Hal's Blog Review #16 - Grupo 11 - Scout para el Primer Contacto

I've dropped the 'Friday evening' qualifier from these blog reviews for now, as it's been a while since one of them was actually done on Friday evening (for example, it's now Saturday evening.)

This is a slightly unusual blog review as the blog is in Spanish, which my knowledge of is rather rudimentary. Having said that you don't need much Spanish to translate 'Group 11 - Scout for the First Contact'. I'm always up for discussion of the possibility of aliens, ever since a very odd conversation with a good mate of mine, 'Foley', who argued that extraterrestrial visitation was most unlikely because

"Why would they choose to manifest themselves in such a bizarre manner - floating off the coast of Lowestoft?"

This itself was a reference to an incident in Pakefield (near Lowestoft, Suffolk) in the early 1990s when another mate of mine and sometime contributor to the giroscope comments section, Benny Voller, saw a strange green light out in the North Sea that appeared to be very far away and then very close to the shore only a moment later. Foley's comment has become a classic of its kind and one can almost imagine the government vets during the Lowestoft bird flu outbreak last week:

"Why would the first UK bird flu outbreak manifest itself in such a bizarre manner - on a farm in Lowestoft?"

The lesson being, if Lowestoft's good enough for bird flu (and The Darkness), it's good enough for aliens.

My inability to translate most of 'scout para el primer contacto' makes it all the more intriguing. References to 'la Federación Galáctica' and 'El Pentágono manipuló información para apoyar la invasión de Irak' whet the appetite. Luckily for this reviewer, much of the content is actually translations from English-language websites - for example the latest post, MENSAJE DE SA-LU-SA, is a translation from a site called treeofthegoldenlight.com 'channelled' by a guy called Mike Quisney - English version here. Unfortunately a detailed read of this article reveals that Grupo 11 is about the more new-agey bullshit factory strain of alien contact rather than a more hard scientific approach, or even the post-X Files "alien conspiracy" tradition which forms a bridge between UFO watching and the kind of space which more political conspiracy theorists inhabit.

Incidentally, just to round off today, I saw a trailer for a new BBC series called The Conspiracy Files or something like that... it showed footage of the 9/11 World Trade Centre disaster with a voice-over from Alex Jones saying that '9/11 was an inside job'. Should be interesting, at least...