Around 6 or 7 p.m., I was reading Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. Specifically, I was reading the second chapter of the part written by Leslie, which is called "The Flying Saucer Museum" and consists of a long list of what we would now call UFO sightings, but which occurred before the modern UFO era. Most of the individual entries in this list have nothing to make them memorable, but I did notice this one:
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"?
At about 1:00 this morning, I was browsing /pol/ -- /pol/, not /x/ -- and found a thread asking, "So aliens are ugly flying starfish?" with this illustration:
The crown-of-thorns is notable for being a rather "ugly" starfish:
The first reply on the /pol/ thread suggests an answer to the question of how the same object could be both round and star-shaped:
it doesn't stay the samethey usually go between 3 different formsthe default form is a perfect sphere
The name crown-of-thorns obviously alludes to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the above picture, the cross hairs around the "ugly flying starfish" suggest a Christian cross. Specifically, they suggest the "cross potent" or "Jerusalem cross," the central element in the Five-fold Cross of the Crusaders:
That word five-fold is closely associated with starfish, which are among the few animals to exhibit five-fold radial symmetry.
Note added: Here's a bit of Synlogos feed poetry, funny in its own right but also relevant to Bill's symbolism of octopuses and spiders (not necessarily with the usual count of eight appendages) representing the "whore of all the earth":
Second note added: Approximately 40 minutes after publishing this post -- with its references to starfish, five-fold symmetry, and octopuses with unusual numbers of appendages -- I found that a student had forgotten this toy at my school:
A shape-shifting object in the sky that can appear either as an eight-armed "octopus" or a five-fingered "hand" was featured in my 2022 post "Lightning from the Sun?" That post is about lightning bolts, a symbol that also appeared in the "Bret Michaels" post with its crown-of-thorns reference.
5 comments:
Yesterday morning I had a dream in which you said your latest post included or involved in some way a being/ character named UHU, spelled like that in all caps.
I woke up and checked your blog a little later to see what exactly your latest post was, which turned out to be this one. Obviously no mention of an UHU, but I did look into any elvish word connections.
The prefix U- can mean evil, bad, etc., which leaves us with HU. A few meanings, one of which is Spirit / Shadow. An Evil Shadow could jive with where you took this post, which was back to Ungoliant. One translation of Ungoliant's name is "Shadow Spider". In conjunction with Shadow, earlier and related variants of Hu mean things like "gloom, night, fog, darkness, night, murk", etc.
Possible link, but I am not sure why the name was in that form in all caps.
I could swear I saw that first flying starfish in a Godzilla movie.
A three-letter name, all caps, beginning with U, suggests URV.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2026/04/harad-and-urv.html
When I was looking through old Scarlet Notebook poems and found the URV poem, I also found this and copies it out as potentially noteworthy. I wasn't sure why at the time, but your mention of "murk" suggests a link.
List Suva at the end
You list Suva at the end
You, you do, and yes, I do too
In the tub with an eel -- a skill, a skill, yes a skill
Elfin embossment grows thin
The urn peels, the two teepees nod in error
On the loom of evil
Detect two teepees nodding
I spent my tip, I was stiff, I stole the stars from god
A mix, a beam, or an emir hooting to his fellow
An all too domestic mix
Murk
In the murk, no nymph, no nymph
No nymph in the mud
In the mud, the mud, yet in the mud
A man in the mud
A mandrill in the light of the miner
Some interesting imagery in there.
Another translation of Ungoliant is "Gloomweaver", so the mention of a "loom of evil" caught my attention, as did the reference to stealing the stars from god, for a few reasons.
The following morning, one of my dream scenes involved regurgitating a foot. I basically threw up this claw-like foot which appeared, in the dream, to appear to be both a bony bird talon (I thought vulture in looking at it at first, I believe) and the paw of a wolf at the same time. I was sort of horrified by the fact that this came out of my mouth as I looked at it on the floor.
The act struck me very specifically as owl-like, in creating an owl pellet of undigestible material like bones and vomiting it. Later I would realize this imagery also correlates with symbolism in other stories, such as Moby Dick and Ahab's missing leg and its connection to missing shoes and feet. In the white whale symbolism we also went down the path of a regurgitated foot in the form of Ambergris.
Anyway, also yesterday my wife asked me to take a photo of wallpaper sample she had taped to the wall. I forgot, and she reminded me this morning. As I took the photo, the name of the wallpaper manufacturer jumped out at me: "Schumacher".... Shoe Maker in German.
The wallpaper itself is patterned in a light blue-gray lattice called Burley Orpington Blue, the color correlating with the blue-gray ambergris. The wallpaper is for our laundry room, potentially relevant since this is a room dedicated to washing and cleaning clothes..
Owls do sometimes attack poultry (such as Blue Orpington chickens) and regurgitate the bones in pellets.
In case you missed it, Captain Ahab came up in the comments here:
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2026/04/bowie-believers-and-marvel-universe.html
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