UFOs in Pennsylvania?
What is happening in Murraysville, Pennsylvania?
They don't look like planes to me - especially if you catch some of the other videos of them being single orbs of light, both stationary and pulsing, then adding new lights.
They also don't look like the classic media 'UFO' - you know, solid disc-shaped craft, what Spielberg did - but they DO look and act like some of the early actual UFO reports - the 'constellation of lights which change' configuration.
A very elaborate Youtube hoax? If it is, I'm impressed by the attention to detail. It's got my attention.
Beyond the Singing Flame
or, Monsters Are Not Going To Come Out Of The Sky And Eat You.
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
-- Kryptos
For I am persuaded neither life nor death
Nor angels nor powers nor things yet to be
Can separate us from our Father's love
There's nothing no nothing can come in between
No walls can be builded to fence in the soul
No cavern of darkness can hide me away
I'm sure that He loves me, He lives in my heart
For I am persuaded that He is the way
-- hymn
I've had my head in strange spaces recently.
On the one hand: my life as a mid-level IT geek and a member of a small Anglican church and a neighbourhood association.
On the other hand: involvement in web forums to do with an enigmatic physicist at the heart of the UFO mythos and the intersection of spirituality and the paranormal.
On the third hand: ideas I'm playing with for an experimental programming language which might or not ever be useful, but for the moment is a fun mental toy.
On the fourth hand: my involvement in the Interactive Fiction gaming subculture.
This journey of mine is largely what this blog is about - because I think it's important to document, even if for my own future reference - but sometimes the path gets more emotionally intense than I can put into words on screen. And sometimes I have to rethink what I am trying to do and how I am trying to go about it.
The two 'spooky' boxes that I have opened up - the psychic communities which for want of a better name I'll call the Townsend Brown cluster and the Stephen cluster - are familiar to me because I first came across them back in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unresolved emotional baggage associated with both of them.
Stephen has been called a demon, for instance, and it's not quite clear just what kind of machine Townsend Brown was building in the 1950s but there were claims that interdimensional... something... was involved. Both are the sort of people who have been accused of being the Antichrist, summoning the devil, causing the end of the world, etc, etc. Or else - with a sigh of relief - they were both safely frauds and everything said about them is utter lies.
Except that I now personally know people involved with both of these mystical gentlemen and they don't seem to be either liars or demon-summoners, and last I checked my delicious soul was still safely uneaten. For now.
Most (though not all) of my gamer friends consider everything to do with the paranormal or the soul safely nonexistent (as Science teaches, praised be Science), and happily play and write games set in H P Lovecraft's bleak nihilistic universe of cosmic terror and scientific rigour where mad alien gods eat the Earth when the stars are right.
Which is all good clean fun except that it's now becoming obvious that there really, truly is stuff out there that we don't know what it is.
You can see, perhaps, how this sort of thing can get complicated. There's fiction. There's reality. And the two... sometimes get confused.
Like, for instance, reading Clark Ashton Smith and going 'hmm, he's cribbed that from actual psychic accounts of the next dimension, because I recognise what he's talking about'.
It was as if we no longer existed, except as one divine, indivisible entity, soaring beyond the trammels of matter, beyond the limits of time and space, to attain undreamable shores. Unspeakable was the joy, and infinite the freedom of that ascent, in which we seemed to overpass the zenith of the highest star. Then, as if we had risen with the Flame to its culmination, had reached its very apex, we emerged and came to a pause.
My senses were faint with exaltation, my eyes blind with the glory of the fire; and the world on which I now gazed was a vast arabesque of unfamiliar forms and bewildering hues from another spectrum than the one to which our eyes are habituated. It swirled before my dizzy eyes like a labyrinth of gigantic jewels, with interweaving rays and tangled lustres, and only by slow degrees was I able to establish order and distinguish detail in the surging riot of my perceptions.
All about me were endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth; arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor. I appeared to be treading on jewels, and above me was a jeweled sky.
Presently, with recovered equilibrium, with eyes adjusted to a new range of cognition, I began to perceive the actual features of the landscape. With the two moth-like beings still beside me, I was standing on a million-flowered grass, among trees of a paradisal vegetation, with fruit, foliage, blossoms and trunks whose very forms were beyond the conception of tridimensional life. The grace of their drooping boughs, of their fretted fronds, was inexpressible in terms of earthly line and contour, and they seemed to be wrought of pure, ethereal substance, half-translucent to the empyrean light, which accounted for the gem-like impression I had first received.
Translucent, gem-like vegetation. Check. Sights which can't quite be translated into 'three-dimensional' language. Check.
Except Smith's tale is just a 'weird fiction' story from the 1930s.
Except if you read that review, it's more than that - it was actually born from a personal spiritual experience of the writer, it had a huge impact on his life, and as a story it's a wonderful allegory of the imaginative or spiritual life (and are they the same thing or two quite different things?), and the fear and wonder of facing that inward journey. Which suggests it's something more than 'just' a story.
There's more to be said, I think, about how the explosion of 'mediumship' in the late 1800s and early 1900s fed into first Theosophy in its multiple cults and factions and then the 'weird fiction' and then 'science fiction' scene and then the original somehow vanished, so that what we're left now in a lot of fantasy and speculative fiction is actually the fossils of preserved ideas from a former era. All washed up on a beach without cultural context and polished up as fictional tropes.
Take superheroes, for instance. Most superpowers from, say, the X-Men make no scientific sense whatsoever as 'physical mutations' - say Storm's ability to control the weather, or Wolverine's magic 'healing factor' which can withstand a bullet. But they make perfect sense from the 'mind over matter' perspective of a monistic-idealistic philosophy like Christian Science. If the mind creates the body, then of course it can repair it - that's how psychic healing works. So it looks to me like the ideas that fed into the 'superhero' fictional trope - now just a tiny petting zoo for growth-stunted American national gods like Superman and Batman - arose from a wider body of thought swirling around in a whole soup of mystical/scientific dreaming a hundred years ago.
And see, the wider point is that some of these very much out-there ideas, like monism and idealism, weren't fiction then and aren't fiction now. Any more than the things which Project Sign looked at in 1947 and concluded weren't any kind of illusion. Even though they got the Hollywood treatment, even though most of the truth has been wrung out of them. We don't know what these things are, but we know that they exist. Even though we've spent much of the last century denying it - to the point that we're still confused about exactly what went down.
So what kind of world does that put us into, here in the 21st century? One with wonders in it and a lot of fear... and what happens to the firmly materialist science we thought we had, which was going to save us from our nightmares of spirituality, but seems to be opening the doors to everything again?
Weird fiction isn't as fun if you know for a fact that there are actually are shadows in the dark. You tend to be always looking over your shoulder, even inside your own mind. But on the upside: shadows don't necessarily mean danger. They might be friends you've already met coming to say hello.
What we need is a new genre of 'weird fiction' which isn't weird, but points out that yes, we live on the shores of a vast sea, but it's actually a lot happier and more friendly out there than it is here.
Watch the Skies
A local UFO flap, or just dots?
2005:
January 2
2008:
April 10
April 10
April 26
Can't say I've ever seen anything interesting in the sky here.
Squid, Boundary, Saucer, Ploughshares
Te Papa's Colossal Squid is now defrosted and pickling in formalin. I've been watching the webcast intermittently, but the photos on their blog are probably more interesting.
(Edit: Video clip from National Geographic.)
Via the TT Brown forum, the Boundary Institute has a very interesting collection of papers on logic- and computer-science approaches to a view of physics which would include psi.
Also via TT Brown, Wilbert Smith is a key figure in the Canadian UFO scene who deserves more attention, particularly on the intersection of the 'contactee' phenomenon and psychic phenomena.
And finally: yay to the Ploughshares team who deflated one of the Waihopai domes.
Pop!
Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown
A new biography of Thomas Townsend Brown (that patron saint of antigravity and weird science), finished in 2005 and which I came across while it was being written, but which I have not yet read now that it's done.
It's a fun story, and looks like an intriguing read for fans like me of the UFO and antigravity mythos.
At the very least the man invented air ionisers. And maybe impossible things - or maybe not.
Edit: It's now Wednesday, and I've finished reading the book, and um, wow. It wasn't finished in 2005, it was finished a month ago, and the conversation's still ongoing. And those last two dreams seem pretty much predictive in retrospect.
Astrospies
More on the semi-secret history of the USAF's acknowledged MOL and Blue Gemini programs: a PBS documentary airing this week, Astrospies.
Edit: More commentary on Slashdot.
Edit: It also wasn't an X-20 DynaSoar in Marooned, it was an 'XRV lifting body' based on the X-24A. So many ships that never were.
23 48′47.70″ S 133 44′16.86″ E
Flat chat Pine Gap in every home a Big Mac
And no-one goes outback that's that.
-- Midnight Oil
The Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, Australia has always had significance in the UFO urban mythology. What is publically acknowledged and uncontested about the US-led base is that it, like its much smaller New Zealand cousin Waihopai, does signals intelligence for the UKUSA intelligence community and the so-called ECHELON program, and that (among many other supply lines) it is serviced on the New Zealand end by military cargo 'channel flights' routed through the Operation Deep Freeze Antarctic science base in my hometown, Christchurch.
(Interestingly, my father worked with Deep Freeze as an engineer for many years and although I don't believe he ever lied to me, I was surprised to discover that the Harewood base is considered sovereign US soil - the subject somehow never came up, or if it did it didn't stick. Dad, like I guess a lot of civilian air people of the generation old enough to remember WW2, was generally a supporter of the USA, and the assumption was that you got out of the way of the military and let them do their thing, and antiwar protesters were annoying people who might have a point but took it too far. After all, who else would save us from the USSR?)
But I also grew up with an assortment of UFO lore from sources like Stan Deyo's Cosmic Conspiracy, in which Pine gap featured prominently in a much wilder, science-fictional role as 'the Australian Area 51'.
Every now and then I check up on the UFO mythos potboiler websites to see if any actual gems of truth (or what passes for it) have surfaced out of the glop. The problem, you see, is that once you've been exposed to one source of mind-blowing information (and growing up religious meets that criteria), it's harder to dismiss outright even the most incredible claims, because well, who's to say? And of course it's always hard to tell a well-stage-managed hoax from mind-melting truth, especially when you look back at the history of the 20th century and go 'whoa, we landed on the freaking moon!' In comparison to Tranquility Base, not much is weirder.
Note to conspiracy buffs: my personal list of conspiracies does NOT include 'Apollo never happened', and it disheartens me immensely to see how popular such an outright lie has become. But what fascinates me, in retrospect, is looking back at the Cold War, the Space Race and the curious gaps in history; the politics, the media spin, the popular culture, the artful not-quite-outright-deception that painted a picture of Space as the New Frontier, Kirk and Klingons and all, when in reality it wasn't a frontier for anything much except communications satellites and city-killer ICBMs. And after touching the moon once, we never went back at all! Doesn't that seem strange? It does to me - but only if you believed the public not-quite-lies as to why the Space Race happened, if you bought the spin that NASA was 'civilian' and 'we come in peace for all mankind' - while all the Apollo astronauts were military men and the same rockets were cross-purposed for weapons of mass destruction and the lead scientists were ex-Nazis - but they were now 'good' rockets because they did SCIENCE.
The problem with wars is that they breed secrecy. The problem with total wars is that they breed total secrecy. The problem with total secrets is that they need to be defended with total lies: blank-faced outright denials, and an ecosystem of 'disinformation', cover stories, and psychological manipulation.
The problem with building public democracy on a security-first policy enshrouded in total lies is that, eventually, people stop believing anything their elected representatives say. And that's a very dangerous place for a democracy to head - aliens or no aliens.
Pine Gap is one of those holes. On the surface, it's just a bunch of satellite dishes. There's a mythology of course about a whole underground base there. Which seemed pretty bizarre to me, but then you stop and think: this was the Cold War. Pine Gap is a hugely critical bit of infrastructure. It's right in the middle of Australia, one of the safest places to be in a nuke war, as far away from the continental USA as you can get, but it's got the biggest bullseye ever painted right on it - it'll be about the first target to get melted when the ICBMs start flying.
So. If you were in the 1950s or 1960s, and you had the military money, the military motivation, and the military secrecy needed to, say, excavate large underground bases for continuity of government and similar Cold War functions (the 'mineshaft gap' as Stanley Kubrick satirised it) -- would you miss the chance to put a hardened facility in Australia?
If there were some kind of bunker there, more than just a listening post - what else might be in it? In the absence of truth, speculation runs riot. And besides, it's just plain fun to think about secret military bases fighting UFOs, like a Gerry Anderson show.
That's one hole. Then you get the curious fact of the parallel USAF manned space program, not often talked about and supposedly shut down in 1989 (itself a curious year of global realignments)... and that's another hole.
The 1960s parallelism of USAF and NASA, and a guest appearance by the X-20 Dyna-Soar, are both apparent in the underappreciated 1969s space disaster movie Marooned. Watch this movie, which was playing (or at least fresh in the public's minds) at the time of Apollo 13, and you might get a sense of both how jumpy NASA was about the PR risks of manned spaceflight (which might explain why Apollo was so abruptly discontinued by Nixon) -- but also about what the future of the Apollo program was expected to look like. Not the lumbering Shuttle, but Dyna-Soar and MOL.
(Whatever did happen to MOL? Was it *really* cancelled in 1963? The bumbling US performance on ISS compared to the Russians suggests yes, and I guess a Saturn launch from the West Coast would be hard to hide, but... well, it's fun to speculate on what might have been, and might still be in some parallel universe, anyway.)
So: it's against a framework of such reasonably hard-science possibilities and intriguing lacunae in the public record, and the known paranoia and 'Team B' double-handling and compartmentalism of those Cold War years... and the awareness that many of the same people who ran with Nixon and Reagan are still movers and shakers... that you overhear some strange conversations on the Web.
Yes, it's most likely just another hoaxer. A lot of what he says sounds too plausible to be true, for those with a preconditioned science-fiction, UFO-lore mindset. That rings alarm bells. But...
Well, it's those holes that interest me. And 23 48'47.70" S 133 44'16.86" E is a lot of fun to look at in Google Earth, especially if you turn terrain elevation on (I maxed mine up to 3x) and just take a wander around. I didn't realise there were so many conveniently diggable-into hills there; flat satellite maps don't do it justice.
What *is* under there? Not that I necessarily want to know, if it's just bombs. I want the truth to be cooler than that. I want there to have been a Stargate program running from inside Cheyenne Mountain. I want us to have been out there exploring the galaxy, not just fretting about Islam and China. I want all that money to have been spent at least on some good special effects. Even if the story is a lie. I want to believe the truth is out there. I really do.
But one day, Pine Gap and all the places like it will be either opened up to the light of truth, or torn down by the violence they're stacking up, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
And then peace will come.
Review: The UFO Experience
Book: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry by J. Allen Hynek (1972)
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
I was sixteen miles from home and nobody in sight
I saw a UFO and nobody believes me
And what's it gonna take to be back home tonight?
Sneaky Sound System, UFO
Hynek (who died in 1986) is one of the key figures in scientific UFO investigation. An astronomer employed as science consultant for the US Air Force Sign / Grudge / Blue Book investigations, he started out as a debunker but by the end of the 1960s had become a believer in the reality of UFOs as a 'real' phenomenon. This book, his first after the end of Blue Book, is the origin of the term 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' later made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie - as well as 'high strangeness' which often occurs in discussions of UFOs and the paranormal.
The book is probably one of the best of the genre in my opinion. It is basically a statistical analysis of the Blue Book case data (UFO observations from the 1940s-1960s) and breaks them down into categories: Nocturnal Lights (moving points of light at night), Daylight Discs (saucer-shaped objects seen in the daylight), and the three types of Close Encounter (objects seen at less than a couple hundred feet, interference with vehicle ignitions, and 'occupants'). Hynek also assigns a simple two-axis scale of 'probability' (based on number and character of witnesses) and 'strangeness' (number of elements not consistent with known science) for each of these typical cases.
Regardless what you think of the UFO phenomenon itself, Hynek's approach is very careful and instructive for any kind of paranormal investigation. He confines himself to the data, he focuses on the most solid and interesting cases rather than the noise, and he does a minimum of speculation as to causes, merely reporting *what* he believes the phenomenon to be - which is hardly talked about today, compared to the deluge of popular science-fiction *interpretations* of UFOs, and the 'Majestic' and 'Roswell' mythologies. Hynek does not appear to believe there is evidence for any particular 'conspiracy' theory - rather he feels that the US military staff he dealt with were simply psychologically unprepared to deal with a phenomenon that they could not understand, could not control, and wished would disappear - but he is also rather precise in how he uses words, leaving the impression that there is evidence that *could* support the existence of a separate, more highly secret UFO investigation unit than the Blue Book team. He merely says that as far as he knows, *he* wasn't aware of any such unit.
At no time, however, did I encounter any evidence that could be presented as valid proof that Blue Book was indeed a cover-up operation. However, many indications, bits of information, and scraps of conversation could be force-fitted into a yes for the cover-up thesis. Thus, for instance, one time when I inquired into the specifics of a certain case, I was told by the Pentagon's chief scientist that he had been advised by those at a much higher level to tell me 'not to pursue the matter further'. One can make of that what one will.
Hynek however does describe the existence of several 'factions' within Sign - the believers and the skeptics - and he also points at the shift from Sign to Grudge (February 11, 1949) as being the point where he believed the project moved into full-on debunking mode. If one were to speculate about the 'UFO believers' within USAF setting up a shadow group, it would seem that the interesting decisions would have been made in 1948. (But of course even if there *were* classified UFO investigations, it does not follow that they necessarily were any more successful at making sense of the puzzle.)
I was interested to notice that Hynek also outright admits that there were 'UFO simulation' exercises conducted in order to track public UFO reports; he considers the failure of these to generate large number of false UFO reports very strong evidence for the UFO.
It is interesting to note, as substantiation of the theory of the credibility of reliable witnesses, that in those instances in which 'fake' UFOs have been deliberately contrived to test public reaction - hot air balloons and flares dropped from airplanes are examples - the resulting UFO reports were not only invariably far fewer than the experimenter expected but of interest more for what they did not report than what they did. Occasionally a fanciful UFO report is generated as a result of such a test, but it fails to meet the test of acceptance because it does not square with what others have reported about the same event - often solely because of its internal inconsistency and incoherence.
This seems to be something confirmed by Jacques Valee's 1993 'Pentacle Memorandum', but I don't see why he is so angry with Hynek about this given the admission above - Hynek gives the impression of always being careful about what he discusses, and respectful of confidentiality agreements, but doesn't ever seem to outright lie or even wilfully misdirect. On the whole, of the whole UFO scene, Hynek still comes out as being the most honest, up-front and frankly scientific of anyone, and I think the attitude of a particular researcher toward him is a good touchstone for how sane they are (or whether they have a hidden agenda).
Irreducible Mind
I've finally finished reading Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.
It's a hefty tome, just published this year, tracing the outlines of mainstream cognitive psychology/neuroscience versus the evidence for various forms of anomalous cognition, altered states of consciousness and extreme psychophysical interaction, with a view to proving that mind is demonstrably not a function of the brain but is something entirely elsewhere. The authors (apparently mostly involved with the Esalen Center as well as University of Virginia) recap over a century of data from hypnosis, meditation, trance mediumship, dissociation/multiple personality, psi and near-death experience studies, and seem particularly taken with the turn-of-the-century ideas of William James and Frederic Myers, both of whom were involved with the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s to early 1900s.
The idea that the soul/spirit/mind/psyche has a separate existence from the body is not news to many religious believers, anyone who's had any kind of anomalous experience, or even anyone who's read any pop-science New Age book about the philosophical implications of quantum physics in the last twenty years, but coming even from the fringes of the scientific world it's a bit startling to see stories of the kind that have long circulated in the underground laid out all in one place with real footnotes.
There seems to be a a bit of a 21st century psi / anomalous cognition publishing renaissance happening right now, what with Dean Radin's Entangled Minds, and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing (next in my read pile). Irreducible Mind, though, has the weight and feel of a textbook. It's not a book you'll necessarily lend to a friend over coffee. It took me a solid two weeks to plough through it.
Myers' theory, published in his book 'Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death' in 1903, centers around the idea of a 'Subliminal Self', which is different from the Freudian or Jungian unconscious in that it is conscious (but of which we are not normally aware in our usual cognitive stream). More of a 'superconsciousness', perhaps. The theory appears to have emerged in response specifically to 19th century multiple personality studies, which apparently showed a cluster of hypnosis / enhanced psi / MPD connections, to the point where it seems Myers believed that the most progress in uncovering the true nature of human psychology and the keys to enhanced human mental/psychic abilities would be found by studying MPD patients - and possibly even, though I'm not sure he went so far as to say this out loud, deliberately inducing alter personalities through hypnosis in a lab setting. (This will be ringing familiar loud bells to anyone who's read Rigorous Intuition and delved a bit into the underground MKULTRA mythos out there on the net. Not something I personally want to turn out to be true, but it resonates strongly here. Perhaps the creators of the 'Bluebird' story are themselves big fans of Myers and the SPR, and that's how the same material has seeped into the underground? It seems a very steampunkish sort of retro-obsession to share, though.)
Leaving aside the MPD/DID weirdness - and there's plenty of weirdness left to go around - the other main feature of the Subliminal Self theory is that it seems to cover a continuum of multiple 'selves', whether manifesting in one person (trance/possession/alter) or potentially across multiple people (telepathy/clairvoyance/synchronicity). By the way, Myers was the person who first coined the word 'telepathy', so perhaps he knew a thing or two about the subject?
An analogy of Myers of a possible cognitive spectrum, akin to the electromagnetic spectrum - ranging from 'infrared' autonomic processes through 'visible' conscious state to 'ultraviolet' higher-level super-consciousness of whatever sort, made me sit up and take notice, because again it's spookily similar to P J Gaenir's Rainbow of Soul. Perhaps she's also a Myers fan?
What intrigued me most, though, were the absences. Despite lots of mention of faith healing, hypnosis/mesmerism and placebo effect in the late 1800s/early 1900s, there was not a peep about Christian Science (who surely were some of the first to document case studies of this sort of thing?) The authors sketch out the vague outlines of two possible lines of cognitive synthesis in the final chapter, a dualist and a monist approach, and mention that they find the monist one more challenging but ultimately more attractive. But no mention of the monism of A Course In Miracles - itself an artifact of high cognitive strangeness - which seems to me to slide neatly into a few holes in the cognitive psychology field at right about this point. Extend the idea of the Subliminal Self to its logical extent and you seem to get something very similar to a One Self. But the authors stop short of this, presumably figuring they've burned enough karma as it is and don't want to get into religion and philosophy as well. But I do, because otherwise what's the point? Still, I'm not really even pretending to be scientific about my approach.
No mention of Walter Russell's ideas about genius and divine inspiration either, though they parallel Myers' and the author's stance (and though his self-reported 'illumination' experience includes levitation, which they admit as a known side-effect). Bertrand Russell, yes, gets plenty of footnotes. But not the other one.
I have a few new leads to follow up having read this. The philosophy of David Bohm, for one, feels familiar and worth exploring. Human Personality itself, I guess, though I'm really less impressed by sheer bulk of data at this point than by philosophies that somehow seem to internally resonate. What exactly I'm looking for I'm still unclear about; this kind of research seems to skim to one side, being almost but not entirely irrelevant, though still useful as a sort of brute-force tool. I'm almost afraid of coming too close to material of too high strangeness in case it leaves me psychically burned; I'm certainly very wary of attempting to process it using strict waking-mind logic like a dutiful little scientist. That seems like a good way to give oneself a headache and get lost in strange loops.
But, on the other hand, it is very nice to see that there are people willing to think seriously about approaching weird psychological states with an open mind and risk exposing both it and themselves to reproducible experimental protocols. I don't think psi will yield to scientific examination of the old 'we're humans dammit and we'll smash God Himself to find out what's inside' kind, because we're dealing with systems that are observer-dependent, sentient and smarter than us -- but there are, I think, perhaps ways of approaching this stuff humbly and wisely with the intent to catalogue and learn and not getting burned.
At least, I hope so.
