Can I hitch a ride to Mars?

Reality can be different things to different people. What some might see and accept as the gospel truth, there are others that might see nothing at all and question the sanity of the person making the declaration of what is real.

If you think about this a minute, I'm sure you can think of an example. Like some nut job saying the Arizona Cardinals would be in the Super Bowl. Yeah, right! What? They are? Go figure.

Every day we receive all sorts of things here at the Sentinel. From press releases to books to an occasional CD or DVD, we get some interesting items, each trying to get our attention and get mentioned in these pages.

This week, we received a review copy of the book "Hercolubus or Red Planet." It's a pocket sized, 50 page book with a very strong message and a colorful front cover portraying the large red planet Hercolubus hurtling on a collision course with a much smaller planet Earth.

As you may infer from the cover, it's not a happy story. The author spends much of the time warning about the coming collision of the much larger Hercolubus with the Earth and how we will be powerless to prevent the annihilation of mankind.

But, on the plus side, he points out that there are civilizations thriving on neighboring Venus and Mars and these folks might just let us hitch a ride on one of their public spaceships, which are travelling by all the time.

How does he know all of this? He has travelled to both Venus and Mars by using Astral Projection. He even includes the chants and prayers that we will need to perform in order to travel in another dimension.

Good stuff.

I began thinking about this whole concept of a planet hurtling to a collision course with Earth and recalled seeing it all in a movie as a child. In 1951, "When Worlds Collide," an adaptation of a science fiction novel of the 1930s, hit the big screen. It told a tale of a rogue star and planet that would come on a collision course with Earth.

A group of scientists worked feverishly to construct a spaceship that would transport a selected number of people, animals and plants to live on the new planet, Zyra. As you can imagine, when the general public finds out moments before the collision, they are not pleased and try to storm the spaceship, fittingly named the Ark.

The Ark is able to take off and makes a successful landing on Zyra, ensuring the survival of humanity. The movie is in the process of being remade, and is expected to come out in 2011.

I did some research on this whole Hercolubus thing and found that there is a lot of information out there. Astronomers have named the comet Barnard I, and it is referred to in the Bible as Wormwood. According to Gnostics, this will be fifth time that Hercolubus and the Earth have crossed paths. Earlier encounters were responsible for wiping out Atlantis and an earlier civilization that lived at the North Pole. Apparently, the gravitational pull of Hercolubus realigns our poles and causes catastrophes. The more advanced our civilization gets, the story goes, the more prideful and decadent we become. This eventually leads to our come-uppence with the return of Hercolubus.

So, you can insert your own wisecrack here. While the author has the most noble intentions (what could be more noble than saving humanity AND copying a B movie from the 1950s?), he says he can only warn us and give us the chants to do Astral Projection.

Fun fact: the astral plain is identical to the 3-D world, so when you are chanting and are unsure which plain you are in, jump up. If you've made it to the astral plain, you will float.

You can't make this stuff up.

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.