Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Man Who Found A Door in the World

It's time for Thanksgiving and family, so I'm headed back to GOD's Green Hills in West Virginia. And thus, this is the last post for a while [maybe two-&-a-half weeks]. I'll be passing right by the Grave Creek Mound, so maybe I should tell something about it & its mysterious tablet when I get back. I'll even spend some time in Proctor, but definitely NOT "Out Proctor". But to be sure that we don't lose touch with Out Proctor, here is the story of the man who found a door in the world. The picture above is the cover art of Charles DeLint's wonderful fantasy book, The Little Country, wherein the Men-An-Tol serves as a door between the worlds. The "places where the world grows thin" are alleged to have once been plentiful and easily stumbled into. Today, the interfaces with a parallel reality seem rather legendary at best. Still, once in a while, we get a report of someone who claims to have found such a place and temporarily entered "the other side". So, caveat emptor, and here we go Out Proctor.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a story that I was going to tell, because it came to the Center For UFO Studies and was about an experience had long ago [1968]. Then I wasn't going to tell it because I noticed that the CUFOS letter was recently dated and maybe the guy involved didn't want the story out. But, three's the charm, and I felt if I kept the fellow anonymous [he didn't even request it in the letter] and not give this exact location [which he seems to have entered a successful mining claim on anyway], perhaps I wouldn't be off-base sharing his experience with you. This affair took place in the very north of Canada, south of the Native American [eskimo] town of Kugluktuk. This is a port of sorts and an exit point from the great copper areas of the Northwest Territories which are called the Coppermine Mountains. I believe that the local people are Inuit. The Coppermine River runs, generally a twisty southern direction from Kugluktuk, and ends up cutting through the mountains about 60-65 kilometers south. There are some camps in the area but for the most part things are pretty wild. This is where our adventurer found the Door. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This took place on August 31, 1968. Our hero in the drama was a successful "down-in-the-dirt" sort of practical minerals prospector working for a Canadian company operating out of Vancouver. He and his partner had flown in from Yellowknife, where after a battle with the elements, they got to their camp at Willow Lake [basically just a cabin in the wilderness]. The two of them moved south a bit and set up a secondary camp which was merely a tent--here is where they would strike out each day in search of mineral signs. They sometimes worked together as a team, but most often they ranged alone. during the two-&-a-half months they were there, the only unusual thing that occurred was the discovery of a strange type of "rock" shaped like a double blade of a fan or windmill, that they [and, later, geologists] were not able to classify. On their last day in the field, this story happened. On that day they were as usual on their own, our reporter exploring around Burnt Creek and north in the hills, but returning to camp empty handed. His buddy wasn't there yet, so he just sat and meditated on the hills. Bored he got up and walked to the edge of a small [still 50foot drop-off] cliff, and looked down into the gouge below. This gouge was peculiar: about 50foot long and only 4feet wide and flat. In it were some "bubbly looking rocks" and a "tubular fog bank". The apparent minerals were odd, but the unmoving fog bank moreso. He felt nervous just looking at it, but decided to go down into the gouge and explore. There he found more of the unusual unidentified mineral and it seemed to be associated with a small-scale mining activity [even though there was supposed to be no such thing in this area.] Puzzled by the rocks, but still in the presence of the unmoving mist, he finally decided to walk into the fog bank.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------His words now: "Approximately two steps into the mist, I saw a grassy field for as far as my vision was capable of seeing at that time. The grass was about one foot tall at that point. The more I advanced towards the grass, the higher the grass became. there was a wind blowing from the grass away from me. On entering the mist, my vision was limited to my left and right. I advanced until the grass, brown colored, was approximately three feet tall. Then I decided to retreat, which I did. I cannot remember what the sky looked like; grey colored seems correct. i decided to go back into the mist and cautioned myself not to walk into the grass. I went as far as the first [time] and things were the same. As I advanced, the grass got taller [but he seems to be now walking beside it, not in it], approximately 4foot now, and my vision left and right got wider. Far off to my right there was an oasis? with medium sized trees in a circle with two tall palm? trees growing in the center of the circle. At that point I had enough. At that time my mind went completely blank except for one little piece of my brain that was fighting the takeover of my brain. Next I was on my hands and knees with my brain powers intact and I got out of there in record time." Our hero told neither his buddy nor anyone else what had happened to him. But he never could shake the thought that he had passed into another dimensional reality for those few minutes. He wondered about the strange stones which should not have been there and the small mining operation which likewise should not have been. As the years have gone, he has gotten more courage, and wants to go back and go through the doorway again, which he imagines as a permanent sort of location. Who are the people on the other side, he wants to know? Why did they visit here? Why are people such as ourselves so interested in going to a dead Moon when a far wider adventure exists right here on the planet? The only people that he had told [and those only recently] about his adventure were the SETI Institute and string theorist, Lisa Randall. You can imagine what they thought. In his letter he writes: "WHAT HAPPENED TO ME?!"------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, we don't know what happened to him, if anything happened at all, do we? "Fairy stories" of people coming in from another dimension are common among the folk tales of the Eskimo peoples, and in 1988, around Nome, Alaska, there was a miniature flap of "little people" sightings [by both adults and teenagers], wherein sudden appearances and disappearances, and glowing entities, changing colors as they went, plagued the locale. I don't recommend that you go hunting in the Northwest Territories for the "door" that our adventurer found, but, if you do, and you discover a sign saying "Area 52", I'd suggest getting out fast. For me, my visit to the Men-An-Tol was only a partial success: the hole was open but the "door" wasn't. We all got through the hole, but there were the same number of us afterwards as began the attempt---one of us of tremendous bulk almost caused an international incident by getting stuck, but things came out in the end. We secretly knew that if we expected to visit the "Little Country", we would have to pass through seven times "against the Moon" while the "Moon" was full---the Men-An-Tol is a tougher Tol-booth [sorry] than the mist our traveler found in the Coppermines. Copper they say is the metal of Magick...hmmm...way Out Proctor now. Happy Thanksgiving.

14 comments:

  1. Another fascinating piece sir, well done. I have a particular interest in all thing Yukon and the Northwest in general and this just adds to the list. Will take more if you have it...

    Enjoy your time off Professor. Relish time spent with friends and family. I'm sure I speak for many when I say we'll be here waiting for more from you and will look forward til then.

    Wishing you safe travels and a Happy Thanksgiving.

    ~J

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  2. This is weird.

    I have certain rules when it comes to revealing weird stuff about myself, one of which is there's got to be some sort of correspondence between whatever I'm responding to and my own experience.

    The key ideas/words in your piece above, then, are the notion there may be doors between worlds, images such as strange, puzzling rocky terrain and, and I quote, a mysterious "tubular fog bank".

    Now, in my next comment, read what I just wrote, (before coming here), to Brian J. Allan in response to his piece, Both Ends Against the Middle on the Looking Into the Dark Places site:

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  3. Hello, Brian,

    I've just been reading your piece Both Ends Against the Middle on the Looking Into the Dark Places site.

    In it you point out some of the blindspots of others but, if I've understood you correctly, I'd like to suggest you MAY have one yourself.

    You seem to favour the idea we unwittingly dwell alongside a parallel, perhaps energy based race - quite possibly identical to the Jinns mentioned in the likes of the Koran - and propose these as an explanation for many UFO related sightings and encounters, not to mention many another type of paranormal episodes.

    In fact I have no problem with this idea - though I also strongly suspect we're dealing with more physical 'nuts and bolts related critters, too - but I'd just like to suggest something many Ultraterrestialists seem either unheedful of or downright impervious to: the possibility not only are many paranormal episodes due to 'Jinn' who're denizens of this world, but also 'Jinn' who're natives of other worlds - including not only the likes of the Moon, the planets and even the sun of our own solar system, but also denizens visiting us from the other side of the Universe, (not to mention many another parallel universe or, indeed, many another time).

    I myself only came to this conclusion as a result of undergoing a variety of experiences which strongly inclined me to this possibility, one of which, (as a 'denizen' of 'Dark Places'), may be of interest to you.

    Periodically, 'something' – who knows what - takes me 'walkies', as I sometimes dub it, i.e., it yanks me into the 'void', (I don't know how else to describe it - it isn't, [in the sense there're no stars, etc.], Space, just this region of pitch darkness).

    None of this, I might add, happens while I’m dreaming - that's a whole other world of special effects! - but while I'm actually awake, and during one of these 'trips' I suddenly found myself flying over a 'far, far away', Moon like barren world, except instead of craters it had all these rows and rows of tall thin tube like chimneys emitting wispy trails of rising smoke.

    Now while this 'something' obviously communicates with me, it invariably doesn't do so in words, and on this occasion I must've somehow understood it as implying something about this world, because I suddenly found myself unexpectedly and involuntarily saying, as if the words were being put into my mouth, "Where, I can't see any life," to which it must've responded, because I now found myself vexedly saying, "Where?", immediately followed by an aghast, "WHAT!!!??? Those smoking chimneys're life forms! NO WAY!!! There's no way I'm having that!"

    At that moment I now suddenly found myself being 'shown' a man smoking a cigarette, with his head tilted right back so his mouth was an opening directly over him, from which he theatrically puffed a series of rising smoke rings, an image which led to me suddenly realising when you take into account the mouth ultimately leads straight down into the oesophagus, the lungs, stomach, the intestines, etc., all we are, from that point of view, is walking vertical tubes or chimneys.

    Anyway, thanks to experiences like that, whenever I read accounts of astronomers over the centuries seeing 'impossible' sights on the likes of the Moon and Mars, (or the likes of Adamski's trips to Venus?), etc., I find it hard not to consider the possibility these men, rather than being deluded or outright frauds, were actually catching a brief glimpse of, or interacting with, the civilizations of the 'Jinns' native to the worlds concerned.

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  4. Very interesting experience. I'd like to comment on it, but, because I have no analogous experience, and have no "pile" of similar encounters from the literature, I have not earned the right to do so. The blog does mention Djinn in an earlier entry on poltergeist-like phenomena and I believe that my grad student PhD assistant was telling the truth about that. I also probably have made it obvious that I feel that a parallel reality wherefrom come many encounter experiences exists [Magonia, or whatever we want to call it, as a "homeland" for the "nature spirits" or "neutral angels" or "X"]. But as to the core of the UFO phenomenon, I believe that it resides in this same physical law-driven Universe like all of us Earth critters [i.e. I am a supporter of the ETH}.I can't say what your own experience entails. Paranormal dream? OOBE? Spirit World excursion? XYZ? All I can say is that it sounds interesting and thank you for sharing it with us.

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  5. In this case, you can only find what you're not looking for.

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  6. Dear sir

    Do you have opinion on the explorer's meaning when he said "At that point I had enough. At that time my mind went completely blank except for one little piece of my brain that was fighting the takeover of my brain. Next I was on my hands and knees with my brain powers intact and I got out of there in record time." ?

    did something actively trying to hypnotize/influence his mind further ? as i think he was already entering some kind of faerie area that was visible in his mind's eye (eg spiritual eye) ? I still fascinated by his encounter, i think if he goes in further he will experience some kind of time loss just like being kidnapped by faeries of the old lore.

    IMHO these kind of things usually happened to persons that is sensitive / psychic and wont happen to non-sensitive.. a non-sensitive may feel something but shouldnt see anything. and yes you mentioned in your blog that one of the fastest way to get psychical / sensitive is by playing Ouija. you right on both counts, the Ouija and the Dangers related to it. In here its not called Ouija, but there exist some kind of spirit calling 'game' where a makeshift 'doll' are created and then people askking question to the doll after certain ritual, and the end result is exactly the same as ouija's negative manifestations.. dangerous game that opened one to spiritual attacks..

    regards
    milomilo

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    1. I do not know what he meant by this. My guess is that he, being a very "concrete" practical man, knew that he was into something beyond his normal reality and that he had to fight its influence or perhaps not be able to get back to the world as he knew it. He felt in danger of losing his groundings entirely.

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  7. prof

    i keep rereading this case as it fascinate me.. i was thinking that the miner are enticed by the entities to enter the fog , seems like they put on quite a display of strange rocks and minerals and even sign of mining activity that will get the attention of the witness. Once he enter the gouge he must feel compelled to explore the rocks further thus he must enter the fogbank..

    if he continue walking , maybe he will get abducted by the entities ? just like faeries that love to abduct human by enticing them to dance or eat with them ? didnt you mention some woman who was standing near river and then suddenly she got transported to a dining room with the whole host looking at her as if inviting her to sit , stay and eat ? is this also the form of entrapment ? a modus operandi of the faerie if you can call it that..

    ok enough guessing i guess i got too much imagination going on..

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    1. I see nothing in his story to support your speculation.

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  8. There's another site with this story , complete with diagrams and more details , in http://www.ufobc.ca/Reports/StrangeAnomaly.htm

    there's one additional item not mentioned in your story, that's the description of 2 humanoid entities who watched him after he exited the fog..

    Exiting the fog he found himself on his hands and knees, looking down at the ground. He felt mentally fatigued. He looked up at the mist and saw two men looking at him, they were standing side by side at the edge of the fog and about 3 feet off the ground. They appeared to be about 6 feet tall plus, had long hair and long beards, salt & pepper colour (more salt colour). They appeared to be about 40 or so years old. They looked Caucasian having facial features like ours but could not see any eyeballs. They looked like identical twins. They were wearing pale coloured pants and robes that extended down midway between the knee and ankle and a belt around their middle, both were wearing sandals. He looked back down at the ground then back up at the two men in the mist, now one is off to one side in the mist and behind the front man. The man in the front was still standing while the man in the back seem to be sitting on a chair that was not there, it was a lot more difficult to see him in the mist. The man in the back reminded him of the statue called “The Thinker”. Neither of them said anything, they only watched him. Alex said that at this point he was feeling quite shaken, and decided to get back to camp.

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  9. continued ...

    "He went up the sloped bank to the west of where he was**. He looked back at the fog and the one man continued watching him until he was about half way up the slope. At the top of the hill there was a body of water that was close to the edge of a cliff. He walked to his right to go around the base of the hill then went partway down the hill going south; he noticed that he was close to his line of travel between camps. He could see small bodies of water on the top of the hill; he decided to go up the hill to investigate**. The bodies of water were sloping down both sides of the hill. The surface of the water followed the slope; in other words the surface of the water was on an angle (not flat) the water was contained by walls of grass. The grass was about 12 to 18 inches high by 4 inches wide and about ¼” thick, shiny green in colour and had a waxy texture. The grass was holding the water in place. The water was very calm and about 3 feet from the edge of a 30 foot cliff as shown in the diagram Figure 3. There was no debris floating in the water. (See Figure 3 and Figure 4)

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  10. When Ron Quinn wrote about his fairy encounters, he received a lot of replies. Two of them involved visits to some alternative reality. See my review of his book at https://malcolmsanomalies.blogspot.com/2019/02/ron-quinn-and-little-people-of-new-york.html and scroll down to "High Strangeness"/

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    1. That's true. I've written them up twice in this blog I believe. And I will mention them again (plus this Hole-in-the-world claim) in one of the last posts of SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA.

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