Net.Weirdness: AI and Aliens

"[A] compendium of some of the tastiest parts of the Net." Yes. Yes, I am here for this, for the "gnarly edges to the global data-mushroom." What has survived for 25 years? What got copied by the Internet Archive? And what has completely disappeared? Let's find out!

Schwa Corporation, posted to Facebook in Nov. 2011

- AI -

Telnet: debra.dgbt.doc.ca 3000
"Humanity got ya down? Wanna spend some time in scintillating conversation with a machine? Telnet here and chat with an Artificial Intelligence bot."

Still online? No.
Does anyone remember it? Yes! Maybe?
"Another useful source of government information is the Communications Research Centre gopher at EBRA.DGBT. DOC.CA. In the directory called 'open government project' is a section on Supreme Court rulings. Located here is a transcript of the recent Rodriguez case. This site is well worth watching because it is planning to have addresses of MPs, Senators and Supreme Court Judges available shortly. Other directories of the DEBRA.DGBT.DOC.CA site provide documents of Industry Canada as well as access to other government gophers such as those at Natural Resources Canada, Statistics Canada and the National Library of Canada. And in these are listings of services as well as full-text documents."
Source: Access to Government Information
By Richard Malinski, Chief Librarian, Ryerson Polytechnic University

Anything like it now? Yes! There are enough to warrant a Top 7 of 2020 list, no telnet necessary. 


- Aliens -

Schwa Corporation
Web: http://www.scs.unr.edu/homepage/rory/schwa/schwa.html
"Be protected! Aliens are among us and you may have already been abducted and not know it. How can you be helped? Schwa has all the answers (and the products that go along with them)."

Still online? No.
Archived? Nope, seems it was offline by April 1999
Remembered? Yes! Wired has an article from 1994 on Schwa, with a bit more information, and Wikipedia has various updates, and Laughing Squid captured some of William "Bill" Barker's second phase, alaVoid, but sadly it seems that Bill Barker is offline, again.


Paranet Information Service
Mailing List: infopararequest-at-scicom.aphacdc.com
"Paranet Information Service is standing by with up-to-the-minute info on alien infiltration, weird sightings, odd happenings, and other extraterrestrial events."

Still online? No.
Archived? No, but yes.
What? There was a Paranet BBS, and there's this snapshot of old discussions, captured on the Internet Archive.
Anything like it now? Plenty, but it seems like a lot of alien/ UFO discussions get muddied (or polluted) with racists, so it's hard to link to anything that doesn't include a lot of that junk. Surfer beware.


UFO/Alien/Space Pictures
FTP: Vab02.larc.nasa.gov
"While we wonder about government cover-ups, NASA has been archiving UFO pictures right under our noses! FTP on over there and see grainy and blurry evidence that aliens are among us."

Still online? No.
Archived? Not quite. The Internet Archive captured the web presence of vab02 from 1997, but the Vehicle Analysis Branch (VAB) of Langley Research Center (LaRC) doesn't appear to have much in the way of blurry UFO pics, though it does have a page of Advanced Launch Vehicles & Planetary Flight, including some pictures of (identified) spacecraft.
Anything like it now? I'm not sure what Vab02 had back in the day, but quite recently, the U.S. Navy declassified and confirmed leaked three videos of UFOs from 2004 and 2015, and before that, the NSA released older documentation of unidentified flying objects that came to light thanks to the work of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy.