JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Spots. Being in a tight spot, Spot the dog, SPOT satellite, spot-on, spot price, spotlight, Data's (STNG) Spot the cat, the Great Red Spot, and on and on, most of the remained of "spots" seemingly having to do with animal and largely bird names (spot-billed, -necked, -legged, -breasted, -tailed, etc.). There are certainly "spots" in the history of art, though I have a hard time referring to Malevich's circles as spots; I have no problem calling Damien Hirst's spots "spots" though I would not call them "art". There were spots on the Moon for some time under they were revealed to be Mare, and in the world history of spots I think that was the only spot relating to the Moon, outside of the spot picked for the Apollo spacecraft to land. That is until today, when I bumped into this not-remarkable remarkable outsider-y pamphlet that was ostensibly a screed against the International Court of Justice and the League of Nations...except that the broadside opens with a mighty salvo proclaiming a miracle of a black geometric spot that appeared on the Moon's surface on December 5, 1925.
If there was any proof necessary beyond a drawing of the spot, there is none. Why throughout the world of telescopes and observatories that no one anywhere thought to make a photograph of an irregular quadrilateral shape occupying 5% of the surface of a half-Moon is a secret mysterious outer space mystery secret. Mystery.
But there is a drawing of it. And here it is.
[Source of the mystery: "The Great Miracle of Yesterday! As Thou Sawest it, so ws it!" , by "A Humanist", one-page, two-sided broadsheet, printed 1925. I have a number of other bits by the author, all of which are as slippery with commonly-acknowledged reality as this one.]
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