The Answer Is Out There...,

Strongest argument against aliens pic.twitter.com/eF2FFZpJQE

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2021

richardhanania |  Imagine an alien civilization that can make it to this planet from somewhere in the universe beyond what we can observe. Once they get here, they are so advanced that all of our scientific knowledge leaves us dumbfounded about how they can achieve such speed and mobility.

At the same time, these aliens keep getting caught on camera, and sometimes on radar (while humans have already invented aircraft that largely avoids it). But the pictures are never any good! They’re just dots in the distance that seem to move around erratically, and despite all of our improvements in technology and camera resolution, our pictures and videos of them never improve.

I can imagine three possibilities:

1) Aliens visit this planet and want to get caught.

2) Aliens visit this planet and don’t care if they get caught because they’re too advanced and physics-defying to care what we think.

3) Aliens visit this planet and don’t want to get caught.

We can rule out 1, as if they wanted to get caught they’d clearly provide much stronger evidence.

I think we can also rule out 2, because a common theme of these sightings is that when military cameras start to lock in on the aliens, they fly away and disappear. If they didn’t care if we saw them, it’s likely they would leave some more evidence behind, and not freak out when they’re observed.

As for 3, it’s hard to imagine that a species this advanced would be so incompetent. Intergalactic travel seems a lot harder than avoiding radar and US military pilots. Maybe aliens are flying around all the time, it’s just their lowest IQ pilots that keep getting caught. But you’d think a species that advanced would have a more meritocratic selection process for space missions.

 

Prophetess Of The Saucers

greyfalcon | September 30 marks the birthday of this strange but remarkable woman, who probably did the most to spread the "Hitler escaped in a UFO" legend.

Her name was Maximiani Portas, but she's better known to history by her nom de voyage, the name she traveled under...Savitri Devi.

Maximiani was born in Lyons, France's second largest city, on September 30, 1905. "Her mother, Julia Nash, came from Cornwall, and her father was of mixed Mediterranean heritage, having an Italian mother from London and a Greek father who had acquired French citizenship due to his residence in France."

As a schoolgirl, Maximiani was greatly influenced by the work of the French poet Leconte de Lisle, whose Poemes barbares glorified the gods and religions of antiquity. And when she dicovered Bullfinch's Mythology, the result was the same as with H.P. Lovecraft a decade earlier. She became an ardent believer in the gods of Olympus. But where Lovecraft soon ended his infatuation with Graeco-Roman religion, the topic became a lifelong obsession with Maximiani.

In 1929, now interested in tracing the roots of occult traditions, Maximiani traveled to Jerusalem. She arrived just in time for the riots between the Arabs and the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants. She sided with the Arabs, and the entire episode left her with a lifelong hatred of Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the Talmud. [Some occultists believe that there is a network of ancient tunnels under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, similar to the tunnels in the Andes. These tunnels are alleged to be left over from the lost continent of Atlantis. See the book Timeless Earth by Peter Kolosimo, University Books, 1974]

By 1932, Maximiani's quest had brought her to India. Here she came under the influence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920), also known as Sri Baba Lokmanya, who was widely acclaimed as the 'father of Indian unrest'. Besides his radical political activities, Tilak was an accomplished scholar of ancient Hindu sacred literature. Imprisoned by the British Raj in 1897 for sedition, Tilak had immersed himself in Vedic study and in 1903 published his book about the origins of the "Aryan race," The Arctic Home in the Vedas.

Maximiani wandered through India for three years. Then, in July 1935, she enrolled in Rabindranath Tagore's ashram in Shantiniketan in the Bolpur district.  But she left in December after getting into scraps with German Jewish refugees who were also the guests of Tagore.

At the ashram, she "learned Hindi and perfected her command of Bengali. She then taught English and Indian history at Jerandan College, not far from Delhi, and worked in a similar capacity in Mathura, the holy city of Krishna, during 1936. Ever more involved in the life and customs of Hinduism, she adopted a Hindu name--Savitri Devi."

Settling in Calcutta in 1936, Savitri came under the influence of Srimat Swami Satyananda, who was director of the city's Hindu Mission and active in the nationalist Hindu Mahasabha movement. Tilak had gotten it wrong, Satyananda told Savitri, the Aryans didn't originate in the Arctic--they came from the Antarctic. During previous interglacial periods, Antarctica had enjoyed a temperate climate, and there were still ancient cities buried under the ice and snow. [Curiously, Lovecraft wrote a short novel about this topic in 1932 entitled At the Mountains of Madness, repeatedly referring to a city called "Kadath in the Cold Waste"].

More ominously, Satyananda told Savitri that the presence of the swastika, the traditional Hindu sign of good fortune, in the flag of Nazi Germany showed that this European nation was returning to its Aryan roots. In addition, "he told her that he considered Hitler an incarnation of Vishnu, an expression of the force preserving cosmic order."

Satyananda and his new guest lecturer, Savitri Devi, were very much excited when Hitler dispatched an expedition to Antarctica in 1938 under Captain Alfred Rischer. Here was proof that the Nazis were seeking the ancient Aryan homeland. [In 1916, Charles Fort wrote a book called Y in which he talked about buried cities at the South Pole. He inexplicably destroyed this manuscript in 1917, claiming that "it was not what I wanted." Whatever Antarctic oddities the old boy dug up are delightful to conjecture but are unfortunately lost to history].

Friends in the Mahasabha introduced Savitri to Asit Krishna Mukherji, the editor of The New Mercury, India's one-and-only National Socialist magazine until its suppression by the British authorities in 1937. "Mukherji admired the growing might and influence of the Third Reich. He was deeply impressed by the Aryan ideology of Nazi Germany, with its cult of Nordic racial superiority, anti-Semitism and race laws," which he compared favorably with the Vedic law of varna or caste.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Savitri and Mukherji became the biggest pro-Axis cheerleaders around. Which immediately got Savitri into trouble with the Raj. For one thing, she was a citizen of France and needed a permit to stay in India. Her pro-Nazi views put her on a list for deportation. And when the Germans overran France in May 1940, she was in imminent danger of arrest as "an enemy alien."

So, on June 9, 1940, at the age of 34, Savitri married Mukherji in Calcutta. It was a traditional Hindu wedding.

While her husband worked for Indian independence under the pro-Axis leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, Savitri "spent the rest of the war in joyful anticipation of an Axis victory. By the end of the war, Savitri Devi had assimilated many notions from Hinduism into a heterodox form of National Socialism that glorified the Aryan race and Adolf Hitler.

Undeterred by the Allied victory in May 1945, Savitri resolved to return to Europe and preach her new Hitlerian faith. What spurred her to action was a curious article that appeared in The Times and Le Monde on July 18, 1945 claiming that Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, had been taken by a U-boat to Argentina.

Convinced that der Führer would soon be making his comeback, "Savitri Devi returned to Europe in October 1945. In London she took casual employment as a wardrobe manager with a traveling Indian dance company."

 

During her brief showbiz career, Savitri read another article that appeared in the Argentinian newspaper Critica on July 17, 1945 which "stated that the Führer and Eva Braun had landed from the U-530 in Antarctica, noting the possible place of embarkation was Queen Maud Land, the destination of a German Antarctic expedition in 1938-1939."

 

She also read a book by Ladislao Szabo, a Hungarian living in Buenos Aires, entitled Hitler esta vivo (Hitler is alive) Szabo expanded on the Critica article and discussed the top-secret but abortive Operation High Jump.

 

But what really kindled Savitri's excitement was the sudden appearance of the "flying saucers" in July 1947. UFOs dominated front pages everywhere.

 

Ready to undertake her missionary work, Savitri hit upon the idea of distributing pro-Nazi leaflets while passing through Germany by train in June 1948.

 

Returning through France and entering Germany at Saarholzbach, she spent some three months between 7 September and 6 December 1948 distributing a further six thousand leaflets in the three Western (Allied) occupation zones and the Saarland.

 

While in Germany, Savitri made contact with former SS men, who told her an amazing story: in 1942, a German engineer named Miethe began work on a "flying disk," also known as the V-7. Encouraged by the progress in the development of this new "vengeance weapon," Hitler placed the project under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Kammler. A limited number of these vehicles were produced at underground factories in the Harz Mountains.

The V-7 was a futuristic aircraft, Savitri was told, 'a fantastic creation nearly 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter, in its center the plexiglass cupola of the control room glistening in the sunlight.'...it had no rotating parts and was driven by twelve adjustable jets, five rearward for forward flight and the other seven for directional steering. With a range of 13,000 miles (20,000 kilometers) the V-7 was able to reach 1,500 to 2,000 miles per hour (2,400 to 3,200 kilometers per hour).

Soon it was all coming together in her mind--Hitler's controversial demise, the Antarctic expedition of 1938, the Miethe V-7 flying disk, the SS rumors of a diehard "Last Battalion" preparing to resume the war. She truly believed that a flying saucer had spirited the Führer out of an embattled Berlin and dropped him off in Cuxhaven. From there, the U-boat convoy ferried him to the Nazi colony of Neuschwabenland in Antarctica.

Thus convinced, Savitri undertook her most dangerous gamble yet. In preparation for her third propaganda sortie to enemy-occupied Germany, she had printed in London a small German-language handbill with a swastika. Here she exhorted the Germans to remain true to their Führer, who was alleged still to be alive, and to rise up against the Allied forces that now were stationed throughout the country.

In part, the handbill read,

    "However, 'Slavery is to last but a short time more.'"

    "Our Führer is alive."

    "And will soon come back, with power unheard of."

    "Resist our persecutors."

    "Hope and wait."

She began distributing the handbill on the night of 13-14 February 1949 in Cologne and soon found a young ex-SS man to help her.

The Allied occupation officials were at first alarmed by the appearance of these handbills. Was there a clandestine neo-Nazi group out there actually agitating for revolution? But then a German informer told them that a certain Mrs. Mukherji was distributing the subversive leaflets. And on February 22, 1949, Savitri was arrested by the British Army.

 

She was detained at the British military prison for women at Werl until her formal trial, which was fixed for 5 April 1949.

No doubt about it, Savitri was in a heap of trouble. As part of the postwar "denazification" program, the Allies had proclaimed the Laws of Occupation Status n Germany. Article 7 of Law Number 8 "forbade the promotion of militarist and National Socialist ideas on German territory subject to the Allied Control Commission." The maximum penalty was death.

Instead, the Allied court-martial sentenced Savitri to three years at the prison in Werl. She struck up close friendships with former SS concentration camp guards from Belsen and began writing her book Defiance. Here she enjoyed a high regard among her fellow Nazi and SS prisoners for her high-flown rhetoric, her insistence on the idealistic philosophy of Aryan rebirth, and her pious Nazi spirituality. Her presence proved so disruptive that Savitri was soon placed in solitary.

Just as Savitri was looking at an extended stay at Werl, the husband she had abandoned four years earlier came to her rescue. Asit Krishna Mukherji, now a citizen of newly-independent India, arrived in Germany and lobbied the Allied occupation authorities for his wife's release.

In the end, Mukherji was successful, and Savitri was released from prison in August 1949.

For the rest of her life, Savitri continued her mission as a Nazi evangelist, writing several books and helping to found the World Union of National Socialists. She also insisted that some UFOs were indeed craft from the Nazi sanctuary in Antarctica, a theme that her colleage and disciple Ernst R. Zundel expanded upon in his 1974 book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?

Savitri Devi died on October 22, 1982.

Although her main contribution to ufology was the promotion of the "saucer Nazis" legend, there is one curious postscript concerning Savitri Devi.

On April 5, 1949, at the same moment Savitri was facing the Allied court-martial in Germany, a spectacular UFO event occurred thousands of miles to the west, over that part of the USA's New England region Loren Coleman calls "the Bridgewater Triangle."

A "very large, luminous, blue-green object" first appeared over Middleboro, Massachusetts, then flew a wobbly corkscrew course westward over Taunton, Rehoboth and Seekonk, Mass. and finally over H.P. Lovecraft's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, where it suddenly and inexplicably vanished. The sighting was reported in Doubt--The Fortean Society Magazine for October 1949.

Killer-Ape Shenanigans Bubbling Just Beneath The Surface Of Consensus Reality...,

hopenothate |  The Order of Nine Angles is a Nazi-Satanist “group” (or Nazi Occult as they prefer to describe themselves) that promotes a supernatural, hateful system of thought which condemns liberal, Judeo-Christian society and longs for a new imperial age created by a ludicrous sub-Nietzschean superman figure called ‘Vindex.’ Ultimately, the O9A elite aspires to colonise the solar system.

The racist order deifies Hitler and the Third Reich, which are regarded as having attempted to create a “Satanic empire” in order to achieve the destiny of the western world.

Much of the O9A writings and activities appear on the surface quite comical. The chanting, the dressing up, the rituals. 

The Mass of Heresy, contained within the ONA’s Black Book of Satan, is performed before an altar adorned with a swastika banner, a framed photograph of Hitler and a copy of Mein Kampf. With black candles and incense of Mars burning, the congregation, dressed in black robes, chant:

We believe Adolf Hitler was sent by our gods To guide us to greatness.
 We believe in the inequality of the races

And in the right of the Aryans to live According to the laws of the folk.

In The Ceremony of Recalling, the Preistess blindfolds the Priest and takes him to each member of the congregation who kiss him. After being lifted on an alter containing “red candles and quartz tetrahedron”, the Priest has his robe removed by the Priestess as the others walk around him. After performing a sexual act on the Priest, the Priestess removes the robes of the congregation. Meanwhile, the Mistress, dressed in a white robe, “takes the person she has chosen and indulges herself according to her desire. The congregation consume the consecrated cakes [made from wheat, water, egg, honey, animal fat and marijuana] and wine and take their own pleasures according to their desires.” The ceremony ends with the killing of a chosen one; in a symbolic sacrifice, an animal replaces a person. On the next new moon, the congregation consume cakes containing the sacrificial victim’s blood.

But behind the fantasy and roleplay lies a very sinister organisation which has the potential to inspire their followers to commit extreme acts of violence. 

The O9A believes civilisation must be undermined and destroyed from within, so adherents are encouraged to be as grubby and horrible as they like – committing crimes, random acts of violence, sexual assaults, and even the “culling” of human victims.

The three volumes of The Black Book of Satan are considered so extreme that they are kept is a special section of the British Library and not available to the general public. There is repeated talk of “culling”, committing acts of violence and destabilisation and even terrorism. In the The Dreccian Way, an O9A training manual written by leader Richard Moult, followers are encouraged not just to commit crime, but to “spread it, encourage it, incite it, support it”.

O9A literature regularly advocates ritualised rape, random attacks on innocent victims and “human culling”. The Black Book of Satan volume 3 describes how the Spring Equinox should be celebrated by a human sacrifice of somebody who volunteers for the role by their bad deeds, which, it suggests, could be “a Nazarene, such as an interfering investigative journalist.” 

“Culling is natural and necessary,” wrote Moult in The Dreccian Way. “To cull humans is to be the ONA. To cull – according to our guildlines and tests – is what makes us ONA.”

But... But... Aliens!

Salvatore Pais Been Playing With Y'all...,

foxnews  |  A former Navy pilot says he witnessed UFOs flying in restricted airspace off the coast of Virginia nearly every day for two years beginning in 2019.

Former Lt. Ryan Graves told CBS’s "60 Minutes" that the unidentified objects — like ones seen in a Pentagon-confirmed Navy video near San Diego — are a security threat.

The latest firsthand account comes a month ahead of a report by the national intelligence director and secretary of defense on unidentified aerial phenomena, a measure that was including in a COVID-19 relief bill passed in December.

"I am worried, frankly. You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hanging out up there, it would be a massive issue," Graves said, according to a clip of the "60 Minutes" interview, which is set to air Sunday. "But because it looks slightly different, we’re not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We’re happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day." 

Seamen who have seen the unidentified objects believe they could be a secret US technology, enemy surveillance devices, or something entirely different, Graves told CBS.

"This is a difficult one to explain. You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, frankly," the lieutenant told correspondent Bill Whitaker as he watched an unclassified video.

"I would say, you know, the highest probability is it’s a threat observation program," Graves said, according to the report.

A former defense official who spent years investigating unidentified aerial phenomena told the network program that the vehicles have technology vastly exceeding any human invention.

 

Naval Footage Of Transmedium UAPs

foxnews  |  Video taken aboard a US Navy ship off the coast of San Diego shows a mysterious, spherical object flying in the air before disappearing into the ocean, reports said Friday.

The footage is the source of two freeze frame images of unidentified flying objects previously released that a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed was recorded by US Navy personnel, FOX 8 reported. 

The black and white clip, taken aboard the USS Omaha in July 2019, shows a small round object flying parallel to the ocean, hovering for a moment before it drops into the water out of sight.

"Whoa, it’s getting close," a voice can be heard saying in the clip as the craft got closer to the water’s edge.

"It splashed!" the voice said when the object hit the ocean.

Luis "Lue" Elizondo, a former Pentagon intelligence officer who used to have access to the agency’s UFO data, previously told The Post UFOs have "transmedium" capabilities, meaning they can freely travel in space, water and air.

The clip was taken with a cell phone inside the ship’s Combat Information Center, a classified location on the vessel where phones are not allowed, a Navy source told The Post.

Somebody Gotta Service Scurred Old Rich Mens Enthusiasms....,

newyorker |  Leslie Kean is a self-possessed woman with a sensible demeanor and a nimbus of curly graying hair. She lives alone in a light-filled corner apartment near the northern extreme of Manhattan, where, on the wall behind her desk, there is a framed black-and-white image that looks like a sonogram of a Frisbee. The photograph was given to her, along with chain-of-custody documentation, by contacts in the Costa Rican government; in her estimation, it is the finest image of a U.F.O. ever made public. The first time I visited, she wore a black blazer over a T-shirt advertising “The Phenomenon,” a documentary from 2020 with strikingly high production values in a genre known for grainy footage of dubious provenance. Kean is stubborn but unassuming, and she tends to speak of the impact of “the Times story,” and the new cycle of U.F.O. attention it has inaugurated, as if she had not been its principal instigator. She told me, “When the New York Times story came out, there was this sense of ‘This is what the U.F.O. people have wanted forever.’ ”

Kean is always assiduously polite toward the “U.F.O. people,” although she stands apart from the ufological mainstream. “It’s not necessarily that what Greer was saying was wrong—maybe there have been visits by extraterrestrials since 1947,” she said. “It’s that you have to be strategic about what you say to be taken seriously. You don’t put out someone talking about alien bodies, even if it might be true. Nobody was ready for that; they didn’t even know that U.F.O.s were real.” Kean is certain that U.F.O.s are real. Everything else—what they are, why they’re here, why they never alight on the White House lawn—is speculation.

Kean feels most at home in the borderlands between the paranormal and the scientific; her latest project examines the controversial scholarship on the possibility of consciousness after death. Until recently, she dreaded the inevitable dinner-party moment when other guests asked about her line of work and she had to mumble something about U.F.O.s. “Then they’d sort of giggle,” she said, “and I would have to say, ‘There’s actually a lot of serious information.’ ” Her blunt, understated way of talking about incomprehensible data gives her an air of probity. During my visit, as she peered at her extensive library of canonical ufology texts—with such titles as “Extraterrestrial Contact” and “Above Top Secret”—she sighed and said, “Unfortunately, most of these aren’t very good.”

In her best-selling book, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record,” published in 2010 by an imprint of Random House, Kean wrote that “the U.S. government routinely ignores UFOs and, when pressed, issues false explanations. Its indifference and/or dismissals are irresponsible, disrespectful to credible, often expert witnesses, and potentially dangerous.” Her book is a sweeping reminder that this was not always the case. In the decades after the Second World War, about half of all Americans, including many in power, accepted U.F.O.s as a matter of course. Kean sees herself as a custodian of this lost history. In her apartment, a tranquil space decorated with a Burmese Buddha and bowls of pearlescent seashells, Kean sat down on the floor, opened her file cabinets, and disappeared into a drift of declassified memos, barely legible teletypes, and yellowing copies of The Saturday Evening Post and the Times Magazine featuring flying-saucer covers and long, serious treatments of the phenomenon.

Kean grew up in New York City, a descendant of one of the nation’s oldest political dynasties. Her grandfather Robert Winthrop Kean served ten terms in Congress; he traced his ancestry, on his father’s side, to John Kean, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress, and, on his mother’s, to John Winthrop, one of the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She speaks of her family’s legacy in rather abstract terms, except when discussing the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, her grandfather’s great-grandfather, whom she regards as an inspiration. Her uncle is Thomas Kean, who served two terms as New Jersey’s governor and went on to chair the 9/11 Commission.

Kean attended the Spence School and went to college at Bard. She has a modest family income, and spent her early adult years as a “spiritual seeker.” After helping to found a Zen center in upstate New York, she worked as a photographer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In the late nineteen-nineties, after a visit to Burma to interview political prisoners, she stumbled into a career in investigative journalism. She took a job at KPFA, a radio station in Berkeley, as a producer and on-air host for “Flashpoints,” a left-wing drive-time news program, where she covered wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and other criminal-justice issues.

In 1999, a journalist friend in Paris sent her a ninety-page report by a dozen retired French generals, scientists, and space experts, titled “Les OVNI et la Défense: À Quoi Doit-On Se Préparer?”—“U.F.O.s and Defense: For What Must We Prepare Ourselves?” The authors, a group known as COMETA, had analyzed numerous U.F.O. reports, along with the associated radar and photographic evidence. Objects observed at close range by military and commercial pilots seemed to defy the laws of physics; the authors noted their “easily supersonic speed with no sonic boom” and “electromagnetic effects that interfere with the operation of nearby radio or electrical apparatus.” The vast majority of the sightings could be traced to meteorological or earthly origins, or could not be studied, owing to paltry evidence, but a small percentage of them appeared to involve, as the report put it, “completely unknown flying machines with exceptional performances that are guided by a natural or artificial intelligence.” COMETA had resolved, through the process of elimination, that “the extraterrestrial hypothesis” was the most logical explanation.

Kean had read Whitley Strieber’s “Communion,” the 1987 cult best-seller about alien abduction, but until receiving the French findings she had never had more than a mild interest in U.F.O.s. “I had spent years at KPFA reporting on the horrors of the world, injustice and oppression, and giving voice to the voiceless,” she recalled. As she acquainted herself with the plenitude of odd episodes, it was as if she’d seen beyond our own dismal reality and the limitations of conventional thinking, and caught a glimpse of an enchanted cosmos. “To me, this just transcended the endless struggle of human beings,” she told me, during a long walk around her neighborhood. “It was a planetary concern.” She stopped in the middle of the street. Gesturing toward a heavily overcast sky, she said, “Why should we assume we already understand everything there is to know, in our infancy here on this planet?”

SMDH..., Old Rich Men Fearing Death Stay Fiddling With Their Bowels and Whatnot

NYTimes |  What’s across the River Styx? Robert Thomas Bigelow would like to know. Wouldn’t anyone, especially now? But Mr. Bigelow is not just anyone, or any 76-year-old mourning a wife and confronting his own mortality. He’s a maverick Las Vegas real estate and aerospace mogul with billionaire allure and the resources to fund his restless curiosity embracing outer and inner space, U.F.O.s and the spirit realm.

Now he’s offering nearly $1 million in prizes for the best evidence for “the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death.”

In other words, was Hamlet right to call death an inescapable boundary, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns?” Or does consciousness in some form survive bodily death — what the Dalai Lama called how we merely “change our clothes”?

Is Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep only a nap?

Mr. Bigelow believes so. “I am personally totally convinced of it,” he said.

A daunting quest, perhaps fringe to some, but the shaggy-maned and mustached entrepreneur, the sole owner of Bigelow Aerospace and Budget Suites of America, is not easily put off. He amassed a fortune to pursue his interests, including the designing and building of inflatable astronaut habitats for NASA, like his soft-sided expandable activity module called BEAM attached to the International Space Station.

His aerospace ventures have been financed by his Budget Suites business, one of the first extended-stay rental chains, now housing some 15,000 people in three states. The profits have enabled him, he says, to sink more than $350 million into Bigelow Aerospace, “my own real black hole,” as he put it in recent phone interviews.

They have also enabled Mr. Bigelow to indulge a celebrated, if sometimes derided, interest in what he called “anomalous events” including his 20-year ownership of a spooky Utah ranch overrun by flying orbs and other creepy phenomena. The strange goings-on drew the interest of the Defense Intelligence Agency and, through funding secured by Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, led to the formation of a Pentagon effort to study unidentified flying objects — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, revealed by The New York Times in 2017.