December 2024 – John D Reinhart

Cooler Heads

Following up on yesterday’s fearful diatribe, let’s us think for a minute, you and me.

IF the aliens use this hydrogen technology for fuel, they can’t be using a lot of seawater. All they use is a single hydrogen proton at a time. Seriously, how much water do they need, when, like, a teaspoon will get ’em from here back to the planet Zemnar, or wherever they live?

I mean, with global warming, the sea level is actually rising. That means they must know there’s plenty to go around.

If they were all that afraid of us, we’d be zapped back to the stone age already. That we’re not means we’re more of a sideshow than a threat.

The big WHEN of our cracking the hydrogen proton puzzle is decades away, and is still a pretty big IF.

And all of it is just theory in the first place.

So, until they land on somebody’s front lawn and say “yes, we’re using a proton-fission engine to create spacetime bubbles around our ships while we harvest droplets of your seawater for fuel and if you interfere with us we’ll zap you into non-existence,” I don’t think there’s all that much to be afraid of.

OMG, what if they land on MY lawn?!? I’ve got to go mow it right now!!!

I Have No Crackers

You know me, right? I like funny stuff, and writerly stories and stuff like that, right? Well, I just had the crackers scared right out of me. Right out.

I just finished reading Luis Elizondo’s book Imminent, you see.

It’s about UFOs, although they are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. They changed the name because our Navy ships have reported seeing vast, glowing orbs beneath the bubbling waves. And because of the Roswell crashed ship (no longer flying).

This author is the former top CIA guy who ran the UAP program for the Department of Defense and has worked closely with guys like General Jim Mattis and Senator Harry Reid. He’s legit.

He’s now gone public because he believes UAP are an IMMINENT THREAT not just to the country, but to humanity itself.

Because. They. Are. Real.

That’s pretty creepy, but here’s what scared the crackers out of me:

We’ve all heard about UFOs darting this way and that, super fast but usually silent. If you’ve seen one, and I have, you ask yourself how could they do that?

Well, Elizondo’s scientific team figured out that alien spacecraft have an energy source so profound that it warps spacetime. They travel through our atmosphere in a spacetime “bubble,” separate from our own atmosphere, yet passing through it. The bubble warps spacetime, allowing them to dart and dash around us and travel vast, galactic-sized distances in the blink of an eye.

The only way to generate so much energy that we know of is to split the proton of a hydrogen atom – we split the atom itself to make hydrogen bombs. Splitting the proton inside the atom releases way more energy. It works out in Einsteinian physics. (In a timely aside, I was reading about our own experiments with that just last week.)

So, these spacecraft probably run on hydrogen.

That’s why they’re here: our vast oceans are huge hydrogen reservoirs.

So it’s not about us, and never has been. We’re a convenient gas station. They’ve only ever been interested in our water.

Except that the UAP have frequently been seen hovering around our nuclear facilities.

Which means that now it is about us, because we’re starting to dabble with those super-high levels of energy ourselves. When we split the hydrogen proton, we’ll be a competitor for their fuel supply.

Elizondo’s team reasons that this is why aliens have been abducting humans – to learn our physiology. It explains the crop circles and the mutilated cows – to figure out what we eat.

He tells very scary stories of UAP starting and stopping our nuclear missiles – shutting down banks of silos, and actually launching a rocket, only to shut if off the last second before it left the silo. And shadowing our aircraft carriers and charging our aircraft. All to figure out and test our military capability.

They don’t want to invade us because they don’t care about us.

They’re just learning how to wipe us out because we’ll be a competitor. An annoyance.

If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, there is one more little data point: we have utterly no defense against them.

Now, Elizondo is a security guy with 22 years in the Army and CIA. He’s got that kill-or-be-killed mindset, and that’s why he sees them as a threat. But he makes it clear that we are no longer the dominant species on this planet, and probably haven’t been for a long, long time.

Now, maybe the aliens will welcome us into their spacefaring community. Maybe it’s not dire. I keep thinking that, like the Europeans first visiting the New World, there are different nationalities, perhaps races of UAP. In that case, maybe they won’t act in concert to eliminate us.

But we have no value to them. We’re like gnats, except when we start dabbling in that level of power. Then we’ll be an annoyance. Pests.

It makes me very sad to think that this could be our fate, that you and I could somehow be zapped out of existence, rather in the blink of an eye, I would hope, over reasons we’ll never quite understand.

Normally I’d make a closing joke, but, honestly, I don’t know what to think.

Read the book – Imminent, by Luis Elizondo – and see what you think.

Thanks for staying with me all these years!

Lost in a 3D Purgatory

I would say “3D Hell” but I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this week, and much prefer their version of H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks (because I won’t write hell.)

These times, they are a’changin’, and not so much in a way that you’d kind of expect.

My office is actually my bedroom, well, our bedroom, but it’s my office. Well, this little corner over here is my office, because, really, it’s our bedroom. My wife’s office is over there, in a former, not our, bedroom, and it really is an office. My office is this kinda cool, sorta funky desk/shelf combo we bought at Staples for $180 and I screwed together with that tiny hex wrench designed to strain your fingers… I digress.

I’m listening to zen music, a piece called E V E Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music designed to calm you down, help you destress…

You see, earlier this evening, my wife was in Ohio, heading into Indiana at 10 at night Ohio time in a snowstorm, with a plan to drive all the way to St. Louis, which was, like, another 3 hours. But she was open to staying the night in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Mr. Gallant (that’s me) got her a room in Terra Haute, on Highway 41. I texted her the address, 3300 Highway 41, like a nice guy. Turns out there are TWO 3300 Highway 41 locations, you see, and I forgot to include the word SOUTH in my text.

So she’s driving down dark, sorta scary, snow-covered roads, farther and farther away from Interstate 70, going the wrong way into the wilds of Terra Haute. Finally she calls, frustrated and cold and sort of furious, and we sort out my little oversight. oopsie.

Now I’m a little stressed. So, I thought I’d, you know, take an audio chill pill and listen to Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music, see? But the Internet signal in our bedroom is spotty, and the freaking thing keeps shutting itself off. And I’m getting….A. Little. Frustrated.

So, the point of this whole diatribe is to tell you another of my brilliant ideas. This one’s sure fire.

I found a company that makes little cars, see? Well, I have a passion for little cars. And they don’t have any fun animations on their website.

Why, if I was to cleverly build up a nifty little world in the free Blender 3D software, I could make them a video that shows my filmmaking genius to a tee and get them to hire me.

The company’s in New York, see, and I’m moving to New York in about 18 months, so it all works out brilliantly.

Except my Internet keeps cutting out and the freaking Ethereal Music is getting on my nerves and my wife’s stuck in a snowstorm in freaking Indiana because I sent her off in the wrong direction and now she’s mad at me and my copy of Blender keeps dropping out and screwing up my carefully organized little car files and my book is crummy and I just don’t think I can do this anymore.

I can’t do this anymore.

At this moment, it all seems so darned hard. So hard.

It’s a challenge, and I come from a long line of challenge-run-away-fromers. I’ve bucked the trend so far, but sometimes the old run-and-hide routine seems mighty alluring.

My wife’d kill me, though. She’s already mad at me, so it wouldn’t be much of a step to go to flat-out murder…

Wait, what is all this nonsense?

So here’s the writer’s story for you: you are your own worst critic. When it seems time to give up, time to run away, that’s the time to sit down at your computer and bang something out, because when you’re tired or stressed, you tell yourself the dumbest things.

My book is flat like last week’s Coca Cola. I get it. I see it. There’s a way to make it unflat, I know. When I find that way, heaven help the poor sod that keeps me from the rewrite!

My wife made it to the hotel, no thanks to me, and the Internet is back on. I think I know what’s wrong with Blender, and the little car video idea is actually a good one. The picture in the header is a neighborhood I’ve been working on. Not so bad…

Maybe I’ll run away next week. You know, honor the family and all…