Well, this is a curious thing. In the same little plastic box with the wooden plugs from a telephone in Point Pleasant, John kept this pill. And he had this to say about it, in his unfinished dictionary:
In fact, sulfa or sulpha is a common antimicrobial, and the most popular antibiotic before the discovery of penicillin. Roche still produces it. The idea that aliens might want to protect themselves from microbes recalls, inevitably, The War of the Worlds, in which microbes were the downfall of those nasty Martians.
Several of John’s “silent contactees” (UFO experiencers who shunned publicity) reported that aliens and/or Men In Black took pills. I suppose this one was given to John by one of them. (ADDENDUM: It was given to him by Jaye Paro, one of the contactees he was investigating, in 1967.)
I’ll point out that John doesn’t seem to have had direct contact with anyone claiming to be an alien; phone conversations and correspondence were always through the contactees, sometimes by channeling. To me, that suggests that the supposed UTs (ultraterrestrials) had no independent existence. But, for all of us intrigued by those persistent tales of pill-popping aliens, well, this is what the pills looked like.
Sulpha/sulfa has nothing to do with sulphur (except for the S-molecule), and is short for Sulfonamide.
To eat sulpha as a substitute for sulphur would be totally worthless.
“It is important to make a distinction between sulfa drugs and other sulfur-containing drugs and additives, such as sulfates and sulfites, which are chemically unrelated to the sulfonamide group, and do not cause the same hypersensitivity reactions seen in the sulfonamides.” -Wikipedia
Blodbrok
Comment by Blodbrok — January 15, 2013 @ 3:12 am
Maybe John needed to do more research on this one…
Comment by Doug — January 17, 2013 @ 4:00 pm
Hello, there is a flip side to this. Have you ever thought that taking an anti-microbial would be a good precaution for a human if you knew you were meeting someone who’d been in contact with aliens? If an alien were carrying any disease (which might even be harmless to them) from it’s home world we’d have no immunity to it. To be honest, if I were planning to meet an alien or someone who I knew had been in contact with aliens, I’d be wearing a full hazmat suit!
Maybe we should be thinking ET (the film) rather than war of the worlds.
Comment by Basil — February 22, 2013 @ 8:14 am