Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
An interview for Dazed & Confused with Richard Hoagland, the former CBS News consultant who claims the Cydonia formation on Mars is an artificial face and whose book Dark Mission alleges NASA was founded by Freemasons and Operation Paperclip scientists. Hoagland predicts the ruling elite will use 2012 to disclose microbial life on Mars, and reads crop circles as a decades-long education program.
An interview from Dazed & Confused, republished on Reality Sandwich in May 2012, with the historian Richard Dolan, author of the two-volume UFOs and the National Security State and of A.D. After Disclosure. Dolan describes how a doctoral dissertation turned into a career documenting official secrecy.
Written for Reality Sandwich in December 2009, two nights after a white spiral appeared over Norway. Pinchbeck sets out why the failed-missile explanation seemed to him inadequate, notes the timing against Obama’s Nobel speech in Oslo and the Copenhagen conference, and ends with the Vatican’s own conference on extraterrestrial life.
A Conscious Choice column from September 2008, written after speaking on orbs at a Glastonbury conference. Pinchbeck stays agnostic on what they are and turns sociological instead: orbs are a postmodern phenomenon that could only appear through digital cameras and photo-sharing, and their real interest lies in what they say about group consciousness.
Written for Reality Sandwich in July 2008 as an abstract for a lecture at the Prophets Conference in Glastonbury. Pinchbeck proposes that orbs, crop circles, UFOs and spirit encounters are neither simply real nor simply imaginary: the Other is coming to presence within the human psyche, in stages, as a co-creative initiation.
A Conscious Choice column from January 2008. At a Phoenix conference on UFOs and crop circles, Pinchbeck meets Dr. Nick Begich and takes up his long campaign against HAARP and the wider class of technologies that act directly on the brain — Philip K. Dick’s dystopias, he notes, are better read than lived.
A Conscious Choice column from December 2007 on two books at the far edge of the permissible: Steven Greer’s Hidden Knowledge, Forbidden Truth and Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara’s Dark Mission. Pinchbeck describes his own process of absorbing fringe material — first as joke, then, slowly, as serious possibility.
Published on Reality Sandwich in September 2007. Pinchbeck recounts a public disagreement with Whitley Strieber, who insisted a massive human die-off was mathematically certain, and reads the quarrel through Ramesh Balsekar’s denial of individual agency — the self as a part written by a universal consciousness enjoying its own play.
A Wired dispatch from August 2002 on crop circles. It surveys the croppie subculture in Wiltshire, Gerald Hawkins’s geometric analysis, Colin Andrews’s magnetic-field claims, and Michael Glickman’s theory of a 2012 dimensional shift, and quotes SETI astronomer Seth Shostak dismissing the Chilbolton glyph that appeared to answer the 1974 Arecibo message.