Flying the Anomalous Skies

UFO sightings map (click to enlarge)

"This map is based on data from the National UFO Reporting Center. It includes over 90,000 reports of UFO sightings dating as far back as 1905.

Each circle on the map corresponds to a reported UFO, with the size representing the number of UFO reports received.

For any UFO reported by at least two people, details of all sightings are available by clicking on the circle. More circles become clickable as you zoom in closer."
- Via Metrocosm's interactive UFO Sighting's Map website.



Created by Max Galka using data from the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network, the interactive UFO Sightings map above (and it's website) give us cause for pause...

90,000 UFO sighting reports on just the U.S. of A. side of the equation? If you're getting the impression that the "anomalous" isn't quite so anomalous after all, you're not alone.

... but my guess is that you knew that already. ;-)

(Hat-tip to Reality Sandwich.)

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And, just for fun, in some recent, related news:

UFOs appear on International Space Station cameras just as NASA cuts live feed

The follow-up:

4 explanations for UFO sightings just before NASA halts live ISS feed

(Hat-tip to Tam B.)

But can we really trust someone going by the name of "Mr. Enigma"? ;-)

Vale, Bruce Duensing (In Memory of a Beautiful Mind)

Photograph (above) - a still from Wim Wender's Wings of Desire (trailer)- and the videos presently on the sidebar (Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, and Strange Angels by Laurie Anderson) were borrowed from Bruce Duensing's blog, A Transit of Contingencies. See quotes below.

"All of this brings to mind imagination and consequently concepts that have no form, which then brings to mind the invisible man who had to wrap himself in bandages to be seen. Going further down the rabbit hole, there has been a great deal of dialog and debate in the scientific community about the equally loaded language generically termed “life after death” which if you ponder this for a moment and the associations it brings forth, it’s as incoherent a framework as it is screamingly apparent that any sentient existence of ourselves beyond physical embodiment would have no resemblance to life as we know it."
- Bruce Duensing via The Voyages of The Dead, his last blog post on "A Transit of Contingencies".

"The spirit of life was in them: death can do nothing against the dawning light; death is but a cardboard mask soon consumed by fire. Behind the black flag - which is nothing other than an anti-flag - the garden of all possibilities is hidden, opening out infinitely to the sea."
- Bernard Roger; quote via A Transit of Contingencies' sidebar.

“It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”
- Surrealist Andre Breton; quote via A Transit of Contingencies' sidebar.

"The transference of memory outside of it's utility has been a chief feature of ghost encounters as well as dreams. What connects them is the strange bandwidth of a call, like the hoot of an owl or a sigh or the modality of words that proceed communication...the bandwidth of emotional engagement in the dreams that are superimposed as realities and the realities akin to dreams where the twain meets being neither one or the other, unconstrained by descriptors and yet in the genetics of an art where one brush stoke is built upon another, remain visible as a pixel in a memory without constraints..the glue of emotional engagement to referents that span our demarcations..become a cellular superimposition in a waking dream on both sides of this  proverbial mirror more akin to art than science more reinvention than mimicry, the recreation of our inner realities, a play upon solids that are not solids, but brush strokes."

"Perhaps the dead view us as dead as much as we view them to be artifacts of memory put in their place as we dream we are something termed alive. File cabinets, reams of paper, language, islands, the waves of sound washing on the material making patterns of undeniable artistry that has no objectivity we can wrest from it. Reality is silent to the words we utter, yet we partake of this orchestrated art, to make images in the mind, to imagine what is not and to visualize it as a stick one end pointing to the devil, the other to Angels in a relativity of an art critic."

"In praise of the toys, in praise of the play of dreams wound on a mainspring by birds on the wing... never to return this way again. Then if we left all of this to the recycling bin, to the scrapyard of the impractical, I sense we will lose our sense of enfoldment, which as an attachment I have found is crucial to a life, perhaps more so than that ATM card we keep close at hand."

- Three separate quotes taken from several earlier posts on A Transit of Contingencies.


"We spend most of our existence in a dynamic of unconscious self-sabotage."

- Bruce Duensing quoted, via the June 16 Radio Misterioso  show, "A Tribute To Bruce Duensing – Life Is But A Dream". (highly recommended listening)

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On May 23rd of this year, mathematician (and the subject of the 2001 film adaption "A Beautiful Mind") John Nash died. But, the world lost another - less celebrated - beautiful mind last month; that of Bruce Duensing.

Some of you may have known Bruce through his blog, A Transit of Contingencies (contingency referring to a future event that can't be predicted with certainty), or his earlier blog, Intangible Materiality, previously mentioned on PMB here, which had a tribute to Mac I listed on the PMB sidebar under "Other... Memorial... Links". (Note: for whatever reason, Intangible Materiality is no longer available to the general public, and this is unfortunate.)

Bruce had been a follower - and fan - of Posthuman Blues and mentioned Mac from time to time in the context of his own paranormal thought experiments. Having lost his son, Matthew, whom he mentioned often in his writings, Mac's early, unexpected death especially touched a chord...