Saturday, January 1, 2022

The THING about ET and the Paranormal...

Is The_Thing an ET monster, or is it just a very adaptive life form? As The_Thing has been depicted in various movies, it is a very aggressive & dangerous organism that is a total predator and mimic. 

Several similar or parallel posts are at, TFZ and especially, TDL

The friendly Extra Terrestrial and the malevolent Alien have been depicted in so many ways. 

https://thedigitallabyrinth.blogspot.com/search?q=Alien

Panspermia is a fascinating concept as a natural way for the building-blocks of life to be distributed to a multitude of worlds. https://paranormal-intersection.blogspot.com/search?q=ET , https://thedigitallabyrinth.blogspot.com/search?q=ET , https://desertshapes.blogspot.com/search?q=ET

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/panspermia

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..419K/abstract

Of course there have been several Sci-Fi stories about BIG and small things reaching the earth. Several of them are ET+monster stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World (1951)
https://thedigitallabyrinth.blogspot.com/search?q=The+THING

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers (1956)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain_(1971_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_Express (1972)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers_(1978_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(2017_film)


From Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus to the Alien Prometheus...

Frankenstein was first published in 1818 on January 1st.

Of course several monster stories are set in urban-areas, or on other worlds. Perhaps scary stories that are set in remote or desolate locations are the most frightening of all.

"the monster wanders through the+wilderness."  

"Victor Frankenstein builds the creature in the attic of his boarding house in Ingolstadt after discovering a scientific principle which allows him to create life from non-living matter. Frankenstein is disgusted by his creation, however, and flees from it in horror. Frightened, and unaware of his own identity, the monster wanders through the wilderness." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein's_monster#Shelley's_plot

"In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left largely ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein spends two years painstakingly constructing the Creature's body (one anatomical feature at a time, from raw materials supplied by "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house"), which he then brings to life using his unspecified process." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein#The_Creature

The Frankenstein monster was the quintessential composite Sci-Fi creature in the 1800s, that still resonates in popular culture over two centuries later. It was far from being like a Terminator robot and not simply an animated machine of body-parts. However, Frankenstein might be considered as a forerunner to the concept of the cybernetic_organism

https://brianaldiss.co.uk/writing/novels/novels-d-g/frankenstein-unbound

https://custom-writing.org/blog/monsters-in-literature

"Recent incarnations of mythical cyborg characters are often dangerous or violent.  The replicants in BladeRunner and the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation are examples of cyborgs whose machine/computer half has gone awry.  As the cyborg creature is about supplementing human deficiencies, disguising disabilities, and improving flaws, the terror of a cyborg creation that develops its own flaws is the nightmare of cyborg science.  The fear of machines that control and destroy stands in opposition to the possibility of machines liberating consciousness from the human body and providing useful, powerful extensions to the body.

Various manifestations of machine-human symbiosis and hybridity have descended from the original Frankenstein monster.  But not all cyborg monsters are as destructive as Frankenstein or the Terminator." https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/cyborg.htm From, Jessica Santone.


Reading the Cyborg in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

by Sarah Canfield Fuller https://www.jstor.org/stable/43308625


https://custom-writing.org/blog/mary-shelleys-frankenstein-themes


Of course the Prometheus movie is in some ways is a continuation of the Frankenstein theme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(2012_film)#Plot

https://medicalfuturist.com/from-human-to-cyborg

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2018/07/30/biology-and-robotics-enter-into-an-unholy-union-to-bring-forth-creatures-from-hell/18564

https://www.bionity.com/en/encyclopedia/Cyborg.html

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/08/18/scientists-will-use-newly-discovered-cyborg-material-to-invade-our-brains-and-merge-with-our-thoughts-and-turn-us-all-into-mindless-zombie-robots-says-report/35328

While the movie Prometheus provides a subtle take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein-Prometheus theme, Alien:_Covenant makes an obvious reference to Percy_B._Shelley.  

https://www.alien-covenant.com/topic/44302

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, 

The lone and level sands stretch far away." - Percy Shelley 1818 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v-bxPsxpE0 , https://www.youtube.com/c/TechOnPC/videos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Publication_history 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy-bysshe-shelley

Prometheus and Alien:_Covenant could have been much better movies, but they still provide interesting & essential elements to the overall Alien-Prometheus story-line. https://www.hrgiger.com/alien.htm

https://horrorobsessive.com/2018/08/15/the-art-of-literary-misinterpretation-in-alien-covenant

So Mary_Shelley arrived in Switzerland in 1816 and would eventually create the Frankenstein-Prometheus story. H._R._Giger was born in Switzerland and by the late 1970s was involved with the Alien movie. HRG lived long enough to see the Prometheus movie.

Prometheus - David in the Orrery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1EeYB8Aog0

https://desertshapes.blogspot.com/search?q=Prometheus

Humans will become more augmented, but not everyone is interested in becoming something like Master_Chief or especially The_Borg


Interfacing the Brain & Machines: Another Step to a Cyborg Future

"Controlling robotic prostheses with one’s mind has been a hot topic in research, but making a prothesis ‘talk back’ has been a stumbling block. Researchers from Switzerland show progress in creating sensations from a bidirectional neuroprosthesis."

"Researchers from the University of Geneva, in Switzerland, are developing a new method to connect a prosthesis to neural activity in a bidirectional manner, which could solve some long-standing challenges of brain-machine interfaces. Published in Neuron, their early testing in mice models had promising results." https://www.labiotech.eu/more-news/university-genera-brain-machine

https://www.iris.ethz.ch , https://srl.ethz.ch


https://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/search?q=monsters

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/381303/Monsters-of-the-Wilderness-Oswalds-Curse


https://paranormal-intersection.blogspot.com/search?q=horror+movies

https://paranormal-intersection.blogspot.com/search?q=the+wilderness

The X-Files intersection

The_X-Files could have easily had at least one episode about the_human_foot mystery between Seattle and Vancouver, BC.

But for some reason, it was never covered within the overall mythology of the series. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files#Mythology

Of course there is suppose to be a logical explanation for all the severed feet, but it's still a bizarre mystery.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3bka4/bcs-floating-feet-mystery-is-more-boring-than-you-think

Even if that part of the world just happened to become a region where a foot is all that is discovered from a missing body, it's a very strange phenomenon. In this case, a paranormal explanation might really make a lot more sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries#List_of_discoveries

It's been a couple of years since the last foot was found, but that doesn't mean this (unofficial paranormal) mystery is over.

https://www.insider.com/british-columbia-find-severed-human-feet-on-shores-2019

https://globalnews.ca/news/4949907/dismembered-foot-bc-beach

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-severed-foot-1.5903703

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/missing-foot-mystery-deepens-with-latest-find-1.313252

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries#In_popular_culture


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scary_Monsters_(The_X-Files)

https://screenrant.com/x-files-scariest-monsters-ranked-tv-show

https://www.ranker.com/list/scariest-x-files-monsters/megan-summers

https://www.sociomix.com/diaries/entertainment/10-most-disturbing-monster-of-the-week-villains-from-the-x-files-season-1/1630949876

https://www.earthfiles.com/real-x-files


https://paranormal-intersection.blogspot.com/search?q=The+X-Files   

https://desertshapes.blogspot.com/search?q=The+X-Files

https://paranormal-intersection.blogspot.com/search?q=monsters