Sometimes — when the bouncing between news articles, when refreshes of a browser clicked again and again are all out of measure — it seems as if there might actually be something to the simulation hypothesis.

My interest in astronomy stemmed from a fascination with flying saucers that was sparked in the late 1970s by castoff paperbacks from the Cold War. In this archived post, I tried to capture a handful of wistful memories of that personal trajectory. Given that intense interest that I felt all those decades ago, straining in a near-vacuum for every scrap of information that I could find concerning elusive silvery discs, I felt I somehow owed it to my former self to think logically and try to figure out what was going on when the New York Times started publishing clearly serious, yet bizarre and altogether bewildering articles about UFOs. Yet there was nothing in the articles to give foothold. I could muster no opportunity for order-of-magnitude assessments to generate a quantitative context. And then, a year or so later, as more articles came out. Tom Delonge, yes Tom Delonge, he of All The Small Things (this full-show video is pretty good!) somehow catalyzed all this coming to light… Quite frankly, the cognitive dissonance was so overwhelming that I just set it aside and stopped being too concerned.