A recent news item on how space junk is littering earth’s orbit caught my eye amidst a clutter of articles on the internet. Space junk is apparently making such a mess of the uppermost layers of the planet’s atmosphere that scientists are proposing an imminent clean-up.
Typically, the boffins at NASA and elsewhere have suggested investing billions of dollars to develop space technology which runs to the nature of exospheric versions of nets, magnets, and even giant umbrellas – while ignoring a similar problem close to home… the mounting piles of garbage in the lower levels of humanity’s habitat, the troposphere, which make life stink (quite literally) to high heaven.
If you had been keeping your eyes peeled for such weird news, too, you would also have noticed more such oddities jinking around in the information orbit. One particular eye-opener that caught my attention was the poorly reported happening at Mount Lavinia recently, where a clutch of Sri Lankans had their eyeballs popping at the alleged sighting of an UFO.
Apparently, this is not an isolated case. Earlier in the year, an RAF officer on holiday in the island ostensibly had a not-so-close encounter with a bright orange disk of light which gave off the sound of a thunder clap before it disappeared into the wide blue yonder. And the vacationing flying type is not alone. Independent observers all over the country have filed often sensationalistic reports of ostensible UFO sightings.
Another leitmotif in the news these days up to and including today is 9-11, or the now iconic events of September the Eleventh, 2001. On the tenth anniversary of the ironic enough attack by unidentified terrorists on the world’s solitary superpower in its own backyard, the media across the spectrum from big news corporations to humble bloggers have gone to town to revisit the events in downtown Manhattan that fateful day. And in much the same way that historians once dated the advent of the postmodern age to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, perhaps the philosophers of a future age will discern the turning of the tide yet again on this day not so long ago?
That all of these occupy the headlines in a news milieu at home that is much concerned with more mundane affairs is not puzzling in the least. As the erudite poet once observed, humankind cannot bear too much reality. And if it is inanities about impending elections or trivialities about forthcoming human rights forums that attract our attention more than the odd UFO, so be it! If we are deliberately banal about the political scene, it is because larger issues lurk behind the reported news.
Because the polity as a whole has become rather blasé about the certain uncertainties that prevail at home and abroad with sufficient impact as to have no ramifications for their already boring lives. Not even another 9-11 could shake us up enough to wake us up to alternate realities such as a cosmos teeming with non-human life…
These abstract reflections may have a more down-to-earth application for the pragmatic folks among this journal’s readers, who no doubt chafe at the bit at such non sequiturs. But what if the world technological community’s attention was focussed on taking the trash out at ground level, for starters, before venturing out into the ionosphere? What if the bizarre sightings in the mesosphere have less to do with aliens from strange or cosmic races, and more to do with a certain naked ape’s most recent covert defence – or, startling, stealthy attack – advancements?
What if all the security that remains in situ in an island republic that shall remain nameles in the fear, dread, or anticipation of a 9-11 on home ground by an as yet unnamed force inimical to national integrity and territorial sovereignty? Those UFO sightings taken in tandem with less recent reports of alleged intrusions of our air-space or flight information area or whatever it may be could well be ringing alarm bells in certain quarters.
Though you might be prone to dismiss such surmising as the fevered brow of sunny afternoons in which the original 9-11 is a memory or jagged tooth to which the tongue returns, there is no harm admitting that there is more to this world than is dreamed of in your philosophy.
Thankfully we have more worthy news and views to occupy us. Who cares a smidgen for careening UFOs when the nation’s IOUs are steadily piling up and our COL is on a thunderous ascent into the stratosphere? |
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