This post is the product of a friend of mine's interest in two cases involving poltergeist houses and light phenomena, which he ran across while blundering about the internet. He sent them to me and they have their interesting elements, so I thought that you should get the benefit--for whatever it's worth. I've added a third case which serendipitously I fell into at the same time.
Case one: Clayton, NC; late June/early July 1962. A widow is living in a house with her two children, daughter age 19, and son age 22. Near the end of June, they begin to have light phenomena flashing in the house in the evening. This amounted to very rapid sequences of light, like a rapid strobe-light. [the rate of this was too quick to count, but it was several flashes per second]. The light seemed to be sequential in color to some degree, showing yellow, pink, and white light.
This business was often enough and disconcerting, that the family talked about it and it ultimately got into the media. As soon as that happened, they began to get nasty anonymous phone calls. Due to all this, the police were called in [under the suspicion of some sort of harassment] and so was well-known poltergeist expert, William Roll [on the left]. Several people claimed to have seen the flashes, and Roll became convinced [very possibly wrongly, as he had a preconceived theory of what all poltergeist cases were] that the lights were associated with the daughter. [subconsciously via psychokinesis].
The one genuinely intriguing thing that his questioning concluded was that the light though very "bright", did not seem to affect the eyes in the way such a bright light should---we have seen this "non-blinding" bright light before in UFO cases. Throughout his first investigations, Roll thinks that he himself never gets to see the lights because he is somehow a "hex" throwing cold water on the phenomenon. And the lights DO go away for a while.
Then a couple of days later, the family gets another nasty phonecall, which says that they will start back up. They do. Even the police now witness the light flashes [reminiscent of the Toledo case]. Wiring is disconnected [after the whole house is inspected] in the daughter's room, and the lights persist. Now we are all the way to July 10th, and neighbors are awakened by the flashing. They call the cops and emerge with their guns. The affected family vacates the house as well. Police on the scene see a pinkish light emerge from a window [and supposedly disappear]. Nights later a policeman inside the house witnesses light flashes while the daughter is in sight but with both hands occupied. Roll decides to camp out on his back in the flower garden, and he at last sees light flashes. The family has finally had it, and moves away. The phenomenon stops, and does not follow them to their new home either. Roll floats the idea that the daughter caused all this by PK, and the mother dismisses him with "electricity in your body don't make phonecalls!"
Although a tad oversimplified, I'm rather on the side of mom on this one, as in some instances the daughter was a bit away [others were closer] and the affair smacks of Catherine Crowe style spirit hauntings more than teenage angst to me. But.....
The second case sent by my friend was from Culver City, CA in 1974. A 30-something mother with two boys [ages 16 and 10] met a couple of California ghostbusters at an occult book shop and told them that her house was haunted. Naturally they were interested and made a series of interviews/investigations.
The haunting phenomena were limited to moving objects and odors to begin with [one of the ghostbusters saw a flying frying pan himself] , but two others elements emerged. The woman said that she was being often "raped" by the spirits [whether she used the classic term "incubi" or not isn't stated]. She would show the investigators her bruises where she had been held by lesser demons while the larger one assaulted her. Well, who can say anything about that?
Then the light phenomena began, often with the investigators present. Supposedly the accompanying photo represents one such case. [It's a bit dramatically posed for my tastes]. Allegedly the walls were covered to block out any source, but the lights showed up anyway. First they would look like a spot on the covered wall. "It" was asked to blink and it did. It was asked to move away from the wall and it hovered in the air. Showing that it had good taste in music, when the son played Black Sabbath [which he said he knew it disliked] it grew angry and large. On a next night a BOL showed up and tried to assume the figure of a man [the incubus?] This show was not able to be photo'd for some reason. At the end of the week the whole thing was dying; the family moved out and the lights never re-manifested. This thing has less of an air of reliability to me but this is what is claimed.
The last case comes from an eighteenth century book by Augustin Calmet entitled
The Phantom World. This writing has become somewhat popular lately because it mentions vampires, and resonates with the recent craze. [I cannot relate to that as the topic is one of no interest to me at all]. But Calmet writes of many things. One of these involves a poltergeist light.
This story comes from a French Count and Countess who were traveling in the south of France and stayed at plush lodgings in Marseilles when they did. [The case dates from sometime in the 1700's but the exact date is not stated]. At the time there was a famous and much respected "natural philosopher" named Pierre Gassendi, who was regarded as both intelligent and pious. The Count sent the incidents to him for comment. [Gassendi is on the left].
What was reported was that the royals were awakened by "luminous spectres" entering their room. When the summoned servants brought in candles, the lights would disappear. [exactly as described by Catherine Crowe]. Once again all windows etc were covered to no avail. These lights hovered in the air and were sometimes "angular", sometimes spheres, sometimes ovals. You could read letters by the light, and the light itself seemed to have some symbols [undetermined] on/in it. If you attempted to grab one, it just disappeared. Most curiously perhaps, the presence of the lights gave the observers a sense of peace and pleasure.
Gassendi, an honest science-minded man, said that he could not say what it was. Being a pious man, he wondered if it could be a message from GOD since the royals were good people and the lights gave pleasure. Augustin Calmet, who was a Benedictine and a scholar, begged to differ. GOD would not send such a fancy "message" and leave it undecipherable--"GOD does not jest", he said. He went on to wonder if some "natural" phenomenon could be at work, or whether the royals had some strange hallucination.
Later the Count was in Marseilles on his own and assigned to the same room. Here again came a BOL, this time seen by him penetrating the chamber "through the wainscot". Later still, the Countess tried to claim that she had rigged the whole affair by having a maidservant hide under the bed--this despite the inadequacy of explaining all the different light positions [including on the bed surface itself] and the Count's separate experience. Well, such noise in the case effectively ruins confidence anyway, since we have no good "in-field" investigation to refer to.
Despite the believe-it-or-not qualities of these incidents, they contain interesting elements of strangeness that we have seen elsewhere--so perhaps were worth re-telling anyway. At least we know that Hollywood believes that poltergeists are associated with light phenomena as the screen-capture above attests [what more proof do you need?]
And "undeniably" of greatest significance: the lunar crater Gassendi is the site of more transient anomalous light phenomena [15 cases since 1900] than almost any place on the Moon. And, no, I don't think that there's any possibility of a connection whatever, so don't start a new internet growth industry.
You've probably read the hoopla about the Discovery Channel program wherein Stephen Hawking warns us that sending out powerful signals about where we are might not be a smart idea. Afterall, Hawking says, why would we want to attract aggressive and highly-advanced technologists from deep space? The idea is not a foolish thought. Carl Jung warned us about even a benign superior civilization putting the brakes on our enthusiasms and our imaginations, and reminded us that Earth cultures have been [even unintentionally] stunted by contact that they were not ready for. The Brookings Institution did a famous study for the government in the 1960s [I think...might have even been the late 1950s] which had the same conclusions. In a NASA sponsored debate on the subject in the 1970s, although Carl Sagan and Philip Morrison expressed blue-sky optimism, two other panelists had the exact opposite view of "alien contact". Over in Great Britain, astronomers like Zdenek Kopal were saying things like "they could exterminate us", and "If the phone rings, hang up!". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in 1960, a naive young radioastronomer named Frank Drake was in charge of certain programs at the national radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia. [that's the old Green Bank telescope at the left, and the guy with it is radioastronomy legend, Grote Reber]. My memory is that there was a senior astronomer in charge of the whole show there, but he relented and let Drake and a few others decide not only to "listen in" for signals from a few stars but to actually send a signal out. [once again:apologies for the lack of my files]. Now this is where the rumors come in: when certain military people heard that an unauthorized broadcast [which was much more powerful and more concentrated in direction than ambient radio signals that we always make] had been beamed at two nearby stars, the Pentagon went through the roof. Allegedly, many naive astronomers got a talking to, which included protocols not only forbidding such transmissions without military "advisement" regarding security issues, but protocols for reporting and responding to incoming signals. I don't know whether all that happened or not, but it is information that I read and heard a long time ago in the 1970s. One reason that adds to my suspicion that this is true is that when Drake was cleared to send another signal many years later, he set the mighty Arecibo telescope to a globular cluster populated with many stars [yes] but only with stars of low metallicity [i.e. having no chances of having planets around them.] This latter fact is always conveniently not mentioned when persons like Sagan or Shostak regale their gap-mouthed audiences with this great reaching out to Space. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the 1980s when I was in my heyday of filling my head with frontier information about the sciences, I was privileged to attend many symposia at American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings. There I was able to hear nearly every conceivable expert in every field speak, and ask questions if I wanted. It was a learning paradise. One symposium was particularly disturbing and relevant to this topic. It was about deep space exploration and possible consequences of contact. One of the experts [and expert they were] was a technologist who, among other things consulted for the government. The panel had discussed deep space travel technologies. He took a different angle. Accepting the possibility of very high velocity ships [ships which could approach significant percentages of the speed of light], he noted that at that stage of development any highly advanced society would suddenly become uncomfortable with us. This is because we not only would have produced a "relativistic rocket", but that device would gain tremendous mass due to the relativity effects of the Special Theory. At that time we would have acquired a "Planet Cracker", a weapon of such mass that it could blast away anyone's home world. He referred to it as the "Gun Which Makes Everybody Equal". He even went so far as to muse that Aliens could be monitoring us right now to assess whether they can afford to allow us to make that last technological step, or to snuff the dangerous vermin out before they break out into space as destroyers. So you see, not everyone has the same sorts of thoughts in their minds.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Guys like Drake [above] and Sagan and the SETIans consistently want to believe that all the folks out there are good guys, and that we could never threaten them in any serious enough way to bring retribution upon us. And we'd all like to believe that. But we should also admit two other things at least: 1). we have no idea what we're talking about; and 2). such behavior on the parts of Drake, Sagan et al shows that they [and we?] are emotion-driven risk-takers. Sure, everyone in such discussions is emotion-driven. But emotion-driven and risk-taking is different from emotion-driven and not. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of us interested in Space, ET, and UFOlogy want there to be extraterrestrials, and all of us would like them to be friendly [and tolerant]. None of us know that. In fact, the only chance that we have of trying to know that is to study UFO incidents. One might assume that the security-minded modern Pentagon types are not studying that data too hard, and the modern SETIans sarcastically reject it as well. So the major players in the issue remain stone-dead ignorant of the only source of information which might cast a little light on this. ..... except for Drake himself. Frank Drake never stopped being a closet UFOlogist. Maybe that's why he thinks that they might be friendly enough not to bring in the Extraterrestrial Terminix Man.
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