Summer Satellites and the Great Scar

Well, Summer is supposedly here, though it's not always easy to tell in Portland. Not that I'm bitching - you can have the heat and sunlight. The only thing that is sort of a downer is that sky-watching is less fun when it's cold and limits the amount of time you want to spend gazing upwards from a lawn chair. That said, last Saturday was a pretty decent night and after BBQing, my girlfriend and I pulled out the tri-fold lawn chairs and watched the sky for a couple of hours.

It may sound cliché, but it's really hard to argue against how well Dark Side of the Moon goes with watching the countless satellites drift through the salted sky, peppered with the occasional meteorite. I wasn't looking for anything in particular and had no hopes of catching anything mysterious -- that's not why I stargaze. But there was one particularly bright object that we caught in the Northwest moving speedily towards the Southeast. It had a brightness of 4 and was quite stunning. After a brief What The Fuck moment, we both realized it was the ISS. We confirmed this later by an online tracker that gave the exact time and location in which we saw the object.

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It Rhymes with 'Bars Mace'

If you've fallen for the recent 'Mars base' claims and have been too submerged in your own beliefs to look for opinions and information to the contrary, then this post is not for you!

Original:

Mars Express orbiter image H5620_0000_ND2

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Dimensional Wrinkles

Some time ago I had been thinking about the morph-able abilities of some UFOs, giving them an almost living quality, as opposed to an actual craft of some kind of metallic-esque alloy, welded or bolted together, with computers inside, some sort of propulsion engine, and a crew. I wondered if a vessel could be constructed in a way that would allow for physical transformation into various shapes, and what the purpose of such a vessel would be.

Then I began thinking about your more typical sightings: saucers, cigar-shaped, triangles, rectangles, and so on. How peculiar it seems that in our own imaginings (i.e. Science Fiction), alien ships would look something more like a Klingon Bird of Prey, The Millennium Falcon, or the Battlestar Galactica. If sightings of classic UFOs are indeed extraterrestrial in nature, the contrast is stark, with these craft carrying few details, save for their shapes, lights, and in some cases, portholes. And maybe that’s really how it goes. As creative as human beings appear to be, maybe we’re really over-thinking the whole thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure we are.

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