(Image credit: Jonathon Keats)
A village in central Italy is crawling with alien-human hybrids.
These folks were transformed by drinking from a fountain in Fontecchio, a picturesque town within the Abruzzo region. The water flowing from medieval fountain bubbles with extraterrestrial effervescence, because of experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats.
Keats embedded into hillside above Fontecchio a meteorite — a standard chondrite, whose parent body hails from main-belt between Mars & Jupiter. The space rock’s alien essence has therefore leached into village’s groundwater & now courses through its pipes.
This was no act of obscure cosmic vandalism. Keats was invited to Fontecchio by a governmental commission led by Ufficio Speciale per la Ricostruzione dei Comuni del Cratere, as a part of a program called Riabitare con l’Arte. He’s creating “Fountains of Tolerance,” 1st of which was unveiled in Fontecchio during a ceremony in August 2021.
The project’s overarching goal is to assist combat xenophobia & other sorts of prejudice, which are on rise in our increasingly fractured & fractious society.
“When we become alien together, through ingesting this meteoritic material, we are directly becoming more consciously a part of cosmos,” Keats told. “Therefore, there’s this enlarging beyond the very fact that I’m from one place and you’re from another to a recognition that, in fact, we’re all from an same-place, which is that the cosmos. and there is also this sense of how the differences that we perceive are very small as compared to the similarities that we’ve .”
This broad theme recurs frequently in Keats’ work, as does his use of a cosmic canvas to draw it out. In 2017, for instance , he & space archaeologist Alice Gorman introduced “cosmic welcome mats,” which encouraged intelligent aliens to drop by for a visit & aimed to increase up general welcoming quotient of our planet also .
(Image credit: Jonathon Keats)
And there’s a good more direct antecedent to Fountains of Tolerance in Keats’ oeuvre. In 2010, he established the Local Air & Space Agency, which, among other activities, sold bottles of mineral-water infused with essence of moon, Mars & distant stars.
Fountains of Tolerance broadens this hybridization effort, taking it into general public square with no purchase necessary. Fontecchio may be a great place for the 1st fountain, and not merely because local officials are fully on board with project. The village lies just a couple of miles from Sirente Crater, a 425-foot-wide (130 meters) hole within the ground that was likely blasted out by an impactor about 1,700 years ago.
In fact, some scholars believe that very same space rock generated light in sky that, because the legend goes, helped convert the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity within the year 312 CE. The timing matches up, as does geography; Constantine was just outside Rome, about 62 miles (100 kilometers) from present-day Fontecchio because the crow flies, when the heavenly light blazed up.
Sirente is a crucial a part of the Fountains project. Fontecchio residents have made a different types of drinking cups from crater’s clay to assist share the village’s perspective-altering water. Those receptacles are being displayed in Fontecchio’s archeological museum during a special exhibition called “Vessels of Tolerance,” which opened on Friday (Sept. 24).
As Carl Sagan famously noted, we are all made from star stuff — atoms forged within the cores of long-dead, far-off suns. And each year, Earth sucks in additional than 5,000 plenty of dust , a number of which makes its way into our lungs & bellies. So you do not necessarily need to make a pilgrimage to central Italy to urge a clarifying perspective shift, Keats stressed.
“Fontecchio may be a beautiful medieval town, and that i hope more people will visit,” he said. “But you do not need to go there so as to make transformation in your state of mind, in terms of becoming alien hybrid. We all already are. And this is often simply an area that ideally can help to activate that.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.
