The Passion of the Space Jockey: Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H.R. Giger
Ancient Gnostics believed in a primordial Fall of spirit into matter. Swiss artist H. R. Giger’s paintings from the 1970s depicted tortured and mutilated beings imprisoned in technology, very much a Gnostic vision. His design of the fossilized alien star pilot from Ridley Scott’s Alien, sometimes called the “Space Jockey” (left) is the best example of this. Although Giger’s vision of a humanoid creature literally fused to its cockpit was “revised” decades later in Scott’s prequel Prometheus, Wargo here examines Giger’s original vision for this being, and the prophetic warning the artist was expressing: A warning about a future “fall of spirit into technology,” becoming engulfed in our machines.
Such a fall is in some ways a mirror of how simple organisms in the primordial soup engulfed each other in the unions that led to complex life early in Earth’s history, according to biologist Lynn Margulis.
This article, presented at Rice University’s Gnostic Afterlives conference in 2018, appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of Gnosis: The Journal of Gnostic Studies.
Harriet Tubman, the celebrated abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad, also displayed remarkable psychic ability, according to many people who knew her over the course of her life. Tubman has become an almost mythic American icon, and at such a great historical distance, sorting out legend from truth is not easy. But many of the accounts of Tubman’s abilities, as well as their possible origins in highly traumatic experiences in her childhood, are consistent with contemporary cases of “precogs.” Did Tubman’s sixth sense help guide her on her own escape from slavery and in her clandestine missions liberating other slaves? This article, based on research presented at the first Black Superhumanism symposium at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research in 2021, examines the evidence. It appeared in the June 2022 issue of EdgeScience.
Pat Price, Precognition, and “Star Wars”: A Reexamination of a Historic Remote Viewing Case
One of the most storied episodes in the strange history of the government-funded ESP research at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s is star psychic Pat Price’s remote viewing of a top-secret research facility in Soviet Kazakhstan called Semipalatinsk. In various histories of this research, Price has been portrayed as a psychic superman, accurately viewing not only visible above-ground features of the site (such as the crane above) but also the facility’s suspected purpose at the time: to build and test anti-missile beam weapons that could tilt the balance of Cold War terror in the USSR’s favor.
The problem is, very little of the story we have been told is true.
This article, a reexamination of transcripts of the original remote viewing sessions that came to light in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, shows what Price really saw, and didn’t see, on four remarkable days in 1974 in Menlo Park. It also sets this case within the context of the propaganda being circulated in the intelligence community in the lead-up to Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense initiative. The target site in reality had nothing to do with beam weapons, and little or nothing of Price’s descriptions matched what was there, with the exception of things he was shown in a picture as feedback on one of the sessions. The evidence supports that, if anything, Price was precognizing that picture, not psychically surveilling a remote location in the Kazakhstan steppe.
This article, the first published work to come out of the Rice Archives, is a case of eccentric psychics, eager defense contractors, and paranoid military men that would make a great Thomas Pynchon novel, except it’s real. It appeared in the June 2020 issue of EdgeScience.