Betty & Barney Hill vs the Grays IV

Race

Strangely the concept of race itself is, at one level, entwined with the idea of contact.  The idea of aliens, in a cosmic sense, is not separate from considering the place of Homo sapiens, the human race, in the grand scheme of things.  The ‘aliens’ may be our cousins, perhaps grand-sons and grand-daughters, many times removed, not just metaphorically but literally.

…Do you remember those old “Night Driver” video games, where you had to use a steering wheel to keep centered between an endless line of approaching dots that shifted right and left across the screen? Driving Rt. 3 at night is like that.

We may be related in ways we would not, could not even dare to believe.  Our long lost relatives, prodigals returning at last from a forgotten expedition, with toys we cannot fathom, and even stranger dispositions cultivated in time spent beyond the stars… then again they may have nothing to do with us at all, not in any obvious sense, but still have a kinship in whatever passes for their hearts and minds, and have searched us out, not simply stumbled across us, out of a kind of loneliness we cannot begin to comprehend.

From Interrupted Journey…

Betty and I went to hear a lecture one time by Dr. Carleton S. Coon of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard, and he showed a slide of a group of people who lived around the Magellan Straits.  We both had quite a reaction when we saw it, because this group of Indians, who lived in an extremely cold atmosphere high in the mountains where there was little oxygen, bore a considerably close resemblance to what I’m trying to describe…  They had Oriental sort of eyes but the eye socket gave an appearance of being much larger than what it was, because nature had developed a roll of fat around the eye and also around the mouth.  So it looked as if the mouth had almost no opening and as if they had practically no nose.  They were quite similar, in a general way, to the men I’m trying to describe.

A comment from Alienated Histories…

However, The Interrupted Journey approaches this future with trepidation. The extraterrestrials’ treatment of the bodies in their possession, far from suggesting that the transcendence of race via the mediation of technology is a cause for celebration, instead functions as a warning that there is considerable potential for this future to go far, far awry. In the Hill narrative, rather than race being transcended, it has been deleted through the aliens’ mastery of technologies that skew the Hills’ sense of time and narrative. Ultimately, the text suggests that the overcoming of epidermal racial signifi ers has the potential to erase the aff ective significance of the body and its physical reminder of racial diff erence and its history in the United States.

Hebron or not to Hebron? 

35 miles down the road would have ensured that the Hills would have woken up in the very same town in which Crowley was actually living in 1916- it was Hebron, not Bristol proper.

Adams’s cottage was located in the village of Hebron, NH, ten miles north of Bristol. According to Musgrove, “Hebron village is situated very pleasantly on a plain near the northwest shore of the lake. It contains a church, town hall, schoolhouse, a store, and several dwellings”

Let me repeat that: the Hills woke up from their missing time episode in the very same town that Aleister Crowley had lived just months before his own contact experience.

The above is courtesy of Secret Sun.

And this, again from Interrupted Journey:

But neither can remember much detail, other than this, until they had driven on to the new throughway, U.S. 93. Not long after enteringthis highway, Betty suddenly snapped out of her semi-wakefulness andpointed to a sign reading : CONCORD- 1 7 MILES. 

Well Hebron is about 50 miles out of Concord…  though the specifics of Chris’ claims may be a little askew his main point seems to be right on.  But the fact that Crowley passed thru this area some 45 years earlier…  no matter how close it really is…  what do we make of this synchronicity…  anything at all?

His portrait of Lam is said to resemble nothing so much as the ‘typical grey’… hmm.  I see some resemblance.  I don’t know that I would mistake one for the other.  However let us suppose if not identity there is a relationship between these… things…

The short version is simply did the beast open the door…  to something?  Now it is a fact if we go back a couple of centuries or so we can find the witch trials turning the whole of New England upside down.

We find this from the year 1682, not recorded until 1698:

After this we injoy’d our former Peace and Quiet, unmolested by these stony Disturbances, that whole month of August, excepting some few times; and the last of all in the Month of September, (the beginning thereof) wherein Mr. Walton himself only (the Original perhaps of this strange Adventure, as has been declared) was the designed concluding Sufferer; and going in his Canoo (or Boat) from the Great Island, where he dwelt, to Portsmouth, to attend the Council, who had taken Cognizance of this Matter, he being Summoned thither, in order to his and the Suspect’s Examination, and the Courts taking Order thereabout, he was sadly hit with three pebble Stones as big as ones Fist; one of which broke his Head, which I saw him show to the President of the Council; the others gave him that Pain on the Back, of which (with other like Strokes) he complained then, and afterward to his Death. 

From this distance in time it reminds one of a poltergeist.  The entire episode is referred to as: Lithobolia: or, the Stone-Throwing Devil. Being an Exact and True Account (by way of Journal) of the various Actions of Infernal Spirits, or (Devils Incarnate) Witches, or both; and the great Disturbance and Amazement they gave to George Waltons Family, at a place call’d Great Island in the Province of New-Hantshire in New-England… well we invite your perusal of the record entire here.

Most of the incidents happened in July, some in June, but interestingly, a bit of a synchronicity I guess, they didnt conclude until September of 1682.  New Castle is literally minutes away from Portsmouth, where Betty and Barney Hill resided.

Well now there is a little more to all of this.  Betty apparently had ‘dealings’ with the other world reaching back into her childhood. Here is something about a ghost named ‘Hannah’ courtesy of Classic Mysteries:

A good twenty years before Betty’s UFO contact she recalls that her sister Janet repeatedly corrected her three children, then aged 2, 5, and 7, for mischief they denied doing. When they were older, they said that they had been punished for things they didn’t do. But, at the time they could not figure out how these things were always happening. Silly things such as: who spilled the contents of the wastebasket all over the kitchen floor?

Finally Glenn, the middle child, whom Hannah the child ghost was particularly fond of, went away to service, and Hannah moved into his room. But, when Glenn came home, Hannah would have a fit. Night after night she would awaken him and throw his clothes across the room. If his clothes were hanging in the closet, they’d all fall off the hangers and be left in the middle of the closet with a bang, or they would tumble down just as if someone took them and swept them off the rod. Also, things would fall off the edge of the dresser. Betty saw some of these things happen herself.

“Sometimes you could hear Hannah sobbing. She would call, ‘Mommy, Mommy.’ One day my sister Janet answered the door and it was the assistant scoutmaster dropping by to see her husband Donald. (Janet’s brother-in-law was always active with the Scouts.) Donald wasn’t home, but while the scoutmaster was talking to Janet, Hannah started sobbing and crying, ‘Mommy.’ The man stopped and asked, ‘Is that your grandson?’ Janet said, ‘No’ and the he said, ‘You’re taking care of some neighbour’s child?’ Janet still said, ‘No’. Then he said, ‘Well, where is the child crying?’ And Janet said, ‘Oh I never told you, but that’s our spirit Hannah.’ And he took off!

“We realized something was going on, but we didn’t know what. My sister went to a psychic, who said we had the ghost of a small child living in the house. He told us the story of Hannah – how she had lived with her parents somewhere in the vicinity about a hundred years ago and how there had been a fire in which both her parents burned to death. Hannah was rescued, and neighbors took her in and adopted her. The psychic said that Janet was living in Hannah’s adopted parents’ home. Janet said, ‘No, that couldn’t be,’ because she and her husband built the house themselves and there was no former house there. The psychic insisted that there had been a house there, but Janet disagreed because the land had been in their family since 1840. The psychic still insisted and said that the people adopted Hannah, and that one day while she was riding horseback, when she was about 5 or 6 years old, Hannah fell off, was injured and died.

Well here is a synchronicity for you: the ‘witch’ they wanted to blame for all that stone-throwing back in 1682 was another Hannah..!  I doff my hat to Chris @ Secret Sun…  I probably would not have looked for this curiosity if it wasn’t for the weight of his weirdness…   From As I Please:

According to Chamberlain, Hannah Jones angrily told Walton that he “should never quietly injoy that piece of Ground”. Her comment was taken for a bewitching curse and, therefore, evidence that Jones’ witchery had likely summoned the Stone-Throwing Devil. 

Hannah, graced or favored by God, as Hannah in the Bible was blessed to bring the prophet Samuel into the world.  From Wikipedia: The ‘Hannah’ spelling of the name was taken up as a given name by the Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries and has always been a common Jewish name.

TO BE CONTINUED

Betty & Barney Hill vs the Grays III

What is Yellow?

I remember traffic was very light that night. We continued down the highway, and the light in the sky followed us. It came close to us. It was a bright yellow light — a fantastically bright yellow light. I never saw anything like it before. We continued along the highway for another thirty miles or so, until we arrived at what they call the Indian Head area. That’s where the Old Man of the Mountains is located, and I remember that the light seemed to dance directly in front of it.   (We lost the Old Man in 2003…)

The reverse of the state quarter of New Hampshire features the Old Man of the Mountain, alongside the state motto ‘Live Free or Die’. Courtesy Wikipedia.

(Quote from Betty Hill in Still No Answer.)

BETTY-Well, when I had the dreams, I told him I was having nightmares, well not really nightmares, but strange dreams . But I didnt tell him about my dreams at that time. And then, when Mr. Hohman and Mr. Jackson came to the house, and we were trying to recall- I think it was Mr. Hohman asked us why the trip took so long to come home . And that’s when I said that I remembered about the moon being on the ground.

DOCTOR- Is this that big yellow object, or light, you saw?

BETTY- Um-hmrn . It was just like a big moon. And it was on the ground. I could see sort of right through the trees in front of us.

DOCTOR- Barney heard you describe all these things, I suppose?

BETTY- Well, when they said, “What took so long?” I said, “We didnt know what took so long.” Well then I started to think about the moon being on the ground. And I mentioned seeing it. And Barney said, “Yes. I saw it too .”

(From Interrupted Journey.)

“What are vege­tables?”

And I said that this is a broad term and could cover a great variety of certain kinds of foods we eat. But I couldn’t just explain what vegetables are, there were too many. And he said was there one kind I liked. I said that I ate a great many, but my favorite is squash.

So he said, “Tell me about squash.” So I said that it was yellow, usually, incolor.

And he said, “What is yellow?”

So I said, “Well, I will show you.” And I started looking around the room, and I couldnt find any­thing yellow at all. And I wasn’t wearing anything yellow. I told him I couldn’t show him what the color was, but it was a bright color ­something like we consider sunlight yellow. And there was no sense talking about vegetables, because I couldnt explain what I meant.  ( From Interrupted Journey.)

The Leader had trouble with several other concepts besides the color yellow… dentures, old age, vegetables, years… I don’t know that these have anything in common.  That he didn’t seem to know this color- or at least the English word for the color- is a very curious thing.  His English is in many respects almost too good. The blind spots, the lacuna in his vocabulary, seem quite strange.

Of course there is at least one more use of the color yellow in the Hill’s adventure… and its aftermath.  Marjorie Fish’s interpretation of this map has most of the stars, like our sun, being yellow.

Proof

There was substantial evidence to support the Hills’ claim, including the scraped tops of Barney’s dress shoes, broken watches, 12-18 circular highly polished, silver dollar size spots on the trunk of their vehicle that caused a compass needle to spin and spin, only over the spots on the trunk; and Betty’s new dress that was badly torn, and later, became degraded by a pink powdery substance that ruined it.  The dress has undergone chemical and forensic analysis and the scientific reports appear in Chapter 24 of Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience.  (From Captured!)

Betty & Barney

Of course their report as well stands as evidence… from NICAP here…  but really none of what we have now is what I would think of as hard evidence.  If some investigation had been done on the heels of their encounter, something that never happened, perhaps we would have more.

Without a doubt something did happen but whether the nature of it stands revealed by the Hill’s hypnotic testimony I think is open to question.  As I tried to show in Part II the opinions are across the board and the amount of reflection, analysis, and consideration this case has been given over the years …  well on the internet and off it amounts to quite a lot of material.

No summary of their case is included here.  Not only is their book The Interrupted Journey a good starting place, but there are plenty of sites on the internet that reference their abduction with thumbnail summaries galore.  It is a staple of UFO folklore now.

To be repetitive… No links to important documents, or viewpoint on the star map… Tormance is about the scarf and the Jimmy Durante noses, Nazis, the scuffed shoes, the purple dress, the  block of ice, the blue ear-rings in the leaves on the dining table… did something really happen to them…  or not…

Their report, and I would include I think the nightmares as well as the hypnotic sessions, all of that as supporting material…  the Durante noses, for example, were really a part of Betty’s nightmare sequence and I don’t think showed up in the sessions with Dr. Simon… but in addition there were some strange events that simply stand out seeming not to corroborate any point of view at all but echo a strange quality that seems also to be part and parcel of their experience.  The block of ice is one one of those events; here is an excerpt from Captured describing it.

Betty wrote the following more detailed account in her diary:

I put the newspaper into the trash and we stood there, staring at this “ice,” wondering. It looked as though it had been frozen in a bowl; it had some small pieces of leaves, twigs, and dirt in it. It appeared as though there were a pattern in the bowl-shaped chunk of ice, like the design one might find on the sides of a cut-glass dish. But this was inside the ice, not on its surface. I picked it upand the outsides edges were smooth. There was no wetness onthe table and no traces that it had been there. It felt ice cold butit did not have the weight of a block of ice that size. Also, it did not have the solid hardness of ice, but had flexibility to it. We put it into the sink and ran hot water on it. As I was preparing for bed, I turned on the hot water and let it run until all traces of theice were gone. Barney and I have more puzzles in our lives then we can handle without adding one more to them. So, we solved the puzzle by destroying it and deciding we would forget this one.

You can find many points of view online.  Pro and con.  There is more than one ‘investigator’ that has a solution to their puzzle.  Plenty of skeptics ready to dismiss their story, their perplexing adventure, based on just the facts.  And plenty of champions of the star map.  Ready to welcome the Reticulans to Earth!

In the way of what I would think of as real proof… there ain’t much.  Pease AFB did have some curious radar returns that night.  And nearby Concord as well… it is possible to dismiss both as having little or nothing to do with the Hill’s abduction.  The timing of one is off and the other… well supposedly the UFO was ‘parked’, landed, when that happened.  So whatever it was it was something else.

Maybe not…  there is this curious note re the Blue Book report, courtesy of a research paper on the CUFON site, portions of which have been excerpted on NICAP here…

It is interesting to note that the Project 10073 Record Card was typewritten except for a ball-point checkmark in the air-intercept radar box in item number four. The official Form 112 submitted to Project Blue Book by Pease AFB officials indicated the radar sighting was made on precision-approach radar. Since there was no indication of an air intercept having taken place, it might be assumed that the air-intercept radar box was marked incorrectly. It is important to note, however that this is merely an assumption of this writer.

Strangely Barney’s scuffed shoes, the simplicity of this detail strikes me more forcefully than anything the radar might offer us.

Betty did pass a lie detector test.  There used to be a TV show featuring the lawyer F. Lee Bailey on which she appeared and took the test.  I believe she passed with flying colors.

What Happened?

One must also ask why Betty Hill’s aliens seemed to have no grasp of basic human concepts (such as how we measure time) — yet they knew enough about us to speak English fluently and had even mastered our slang. Were these real aliens, or humans engaging in theatricals (and occasionally muffing their lines)? For that matter, why did Betty Hill originally recall her abductors as humanoid, only later describing them as aliens? The Hill case provided a particularly controversial piece of evidence — the celebrated “star map” recalled by Betty Hill under hypnosis. In later years, an Ohio schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish made an ingenious and laudable attempt to discover a match for this map by constructing an elaborate three-dimensional model of nearby star systems; whether she succeeded remains a matter for keen debate[160]. For now, I prefer to avoid taking sides in this dispute and will confine myself to insisting that pro-ET ufologists answer (WITHOUT resorting to glib ripostes) a point first raised by Jacques Vallee: THE MAP MAKES NO SENSE AS A NAVIGATIONAL AID. Vallee notes that, even if we grant the Fish interpretation, the stars are not drawn to scale — and at any rate, alien spaceships would surely be navigated the same way we guide our own spacecraft: via computers and telemetry[161]. The validity of the Fish interpretation is irrelevent; the point is that ANY such chart would have NO value to an interstellar star-farer.

The above is from an article The Controllers by Martin Cannon.  I think it goes a long way toward explaining what might have happened to the Hills and the sundry curious details surrounding their case that Val Germann, among others, mentions in his article.

Of course the case is a sort of centerpiece for Ufology. Considering that it may indicate something quite different than is usually thought about, that the star map may indeed be simply a prop, perhaps a very well designed prop, what does that leave us with, where indeed does that take us?

What it doesn’t do is get rid of the aliens…  although the Hill’s may not have encountered such on their trip, we can’t eliminate their presence entirely even from their experience.  If mind control was a central element of whatever did happen to them, and although it may leave the idea of aliens in the dust, still it is not impossible they played a part in this scenario, their presence very much in the background.  But at the same time it gives us the possibility of considering their case without them…

The idea that mind control is central to their case, central to what happened to them, at first committing yourself to this solution to their puzzle would seem to leave any mention of aliens as a ridiculous afterthought.

Some faction, some strange echelon of our government, perhaps even a private concern had arranged what may have indeed been not simply hypnotic control, but a form of theatre, a literally outlandish version of a Mission Impossible script, for the purpose of leading the Hill’s ….  well let’s say down a different path.  The ulterior motive is only speculation again.

However once we begin to look at possibilities we have to admit the possibility that this might indeed be the face of contact, that what was involved was not an echelon of our world at all, but is the chosen method of aliens attempting to communicate with us, and they were the architects of this piece of theatre, or drama… or is that too much to ask?

Our understanding of the vagaries, even the mere outlines, not to mention the nature and substance of such contact is surely still in its beginning stages.  Strange to say given the possibility it may have lasted millenia.

The incidents with the block of ice, and the earrings, for example, seem to border on plain nonsense.  I can’t tell whether Betty or Barney took anything from these occurrences beyond a vague sense of foreboding. Did they mean anything at all?

The only speculation I can begin to offer is they seem to hint at a continuing surveillance; almost as though someone wanted them to know they were being observed.  The possible meanings inherent in this speculation are at once too vague and manifold to even begin to address.

TO BE CONTINUED

Betty & Barney Hill vs the Grays II

“In all the universes, in all the unities beyond the universes, all who have eyes have eyes that speak and all speak the same language.”

Variations, Val Germann & Others

Here is an opinion from The Iron Sceptic re the shenanigans of Betty & Barney Hill:

Everyone has their pet explanation for UFOs in general and this case in particular. Perhaps it really occured the way that they claimed and the many variations, contradictions, and flat out insane claims made by the Hills are just unlikely coincidences or the product of space aliens monkeying about with their memories. Perhaps it truly was a case of Folie a deux. Perhaps it was a product of Betty’s worries about her medical condition; perhaps it was a product of decades of bad space alien horror flicks coupled with the hysterical predictions of the UFO literature at the time (they’re coming!) Perhaps this story is simply the product of a mind in the grips of paranoid fantasies, which (I speculate without having looked deeper into it) could explain the hypocondriac fears of Betty, the whispers and thoughts of conspiracies and shadowy dealings, the feelings of persecution, and Betty’s later grandiose claims.

For me, it all boils down fairly simply: Betty was a loon and, with the aid of a hypnotist, convinced her husband that something which did not occur had really taken place. He fought against it, knowing this was crazy, and though he finally broke, his account is more riddled with contraditions and less fiercely accurate simply because he was unable to convince himself of a fantasy as thoroughly as his wife could. It is my opinion, and an opinion that I espouse as frequently as I can, that there are many explanations for cases of UFO abductions, but all are grounded in the flaws of the human mind. After seeing something in the sky, Betty believed what she wanted to believe (that it was a ship) and her neuroses (a need to believe, paranoid, fears for her health, etc.) combined with this to create a fantasy world in which she lived.

He isn’t alone in this estimation…  but I don’t think this is what happened.

This, from the Professor at The Big Study…

Allen Hynek ultimately went to New Hampshire [lot closer than Papua] to visit Betty and Barney, and even Benjamin Simon came to give a last hypnosis session, essentially for UFOlogy’s “grand old man”. Hynek was wowed [despite being, admittedly a clutz at asking questions]. Barney’s terror blew him away. Hynek never knew what he should make of this [you can read his fiddling commentary in his book] but he was sure that he was witnessing the effects of something real. I’m with him on this. For me, the “All-The-Way-Fool” position is that the Hills’ experience is what it seems to be: an on-board encounter. As a memorial of the great time, each one of the five members of that last session took home a card with them signed by all—a repro of it is above. A rather fine thing, methinks, and good sentiments.

The Professor is far from alone in his opinion.  Indeed it resonates with many of us…

Here is yet another from Factman:

In the early hours of Wednesday, September 20, 1961, shortly past midnight, the Hills’ trip south on US Route 3 was impeded by a roadblock near North Woodstock, N.H.; they were diverted to a road to the left, State Route 175, which bridges the Pemigewasset River, then curves to the right. Just beyond this point, their travel was further impeded by a group of humans standing in the road. The Hills were directed to park their automobile off the road, taken from the vehicle, and led a short distance away to a building, perhaps a hunting or fishing lodge, perhaps a storage barn. The abduction had taken place.There is no reason to suggest the abductors were other than persons present in the Colebrook restaurant when the Hills entered around 9:30 pm. It may reasonably (considering the temper of the time) be suggested the “sensibilities” of these observers were offended. I estimate the number of abductors at not fewer than six nor more than twelve.What occurred when the Hills were later detained can only be conjectured, and I decline to offer to this site descriptions that would be of a necessarily graphic nature.After perhaps an hour or an hour and a half, the Hills were returned to their vehicle and allowed to continue their trip, but accompanied by the threat of reprisal should they reveal the incident to others.They drove south on SR 175 and returned to US 3 at one of two or three possible junctures and continued on their trip home.That is as succinctly as I can outline the event, obviously omitting a great number of details.Again, as I have stated previously on several occasions, the lack of evidence poses problems. The only people who know precisely what happened are the participants, one of whom we know is dead. Others may also be deceased. We do know of one who is still living, and I consider it reasonable to assume several more also survive.The dearth of hard evidence thus requires by those outside this group analysis by inference. Common sense should explain a great deal.

If I have previously posted ambiguous argument, I did not intend to. There are allegations that allude to living, though unknown persons, and I prefer to err on the side of caution. But I’m certain there were hints aplenty in my postings.

This is an interesting version.  The number of variations out there… well there is something for everybody.  And here, from Val Germann, is a more potent spell:

ISN’T IT INTERESTING that the man finally called in to do the regressions on the Hills was the Executive officer of the Army’s main psychiatric hospital during World War II, who did his undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins University whose wartime president was a member of MAJESTIC-12 and who was the technical advisor on the major WWII propaganda film made by the famous director John Huston? The Hills went through two other therapists before going to Simon. Did they have the money to pay this gentlemen, who must have been very, very expensive? This is something Fuller does not talk about. Did NICAP pay their way?

UNPLEASANT POSSIBILITY The Hills were “set up” by the people dealing with the so-called “Greys” out in New Mexico. The Hill case was either a deep-cover check on what the “Greys” were doing under the “agreement” or it was an even deeper-cover attempt at “disinformation” to get “abductions” in play–safely.

We can sink our teeth into this..!

A Limited Hangout

Even the aliens are vague on their origins and intentions. Upon further examination, even stories in which the aliens seem to allude that they are from another planet, it is clear they are not in admission of such. For example, in the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case, Betty, looking at a 3D “star map”, asks one of her abductors to show her from where they originate. The answer is curious; the alien asks her if she knows where Earth is on the “map”, and she replies that she doesn’t. He then asks her if she doesn’t even know where she is, how can he possibly tell her where they are from?

That the alien did not simply show Betty where earth was by pointing, and where his own home planet was by pointing, may imply an impossible fault with the question, rather than coyness on the alien’s part.

The above, from the article Yabba Dabble Doo: How Aleister Crowley
Introduced the Iconic Gray Alien, confronts the coyness on the alien’s part with a sort of answer… that there was something wrong with the question itself.

Indeed, what is wrong with simply pointing out where we were, and where they were… though that would still not have much meaning for Betty still it would have meant a little something.

Their answer instead seems designed to say something perhaps more profound, but on the other hand how would she ever know where Earth was on their map..?  What was the point in showing her the map at all?

Of course defenders of the reality of the star map would say the answer to that question lay in the future, to be discovered…  by Marjorie Fish. The rest of us might think otherwise.

More dezinformatsiya…  Victor Marchetti wrote: “A ‘limited hangout’ is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”   (From Wikipedia here.)

Betty Hill’s star map has been superimposed on a map of troop movements from WWII in the image above.  The match is eerie… courtesy of UFO Iconoclasts.  Now this map is supposed to have been displayed at the government offices where Betty worked. Too much information? Indeed the tapestry of Betty & Barney Hill is complex. Just how complex…? Well the subject of Hohmann & Jackson, Mr. C.D. Jackson in particular might give us pause.

C.D. Jackson

Again I am going to return to Val Germann’s piece; we are quite indebted to his work and many others, but Val Germann was one of the first to shine a light on some of these details.

WHO WERE “HOMANN and C.D. Jackson?” Who were they really working for? Why was a “major electronics firm” paying them to investigate 60-year-old fairy tales about Nikola Tesla? What “scientific theories” held by Hermann Oberth could be of interest to an “electronics firm.” What we actually have here is a “cover” for intelligence activity.

IN ALIENS FROM SPACE, 1973, Keyhoe says that these two “engineers” were “aiding NICAP.” That is not the impression that is given in Fuller’s book. In INTERRUPTED JOURNEY the strong impression is that these two gentlemen simply had an independent interest due to a strange research assignment from their company. This could be accepted in 1966. In 1990 we know better.

YOU SEE, by the fall of 1963 a gentleman named C.D. Jackson was working for Time/Life Corporation in an executive position. In fact, he was helping to arrange a $25,000 payment to the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald.

IN CASE YOU HAVE forgotten, Time/Life bought the Zapruder Film for $150,000 and then made sure it was not shown as a film for many years. Then, when it was shown, it had been obviously altered. David Lifton in BEST EVIDENCE says that the film was at the CIA’s photo interpretation lab the day Time/Life bought it.

DOES THE FACT THAT Donald Keyhoe had lunch with C.D. Jackson just after getting Betty Hill’s letter “resonate” with you?It does with this author. Donald Keyhoe was, in UFOsearch’s opinion, running a two-track operation. In the public and with his organization he was not interested in “contactee” stories. But on deep background he was involved with another investigation, one connected with the intelligence community. Were they running him?

Now actually when I first read this I thought surely Mr. Germann is mistaken.  We are talking about two people that just happen to have the same name; how could the person that bought the Zapruder film have anything to do with …  well aliens…  of course I was very far at the time from seeing what might really be going on. And how far-reaching, how cunning, and how literally incredible the cover story might really be.

The following is from JFK & The Majestic Papers by Seamus Coogan:

Now, Walter Bedell-Smith is viewed as being the first person to envisage the CIA using UFOs as potential PSYOPs via this message he sent to Raymond Allen, head of the PSB (Psychological Strategy Board) in 1952:

I am today transmitting to the national security council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems connected with the UFOs appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations… I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive and defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.

The reality is that the decision to utilize UFOs for psychological purposes likely happened sometime earlier than even Davidson suggested, and well before Bedell Smith ever cottoned on to the idea. It likely started in the bowels of the OSS immediately during the war with an increase in sightings of unidentifiable aircraft. C.D. Jackson of Time-Life was a man with an extensive PSYOPs background and had a major role in the formation of that organisation, not to mention that of it’s follow up group, the Operations Coordinating Board (OSB), in 1953. He was also involved with the dubious NICAP organisation that interviewed Betty and Barney Hill about their alien abduction story in 1961. (See the book The Interrupted Journey, which was adapted into the 1975 TV film The UFO Incident.)

Well Mister C.D. Jackson really got around didn’t he..?  I am shocked that he had the time, with Mr. Hohmann, to put that article about Tesla and others together, An Historic Report On Life In Space: Tesla, Marconi, Todd, but there is a copy on the internet here.  Without a doubt C.D. Jackson had a pivotal role in the ‘investigation’.

Now Mr. Germann says “In 1990 we know better.”  Surely there is a little bit of truth in his statement but this is 2012 now…  and the Betty & Barney Hill case, thanks to the star map, is cornerstone belief.  How much wiser are we really..?  The cover story is still in play full tilt.

TO BE CONTINUED

Betty & Barney Hill vs the Grays

The Cause

The Leader

You know I can remember when The Interrupted Journey first came out. I remember seeing it at the local library, in bookstores, and at some point finally had to read it; I was already obsessed with the idea… when that obsession began is another story. It was and is still a striking tale. Betty Hill has been, so to speak, one of those voices in the wilderness. She has been a champion of the cause.

I remember being impressed with the story, the hypnotic sessions seemed to just about clinch the truth of the tale for me- I had little knowledge of hypnosis at the time, or so-called false memories, confabulation etc.- and this was way before all the information on the star map came out- but of course having never seen an alien myself, at least to my knowledge, crossing that line, no matter how close I was to the line, and I was very close to crossing it, well I would have expressed my belief regarding their abduction in terms of probabilities. Though my estimation of this case has changed in many ways I would be inclined still to express my opinion in similar terms today.

It might be helpful to say a little something about the cause. The cause isn’t something quite as simple as bringing the truth to the world at large about the aliens in our midst; without a doubt this is still hardly a tangent to the cause. Many of us that think contact a real possibility if not probability- to some of us indeed a certainty- would identify with this cause. The real cause, the one behind all the so-called information about aliens, Reticulans or not, a cause which I think Betty was something of a champion of also, however nonchalant, is that this enigma holds something of value to be discovered and is worth investigating.

Later of course the discussion about this case, still continuing today, shifted its focus with the advent of Marjorie Fish’s research into the star map Betty had been introduced to on the ship. Really the focal point of the abduction is now the star map. The reality of the abduction, many people tend to believe, stands or falls based on the truth of this map… And that map has been the point of origin of an entire mythology.

The details and pattern of this abduction have become a touchstone in the field. The star map renewed debate, if it needed renewing, and in no small way is responsible for the high profile this case may still have; it is a ‘believable’ abduction, so-called, the field itself suffers from being too unbelievable… and just what is going on with that map?! That is no small thanks to Betty herself too.

The case has imperceptibly, slowly but surely, been accepted as genuine by a gamut of investigators and others, people that may, in terms of belief, occupy distant poles in their philosophies re alien contact and UFO’s in general. Still, even now, there is quite enough material out there however to bring into question the reality of their ordeal.

What are the alternatives?

Of course we can accept their tale at face value. They were indeed, physically, as that word is usually understood, aboard an alien ship, abducted by aliens whose ultimate reasons are still, perhaps, absurd or shadowy. They met with them, underwent some kind of medical evaluations, and Betty almost left the ship with one of their books, well in short we can accept all the many details of the story as having happened, quite literally, in the reality we know and love. The scarf and the Nazi appearance of the leader would be included in such details.

What if it didn’t happen? At least it wasn’t the literal in-your-face ordeal, frightening them out of their wits etc… of course it did seem to be very frightening to them both and the edges and screams in their voices can still be heard in the tapes of their sessions with Dr. Simon…

One of the alternatives is to imagine they were indeed lying, the whole tale one sustained lie, and the hypnotic sessions a triumph of their imagination, let’s say, among other possibilities. I think few of us who have looked into the case even a little bit could accept the alternative they were indeed quite simply liars. Betty’s indefatigable testimony would seem to point to another alternative. This alternative of a sustained lie is too unbelievable in itself, more unbelievable perhaps than her rather absurd testimony, than the aliens themselves.

Perhaps the tale is indeed a triumph of their imagination, Betty’s imagination in particular, but a triumph so complete they believed the tale themselves. This is a marginal interpretation probably accepted by few people. Of course how it happened they were so completely taken, persuaded, by such a thing would beg another explanation.

Is there another alternative? Perhaps the question of reality should be reconsidered. Can there be only one reality? Is it possible the tale indeed is real but the reality it enjoys is not our reality? Or is this idea too close to imagination to be given attention?

Often in discussions of this case the only alternatives allowed are either it happened or didn’t. The discussion is very black and white without degrees of interpretation. Betty with her very outspoken testimony tended to make it difficult to consider the alternative that it didn’t happen. There are many interviews with her. You can see an example of her style and voice here…

Of course the third alternative is that something did happen. But just what that something is, being beyond both reality as we understand it, and the reality they seemed to understand as well, and its negation, is often not considered or given quite short shrift. Is the tale more symbolic than real; does it still hold the promise of contact?

The Question of Reality

The third alternative is a cover for more than one possibility. She may have been contacted through dreams and fantasy. Her story may still say something about contact but perhaps something different than we think.

On the other hand their imagination may have been primary. Betty came to believe her own imagination. This really isn’t as strange as it might seem; memory is a strange thing.   And in spite of what I said above we do come to believe in many things, many of which are real, through our imagination.  Still it seems an extreme position.

Another alternative often not spoken about in direct terms is manipulation. Now most of us would not get this possibility at all. The idea is other people may have had a hand in this story, especially in the Hill’s acceptance of it; that they were indeed led into believing it. The reasons for this manipulation would not be so apparent.

Lastly of course the idea that the story is indeed real, but not situated in our normal definition of reality leaves one clueless; if you have never experienced anything like this kind of thing the notion will seem utterly absurd.

Missing Time

Janine is carefully reading Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey. She finds in it some important facts that I had missed. The whole story of the abduction of the Hills by saucer people didn’t originate with Dr. Simon at all but with this man Hohmann himself. This is the way it happened: when they came home to Portsmouth after their sighting of 19 September 1961 Betty first mentioned the incident to her sister Janet, who in turn spoke to the former chief of police of Newton. They were told to contact Pease Air Force Base, where practically nothing was done. Two days later Betty found one of Keyhoe’s books in the library. She wrote to him and the case was forwarded to Webb, a NICAP consultant, by Richard Hall, about one month after the sighting. In the meantime Robert Hohmann and C.D.Jackson had come to Washington where they had lunch with Keyhoe. The case was brought up. On November 3rd they wrote to the Hills and they met with them on November 25th, interviewing them from noon to midnight. They even asked them if they used fertilizers for their trees, because they thought saucer pilots might want to steal the fertilizer. Hohmann and Jackson also told the Hills there might well be life on Alpha Centauri. It is this team of selfstyled scientific detectives who discovered that some sixty kilometers and some two hours were “missing” from the couple’s itinerary. A friend of the Hills who attended that meeting suggested hypnosis. On 25 March 1962 Betty and Barney consulted Dr. Quirke… 

The quote above, from Forbidden Science by Vallee, implies the Hill’s were not aware at all of this question of time before that conversation. Betty has said something different in other places; they were both aware the trip back had taken longer, had taken long enough to cause them to be aware of the difference.

Of course the emphasis on this gap of so-called ‘missing time’ is one of the things that leads to the inevitable question: what was going on during this strange gap? Well anyone that has taken a long road trip, hours in duration, can answer that. Who knows?! Really it’s not atypical for such trips to behave like that. It is the nature of the beast so to speak. Sometimes you can point to something specific that caused the difference in time but often it is simply a cumulative effect. Your average speed was slower returning than leaving or vice versa, but the things that contributed to that difference are often harder- or impossible- to isolate.

Having first read about this case before taking any long road trips this seemed like a big thing, an important point about their adventure. Now, a little wiser, it seems ridiculous, really almost trivial, to make something out of it. Still, having said all that, the converse isn’t true or to put it differently just because you may be paranoid does not mean there are not people out to get you. They may still be out there. The point being that by itself this missing time isn’t very meaningful in this particular case; in other words if there was nothing else we would not have a case at all.  Or, in other words, there may indeed be some real time actually missing, but beyond the usual parameters of a road trip?  Who can say..?

Both Betty and Barney Hill, apart from the missing time, seemed ‘haunted’ by this trip. Betty had nightmares. Barney suffered an unremitting anxiety until his death. That they went through something, something off the beaten track, is at least suggested by these telltale signs.

Listening to their sessions with Dr. Simon it seems evident they both struggled with something that happened to them but the nature of that something is literally something else again.

The Nazi

Barney: (He takes care to be extremely precise.) There was a row of windows. A huge row of windows. Only divided by struts – or structures that prevented it from being one solid window. Or then—it would have been one solid window. And the evil face on the— ( He starts to say Leader.) He looks like a German Nazi. He’s a Nazi. ( There is a questioning tone in his voice.)

Dr. Simon: He’s a Nazi. did he have on a uniform?

Barney: Yes

Dr. Simon: What kind of uniform?

Barney: ( With a small amount of surprise.) He had a black scarf around his neck, dangling over his left shoulder.

Dr. Simon: ( Another sharp probe.) How could you see the figures so clearly at that distance? Barney: I was looking at them with binoculars.

Dr. Simon: Oh. Did they have faces like other people? You said one was like a red-headed Irishman.

Barney: ( Describing the scene very slowly and carefully.) His eyes were slanted. Oh– his eyes were slanted!. But not like a Chinese– Oh. Oh.

Dr. Simon: What was Betty doing all this time?

Barney: I can’t hear her.

Dr. Simon: Did you make an outcry to her like you did to me?

Barney: I-I can’t remember–I don’t know.

Dr. Simon: You would remember if you did.

Barney: ( His thoughts seem to be on the craft, and not on the Doctor.) I did not. I know this creature is telling me something.

Dr. Simon: Telling you something? How? How is it getting to you?

Barney: I can see it in his face. No, his lips are not moving.

Dr. Simon: Go on. He’s telling you something. What did he tell you?

Barney: Stay there–and just keep looking. Just keep looking–and stay there. and just keep looking. Just keep looking.

Dr. Simon: Could you hear him tell you?

Barney: Oh! I got the binoculars away from my eyes. ‘Cause if I don’t, I’ll just stand there.

Dr. Simon: Did you hear him tell you this?

Barney: Oh, no. He didn’t say it. ( More tremor in his voice. )

Dr. Simon: You felt he said it?

Barney: I know.

Dr. Simon: You know he said it?

Barney: Yes. “Just stay there”, he said. ( Now his voice breaks in extreme terror. ) It’s pounding in my head!! ( He screams again. ) I gotta get away, I gotta get away from here!

Dr. Simon: All right. All right. calm down.

Barney: ( Still breathless. ) Gotta get away.

Dr. Simon: Calm down. How can you be sure he was telling you this?

Barney: ( He speaks now with awe.) His eyes! . His eyes. . I’ve never seen eyes like that.

Dr. Simon: You said they were friendly.

Barney: Not the Leader’s. I said the one looking over his shoulder.

Dr. Simon: How did you know the other one was the Leader.

Barney: ( In careful level tones again. ) Because everybody moved – everybody was standing there looking at me. But everybody moved. These levers that were in the back….or they went to a big board, it looked like a board. And only this one, with the black, black shiny jacket and the scarf stayed at the window.

He had a black scarf around his neck, dangling over his left shoulder.  A stylish UFO pilot..?! Well I don’t want to make too much of this… not just a scarf, but a black scarf, and dangling over his left shoulder! Nazi or not he reminded Barney of a Nazi… with a scarf dangling over his left shoulder.

Tapestry

…Thomas E. Bullard opens his massively impressive study of the abduction mystery with a discussion of the legendary status of the “interrupted journey” of Betty and Barney Hill. It was the most sensational UFO story of its time; a nasty little horror story which engraved itself on the unconscious of a generation. The growth of UFO abduction reports subsequent to their appearance on the cultural scene is unsurprising…

This is from Martin Kottmeyer’s article Entirely Unpredisposed… and its true it was a horror story that engraved itself on the unconscious of a generation.  The average person now, unless he has had a reason to look into the history of this field, knows more about the Flintstones than about the star map & the Reticulans.

Well maybe I should take that back; they may have heard of the Reticulans. The Grays are, so to speak, contemporary and that is a ‘nickname’, depending on your realm of discourse.

The reference to the Nazis, believe it or not, has been used by some to support the idea the Nazis indeed had an inside track on UFOs… well there may really be a crumpet of truth here but I tend to believe the Hill’s or their case don’t have much to do with supporting the idea the Nazis had anything to do with flying saucers.

Let us not forget the Jimmy Durante noses…  Originally that was Betty’s description.  Of course Jimmy Durante would be another tangent to this affair.  Jimmy Durante and Betty Hill are anachronisms.

Most of the (beings) are my height … about five feet to five feet four inches. Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) than the average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs — like Jimmy Durante.

Their complexions were of a gray tone; like a gray paint with a black base; their lips were of a bluish tint. Hair and eyes were very dark, possibly black. The dreams continued for five successive nights.  (Betty Hill from The Interrupted Journey)

Jimmy Durante

On August 4, 1955, The Jimmy Durante Show on NBC was the venue of the final performance by the famous Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda. Miranda fell to her knees while dancing with Durante, who instinctively told the band, “STOP–da music!” He helped Miranda up to her feet as she laughed, “I’m all out of breath!” “Dat’s OK, honey, I’ll take yer lines,” Durante replied. Miranda laughed again and quickly pulled herself together and finished the show. However, the next morning, August 5, Miranda died at home from heart failure.

Jimmy Durante added some warp and woof to the wall-to-wall of comedy… And without a doubt UFOlogy and Forteana would be different today without the tapestry of Betty & Barney Hill.

And there are other details just as curious… contradictions in their accounts.  What to make of them is a question mark.  Now it leads me more into the realm of dream than reality.  Could a dream have affected them as deeply as this experience has done, wherever- and however- the roots were planted… is that possible?  And if it is possible surely it was an uncommon dream without doubt!

And let’s not forget this curious little tidbit of information re Betty’s initial letter to Donald Keyhoe @ NICAP:

NICAP received more than 40,000 letters per year (about a hundred per day), but this single letter nevertheless made its way quickly to the attention of Keyhoe.

This peculiar fact has been noted by more than one researcher… What really happened to them?  Vallee’s statement that their experience was a grave and terrible mystery not only is a curious choice of words but curiously appropriate.

TO BE CONTINUED

Doom Patrol

The Revelation of St John: 5. Opening the Fifth and Sixth Seals

"Oh," she said, "it’s just so beautiful! Something in it keeps on moving ... "

We have met the aliens and they is us..!

A Pocket Full of Saucers

Large Silver Disk, Kustavi, Finland, 2004

The Disc

I had pulled over into an empty field, to rest from a long drive, when I noticed something moving about in the air, a dragonfly I thought, at first; but the object seemed to be under some sort of  intelligent control.  It had landed on the ground, not far away, looking instead like a disc; I could still see it, the size of a silver dollar, smooth and silvery, it was just that shape.

I had to sneak up on it, expecting it would take off any moment, but was able to snatch it up before it could get away.  I had proof of something really extraordinary.  I couldn’t believe it!  Nobody would believe it!

It was vibrating in my hand…  I knew it wanted to escape, getaway, but I held it tightly, wondering what to do, where- or how- to keep it.  I secured it, for the time being, inside my shirt pocket.

Soon it was trying to get out again…  I can’t remember now everything that had happened back then.  I had checked into a hotel room and spent several hours trying to decide what to do now that everything had changed… Really nothing was the same anymore.

It got away from me in the room but somehow I managed to get hold of it again.  It didn’t seem to have much power- or it was building up quietly in some way- and I noticed in flight it actually seemed to be spinning.  It moved slowly… but at the same time seemed to drift about on the slightest currents of air.  I had thought about putting it in a glass cylinder, on a table in the room, but found I couldn’t let go of it- afraid if I put it anywhere else it would get away.

I suspected then, not knowing why, there were people that already knew I had found the disc.  I had dinner with friends, not planning to share the experience, but still, in spite of myself, began telling them about something I had found, without giving it away; I knew they wouldn’t believe me.

One of them noticed a sort of bulge in my shirt, it was trying to escape again, so I reached inside to grab it in my hand and hold it close.  “It’s like Bilbo and that ring…”  I had been holding the disc in my hand as I tried to explain what was happening and remembering, at the same time, other sightings of saucers, explaining how I had seen them before but now I have proof.

Waking up I had this palpable sense of having held it in my right hand but it was gone..!  It finally got away…  I realized then I probably would not find it again.  And it came to me only then it was all a dream.

The Bell

It was late at night, past my bedtime, but really I always go to bed past my bedtime, and I was reading, a habit I haven’t indulged in for quite a long time until very recently.

“…  A feeling of calm & profound peace would flood over the two girls, and at some point a cylinder of pale blue light six inches long would appear in the middle of the playhouse.  Although JoAnn cannot remember seeing an actual figure within the cylinder, she refers to it as her ‘Tinker Bell’, and she knew that its consciousness was female…”  (from The Secret Life of Kids)

Well about the time I get to the end of this paragraph I hear the clear distinct sound of a bell, from the other side of the room, on my left… I didn’t immediately connect what I read with the sound; they seemed completely different things to me.  The sound was quite a distraction.  I was alone in the apartment, surrounded by silence.

When I did return my attention to the book and realized what I had just read a kind of chill went thru me.  I had the weird feeling I might not be alone…  and then I laughed out loud!

Not because I believed this, or didn’t believe it, but was struck by the nature of the situation, that it was a rather funny thing to happen; as if the ‘spirit’ or whatever had caused this noise had a sense of humor.  Of course, rationally, I thought the sound must have come from a nearby apartment.  And had no relation at all to the book I was reading.

It was a wee bit scary; though, perhaps, on second thought uncanny would probably be a much better choice of words.  I quickly began to think of it as comforting in some strange way- to think I was being watched or ‘watched over’ perhaps- and something or someone chose this humorous way of letting me in on it.  I didn’t hear it again.

MUFON Case # 25273

He went to bed at 12:30 AM this morning and was awakened by a bright flash in the room like a camera flash. He opened his eyes and saw a small disc-like UFO in the corner of the room with a large dome on top of it with windows all around the dome. The disk was a light grey metallic color with black around the windows, it was lighted on the inside and there were no lights on the outside, except the one the kept flashing from the front of the vehicle. The witness watched the 12″ diameter craft move about the room from corner to corner, flashing the strobe-like light (he believes it is a camera of some sort), then it hoovered over his bed. 

He tried to remain as still as possible while shaking his wife and getting her to wake up. She also saw the craft just as it moved into postion near the foot of their bed. He noticed a very low humming sound. It then moved slowly forward and that is when they saw the tiny beings inside the craft looking out at them – they both sat up in bed and the beings looked surprised, then the craft took off very quickly towards the closet/chimney area and dissappeared. They could not get a good look at the beings inside the craft, but the witness claims that they had large heads for their small bodies, and they looked humanoid. All he could see was a kind of grey skin color and he thinks the eyes looked more like human eyes, not large almond shaped eyes that are like the typical greys. 

Later, after they had fallen asleep again, the witness again woke up and saw a white-gloved hand floating approximately 10″ above his head. He only saw this for a couple of seconds, then it dissappeared. He jumped out of bed to investigate but could find nothing in the room. 

Find the case here.

Another Cylinder

One evening in 1977, in a small apartment building in Hanna City, Illinois, I as a 5 yr old child, had been awoken to something that was incomprehensible and terrifying. This particular night, I went into my Mother’s bed to sleep which was not routine for me.

Sometime during the night, I was awoken by a strange cylindrical, machine-like object. It was approximately the size of a coffee can, maybe a little bigger. It hovered 3 to 4 inches off the floor and spun silently as it moved around the bedroom. There was a slight glow around this object and it seemed to almost have intelligence about it.

How it got into the building, I don’t know. I was positioned on the right side of my Mother’s queen-sized bed, and she was asleep on the left. She never awoke during my witnessing of this object. I first noticed it as it entered through the bedroom door on the right hand side of the room. It was metallic and appeared to have sharp edges. After it made its entrance into the bedroom, it hovered in front of the foot of the bed going right to left. I could see its glow cast just below the foot before it had emerged into sight. It then proceeded to come back and make a turn around the right front portion of the bed and slowly approached me along the right side of the bed still hovering/spinning approximately 3 to 4 inches off the floor. As it made its way to just below where I was sitting watching it, it ascended up to my level.

At this point I was paralyzed with terror, I could not scream or move. I lost all consciousness and never had another experience like it again. I have no memory of what occurred after that, what it was, or why it was there.

Details here.

Exegesis

What do we do with these odds and ends?  They seem to be pieces of a puzzle… but what would that image be if we could at last put it together?

Earthquakes, floods and tsunamis make mockery of our technological pretenses. The same great scientific minds who claim dominion over the planet would wilt in panic like frail flowers in a half-decent thunderstorm, never mind a typhoon. Though we try to ignore them, the nuclear flames of Fukushima are nothing less than a slap in the face of our Technocracy.  From The Secret Sun here.

Perhaps we have too much faith in our technology…  Now Chris @ The Secret Sun makes some related points:

We see the world through an extremely limited band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The same goes for our hearing. We consciously process a remarkably tiny proportion of the limited sensory input we receive. We are only able to measure that which can perceive. And we still don’t understand exactly how or why we process anything, other than to facilitate our survival on a purely reptilian level.

There are millions of square miles of land we’ve never stepped foot in. There are many millions more we have only the faintest experience in. The same goes for our oceans- we’re still struggling to explore the endless depths- 71% of the surface of the world is water- and are physically limited in our ability to do so. And we’ve barely touched the unimaginably vast network of caverns beneath the Earth.

We think we know a lot but I think Chris has tried to put us in our place.  My estimation would be even lower in the sense I think our technology is not much more than a crutch for human beings; the Hubble telescope, and the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider notwithstanding.  I think cell-phones rather than improving communications have more likely complicated the process of communication for the species.  The words from How He Loves seem much more appropriate to me:

We are His portion
And He is our prize
Drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes
If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking
So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss
And my heart burns violently inside of my chest
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way
He loves us

It seems much more to the point to me that without His grace we would not even have this small portion of the universe carved out for us; a balance, which we have no deep understanding of, sustains and nourishes us.  They are undoubtedly part of this balance.

I have never seen or communicated with a fairy… or an alien… as far as I know.  Still I did hear that bell… was this simply a synchronicity?  The sound of the bell traveling from another apartment… what kind of synchronicity is this meant to be?  Maybe I was simply hearing things.

Still what if indeed it was meant to be a real communication, at some level, what sort of communication is it?  What would be the message?  It seems a strangely mischievous message; a simple communication, yet perhaps echoing on more than one level.  Of course anyone familiar with the breadth of so-called communications from the so-called aliens etc. in UFO lore knows this is part and parcel of that same lore.  Not to mention fairy lore.

Without a doubt it was a bit scary; and disturbing.  Beyond that, beyond saying something like ‘here I am catch me if you can..’ it would seem like an exclamation point saying nothing is like you think it is…  if I am here everything you think you ‘grok’ is off the mark.  Way off the mark?!  Further I am indeed here but just where am I… it makes no sense!

Indeed the communication itself seems underlined by its nonsensical nature with that exclamation point to drive the point home.  Another dimension…?  Well really I don’t quite know exactly what that means… a parallel world?  Are they the same thing?

Yet given all of this there is a strange beauty in the succinct quality of the communication; to awaken so much with a single sound.  The sound suggests a whole other world…  and where does that suggestion take us?

The miniature UFO’s from the other stories suffer some of the same problems…  they can’t be real can they? Of course they can’t! Dreams…  how could they be anything else?

Talking Dogs, Fermat’s Last Theorem

Often it is in trivial or quite commonplace ways and circumstances that such things manifest; not unusually they seem quite brief, sometimes bordering on the edge of being meaningless when there seems to be meaning at all…  why is that?

Major intrusions, even when they occur, also seem to leave no real tangible evidence that can lead us back to anything.  Has  Ariadne forgotten her thread…?

Roswell is a case in point.  We have all sorts of tempting leads, suggestions, etc., yet still no true artifact of any kind.  Nothing that points to its substantial reality, beyond doubt.  Well perhaps beyond doubt is more than we might expect…

What is going on with this cat-and-mouse game..?  Is the real nature of whatever this is so far beyond our realm that all of these things represent only the faintest traces of …  what?  Is it the so-called ‘incommensurability problem’?  That we are so different any kind of communication is at most impossible..  at least confusing beyond belief..?

{Of course the alternatives may be beyond imagining…  we may have no idea what is really going on.  If indeed some of us have been contacted, and the contact and its consequences veiled in secrecy by certain echelons within a government ‘elite’,  the knowledge kept from us by this black world would be a mirror reflecting our own image…  this option, tantalizing and confusing at best, impossible and impenetrable at worst, has become the elephant in the room, or more appropriately a Trojan horse ushering in our downfall.}

And there must be no real interest in real communication..?!  Wouldn’t we have books of substance, not Urantia or the UMMO affair, all the strange documents that have poured from that, even Scientology, well that does seem a little bit of a joke, but something leading us somewhere real and definite…  Is the Seth material & Telka, to pick two disparate examples, Urantia as well,  all that one can expect..?

What about a talking dog, or proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, even a communications device a la Contact, 2001, or This Island Earth… ??  Or that book Betty Hill wanted to take with her…  hmm.  Of course that got left behind…  what if the ‘leader’ hadnt changed his mind?  Would we now have a book, or Betty rather, that could or would change humankind’s destiny..?  Judging from past history that is unlikely in the extreme.

(An aside re talking dogs and the last theorem of Fermat.  Andrew Wiles, nor his assistant Richard Taylor, walked out of a flying saucer; we do have, thanks to them, the long awaited proof of this assertion.  But Fermat’s ‘truly marvelous demonstration’ of his theorem, if it ever really existed, has not been rediscovered.  That would be a new chunk of knowledge!  Wiles’ proof, to the contrary, is over 100 pages of reasoning and requires some patience to wade through.  Details from Wikipedia here.

Talking dogs of course are another way of intervening in human affairs that might demonstrate the alien’s possession of a knowledge, not simply different from ours but able to transcend our own.  Again in our own human sphere this possibility has a rather strange history.  Fort himself commented on the possibility in Wild Talents…  there is also the following:

Bondeson writes that in Germany in the early 20th century, some people had a strong belief in the potential of super-intelligent animals. He said that along with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, an Airedale terrier named Rolf was considered one of the leading German intellectuals of the time. Rolf’s owner said she taught him his own alphabet with a system of taps of his paw on a board and, Bondeson notes drolly, “he successfully dabbled in mathematics, ethics, religion and philosophy.”

See the article here.  Of course Nazis and flying saucers have an intimate association so to speak; a review of The Hunt for Zero Point can be found here.

Of course the idea being pointed to is the aliens’ superior knowledge.  Simply demonstrating said knowledge would provide some substance to their communication(s) that none of the so-called communications the human race may have had with them, so far, has included.  Simply one among many reasons to doubt the reality of such communication.  Still there is the idea that their knowledge may not be so much superior but simply different but different in a way that may be very difficult to communicate… )

The dream above seems to address this conundrum in some weird fashion. We are only going to have memories, not the real thing itself…

The thing is that as I came up to this place where the thing came out of the ground, and I could see no evidence of there being a hole or anything, it just looked like a solid.. just a clearing in the woods, like a clear cut. And the MIBs are standing on the edge of it, and they came towards me and, here’s where we get totally “out there”.. I got the telepathic message from the MIBs that, “You don’t belong here.” That was the message I got from them. they were still probably 20’ away, but they were walking towards me, and I was looking at these two guys, and there was a woman in red. It was just like some of these experiences that you read about. I read about them later. After running into the MIBs, I learned about them on the internet! (laughing) I was like, no, the men in black aren’t real too, are they? But there was a woman in red, who had blonde hair, bright red dress, and white skin, and she was wearing sun glasses. They were all wearing the same sun glasses. They really had the same sort of oriental look, sort of asian look, really thin, same hair, shiny black shoes in the middle of the Cascade mountains.

From here…  the experience of Henry Franzoni… and here is where he is at now:

I realized that all these stories I was making public-sightings going back hundreds of years-were like recipes on how to find Bigfoot,” Franzoni says. “And I came to the conclusion that that wouldn’t be a good thing. So now I cover my tracks. I don’t mention details. If I saw a Bigfoot picnicking at Champoeg Park, I’d probably come home and tell my wife, and that would be the end of it.”

It seems, for Henry Franzoni, Bigfoot isn’t really about Bigfoot, anyway. “If I were going to write a book about my Bigfoot research, Bigfoot itself would be a tiny footnote in the appendix,” he says. “It’s all the other stuff that I learned that I find much more interesting. I gained a real appreciation for how fragile the natural balance is. I learned a hell of a lot about Indian myths and Indian societies. I learned how to do good science, and that sometimes good science isn’t good enough. And all this led me to doing what I’m doing now.

So it goes.

Truth and the Shroud of Turin

The Mountain

There is, on the net and elsewhere, in the media in general, and the world at large, a Kilimanjaro of information on the Shroud of Turin.  The effort of climbing this mountain of information is more than simply daunting, it leaves you breathless, and in a state of mind probably outside the one you are used to…  in short, to paraphrase Dorothy, we will not be in Kansas anymore.  Whether or not you are Christian it is a tantalizing and ultimately inspiring climb.

Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.Current resting place of the Shroud.

We will talk a little about the climb here, some of the sights along the way, the mystery of the Shroud will not be removed, indeed we may end up a little lost, and the descent may be something different than intended, and perhaps something we will not be quite looking forward to or ready to complete.

The Shroud of Turin is kept in the Royal Chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, in northern Italy.  It has been a home now for the Shroud since 1578 when it arrived in Turin, heralded by a gun salute courtesy of the local artillery.

The so-called ‘undisputed’ or documented history can be traced back to about 1350.  Its whereabouts and exhibitions since that date are generally agreed upon but before that time, well before that time even its existence remains in question.

The Shroud has been around a long time… and it isn’t too difficult to trace back to the 14th century.  The documentary trail doesn’t come to an abrupt halt but peters out, fades away slowly in the sands of time.  We find hints and guesses about its travels, and less and less certainty the further back we go.  Is it the Cloth of Edessa, the Mandylion..?  These may very well be other names for the Shroud of Turin and are indicatvie of  some of the hurdles in trying to establish a provenance for the Shroud.

The Trail

We could begin with a quote from the Bible:

And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre. (Mark 15:46)

Churchgoer prays in front of Holy Shroud.

And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound [weight]. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.  (John 19:39-40)

The story that has been handed down with the Shroud of Turin is that it is this same linen cloth(s) that wrapped the Christ.

The Shroud now belongs to the Holy See, bequeathed to them by the House of Savoy rather recently; the year was 1983.  The House of Savoy guarded this treasure for hundreds of years before that.  And it was moved to Turin, Italy back in 1583, still under the protection of the House of Savoy.

The occasion of the move to Turin was to offer the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, an opportunity for worship, so sparing him a long journey to Savoy where it had resided until that time.

Duke Louis I of Savoy agreed to pay the canons of Lirey an annual rent in return for ownership of the Shroud.  The Savoys can date their ownership from that time, the year 1464 to be exact.  And before that, the earliest unquestioned possessor, from the year 1349,  is the famed knight Geoffroi de Charnay, Seigneur de Lirey; the Shroud remained in his family until the accord with the House of Savoy.  It is the time before 1349 that becomes murky, and speculation has placed it with the Templars for an uncertain period.

Now it is kept in one of two reliquaries.  One reliquary, when not on exhibition, keeps the Shroud flat and horizontal, in an inert atmosphere, behind a multi-layered ‘sarcophogus’ to protect it from fire.  The other reliquary used when on exhibition is a parallelepiped able to rotate from a horizontal to vertical position.  The upper surface of both is bullet-proof laminated glass.  See the photo at right.  The official site is here.

How Old is the Shroud?

Most of the relevant information re the Shroud is available, in one form or another, via the internet.  Though this article isn’t a summary of the various results about the Shroud it is still necessary to be able to say something about what it is as opposed to what it isn’t.  The age of the Shroud is illustrative of the treatment it has received in microcosm.

Container of Shroud contents with papal seal.

The only Carbon 14 test that was done dated the Shroud to the 14^th century.  After this test was published the consensus was the Shroud was not what it pretended to be; that it was indeed a fake, probably one of the many ‘manufactured’ religious relics from the Middle Ages…   The Middle Ages invited an atmosphere conducive to trafficking in these relics and it could be a lucrative business in those days.

There is little doubt this test was not the whole story.  And in fact as far as dating the Shroud itself was more misleading than anything else.  From a copy of a report re the Carbon 14 tests in Thermochemica Acta:

Damon et al. reported that “The age of the shroud is obtained as a.d. 1260–1390, with at least 95% confidence.” However, that date does not agree with observations on the linen-production technology nor the chemistry of fibers obtained directly from the main part of the clothin 1978.

Without going into the twists and turns of the story that is the Carbon 14 ‘scandal’ the fact of the matter now rests in the possibility the linen may indeed have an age that reaches back 2000 years.

Sindonology?

The more one follows the arguments and evidence for and against the Shroud the more one notices the number of contradictions in the ‘vast’ literature; in concert with this one also notices the number of people with an ax to grind, not always obvious.

Staying neutral is a difficult stratagem in this arena.  And indeed it is now a study all to itself- Sindonology.  Courtesy of Wikipedia: Sindonology is from the Greek σινδών—sindon, the word used in the Gospel of Mark to describe the type of the burial cloth of Jesus.

Jewish Burial Customs

The question of Jewish burial practices in the 1^st century and whether or not the Shroud is evidence of same is a case in point.  Many sources claim the Shroud to be consonant with such customs.  And several, often quoting the Bible, say just the opposite.

These opposing standpoints are typical of many facets of the Shroud; getting to the bottom of them isn’t always easy or possible.  It would seem the Shroud itself however is not in accord with typical customs.  The body in most cases was not wrapped with but a single shroud but several strips of linen according to Jewish customs, generally.  So either this particular instance of a burial shroud is rather unique, or it’s simply not the real thing…  or is it?

Here from shroud2000.com is a comment about this issue:

One of the points of confusion with the Shroud is that it was a custom to wash the body before burial. Yet the Shroud seems to depict a man whose wounds were never cleaned. However there appears to be an exception to this custom for those who have died a violent death. Here is an excerpt from The Jewish Way of Death and Mourning by Maurice Lamm (1969):

“The blood that flows at the time of death may not be washed away. When there is other blood on the body that flowed during lifetime (while alive), from wounds or as a result of an operation, the washing and taharah (purification) are performed in the usual manner.”

“Where the deceased died instantaneously through violence or accident, and his body and garments are completely spattered with blood, no washing or taharah is performed. The body is placed in the casket without the clothes being removed. Only a sheet is wrapped around it, over the clothes. The blood is part of the body and may not be separated from it in death.”

“Where blood flows continually after death, the source of the flow is covered and not washed. The clothes which contain the blood that flowed after death are placed in the casket at the feet.”

Notice how only a single sheet is used. Also, the man on the Shroud is naked because they cast lots for his garments. The reason for this unusual custom was due to the belief that “life is in the blood”. Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”

In other words the Shroud doesn’t appear to be inconsistent with these practices.  Their practices covered many possibilities and changed depending on certain characterisics of the body: if they died through violence or accident leaving the body covered in blood they were treated differently.

So it goes with many aspects of the Shroud.  You can find people on both sides of the fence making contradictory claims about the Shroud.  Yet the truth here seems obvious once we have studied the complete picture.

The Image

The image on the cloth is…  unusual.  Now it has a subtle, almost ghost-like quality, but whether it has always been just so isnt really known with any certainty.

The discovery of the three dimensional aspect of the Shroud by Dr. John Jackson in 1976 using the VP-8 analyzer is still a source of wonder.  That in some way the image on the Shroud is a negative, in a photographic sense, as uncovered by Secondo Pia at the beginning of the last century, and additionally has encoded in it information that allows a three dimensional version of the image to be reconstructed, these characteristics by themselves make the image unusual enough.

Still beyond that the image has a quality, not done complete justice to online, that is hard to put into words, a new experience, as the following comments show.  You can examine the Shroud for yourself here, on shroud.com.

Chemists now know the coloration for the images is superficial at the topmost fiber surfaces of the cloth. The fibers are coated with a thin film of impurities made up mostly of starch. It is in this coating that the image resides. The visible image is the result of a chemical change, in certain places, that results in an observable change of color.

The coating can be physically removed from the fibers with adhesive tape. In fact, flakes of color can be seen where it separated from the fiber and stuck to tape used to collect particulate samples from the Shroud. You can see the thin coat of color through a microscope and it is hard to imagine how an artist could have accomplished this.

The images on the Shroud look ghostlike. They look scorched into the cloth. But chemically they don’t resemble scorches. They don’t contain the chemical byproducts produced by scorching.

Sculpture by Luigi E. Mattei

More here.

While photography has the advantage of fixing an image in time and of concentrating it so that whicheverangle you look at it from it remains the same, with the Shroud itself that is not the case.

Moving around that table from a certain angle I saw this image  so faded as if to practically disappear, whilefrom others it seemed as if the figure were almost outside the sheet; it was, I repeat, an incredible emotion.At that moment I knew that this image was unique.

Let me tell you more.

I asked permission to photograph  some details of the face.  As I said previously, I thought I knew it well..

I approached the face placing my camera at a distance of about 20 – 30 cm, aimed the camera at the face andsaw ………… nothing in the viewfinder; “and yet” I said ” I know it by heart.”  I had to beg my friend topoint to the position of the eye, because from a distance of 30 cm I could not see it. I could only see it as Imoved away from it.

So it is a barely perceptible image, one which escapes you, which leaves you perplexed.  I am convinced thatif people could see it from close up they would not only feel great emotion, but would also realise the realconsistency of this image, which would dispel the many doubts surrounding the authenticity of this sheetwhich unquestionably enshrouded a corpse, and of this there is absolutely no doubt.

See here for complete article.

In order to correctly perceive what is actually on the Shroud, one must undand not only the nature of the images but also the physiology of visual perception. The retina of the human eye has the built-in characteristic of automatically suppressing images which are fuzzy or of very low contrast in order to sharpen what is finally perceived. This ordinarily helpful function creates a problem when viewing the Shroud, since one may not perceive images which are actually there. Various enhancement techniques are necessary to correctly discern some of the images. Also, most people are not accustomed to looking at partial, complex images in the negative, and hence miss much of what is actually there.  If one’s visual memory banks are not programmed with a large number and variety of images, one may simply overlook images that are there.

See here for details.

Tonal changes from light areas to dark areas are exceedingly smooth and gradual. Artists sometime describe this as lacking outline. We see this when the Shroud is viewed up close. When we look at the image from less than about a six-foot distance, the image seems to completely disappear. It does not disappear, but our visual senses cannot easily discern it. To many, this had seemed a most mysterious property. But there is nothing mysterious about it. It has to do with the way our brain interprets what our eyes see. Though we are not consciously aware of it, our minds automatically create the semblance of boundaries and shapes from changes in color and tone. So subtle are the gradual shifts of tone on the Shroud that if we get close enough, thus stretching our field of view, changes in tonality are imperceptible. Step back, and the tonal shifts become tolerably narrow enough for our brains to discern the pattern. Paintings, and other hand produced works of art, do not display this characteristic for the simple reason that the artist must stand close to apply his or her paint or colorant. Artists – because they must – consciously or unconsciously, create outlines. The Shroud has none. It is beyond imagination to think that an artist could apply colorants so precisely and so gradually as to be viewable only from a distance of more than six feet.

See here for more details.

If fashioned in the fourteenth century, then the facade it showed its intended audience was pretty unconvincing.  Seeing the Shroud with the naked eye is seeing it at its worst. Only five hundred years later, when modern science thoroughly penetrated this facade did the Shroud become really convincing.

See here for more.

Pantocrator

Just What Does the Shroud Mean?  A Fifth Gospel?

It is understandable that people on both sides of the debate, not re authenticity, but the debate that is underlying the formal debate about authenticity, the ‘debate’ between let’s say believers and atheists, this underlying difference of opinion that sharpens the axes of almost everyone involved in Sindonology, it is understandable how for both atheists and believers alike seeing the Shroud as a fake or imitation, an artifact of some kind, but not the real thing, would make the whole matter less difficult to swallow.  We would no longer need to give thought to this strange image.  Indeed many on both sides of this underlying issue agree it is not the real thing.

Still a great many have seemingly been persuaded to its authenticity.  The amount of material on the web seems disproportionately taken with the idea of its authenticity.  Of course there are plenty of skeptics out there… sometimes harder to find.  And their arguments often, as a matter of course, include the original results of the Carbon 14 tests, for instance, and just as the believers have found a way to stand these tests on their head the skeptics have ways of re-interpreting the so-called errors made. So we are involved in this perpetual game of interpretation as opposed to ‘truth’.

From Requiem for the Shroud of Turin:

Take, for instance, the appearance and anatomy of the figure on the Shroud. The first reaction of many who view it is that it resembles a Gothic — perhaps vaguely Byzantine — representation of Christ. Since, as Augustine lamented, the world has no idea what Jesus looked like, the conventionally medieval appearance of the image ought to be evidence for its being an artifact. But wait: if the Shroud is authentic, might it not be that the standard Gothic representations of Jesus are in fact derived from the Shroud, rather than vice versa? And that is precisely the argumentative strategy of most of the Shroud enthusiasts. “Where was the Shroud before the mid-fourteenth century?” ask Kenneth E. Stevenson and Gary R. Habermas in their book on the Shroud (Stevenson is a former STURP member, Haberrmas is on the faculty of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College). Clues come from Byzantine art. Before the sixth century Christ’s face was painted in many ways, but then artists began to render it in a way uncannily resembling the face of the man buried in the Shroud of Turin.” Uncanny!

This particular ‘see-saw’ is highlighted by Denis Dutton in his article but characterizes the entire dialogue re the Shroud.  Of course for this author these characteristics underline its artificial nature.  Finding the truth is like looking for a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.  Hard to see! And if the Shroud is not His burial Shroud…  well just what is it?  An artifact from another time, meant to fill probably a slightly different purpose than it does today…  or was it meant to be a ‘prop’ to faith…  and is that all it is whether or not its real?

Believing the Shroud to be the real thing, to be His burial shroud, to have found at long last a face to put with the Man of Sorrows, is an amazing thing, indeed a miraculous gift.  How can everyone not realize He has left this evidence for us, it seems almost a kind of secret knowledge, literally millions have accepted its authenticity yet, to cross that line, to believe not only it could be true but is His Shroud…  beginning to live with that knowledge…  it becomes a very personal thing.  Is it just an old cloth, an ancient piece of linen with a strange image, or is it something from His life, something very personal left over from His time on Earth?

Strangely the final answer may elude us.  Even if the cloth itself is proven, and that word is used advisedly, to hail from His time period we may never be able to say with certainty if the image itself was formed back then.  And even if we can at some time take that step, well the fact of the matter is obvious.  Without the skeptics, if none existed, if it seemed opinion was unanimous, there would still be a measure of faith in accepting this truth.  There is a measure of faith in all science.  Absolute certainty belongs to another world.

The Faces of Jesus

This is from the History channel’s reconstruction based on the Shroud.  Details here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting by Glenda Green…  see details here.

Richard Neave, from the University of Manchester in England, recreates an image based on forensic and archaeological evidence.  Article appeared in Popular Mechanics here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Ariel Aggemian in 1935.  Details here.

Pantocrator

“The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, encaustic on panel (Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai). The two different facial expressions on either side emphasize Christ’s dual nature as fully God and fully human.”  Courtesy Wikipedia.

Copies

There are many copies of the Shroud in existence.  Many of them were made in homage to the original and reside in various churches now.  From shroud.com:

Ever since the earliest days of Christendom, the Shroud of Christ has been a most precious relic, which “palladium” was safeguarding rulers, nations and cities….. The image on the Shroud has been copied by numerous artists on countless icons. Today more than 50 copies of the Shroud of Turin are guarded in churches, museums and private collections in Italy, Spain, Portugal, USA, Argentina and Belgium. Even non “connoisseurs” will not have any trouble at all, to see that these copies are certainly not “”acheiropopoties”" but works of art, made by human hands. The best “hand made” copies were made in 1898, by Ruffo and Cusseti, both guarded today in Turin. Today some excellent full size photographs of the Shroud are placed in churches all over the world.

Details here.

Of course there are many copies now made in effort to simulate the original Shroud, efforts to uncover the original process that led to its creation.  Such is the one by Luigi Garlaschelli.  See here for details.

Healing Powers

There have been healing properties associated with the Shroud as well:

From its earliest years, in legends and in art, there have been claims of miracles and healings through the shroud. Four credible witnesses reported that in 544 when Edessa was threatened with siege by a Persian army, the image was rushed to the top of the city wall and prominently displayed; the army turned and abandoned the attack. Eusebius and others state that King Agabar V of Edessa was mortally ill and was instantly healed when shown the face on the cloth. While the shroud was being carried to Constantinople in 944, it was said that a man possessed of demons was cleansed when he touched it.

See here for details.

Something more recent:

May 11, 1955- Cheshire receives letter from Mrs. Veronica Woollam of Gloucester, asking if her ten-year-old daughter Josephine, crippled with osteomyelitis in the hip and leg, ‘could be blessed with the relic of the Holy Shroud’. Unable to travel by air because of his lungs, Cheshire takes Josephine and her mother by train, first to Portugal, for ex-King Umberto’s permission, then to Turin in the hope of her being healed via the Shroud. The Shroud is taken out of its casket, its seals are broken and Josephine is allowed to put her hand in beneath the silk covering. But it is not unrolled. Although there was no immediate change in Josephine’s condition, she later recovers to lead a normal life, though she will die young.

DNA & the Shroud

Dr.Leoncio Garza-Valdes with the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, after his discovery of a bioplastic veneer coating some ancient Mayan artifacts, had speculated about the Shroud of Turin’s Carbon 14 dating that the veneer might have been partly responsible for an error in dating the Shroud.  This speculation eventually led not only to testing the Shroud for the veneer but also to DNA tests of the blood on the Shroud.

Dr.Victor V.Tryon, director of the University’s Center for Advanced DNA Technologies, is reported to have cloned extracts from these bloodstains and deposited them, for safe keeping, in the University of Texas’ bloodbank.

There are so many stories associated with the Shroud, not only those from its ‘legendary’ time, but obviously stories with the immediacy of so-called urban legends whose truth is obviously questionable.  Other reports re DNA and the Shroud indicate what little is there is hardly enough to generate much of anything substantial in the way of evidence, one way or another, beyond the mere existence of blood on the Shroud.  More details here.

The Violet Apple

The Shroud of Turin is not unlike the violet apple re-disovered in Lindsay’s novel The Violet Apple.  The parallel is interesting…  In the novel a seed from the Tree of Life in Genesis has somehow been protected against the vicissitudes of Time and found its way into our wondrous Modern Age.

The fact of the Shroud of Turin, that it has survived into our time, a fragile thing that, unlike so much of human culture from bygone ages, is somehow still around, it would seem miraculously, may betoken something in itself…  as if it has been protected against those same vicissitudes itself.

In The Violet Apple it is a glass, in the shape of a serpent, has carried the seed on its journey, and the story has wended its way along with it.  When the glass is broken, by accident, the seed is transplanted and a dimunitive tree grows and its fruit is the violet apple of the title.  Tasting this fruit is an experience beyond the ordinary and brings one to the beginning of a knowledge of their true being.  Is it impossible to suspect less of the Shroud of Turin?

From The Violet Apple:

I happen to be one of those queer folk who have faith in Eden or its equivalent.  The farther back you go the lovelier people seem to have been.  Somewhere, sometime there has been a very lofty chain of celestial mountains from wich the rivers have been flowing down ever since, to water our modern civilization, and should they ever run dry they can never, never be replenished.

Obsession

Really I have an obsession, even something akin to a hankering, after anything and everything perhaps best described as ‘beyond the pale’.  Here is something from phrases.org about the origin and meaning of this phrase:

The paling fence is significant as the term pale became to mean the area enclosed by such a fence and later just the figurative meaning of ‘the area that is enclosed and safe’. So, to be ‘beyond the pale’ was to be outside the area accepted as ‘home’.

Catherine the Great created a ‘Pale of Settlement’ in Russia in 1791. This was a western border region of the country in which Jews were allowed to live. The motivation behind this was to restrict trade between Jews and native Russians. Some Jews were allowed to live, as a concession, beyond the pale.

Pales were enforced in various other European countries for similar political reasons, notably in Ireland (the Pale of Dublin) and France (the Pale of Calais, which was formed as early as 1360).

The phrase itself comes later than that. The first printed reference comes from 1657 in John Harington’s lyric poem The History of Polindor and Flostella.

In that work, the character Ortheris withdraws with his beloved to a country lodge for ‘quiet, calm and ease’, but later venture further – ‘Both Dove-like roved forth beyond the pale to planted Myrtle-walk’. Such recklessness rarely meets with a good end in 17th century verse and before long they are attacked by armed men with ‘many a dire killing thrust’. The message is clearly, ‘if there is a pale, you should stay inside it’, which conveys exactly the meaning of the phrase as it is used today.

I think this goes a long way to defining this obsession.  But it may be a little too wide of the mark.  Forbidden or forgotten knowledge, ancient knowledge, future science, alien technology, UFO’s, the paranormal, supernatural, miraculous, ancient wisdom, the occult, science fiction, fantasy, symbolism… well I am not going to continue this list.  It can go on and on.

There are so many words and phrases to cover this area of ‘knowledge’ and initially trying to pick a phrase that would cover everything and a little bit more was difficult.  So I settled on ‘beyond the pale’.  Of course the average person, especially so those scientifically minded, would probably think most if not all of these categories are empty, or at the very least empty of anything worthwhile.

I do have, within this ill-defined realm, some particular obsessions.  Flying saucers, the paranormal, supernatural, or miraculous, and forgotten or forbidden knowledge, as well as ‘cryptids’, and Fortean phenomena in general.

Where does this obsession come from?  My first answer to this, and it is just an initial response, would have to do with a vision I had over 40 years ago now.  Now I rarely discuss this with anyone.  I can’t remember if I ever told my wife, I don’t think I have, but even if I did I know it’s not a subject we have ever talked about in detail.  I have mentioned it to few people and the few I have mentioned it to have not been very interested in details.

Now that is curious to me, because I am a very curious fellow, and if someone had talked to me about a vision they once had, well I probably would have all sorts of questions.  One thing I have learned over the years however is people, generally, are not very curious.  Of course that is a curiosity in itself.  Still, for our species on the whole, curiosity is a driving force.  Otherwise it probably would not have killed the cat!

This vision as I remember it did not last much longer than maybe a minute or two and the easiest way for me to describe it is that it was like someone had flipped a switch and turned a light bulb on inside my head and that light illuminated a scene.  At first the scene seemed like a painting but it had 3 dimensional qualities that no ordinary painting has yet it still had boundaries of some kind and what has stayed with me after all these years is a memory of a three dimensional ‘painting’.

The painting had a surreal quality.  In the foreground was a crater, perhaps a volcano, but I have always thought of it more as a sort of ‘caldera’, and ‘floating’ above this crater were hands and each hand held a lightning bolt.  The hands held them in such a way that the bolts crossed each other above the crater with their tips pointing downward into it.  The figure that held the bolts was obscured and could not be made out in the background.  The hands looked very real, having an unusual dimensional quality that made them stand out, the lightning bolts having that same quality.  Hanging above the crater, part of the background as well, were clouds mounting up to the heavens, in rainbow colors.  The entire scene was enlivened with color.

Slowly, as if the light bulb was going out, the scene faded away until the last vestige was gone.  I was dumbfounded.  I wanted to tell somebody but there was no one I could tell that would care.  I made a few half-hearted attempts to talk about this experience but soon gave up.

My parents were no longer together, we were living with our Mom and her family, but at that time in my life, really most of my life, my connection with them hasn’t been close.  Probably it crossed my mind to mention it to someone in my family, but crossed my thoughts very quickly, as soon leaving them as beginning.

Now visions are not so weird.  They are not an uncommon experience though many people have never had one.  Still beyond the experience itself I had a different kind of knowledge; that yes, there are things beyond what we might refer to as ‘ordinary’ experience.  Things do happen that not everyone would believe but are still true.

Now that indeed was no small piece of knowledge and without a doubt prepared some groundwork for my obsession.  Everything isn’t just as it seems…  Still I don’t think this is the root of my obsession.  Yet it was preparation of sorts, indoctrination into the no man’s land covered by these subjects.

One last comment about this vision.  When I had it, some time in high school, there was no reason I can think of I would have connected the primary components of this vision together- the lightning, crater or volcano, and colored clouds- strange to say but lightning in the vicinity of volcanoes is far from unusual and is actually part of what goes on in eruptions etc., and the colored clouds strangely are related to volcanic phenomena too- Krakatoa is a good example, and what happened after its eruption.

There were unusual sunsets, and sunrises, across the world in the wake of that event, strangely colored.  Now this is an interesting ‘coda’ to this vision…  but leaves me still bewildered at its real meaning.  As a matter of fact I have not the slightest idea what it means, and have, ever since the vision, wondered if or when I might in reality see some version of it, in a painting or photograph etc.

The vision struck me immediately as laden with significance, and a symbolism that seemed just beyond my powers of ‘decoding’…  I have since of course tried to uncover what meaning was meant for me in this vision but have never considered myself completely successful in the attempt.

Of course the lightning bolts remind me of Zeus, the word ‘crater’ in Greek has some significance, I remember a painting by William Blake that seems a very distant relation, and actually the content of the image has always seemed to almost bring to mind a painting I might have seen at one time, but never have seen since.

I did at the time this happened make an attempt at drawing the image- I am not much of a draughtsman and the hands turned into claws and the clouds were not much to look at.  The experience itself however left an indelible mark!

Before & After Science

Koans and Cyphers

When I began this post it wasn’t with any glimpse of the Pandora’s box that it would open.  I have shied away from trying to define synchronicity…  instead throughout I have seemingly been running around it in circles.  I have kept adding bits and pieces to this post, not so much in the interest of summary, because the subject itself is a tangent to so many things that a true summary would have to include, well more information than it was ever my intent to include in this post, so not a summary but a sort of ad hoc schedule of indices, indicating take-offs and landings for some of these obvious tangents.

Before and After Science seems a perfect setting…  one of the essays I stumbled across in trying to understand this topic referred to the idea as a way of seeing the world, before the invasion of science.  Curiously in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, unlike the technical backdrop of the movie Blade Runner which is based on it, the setting is a dystopia.  The inner and outer cities are crumbling apart, there are wastelands… a post-apocalyptic nightmare… and really that setting is more appropriate to the basic ideas of the novel…  the human world is passing away, in front of our eyes.

This particular category of Koans and Cyphers I had never completed- though it was separated out some time ago- what was to fall into this category I couldnt quite work out.

Synchronicities do seem much like koans, they are puzzles of a sort, and their comings together and leave takings seem often completely inexplicable.  The teapots below offer such an example.  The following is from Max’s site:

On January 30th, 2006, I was suddenly compelled to explore the hidden crawlspace under my back stairs.

Now, I’m “Max Action – Urban Explorer” – a huge part of my life and self has been built up around my passion for exploring caves, tunnels, rooftops, basements – spaces between, spaces forgotten, spaces forbidden. And, of course, I LOVE crawlspaces.

Max found a teapot in that crawlspace.  Now just a couple weeks before he had been in California and had what he describes as a mystical experience, but by the time he found himself back home, a lot of that feeling had faded away.  He was still on the edges of it when he visited a Unique Thrift Store, having returned to Minneapolis, all this still before his teapot in the crawlspace.  And he couldn’t let go of one item. 

 “I don’t know – there’s just something satisfying about it –
 I like the materials, the construction maybe -
 the connotations are somehow pleasant to me.
 I don’t know. I just feel like I want this in my house.”

So he bought it.  It was a teapot.  And when he discovered the teapot in the crawlspace, days later, it was mind-boggling.  They seemed to be twins.

And his verdict…  “It seemed inescapable; I had asked the universe if I could really believe in intuition, in, essentially, magic … and the universe had answered with a resounding “yes” – in the form of “synchronicity.”

I cant quarrel with that.  His teapot generated the one comment to this post.  Really to me the teapots are a koan, and indeed I think he accessed, for him, if not its real ulterior- and interior- meaning, at least one of them.

Often synchronicities seem just like that; and on a different level codes or cyphers would be the perfect metaphor.  Something is hidden in the code.  The meaning can be tapped with a little extra effort.  Sometimes years of efforts as in the case of the Voynich manuscript…  although synchronicity and the Voynich manuscript probably dont make much sense in the same breath.

It is interesting that the original meaning of koan, a ‘public record’, points to an objective reality beyond the koan, as opposed to something personal and private.  Yet often synchronicites seem couched in such personal and private references that this seems almost contradictory.  Well synchronicities are that too.

Before and After Science 

Calling this post Before and After Science, at first thought after Eno’s luminous work, secondly to point to the idea of synchronicity as being independent of Science itself, but also, uh thirdly, to the idea being mired in a kind of timeless region, as if the meanings to draw from synchronicities are sideways glances at something missed, or to come, or well something else.  A well of inexhaustible energy that beckons just beyond our island of existence. 

Matthew Weiner imagines in his column in Stylus on Eno’s Before & After Science it is the perfect Desert Island disc, something to listen to when you are stranded on that island…

Thus began a search through nearly every record in my collection (Pet Sounds? Too whiny. Any reasonable person would want to choke Brian Wilson after about a month; plus, the “Why won’t you let me go home?” refrain of “Sloop John B” wouldn’t exactly get my mind off the fact that I’m stuck by myself on a rock). And somehow, the one that kept coming back to me was Before and After Science. In the decade-plus since I had first heard it, the album as a whole became clearer to me, while at the same time retaining the mysteries one hopes would endure over the long, hot months of nothingness. 

Eric Weiss in an essay on the subject refers to synchronicity as something of a ‘throwback’, a part of the world before Science etc.:

In this pre-modern world, synchronicities will seem perfectly natural. Theentire physical world will be imagined as a creation of the Divine, created precisely for the purpose of some drama that is taking place between the Divine and Its creatures. So we might, for example, imagine the physical world as a kind of school in which humans learn certain kinds of lessons. The general run of everyday reality is a sufficient school most of the time, but sometimes the teacher needs to intervene more forcefully. That he does by means of synchronicities – or in this context we might call them miracles. Synchronicities serve a divine purpose (final cause) and do so according to a divine plan (the archetype, formal cause).

Our lives abound with synchronicities, writ large and small, and often simply ignored by us as too trite, or ridiculous, or meaningless in this modern age. 

Voynich and Nostradamus

Does the subject matter of prophecy fall into some corridor of synchronicity- or not?  The Voynich Manuscript, the Lost Book of Nostradamus, the manifold interpretations of Centuries… 

Is it Revelation?

There is a scene in the movie Blade Runner that brings Deckard and Rachael into a strange confrontation.

Deckard: “You remember the spider that lived in a ‘bush outside your window’? ‘Orange body, green legs’? Watched her build a web all summer? Then one day, there’s a big egg in it. The egg hatched…”

Rachael finishes the sentence: “…and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.”

Deckard: “Implants! Those aren’t your memories. They’re somebody else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s. (Pause) OK, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You’re not a replicant. Go home, OK? No really, I’m sorry. Go home. (Pause)”

The revelation is chilling. “Replicants aren’t supposed to be emotional, but because Rachael is ‘more human than human,’ tears well up in her heartbroken, watery eyes, and they liberally flow down her cheek. Her face melts after he pounds in the truth. When Deckard leaves the room to get Rachael a drink (lights turn on automatically as he enters his kitchen), she flees the apartment – devastated.”

Of course in the context of the film this revelation is not an example of telepathy, clairvoyance, or even synchronicity, but simple detective work. The exchange has a haunting quality that has stayed with me ever since.

Here is Jung’s classic example from Synchronicity:

“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”

The images here all depict various synchronicities, absolutely meaningless without context to fill in the blanks. All synchronicities are multiple in some sense; it is that ‘multiple’ quality that is the synchronicity. The images, events, or simply ‘things’, whatever they are, are ‘reflections’ of each other and seem to provoke meaning without usually offering a simple translation.

The origins of, for instance, the two constellations of ‘dots’ below are very different, yet in a certain context they seem to be strangely incredible reflections of each other, however statistically improbable.

The picture on the folded twenty dollar bill seems to summon the image of the twin towers: is there a hidden agenda this peculiar likeness is meant, even ‘designed’, highlight? Or is it one of the many outcomes of chance?

The teapots have a history: the history of  bringing them together seems meaningless, hasn’t resulted in any discovery beyond the pots themselves really. It seems a pointless synchronicity yet that is what makes synchronicities: even in their pointlessness they seem to harbor some strange meaning we can’t easily decipher.

What is it about synchronicities?

It seems the pointlessness has something in common with that of a puzzle…  usually when we put a puzzle together we have an idea of the overall picture; without that picture putting the puzzle together would be difficult, though not impossible.  Synchronicities seem to operate similarly, not really in the reverse, but simply without that guiding image; we have the pieces, the various synchronicities, or steps toward their eventual occurrence, but the picture itself isn’t clear.

The puzzle offers its challenge in assembling the pieces but knowing the outcome; how do the pieces fit together?  The synchronicity on the other hand seems to offer us the pieces but asks of us something quite different, what is the real picture, and further the meaning beyond the pieces, as if we need to somehow put the picture together into a revelation of sorts. We have the idea this picture exists, if nothing else the synchronicity seems literally pregnant with its meaning, though often that real meaning seems unclear and indecipherable.

Here is another interesting example, astounding to say the least, of an improbable coincidence:

“All fifteen members of a church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska, due at practice at 7:20, were late on the evening of March 1, 1950. The minister and his wife and daughter had one reason (his wife delayed to iron the daughter’s dress) one girl waited to finish a geometry problem; one couldn’t start her car; two lingered to hear the end of an especially exciting radio program; one mother and daughter were late because the mother had to call the daughter twice to wake her from a nap; and so on. The reasons seemed rather ordinary. But there were ten separate and quite unconnected reasons for the lateness of the fifteen persons. It was rather fortunate that none of the fifteen arrived on time at 7:20, for at 7:25 the church building was destroyed in an explosion. The members of the choir, Life reported, wondered if their delay was “an act of God.”

See here for details.

Devil in the Details

Some of the details re the above images might be ‘illustrative’ or even interesting but what those details will not be is enlightening.

For instance:  we don’t really know how the image of the towers from a folded twenty dollar bill first came to light.  There are references, on the internet, to an email several years ago.  But that email doesn’t seem ‘extant’ now.  Who would have gotten the idea of folding it in just that way; though folding money into images like this seems to have a long history.  Is it even remotely possible that there is an intention in back of this..?  The twenty dollar bill was ‘re-designed’ before the Towers disaster.  Does that mean it was planned… well these questions aren’t answerable.  And they seem far removed from possibility.  And if we grant that it has even a hint at possibility why in the world would someone with that knowledge choose this way of revelation?

Something similar is true in the case of the Pleiades.   I can quote the origin of the coffee stains, and the process of trying to identify the pattern, but is there real meaning in this similarity, as striking as it is, or is it something simply totally absurd?

And the provenance of the teapots is equally plain, but is their any point in bringing them together… it seems not.

Small World

Are the ‘phenomena’ of synchronicity, the circumstances that bring about the multiverse of coincidences, byproducts perhaps of the ‘small world phenomenon’?  The notion of a small chain of acquaintances linking any two people on earth was first ‘popularized’ by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in Everything is Different.  From Everything is Different courtesy of Wikipedia :

A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth—anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.

In other words does increasing the connections we have to one another increase the probability of some, or any, coincidences?  Without doing an extensive analysis (indeed there are mathematical studies of the idea), it might seem, especially so because of the internet, our ‘small world’ might be overrun with coincidences.  Of course drawing distinctions among coincidence, serendipity, and synchronicity might change this outlook.  Still there may be a real effect from the so-called ‘small world phenomenon’ on the varieties and occurrences of coincidence(s).

Chernobyl

There is also the example of Chernobyl.  The biblical version from the Book of Revelations:

And the third angel sounded the trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, burning as it were a torch, and it fell on the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters: And the name of the star is called Wormwood. And the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.  

There has been some controversy whether or not Wormwood should be translated as Chernobyl…  whether the meaning is exact is hard to determine but it seems that even if not exact Chernobyl has been used to refer what is called Wormwood in English.

So what kind of synchronicity is this..?  Is this mere coincidence…    unlikely as it is- and maybe that is all it is- simply an unlikely coincidence with no meaning beyond ‘mere’ coincidence..?  Of course the author of Revelations refers to a star falling and what happened at Chernobyl was not that…  still it was a place where nuclear reactions occurred.  The same energy that powers stars…

The sub-title to one of the other images in that same set as the image at the top of this post, an image from Chernobyl:

“What is most striking here is the contrast between the world of Civilization which is ours and the world of Nature. The world of civilisation is physical, while Chernie is a metaphysical world, “meta” means “after”, Chernobyl is the world after physics. The world of Nature is something that exists of itself, it is how this world has been for millions of years before us and how it will be after us, while civilization is mere appearance, it is not “just there,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires engineering and science to support it. If we want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern ourself with the upholding of civilisation�we are done for. In a trice we find ourselves left without civilisation. Just a push of a wrong button and everything goes straight to a primitive state. We look around and see that civilization is vanishing into the air, like fata morgana. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if the curtains of Civilization, covering pure Nature, have been drawn back.”

Hebrew

Here is a look, from a slightly different perspective, at the idea of coincidence.  The Hebrew language seems to lack a precise equivalent of ‘coincidence’:

“Coincidence” is the English equivalent to the Hebrew word, mikreh. Is there a difference in their meaning? At first glance, you might say no. After all, how else would you translate mikreh, if not “coincidence”? But Hebrew – loshon hakodesh – is the holy tongue; the language in which G-d Himself spoke; the language in which He gave us His holy Torah. Therefore, there can be no true equivalent to any Hebrew word in another language.

Literally translated, mikreh means “karah m’HaShem – it happened from G-d. The word itself testifies that nothing, absolutely nothing, occurs without His guidance, and this holds true from the most major to the most insignificant event. Our sages teach that a man does not so much as prick his finger or stub his toe without it being orchestrated from Above. Coincidence, on the other hand, connotes a random event. Things happen because they happen, without rhyme or reason, and G-d is most certainly out of the equation. On the other hand, we, Am Yisrael, see hashgach – Divine guidance and direction in every situation, even in apparently ordinary occurrences, and nowhere is this more evident than in Jerusalem.
The full article is here.

There is no word for coincidence in Hebrew. And Jews are likely to share the view that coincidences are just not worth talking about. After all, the word has been perverted from its orginal use. Coincidence first entered the English language in the seventeenth century as a means of denying any causal connection between unrelated events. The word was a particular favorite of Sir Francis Bacon, who advanced scientific rationalism against the claims of faith.

Please see here for original article.

Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon

There are a host of related ideas having to do with the concept of synchronicity. The Baaden-Meinhoff Phenomenon, Littlewood’s Law, the Law of Truly Large Numbers, the Recency Effect, Cognitive Bias, the so-called 23 Enigma, probably there are others…  Whether or not to take these as synonyms of synchronicty, or as descriptions of its varied aspects, is probably more a matter of individual taste than a true delineation of logical categories.  

Littlewood’s Law has to do with probability and miracles.  What is the frequency of ‘miracles’…  again we are caught in definitions and semantics; to some extent this is a fundamental concern.  Drawing the lines to decide what constitutes a synchronicity in the first place can be difficult… 

If you think, for instance, one of the defining characteristics of a miracle is its rarity, Littlewoods Law attempts to relate this probability to the number of events happening to an individual in a month of days.  So if you regard a miracle as something that only happens once in a million times, for instance, we are very likely, in a months’ time, to experience at least one miracle, because in a month’s time we experience at least that number of events…  perhaps really yet another example of the Law of Truly Large Numbers…   The relationship to synchronicty depends on your window to this idea.

 The Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon? 

You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.  More here.

More from that same article:

In point of fact, coincidences themselves are usually just an artifact of perception. We humans tend to underestimate the probability of coinciding events, so our expectations are at odds with reality. And non-coincidental events do not grab our attention with anywhere near the same intensity, because coincidences are patterns, and the brain actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns… hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming.

Further reflections on this particular aspect of synchronicity may be found here.

Mantis Carol 

I will end this post re synchronicity with a reference to this ….  Unusual work by Laurens van der Post.  Mostly famous for his The Lost World of the Kalihari… from The Coming of Mantis: 

This was perhaps the most reprehensible lapse of all, for some instinct has prevented me from ever finding coincidences accidental.  I had come gradually to think of them as manifestations of some cosmic law of which we are inadequately aware, confirming among many other things, the extent to which one’s own life was obedient to an overwhelming universal pattern.  I had even reached at that precise moment the place in the book I was writing where I was trying to suggest that this great veiled law with its special messengers of strange, often absurd parallels disturbing our highly organized allegiance to a rational and causal progression of thing, could be the law becoming the growth of meaning in our lives, the kind of meaning which the Chinese centuries before Christ defined as that which has always existed through itself. 

The Birds

In the spirit of this post I wanted to somehow bring full circle the zig zag path that began with Blade Runner.  That is rally a tangent to what this post is about and yet, strangely enough, seems really to have something to do with this idea of synchronicity and not just a roundabout fashion. 

There was also a comment re The Birds, ala Jung and the movie, that was going to be explored.  Here is, after a search on Google for ‘Blade Runner & The Birds’ a comment from one of the sites it pulled up:

Birds are also a common motif in Blade Runner. Nothing represents freedom quite as well as a bird in flight, and nothing represents imprisonment quite as well as the same bird caged. However, different birds appear at different times, each serving a different function. Roy refers to “shores burning with the fires of a hawk,” a bird known as a hunter and predator, perhaps meant to represent Roy himself. Instead, the dove released by Roy when he dies symbolizes peace and, perhaps, his soul. Much earlier, near the beginning of the film, there is an owl in the lobby of the Tyrell Corporation. It’s a bird known for its large eyes (again, a symbol of watchfulness), and it is also mechanical. As it flies across the lobby, its image is juxtaposed to that of Rachael, looking like a flawless china doll as she walks out to meet Deckard. The message is obvious: the owl is artificial; Rachael is artificial. (Owls are also a symbol of wisdom, of course, which suggests that the replicants are in some respects wiser than humans; more on that below.)

See here and here.

David Vincent & Others Part III

The last addition to my gaggle of thoughts while listening to the radio one day recently; all these things on my mind ‘thronging’ for my attention, in spite of, or perhaps in part because of my situation.

We are in dire straits financially. Strangely, because I don’t see how, I expect we will recover and move beyond this place but while we are here it’s not fun being here. It’s taking a toll on our marriage, and our marriage doesn’t need any more tolls, and to be honest I am not sure we will weather this storm. We will, finally, financially I believe, but I am not sure where our relationship will be a few months from now.

I know Michelle is ready to leave, not just because of money, she doesn’t feel appreciated emotionally, in more ways than one, and she is just plain tired of the storms. I know to some extent all these wonderings are a distraction for me, but they are not ‘mere’ distractions, not momentary considerations at all, but guests that have been in my life for a very long time. So I indulge them I guess.

Omnec Onec. Alias ‘Sheila’… Just one of the many, many contactees. The following is from her book “I Came From Venus”:

“After two Decades of silence, can the truth be told about those cold desert night. Until that moment, to me sometimes appears like an eternity, I have the life lived by Sheila. But Sheila was only so long as my name, until the right time had come to tell the people of the world, who I really am and where I come from really. That time has arrived.

My real name is Omnec Onec. I was in that night the desert the little blonde girl and the handsome man next to I was Odin, my beloved uncle. We both came from Tythania, the planet that you call Venus. As a child I had the decision prepared to spend the rest of my life on earth, one before particularly fateful matter of karmic reasons.

I am one among thousands of people from the neighboring planets, the earth make it their home. Some of us remain only until they have fulfilled a special mission, but many have taken the courageous decision, the rest of her life here to spend. Scientists, doctors, educators, artists, engineers and live ordinary citizens of this planet advanced and work incognito among the inhabitants of the earth.”

The following sites have info about the varied literature from many contactees here, here, and here for more on Omnec.

Is Omnec the real thing…? We might as well ask that of George Adamski… Not very many people will believe Sheila is a ‘walk-in’ that indeed hails all the way from Venus, and then not really the Venus most of us earthlings are familiar with but an astral analog of that Venus, one that exists on another plane.

Let’s face it for most of us that is a lot to swallow all at once, and even in bite-sized gulps it’s going to make you wonder… For some reason she has gotten stuck in my mind, partly this name Omnec Onec, which is just plain odd (of course the name Valiant Thorr, one of her ‘countrymen’, is unusual too), partly her appearance, she has an attractive appearance, but there are videos of her as well, and in addition there is a blog by someone claiming to have been her husband… in short she doesn’t look as if she came from Venus (of course being a ‘walk-in’ she would look quite earthly wouldn’t she…), still the few details about her on-line seem to indicate she has an unusual character. And Omnec was stuck in the back of my mind too, along with Lucretia, Abraham Lincoln, David Vincent, Mac Tonnies, and others.

Mac Tonnies, someone I came across only very recently, was definitely someone with a unique point of view. He has now, post-humously, a book out, “The Crypto-Terrestrials”, and though I have not read the book, only his blog, and listened to some interviews, I am sure it is informed with the same wisdom and wit as his blog. Mac had given some real thought to what this field is about, his was a unique voice, and will definitely be missed.

His death, at the early age of 34, seems definitely peculiar, a strange kind of anticlimax of sorts to a strident, intelligent voice that was full of life, and curiosity about everything.

The subtitle of this book I think says a great deal about him and his message: “A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us”.  He was coming from a place in his ruminations on this subject that indeed rank him next to Keel and Vallee and other noteworthy researchers in his attempts to get to the heart of the matter. A review by Nick Redfern on Fortean Reviews has a detailed summary of Mac Tonnies’ point of view:

“Rather, Mac – right up until the time of his death – was chasing down the theory suggesting that the UFOnauts may actually represent the last vestiges of a very ancient race of distinctly terrestrial origins; a race that – tens of thousands of years ago may have ruled our planet, but whose position of power was thrown into overwhelming chaos by two things: (A) the appearance of a “debilitating genetic syndrome” that ravaged their society; and (B) the rising infestation of a violent species that threatened to eclipse – in number – their own society.

They are the Cryptoterrestrials. And that violent species that blusters around like an insane, unruly and spoiled child, and that has done more damage in its short life-time than can ever be truly imagined, is, of course, us.”

And this:

“And that is the trick, the ruse: in actuality, their numbers today may be very small. They may well be staging faked UFO events to try and convince us that they have a veritable armada at their disposal when, perhaps, the exact opposite is the case. And, most important of all, they desperately want us to think of them as visitors from the stars. If their plan to rejuvenate their species is to work, then stealth, subterfuge and camouflage are the essential orders of the day.”

Finally:

“As for so-called “alien abductions”: the clumsy, intrusive means by which ova and sperm are taken by a race of beings we are led to believe are countless years ahead of us is addressed. That the ability of the aliens to wipe out the memories of those they abduct is constantly and regularly overturned by nothing more than simple hypnosis is highlighted. And the unlikely scenario that our DNA would even be compatible, in the first place, with extraterrestrial entities is also firmly dissected. Mac’s conclusion: all this points not to the presence of highly-advanced aliens who are thousands of years ahead of us; but to the actions of an ancient Earth-based society whose technology may not be more than a century or so in advance of our current knowledge.”

I think that is enough of Nick Redfern’s review- and it can be found here- enough to show where Mac stands.  He stands, perhaps, one step closer to finding a window on the phenomenon- phenomena?-  that allows us to begin to see it for what it is… wouldn’t it be advantageous to the ‘crypto-terrestrials’ to make sure our versions of remote history come nowhere close to the truth?

Indeed they are probably partly responsible for collapsing legominisms that would have revealed their identity. Of course this opens up a whole new window on what has been going on down through the ages and sinking these bridges to the past is one reason we find ourselves where we are today. Lost is perhaps the best single word summary.

Here is a note to end this long commentary re my gaggle of thoughts, a review of yet another work I have never read (in addtion to ‘The Crypto-Terrestrials’ and ‘Raechel’s Eyes‘) that includes an interesting aside re Tolkien:

“A pertinent factoid about Tolkien that is not in the book, is that the good professor had dreams throughout his life about a huge wave that crashed over the land, destroying everything. The dreams stopped when he began to write the Lord of the Rings, which is of course a vast mythology based on the concept of an ancient civilization that had somehow been destroyed.”

Find the review of  ‘Occult Atlantis’  here.

Mac indeed I believe is onto something.