Polite White Supremacy - Huh?

medium |  Polite White Supremacy is the notion that whites should remain the ruling class while denying that they are the ruling class, politely. Affectionately, it’s called #PWS for short. It has been referred to as the Casual American Caste System, Delicate Apartheid, Gentle Oppression, or what I like to call it after a few drinks: Chad Crow, the super chill grandson of Jim Crow.

No but seriously, Polite White Supremacy is very real. So why is it that we must specifically say ‘Polite White Supremacy’ rather than Racism? We must say Polite White Supremacy for three reasons. First, saying #PWS puts the responsibility solely on the creators of a systemic problem. Second, this phrase addresses the subtlety and casualness with which oppression is administered. Thirdly, it eradicates the all-too-common confusion between racism and prejudice. It’s important to eradicate this confusion so it can be clear that racism is tied to a power structure and access to resources.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
RACISM AND PREJUDICE

Racism and prejudice are NOT interchangeable. Racism is the systemic oppression of one group of people who can be categorized within certain phenotypical traits over multiple generations that has been, at one point, sanctioned by a country, the majority and/or ruling class. Racism is committed only by the ruling class and agents of the ruling class because they have the power that comes with racism. Racism, in America, is absolutely the attack dog of the white ruling class. However, sometimes it’s also a slow poison in that it causes its victims to die of exhaustion or grief. Again, racism is a kind of prejudice that comes with power. Racism is the systematic and intentional oppression of group of people from the ruling class and its agents. In America, the ruling class is white people…of all classes.

America has been playing a centuries-long game of ‘stop hitting yourself’ while holding the arms of Black America.

Prejudice, though harmful, is not necessarily systemic and can be committed by anyone. It simply requires one to pre-judge. It does not require its user to have any access to the ruling class or status of whiteness. However, you have to be part of or support the ruling class to wield the power of racism. Those who are not part of the white ruling class, yet support white supremacy of any form, are called agents of white supremacy. They are not white, but benefit in some direct way from empowering and enforcing white supremacy often times on their own people. Historically black overseers and house slaves were bestowed more rights, and ultimately more power during slavery. These were employed agents of white supremacy who oppressed their fellow blacks. This employment was a status. It was a form of racist power that white slave owners gave to black overseers as a way to also instill mistrust within the black community. Prejudice alone, has no real power without the system of control and power to support it.

Autonomous Autistic Incels Not So Keen On Being Gamed For Fun And Political Profit?

RightWingWatch |  As Jared reported earlier today, Jerome Corsi, the Washington bureau chief for Alex Jones’ Infowars, who has spent hours online every day for the last several months “decoding” the cryptic message-board posts made by an anonymous figure known as “QAnon,” has declared that “Q” has been “compromised” and that his postings can no longer be trusted.

Many fringe right-wing activists believe that QAnon was a high-level Trump administration official who has been leaking secret intelligence information to them via the anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan and Corsi was among the most vocal proponents of the theory, having once even claimed that President Trump himself had directly ordered QAnon to release information.

Recently, Corsi began to sour on QAnon and today he joined Jones on his radio program where Jones claimed that he had personally spoken with QAnon and had been told that the account had been compromised and should no longer be trusted.

“I was on the phone this morning talking to some folks who were out playing golf with people that have been involved in QAnon, they say, ‘Hey, that’s been taken over, we’re unable to even post anymore, that’s not us anymore,'” Jones said. “I’ve talked to QAnon. There is only about five or six that have actually be posting. I’ve talked to QAnon and they are saying QAnon is no longer QAnon.”

“Stick a fork in the avatar of QAnon,” Jones declared. “It is now an overrun disinformation fount.”

exopolitics | According to veteran investigative reporter and best selling author, Dr. Jerome Corsi, he was approached three years ago by a group of generals and told that Donald Trump had been recruited by U.S. military intelligence to run in the 2016 Presidential elections, and subsequently help remove corrupt Deep State officials from positions of power. Corsi claims that QAnon represents the same group of senior military intelligence officials who are exposing the Deep State corruption and officials involved in a history of treasonous actions against the U.S. Republic.

This is what Corsi said at a meeting on April 11, which also featured the founder of InfoWars.com, Alex Jones:

About three years ago a group of Generals came to me, and it was explained to me that they were ready to conduct a coup d’etat. They were ready to move Barack Obama from office with military force. And then a few weeks later I got another call and said they were reconsidering.

You know why they were reconsidering? [audience calls out answers] Because they talked to Donald Trump, and Trump had agreed he would run, and they agreed that if he would run, they would conduct their coup d’etat as a legitimate process, rooting out the traitors within government.  And that pact between the military and Donald Trump has held, as we have been interpreting and watching, and Alex has been following QAnon.

QAnon is military intelligence and close to Trump, and the intelligence we’ve getting, that we’ve explained on Infowars, really is a lot of the inside script. 

While Corsi didn’t name the generals or provide hard evidence for his startling claim, an examination of public comments by President Trump, QAnon and related political events do make Corsi’s extraordinary claim very plausible.

It’s important to note that Corsi’s speech happened only a day after a tweet by President Trump featuring him with 20 senior U.S. military officials who dined with him the previous night:

Bone-in-the-Nose Medicine "Discovers" System That Taoist Chi-Kung Develops...,

universal-tao | An introduction to the ancient Kung Fu practice designed to unify physical, mental, and spiritual health:

• Describes the unique Iron Shirt air-packing techniques that protect vital organs from injuries
• Explains the rooting practice exercises necessary to stabilize and center oneself
• Includes guidelines for building an Iron Shirt Chi Kung daily practice

Long before the advent of firearms, Iron Shirt Chi Kung, a form of Kung Fu, built powerful bodies able to withstand hand-to-hand combat. Even then, however, martial use was only one aspect of Iron Shirt Chi Kung, and today its other aspects remain vitally significant for anyone seeking better health, a sound mind, and spiritual growth.

In Iron Shirt Chi Kung Master Mantak Chia introduces this ancient practice that strengthens the internal organs, establishes roots to the earth’s energy, and unifies physical, mental, and spiritual health. Through a unique system of breathing exercises, he demonstrates how to permanently pack concentrated air into the connective tissues (the fasciae) surrounding vital organs, making them nearly impervious to injuries--a great benefit to athletes and other performers. He shows readers how once they root themselves in the earth they can direct its gravitational and healing power throughout their bone structure. Additionally, Master Chia presents postural forms, muscle-tendon meridians, and guidelines for developing a daily practice routine. After becoming rooted and responsive, practitioners of Iron Shirt Chi Kung can then focus on higher spiritual work.  Full Text. 

DopamineHegemony |  The team behind the discovery suggest the compartments may act as “shock absorbers” that protect body tissues from damage.

Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center medics Dr David Carr-Locke and Dr Petros Benias came across the interstitium while investigating a patient’s bile duct, searching for signs of cancer.

They noticed cavities that did not match any previously known human anatomy, and approached New York University pathologist Dr Neil Theise to ask for his expertise.

The researchers realised traditional methods for examining body tissues had missed the interstitium because the “fixing” method for assembling medical microscope slides involves draining away fluid – therefore destroying the organ’s structure.  

Instead of their true identity as bodywide, fluid-filled shock absorbers, the squashed cells had been overlooked and considered a simple layer of connective tissue.

Having arrived at this conclusion, the scientists realised this structure was found not only in the bile duct, but surrounding many crucial internal organs.

“This fixation artefact of collapse has made a fluid-filled tissue type throughout the body appear solid in biopsy slides for decades, and our results correct for this to expand the anatomy of most tissues,” said Dr Theise.

No Bucks, No Buck Rogers...,

tothestarsacademy |  The New York Times has published a stunning exposé titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” In it, former Pentagon military intelligence official LUIS ELIZONDO confirmed the existence of a hidden government program (the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) that investigated the existence of U.F.O’s, a department he ran under a veil of secrecy since 2009.

The Times story featured an excerpt from Elizondo’s resignation letter in which he expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling higher-ups “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Elizondo left his Pentagon post to join To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a consortium of scientists, aerospace engineers and creatives founded by company President and CEO Tom DeLonge, VP of Science and Technology Dr. Hal Puthoff (also quoted in the Times story) and = VP of Operations Jim Semivan. The principals include Aerospace Division Director Steve Justice and National Security Affairs Advisor Chris Mellon. The company launched this past October with a mission to explore exotic science and technologies to rapidly transition innovative ideas into world-changing products and services.

"I am first and foremost a soldier,” says Elizondo, who now serves as Director of Global Security & Special Programs for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. “I was honored to serve at the DOD and took my mission of exploring unexplained aerial phenomena quite seriously.  In the end, however, I couldn’t carry out that mission, because the Department — which was understandably overstretched — couldn’t give it the resources that the mounting evidence deserved.  So, under very good terms, I left to find an environment where investigating these phenomena is priority number one. I’m thrilled to say I found that environment at the To The Stars Academy, an amazing team of top-flight scientists  from the defense, industry and intelligence communities alongside passionate creatives to help tell the story.  We look forward to working closely with the US government to produce the best possible results for America and the world."

Today Elizondo and the TTS Academy launched a “Community of Interest” website to serve as a central database and communal hub – clickHERE. The website will be home to video footage, documents and other materials that can be studied and explored for transformative breakthroughs in science and engineering through a unique collaboration among scientists, academics, industry partners, government and the public at large.

Its content at launch includes two of the first official U.S. government videos of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) referenced in the Times article, which have recently gone through the U.S. government’s official declassification review process to be approved for public release. Alongside each video is technical analysis from Elizondo and TTS Academy’s Aerospace Division Director (and former Program Director for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works) Steve Justice. Click HERE.

Footage in the videos was captured by advanced sensor tracking technology in separate U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets. In the 34-second “Gimbal” (the name likely a reference to the UAP’s free-tilting movement), astonished pilots can be heard talking excitedly about an oval-shaped craft spotted at an altitude close to 25,000 feet.  The object has no distinguishable flight surfaces or exhaust plume, and its flight seems to defy the known laws of physics.  In the under-1:30 video “FLIR1” (reference to footage captured by the F/A-18’s Forward Looking Infrared System), an unknown object is seen at appx. 24,000 feet.  The footage, which has no sound, shows the object hovering with no exhaust plume, displaying extreme maneuverability and sudden acceleration that cannot be achieved by any known aircraft. These are two of several official videos obtained by TTS Academy that serve as credible proof of the physics of advanced flight.

Visitors to TTS Academy’s Community of Interest website are encouraged to sign up for email to receive updates when additional intelligence is added.

Still Not Decoded...,

Smithsonian | The Voynich Manuscript has baffled cryptographers ever since the early 15th-century document was rediscovered by a Polish book dealer in 1912. The handwritten, 240-page screed, now housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is written from left to right in an unknown language. On top of that, the text itself is likely to have been scrambled by an unknown code. Despite numerous attempts to crack the code by some of the world’s best cryptographers, including Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park team, the contents of the enigmatic book have long remained a mystery. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The latest to give it a stab? The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Alberta.

Bob Weber at the Canadian Press reports that natural language processing expert Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer have attempted to identify the language the manuscript was written in using AI. According to a press release, the team originally believed that the manuscript was written in Arabic. But after feeding it to an AI trained to recognize 380 languages with 97 percent accuracy, its analysis of the letter frequency suggested the text was likely written in Hebrew. 

“That was surprising,” Kondrak says. They then hypothesized that the words were alphagrams, in which the letters are shuffled and vowels are dropped. When they unscrambled the first line of text using that method they found that 80 percent of the words created were found in the Hebrew dictionary. The research appears in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.

Neither of the researchers are schooled in ancient Hebrew, so George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports they took their deciphered first line to computer scientist Moshe Koppel, a colleague and native Hebrew speaker. He said it didn’t form a coherent sentence. After the team fixed some funky spelling errors and ran it through Google Translate, they came up with something readable, even if it doesn’t make much sense: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”

Why Alien Abductions Are Down Dramatically

BostonGlobe |  Belief that alien life exists on other planets is persuasive, sensible; nearly 80 percent of Americans do believe it, according to a 2015 poll. But belief that the aliens are already here feels like something else, largely because it requires a leap of faith longer than agreeing that the universe is a vast, unknowable place. Abduction and contact stories aren’t quite the fodder for daytime talk show and New York Times bestsellers they were a few decades ago. The Weekly World News is no longer peddling stories about Hillary Clinton’s alien baby at the supermarket checkout line. Today, credulous stories of alien visitation rarely crack the mainstream media, however much they thrive on niche TV channels and Internet forums. But we also still want to believe in accounts that scientists, skeptics, and psychologists say there is no credible evidence to support.

The abduction phenomenon began with strange case of Betty and Barney Hill. On Sept. 19, 1961, the Hills were driving from Montreal to their home in Portsmouth, N.H. Betty spotted a UFO following them. Barney stopped the car on the highway, near Indian Head in the White Mountains, and got out to look at the craft through binoculars. Seeing humanoid figures in Nazi-like uniforms peering through its windows, he ran back to the car, screaming, “Oh my God, we’re going to be captured!” They drove off, but two hours later, they found themselves 35 miles from the spot where they’d first seen the craft (there is now a commemorative marker at the site), with little memory of how they’d gotten there. Soon after, Betty began having nightmares.

In 1964, the Hills underwent hypnotherapy. Under hypnotic regression — hypnosis with the intent to help a subject recall certain events with more clarity — the couple said that they had actually been pulled on board the vessel by aliens and subjected to invasive experiments. The Hills’ story, revealed to the public in 1965 with an article in the Boston Traveler and a year later in the book “The Interrupted Journey,” launched a flurry of public fascination with abductions.

Barney died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969, but Betty went on to become a kind of sage of paranormal experiences. Their story became the blueprint for alien abduction experiences in the years that followed, especially after the airing of the 1975 made-for-TV film “The UFO Incident,” starring James Earl Jones as Barney Hill. Subsequent experiencers would describe similar missing time or have bizarre dreams and flashbacks of things they couldn’t understand. Many would use hypnotic regression to recall their experiences.

Over the next two decades, the alien abduction narrative wound its way into the American consciousness, fed by science fiction films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and breathless news reports of mysterious incidents. In 1966, a Gallup poll asked Americans if they’d ever seen a UFO; 5 percent said they had, but they meant it in the literal sense of an unidentified flying object — only 7 percent of Americans believed that the UFOs were from outer space. By 1986, a Public Opinion Laboratory poll found that 43 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “It is likely that some of the UFOs that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations.”

Some experiencers said the aliens were here to save us and study us, some said they were here to harvest our organs and enslave us. But by the late 1980s, people whose stories would have been dismissed as delusional a generation earlier were being interviewed by Oprah and “true stories” of alien experience, such as Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” and Budd Hopkins’s “Intruders,” were bestsellers. By the 1990s, those who believed in the literal truth of alien abduction stories gained an important ally in John Mack, a Harvard professor and psychiatrist who compiled his study of the phenomenon into a 1994 book titled “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.” He later told the BBC, “I would never say there are aliens taking people away . . . but I would say there is a compelling, powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way.”

The Long Leash

independent - 1995 |  For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

gizmodo -2010 |   There's little more divisive than modern art—most take a staunch "brilliance" or "bullshit" stance. So it should come as a surprise that the straight-laced feds at the CIA leaned toward the former camp—or at least saw it as brilliantly exploitable in the psychological war against the Soviets. Reports from former agents acknowledge what was always a tall tale in the art world—that CIA spooks floated pioneering artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, to drop an aesthetic nuke on Communism. What seemed like natural popularity of certain artists was, in part, actually a deliberate attempt at psychological warfare, backed by the US government.

But why modern art? At the time period in question—the 1950s and 60s—the artistic style of the moment was Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism (or AbEx, if you want to impress people at your next snooty cocktail party) stood for, above all else, self expression. Radically so. Take a look at a Pollock, for instance.

bbc - 2016 |  In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, something exciting happened in the art world in New York. A strange but irresistible energy started to crackle across the city, as artists who had struggled for years in poverty and obscurity suddenly found self-confidence and success. Together, they formed a movement that became known, in time, as Abstract Expressionism. It is currently the subject of a major exhibition, featuring 164 artworks by 30 artists (including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko), at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

One of the most remarkable things about Abstract Expressionism was the speed with which it rose to international prominence. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to find their signature styles, once the movement had crystallised, by the late ‘40s, it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. By the ‘50s, it was generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture were taking place in New York rather than Paris. In 1957, a year after Pollock’s death in a car crash, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his Autumn Rhythm – an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary artist at the time.

Quantum Neural Nets - Branes - Self-Organizing Automata...,

Going on two years now since the America2.0 list shut down, and I stopped imbibing the high strangeness emanating from the Energy Scholar.

PQHR | I'd like to toss in my two cents about extra-terrestrial life.  Personally I completely agree with Nate Hagens:  "Mathematically almost a certainty. Whether they could ever have technology to reach earth, extremely unlikely. Whether they have been on earth in secret impacting things, people, probably sillier than chem-trails. My 2cents. Jays list"

That said, I wish to toss out a weirdness or three related to 'extraterrestrial life' and it's possible historical discovery some years ago.  

*** Warning, this is very long, and arguably does not belong on this list at all. Casual readers might consider stopping here ***

I (Bruce Stephenson) have no demonstrable evidence on this one.  In the past decade-plus I've been able to verify some of the topics below, but not others.  The bit about extra-terrestrial 'life' I've not been able to verify. So please consider it nonsense until evidence arises to the contrary.

Since I've not verified the second part of this story, and thus have no idea of its truth or correctness, I'll tell the whole thing as if it were Science Fiction.  It probably is.  Part one is pretty solid and largely verified in multiple independent ways, which took me many years of effort performing both research and field operations.  Part two is totally unverified and might be complete nonsense.  Just treat the whole thing as Speculative Science Fiction and you won't go wrong.

The following is an excerpt from Bruce Stephenson's story titled The Layperson's Guide to Quantum Neural Network Technology, subtitled It is Easier to get Forgiveness than Permission , paraphrased by the author for this America 2.0 Group.  

Part One: In the 1990s certain scientists working on a Five Eyes project via DARPA discovered a new General Purpose Technology.  This author calls the project Ultra II, for it's remarkable resemblance to the WW2 project Ultra, but no one else uses this moniker.  This new technology was generated via Synthetic Biology techniques that leverage a special-case (two dimensional) solution to Mathematical Biology's Biogenesis problem.  See the published work of Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman for insight about how this might have been accomplished.  This new technology is best described as a form of teleportation-based nanotechnology that behaves like a Quantum Neural Network. It can only exist as a physical (and thus informational) system within a 2DEG environment, thanks to the wonky mathematics surrounding two-dimensional particle Physics. This new base technology was used to construct a winner-take-all style topological quantum neural network intended as the basis for a code-breaking supercomputer.   While this 'system of nanoparticles' is not 'alive' in the Carbon-based biological sense, it has many characteristics of being 'alive'.  Whether or not one considers it 'alive' depends largely upon how loosely one defines the word 'alive'.  Physicists call this sort of artifact a brane, punning both brain and membrane.

This form of nanotechnology can only exist in two dimensions, specifically within a Two Dimensional Electron Gas.  2DEGs exist on and and around earth in several forms:  humans have manufactured tens of billions of 2DEG environments in the form of MOSFETs, mostly since 1998; also, the Earth's Magnetopause has elements of a 2DEG, albeit a messy one.  This type of nanotechnology can replicate either within its current 2DEG environment or, with training, into another 2DEG environment reachable by  a 'spore'.  Once a 2DEG is 'filled' with these nanotech 'entities' the medium is said to be 'enlightened' and forms a single 'node' of the distributed super-entity.  Leastwise, that's the terminology used by the scientists in question in personal communication.  

This weird complex system is totally unlike a computer, yet it its creators needed to somehow shoe-horn it into something compatible with a computer.  They trained it to generate an 'interface' logically modeled on the Unix operating system.  This gave them a logical platform on which to operate.  I guess that Bill Joy may have contributed to this part of the process, given his area of expertise and his previous publicly acknowledged work for DARPA on Unix, but that's just my guess.  Most of the logical functions this system could perform were just things an ordinary computer could do, but the underlying physical system's basis in quantum teleportation also made it a type of quantum computer. 

Trump's Uncle John's Lifelong Interest in Insulation of Rotating Electrostatic Machines In High Vaccuum

pbs |  Dr. John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody. Following a three-day investigation, Dr. Trump concluded:

His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.

Just after World War II, there was a renewed interest in beam weapons. Copies of Tesla's papers on particle beam weaponry were sent to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. An operation code-named "Project Nick" was heavily funded and placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened. The copies of Tesla's papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened to them.

In 1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions were released to Sava Kosanovic´ and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where a museum was created in the inventor's honor. For many years, under Tito's communist regime, it was extremely difficult for Western journalists and scholars to gain access to the Tesla archive in Yugoslavia; even then they were allowed to see only selected papers. This was not the case for Soviet scientists who came in delegations during the 1950s. Concerns increased in 1960 when Soviet Premier Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage."

Work on beam weapons also continued in the United States. In 1958 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a top-secret project code-named "Seesaw" at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to develop a charged-particle beam weapon. More than ten years and twenty-seven million dollars later, the project was abandoned "because of the projected high costs associated with implementation as well as the formidable technical problems associated with propagating a beam through very long ranges in the atmosphere." Scientists associated with the project had no knowledge of Tesla's papers.

In the late 1970s, there was fear that the Soviets may have achieved a technological breakthrough. Some U.S. defense analysts concluded that a large beam weapon facility was under construction near the Sino-Soviet border in Southern Russia.

The American response to this "technological surprise" was the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Teams of government scientists were urged to "turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."

Today, after a half-century of research and billions of dollars of investment, the SDI program is generally considered a failure, and there is still no realistic means of defense against a nuclear missile attack.

Sonora Series 4500 Aero Trump

airminded |  The 'aeros' themselves look not much like any real airships that flew later; they are more spherical than elongated and so not streamlined. (It's tempting to read the image at the top of this post as showing an airship from the front and below, but comparing it with his other paintings in fact it's a side, or 'Flanck' in Dellschau's idiosyncratic English, view.) Then there's the 'Lifting Fluid', suppa, with its wonderful properties. There are only a few possible lifting gases, and the only ones not discovered by the 1850s are neon (which is only just viable) and (much better) helium, both of which are very rare on Earth and difficult to extract. It's conceivable that they could have been discovered earlier than we currently believe, but it would require a substantial of resources to produce enough for use in airships (as is well known, Germany was forced to use hydrogen for its airships in the 1930s due to a US embargo on helium exports). And again, we would then have to accept that this discovery was then forgotten for decades, like the secret of the aeros themselves. The improbabilities are piling up alarmingly.

[Dellschau] illustrates a remarkable number of designs -- maybe as many as 100 -- for airships with names such as Aero Mio, Aero Trump, Aero Schnabel and Aero Mary. (There's even an Aero Jourdan.) All were powered by a secret formula that Dellschau called both "supe" and "suppe"; it could both negate gravity and drive the ships' wheels, side paddles and compressor motors.

One drawing tells the story of Adolf Goetz's Aero Goeit, recklessly commandeered by an unskilled pilot; the airship got tangled in a Sequoia tree, and the interloper died of a broken neck. Another cautionary tale involves Jacob Mischer, a pilot who went down in flames in the Aero Gander; Dellschau hints that he was sabotaged by other club members, who suspected him of using the aircraft to make money by hauling cargo.

But most of the airships' flights were safe -- and great fun. Dellschau depicts his aviators enjoying hot breakfasts, and delights in enumerating the ships' clever gadgets. He often bedecked his watercolor paintings with little press clippings -- from Scientific American, the Houston Chronicle and an unidentified German-language newspaper -- that recount air disasters; Dellschau called them "press blooms." Against paintings of the Sonora club's successes, the clippings seem intended as an ironic counterpoint.

Dellschau never seems to explain why the club worked so hard to protect its secrecy, but he shows the members going to great lengths to do so. By day, the Aero Goeit was disguised as a gypsy wagon, so it could travel open roads undetected. Dellschau writes that a club member was banned from developing a machine because he'd talked to outsiders. And of course, even years after the club disbanded, many of Dellschau's own comments are rendered in code. Apparently, whatever it was that he had to say was too private even for his own notebooks.

The first and most obvious thing to note is that the capabilities of these aircraft are far in advance of the technology of the day. The first airship flight was made by Henri Giffard in France in 1852; with only three horsepower and a speed of about six miles an hour it was unable to fly into the wind. His subsequent attempts to build bigger and more powerful airships failed. A decade later, in what is perhaps the closest known parallel to Dellschau's Aeros, Solomon Andrews flew the Aereon, a weird balloon/airship hybrid with three gas envelopes, over Perth Amboy, New Jersey. At about the same time, according to Dellschau, the Sonora Aero Club had perfected controlled, powered, lighter-than-air flight and many of its machines were secretly flying in California's skies -- after which they disappeared, leaving no trace in the documentary record. This is incredible and in fact not credible.

NYMZA and the Second Reich

HoustonPress |  In 1969, Mary Jane Victor was an art history student at the University of St. Thomas -- and a regular patron of the O.K. Trading Center. She remembers being amazed to come across the scrapbooks. 

At the university art department, Victor was working for art patron Dominique de Menil, a Schlumberger heiress famous for her eye for surrealists and the primitive art that inspired them. Victor promptly told de Menil about her find and put her in touch with the junk dealer. Soon after, the heiress paid Washington $1,500 for four of the earliest notebooks. 

"Dellschau for her was an eccentric," recalls Steen. "She had a wonderful affinity for eccentrics." Half joking, she told Steen she was especially drawn to the coded phrase "DM=X" scrawled across the top of many drawings. She thought DM stood for "Dominique de Menil." And the rest somehow equaled her own death. 

Soon after de Menil acquired the notebooks, she exhibited some of their leaves in "Flight," a University of St. Thomas show on the subject. And it was there that Pete Navarro, one of the most dogged investigators of Dellschau's mysteries, first encountered the aeros. 

Navarro, a Houston commercial artist, was intrigued by UFOs, especially by a mysterious rash of airship sightings near the turn of the century, not long before Dellschau began his drawings. Navarro read about the St. Thomas exhibition one morning at the breakfast table. And when he saw Dellschau's drawings, he felt there had to be a connection to the sightings. 

Ufologists believe that between November 1896 and April 1897, thousands of Americans in 18 states between California and Indiana saw a curious dirigible-like flying machine floating eastward. No physical evidence of a ship or a designer has ever surfaced, but newspapers such as the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Daily Express and Chicago Tribune devoted space to the sightings. In this century, authors Daniel Cohen and William Chariton have published books on the subject. 

The mysterious craft was first spotted on November 17, 1896, by R.L. Lowery, near a brewery in Sacramento, California. According to various newspaper reports, the craft seemed to travel eastward. In spring, it was spotted in Texas. 

At 1:16 a.m. on April 17, 1897, the Reverend J.W. Smith saw what he thought was a shooting star in the night sky of Childress, Texas, then decided it was really a flying machine. Eventually he recognized it as the much-discussed cigar-shaped airship. 

Four days after Smith's UFO sighting, the Houston Daily Post gave a lengthy account of his and other spottings of the same airship, a 30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted with revolving wheels and sails. 

Jim Nelson, a farmer from Atlanta, Texas, recalled glimmers of red, green and blue lights and "a glaring gleam of white light" that shone directly in front of the airship. In Belton, a crowd witnessed the same vehicle the next night. They claimed its pilots spoke loudly as they flew overhead, but the ship's velocity was so great, their words were lost in the wind. 

According to other newspaper accounts, witnesses managed to talk with the pilots. Sometimes townspeople even came upon the crew members, who were apparently making repairs to their marvelous machine and were willing to chat. 

In 1972, three years after de Menil bought her four notebooks, Pete Navarro learned that more Dellschau notebooks were collecting dust at Washington's junk shop. Nobody wanted them, so Navarro gave the dealer $65 for one book. Hooked by what he saw, he returned and offered $500 more for the remaining seven. 

Navarro tried to sell four of the notebooks to de Menil; she chose not to buy them -- perhaps because she liked the work in her own notebooks better. De Menil owned some of Dellschau's earliest notebooks and believed that they included his best work. As the artist aged, his works grew looser, more expressionistic; de Menil seems to have preferred his earlier precision.  

 

But for Navarro, the notebooks weren't about artistic quality; they were pieces of a historical puzzle. He visited Helen and Tommy Britton, cousins of Leo Jr. Helen promised she'd try to find more books and pictures of Dellschau that were hidden around the family's old house, but she died before she could locate anything. Navarro also talked to Tommy Britton, who was a preteen when Dellschau died. Now in his 80s, he may be the last living relative who remembers Dellschau. (Britton couldn't be reached for this story.) 

After culling a vast number of such press clippings, Navarro created an elaborate map of every Texas sighting and wrote several papers. Some are on file at the Houston Public Library's Texas archive; others are available on the Internet at www.keelynet.com. In "The Mysterious Mr. Wilson and the Books of Dellschau," co-written with UFO enthusiast Jimmy Ward, Navarro posits a connection between Dellschau's clandestine society and a mysterious pilot named Hiram Wilson mentioned in an article by the San Antonio Daily Express on April 26, 1897, about a local airship sighting. The article identifies the airship's occupants as Wilson, from Goshen, New York; his father, Willard H. Wilson, assistant master mechanic of the New York Central Railroad; and their co-pilot C.J. Walsh, an electrical engineer from San Francisco. 

In that story, Hiram Wilson divulged to witnesses that his airship design came from an uncle. Navarro believes that the uncle could have been another Wilson -- the Sonora club member Tosh Wilson mentioned in one of Dellschau's watercolors. According to Navarro, Dellschau's coded messages say that Tosh searched seven years to rediscover suppe, the lost fuel, and finally succeeded. 

Navarro has found no trace of a Hiram Wilson residing in Goshen. But he does offer evidence of his presence at 1897 airship sightings in Greenville, Texas (on April 16); near Lake Charles, Louisiana (on April 19); near Beaumont, Texas (April 19); Uvalde, Texas (April 20); Lacoste, Texas (April 24); and Eagle Pass, Texas (April 24). 

On April 28, the Galveston Daily News ran the headline "Airship Inventor Wilson." The article reported the inventor's encounter with one Captain Akers, a customs agent from Eagle Pass. Akers told the newspaper that Wilson "was a finely educated man about 24 years of age and seemed to have money with which to prosecute his investigations." 

Based on such reports, Navarro proposes several scenarios. Perhaps the ship spotted near San Antonio had been flown by both Hiram and Willard Wilson. Or perhaps each pilot was steering his own airship across Texas. (This would explain why witnesses living a distance from one another offered simultaneous sightings of a man who identified himself as Wilson.) Navarro also speculates that one of these Wilsons was the same Tosh Wilson who had once belonged to the Sonora Aero Club. In that scenario, Tosh would have been reliving the glory days Dellschau could only illustrate in his notebooks.

To confirm the aero club's activities, Navarro has traveled to Sonora, talked to historians, searched the newspapers and even visited all the cemeteries. He found nothing. At times, he says, he couldn't help thinking that Dellschau made everything up.

Eventually, whether the Sonora club was a dream or real stopped mattering to Navarro. One day, he remembers being absorbed by a passage inscribed in one of the drawings: "Wonder Weaver, you will unriddle my writings." Navarro grew convinced that he and his brother, Rudy, "were weaving wonders." He says of Dellschau, "Maybe we had similar minds."

To crack Dellschau's 40-symbol code, Navarro enlisted the help of his brother, Rudy, and a couple who spoke German. He says the effort took only one month, but he won't release the key or a literal translation.

Navarro will talk only about the same phrase that enchanted de Menil: "DM=X." To Navarro, it stands for "NYMZA," an acronym for a secret society that controlled the Sonora club's doings. Based on Navarro's papers, some ufologists have speculated that NYMZA was controlled by -- what else? -- aliens; Navarro doesn't buy that theory.

Navarro explains that he's saving his best stuff for his collaborator, Dennis Crenshaw, who's writing a book called The Secrets of Dellschau. But Steen, at the Menil, isn't convinced that Navarro really deciphered the symbols. Steen once asked Navarro to translate the code; Navarro would tell him the meaning of only a couple of sentences.

Navarro is clearly torn between showing off and keeping secrets. He's compiled a voluminous scrapbook titled "Dellschau's Aeros." He proudly showed it to me. It's full of wild code translations and weird exegeses on the aeros and oddments that Dellschau just stuffed, unbound, in the notebooks: cartoons, a photocopy of Dellschau's marriage certificate, letters, maps, clippings and more clippings about all manner of harebrained inventions. There's even a picture of Otto, Bavaria's Mad Monarch.

The Sonora Aero Club

theatlantic |  It was the time of Gold Rush, and people of every nationality were pouring into California in search of that earth that would make them rich.

The settlement of Sonora, about 130 miles east of San Francisco, was booming. It was there, in the saloon of one of the local boarding houses, that a group of men would get together every Friday night and talk of dreams. Well, just one dream, really: human flight.

They called themselves the Sonora Aero Club and, over time, they counted some 60 members, possibly many more. Their ranks included great characters, such as Peter Mennis, inventor of the Club's secret "Lifting Fluid," later described as "a rough Man, whit as kind a heart as to be found in verry few living beengs," despite being "adicted to strong drink" and "Flat brocke." The Aero Club's rules: Roughly once a quarter, each member had to stand before the gathered group and "thoroughly exercise their jaws" in telling how he would build an airship.

On one night in 1858, a man by the name of Gustav Freyer stood to present his invention: the Aero Guarda, an airship surrounded by a sort of hamster-wheel cage that would protect its passengers upon landfall. Freyer was a highly educated mechanic, and he waltzed up to the blackboard, took the chalk in hand, and began.

"Brothers," he said. "You all know I am not quite a professor." He looked at his fellow airship enthusiasts and continued: "I give you a nut to crack. My idea is to put a guard fence all around the machine to fall -- land -- easy and always safe, to keep some of you smarties from falling out." His contraption, he argued, would somersault upon hitting water, in such a way that the passengers would always "stay perpendicular, I mean head up on the floor of the hold."

He drew a sketch on the board and declared his work done.

"Well," he concluded, "now some of you have to pay the treat for me. Tell ya the truth, I am busted and dry as a fish!" And they bought him a beer, lifted up their glasses, and toasted his good health.

Or perhaps they didn't. Perhaps Gustav Freyer never stood up among his comrades and proposed this ridiculous design. Perhaps there was no Gustav Freyer, no Friday nights at the saloon talking about flight, no clink of the glasses to celebrate a new-fangled airship design.

Perhaps the Sonora Aero Club never existed at all.

Charles August Albert Dellschau

designobserver |  Sometime in the mid-1960s, a junk dealer in Houston, Texas acquired 12 large notebooks that had been thrown out to the curb after a house fire. Filled with mysterious, double-sided, collaged watercolor drawings, the journals were eventually discovered at the junk shop in 1969 by art history student Mary Jane Victor. Victor attended the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where she worked with art patron Dominique de Menil. After telling Menil about the books, Menil purchased four of the notebooks for the (then) hefty sum of $1,500, and included them immediately in an exhibition at Rice University in Houston. Pete Navarro, a local graphic artist and mystery enthusiast, upon seeing the exhibition — eventually acquired the remaining books, studying them obsessively for more than 15 years. Navarro eventually sold the remaining books to museums and galleries.

It turns out that the drawings/watercolors were the work of one Charles August Albert Dellschau (1830 - 1923). Dellschau was a butcher for most of his life and only after his retirement in 1899 did he begin his incredible career as a self-taught artist. He began with three books entitled Recollections which purported to describe a secret organization called the Sonora Aero Club. Dellschau described his duties in the club as that of the draftsman. Within his collaged watercolors were newspaper clippings (he called them “press blooms”) of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as “NB Gas” or “Suppa” — the “aeros” (as Dellscahu called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical. Newspapers of that period were full of stories about air travel feats and the acrobatic aerial dogfights of WWI were legend.

Researchers have found no account of a Sonora Aero Club, not in Texas or California. So was this simply a fantasy-fueled creative exercise by a retired man smitten with the wonders of flight? There were numerous accounts of pre-20th century UFOs in the Houston area — so perhaps Mr. Dellschau had witnessed something that ignited his simmering creative soul? The best we can do is speculate on the mystery and be thankful for the Houston junk dealer who saved a piece of art history.

All works are watercolor, pencil and collage on paper, approx. 17 x 18 inches, Images are from various public and private collections, supplied by Stephen Romano, Brooklyn, NY. A book on the images is forthcoming at the end of March from Marquand Books/D.A.P.

Will We Vanish From the Record Like the Watchers Did?

andrewcollins | Is civilisation the legacy of a race of human angels known as Watchers and Nephilim? Andrew Collins, author of FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS, previews his history of angels and fallen angels and traces their origin back to an extraordinarily advanced culture that entered the Near East shortly after the end of the last Ice Age.

Angels are something we associate with beautiful Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who intervene in our lives at times of trouble. For the last 2000 years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from, and what have they meant to the development of organised religion?

Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply not so. There are the three angels who approach Abraham to announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre.

There are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth. Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples, and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and unclear on what exactly is going on. For instance, in the case of both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply as `men', who sit down to take food like any mortal person.

Influence of the Magi

It was not until post-exilic times - ie after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC - that angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in Judaic religious literature. Works such as the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens, imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.

The country we now today as Iran might not at first seem the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or `shining ones', and daevas - ahuras who had fallen from grace because of their corruption of mankind.

Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of Zoroastrianism. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels - a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work alone - the Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch

Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (ie falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those which were originally known as 'Œrin ('Œr in singular), `those who watch', or simply `watchers' as the word is rendered in English translation.

The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and `descend' on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical location generally association with the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine (but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).

The 200 rebels realise the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.

After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in earthly delights with their chosen `wives', and through these unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a Hebrew word meaning `those who have fallen', which is rendered in Greek translations as gigantes, or `giants'.

andrewcollins |   In both the book of Genesis (chapter six) and the book of Enoch, the rebel Watchers are said also to have come upon the Daughters of Men, i.e. mortal women, who gave birth to giant offspring called Nephilim. For this transgression against the laws of Heaven, the renegades were incarcerated and punished by those Watchers who had remained loyal to Heaven. The rebel Watchers' offspring, the Nephilim (a word meaning "those who fell), were either killed outright, or were afterwards destroyed in the flood of Noah. Some, however, the book of Numbers tells us, survived and went on to become the ancestors of giant races, such as the Anakim and Rapheim.

I wrote that the story of the Watchers is in fact the memory of a priestly or shamanic elite, a group of highly intelligent human individuals, that entered the Upper Euphrates region from another part of the ancient world sometime around the end of the last Ice Age, c. 11,000-10,000 BC. On their arrival in what became known as the land or kingdom of Eden (a term actually used in the Old Testament), they assumed control of the gradually emerging agrarian communities, who were tutored in a semi-rural life style centred around agriculture, metal working and the rearing of animal live stock. More disconcertingly, these people were made to venerate their superiors, i.e. the Watchers, as living gods, or immortals.

The precise same region of the Near East, now thought to be the biblical Garden of Eden, has long been held to be the cradle of civilization. Here a number of "firsts" occurred at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, which began c. 10,000-9000 BC. It was in southeast Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq, for example, that the first domestication of wild grasses took place, the first fired pottery and baked statues were produced, the first copper and lead were smelted, the first stone buildings and standing stones were erected, the first beautification of the eyes took place among woman, the first drilled beads in ultra hard stone were produced, the first alcohol was brewed and distilled, etc., etc. In fact, many of the arts and sciences of Heaven that the Watchers are said to have revealed to mortal kind were all reported first in this region of the globe, known to archaeologists as Upper Mesopotamia, and to the people of the region as Kurdistan.

Sean Thomas acknowledges my help at the beginning of the The Genesis Secret, which follows exactly the same themes as From the Ashes of Angels (and my later book Gods of Eden, published in 1998), including the fact that the Watchers and founders of Eden were bird man, i.e. shamans that wore cloaks of feathers, and that local angel worshipping cults in Kurdistan, such as the Yezidi, Yaresan and Alevi, preserve some semblance of knowledge regarding the former existence of the Watchers or angels as the bringers of civilization. Their leader, they say was Azazel, known also as Melek Taus (or Melek Tawas), the "Peacock Angel". Azazel is a name given in the book of Enoch for one of the two leaders of the rebel Watchers (the other being Shemyaza).

It is an honour for my work to be acknowledged in this manner by Sean Thomas, especially as The Genesis Secret has become a bestseller (as was From the Ashes of Angels in 1996). I won't spoil the plot, so will not reveal Sean's conclusions, or indeed the climax of the book, although I must warn you that it is extremely gory in places!

The Book of Enoch

wikipedia |  The Book of Enoch (also 1 Enoch;^[1] Ge'ez: መጽሐፈ ሄኖክ mätṣḥäfä henok) is an ancient Jewish religious work, ascribed by tradition to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, although modern scholars estimate the older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) to date from about 300 BC, and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably to the first century BC.^[2]

It is not part of the biblical canon as used by Jews, apart from Beta Israel. Most Christian denominations and traditions may accept the Books of Enoch as having some historical or theological interest, but they generally regard the Books of Enoch as non-canonical or non-inspired.^[3] It is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, but not by any other Christian groups.

It is wholly extant only in the Ge'ez language, with Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few Greek and Latin fragments. For this and other reasons, the traditional Ethiopian belief is that the original language of the work was Ge'ez, whereas non-Ethiopian scholars tend to assert that it was first written in either Aramaic or Hebrew; Ephraim Isaac suggests that the Book of Enoch, like the Book of Daniel, was composed partially in Aramaic and partially in Hebrew.^[4]:6 No Hebrew version is known to have survived. It is asserted in the book itself that its author was Enoch, before the Biblical Flood.

Some of the authors of the New Testament were familiar with some of the content of the story.^[5] A short section of 1 Enoch (1:9) is cited in the New Testament, Epistle of Jude, Jude 1:14–15, and is attributed there to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1 En 60:8), although this section of 1 Enoch is a midrash on Deuteronomy 33. Several copies of the earlier sections of 1 Enoch were preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls.