Hi Strangeness Arrives in "Space Odyssey" Form

The theory is that the contact is interdimensional, not extraterrestrial, and that it takes whatever form it finds propitious, taking into account the cultural sensibility of the time and place, which in turn may bubble up from Jung's "collective unconscious."

In the late 1960's, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick collaborated on their shared fantasy of an alien intelligence embodied not in a spindly, big-headed, black-eyed midget, but in something more unsettling -- a perfectly wrought but perfectly opaque and inscrutable geometric form, appearing on our planet intermittently, at times of great human paradigm shifts.  Their vision was audacious, among other things, because the role played by the black obelisk was akin to that of a pre-Abrahamic god -- the Golden Calf or maybe the fecund Earth Mother whose image was fashioned out of clay -- but stripped of all the meaning that comes with something that can be said to be "representational," be it calf or earth mother or sasquatch or skinwalker.

Seen through the prism (pardon the expression) of later events, it is hard to say whether Clarke and Kubrick's joint vision tapped into a pre-existing zeitgeist or rather helped to create a new one.

In 2009 and 2018, over the Kremlin and the Pentagon respectively, massive pyramids were captured on video hovering perhaps 1000 feet in the air.  They came with no internal or external light source; they appeared to be nearly translucent.  They were about the size of a three- or four-story building.  One, the Pentagon object, seemed to rotate slowly on one axis.

If the "object of the objects" was to intimidate us into more peaceful behavior than we have shown in the last few hundred years, in light, perhaps, of world-historical nuclear developments, then they picked a terribly abstract symbolism for their project.  A ten-armed Shiva wielding fiery swords, or even Godzilla himself breathing propane, would have done better.  But that's really not for us to say.  After all it is not we who are in charge.