Lately I've been encountering references to UFOs in unexpected places. Here's a roundup of them:
Fargo, Season 2
Wendy and I recently watched season 2 of the TV show Fargo. It was a fictional tale set in 1979 about ordinary people caught up in a turf war between the Kansas City mafia and the North Dakota mafia. Weirdly, there was a UFO subplot throughout the season: they kept appearing at critical moments in the story. Several episodes hinted that some of the main characters were being abducted by aliens. Nothing about the UFOs was ever explained. It was left, as in life, a complete mystery.
New York Times
The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline "People Are Seeing U.F.O.s Everywhere, and This Book Proves It". It's about a married couple that recently published a book called UFO Sightings Desk Reference. They gathered statistics of UFO sightings collected by two organizations (MUFON and NUFORC), and created a 371-page book full of charts, graphs, and tables that break down the data by geography, time, and shape of UFO. There's no narrative in the book, just data. The article also linked to their blog, New York Skies, where they discuss some of the patterns they've uncovered during their research.
Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos
Eventually I plan to write a blog post about Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) and the over 14,000 psychic readings he gave during his life, and how they've been thoroughly documented and cataloged, and how he became known as "the sleeping prophet" and "the father of holistic medicine" and "America's greatest psychic", and how some of his predictions are still coming true today. But, this is not that blog post.
Instead, I will mention that I recently read the book Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos, written by astronomer James Mullaney. He explores what the Edgar Cayce readings say about our universe. I was very pleased to learn that Mullaney is a highly qualified astronomer: he was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society of London, helped contribute to Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series, and has written for, and served as editor of, Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines.
I was even more pleased when I read the preface of Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos. Mullaney writes that with his scientific background, he was skeptical of the Edgar Cayce material, just like he was skeptical of UFOs. However, he says:
I was not expecting anything UFO related from the book, so this was a pleasant surprise.I came to realize that such a formal background can also in many situations blind a person to the deeper realities lying behind nature. With further study of both the Cayce material and the UFO phenomenon, I soon lost all skepticism about either of them!
Atlantis Author
Last month I went to a presentation given by an author who's written a number of books about lost civilizations, such as Atlantis. During the Q&A at the end, I asked if he was working on any new books. He said yes, he'd just finished one, and it was on a topic he never thought he would write about: UFOs!