means, with a good house, with everything that is to be envied and yet I am not happy I am tired of life he possesses within him a portion of the [Greek term] of Aristotle but he knows it not, to such a man the Society should go, should test, and should finally show him the greatness of the scheme and list him as a member.
Take one more case of the younger son with high thoughts, high aspirations, endowed by nature with all the faculties to make a great man, and with the sole wish in life to serve his Country but he lacks two things the means and the opportunity, ever troubled by a sort of inward deity urging him on to high and noble deeds, he is compelled to pass his time in some occupation which furnishes him with mere existence, he lives unhappily and dies miserably. Such men as these the Society should search out and use for the furtherance of their object.
(In every Colonial legislature the Society should attempt to have its members prepared at all times to vote or speak and advocate the closer union of England and the colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire. The Society should inspire and even own portions of the press for the press rules the mind of the people. The Society should always be searching for members who might by their position in the world by their energies or character forward the object but the ballot and test for admittance should be severe.)
Once make it common and it fails. Take a man of great wealth who is bereft of his children perhaps having his mind soured by some bitter disappointment who shuts himself up separate from his neighbours and makes up his mind to a miserable existence. To such men as these the society should go gradually disclose the greatness of their scheme and entreat him to throw in his life and property with them for this object. I think that there are thousands now existing who would eagerly grasp at the opportunity. Such are the heads of my scheme.
For fear that death might cut me off before the time for attempting its development I leave all my worldly goods in trust to S. G. Shippard and the Secretary for the Colonies at the time of my death to try to form such a Society with such an object.
SPACE MONOLITH
If
But space monoliths?
When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin entered space in 1961 he is said to have observed an alien communication beacon, dubbed the Monolith, which continued in orbit until 1972 when it was retrieved by a US military shuttle and taken for study at a clandestine base, probably Area 51. In between these dates, the Monolith almost caused the demise of the 1969 Apollo 10 mission, which took a top secret detour from its schedule as the “dress rehearsal” for the moon landings to photograph the celestial map carved on the Monolith’s surface. As Apollo 10 approached the Monolith, the crew of Stafford, Young and Cernan suffered communications and technical malfunctions resulting in a re-entry to Earth at a dangerously high speed which the crew were lucky to survive.
Remember Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film
The evidence for the monolith theory is scant. Neither Gagarin nor the Apollo 10 crew ever mentioned seeing a monolith. Apollo 10 splashed down within thirty-five seconds of its scheduled landing time, meaning that the technical problems suffered were indeed very minor—and that there cannot have been time for a detour to investigate an alien artefact. One of the fuller expositions of the monolith conspiracy, by Richard Boylan in the pages of abovetopsecret.com, is based on information “disclosed to me by a reliable confidential informant, who previously worked on contract for the National Security Agency, and maintains connections within the Intelligence community. This informant, whom I shall call ‘Jesse’, has over 40 years of notes from a very close relative, who served as CIA liaison officer to the National Council on UFO/ET matters.” In other words, the “information” is third-hand from unnamed, unidentified sources.
For years the Monolith theory went into abeyance, and just when it seemed dead in space a camera from the University of Arizona’s HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) project took a photograph of a “monolith” on Mars in 2011. Veteran astronaut Buzz Aldrin then stoked the space conspiracy theory by announcing that a similar monolith had been detected on Mars’s moon Phobos. The University of Arizona, however, roundly rejected any notion that the monolith was an alien-made structure. Alfred McEwen, professor of planetary science at the university and HiRise’s principal investigator, said: “Layering from rock deposition combined with tectonic fractures creates right-angle planes of weakness such that rectangular blocks tend to weather out and separate from the bedrock… It is not that unusual. There are lots of rectangular structures on Mars. It is striking when you see one that is isolated, but they are common.”
Buzz Aldrin suggested that the only way to prove the matter of the Mars monolith one way or another was to pump money into space exploration and go there.
SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA
At around 2.00 p.m. GMT on 1 February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere after sixteen days in space. Tragically all seven crew members taking part in mission STS-107 were killed. Barely had Columbia’s debris finished showering down on the East Texas town of Palestine (pop. 18, 458) than the conspiracy theories lifted off.
As to whodunnit, there is an embarrassment of choices:
• There was some irony—or maybe a clue—in the falling of the wreckage on “Palestine”, because
The son of Holocaust survivors Colonel Ramon was the first Israeli to enter space, taking with him a scroll of the Torah. This read: “Has any nation ever heard the voice of God speaking out of the mist of the fire, as you have, and yet lived?” On due consideration of this, Palestinian organizations and the Islamic press decided that Allah had waved his hand to destroy Columbia and stop the Jews entering the celestial sphere. In the words of Abu Hamza Al-Masri, Islamic fundamentalist preacher (and terrorist, and benefit fraudster) in an interview with
The target of this event was the trinity of evil, as the shuttle carried Americans, an Israeli, and a Hindu, the trinity of evil against Islam. This is a message to the American people that Bush’s term is nothing but a string of curses cast upon them, and that it will lead to the exhaustion of their resources and the elimination of the false American dream… This is a divine message to the Israelis, saying that they are not welcome in space.
• The Russian news service PRAVDA suggested that China or North Korea had hacked into Columbia’s onboard computer and uploaded a virus or worm that caused Columbia to malfunction.
• An amateur astronomer by the name of Peter Goldie took photographs of Columbia seconds before its break-up which purportedly show a purple bolt heading towards the craft. Numerous conspiracists thus maintain that Columbia was shot down by a particle beam destroyer or some form of HAARP-like ray device employed by the
