Strange Angels: Conclusion

This is a good point but we would have to know a lot more about Mr. Hingley, and his attitude towards his wife's religious convictions, her former church (was it his also?), and the couple's attitude to the place of the woman in the home before deciding that this was the main trigger or focus of the experience. Could her experience have been a metaphorical externalization of worries about the value and authenticity of organized religion? Bob Rickard and John Michell commented that "Jean Hingley was a deeply religious woman who saw continuity, not difference, between her faith, the psychic experiences she had experienced since childhood and her alien encounter."

Of course, all of this commentary assumes that Mrs. Hingley hallucinated. The strange 'alien fairies' she encountered had no physical or otherworldly reality, only a symbolic significance peculiar to her. If this is the case, the irony is cruel, because she appears to have completely missed the allegorical message as far as we know.

Before going any further, there is a morass of 'fortean politics' that is revealed to us. We can have a great deal of sympathy-even enthusiasm for the psychosocial interpretation of fortean paranormal phenomenon. This is because it sometimes is more fortean than forteans and as unabashedly sceptical and ill-informed as a man like Professor Richard Dawkins is on matters of religion. It is a given of fortean scholarship that one can, given enough intellectual gymnastics, have it both ways, or any way you like as long as you let the possibility of the reality or at least a small trace of true strangeness to remain roaming about the world. The psychosocial faction is always very articulate and truly insightful when giving its special combination of prosaic explanations and symbolic, social, or psychological interpretations of events as reported, or events-as-psychologically reconstructed.

On this path, however, the apparent focus of study, that is, the witness or experiment of the event, may disappear. This is because very few psycholsocial theorists ask the witnesses themselves, what they think of such 'alternative' analyses of their experiences. Of course, some witnesses may have passed on (Jean Hingley died in 1982). This can make verification as difficult for these analysts as it is for the die-hard belivers of government cover-ups of UFO crashes and retrievals who have a knack for relying on death-bed testimony.

Sometimes visionaries and channels of otherworldly realities are just crazy, and it is only a question of their abilities to use public relations and the character of their times and culture as to whether their strange ideas are made to have any practical effect. 20th century history gives us some negative examples of this with men who had a liking for grand parades and odd facial hair. Perhaps souls such as Jeanne d' Arc and Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes could be considered visionaries on the more positive side.

The ground-breaking work of psychologist R.D. Laing, maintains that visionary psychosis is the outcome, not the cause, of a misunderstanding of the capability for perceiving other realities. The Jungian psychoanalyst Anne Baring seems to agree with this when she writes: "There are many kinds, levels and degrees of visionary experience. Such an experience. Such an experience is an encounter with the numinous and can be overwhelming and terrifying as well as exalting and inspiring. The line separating the visionary, the genius and the psychotic is very fine. All three have a psychic threshold which is permeable to deeper levels of experience, to non-ordinary states of consciousness. A culture may confirm or deny the validity of this kind of experience and it may be the fear and denial of it which may actually drive certain people into psychosis who in other cultures would be confirmed and supported in their calling as a healer and spiritual guide to the community...There is [in our society] no deep and sacred relationship with life, no sense that the life of the individual has meaning and value beyond achieving a position of power and influence in society...If William Blake had lived today, he would undoubtedly have been classified as insane and given drugs to bring his visions under control or get rid of them altogether.

"What is missing and has been repressed for a long time in Western culture is the connective principle of soul. It is the feminine principle that carries our deepest longings, our deepest instincts. It is, in essence, the root of the visionary imagination. It is this special faculty of the imagination that seeks relationship with the invisible, that can connect us with the unseen face of spirit. Like the thread of Ariadne, it can guide us through the bewildering labyrinth of life. We know that if we are deprived of sleep for too long we become disoriented. Perhaps it is the same if we are deprived of the visionary imagination".

Sorry it took me so long to get the conclusion to this series here! The idea and most of the information for this short series came from "The Fortean Times Random Dictionary of the Damned" compiled by the Hierophant's Apprentice, in issue number 234 from May 2008 of the Fortean Times magazine. Thanks again for all of your thoughtful, creative and intelligent comments! Peace and be well anyone stopping by or passing through.

Strange Angels Part Two

The 'conversation' between Mrs. Hingley and the entities went on as oddly as it had started. They seemed to state in a fairly obscure way that they 'came from the sky,' the three beings flew to a picture of Jesus on the wall and began talking about "Jesus and his welfare, Tommy Steele (widely regarded as Britain's first teen idol and rock and roll star), the place of the woman in the home, the Queen, children, babies, and back to Jesus again." The beings seemed to observe the room for a bit longer and she asked them if they would like something to drink. They asked for water, which Mrs. Hingley got for them, also thoughtfully adding holiday mince pies to their order! When the ever solicitous Mrs. Hingley tried to show them how to smoke a cigarette, they fled outside, with wings closed-but didn't leave behind their mince pies:-).

Through the window she observed "an orange glowing thing" parked in the garden (presumably the same craft she had spied earlier); when the "fairies" boarded, it took off towards the north. The whole incident had lasted about an hour.

Once the "fairies" had departed Mrs. Hingley "jumped" onto the floor, where she lay in agony. Finally, she managed to get into a chair. A tall figure robed in white appeared by her television set for a minute or two, then faded out of existence-as if the days events hadn't been enough already! At about 5 p.m., she felt "sufficiently recovered to make tea for her husband."

This case also presented some fascinating physical trace evidence: snow on the garage roof had melted away, and there was an 8ft (2.4 m)- long impression in the snow on the lawn in the garden. The impressed snow melted quickly "and grass would not grow there for more than a year afterwards." Other strange 'evidence' after the "fairies" departure included the radio and TV not working, cassette tapes that the beings had handled were scrambled, a 5-8 (12.7-20 cm)- diameter circle was etched into the glass back door, and Mrs. Hingley's gold wedding ring had turned white on the outside.

Mrs. Hingley herself suffered physical ailments from an aching jaw, horrendous headaches, blackouts, and sore eyes for weeks after the encounter. Mrs. Hingley also developed a 'wild talent' (moreso than she already possessed it appears from the reports) after the encounter. She now had telepathic powers! Albert Budden reports she was able to 'scan' others and obtain private information at times...The investigators [Stephen Banks, Martin Keatman and Andy Collins] were amazed when Jean suddenly told them the central details of an unrelated case they were working on."

It was in 1988 that Budden came to the conclusion that Jean Hingley had had a close encounter with an 'Earthlight' in an area of high electromagnetic activity, and that this had caused her to hallucinate. But let's say for the sake of argument that Budden is correct. What then caused the physical evidence? The original aftereffects she suffered. Her telepathy? Note: not that I am saying only an otherworldly encounter could have caused these!

In 1995 Budden published a book that painted Mrs. Hingley as a poorly educated orphan. HOWEVER-it also noted that she was a sharp-witted, intelligent, down-to-earth, and sensible woman. She had been judged to be trustworthy enough to have fostered a number of children. She had also had 'psychic' experiences all her life-her encounter with the "fairies" had just deepened her talent. The initial investigators also knew that she was very religious (as opposed to the States it would be a fairly uncommon sight to have a picture of Jesus in the living room). Andy Collins noted that, from her description, the winged 'aliens' had a strong resemblance to the fairy that those same aliens had so rudely and rather mockingly ("Nice?") shaken from the Christmas tree; he also reported that "a few days after the encounter the Christmas tree vanished from the living room. Two days later it reappeared in pieces in the back garden, without its ornaments...These gradually reappeared, over several days, just outside the garden.

It was discovered during the course of the investigation that Jean Hingley had been a member of a local, semi-fundamentalist church and had had a dispute with a group of people who went there also not long before the encounter. Other researchers noticed that the 'alien fairies' showed no respect-even derision-for the most important people and symbols of the most widely celebrated time in the Western church's calendar. The beings would continually bring the conversation back to Jesus ("and his welfare"). The similarities between the floating aliens and the Yule fairy (itself interchangable with an angel, according to one's belief structure) atop the Christmas tree, seems to allude to the Christmas spirit itself was showing how artificial-even inane it had become. The Christmas tree disappeared or was made to disappear and came back in pieces without its gaudy decorations. A commenter on the case who had noted Mrs. Hingley's selfless dedication to being a good hostess to the fairies, and the discussion about the Queen and the role of the woman in the house (even managing to make tea for her husband after this incredible experience) has said "it's hard not to see some manifestation of repressed domestic anxiety at play" here.

To be continued...

Strange Angels Part One

There has always been a middle-ground between the yin/yang, yes/no, believer/skeptic debate in the field of paranormal studies (and thankfully so!). This "middle-ground" crowd would explain things like angelic visitations, UFOs, ghostly encounters, near death experiences (NDEs), and the whole host of otherworldly phenomenena by "natural" or "technical explanations. Things like NDEs, UFO encounters and the like would be explained by many in this group to be electromagnetic effects on the temporal lobe of the brain. Sightings of UFOs are usually explained by "Earthlights." Even sightings of ghosts are explained by physical attributes in the enviorment. NDEs are explained as the increasing anoxia in the brain as it starts to "die." I think it is wonderful that there is a group of people-laymen and scientists alike, who try to explain some of the mysteries in our world through "logical" means. I don't believe that everything can be explained away by resorting to scientific reasoning. I do think there is a "magical" aspect to our reality for lack of a better word that will never be "solved" - but that is just me. I would like to fall on the cautious and skeptical side when discussing most paranormal things -even though I know it must seem to many who read my blog that I believe in everything!

I think it would be helpful to look at a case that seems to bridge ufological and faery/elf territory-as so many of them do it seems. Some of these encounters appear to mock our notions of physicality, dimension and space-time. This case is highly unique to say the least maybe sui generis would be a better word for it! We can look at this case through our own eyes-and decide to completely dismiss it-or perhaps think something did indeed happen. We can also look at this case through the eyes of a Mr. Albert Budden who came to the conclusion this this was a case of a woman who had a close encounter with an "Earthlight" in an area of high electromagnetic activity that consequently led to a hallucinatory experience.

This very strange case involved a Mrs. Jean Hingley and occurred on 4 January 1979 in Rowley Regis, England. It was 6:30 in the morning and Mrs. Hingley's husband had just left for work. It was still dark outside. From the kitchen, she observed a large, orange glowing sphere that hovered over the carport in the left hand corner of the back garden. Mrs. Hingley opened the door to get a close look and "three beings rushed past her into the house. As they did this, she felt herself float away from the floor, hovering a few inches above it." From then until the entities left, her feet did not touch the floor.

She heard a commotion from the living room and drifted above the floor into it. She saw two of the creatures shaking the Christmas tree so roughly that the fairy on top fell off. When the beings saw her gaping at them they turned and said in unison: "Nice?" Even though she was partly paralyzed by the encounter, Mrs. Hingley finally managed to say Bruce Forsyth's catchphrase: "Oh, it's nice to see you, to see you nice." Bruce Forsyth was a British showman and entertainer and apparently had many catchphrases that "caught on."

Things got even more bizarre when she asked them where they were from. In answer to her question they flew around the room, "eventually landing on the sofa...and jumping up and down on it like naughty children. She told them sharply to stop, which they did." That was the end of Mrs. Hingley's attempts to control events. Anything else she tried to do to reign in the situation earned her a shock to the middle of her forehead by a laser-like paralyzing light beam that was emitted from the beings' helmets.

The bubble helmets with their constantly glowing light on top (when not zapping the unfortunate Mrs. Hingley) and the beings' faces are almost the only feature that ties in with other descriptions of UFO occupants. A few researchers wondered if the archetypal nature of Mrs. Hingley's account of their appearance put a shadow of a doubt over her claim to have had not the slightest interest or knowledge of the UFO phenomenon.

"They had large eyes like 'black diamonds' with a glittering lustre, set into wide white faces with no nose to speak of and a simple line for a mouth." A "close-fitting" hood hid any possible ears the creatures may have had. Their arms and legs ended in tapering points, to which they could make objects adhere to. Their legs were a silvery green color (this despite them being called "blue fairies" in some of the ufological data); when they flew, the legs hung down stiffly, 'as do some terrestrial insects'; the forelimbs were clasped together. The whole area around the creatures' bodies was surrounded by a halo. But these were not even the most extraordinary characteristics the beings possessed. This title was claimed by a pair of oval wings! These "looked as if they were made of thin, transparent paper covered with dozens of multi-colored dots." These appendages didn't seem to contribute much to the "fairies" ability to fly-only fluttering slightly or even folding up when they were aloft.

To be continued...

"They're still out there"

This article first caught my attention at the Rigorous Intuition discussion forum last year. It is an article from 20 September 2008 about a UFO encounter 34 years previously by a Canadian farmer. It also appears the farmer has had some sightings in the sky in more recent years. This is the last article I had saved to drafts. I wanted to put something here in case it takes me days and days to feel better, and this was convenient as it was 99 percent ready to go. The article is from the STAR PHOENIX newspaper in Saskatoon.

"It was 34 years ago this month when Edwin Fuhr encountered five dome-shaped objects hovering about a half-metre above his canola field.

The passage of time has done nothing to quell the 70-year-old Langenburg man's conviction that we are not alone in the universe. In fact, Fuhr believes his visitors are still keeping watch--from a distance.

"They're out there, there's no question," he said in an interview.

About five or six years ago, in the northeast part of the sky, four or five lights did something strange.

"They followed you," Fuhr said. saying that they looked like stars but "a star doesn't move or change colors."

In 1988, he moved from the farm, about 10 kilometres north of Langenburg, into town. The urban lights tend to wash out the night sky, but every so often in the northeast, the lights show up and follow along, Fuhr said.

"I'm pretty sure they're the same ones (that were in the field in 1974). That's the direction they took off in '74," he said.

Many UFO sightings on the Praries occur in fall, when farmers are harvesting before the frost hits. That's when reports of crop circles tend to..er crop up.

Going to inspect the landing area the day following his encounter, Fuhr found five rings of depressed canola swirled in a counter-clockwise direction. More circles were found in the area later that month, according to the media and public reports from the time.

Over the next while, the site was visited by the RCMP, scientists, UFO researchers from across North America and even the FBI. Sniffer dogs used by the police refused to enter the circles, according to Fuhr.

"Something was there and I doubt it was a hoax. There's no indication anything had been wheeled in or out and Mr. Fuhr seemed genuinely scared," RCMP Const. Ron Morier was quoted in a Star Phoenix story of Sept. 19, 1974.

On Sept 27, 1974, another newspaper article referred to the Martensville police constable and his wife witnessing a UFO over Saskatoon. It hung above the Nutana neighborhood briefly before taking off. The officer, Albert Goddue, describing it as being dome-shaped.

"No one will ever convince me it was any type of conventional aircraft. It was nothing I have ever seen in the sky before," Goddue was quoted as saying.

Not everyone remains a believer after a close encounter. On Sept. 19, 1963, an 11-year-old schoolboy and three friends were playing in a Saskatoon schoolyard when they saw a bright oval object hover and drop something. They claim a figure stood up three metres tall, made a moaning sound, held out his hands, and floated towards them.

The 11-year-old told investigators the figure was a man dressed in clothes "like a monk," which were white like a crayon.

The accounts are recorded in two books, Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds, by Jacques Vallee and The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, by John Keel.

The children ran off and became so hysterical that he had to be hospitalized.

"Sometimes I could see right through him," the 11-year-old said.

Now 56, he refuses to believe it ever happened.

"It was just overzealous kids with good imaginations," he said in an interview Friday, the 45th anniversary of the event. "I don't want to discuss it.

The man said he went through a "tough time" in school after the supposed sighting was made public. Since then he has moved from Saskatoon and no longer associates with the other three children who were with him that day. He has been married 35 years and neither his wife nor any of his immediate family know anything of the incident, he said, asking his name be kept out of the newspaper.

"It's in the past and that's where it should stay," he said. "I don't need the headache."

Fuhr was 36 when he saw the saucers around 10 a.m. Initially, he noticed one metallic object in a depression on the land. He walked to within 15 feet of the object.

"I saw the grass was moving and I looked up and saw this thing spinning at one hell of a speed," he said on Thursday.

There was no sound, no smell, no windows to peer into, said Fuhr. whose joints ached as he walked backwards to the swather, keeping his eye on the saucer.

Then he noticed four more off to the side, arranged in a "half-moon" formation. He estimates the two largest ones were 30 feet in diameter with the rest slightly smaller. They hovered about 15 minutes before taking off, one-by-one, with a gust of vapour.

A few weeks after the incident, a scientist from the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa suggested the rings were caused by mushrooms. Allen McNamara, he of the NRC's upper atmosphere research section, also theorized the glow from the saucers may have been caused by the fungi.

The crop circles were exactly the same as "fairy rings" produced by underground mushroom filaments, he was quoted as saying. When asked by reporters about the canola pressed in a circular motion, McNamara guessed it was caused by wind.

Fuhr has never been provided an explanation that would convince him he was imagining things.

"Imagination doesn't leave marks in the ground does it?" he said, noting the landing site was tested as recently as four years ago and is still emitting radioactive waves.

For the first year, nothing would grow where the circles were and "the ground was hard, like cement."

Though he no longer works the land, it remains in the family, farmed by a nephew. Fuhr has never asked him whether he's encountered anything strange."

This ends the article from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix from September of last year. Hopefully this will be a LINK to the original story. So many things fascinated me about this article. The mention of crop circles and depressions in the ground was one. I am well aware that the crop circles, depressions in the ground and "fairy rings" go back quite a few years before crop circles really hit the news in the late 80s and early 90s, but it still interested me to see references to them in the article

I also think it is so funny how science always has an "explanation" for events such as these no matter how many "rings" they have to run around to promulgate their hypotheses. I think the radioactivity at the site is also very intriguing. Another item of great interest to me is how some people who have had odd encounters "shut down" after awhile and insist the event never happened, like the boy from the encounter in 1963. I would just absolutely love to know if Mr. Fuhr's nephew has had any strange encounters! Perhaps the area this farm is on could be a "window" area of paranormal activity. Finally, I thought this was a very well-written article that really got my imagination going, and I hope others who might see it here enjoy it too! The second image is of Mr. Fuhr in his canola field after his original 1974 sighting. The first and third images don't have anything to do directly with the story. The third image is of the 1996 "Julia Set" crop circle formation found in the United Kingdom. Oh!-One more thing-I would love to know if Mr. Fuhr or any of the other "experiencers" have had episodes of "missing time." Peace and best to anyone stopping by!

Carl Jung, UFOs & Daimonic Reality

In Patrick Harpur's book, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, he talks about many things similar to Jung's collective unconscious and Harpur's own notion of the slippery world of daimonic reality. My understanding after reading most of this wonderful book is that Harpur doesn't think we will every be able to describe many aspects of this other world that includes fairies (not my brand of them:), creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster among many other cryptozoological wonders, spirits, gnomes, trolls, UFOs and their "occupants" and other types of paranormal experience. He doesn't think we will ever be able to put these experiences on some great balance sheet because we try to literalize them. From page 48 in Harpur's book here is a quote that I hope will go some way towards explaining the concept of literalizing something: "When Jung spoke of images, he referred especially of course to those archetypal images we encounter as daimons and gods. We must not be misled by the word "images" into thinking of them as somehow unreal. We should, on the contrary, approach them as Jung approached daimons like his Philemon--"as if they were real people" to whom he "listened attentively." He did not, we notice, treat them as literally real, as we (mistakenly) treat hallucinations or (correctly) treat people in the street. He did not treat them as "extraterrestrials." Nor did he treat them as parts of himself, illusions or mere projections. He treated them as metaphorical beings, as if they were real people. And it is this metaphorical reality, as real as (if not more so than) literal reality--as real as Philemon--that he called psychic reality. In order to remove the taint of subjectivity which popularly attaches to the word "psychic," I shall call it daimonic reality."

Then on pages 13 and 14 of Daimonic Reality, Harpur goes on to say: "If Jung described the unconcious in terms of strata or levels, this was only a manner of speaking. The unconscious cannot be described in itself; it can only be represented by metaphors. It does not divide neatly into levels, for instance. Rather it is oceanic, shifting, seething, constantly in flux. Indeed, the ocean was a favorite metaphor of Jung's according to which consciousness is, of course, only a small island rising out of, and surrounded by, the vast unconcious fluidity."

"The content of the unconscious is a sea of images. These are usually, but not exclusively, visual--they can be abstractions, patterns, ideas, inspirations and even moods. The images of the collective unconscious are representations of what Jung called archetypes. This was not a new idea--it goes back to Plato, who postulated an ideal world of forms, of which everything in this world is merely a copy--but it was a new idea in psychology. The archetypes are paradoxical. They cannot be known in themselves, but they can be known indirectly through their images. They are, by definition, impersonal but they can manifest personally. For example, the archetype which lies, so to speak, nearest the surface is called the shadow. At a personal level, it embodies our inferior side, all our repressed traits. It might appear in dreams and fantasies, therefore, as a dark twin or a despised acquaintance or an idiot half-brother. At the same time, our personal shadows are rooted in an impersonal collective shadow, the archetype of evil, such as the Christian Devil represents."

And finally from Harpur's Daimonic Reality on pages 14 and 15: "The archetype which most concerns us is the one Jung called the self. It is the goal of all psychic life, all personal development, which he called individuation. This process forms the major task of our lives, in the course of which we are supposed to make conscious, as far as possible, the contents of our unconscious--for instance, by withdrawing our projections onto the world. The result is an expansion of personality and, finally, a state of wholeness which embraces even the dark and contradictory sides of ourselves. The self archetype is foreshadowed in the image of the Wise Old Man and consummated in his mystic marriage with the anima. But such personifications are not the only images of the self. They also occur in abstract form, most notably in circular patterns, often divided into four, which oriental religions have long understood and called mandalas. Such images can occur spontaneously near the beginning of the individuation process, or at a crisis in our psychic lives, as a guide to and token of the final goal. Jung believed that "flying saucers" were like mandalas; that UFOs, in other words, are projections of the collective unconscious. (However, I shall have more, and critical, things to say about "projection" later on.)"

And indeed, Patrick Harpur will have more to say! I do not think I have read a book that comes anywhere near as close to explaining why paranormal phenomena are so tricky, slippery and prone to exhibit strange but metaphorical and synchronistic behavior--on up to just plain bizarre and utterly nonsensical behavior. I hope to share more of what I have learned and am still learning from this astounding book very soon. The image is of a "Sunflower" mandala. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

Jacques Vallee and Dimensions Again!

This article was meant to go in the previous article-sorry it took me so long to get it posted here. This quote is from Jacques Vallee's Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact: "Equally fascinating to the student of close-encounter cases are the scenes in which animals are carried to the hovering disk. In one case, a god is seen holding a horned animal under each arm-a scene certainly reminiscent of many a claim of animal kidnapping by UFO occupants. Three of the cylinder seals (Here Vallee is referring to a kind of protective amulet worn by the ancient Phoenicians) show approximately the same thing: a disk above some elaborate ground structure, a human in adoration, and someone bringing a horned animal toward the center of the scene. The beings themselves fall into the following categories: 1. Human beings that Assyriologists call worshippers, priests, kings, etc. Sometimes they are wearing winged garments. 2. The gods. They are shown either emerging from the disk and wearing, in some cases, elaborate headdresses or walking outside the disk, as in one amulet where an entity seems to be wearing its hair in three long tresses on either side of the head. 3. The scorpion-men, who have large phallic attributes in one figure but in another case would more properly be called scorpion women. They are only seen supporting the disk. It would be interesting to find out where the word scorpion comes from in connection with these figures.

The scorpion-men are consistently about two-thirds the size of men, who in turn are smaller than gods. (Professor Douglas Price-Williams of UCLA points out that in the Gilgamesh epic the scorpion creatures were the guardians fo the mountain of the sun. The scorpion-man in the Babylonian Enuma Elish was a monster created by chaos at the beginning of the world. Price-Williams adds: "These creatures would thus be tellurian beings, 'chthonic' as Jung would have said." 4. Various monsters, such as a horned creature or a sphinx. Why should the observation of a flying disk be represented in the context of an obviously magical ceremony that does not appear to have any traditional characteristic of Phoenician religion.?" A bit later in Dimensions Vallee talks of this: case (think of #3): "A letter from a British woman begins: At the lecture by Jacques Vallee at the London A.A. [Architects Association] on the 12th of December I was surprised by one of the slides of a Phoenician seal showing a winged sphere held up by two creatures which he described as "Scorpion-men." Perhaps I have seen such a man myself.

The letter writer continues: "It was the summer of 1968, about 4:00 P.M. She was driving from London to a place near Stratford to visit friends for the weekend. She had a companion in the car with her. Just outside Oxford they both saw a shining disk in the sky. They slowed and then stopped to watch it as it darted and dodged. Another car stopped to watch it too. Eventually it sank behind the trees. They resumed their trip, but the really striking events took place after the disk disappeared: During the drive between Burford and Stratford I had some startling, and to me, novel insights into what I can only describe as the Nature of Reality. They were connected in some way to this shining disk, and have had a profound effect on me, causing what is commonly known as personality change. I won't try to explain what those insights were since almost all the religions of the world have tried to do this and have failed. (In that afternoon I changed from an agnostic to a gnostic, if that means anything at all.). However, these insights hit me like bolts from the blue, as though from outside, one after the other. I've never had a similar experience since. The letter continues with a description of what the woman saw that evening after supper, a description that seems to be straight out of a John Fowles novel: the guests were in the sitting room, which had open French windows leading out onto the lawn, and the woman went over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. The weather, she wrote, was "very hot and close."

The woman's letter continues: "The light from the room shone in an arc of about ten feet around the window. In that area I saw, as soon as I came to the window, a strange figure. My perception of it was heightened by the state of frozen panic it induced in me. It was for me without any doubt, a demon, or devil because of my western oriented interpretation (I imagine) of the vision or creature or animal or man, or whatever it was I saw. Like the "Scorpion-man," as well as Pan, it had dog or goat like legs. It was covered in silky, downy fur, dark, and glinting in the light. It was unmistakably humanoid, and to my mind malevolent. It crouched, and stared, unblinkingly, at me with light, grape-green eyes that slanted upwards and had no pupils. The eyes shone and were by far the most frightening thing about it. It was, I think retrospectively, trying to communicate with me, but my panic interfered with any message I might have received. If it had stood to its full height it would have been about four to five feet tall. It had pointed ears and a long muzzle. It gave the impression of emaciation; its hands and fingers were as thin as sticks.

Continuing with the same woman's letter to Jacques Vallee-I am trying to break this up a bit to make it easier to read: "Eventually, convinced that I was hallucinating, I went and sat down for a while, until the panic had subsided. Then I went to see if it was still there. It was, except that it had moved further into the shadows on the edge of the arc of light. I made sure I kept away from that door for the rest of the evening, and left next day. I told no one. That it may have been connected with the shining disk I only realized after I saw that slide." I was somewhat leery of putting this in the other article-as it seems to be of such different subject matter-of course it wound up being separate anyway. But the woman's saying that she changed from an "agnostic to a gnostic" really struck me. I forgot a link that shows a theory or some thinking about what I hope the UFO phenomenon to really be about. I hope to be back with that shortly. Thanks again for all of your kind, thoughtful and intelligent comments!The first image is a picture of a cylinder seal. The image below the first is a picture called The Seance by artist Rosaleen Norton-I would like to do an article or two about her in the future. This link HERE should go to a video of Terrence McKenna talking about the UFO phenomenon that Christopher Knowles had posted at his excellent and fascinating Secret Sun blog. McKenna and his work and life have always interested me greatly and if I can ever get any energy back I would like to also do an article or two about him.

R U Sirius? More Dogon Zamora Thoughts

Here are some more thoughts I have in relation to parts or a part of the UFO mystery. I would also like to give a couple of paragraph sized quotes from my all time -can't live without-if I was forced to take one book only to a desert island exile-this would be it book-Jeff Wells splendid Rigorous Intuition: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them. I am also calling this a rough draft because insomnia struck yet again last night and I feel really, really slooow-so I would like to come back later and make sure it reads all right, the links work and maybe add more info and pics. How slow am I today? Well I just spent like an hour and a half trying to figure out WTF trans-Plutonic meant-and am still not quite sure. I think it just means outside the realm of our solar system-beyond Pluto. At first I thought it could be some mystical realm or even a level of "being" beyond the element Plutonium.

I think I should first say that I always wondered if at least part of the answer to the secret of the UFOs and some other paranormal phenomena is that a gateway or portal to another dimension or spacetime was opened, either intentionally or accidentally. That probably sounds very wild to many people but the high strangeness of many of the reports led me to consider that we were not just dealing with physical manifestations on our level of reality-but perhaps manifestations opening/unveiling beyond our three dimensional world and spacetime and also interpenetrating it. Jacques Vallee is one UFO researcher who has reported UFO encounters that seem to straddle the boundaries between the physical, non-physical, archetypal and even mystical. Over the years I began to think that the UFO mystery did indeed have some sort of meaning but I also wondered if humanity would ever be able to understand the meaning of the phenomena. I often thought of the analogy of a caveman trying to explain a 747, but a magnitude of difficulty in understanding beyond that.

Getting back to gateways and portals. In 1918 Aleister Crowley was working with a female partner named Roddie Minor using Ceremonial and Sexual Magick with the intent of invoking what he referred to as "intelligences" to manifest. If they are to be believed they had success with this and through Minor's psychic mediumship made contact with an entity called "Lam" through a tear in spacetime that created a portal between realities. Here is a quote from Jeff Wells', Rigorous Intuition from pages 292 to 293: "Remember Lam, and Aleister Crowley's "Amalantrah Working"? Using sex magick with his partner and psychic sensitive Roddie Minor, Crowley claimed to have opened a dimensional portal, through which passed Lam, whose portrait appears an archetypal grey, though Crowley drew him "from life" in 1918, many years before the greys entered our cultural consciousness. Before Lam appeared, Minor channeled messages from a spirit-wizard called Amalantrah, who told Crowley to "find the egg." Ian Blake, who has much of interest to say about Crowley, Lam, and the egg metaphor here, writes that "one of the earlier versions of the Amalantrah Working ended with the sentence, "It's all in the egg." During the final surviving version of this Working, in reference to a question about the egg, Crowley was told: "Thou art to go this way."

That was the first of two quotes I wanted to use out of Jeff's superb book for this post to hopefully illuminate what I am trying to say with my clumsy wordage. If anyone is having trouble following do not worry whatsoever-the story with Crowley and his entourage-perhaps I should say proteges is bizarre and it gets moreso by the time further on when two names are added to it. One of these names will possibly be familiar to you and one obscure. I won't go into them today but I will tell you the names: Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard. Interesting to me is also the fact that Crowley recieved channeled information from his first wife Rose in 1904. Here is a quote about that event from of all things a newsletter put out by the sublime musical group TOOL: "A possible example of just such a Sirian communication is LIBER AL, better known as "The Book of the Law." According to Crowley, Liber Al was a received text, channeled through his first wife Rose (named Ouarda the Seeress by Crowley) while in Cairo, Egypt. The foreboding prophecy of the text was dictated in a rich timber by a higher intelligence which called itself Aiwass, an emissary from the Egyptian Neter, Horus. One passage in the book even asks "is a god to live in a dog?" A possible reference to the Dog Star Sirius."

Michael Bertiaux claims to be a more recent Lam contactee. He is supposed to have had much success in communication with the "intelligence." Bertiaux sees Lam as a "subterranean burgeoning of Lucifer-Gnosis." Gnosis which is higher or intuitive knowing would bring out the meaning of that statement to be that "knowing Lam is to know a welling up from the unconscious of an inner knowing of Lucifer." It is important to note here that Lucifer here is not to be thought of as the Christian devil but the "Light Bringer." "Lam" is also considered to be a class of entity-as opposed to an individual being. If a person invokes "Lam" they are asking an entity of that type to manifest rather than a particular being. Here is yet another quote by a man named Ian Blake who also discusses Crowley and the Sirius connection: "During the 1950s, Crowley's last disciple, British occultist and current Outer Head of the Typhonian O.T.O., Kenneth Grant, worked rituals with the NU-ISIS lodge that were designed to receive Maatian emanations from Sirius. In his remarkable Typhonian trilogies, Grant leaves a record of the lodges attempt to establish traffic with non-human entities from a planet that he describes as being trans-Plutonic."

So I am wondering what is going on? Sirius-if I remember my astronomy correctly is of spectral type A1 (not like the steak sauce;-)-sorry for the "Lam" attempt at humor-I can always tell when I am getting tired. It is a very bright star, so the fact that it is mentioned from antiquity until the present day in all kinds of ways makes sense. However, my understanding is that this type of star is extremely unlikely (of course this is just by our "current" understanding of science) to support life. Yet certain ancient societies and a very old tribe existing today mention it as sustaining physical life. The Dogon in Africa is a very fascinating tale that I will provide a link for. This tribe "knew" things about the Sirius star system that by any conceivable means they should have had no way of knowing-first of all that it is indeed a pair and not just one star and secondly they seem to have knowledge of the physical qualites of the smaller star-a "white dwarf " that modern physics didn't even begin to describe until the twentieth century. Sirius-it seems to me anyway-not that I am claiming to know about all metaphysical systems-but in so many that I have heard of the status of Sirius is extremely important. The information about Lam and his image-which I will come back with. Coincidences do happen but I remember getting a shiver up my spine when I first viewed the Lam image and realized it was from 1918. And what is with all the egg stuff? So many thoughts come to mind with the word "egg" that I wonder if that is part of the "game" also whatever the "game" is. I think of creation myths, the big bang (which some scientists are starting to question), how everything from chickens to us homo saps are born, for some reason the "alpha and the omega" always come to mind when I think of the word egg. I am probably the only person weird enough for this! Well I am going to close the post out with a last quote from Jeff's book-I have probably been very much overly-wordy which seems to become worse the more tired I am. I am also going to be coming back to other subjects in Rigorous Intuition. There are so many varied and interesting subjects in this book it will be hard to choose which ones to work with-it is five hundred pages of paranormal, parapolitical and conspiratorial yummy goodness!

OK now more about the Zamora case and other thoughts from page 294 of Rigorous Intuition: "One final thought. Lonnie Zamora reported seeing "markings in red letters about a foot high on the side. It looked like the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that." To those who regard UFOs as nuts and bolts spacecraft, perhaps these markings would be regarded as the designation of an extraterrestrial authority. Their "flag." But it's quite anthropomorphic to presume aliens would think in such terms.

If we consider ritual magick, the symbol resembles a "sigil," used for the invocation of angelic and demonic entities. I haven't searched yet for a crescent with a vertical arrow within it and a horizontal bar beneath it. But I wonder what the implications would be if one were found."

When I read Jeff's thinking about the "sigil" it really hit home how very odd and out-of-the-box this phenomena is, because that is indeed what the marking Lonnie Zamora saw looks like and also the marking on the "UMMO" UFO in the above picture. I am realizing I not only forgot "Lam's" image but also some links-like sigil-I will try to come back with these shortly. If anyone reading this post didn't understand it please let me know-I would much rather re-do a whole post and have people understand than people looking at it just saying WTF?! Anyone hearing of this for the first time may need to go to the links I will provide to get a better understanding. I am still trying to decide what to focus on next and have several ideas. I also owe Autumnforest a "thanks" for giving me the idea to start a new series to go along with the Mind, Soul and Reality series. I think I am going to call it "Prophets and Possession" and have no idea how quick the next post will be here-maybe not that long and I would also like to return to Rigorous Intuition and other sources for it. Here are the links-I hope anyone stopping by had a beautiful weekend!Finally got the image of "Lam" here at the top of the post.

http://www.boudillon.com/lam/lam.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/Ordo_Templi_Orientis

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

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

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

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

http://www.toolband.com/news/letter/2000_07.php

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

Lonnie Zamora Encounter 45 years Later

On 24 April 1964 a very important UFO encounter took place outside of the small town of Soccoro, New Mexico. The incident was very interesting because of the extreme credibility of the main witness, multiple witnesses reported it and physical trace evidence. At about 5:30 pm that afternoon police officer Lonnie Zamora had just noticed a black Cadillac drive past him in the other direction at excessive speed. The description of the car that was speeding is also interesting in light of the "Men in Black" reports around the world as they are often said to drive big black luxury cars! Thinking to catch the speeding vehicle Zamora quickly turned his police car around, and with squealing tires was in hot pursuit. He was on State Road 85 with the Cadillac still speeding ahead of him, when he heard a noise like a roar or thunder. Towards the southwest direction and about three-quarters of a mile away, an orange and blue colored flame shot across the sky. A dynamite shack was located in the area in that general direction and Zamora had hoped there hadn't been an explosion there. At this point Officer Zamora decided to let the speeder get away and go investigate. Once he had driven up the first hill he looked in the direction of the dynamite shack and saw a glowing white object at the bottom of a gorge about 500 feet away from him.

Now he was thinking some terrible accident had taken place there-perhaps a small plane crash or car wreck. Zamora radioed to the Soccoro police station that he was going to leave his patrol car and "check the vehicle." As Zamora got closer he realized that what he had thought of as a wrecked vehicle was something entirely different. Two "persons" in white overalls were standing near a white, glowing, metallic object that was shaped like an American football or egg and standing on four thin black landing struts. One of the humanoids looked in the direction of Zamora's car and was apparently startled by it an began moving quickly. Officer Zamora approached the object still thinking that whoever the occupants might be they might need help. As he got closer, Zamora again heard the noise of thunder and also saw a flame. The flame was bluish in color; accompanied by a loud roar and was coming from the underside of the object. Zamora noticed a sign or symbol on the object. It was painted in red on the white side of the object. It looked like a semicircle, drawn horizontally, about twenty-five inches long. Inside it was an arrow pointing upwards with the shaft cut off at the level of the barbs. Zamora was now quite frightened and thought the object was in danger of exploding and didn't hesitate hitting the ground running. Once he got to the other side of the hill he felt a little more safe and turned back to observe the egg-shaped object. He took shelter behind some rocks and bushes and watched the craft fly away at a low height of fifteen to twenty feet above the ground. It missed the dynamite shack by only about three feet. After gradually increasing its velocity the object finally disappeared in the distance.

Officer Zamora ran back to his car and radioed to a fellow officer at the police station, "Look out the window and tell me if you can see an object. It looks like a balloon." However, a moment later Zamora realized that it would be impossible for his fellow officer to witness the object as the window at the station faced the wrong direction. Here is a quote by Officer Zamora describing how the object took off, "After I fell by the car and my glasses fell off, kept running to north, with car between me and object period. Glanced back a couple of times. Noted object to rise to about level of car, about 20 to 25 feet guess-took I guess about six seconds when object started to rise and I glanced back. I ran I guess about halfway to where I ducked down -about 50 feet from the car is where I ducked down, just over the edge of hill. I guess I had run about 25 feet when I glanced back and saw the object level with the car and it appeared about directly over the place where it rose from. I was still running and I jumped just over the hill-I stopped because I did not hear the roar. I was scared of the roar, and I had planned to continue running down the hill. I turned around toward the object and at the same time put my head toward ground, covering my face with my arms. Being that there was no roar, I looked up, and I saw the object going away from me. It did not come any closer to me. It appeared to go in straight line and at same height possibly 10 to 15 feet from ground, and it cleared the dynamite shack by about three feet. Shack about eight feet high. Object was travelling very fast. It seemed to rise up, and take off immediately across country."

Almost immediately upon the object leaving the area, State Police Sargeant Sam Chavez arrived having overheard Officer Zamora who had radioed wildly to his dispatcher hoping that someone else might be able to see the object. Together they noted the evidence in the arroyo: a half-burned bush, four angular impressions in the soil where the "legs" had been and several small footprints and other impressions.

Hector Quintanilla, Jr., the former head of the Air Forces Project Bluebook writes in a declassified CIA document from 1966-"Studies in Intelligence" that: "There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora's reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well-versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw, and frankly so are we. This is the best documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle, or the stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic."

The first image is a drawing Lonnie Zamora made of the "insignia" on the craft. The next iimage is a sketch Zamora made of the craft itself. The last image is an artist's conception of the encounter. http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case90.htm Best to anyone stopping by and thanks again for all of your considerate, insightful and intelligent comments! PS-I may be back with a bit more about this case soon-not sure yet- may have some more thoughts and information about it.

French Encounters of the Close Kind

1954: Quarouble Nord-Pas-de-Calais. During the intense UFO wave of 1954, Marius Dewilde had a bizarre experience on the night of 10 September. He had gone to calm his barking dog. Mr. Dewilde was shocked when his flashlight illuminated two short creatures with large heads, dressed in what appeared to be 'diving suits.' He lunged at them, but was blinded by a brilliant beam of light, and saw a strange object rising into the air. The image above is a newspaper with an aritists rendering of the encounter and an actual photo of Marius Dewilde. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Dewilde

1965: Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute Provence. Farmer Maurice Masse heard a hissing sound and saw a spherical shaped object, as big as a small car land in his lavender field on the morning of 1 July. Two small humanoids with large heads seemed to be inspecting his plants. As he got closer, one of the beings saw him and pointed a strange object at him. He found himself paralyzed and feeling somewhat tranquilized. After the UFO left marks were found in the field and days later the lavender began to die within 5 to 6 meters from where the UFO landed. The local gendarmerie believed his story and effects from the incident were still felt eight years after wards. http://ufoevidence.org/cases/case140.htm The image below is of Maurice Masse standing where the object landed.

1981: Trans-en-Provence, Var. The truth of this case largely stands on the testimony of one witness. On 8 January, Renato Nicolai claimed he saw a metallic, disk shaped object touch down on land below his farm house at dusk. The object quickly left took off and disappeared, leaving behind circular traces on the ground. Plant and soil samples were subjected to a detailed scientific investigation by scientists from GEPAN (Study Group into Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena). GEPAN concluded that a heavy, metal object had impacted on the ground, which had been subjected to intense heat. This has become one of the best 'physical trace' cases in the UFO literature. http://www.ufocasebook.com/transenprovince.html The image below is an artists rendering of what Renato Nicolai claimed to have observed.

1994: Air France Flight 3532, in flight from Nice to London. On 28 January, shortly after noon, the flight crew of an Air France Airbus saw an reddish-brown object of "immense size" and "constantly changing shape"-to the flight captain it looked "like an enormous lens" and changed shape several times before it disappeared. Ground radar confirmed an unidentified trace crossing Flight 3532's trajectory at the time of the sighting. The GEPAN study concludes: "The case has never been explained to this day and leaves the door open to all possible hypotheses." http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1062.htm The image below is an artists rendering of the Air France encounter. As often happens with artists who are unfamiliar with aircraft-the plane is wrong-looks to me like he drew a 727 and it should have been a twin-engined Airbus A319. Of course it is the image of the unidentified object that is most important so I went ahead and posted it.

I hope there are no spacing problems when I post this as there usually are when I try to do multiple images-if so I will try to work them out. I was going to put a 1968 French case in with these, but thought it deserved its own post. I would also like to do a single post about a 1978 case in Australia and a 1980 case in Texas, USA. However, the next series I would like to do is just a short bit of Fortean history that I think will be interesting and different from the things I have done before here, I hope to have it here fairly soon. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by and thanks so very much for your intelligent and thougtful comments!

UFO Mysteries: Passport To Magonia Part Two

Again from Jacques Vallee's, Passport To Magonia: "Paracelsus was probably born in 1491, and in the very same year Facius Cardan recorded his observations of seven strange visitors directly related to the creatures of the elements who were so puzzling to the great philosophers. The incident is preserved in the writings of his son, Jerome Cardan (1501-1576), who is well known to us today as a mathematician. Jerome Cardan lived in Milan and was not only a mathematician but also an occulist and a physician. In his book De Subtilitate, Cardan explains that he had often heard his father tell the particular story and finally searched for his record of the event, which reads as follows: August 13, 1491. When I had completed the customary rites, at about the twentieth hour of the day, seven men duly appeared to me clothed in silken garments, resembling Greek togas, and wearing, as it were, shining shoes. The undergarments beneath their glistening and ruddy breastplates seemed to be wrought of crimson and were of extraordinary beauty.

Nevertheless, all were not dressed in this fashion, but only two who seemed to be of nobler rank than the others. The taller of them who was of ruddy complexion was attended by two companions, and the second who was fairer and of shorter stature, by three. Thus in all there were seven. He left no record as to whether their heads were covered. They were about forty years of age, but they did not appear to be above thirty. When asked who they were, they said that they were men composed, as it were, of air, and subject to birth and death. It was true that their lives were much longer than hours, and might even reach three hundred years duration. Questioned on the immortality of our soul, they affirmed that nothing survives which is peculiar to the individual...When my father asked them why they did not reveal treasures to men if they knew where they were, they answered that it was forbidden by a peculiar law under the heaviest penalties for anyone to communicate this knowledge to men. They remained with my father for over three hours. But when he questioned them as to the cause of the universe they were not agreed. The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity. On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should he desist for an instant the world would perish...Be this fact or fable, so it stands.

At the end of Passport to Magonia, before the huge appendix section of that book begins, Jacques Vallee has some great thoughts about the UFO phenomenon that I think are very much remarking on here: "To conclude, let us remark that the density (timewise) of UFO manifestations is not decreasing. Let us also note that knowledge of the structure of time would imply superior knowledge of destiny (I am using the word "destiny" to designate not the fate of individuals but the mechanism through which physical events unfold and the canvas upon which they are implemented). Perhaps I should remind the reader of two points we have touched on earlier: (1) the relativity of time in Magonia, a theory passed on to us in numerous tales we have reviewed; and (2) that astonishing little remark made by a sylph to Facius Cardan, which antedates quantum theory by four centuries: "He added that God created [the universe] from moment to moment, so that should he desist for an instant the world would perish."

As Jerome Cardan says, "Be this fact or fable, so it stands." I cannot offer the key to this mystery. I can only repeat: the search may be futile; the solution may lie forever beyond our grasp; the apparent logic of out most elementary deductions may evaporate. Perhaps what we search for is no more than a dream that, becoming part of our lives, never existed in reality. We cannot be sure that we study something real, because we do not know what reality is; we can only be sure that our study will help us understand more, far more, about ourselves. This is not a worthless task, and this idea gives me comfort, as I leave you with the lines of Milton:
I took it for a faery vision
Of some gay creatures of the element
That in the colours of the rainbow live
And play i' the plighted clouds. I was awestruck
And as I passed, I worshipped; if those you seek
It were a journey like the path to heaven
To help you find them.

I hope anyone reading these posts has enjoyed them. The major reason I wanted to put them here is to give a kind of boost to the series I want to start on Thursday or Friday. I don't know about anyone else, but this information from Passport To Magonia really got my imagination going; as to the question of whether beings from other realms, planes, dimensions or even frequencies of existence could be real and what form they might take. Thanks again for all of your kind, thoughtful and intelligent comments. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

UFO Mysteries: Passport To Magonia

Before starting the series I want to begin on Thursday or Friday, I have found some information in Jacques Vallee's book, Passport To Magonia, that I think will help with understanding the next series, although it is not about UFOs. The information I would like to post is from pages 11 to 14 in the book and I will try to get it here as fast as possible. I do not think it will be that much. I think Passport as with his other books will help us understand this bizarre yet beautifully mysterious phenomenon better. Starting with page 11 Vallee states, " Plutarch even had a complete theory on the nature of these beings: He thinks it would be absurd that there should be no mean between the two extremes of an immortal and a mortal being; that there cannot be in nature so vast a flaw, without some intermedial kind of life, partaking of them both. As, therefore, we find the intercourse between the soul and the body to be made by animal spirits, so between divinity and humanity there is a species of daemons." This part from Vallee's wonderful book is from A.H. Clough's, Introduction to Plutarch's "Lives." Continuing on: " It is not surprising, then, to find that the "Philosophers" disagreed with Agobard on the nature of the three men and the woman who were captured by the mob in Lyons: In vain does a Philosopher bring to light the falsity of the chimeras people have fabricated, and present manifest proofs to the contrary. No matter what his experience, nor how sound his argument and reasoning, let but a man with a doctor's hood come along and write them down as false-experience and demonstration count for naught and it is henceforward beyond the power of Truth to reestablish her empire. People would rather believe in a doctor's hood than in their own eyes. There has been in your native France a memorable proof of this popular mania.

The famous Cabalist Zedechias, in the reign of your Pepin, took it into his head to convince the world that the Elements are inhabited by these peoples whose nature I have just described to you. The expedient of which he bethought himself was to advise the Sylphs to show themselves in the Air to everybody: They did so sumptuously. These beings were seen in the Air in human form, sometimes in battle array marching in good order, halting under arms, or encamped beneath magnificent tents. Sometimes on wonderfully constructed aerial ships, whose flying squadrons roved at the will of the Zephyrs.

What happened? Do you suppose that ignorant age would so much as reason as to the nature of these marvellous spectacles? The people straightaway believed that sorcerers had taken possession of the Air for the purpose of raising tempests and bringing hail upon their crops. The learned theologians and jurists were soon of the same opinion as the masses. The Emperor believed it as well; and the ridiculous chimera went so far that the wise Charlegmagne, and after him Louis the Debonair, imposed grievous penalties upon all these supposed Tyrants of the Air. You may see an account of this in the first chapter of the Capitularies of these two Emperors.

The Sylphs seeing the populace, the pedants and even the crowned heads thus alarmed against them, determined to dissipate the bad opinion people had of their innocent fleet by carrying off men from every locality and showing them their beautiful women, their Republic and their manner of government, and then setting them down again in divers parts of the world. They carried out their plan. The people who saw these men descending came running from every direction, convinced beforehand that they were sorcerers who had separated from their companions in order to come and scatter poisons on the fruit and in the springs. Carried away by the frenzy with which such fancies inspired them, they hurried those innocents off to the torture. The great number of them who were put to death by fire and water throughout the kingdom is incredible.

One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and a woman were seen descending from these aerial ships. The entire city gathered about them, crying out that they were magicians and were sent by Grimaldus, Duke of Beneventum, Charlegmagne's enemy, to destroy the French harvests." The rest of this quote from A.H. Clough's work from Jacques Vallee's book is in the fifth paragraph of my 18 January Airship Mysteries Part Five post. Vallee goes on to say, "Such stories were so well established during the Middle Ages that the problem of communicating with the Elementals became a major preoccupation of the hermentics and an important part of their philosophy. Paracelsus wrote an entire book on the nature of these beings, but he took great pains to warn the reader of the dangers of an association with them: I do not want to say here, because of the ills which might befall those who would try it, through which compact one associates with these beings, thanks to which compact they appear to us and speak to us. And in a treatise entitled "Why These Beings Appear to Us", he presented the following ingenious theory: Everything God creates manifests itself to Man sooner or later. Sometimes God confronts him with the devil and the spirits in order to convince him of their existence. From the top of Heaven, he also sends the angels, his servants. Thus these beings appear to us, not in order to stay among us or become allied to us, but in order for us to become able to understand them. These apparitions are scarce, to tell the truth. But why should it be otherwise? Is it not enough for one of us to see an Angel, in order for all of us to believe in the other Angels? I hope to have the next part of this here very soon, especially as I think this information from Vallee's work is a great primer for the next series, so hopefully it will be posted sometime tomorrow before my 'offline' time starts between late Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

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 : 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

Paranormal & Fortean : UFO Mysteries

The varieties of experience human beings have had with the occupants/beings of these magical mystery ships are incredible in both their depth and range. Some cases of contact have been downright 'cartoonish' when taken at face value, yet some of the silliest cases -looking at them through the prism of human imagination-have produced some of the most evidence. Everything from scars and other damage to human tissue, unexplained missing time-where the experiencer seems to have 'lost' some hours-days in some cases, radiation traces at the site of contact, and even pancakes-yes there you have it -a farmer was served some extra or ultra -terrestrial flapjacks-although the cakes did not have any unearthly ingredients in them, the case I am thinking of also produced physical trace evidence. I should have got a link for this one-I will come back after the post-if I remember right-the man's name was Joe Simonton.

Sometimes the incidents are horrifying and dehumanizing. Things are done against the will of the contactee/abductee -including anal probes, that I don't even think yours truly would find remotely enjoyable. I tend to prefer any invasion of that area of my person to be made by an organ of human flesh. The credibility of most of these abductees is beyond reproach-they are from all walks of life and have a wide range of interests -actually they are as different as any random sample of folks would be-the one thing they share in common is the psychological damage of being taken and used against their will -This I would think would be a terrifying ordeal to go through. I really admire the courage of these people to come out and share the stories of their ordeals.

Sometimes the contact made can be overwhelmingly positive. The contactees views of their lives and the nature of the universe itself are changed for the better. Some of these people feel that they have a new outlook on life and a mission to change life here on our little world for the better.

There are cases where the person involved seems to be in contact with a universal archetype-positive or negative-the joker/trickster theme is often found in the literature-maybe the gods and deities of ancient times have come back to us in a form changed to suit our modern age.

Then there are varieties of experience that really are on the 'borderlands' and the cases reported seem to overlap into several areas of the paranormal. These are some of the most interesting to me because even though they are classified as a "UFO" experience they include a range of phenomena-from the fabled Men in Black, telepathy, poltergeist type activity, the contactee viewing alternate timelines and events from the past and possible events from the future-especially if it is in regards to humanity not changing its ways-there is a particularly fascinating case from Ruwa, Zimbabwe that I will come back with a link for if at all possible-the Ruwa case happened in 1994 and involved a large group of school children-who many after all these years have not changed their stories one iota. In 1989 as the communist world was collapsing there was also another fascinating case from the Soviet Union that involved young children. There are even UFO cases where the contactee has felt like they have viewed past and future lives of their own. Another type of activity that sometimes goes hand in hand with the Men in Black cases-but not always, has the person or persons involved getting strange phone calls-sometimes in language they can understand, sometimes just jibberish and eerie sounds and metallic noises. In these cases the theme of being warned away from talking about the experience is repeated often. The image is the Rosette Nebula-a stellar nursery in the constellation Monoceros about 5200 light years away.

To anyone passing through or stopping by I hope you have found something here to enjoy-I wanted to do this set of posts because I would like to return to this and other Fortean and Paranormal subjects from time to time, especially once I am through with the Hadrian and Antinous series. These subjects interest me so much because I think they provide clues to just how strange, yet magical and beautiful the universe really is. I hope to be back very soon with more about H/A and other things.
The links-Simonton 'pancake' case http://www.anomalist.com/reports/pancakes.html

Ruwa, Zimbabwe case- http://ufos.about.com/od/ufohistory/a/ruwa.html