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Don’t miss the Netflix short film ‘John Was Trying to Contact Aliens’
08.20.2020
07:12 am
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This is a guest post by Nicholas Abrahams.

If you have a spare fifteen whole minutes, you could do worse than check out the new short film John Was Trying to Contact Aliens on Netflix about John Shepherd, a guy who has spent 30 years beaming out obscure music to aliens, constructing a homemade SETI project based at—and taking over—his grandparents home in rural Michigan. We shot the breeze with director Matt Killip.

Dangerous Minds: Firstly, how did you come across John Shepherd, the subject of your new short film on Netflix?

Matt Killip: I first saw a picture of John in the book Messengers of Deception by the UFO researcher Jacques Vallée. The same photo is in my film: John is seated in front of a large bank of UFO tracking machines in a living room, with his grandma next to him doing her knitting. I immediately wanted to know more about this image—what was going on here?
 

 
Luckily I was able to track John down and make contact. When I heard about the circumstances of his personal life I started to realize his story could make a beautiful film. A while later I found some footage of John broadcasting the band Harmonia into outer space. It turned out that John was broadcasting loads of music that I love into the cosmos: Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Terry Riley, Gamelan music from Indonesia, free jazz, loads of reggae and dub ... It was an amazing playlist—in effect a cosmic radio station broadcasting music for aliens.
 

 
DM: He’s quite amazing, playing music into deep space for aliens to come across and make contact. But most people would maybe have a dream of doing this, whereas John takes over his grandparents house to actually do this!

Matt Killip: Ha! Well, John is completely self-taught, he built many of the machines you see in the film himself. He has an incredible technical mind, a deep love of physics and, in particular, electricity. He spent a lot of time hunting in scrap yards and military auctions with his grandfather, who was a machinist and also helped him build some of the equipment. The radar John built was sitting on a tower made out of a scrapped ski lift! But I don’t really explore the science behind what John was doing in my film. I was afraid of getting slowed down in technical details when I was most interested in the fundamentally romantic idea of contact: this search John had for something beyond him.
 

 
DM: Yes , he seems to be on a romantic quest of some kind, to ‘make contact.’

Matt Killip: I know a lot of people might view John’s project as quite eccentric but I would encourage everybody to think about it another way: we are on a planet, that’s part of a galaxy, one of billions with an infinite number of other suns and planets. We don’t know what else is out there ... Why wouldn’t you try to make contact? John was using music as a sign—or even a gift—to other consciousnesses.

DM: You pack a heck of a lot into fifteen minutes.. It has the three act structure of a feature film… in fact it is better than many feature films I’ve seen…

Matt Killip: Thanks!

DM: What are the challenges of keeping a film short? Were you tempted to make it as a feature doc?

Matt Killip: I just wanted to stick to the core of the storytelling. Originally there was a whole section about UFO culture, but I cut it out to make the story flow better. Also, I’ve only made short format films, so maybe I’m a little scared of making a longer one…

DM: Your earlier films are pretty bonkers. There’s one about teenage backyard wrestler and horror filmmaker Ronny Long, and another about a guy who arranges microscopic creatures onto slides in psychedelic patterns. What’s the connection?

Matt Killip: I’m think I’m drawn to people who have found ways to escape everyday reality into other worlds. I’m really sympathetic to that impulse.. I share it to a certain extent, but I’m lacking the obsessive drive needed to see it through. It’s a very singular vision that allows Ronny the teenager to keep creating for his own pleasure, or John to broadcast music for 30 years, never knowing for sure if anyone could hear it.

DM: Tell me more about Ronny. (Full disclosure - I met Ronny Long when he visited the UK to hold an exhibition at the Horse Hospital in London. Ronny is as great as you would imagine from watching Master of Reality.)

Matt Killip: I’ve always loved wrestling for the characters and story lines, it’s like a kind of folk theatre. In the early 2000s my interest led me to Ronny Long’s website “Texas Boneyard Wrestling.” Ronny had started a horror-based wrestling federation in his backyard in the suburbs of Dallas. It was a really elaborate affair and so much thought and effort went into it. He was fifteen at the time. After speaking with him I realised that wrestling was only part of Ronny’s story—he was obsessed with Bigfoot and cryptozoology, was continuously drawing and painting and had been making abortive attempts at horror movies for several years. He was burning up with this stuff. His output was enormous and it seemed like he was compelled to create these things. He was not getting support or encouragement from anywhere—certainly not from school—but he was just off, creating these worlds. I really love that about him.
 

 
DM: Are you still in touch with Ronny?

Matt Killip: Still in touch… These days Ronny is still drawing and painting. He also records a wild talk show in his basement.

DM: I really love his paintings of Bigfoot.

Matt Killip: As a nine-year-old kid he really believed in Bigfoot. They are him. He has something of an outsider quality to him. And yes, his paintings are amazing.
 

 
DM: And The Diatomist?

Matt Killip: I love nature and have made several shorts that could be considered in some way nature films. In the case of The Diatomist, I came across an extraordinary image of an antique diatom arrangement. I couldn’t quite believe that these beautiful microscopic sculptures were actually tiny sea creatures, completely invisible to the naked eye.

In general I get tripped out by the extraordinary variety to be found in the natural world. Looking through books on moths, beetles, mushrooms or lichen, the multiple different forms, related but always changing, are completely amazing to me. It’s as close to a religious experience as I can get. Diatom arrangements completely embody that sublime feeling. After more research I discovered that there was one man, Klaus Kemp, keeping this Victorian art form alive, so I immediately got in touch with him. Klaus is undoubtedly obsessive, but it’s a beautiful obsession. He is practicing an artform that embodies Darwin’s phrase: endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

DM: The films all seem to end in a cosmic way, with the humans somehow part of a great cosmos.

Matt Killip: I guess we are all trying to find our place in the cosmos. It’s just….. there’s a good quote by Carl Sagan… here it is … “The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question - the search for who we are.”
 

 
This is a guest post by Nicholas Abrahams.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.20.2020
07:12 am
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Martian chronicles: Fantastic covers for UFO comics of the 1960s & 70s

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Little green men ain’t what they used to be. We don’t need Sean Spicer to confirm that aliens have already landed and have squeezed their scaly green asses into government. Hell, they don’t even have to fire their ray guns to let us know their intentions are hostile. They’ve taken over and not a shot was fired.

Once upon a time, this kind of speculative alien invasion was the prime cut of science-fiction comics like UFO Flying Saucers. First published by Gold Key in 1968, UFO Flying Saucers evolved into UFO & Outer Space before ceasing publication in 1977.

During its just over a decade run, UFO Flying Saucers did ask all the right questions like “Do alien explorers hold earthlings in their grip?” and “Is Earth their laboratory? Are we their specimens?” Some might say, in light of recent events across the world, the answers are kinda obvious now. And worryingly these flying saucers might not just be in charge of one government—looks like they’ve got a whole deck of countries to play with.

Stephen Hawking once wisely pointed out that if alien intelligence ever read the messages we pump out into space then we should be careful as these extraterrestrials may be hostile and not “see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.” These UFO comics were way ahead of you there, Stephen.

Recently, scientists at the Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) confirmed “mystery bursts of radio waves that astronomers have hunted for ten years really do come from outer space.”

These Fast Radio Bursts are intense pulses of radio light that last for only milliseconds and come from way, way out in the outer reaches of space. These pulses were first discovered over ten years ago and are “about a billion times more luminous than anything we have ever seen in our own Milky Way galaxy.”

At first, they were thought to be interference. Now, it seems these pulses are some kind of transmission. ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Matthew Bailes has suggested the signals may (“bizarrely”) be “alien transmissions.”

If they are. Well, we know what to expect. If not, a refresher course of the covers to Gold Key’s UFO Flying Saucers and UFO & Outer Space might supply some useful answers.
 
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More fabulous covers from UFO Flying Saucers and UFO & Outer Space, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.12.2017
11:50 am
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Dreamy sci-fi paintings show the world after an alien invasion
07.22.2016
09:30 am
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While science fiction is a rich genre for both film and literature, the visual art it inspires—most frequently relegated to the covers of bad paperbacks—is very often astoundingly corny, regardless of how good the book it’s interpreting might actually be. Really good sci-fi art is really hard to come by, another reason why Simon Stålenhag is so singular; his post-invasion landscapes are dreamy, intense, and mysterious—completely devoid of the heavy-handed cheese one normally associates with paintings of robots and/or aliens taking over the earth.

Stålenhag has complied his work into two high-concept art books, Tales from the Loop and the sequel Things from the Flood, which comes out in November but is available for pre-order now. Ground Zero for Stålenhag’s dystopia is an alternative Sweden from his own ’80s and ’90s childhood, where experiments with a massive particle accelerator—“The Loop”—go terribly wrong. Despite the disaster, Stålenhag likes to focus on the quiet and the mundane countryside, now irrevocably altered by mysterious invaders. Still, there is an intimacy to his work, with special attention to the domestic lives, childhoods and romances of the people living in this chaotic new world.
 

 

 
Much more of Simon Stålenhag’s work after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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07.22.2016
09:30 am
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Super-strange 1978 PSA film might give you an acid flashback
04.12.2016
09:16 am
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“Safety Woman” from the school safety video “Safety: In Danger out of Doors” from 1978.
 
This late 70s school safety video is full of so much weirdness that it’s hard not to feel like you’re suddenly having an unplanned acid trip while watching it.

In this short film from 1978 menacingly entitled Safety: In Danger out of Doors, we meet the fictional character Miss Karen Kingsley, who the narrator describes as “a youthful, gifted, attractive, successful, freelance architect” who spends her free time volunteering as a school crossing guard. The fourteen-minute PSA plays out much like a lost B-movie when the multi-talented Miss Kingsley somehow becomes “Safety Woman,” a shiny-jumpsuit-wearing superhero (who came to be thanks to some sort of sketchy divine alien “interaction”), that shows up just in time to save her accident prone school-age pals from certain death. If this video had been made in the 80s, that jumpsuit would have reeked of Enjoli perfume for sure. Check out all the possible scenarios that put children of the 70s in peril, like skateboarding or swimming—which we (or at least most of us, I suppose) somehow miraculously survived—after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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04.12.2016
09:16 am
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Cthulhu, Bigfoot and Ancient Alien Pyramid blankets
05.19.2015
12:23 pm
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I’m digging these Cthulhu, Bigfoot, “Ancient Alien Pyramid” and “Scholarly Skull” throw blankets by Middle of Beyond. It looks like (don’t hold me to it) they’re large enough to fit on a double bed. Although, if I had one of these, I’d probably use it on my couch.

The blankets are reasonably priced at $59.99 + shipping. According to the website, all the blankets are in stock and ships in 1-2 days. Not too shabby. 


 

 

 

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.19.2015
12:23 pm
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Aliens, bleeding walls and too many cops: The amazing public light art of Madrid’s luzinterrup

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The global metropolis is seeing a golden age of street art nowadays, as seen in the evolution from spraycan through stencil/wheatpaste and on to other outdoor installations. The Luzinterruptus crew from Madrid has been doing some amazing light-work lately with some compelling underlying themes.
Their latest, Ejército de platillos volantes desechables (above), saw them land an army of disposable flying saucers in Parque del Oeste, the home of the rebuilt ancient Egyptian Temple of Debod.
 
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Before that, the Luz’ers’ Publicidad herida de muerte (Mortally Wounded Advertising) commented on the thick layer of posters that cover the city’s walls by making them bleed fire.
 

 
Some months ago, curator Sebastian Buck in Good Magazine surfaced Luz’s Tanta Policía, para tan Poca Gente… (Lots of Cops for So Few People), in which the crew protested the increased police presence in their East Villagesque Malasana neighborhood by decorating 50 random cars with homemade replicas of the city’s official blue siren.

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.25.2010
12:22 am
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