Alongside the Stream of Consciousness

Just watching the flow these days..... nothing profound to say, but probably all that is well-seen is profound anyway. To keep-on keeping-on with the blog [in the face of a lot of worthy distraction], I'll try occasionally to just dip into the Chaos Pile of unfiled materials and hand you a bowl of Anomalistic Popcorn now and then. Today is one such day.

This is something that someone knows something about, and I probably should too --- but I don't.

These are four photos from a SITU Chaos Box serving to "document" a Bigfoot footprint discovery in Astoria, OR in 1977. I looked on the internet and there is a Bigfoot sighting there in 1977, but it was in September, and the discovery of these prints was in November. Also, and this is where I am in arrears, this set of photos should have appeared in PURSUIT [SITUs journal], but putting in a "little" time at least, I didn't find it. Probably they're in there somewhere and I just blew it.

The September case is an 8' red-haired critter with 14-16" long feet, which were c. 8-9" wide. Our anomaly was making off with a chicken.

The November pictures are of two kinds of footprints: one "traditional" --- 17" long and 7 1/2" wide; but another apparently walking alongside of only 4"x2". The "Little Bigfoot" seemed to limit the stride of the bigger, as the walking went from 6' strides to only 8" at times. Both types of prints were barefoot in the snow.

Mermaids at Play by Arnold Bocklin, 1886.

1886 was a good year for Mermaids it seems. Bocklin's painting celebrated an enthusiasm for the concept, Over at Cape Breton, Canada Nova Scotian fishermen spotted a mermaid floating in the water from their boat, which "sat up" in the water as they approached. This in September.

After what must have been a long hard swim, the Mermaid appeared again in the waters of Sanderstrand, Denmark. Here she [as she was ostensibly female] also showed herself to a fisherman at sea.

Our sea girl couldn't have been as pretty as the above illustration as it took awhile for our reporter to become certain that she was a girl [well, she said she was 30]. 

Whoops --- she SAID this to him? Yep, the Mermaid and the fisherman had a conversation. After exchanging much Q&A together [none of which was detailed in my resource @#%^*##], the dark-haired lady swam off, doubtless to bring news of we goofy humans to her people.

Down in one of the Chaos Boxes resided a single page of some longer document. It looked like something sent to Ivan Sanderson by one of his far-flung nature roaming buddies. {I don't believe that it was by Ivan himself.} 

The page described a set of experiences had by the crew of Academic Kurchatov in 1968. They were in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. The research vessel had been accompanied by schools of pilot whales and blunt-nosed dolphins for some time. They were attempting to take deep-sea readings with instruments lowered on steel cables. [the people were, not the dolphins --- no one's sure what the dolphins were doing.]

They sent down a heavy net device for collecting sea creatures and plankton, and 500 meters down the equipment broke away. The steel cables had snapped. This was odd as these rarely snapped and then only when being hauled up under some force. The core-extracting device was also ready to lower, and it too snapped at about the same depth. Then it was the turn of the bottom dredge and, yep, its cables too. 

What had happened? Each of the three sets of cables had been sliced off with areas near the end "polished to a fine gleam" as if "cut with an enormous file." Throughout this fiasco, the pilot whales were merrily swimming about looking out of the water at the ship. Nobody believed that the pilot whales nor the dolphins had the requisite tools to pull this off. 

Who done it?

Cryptozoologists prefer to think that big-toothed underwater nasties "did it", and maybe they're right, but some would like to believe that intelligent characters in fancy machines are the culprits [although  the cutting of research cables is fairly lacking in intelligence to me.]

One set of candidates for such malfeasance could be the Malcontented Maltese sub-Mariners of 1947. Well, to be fair, they're only "malcontents" if they were the same guys who cut the cables in the earlier story. 

These descendants of Nemo allegedly surfaced near fishermen plying their craft 20 miles to sea from the island. Looking Big, Black, and Round, the rising object was intimidating, and judged originally to be a "monster." But shortly it lit up the area and out on its deck emerged "little men" gamboling about on some agenda. Shortly the small men re-entered their submarine, which put out a blinding glow, and then submerged. 

Whether the witnesses caught any fish that day isn't reported.

Another loose sheet of paper was a letter to "someone" [maybe SITU; maybe Joan Whritenour who sent some boxes to SITU when her magazine died], dated February 28, 1978. In it was a report of a sighting of a sky anomaly from December 19, 1971 from Villa Igara, Canoas, Brazil. 

"A luminous cloud was moving slowly from south to north. It was very illuminate, and it was egg-shaped and I could see that in the middle of it was something just like a dark pit. My father observed the strange appearance with his field glass and so he could identify two red lights that were in diagonal position compared to its course, that could be seen clearly in the middle of the dark pit. 

"The illuminate cloud had the same diameter as Orion. When it was exactly over us it was shining brightly, but it continued to move slowly from south to north.... Suddenly we saw that it was losing its luminosity and when it was coming closer to the Pleiades, it was almost invisible. Even so, the two red lights in the middle of it could be seen clearly for a while, and then they disappeared."

The sighting took six minutes. Many people witnessed this thing in cities all around Rio Grande do Sul. The writer said no one could explain what this was, but: " I am sure you can give me a positive answer very soon and I thank you beforehand for this great favor." 

Yep, we'll get right back to you with the answer on that. Yessirree Bob. {or rather, Ingrid}. 

Lastly, there is a photocopy of a letter to Official UFO, which I copied simply because it was too mind-addling [or just fun] not to.

In the letter a young woman is pleading with the readership to help her with her frightening experience [I'll let you speculate why this went to a UFO magazine.] She and her boyfriend were driving when they saw a "glowing thing" coming closer to them. She stopped the car and they got out. She got scared and wanted to get back in, but he said that he wanted to see it closer. She felt faint, and blacked out.

When morning arrived, she was still at her parked car, but her boyfriend was gone. And.... NOW THE MOVIE............

She drove to her boyfriend's house and told his parents what had happened. They informed her THAT THEY NEVER HAD A SON. 

Her own parents informed her that she wasn't dating anybody, and the police stated that there was no such individual. 

The witness {?} then went on to insist to Official UFO that she wasn't crazy, described her vanishing boyfriend and pleaded for help. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of nonexistent persons in Endicott, NY should chime in here for humanitarian if not cosmic ontological reasons. 

Well, that's a Big "NO" to Death-by-Aliens, but a good place to stop this entry short of Deepest Out Proctor. Sitting by the Stream of Consciousness is meant to be fun I believe at least some of the time. 

I see my "position" by the Stream like an Old Fisherman on an island with streams left and right. One of these is overtly tangible spraying droplets of reality all over me and my physical life. On the other side, the stream is misty. It's still real, but it resists close inspection. We need to spend some time reflecting on both streams. 

It is a dull soul who looks only on the drenching stream; it is a lost soul who spends all its time with the Mists. 

And it is the Happy Soul which occasionally takes a swim in both.

Peace brothers and sisters. And warmth --- that stream is solid ice right now in Kalamazoo.