Down in the Cryptodumps, part last: Stuff that Ivan was reading.

Last entry on the big pile of miscellaneous cryptozoological chaos which accumulated in an anomalies dump box with no filing. It gives me GREAT pleasure to wrap this small part of the four dump boxes up. 

Most of these things to follow are bits which I found in the SITU files [also chaotic there] and thought interesting enough to photocopy before they disappeared beneath the thermodynamic noise content never to break surface again. This particular set of articles/newsclips etc was stacked together in a way that indicated that Ivan had read them together. So, without further delay: 

This is a famous 1910 article reporting on the alleged sighting of a dinosaur in central East Africa. 

I won't have much insight on most of these articles but I believe that I know just a little about Sanderson's opinion of this one. That's because it rested on the authority of Carl Hagenbeck. Ivan saw Hagenbeck as an outstanding example of his own "tribe", animal collectors and zoo providers. If Ivan had an ideal profession, that was his passion. Because this claim of extant African dinosaurs was a claim of a hero, I believe that Sanderson saw it as strongly likely. As he said: "Hagenbeck was no fool." 

..... and once you accept Hagenbeck, other claims, such as this in a 1919 clipping [unfortunately by a much less known guy] are pretty easy to buy into. I am intrigued by the fact that the location here is Congo --- almost right on top of the claimed area of our later Mokele mBembe claims which got Roy Mackal, Richard Greenwell, and Herman Regusters exploring there 60 years later. 

Ivan didn't have this drawing in these files, just a typed version of an 1819 report of an African explorer traveling up the western coast, and once getting to Gabon, hearing tales of a giant "ourang-utan" called the "Ingeena." The illustration is from Paul duChaillu's book about his extensive [and amazing] travels through central Africa and could fairly be used to illustrate this 1819 claim. In those days, "we" had discovered the Orangutang but not yet the Gorilla. In Africa tales were however coming in that there were two "mysteries" afoot there. The "Lesser Mystery" turned out to be the Chimpanzee. The "Greater Mystery"= the Gorilla. 

The 1819 story told a weird tale of the Ingeena being almost impossible to fight due to its incredible strength, but that you could win due to its stupid imitative behaviors [the origin of the idea of "ape-ing"]. The Ingeena it was said would see us carrying wood on our shoulders and pile so much wood on its own and carry it around endlessly, that it would exhaust itself and you could dispatch it. Other ridiculous claims like this were also made. 

These tales sound so much like the primitive ideas that we had about the Gorilla that it's hard for me to credit them with anything else ... but Ivan seemed looking at them as if they might hint of a "third" mystery ape. 

An 1816 article [typed only] was in the pile. It spoke of a Flathead River, WA experience reported by hunters in the wilderness. Allegedly a bear broke into their camp and grabbed one of the men, then rose on two feet and ran rapidly away on a two-legged sprint. The illustration above is of the recent case of a urban-going bear which walked two-legged all over town. So, bears with a reason [this one had both front paws damaged] can walk on twos just fine. 

So, it's possible that the hunters' tale of the temporary abduction of one of their buddies was true. What one wonders however is whether the Bigfoot Albert Ostman tale decades later relates to this at all. Did Ostman have a bear encounter and embellish it by morphing it into Bigfoot? Ivan doesn't tell us why he was interested in this. 

There was a 1781 report from Quebec with quite charming descriptions of [as far as I'm concerned] walruses and lake sturgeon --- both of which had wowed the writer [he considered the walrus a sea monster]. The diagram included above is my addition not the writer's. 

The writer also said that there was another mystery beast called the seawolf --- again no illustration, so I've appended one sort of old representation of a seawolf. Frankly the author's description sounds like neither the beast above nor my own favorite seawolf [the Wasgo/Sisiutl] but rather another form of walrus-like creature. Why was Ivan interested? Who knows?

A 1778 article described encounters with a wildman of the Pyrenees Mountains. In this case my appended picture isn't far off. Here's a quote: 

"In the year 1774, a savage, or wild man, was discovered by the shepherds, who fed their flocks in the neighborhood of the forest of Yuary. This man, who inhabited the rocks that lay near the forest, was very tall, covered with hair, like a bear, nimble as the Hisars, of a gay humor, and, in all appearance, of a solid character, as he neither did, nor seemed to intend, harm to any body. He often visited the cottages, without ever attempting to carry off anything. He had no knowledge of bread, milk, or cheese. His greatest amusement was to see the sheep running, and to scatter them, and he testified his pleasure at this sight by loud fits of laughter, but never attempted to hurt these innocent animals. When the shepherds (as was frequently the case) let loose their dogs after him, he fled with the swiftness of an arrow shot from a bow, and never allowed the dogs to come near him. One morning he came to the cottage of some workmen, and one of them endeavouring to get near him, and catch him by the leg, he laughed heartily, and then made his escape. He seemed to be about thirty years of age." 

..... the author then went on to assume that this must have been a human abandoned in the forest long ago, who grew up subsisting on local plants. {Not too long thereafter, in early 1800s France, such a "wolfchild", the "Wild Boy of Aveyron", would become the most famous such abandoned survivor in the world, if you discount Romulus and Remus.}

Ivan probably saw in this story a possible primitive humanoid, his favorite of which was the Wudewasa --- and who knows? maybe he was.

The reference to "nimble as a Hisar" flummoxes me, and the widest stretch that I can come up with there is that it could be slang for the fantastically successful and agile Polish cavalry, the Winged Hussars. These forgotten troops were essentially invincible for 100 years of fighting during the 1600s.

The next bit was from the journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson, 1799-1814. This reference was by Henry, and to the local Native American "Saulters" of the Northwest Great Lakes, that an animal was known there at that time called by them Kitche Amick, or, a giant beaver. I always thought that this sort of thing was a joke, forgetting that such animals DID exist in palaeolithic times or a little earlier. The tale here was of an armed Saulter seeing an animal on the water which he thought was a moose, but was then seen to be a giant beaver. These animals, being felt to be spirit animals, the Saulter refused to shoot. {Saulter is the old French name for the Ojibwe.}

Second to last is a letter in Ivan's files from a guy named Curtis L. Gibson. This letter [sent to someone else] Ivan had copied to his Thunderbird file. The fellow, who I've never heard of, stated plainly that he was an authority on all Fortean Lore {Wow!}, had neatly wrapped all cryptozoology up in a three-point nutshell. Ready?

All cryptozoological claims are due to one of three things:
1). "natural" biological species not recognized by zoologists. He gave as examples super-condor, sea serpent, sasquatch, and a subclass of this category including things like mermaids and satyrs. He kind of lost me there --- biological or not, big fella?
2). "metempsychic creatures": everything you can imagine with "were-" stuck in front of it. These things are completely physical, and only [violating all reason, but a casual matter to Gibson] morph into entirely different forms whenever they want to. He also had a subclass here which included witches, who he said were "slightly more supernatural" --- I can't wrap my head around that and am not sure I want to.
3). Animate robots which are the products of UFOs, and probably left behind by them, or possibly similar creatures which have been inserted into our environments by some technological intrusion. I suppose that you COULD explain about anything with hypotheses like that.

He then comes SLIGHTLY more down to Earth by discussing some claims that the original letter writer posed to him.

The first was that there is no doubt that Satyrs "still" occupy the desert area of Babylon. He said that he had explained this all in his earlier article in Explore The Beyond magazine in 1960. He based his certitude on the sighting of such by a British traveler whose story he read in an unnamed book, PLUS the Bible says that satyrs will be the eternal inhabitants of Babylon along with bats. He does seem to have great trust in biblical things.

His second topic might have more legs, or wings. It was about the large salt desert bird nests found in Utah. The crypto part of this was the flurry of letters he said his article got about these things, which included thunderbird sightings in that area.

He followed that up with a report from a man in Canada who said that he had seen giant birds several times at a lake there {please tolerate the Japanese film monster picture; his claims weren't that big.} Gibson refused to name the exact location as he did not want tourists crowding in there and extincting the animals.

Apparently some winged creatures were visiting the St. Louis region at that time [c.1971], and he thought that he had the solution for that. {Buckle up on this one}. He saw this as a future projection coming back 100 years or so in time. But that's not all of it. Such things happen when a member of a cult merging Christianity and Trance Exercises doses off [in Church --- he said it, not me]. If this fellow is of exceptional psychic strength he will create in his dreams physical manifestations which will appear not in his own time, but in the past.

Uhhh.... OK.

Lastly, he allowed that many of our unusual creatures past and present have been the aliens abandoning their pets. When they do this in pairs or more, these animals will breed a new colony of alien animals sooner or later to be seen by us. This explains most of Earth's humanoid species.

Uhhh... don't bother to get up, I'll let myself out.

One wonders how much of this Ivan paid any attention to, or why he had it in his notes at all. Maybe the Canadian thunderbirds.

The last thing for today was not during Ivan's period --- just a note stuck in among the rest.

In 1985, at a campsite near Greenwater Texas, a couple said that a big [8-foot] hairy [brown curly] heavily built [must have weighed a ton] bear had strode into their camp and --- ready?--- asked them if they had permission to camp there. Not believing their protestations, the bear told them to get off the premises. To hurry them along, the bear threw rocks at them.

A Narnian Bear in Texas ... THAT's a tale that I can get behind.

Peace, folks.

WHAT'S HARDER TO UNDERSTAND: UFOs or US?

This post is shrapnel from my flailing around trying to "recover" organization from the weekend's UFO get-together. Much paper has been flying about; a situation which was magnified by the arrival of the remnants of Onondaga College's discarded UFO archive collection [stimulated originally by CUFOS subscriber Steve Zalewski.] Now that Steve has passed [at least I've been given to believe that], Onondaga had no advocate for keeping the collection and wanted to free archive space --- there's a lesson there for those who think that any college is an eternally safe repository. Mark Rodeghier received notice of Onondaga's decision with a request that he should take the collection if CUFOS wished. Mark asked me. I asked "how much?" Onondaga said "six file drawers."

A few weeks ago six file drawer-sized boxes arrived at 818 South Park. I took them on the premise that I'd search through everything, save out what little I assessed that CUFOS didn't have, offer the remnants to my weekend friends, and pitch the shrapnel into the recycling bin. All that has happened, and every page poked into by multiple UFOlogists. Nothing important escaped. But I had more filing to do.

This post comes out of a rare-ish newsletter originating with the early Chicago-area Rocket Society. The leading, and nearly only, article in this June 1950 publication was "A Scientific Analysis of the Flying Disk Reports." I find it interesting for several reasons, so you're getting stuck with reading about it.

Before I jump directly into this newsletter, it's helpful to know that by June 1950 we've not only had the big 1947 flap, but inside Wright-Patterson's Project SIGN thoughts about the disks being extraterrestrial had held sway, the USAF Pentagon had rebelled against that, Saturday Evening Post's Sidney Shallet had gotten into Wright Pat for his mind-boggling article in 1949, and in 1950 White Sands missile commander Robert McLaughlin has written a TRUE article almost flatly stating that the disks had to be extraterrestrial. Some of the above information was hidden from the public, and other bits were separated by authoritative-sounding Air Force claims that it was bunk. The "intellectual" atmosphere for a scientist, or an engineer, or a technical writer, was puzzling and fascinating in the extreme.

This is the atmosphere which produced Don Keyhoe, but he wasn't the only one --- he was the most life-long pain-in-the-Air-Force's-butt, but other writers and scientists felt that the USAF was covering something up as well. When the 1949 Saturday Evening Post article{s} came out, the USAF "coincidentally" prepared a review of the flying disks entitled "Project Saucer", and invited anyone [particularly newswriters] to come to the Pentagon and read it. Keyhoe was one who did. Apparently a Chicago-based technical writer, and member of the Chicago Rocket Society, was another. The Air Force's release was a colossal snafu by them, as it gave the impression of an even greater support for the strangeness of the flying disks than Shallet's modestly-written pieces. Keyhoe smelled a rat. Apparently so did George A. Whittington.

Whittington probably shared out the information in the Project Saucer release with his Rocket Society colleagues as they waited for further revelations from the Air Force. As SIGN had been smashed down by the anti-saucer Pentagon, none did. Then in January of 1950, Keyhoe unloaded his TRUE article, "The Flying Saucers are Real", and in March TRUE followed with Commander McLaughlin's " How Scientists Tracked a Flying Saucer." Keyhoe was a retired marine with no particular expertise in advanced flying technology [despite being a pilot himself and personally knowing heavyweight Navy technologists], but Robert McLaughlin was one of the Navy's top missile experts, AND in command of Naval research at White Sands. He had a powerful voice. {Note that neither Keyhoe nor McLaughlin were Air Force.}

Whittington heard McLaughlin loud and clear. His talk to the Rocket Society [March or April, it's not dated] gave the following views:
a). The military has plenty of evidence for the reality of the flying disks and there is no question of their reality;
b). They want the public to believe that they have the situation in hand, thus the admission of an on-task Project Saucer [he could not have known the internal politics that had brought "Saucer"/SIGN down and replaced it with the incompetent Grudge, then nothing at all for a time];
c). The Air Force is acting so quietly about this that they must not only know that the disks are interplanetary technology, but know far more than that, even to the extent of contact.

Whittington then went on to speculate why the Pentagon would not release the whole facts, citing everything from panic to warmongering overreaction to war industry economic dislocations, or just simply that communications were primitive and information releases were premature. Whittington then said that although he had spoken his views "lightly" and humorously, he was not joking. The expert authority of Commander McLaughlin essentially assured him that the flying disks were advanced flying machines well beyond our capabilities.

That position was shortly buttressed by another Rocket Society member of greater technical "presence."

First, what was the Chicago Rocket Society anyway? It was an "amateur" membership in that you did not have to be exceptionally qualified to belong [just love rocketry], but it was one of the elite such societies in the country. The Society hosted the overall American Rocket Society national meeting in 1957, and that's one of the Nazi Paperclip rocket experts pictured at that meeting above.

I couldn't find a picture of sometime-president of the Rocket Society, Dr. Norman J. Bowman, but he might be in one of the pictures above [about adult advisors with the High Schoolers of the Northern Indiana Rocket Club]. Bowman was a secondhand helper there. {I also put this up here since I found that the pictures contained a photo of a genius ex-Notre Dame classmate of mine, Physics major Ray Durand. ... nostalgia, but the darned guy would sneak into my dorm room and shout out all the answers to the NYT crossword puzzle when I was trying to work it.}

Bowman was a real rocket expert.

 

 Bowman was a research chemist at Standard Oil Research Laboratories in Whiting, Indiana and, obviously from the publications above, knew a lot about the state of American rockets, missiles, and Space Flight. So when Bowman was invited to give a talk to the Chicago Association of News Broadcasters, people listened. {This talk was presented then in the June 1950 Rocket News Letter, whereupon it comes down to me and you.}

Bowman's talk showed great familiarity with whatever the intelligent layman had available to him at the time [ex. Project Saucer release, SEP article, TRUE articles] as well as an expert training within which to evaluate the information, and the scuttlebutt which doubtlessly was passing back and forth among his colleagues in the rocketry "business". After repeating the background points of the Project Saucer evaluation he said this:

"I believe it is the almost universal conclusion of persons, including most scientists, who have studied the reports, that there is some unusual aircraft being commonly observed. I personally feel this is well established beyond any reasonable doubt and it is on this basis that I shall proceed (with the rest of the concepts and deductions of his talk)."

Hmmmm... right on, Dr. Bowman.

He went on to remark:

"PROPULSION: The most striking fact about the disks is that in practically no case has a visible means of propulsion been observed nor has any noise been heard. It is most surprising that noise from a propeller or other means of propulsion, or a jet trail, has not been observed. This seems to indicate some new means of propulsion." 

Speaking then about shapes, speed, altitudes, and range --- ALL of which defied modern aircraft performance --- he then said:

"MANOEUVERABILITY: Next to the lack of visible propulsion mechanism, this is the most striking feature of the disks. They have universally been reported to change linear velocity, altitude, and direction with almost incredible rapidity. Accelerations calculated for these changes have commonly run to 20Gs or more, which is beyond the ability of our human body to endure even for a short time. It further seems very doubtful that these disks are pilotless guided missiles, as they have manoeuvered in a manner with aircraft, and almost engaged in dogfights, which would be impossible for guided aircraft, particularly as they must have been out of sight of their home base. It is well known that the big bottleneck in our guided missile program is the guiding mechanism." 

Bowman reflected upon the then-recent US News and World Report story that the disks were only Navy developments from the war era. You can almost feel him scratching his head at the stupidity of this, calling the Navy craft The Flounder and remarking on its primitiveness. How anyone could be floating such bunk mystified him. 

He also wondered how [why?] a world class scientist like Irving Langmuir would be speaking an Air Force line about the disks being confusions and errors et al. He probably didn't know that Langmuir was an oldtime Air Force Scientific Advisor linked into the Pentagon. 

Bowman wasn't cowed by Langmuir or the Air Force's public mockery. He closed his talk with a frank discussion of the extraterrestrial hypothesis from an engineer-scientist's point of view. He said that it was unfortunate that some were dismissing this as pulp fantasy. On the contrary, he pointed out that we were close to being able to build an orbiting rocket and therefore a space station. He spoke of ultimately using nuclear power plants to make serious lifting of payloads and people possible.

"If we forecast space flight for ourselves, why should it be unbelievable that intelligent life elsewhere in this universe has achieved it somewhat ahead of us? Those who say it is impossible would, I fear, have also stated unequivocally in 1940 that the atomic bomb was impossible.

 Well, to summarize what I have said: It is my belief that the data is adequate to say that the flying disks are real and that some type of unusual aircraft is commonly being observed. If one takes the best authenticated reports as being substantially correct, the performance characteristics of the ships are beyond current earth technology and one must conclude that they are indeed extraterrestrial space ships. On the other hand, if the reports have been consistently exaggerated to a considerable extent, it must be concluded that the disks are simply some new type of US aircraft." 

It's clear that Bowman didn't buy Consistent Considerable Exaggeration here. 

Over at Wright-Patterson's T2 intelligence program, Colonel Mack McCoy during the Project SIGN days didn't buy "lousy reporting" either. Mack had stretched his imagination trying to figure how these things could even get here from foreign soil. Some kind of floating aircraft carrier? He asked ex-German wizards --- no luck. Nothing like that had been under development let alone flown.

McCoy's engineering buddies at SIGN [Albert Deyarmond at left and Alfred Loedding at right] also could not see the way around what to them was a simple engineering conclusion: These things are WAY too clever to be ours.

Down the road at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Nuclear Energy for Aircraft Propulsion {NEPA} was getting started. It had ideas and designs for propulsion systems on the board [intriguingly, it also attracted UFO overflights.] We as engineers, knew that nuclear-powered flight was possible and could "get us off the ground" and into space.

Over at the Air Force thinktank RAND, chief designer Jimmy Lipp had already roughed out the overview and pieces for an "Earth-circling spacecraft". We knew all these things, but still....

Lipp is a case in point. He ostensibly at least, HATED UFOs. His nephew was longtime UFOlogist Bob Wood. Lipp was so intimidating in his hatred of the subject that Bob rarely even mentioned it to him. 

Why was that? Do some, even very smart people, FEAR the idea of extraterrestrial visitation so much that they just deny it away? Listening to the Lipps, Menzels, Langmuirs of the world, one might make a theory about that. 

But so many of their peers didn't feel that way at all. And some of the most responsible of them did not feel that way. 

NATO chief Lionel Chassin....

 Air Marshall George Jones ....

CIA chief Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter...

All these men during this period and throughout the 1950s expressed dismay that the UFOs were not being taken seriously, and the ETH ignored.

Art Lundahl, the best intelligence photo interpreter that we ever had, felt that he had seen plenty of solid photographic evidence for the disks and that the ETH was the only thing to explain them.

Astronaut-to-be Deke Slayton had a mid-air encounter with a disk over Wisconsin during this period. NASA didn't like him to talk about it, but Slayton never felt that he had an explanation. 

In 1952, Pentagon intelligence analyst Stephan Possony was head of the USAF Special Study Group working out of General John Samford's office. One of Possony's projects was trying to figure means of communicating with the saucer pilots. --- right in synch with George Whittington's speculations. 

So, as we stare at a photo allegedly taken by a person near an airbase in 1950, we can reflect: The professional engineers thought that we had plenty of evidence WAY back then [let alone now] to be talking about and taking the ETH very seriously --- BUT WE STILL AREN'T.

So, what's easier to understand: UFOs or US? 

Peace, folks, and a happy start to the summer.

UFO Meeting at 818 South Park

Hello, folks. The UFO History Group get-together [which has been occupying a lot of my attention for the last two weeks {since I was host}] has come to pass, and I believe that a report on it would be of at least mild interest. Eleven folks migrated into Kalamazoo from around the country [Tom Tulien/MN, Linda Murphy/MI, John Reed/MD, Rob Swiatek/VA, Robert Powell/TX{strategically hiding from CIA surveillance behind Rob }, Bill Murphy/MI standing, Jan Aldrich/CT, Sue Swiatek/VA, Will Matthews/MI, and Eddie Bullard/IN.] I am claiming to be behind the camera.

It was a very good time --- these folks like each other and like to be part of a team. We discussed interesting things and "news". Some of that news was that all three of Jan Aldrich, Robert Powell, and Barry Greenwood [who joined us on Skype for a bit], have, in three separate ways [USAF case index cards, Otis AFB documents, Viet Nam history documents] found UFO incident reports allegedly reported to the Air Force system BUT WHICH DID NOT REGISTER IN THE PROJECT BLUE BOOK RECORDS. At the very least this means that a mother-load of UFO military reports exists out there in hidden cubbyholes, which are, however, accessible by us if we can just figure out the right "questions" to ask. 

{{ Up on the roof on a perfect Michigan day --- fellow second from the left is one of my house buddies, Fr. Michael Howell, semi-retired Catholic priest and a great friend }}.

Another thing of interest were Robert's revelations about how well MUFON was acting [but unfortunately still mainly behind the scenes and still dependent largely upon himself and a few critical guys on the scientific review board and the Director of the Star Team investigations. ... and most importantly, himself --- this is me saying this, not Robert.] MUFON's case reporting mechanism is now getting about an equal share of reports as is NUFORC [c.6000 per year]. MUFON is, in my opinion, a FAR better choice as a reporting destination as every report gets assessed and, if it has seeming merit, gets acted upon. Of those 6000 cases per year, the case review board will sift out about 90 as particularly interesting. Those will all be parceled out to the state directors, who then have responsibility for the investigations --- if they blow it, it's on them. Of the 90, about ten will be considered excellent cases as to credibility, strangeness, and solid investigation. These ten cases MUFON will consider eminently defensible in front of any reasonable open-minded individual. I, despite a very good friendship with Robert, had not realized that the behind-the-scenes work was getting that well organized. I wonder if MUFON knows how much they owe him?

We skyped, for the first time, both to Barry Greenwood in Massachusetts and Bill Chalker in Australia, with modest success --- the connection to Australia was stronger than the connection to Massachusetts, proving that Skype is in fact Magic and not Science. The picture above is Bill skyping back at us [he's the little window at the bottom right.] Barry told us about the Viet Nam news [oddly involving an Australian ship] and Bill told us about everything else.

Although the skyping didn't have anything to do with it, the third thing of interest [at least to us] was the decision to go forward, at a very modest pace, with the idea of a master book on UFO phenomenology --- think chapters on the case categories [CE1, Distant Objects, Radar Cases et al] including readable narratives followed by intellectual studies --- and doing this with the mild twist of making our website-in-process largely dedicated to "book support" information [think of a reader getting curious beyond the book text and being able to go right to the website where "book search" sent them to a large number of vetted supplements to the text.] This concept puts a double-barreled strain on us for both book and resource production, but with patience and perhaps trustworthy "outside" help, we should slowly grind it out. We see this as important as we believe that there has never been an english-language book on UFO phenomenology which has contained both readable engaging narratives and scholarly research. Just like UFOs and Government for the human-response history, this book is the other necessary bookend for the University shelves [more than 90 universities now have UFOs and Government.]

Lots of other things were discussed and are being done. The most significant of these for a historian of the anomalies is that John Reed is preserving the entire collection of the notes of Charles Fort in a format which will be readable, searchable, and available to researchers.

Stuff still happens, folks, and stuff is still out there to do. I can recall someone showing me the website of some trollish disrespectful boor who stated that he could not wait for us oldtimers to die so that the youth could jump in and solve all this. That same person said that none of us do any research. I'm not sure what reality those slurs could exist in; it is not mine. My friends are Warriors for research on UFOs and the anomalies --- and we produce.

God Bless all of them, and may they have long lives [despite the sociopathic voodoo of some cheap shot artists out there].

And God Bless all of you, too ... and if I can get a little of that, maybe I can get more work out now for the blog.

Till then.

Are There Doors in the World?

A novel that I like quite a bit is Charles deLint's The Little Country. In that book he allows the reader to believe that there are places where [my phrase now] "the world grows thin" and one can pass from one reality to another --- for we Earthlings, Terra to Faerie, or whatever one wants to call your favorite "other place". In deLint's book, the transporting place was the Men-an-Tol in Cornwall. 

I used the picture above long ago { 11/21/09 } on this blog to lead off a wildly Out Proctor claim by an old Alaskan copper miner that he had in fact stumbled through such a portal and knew exactly where it was. He had written of all people a UFOlogist about this, and his letter was passed on to Allen Hynek, who I presume did nothing about it --- it would have been a cold rough trip to the Yellowknife Copper Mountains region of upper Canada. 

This was the general region that he described....

.... and this was the specific. There is a Willow Creek running west/east on the left side of the map, and a lake pooling in it. He mentioned Willow Lake as his main camp. {so get your tickets}.

The countryside is not scenic. The ground is mainly rock with a moss and lichen cover. His job was to wander about this area pounding on promising looking surfaces, and if lucky taking samples for lab analysis. It was near the end of a tenure out in this wilderness when he was finished with his job and just decided to wander, when his adventure happened. Before I go into it though, here is why I'm writing about this again: a regular reader of this blog noticed that this story, slightly different [as it came from a relative of the witness whose letter Hynek had] had been been posted on another site. As the story was the same [all the settings were identical plus the beginning and ending], but different [the original witness correspondence had left out some high strangeness], this "news" cried out for a new hearing.

The part of the story that I had had him walking into a nearby but new area and coming upon a narrow gully, almost a cleft, in the low mountain there. This cleft was only four feet wide and about 50 feet long. It took a 50 foot drop to get down there. {some of this fellow's description is a bit unclear to me, but I'm going to assume that it was the initial gouge in the cliff-face which was 4x50 and after that you got out into a small gully which widened out a little.}

Once into this gully he saw some odd rocks which were very puzzling to him plus one old dead tree and no other signs of life. What fixed his attention though was a "stable" highly localized fog bank shaped like a tube. This was too much to resist so he walked into it.

In "my" letter, he walks two steps into the mist and begins to see a vast grassy field which increased in height as he walked until it was three feet high. Startled, he walked back out. He couldn't resist however and again walked back in.

As he penetrated the mist further, he began to see more to his left and right which allowed him to see much greenery and even what he called "an oasis", as the mist left him. In my letters at this moment he says his mind went blank except for a fight or flight instinct, and he forced himself to stagger and crawl out of there, soon returning to camp. But with the new material from his relative, it appears that he left a little something out --- understandable when you read it and consider that he was trying to get people to believe his story so as to go back up there with him to reclaim this location.

So what happened when the mist cleared and he was surrounded by the beautiful green world?

He had company .... apparently interested company. My composition above isn't exactly accurate [ robes only went to the knees and they had sandals ] but the feeling is creepily in synch with the way these entities made our fellow feel. ... which was almost nauseous with fear and shaken. He said that these "persons" just hung there in the air staring at him from their vantage of three feet off the ground. They never addressed him nor one another ... just silently stared.

This, understandably, made him want to get-the-hell out of there, and he scrambled up a nearby slope to put distance between them. One of the entities continued to turn in his direction as he climbed. There was one more Whackland experience before he "got back to reality." He came to a small hillside lake, or something. This "lake" consisted of two triangular bodies of water separated by a regular row of plants, and generally looking geometrically constructed. Well, OK, so what?

The "lake" sloped seriously downhill AND ITS WATER LEVEL SLOPED PARALLEL TO THE HILLSIDE. Uhhhhh .... WAIT A MINUTE!!! He was so shook up at the moment that the impossibility of this [in our reality of physical law] didn't fully register on him until he was well away.

Somehow he got into familiar rocky mossy country and found his way to camp.

Did our fine fellow not only walk trough a portal mist into Faerie but even encounter two of its inhabitants? His, as we know, is not the only such claim even in my files. Diarmuid MacManus has a few such tales of blundering across a threshhold onto "The Stray Sod". And it's intriguing, and annoying, that some UFO cases have these darn mists just before the weirdness happens.

Well, what can I tell you?: I like the idea. I liked going to deLint's portal in Cornwall too, and even going through the Men-an-Tol opening --- no, I wasn't too fat [and it was very unkind of you to think that]. But I WAS obviously unworthy as no Faeryland landscape appeared other than the Cornish landscape itself. [which can be pretty close].

So, once again, an abject failure ... but maybe it was a moment of fun for you.

Peace.