YAKIMA: The Third Curtain

Alright. Weirdness is beginning to muscle in on the blog. The topic seems about to blow up into too many fragments, but we soldier on into the wilderness.

... but I have to admit that I'm just jumping in and winging it on this one.

Does the Yakima Glo-Ball phenomenon have anything to do with Bigfoot? Do the Yakima structured UFOs ? Why even ask the question? 

The question arises because our primary knowledge source, Bill Vogel, began to get quite a few Bigfoot reports right along with getting Yakima Lights reports --- not really AS many but a goodly pile nevertheless. Plus this is "Bigfoot Country", at least sort of.

This is one meta-compilation of Bigfoot sighting locations in the State of Washington. There are a lot. In fact, Washington ranks number one in total recorded Bigfoot sightings by several sites that I looked at. But so what?

 

Stan Gordon of Pennsylvania and Kecksburg fame would remind us that he has seen many reports of Bigfoot in association with UFO cases in his area, particularly in the 1972-1974 era, precisely that of the big Yakima Lights flap recorded by Bill Vogel. That's Stan to the left above, and a ghostly professor is holding up his book and a three-toed cast sent to the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained --- MAYBE from Pennsylvania and Stan; it was not labeled. I do not know if Ivan was the one who received the cast, though Ivan was more skeptical of three-toed casts of anything but bird prints, if we were talking about a biological entity. Mark Moravec from Australia also collected a pile of Bigfoot sightings where some UFO claim was simultaneously made.

OK, so you guys have convinced me to look. Mainly however it was Bill Vogel who did.

Bill Vogel had accumulated over two dozen encounters around or near the reservation, but initially didn't want to talk much about them, at least to the press. This is normal "anomalies researcher behavior", you run into enough problems trying to get anyone to take you seriously on just one anomaly let alone piling several together. But Bill Vogel was a curious and relentless-in-pursuit-of-truth kind of guy, so he kept the cases and wrote them up in what he called his "on the trail" journal. Greg Long was ultimately entrusted with the material and wrote about it in his Examining the Earthlight Theory, mainly including the cases in an appendix. Then Long gave Peter Guttilla the On the Trail journal, and Peter included it in his Bigfoot Files as a separate chapter with Bill Vogel's authorship --- so you know where to go for the readings.

Bigfoot sightings and big claims are all over this area --- in the map above one notices that immediately to the south of Goldendale and the Reservation is the Oregon border town of The Dalles, one of the densest areas for sightings.

On that same map, Bigfoot sightings cluster tightly around Mt. Adams to the Reservation's west, and therefore from the direction that most Yakima Lights are seen by the fire lookouts.

On this map we see our favorite locations: Satus Peak, Toppenish, Goldendale, Mt. Adams. At the teardrop we see the name of Klickitat County, just about where our UFO case of the spinning pinwheel-of-colors from the previous entry took place. The teardrop, though, indicates a place named Skookum Canyon. And .... ?

Skookum is a Native American word, used more in Oregon than anywhere else, which has a few meanings, but two in particular. The more generic of the two meanings is "strong and good" --- meaning I believe a strong good as in something which excels the norm. The second more specific meaning is a "monster of the wilderness." It's not just guesswork that Skookum has been a word related to Bigfoot/Sasquatch, as people from local communities have told the rest of us that this is exactly what the word sometimes means.

So, UFOs all over the place, Bigfoot sightings all over the place, Bill Vogel collecting a pile of each ---- so do they come as a team?

I read pretty carefully every case in Greg Long's book and in Peter Guttilla's Vogel chapter. THERE ARE NO CASES CONTAINING BOTH ANOMALIES. The nearest thing to a case of such is of a police patrolman who was out on a reservation road responding to a UFO call, never seeing a UFO, never getting to the call site, but encountering three "human-like things covered in hair from head to toe" and he panicked and drove off as fast as possible. Data-wise there is no connection.

Still the idea is fascinating. Vogel wondered about the Native American legends of The Stick People, by which they meant the human-like people who live among the "sticks"/wilderness. These people were viewed as having great powers. He fixed his idea of a possible Lights-Bigfoot connection with a legend that he was told to be very old.

   "The Yakimas have one concerning a large man with red eyes who came to live with the tribe. 
   One day he knew he was dying and asked the Indian people to take him to a particular spot or 
   location so that he might die there. They did, and shortly after he died, a huge flying object came
   down from the skies, took his body aboard, and flew away." 

Wait a minute there, Jack, would say Michael Persinger. There are plenty of Earthstress incidents all over that area, AND there are plenty of Bigfoot hallucinations all over that area, AND there are plenty of structured UFO hallucinations [ I actually like the Michigan farmer's way of phrasing this during the 1966 Swamp Gas reporting better --- he called it Hullabillusions. ]

So we have Earthquake stresses and all manner of Lights and Hullabillusions ---> OBVIOUSLY I'M RIGHT!!!

Hmmmm .... I guess that anything's possible, but I don't think so.

I would theorize rather that IF the Earthstresses Theory was correct, and IF those mysterious fields created Hullabilliusions [by an even MORE mysterious and undetected brain mechanism,] THEN, since both the UFO and Bigfoot imagery is widespread and persistent in the area, one should see plenty of Hullabillusions containing both images.

BUT WE DON'T.

I'll keep a slightly open mind about this, but I don't see the data.

In fact, if we go back to that earlier map, when I stare at that thing I see the reservation as an eerily "empty" area for Bigfoot sightings. The Yakima Lights and the Washington Bigfoot phenomenon might be two separate things, which happen to coexist in nearby but not too overlapped geographic locales.

Greetings small hairless humanoids!!

Hello, big fella. Don't take this the wrong way, but I prefer my UFOs without much Sasquatch in them.

You know, multiplying anomalies and all that.

Yeh .... exactly .... little over the top for academia.

But Yakima is not finished.

The Glo-balls have more to say.

Perhaps literally.

The fourth Curtain, next time.

Peace.

YAKIMA: The Second Curtain

It is a real pleasure to have such a nice simple anomaly on our hands, is it not? Just some pretty lights which suddenly appear and sit motionless in the air, or dance around a bit, and then just go out. Maybe Mother Earth is having some gastric distress, but because she's such a perfect lady, she turns little burps into Xmas Tree like ornaments to decorate the Sky. Yep, a nice well-behaved little mystery ......

September 29, 1978. Satus Peak Lookout Station, Toppenish Reservation, WA.

Veteran fire lookout Louise Kutz turned her television off to get ready for bed. Looking to the west she saw a bright orange light, seeming like a headlight, in the direction of Goat Rocks, where many such manifestations are seen. Habitually, she got out her binoculars, braced her elbows, and inspected the thing. It was an oblong {elliptical?} shape, and it wasn't moving. In the middle of the shape there were clustered an abundance of smaller lights of every shade of the rainbow. These bits of light "swelled and surged" pulsating like a colored "fountain spilling out".  45 seconds later the "fireworks show" faded away.

Her curiosity, however, refused to die with the lights. Wondering if they would come back on, she continued to survey the general area. The only slightly odd things were a few thin elongated clouds resting over the Goat Rocks. Then those clouds became illuminated by some light source beneath them. Maybe the show wasn't over afterall. Beneath the clouds was a black space. Focussing on it, she saw a row of windows in the air. These windows were not themselves emitting light, but were illuminated by small lights near their casing structures, allowing their square forms to be visible. These lights were dim, much like those of a phosphorescent watch dial at night.

Shortly the windows faded out, but the original "oblong" orange object appeared in their place. This thing still had its internal surging rainbow lights active. This second show lasted 5 minutes. Then the rainbow quit. In its place a small red light came on ... then another ... several in a horizontal row, right to left. Then the whole lighted array just switched off.

The final aspect of this is that something like a small plane [it at least had the proper lighting for that] came flying straight out of that line of sight and eventually passed north of her, making a small engine sound. She wondered if this last bit was also part of the rest, as the lights of the "plane" did not blink.

The whole of the event though had a punch to it regardless. "I came in [she had walked out to follow the "plane"], and I couldn't go to sleep. I went over it step by step in my mind, and since then I've sat there and said Louise, you didn't see what you saw, you just think you saw what you saw."

Well, "young lady", I believe that you DID "see what you saw." But it begins turning Yakima into something not so simple.

David Akers {Standing applause and Thanks to my buddy Bill Chalker for coming up with a picture of this fine gentleman, and standing applause for Mr. Akers for doing such good field research --- which I am delighted to state he is still actively involved with} did a yeoman's job at the Toppenish Reservation in the 1970s, logging quite a list of incident reports, as well as his main interest which was photographing the lights and taking magnetometry readings for correlations.

Akers along with Bill Vogel and Greg Long have lain a great foundation of data for any attempt to further probe this mystery. Much of his past and current work is on a website attributed to Willard J. Vogel and if I wasn't several geological ages fixed in the technological past, I'd make it easy to get to for you. I'll say more about the good Mr. Akers' work later, but first the simple listing of the reports he obtained back then:

These are the cases. Of the 55 reports that he had encoded at the time of the review report, 78% of them were "nocturnal lights." Just as the well-behaved Yakima mystery is supposed to be. But that leaves 22% or 12 other kinds of things. Looking closely at the table you find "D" disks and "CEs". Some of these are "CE3s" --- uh oh. Once in a while there is an "UNCL" unclassified --- and that could be even worse. I wonder what Louise Kutz' observation would be?

Above are some of my strange cartoons for four cases in Greg Long's articles { the orange-red BOLs are just winged from the description, but that was pretty basic, while the other three are colored up versions of drawings right in the texts --- so probably not horribly misleading except for the vivid colors.} The top two are daytime cases and the bottom two at night. In order to not write a book on this entry, a thumbnail rendition of these cases:

{Bottom right} September 9, 1982   Medicine Valley, Yakima Reservation, WA

A fire lookout sees an odd light and radios a family who seem nearer the object. They go to look. The father, mother, and son watch the thing through binoculars and a telescope. It's a yellow-orange motionless light. Through the telescope it's two pale-orange/amber lights horizontally side by side. They begin traveling in a jerky stop/go stop/go series of motions. A plane flew over. The lights dimmed down till it passed. Through binoculars though the lights were still there, now accompanied by a string of smaller lights which were however quite bright. Both the mother and son had the impression that the smaller lights were "windows." The array then flew off.

{Top right} Mid-July, 1971   Timberwolf Mountain Lookout Station (northeast of Mt. Adams), WA

The lookout was taking his lunch outside to relax. Sitting on his steps listening to the news on radio, he saw what first appeared to be a big helicopter. No noise, however, was forthcoming. It seemed to be silently parked about 7,500-8,000 feet in the air. The observer had seen helicopters rarely in the area, but much lower and always easy to hear even at much greater distance. He ran in the cabin and got his binoculars. The thing was a bright silvery disk/cigar with black rounded "domes" on each upper end. It just sat there for a minute and a half's observation, swinging very slightly so as to catch the Sun's rays a glint brightly. He dropped his binoculars for a second, raised them back up, and it had disappeared. One additional unusual detail: the thing seemed made of riveted together plates.

{Top left} Fall of 1961   Satus Peak Fire Lookout Station, Toppenish, WA 

A husband and wife lookout team were startled by a light like a camera flash going off. He grabbed the binoculars and saw several "dull stainless steel" objects doing formation flying at treetop level. These things seemed to effortlessly hug the contours of the Earth [probably like a cruise missile today.] The things looked like teardrops with a black spot on them. They never wavered in their tight formation. He guessed their speed at about 300mph. Once again, these things made no sound. He later saw on a much different occasion a jet racing across the area "on the deck" but there was no mistaking it nor its sound.

{Bottom left} July 31, 1974   Wishram Heights, Klickitat County, WA

A mom and her daughter and her foster daughter were sitting in their backyard coming up on midnight. They were habitually star-gazing when they noticed "a number of lights directly north of them which seemed to be alternately arranged in alphabet letter shaped patterns." {OK. Cue the Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie music.} They brought out their sets of binoculars and observed these lights for two hours. The things moved in jerky "stair-step" motions, seemingly at random. Of course there was no sound. The things appeared like "vanilla wafers" with a shallow bump on top, when seen on edge, and two lights [blue and red] were on their sides. But when they turned their "bottoms" up towards the witnesses, they displayed a dark round object with a whirling rainbow all-mushed-together pinwheel of light flowing out from the edges. The six objects seemed to arrange themselves into a triangular array and moved off. The ladies called the sheriff at Goldendale [just south of the Yakima Reservation] and two officers saw them.

Well, not exactly simple lightballs. The idea of anything flying in formation meant only one thing to Major Dewey Fournet when he made his USAF Pentagon study of UFO motions in 1952 --- these things are CONTROLLED. Animals and loose balloons and naturally-produced physical energy balls do not fly in rigid formation nor maneuver geometrically. He couldn't convince the Robertson Panel about this, but then no one could.

Early February, 1982   Highway 222, Yakima Reservation, WA

A police officer was on routine patrol. He saw a light ahead and worried that it might be a house fire or even brush fire, so off he went. He was driving along Toppenish Creek when over the trees rose something he was not expecting: two bright-white light cylinders each the size of a house. The bottom of the cylinders seemed to resemble half moons. The ominous objects rose silently to 100-150 feet and began moving towards Toppenish Ridge. they smoothly, never breaking their side-by-side arrangement, slid up and over the 1,500 foot ridge and sailed away making a lazy "S" travel route as they left. All this happened in seconds once the officer saw the things rise up.

November 1974, in the middle of the local flap.   East of Goldendale,WA

A husband and wife were having a small get-together on their ranch. There were six adults, two women and four men. At 8pm one of the women stepped outside and saw an odd light. She mentioned it but was pooh-poohed that it was nothing. At 10pm she stepped out again and the light was there, now much closer and seemingly parked on the ground. This time she didn't mention it. At 11pm the party broke up, but as the guests began to leave something awaited them. Suspended only 15 feet off the ground and just 10 feet away was a cylinder. The thing was seemingly made of silvery ice crystals which you could almost but not quite see through. Two thirds of the way up the cylinder projected a bright beam of {solid} light. This beam was two inches in diameter and three feet long. The cylinder itself was 36" tall and 14" wide. The lady observed the thing closely while the men [most of them] cowered back into the house --- she later noticed that those men who were the most "controlling" types were the ones who couldn't face the experience. They watched the unmoving thing for 10 minutes, then retreated to conversation inside. They peeked out thirty minutes later and their unwanted guest was gone.

Well, THAT one was surely just a normal evening at the reservation --- yep, no trouble explaining THAT experience!

Two guys who probably would like to give a try at explaining it are Greg Long on the left, and Ron Westrum on the right. Both of them visited and worked with Bill Vogel during these years.


Both Greg and Ron found many new cases that Bill had not heard of, which made him happy. And David Akers was piling up data too. Yakima was starting to look like it could become UFO Central.

These are David Akers charts for those early to mid-seventies years. I'm not going to pay much attention to the monthly pattern, because I don't know when he was there surveying nor the social dynamics of that, but the time-of-day should not suffer from that. And there we see something very interesting to me .... because that graph looks suspiciously similar to the famous UFO Close Encounters graph/pattern found by Claude Poher called "The Law of the Times." This pattern, with a peak at 10-11pm and a surprising secondary bump at about 3am, has been seen in other data sets by Vallee, Ballester-Olmos, Ted Phillips, and Australian data. I've seen it in one or two other places myself. {Look this up or search it here on this blog, if you're interested].

Well, how about all this! We've looked behind the second curtain and found aliens!!

.... or have we? 

Yow. What's behind curtain number three? 

Till next time folks [might be a weekend though],

Peace and no fears --- the Light Crystal cylinder WILL NOT GET YOU!

Trust me on this.

YAKIMA: Opening the First Curtain

I'll explain a bit about why the topic.

A group of UFOlogists {The UFO History Group} are in the earliest planning stages of producing a large book on The UFO Phenomenon to act as a companion piece to UFOs and Government. Our honored colleague, the inestimable Dr. Thomas Edward Bullard, noticed that most of the cases we were talking about were "old", and wondered if they could be supplemented with newer ones. Eddie then plowed through every MUFON Journal of the 1980s and 90s looking, and made a list.

OK, I thought, typical Eddie Bullard warrior-worker behavior --- I wonder if any of them are any good? So, I started reading the journals. Most of the cases weren't too impressive, but something else was: a series of articles by Greg Long documenting the goings-on at Yakima from the 70s and 80s. These, for those of you unfamiliar, are the famous "Yakima Lights" from the area of the Native American Reservation near Toppenish, WA. Because I had volunteered to be the author of the chapter on anomalous lights for the book, I thought that I better refresh my memories here. I almost wish that I hadn't.

You can see the main area here. West of highway 12 the green area around Toppenish is a forested stretch overlooked literally by a handful of forestry fire lookout stations, from which come most of the reports of strange goings-on. The two big mountains to the left are Mt. Rainier in the top left, and Mt. Adams to the bottom left quadrant. It is an area where a gentleman named Arnold made a little flight in 1947.

The outer world began to become aware of Yakima strangeness in the 1950s, but this didn't focus until the arrival of a fellow named Willard {Bill} Vogel in the 70s. I don't have a picture of Bill Vogel to show you and wish that I had; he certainly deserves that much at least. Vogel became chief of the fire lookouts of the area, and got to know everyone quite well, including most of the local people. It was inevitable, given his job, that when an anomalous light was reported which might have been a fire, but when searched for produced no evidence of such, he began hearing the stories of the mystery lights. To begin with, he viewed these as tall tales, but then he began witnessing the lights himself.

It didn't take long to be convinced that something unexplained was present there. The witnessings were too frequent. {There is one veteran fire lookout who has seen over a hundred incidents.}

Vogel thought that these encounters might well have something to do with UFOs, and so he contacted J. Allen Hynek about them. The Colorado Project had just been used by the Air Force as their excuse to cancel the Blue Book Project, and Allen was out of a UFO job... but still plenty interested. Vogel quickly became an associate of the very earliest rendition of the Center for UFO Studies.

Hynek was getting along well with Coral and Jim Lorenzen of APRO post-Colorado, and through them was located an APRO investigator-consultant, David Akers, who came to Toppenish and, with permissions, began filming and measuring magnetic field shifts in the early seventies. {I also have no picture of David Akers, and he deserves the honors, too.}

{above: a Yakima area fire lookout station }

Vogel collected a huge number of reports. Akers got some pictures and a lot of measurements. Vogel stated to Hynek that in the 1972-1974 period, he logged just a little short of a hundred anomalous lights and objects reports. It certainly was a place to go if you wanted to have a personal "UFO experience." Allen Hynek then DID go there and interviewed many of the witnesses and the fire lookouts in particular.

Dorothea Sturm, the lookout lady who has seen the over-hundred lights has, perhaps better credentials to characterize them than anyone else. The nocturnal lights tend to fall into two main types: bright red-orange balls, sometimes with yellow centers, and white balls of light, sometimes with other colored lights "on" them. They tend to be seasonal, so come in August, September, October.

Here are a few of our anomalous friends:

... and an impressive lot they are. 

Well, so far so good... nice well-behaved anomaly, and apparently so relatively regular and located that we might just be able to do some "science" on this. 

This somewhat optimistic-bordering-on-arrogant thought is precisely that expressed by two physicists at the famous Rockefeller-Sturrock Conference held at the Rockefeller estate so long ago that I don't remember when it was. The happy fellows in the picture are, right to left, Jean-Jacques Velasco, Richard Haines, Mark Rodeghier, Erling Strand, and a certain blog writer. I don't remember who took the picture, could have been either John Schuessler or Francois Louange.

The point of the photo is that Erling Strand was there to tell of his work in the Hessdalen Norway lightfield. After a bit of stage fright { there were two physicists there who were assholes and tried to intimidate people --- most of the folks were nice }, Erling caught his second wind and described very professional research work filming and measuring light incidents, sounding nearly exactly like the project of David Akers. Even the two assholes were impressed, and stated [loudly] that, Well! At least THIS was something that they could go up there for a week and solve!! I have not noticed them doing it ... nor anyone else, when it comes to "solving" it. 

However, John Derr gave it a try.  John's a good guy. And he has been generally sympathetic to UFO research. But the Yakima situation gave him an opportunity to crack into the scientific literature with a piece of work close enough to establishment thinking that it didn't violate their comfort zone too much {just like the Rockefeller physicists.} 

John tried to correlate the anomalous light sightings with Earthquake stresses. He was pursuing, to a point, the idea that underground shifts of igneous rocks composed of things like quartz/granite would produce piezoelectric ["pressure-electric"] currents and fields in enough strengths to manifest light effects at the surface. This, by, admittedly, no known mechanism, would somehow create not-yet-understood plasma-like masses of excited gases or something-or-others, and would "explain" Earthquake Lights and animal reactions pre-quakes, and anomalous BOLs in general. There is nothing at all wrong with studies like this and we should applaud John and creative explorers like him. There is only wrong in buying it if it doesn't deal with all the facts. 

John was humble about the work, and surely he was onto SOMETHING, but how far one could take it, who knows? Much wilder and yet close-minded theorizers like Michael Persinger have taken the work far beyond the data, and by ignoring many things have concluded that the work solves essentially everything in the anomalies world. The famous Persinger Earthstress theory says in simple: the earth's interior grindings create electric fields which produce light phenomena of many sorts accompanied by mental deranging brain environments leading to hallucinations which explain everything else. It is an absurdity of a "Universal" theory of reductionism that I will not honor with further comment here. 

Whereas IF Yakima presented only interesting lights-in-the-sky, one might very seriously entertain John's work as a viable first step towards a theory for them, Yakima doesn't stop there.

We'll draw back the second curtain in a day or two...........

Till then, Peace. 

A Very Short Flight Out Proctor With Ivan

A brief thing, just because....

Ivan was a friend of Vincent Gaddis [and I think that Gaddis somewhat inspired him about the underwater stuff and the Bermuda triangle and on to the "Vile Vortices."] Gaddis wrote for Argosy in 1964 on the Bermuda Triangle, and Ivan followed up in the same magazine in 1968. Gaddis sent him a report by a military person on vacation going to Bermuda, and encountering a freak, rather unexplainable, turbulence with radio knock-out, which fed into Ivan's growing idea of "Vile Vortices" around the globe.

But it was Ivan's own Argosy piece which brought him two letters which set his mind spinning.

One of these was from a B-26 pilot/navigator flying in Korea in 1955. This material found its way into Ivan's book Invisible Residents  [which in itself imitates Gaddis' Invisible Horizons.] The fellow was navigating at the time and on their way north-to-south through the middle of the Korean peninsula, he found that they had a ground speed of 550 knots. Knowing what his engines were doing at the time, this meant that, if this was correct, they were getting a wind assist of 265 knots. At jet stream altitudes this was barely possible, but they were only at 7000 feet. Plus there was no evidence of any such high wind at all.

The military guy and the pilot just laughed it off, as just some strange thing, and flew the rest of their route. But the anomaly grated on the navigator, and the more that he thought about it, the harder it was to let it go. Many years later [thankfully he had good notes], he read Ivan's article and wrote him.

Ivan wasn't comfortable with interpreting the letter but felt that it was interesting and maybe important. Fortunately PURSUIT had on the editorial staff a very good anomalies researcher, ufo-expert, and an experienced professional pilot, Robert Durant.

Ivan asked Bob to work on these ideas with him, and he ended up asking several key questions of the witness, who was happy to correspond.

In that correspondence, Bob determined that the witness was very sharp about navigation, and his facts convincing as to their accuracy. BUT, if these facts were as stated, and it would take someone of Bob's intelligence and openness to see this, this anomalous speed phenomenon could not have been a simple meteorological freak wind storm.

Durant determined that the data held by the witness was incompatible with the idea that the jet stream somehow came all the way down to 7000 feet and just blew the plane along. Not only does the jet stream never do this [low-level 265 knot winds], but even if it had the experience of the navigator and crew should have been different. Everything instrumentally and sensationally indicated that the B-26 was operating normally, and there was no indication of "entering" a forceful wind area which sped up their pace by double.

The only theory which fit the data in Bob's mind was that the aircraft made its turn towards the north-to-south flight path and all measurements showed that everything was normal. [the B-26 was at 230 knots and its true groundspeed was 250 knots.] Bob postulates that it entered an anomalously fast area of air sometime after the turn and rode with that excess speed most of the way down the peninsula. He says that there would be great turbulence at that point, but my reading does not see the navigator saying that there was any odd turbulence at all --- I believe that Bob just assumed it because not assuming it was just too weird. 

Even then, the event remains stranger yet. The speed readings for the B-26 were stable at 230 knots during this "fast"[550 knots] time. The ride seemed smooth. This shouldn't have been possible with a violent extremely high speed wind carrying them. Such chaotic systems are not homogeneous and cause all manner of turbulence. It was, as Bob concluded, as if the plane had entered a bubble of atmosphere moving at greater speed than all the surrounding atmosphere, but being relatively smooth and calm within itself. "I know how absurd this sounds, but it is the best 'explanation' --- the only explanation which fits the reported facts." 

Ivan would later privately disagree.

From the same article came a response from a different witness to the unusual. This fellow was flying in a C-97 transport from Kwajalein to Guam, a trip taken often. After two hours of flight, navigational checks indicated normal flight direction and speed. But at the third hour, the navigational measurements indicated that they had been traveling at 110 knots faster than expected [despite clear, normal conditions. The correspondent said that he nearly fell off his chair at the calculation. He checked and rechecked, but no error. At the end of that hour, the plane's speed was dropping well back towards normalcy, but it had traveled 340 nautical miles in that time "for no apparent reason."

Durant also corresponded for Ivan about this. They determined that instead of the expected nne-to-ssw wind of 10-40 mph, the actual air-assist measured was a nearly flat east-to-west "wind" of 70-110 mph. Making some reasonable assumptions about when the "third hour wind" began and ended, an estimate of 190 knots was not unreasonable as a guess for this anomaly. Bob said: where's the turbulence? Where's the drift? "Something very weird is going on here."

Bob's model for what was happening in these cases was that the aircraft had gotten enclosed within some bubble which being internally smooth did not indicate to the travelers that they were in anything at all. YET, the portion of the atmosphere that they WERE in was moving at a super rate compared to the normal outside. The bubble insulated the planes from any sense of this abnormal, should-be-violent motion. But how could such a thing be possible? Bob apparently had begun to believe that this "space" that surrounded the aircraft was abnormal in some fashion, perhaps even not truly part of normal reality at all. 

Ivan, not content to merely go Out Proctor with Bob, decided to go "All-The-Way-Fool" and do him one better. Not part of normal space? Yes! BUT, this area of space which the planes had flown into were realities wherein the rate of time flow was different. It wasn't bubbles of air which were going fast, it was Time which was going slow.

THAT's the ticket! That's what's odd about certain areas of the planet, and how certain anomalies take place! Shiftings into parallel physical realities with different time rates.

This is what the Vile Vortices were. These were areas more likely to suddenly glitch and encompass planes, boats, people, "stuff" into parallel physical conditions, mostly like our own, and transport such catches anywhere and everywhere ... or nowhere.

In Ivan's notebook file on the Vile Vortices, he had a couple of letters from a gentleman whose thoughts make little sense to me. One of the pages is above. REAL SPACE VANISHES INTO IMAGINARY TIME.

I can't imagine that Ivan understood a bit of it.

But he liked it ... and kept it.

Got a plane to catch.

Peace, friends.