Mark O'Connell, The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs. HarperCollins, 2017. A human life can be read as the totality of its enigmas. The questions to be asked, naturally, will differ from person to person. For J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), the brilliant … [Read more...]
The Daimon, the Witch, and the Moon-Journey – “The Dream” of Johannes Kepler (Part 2)
The story so far, of pioneer astronomer Johannes Kepler's pioneering science-fiction story "The Dream": The young hero Duracotus has gone with his witch-like mother to a crossroads, the kind of place where witches perform their rites. There she's conjured up a "daimon." Not a demon, exactly. A … [Read more...]
The Daimon, the Witch, and the Moon-Journey – “The Dream” of Johannes Kepler (Part 1)
A not-so-trivial trivia question: who was the astronomer whose mother was tried as a witch? And who blamed his own unpublished science-fiction story--regarded by some as the first science-fiction ever written--for getting her in trouble? Welcome to the wonderful world of the 16th and 17th … [Read more...]
Truth with Meaning – The Quest of J. Allen Hynek
Last week's post, on Jeff Kripal's Mutants & Mystics, has called forth thoughtful responses from a long-time reader named Ross, and from Jeff himself. Both took issue with my (very qualified) endorsement of the view expressed by Lester del Rey, that materialist science's transformation of our … [Read more...]
The Philadelphia Experiment – Carl Allen and the Esoteric Tradition
This week's post I owe entirely to a man named Marco Mucci, whose acquaintance I've made over the past two weeks. Marco lives in Rome, where Journal of a UFO Investigator has just been published in Italian, as La Voce Smarrita del Cielo ("The Lost Voice of Heaven"). He's made a series of … [Read more...]
