UFO Mysteries: Unusual Cases & Metalogic

Although Europe has over 100,000 UFO sightings, due to the lack of a common language, there is often a hindrance to researchers in getting accurately translated information. The following case happened on 1 November 1954 in Italy and over the years it has taken quite awhile to get an accurate portrayal of what happened. This case happened in Cennina, a small town near Bilicine in the province of Arezzo and is the most-or one of the most bizarre cases to come out of the huge UFO wave of sightings that hit all of Europe throughout 1954.

On this day, Mrs. Rosa Lotti, who was forty years of age at the time was going to a cemetery with some flowers placed in a pot. She was a devoutly religious woman and what was about to happen to her shocked her to the core of her being. As Rosa walked past an open, grassy space she saw a vertical spindle-shaped object (an artists rendering of Rosa Lotti's encounter and the craft is in the above image). In the lower half of the object there was an opening, through which she could see two seats. The object or craft also had a window or door on its side. From behind the craft two small, humanoid type beings appeared. They were about three and a half to four feet tall, wearing greyish tight-fitting coveralls that appeared to also have a cloak or cape attached to them. The beings also wore reddish leather helmets that were similar to skullcaps. The little beings also had what appeared to be a "convexity" in the center of their foreheads. They appeared to be very happy and spoke in an incomprehensible language with a lilting quality to their speech.

All of a sudden the two entities surrounded Rosa and snatched her pot of flowers. The distraught woman tried to get her flowers back, but the beings ignored her and returned to their machine or craft. Rosa Lotti ran away screaming when one of them pointed something at her in what seemed to be an aggressive manner to her. By the time the woman reached the police her memory of the events was already fading, almost like a dream fades upon waking. In fact, during the time the sighting occurred she had been in a strange, detached mental state for most of it. This detachment or dreamlike quality of consciousness is a common factor in many UFO sightings, especially ones where contact with the occupants takes place. Many villagers converged on the site, finding only a crater where the odd, spindle shaped object had been. Other witnesses near the area at the time claimed to see it leave the area leaving blue and red trails in the sky. The local farmer had hurried there when his sons told him they had seen the woman being accosted by the little men. With so many people in the area before investigators could arrive there was little chance, especially with regard to the technology of the time to collect valuable forensic evidence. I had wanted to do this post and others like it here and there like the ongoing reincarnation series to show how bizarre some UFO sightings are to categorize. I do not think these events were just in Rosa Lotti's imagination, as there were multiple witnesses to at least some of the events. Also 1954 was a year of very 'high strangeness' all over Europe with regard to UFO sightings and encounters. If these beings were aliens from another solar system they seemed to have a very humanoid-almost elven type appearance and mannerisms-I wonder would life on planets hundreds or thousands of light years away evolve creatures such as these? If these beings were humans from the future traveling back in time, their 'mission' that day sure seems odd to me. They ended up terrorizing a devoutly religious village woman all for a pot of flowers. With this case-although as with many of these cases of high strangeness-we will probably never know for sure, but I lean towards the ultra-terrestrial hypothesis with this one. This would be where creatures that can inhabit and visit our world, yet live in a 'frequency' or other dimension from ours drop by every now and then. Perhaps the oddness of their behavior only seems odd or weird to us because we are not understanding the context of where or when they come from. Maybe these inpenetrable actions they take seem that way to us because our brains filter out parts of these encounters-or misinterpret them entirely. This is a quote from Jacques Vallee's 1988 book, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact: During the 1970s, the report of paranormal events in connection with close encounters with UFOs seems to have become the rule rather than the exception, and most investigators have found it very difficult to deal with this aspect of the cases because it does not match their expectations of what an extraterrestrial visit would be. Such paranormal events might take the form of minor unexplained coincidences in which a man might have had a dream prior to the sighting (or answered a knock on the door only to find no one there, as happened to a policeman who later the same evening reported being paralyzed by two occupants of an unknown craft). Sometimes the event was more significant. A number of witnesses, for example, reported perceiving distinct messages inside their heads, a fact they interpreted as an indication of telepathic ability on the part of the UFO occupants. Still other categories of psychic events are the distortion of time and space reported by witnesses and the apparent violations of physical laws represented by the sudden appearance and disappearance of physical craft. And as we saw in the previous chapters, close observers often report something akin to a trip into a parallel time stream. These observations constitute collectively what I call the "psychic component" of the UFO phenomenon.

It is a lot to think about-parallel dimensions, alternate frequencies, parallel timelines and the whole host of other 'explanations' of this strange phenomenon. I have often thought that maybe the universe is big enough-infinitely so-where all of the various theories about UFOs and other paranormal events could be 'true' in some sense. I hope that anyone stopping by enjoys this bit of high weirdness. Thanks again so much for all of your wonderful, thoughtful and observant comments! I hope to start the new short 'series' that I really enjoyed looking into on Thursday. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by! Other sources of information for this article were Jacques Vallee's 1970 book, Passport to Magonia, Fortean Times magazines May 2006 edition page 26 and also http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case703.htm

Paranormal & Fortean : EVPs & The Spirit World Part Five

To finish up the EVP series-at least for now-I wanted to give a link to a site that has many examples of EVP on it and tell readers of this blog some thoughts I have had and would also be very happy to get any comments on the subject from other people. It seems to me that there is an extreme amount of variation in this phenomenon as with a lot of paranormal subjects. I do think that the great majority of EVP are pretty useless as far as sources of information and some are even non-sensical, of course on this side, if the EVP is truly emanating from the spirit world or afterlife-we may just not be able to understand the context of the message. However, as I began to dig deeper into the subject I realized that if certain claims are true, there are actually some EVP recordings that have usable and amazing information on them. For example, in one of the previous posts in this series, Konstantin Raudive (also I have heard of other claims of other dead resarchers helping with EVP on 'this side') was helping researchers into this subject after passing away and also from a previous EVP post, 'Doc Mueller', who was not only supposedly helping researchers, but even gave the date, 1981, that the Spiricom device would cease to function.

Other thoughts and questions I have are: In the study of this subject I have done it seems that if taken at face value, in a lot of EVP recordings where communication takes place, it seems that the 'spirits' are communcating with people in this world almost as if the afterlife is just a mirror-image if this one. This thought is really kind of depressing to me! A couple of examples I would give is a recording where a deceased relative could be telling a living member of her family not to waste sugar by putting too much of it on cereal! Some recordings I have heard will have the 'spirit's' voice communicating or making an observation that would almost seem to indicate they still 'live' in the location where the recording is done. In one tape recorded in a mausoleum a live researcher comments how dark and cold it is and a voice on playback can be heard to say "Its always dark and cold in here." I heard this particular recording on the Coast to Coast AM radio show. The group of people that the radio show has on it normally have a lot, or it seems to me anyway a lot of recordings that seem to suggest the after-life, spirit -realm, whatever you want to call it isn't really that different from this one, and I kind of find this disturbing. Perhaps this is because some spirits can't pass on to a higher level and get 'stuck' here. I am just speculating with this.

Another thing I wonder about is if the EVP recordings-at least some of them are generated by living human consciousness as it interacts with the universe. I very much believe our universe is 'alive' on many levels and that maybe there is some truth to religious and philosophical musings on a 'Cosmic Mind'. Could some EVP recordings just be simple static and radio interference that the human mind 'paints' as a voice from the spirit-world, much as people can pick out faces in clouds and that type of thing? I may come back to this series, here and there as with all of the things I get into here. I would be happy to get any comments from readers if they have any thoughts on EVP (or anything else) and I am incredibly appreciative of the thoughtful and intelligent comments I have been getting!
I have a new series that is ready to go and hope that people will enjoy it-as usual I have no clue as to how many posts it will run to. I had already had a thought of doing this series-but it really became strong-as I think it is a serious-but also kind of fun and different. Both online and in meatspace life (also myself) I have been communicating with some people who are feeling down and unsure about the future, not everyone by any means -but enough people where I thought that doing a series that was paranormal-but also not so deadly serious would be great to take my mind off other things and hopefully just maybe, a smile for anyone who stops by to read. I am also thinking about a complete change in the examples of writing that I post. I am more or less writing my life story for 'therapy' in some ways-not that I don't enjoy it. What I am thinking of doing is starting to try to write a short story-possibly in the horror, sci-fi or fantasy genres-maybe even a mix of genres, that hopefully will get my creativity going and hopefully, although I am not holding my breath-be decent enough that I can post parts of here and get people's opinions. Also in the future I am going to have Tuesday be the day of the week that I do any online research I have and most importantly-get caught up on the work that other people do on their blogs and sites. From Tuesday evening until Thursday I am going to be offline-I am intentionally setting aside this time to do other things (hopefully my new story and work on series for the blogs I have) so I will definitely not post anything on Wednesdays and most likely Tuesdays. Again, I can't express how much I appreciate reader's kind, thoughtful and imaginative comments here-peace and be well to anyone stopping by! the link http://photos2.ghostweb.com/evp.html

Paranormal & Fortean : EVPs & The Spirit World Part Four

By the time Spiricom had ceased to function the interest in EVP was worldwide. Groups interested in the subject had started up in many nations. In Britain George Gilbert Bonner, a psychologist and artist and Raymond Cass, a former hearing-aid consultant used reel to reel recorders and battery radio tuned to 'white noise' or static, to act as a medium for the voices. In 1972 Bonner asked into his microphone: "Can anyone hear me?" He was not expecting an answer, but he got one. A reply of "Yes" could be heard coming through the background static. During the next twenty-two years Bonner recorded more than 50,000 voices. It had taken him five years of practice to be able to perfect a listening technique that allowed him to hear voices, as they sometimes registered only the tiniest prescence. Even with the massive amount of voices Gilbert Bonner had archived over the years, along with research and theories as to their origin, and even their technical characteristics, Bonner died in 1997 without being able to interest fellow scientists in continuing his resarch. Ray Cass, who died in 2002, had said, "There was great enthusiasm at that time, and many experimenters, but as it became clear that weeks or months of effort was necessary before a single voice came through, most people dropped out. Only a few survived--George Bonner and myself, amongst five or six others. We eventually assembled a body of objective voices, which clinched the case. However, the Establishment ignored the evidence. The Society for Psychical Research was frosty; the Spiritualists relied on mediumship, so the EVP people were pretty isolated."

Some researchers tried to find different ways of finding voices. The traditional way of recording and playing back tapes could be very time consuming. Many times, EVP voices were faint or hard to pick out from the background static. In 1982, Hans Otto Koenig, performed a supervised experiment on live television, which used his 'field generators' that used ultrasound signals in the kilohertz range to 'boost' the 'live' voices which came through an intricate electronic system. Koenig's experiment was presented by a major European network, RTL and its commentator Rainer Holbe. Holbe had also done other things to make EVP known to European audiences. Hans Koenig's ultrasound instrument was erected under the supervision of the station's engineers. It was then turned on. After a matter of just seconds, a clear voice said: "Otto Koenig makes wireless with the dead." The engineers and supervisors of the experiment stated there was no evidence of fraud.

I think EVP and the study of it is fascinating. The interest in the phenomena is worldwide and continues to grow. Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) is a term that is used to describe not only EVP, but other paranormal phenomena involved with electronic devices; from video recordings, phone calls 'from the dead' and even what some feel are messages from the afterlife left on personal computers. In the next post I would like to sum up my own thoughts on EVP and again ask people who read this blog their feelings about the subject and also have an example of an EVP recording. Thanks again for all of the thoughtful and intelligent comments! Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Paranormal & Fortean : EVPs & The Spirit World Part Three

Friedrich Jurgenson was decorated with the Commander Cross of the Order of Saint Gregory by Pope Paul VI in 1969. The honor was supposedly bestowed on him because of documentary film work on the Vatican and Pompeii. However, Jurgenson told a friend the Vatican was interested in his work. Perhaps this was the case as Pope Pius XII had known of the work of Father Genelli and Father Ernetti's accidental involvement with electronic voice phenomena. Another Latvian, Dr. Konstantin Raudive, who was a well-known psychologist and student of Carl Jung, became involved with the subject in 1965. Raudive had met Jurgenson and became convinced of the reality of EVP. Dr. Raudive started his own research in Germany and eventually received help from physicists and electronic engineers, who helped him create an instrument specifically designed for this task. The instrument's name was the 'Goniometer' and Raudive recorded thousands of discarnate voices with it. In 1968, Dr. Raudive published a German language book with the results of his research in it. The book was translated into English in 1971, as Breakthroughs. The book's English publisher, Colin Smythe, undertook for rigorous scientific testing of Raudive's work.

This testing was run by acoustics engineers and recording engineers from Pye records. The crew set up four tape recorders, which were shielded from radio interference and set to record for eighteen minutes. I do not know why eighteen was the chosen recording time length--perhaps they asked President Nixon's former secretary about the proper recording time:-) The group heard nothing as the recording was in session and they were monitoring the recordings with headphones. However when the tapes were played two-hundred voices were heard! One of the voices was recognized by Sir Robert Mayer, as his deceased friend, Arthur Schnabel. American businessman, George Meek, became interested in EVP the same year that Raudive published his book. An associate named Bill O'Neil helped him as he began building the world's first device to directly communicate with the spirit world. Mr. O'Neil claimed to be 'channeling' the design of the device from 'Doc Mueller', who was a former NASA scientist who had passed away in 1967. When the instrument was finally built it was named 'Spiricom'. The inventors, with the help of their departed mentor said it would provide direct two-way communication with the dead. Bill O' Neil and George Meek made hours of recordings of these conversations, but with all of the money, time and effort put into his research, they could never prove they had made contact with the other-side or afterlife. Spiricom stopped functioning in 1981, as the deceased 'member' of the project had warned it would. In an interesting sidebar to the ongoing study of EVP, it is said that Dr. Raudive who died in 1974 has been communicating with EVP researchers. Dr. Raudive's messages are said to show up not only on tape, but also video and even computers.

Most of the information in this series I am trying to post is from an excellent article in the April 2005 edition of Fortean Times magazine, by Judith Chisholm. I was already aware of a lot of the information, but Ms. Chisholm's excellent article gave me the idea for the series. EVP has always intrigued me and it is yet another one of those things in the fields of the paranormal and parapsychology that I just can't make up my mind about-as with UFOs-at least I think something is happening here-the what is happening is once again the rub, so to speak. I have been going through a major drought as far as my own attempts at writing go. I will post another example of it here soon, before starting the next series. Do not worry about any criticisms of my writing folks who read my blog may have-I know I am going wrong-I just don't know where. I so admire anyone who has ever attempted to write anything-much less get published! My health has not been the greatest lately and I have also been having net connection problems again. If anyone has any comments-please do so-they will get here eventually-with a response from me also, although it may take some time. I hope to have the next post in this series here as soon as I can. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Paranormal & Fortean : EVPs & The Spirit World Part Two

The Spirit Electronic Communication Society was a group formed in Manchester, England in 1949. The group published a pamphlet with the goal of "Electronic Communicaton for the Spritual Emancipation of the People." The inspiration to start the group was the work of Dutchman Mr N. Zwann who had demonstrated, at the International Spiritualism Federation's 1948 Congress, an "electrical device which produced a field of energy capable of stimulating the psychic senses into activity." This device went through several name changes and remarkable results were claimed when using these devices. This supposedly included a way to have direct communication with the dead. By 1952, however, the excitement generated by the devices had died down(no pun intended). In the same year however, two respected Roman Catholics, a Benedictine monk Father Pellegrino Marina Ernetti and physician, Father Agostino Genelli, accidentally picked up voices of unknown origin while working on a recording of a Gregorian chant with a wire recorder in the physics lab at Milan University.
The work the two men were doing was not going well. In frustration, Genelli asked his dead father to help him. When the pair listened to what was on their primitive recorder they were astonished to hear Genelli's dead father's voice saying, "I am always with you and help you." Pope Pius XII even got in on the act after word reached him about the event. The pope decided that the Father's should not worry, because the voice they had recorded was a scientific fact and had no spiritual value.

In 1959, seven years after the event took place with Father Genelli and Father Ernetti, is when the real brealthrough came. A Latvian born artist and documentary film producer, Friedrich Jurgenson, was recording birdsong in the woods near his home in Molnbo, Sweden, for a film he was making. When Jurgenson played the recording later he heard a man's voice speaking Norwegian and discussing the nocturnal habits of birds. Jurgenson thought that maybe he had picked up a normal radio transmission even though the synchronicity of the subject matter was surprising. However, weeks later, Jurgenson was rattled and astonished when another recording had a female voice on it. The voice asked: "Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?" Jurgenson instantly recognized his mother's voice calling him by his pet name. His mother had died four years previously. Jurgenson now believed he had found a connection to the hereafter. He continued recording, eventually registering hundreds of voices. Many of them spoke in different languages and many responded to him personally. He also identified some of the voices as belonging to deceased friends and relatives. In 1964, Friedrich Jurgenson published his findings in a book called Voices of the Universe. This book also attracted other researchers and scientists, including Dr. Hans Bender. Dr. Bender was the head of the parapsychological research unit of the University of Freiburg in Germany. Bender started his own team of scientists working on recording the phenomena. Their results, obtained by using blank tapes and regular tape recorders in a quiet enviorment, captured voices also, so this appeared to confirm Jurgenson's results.
The image is of the previously mentioned Friedrich Jurgenson. I hope to have the next post in the series here tomorrow. Thanks again for all of your thoughtful and intelligent comments. All the best to anyone stopping by!

Paranormal & Fortean : EVPs & The Spirit World Part One

I would like to do another small series on a paranormal phenomenom that perhaps readers have heard about, perhaps not. There are several reasons for this. 1) I think it is a very interesting subject to look into. 2) It ties back to the series about the Belmez Faces. 3) I think this subject, as so many other subjects in the study of the paranormal and parapsychological, always get a good round of thoughts and comments going about just what the fabric of our reality is like and what we can say about it. There are several hypotheses about the 'Big Picture' that the study of Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP can connect with. EVPs are supposedly the 'voices' of discarnate spirits that are either intentionally or accidentally recorded on any type of recording device and the material that is actually used to store the data or voices, magnetic tape for example in a typical tape recorder.

Thomas Edison, America's most illustrious inventor, whose inventions include to name a few, the phonograph, moving pictures and the electric light, wrote the following in the 30 October 1920 issue of Scientific American: "If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave this Earth would like to communicate with those they left here... I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected or moved or manipulated...by our personality as it survives in the next life, such as an instrument, when made available, ought to record something." There has been some speculation that Edison himself experimented with such a device, although no evidence has come to the fore to confirm this. Edison's linking of the spirit world to that of new technologies may not have been the only one in the world of his day. There is some evidence that Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of modern radio and Nikola Tesla, also a very celebrated inventor of his day (who we would probably hear more about, but it does not suit the purposes of those really running the show here on Planet Earth)-who invented alternating current (AC) which remains the way electricity is transmitted across power lines and also drives the induction motor, another Tesla invention, that these men also showed an interest in using emergent technologies to contact the other-side independently of Thomas Edison.

Only after a matter of decades would what became known as electronic voice phenomenom come to light. In the 1930s, during the build-up to World War 2, Norwegian and Swedish pilots found unrecognizable and strange voices on their frequencies. The voices were believed at the time to come from stray Nazi transmissions. There was no evidence for this either way. The odd voices the pilots were picking up stopped appearing as suddenly as they had started in 1934. Once the voices stopped being picked up they were largely forgotten. It is also interesting to me that at least in its early days, the science of EVPs had so many Scandinavian connections, as we will see.

In his book, Exploring the Psychic World, John Butler described a very strange event. This event also took place in the 1930s and happened in front of approximately six hundred people. A medium was on stage with a microphone placed ten to fifteen feet away. This microphone was wired to loudspeakers throughout the meeting hall. Abruptly, voices began to speak through the microphone. People in the audience counted between forty and fifty different voices. There was no one near the microphone. Two technical representatives of the well known company that specialized in public address systems heard the voices and publicly stated that they could not have had a human source and seemed to be disembodied in origin. These two men signed a statement later, which was published in Psychic News, that they had become spiritualists as a result of this experience. I am really excited about this series. I do not know how many posts it will run to, if it goes over four posts I will break it up with poetry or something different. I will also have audio examples of EVPs in at least one of these posts. One of the questions that came to my mind as I started writing down information for this series is that if indeed there is an afterlife, I think it would be interesting if 'they' had a kind of technology in their world and needed our technology to catch up, so to speak, in order to be able to communicate with the earth plane of existence. Thanks again very much for all of the thoughtful and intelligent comments people have been doing here, I really appreciate it so much! Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Reincarnation: Children's Memories of Another Life

A three year old girl living in Sri Lanka asked her mother an odd question in 1990. The girl's name was Pumima Ekanayake, and she asked her mother whether car drivers who kill pedestrians are bad people. The question turned out to be important, because in a few months Pumima claimed to be able to remember details of a previous life. In this life she was an incense seller, who got about town on a bicycle-until one day she was struck by a car and killed. Pumima recalled 'floating about' for a bit, before she was born into a new body. I think this is interesting because Pumima's description of the life before life was very similar to the one in the Two Souls-One Body, Iris/Lucia series I did in December.

Pumima Ekanyake's story is anything but an isolated case. All across Asia, in countries like India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma, there has been a great increase in the number of children claiming to remember past lives. The number of these cases has reached such a level, that finally some in the scientific community are taking an interest in these cases. Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychologist from the University of Virginia, became deeply involved in the subject of children who had past-life memories. Stevenson's investigations into these cases began in the 1960s in India. He encountered many children there who exhibited past-life memories. In some of what I think are his most interesting cases,(that I hope to post here in between other things, along with other stories about reincarnation), the children's bodies had strange birthmarks that coincided with the area of an injury in the claimed previous life. Dr. Stevenson became convinced of the reality of reincarnation, and published a major work in 1974, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, that is still wide quoted and studied today.

In one of these cases, a young girl named Swarnlata talked of having been a married woman named Biya Pithak, who had lived in a nearby town in a distinctive house. One of Dr. Stevenson's colleagues interviewed Swarnlata later in which she gave over fifty details about Biya's life that were later verified. Swarnlata was taken to the town where Biya had lived. During the visit to this town Swarnlata not only recognized her own house(Biya's house), but also some members of Biya's family. Dr. Stevenson had offered this as one of his 'best evidence' cases for reincarnation. Different investigators and psychologists were not so sure.

In recent years psychologists have studied children with past-life memories. They have tried to quantify this phenomenom and also tried to see if there were any 'rational' explanations for these cases. Their studies have shown that children claiming to have past-life memories are indeed mostly in nations and communities that have a large Hindu and Buddhist following. However, isolated cases occur all over the world from Australia to Zimbabwe. In a typical case the child will begin to 'remember' scenes from their past-life at around three years of age. These memories, if that is indeed what they are stop at around about five years of age. During this small window of time that the child remembers things from an apparent past-life, they will describe family scenes many times and very vividly remember the manner of their death in the previous life, which is almost always violent in nature-anything from an accident to being murdered. Some other details that are remembered are what the town, city or houses they lived in were like and some, as in Pumima's case, remember what job they held.

Psychological profiling of the children shows them to be prone to attention-seeking, daydreaming and they often describe themselves in the third person. (Remember Bob Dole anybody?:-) Many of these children have similar psychological profiles to people who suffer from dissociative syndromes, such as multiple-personality disorder (MPD). People who suffer from MPD are able to create very real fantasy worlds and very different personalities. This disorder is sometimes caused by extreme abuse when one is a child. Some psychologists then suppose that children with overactive imaginations are having memories of their 'past-lives' 'nurtured' by parents whose religion has a belief in reincarnation. I think in some cases this is exactly what happens. A child with an overactive imagination (I think it is good in some ways to have an overactive imagination) is 'led on' by parents and the story continues to grow. There is a famous case from England in the 1960s in which twin girls claimed to remember details about the lives of their elder sisters who had died years previously. The Pollock twins case, as it was known, was debunked when it came to light that the father was a fanatical believer in reincarnation. The father of the twins had told people they were the incarnations of their sisters before they were even born! It is now thought that the father had unknowingly 'taught' the girls to remember the lives of their dead sisters.

I do think that psychology can explain many aspects of the past-life recalls of children. An example of this would be why it so often happens in families that believe in reincarnation. However, as Dr. Stevenson also questions, I do not see how psychological explanations can fit all of the facts involved. The children provide facts about their previous lives such as names, dates, addresses, how they died and many other smaller details that can be and have been verified. Sometimes it is the smaller details that once verified are the most fascinating to me. This is because the smaller details are often not known by anyone outside of the family the child claims to have lived his or her previous life in. Some researchers have offered extra-sensory perception as a mechanism for this to be happening. I am not totally averse to this idea, but it is every bit as mysterious as the reincarnation explanation, if not moreso. Dr. Ian Stevenson is not wavering and is adamant in his thinking about the children's cases: "My conclusion so far is that reincarnation is not the only explanation for these cases but that it is the best explanation for me." I hope anyone reading this has enjoyed these last segments. I hope to continue having posts about reincarnation, UFOs and other paranormal phenomena as time goes on. I am looking forward to starting the next series because it is about a subject that was discussed in the posts about the Belmez Faces. Thanks again so very much for the thoughtful and intelligent comments I have been getting! Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Reincarnation: A Case of Past Life Recall

In 2004 a Swedish man recalled a previous life in Scotland for a television program about reincarnation produced by Strix Television AB. While under hypnosis in Stockholm, Jesper Bood, then 29, said he had been born John Smith in Dunbar, East Lothian, in 1852. He said he was the son of a blacksmith, also named John Smith and Mary Craig. He became a fisherman when he grew up. Local census and registrar records confirm these names. A later census records a fisherman named John Smith, aged 30 and married to Elizabeth. While hypnotized Bood had called his wife Betsey or Bessie. The family lived in Public Road, Gateside, on what is now the A1 between West Barns and East Linton. The community no longer exists, but records show a blacksmiths forge was operating there at the time.

A local historian, Roy Pugh, who was invited to be a researcher and asviser to the program, was amazed by the penetrating knowledge of Dunbar that Bood had shown. Bood had never been to Scotland before. "I was completely sceptical about the whole idea. But in two days when I walked about Dunbar with this young man, I now know what it means to experience a shiver in the spine and a curious feeling in the hairs on the back of my neck," said Pugh. Bood spoke of it having taken thirty minutes to walk to school, and when descrbing a Dunbar parish church, he said, "It was the first building I saw when I went to school every morning. I know it was close to the sea and that I could see it from my classroom window, it being diagonally opposite from the school." Mr. Pugh said this and other details given by Bood were an accurate description of the church and the former Woodbrush school, which was demolished after it closed in the 1950s. Mr. Bood also described in great detail, the site of a former fisherman's tavern in Lamer Street, which had a green sign hanging from the door. The site Bood had identified indeed once was known as the Jersey Arms, a well known fisherman's hang-out. The image is of the Street in Dunbar where the Jersey Arms used to be, it is now called the Creel restaurant. This case leaves me with some questions, both pro and con. I think a lot of it boils down to how trustworthy the information gained from hypnosis is and also if Mr. Bood could not have come by this information any other way-I am not trying to question his integrity. I just wanted to add this post as a continuing investigation of reincarnation. Personally, I find myself very much wanting to believe Mr. Bood's story while under hypnosis. How about you? The source for this article was the Fortean Times magazine, July 2004 edition. I am anxious to start the next series, but have come across more reincarnation type stories that I think I should do first-it will probably not be a lengthy post-or two at the most. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Paranormal & Fortean : Deja Vu An Unusual Case

The French expression Deja Vu means "already seen." It describes experiences that people have with some frequency. Some cases of deja vu seem to 'hit' the person experiencing it lightly, and some like my experience discussed in my 3 January 2009 post hit you over the head like the proverbial ton of bricks. The following case is one of those and is of a higher degree than most instances of deja vu.

The story appeared in a four column article written by Christopher Wren in the New York Times on 17 April 1979. Wren was in Egypt when he wrote the article entitled, "Briton with a Sense of Deja Vu Calls Ruins 'Home'. It all started when Dorothy Eady, at the age of three, fell down a flight of stairs in her home in Plymouth, England. She had been pronounced dead by the local doctor. "When he came back with the death certificate, the body was sitting on the bed playing', she revealed. Then she began to cry. "They asked why I was crying, and I said, 'I want to go home.' They assured me I was home." Wren wrote : From then on she was convinced that she belonged in another, dimly remembered time. She played hooky from school and hung around the Egyptology Room of the British Museum in London. When she first saw a magazine photograph of the magnificent temple at Abydos, she told her parents: 'Here is my home, but why is it in ruins and where are the gardens?' "

It was not until 1933, when she was in her late twenties that she was able to go to Egypt. " I never left; I never wanted to." She took a job with the Egyptian Antiquities Service and acquired experience in field excavations, but it was some years before she had time to travel to Abydos. 'As soon as I saw the mountain, I knew where I was. The train stopped, and I got off.... There was no other place for me to be." The Times article continued: "In 1956 she managed to get transferred to help with the excavation and restoration of Abydos, which has some of the finest bas-reliefs of pharanonic art. Her colleagues were surprised by her immediate familiarity with the temple. 'In the pitch dark I went to each place they told me to.' " She would then describe the scene. "Every time I was right."

Dorothy had mentioned gardens being at the place as a child. No discovery of this was made by any archaeologists. However, when Dorothy got to the scene she was able to give the exact location. The tree roots, vines and even the old, dry water canals were there too. The Times article continued: "She also correctly estimated the height of damaged columns where the temple roof was missing and she translated some of the more enigmatic hieroglyphics. In a previous incarnation, she believes she was the orphaned daughter of a common soldier and a vegetable seller and she was adopted by the temple, where the spring resurrection rituals to the god Osiris were conducted. " I can't remember an ordinary life, so I think I must have been stuck in the temple. I have a vague memory of possessions. I can remember an awful killjoy of a high priest."

The period of history that Dorothy believes she had previously lived in was 3,200 years ago in the nineteenth dynasty under Seti I and his successor Ramses II. Dorothy Eady named her son Seti. She had married an Egyptian, but the marriage had lasted only two years. In the village where she lived, Dorothy was known as Om Seti, which means mother of Seti. Dorothy admits that "her Odyssey from the middle-class gentility of Plymouth to the rural poverty of a remote Egyptian village (where she was living in at the time of the article and living on a modest pension) sounds bizarre." Some people say that when "I fell downstairs it knocked a screw loose." Whatever the truth behind this story, there is no question of her abilities as an archaeologist. "Her grasp of ancient Egypt is formidable", writes Wren. "Egyptologists still visit her sparsely furnished house in Abydos to benefit from her knowledge and her lively self-deprecating wit. James P. Allen of the American Research Center in Cairo has described her as a patron saint of the profession. ' I don't know of an American archaeologist in Egypt who doesn't respect her."

Note to reader: There are other cases where bodily trauma has triggered what people feel are past-life memories. In a German newspaper, Rheinischer Merkur, from 31 May 1947, a similar story is told. The story involved a girl in Ihansi, India, who fell out of a third story window. Fortunately she did not suffer lasting bodily harm, but suddenly began to speak in several languages. Scholars later found these languages to be old Indian dialects that had not been used for centuries. Dorothy Eady died in 1981 and is buried in the desert near Shunet el-Zebib. I wanted to do this post because I thought it related to my continuing study of reincarnation and different theories and experiences of it. The major source for this post was, Reincarnation A New Horizon In Science, Religion And Society by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams. The book was published by Julian Press in 1984, pp 80-82. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Eady

Strange Days Indeed!

I apologize beforehand for this stream of consciousness post, I will try not to ramble too much. Originally I was going to post another bit of my writing while I try to find the next paranormal story or series to work on here and also while I try to get my new blog going. I just have to get some of these thoughts out of my head. I actually owe a great deal of the inspiration for this post to people whose blogs I link to. I was going to name each one individually, but in the end did not think that would be necessary, as I think there is also some cross-linking between the ideas people I link to are working on. Also some of the inspiration comes from people who comment here. I was also reminded of why I wanted to do this post by one of my own posts! The words that reminded me were not mine however, but Royston Lambert's from when I was doing the series on Hadrian and Antinous. In the 26 November post about Hadrian's succession to emperor Mr. Lambert's words were, "It was a strange and disconcerting beginning....".

This is the way I am starting to feel about the coming 'reign' of America/Rome's new emperor. I will definitely have to give a nod to Michael at Gosporn for the wording of this sentence! I would also like to give a quote from one of Jeff Well's posts that is also in his fantastic new book, Rigorous Intuition: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them. I did a post about this book on 20 December, here is the quote from Mr.Wells from his 31 July 2006 post, 'The Violent Bear It Away', "The Age of Nations is over, and many of the most powerful are no longer ruled by forces, which safeguard the interests of the state, let alone it's citizens. We're entering an extinction boundary, between the reign of mammals and the return of the jellyfish. What are the politics of jellyfish?" Wonderful wording and imagery as always Mr. Wells! The 'jellies' or the 'deep ones' as people of Lovecraftian bent might have it are coming back in great numbers. There are an ever increasing number of 'jellyfish' type UFOs in the sky also. I wonder if on some very deep sub/unconscious level of reality if the gods of old are coming back. When I look back over the events of the last ten years, especially the last eight-sometimes a sense of unreality hits me that is so strong, I say to myself, "Can this be real?" or "Is this really happening?"

Here is a breakdown of but a few of the events that have happened recently and things said about them, that have caused a deep sense of angst/loss inside my soul that leaves me wondering if humanity is going to make it past this 'sticky wicket' -a nod to Mother Shipton, I think? here, we are in. Locally to my dismay I found out a bit of news that I wish I had never seen or heard about. On 23 December 2008 in Chandler, Arizona-a city that I live very close to, a mentally disturbed man followed two very young boys as they were heading to a park to play and beat them both to death with a baseball bat. How sick is that? How will the families of these two little boys ever recover? And of course its not just this-its every time you turn around there is some horrid new example of human brutality to humans in the news. Just a matter of hours ago I saw a headline on Yahoo news where a French synagogue has been firebombed -no doubt due to the Israeli pounding of Hamas in recent weeks. Here I am not pointing fingers-I think this is where people always go wrong. Only the "Big Pine Cones" in Russian wordage are to blame for the overall horrific state of affairs in the world-although we, the 'small people' each and every one of us, no matter our rank on the social totem pole, race, sexual orientation, religion etc may all have to bear a kind of collective guilt for allowing 'leaders' like the current batch to rule over us. That's not enough to worry about-OK -let us start small and work our way up to big issues-although the small and the big may intermingle quite a bit here.
1) Job growth in the United States during 43s tenure was just 2%-and that is if you believe government stats-it was the smallest 8 year gain on record and GDP grew at the slowest rate since the Truman administration (synch wink here :-). A Moody's economist said, "We really went nowhere for almost 10 years." I say No Shit Sherlock! Oh well they can always print more bucks right? If anyone has the least bit of grasp of financial history they will know where all fiat currencies eventually end up -which leads to
2) William Buiter, a former Monetary Policy Committee member for the Bank of England from June 1997 to May 2000 believes that the plug is about to be pulled on the US dollar. He thinks that an increase in government spending will be catastrophic and foreign investors will not only turn away from the buck, but also US backed assets including government bonds.
3) Bernard Madoff, the man who allegedly committed the largest financial crime in history will not go to jail as he awaits trial. Mr. Madoff will be able to await hiw trial in his tony Manhattan penthouse. This really galls me to no end-here we live in a country-and indeed a world where homelessness is being criminalized. A man stealing food to feed his starving family can go to jail for stealing a fucking (scuse the lingo please-anger here) loaf of bread-but the greedy pigs who run our world continually pull shit like this and get a slap on the wrist. All equal under the law-haha-what total garbage! Anyone who believes this about the USA in the 21st century needs to come out of their caves.
4) Russia is a little pissed off right now -to put it mildly. A new deal to start supplying the Ukraine with gas just fell through. The Ukraine, Poland and Bulgaria (the poorest EU member) have been hardest hit by this, but the Bear's displeasure has rattled nerves all over the continent. Topolanek, the Czech prime minister and other European officials are clearly unnerved as lights in factories have blinked out and homes went without heat in some of the new European Union member states of east Europe. This is also a very cold winter and even if Russia decides to turn on the gas it will take 3 days to repressurize the pipelines. Oh-did I say cold? Well ole Mr. Sun just might have something to do with this and this leads to
5) "Its quietest before the storm" applies to the solar maximum also think scientists at NASA and the period between 2004 to 2008 has been unusually quiet for our dear Helios-but not to worry-hehe NASA thinks our friendly little star is going to make up for this in the 2010-2012 timeframe with "the mother of all solar maximums". MFM wonders if we are not about to be nuked into being crispy critters if Mr. Sun is going to do it for us! O -I said nukes! well not to worry here folks!
6) Think about this set of countries at each others throats as critical resources dwindle and the food supply gets to about a thousandth or millionth of the level it is at now-geez right when there are the most people living-good timing there! USA, China, Russia, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan and lets never forget Mr. Hair in North Korea-but not to worry he seems like a good bloke(wink) and that isn't even all of the nations in the nuclear-can I say it this way now-or do I have to wait until 20 January and say noookular til then!

Do not worry fellow citizens of the world-I am sure our valiant leaders have it all figured out for us -hey they did such a good job on September 11, Katrina, the boxing day tsunami in 2004, Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Afghanistan, a fucking superb job on 'noookular' containment-wouldn't you say? How about the global financial meltdown-hey thumbs up there boys-U B Smart! It just makes my little ole heart pitter patter with joy thinking that this bunch of clowns are going to be guiding us "to the light" as food rations drop, the global economy tanks, climate change gets more severe, more and more nations get the bomb. Like I say NOT TO WORRY!

Sorry folks-had to get this out of my system. This is why you will not find MFM doing politics too much! I am trying to find a nice paranormal series to get going to get my mind off things and also work on my other blog. Tomorrow if I am able to post I might have to subject you to my writing:-). Peace and be well all of you! Special thanks goes to wise woman, Michael Skaggs, Xdell, Jeff Wells, Anadae, Nina, Michael at Gosporn, Aggie, Ben-Emlyn Jones, aferrismoon and all of the other wonderful, funny, intelligent and thoughtful people I link to and follow and that comment here! I have to give the most thanks and hugs and love to my mom, dad, brother, payro and clementina-without who, neither me nor MFM and Dev's Questions would exist! Don't go to the following link unless you want more bad news http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/soviet-doomsday.html

Langston Hughes: Poet To Bigot

I have done so little
For you,
And you have done so little
For me,
That we have good reason
Never to agree.


I, however,
Have such meagre
Power,
Clutching at a
Moment,
While you control
An hour.


But your hour is
A stone.


My moment is
A flower.


With all the poetry I have been trying to do, by different poets I love, I could not believe I had not put a Langston Hughes poem in here! He is one of my all time favorites and was a great human being along with it. I think this poem proves that sometimes short is sweetest. The image is of a terrazzo and brass African cosmogram titled Rivers, it is on the floor in front of the Langston Hughes auditorium in Harlem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes

Paranormal & Fortean : 1986 Japan Airlines UFO Encounter

I wanted to do a post about one of the most impressive cases of a UFO encounter with a civilian airliner. The reason for this is not only because I think this is an extremely interesting case, but I also feel that not very many people are aware of it due to the passage of time and lame media coverage. On 16 November 1986 Japan Air Lines (JAL) Flight 1628 left from Paris, France with a layover in Reykjavik on the way to Tokyo. The plane had two crews which relieved each other during the long flight. They were transporting 200 cases of top quality French wine. Their stay in Iceland had been prolonged due to bad weather. They were finally able to leave Reykjavik on 17 November 1986.



The pilot of flight 1628 was Flight Captain Jenju Terauchi, pictured above, who had nineteen years of flight experience. The planned route was the polar route over Greenland, northern Canada and Alaska towards Japan. The moon was bright that evening and cast a blue-white light upon the glaciers of Greenland. When the 747 was above a settlement called Shingle Point at the border between Canada and Alaska it was pitch dark. The only lights that could be seen were the lights from isolated human settlements strewn here and there in the immense Arctic desert. Towards the east there was a bit of an afterglow from the sunset. Everywhere else, the land below them was extremely dark. In the cockpit too, it was dark and quiet except for the lights of the flight instruments.



At 5:11 pm Captain Terauchi saw two lights that shouldn't have been there. He had become aware of them a minute earlier but had thought they were military aircraft, the lights were to the left and below the 747. But by now, had they been military aircraft, their position should have moved and even more, they seemed to be flying in formation with Terauchi's aircraft. He was flying on autopilot at a speed of 525 knots at an altitude of 35,000 feet. The 747's location was about 90 nautical miles northeast of Fort Yukon, Alaska. Both lights appeared to be flying 2,000 feet below the JAL plane and were keeping to the 10:00 position.



Suddenly after six minutes they appeared in a position directly in front of the flight crew and Captian Terauchi saw two pairs of rectangular shaped lights, one above the other. Terauchi described the lights later as "two spaceships from which white and amber-colored lights shot out, pulsating jets in the direction of a dark vertical field in the middle of each object." The lights were so close that they lit the cockpit of the 747 brightly. Terauchi also believed he could sense warmth emanating from them. A few seconds later the objects stopped sending out beams and started forming small circles of light. These lights would switch from bright to dim and their colors were of a dull red, soft green, white, orange and a brighter red. The objects were now estimated to be 600 to 900 feet away, higher than the 747 and "had the size of a DC-8." Five minutes later the objects changed their formation and flew side by side. Co-pilot Takanori Tamefugi said, "Somehow I was reminded of Christmas decorations." Flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba was also witnessing these events and said, "I did not even feel threatened by their sudden maneuvers." Later he would also state, "There was something reassuring that came out of them."



The radio contact with ground control at Anchorage was unusually poor and at 5:22 pm it stopped completely. At 5:23 pm, Anchorage asked them (the flight crew) to change the frequency they were operating on because they could barely hear them. However on other frequencies there was only static and hissing. The control tower at Anchorage asked Elmendorf Regional Operation Control Center (EROCC) if they could see anything near the JAL 747 on their radar. Things were getting stranger for the flight crew, as the two objects left the 10:00 position in front of the plane. After doing this they appeared as two lights in the distance in front of a huge silhouette. Later, Captain Terauchi would say of this, "the outlines of a gigantic spaceship, and also, "I got the impression that they were two small ships returning to their mothership, which was hanging there hidden in the night sky; but the rest of the crew could hardly make out more than lights of the reconnaissance ships." Captain Terauchi could see the Saturn-like shape of what he thought of as the mothership. He switched on the on-board radar. On the screen an echo could be seen of an enormous object in the 10:00 position and at a distance of about 8 nautical miles. It was not like the red echo of a conventional aircraft. The echo was green in color that only non-metallic objects reflect. From Michael Hesemann's, UFOs: The Secret History, "Either the gigantic space vessel was not made of metal, or it used a camouflaging technique like the American stealth bomber. That would explain why the air traffic controllers at Anchorage had not seen anything definite on their radar, whereas the far more sensitive EROCC radar had picked up something which, with certainty, was no normal aircraft. And now, Anchorage could also spot the target 8 miles in front of the JAL machine, somewhat in the 10:00 position. But for the crew of the Japanese Boeing, the two objects were just two points of light."

Around 5:30 pm, the crew could see the lights of Fairbanks, Alaska, as they were thirty miles away from the city. For a few minutes the crew thought that maybe the objects were gone. The wonderment and silence of the cockpit crew was broken by Captain Terauchi's voice, "There it is again!" He had looked out of the left window towards the back and could see the enormous silhouette of the 'motherhship' better than before, because it was backlit by the bright moonlight. Also from UFOs: The Secret History: "The lights from the city of Fairbanks were reflected on the metallic stern of the spacecraft. It was a majestic spectacle. A shiver of fear ran, down Terauchi's spine: for the first time now, flight captain Terauchi was touched by fear: "Request...deviate...from...object...request heading two four zero," stuttered copilot Tamefugi into the microphone, "its...ah...quite big!" He had to repeat his request four times because the connection was so poor. Then after a minute the JAL 747 was granted permission to change course." Flight Captain Terauchi was unable to shake off the craft by changing course and even when he flew in a circle with permission of the tower the enormous craft stayed in the same position behind the airplane. The craft or whatever it was, was no longer visible to the naked eye, but at 5:38 pm the EROCC radar confirmed that there was definitely no military traffic in the area and the unidentified radar echo was still in the area of the JAL 747.

Again from Hesemann's, UFOs: The Secret History, "JAL 1628 would you like our military to scramble aircraft?", asked Anchorage. Terauchi quickly refused the offer: "Negative, negative." "Whatever it is, we should not provoke it", were his feelings. After 10 minutes, however, when a United Airlines plane came flying in the opposite direction, the apparition came to an abrupt end. At 6:20 pm, the Japanese plane landed at Anchorage. The same evening, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) of the United States at Anchorage started investigating the incident. Three FAA officials interviewed the three witnesses from the JAL crew as well as the traffic controller at Anchorage and the radar operator at EROCC. Four months later, in March 1987, the authorities released their concluding report: "The FAA is not responsible for UFO investigations, and since there is no proof of violation of the airspace, we have ended our investigations with this conclusion."
I wanted to do this post also because it is so well documented and the witnesses are beyond reproach. I do not know what to make of it, but one thing that I feel is certain in this case is that whatever JAL flight 1628 encountered was not ours! Maybe some aliens looking for a great deal on expensive French wine:-)? In all seriousness I believe in this case of airliner contact, that this crew witnessed something of extraterrestrial origin or ultra-terrestrial origin. I am indebted to the Michael Hesemann book for the idea for this post. I am working on many projects for the blog right now and hopefully can post about one of the new ones tomorrow, while continuing with the reincarnation series, poetry and my writing here and there. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by! http://www.ufocasebook.com/jal1628.html

Denise Levertov: Tenebrae

Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.

We are at war,

bitterly, bitterly at war.

And the buying and selling

buzzes at our heads, a swarm

of busy flies, a kind of innocence.

Gowns of gold sequins are fitted,

sharp-glinting. What harsh rustlings

of silver moire there are,

to remind me of the shrapnel splinters.

And weddings are held in full solemnity

not of desire but of etiquette,

the nuptial pomp of starched lace;

a grim innocence.

And picnic parties return from the beaches

burning with stored sun in the dusk;

children promised a TV show when they get home

fall asleep in the backs of a million station wagons,

sand in their hair, the sound of waves

quietly persistent at their ears.

They are not listening.

Their parents at night

dream and forget their dreams.

They wake in the dark

and make plans. Their sequin plans

glitter into tomorrow,

They buy, they sell.

They fill freezers with food.

Neon signs flash their intensions

into the years ahead.

And at their ears the sound

of the war. They are

not listening, not listening.

Denise Levertov composed this poem in the fall of 1967 during the Vietnam war. The image is 'War' by Constantino Brumidi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Levertov

My Favorite Monsters Ponders Geopolitics In 2009

Still working on my reincarnation story-I hope to have it here very soon-possibly tonight or early am if nothing technical prevents. Sometimes if I am stuck with something it helps me to work on other things. I think this very short post would be a good one as some of the things in it will also relate to the study of how empires rise and fall in the future. I am so hoping 2009 will be a year of love and peace between nations. If we do not learn to work together and at least learn to coexist with each other, surely we will all die together. I actually think if all of the nationalist bullshit was stripped off the layers of people's psyche that it would be incredibly easy for nations-even the ones that are usually at each other's throats to not only get along-but to come to love each other as sisters and brothers on this puny but immensely beautiful and mysterious little blue world we inhabit as we sail through interstellar space on our journey of 250 million years that it takes us to make one orbit around our majestic Milky Way galaxy.







One thing that really gets me down is that I see so many incredible opportunities for nations to work together on common goals that would benefit all people in the world. But what I see happening in reality is hatred getting piled on top of hatred and in the competition for natural resources and hegemony over other weaker nations I think the so called 'major powers' of the world both economically and geopolitically are dropping the ball at every turn. Here are a few flashpoints of danger I see-these are just a few. I will not even touch on Israel and Palestine as it is being covered so well on other blogs, Cruel Virgin and Unloaded to name a few fantastic blogs that have touched on this.



1) The India and Pakistan crisis. This could indeed turn into a nightmare of biblical proportions as both nations are nuclear armed and Pakistan is unstable politically. I think the other nations that are meddling in Pakistan's internal affairs-the United States being one of them are not helping matters at all and making the situation more dangerous.




2) Russia and the problems it is facing economically will certainly not be welcome additions to the intense competition to secure resources and its spot on the global stage. Here again the United States is not helping matters, along with some of its allies it seems to me that the US has done everything in its power to make Russia feel threatened and a less than equal partner on the world stage. I am not going to get into the legitimacy of either the Russian or American governments at this point. I am simply pointing out that when you are dealing with crises and supposedly trying to solve them-it does not help things one bit if you are constantly trying to destabilize and weaken the power of another nuclear armed nation as the US is trying to do to Russia. Flashpoints here would include the Georgia/Ossetia region-this one is rather obvious of course as it has already happened. What I think really happened in this crisis was that the US goaded Russia into action, just to see how far it would go to stop meddling in its affairs. I also think the Georgia-Ossetia crisis had everything to do with the oil pipelines coming from the former Central Asian Soviet nations and nothing to do with the 'human rights' concerns. Russia, from the research I have done is in a position to shut off vital oil and natural gas resources-not only to Ukraine, but to western Europe as well-dangerous games being played here-games where I can only see losers and no winners. I like it when people who blog dig back deep into history for ideas and stories-three blogs-these are not the only ones, but ones I really enjoy visiting that have done this recently are The X Spot-not only with its current fascinating series about the Manson Family crimes but with many other topics as well. too long in this place with not only wise woman's current post about the questions surrounding the death of actor Pete Duel in 1971, but other wonderful posts she has done about events in the past also. Michael at The Hidden Agendas has been digging deep into the past about topics as diverse as the eugenics movement and the 'counter culture' movement of the past and the manipulation of these by the Powers That Be. Here I would also like to add a little snippet of a belief that I have long held from the past. I think the military-industrial complex (MIC) caused Francis Gary Powers plane to be intentionally shot down over Soviet territory in 1960 to cause the detente building at the time between the USSR and the US to completely fall apart. I think this led to President Eisenhower's warnings about the power of the MIC in his farewell address of 17 January 1961. I will also always believe that the MIC played a role-maybe the major role in JFK's vicious and sadistic murder. I think JFK did not want to keep messing with Vietnam, Cuba and other nations. He, along with Nikita Khruschev wanted to be able to see their children and grandchildren grow up in a peaceful world.



3) This leads to thoughts of the alliance between Brazil, Russia, India and China. The BRIC alliance. Would these nations ever have felt the need to form this anti-western alliance if the western world was more statesmanlike and less competitive? Are the United States and some of its allies in 2009 about to have a BRIC thrown at their glass houses?



4) China-a country that along with Russia has never ceased to interest me; especially in regards to its 'real' position on foreign affairs. Sometimes I wonder if China is playing a very intelligent game of playing the United States and Russia off-against each other-ever so subtlely. What will happen with China and Taiwan in the coming years? This will be very interesting to see because China views Taiwan as a renegade province and Taiwan of course views itself as independent.


What about China and Tibet also? I think China is holding onto Tibet for its mineral wealth and perhaps future lebensraum or living space for the Chinese people. China has held onto Tibet at great cost to its image internationally, so it is very important for some reason.





These are but a few of the global flashpoints I can see getting worse if the powerful nations of the world do not start putting individual human life and dignity above international power and prestige. Hopefully these nations I have mentioned and others will take the right road towards solving both domestic and foreign problems in 2009. I also want to digress here for a little more thinking about the importance of one person that comes to power in a government. Many conspiracy folks say that one person really does not matter and that everything is pretty cut and dried as far as decisions on 'where' and 'how' power will be used and which nations will benefit and which will suffer. I differ with some of these views and think that at times one person can make a difference. I have already mentioned JFK, Eisenhower and Nikita Khruschev as leaders who really wanted to live in a peaceful world. Eisenhower warned us. JFK was murdered for his efforts to bring the MIC and others who did not want peace under control. Khruschev was overthrown in a palace revolution in 1964 by the more war-like troika of Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. Here I would like to name and give links to two Chinese 'what if' leaders that came to bad ends when they challenged power for power's sake. Lin Biao, whose plane was thought to have been shot down by the Chinese military in September 1971 in a failed attempt to oust the blood-soaked Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four which included Mao's wife. Also Zhao Ziyang, who was ousted from power in China in 1989 because he sympathized with the Chinese students, peasants and people who wanted more democracy. What if either of these leaders had made it to the top and been able to carry out reforms, as Gorbachev tried to do in the USSR. just some food for thought. I put this information in here because it will also be important when I begin examining the rise and fall of empires. I think there are a lot of 'what ifs' and accidents in history that need to be taken into account when thinking about major subjects. Here are some links for all of this information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Ziyang


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo_Pakistani_relations , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitry_Medvedev


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC


The eagle, bear and dragon. Three 'totems' to think about as we head into the new year. For anyone going to the links, take time to notice what I think is a bit of silliness in the entry of a world leader about Medvedev's cat, Dorofey, fighting with Gorbachev's unamed moggy. Hehe-who puts this stuff in there. For synchromystic friends -if the wiki info is correct about Medvedev and I think it is because I have heard this before. The name Medved means 'bear' in Russian and the Russian surname Medvedev means 'bear's son'. I think this is interesting to think about because the bear is Russia's animal totem so to speak. Hope to be back very soon with my reincarnation story-apologize for the delay. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!


Note to anyone reading this post -I have tried four times now to correct the unnecessary spacing in the post-especially the ridiculous amount of space at the end and it is not letting me. I thought that when I added the above BRIC alliance leaders picture it would fill in that space, but obviously that didn't work-so I am just going to leave well enough alone before I make it worse!

Stephen Morrissey: Reincarnation

We meet again, again flesh

and blood, again bone, tendon

and memory. Events of old lives,

clothes divested as I diverted

the past in meeting you,

in meeting you again

and again and again

into infinity

Forty years of waiting for you,

a dark delirium of the soul,

we met apparently for the first time

but home is where we are together

in this room, this house,

the two square feet we occupy

in a single embrace. The embrace

of memory, bred in muscle, eating

or favoring one side in sleep,

falling asleep in your arms.

The arms of many births,

deaths, incarnations of

gods and goddesses,

Bardic voices, Druid's potion.

Listen, we share the sounds and sights

of a summer's evening. fireflies

across a field seeming

distant but as close as

a hand before your eyes,

breath on the back of your neck;

or is it the darkened field

and firefly lights

repeating their journey

between this life and that?

With you I have

returned home, not a place

where walls enclose silence,

but soul meeting soul

in the ancient movement of time

I lie asleep on the floor

ear pressed to the darkness

and hear the hum of earth,

the generations of families, priests,

and existence of all living things

like listening, ear to a pregnant

woman's belly, baby's rapid

heart beat; shadows fall hundreds

of feet, listen into the soul

of man preparing for its journey

of final sleep, we came

from here and return, forgetful

of our origins, or of the father

and mother who created us.

I hope you enjoyed this beautiful poem found once again by my mother. It was astonishing to me as I began to read and really listen to the words the poem is trying to speak, very well I think, because I think this poem is tied in directly (through its words) to my relationship with who I refer to as "Diego" in my writing. I have obviously not even decided what reincarnation 'is' or what might cause it. But I am now one-hundred percent certain that "Diego" and I knew each other from somewhere else previously. It is also interesting because "Diego" made an odd reference to me one night some time ago that should have hit me on the head like a ton of bricks that relates to 'my story' of the feelings that brought me towards belief in reincarnation-so it is indeed kind of a double whammy so to speak. I must tell 'my story' of what started this cascade of feelings very soon-perhaps I will start the next time I post. I will also be trying to do other things here, so no worries for anyone who is getting bored with this-it is very important to me for some reason to tell this story. Peace, best wishes and happy new year to anyone stopping by!