Chris

Male | 20s | 5 to 10 minutes
Starts on page 7

EXTRACT: The loft was a place where I would frequent as a child. I found comfort in the abandoned objects that were stacked, hidden and discarded in the dusty void upstairs. Our house was in our family for generations before we…lost it. My parents couldn’t maintain it any longer and I left. I could barely stay still in one place. I spent most of my youth traveling, studying, getting myself involved in things that mattered, with people that mattered. I never had a loft myself. My first sacred space was my garage that I converted to an office where we worked…secretly, of course. Ned, Rachael and Anne would remember that space. I mean, lofts can be a cozy place to relax, read or get some quiet work done, but the one I remember as a child – made you want to get that holy water and salt out and burn that sage, you know, with generations full of history scattered everywhere. But what would draw me to that loft was not the old rocking chair that would occasionally rock back and forth, or the thuds we would hear in the middle of the night coming from above, or the footsteps we would hear when no one was up there. It was the old projector and case of slides. I would turn on the projector and go through every slide and marvel at the black and white images of the pyramids of Giza. Men in military uniforms in the foreground. Arabs in the distance. Images of the desert. Images of carnage, of bodies lying motionless. But most of all, it was the pyramids. Images taken by an ancestor long ago, preserved in a box. These pyramids align with the stars in Orion’s belt. They also align with Tharsis Montes. Mars. Three ‘volcanos’ in the Tharsis region, which happen to be evenly spaced out, is ‘apparently’ coincidental. Olympus Mons – the biggest mountain in our solar system – and Tharsis Montes correspond in their geometry with the Pyramids’ alignment to the holy mountain Al-Wadjit, which is to the west of Giza. I’m not saying that aliens built the pyramids in Egypt. That would be insane, I mean after all, there is evidence – there’s actually a diary written by an Egyptian official literally explaining how these pyramids in Egypt were built. I’m not into that bullshit. It’s about the truth, even if it disappoints. I mean how wonderful would it be to finally discover that they were built by ‘aliens’? Well, that’s not going to happen. What is going to happen, is the discovery of our pyramid that has been guarded for many, many years in our own continent. The smooth pyramid with intricate symbols around the base of the object right in the Simpson Desert. Mars Mission Australia will find this, and then, after all, we will find unity. Unity in humanity and unlock the secrets that bind us all – all living things that have lived, are living, and yet to live. That holds the truth…the truth behind everything that has been going on for centuries. We will get there. We will find it…

Radford

Male | 40s | 5 to 10 minutes
Starts on page 35

EXTRACT: You’re staring down at the floor. You know nothing is perfect. Everything that is made by hand has some imperfections – smudges, bumps, cracks. You cannot produce a perfect object by hand. Even things that are made by machines have little faults in it. Here. Have a look at this pen. Look at it closely. See that bit of metal there? If you put it under the light, you notice some very tiny – miniscule imperfections. Now, this pen wasn’t made by hand. They used to make them by hand, but not anymore. They make them in a factory. Machines make them. But some things are still made by hand. Like these tiles on the floor. Can you believe that someone actually made these floors? From concrete? Concrete tiles? By hand? Very hard to imagine. But that’s how things work. You can’t ask machines to make these, and you certainly can’t ask people to ask the machines to make these for us. We got people to make them. Now look closely at the concrete, you see ripples, small bumps, crevices, swirls…and sometimes you’re very lucky if you stumble across a finger print. Now if you look closely…very closely…you may see…a face…staring right at you. Clearly. Eyes, a mouth, and even a shape of the head. Can you see one looking at you? Can you see it? Do you think that the people who made these slabs drew those faces on them? Was it on purpose? Did they think ‘I’m going to draw a face on this slab, I’m going to draw one on this and see if anyone notices’? Pause. No. I’m afraid not. It happens by chance. Pereidolia. Para: ‘instead of’ - eidōlon: ‘in the shape of’. Instead of in the shape of. Pereidolia. The man on the moon, the animals you see up in the clouds. The hidden messages when you play a song backwards….The mind captures a familiar image, a familiar pattern out of something where one doesn’t actually exists. There’s no face in the concrete. There are no faces on the moon. Pause. Look at me. Look at my face. What do you see? Do you see face? Are you sure? Do you see eyes. A mouth, a shape of a head? Are you sure? Look closer. Look closely. Keep looking. Pause. Don’t trust everything you see.