Charting my Course (Ain't Nobody Going to Read my Mind)

One thing I noticed while reading UFOlogist is that the contributors seem very fond of charts.

Very fond.  The chart option on Excel has a lot to answer for.

Inspired, I decided to join in the fun.

The labels are probably too small to see, unless you move your face about half an inch away from the screen and squint.  I just tried that and I still can't really read them, plus I have a headache - so I wouldn't recommend that course of action.

Each of  the colours is the magazines we've had so far.  UFOlogist is green, Shop 4 Kids is red and in a completely unsuitable turn of events, Classic Tractor is neither John Deere green or Massey Ferguson red but is stuck with blue.

The categories are, from bottom to top, Craziness, Educational Value and Enjoyment of Activities.  So Classic Tractor was a low craziness (even with the sombrero-wheel-tractor-paint-fumes debacle), high educational value and relatively high enjoyment (mostly because of Toby's toy tractors).

UFOlogist, you may notice, actually wins the enjoyment of activities category.  Why?  Well, what better thing to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon with your 11 month old than make tin foil hats?

That's right, nothing.  

They're reading my posts!

After my expose on the National Australia Bank logo (well, ok, my mocking of the expose in UFOlogist), it appears the big banks are listening.

ANZ announced today that it was changing it's logo.  The old logo is the one at the top, the new one down the bottom:

News.com.au describes the new logo as 'blue blobs' but I am more savvy than that.  Two eyes, a mouth and antenna later:

ANZ has clearly joined the herd.   The Australian banking industry welcomes the new alien overlords!

Actually, sometimes it's just paranoria.

Today's featured article from UFOlogosit is by Jon Wyatt, who postulates that many corporate logos hold hidden messages of welcome to alien visitors.

          

The first one isn't a logo so much, as an ad promoting Connex's new sms service:  a fact Jon Wyatt does acknowledge, but adds 'but is it also welcoming any ET commuters?'.

Sure.  In the same way that ET was a giant conspiracy to make humans welcome our alien overlords as cute little creatures...  hang on a minute.  Maybe there's some truth in this alien conspiracy thing!  Or perhaps I've been reading UFOlogist a little too much lately.

Jon Wyatt continues.  Now I can give him that the Optus, Telstra, Powertel and Orica logos look a little spacelike.   Even the old Telstra logo (bottom right, first picture) could look, as he suggests, like a 'an ET with large hollow eyes gazing at us from a star field'.  If you squint and turn your head on the side.

The predominance of telecommunication companies represented gives rise to a query though.  If Optus, Telstra and Powertel really do have the technology to be in contact with alien beings, how come I still can't get a mobile phone signal in parts of Canberra?   You'd think that transgalactic communication would mean consistent coverage across the nation's capital would be easy stuff.

When the attention turns away from the telcos, things get a bit iffier.  Take the National Bank logo for instance.  It's a red star.  John Wyatt says it 'may symbolise the Planet Mars with the orbits of Phoebus and Deimos, its two moons, indicated by two notches'.  Ok, first off, Mars?  Doesn't look like a 6 pointed red star.  Mars looks like this:

Though, it is true that Mars is sometimes referred to as the red planet, and there is a Project Redstar which has released a video entitled 'Martian Genesis' which offers, apparently 'incontrovertible evidence of an extraterrestial base on Mars'.  The link is here - but don't go if you value your eyes.  

So perhaps the red star link can be justified - by use of a conspiracy theory.  Sure, using a conspiracy theory to prove another one, that's solid logical ground!  My debating coach would be so proud.

Taking the National Bank logo as welcoming the Martians causes some concern though.   There may be life on Mars, it's true.  But NASA tells us it would most likely be 'very small, bacteria-like life forms'.   National Australia Bank has designed its logo to make the alien bacteria feel at home?  

Good thing I'm with Commonwealth.

Now to give John Wyatt his due, he does present his findings in a not altogether serious manner.  (Which is good, because the RMIT logo looks less like a 'fiery object entering the Earth's atmosphere' and more like a sideways Pac Man baddie to me).   But I thought it would be worthwhile to see if anyone else had come up with the link between corporate logos and hidden messages to aliens.

What I found is 

1.  A lot of people suggesting a link between a 1967 sketch of UFOs and the XBOX 360 logo:

    

2.  If you google "alien conspiracy theories corporate logos", you're asking for everything you get.  (Apparently the Google UFO logo and Masonic/Illuminati conspiracy theories rule the roost (I blame you, Dan Brown!)).

Aliens of the world unite.

You know what's disappointing about UFOlogosit?  The lack of pictures.  Most articles are text heavy

and the one article that does have pictures, the photos aren't of aliens at all but planes.  Regular, run of the mill planes.

If that's an UFO, our recent trip to the USA was a lot different than I remember it being.

The lack of pictures is a pity, because if there were pictures, it would be a veritable multicutural plethora of aliens.   In one issue of UFOlogist, we have:

• Underwater aliens in Russia - 'mysterious underwater swimmers, very human-like, but huge in size (almost three meters in height!)'
• Dog or gorilla shaped aliens in Brazil (the accounts differ) - 'an enormous swift-moving ape that moved on all fours with large red eyes', 'a colossal dog that reeked of carrion'
• Cat shaped aliens in France and Spain - 'a hideous feline shape that darted into the surrounding darkness'
• Humanoid aliens in England (Finally! I was begining to think the animal aliens were taking over) - 'three very tall humanoids... their silver suits had no zippers, buttons or seams'

Given that UFOlogist hasn't given me pictures, I went in search of my own, with varying degrees of success.

The dog/gorilla alien could be from Alien 3:

The scuba diving aliens seemed to have combined with the cat aliens (which, let's face it - feline shape disappearing into the night?  Sounds like your standard backyard moggy to me):

But my greatest success was with the humanoids.  Tall, shiny tight silver suit, no zips?  Oh my god, they found Seven of Nine!

It's not paranoia if it's true.

Magazine Monday has rolled around again, and after the consumer bent of the last two weeks, I wanted to take another path.

I enjoyed reading about tractors, so I thought it was time to expand my vehicle horizons.  Now I could have chosen boats, planes (real and/or model), motorcycles, bicycles, cars, steam trains, electric trains or unicycles.  (Ok, I'm not sure there actually is a unicycling magazine.  But it wouldn't surprise me if there was.) 

I decided to think a little outside the square.   And so, introducing....

UFOlogist!

The subtitle is Beyond Imagination Lies Truth.

I can tell it's going to be an educational week for me, because the first page alone has taught me many new words and methods of scientific studies.  There's the relatively boring fields of geomancy, gematria and simulacra.   Then there's archaeoastronomy, a science described as "A field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other".  I'm sure UFOlogist falls into the high quality end.

My favourite however is euphonics.   Spell checker doesn't like it and google doesn't think it exists.  (And, in case you were wondering, Classic Tractor kicks euphonic's butt in a googlefight.)  So I figure by the end of this week, I'm going to be smarter than spellcheck and google combined.  Right?