God-whales on April 27 and Naples on May 11

After finishing some other things I'd been reading, I returned today to Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. The last time I posted about that book was in "Ugly flying starfish" (April 20):

1863 April 27th. Zurich Observatory. Dr. Wolf sees large number of shining disks coming from East. Some have tails, others are star-shaped.

This entry got my attention partly because of the date (April 27, the date of Dee and Kelley's whale vision) and partly because of the confusing description. How can "disks" be "star-shaped"?

"Star-shaped" things appeared again yesterday, in "Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid," because asteroid literally means "star-shaped." Bill tied this to the star-shaped island of Numenor (flooded, like the asteroid in the story), and the story also includes a star-shaped star:

As noted, that passage from Flying Saucers Have Landed caught my eye because of the date. April 27, 1584, was the date of John Dee and Edward Kelley's vision of a many-eyed Whale that represented God.

Today, reopening my epub of Flying Saucers after a fairly long break, I immediately ran across another reference to the April 27, 1863, sighting, some 40 pages after the one quoted above:

On 27 April 1863 Henry Waldner saw a similar procession [of flying disks] which he reported to Dr. Wolf, of the Zurich Observatory, who told him that a similar performance had been witnessed by Signor Capocci, of the Capodimonte Observatory, Naples, on 11 May 1845.

This must be a second reference to the same sighting, though the details are inconsistent. In the first telling, Dr. Wolf is the one who sees the saucers; in the second, the sighting is reported to him by someone else. Notice the "Naples, on 11 May." The first ever reference to Naples on this blog was published three days ago, on May 11, in "The secret rules of Wonderland."

Remember that the significance of April 27 is that it is associated with a vision of God as a Whale. Later today, I read this in Flying Saucers, commenting on possible motivations for governments to cover up UFO phenomena:

And if you were head of a slave state, and you learned one terrible day that there were greater gods in heaven than the ugly faces on your party posters, you would do anything to prevent the people finding out. For a big fish in a little pond can remain a big fish only as long as the little fishes know nothing of giant porpoise and ocean whale. The inopportune arrival of a mighty fish from the great beyond would reduce you to your proper size.

Here, "greater gods in heaven" and "ocean whale" are metaphors for the same thing: extraterrestrial beings of superhuman power.

John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices

On May 12, Debbie left a comment on my post "Under" saying:

Didn't all prophets at some point emerge from a cave?

The next day, May 13, I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, published May 11, with the headline "'There, It Couldn't Be More Clear,' Announces John After Finishing Revelation." It begins thus:

PATMOS — The Apostle John emerged from his cave earlier this week feeling confident that he couldn't have been more clear in his description of the revelation he'd received.

There is no reference in the Bible to John of Patmos ever having been in a cave, but apparently there is an extrabiblical tradition to that effect. The wording corresponds almost exactly to Debbie's.

The whole article is about how sure John is that he has expressed himself with perfect clarity, which should "keep anyone from coming up with weird interpretations" of his book. The joke is of course that Revelation is notoriously cryptic and confusing and has generated thousands of mutually incompatible interpretations. Calling it "clear" is so obviously false that it's comical.

On the night of May 13, some hours after reading the Bee article, I began listening to the latest installment in the series with Latter-day Chad on Zion Media:

At the 15-minute mark, host Shane Baldwin says:

Literally, John himself visited me when I was in prison in 2015, and he taught me this, and it's plain, and it's simple. And Revelation is, the Book of Revelation is one of the most plain and simple books you could ever read, once you have the codex.

I don't know what he means by codex here; I think it was a slip of the tongue, and he meant something like "they key to the code." Codex just means "book," though -- a modern-style book with pages as opposed to a scroll. Whatever Baldwin intended to say, what he actually said is that all you need in order to understand the Book of Revelation -- to experience it as "one of the most plain and simple books you could ever read" -- is to have the book itself.

The Bee article says the same thing:

When asked by a scribe the exact identity of the beast with ten horns and seven heads, John sighed with impatience and said to just read what he wrote.

"It's literally spelled out," said John. "All you have to do is read it. I can't make it simpler than that."

And, although the historical John would almost certainly have written on a scroll, the illustration accompanying the Bee article shows him with a codex.

Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid

On May 9, something random from my childhood popped into my mind for no apparent reason: a story revolving around a misunderstanding of the phrase "beans swell" -- which was intended to mean that some beans had swollen to gigantic proportions but was understood to mean that beans are really "swell," in the dated slang sense of nifty or smashing. I searched the Internet in vain, finally resorted to consulting a Fake Intelligence, and found that the book I was thinking of was Commander Toad and the Dis-Asteroid by Janet Yolen, which I presumably read shortly after its 1985 publication.

The title's portmanteau of disaster and asteroid most naturally suggests the idea of an asteroid hitting Earth or something like that, but in fact the disaster takes place on an asteroid which is, despite its small size, an inhabited world. Responding to a cryptic SOS call ("Help. Help. Beans swell. Beans bad."), Commander Toad goes to this asteroid:

Ahead on the screen is a pleasant world. It is filled with water. There are no cities, no houses, no bus stops or barns. Just water everywhere. Above the water, calling softly as they fly, are thousands of doves.

They soon realize that this word is not as "pleasant" as it appears at first:

Mr. Hop thinks. "Everything is flooded," he says at last. "And that means that the pigeon folk who live here have nowhere to land."

Commander Toad looks out again. This time he understands. "I wonder how long they have been flying."

Doc Peeper looks out another peephole. "I will have to treat a lot of cases of tired wings," he says.

A dove flying over a flooded world is symbolism right out of Genesis -- both the Creation, where "the Spirit of God," later symbolized by the dove, "was hovering over the waters" of a world with no dry land (Gen. 1:2), and the Flood, where Noah sends a dove out of the ark but "the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth" (Gen. 8:9).

In each case it is a single dove, though. For many birds flying over the flooded world and getting tired, we must turn to the Flood as portrayed in my Yes and No, quoted in "Ark in the dark" (December 2020).

The lions, tigers, bears, and horses

All were turned to bloated corses.

The cattle and the creeping things,

The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings

Had not at last the strength to keep

Them safe above the rising deep --

In short, all things in which was breath

Succumbed to universal death.

And God's own image, which had crowned

His whole creation, also drowned.

"Ark in the dark" coming up now is interesting, since I just posted "Voyage d'ark" yesterday.

In the story, it turns out the the asteroid is inhabited solely by intelligent doves, who has for some reason put let beans get in all their storm drains, where they swelled to enormous size, blocking the drains and causing the entire planet to flood. Stands to reason.

Last night I was listening to "Wild Roses" by Of Monsters and Men, and it occurred to me to wonder whether Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir had ever done any solo work. Wikipedia informed me that before OMAM she had performed as Songbird, and the most recent solo single mentioned in the article is "Disaster Master." Birds and disaster -- a  bit of a sync, though a rather weak one. I looked up the lyrics, which begin thus:

Take me out into the chaos

Waiting up for Helios

Bottled up with my emotions

Another drink to calm the ocean

The "chaos" and "ocean" references tie in with the doves over a flooded world, since in Genesis 1 this primeval ocean represents the chaos before Creation. Another line says:

Even Pluto was a planet, was a planet

Today Pluto is considered to be too small to count as a proper planet, though in the past it was classified as one. Asteroids, too, are too small to be planets, but in Commander Toad the asteroid is a "world."

Still relatively minor syncs, but I'm posting them anyway because it seems like they might develop into something.

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Note added: In a comment, Bill points out that a flooded asteroid suggests Numenor, which was star-shaped (the literal meaning of the word asteroid). One of the illustrations in Commander Toad shows a "shooting star" that is actually star-shaped:

There's certainly a resemblance:

That particular way of anthropomorphizing a star foreshadows the SpongeBob character Patrick Star.

"Shooting" has come up before, for example in "Hello. Goodbye. Shoot this man" (July 2025 but recently linked in "Just-ice and Al-ice") and in Angelina's approving reference to Melville as a "straight shooter" in "Terry the Giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences" (also July 2025).

Shooting stars feature in "All Star," a song which due to the Mandela Effect is now, it pains me to report, the signature song of what was in the old timeline a perfectly respectable ska-punk band. I posted about it in "All Star music video sync" (March 2025), a past that begins with a reference to "vulture bees." Vultures are the last birds mentioned in the closing paragraph of The Rot (see Laeth's comment below).

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Second note added: I just checked todays Barnhardt Meme Barrage and found this:

Bill in the comments mentions Pluto being the god of wealth, but he's also the god of the Under world.

A golden fist raised to heaven

On May 9, I posted "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam," in which I described the montage with which every UltraMormonChan video ends. I specifically mentioned this image:

This ends with a closeup of the Angel Moroni's hornless hand (it was dislodged in an earthquake in 2020, a sign the church studiously ignored), as if a fist raised to heaven.

Here are the two Moroni images shown in the montage:

Today, May 12, I discovered (via a couple of Babylon Bee articles making fun of it) that a golden statue of Donald Trump was unveiled on May 6, as reported in The Daily Beast. Here is the lead photo from that article:

The resemblance to Moroni -- without, ironically, his trump -- is obvious.

Even more interestingly, Debbie has often commented here about what she calls her "Where's My Horn?" dream, which she interpreted as foretelling the Trump presidency due to the trump/horn connection. An angel who has lost his horn is an even more direct link to that dream.

A further coincidence is that I fairly recently (thought I don't know the exact date) added to my sidebar images of golden statues of Joan of Arc and Moroni, together with an image of the Judgement Tarot card (which has a trump like Moroni and a flag like Joan). Back in 2021 I called that card "The Trumpiest trump" and wrote extensively about how it singles him out: "Name, birthdate, hair color -- it might as well be his damn driver’s license!" ("Who is Joe Biden?") I haven't had political syncs for some years now, but perhaps they're about to start again.

Voyage d'ark

This morning I woke up with a line from "Joan of Arc" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in my mind:

Now she's on her way to another land

During my lunch break today, I started reading Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad, a novel I picked up at a used bookstore some months ago for no other reason than that it had my name on it. (Tychonievich means "son of Fortune.")

When I set it on the table in the café, the waitress said (in Chinese), "Excuse me, is that the Bible?"

"No, it's just a novel."

"Really? It looks just like a Bible!"

This is the book she was talking about. If your Bible looks anything like this, you're much cooler than I am.

On the second page (p. x of an Introduction that begins with p. ix), I read this:

In the Second Starfaring Age we call that journey, as in another era deep in the past, the wanderjahr, though for some it is measured in weeks and for others in lifetimes. By whatever name that passage has been called -- wanderjahr, summer of love, grailquest, voyage d'ark . . .

That "voyage d'ark" obviously syncs with the song, by a band with Dark in its name, about Jeanne d'Arc being "on her way to another land."

I have some thoughts about this voyage but will have to think for a bit about how best to express them without being indiscreet.

Help, help, I'm being wholesomely repressed!

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

An obituary of Carroll in the Saturday Review pointed out that she [Alice] 'moves through her wonder-world with much of the modern spirit, which has now and then to be wholesomely repressed'. The notion that repression of any kind could be wholesome might sound surprising, although it was a standard idea at the time, bound up with a wider celebration of self-sacrifice in public service; hence Tennyson's dedication of Idylls of the King to the recently deceased Prince Albert, in which he praised the 'sublime repression of himself' that had distinguished a life 'modest, kindly, all-accomplished, wise' (p. 441).

The same day, I found this written on the side of a cake box:

It reads "Tea does our fancy aid, Repress those vapours which the head invade, And keeps that palace of the soul serene." It's apparently part of "the first English poem which included the word tea," written by Edmund Waller "as a birthday ode to Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II and the first British queen to drink tea c. 1662." How it ended up on a cake box in Taiwan in 2026 is anyone's guess, but it shows that the idea of "wholesome repression" is much older than the Victorian era.

Then today on Synlogos I found a link to a First Things article called "Kinder, Gentler Repression" -- obviously meant sarcastically, but in keeping with our theme if taken literally. It's a review by Helen Roy (whose name will be sadly incomplete if her middle initial isn't T) of Mark B. Smith's Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union As a Civilization, 1953–1991.

Soviet repression also figures in The Story of Alice. The Russian translation of Alice was done by none other than Vladimir Nabokov, and Douglas-Fairhurst notes that the courtroom scene in the final chapter -- with "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards!" changed by Nabokov to "Execution first -- sentence afterwards!" -- would be very dark humor for émigrés like Nabokov, since

Alice has become the victim of a show trial -- the sort of nightmare from which many of Nabokov's fellow Russians were unable to wake up.

I somehow never knew that Nabokov had translated Alice, but it is of course perfectly in character for him to have done so. I wonder how much my personal favorite Nabokov novel, Invitation to a Beheading, which was published 11 years after his Alice, owes to Carroll's topsy-turvy courtroom -- which is, it now seems obvious, a much apter comparison than the usual go-to adjective Kafkaesque.

Red rum, sir, is murder

This past Saturday, May 9, one of the reading comprehension exercises in the English textbook I'm using for one of my classes was a paragraph about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The first comprehension question after the article had four pictures of Egyptian deities (easily recognizable as Sekhmet, Bastet, Isis, and Thoth), and the students had to identify which one was Sekhmet based on the description in the paragraph.

At the time, something about the whole thing struck me as synchy, but I couldn't put my finger on anything in particular. At first I thought it was just that it showed four Egyptian gods. The UltraMormonChan montage I had posted earlier that same day in "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam" had included a painting of Abraham on an altar, about to be sacrificed to the Four Sons of Horus, but when I rewatched the montage I saw that that photo had actually been cropped so that the four Egyptian gods were not visible.

Today, though, the expected sync appeared, in the form of a comment by Bill on yesterday's post "Under." He writes, in part:

Nephi wrote that the secret combinations were synonymous with Murder - it was the specific work of darkness he called out - something you just alluded to again with your "Is Abel" play on words, in referencing the first murder of the Bible. I referenced Jack Nicholson's role in The Shining (Luciano means Shining as well). Murder was a central theme of that movie, but for most of it the word was said and spelled backwards: "Redrum", like something Mr. Mxyzptlk would do.

I dislike Stephen King and have never read or watched The Shining, but apparently redrum -- or, as in the well-known palindrome, red rum -- is a stand-in for murder.

Here is an excerpt from the Sekhmet paragraph:

Ra would send Sekhmet out to punish his enemies. In one famous story, she almost destroys the whole human race. However, she is tricked into drinking a lot of red beer, which she thinks is blood, and ends up too drunk to do her job.

Red beer is obviously a close conceptual cousin to red rum, and it, too, is linked to murder. Sekhmet intends mass murder and only drinks the red beer because she thinks it is human blood.

Bill brought in redrum in connection with Cain and Abel. Why were we talking about Cain and Abel in the first place? Because Debbie mentioned prophets being in caves and quoted (in a modern translation) the Lord's question, "What doest thou here, Elijah?", leading me to quote the beginning of "The Ghost of Abel," where Blake addresses that question to Lord Byron. In the climax of that play, Satan, defying Jehovah, refuses to accept any substitute for human blood:

I will have Human blood, and not the blood of bulls or goats,

And no Atonement, O Jehovah!

The Elohim live on Sacrifice Of Men: hence I am God of Men!

Thou human, O Jehovah!

By the rock and oak of the Druid, creeping mistletoe, and thorn,

Cain's city built with human blood, not blood of bulls and goats,

Thou shalt Thyself be sacrificed to Me, thy God! on Calvary.

In that same comments thread, I brought up my old semi-fictional reggae band Tycho and the Drifters. This is another link to red alcoholic beverages (though without a murder angle that I know of), since the most famous White reggae band is UB40, and their most famous track is their cover of Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine."