Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Talking about the art of science fiction




I was recently included in this article where I got to join four other science fiction writers and discuss the art and relevance of the genre. We talk about what got us interested in science fiction, the kinds of sci fi we like to watch and read, and why this genre is more relevant now than ever. 

As I discuss, we love sci fi and the genre is sure to keep growing in popularity in books, movies, and TV, because we seem to be living in a world that resembles a science fiction story more and more each day. The government’s UFO revelations, anyone? 

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Win a FREE book this July!



Do you want a FREE book? The one that predicted last year's metal monolith mystery? The book Kirkus Reviews calls "A captivating examination of humanity's fear of the unknown, with hints of sci fi and fantasy"? The one that convinced conspiracy theorists that I’m a real-life James Bond villain plotting to brainwash the world on behalf on the New World Order? With the release of my new novel, FATAL POSE, just a little over two months away, this July and August you can win a signed edition of my first two novels! Until July 31, you can get a copy of "Confirmation: Investigations of the Unexplained," the book that rubbed so many conspiracy theorists the wrong way. Get it for free only on Goodreads.com. As Paul Levinson, author of “The Plot to Save Socrates” wrote, this book is “a media-savvy, X-Files-like, fast paced story that’s just dying to be made into a Netflix or Amazon series.”

 

Sign up for a chance to win right here:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/327328-confirmation-investigations-of-the-unexplained?fbclid=IwAR0NYtwKiZxiKTj0LusC3LThX6dgKUyYHtaBvVaTKLMCqQZxFYalRqImr-o


Sunday, June 27, 2021

My Guest Spot on the Common Cents Finance Podcast



I was recently interviewed by a couple of excellent Saint Peter's University business students for their Common Cents Finance podcast and we discussed an eclectic mix of topics that included branding, public relations, crisis communication, publicity and brand management, not to mention our discussion of conspiracy theories. And we even lay the smackdown on John Cena for embarrassing himself with that groveling apology to China.

Check out the episode right here.

And do make sure and listen to all of their other episodes as well because the show's knowledgeable discussion of business issues can give a lot of big-name, professional business-broadcasters a run for their money.

Especially in our discussion of off the wall conspiracists like Alex Jones, State of the Nation, and the rest of their ilk, we discuss why the people behind these odious websites and social media need to argue that EVERY SINGLE major world event is really a part of a conspiracy. While these people might be unscrupulous and obviously lacking any sort of a moral compass, they are shrewd practitioners of personal-branding strategies and tactics. If your brand is that of the biggest conspiracy theorists in the world, you have no choice but spin alternate narratives to the consensus reality and information from mainstream sources to keep your fans happy. Why just imagine if State of the Nation did NOT blame some major news story on the Deep State, the Illuminati, or the New World Order! What would their fans do? Most likely star migrating to other purveyors of nonsensical fabrications and fake news.


Saturday, June 5, 2021

A Nice Little Gem of a Movie In Light of Recent Events


While you wait for more information on the Defense Department’s report of its UFO studies to be released in full to Congress by the end of June and peruse the news for analysis of the parts of the study that have already been leaked, I would like to recommend a nicely original little film about alien encounters. 

I ran across “UFO” (2018) while randomly looking through Amazon.com’s recommendations of science fiction films. I was in a sci fi mood and desperately hoping to find something more interesting than superhero films or Star Wars. The user comments for this film were very positive, making the story sound blessedly original. I was definitely not disappointed after adding the DVD to my collection.

 

The film is based on a 2006 sighting of a disc-shaped object over Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, an event quite familiar to UFO enthusiasts. You can check out the overview of the O’Hare incident right here. The plot involves a mathematics graduate student who is able to figure out that the FAA’s explanations for strange aerial phenomenon over an airport (moved to Cincinnati from Chicago) don’t make sense. After convincing his friends and one of his professors (Agent Scully herself, Gillian Anderson, in a nice bit of casting) that there is something unusual going on and government investigators’ prosaic explanations don’t make sense, our headstrong hero finds himself under surveillance by a shadowy group of investigators who want to know how he figured out what he did.

 

That synopsis might sound like something that could have been recycled from a million UFO-conspiracy films, but the film is much more than that. It uses the archetypes of the genre to examine the psychology of what it’s like to crave answers, the obsessive need to know in the face of an unsolvable mystery. I don’t want to go into more details about plot points because I don’t want to spoil anything, but do check out the film to see how effectively one can tell a story about the true nature of the unknown.

 

It might make you look at the latest UFO discussion and speculations playing out in the news every day in a whole different light. Just what if there really is something extraordinary flying around in the skies out there, but we may never know what it is? What if there is nothing more in the hidden government files than the admission of total ignorance?

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Fascinating!



UFO’s are all over the media lately, and not just on the History Channel and the Travel Channel. 60 Minutes recently did an extensive story on the government’s admission that it had started investigating the phenomenon again in 2007. The 60 Minutes segment can be seen on YouTube here, and several extensive stories about the new UFO revelations can be read here and here. 

And this month, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Defense are required to share their findings with Congress.

 

The US Air Force had conducted several research efforts into UFOs in the past, starting with Project Sign in 1948, then Project Grudge in 1949, and finally the famous Project Blue Book that ran from 1952 until 1969. Once Blue Book was shut down, the government said that it would no longer spend resources trying to figure out what was behind the phenomenon. The study’s official conclusion was that the vast majority of sightings were misidentifications of everything from temperature inversions, unusual cloud formations, meteorites, swamp gas, and stars, to birds, weather balloons, and conventional aircraft. Since UFOs appeared to pose no threat to national security, there was no reason for the government to be in the business of studying them.

 

That changed, apparently, in 2007 when Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, had been given information about Navy and Air Force personnel—including fighter pilots and radar operators—routinely seeing unidentified flying objects. These UFOs (or UAPs, “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” as the term UFO had been rebranded) would routinely exhibit flight capabilities beyond those of any existing aircraft in the world. Just as decades’ worth of UFO sightings claimed, the unidentified objects would be capable of speeds exceeding those of any known Earthly aircraft and would perform maneuvers, again, beyond the capabilities of aircraft manufactured by anyone in this world. The UAPs reported by the military personnel must have been powered by technology we can’t even theoretically conceive of. Aside from their abilities to accelerate or decelerate at rates that would most likely compromise the structural integrity of any aircraft—and kill any living being inside it—several of these mystery craft had been seen plunging into the ocean or emerging from it to fly away into the sky. 

 

Harry Reid’s reaction to this information was the request that $22 million be allocated to the Pentagon’s black budget to study these UAPs. As the Senate Majority Leader, he got what he asked for.

 

As the links to the stories attest, the result was the establishment of a study group called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), run by the Defense Intelligence Agency and tasked with cataloging the UFO/UAP sightings. AATIP was funded until 2012 and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force was a follow-up program.

 

We now know all this because a former AATIP director, Luis Elizondo, leaked the information to the media after resigning, allegedly frustrated by the Pentagon brass’ lack of interest in trying to determine what the UAP’s are. In 2017, the New York Times broke his story in this article.

 

So, any day now, we could get the Defense Department's report on all this and, at the very least, it’s expected that the report will acknowledge that the military is aware that some sort of hyper-advanced aircraft are able to enter U.S. airspace at will and evade our most sophisticated defenses. What these aircraft are, the report will no doubt say, nobody knows.

 

If, in fact, the government is “keeping something hidden,” as so many UFO-conspiracy films, TV shows, and books have claimed, that hidden information, I always suspected, is this sort of ignorance. There is something in the skies and we don’t know what it is.

 

Such information would be quite sobering, if not disturbing. It’s actually much more disturbing than all the rococo conspiracy theories about retrieved alien flying saucers and back-engineered UFOs in Area 51. The unknown is the most frightening thing in the world. 

 

It should inspire what past governmental studies of UFOs could not: a broader investigation of the phenomenon by the scientific community. Hopefully scientists might step up and do what Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book’s skeptic/debunker-turned-believer called for when he said the subject needed “agnostic” investigators. It needed people who neither blindly wanted to believe, nor their mirror-image opposite, the zealous debunkers who had made up their minds that UFOs could not possibly exist before examining the facts.

 

What might eventually derail any such open-minded investigative efforts would be the hard-core conspiracy theorists once more. The conspiracy culture in the UFO community had already driven scientists away once before. As French information scientist and UFOlogists Jacques Vallee wrote in his 1991 book, “Revelations,” by the 1980s scholars like himself had walked away from UFO investigations because the field had been taken over by the saucer-crash proponents and the uncritical believers of ever increasingly outlandish theories about aliens in underground bases experimenting on human abductees, extraterrestrials living among us and walking next to us on the street, or ETs clandestinely running the countries of the world. The sober, cautious, and conservative investigations of lights in the sky and distant sightings, Vallee writes, was just not as sexy as the lurid tales of alien abductions and clandestine military/alien partnerships. But the “sexiness” of the conspiratorial claims had also killed the chance of mainstream science taking the UFO phenomenon seriously.

 

Hopefully that won’t happen again.

Saturday, May 8, 2021

MUSCLES! MAYHEM! MURDER! And the FATAL POSE plot reveal!

 


September 14 is the date! My new novel, the murder mystery FATAL POSE is dropping from World Castle Publishing and Gunnar Marino and Erika Lindstad are investigating the deadly side of professional bodybuilding! And check out this sneak peek at the plot...


Venice, California: Where you’ll find the hottest beaches, hottest gyms, and hottest bodies. This is where ex-bodybuilder turned private investigator, Gunnar Marino, runs his business.

The World BodyBuilding Federation: The most successful health and fitness empire in the world. But WBBF President of Operations, Laura Preston, suddenly finds herself in the middle of a blackmail scheme, with bodybuilder Brad Holt threatening to expose a shattering secret from her past.

Where two adversaries meet: After Holt dies at a contest from what appears to be a dangerously unhealthy dieting regimen, Marino is hired to look into whether or not his demise might have been the perfect act of murder. But the deeper Marino digs into the case—pressed by a personal obligation to Holt's sister—the more unsettled he is by Holt’s background, questioning the morality of seeking justice for a corrupt murder victim and pursuing a prime suspect who might have been a victim herself.

A showdown no one might walk away from:  Finding himself in an escalating battle of wills and wits with Laura Preston, Marino is aided by a group of athletes he employs as an investigative staff, and Dr. Erika Lindstad, his former lover and ex-bodybuilder in her own right. But the more troubled Marino gets by the case, he realizes that he has no choice but to see the investigation to its conclusion...because suddenly he and everyone he cares for are targeted for death.

Sunday, May 2, 2021

You don't become a successful conspiracy theorist like this...

So, my "anti-fan," Hank Wolfe, on the Before It's News conspiracy site is again claiming that I am up to more dastardly deeds and wickedness. So far he had accused me of being a part of a plot to brainwash my students using 5G technology during my online classes and to replace students who are critical of conspiracy theories with computer-generated "deep fake" doubles. He seems to imply that I either had advanced knowledge of the COVID-19 outbreak or I'm just taking advantage of a COVID hoax - his postings are not quite clear if COVID-19 was manufactured or it's a hoax and no virus actually exists - in order to enslave my students. Since he doesn't seem to be accusing me of being one of the creators of the pandemic (or hoax), I am actually a bit disappointed. I really would have liked to have been accused of something as grand as causing the entire outbreak, or maybe just sitting on the all-powerful Committee of Doom that had manufactured the pandemic.

Now in a post from December 23, which I just noticed on Hank's Before It's News page, he does accuse me of being the mastermind behind the 2020 metal monolith mystery. My novel, CONFIRMATION, Hank argues, is but a bit of "predictive programming," or a part of some greater global plot. I need to reread his post since I can't quite recall his muddled line of "reasoning." Or you can check his posts about me and monoliths here and in right here.

It's true that I joked around about the monolith connection to CONFIRMATION on this blog, but it was, you know...A JOKE!!!

Now it's easy - and oh, so enjoyable - to make fun of a second-rate fantasist like Hank Wolfe. He makes broad declarations of grand conspiracy theories without offering a shred of proof for any of them. In fact, he does not even try his hand at the sort of conspiracist illusion of proof where he provides links to other conspiracy sites making their own unsubstantiated claims. 

That sort of citation, for example, is the stock in trade of State of the Nation, where each of their unhinged claims of COVID hoaxes, alien space weapons, and false flag operations reference a large number of other sources. Those sources, of course, are conspiracy theorists or just previous State of the Nation articles. This sort of circular method of self-referentiality is so amusing that I think I might use it as a teaching tool in my research methods class this fall. Study State of the Nation very carefully, I will explain, to learn how not to present research.

But Hank Wolfe does not bother to try and reference his shocking claims with even the sort of inept approximation of the scholarly citation system. Hank, actually, appears to be somewhat of a lazy conspiracy theorist, posting claims of far-reaching evil plots sometimes weeks, or even months apart.

What Hank does do on occasion is offer links to some news stories he attempts to use as proof that some immense conspiracy can no longer be kept secret. For example, check out this post where his headline screams that the January 6 Capitol riot was so obviously a false flag attack that even The New York Times says as much. Except the Times does no such thing.

And then we have Hank's latest postings about several stories in the Saint Peter's student newspaper, The Tribune. He argues that these two stories - check them out here and here - just about admit that my grand scheme of controlling students' minds are in full swing. The first story, about marijuana legalization in New Jersey is really an admission of an MKULTRA-style mind-control experiment, or so says Hank. The the story about students and faculty starting their COVID vaccinations, Hank writes, is a glimpse into the university's forced vaccination policy. If anyone reads these stories, they will immediately see that Hank is either spectacularly delusional, can't read, or that he thinks his fans are as lazy as he is and would never check his sources.

Hank Wolfe really could benefit from taking my class on conspiracy theories. The Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise could help him come up with a much more convincing fake conspiracy theory than the kind of lame material he posts on his Before It's News page.

But I guess we can thank Hank for his ineptitude. In a way he helps shine a light on this bizarre cultural phenomenon that has gone so far off the deep end that at its core is but a collection of fabricated stories by sad, desperate losers and opportunists dreaming of becoming next Alex Jones. Hank's nonsense about 5G mind control technology and online learning come through in much fewer articles that say the constant deluge of rancid sewer sludge on the Sate of the Nation or Millennium Report sites. Although Hank sometimes proclaims in very matter of fact tones that the COVID pandemic is a hoax, his focus still seems to be on the more exotic realms of MKULTRA-like brainwashing conspiracies. His work is both scattered and inept. It is not in the league of the shear, cold-blooded, opportunistic evil of a conspiracy site like State of the Nation that repeatedly implores its readers not to get vaccinated, not to wear masks if one is not vaccinated and in the company of strangers, and to avoid all safety precautions that might stop the spread of COVID-19. Hank Wolfe is but a sad, inept clown, a wannabe in a crowded field of aspiring conspiracy influencers. His competition, like State of the Nation, on the other hand, spreads information that's as close as one could get to attempted murder.