Close Encounters of the First Kind: Do we really care? Part Three.

Part Three, eh? Time to depart from the semi-sane ground of actual UFO data and spew forth shameless speculation about what might be going on. Well, folks: Crap Detectors at Full Power!! Shields to Maximum!! Ready or not.......

The first speculation that I heard about the "endless variety" phenomenon for close encounter craft design was the equally "endless variety" of extraterrestrial civilizations. That theory said: there are a lot of different folks out there, and it seems like a lot of them are visiting Earth. The concept is that a very large number of worlds all have their Henry Ford Model ZZZZZZZ UFO makers, and the changed craft designs identify those different worlds.

I don't like it. Maybe you do, but not me. Hundreds of thousands of different civilizations seem a bit much to me. And just one guy per civilization? I would think that we'd have rather large clusters of cases with identical craft, but I, at least, find no support for that in the case pile. Fell free to disagree of course. Not for me.

The second "explanation" for the design differences in all these cases [that I can remember anyway] is the "the craft are designed differently with different tasks in mind." Well, OK, sort of. Steamshovels should look different than Limousines than Tanks than Race-cars. But this just won't cut it. I'm even more sure of that than about hypothesis #1.

The reason is that I've done simple analyses of things like Car-Stop incidents, and the cars get stopped regardless of the shape, details, color, beam, or anything at all of the craft. The form of the craft seems to have nothing to do with it. The form in fact seems like an outer shell of misdirection surrounding what is actually going on. So, no good for me.

If not #1 or #2 then what? The lightbulb is only slightly above dim here, but we can at least stumble "Out Proctor". The following commentary will definitely be Out Proctor [i.e. so crazy as to be only marginally conceivable], but not "All-The-Way-Fool" [i.e. that I'm convinced of any part of it]. We're Out Proctor quite a bit on this blog, but All-The-Way-Fool is rarer, like when I could not avoid the apparent Fact of a Real Nessie, BUT a non-physical/biological one, and therefore was stuck with a folkloric paranormal spirit type theory.

So, what's Out Proctor on this topic??

The slightly agreed-upon hypothesis of at least a handful of UFOlogists is that the constant meddling with design is a ploy to break down our human search for patterns in the data. We have seen over and over again how difficult finding such patterns is. The intention of the altered designs would be therefore to maintain a general covertness in the phenomenon, while allowing all the "in-your-individual-face" overtness that any ET agenda might want. I believe that this hypothesis, though not able to be tested scientifically, could be seen as sufficiently dealing with the variation-of-structure enigma to be a "keeper", as far as a reasonable thought is concerned.

That theory might also be seen as amenable to any hypothesis of what the alien agenda might be, as long as some overall covertness is deemed important. So whether you want to be relatively non-interfering explorers, or relatively non-interfering meddler societies, or relatively non-interfering social, psychological, political game players of some kind, the craft variation to break patterns is an idea that can serve.

But is there another way of looking at it? Doubtless hundreds. But one way intrigues me until I get some real negatives about it.

I asked a friend about this element of UFOs the other day. He looked at the panels and said: What it reminds me of is Art. What he meant was an outbreak of INDIVIDUALITY in the production of the specific piece of technology that was that individual's personal device. Ernest Callenbach's ECOTOPIA had the idea that a person's private automobile would be craft-customed to the desires of the owner, by the owner. That concept leads, whether based on a real concept of ET civilization or not, to some interesting lines-of-thought.

We've tended to think about UFOs as the products of great systemic agendas of space powers, who have come great distances with some iron-willed purpose. Almost an Industrial-Military vision of those home worlds. But "Art?". THAT's Freedom. What if? Just what if? Could some "individuals" just simply be here?

The idea of an advanced civilization which honors the individuality of its citizens by granting and maintaining a liberal amount of freedom shouldn't be automatically rejected as unthinkable. Almost all Americans hope [sometimes against all data] that the USA and our tired old Earth will end up that way. So maybe. If so, what "flavors" of a free society might there be?

For discussion sake, let's take the pragmatics of money and technology out of the discussion as useless misdirections. Our imagined societies will have the means to travel --- maybe expensive but not prohibitive. What sort of civilizations might they be coming from?

One can imagine a society so liberal that it permits radical freedom. Such a world would be pouring forth all manner of "behaviors" into the Galaxy and upon our world. UFOs do a lot of things, but I don't see that. There are very strange incidents occupying the Whacked-Out dump baskets of our files which could be interpreted that way, but very few credible ones. That would be a UFOlogy like Ford Prefect's remark in The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy when he mentioned ET teenagers putting on weird hats and "strutting around in front of people making Beep-Beep noises". That is not the UFOlogy that we have.

But we could have visitors coming from freedom-oriented societies, whose actions were restricted by either technological limitations or by policy limitations.

Some would attribute the preponderance of designs based upon radial symmetry as an indication of a technological limitation or at least a technological advantage. That in fact seems a perfectly good idea to me. If one adds to that a policy limitation: one only gets a permit to come if one can indicate a useful role in whatever the over-all exploratory agenda is, or at least a range of proposed activities which does not contradict that over-all agenda, THEN the variations of behavior shrink quite nicely into what [I believe] the case experiences have to show us. This sort of vision would be VERY upbeat. The civilization would be a benign one towards its own citizens, honoring freedom. The persons coming would be serious and "mature" persons, possibly involved with research, and the home civilization would have a well-thought-out and mainly non-interfering program of interest.

I asked two UFO-savvy friends what they saw in the UFO data mountain which violated the general idea. Chupracabras was the first word out. OK, but I don't believe that that concept is real, and don't buy the alleged UFO connection anyway. So, right or wrong, that "problem" doesn't bother me.

Mass Abductions and the mistreatment of Abductees was the second word out. Well, there's a bunch of assumptions there able to be debated [see John Mack], but [and I'm not going to go into it] I do not find the MASS part of mass abductions at all convincing either. Betty and Barney, fine. Buff Ledge, Stanford,KY, fine. The gigantic avalanche, no.

Deliberate harming of humans by craft? Well, we did a whole series of CE2ps here, and there was VERY little evidence for that. Even the one deliberate action [paralysis] does not result in long-term effects. Neither wild freedom individuals harming humans nor individuals systematically harming humans under some mass agenda seem [to me] to be going on.

So, Out Proctor we've been. Whether all this craft-design variation is "just" the required psychological dissonance of a great rigid agenda, or the product of allowable individuality among responsible explorers, the two models seem simplistically OK with the data, at least to me.

Throw in a spicy dash of local Tricksterisms and you have a very interesting if unprovable world.

May the Advancement of Civilization never leave Art or the Artistic Soul behind.

Till the next time, folks, whenever that may be.

Close Encounters of the First Kind: Do we really care? Part Two.

Let's see how far I can get on this topic today. When you're dealing with an old man sometimes the energy just quits --- but high hopes. Yesterday we looked at some of the 1940s and 1950s cases which happened to be in my files [I say that to remind us that there are MANY other cases and many other drawings], where the witness blessed us with an actual first hand illustration of the object involved. Today we can gaze at another set of these things; this time from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. And so we go....

Our first and unsurprising "conclusion" is that they continue to defy any detailed pattern, just as their earlier sister set of cases also did so deny [how's that for 19th century British sentence structure? --- sorry, my PhD is in 19th century History of Science and Technology]. If anything these characters may even be a little bit more diverse. Even the two "diamond hexagonal" objects differed mightily in size, although they were both on the small side when it comes to UFOs. It was nice that the one lady felt that she saw the same shaped craft ten years and several hundred miles apart, but even that might give one some cause for out-of-control speculation [feel free; it doesn't hurt that much if you're honest about it].

As to the specific sightings: There are some of UFOlogy's strongest CE1s in this set. I've found over the years, even in very informal polls at UFO get-togethers, that folks differ greatly in their "favorite case lists", but a couple of these above make them more than not [ Red Bluff and Exeter]. [I've read recently an attempt to debunk Exeter, but if you read the extensive interviews by John Fuller and others on this case, you see rather quickly that the persons pushing the debunk aren't interested in addressing the whole case's details]. And Red Bluff is a UFO Titan no matter how you want to cut it. In that case the Air Force and Donald Menzel actually used atmospheric diffraction of stars WHICH WERE NOT EVEN IN THE SKY YET to come up with what was a totally ridiculous concept anyway. THAT was one of the biggest, most over-the-top, explanatory stupidities or dishonesties [take your pick] in the history of the field.

A case that I particularly like [probably for irrational reasons] is the Millersport, OH incident of 1963. [my "synthesis" of the four witnesses' drawings is above]. In this case a family watched a UFO essentially "parked in the air" for some time until it took off. The drawings were done separately and "are the same, and different at the same time". They have plenty of similarity to convince one of the unity of the experience, and enough difference to convince one that the witnesses were not even subconsciously pushed to say one exact story. So, for me, even though this was one family, the reports have an element of credible independence. This case may also be a good old-fashioned CE3 as well, as the mother felt that she quite clearly saw a humanoid -shaped figure silhouetted in one of the windows. So, what can I tell you? I like it, and probably would put the case in my top 200 or so encounters to use to defend the phenomenon. And just to complete that thought: it is my experience with just my own files that there are probably at least 400 or 500 cases good enough to roll out there in front of reasonable people to defend the basic anomalous nature of the phenomenon.

There are other cases in the list of similar confidence... but I've placed alongside to the left a drawing of one just too late to have made that panel: Mackay, Queensland 1965 [actually it may well have made it if I was being obsessive about month-&-day order but life's too short for such nonsense in filing.]

Mackay has multiple independent witnesses, a very good viewing allowing much detail, and a possible related trace [which would convert it into a CE2t]. For the ET-technology debate, the witnesses stated that this was "a well-defined machine, solid and metallic". The witnesses had no background with which to judge size, and said it could have been anywhere from 30' to less than 10'. The internal diameter of a ring trace found the next day a little ways away was c.20', so the guessed range may have been good. Three brilliant floodlights surveyed the ground, and the thing was in sight for 30 minutes. It then rapidly accelerated away. Well, I say that's a rocking good UFO! And it's one of the many that Jim McDonald researched while he visited Australia in 1967. I'm happy to share anything with Jim McDonald, but particularly a mutual interest in the Mackay case.

Other things are sequestered on this list. Sheffield, OH 1958 was probably the incident which caused the Air Force more difficulty in Congress than any other. It was a pretty good unknown, but the difficulties were caused by the USAF making a complete hash out of its non-investigation and making statements which offended a no-nonsense woman. With Mrs. Fitzgerald's cooperation, a Ohio UFO group [not NICAP but of NICAP attitude and competency] pursued congressional aid in redressing USAF incompetency and nearly got an investigation by congress when Don Keyhoe couldn't. The ultimate case report small monograph [ called the "Fitzgerald Report"] was delivered to many congressmen, and is a UFO historical classic.

Elsewise here, are things like the great Lt.Colonel Gasslein case from Springfield,PA with all its witnesses and its long-observation, and apparent clear high technology nature. Another thing which is irrelevant to everybody but my brother and myself is the St. Albans, WV case of 1958, which is our own personal CE1. I used to view this as "just as nice domed disk", but as I thought about our observation the thing had to be closer than I thought.

I should have drawn a little "map" but this should be simple enough to follow without that. Tom and I watched the disk going by E-to-W almost exactly, looking out of a north-facing window in our home. When it looked like I was going to lose the sighting shortly, I "sacrificed" a little of the window view and turned and bolted for the west-facing door in another room. Trees unfortunately blocked the whole scene so I had to continue running until I cleared them [ah, those were the days .... actual running]. Once cleared the thing still wasn't in sight so I shifted on a precise right angle turn to the north [not by plan; that was how you had to go given all the obstacles] and jumped down a steep embankment [could I ever do that? Yes you could old man; you were once a basketball player remember? Basketball? What's that?]. Once down that embankment it was just a few more strides to get a look to the west and there the thing was, almost due west at the time. So you can see that I took a "Z" shaped run with right angles, and the object was at least close to dead west on that final angle. I'm not saying that the disk was only 30 yards away when it passed by the window; that seems way too close, but who knows? But even given some slop in the actual angle-guessing of my last position, that object was very probably far closer than a football field. So, I'm giving myself credit for a CE1. If you don't... that's OK too. It's also a good case because someone up-river was reporting it to a local radio station at the time. I have no idea how many other folks may have seen it, or whether Tom and I got the best look.

The picture above is the artwork from the old J.Allen Hynek slideshow, illustrating the concept of a close encounter of the first kind using the Exeter case. It is a pretty faithful rendition from witness testimony vs some of the other representations that you see [example, see the picture at the very top of this post; also supposed to represent Exeter]. It points out another danger in these drawings: never put anything out there without the approval of the witness. It as an old prof friend of mine would say "subtracts from the sum total of knowledge in the Universe".

My lightbulb is growing dimmer than usual at the moment, so I'm going to stop here, and complete this topic next time with the Total BS part: what might it mean? Till then, if you have the stamina.

Close Encounters of the First Kind: Do we really care?

A little look at some CE1s--- but first: "Excuses, Excuses." The blog's been mainly dormant for several weeks for some "good" and some not-so-good reasons. My mother's care continues to occupy a lot of time, and a lot of energy. Currently I'm getting a "month-off", thus finally this posting. Secondly, the big UFOs and the Government book is in the final polishing, has been in the majority seen by the publisher, and is being read by the author who will write the foreword. In other words, such stress is about to float downstream. SITU is actually at the point where I can build the final interior shelving units in the garage, and begin shelving books and journals according to category. There is some psychological relief in that, and such relief aids in the day-to-day "optimism" which is necessary to do research and contribute to blogs. So, life is still not that of an irresponsible playboy, but just enough relaxation of issues is occurring to make a few occasional blog entries more likely.

So, to the material-of-the-day: this comes from my freedom to attempt straightening out my files which had gotten out-of-hand due to problems one and two above. I had probably 200-300 cases to log and file; that's how far behind things had become. Once I finished, I thought: is there something here relatively mindless that can be done which would be amusing? For reasons unknown, I pulled out the files from the CE1 drawer and began to idly page into them. The interest arose as I saw that, although in the minority, there were quite a few files wherein the witness had sketched a craft [or someone else did, but had gotten witness approval]. So, I began plucking them out, and here they are. [I've more than this first page --- waiting with the rest until later is good strategy, I think].

Here are twenty-one case drawings from the WW2 to 1957 era. It's interesting, I think, for anyone to just look at the array for a minute without me gabbling away making noise about them.

And here are the thumbnail case details for the sketches above. Hopefully you will be able to pop this graph up and magnify it if necessary; there are a lot of pixels in it.

I'm not sure what to begin to say. I'll be bonehead obvious to start. UFOs don't look alike. They especially don't look alike if they are anything but smooth featureless globes or disks, or cigars or ovals. As soon as you get features, then the simple description of a "UFO" goes out the window.

For those of you who have been around the subject for a long time, you know that this is one of the great and frustrating enigmas about the phenomenon. Why don't the darn things look more like they came off a high-tech assembly line? People will try to say that they all look like they are in a general class of shapes ["radial symmetry" would be the fancy talk], but even that isn't really true. They rarely look alike; they rarely are the same size or color; they rarely behave alike; --- even giving them the benefit of somehow "seeming" alike [some good percentage of them anyway], they are far from Model T Fords a la Henry's mass production concepts.

There are UFOlogists who dislike this very much. I used to be that way. Now I've done a "180". The fact that everyday Janes and Joes do NOT describe some fixed image "flying saucer" gives me a significant boost towards the credibility of the reports. Arrays like that pictured above show [to me] conclusively that the media does not control UFO report content, and probably controls nothing about UFOs at all.

Let's leave the general comments with that for now, and say something about a few of the specific cases.

The drawing way at the top was one of Edward Ruppelt's favorite cases, and it has become one of mine as well --- whether it happened or not. This was the "shooting" incident which he was told about on one of his trips to Holloman AFB. An officer there told him that a pilot had fired his weapons at a UFO [VERY controversial thing to do] and even showed Ruppelt the incident report WHICH THE OFFICER PROMPTLY BURNED!!! Ruppelt was thoroughly boggled by this, BUT HE BELIEVED IT. We know that he believed it because he presented this incident prominently before the CIA investigation panel [The Robertson Panel]. Could we have actually had a USAF/UFO shooting incident in late 1951?

The next drawing down is my colored up version of the little sketch in the witness drawing panels. It's the 1952 Bainbridge, MD case where two women naval officers saw a large black disk hovering over the roadway which they were walking and spectacularly "pouring" sparks like a liquid fall down onto that road. This two-witness case has the necessary high credibility AND high-strangeness to make it one of my favorite "hidden" encounters.

The incident pictured just above [again my colored-up version of the witness sketch] is the Yuma, AZ case of 1952, and is another little-known report. The case has a very detail-oriented observer, picturing a rather unique craft, and with an intelligent credible report [there were allegedly two military observers to this but, as usual, the second wasn't around for an interview]. My favorite detail was that the object produced a distinctly different color-pattern when it decided to take off, from that which it displayed while hovering.

The case at the bottom is a 1954 case from the Pacific Ocean, off Yaron-Jima Island. In this incident, the crew of the ship saw a very bright neon-blue object approach, looking only like a line of blue in the distance, but a disk when close. When directly overhead it appeared to have a thick red-colored ring surrounding a black center on its underside. The thing was quite large, perhaps one hundred feet in diameter.

I'm going to leave off at this point. I'll try to get another set up tomorrow or soon, with some further commentary. Until then, Happy Valentine's Day.

Everyday Spirituality; Matters of the Heart.

Back in Kalamazoo again. Back in my nice little city, and my nice little neighborhood. Back where The Enclosure of the modern urban life seems farther away. Here is where there is at least some chance of opening up my soul to the Life of things natural and real. And so here, blessedly, is where [if one is lucky] a connection is waiting....

The Sun is out in all its glory today, as our odd "winter" continues its strange ways. The snow is melting and the roof is weeping its water from the overhang just in front of me. The snow crystals are compacted; just showing a blazing beacon here and there. No colored jewels... well, maybe a gentle sapphire over there, or a quick flash of the spectrum, then gone.

God's wind is singing in the pine trees to the southwest. Part of the Original Words of Physical Law placed in this old Universe long ago. It's good to just sit and listen. Even the birds are relatively silent and respectful this day. The sky is pure blue. Only the lines drawn upon it by our technology disturb its simplicity. I actually don't mind the jet-trails. They too are simple enough. And they symbolize that we poor humans are striving mightily to accomplish things --- even as wrong-headed as we often are.

The humans on the ground are striving too. The young man runs by, trying to recover the condition of his college days. The old man jogs by; grimly trying to maintain what he still has. The middle-aged man with the deformity forces himself down the road. Determined to overcome. Full of hope. Spiritual or not: may there be Blessings to them all.

For me, just sitting here watching their striving, I am just trying to reconnect. I love that they are giving such effort. For me it's more about NOT making effort at the moment. The connection comes with the quiet, not the noise.

The roof-drops fall in front of me. They crash into the dripline formed from many such years ... and spatter away like a faerie fountain. Every splash seems different. Every splash seems part of this uncountable diversity spoken into this Universe. .... Magnificent .... Watching the never-ending ramifications of the Word of God.

.... Connection.

We all need to get out of The Enclosure. We all need to occasionally "turn away". We need to listen to the Universe sing ... we need our own soul to sing with it.

The Song is always there.

Every Kid Likes Dinosaurs, Part three.

This will be the final part of this anomalistic trek, and probably the least newsworthy [I rather liked part two, which was the reason for this whole effusion]. Today, though, we should terminate this with a few framing remarks on the topic and the general controversy.

The first thing that ought to be mentioned is the "feasibility argument" for continued existence of dinosaurs. Regusters was trying to make a geographically-focussed case for such a thing with his carbon-dating of the Niger fossil bone. There is a bigger picture [literally] into which such an argument would fit. That's Continental Drift.

In the Continental Drift hypothesis, all the current landmasses were joined together in an unstable jigsaw named Gondawanaland. This happy state lasted for even a geologically-long time offering plenty of habitat stability to encourage beasts to maximize their genetic potentials in environments to which they became exceptionally well adapted. Some of that maxing-out produced the dinosaurs.

When the Gondawanaland supercontinent decided to rip apart, all that "easy life" of stable habitat began to be more and more severely disrupted. This, and its consequences, is what led to the Death-of-the-Dinosaurs, not some "Death Star collision", which at most provided a punctuation mark on terribly distressed species. It was evolving environmental change, not sudden catastrophe, which put these monsters down.

But, it could be imagined that one big area of the supercontinent did not get the brunt of those changes, at least as hard.... Africa. Africa, as seen illustrated in the simple map above, sits there in the middle of the fracturing supercontinent and rather waddles about in place, while its siblings go sailing off across oceans to crash into one another, meet subduction zones, produce mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, and all manner of nastiness. "Somebody" sitting there at home in Africa, in their happy little tropical environment, might wonder [relatively speaking] what all the hullaballoo was about. Environments even here in Central Africa would still be slowly and dramatically changed, but not perhaps as drastically as elsewhere.

This is the larger scale into which a feasibility argument might nest.

A second point would be that it is not at all obvious that just because you were big and reptilian that around 65 million years ago you had to go. We have some pretty impressive big reptilians who say: "Not so fast, my friend!" [Well, maybe skip the "friend" part]. The continued survival of the crocodilians remains a mystery to the theorists today. Turtles, too, puzzle these guys. There is no ready answer to this which rises above the level of academic BS. I'll contribute to the pile with my view that a). every species was at different stages of being able to adapt to the slow-death-march caused by the supercontinent break-up, and b). these animals lay a lot of eggs and do so regularly [NOT your usual very slow populators], and this gave the succeeding generations greater chances for survival both by positive genetic variations and greater numbers to accidentally find successful food niches, etc.

Were some of the greater than 500 genera of dinosaurs [these are just the ones known] living more like the crocodilians as to frequency of egg-production and maternal egg-guarding, etc, so as to mimic what the crocs and gators did?? Well, why not? The point is that the idea is not a crazy one.

A couple of years ago, one team of fossil scientists reported that they had a find which when dated showed a date well after the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. To their eyes, the Great Stop Sign had not stopped these particular dinosaurs. This was at a US dig in New Mexico [San Juan Basin shown above] and seems to indicate that these hadrosaurs beat the widowmaker by at least 500,000 years. This does not at all surprise me, as our fossil record is so incomplete and our fossil studiers so resolute in wanting to fit things into the textbook cant, that exceptions to the boundary line must exist all over the planet. So, why not Africa? And why not for longer?

Of course you must have the solid evidence... but this is a feasibility study, and the purpose of a feasibility study is to tell the sniggering jackanapes to shut up and get out of the way of people who want to do something.

The skeptical argument that nothing so large could continued to go undetected is baloney, particularly if applied to this swamp area right up to modern times. The picture above is from a regular [non-mokele mbembe] herpetology expedition to those swamps in, I think, 1999. I've also read of similar conditions in another even more recently. Look at what the porters are putting up with! And these sorts of conditions persist across an area at least the acreage of Florida! Yeh, sure, we'll pop over there and solve this thing.

Some people like to use as part of their feasibility argument the legends of Dragons which occur in surprisingly different cultures going way back in time. The argument, obviously, is that they refer to dinosaurs. That's a tough one for me. Dragon legends interest me almost as much as the Little People tales, and in my opinion are more complicated and harder to get clear as to what we're even talking about.

The "dragons" COULD be experiences with remnant dinosaur populations, I suppose, but it doesn't feel at all correct. The dragon legends are too ubiquitous to be real meat-&-juices encounters all over the place, yet completely evade science in all those same areas. Dragon tales could grow from merely seeing the exposed bones of dinosaurs as some suggest, but fossils intact enough to show the true conformation of the beast are really rare without full-fledged digs, so I really doubt it. We know that many early such fossils were just attributed to Giants of some kind.

I think that the origin of dragon legends in true dinosaur encounters is a false lead and is a road to confusion. People like to hearken back to writers like Pliny {above} for support for such as this, but nope. I am a privileged person so as to own a personal copy of the early english translation of Pliny[1634] and am happy to take any excuse to haul it down from the shelves and read it. He does say that he is commenting upon "dragons" in the text. They exist in India and in Africa in places like Ethiopia. BUT, he is obviously, completely obviously, talking about really big serpents of the boa constrictor/python type. Now if anyone wants to make an argument that he's describing cryptozoologically-huge snakes, OK by me. Dragons, no. And Dinosaurs, no.

This is not to say that I'm opposed to someone showing me some legend somewhere which sounds like existent dinosaurs, but generically recruiting dragons for this doesn't work for me.

Something else which doesn't work for me is Creation "Science".

Long-term readers of this blog know that I am a Catholic and hold a great deal of stock in spiritual matters of almost all sorts. [The whole blog is, in its different ways, founded upon the belief that our weary old world needs a strong infusion of at least open-mindedness to mystery, if not precisely open-mindedness to the paranormal and the spiritual]. I have no fundamental prejudice against the claims of Creationists. It's just that almost all of them are bunk. In this shockingly abrupt conclusion, I am in the comfortable company of almost all of the theologians of my church, and absolutely all of the Catholic scientists, of which I class myself as one.

But I AM a scientific type of mentality and I believe in subjecting claims to some tough but open-minded scrutiny. The ultra-right wing of christian beliefs that goes for a 4004BC origin of the world, or any such minimalist date, fails every rational scrutiny. So do the several "deductions" which are forced upon any who would try to defend this. These deductions include things like: humans and dinosaurs totally co-existed ubiquitously; and Noah took the dinosaurs on the Ark. Because these folks attempt to believe this, they have welcomed the news that mokele mbembe still exists in the Congo.

I really wish that if they insist on some of these desired conclusions, that they'd come up with some better scenarios. Time after time people will throw the dinosaurs at Noah in a challenge to Ark capacity. The apologists toss this aside with the most mindless disregard, despite seeming somewhat intelligent in some of their other arguments.

C'mon, guys!! The Ark was big but not THAT big! [I'm giving them a biblical-sized Ark here just for conversation sake]. Do you really think that we could get all the animals on an oil tanker let alone the Ark?

There were some pretty big dinosaurs out there. And they couldn't come just one at a time; there had to be at least two of each if not seven pairs [I think].

Some of these monsters were well over a hundred feet long. And though many were smaller, there were at a minimum 500 genera of them.

And this is just dinosaurs that we're talking about --- think of all the other essentially land-living or semi-aquatic species that Noah would have to be cramming in there.

The only way out for the Creation "Scientists" on this one would be to ask God to do something about it. Saying that they were ALL destroyed in the Flood [which also didn't universally happen; I'm just barely open to a localized upper Mesopotamian area flood ], just won't do as literal interpretation of that phrase in Genesis says Noah took examples of ALL the creatures. God would have to do something far more creative: like condensing everybody down to miniature size once they crossed the entryway portal. That action however didn't make it into the story, so it's not popular.

The relevance for our mokele mbembe story is that now the Creationists have begun tramping towards the Likuoala River in search of dinosaurs.

I'm not sure how many of these "scientific expeditions" have been sent [more than one for sure] but they have come back claiming success. It's everyone's choice, as usual, to decide about their claims. It's my feeling that these guys are going to have to really get the true goods if they are to add anything to our understanding of this at all. They have a bigger barrier to overcome because their own prejudices are so much more blatant.

Here's a drawing of a mokele mbembe allegedly seen by one expedition member. He called it an Apatosaurus. Pretty shocking as Apatosaurus is one of the big ones. Seventy feet long... amazing that everyone else missed it. No tracks of the monster either?

And the above photo [?] is labelled charging dinosaur [!!!]. Actually, I've partly lied. The whole title included the words "Photographic proof at last!"

The level of stupidity in that goes past embarrassment and far into pathos. Lord God save us from your more hysterical supporters!!

With that I leave you to your own problems getting visas for the Republic of the Congo, and wish you Godspeed until next topic [whatever weird thing that turns out to be.]

Every Kid Likes Dinosaurs, Part two.

Today's rendition of this topic focusses solely on the apparently unwanted outsider in the story: Herman Regusters. There is some unknown [to me] bad "sociology" in this part of our tale, but as I know little of the substance, I'll try to stick mainly to what if anything Regusters found.

From what I can tell Herman Regusters was indeed a NASA engineer and was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory associated with Cal Tech when he decided to take his fling at Mokele Mbembe. His father had been a west African missionary which doubtless gave him a special feeling of connection to sub-Saharan Africa. He met his wife, a psychologist with some medical background, in Ghana, and they were married there in a traditional local ceremony. She went with him on this Congo expedition. Regusters was a technology expert and good at hi-tech equipment and photography. He was also a pilot and had served with the USAF in Korea. Regusters heard of other probes into the Likuoala swamps and their difficulties in "navigation", and the whole project interested him. Having NASA contacts, he was able to float a brilliant idea: why not let me go into those swamps as a test of our LANDSAT and NAVSTAR capabilities for mapping difficult areas?? NASA wouldn't pop for the idea officially, but Regusters decided to go for it anyway unofficially.

What Regusters WAS able to do was to get good LANDSAT imagery of the relevant area. Through that he was able to reject the idea of flying directly to the lake [uncertainties as to depth and obstructions], but rather fly semi-directly [to the village of Epena] and trek the rest of the way.

On the map beside, you can see Impfondo circled in green, where most expeditions were stuck with as a staring point. Epena is at the end of the orange line at the edge of the red circle, allegedly prime mokele mbembe territory. Regusters was already well ahead of the time curve. Regusters, like Mackal et al, also traveled southwest along the Likuoala River searching for the semi-hidden Bai River, which would take them north to Lac Tele.

At the village of Boa, however, he discovered that all the maps were invalid as to the actuality of getting to Lac Tele. This, it turned, was impossible by water. The inability of the Powell-Mackal expeditions to get there was readily explained. Instead, locals informed him that there was a way, surprisingly on foot. Porters were hired and the trip was successful without ever seeing the River Bai. Even then it was not picnic with much hard sloshing and little food on the trail. Regusters said that "anything which crossed the gunsight" ended up on the fire. This included Crocodile, Snake, and Monkey. Asked what Monkey tasted like, he resisted the standard joke and said "dark meat".

Whatever the "advantage", Regusters did in fact make it all the way to Lac Tele and there, at a minimum, found a rather strange perfectly round body of water --- let the unfettered hypothesizing begin!!. One idea which "surfaced" immediately was that it was formed by a meteorite impact, but how had it fought off the encroachment of the swamp vegetation so effectively? I suppose we'll never know that answer.

Other than a mysterious round lake, what else did he find?? One possibility was tracks. He felt that maybe these tracks, like the one pictured above, might belong to Mokele Mbembe. This is probably wrong.

One thing that over-enthusiastic explorers might forget is that their are some plenty big but well-known critters out there. Also these characters often wander about more than you'd expect. We saw earlier on this site how Ivan Sanderson was corresponding with a guy in Africa who thought that he might be on the track of some kind of living mastodon like thing, and Ivan was right behind him on this. He ultimately got a mudtrack, which was not that much different than the one above, and he and Ivan still both thought they had something big. Ivan's zoologist friend at the Philadelphia Zoo had to talk him down off crypto-olympus by telling him that this was surely a pygmy rhino. [I think that's what he determined anyway --- too lazy to go back and look it up now].

Regusters thought that his print might show three toes and thereby a dinosaur-like foot. But our friends the rhinos have a foot conformation which produces such fooler mudprints, and so our intrepid NASA engineer is probably out of his depth on this one.

On another website, someone published a later story [entirely different thing having nothing to do with Regusters] wherein locals told of a battle with a mokele mbembe and when shown a picture like the one below said that yes, that is precisely what mokele mbembe looks like. What this tells us is that legends slide around the countryside and people with no contact with "mokele mbembe" at all transfer the name into other experiences with large dangerous and unfamiliar [to them] animals. It also tells us that you need more than stories.

So did Regusters come up with more than the stories of Mackal et al?

Most interestingly for we casual followers of these matters were several instances where the group felt that they saw an unknown large animal. Case 1: "perturbations in the glass-smooth surface of the lake which implied the presence of a sizable object".

Case 2: Object sighted. "A long necked member could be clearly distinguished in the clear morning air". Submerged and not sighted again.

Case 3: A loud roar from the jungle [this was recorded].

Case 4: "Appearance of a very large object moving through the water." One kilometer distance. Pronounced wake. No head nor neck seen. Smooth dark brown surface. Native observers with team said much too large for hippopotamus, which is also unknown in that area.

Case 5: Loud animal sound. Splash of something big entering water. Regusters' wife sees long serpent-like neck and head emerge from water c. 30 meters from boat. Head held two meters above surface. Dark gray color and smooth-skinned. Whole sighting was only about 5 seconds.

Case 6: Regusters and wife alone exploring north end of shore and forest [place where allegedly two mokele mbembe animals had been killed by locals in past.] Heard heavy footsteps approaching from three different directions. The exploring instinct gave way to more fundamental ones and they ran.

The line drawing above: this wasn't identified in the file materials, but appears to be a sketch by a local person of what he saw at Lac Tele. It could represent "Case 2". [correction: while packing up the SITU file, I came across Regusters' title for this. It is: Sketch of an animal (monster) made by Colonel Emmanuel Mossedzedi, deputy commandant of the Brazzaville Garrison. Later Regusters said that this sketch "came alive" with one of the sightings at the lake.]

The camera shot of above left: this was also not identified in the file, but its location therein clearly indicates that it was sent by Regusters as part of his documentation of the expedition. I have seen this [in color and always left/right reversed] on the internet, and commented upon as if it is a probable crocodile. This could be true as Regusters says that the lake is heavy with crocodile population. [Another correction for the same reason as above: Regusters says that this is the Head portion of Mokele Mbembe submerging into Lake Tele. Taken from estimated distance of 300-400 feet.]

So, what else? Regusters brought back his taped jungle roar and got some pretty good expert opinion to analyze it. That opinion said: interesting sounds but we can't identify them with any animal we know. All of us non-animal vocalization experts must take that for what it's worth.

The only other scientific thing that Regusters did which is germane does not involve Lac Tele directly. It involves rather a dinosaur skeleton fossilized in Niger, of which he was given some "bone" samples to analyze. Why??

Regusters' idea here was not crazy. What he felt that he knew from the geology of that Niger region was that it was not desert [as it is now] c.10,000 years ago, but rather quite wet, and likely verdant. And, it would not be a stretch at all to imagine that it was part of a large ecosystem which stretched from there down into the Cameroons and Congo area. If so, and if some evidence could be found for a surviving dinosaur species in the Niger region in the vicinity of a few thousand years ago, that evidence would state that African dinosaurs had indeed survived the Cretaceous boundary extinction, and as habitat shrunk, may have been left as a concentrated remnant in those Congolese swamps. So, he accepted the fossil samples happily and got a good lab to try to date them.

As you can read in the letter above and below, the testing was not exactly plain sailing. This is well-explained by the analyst and is nobody's fault that a clearer answer was not obtained. All we can say is that the analysis does NOT show a VERY late date for the sample. What is frustrating about the language though is that one does not know whether it says that the sample was in the ballpark of a few tens of thousands of years [which would make Regusters' point just fine], or merely that anything over 30,00 back to multiple millions of years is fair game.

So, there are the concrete elements of this, and the science, as best it happened. In all of that it seems to me that Regusters did a decently good job. However, this was not at all welcomed in either the skeptical nor cryptozoological communities. Why I do not know. Regusters was a cryptozoological outsider. Perhaps he wasn't "generous" enough to his forebears. Perhaps he was seen as an unwanted usurper, much as was Gerald Hawkins by the traditional archaeologists about his Stonehenge astronomical theories, or Luis Alvarez by the palaeontologists with his asteroid-killed-the-dinosaurs hypothesis [in these Hawkins was right, and Alvarez in great part was wrong, but paradoxically the wrong theory is nearly universally accepted by now and the right one still fights to get into the textbooks --- we surely can mess things up]. I have my own experiences with such tribalism [I'm OK if I'm writing about UFOs {since I'm a Tribal Elder}, but roundly criticized if I write about Cryptozoology, by some anyway]. This is horribly ingrained in us apparently, much to the detriment of our species' advancement of knowledge.

Whatever went on here in the Regusters case, it didn't help the cool pursuit of the truth about mokele mbembe. Regusters was angrily miffed by some of it. He wrote to Bob Warth:

"I came to learn, sadly, that I was better prepared for the adventures of exploration and new geographic and biological discoveries than I was for the criticism and negative comments and attacks on my integrity I did receive after my return; especially criticism from armchair investigators, pseudoscientists, and skeptical members of the media."

Regardless of what went on here in this sociological fiasco, any long-term member of the anomalies-researching community [who actually does any work and publication] has been there. I don't know what "blame" exists in this, and to whom, but on the surface of the documents that Bob Warth had in the SITU file, it seems to be to have been an honorable try by Regusters to discover something.

There are animals who eat their young..................