~ Friday, November 15, 2019 ~
In September of this year I spent three weeks at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome, working through a run of Bohemian Province correspondence from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The material I was looking for concerns the missionary effort in rural Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain — the same campaign documented in the reports I have been writing about for several years. I found what I was looking for. I also found something I was not looking for at all.
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~ Tuesday, October 8, 2019 ~
There are currently five competing physical explanations for the Hessdalen lights, all with peer-reviewed literature behind them, none of which accounts for the complete observational record. This is not a failure of science. It is a description of where the science stands. I am going to set out each model, note what it explains well, and note where it runs out.
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~ Saturday, September 14, 2019 ~
A map of the amber route shows something that does not look like a road. It looks like a river system — which is, in essence, what it was. The route followed water: north to south along the Vistula, across the Silesian lowlands, through the single gap in the mountain chain that separates the North European Plain from the Danube basin, and then south along the Morava river to its mouth at the Danube. From there, east along the river to the great legionary fortress at Carnuntum. The route is roughly two thousand kilometres. The terrain determines nearly all of it.
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~ Saturday, June 22, 2019 ~
In the winter of 1984, a team from Østfold University College arrived in Hessdalen with radar equipment, magnetometers, and a spectrum analyser. They were there for five weeks. In the first week they recorded fifty-three observations, several confirmed simultaneously by both visual sighting and radar return. What the instruments showed over the following decades is worth setting out carefully, because the data is more specific — and more strange — than most popular accounts suggest.
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~ Friday, April 12, 2019 ~
The Baltic shore in April is cold and grey, the water colourless where it meets the sand. The material that made this coastline legible to Rome — that gave it a name in the Roman mind when the name of every king who ruled it was forgotten — washes up after storms: pale, translucent, light in the hand. The Romans called it by two different names, and the difference between those names contains almost everything that needs to be said about how knowledge travels.
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