With the recent release of articles by James Iandoli and Twitter user @Jay09784691, and hosted by Danny Silva and myself, we see an interesting connection between materialist biology and science, and the mystical non-physical world of esoteric metaphysics. The work being done by Dr. Garry Nolan of Stanford University and Dr. Christopher ‘Kit’ Green, a medical doctor, create a symbiosis between the real and the ‘unreal,’ between the natural and the super-natural.

Being a product of a good Jesuit education, I am reminded of St. Paul. Around 54 CE, Paul wrote his famous letters to the Corinthian churches. Known to most Bible readers as 1 Corinthians, Paul expresses in those letters the basic notions of what the Church ought to be. Moreover, his ideas lay the foundation for the dogma of most Catholics. His ideas, though two millennia old, continue to resonate. In 1 Corinthians 15:49 (NIV), he wrote,

“And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.”

Being a student of various esoteric philosophies, I am also reminded of Hermeticism, and the infamous, though dubiously sourced phrase,

“As above, so below.”

It seems Paul and early Hermeticists were on similar paths. What is physical reflects the mystical, and vice versa. To paraphrase what Jesus said to Peter, what is bound on Earth is also bound in Heaven. I’m going to guess that Christ was being both literal and metaphorical here. The material and the immaterial are shadows of the other, mirrors, which reflect the other in themselves.

The realm Nolan and Green seem to be dabbling lies in the gap between the material and the immaterial. The biological evolution of the human brain hardwired to sense the natural world around it, yet simultaneously wired to ‘sense’ the super-natural. While we can only speculate, since this study is in its infancy, we seem to be going through a shift in general perception regarding science, but more importantly, what we deem to be real.

While empiricism and materialism may still reign supreme, the turn towards a more holistic and idealist approach to the world around us has been slowly taking shape over the last several decades. What has been occurring is not a revolution in thinking, but rather an evolution. With the incredibly broad implications and complications of a strange and spooky quantum universe, and with the development of better and more rigorous testing for anomalous science, such as various psi phenomena, everything we used to take for granted is beginning to slowly evolve into something different.

I am not suggesting some “end of days” scenario for mainstream science, nor some dramatic shift towards a world full of New Age hipster academics who believe in The Great Spirit (though, the times they certainly are a’ changing). This shift will be slow and cautious. Perhaps it will be a quiet return to some bygone age where the physical measurable work of scientists was also the mystical work of shamans seeking to understand some version of a Neoplatonist anima mundi. It may sound silly. Perhaps it is. It is a strange world we live in, and while empiricism’s goal is to make it less strange, perhaps it is time to embrace the strange.    

Nolan and Green’s hypothesis concerning the connectivity between the brain’s caudate and the putamen structures as being a potential indicator of high cognitive functioning is incredibly fascinating. Moreover, the theories presented by Nolan and Green suggest that this brain system also leads to the potential of ‘sensing’ data and information beyond the five normal senses. Their presentation at Harvard did mention certain candidates in their study who often see and hear things beyond the five senses and possess a sort of “sixth sense” that allows the individual to interact with shades of the universe beyond our current understanding.

Putamen and Caudate Brain Structure

(artist rendering, not to scale)

Putamen and Caudate Brain Structure

(image from Nolan & Green)

I’ve asked this before in previous posts, and I address this idea more in my book, but are we a simultaneous blend of immaterial systems and material structures? Am I made of dreams and bones?

Returning to ancient religious traditions, such as the writings of St. Paul and the texts of the Hermeticists, Nolan and Green are walking down a well-trodden path, and in good company. This new and unique look at these physical brain structures may be a key to understanding these esoteric ideas which have been around for thousands of years. Our ancient predecessors would not have had the ability to understand the complex physical system of the brain, but they did have the awareness and the insight to understand that the mind was reflexive and reflective of a symbiotic, if not divine, system of the Other.

In my book, I refer to the UFO community as a collection of ghosts who haunt the broader mainstream culture by constantly challenging popular interpretations of reality. Much like ghosts, the community exists, for better and for worse, in the anarchic gap between what is understood and what isn’t. Like so many other religious and spiritual movements, perhaps Nolan and Green are scratching at the surface of what causes communities like the UFO community to form. Jacques Vallee referred to this intelligent Other as a ‘control system,’ and indeed it very well may be, but our various cultures and societies also seem to give it shape (and at times, breadth and depth). In other words, we are influenced by this Other as much as we influence it.

It stands that if there is some Other, well above us in awareness, or ‘intelligence,’ and agency, then indeed, our only tool, our immaterial mind and material brain, which allows for creativity, intellect and imagination must be housed below. Our thoughts and ideas are not totally our own, but part of a larger system. To steal from Jung, we seem to be shadows of something larger, yet in our own right, also seem to cast shadows upon that broader body. Nolan and Green may be at the gateway to this realm of the Other; perhaps they have found the door, and all that is missing now is the key.

Something weird is going on in the skies over the United Kingdom. Of course, I would argue that something weird is happening in the skies all over the world. From unexplained booms to mysterious fireballs, something just doesn’t seem right overhead. Of course, it could merely be that between cameras and the citizen reporting made possible by social media, we’re just more aware of minor meteor impacts and atmospheric events than we used to be. Still, it seems like there is a pattern of aerial strangeness lately that suggests something weird or new is happening. I’m not crazy, right?

If meteor impacts were becoming more common, would government agencies want to incite panic by making it public?

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, in particular, there has been a recent string of strange UFO reports and aircraft activity suggesting military exercises or perhaps something stranger. In November 2018, multiple commercial pilots witnessed mysterious fast-moving lights off the coast of Ireland, and a month later the Royal Air Force was scrambled to intercept an unidentified flying object above East Yorkshire. Then there was the whole strange saga of the “drone” sightings at England’s Gatwick airport, an incident which has yet to be fully explained. What’s going on in the skies over the British Isles?

Whatever is going on, it’s still going on. Today, news broke of a mysterious green flash seen in the skies above Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in central England, not too far from where the December UFO incidents were reported. Rather than an unidentified aircraft, this time eyewitnesses reported a bright green light or streak in the sky on the evening of January 8.  Some witnesses described the light as “neon green” or “white and a bit green” while some say the light was blue. All reports describe the object as incredibly fast – too fast for conventional aircraft.

Green fireballs are some of the most commonly reported unidentified aerial phenomena.

One witness, Debbie Pickard of Ilkeston, thought the object was flying at a low altitude over nearby homes and says this isn’t the first time she’s seen such an object:

It was as if something shot through the houses. It did not look very high and it looked like it was travelling horizontally. It’s a UFO by definition. It was like someone had thrown a frisbee. Me and my dad spotted a similar thing in 1988, it was in the papers then and confirmed on Gatwick radar. You do wonder what these things are.

UK Meteor Watch and the American Meteor society reported dozens of reports of a fireball that night. Meanwhile, speculation on social media about what the light could have been ranges from the International Space Station, fighter aircraft cockpit display panels, or spotlights. With the RAF Donna Nook bombing range and RAF Waddington and RAF Coningsby bases nearby just to name a few, it’s also possible that the light was caused by military activity. Until more details emerge, if they ever do, we’ll just have to keep our eyes upward and wonder what’s going on up there.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: the Rotating Black Holes would be a great name for a band.

That being said, with the nasty reputation black holes have for destroying everything that gets close to their namesake characteristic, it seems strange that scientists might consider them to be a safe and efficient means of hypersonic travel. And yet, that’s exactly what a new study proposes … providing you use the right kind of black hole. And that, if you’ve been paying attention instead of registering that new band name, is the rotating black hole.

“If the black hole like agittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then Interstellar” have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.”

Singularity of massive black hole or wormhole. Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst.

Gaurav Khanna, a National Science Foundation-funded physicist and co-author of “Physical objects approaching the Cauchy horizon of a rapidly rotating Kerr black hole” (published in Physical Review D) was kind enough to explain his theory in somewhat layperson’s terms in his recent essay in The Conversation. The study was inspired by the movie “Interstellar” in which Matthew McConaughey’s character falls into a fictional rapidly rotating black hole. Ph.D. student and study co-author Caroline Mallary wrote a computer model to simulate the same experience using Sagittarius A*. Spoiler alert (for the study, not the movie): it could work!

“What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole’s so-called inner horizon singularity. This is the singularity that an object entering a rotating black hole cannot maneuver around or avoid. Not only that, under the right circumstances, these effects may be negligibly small, allowing for a rather comfortable passage through the singularity. In fact, there may no noticeable effects on the falling object at all. This increases the feasibility of using large, rotating black holes as portals for hyperspace travel.”

Khanna explains that the singularity in a rotating black hole is technically “weak” and won’t damage ships or other objects entering it. Also, Sagittarius A* is much smaller than the massive black hole in the movie (Gargantua), so the singularity would be easier for a ship to detect and be prepared for. The model also showed that the effects of the singularity — cycles of stretching and squeezing on the spacecraft – are constant rather than rapidly increasing, so the effects can be planned for without any surprises.

Supermassive black holes are incredibly dense areas in the centre of galaxies with masses that can be billions of times that of the sun. They cause dips in space-time (artist's impression) and even light cannot escape their gravitational pull

However (there’s always a ‘however’), the potential hyperspace travelers have to pick the ‘right’ rotating black hole – that is, one that is so far away from any other stars or their radiation that there are no outside disturbances which can affect the singularity. Unfortunately, Khanna points out that the known black holes all have dust, gas, radiation and other cosmic material rotating around them.

Of course, all of this is theoretical since the Catch-22 (another great movie and pertinent paradox) of rotating black holes is that we need to try one to see if it works … but the only way to get close enough to one is to successfully travel through one.

This graph depicts the physical strain on the spacecraft’s steel frame as it plummets into a rotating black hole. The inset shows a detailed zoom-in for very late times. The important thing to note is that the strain increases dramatically close to the black hole, but does not grow indefinitely. Therefore, the spacecraft and its inhabitants may survive the journey.

If only real space travel was as simple as band names and movies.

Residents of Ontario, Canada had a rare and spectacular view of a very odd-looking upside down rainbow. Technically called a circumzenithal arc, it is caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that act as a prism which refracts light and creates an upside down rainbow.

Although they look identical to a rainbow (with the exception of being upside down), they’re not technically rainbows. Rainbows are formed when light reflects off of water drops such as rain or fog, while a circumzenithal arc is the result of light refracting off ice crystals in the upper atmosphere and are related to the very commonly seen halos that appear around the sun and moon. In addition, the weather has to be calm and cold, which is definitely not a problem with it being winter in Canada. Circumzenithal arcs normally appear when little to no clouds are in the sky.

The center of the bow is always towards the sun with the red color on the outside closest to the ground and purple at the top. They only happen when the sun is at a height of less than 32 degrees in the sky.

Canadian residents witnessed another beautiful phenomenon recently called “sundogs” which is when mini-suns appear hovering close on each side of our actual sun. The technical name is parhelion and the spots on each side of the sun are usually white but can sometimes appear as a reddish color located on the inside and blue on the outside.

Sundogs are created when the sun shines through a cirrus cloud that’s made up of hexagonal ice crystals that are falling with their axes located vertically. When the axes are arranged perpendicularly to the sun’s rays, they instead create the halo phenomenon. Sundogs appear at 22 degrees on either side of the sun and are also at the exact same height as our sun.

These sundogs can even be seen in tropical countries because the cloud layer is “cold no matter where you are,” according to British physicist Les Cowley.

• Click here to see pictures of the upside down rainbow and the sundogs.

An upside-down rainbow is called a circumzenithal arc.

(Submitted by Christy Litster)

The weather phenomena of a sun dog is caused by ice crystals in the sky.

(Submitted by Andy Breschuk)

The spots on either side of the sun can be reddish but are most often white.

(Submitted by Bonnie Stefishen)

So next time you’re outside on a bright sunny day, you may want to look up at the sky and you may catch a glimpse of a rare, but spectacular weather phenomenon.