New article at We Are The Mutants - Men in Black

If you've been reading the site for any length of time, you'll know that I have a longstanding interest in the unexplained and paranormal. Particularly UFOs and all of their associated phenomena! Well, given that the new Men in Black film was just released, I thought it was time to take a closer look at the possible real-life origins for their entry into the wider discourse around UFOs.

You can find my piece over at We Are the Mutants -- Harbingers of Paranoia: How Men in Black Infiltrated the UFO Phenomenon.

The Westall UFO (We Are The Mutants post)

As regular readers will be aware, I write for other sites occasionally. You'll also know that I've written about UFOs and aliens from time to time, usually in the context of the Sunday Afternoon Reader articles.

Well, those interests have finally combined in my first piece for We Are The Mutants! A relatively new online magazine, We Are the Mutants focuses on the history and analysis of Cold War-era popular and outsider culture, with a strong emphasis on speculative (sci-fi, fantasy, horror), genre, pulp, cult, occult, subculture, and anti-establishment media. In other words, it's right up my alley, and I think a lot of you will really enjoy it too. There's plenty to be found for nostalgia buffs and more serious historians alike. 

I've put together a piece about the 1966 Westall sighting, a famous Australian UFO incident. With a huge crowd of witnesses to the event and possible government conspiracy to cover the whole thing up, it's a fascinating insight into the Cold War paranoia of the time -- and you can read the full story here.

This will hopefully be the first of several pieces from me for We Are The Mutants. As always, keep an eye on this page for updates, but you can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook too. 
 

Lego Review: Creator 3in1 Modular Winter Vacation (31080)

Creator is great at slice-of-life stuff, frequently accompanied by a healthy dose of the fantastic. Most of the sets would look great in a full-blown City set-up, but they also work as standalone dioramas for your desk. The Lakeside Lodge that I bought a couple of years ago is a great example, and this one probably exemplifies it even more effectively.

Today though, we take a look at the Modular Winter Vacation. The primary build of the set – seen in these photos – is essentially a chalet. Originally developed in the Swiss Alps, you can now find them dotted all over snowfields around the world. In real-life, its angled roof serves a practical function; snow naturally slides off, preventing build-up and reducing maintenance in the process. Sadly, in real life a couple who can afford to rent or own it would likely be extremely high maintenance.  

However, Lego is free of real-life WASP-ish social concerns and so the minifigures included in this set look friendly enough. There’s a guy and a girl – presumably a couple, though you can insert your own narrative here – equipped with skis and a snowboard respectively. You can make either of them bust out a sick 1080 if you want. Neither of them warrants a lot of comment; they’re both dressed in appropriate snow gear but they’re not particularly exciting. Though in a nice touch, the guy also has a frightened face printed on him too, which is great if you want to send him down the sloping roof of the house.

The chalet itself is great fun to build; a deceptively simple design that looks quite impressive, effectively creating the illusion of fallen snow and a cosy cottage. There’s two exterior elements too; a snow-capped tree and a bench for lunch.

The interior isn’t as great, but it looks generic enough that it could be a place to stay, a café or perhaps even an equipment rental store. For myself, I’m sticking with accommodation, particularly as that’s how it looks from the front.

On the roof, there’s also an area for the holidaying couple to sip on schnapps, beneath the light of a lantern. An owl also perches on the balcony, presumably drawn by the heat – and here we move to an unusual point.

Towards the end of building this set – actually, pretty much when I got to building the owl – I stumbled upon a subconscious reason as to why I may have wanted this set in the first place. Sure, it’s pretty cool in its own right, and the build featuring the Yeti looks really fun. But I think an underlying reason I wanted it was because the main build looks a lot like the way I used to picture Whitley Strieber’s cabin in Communion. Those of you who’ve read the book or seen the movie will also know that owls play a significant role in the narrative, which makes its inclusion particularly poignant. As you can see in this link, it doesn’t look much like the real thing. But I first read the book around ’98 or ’99, and I don’t think I ever saw a picture of his cabin until ’10 or ’11.

There are two other ways to build the set – a bobsled launching point, and a public toilet being attacked by a Yeti. I like both of them, but my main issue with them is that they’re sort of devoid of context on their own. Ideally I’d buy three separate copies of this set and build them all together, but in the meantime I think I’ll just maintain this build for display.

Even without the (admittedly tenuous) Communion connection, this is a really fun set. It doesn’t have a lot of other sets to go with it at the moment, but hopefully there will be more snow-themed sets in the near future. It’s an area that could have plenty of potential and hasn’t been widely explored outside of the of the Arctic-themed City sets a few years ago. Highly recommended.

Alien Funko POP! (The X-Files)

Theme: X-Files

Series: POP! Television

Year: 2015

From a rational perspective, I think it’s very likely that there is life elsewhere in the cosmos. The chances of it visiting earth on a regular basis, however, are substantially lower. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the possibility and thus I have cheerfully invested a good chunk of my life reading about topics which are (at best) on the fringes of science and outright fraud at worst. Wasted time for some, hours of entertainment for myself. So it goes with just about every hobby, I've found.

This has been going on since I was quite young, so naturally I was interested in The X-Files as a kid. But my parents felt that it would probably give me nightmares – fair enough, considering I was only 8 in 1993. As an adult, I ended up watching the first two seasons, which were great fun but not really compelling enough to make me watch the remaining seven (though I’ll probably give series 3 a go at some point).

From a solely X-Files perspective, this alien is okay but not great. Of the four POPs they’ve released, I think the Cigarette Smoking Man fares the best in comparison with his real-life counterpart. Scully looks the part, but Mulder could be anyone. Likewise, looking at images of the aliens in the series, this guy looks a little off. But don’t think that means I don’t like him – quite the opposite, in fact. The fact that it’s X-Files merchandise is really neither here nor there for me; it’s clearly a Grey and the Funko style renders it generic enough that it’s not tied specifically to that brand. Naturally I hope they do a few variants of this guy – green, glow in the dark, metallic, to name a few. I would happily buy a small army of these guys, were space and finance to permit it. Realistically, I think the smart money’s on the GiTD variant – and if Funko doesn’t do one, I may have to buy a second one and paint it myself.  

Given Funko’s investment in original moulds of late, I suspect we won’t see this piece reused very often, if at all. Though it would be great to see this sculpt reused (and maybe slightly retooled) for a Communion series of Funko POPs. It’s shocking that Christopher Walken doesn’t have his own POP yet -- but Communion seems oddball and obscure enough for it to work.

At any rate, this Alien has been an essential addition to my collection since I first saw him previewed – your own mileage may vary a little, depending on your tolerance for unusual ideas and/or X-Files fandom. 

The Lupine Book Club Sunday Afternoon Reader -- Part 2

More Sunday Afternoon reading! Let's get into it. See the Part 1 for an explanation of what I mean by Sunday Afternoon reading, should you require one.

Messages – Stan Romanek (2009)

Pic from Amazon.com

A few months ago, my dad leant my sister this book. She’s currently undertaking her PhD in psychology, so my dad was interested to hear what she thought about it from a psychological perspective. So I decided I’d have a read as well.

One of the main points which distinguish the book from the hundreds of others like it is that author Stan Romanek seems to have accrued a number of photos, as well as some video footage, of his abductors. Unfortunately, many of them do not seem to have made it into the book. I can appreciate that there are space considerations, but it does his story no favours when he talks about amazing photos he’s taken, then doesn’t include them. And to put it rather bluntly, regardless of where you sit on the sceptic/believer spectrum, the included photos are not going to impress. The same applies to his footage of “Boo” (one of a number of named aliens in the book) which you can view here.

Still, Messages is an entertaining, enjoyable read, and – whether true or not – a good introduction to the main tropes of UFO abduction phenomena. One of my sister's thoughts, incidentally, was that whether or not anything real had happened, he probably needed some counselling for stress.

Lego Batman – The Visual Dictionary

Pic from Amazon.com

I bought this while overseas in 2013 – I figured 5 pounds was pretty good for a Lego-related book and Batman minifigure. The book was definitely worthwhile -- covering the Batman and (DC) Super Heroes Lego from 2006 through to 2012, it naturally inspires a great deal of regret that I wasn’t paying more attention to Lego around this time (not that I could have afforded it back then anyway). Though a lot of licensed Lego is a mixed bag, the Batman theme in particular generated some really cool sets. Additionally, there are curiosities such as a prototype of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane – which will be showing up in 2015, albeit it different form.

Unfortunately, the minifigure was pretty disappointing in comparison to the book. Based on the Electro Suit from the 2008 Lego Batman video game, they’ve used the flimsy plastic that sometimes turns up in the Minifigures theme, the helmet doesn’t fit properly and he's missing the backpack that he has in the game. Nonetheless, when considered as a package, it’s definitely money well spent. No regrets about this one.  

Mysteries of the Unknown: The UFO Phenomenon (1987)

Pic from Amazon.com

I mentioned this book in the previous instalment of the Sunday Afternoon Reader. Of the two, I think it is the better, with more impressive illustrations, and an overall more unsettling tone. But of course, ideally you’d own both, even if they do cover some very similar territory.

A classy looking faux-leather cover, lots of metallic ink printing and many entertaining stories add up to make this one a winning combination. 

The only downside is that now I feel like I need to track down a copy of Mysterious Creatures, which was another excellent one from the series. It's still available reasonably easily, so it may be one to track down in the new year.

Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior -- John Man (2013)

Pic from Amazon.com

As we get older, there are certain beliefs we held as children that need to be challenged. One of them is the idea that ninjas were black-clad badasses who pretty much went around chopping people's heads off and then disappearing in clouds of smoke, leaving any survivors in awe of their near-supernatural abilities.

Sadly, this wasn't the case, and it's a shock I think most men struggle to come to terms with. It's way worse than finding out Santa isn't real. I don't think I've quite dealt with it yet, and so I cling to characters from my past like Storm Shadow and Raphael -- ninjas who do live up to my exceedingly high expectations.

Ninja dispels a lot of legends surrounding the titular warrior-clan, but it also contains enough sensationalism to keep the interest inflamed throughout the course of the book. Importantly, it shows that for everything we do know about the ninjas, there's a buttload more that we don't know -- after all, what we do know seems to indicate that they were deliberately secretive...in the meantime, I'll probably continue to use outrageous pop culture interpretations to fill in the blanks.

That wraps it up for another installment of Sunday Afternoon Reading -- Part 3 will hopefully not take as long to arrive as Part 2 has!

If there's a particular book you'd like me to look at in the future, post in the comments and I'll do my best. You can also visit the Lupine Book Club on Facebook. Click here!