Just Another Saturday: Satellites, UFOs and Sun Shenanigans

The fog is here today. Outside my window is cold and grey and covered in a thick layer of marine haze. It looks like nothing is happening, and nothing is going to happen. This is just the same old Saturday that we have all lived multiple times since we landed on this planet through the usual means of birth, and that we will keep on living until the very last Saturday we ever get…which could be simultaneous and soon if the world keeps on going this way.

I have a secret to confess: I like conspiracy and alt media websites. I keep my interest as a purely personal hobby, and take it all with a huge pinch of pink Himalayan rock salt, but there are things you find out – perfectly verifiable things – that are drawn to your attention, the more you open your eyes to the sheer strangeness of the world around you. My interest started as a teenager when I found a copy of the Fortean Times and eagerly devoured anything I could read on cryptozoology, ancient aliens and UFO sightings. It was as harmless as the Beano, and distinctly less harmful than Cosmo, or whatever other ‘girls’ magazines were aimed at me. A Fortean Times, perhaps a copy of Rolling Stone, some big red chewing gum and Television’s Marquee Moon on the stereo filled up many a boring teenage Saturday afternoon. My tastes have not changed much with age, though I no longer chew gum, drink inordinate amounts of tea, and gave up on Rolling Stone years ago.

My Saturday morning reading consisted of a story about a ‘piece of the Sun breaking off’, strange green lasers over Hawaii and our air force shooting down a cylindrical shaped UFO over Alaska. Sadly reports that it was shot down over Cumtown, Alaska are sadly a hoax – no such place exists. Because this shooting down of a cylindrical shaped object happened 69 days before 4/20, and the event happening over such an amusingly named town would have been solid proof that we live in a simulation, but I digress.

The first story, an alarming little piece about the sun breaking apart turned out to be true…and not true…like all good distractions are. This solar event in question was not a lump of the Sun, but instead a solar ‘prominence’, which is a loop of electrically charged gas or ‘plasma’, which emerge from the Sun quite regularly. One of these prominences broke away and then span around the Sun’s north pole. The prominence breaking off was not strange, but the swirling around the Sun’s north pole was. It was observed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been looking at the Sun since 2010. File that one under ‘interesting but not that interesting unless you are a nerd.’

The second story is a little more unexplained, slightly more concerning, but seemingly real. On the 28th of January this happened:

Nasa have said it was not them. The finger is pointed by various people who like to discuss such things online towards Chinese CCP satellites, presumably not satellites of love like Lou sang about, but ones with more nefarious purposes. Even if they are simply Daqi satellites made for scientific research it is more than a little disconcerting after the Chinese spy balloon action earlier this week. Maunakea, Hawaii is the site of a dormant volcano. Why would lasers be sent down over this remote area? Who knows, except it does not seem to bode well. There is just something about creepy green laser scans which is Matrix-like and essentially threatening, especially when we do not know who, or why they were doing their little dance in the sky.

Finally the cylindrical object shot down over the northern Alaskan coast has got me wondering if the world is headed for troubled times. The war in the Ukraine, CCP spy balloons, disturbing laser scans over Hawaii…and now the US Air Force having to shoot down something cylindrical and ‘the size of a car’ over Alaska, hardly bodes for a peaceful 2023. Outside the people are antsy, everyone seems to be on edge or else tipped right over it and wailing in the streets. There is a mental health crisis on the streets of San Francisco. It is almost like humans are tapping into the unrest and reacting badly to it. Inflation isn’t helping. Food is outrageously expensive, so is rent. Everything seems dark in these post covid days, and no green satellite-light is going to ominously shed any positive light on the situation.

To paraphrase TS Elliot, and by extension, Chaucer who he lifted it from in the first place, spring is the cruelest season, because it forces roots from dead ground. Yet here we are still in winter and I don’t know how much crueler things can get. All of a sudden the world feels like a very dangerous place indeed. I have pretty well attuned danger-antennae. I have lived a life having to worry about the danger round the corner, thanks to my somewhat unusual circumstances. Right now I have the shivers up my back and an unrelenting sensation that everything is going to shit once again. Add to that the prospect of a new pandemic, with the H1N1 avian virus crossing over to humans once again, and to be frank the only sensible reaction is to start planning for disaster.