Finding Common Ground Inside Denver International Airport

In the consideration of the arguments and circumstances for gaining common ground in human understanding, the astrophysicists and occultists still fail to leave room for the type of conclusion which, although it might exist as a kind of ultimate disturbance to the basic principles for understanding, is itself reached only by a careful adherence to the most common decencies in argumentation. Instead of humbling the arrogance of pure reason by divesting, article by article, the emperor of his clothing, they overlook the need for common ground by beginning at the end — mocking those who haven’t made the leap beyond logic, because we haven’t quite found its precipice.

They are — firstly — wrong to assume that any person could suffer existence and not know its precipice(s). And wrong — secondly — to presume that their distancing themselves from us would make us assume that the distance they create is the ravine we should leap across so that when we do leap, we should leap into their arms. Rather than struggle to enrich their readers by promoting true observation of purpose and design, they paint themselves as the ultimate designers, meanwhile committing the ultimate indecencies of argument, and consequently destroying any hope for powerful conclusions in the minds of truly intellectual readers.

Because they cannot twist any but the most weak-minded thinkers into their webs, they set out to attack outsider individuals with their tightly-knit groups. Naturally, those groups become radicalized, and their conclusions become vague, awkward, and often very difficult to even understand.

Thus establishing, to their satisfaction, that the intricate design of the universe presupposes an infinitely systematical creator, the apparent chaos in our world must be the result of a conflict of systems. While a conflict of systems precludes the possibility of an infinitely systematical creator, they now say that a variety of infinitely systematical creators does not. The conflict between multiple designs would explain how, for example, it could be that a universe with no latent energy in its empty spaces could expand at an increasingly higher speed. So it is said that gravity has a negative energy, called dark energy (some even theorize that this was the source of the Nazi interest in “black sun” technology).

To follow a typical occultist argument, we could begin to trace how the references to this energy have been theorized on earth in the texts from various ancient civilizations, creating linkages and inserting our own commentary along the way, increasing the distance between what we know and what we would like the reader to think they know or do not know. It is not even worthwhile to begin to ask ourselves whether such theories are “right” or “wrong,” or whether we “know” or “do not know,” because their imaginative scope already redeems them, in principle, for an imaginative reader. So let us imagine that they are correct to say that the expansion of the universe is the result of a kind of dark propulsion, invisible but omnipresent and omnipotent.

Does that lead us to conclude that Iraq II was fought in a final, failed attempt to enter Mesopotamia in order to retrieve an ancient Anunnaki star-gate, entrusted by that ancient, extraterrestrial race, to their earthly brethren, the Sumerians? Critics of the theory have a hard time answering for the astronomical accuracy of Sumerian and Akkadian planetary charts, especially for the inclusion of a mysterious, dark “planet X,” then known as Nibiru. While proponents of the theory say that this planet is now missing because it was knocked into a 3,600 orbit by a collision with the debris from an even more ancient collision with a planet called Tiamat (now our “asteroid belt”).

But, instead of such an elaborate set of postulates to establish the existence of this mysterious, dark planet, wouldn’t it be far more useful, and far less perverse, to follow scientific findings on common ground? Wouldn’t a dark planet be of that species of things that, when looked at through the dim visibility of a forest at night, appears to us as no more than another shadow in the woods?

And if it is a dark object in a dark place, couldn’t critics begin to think of the ancient accounts of its presence as fundamentally theoretical, predating the theories of dark energy and dark matter by several thousands of years? A theory itself, one might say, is never much more than the collection of invisible materials into a ponderable whole. Why should Nibiru’s invisibility make it so hard to see?

The creation of black holes — we now know from the research being conducted with the Large Hadron Collider — is possible. We could have inferred this possibility from the production of theories in our world. They likewise seem to suck everything in. (Some are even theorizing that the missing stargate could be an entry point for a black hole: a sort of ancient,  likely extraterrestrial, Large Hadron Collider — and taking this theory further to argue that the successful firing up of the Large Hadron Collider might, in part, explain the recent withdrawal of troops from Iraq. ie. The Americans no longer need the Sumerian star-gate, because they now have their own.)

I hope to demonstrate with my examples how theories work and do not work. So, of course, I am following occultist logic to its most unconquerable extremes. If a reader follows me this far, it should be for the energetic movement of my argument — and not for its conclusions. Because I have only come to these extremes to show the reader that I am familiar with their true absurdities and dangers, and that what I am about to relate has not been thought through without balance of reason and attention to the need for common ground.

Eternal vigilance, we hear, is the price of democracy. But is it possible that vigilance could be eternal, when so much of our lives are spent sleeping, dreaming, and talking to each other about our dreams? It is difficult to know when a friend calls you in the middle of the night, frantically relating a profoundly affective cosmological experience, whether they have been truly awakened, or if their dreams have merely acquired a supernatural intensity.

Before I left for a recent trip to Central America, I received such a phone call from an old friend — erstwhile a student of the physical sciences and a failed businessman. From what I can recall — or, really, piece together from my recollection of his deranged rant — he had been reading of Hörbinger‘s Cosmic Ice theory which, though dismissible as absolute nonsense, still brought him to wonder how astronaut-carrying spaceships were able to skirt coolly past the torus of energetic charged particles known as the Van Allen radiation belts, held in place by the earth’s magnetosphere, without incinerating them in blasts millions of times more intense than the atom bombs of earth.

He had concluded that there is no way the flimsy Apollo spacecraft of 1969 could have passed through the belts without keeping its unprotected, fleshy passengers from being burnt to a crisp. He repeated Gus Grissom‘s name several times — concluding that, while the United States could claim to have made it to the moon in 1969, it was not to win the space race against the Soviets but to offer a satisfactory picture of a decoy technology that would turn attention away from far more advanced spacecraft already in their control. He claimed that the United States had already been to Mars (in a joint venture with the Soviets!) as early as 1952. (The significance of the year 1952 needs no explanation to any ufologist.)

He mentioned, once or twice, the apocryphal Book of Enoch, while I indulged his enthusiasm. Had he called me because he thought me as crazy as him? I asked him. He didn’t bother with my jab — but insisted that, on my way to Central America, I meet him in Denver to look over some evidence for myself. He was living in Boulder and would meet me at the airport.

Now — just because I went to Denver, that shouldn’t give the reader the incorrect idea that I for a second took him seriously in this matter. He is an old friend of mine and, despite his wilder flare-ups of imagination, we have had many clear, thrilling and utterly sober conversations about the universe and life. If I decided to stop in Denver, on my way to Guatemala, it was to see his familiar, thin dreadlocks bouncing up and down from his forehead as we laughed over some mutual excitement. When I arrived, I had a few hours layover time to find him and see what he had to show me.

We walked together and I didn’t bother to ask what it was. His calm, wholly genial side had returned and I started to wonder if it wasn’t all a big hoax to get me to visit him, if only for a little bit. I soon learned that, much to my dismay, it wasn’t — and that I would soon forever prefer that it had been.

I noticed the richly colored marble inlay of the floors and wondered about the strangely asymmetrical, tent-like ceilings that I had seen from the plane. From above, they had given me the impression of being a kind of black, starry constellation against a white, night sky.

As we approached a series of murals, they caught my eye just as he began telling me that this is what he had wanted to show me. Before I could even begin to process the absurd notion of bringing someone across the country to show them a few murals in an out-of-the-way airport, my eyes were taken up in horror at what I saw. I felt the reptilian scaling of chills going up arms and over my spine — as I looked at a painting that showed an end to life on earth. Children were dead or crying as some had to choose which animals to save, the most prominent of these being the quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala and the emblem of the snake-god Quetzalcoatl. In the painting it was identified by its scientific name, “pharomachrus mocinno,” as if to ensure scientific recognition. In the background, a city surrounded in flames from what looked like a blast from the sky.

Other panels in the series of murals showed what looked like an alien storm trooper piercing his sword through the butt of a dove, while a train of brown people (some in sombreros) were filed into the distance and a child’s letter from a Nazi concentration camp was ‘published’ along the opposite side. In the final image, the children of earth had defeated the alien trooper and were bending his sword to a plowshare. Elsewhere, a mysterious, alien plant was giving new life to the children. The world, it seems, had been reborn.

As I took the intensely confusing images in, my friend began to show me certain very specific ‘clues,’ as he called them, within the paintings. The first was the ubiquity of Hopi imagery throughout the series and another was the inclusion of a few Mayan glyphs in a piece of stone carried by a stolid-faced girl. Knowing my interest in archaeoastronomy and that I was going to Guatemala for some independent research in Mayan cosmology, he asked if I recognized the glyphs she was holding. I admitted that I did not but feared that what I would guess might be true. It was — and they were the now famous glyphs of Coban calculating the impending, massive baktun shift that many agree will occur in 2012. I asked about the artist (Leo Tanguma) and was told that he had been tacit about this particular project, having once claimed to have been directed in its particulars.

I couldn’t be taken away from the scenes of horror until he told me that there was more. Outside, he said, stood the now famously controversial statue of the pale horse of the apocalypse (see image above) — but inside was the even more puzzling plaque commemorating the “New World Airport Commission.”

His assurance that there was no such thing, as far as he knew, of the “New World Airport Commission” was no reassurance. He began to tell me more about the airport — how it spread over a territory twice the size of Manhattan, and was intersected underneath by a series of tunnels, some — he claimed — leading to the nearby self-sustaining underground city, NORAD (which is said to connect to similar bunkers in Creede, Denver, Dulce Base, Kinsley, and from these connecting throughout the underground American West).

I felt like a rabbit impelled through a conspiratorial warren that I’d only have a few more minutes to try to get out of, before my flight took off. But I couldn’t offer myself any explanation. And could only remember that, in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a counterfactual novel set in a post-WWII world, where the Axis powers had won the war, the last sliver remaining of the United States in the 1960s was a thin enclave along both sides of the Rocky Mountains. And there I was in that thin, desperate sliver. The fiction suddenly troubled me even though it was a fiction and this was real.

I left my friend with more questions than he could answer. Soaring through the sky, my imagination started to saunter just like his had. Could the symbolism at the airport be a warning — or a kind of beacon, encouraging those who might understand its message to follow its guidelines? If so, what could those guidelines be? What common ground could we gain from the experience and message of the apocalypse? And — was my friend correct to presume an underlying, alien truth to these things? I imagined the plane I was in, taking off from the Denver airstrip and continuing through the atmosphere and the magnetosphere, to other worlds. When suddenly I remembered the grim warning left by the child who had died in the Nazi concentration camp, which read:

I was once a child/who longed for other worlds./But I am no more a child/for I have known fear,/I have learned to hate…/How tragic, then, is youth/which lives with enemies,/with gallows ropes./Yet, I still believe/I only sleep today,/that I’ll wake up,/a child again, and/start to laugh/and play.

And another far deeper and more horrible chill went up my spine.