Aliens invade a book club (and other updates)
Thanks for tuning back into the BeX Files!
It’s a short file today with a few updates and links. To start, I’m excited to announce that First Contact has been selected for the Tompkins County Public Library (TCPL) book club. If you happen to be in central New York on January 22, join me at the Green Street branch for a discussion of the book from 6 to 7pm. Registration is required!
I’m especially stoked about this event because a big chunk of First Contact was written at this very branch, and I relied heavily on TCPL for research materials (along with Olin Library at Cornell University, where the sublime can be found hidden in the endless stacks). For that reason, the book club really feels like coming full circle on First Contact. Libraries rock! They are one of humanity’s best ideas, and I bet that if intelligent aliens exist, they have cool libraries, too.
I also wanted to share two new podcast appearances that posted this week. I spoke with Mike Carruthers on Something You Should Know about how ancient peoples imagined alien-human contact, to the mysteries of UFOs and UAP, to the modern search for life in a vast universe.
Here’s a short passage:
MC: Pop culture is filled with stories of aliens and pictures and ideas of what they look like. They're in movies and TV, comic books, and video games. Is pop culture what fuels our obsession with aliens? Or have people always been obsessed with aliens and because people are obsessed with them, pop culture delivers stories in movies, books and TV shows, because that's what we like?
BF: My personal opinion is that this must be a fascination that dates back tens of thousands of years, if not earlier. And the reason I think that is because you see in all myths that are surviving, from all cultures, an urge to personify the sky.
In many cases, this would have been for survival. People wanted to be able to link the seasons and other important information to the stars. But in order to do that, they made these tales about what might be living there. They would make the constellations into these various characters. There's no culture that doesn't do it. And so I really do think that that indicates that we have always had this premonition that we're not alone in the universe.
Last, I also had a blast as a guest on the podcast Real Life Sci-Fi with comedians Wade Randolph and Willy Roberts.
Their show is set up as a debate between a believer and a skeptic on an issue, with the guest brought in for their perspective. Our topic was Ancient Aliens, but the conversation veered into riffs on our favorite dinosaurs, the Loch Ness monster, and whether the Epstein Files might be on the 3IATLAS comet. In addition to the YouTube video above, the episode is available on Spotify and other platforms.
With that, time to close up the file for the week. See you at the cosmic rest stop next Friday!
