes an individual ends up as an outsider not by choice.   I decided to spend the day profitably and bang out another edition of my print zine, Ray X X-Rayer, albeit a short one, one sheet - two pages.  With that printed and out in the mail earlier in the afternoon, I'm using the quiet evening time to reformat the zine article and post them here.  Usually I do the opposite: blog posts first, then reformat them for a zine.  I don’t know how coherent my writing is today because I’m suffering from a one-two punch of allergies and a cold, sneezing and coughing.  The cold started last night.  How appropriate.  Like I say, timing is all about the comedy. At least the sun was out today.  My computer is near a window and the streaming light felt good while I was working on my zine, even though was around the freezing point outside. ...

While listening to the Liberty Net ( www.3950.net ) recently I’ve heard the term “civil disobedience” mentioned.  This was provoked by the re-election of President Obama, an event that produced consternation among the ultra-conservative ham radio operators. Here are some select comments from the chat room on 11/18/12 by one Rick “CAPS LOCK SHOUTER” Flynt : “OBAMA CAN SHUT DOWN ANY AND ALL RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTS AND INSERT HIS DIRTY DICK WITH THE WAVE OF HIS HAND, LIKE GOD!! hE HAS BROADBAND GENERAL COVERAGE XMITTERS THAT HAVE BEEN TESTED TO IONIZE THE ENTIRE NORTHWAST STATES. THIS WAS TESTED AND WAS COMPLETELY EFECTIVE A COUPLE WEEKS AGO!” “OBAMA HAS POWER TO KILL THE INTERNET WITH A BUTTON! THE BILL PASSED! PASSED!!” “I TUNED INTO THE CHAT TO FIND HOPE FOR US. THERE IS NONE! NOT A WORD OF WHAT WE CAN DO AT ALL AFTER Nov 6th!! Not HOPE but HOPELESS! All freedoms, any way out have been sealed before we could save our country from slavery and confiscation of ALL of our...

“UFO lawyer” Peter Gersten waited for an interdimensional portal to open above Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona after the magical hour of the winter solstice arrived on December 21, 2012.  With his Leap of Faith he said he was going to jump into the portal and save the world which he considers to be nothing more than a hologram. No portal, no Leap of Faith as advertised.  Gersten just went home. Apparently the authorities were concerned about him and anyone else showing up for the cosmic event who might be considering taking a leap.  Police and an emergency crew were nearby as seen in a news video posted online by the Fox 10 TV station in Phoenix*.  The video also shows some of the characters who showed up, including a couple of aluminum foil aliens, i.e., people wrapped in foil suits with springy antennas topped with silver balls attached to their heads. Speculation on why Gersten didn’t jump: Maybe he realized that even hologramic gravity can turn you into a splat all over some r...

For some of you the image of the cute cartoon flying saucer above looks familiar. I previously wrote about a movie serial from the 1950s based on the comic book character Blackhawk. The hero is in his plane when the bad guys attack with a remote-controlled flying saucer. The “Blackhawk” serial was made in 1952 with Kirk Alyn as “the fearless champion of justice.” Back in 1950 Alyn starred as the hero in a different serial based on Superman. I didn’t see “Atom Man vs. Superman” until recently and was surprised to spot a familiar cartoon flying saucer making its appearance, this time under the control of Supe’s arch enemy Lex Luthor. At one point newspaper reporter Clark Kent (Superman’s secret identity) and his co-worker Lois Lane are in the Daily Planet airplane when they encounter the animated weapon. Fortunately Lois faints so that Clark can change into Superman and save the day. The “Blackhawk” movie serial two years later did some recycling from this movie. It used the...

Zine Zaps: Fadeaway & Opuntia Quick looks at what has been popping up in my snail mail box. (The Web hasn't killed off paper zines yet.) * * * FADEAWAY – Robert Jennings, 29 Whiting Rd., Oxford, MA 01540-2035. “A fanzine devoted to science fiction and related fields of interest.” 8 ½ x 11,, side stapled, 30 pages + per issue. A mix of articles, art, and an active “Reader Reaction” department where topics like the high price of comic books, the death of paper books, and old SF fandom versus modern fandom are discussed. While Robert is open-minded about all sorts of POVs, I could tell he was writing from the perspective of an older fan (he revealed in #32 that he’s 69 years old, “a genuine geezer.”). Then again, you would be surprised how old some zinesters (ahem) are… Robert’s articles are well-written. Even though I’m not a fan of Tarzan or old time radio, I ended up reading an article about Edgar Rice Burroughs marketing his most famous...

Ronson & Jones: New Hit TV Series Created By Ray X It's a big hit even before it's on the air – or even before one episode has been produced. A slightly nebbish writer/documentary producer from England – Jon Ronson – teams up with a ranting right-wing radio commentator from Texas – Alex Jones – to investigate shadowy evil conspiracies around the world. High concept: "The Odd Couple" meets "The X-Files." My series is based upon Ronson's non-fiction book, "Them: Adventures with Extremists" (2002), detailing his travels about the US and Canada while looking into the world of conspiracy theories. In the book Ronson encounters Alex Jones, anti-Illuminati crusader, and works with him to penetrate the secrets of Bohemian Grove. The Grove is a vast California campground where some of the most powerful men in the world meet mid-summer for two weeks to piss on redwoods and watch a ceremony called Cremation of Care where a human effigy ...

Peter Gersten: Still Planning His Apocalyptic Leap? "If I'm wrong, everybody dies." So proclaims a 70-year-old freethinker in an online video (ebaumsworld.com) entitled "Apocalypse 2012 Hero Peter Gersten" about his plan to save the world by leaping off a towering rock at the moment the winter solstice arrives. Human beings, he believes, are part of a computer program, a hologram. Peter Gersten is known as "the UFO lawyer" for his legal efforts to find out what the US government really knows about strange things in the sky. He has announced that he will leap from Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona at 11:11 UT (Universal Time) or 4:11 AM local time on December 21st, 2012. As one article has noted, the winter solstice doesn't really occur until 11:12 UT. Hopefully Gersten won't jump the gun. Maybe he needs a minute head start to achieve his goal: participating in a T-DE, Trans-Dimensional Event, that will allow him to enter a cosmic po...

Everyone Loves Vern But Not Everyone Loves Ray X Besides 3950.net another site, stickam.com/ thelibertynet, also streams the Liberty Net on-air discussions with a chat room. This image is from the second site. LibNetters claim that they are against Barack Obama but not because he is black. Then why do some of them use terms like "monkey" when referring to him? And the sisyphean Liberty Net keeps trying to roll their rock up Reality Hill, each time expecting a different result. Every Saturday night the Lib Netters take to the airwaves, ham radio operators of the ultra-conservative bent (think mega-conspiracies: Illuminati, New World Order, etc.). Simultaneously they also share their views via text in a chat room at 3950.net . Sometimes I copy and archive the chats. I found one session from three months ago to be particularly interesting. One person who joins the LN airwave discussions is Vern Kasper, an older man who is has been successful in business, ownin...

Jim Moseley: Flying Saucer Farewell I'll miss my late night phone conversations with Jim Moseley. Despite trying to track how he was doing in his fight against cancer I didn't hear the bad news until yesterday. Jim died on November 16, 2012. One of my regrets that I never had the opportunity to visit him in Key West and spend a day with him. Even though we never met in person, he was a friend. I mainly knew Jim as a voice on the phone -- and, of course, as the writer-editor of the zine Saucer Smear (and also as the author of postcards he sent to me marked PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL). Jim was around at the dawn of ufology -- or as the topic was called way back then, flying saucers. Parts of the field he couldn't accept, personalities way out there without anything real to back them up. For example, George Adamski. Jim was critical of "ufoology." Through his writings Jim made friends and enemies. His humor and tell-it-like-it-is attitude didn...

Beside personal crap, one main reason why I haven't been blogging at all for the last two months is this piece of garbage I'm typing on. I hate shit-rate products whether it be the computer or the software. I don't like being completely dependent on Microsoft products like Word. So I've tried using other word-processing programs. Open Office. Libre Office. Abiword. Jarte. They're all shit. I gave up on Open Office a long time ago because I wanted something that could create files compatible with Word documents. But when formatting my zine, all the work I put in would fuck up, the layout would move around when I opened the Open Office .doc file in Word. Libre Office seemed promising until I got this message only a week after I had installed it: "For some reason Libre Office has stopped working." OK, I go into the control panel and do a repair. I open up Libre Office again and -- "For some reason Libre Office has stopped working...

Atonement It's amazing how materialism can suck down higher intentions. During a nine-year stretch Vermont filmmaker Mac Parker said he was raising money to create a spiritual documentary. Prosecutors countered that he was engaged in a $28 million Ponzi scheme. So far no movie but there's a book by Parker, a work of fiction dealing with the theme of trust. Back in March Parker accepted a plea deal, saying he was guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and tax fraud. Prosecutors said that only $700,000 of the millions raised for the proposed movie, "The Birth of Innocence," went towards the film project. As with a typical Ponzi scheme, prosecutors contend some of the money was used to pay back earlier investors. Parker's partner and mentor, chiropractor Louis Soteriou of Connecticut, was also indicted but pled not guilty to the charges. As part of the plea deal, Parker will help prosecutors with their case against Soteriou. Authorities say tha...

Randle's Mysterious Pumice Roswell. 1947. Some people claim that an alien starship crashed in that area of New Mexico. There are stories about pieces of metal from that doomed craft that one could crumple up into a ball and it would flatten itself out, a molecular memory. And then there's the pumice. Pumice? The non-fiction book, "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell" (1994), details the 1991 investigation by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt into the Roswell crash. They interviewed people who said they had held hard evidence of the crash, evidence that somehow has disappeared, apparently sucked up by the US government's TOP SECRET vacuum cleaner. In the chapter entitled "A Complete Examination of the Evidence" I found this statement: "Kevin Randle handled a small piece of material that he was told was picked up on the crash site. It looked like gray pumice, had no weight to it, some stratification, and seemed to be very tough....

Important Notice From Jim Moseley In the latest issue of Saucer Smear (May 20th, 2012) Jim Moseley included this item: "As of this writing, it looks like your Editor will soon have a serious operation.  The next issue of 'Smear,' as well as answers to your letters, etc., may be delayed for a currently unknown period of time.  More later, hopefully..." Jim added this statement: "Details are KLASS-ified." Good luck with the surgery, Jim.

Mental Capability And The Hand Lotion Threat Is there a conspiracy to target certain human genetic types with hand lotion as a delivery system of destruction? Leave it to the theorists at the Liberty Net -- the ham radio/Internet forum for ultra-patriots -- to discuss such an idea as a plausible threat. During a recent get-together longtime member Al Parker mentioned a news story from New Zealand about a mysterious group of vendors -- apparently Israeli citizens - who were aggressively pushing hand lotion from a shopping mall kiosk. The same organization has also set up kiosk operations in other malls in Australia and the United States. According to the NZ article, the vendors disappeared overnight, leaving considerable damage to the plumbing in a rental unit after they whipped up some of the special lotions. Al Parker suggested that maybe the so-called Israeli vendors were actually Arab terrorists in disguise. The operation could be a front for biological warfare, set...

OK, UFOs -- Do Something! Now this is taking my suggestion to the extreme... The reports keep coming in. Some are hoaxes, some are misidentifications, some are delusions. What remains are unexplainable incidents. A person sees a strange light in the night sky performing maneuvers beyond the capability of any terrestrial vehicle. Another observes a mysterious object during the daytime, a mysterious visitor from beyond the outer limits. The sightings are usually brief, no proof left behind. Photos and videos? Images can be faked, especially in this age of CGI. Not hard evidence. UFOs keep teasing, just out of our tangible grasp. Enough is enough. I can't bother to read any more inconclusive reports involving will-o-wisps. I'm ignoring the phenomena, at least the endless and meaningless reports. Until you UFOs do something, I'm not bothering playing your game. Put on a real show instead of pissing around in the heavens. Don't harm any livin...

Planning Your 2012 Doomsday Vacation?  Pic de Bugurach , Wikimedia Commons  Hippies? I thought they died out in the 1970s, either by cleaning up their act and going mainstream or by ODing on bad drugs.  But that's the term I encountered in a headline about the people gathering around a mountain in France, hoping to hitch a ride aboard a starship when the world ends (once again) on December 21st, 2012. ( "Hippies head for Noah’s Ark: Queue here for rescue aboard alien spaceship" )  Well, if you're a "hippie" or New Ager wondering what do to (again) on doomsday, your best bet seems to be joining the approximately 20,000 souls who are abiding their time in the area of a Pyrenean village called Bugarach and a mountain named Pic de Bugarach.  The mountain is the focus of all of the attention. Some say a spaceship is hidden inside Pic de Bugarach and when the cosmic crap hits the celestial fan, the benevolent ETs will provide a safe ride away fro...

Alternative Title For New Age Film: Death of Innocence Profile photo from Birth Of Innocence Facebook page. "BIRTH OF INNOCENCE is a feature-length narrated film by Mac Parker about the power in every single one of us, waiting to be brought into our lives through our innocence..." -- Facebook page for BOI [ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Birth-of-Innocence/115493931813189 ] "For most of my adult life, I have been an ambassador for Vermont through my stories, my writing, and my films... Birth of Innocence is my most ambitious project yet, and my hope is that it too will reflect beautifully on our state and our people. How ironic that an agency of this state I love so much is now spending taxpayers’ money trying to prove that I’m a bad guy." -- Mac Parker, quoted from his written statement, article "State Files New Charges Against Filmmaker Mac Parker" by Shay Totton, Seven Days reporter, April 23, 2010 [ http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2010/04/state-files-ne...

But It Probably Wasn't The Ghost Of An Angry Santa So what was banging away at night on the roof where Steve Volk lived when he was young? Was a ghost terrifying his family, trying to hack its way it, the same entity that yanked the covers off the beds of his sisters? I don't know. Volk describes the incident in his non-fiction book, FRINGE-OLOGY: How I Tried To Explain Away the Unexplainable —And Couldn't . As a reporter he couldn't write the typical joke article that laughed off the supernatural as the crazy delusions of fringe types. While tagging along with ghost-hunters, he could see that while many cases had earthly explanations, there were a few incidents that couldn't be dismissed so easily. Unlike hard-core skeptics who create scientific justifications to dispel any paranormal ideas, Volk thinks some things are simply unexplainable. Volk says that the supernatural and the paranormal are not the same. The supernatural is “of or relating to an order of ex...

Alex Jones: Stochastic Agent? The hyperlogic razor can cut both ways. Ask Alex Jones. Jones is a conspiracy theorist who rants on about the New World Order through his radio program and Websites. He angrily calls out certain political leaders and governmental officials for being masters of deceit. Imagine Milton William Cooper but without the charm. The Website truther.org has run a series of articles implying that Alex Jones is a deceitful master. According to David Chase Taylor, there is evidence making it "likely" that Jones is really a double-agent working for Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.), a private intelligence firm whose secret emails were recently published by WikiLeaks. In his articles Taylor claims that Jones is really working for the Israeli Mossad, hiding the truth from his unsuspecting followers that the US is really under the control of the Zionists. Taylor also calls Jones a "stochastic terrorist," i.e., someone who uses mass communicati...

Earthling Or Earthding? "Because all you of Earth are idiots... Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!" -- Eros, Plan 9 From Outer Space Are earthlings nothing more than a bunch of ding-a-lings who need ET visitors to bump up our collective IQ? That's the POV of most true believers into the ancient astronaut/exopolitics meme. Take Roswell -- please. Like a bumbling Prometheus aliens crashed their ship into the New Mexico desert so that earthdings could reverse engineer the tech on board, thus resulting in miraculous devices like high def flat TV panels showing the same old crap but with superior resolution. In fact, if you follow the reasoning behind AI (alien intervention), the people of Earth didn't have the brains to build pyramids. Aliens in saucers came down like the gods and used their advanced tech to lift and place colossal stone blocks. Forget the thousands of expendable human slaves under the whip using rope, rollers, and ramps to do the job. Hypersonic le...

Our Father Who Art In Space Let's talk about religion and ETs – or advanced beings (ABs) if you will. Author Paul Von Ward is apparently a member of the exopolitics crowd. In his book, We’ve Never Been Alone: A History of Extraterrestrial Intervention , he takes the exopolitical stance that otherwordly beings are here, no argument about it, so we better start thinking about mankind’s relationship with those visitors. Von Ward accepts evidence of AB reality through the works of such writers as Zecharia Sitchin, the whole ancient astronauts were the basis for the gods/God shtick. Yup, YHVH was only an alien with superior technology that he used to control his faction of humans. Apparently in ancient times advanced beings showed up and each one had his own share of the mankind market. They fought among themselves and then left, leaving behind the structure of what Von Ward calls “god-cults.” The reason why many nations and religious groups are fighting among themselves, says Von Wa...

Yeah, That'll Work Anyone in favor of skeptocracy, government by skeptics? That concept popped into my head the other day. After all, skeptics are supposed to stress rationality over emotion. Dealing with facts, not opinion, should lead to better government. In the previous issue I talked about Elevatorgate, an incident from last year that proved how skeptics are all on the same page when it comes to The Truth. Rebecca Watson, of skepchick.org, was at a conference where she spoke about sexism and skepticism. She claimed a male conference attendee hit on her in an elevator when she was returning to her room. She hated being regarded as a sex object – even though she appeared semi-nude in a couple of Skepchick calendars. Her take on the incident whipped up a storm of controversy among the skeptical community. Atheist Richard Dawkins wrote a satirical piece involving a letter to a fictional Muslim woman, a victim of severe oppression in another country, telling her that her prob...

Another Year On Paper February 2012 marks 18 years I’ve been zining about offbeat topiX. I can’t remember the eXact date of that freezing winter night when I sat down at a computer and roughed out a short four page issue, Ray X X-Rayer #1 . It was a way to get through the drudgery of the long winters around here. But as time has passed neither winter nor zining has become easier. Back in those early years I was reviewed in Factsheet 5, the leading publication for zine reviews. That exposure did generate a few readers but nothing like the hundreds I have with my blog. I think print zines suffer from the Poet Syndrome: for every 100 people who write poetry, only one reads poems by others on a regular basis. So as another winter drags on − despite its relative mildness – I’m still putting out a zine, albeit in a much shorter form, one double-sided sheet, two pages total, for those who prefer paper over photons. All four of them.

Stromy Relationships A girl has finally joined the boys club. The Liberty Net is a long-existing group of amateur radio operators who meet weekly to discuss “current events” from the perspective of angry white men who think the New World Order / The Illuminati is taking over mankind. Sometimes it sounds like the guys are falling all over themselves because Nissa wants to be in their treehouse. Of course, one woman in the group reflects on how most voices in the areas of both ham radio and conspiracy theory are male. I’ve only heard Nissa a few times but from what she says I don’t detect that streak of racism evinced by others in the net. The other night a new commenter said he hoped the mainstays of the group weren’t engaging in racism when talking about President Obama. The commenter said he didn’t like the policies of the president but there was no reason to attack the POTUS based on just his race. A LibNetter replied that Obama could be as white as a ghost and they would still cr...

Rosary Workout For some people exercise is their religion. But what if you could combine physical and spiritual fitness in one program? Author Peggy Bowes, a devout Catholic, has the answer. Through her book, "The Rosary Workout," you can discover how to pray and exercise at the same time. I was completely unaware of this Rosary-exercise combo until I happened to hear Peggy on the radio while dialing through the shortwave band. EWTN, the Eternal Word Television Network, has a SW radio outlet. EWTN is a cable TV channel started up by a nun in the 1980s to reach the masses to draw them to the masses (and the collective collection plate). Peggy was a guest on the program, "Blessed 2 Play," described as "spiritual sports radio." For those of you unaware of the Rosary, it is a set of prayer beads that loops back on itself, a circle with one row hanging from the bottom with a small crucifix. Think of a large O with a tail. The prayer holds a bead between...

2012: The Year The World Ends (Again) It’s another new year in which we’re faced with eschatological excrement of a taurine nature. In 2011 biblical scholar/radio broadcaster Harold Camping was rapping that the Rapture was happening on May 21. Some of his followers emptied their bank accounts, donating all to the cause: billboards, books, etc. Money gone forever. Nothing happened. Camping’s organization said sorry, no refunds. Then Harold said he was a bit off with his calculations, that all good Xtians would bodily ascend into Heaven on October 21 before the world was destroyed. Again, nothing. Between his two predictions Harold suffered a mild stroke that affected his speech. This prompted one Xtian Website to pose the question: “Was Harold Camping's stroke punishment from God?” In the meantime it seems that the only world that is ending is Camping’s. After such events in 2011 you think we would get some time off from the End Times. No such luck. This time the target date is...

Critical Skepchick Shows Uncritical Thinking I almost missed this item from last year: Elevatorgate! Rebecca Watson, leader of a core of skeptical women over at skepchick.org, was attending a conference in Dublin, Ireland during June 2011 and a guy in an elevator hit on her (or so she claims). No, the man didn’t assault her, just asked her back to his room to discuss various issues over a cup of coffee. Apparently Rebecca didn’t like being a hittee. Her lecture topic at the conference dealt with anti-feminism. It really bugged her the Elevator Guy was “sexualizing” her. Really. Is this the same Rebecca Watson who posed nude for Skepchick calendars? It’s too bad that the Elevator Guy got the shaft.