The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars
In the Great River's current Floating on the wind, What do I resemble Du Fu, 'Travelling at Night' China, Tang Dynasty, 765 Each field of science has its own complement of pseudoscience. Geophysicists have flat Earths, hollow Earths, Earths with wildly bobbing axes to contend with, rapidly rising and sinking continents, plus earthquake prophets. Botanists have plants whose passionate emotional lives can be monitored with lie detectors, anthropologists have surviving ape-men, zoologists have...
Spoofing and Secrecy
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. When the mother of celebrity abductee Travis Walton was informedthat a UFO had zapped her son with a bolt of lightning and then carried him off into space, she replied incuriously, 'Well, that's the way these...
Preface My Teachers
It was a blustery fall day in 1939. In the streets outside the apartment building, fallen leaves were swirling in little whirlwinds, each with a life of its own. It was good to be inside and warm and safe, with my mother preparing dinner in the next room. In our apartment there were no older kids who picked on you for no reason. Just the week before, I had been in a fight -1 can't remember, after all these years, who it was with maybe it was Snoony Agata from the third floor - and, after a wild...
Aliens
' Truly, that which makes me believe there is no inhabitant on this sphere, is that it seems to me that no sensible being would be willing to live here.' ' Well, then ' said Micromegas, ' perhaps the beings that inhabit it do not possess good sense.' One alien to another, on approaching the Earth, in Voltaire's Micromegas A Philosophical History 1752 It's still dark out. You're lying in bed, fully awake. You discover you're utterly paralysed. You sense someone in the room. You try to cry out....