YAKIMA: The Last* Curtain

*: This certainly isn't the last curtain, but since I'll have exhausted what I reasonably have to say [and a lot of what I UNreasonably have to say], this will be the last curtain for me at least for now. Hopefully all of you will continue to pull back more "curtains" for your own understanding.

There's something, something which seems to be MAJOR and well-attested, about these lightforms which hasn't been featured yet in these entries. Here's a lead-in case:

Gladys McDaniel was serving at Signal Peak Lookout Station one evening when she noticed an out-of-place light. It looked like a streetlight "sparkling through the trees" in the direction of Cedar Valley. She'd seen so many of these lights that she decided that it might be interesting to "signal" it. She pointed her flashlight at it. A red-orange light ball appeared there and flew over at her signal. It seemed the size of a basketball. It circled her cabin once, raced back, and seemed to merge with the "streetlight" [there were of course no street lights in the vicinity] and both blinked out.

I suppose a desperate debunker would claim either that Gladys McDaniel was a hallucinator or a liar, and if nobody bought that [they wouldn't in her case], then the experience was a coincidence. It goes almost without saying that such debunkers are the fools in this story not Gladys. The responsive nature of anomalous lightforms worldwide is legion [not all do act this way, but many do.] But at Yakima this is particularly common.

When David Akers first came to Yakima with his cameras and magnetometers, Bill Vogel noticed that one feature of the light phenomenon became hugely enhanced. His quotes:

"Strange as it may seem, when these objects were spotted, if there was any radio traffic about them at all (lookouts radioing a sighting), they would quickly disappear. As soon as it seemed they realized they were spotted by somebody who started talking about them, they'd vanish. When Dave first started coming over, I would call the lookouts and say, Dave may be up this evening so that they wouldn't be frightened if he pulled up there and just parked in the middle of the night. We had to quit that because as soon as we did that nothing would happen. I mean maybe we could have activity like you'd never believe Monday through Wednesday. Thursday I'd call and say Dave's going to be up your way Thursday night. He'd come over from Seattle and nothing would happen until Dave left. "

Vogel and Akers had to set up a minimalist communication and random arrival type of methodology to thwart this strange "behavior." But it worked. Even with this human-stealth though, Akers tended to get more results on the first night of a stealthy visit than on subsequent evenings. This led Vogel and the lookouts and to a degree Akers to wonder if there was "intelligence" associated with the lightforms.

"Intelligence-associated" can be interpreted in a variety of ways. UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft would be a case of intelligence being associated with them, just as much as a USAF guided missile. But this discussion was taking the other tack: were the lights themselves "intelligent? "

This view of the lights has been gaining momentum lately, sometimes using certain expert opinions properly and sometimes not [in my reading.] A case in point is Dr. Harley Rutledge's study of the Piedmont, MO lights flap that he studied intensely and wrote about in Project Identification. I have read recently a statement that Dr. Rutledge believed that the lights themselves were intelligent. But, although he may have said that somewhere, that is not how I read his book's conclusions.

"The most startling discovery was that on at least 32 recorded occasions the movement of the lights synchronized with actions of the observers. They appeared to respond to a light being switched on and off, and to verbal or radio messages." 

In other words, Dr. Rutledge's Piedmont Lights manifested the same RESPONSIVE character that was seen in the Yakima Lights [rather identically, amazingly enough] but in neither case does this responsiveness distinguish between the intelligent lightform and advanced technology hypotheses.

But today, as we type, the intelligent lightform hypothesis seems to be gaining adherents. A couple of those come from the "other" big recurring lightfield, Hessdalen, Norway.

Readers with sharp eyes and good memories will note Erling Strand, the Watchman of Hessdalen, standing in the background, while another gentleman sits at a table in Erling's urban HQ. That gentleman is Massimo Teodorani and he is a PhD physicist from Italy with an unusually open and inquiring mind.

Dr. Teodorani went to Hessdalen with the proper scientific attitude that this is a place where not only unsolved anomalies occur, but they occur at regular enough intervals that one should be able to gather data in real time. --- just like Yakima.

And so he did --- very impressive measurements of not only light spectra but also things like magnetic field shifts. He risked publishing these results in talks that he gave and as the talks went forward the summary views began to get more "courageous." This is because, as he studied not only Hessdalen but also Yakima and Marfa and a couple of others, he began to get the impression that these phenomena were not only {mostly} the same, but that there was an intelligence about them.

Here are a couple of our "friends" from Hessdalen --- although the lights take on different colors and less rounded shapes often, these could easily be mistaken for model Yakima Lights.

One guy who has been on the intelligent lights bandwagon for a long time is Earthlights/ Ley Lines expert Paul Devereux. I like Paul --- at least all the time that he's not talking about the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which he detests. I greatly admire his pursuit of energies and forces associated with old Celtic [or whoever built them] megaliths and circles --- something which for a time was called The Dragon Project.

Paul believes [I think] that these lightforms from places like Yakima and Hessdalen have nothing to do with Extraterrestrials and only to do with Earth stresses in that the stresses are just a side effect of the greater phenomenon which is being expressed.

He says this: "If Earth Lights actually are geophysical-based manifestations of consciousness, then they represent an older form than biologically-based consciousness. In effect, they are ancestor lights. Perhaps it is time we got to know the ancestors a whole lot better." 

Boy oh boy, I just don't see it. Some physicist said recently that he was amazed to see changes in very briefly existing plasma balls similar to things like cell division or replication. But LIFE needs more than an ephemeral unit division to have it meet the physical criteria for "life". And INTELLIGENT life needs WAY more dynamic change+stability to create evolved [extremely complex] systems. Nothing associated with plasmas looks anything like that. To contemplate something like an Earth-based energy lifeform, I believe that you would have to postulate something akin to a super-entity like a GAIA form. The lightballs would not be evolved lifeforms at all, but if you went All-The Way-Fool on this, you'd have to postulate the GAIA intelligence as creating them "herself" ad hoc without bothering about the evolution of complexity.

I'm intrigued with the apparent responsiveness and "curiosity" seemingly shown by light balls near the ground, but I don't see data to give me confidence that they would be evolved living entities. "Spirit" or "Middle Earth" entities, maybe. At least that gets around the nonexistence of physical evolutionary mechanisms for these things. Manifestation of advanced technology also gets around the science-textbook way of hopefully looking at an evolved organism. If you don't want the things to be "evolved", then where did they come from "as is?"

This is a very old news clipping --- sorry, don't have the reference ---70s Science News, I think, from the late 1970s or thereabouts. It speaks of scientists 40 years ago measuring a strong "earth current" running down the "crack" in the continent which split off Vancouver Island. When it hits solid ground in Washington, it doesn't stop. You can see the wavy track of the scientists' measurements heading south ... to Yakima. [I dotted in the Reservation a long time ago on that map [intuition?]

Well, a huge earth current running down Washington to Yakima ... what the ley hunters would call a "dragonline" [not a leyline since it's curved not straight.] Are we all set up for a region of anomalous phenomena? Persinger is probably delighted but I've told you why I think that the theory is a loser. But could these "currents" be the occasion or opportunity for something to "come through"? The questions are huge of course: does a crack in the physical environment assist the "entry" of things not normally present? If so, what sorts of things? Are most such places "where the World grows thin" relatively small, but occasionally [Yakima; Hessdalen] fairly extensive? Are there any limits?

These guys seem not to believe in any limits, and smart as they are [Jacques all the time; John only now and then depending upon when in his life we're talking about] their anything goes theories become precisely useless to me as anything but conversation and meditation stoppers. No limits equals no controlled variables on your thinking process. Since anything is possible in a Keelian universe, nothing can possibly have any explanation, ever. If the Universe is that way, so be it. In the meantime, I'll keep exploring and thinking about things thank you.

Lisa Roy's Fairy with Lightball is one of my favorite fantasy paintings. It is an image which gives a visual to one of the oldest hypotheses, that these lights are part of Faery, but the enigmatic interaction between Tinkerbelle's Sister and the BOL gives you no answer to its meaning. That seems just about right for our understanding of these things.

In my files I have a fair stack of BOL cases where the BOL seems to be either "pursuing", "stalking", "curious", or "teasing." In short, a whole pile of such things seeming to show some response to the human witness, and therefore intelligent involvement. But where does that lead us? The pun here would be to say that just as the traditional Will-o-the-wisp "fairy-led" the unsuspecting into danger, so we too are in imminent danger of getting lost. I agree. Deep waters. But the old folklore concept of being fairy-led by these manifestations doesn't have to be false. Weirdly, it can still stand as a defensible concept. {Due to the evidence of all the folkloric creature "close encounter" incidents which exist.}

We have discussed on this blog the book by Mark Fox which utilized the collected reports of British biologist Alister Hardy, on manifestations of lightforms which witnesses associated with "spiritual" happenings in their lives. For those who have read the book [or even the summary in this blog], the numbers of these lightform experiences are pretty impressive.

Well, no one is saying that the Yakima Lights are about Spiritual experiences, BUT what Fox' book does tell us is that such light forms "show up" in a lot of different scenarios. ALL of these in Fox' book must be credited as having an "intelligence element" about them. So.... lightforms linked with some dimension of intelligence seems widespread, even if for widely different reasons.

JAH: Well, darn it Mike!! What's going on!!?

Sorry Allen, you almost started this by getting David Akers to go out there. I can't help it if you caused a Pandora's Box to open up.

JAH: BUT, BUT, BUT I want to know who's behind The Curtain!!!!

Allen!!! Get yourself together!!! We don't know!!! All we can say is that it's not some old faker.

It could be Faery or it could be Advanced Non-terrestrial Technology.

It could be our old meddling "friend", The Trickster..... or God Forbid, it could be something far worse.

I'm starting to get a little nervous about opening the Door. What's Back or Down There?

Is it something utterly alien to our reality, based far down in the mechanisms of the multidimensions of the multiverse?

Or is it a Crack in the World which might allow almost anything through? They do call it Dragonline, afterall.

Even though I've gone Far Out Proctor with that list of hypothetical visions, I refuse to go All-The-Way-Fool and settle on one. There are SOME that I irrationally LIKE more than others, though. I like ET-style technology for things which seem like nuts-and-bolts tech. I still believe that this is what the core UFO phenomenon is. But I also like the concept of the para-reality of the Folkloric World Alongside. I could relish a reality where Faery, including Faery BOLs and paranormal Bigfoot et al, crossed into our dull old world when given the opportunity --- opportunities perhaps made more frequent by a fragile shifting Earth. ... or many other things like ore deposits, the combination of certain human mental states and actions, matters of the powerful spiritual occasions, etc. Persinger doesn't come close to encompassing what goes on out there. Keelian Ultraterrestrial comments upon analysis don't either as they have no substance. What the Hell does "ultraterrestrial" even mean? But ET-civilization has meaning, and so do the widespread spiritual traditions of our ancestors. I can work with those two models, and they've done good service for me.

Am I right about this anomalistic hard-to-solidify world? No way I'm saying Yes to that. I'll keep the other ideas in mind. But when I walk Out Proctor, I feel like I'm taking one fork towards ET or the other fork towards Faery. But, whereas Out Proctor is merely my jocular way of phrasing the Land of High Strangeness, I'm beginning to think that Yakima MAY BE THE REAL OUT PROCTOR.

I need to get back closer to comfortable reality ... maybe read a relaxation book about travel.

Dammmm! Here's that red-orange light again!!


Peace, folks. { little vacation coming up }