Piece Of Art

Further Update ~ Thursday a.m., the death toll was increased to a total of six. A  man walked into an arts cafe near a Seattle university and opened fire, fatally wounding four people. Then he later killed a woman during a carjacking before shooting himself. Six people are dead. Breaking Update ~ The LA Times http://piecee-of-art.blogspot.com/ is reporting late on Wednesday the following: An explosive day of violence ended Wednesday when a man believed to be the one who shot five people in a university district cafe and a woman in a downtown parking lot knelt down in the street when surrounded by police and shot himself in the head. “We strongly believe that this is the person that committed the homicides,” Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel told reporters after the dramatic face-off in West Seattle. The shootings left four people dead and two critically injured. A police source told the   Seattle Times  that the suspect has been identified as Ian Lee Stawicki, 40...

This was the week of a powerful lunar eclipse on December 10, 2011 (beginning at 6:06 am PST) followed by the deadly Mexico City to Acapulco 6.5-6.7 earthquake, which struck almost exactly twelve hours after the eclipse. Added to those events, the previous week's wave of WV, CA, MA, FL and other multiple shootings, plus the NH mall attack, and one has a general uneasy sense that it was, indeed, a weird and stressful time.  Now in the midst of all of this, the links to Garuda  and VA Tech present themselves again into our consciousness. Let's take a quick connect-the-dots detour around this landscape. An Indonesian student activist died late Saturday (December 10, 2011) after setting himself ablaze in a political protest, according to news sources :  " Police say an Indonesian student activist has died after setting himself on fire in front of the presidential palace.  Sondang Hutagalung, 22, set himself ablaze across from the palace in downtown Jakarta…. The activist...

UPDATE: IT'S A HOAX!! Mazland Othman Not Earth's Alien Ambassador, After All Astrophysicist Denies She is UN's New 'Alien Ambassador' (Thanks for the heads up from SMiles Lewis for fakery revision.) Earlier details: Someone linked this news at The Daily Grail: The United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting. Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire. She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before - and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”. During a talk Othman gave recently to fellow scienti...

As Pope Benedict XVI was making his way down the long aisle in St. Peter's Basilica to give the Christmas Eve Mass (24 Dec 2009), a woman in red leaped over the barrier to get closer to him. But in doing so she lunged at him and pulled him down to the marble floor. The Pope was shaken but not injured. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, 87, however was hurt. He was wheeled off to hospital with a broken hip after falling during the incident. He'll be operated on in the coming days. A statement released by the Vatican identified the woman as Susanna Maiolo, a 25-year-old Italian Swiss national. The statement said she was not armed but shows signs of mental instability, and has since been admitted to a health facility for compulsory treatment. Maiolo is the same woman who tried to reach Pope Benedict XVI at Midnight Mass last year. Vatican officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Maiolo was involved in a similar incident last year in which she jumped the barricade as the pope proc...

The Hillsdale bombing by Alex Youshock on August 24, 2009, seems self-fulfilling, in terms of it being a shock to the community where it occurred. On a deeper level, it continues the name-game theme seen recently with the death of John A. Keel and the involvement of the name " Ardmore " in clown and child abduction cases. If you recall, the name Ardmore is a Gaelic word signifying high grounds or hills . John A. Keel pointed to hilltops (literally the "keels" of the high grounds) as the best places to observe Forteana. Furthermore, synchromysticism's godfather John Shelby Downard was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Monday's school violence happened in Hillsdale, California, and, of course, there is a significant Hillsdale in anomalistic history. The famous Hillsdale UFO sightings of March, 1966, involved reports from Hillsdale County, as well as those in Livingston and Washtenaw Counties, Michigan. Over 100 witnesses (including policemen, college students, an...

Ellie Frazetta by Frank Frazetta. The wife of the man who famously painted the Keelian Mothman cover for the May 1980 High Times has died. It would be this painting which was later used on the cover of the Ron Bonds-published paperback book that fell off a shelf into the hands of the person who would recommend it be made into a movie. Frank Frazetta (born February 9, 1928) is an American fantasy and science fiction artist, noted for work in comic books, paperback book covers, paintings, posters, record-album covers, and other media. Point Pleasant's sculpture of Mothman is based on Frazetta's moth-like representation of Mothman, even though the actual descriptions from the sightings in 1966-1967 told of an avian cryptid, the "Big Bird." Frank Frazetta also did the cover for the 1970 paperback by Keel, Strange Creatures From Time and Space . Into the early months of 2009, Frazetta lived with his wife Ellie on a 67-acre (271,000 m²) estate in the Pocono Mountains at E...

A Ukrainian politician who had tried to revive an ancient pagan cult was killed by lightning on Saturday, July 4, 2009, while on a fishing trip. Did this occur about the same time John A. Keel passed away in the USA? Vasily Chervoni (above) was on a fishing trip near the village of Derazhnoye and suffered a direct lightning hit during a thunderstorm. He was taken to a hospital where he died shortly afterwards, the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on Monday, July 6, 2009. The newspaper noted that the late politician was a close friend of Ukrainian President Yushchenko and had at one time occupied the governor’s post in Rovno Region. A former activist in the Soviet youth movement Comsomol, Chervoni started an independent political career in the early 1990s with radical Ukrainian nationalists. At some point, Chervoni joined the religious movement Runvera – a Ukrainian sect that seeks revival of obscure ancient cults, in particular, the worship of the sun god Dažbog. In 1992...

At Fortfest 1992, John A. Keel discusses his research findings (mostly ufological & hints of the cryptozoological) keyed to "pivotal years," e.g. 1848, 1968, 1973, and 1975. In the last 30 seconds of this video, Keel talks about the interrelationship of Forteana and economic collapses. Anomalist Books Editor-in-Chief Patrick Huyghe remarked after hearing of the death, "John Keel was our Michael Jackson." After Keel's 1975 book was adapted into the 2002 film, The Mothman Prophecies , "Mothman" became a household name. However, among a select few, it was John Keel that was the star, not the monster. One of our own had crossed over and had a big tent Hollywood movie made from one of his books. In January 2002, when the film was first released, Fortean historian and http://www.amazon.com/Unexplained-Sightings-Incredible-Occurrences-Phenomena/dp/1439564965/ref=ase_cryptozoologi-20/">author Jerome Clark said that he felt a sense of sincere p...

Jacque Vallée (right) and J. Allen Hynek . Along with his colleague, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Vallée carefully studied the phenomenon of unusual aerial sightings and close encounters with humanoids on the ground for many years. Vallée served as the real-life model for the character Lacombe, portrayed by François Truffaut (shown above, middle) in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind . His first three highly thoughtful books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (1966), and Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969) are classics in the field. A correspondent of mine for decades, I was able to spend some time with Vallée and his wife for the first time only a few years ago when we both spoke at a Virginia Beach, Virginia conference on unexplained phenomena. Therefore, it was good to hear from my associate, the French-born and now California-based intellectual, ufologist, venture capitalist, computer scientist, ...

John Alva Keel, 79, a friend, Fortean, fierce fighter for his theories, professionally a writer and journalist, has died. A fellow admirer of Mothman and the anomalies all around us, such as the “name game,” is gone. John A. Keel's non-fiction look at the very real unplanned twists in life were recorded in his 1966 novel, The Fickle Finger of Fate . "Ufology is just another name for demonology," John Keel told me, a week before the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, which occurred just a couple of miles from where he lives. ...as noted in Mothman and Other Curious Encounters , page 114, (NY: Paraview, 2002). For more images and my complete, detailed obituary, please see "John A. Keel Is Dead." John A. Keel, in 2002.

Adam Gorightly's newest book documents the remarkable phantasmagoria that was the person named James Shelby Downard, an American theorist and pamphleteer who shared his thoughts about conspiracies, coincidences, synchronicity, and symbolism. James Shelby Downard's Mystical War was released by Virtual Bookworm Publishing, in November 2008. The subject of the book, Downard, lived from March 13, 1913 to March 16, 1998 , unless, of course, his death was a disappearing act and he's still alive somewhere, writing under an assumed name. (I'm joking, right?) Downard appeared on the scene when many of my contemporaries and I were just beginning to have lexilinked thoughts and overlapping insights into coincidences. His influence, as Gorightly notes, today has spread far beyond this strange man's life and death. I easily understand the reach of Downard's impact within my own life from this twilight realm. In the 1960s and 1970s, first in correspondence, and then later...