Book Reviews
Heavenly Lights
The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon
Dr. Joaquim Fernandes & Fina d'Armada, MA
ISBN 0-9735341-3-3
284 pp 6 x 9 Paperback Publication Date: July 2, 2005
Translated from Portuguese and Edited
by Andrew D. Basiago & Eva M. Thompson
Foreword by Dr. Jacques F. Vallée
A meticulous synthesis of history, science, and anthropology, Heavenly
Lights establishes that the Fátima Incident of 1917 involved not
"Marian apparitions" — as is conventionally believed — but rather, a
series of close encounters with alien beings.
The first history of Fátima to be written by Portuguese historians
based on the original documents, Heavenly Lights subjects all the
pertinent facts of the Fátima case to a sweeping evidentiary analysis
that is at once thorough and fascinating.
In periodic passages describing "Parallels in Ufology," the authors
identify many relevant connections between the enigmatic events that
took place at Fátima and numerous other episodes in the strange and
storied annals of UFO history.
When it was first published in Portugal in 1995, entitled As
Aparições de Fátima e o Fenómeno OVNI, the Jornal de Notícias
heralded this work as "a literary success without precedent in the field
of Portuguese ufological studies."
This new translation offers a powerful and convincing argument for
mainstream ufologists and religious researchers alike to re-examine the
actual evidence that at last explains the enduring mystery of the
Fátima Incident.
– NEWS MEDIA PRESS RELEASE –
VICTORIA, BC – The Fátima incident was an important event in the
history of religion. In 1917, three little Portuguese shepherds –
Jacinta, Francisco, and Lúcia – suddenly encountered the Virgin
Mary, illuminated in the splendor of heavenly lights, who told the
children three secrets about the fate of the Earth. The contacts were
followed by an unexplained aerial phenomenon, called "The Miracle of the
Sun," in which the Sun was seen to dance in the sky by thousands of
awestruck onlookers who flocked to Fátima.
The apparitions were presumed to be a case of divine intervention in
human affairs, a sign from Heaven that the world war then raging in
Europe should end. A shrine sprang up at Fátima that drew millions of
believers, and a myth was invented that the secrets of Fátima would be
revealed in the fullness of time – as a testament of faith in a
secular age.
"In Heavenly Lights" (EcceNova Editions; July 2, 2005; $22.95),
Portuguese historians Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d' Armada tell the true
story of the apparitions of Fátima. The first history of Fátima to
be written by Portuguese historians based on the original documents,
Heavenly Lights is the result of a 25-year odyssey by the authors in
search of the actual facts of the Fátima case. Fernandes and d' Armada
began their investigation in 1978, when they were given access to secret
archives held at the Sanctuary of Fátima.
The records of Sister Lúcia, kept at the archives since the incident,
revealed that the children did not interact with an apparition of the
Virgin Mary but with a hologram of an extraterrestrial projected on a
beam of light from a spacecraft hovering high above them.
The archives clearly showed that the entities encountered at Fátima
were not deities from Heaven but rather alien beings visiting our planet
from "elsewhere" in the vast Cosmos. This finding was supported by
hundreds of other facts from the time of the apparitions. Fátima, the
authors discovered, was the first major UFO case of the 20th century.
"Heavenly Lights" is certain to become a definitive history of the
Fátima Incident of 1917. When it was first published in Portugal in
1995, entitled As Aparições de Fátima e o Fenómeno OVNI, the
Jornal de Notícias, a leading Portuguese newspaper, heralded the work
"a literary success without precedent in the field of Portuguese
ufological studies."
Now the whole world can know the truth about the apparitions of
Fátima. This new translation by American journalists Andrew D. Basiago
and Eva M. Thompson offers a powerful argument for both UFO
researchers and religious scholars alike to re-examine the actual
evidence that at last explains the enduring mystery of the Fátima incident.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
– Joaquim Fernandes is Professor of History at the University Fernando
Pessoa in Porto, Portugal. He directs the Multicultural Apparitions
Research International Academic Network (Project MARIAN).
His research interests include the history of science and the comparative
anthropology of religion, with an emphasis on anomalistic phenomena.
– Fina d' Armada holds a Master's degree in Women's Studies. She has
written five books about the Fátima incident, all based on original
documents held in the archives – three co-authored with Fernandes –
and hundreds of articles. Her research interests include phenomenology,
local history, the history of women, and the era of Portuguese
discovery.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
"Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon"
–
By Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d' Armada
Translated and Edited by Andrew D. Basiago and Eva M. Thompson
Foreword by Jacques F. Vallée
EcceNova Editions
Publication Date: Saturday, July 2, 2005
Price: U.S. $22.95, CAD $30.95, £14.99
ISBN: 0-9735341-3-3
For Publisher's Summary, Author Information, Jacket Photo, Excerpt, and
Contact Details visit:
www.eccenova.com/
James Connor introduces Kepler’s Witch with an anecdote about meeting a surly, anti-American German student on the train from Stuttgart to Prague and explaining to the student that Johannes Kepler is a man worth knowing. The story concludes with the two men shaking hands in Prague, having bridged their differences thanks to the great astronomer. In between, Connor explains that Kepler has been unjustly written out of the history of science (thanks, apparently, to the egomania of Isaac Newton), that he was as great as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and that “knowing Kepler will make your own life work a little better.” So much for a balanced perspective.
Oddly, Connor does not address these issues in the main text; there is no discussion of Kepler’s treatment by historians of science, nor an elucidation of the comparison with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Granted, it may be true, as Connor says, that most Americans do not know who Kepler was, but how he makes the leap from the quality of American curricula to a supposed exclusion from the history of science is a mystery. I learned about Kepler in high school in Canada, and it is not as if historians have ignored him. As for the claim that Kepler “fought for peace and reconciliation between the Christian churches” (this is what leads Connor to compare him to Gandhi and Dr. King), only a very generous interpretation of Kepler’s work and personal tribulations as recounted in this book could lead to such a conclusion.
Connor’s life and times account of Kepler contains much that is interesting, but it is too deeply flawed to be more than an encouragement to seek out better books. The prose is repetitive and at times jarringly informal, even juvenile. The narrative is also extraordinarily repetitive -- for instance, one is told over and over again about Kepler’s relationship with the Jesuits -- and feels disorganized, as it jumps from topic to topic and year to year, often going back over ground already covered.
Kepler’s Witch is intended for a popular audience, not for academics, so while not expecting much in the way of formal referencing, one does hope in a biography for a certain degree of respect for sources and historical accuracy. Connor provides a few endnotes and a list of source reading, but nevertheless, I found myself questioning his assertions on almost every page, especially once I began to notice factual inconsistencies. For example, he states on one page that Edward Kelley, John Dee’s sorcerous partner at Prague Castle, lost his ears after having been exposed as a charlatan. Later, he writes that Kelley’s ears were cut off as punishment for falsifying official documents. He also mixes things up in his account of the witch trial of Kepler’s mother: in one place the town of Leonberg has burned six witches, in another place it is "more than six," and in yet another it is just five witches. No explanation for the numerical variation is offered.
Finally, he inserts a highly questionable account into a paragraph about tormenting witches and sorcerers. One would assume, from its placement, that the story about Catherine Hayes screaming for half an hour before her death at the stake in London in 1726 refers to a witchcraft case; but England did not burn witches (though they burned heretics), and the last English witchcraft conviction was in 1712. Hayes was actually executed for "petty treason," and Connor should have either pointed this out or found a different example. The continental witch trials could have furnished any number of gruesome and more appropriate instances, so his use of an unrelated English example is a head-scratcher.
This may seem to be merely nitpicking, but errors such as these fatally undermine a reader’s confidence. As much as I would prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt, I would not trust much of what Connor says in Kepler’s Witch. For me, and for any reader who takes history seriously, this makes the book virtually useless. It’s a shame, for a contextualized exploration of Kepler’s life and work is a fascinating subject. To give him credit, Connor highlights Kepler’s religious beliefs and his struggle for survival in the midst of omnipresent confessional conflict. His account also illuminates some of the processes of early modern natural philosophy; the relationships between Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo are particularly interesting. Another positive aspect of the book is the inclusion of a number of Kepler’s letters, translated into English. These make Kepler accessible to modern readers and provide valuable support for certain portions of the narrative. Unfortunately, Connor fails to connect the events of Kepler’s life with elements of his work, other than to suggest that he suffered depression that made work more difficult, and that sometimes he turned to his studies as a refuge from his troubles. This is not a very enlightening conclusion, and hardly lives up to the book’s title.
In the end, this is a book that ought to have been better than it is. One would think that Connor, a former Jesuit priest, holder of several degrees including a doctorate in literature and science, and a current professor of English, would understand the importance of clear prose, accuracy, and reliability. A little editorial effort could have made Kepler’s Witch a great read, perhaps even a contribution to scholarship. As it is, it’s a disappointment.
Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother by James A. Connor Harper San Francisco ISBN: 0060750499 402 pages
Geoffrey A. Landis
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/44448#44624#44624
Strange Angel: The Otherwordly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. George Pendle. xii + 350 pp. Harcourt, 2005. $25.
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science. M. G. Lord. xii + 259 pp. Walker and Company, 2005. $24.
In 1935, three California experimenters—John Whiteside ("Jack") Parsons, Edward Forman and Frank Malina—got together to develop and test rocket engines. Parsons and Forman were barely more than enthusiastic kids fresh out of high school, and Malina was a 22-year-old graduate student at Caltech. They would go on to become founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. The fascinating story of this trio and the early days of American rocketry research can be found in two new books, Strange Angel, by George Pendle, and Astro Turf, by M. G. Lord.
Parsons, Forman and Malina had diverse backgrounds and interests, but their skills were perfectly complementary. Parsons, the group's chemist, grew up on Millionaire's Row in Pasadena, scion of a rich family from back East, but his family lost their money during the early years of the Depression, so he was unable to afford college. He had enthusiasm for a hundred different subjects: poetry, fencing, classical music, the occult, explosives and, above all, rockets. Most of his knowledge of chemistry was self-taught or learned on the job at an explosives manufacturing plant.
Forman, who had been Parson's best friend since high school, was the machinist of the group—a skill that would prove critical for their endeavors. According to Lord, he "could cobble together almost any device out of junkyard finds." Looking back on their early efforts, Forman later said that "It was our desire and intent to develop the ability to rocket to the moon." In the 1930s, that was an ambitious goal indeed.
Malina, the group's theoretician and mathematician, was the son of Czech dissidents who had come to America to escape repression. He had studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate, but he was also a musician and an artist. As a graduate student, he convinced aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán to approve a thesis in rocket design at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Parsons and Forman met Malina when they were drawn to the Caltech campus by a newspaper article about a lecture on rocket technology, and through him they gained access to Caltech's resources.
Strange Angel focuses on Parsons, who was certainly the craziest and arguably the most interesting of the three. The book tells a spellbinding story of a man with eccentricities that went well beyond a fascination with rocketry and included a penchant for the occult. He became an acolyte of the English writer and magician Aleister Crowley, who was the founder of a cult that practiced rituals of magick, "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." Crowley, who called himself "666" and "The Great Beast" (among other things), was dubbed the "wickedest man in the world" by the British press. His Ordo Templi Orientis (which claimed descent from the Knights Templars and the Bavarian Illuminati) was by no means the most bizarre cult in freewheeling 1930s California, but it was strange enough.
Pendle's book follows the 1999 biography Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, by a writer using the pseudonym John Carter. Strange Angel is longer and gives a more nuanced portrait of the subject's conflicted and contradictory personality. Pendle also seems to have had access to some biographical sources unavailable to Carter. Sex and Rockets, however, provides more details about Parson's occult rituals and has better photographs.
The cover of Strange Angel (see left) shows a young, resolute Jack Parsons examining two wires protruding from an odd cylindrical object—perhaps some piece of scientific equipment? The object is, in fact, nothing less than a large pipe bomb. This photograph—printed on the cover as a mirror image—was taken during a famous 1938 trial in Los Angeles in which Parsons testified as an explosives expert and built a replica of a bomb that had been used in an assassination attempt. He was only 23 at the time. This is the young, self--confident rocket scientist and explosives expert, only a few years from his greatest success, which was followed by his equally rapid plunge from science into magick, and from there to his death. The photo is oddly prescient: Just 14 years later, Parsons was killed in a mishap with his own explosives.
Strange Angel has a strong narrative drive and reads like a novel—except that a novel has to be plausible, whereas the life of Jack Parsons, poet, magician and rocket pioneer, had no such constraint.
Lord's Astro Turf, a much shorter book, looks at the same history from a different direction. Her story centers on her personal search to understand her father, who was an aerospace engineer in the early days of JPL's interplanetary probes. In narrating her quest, she weaves backward and forward in time, exploring the history of JPL and interviewing present-day engineers who have worked on the Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover missions.
Lord is more interested in Malina than in Parsons (although the latter does, of course, play a costarring role). Her chapters on Malina, titled "The Rockets' Red Glare, Parts I and II," form the heart (and most interesting portion) of her book.
In 1935, rocket engineering had barely advanced from the technology developed by Sir William Congreve (whose rockets, fired by the British in the War of 1812, inspired the "rockets' red glare" line in "The Star-Spangled Banner"). Indeed, little improvement had been seen since the Chinese had used black-powder rockets in warfare a thousand years earlier. That was about to change rapidly as a result of work on liquid-fueled rockets being done on three fronts: in New Mexico by Robert Goddard; in Germany by Wernher von Braun's Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), or Society for Space Travel; and in California by GALCIT's Rocket Research Group—the "Suicide Squad," consisting of Parsons, Forman, Malina and their coterie.
By 1938 members of the Suicide Squad, no longer allowed to carry out their experiments on the Caltech campus, were testing their engines outside Pasadena in the Arroyo Seco, which later became the site of JPL. They reveled in their nickname. Parsons would dance and chant poetry—most notably Crowley's "Hymn to Pan"—before rocket tests. (Von Kármán called Parsons a "delightful screwball.") Slowly and painstakingly, they developed a practical theory of rocket motors. They also invented propellant combinations that were robust and storable. What is more important, these new liquid and solid propellants fueled working engines—in contrast to the concoctions that preceded them, which had chiefly fueled explosions (hence the group's nickname). In the early days Parsons, Forman and Malina were the driving force, although others of course contributed as well.
The war brought respectability and badly needed funding to the rocket-crazy trio. Malina sold the U.S. Army on the utility of rocket boosters, which were tagged Jet-Assisted Takeoff (JATO) units, to boost overladen bombers from short runways. With von Kármán as its titular head, GALCIT suddenly had a funded rocket-research project. "We could even expect to be paid for doing our rocket research," Malina marveled. And, thanks in good part to the trio's diligence and to the chemical genius of Parsons, their experiments succeeded. Both Pendle and Lord recount how the men launched a small airplane, an Ercoupe, into the air on rocket power. Within a year they incorporated Aerojet to manufacture the JATO units. In 1944, GALCIT was renamed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (At the time, the word rocket, which was associated with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, was not taken seriously, so jet was substituted, having been deemed more appropriate for marketing purposes.)
If the story had stopped at 1945, the success of Malina, Parsons and Forman would have been a classic American tale of triumph against long odds, illustrating the merits of a small, dedicated technical team. The three men reinforced one another. Malina, guided by the genius von Kármán, reined in the impulses of the other two men, who were eager to try whatever idea happened to spring to mind. Malina insisted on gathering rigorous data. The enthusiasm of Parsons and Forman for experimentation, on the other hand, kept Malina focused toward building actual rocket engines, not just solving equations on paper.
In October 1945, the WAC Corporal rocket, the final achievement of the GALCIT rocket project, flew to an altitude of more than 70 kilometers, becoming the first American rocket ever to exit the Earth's atmosphere. (When I started flying model rockets 20 years later, my first launch was a scale model of the WAC Corporal. I did not know its venerable history!)
But the story did not end with the WAC Corporal launch. The descent and fragmentation of the team was as chaotic and complicated as its rise had been triumphant. Of the original three, only Frank Malina was still at JPL when the WAC Corporal penetrated into space, and he was only to remain for another year.
Malina's fate diverged from that of Parsons in 1945, after the trio had succeeded in their original objectives. Parsons and Forman, ill-suited to running a business, were persuaded to sell their Aerojet shares for a modest amount: Parsons netted enough to buy a house, with some money left over to invest—but if he had kept his stock another 15 or 20 years, it would have been worth millions. The buyout was a move on the part of Aerojet to dissociate itself from the increasingly bizarre behavior of Parsons, who was experimenting with "sex magick" and running a bohemian commune and an occult temple out of his home. His behavior got crazy here, as he tried—but ultimately failed—to be as successful in his experiments with magick as the trio had been in their rocket experimentation.
Malina kept his Aerojet shares. It was a youthful interest in the Communist Party that catalyzed his departure from rocket research. After the war, official attitudes turned increasingly toward paranoid anticommunism. Lord puts together a good case that Malina indeed had close associations with the Communist Party in the 1930s, but she also notes that, like most liberals of the era, he broke completely with communism following the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.
As Lord points out, although being an ex-Nazi did not preclude being considered a solid American citizen, being an ex-Communist, or even having attended a single meeting of the Communist Party, branded one forever as un-American. Malina's youthful interest resulted in increasingly hostile attention from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, the development of rockets as a means for delivering atomic warheads, an application the young trio had never imagined, increasingly disturbed Malina's conscience. In 1947 he left Pasadena, and rocket research, accepting a job offered by Julian Huxley to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.
Moving to Paris did not solve Malina's problems with the FBI. In 1952, he was indicted for having failed to list his Communist Party membership on an old security questionnaire from Caltech. He was declared a fugitive, to be arrested if and when he returned to the United States. Malina's stock in Aerojet gave him enough savings to live independently. He went on to have a successful career as an artist and sculptor, and founded the interdisciplinary magazine of arts and sciences Leonardo, which still exists today.
Lord recounts the early days of JPL's founders in pieces, alternating with chapters about her family and about present-day JPL. Her story is weakest, oddly enough, when she talks about her own family and her experiences growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s with an aerospace engineer for a father. Her characterizations of engineers rarely rise above stereotype, and her analysis relies on pop psychology and overused metaphors: Rockets are always "phallic" and "tumescent"; the launch process is "steeped in left-brain, masculine communication patterns." Even mild engineering humor is opaque to her.
In one chapter, Lord blames her father for failing to encourage her to study science and engineering. Her family stories, though, give the opposite impression. A pressure-suit helmet given to her by her father was her favorite childhood toy, and she writes about how she and her father spent "twenty-four weekends" together building model airplanes, which she lists lovingly by name. She states that she was brilliant in all subjects in school, except for having "no aptitude" for "rock-hard, number-filled courses." Yet she never thinks that her lack of interest in math might have been a factor in her father not encouraging her to enter engineering.
Lord's cultural critiques are a bit shallow. We hardly need her exaggerated scorn to tell us that in the '50s and '60s sex roles were stereotyped, or that families who are apparently happy can conceal tragedies.
Some of her accusations are oddly off-target. To illustrate intolerance of homosexuality at JPL in the 1960s, she relates the British persecution of mathematician Alan Turing. It is no particular revelation that workplaces of that era were peculiarly intolerant of homosexuality, but it is odd that Lord had to look back several decades and across an ocean to find a noteworthy example. (The main example she finds of intolerance of homosexuality at JPL is that a 1989 seminar titled "Homophobia in the Sciences" did not rate an announcement in the JPL in-house publication.)
Lord's interviews and capsule sketches of many of the engineers involved in Mars projects past and present at JPL (many of whom I've worked with) are a bright point of the book. The work environment in engineering has advanced since the '50s and '60s, and she excels at personalizing the people involved in missions. In the process, she demonstrates that engineering is no longer the exclusive fraternity of white men with slide rules and crew cuts.
These two books paint a portrait of a remarkable time and place—Pasadena before and after the Second World War, when a small band of enthusiastic kids experimenting in an empty arroyo created a fantastic invention that has shaped today's world. Indeed, when the first American satellite, Explorer, was launched in 1958, the Army team led by von Braun built the first stage of the rocket that launched it—but the upper stages, and the satellite, are direct descendants of the rockets built by the Suicide Squad.
Geoffrey A. Landis is a research scientist at the Photovoltaics and Space Environment Branch of NASA John Glenn Research Center and was a member of the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover Science teams. He is also a prizewinning author of science fiction: His recent publications include a novel, Mars Crossing (2000), and a short-story collection, Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (2001).
I
By David Darling, John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., ISBN# 0471470953, 288 pp.
Review: TELEPORTATION: EXPRESS LANE SPACE TRAVEL –
By Leonard David
SPACE.com / Yahoo News
Monday, July 11, 2005
Think Star Trek: You are here. You want to go there. It's just a matter
of teleportation. Thanks to lab experiments, there is growth in the
number of "beam me up" believers, but there is an equal amount of
disbelief, too.
Over the last few years, however, researchers have successfully
teleported beams of light across a laboratory bench. Also, the quantum
state of a trapped calcium ion to another calcium ion has been
teleported in a controlled way.
These and other experiments all make for heady and heavy reading in
scientific journals. The reports would have surely found a spot on
Einstein's night table. For the most part, it's an exotic amalgam of
things like quantum this and quantum that, wave function, qubits and
polarization, as well as uncertainty principle, excited states and
entanglement.
Seemingly, milking all this highbrow physics to flesh out point-to-point
human teleportation is a long, long way off.
Well, maybe...maybe not.
A TRILLION ATOMS
In his new book, "Teleportation - The Impossible Leap," published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., writer David Darling contends that: "One way or
another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures.
It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers,
which will themselves radically change the world."
Darling suggests that some form of classical teleportation and
replication for inanimate objects also seems inevitable. But whether
humans can make the leap, well, that remains to be seen. Teleporting a
person would require a machine that isolates, appraises, and keeps track
of over a trillion trillion atoms that constitute the human body, then
sends that data to another locale for reassembly -- and hopefully
without mussing up your physical and mental makeup.
"One thing is certain: if that impossible leap turns out to be merely
difficult -- a question of simply overcoming technical challenges -- it
will someday be accomplished," Darling predicts. In this regard, Darling
writes that the quantum computer "is the joker in the deck, the factor
that changes the rules of what is and isn't possible."
Just last month, in fact, scientists at Hewlett Packard announced that
they've hammered out a new tactic for a creating a quantum
computer‹using switches of light beams rather than today's run of the
mill, transistor-laden devices. What's in the offing is hardware capable
of making calculations billions of times faster than any silicon-based
computer.
Given quantum computers and the networking of these devices, Darling
senses the day may not be far off for routine teleportation of
individual atoms and molecules. That would lead to teleportation of
macromolecules and microbeswith, perhaps, human teleportation to follow.
SPACE TELEPORTATION
What could teleportation do for future space endeavors?
"We can see the first glimmerings of teleportation in space exploration
today," said Darling, responding to questions sent via e-mail by
SPACE.com to his home office near Dundee, Scotland.
"Strictly speaking, teleportation is about getting from A to B without
passing through the points between A and B. In other words, something
dematerializes in one place, then simply rematerializes somewhere else,"
Darling said.
Darling pointed out that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers had to get to
Mars by conventional means. However, their mission and actions are
controlled by commands sent from Earth.
"So by beaming up instructions, we effectively complete the
configuration of the spacecraft. Also, the camera eyes and other
equipment of the rovers serve as vicarious extensions of our own senses.
So you might say the effect is as if we had personally teleported to the
Martian surface," Darling said..
SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE
In the future it might be possible to assemble spacecraft "on-the-spot"
using local materials. "That would be a further step along the road to
true teleportation," Darling added.
To take this idea to its logical endpoint, Darling continued, that's
when nanotechnology enters the scene. When nanotechnology is mature, an
automated assembly unit could be sent to a destination. On arrival, it
would build the required robot explorer from the molecular level up.
"Bona fide quantum teleportation, as applied to space travel, would mean
sending a supply of entangled particles to the target world then use
what Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance' to make these
particles assume the exact state of another collection of entangled
particles back on Earth," Darling speculated.
Doing so opens the prospect for genuinely teleporting a robot
vehicle--or even an entire human crew--across interplanetary or, in the
long run, across interstellar distances, Darling said.
"Certainly, if it becomes possible to teleport humans," Darling said,
"you can envisage people hopping to the Moon or to other parts of the
solar system, as quickly and as easily as we move data around the
Internet today."
UFO CONNECTION?
If indeed we are to become a space teleporting civilization, what about
other advanced civilizations circling distant stars? Perhaps they have
already mastered mass transportation via teleportation? One might even
be drawn to consider that mode of travel in connection with purported
UFO visitation of Earth.
"Any strange comings and goings are candidates for teleportation,
although you would obviously have to eliminate all mundane explanations
first," Darling responded. "According to reports, some UFOs do appear
and disappear quite abruptly, which would fit in with the basic idea of
teleportation," he said.
Darling said that interstellar teleportation would be one way to
circumvent the light barrier, "although, as we understand the process
now, you would need to make a sub-light trip first to set up the
teleportation receiver and assembler at the destination."
Quantum teleportation, Darling pointed out is the kind we can do at the
subatomic level in the lab today. And that requires equipment at both
ends to be able to work.
"Extraterrestrial intelligence that is thousands or millions of years
ahead of us will certainly be teleportation experts," Darling advised,
"if the technology can be implemented at the macroscopic biological
level."
What possible outcome, then, from ET successfully tinkering with
teleportation?
"We might expect advanced aliens to be occasionally beaming in to check on our progress as a species," Darling concluded.
Winifred Wagner, Oder, Hitlers Bayreuth
Norman Lebrecht reviews Brigitte Hamann’s book Winifred
Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth (Granta Books 2005): “The Wagners, as Hamann confirms, have shed nothing but shame on their ancestor’s ideals. They were
formative Nazis and unregenerate accepters of post-war
Nazi gold”
There are almost as many books about the Wagner family as there are about the composer himself - and he was once the subject of more biographies than any man in history, bar Napoleon and Jesus Christ. Why this need to read about a nasty clan of nonentities who keep banning one another from the family shrine? Because there is a strong suspicion that the Wagners contributed measurably to the greatest atrocity of modern times, and that the full story has yet to be told.
Brigitte Hamann's new biography of Winifred Wagner, the composer's English-born daughter-in-law, brings to light fresh evidence of the family's involvement with Hitler and its complicity in his crimes.
It took great ingenuity on the author's part since the Wagners squirrelled away their papers and refuse access to outsiders. But Hamann, a Viennese scholar, laid hands on Winnie's letters to her best Nazi girlfriend and, with other sources, has assembled a dossier strong enough to have landed several Wagners in the Nuremberg dock.
Winifred was an outsider. Adopted as a child orphan by a septuagenarian pair of Wagner worshippers, she was presented in 1915, aged 18, for marriage to the Master's only son, Siegfried, a homosexual of 46. Her role was to make babies and help "Fidi" take over the Bayreuth Festival from his mother, Cosima. This was no easy task, since the war had wiped out the family savings. The Wagners blamed the Jews.
By 1921, with no resumption in sight, Fidi toned down his virulent antiSemitism to court funds from Jewish Wagnerians in Europe and the US. Back home, he mingled with rabid nationalists. In September 1923 Adolf Hitler visited the family to pay homage to his favourite composer and meet English historian Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Fidi's brother-in-law (and Neville's cousin), whose racial dogmas pervade Nazi ideology every bit as much as Wagner's teutonic primitivism.
Winnie and Fidi went to Munich for the day to witness Hitler's putsch; later they sent him goodies in prison. The festival reopened in 1924 and Hitler came the following summer, seeing a full Ring cycle, Parsifal and Mastersingers. When he became Fiihrer in 1933, Winnie, facing a shortfall on ticket sales due to the ban on Jews, appealed to Goebbels, who sent her packing.
Hitler then ordered Nazi organisations to bulk-buy tickets at full price, a subsidy that continued throughout the Third Reich. But for Hitler, Bayreuth would have gone bankrupt. Under his patronage, the festival became an offshoot of the Nuremberg rallies, a place where prominent Nazis strutted their stuff before adoring crowds.
Until the Second World War, Hitler was a regular attender meddling with the casts and mingling with the family. Winnie pestered him throughout he year, pleading for extra subsidy and occasionally interceding for victims of the regime.
Relations cooled after Wmnie's daughter, Friedelind, fled to America and made anti-Nazi broadcasts, but Hitler remained attached to Winnie's sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, and conspired with them to oust Mum and Tietien and replace them with Wagner's flesh and blood.
Wieland, whose middle name was Adolf, was in contact with Hitler until February 1945. With his brother-in-law Bodo Lafferentz, he was
put on trial but the Wagner bosses escaped unpunished.
When the day of denazification came, Winifred was banned from running the festival and her two sons took over, just as Hitler intended. The festival, reopened in 1951, and became a gathering place for relics of Hitler's circle. Wieland attacked his mother in the press as "a former leading Nazi" while protesting his own political innocence. Wolfgang raised funds for the enterprise from old Nazis and steel magnates.
LTHOUGH Wieland's spartan staging signalled a breach with the past, nothing else changed at Bayreuth. The brothers soon fell out. After Wieland's death' in 1966, Wolfgang barred his children from the succession. Later he banned the son and daughter of his own first marriage in favour of his lastborn child, Katharine.
While Wieland was a competent stage director and enlightened manager, Wolfgang was a plodder, a thick-skinned autocrat. In 1973, the town of Bayreuth bought the festival theatre, but Wolfgang runs the festival to this day as his private fiefdom, squandering public subsidy on productions of ephemeral consequence and accountable only to a board of poodles.
Now 85, he cannot be long for this world. If the Bavarian authorities have any respect for public probity they will move swiftly on his death to suspend the intended succession.
For the Wagners, as Hamann confirms, have shed nothing but shame on their ancestor's ideals. They were formative Nazis, active SS men and unregenerate accepters of post-war Nazi gold. They were also creative nullities, trading on a famous surname.
Their family saga is no sillier than most telly soaps, except that it involves crimes against humanity. Hamann has provided the fullest indictment so far of Wagner family guilt. There are, to my knowledge, at least two more books in preparation, intent upon dewhitewashing Bayreuth. The evidence is mounting, and the reckoning cannot be deferred indefinitely. Only when the festival is removed from family hands will its wicked past be fully purged, Personally, I won't set foot in the place until there is evidence of regime change.