Do You Believe In Aliens Yet?
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Jason Murphy is a novelist, screenwriter, and content creator. One time he melted an entire car with 80 lbs of thermite. True story.
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The NASA Engineer vs the Demon
It’s a familiar story. A teenager starts acting strangely. They speak in odd tongues. They get hostile, maybe even violent. Scratches and welts appear on their flesh. The priests show up. Etc. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist isn’t just the benchmark for how we perceive demonic exorcisms, it made the mold. What’s unusual about this, the original iteration, is the denouement. You see, Roland, the boy who played host to some sulfurous nether-jerk, didn’t just stay far away from Ouija boards and pea soup. He fled for the moon. After his dance with the devil, Roland Hunkeler became a NASA engineer in the 1960s.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/20/the-exorcist-boy-named-magazine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_Roland_Doe
The intersection of science and the occult is peculiar territory. The story of Roland “Doe” isn’t quite that, but it’s a compelling look at the dichotomy of intellect and spiritualism. How can someone who experienced something so profound - an exorcism - turn around and live a life of science? That’s a big swing in the other direction. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe Roland wanted to get as far away from the Devil as possible, so he went to the stars.
I’ve been told that outside of one of the facilities in Los Alamos sits a statue of the Buddha. At the end of his career, Carl Jung steered his interest in psychology into the esoteric. Even Oppenheimer had a deep interest in Hindu mysticism. If you’re developing a character for a novel or screenplay, the struggle to reconcile the relationship between the sacred and profane could be powerful fuel to push them forward.
The Atlas of Surveillance
Trying to hermetically seal your “information ecosphere” is a game of whack-a-mole. There are so many ways we’re being watched. Our emails are scanned by tech giants and fed into Large Language Models. Our shopping behavior is added to our digital profile. And there are cameras everywhere. I know you understand that on an abstract level, but no. Really. They’re everywhere. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even possible to claw back any semblance of privacy. Has that ship sailed?
The Atlas of Surveillance is a utility that collects all of the ways local law enforcement is keeping tabs on you. It’s more than you think. In fact, depending on where you live, it may be way more than you think. I was surprised to learn that there’s a Cell Site Simulator in Austin.
And these are just the things we know about…
https://atlasofsurveillance.org/
A few decades a go, the landscape of storytelling was changed. Yes, the internet was a new variable to contend with, something that your characters now had access to. But even more important was the proliferation of cell phones. It was a particular obstacle in horror films. Every writer had to figure out more clever ways to isolate their protagonists. You either set your story pre-1990, or you had to address the fact that they could call for help at any time.
But now we have cameras everywhere. In the past, it was a stroke of luck if there was a surveillance camera that captured a crime. Now it’s odd if the crime wasn’t caught on tape. Look at the Atlas. There are thousands of Ring partnerships. Thousands of drones. How do murderers get away with anything?
Iraq Lizard Men
Have you been paying attention to all of the alien stuff in the news? I have. I’m obsessing over it. Sure, it’s probably some treacherous psy-ops government smokescreen meant to get us to pay attention to the aliens while somebody gets away with something diabolical. But I have to admit - it’s working.
Whenever new information comes to light, such as all of the whistleblowing shenanigans of David Grusch, you have to reexamine everything that came before. All of the strange things that Giorgio breathlessly discussed. All of the stories about lost time and probed buttholes. All of the paintings with strange, floating things in the background.
And then there’s Ubaid. In 1919, archaeologists in the Ubaid region of Iraq discovered some figurines. There were male and female, but many seemed to be wearing shoulder pads and helmets. The women were nursing children at their breasts.
Oh, and they all had lizard heads.
Well, surely that doesn’t mean anything. Enki, a Sumerian god in the region, was often identified as a snake and —
Shut-up.
Lizard people.
Years ago, we were working with a friend on an indie film. That friend then confessed to us that he’s certain the reptile beings were already among us. So wow. Okay. That’s a lot to process.
At that moment, I thought, “Oh, maybe we’re in danger right now.” But he didn’t pull out a knife or try to recruit us into his MLM or anything. He’s now a regular in a popular, network drama. The series isn’t about lizard people, but I guess the joke’s on me.
Yeah, I love science and history and facts. I also love Ancient Aliens.
I know. I know. It’s a bunch of old, white nerds pretending to be archaeologists and grossly misinterpreting the actual academia and work of for-real science people. But I still love it. As I’ve said before, it’s like a really obsessive Dungeon Master, taking you on a tour of their completely made-up world. Only … what if you were pretty sure that something in there was real? Not all of it. Not even most of it. But something in this whole deeply unhealthy fixation just might be true. Maybe.
And maybe there were lizard people.
Even if you don’t start a new church to welcome our scaly overlords, at least appreciate the insanity of it all. A secret race of beings living alongside humans and influencing our evolution isn’t exactly novel storytelling, but I think there’s still a lot to be mined from those ideas.
But … you know … just don’t be racist.
Genghis Khan’s Funeral
Genghis Khan went hard. There’s no shortage of myths and legends out there.
Who is responsible for the deaths of up to 40 million people? Genghis Khan.
Who established a Mongolian writing system? Khan.
Who was so horny that he has an estimated 16 million descendants in Central Asia? That’s right. The GK.
Have you ever had a birthday party, but you really, really didn’t want to have a birthday party? Maybe your significant other got it in their head that they had the perfect way to celebrate your birthday, and they won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. So you’ve got to suffer through this trip to Dave and Busters and pretend you’d rather be doing that, instead of your actual plan of ordering Domino’s and watching YouTube videos for 6 straight hours.
I like to think that this is how Genghis Khan’s funeral went down. He didn’t want anything. No pyres. No parades. No burials. But someone insisted. Maybe it was one of his wives.
Okay. Fine. I’ll have the stupid funeral … but I’m killing everyone.
According to Marco Polo, there were 800 soldiers in the funeral procession and they murdered anyone who they encountered, as well as everyone who attended the funeral. When they reached his remote burial site in the mountains and interred the remains, a separate group of soldiers arrived and killed them. Then they took 1000 horses to trample the ground to hide traces of the burial. Some of the more far-fetched tales even say the Mongols redirected the flow of the Onon River to cover the area.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170717-why-genghis-khans-tomb-cant-be-found
To date, no one has found the tomb of Genghis Khan. Is there really not an Indiana Jones movie about this? Or at least a National Treasure spin-off? I’m sure there are any number of pulp novels out there. Unfortunately, in my research I’ve discovered that traps in ancient tombs are really just a thing of fantasy. But maybe Genghis won’t disappoint me. Perhaps when his tomb is unearthed, there will be a curse or an ingenious trap or a Genghis mummy waiting in the shadows.
The Strangerous Channel Updates
One of the other big projects here at the Strangerous utilizes all of the tradecraft and nefarious skills I researched for the Modern Rogue. Cryptography. Lock-picking. Garage chemistry. So naturally, I had to pull these off the shelf:
I also just watched Rabbit Hole on Paramount+. Mind-bending and well worth your time. We’re seeing our very real and current dystopia interpreted in pop-culture now, as it’s happening. With the burgeoning use of AI, don’t expect that to let up any time soon. Art has always been the harbinger of tech to come, but I’m wondering if that tech is just moving too fast for us to catch it.
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Even More Strange and Dangerous!
Thanks for reading our online newsletter! Here’s just a bit of our favorite things we’ve found lately. See ya next week!
Our favorites from the week:
I had to look this one up. He’s talking about John “Mad Jack” Churchill. He was a real guy. And he really did take a longbow and sword to D-Day. There’s more… I’ll be covering this one very soon.
Here’s a short film I think of often. I caught it at Fantastic Fest several years ago. It’s so simple, but so harrowing. I’m always impressed when someone can wring horror out of such a small space and a simple idea.
See you next week, friends. And let me know if you encounter anything Strangerous out there you’d like for us to cover!