My Public PGP key

and YouTube Channel

From past experiences...

Okay, we are now 'backstage', facing the 'crew' of the strandedufo.

The name Paul won't convey much, apart from gender. Well - a female version would be called Paula obviously. But that is where normality ends to reveal someone who has been thinking in hexa-decimal, with a logic based on bits - representing ones and zeroes, raised to the power of 2 - and a syntax to match. Similar to the proposed non-Aristotelian logic in science, or as described in the sci-fi story "The World of Null-A" by A. E. van Vogt.

And that not just since the 90s, when most of humanity was touched by the digital phenomenon, molly-coddled in graphical user interfaces bristling with help, but since the early 60s, when the inherent power of the machine was still raw and untamed, as direct and decisive as a logical AND or Exclusive OR can be. A program`s operation was in your mind, or you were facing a blank wall. Well, a blank screen, really, with a single green cursor flashing away to make you aware of its emptiness.

Those were times when mainframes with less power than a 286 still took up a large room, and single stepping through machine-code processes, with values displayed as rows of ON / OFF points of lights on a console was the way to go.

Instead of automatic debuggers following your high level source code, when one instruction crashed, we would update memory addresses manually, via dials, toggles and push buttons, inserting sub-routines into memory, and then pencill the changes on a listing, before re-stepping over those changes. Print-out was of course reserved for user data from your program, or the program listing from the assembler or the compiler, while input was from punched cards or tape. Multi-tasking was yet to be invented.

Testing was usually done at night, when nobody else needed the machine, though that only happened with the smaller systems, like 360/20 or 30. At other times we didn`t even get to `see` a computer, just handed in our cards or tape, and worked from listings, which was the program`s output, and the occasional "core dump" - or memory and registers print-out - when a crash occurred. Only in `70-71 did I get to work from a remote screen and keyboard console attached to the mainframe, where logging in with my handle, I was given a private task running alongside others.

While on the PDP, we had no music or games, but as it was a defence related electronics firm, we had an A2 sized flat-bed plotter. It had this roving arm that would pick up one of a bunch of coloured pens and then draw some random or other math related patterns. Some of these "paintings" were so good, people actually bought them. Untill the boss put a stop to it.

So while most times I was forced to follow a straight procedural route, my instincts led me down a different path, resulting in being tagged as strange or even weird by those less adventurous. What people cannot understand, they are weary of, and try to belittle to lessen this fear. So what is this "crazy" path?

In order to talk to aliens, humanity has resorted to using science - if you remember the gold plaque on the Voyager probe - as an invitation to `someone out there`, giving our position in space, so they can easily find us. Therefore it isn`t so strange that eventually "someone out there" would send us an answer too. It comes partly as some internet text as well as two crop circles, using the same "code" we used in our original invitation.

Since I am not really a scientist by education, just a programmer - a shaper of artificial and virtual realities - it is that artificiality that will have to tell the full story. My take is that IF fake, which is highly unlikely,then I have only wasted a few minutes reading it, but if true, it IS the best thing that could possibly happen to get humanity further up the evolution ladder.

As for the old debate of these "visitors" being here or not - if you still dismiss all historic references and the relatively more recent still photographs and camera footage as evidence of their presence, due to their possibility of being faked, perhaps the number of moving objects that change direction in these NASA videos should be convincing enough, since we are still not capable of faking such things in open space. Absolutely impossible - in fact, the only crude faking is done by NASA, who tend to airbrush out high-tech structures found on the surface of the Moon. The space station MIR or the Shuttle and a tether that it had extended, all surrounded by a fair number of what could only be intelligently piloted craft, apparently checking what we`re up to. The mysteriously lit up structures, almost, but not quite resembling our space station, or even the strange shaped buildings scattered around the surface of the Moon itself,. can not easily be dismissed. Trying to airbrush them out will only reinforce the mystery and our curiosity.

So maybe I will just leave you with this little self portrait I did in DPaint III - it is already soo old, it has faded, like some black-and-whites in grandad's photo-album...

Nor can a nuclear winter be desired by any reasonable human being. Sadly when even mainstream media - which usually only give either watered down versions, or total exaggerations of world events, depending on their political agenda - will report the high tension in the Middle East in (most of its) gory detail, there is cause to worry.