The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump (WikiDumper.org)

There exist many examples of Psychedelics in popular culture. The psychedelic experience has had a strong effect on many genres of popular music, and psychedelic drug references are common in movies, books, and in popular music.

DMT: The plot of the movie Blueberry (based on the comic Blueberry) touches Dimethyltryptamine practices of Native Americans.

LSD: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has a scene where Admiral Kirk tells a woman in 1986 that Spock did a little too much LDS in the 60's. The woman rolls her eyes at him. This was a reference to LSD, not The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a musical take on Timothy Leary's analogy between the LSD experience and the passage from death through to reincarnation described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Psychedelics in popular culture". This entry is a fragment of a larger work. Link may die if entry is finally removed or merged.

# posted by Cliff Pickover @ 7:43 AM 1 comments

The phrase "Klaatu barada nikto" originates from the 1951 Cold-War-era science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. The phrase "Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" was used to stop Gort, the robot in the film, from destroying the Earth. There is no known translation for the phrase, although "Klaatu" is the name of the humanoid alien protagonist in the film, and "nikto" is Russian for "nobody / no one." This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Klaatu barada nikto". This entry is a fragment of a larger work. Link may die if entry is finally removed or merged.

# posted by Cliff Pickover @ 2:27 PM 0 comments

A mass vision is a phenomenon in which a large group of people, usually in physical proximity to each other, all experience the same unexplained phenomena simultaneously. It is similar but not identical to the Folie à deux phenomenon.

Famous mass visions: List of UFO sightings; The Miracle of the Sun -where 70,000 pilgrims at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun "tear itsef from the heavens and come crashing down upon the multitude".

Richard Dawkins' addresses mass visions, specifically The Miracle of the Sun, in "The God Delusion". Whilst it's unlikely that 70,000 would all have the same vision, he says it's even less likely that what they "saw" really happened (because none of the rest of the world noticed). He cites David Hume's miracle test: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." With this, he shrugs off the mass visions. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mass Vision". This entry is a fragment of a larger work. Link may die if entry is finally removed or merged.

# posted by Cliff Pickover @ 6:39 AM 2 comments