Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Back in the sixties the USSR did a pretty good job of shrouding their space program in secrecy. In fact – as we understand it they even made their cosmonauts mop their way up the flight ramp so the press would just think they were janitors. That’s very subversive.

Really though – they did keep it pretty well hidden. And when a bunch of orbiting, thick accented human beings died in at least 3 separate incidents the world at large didn’t even know about it.

Something seems kind of cool about your body floating through space forever. If you were alive there’d be a lot of panic at first – and hunger. But once you accepted your inevitable death all that endless nothing you’d see out of your windows might seem calming.

You know, some say a cosmonaut who’s feet last touched the ground in the sixties is still floating out there – way out there. This is how the Fortean Times puts it:

“There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.”

That’s something, isn’t it? The phrase ‘into interstellar space’ really gets us. It’s hard to think of a human being so very far away from us. It’s also weird to think that he’s not alone up there in the big black. Allegedly.

Well that’s according to a couple of Italian brothers anyway. They made themselves a pretty powerful radio back in the day. They used it to intercept space transmissions from both sides of the Paific – even the secret ones.

This from The Straight Dope:

“Back to the Italian brothers. According to Reader’s Digest, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia and their team of 15 space enthusiasts heard three signs of distress from Russian rocketeers. On November 28, 1960, a spacecraft supposedly radioed three times, in Morse code and in English, “SOS to the entire world.” A few days later the Russians admitted a failed launch on December 1 but said nothing about anyone on board. This was months before the flight of Yury Gagarin, who supposedly became the first human in orbit on April 12, 1961. In early February 1961 the brothers picked up the sound of a wildly beating heart and labored breathing–a dying cosmonaut? Finally, on May 17, 1961, two men and a woman were overheard saying, in Russian, “Conditions growing worse; why don’t you answer? . . . we are going slower . . . the world will never know about us.”"

‘SOS to the entire world’ could certainly be interpreted in many ways. What it probably meant though was ‘we won’t be picky about which country’s flag is painted on the side of a rescue ship.’

But rescue ships never came. Even today nobody would be able to launch in time to save them. That’s why we think if a country wants to have a space program they should be obligated by law to also have a really long pole with a hook at the end of it. If somebody gets stuck up there – we fish them out.

NASA – you should probably put that on your 2011 Op Plan. You too Russian NASA.

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Well don’t tell Jodie Foster, but she needn’t have made that one movie where she made love to her dead alien father on an other-planet beach. That’s because the premise of that movie – Contact we think it was called – was about how the world would react if it ever received contact from another planet.

Problem is that film was made 20 years after the fact.

SETI is a wonderful organisation that does nothing all day but listen for signals emitting from the radio antennas protruding well-above the crust of other planets. In fact their name is an acronym for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and they take their job quite seriously.

Imagine their surprise then, when on August 15, 1977, they received something that Space.com describes like this:

Of the many “maybes” that SETI has turned up in its four-decade history, none is better known than the one that was discovered in August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio. The famous Wow signal was found as part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State Universitys “Big Ear” radio telescope.

The Wow signals unusual nomenclature connotes both the surprise of the discovery and its sox-knocking strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register as a hit for todays Project Phoenix.)

Now we know what you’re thinking – just because the sound was picked up by an antenna sweeping outer space doesn’t mean the sound came from there. We agree with you – until we read this next bit on our ol’ pal Wikipedia:

[An expert] has stated his doubts that the signal is of intelligent extraterrestrial origin: “We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris.”

He later recanted his skepticism somewhat after further research scientifically relegated an Earth-bound signal to be astronomically unlikely, due to the requirements of a space-borne reflector being bound to certain unrealistic requirements to sufficiently explain the nature of the signal. Also, the 1420 MHz signal is problematic in itself in that it is “protected spectrum” or bandwidth in which terrestrial transmitters are forbidden to transmit. In his most recent writings, [the expert] resists “drawing vast conclusions from half-vast data.”

Your sitting there still sceptical, aren’t you? Would it help any if we told you this isn’t the only time an apparently alien signal has been received? For this next bit we are going to delve back into Hecklerspray’s own memory – to a time we took an ill-fated vacation to Puerto Rico right when 2004′s Tropical Storm Jeanne was deciding to ravish the island.

A few weeks before our trip, you see, we read a news report that the Arecibo Observatory, a huge antenna located on the island, had received what appeared to be an extra-terrestrial signal as well. While on island we took the visitors tour of the site, expecting a massive display explaining their recent good fortune in intricate detail. Instead, there was nothing.

Just before leaving we asked a worker there about the signal – and they knew exactly what we were talking about. The worker told us (and we paraphrase) that there was a system in place where people all over the world could volunteer their computers to sift through data received by the great antenna. Due to the massive amount of info received and the small-ish amount of hard drive to search through it, they hadn’t realised they’d received a signal until years after the fact. What they did get though, was three bursts of signal when you only need two to verify it wasn’t a glitch.

Furthermore, the signal was coming from a place where there was no planet to make it. As we understood it, this was implying it was coming from something intelligent made as it floated through space. Maybe it was a satellite, maybe it was a spaceship.

We’d have loved to use some sort of official quote for that last bit, but we just couldn’t find one.

Anyway – for more on the Wow! signal, enjoy this next video clip. And while you do, enjoy that nice scientist’s earring towards the end there. It’s how you know he’s not afraid to think way outside the box.

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Die Hard 4, Rocky Balboa and the new Indiana Jones were really all just warm-ups for one almighty action comeback movie – Under Siege 3.

Yeah, you heard. Buoyed up by the recent success of his peers, Steven Seagal has decided that he’s going to follow suit and make Under Siege 3. And there’ll be none of this ‘acknowledging the aging process’ malarkey, either – if Steven Seagal gets his way, then Under Siege 3 will be set in outer space where he’ll get to kung-fu a bunch of evil aliens.

So that’s Under Siege 3, coming soon to a theatre near you. Provided that the theatre nearest you happens to be the theatre playing inside Steven Seagal’s wonky and somewhat deluded brain.

There’s been such a glut of elderly movie stars revisiting their action roots lately that reaction to them has run the gamut from surprised appreciation (Rocky Balboa, Die Hard 4) to bemused hostility (Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull) to please-god-never-let-this-happen outright fear (Predator 3).

But there’s one upcoming action movie revival that literally defies reaction. One that, if you think about it in any depth for more than a couple of seconds, will overwhelm your mind with every possible human emotion and turn you into a vegetable. We’re talking, of course, about Under Siege 3.

The original Under Siege was, of course, a masterpiece of modern cinema. The perfectly feasible story of a chef who just happens to have the skills required to single-handedly defeat a gang of mercenary killers who just happen to be onboard the ship trying to steal a shipment of nuclear weapons, Under Siege won every Oscar going for an unprecedented five consecutive years, and made Steven Seagal so famous there’s at least one giant golden statue of him in every country in the world.

Then Under Siege was followed up with Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, which was shit.

But now Steven Seagal wants to get back in the ring and make Under Siege 3. And, just in case the thought of a portly 57-year-old man with a bad ponytail taking down a team of dangerous killers with his bare hands doesn’t sound ridiculous enough, don’t worry – Steven Seagal wants to set it in space. MTV reports:

“There are offers and we’re looking at them,” Seagal told MTV News. And he even has some ideas…of a more alien nature. “I personally want it to be something more modern. In other words I wouldn’t mind if it was about something more mystical or… maybe extraterrestrial in nature. Some real government top secrets instead of just the typical.”

Listen. If anyone who has the ability to greenlight movies is reading this, we want you to greenlight Under Siege 3 immediately. Immediately. Just call up Steven Seagal and tell him you want to make Under Siege 3. You don’t even need a script – just a spacesuit, some wires, 100 blokes dressed up as gun-toting aliens and the speed of reactions necessary to capture all of Steven Seagal’s ass-busting martial arts dynamite.

It’s such a brilliant idea. Part Under Seige, part X-Files. We’d definitely watch it. We’ve even thought up a proper name for the movie – Under Siege: I Want To Believe That Nobody’s Actually Thinking About Making This Bag Of Crap.

Golf games tend to be great fun, when they’re done right at least.

But they can be a bit boring and samey – even the cutesy titles like Everybody’s Golf have far too many identikit competitors these days. So it’s nice to find a golfing game to wile away the minutes that offers something different – golf in space.

Gravitee plays a very simple but strikingly addictive game, seeing the player attempting to swing a ball around the gravitational pulls of numerous planets to land it through a ring. It’s great, and it involves some physicsy/mathsy type stuff too, which is nice.

It also lends itself nicely to compulsive players, constantly challenging you to beat your own high scores as well as those of your opponents. Not that hecklerspray fall in to the trap of being over-competitive, oh no…

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