The Black Vault

Nan Outer Space, ,

Just discovered a website that might interest some of my readers. I found it through a daily email I get from The Guardian. As the title indicates, it’s called The Black Vault.

What prompted me to investigate was this line in the email write-up:

The CIA released thousands of documents on UFOs this week, which the agency claims is all of their records on the objects. 

It seems The Black Vault is an online archive of declassified government documents.

While I personally have no doubt there are UFOs regularly being detected, I am far from the belief they are extra-terrestrial in nature. Nonetheless, I’m aware there are MANY who are convinced that we are being “visited.” Thus, I decided to share the link for those who are interested and would like to investigate further.

Also, when I visited the website, I noticed there is a Message Forum and one of the categories is “Religion/Spirituality” … in case anyone is interested. 🙂

If you’re like me, you’re probably getting a bit saturated with all the “Trump News” — so I figured a distraction might be in order.

Enjoy! And report back if you so desire.

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Image by Stephanie Curry from Pixabay

31 thoughts on “The Black Vault”

  2. Re “If you’re like me, you’re probably getting a bit saturated with all the “Trump News” — so I figured a distraction might be in order.” Do you think anyone in the Trump administration is bright enough to dangle bright, shiny objects in front of our faces to distract us from what is actually going on? Naw … that couldn’t be … could it?

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  3. I saw that headline in my daily Guardian newsletter, but didn’t investigate … might do so later. Frankly, if we are ‘being watched’, they will surely be so disgusted by what they see here that they will hightail it back to their own planet and mark this down as ‘hostile territory populated by freaks and nutcases!’. Sigh.

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  4. This sounds interesting, Nan, but for me that time is not now. There is too much shit going on in the world to worry about shit from outside it.
    But, I will say this: I grew up believing in aliens. I even had a recurring dream as a youngster about an alien rocket ship landing in a park a few blocks from where I lived. Somtimes the occupants of the ship were bad folk, but at least as often they were fun-loving,generous folk. The closest I ever came to getting a story published was a story about aliens stealing things from Earth that they were able to make better use of than we were making here on Earth. The denouement came when they were discovered, but instead of treating them like criminals, earthlings conferenced with them, and we started trading our things for things from their planet we could make better use of. Win-win.
    A publisher loved the plot, but he wanted me to have a fight with the aliens, which of course we won, and and punished the aliens for stealing our stuff. I told him I couldn’t write that, the mutual-benefit outcome was my ending. His answer, then I can’t publish it. No one wants a peaceful ending.
    But anyways, that wasn’t what I wanted to say. In a book of epic space travel I once wrote, never published, I inadvertently wrote a line: the biggest shock humans found in the stars was that there was no other life, anywhere. Nothing but dead worlds, waiting to be infused with life from Earth!
    That line shocked me! I had never even considered such a thing, not in my worst delusions. Yet I had written it. It was there on the page in my typewriter. (Remember typewriters, lol?) Now I don’t know what to think. It is unthinkable that earth is alone in a universe as vast as ours, but why did I write that line. It didn’t come from me, did it?

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    • I’m curious. Why did your own line about “no other life, anywhere” shock you?

      Is it because you essentially believe there is life on other planets in the universe? And if so, what prompts you to think this? Is it related to your outlook on the after-life that you’ve expressed here and elsewhere? (No need for a dissertation — just a bit of sharing. 😉)

      Oh and BTW — I most definitely remember typewriters! Sooooo glad for progress!

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      • It shocked me because I had never considered the possibility of there only being life on Earth. I had read about other people wondering, but it made no sense to me. When I wrote the line, I felt sure it came from somewhere deep inside me, deep inside my spirit. I have been wondering ever since.

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    • That sounds like a great story, and there are outlets that would agree without pointless conflict and jingoism. If you still have the story, you can try magazines like Analog. There’s a new editor there, and if they buy your story I’ll get to read it since I have a subscription. Check out C Stuart Hardwick as a repeat author there. He has conflicts but they make sense within the stories instead of just being shoehorned in because the audience wants to see humans win.

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      • Unfortunately, that story was lost a long time ago, along with a lot of other stories and poetry, when I was locked out of an apartment I was living in–for non-payment of rent. I was paying my share, I thought, but it turned out my not-so-honest roommate whose name was on the lease was pocketing my money, not passing in on to the landlord. I begged and pleaded to get my stuff, but the guy absolutely refused, and one day took it all to the dump.
        The story still remains in my head, but I could never write it the way it was then. But I can tell you, for what it is worth, the thing the aliens wanted most from Earth was a wise old emperor penguin who was living at the time in the Vancouver (BC) Zoo. Humans could not converse with him, of course, but the aliens could, and he was almost like a god to them. He negotiated for us, and found things they had that we needed, while he went with them to live on their world. Win win.
        I cannot remember if it was Analog or Astounding that required the change, but I stopped reading magazines after that. It was about the time I discovered Philips K. Dick, and I became a Dickhead. (No one ever called Dick’s fans that, as far as I know, but Heads were people in the know in the 60s, so Dickhead would have had a totally different meaning then than it has today, lol. Thanks for your comment.

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        • Speaking of dicks … er … Dick, I just received his collection of stories a few days ago. I’ve read a couple of his creations so far. He is definitely an Intriguing writer. 🙃

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          • I am still trying to figure out his thought patterns. He is unlike anyone I have ever read, or met, in my life. Intriguing is definitely an intriguing description of his style.
            His collection? The entire collection? What did that set you back? With the amount of work he produced, I doubt I was able to ever find every book he ever wrote. I scored second hand book stores from coast to coast in Canada till my eyes went batty. There was no Internet in those days, no place to find a list of his complete canon. I have to tell you, Nan, I am mightily jealous.
            I would be very interested to know which novels and short stories you have read, and what you think of each of them. Too bad that would take a book or two to accomplish…

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          • Whoops! Sorry if I misled you — it’s actually the “Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick” © 2002. It’s a hardback –in excellent condition– that I got through Thrift Books for $7.95. Amazon sells it for $25.96; B&N for $30. Definitely not the entire collection!

            I’ve only read 2 short stories so far and am working on one called “Paycheck.” I usually only read for a short time in the early evening so it will take me awhile to progress. The first two were rather weird … “Beyond Lies the Wub” and “Roog.”

            Perhaps you can send me an email and we can share impressions?

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          • Unfortunately, I no longer have all my PKD collection, I moved around too much, and also books went missing through attrition. The titles you mentioned I remember, but the stories not so much. I have a few short story collections on my free kindle, I will see if those are there. Or if I can find them elsewhere.
            Will let you know.

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        • The 60’s? They’ve been through a couple of editors by now, at least. I remember those days of Analog. (just looked it up on Wikipedia – according to them It was during Campbell’s long-time reign, and the name changed in 60, so you probably submitted to Analog?) Bova then Scnmidt and now a new kid whose name I keep forgetting.
          I remember a lot of changes in sci-fi since I started reading older stuff in the 60’s and 70’s
          There was recently a series of stories fictionalizing Campbell and some of his weird beliefs. Fun times.

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          • Missed that series about Campbell, where might I find it. It wasn’t Campbell who ultimately rejected my story, but I did get a bunch of rejection letters from him. Now that I am thinking about it, I think it might have been The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or maybe Amazing Stories.
            Thinking back, the first story I ever submitted was a short I called Who’s Watching the Watchers? about a social experiment started billions of years ago by people of warring galaxies (Was I truly so naive as to think life in distant galaxies would all be human? I guess so!) where each galaxy housed a different race, white, black, yellow, and red. Radicals found a lifeless galaxy, and placed all the races on different star systems to see if they could grow up together in peace. They did not, so next they were put on planets within one star system. Again, war still broke out. Finally, they found Earth, where the different races were put on different continents, but still no peace. They were thinking about putting the races all on one continent somewhere when it was discovered non-radical whites had been manipulating the experiment secretly from the get-go, fomenting war between the races all the way. That started a fight between the social scientists, and the experiment was cancelled. Only then did Earthlings start to learn to get along, but it was too late. I had the white extremists blow up the planet. Now, 50-some years later, and I watch Trump fomenting racism. And I wonder, will we ever get it right?
            Campbell rejected that one, lol.

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          • Seems like it now, yeah. I was just trying to write something different but spacey at the time. My favourite was about a cat who was able to talk, and able to manipulate his claws like fingers. Lifetimes ago cats had crash landed on earth, and the technology wasn’t there to repair their ship. They willingly devolved into barely intelligent animals until the atmospheric radioactivity reached a certain level, then they would wake up to their true nature. The first one who woke up was named the Wandering Jew, and the story was called The Ballad of the Wandering Jew. The only thing I remember was the chorus:
            Have you seen the cat with the orange shoe
            Purple hair, and pink eyes two,
            Have you met the cat that could talk to you
            Have you seen The Wandering Jew?

            He makes his way to the Moon, then to Mars, and sneaks aboard a generation ship to the stars. He rewires the engine, and flies the ship to his home planet, a million years after the original ship left. He is a returning hero!

            Seen I had a real imagination in my youth. And this was before I discovered LSD, lol.

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          • The writings on Campbell were in Analog recently. There has been reflection on the magazine’s history during 2020, a 90th anniversary thing. Campbell was such a big part of Astounding/Analog that part of the retrospective was a couple of fictionalized mini-bios about him. The one I remember was when he and his first wife dealt with him getting involved in psi studies. Story goes that he had a surprisingly accurate run and obsessed about it for some time. I do remember a LOT of PSI stories in Analog from the 60s when he was eager to print those stories but I’m not sure if this story was an accurate portrayal of how he got there. He was also a hug L. Ron Hubbard fan, apparently, which I don’t understand at all. Hubbard always seemed to me to be a hack.
            New editor there is Trevor Quachri. Recent changes include fewer issues per year but slightly larger that used to be standard, sort of a cost benefit trade off to stay in business, allegedly.

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          • Next time in the city (800 kms or 500 m away) I will have to see if I can find a seller. Where I am the library only has about 5 science fiction books in it. Not much interest in the wild west..
            Thanks for the info.

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          • Thanks, they were from long ago. Maybe, when I am feeling better I will see if I can rework them. If humans don’t have to destroy aliens anymore, maybe I can get looked at, .ol.

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          • Oh, yeah, the Cold War is gone (or morphed) and the zeitgeist is geared more toward “how do we get along with each other after the s-fest we just put away?” so the market will be changing everywhere. (notion from analysis of movies like “Alien” as a metaphor for the fear of AIDS)

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  5. And why do you suppose people are not ready for this? The faith of millions of people, no, billions is at stake. Unable to comprehend, unprepared to find out that life hasan alternate meaning. I don’t suppose these aliens are familiar with the God of the universe Yahweh.

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    • How could they? That’s a definite earthly invention. But how can people be ready for progress when literally half of North Americans, or should I say Ancient Greece-based societies, still refuse to want to change. God-Yahweh-YHWH officially died in 1882. It’s time we buried her!

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