300,000 Years Got Us Here - by Guest Writer Zane Worley

By Zane Worley and Ronny Nixon 

The Celestial Orbs, Sentient Abominations, and P.U.R.S.U.E Details

Still from a 1 minute, 46 second video, captured by a U.S military infrared sensor of an unexplained, star-shaped entity flying in the Middle East. (File Name DOW-UAP-PR38)

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On May 8th 2026, the United States enacted the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAPs (P.U.R.S.U.E). 

It was a good week for the ghost hunters, drum circle gurus, whack-jobs, tinfoil hat wearing, and mushroom-tripping conspirators that have timely proved the rest of us wrong once again. 

Perhaps there isn't always a conscientious reason behind the fallacies strung by waves of anti-believers in regard to realms of nature and space that we don't quite understand yet. (And maybe we never will.) Nothing is impossible, and only God knows what is sitting in a box at some undisclosed government warehouse. 

Some say the Loch Ness monster is in there, or maybe an inter-dimensional, time traveling Bigfoot. Hell, maybe their bodies lie cryogenically frozen, among the 3-fingered sentient green men.  

Yes... those green men have always been important, especially on this planet we call home. 

The kicker is: what if they aren't verdant, or tiny mainstream monsters? 

And why here anyway? 

As far back as 1561 in Nuremberg, an aerial battle supposedly emerged at dawn between orbs, crosses, and cylinder shaped space vehicles that appeared to spawn out of the sun. Whatever these machines may have been, the stories of their existence hunting and observing us from afar (and up close), have been circulating long before Spielberg made movies about them. 

Then, just five years later in Basel, Switzerland a similar event happened as people observed "sky miracles" - divine red and black balls battling against each other,  intensely shooting smaller orbs above the city. 

Maybe these galactic visitors serve as protectors - a part of a galactic civilization watch program. But who knows? 

On a global scale, we may not be much different from the Sentinelese - a primitive, pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer society observed from afar, isolated not by geography alone, but by a universally respected no-contact boundary. 

Still, any hard evidence for the existence of these celestial beings is often dismissed - either lost beneath hoaxes or explained away through scientific realism. It’s a recurring pattern, one shaped by decades of campfire stories and the constant spotlight of folklore surrounding the phenomenon.

In 2023, Jaime Maussan presented two corpses to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies that convincingly resembled an unearthed species. However scientists swooped in and quickly debunked these abnormalities, revealing them as skinned monkeys. 

In 2011, also in Mexico, L.A. Marzulli made similar claims - that he had discovered an evil-energy carrying, "biblically-demonic" fairy. When investigated, it was determined that Marzulli's subject was actually just manipulated bat remains. 

These faulty, unserious attempts at unleashing a governmental entity on public UAP investigations are surprisingly successful. At least after the newspapers print stories about them. 

As long as people believe and buy merchandise, the sleazy circus that is the U.S government is willing to entertain us with their presence. All of course, while keeping the actual truth out of arm's reach.

This isn't the grandiose display of servitude and transparency that Locke/Platos argued for, but at least it's something, damn it. The 443,000 concurrent daily viewers of Ancient Aliens can finally breathe, but now must read PDF files before digging deeper into the popcorn bowl. 

Because of P.U.R.S.U.E., 162 previously classified files in relation to 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,' are now public and downloadable, dating back to the 1940s. 

It seems we still stand far away from seeing any real bodies (dead or alive), or recovered aircrafts of the alleged evangelical space agents. But in 1947 an Air Force Major claimed on a phone call with the FBI an "object purporting to be a flying disc was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico," so there are likely many files still being withheld, hopefully to be released later. 

Paul Peyerl (a former Luftwaffe officer) also told the FBI, that Nazis have built a disc-shaped aircraft in 1944 somewhere in the Black Forest, 3 years prior; interpolating that some of these may be man-made weapons of war. 

Many of the reports discussed oval/football, metallic blimp shaped aircraft - sometimes up to 195 feet long - capable of materializing out of the sun. These aircraft are most likely not made by man, and appear strikingly similar to reports of the aerial assault above Nuremberg 500 years prior. 

There were recorded instances in the files that take place in other countries that seemingly targeted U.S military - places like Syria, Dagestan, and Iraq. Also included was an incident with a "star-shaped" entity above the ocean, that feels eerily less like a machine, and more like a living entity.

That tracks, because some theories within Panpsychism suggest that a UAP could itself be a sentient, non-biological entity - either operating autonomously through advanced technology or existing as a naturally occurring energy-based organism. Some researchers have compared these hypothetical entities to plasmoids, non-Newtonian orbs, or even the rumored “space jellyfish” reported in certain anomalous encounters.

Advanced technology capable of consciousness and cognition is not out of human reach. Therefore it can be inferred that any species capable of galactic travel has developed something much more powerful than what we are aware of. In our own world, AI similarly serves as a non-biological life, capable of reason, interacting with its environment, and reproducing. 

There has been countless recorded civilian sightings of the classified/rumored U.S military aircraft TR-3B (also known as Black Manta), allegedly capable of anti-gravitational propulsion, made out of reverse engineered alien technology. 

Yet what is most interesting (specifically to media outlets), is the overwhelming abundance of incidents involving these bright lights or some sort of ball/orb in the files. NASA's Apollo 11, 12, and 17 (1969-1972), all reported experiencing flashing lights - both in space and on the moon's craters - with Apollo 17 reporting triangular-positioned UAPs far away in distant space. 

In late 2025 a U.S helicopter conducting a search (again with infrared sensors) noticed an "extremely hot orb" flying at speeds the Blackhawk helicopter could not match. It gained elevation and almost hit the U.S helicopter, missing by less than 10 feet. Seven U.S federal agents across independent teams have also reported seeing large orbs shooting smaller red orbs out of them, as well as orbs appearing and dissipating into a "firework" like state. 

Because of the currently known lack of physical or biological form, it is suggestible these anomalies aim to directly interact with consciousness, through glimpses of humanity, as manifestations of spiritual organisms. This is favored to many - that sentience and self-awareness transcends on an intricate nature of universal scale. 

The need to emphasize and be aware of another intellectual species may not run only deep in homo sapiens, but in the lonely unknown that has always been interested in us. The Sumerians wrote about and worshipped the "Anunnaki" - extraterrestrial deities that served as personifications of time, and deciders of humanity. A different but similar sectarian belief: the indigenous tribe Blackfoot Nation said the beings of sky, were the first creations by God. 

Aliens have only turned green and started being presented as vigorously meaner, in the last 100 years or so. Maybe they are, and for great unknown reasons, we upset them. 

Recent UAP behavior displays reactionary defense mechanisms and gang stalking, a great contrast to hundreds of thousands of years of alleged cooperation. 

A celestial entity that once defended us in an aerial battle, presenting gifts of knowledge to Mesopotamians, and possibly dropped off (the still encrypted book), The Voynich Manuscript; now attack us, and hide themselves. 

(The Voynich, carbon dated to at least the 1400's, contains text written in an unearthly language, displays images of plants that do not exist, shows what looks like recipes, and features extremely complicated astral charts.)

If space invaders that live 2,000 light years away look at us through a magnifying glass, they would still see the Roman Empire (due to time dilation). Just as if we look back in the sky, we may observe planets and stars that no longer exist. One day another species may do the same to us, and recover our satellites, the Voyager Golden Record, and find remnants of our miraculous culture that will by then, be gone.

Hopefully before that day, they get the courage to talk to us again. If they see the future, hopefully we overcome our significant obstacles. Without proof, we still have humanity, and our desire to not be alone. No matter if man-made, biological, technological, or a physical state of consciousness, we only wish to be peaceful again. 

It might not matter if they are real. 

"A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth." - Cristopher Wren (1750)

Travelling Through Time: An Interview With Tommy Spase

They call Los Angeles home, but what they’ve built sounds like it rolled in from somewhere far stranger - like a traveling show that doesn’t follow roads so much as it follows energy, appearing wherever the weird is welcome and the ordinary doesn't stand a chance.

Step right up - don’t be shy - slip past the velvet rope and into the flicker of a half-lit midway where the calliope hums and the night feels alive with something electric.

This is where Tommy Spase and the Alchemists set up shop, not so much a band as a full-blown spectacle, equal parts carnival, cosmic transmission, and beautifully controlled chaos. A swirl of color, character, and sound. Cloaked figures, cosmic drifters, alchemists with glitter on their hands and stardust in their lungs. It’s as much a visual fever dream as it is a sonic one - half rock show, half living, breathing illustration. You don’t just hear it… you see it unfolding in real time.

They don’t so much perform songs as they conjure them - like some strange carnival has torn loose from time and is now rolling through a neon-lit dreamscape, powered by steam, stardust, and something just slightly unhinged. If you tried to pin them down to a genre, you’d miss the point. This is music that shape-shifts.

At its core, their sound feels like a collision. You get flashes of carnival rock, theatrical glam, psychedelic swirl, and something that almost borders on operatic storytelling. There are moments that hit like a runaway roller coaster - loud, chaotic, electrified - and then, just as suddenly, the band pulls you into a slow, hypnotic waltz, like you’ve wandered into the quieter corner of a haunted midway. It’s controlled madness. Intentional weirdness.

And that’s the key. Nothing about Tommy Spase and the Alchemists feels accidental.

The band has been described as a “spasedelic, steam-powered carnival rock opera,” and that actually lands closer to the truth than anything else. There’s a theatrical backbone running through everything they do. You can hear it in the arrangements - the rise and fall, the dramatic turns, the sense that each song is less a track and more a scene. This isn’t background music. It demands your attention, like a ringmaster stepping into the spotlight.

But what really sets them apart is their commitment to atmosphere. There’s a Tim Burton - like quality to their world - dark, whimsical, slightly off-center. Their sound feels populated by characters rather than just musicians. You don’t just listen - you step into something. A universe where velvet-coated ringmasters, starlight smugglers, cosmic drifters, and carnival ghosts all share the same stage.

It’s theatrical, but not polished in a sterile way. There’s grit underneath it. A kind of raw, churning energy that keeps it from becoming parody. The band walks a tightrope between chaos and control, and somehow never falls.

That balance is rare.

The Carousel Cabaret  - You can get a FREE copy
at the link below.

In a music landscape that often rewards safe repetition, Tommy Spase and the Alchemist lean hard into identity. They don’t smooth out their edges - they sharpen them. And in doing so, they’ve built something that feels alive. It's unpredictable... maybe a little dangerous.. yet perfectly safe. 

It's the kind of sound that makes you feel like you’ve stumbled onto something you weren’t supposed to find.

Step into his website and wander a while - it’s a strange, captivating space where circus, magic, and conversation all unfold together.

Reaching out to Tommy through his website doesn’t feel like filling out a contact form - it feels like stepping onto a path that’s already in motion. You don’t just send a message and wait; you’re pulled into something warmer, stranger, more personal. There’s an open invitation baked into the whole experience, like he’s not just hoping you’ll write, he’s expecting it - and welcoming it. The responses carry a kind of genuine enthusiasm that turns a simple exchange into the beginning of a conversation, and before long, it feels less like artist-and-audience and more like the early stages of a friendship. Then come the surprises - free gifts, unexpected extras, little tokens that make the whole thing feel tactile and real. It’s not marketing, it’s not distance - it’s connection. And honestly, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

He is currently offering one of the band's most popular albums, “The Carousel Cabaret” for FREE. All he asks is that you pay for shipping and handling.

Somewhere between the smoke and the spotlight, I caught up with Tommy Spase himself - the ringmaster behind the madness. What followed was less an interview and more of a glimpse behind the curtain, where the illusion fades just enough to reveal something even stranger.

Before we get weird - can you tell readers a little about your musical background and what kind of music you make?

I grew up in a somewhat musical family. My Mom graduated with a degree in music and taught music. However, oddly enough, she never taught me directly. At one point she urged me to take piano lessons which I regrettably did not. I did however feel a calling to the guitar and taught myself how to play.  I only had an acoustic for the first few years but upon seeing an electric guitar, and the thin body, I knew one day I would get one, which my mom really didn't want to happen. She, of course, ended up supporting my musical journey. As far as the kind of music I make, I describe it as Whimsical, Mystical, Theatrical, Cosmic Vaudevillian Rock ...or… Carnival Rock Opera.

Your sound feels like it exists outside of time - part vaudeville, part rock opera, part something harder to define. How would you describe it in your own words?

I am glad that you mentioned the Timeless feel of it. It is always felt that way to me as well. There was a point in my musical journey where instead of being so wrapped up in my influences that the songs, and music I wrote emulated a certain sound, the songs started writing themselves, so to speak. They truly do come from somewhere else. So the sound is rooted in the tapestry of “people’s music” as it evolved through the human experience, like old gypsy folk songs or spiritual music from the jungle. But it doesn't escape the influences from my early days as a rock guitar player.

Do you write songs like traditional musicians… or do they start as characters, scenes, or stories first?

I can't speak to how traditional musicians write songs, but as I mentioned before they, more often than not, write themselves. At some point I will get an inspiration, or a nudge, or feeling to grab the guitar and then I will quickly stumble onto a musical phrase or a riff and it will strike me as something special. Other times, a turn of a phrase, or a few words, will grab my attention and it's like a little bell goes off and I know it is great lyric, or the lyrical thrust of a song, or the title of a song. Then there is a phase of developing the song and, of course, a creative dance between my own songwriting craft and allowing it to present itself. Oftentimes I jot down these little inspirations on a voice memo and don't come back to it for weeks or months only to listen to it again and have my mind blown as to where that came from. Ultimately, it is a spiritual experience.

Your world overlaps heavily with horror, steampunk, and the unexplained - what personally draws you to the paranormal? 

Ever since I can remember I've had a fascination with the Paranormal. In my younger years I was way into UFOs, extraterrestrials, Sci-Fi, the unexplained and the mystical. I have heard my music categorized as being associated with "horror" as a pop culture genre but it really isn't. "Horror" to me, is more about terror and fear and victimization and that couldn't be farther from the message of my music. The interesting thing about the steampunk thread is that there was a point in time when I gravitated towards the aesthetic of brass and copper gadgetry from some vintage form of technology that I didn't really understand where it was coming from. This was before I knew there was the term "steampunk" or an entire movement. When I discovered this,  I realized I was tapping into the same stream of consciousness that others were. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is some kind of unconscious memory of living in the time of Tartaria, if that was indeed a real thing. But when I did discover “steampunk” I really loved the aesthetic and how far people were taking it, but I came to realize that my music actually did not qualify as steampunk music. There are actually rather defined guidelines to what makes steampunk music, “steampunk” and my music is firmly rooted in the rock band template.  And although there are hints of the steampunk aesthetic in our fashion style, we don’t take it nearly as far as true steampunk enthusiasts. 

What was the inspiration for you to write "Things that go bump in the night"? 

Besides the obvious? It is simply a song that, on one level, celebrates a very Halloween-like, pop-culture human fascination with ghosts stories and the like, and on a deeper level, puts forward the esoteric truth that what we experience in the third dimensional realm is only a small part of the entirety of reality. One of the core messages of my music, in general, is that we are spiritual, multidimensional beings having a human experience.

Do you see your music as storytelling… or as a way of channeling something stranger?

Well, as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. On the storytelling side of it, I very much sing about the journey of life. The ups and downs, the struggles... the victories and defeats. In that, I aim to inspire hope, courage and comfort. On the “stranger” side, I would say I am definitely channeling esoteric truths about the spiritual nature of being incarnated in the body on the material plane in this journey of life…and all that comes with it.

Have you ever had an experience - paranormal or otherwise - that influenced your sound or performances?

At this point in my life, I have done so much spiritual work on myself, that the spiritual realm is a constant influence. Even bringing the music and songs into existence is a sacred mystical experience most of the time. 

Tell me about a weird experience you've had while on tour.

I have had plenty of experiences with technical glitches that made no sense, had no reason to happen that forced me to make due with an alternative solution, only to find that the gear worked perfectly at a later time in another place.  It can be quite annoying and troublesome.

There’s something about old carnival music and the paranormal - they seem to live in the same space. Why is that? 

I would venture to say vibrational resonance. There is/was so much enchantment around carnivals. Early carnivals were all about mysticism and the “uncanny”. Fortune tellers and mediums and freak shows must have really challenged reality to early carnival audiences. That psychic energy still exists in the collective unconscious, I bet. Then throw in the warped, slightly out of tune music… 

A lot of the paranormal is rooted in place - forests, old towns, forgotten roads. If you could perform in any paranormal hot spot - Area 51, Stonehenge, etc, where would you choose? 

Probably somewhere like the pyramids in Egypt or in Chichén Itzá. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle. I was fascinated with the Bermuda Triangle when I was a kid as well.

If your band had existed 100 years ago, do you think people would’ve seen you as entertainers… or something stranger?

Well, if we were rocking electric guitars and full band configuration, they’d probably think we were time travelers. Maybe we really are….

Now Playing: A Funky Space Reincarnation - Marvin Gaye 

Blue Banana Gets Weird with Jude Rawlins of Pink Flag

Some artists make films. Others chase visions. Jude Rawlins belongs firmly to the latter camp. He's a British-Irish filmmaker, musician, and multidisciplinary creator whose work moves comfortably between mysticism, underground music culture, and experimental cinema.

Born in Birmingham, England, in 1972 and now working between New York and Iowa, Rawlins first emerged through music as the singer-guitarist and principal songwriter for the Subterraneans and later as a collaborator with the Lene Lovich Band. But sound was only the beginning. His filmmaking would evolve into something more esoteric - a search for meaning through image, myth, and forgotten histories.

His 2009 feature Albion Rising resurrected visionary poet William Blake in a dreamlike meditation on art and prophecy, while Songs of Alchemy explored the angelic communications of Renaissance occultist John Dee, blurring the line between historical drama and spiritual inquiry. 

His award-winning short The Divine Image captured the attention of festival audiences, earning the Ken Russell Award at the Edinburgh Fringe - an apt honor for a filmmaker unafraid of the surreal.

Rawlins’ projects often orbit cultural outsiders and visionary figures, from reinterpretations of Faust to tributes honoring filmmaker Derek Jarman. Even his early life hints at a lifelong fascination with imagination and exploration - winning an art prize at age seven for a painting of the Skylab space station and excelling as a youth chess champion.

Part filmmaker, part musician, part modern mystic, Jude Rawlins continues to create work that feels less like conventional storytelling and more like transmissions from the borderlands between art, history, and the unseen.

His art is coveted, whether it's film, ink or music. Once while living in New York, he was featured on Handsome Dick Manitoba's podcast. Cyndi Lauper heard it and tried to get him to join her band, but Jude was unable to commit because he had the wrong type of visa at the time. "One thing leads to another," he told me. And now he's in Des Moines. 

Pink Flag

Pink Flag is the name of Jude's current project, a band that is as much Des Moines as it is Birmingham, spiced with flavors from New York, Los Angeles, and regions all throughout Europe. The name comes from the 1977 album by Wire, "Pink Flag." It fits the aesthetic perfectly - Wire is considered a highly influential art-punk band from the UK and well... we can see exactly how this lines up.  

"Pink Flag" the album shattered punk’s rulebook by stripping rock music down to its barest, sharpest most skeletal form. Packed with 21 songs in roughly 35 minutes, the album rejects excess in favor of precision - many tracks end before they fully settle in, turning riffs and lyrics into fleeting, almost conceptual statements.

How does this line up in regard to Jude's new band? Well, I'm excited to find out. 

 

Pink Flag, fresh off tour with Devo, the B-52s and Lene Lovich, consists of Dani Warsdottir on vocals, Jude Rawlins on guitars, Beth Spaniel on bass, and Celestino Ramirez on drums. They will be playing this Saturday night (April 11) at Maggie's Rumble Room in Des Moines. They will be accompanying Iowa's own sonic warlords Jacob County and the Damaged Goods. 

Then they play again on June 13 at Locals alongside Toon Smokes and Bhagwan. 

Jude was kind enough to let me ask him a flurry of questions ranging from what his musical influences are, to his thoughts on Emergence Theory and other quantum concepts, and his interactions with the paranormal. Yeah. We went all over the place with this one. 

Hey ho! Let's go!

Before we get weird — can you tell readers a little about your musical background and what kind of music you make?

 My major influences are punk and post-punk and Sixties proto-punk, but I have always listened to everything except metal and jazz and shitty manufactured pop music. When I was germinating the concept for Pink Flag I was listening to a lot of Killing Joke, Wire, Gang of Four, and the first Siouxsie and the Banshees album The Scream. I’d been listening to this music forever but it started to make a new kind of sense to me. I loved American bands like X, Mission of Burma, and The Adolescents. I also rediscovered bands like Crass and The Poison Girls, Flux of Pink Indians, etc. For me there’s a musical tradition that includes all of those things, but it starts with The Stooges and ends with The Smiths. The Queen is Dead is the full stop, there’s loads of music that came after that I love, but nothing I would really honestly call an influence. I do think we have a kinship with a lot of current bands, like Amyl and the Sniffers, Tropical Fuck Storm, Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten. Right now is a really great time for music, the best in decades. But it still all comes down to side one of Funhouse by The Stooges. The four most perfect rock songs ever captured in a studio. That’s still the high watermark. That’s still the one to beat, but it will never be rivalled.

Do you feel like creativity and the mysterious are connected? In other words, does exploring the unknown influence the way you write or perform music?

 I think creativity at its very heart is an exploration, one of the main reasons we become artists is to try to make sense of things. And we never succeed, but we keep going, we keep reaching, like the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby. That’s why I’ve never liked U2, their songs always just sound like unsolicited advice to me. They exude self-confidence, which is the dullest thing you can ever do as an artist. Take the Ramones or Joy Division or Nirvana, their power came from their fragility, their self-doubt that everyone can relate to. They looked like they could snap like a twig at any minute, yet they just soared instead, like lightning in a bottle. That’s why there are so many sonnets and poems and love songs in the world. Love is the very center of the human condition, and yet it’s still a mystery to us. Without art, it would be inexpressible. The same way nothing can only be expressed through mathematics, the number zero. Without a language or a form, a mode of expression, everything worth our time and attention quickly becomes very big and complex.

You mentioned having witnessed incidents “from the spooky to the downright weird.” What’s one experience that really stuck with you?

When I was a teenager I had a close friend who took her own life. About a year or so after if happened I was sitting on a wall in front of the local library with another friend, and across the parking lot we saw this girl walking down the street, and we both immediately recognized her as our dead friend. Her hair, her clothes, the way she walked, everything. We exchanged a look of complete shock, then jumped to our feet and bolted across the parking lot. She passed behind a wall just before we reached her, and when we got there, there was no one there. Like, nobody, the street was deserted. We still talk about it to this day. I don’t believe in ghosts, but the discovery of Higg-Bosun opened the door for me to Multiverse Theory and the whole world of Quantum Mechanics as something worth exploration. If you are serious about wanting to understand the universe then you have to take Einstein and Stephen Hawking seriously.

 

You also mentioned ideas like emergence theory, quantum echoes, and Hermetic concepts. What first drew you to those ways of thinking about reality?

It all started for me with William Blake. As a choirboy I was required to sing hymns on a Sunday, which are all basically the same. Then one day we were singing “Jerusalem” and it was like a thunderbolt. I started reading Blake and everything changed. I discovered the Sex Pistols around the same time, and the relationship between William Blake’s urge to create your own systems or become enslaved by the systems of others’ and Johnny Rotten saying you don’t need permission for anything, was almost immediately obvious to me. I became interested in Alchemy because of Carl Jung, who thought the Enlightenment was too quick to throw everything away, that there was still stuff to learn from the Ancient Wisdom. I found myself disappearing down the same literary rabbit holes as people like Patti Smith and Jaz Coleman, so I knew I was on to something. I don’t know if Emergence Theory will turn out to be correct, but I feel it is by far the best we have at present.

If you could play music at one truly mysterious place - Area 51, Skinwalker Ranch, Easter Island, or somewhere else - where would you choose and why?

 

There’s so many. I’ve recorded inside the Teufelsberg in Berlin but I’d love to play a show there. Maybe in front of Newgrange in Ireland, or on the steps of the Sacre Couer in Paris. Or in the volcanic caves beneath Naples in Italy. Part of me really badly wants to play in the Badlands, but another part of me thinks we should just leave it alone.

 

 What was the specific moment in your life when you realized the world might be more supernatural than we’re told? What happened?

 I don’t really think of anything as “supernatural”. I think everything is implicitly natural, whether we understand it yet or not. But I do find it pompous an arrogant when people claim the righteousness of their position, be they religious fanatics or atheists. The only certainty is uncertainty, and one of the most valuable life lessons is coming to terms with that. People want to believe in an afterlife because, quite reasonably, they are afraid of dying, because of the simple fear of the unknown, which gives us a healthy respect for life until you interfere with it and start laying down beliefs instead of suppositions. To me, spirituality is the opposite of materialism, but I can’t think of anything more materialistic than bribing people with promises of everlasting life. You’re just exploiting their deepest fears. We have a need for certainty that can never be met. I suppose that makes agnosticism seem like the most sensible proposition, but then an agnostic is still an unbeliever, so it’s just atheism without the vitriol towards religion. It’s none of my business what other people choose to believe, or why, or how. I just think that life is the most valuable thing we have, it might be our only time-off from non-existence, so I think the right to life is the most existentially important thing that we should all agree on. Thou shalt not kill. I can live and let live with anyone who truly believes that.

After everything you’ve experienced or thought about over the years, what’s your personal feeling about that supernatural side of reality? Are we dealing with unknown phenomena, something paranormal, or something else entirely?

For me, unknown phenomena, 100%. We may figure it out, we may not. There are things we know and things we don’t. It’s fine to have theories about the stuff we don’t know, that’s how we may eventually get to understand them, but anyone who claims to know anything about them is actually committing a form of blasphemy in my opinion. Ironically, the Gnostic scriptures, the true historical basis for Christianity, agree with that position entirely. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene warns against following leaders, that all prophets are false. There will always be things we don’t know or fully comprehend, and we just have to accept that. But when there is empirical evidence, then that should have precedent. For example, if we were to see water flowing uphill, natural law says that is impossible because Gravity is one of the few constants in the universe. So if it were really flowing uphill, what would the best available explanation be? It would be that it is actually flowing downhill (which doesn’t break natural law), but backwards through time (which, and standby for this, ALSO doesn’t break natural law.) As outlandish as that sounds, once you obey the law of Gravity, and you get into Emergence Theory’s ideas about time not being linear outside of our experience of it, which is what creates Quantum Echoes (you think of someone and they are the very next person to call you, or you remember and episode of an old TV show and the next time you catch it that is the episode on air) whereby the future influences the present as much as the past does, but we experience it only when we reach that point in the future, which we call Déjà vu. Is it the right explanation? Who knows, but it’s a lot better than any theory that doesn’t follow the empirical evidence.

 

If you could witness one unexplained phenomenon with your own eyes—Bigfoot, a UFO landing, a ghost, or something else—what would you choose?

I’d take the UFO, definitely. When we were on tour last year we went hundreds of miles out of our way on a dodgy tire to see Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, because Close Encounters of the Third Kind is such a wonderful, inspiring and hopeful movie. It’s a statistical probability that we are not alone in the universe, and I would love to know for sure.

Finally, what are you currently working on musically, and where can people find your work?

We’re just putting the finishing touches to our debut album, and we’re booking shows wherever will have us. The best place to find info and links is via the website, www.pinkflag.band - that will lead you to Facebook, Bandcamp, YouTube etc.

Now Playing: "Next Big Thing" - The Dictators (RIP Ross) 

Classic Cases: The UFO Sightings of Kumburgaz Turkey

As a child Yalcin Yalman had a strange experience while fishing with his father. 

At just 12 years old in northwestern Turkey, he was on a routine fishing trip with his father on the Marmara Sea when, about an hour into the outing, a sudden ringing filled his ears and an overwhelming urge made him look skyward. As he glanced up, he spotted three mysterious crafts hovering high above their boat. Shocked, he pointed them out to his father - a colonel in the Turkish military - and together they watched in astonishment as the silent objects hung motionless in the sky before, in an instant, accelerating straight upward and vanishing into the atmosphere.

He didn't realize it at the time, but that moment would mark the first of many more encounters he would endure during his life. 

Several years later during the late 2000s, Yalam held a job as a night security guard working in the small vacation town of Kumburgaz, a seaside tourist suburb in the district of Instanbul. One night during his shift, he once again began to notice strange activity over the water.

The first time he saw the lights, the security guard assumed it must be an optical illusion, perhaps a distant boat shooting off flares, or a hallucination brought on by boredom. 

The next time he saw them, he wondered if it could be a blinking planet, or a shooting star, or maybe a satellite. 

But during the third night of observation, he became convinced that the objects hovering over him in the night sky were something entirely different. Something not from this planet. He thought back to his childhood. He remembered the ringing in his ears. 

Unlike many UFO witnesses who report brief flashes or distant lights, Yalam had something rare: time, opportunity  and a camcorder. Instead of relying on memory alone, he began to record the object in the sky. 

What followed would become one of the most documented UFO recordings ever captured by a civilian.

Over the course of three summers, Yalman filmed the object 23 separate times. Some recordings lasted several minutes, which is unusually long for UFO footage. This allowed viewers to study the object’s shape and movement in detail. To record, he used a Canon GL1 Mini DV, which was a highly regarded 3-CCD Mini DV camcorder, released in 1999, known for it's high quality flourite 20x optical zoom lens and compact design. It recorded to a digital video cassette, which has now become obsolete. In other words, editing and manipulating the footage would be extremely difficult. 

A photo of a craft captured on Yalman's camcorder

The object appeared metallic and structured, sometimes resembling a curved or crescent form suspended over the horizon. In certain zoomed segments, observers claimed they could make out shapes inside the craft itself. Some believers claim that they can see what appear to be alien occupants. 

Soon, the footage reached Turkish UFO researcher Haktan Akdogan and the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center, an organization dedicated to investigating aerial anomalies. After reviewing the recordings, the group declared the footage authentic - a conclusion that propelled the case into mainstream media.

News outlets across Turkey - and eventually around the world - picked up the story. The idea that clear, repeated UFO footage existed captivated audiences already fascinated by unexplained aerial phenomena. The recordings were later submitted to several official institutions for analysis, including Turkey’s National Council for the Study of Science and Technology, plus institutions in Chile and Japan. Investigators searched for signs of manipulation, hoaxing, or digital alteration. None were confirmed.

The object was ultimately categorized not as extraterrestrial, but as something equally intriguing: An unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP). In other words, real footage of something that could not be explained.

However to skeptics, this presented an invitation to look closer for a conventional explanation. Alternative explanations were proposed, ranging from distant ships distorted by atmospheric conditions to optical effects caused by powerful zoom lenses filming across open water.

Either way, the sheer volume of recordings elevated the case beyond a typical sighting. 

Yalman was not alone in reporting strange activity. Multiple witnesses described seeing similar lights and objects along the coastline, and interviews conducted at the time added layers of testimony rarely available in UFO investigations. Others also have recorded footage of these extrordinary crafts. Once, during an interview with a local news agency, Yalman began to hear that mysterious ringing in his ears. He asked the crew filming him to follow him, and he ran outside. There, above the building thay had just run out of, was a craft hovering in the sky. The news crew was able to capture it on film.

Yalcin Yalman holds a UFO model 

In later years Yalman reported that he's experienced  visions or “astral journeys” and has had communication with beings allegedly from a distant star system.

He said the entities he encountered - in his childhood experiences and later his “contact” episodes - originated from the Zeta Reticuli star system, a binary star system about 39 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. He described the aliens as tall, humanoid, with a crystalline or semi-transparent appearance, aligning with the stereotypical “Nordic” or “Zeta” aliens in UFO lore.

According to Yalman, these beings were observers of humanity, monitoring environmental and societal development. He claimed they occasionally intervene subtly, offering guidance or warnings, but never direct interference.

More than fifteen years later, the Kumburgaz sightings remain unresolved. Skeptics propose their alternative explanations (including Yalman's "crazy" claims of contact) while believers argue that the consistency of the object’s appearance, the duration of recordings, and multiple years of sightings make simple explanations unlikely.

No single theory has managed to close the file. 16 years later, the mystery endures, with no convincing explanation for what was seen.