Starship Asterisk*

Jan wrote:That is definitely the Tardis in that picture, or something very like it.

APOD Robot wrote: Milky Way Over Ancient Ghost Panel

Explanation: Long before Stonehenge was built, well before the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, ancient artists painted life-sized figures on canyon walls in Utah, USA -- but why? Nobody is sure. The entire panel of figures, which dates back about 7,000 years, is called the Great Gallery and was found on the walls of Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands National Park.

The humans who painted them likely hunted Mammoths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastadon wrote:
<<The American mastodon (Mammut americanum), the most recent member of the family, lived from about 3.7 million years ago until it became extinct about 10,000 years BCE. It is known from fossils found ranging from present-day Alaska and New England in the north, to Florida, southern California, and as far south as Honduras. The American mastodon resembled a woolly mammoth in appearance, with a thick coat of shaggy hair. It had tusks that sometimes exceeded five meters in length; they curved upwards, but less dramatically than those of the woolly mammoth. They are generally reported as having disappeared from North America about 10,000 years ago, as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna. Paleo-Indians entered the American continent in relatively large numbers 13,000 years ago, and their hunting may or may not have contributed to a gradual attrition of the mastodon population.>>

Arf wrote:Is that the TARDIS I see in the rock 'art'?

Mosbycuz3tr wrote:
Not that I believe in them, but don't alien buffs cite the next to last figure as a prehistoric astronaut visitor?
What are some more sane and sober archaeological musings?

http://indra.com/~dheyser/bc/bc_j.html wrote:
<<The Holy Ghost and Attendants panel is part of the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon (aka Barrier Canyon).
The large figure, the "Holy Ghost," is believed to have been painted by blowing the pigment onto the rock
to create a unique affect. One theory is that this is to create the appearance of a buffalo robe.

Note the finely pecked lines on its torso, which is common for many of the figures at this site. The attendants show abrasion from being pecked after having been created and whether this was done by the original artist or later inhabitants is not known.



One of the many remarkable anthropomorphic figures in the Great Gallery. Note the smaller anthropomorphic figures on the torso, as well as the zoomorphic figures on each shoulder. Some pigment has certainly faded and some has smeared, but the detail and care that went into this image is apparent. This figure is roughly life sized.>>

http://dianeorr.com/ghost.html wrote:
The Holy Ghost Panel


<<Barrier Canyon Style, (style originated with this site in Barrier Canyon, now known as Horseshoe Canyon) B.C. 6500BC to A.D. 300 BC, Emery County

Once difficult to access, now an easy drive and hike, Utah’s premier rock art panel draws a steady stream of visitors. “The Holy Ghost Panel” is part of The Great Gallery, a 300-foot pictograph panel featuring numerous beautifully painted Barrier Canyon style figures.

The moon hangs on the horizon as I walk up Barrier Canyon. It will soon be light. As my feet shuffle in the sand I remember my first trip to The Great Galley. Dr. Dean Brimhall, a seventy year-old archeologist, drove my family in his jeep down a perilous road to reach what was then called “Barrier Canyon.” Brimhall had retired from University life to study Utah’s ancient cultures. He scrambled up and down cliffs using long rope ladders, not unlike the ancient people he studied. He believed The Great Gallery was one of the world’s great artistic masterpieces.

For years [Dr. Brimhall] photographed and wrote about Utah’s rock art. When his work was accepted for publication, Brimhall decided to deliver his valuable slides personally to his publisher. En route, he accidentally left the photographs in a public restroom where they disappeared. The book was never published. His life work was lost.

The streambed, once brimming with clear water is now a river of sand and oak brush. The giant Cottonwood trees of my childhood are gone. Instead large park service signs warn of dehydration.

Above me, on high ledges, dawn turns the deep green leaves almost yellow. The sun inches around the eastern cliff as I round a bend and face the empty eyes of a wall of spirit figures still in shadow. Sunlight creeps quickly down the sandstone wall, touching the skull-like head of the eight-foot Holy Ghost figure. I rush up a sandy cliff, load the camera, lift my tripod, a survey pole, ten feet—to the midriff of the main figure. The cold camera gears click, my heart pounds, I struggle to hold the pole steady and press the starter button on a cable. The sun falls on tall spirit figures and my camera spins, capturing the first light.>>

Bret Webster wrote:I don't know what a Tardis is but I should add that one of the most peculiar things I saw as I waited for the sun to set for this image was the placement of a rather old telephone booth just around the corner. ...couldn't fathom why it was there or why the Park Service would supply such a thing in such a remote area or why an Archaic culture would build one when they knew perfectly well there were no telephone lines? ;v}

JohnD wrote:

Bret Webster wrote:I don't know what a Tardis is but I should add that one of the most peculiar things I saw as I waited for the sun to set for this image was the placement of a rather old telephone booth just around the corner. ...couldn't fathom why it was there or why the Park Service would supply such a thing in such a remote area or why an Archaic culture would build one when they knew perfectly well there were no telephone lines? ;v}

It wasn't blue, was it, with a blue flashing light on the top?

Bret Webster wrote:I don't know what a Tardis is...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS wrote:
<<The TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) is a time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. A TARDIS is a product of the advanced technology of the Time Lords, an extraterrestrial civilisation to which the programme's central character, the Doctor, belongs. A properly maintained and piloted TARDIS can transport its occupants to any point in time and space. The interior of a TARDIS is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its surroundings through the ship's "chameleon circuit". In the series, the Doctor pilots an unreliable, obsolete Type 40 TARDIS, whose chameleon circuit is faulty, leaving it locked in the shape of a 1950s-style London police box after a visit to London in 1963. The Doctor's TARDIS was stolen from the Time Lords' home planet, Gallifrey, where it was old, decommissioned and derelict. The unpredictability of the TARDIS's short-range guidance—short relative to the size of the Universe—has often been a plot point in the Doctor's travels.



BBC staff writer Anthony Coburn is believed to have conceived the time machine's external form after spotting a real police box while walking near his office on a break from writing the episode. At the time of the series' debut in 1963, the police box was still a common fixture in British cities. It provided a direct telephone link to the local police station; the telephone was located behind a small hinged door making it possible to use it from the outside, while the box itself was used as a temporary office containing a desk.>>

Bret Webster wrote:... but I should add that one of the most peculiar things I saw as I waited for the sun to set for this image was the placement of a rather old telephone booth just around the corner. ...couldn't fathom why it was there or why the Park Service would supply such a thing in such a remote area or why an Archaic culture would build one when they knew perfectly well there were no telephone lines? ;v}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_phone_booth wrote:
<<The Mojave phone booth was a lone telephone booth in what is now the Mojave National Preserve in California, which attracted online attention in 1997 due to its unusual location. Placed in the 1960s, the booth was eight miles (13 km) from the nearest paved road, fifteen miles (24 km) from the nearest numbered highway, and miles from any buildings. Its telephone number was originally (714) 733-9969, before the area code changed to 619 and then to 760.



The original hand-cranked magneto phone was set up in the 1960s to provide telephone service to local volcanic cinder miners and others living in the area. The government of California mandated that a network of "policy stations" be placed to service residents of isolated parts of the state. The Mojave booth, located at the intersection of two remote dirt roads, probably replaced an earlier booth located 30 miles to the south.The original rotary phone was replaced with a touch-tone model in the 1970s.

The phone was probably little-used for the next decades, until it became a sensation on the Internet in 1997. A Los Angeles man spotted a telephone icon on a map of the Mojave and decided to visit it. He wrote a letter about his adventure to an underground magazine, and included the booth's number. Godfrey Daniels, a local computer entrepreneur, read the letter and started the first of several websites devoted to the Mojave telephone booth. Soon, fans called the booth attempting to get a reply, and a few took trips to the booth to answer, often camping out at the site. Several callers kept recordings of their conversations. Over time, the booth became covered in graffiti, as many travelers would leave messages on it.

In 1999 Los Angeles Times writer John Glionna reported on meeting a man at the booth who claimed the Holy Spirit had instructed him to answer the phone. The man spent 32 days there, answering more than 500 phone calls including repeated calls from someone who identified himself as "Sergeant Zeno from the Pentagon."

The booth was removed by Pacific Bell on May 17, 2000, at the request of the National Park Service. Per Pacific Bell policy, the phone number was permanently retired. Officially, the removal was done to halt the environmental impact of visitors, though pressure from locals unhappy with the increased traffic may have contributed. The story inspired the creation of an independent short film, Dead Line, and a full-length motion picture, Mojave Phone Booth.>>

http://www.templetons.com/pq/ wrote:
Free phone booth at Burning Man

<<Burning Man deliberately takes place in a harsh, remote location. Each year, 30,000+ people gather and build a city of art on the flat playa of the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, then dismantle it a week later -- to the point that after cleanup, you can't even tell it was there. It's an environment devoted to being appreciated, commerce-free -- about art and technology and shared experience.

The Black Rock Desert is where the rocket cars broke the sound barrier. It's a perfectly flat dry lakebed, the location miles from the nearest village of Gerlach, and about 90 miles from Reno, the nearest significant city. In other words, it's about the last place you would expect to find a phone booth, which is why I had to build one. Ideally I wanted a traditional "superman" style booth, and those can be found, but cost a fortune to ship, so we went with a more modern pedestal style phone. The goal was to have the phone just sitting there, mounted on the desert floor, connected to nothing, yet working, just where it shouldn't. We did it, and the results were amazing and surprisingly emotional. People refused to believe it, then cried out with joy when it became real. In spite of problems, about 1600 calls were made all over the world.



A phone booth is highly familiar technology -- though especially with the younger crowd, you will find many people who have almost never used them since they grew up with cell phones. Placing it in a setting where it shouldn't be made people look at it like it was new. The exclamations of surprise and joy that people made hearing the voices of distant loved ones they had been out of touch with for only a week were perhaps a tiny taste of how people reacted to the phone when it was novel.>>

johndmura wrote:Astro Pic for May 19 description is totally bogus !

Eclectic Man wrote:"The oldest objects in the above image are not the pictographs, however, but the stars of our Milky Way Galaxy far in the background, some of which are billions of years old."

Um, how old is the sandstone? It could also be billions of years old.

Eclectic Man wrote:Um, how old is the sandstone? It could also be billions of years old.