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.