ANGEL-LIGHT

This will be short.

I thought about whether to post this for about a week, since it was so personal to someone that I know. I've decided to do it, and expect you folks "out there" to treat it with civility, given this is from a woman that I've known for thirty years, and who is the daughter of one of my best friends. Even though I have great confidence in the inherent goodness and common social intelligence of most of you who have been reading the blog for years, I'm not going to name her. There are jerks and trolls out there in abundance.

The narrative in brief: this youngish woman had a grade-school-age son, who recently died in a tragic accident. She is one of the tougher-minded persons about warrioring through rough patches in life that I know, but of course this death of her only child was too much for anyone to just shrug off and soldier on unaffected. I don't know how she made it through the funeral [which I attended].

A few days after that funeral, she was alone in her house when she noticed a light on the ceiling. After staring at it for awhile, she decided to get her phone and film it. [as I said, a tough-minded lady]. She filmed the light for about two minutes and then sat the "camera" aside to climb up and investigate more closely. The big deal here was: she could not block the light with her hands. The lightform was on the surface of the ceiling itself and not being "beamed in" from somewhere external. Without the context of her life, we would say only that this was an extremely anomalous light.

Here are a couple of snaps from the "movie":

A snap from the video as it came to me. The lightform stayed centered in the same spot on the ceiling throughout the 2+2 minute camera periods (after coming back down from her "testings" she filmed it for two minutes more, until it faded out --- so, whole experience was about 4minutes filmed and about three minutes elsewise.) Although centering in the same location, the form itself was quite dynamic, changing shape and sending out short streamers.

I darkened the shot here for better seeing the lightform.

A second shot --- I cropped this one to get it "closer" for you.

A second artificial darkening by me.

I don't KNOW what this was. The lady involved doesn't know either [as she's said directly to me.] But I know what both our "leading hypotheses" are, and she has taken some consolation from that.

For what it's worth......

Peace, folks.

And Now For Something Completely Different: West Virginia Dowsing

Hello, folks. As said: something different this time [although there has been some coverage of dowsing in the blog previously --- about three posts in ages past].

Here's how this one happened: in the never-ending battle to organize the archive(s), the material which "fell off the top of the pile" this time was a stack of a newspaper called the West Virginia Advocate. The paper was edited by a fellow who we wish there had been more of --- someone intelligent, skeptical within reason, open-minded to mystery, and willing to take the risks of publishing interesting things. His name was Warren E. Duliere, and from what I read of him, we'd probably all like to have had him as a neighbor.

I had purchased a few WV Advocates during a several day visit to the Gray Barker Archives at the Clarksburg, WV library, though I have no idea why they/Gray had them as nothing of UFOs appears there. What Duliere DID feature in his paper were three categories of anomalies: a). Bigfoot reports and claims; b). West Virginia artifacts and cave markings pointing to visitations to the area by Celtic peoples very long ago; and c). Dowsing. The latter is the most manageable bit, so I'll do that. Maybe i'll get enough energy later to do the other two.

Duliere's coverage of Dowsing surrounds his own introduction to the subject, and includes his unique experience with it --- this is the main reason I want to get the "report" out there as it is in such an ephemeral source that it will be lost. Duliere doesn't illustrate this [as he does other topics] so you'll just have to put up with "random" pictures to distract you. Here's what Duliere says:

This was in 1985-86. He and his wife were wanting to finalize their decision to build a home on property in the hills, but removed enough from any town that there was no readily available water supply. Before going forward, they wanted to get assurance that they had water on the property.

They contacted a number of well drillers, but were given no optimism whatever. The drillers claimed familiarity with the area, and would not even look at the property. Finally, they heard of a sort-of "different" type of driller in Stephenson, VA named C. Edward Shirley. Shirley had a good reputation as a well-finder, but even he was doubtful before coming to the land. This is because all these guys knew practical geology and knew that this particular sand/sandstone strata had very poor results in the past. Plus, it was a risk for drillers to drill in, as the sandy soil thereabouts had produced several situations where the drillers could not extract their equipment, with the result of catastrophic economic loss.

But he showed up, dowsing rods in hand --- much to Duliere's amazement and incredulity. Shirley however took the risk out of the situation by saying that if didn't bring in a satisfactory well, there would be no charge. ... So Duliere watched him get to it.

Shirley used the bent welding rod method of dowsing and began walking with the rods pointing forward. Duliere found it difficult to buy when the rods began to swing out to the sides and then go completely "backwards" as Shirley crossed certain points. This action of the rods happened slowly, and Shirley repeated the procedure several times with apparently consistent results. Duliere didn't believe him when he said that this indicated an underground stream at the key point twelve feet wide and running away along the base of the hillside.

Trying to appease his skepticism while not insulting Shirley,  Duliere said: can anyone do this? Shirley, a lifelong "victim" of skeptics, but one who had retained some humility and sense of humor, replied: you have to be full of shit and half nuts. Duliere responded that people had informed him that he met both criteria, so let's try it.

What Duliere reports next is rather astounding to me. Not that the rods "worked", but the way they worked. As he walked towards the alleged stream line, the rods began to slowly turn. He was shocked to feel this reality happening. He tried to stop it by gripping tighter and tighter. The rods moved anyway, right through the force of his grip. And, they moved oppositely to the way that they had for Shirley. They crossed inwards. But the rods moved for both men in the same relationship to the spot on the ground.

Shirley laughed out loud "Look at that! He's crazy as hell. He's got a short circuit! The rods are crossing on him instead of spreading apart." As Duliere continued to walk, the rods continued to move until they first pointed at himself and continued until they pointed away from one another, having now made a 3-quarters circle rotation [whereas Shirley's rotation to the same orientation had to transverse only 90 degrees "going the short way"].

Duliere speculated that as the rods turned all the way, he must have been walking above the middle of this underground stream. It took the rods twelve feet to make their moves; the same as the width that Shirley had said. Duliere then walked backwards and the rods reversed their behavior, which included the palpable feeling of force overcoming his hand grips. Now convinced that Shirley [and he] had actually located an underground stream, he suggested that this was where Shirley should dig. Shirley said no.

Saying that the site was too close to the bottom of the hill and a risk of catching up his equipment, he took off witching the direction he thought the streamflow went. 200 feet further on, he declared that this was a good spot and that there was "a damm underground lake with one helluva lot of water" down there. Again Duliere's skepticism flared; this new site was further away from his prospective home [by the 200 feet] and also, conveniently, quite near where Shirley had already parked his drilling rig. The two took this good-naturedly, but Duliere still wondered. Then his wife showed up.

Dragooning her into the "experiment" [rather irritatedly to begin with], she couldn't detect any force on the rods at all and they didn't move even at the original point of the "finding." BUT, as she continued on towards the alleged "lake", the rods suddenly twisted in her hands, spreading apart, as they did with Shirley, and she shrieked: "Oh My God!!". From then on there was no stopping her from testing the area with the rods, and she became a total proponent of Shirley's claim that the "lake" was where to dig.

A few days later, the Duliere's were proud owners of a 180-foot deep well, running 70 gallons per minute.

Duliere, for a while, used similar rods to test some of the other information that Shirley had made about the property and its near surroundings. The rods, though "backwards" for him, acted out according to Shirley's opinions about water availability each time.

So what had gone on here? Duliere certainly wanted to know. He made a historical search for what the ancients and mediaevalists thought about dowsing, feeling that he had located references to dowsing in classical Greece, China, and the Bible [I doubt that last one as it is the reference to Moses striking with his staff the rock in the desert from which ran forth water. This COULD be allegory for water witching but there is a better naturalistic explanation involving breaking the crust of a certain type of accretion to allow access to internal water deposited.] The one of these that fascinated me was the reference from Herodotus that the Scythians had been using divining rods that far back in time. If so, this gives possible support for the ancient Irish tale of druid mages finding a lost person utilizing something sounding very much like a witching stick.

Duliere also referred briefly to the several studies that had been done which seem to give controlled data for the phenomenon. In an earlier blog posting, I reviewed some of these, and I believe that the evidence for some unexplained phenomenon here is plenty sufficient to credit it. There ARE also plenty of examples of crap out there though, so one needs to stay "Duliere-ian" with an open-mind and a savvy skepticism with full crap detectors functioning. An example: someone set up a test of dowsing for several practitioners who turned in astonishingly positive water-finding results ["The Alabama Evidence"]. Geologists later pointed out that water was everywhere in that county within 20 feet of the surface. And, though some dowsers seem to have the gift [like Shirley], many don't. One professional driller interviewed by Duliere said that his highest rate of failed wells came when he was brought in "behind dowsers" to drill a well.

BUT... since it seems to be going on, what is it THAT IS going on?

There are several leading hypotheses for dowsing:

A). It's just bunk. You're bound to hit water most of the time.
B). The "good" dowsers, though honest, find water because they have spent a lot of time "in the land" and have a practical-though-subconscious feeling about where water likely is.
C). The material in the "rod" interacts with some force created by the water [usually felt to have to be moving water] and twists of its own accord.
D). The human senses this by some subtle electromagnetic field sense, and subconsciously twists the rod without being aware that the rod has nothing to do with it.
E). The human does it, but by some clairvoyance and subconscious physical response.
F). Both human and rod material have to react in synch to accomplish the "trick", whether it's based in physics or based in psi.

Though there is a bunch of bunk here, hypothesis "A" just doesn't cover the best evidence at all. Hypothesis "B" doesn't seem to either, as there seem to be evidences that "naive" persons can succeed at certain challenges with dowsing ... though two very famous proofs of dowsing, both involving professional archaeologists who "came out of the closet" to admit that they used dowsing to make their dig discoveries, COULD be assigned to hypothesis "B". I do not believe that there is any good evidence for "C", the rod acting on its own. Ivan Sanderson tried to test this, I believe, and his results were unconvincing. The "feeling of force" though would lead people to credit the hypothesis that something is happening with just the rods themselves.

My reading of the subtle human sensory perception literature does not give me any confidence in hypothesis "D". This is not because our sense preceptors "don't have it in them" [we are constantly stunned by the subtlety of what we can perceive], but because "D" would require such low-level stimuli to force major muscle groups to act outside of conscious volitional control --- we just don't see that happening in anything like normal life. So, it's coming down to "PSI" for me. Trimming off the "bunkum" and the "unconscious savvy", what's left for me is truly anomalous action in the non-physical-textbook world.  ....   so sue me. I'm Out Proctor on this one and happy for it. The REAL Proctor WV isn't too far from Duliere's place anyway.

There was a guy, ex-engineer [engineers are often more willing than scientists to explore stuff like this], who published in FATE magazine of all places, in 1966, an article pleading for we humans to dump our unhelpful prejudices and seriously study dowsing. His reasoning was correct. This was/is an anomaly which seems clearly real, and testable, AND potentially a door to understanding wide potentials about the intercommunication between the human mind and the outside world.

Why don't we take this track? Who knows what destinations might be down that way?

Peace, folks.

YAKIMA: The Last* Curtain

*: This certainly isn't the last curtain, but since I'll have exhausted what I reasonably have to say [and a lot of what I UNreasonably have to say], this will be the last curtain for me at least for now. Hopefully all of you will continue to pull back more "curtains" for your own understanding.

There's something, something which seems to be MAJOR and well-attested, about these lightforms which hasn't been featured yet in these entries. Here's a lead-in case:

Gladys McDaniel was serving at Signal Peak Lookout Station one evening when she noticed an out-of-place light. It looked like a streetlight "sparkling through the trees" in the direction of Cedar Valley. She'd seen so many of these lights that she decided that it might be interesting to "signal" it. She pointed her flashlight at it. A red-orange light ball appeared there and flew over at her signal. It seemed the size of a basketball. It circled her cabin once, raced back, and seemed to merge with the "streetlight" [there were of course no street lights in the vicinity] and both blinked out.

I suppose a desperate debunker would claim either that Gladys McDaniel was a hallucinator or a liar, and if nobody bought that [they wouldn't in her case], then the experience was a coincidence. It goes almost without saying that such debunkers are the fools in this story not Gladys. The responsive nature of anomalous lightforms worldwide is legion [not all do act this way, but many do.] But at Yakima this is particularly common.

When David Akers first came to Yakima with his cameras and magnetometers, Bill Vogel noticed that one feature of the light phenomenon became hugely enhanced. His quotes:

"Strange as it may seem, when these objects were spotted, if there was any radio traffic about them at all (lookouts radioing a sighting), they would quickly disappear. As soon as it seemed they realized they were spotted by somebody who started talking about them, they'd vanish. When Dave first started coming over, I would call the lookouts and say, Dave may be up this evening so that they wouldn't be frightened if he pulled up there and just parked in the middle of the night. We had to quit that because as soon as we did that nothing would happen. I mean maybe we could have activity like you'd never believe Monday through Wednesday. Thursday I'd call and say Dave's going to be up your way Thursday night. He'd come over from Seattle and nothing would happen until Dave left. "

Vogel and Akers had to set up a minimalist communication and random arrival type of methodology to thwart this strange "behavior." But it worked. Even with this human-stealth though, Akers tended to get more results on the first night of a stealthy visit than on subsequent evenings. This led Vogel and the lookouts and to a degree Akers to wonder if there was "intelligence" associated with the lightforms.

"Intelligence-associated" can be interpreted in a variety of ways. UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft would be a case of intelligence being associated with them, just as much as a USAF guided missile. But this discussion was taking the other tack: were the lights themselves "intelligent? "

This view of the lights has been gaining momentum lately, sometimes using certain expert opinions properly and sometimes not [in my reading.] A case in point is Dr. Harley Rutledge's study of the Piedmont, MO lights flap that he studied intensely and wrote about in Project Identification. I have read recently a statement that Dr. Rutledge believed that the lights themselves were intelligent. But, although he may have said that somewhere, that is not how I read his book's conclusions.

"The most startling discovery was that on at least 32 recorded occasions the movement of the lights synchronized with actions of the observers. They appeared to respond to a light being switched on and off, and to verbal or radio messages." 

In other words, Dr. Rutledge's Piedmont Lights manifested the same RESPONSIVE character that was seen in the Yakima Lights [rather identically, amazingly enough] but in neither case does this responsiveness distinguish between the intelligent lightform and advanced technology hypotheses.

But today, as we type, the intelligent lightform hypothesis seems to be gaining adherents. A couple of those come from the "other" big recurring lightfield, Hessdalen, Norway.

Readers with sharp eyes and good memories will note Erling Strand, the Watchman of Hessdalen, standing in the background, while another gentleman sits at a table in Erling's urban HQ. That gentleman is Massimo Teodorani and he is a PhD physicist from Italy with an unusually open and inquiring mind.

Dr. Teodorani went to Hessdalen with the proper scientific attitude that this is a place where not only unsolved anomalies occur, but they occur at regular enough intervals that one should be able to gather data in real time. --- just like Yakima.

And so he did --- very impressive measurements of not only light spectra but also things like magnetic field shifts. He risked publishing these results in talks that he gave and as the talks went forward the summary views began to get more "courageous." This is because, as he studied not only Hessdalen but also Yakima and Marfa and a couple of others, he began to get the impression that these phenomena were not only {mostly} the same, but that there was an intelligence about them.

Here are a couple of our "friends" from Hessdalen --- although the lights take on different colors and less rounded shapes often, these could easily be mistaken for model Yakima Lights.

One guy who has been on the intelligent lights bandwagon for a long time is Earthlights/ Ley Lines expert Paul Devereux. I like Paul --- at least all the time that he's not talking about the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which he detests. I greatly admire his pursuit of energies and forces associated with old Celtic [or whoever built them] megaliths and circles --- something which for a time was called The Dragon Project.

Paul believes [I think] that these lightforms from places like Yakima and Hessdalen have nothing to do with Extraterrestrials and only to do with Earth stresses in that the stresses are just a side effect of the greater phenomenon which is being expressed.

He says this: "If Earth Lights actually are geophysical-based manifestations of consciousness, then they represent an older form than biologically-based consciousness. In effect, they are ancestor lights. Perhaps it is time we got to know the ancestors a whole lot better." 

Boy oh boy, I just don't see it. Some physicist said recently that he was amazed to see changes in very briefly existing plasma balls similar to things like cell division or replication. But LIFE needs more than an ephemeral unit division to have it meet the physical criteria for "life". And INTELLIGENT life needs WAY more dynamic change+stability to create evolved [extremely complex] systems. Nothing associated with plasmas looks anything like that. To contemplate something like an Earth-based energy lifeform, I believe that you would have to postulate something akin to a super-entity like a GAIA form. The lightballs would not be evolved lifeforms at all, but if you went All-The Way-Fool on this, you'd have to postulate the GAIA intelligence as creating them "herself" ad hoc without bothering about the evolution of complexity.

I'm intrigued with the apparent responsiveness and "curiosity" seemingly shown by light balls near the ground, but I don't see data to give me confidence that they would be evolved living entities. "Spirit" or "Middle Earth" entities, maybe. At least that gets around the nonexistence of physical evolutionary mechanisms for these things. Manifestation of advanced technology also gets around the science-textbook way of hopefully looking at an evolved organism. If you don't want the things to be "evolved", then where did they come from "as is?"

This is a very old news clipping --- sorry, don't have the reference ---70s Science News, I think, from the late 1970s or thereabouts. It speaks of scientists 40 years ago measuring a strong "earth current" running down the "crack" in the continent which split off Vancouver Island. When it hits solid ground in Washington, it doesn't stop. You can see the wavy track of the scientists' measurements heading south ... to Yakima. [I dotted in the Reservation a long time ago on that map [intuition?]

Well, a huge earth current running down Washington to Yakima ... what the ley hunters would call a "dragonline" [not a leyline since it's curved not straight.] Are we all set up for a region of anomalous phenomena? Persinger is probably delighted but I've told you why I think that the theory is a loser. But could these "currents" be the occasion or opportunity for something to "come through"? The questions are huge of course: does a crack in the physical environment assist the "entry" of things not normally present? If so, what sorts of things? Are most such places "where the World grows thin" relatively small, but occasionally [Yakima; Hessdalen] fairly extensive? Are there any limits?

These guys seem not to believe in any limits, and smart as they are [Jacques all the time; John only now and then depending upon when in his life we're talking about] their anything goes theories become precisely useless to me as anything but conversation and meditation stoppers. No limits equals no controlled variables on your thinking process. Since anything is possible in a Keelian universe, nothing can possibly have any explanation, ever. If the Universe is that way, so be it. In the meantime, I'll keep exploring and thinking about things thank you.

Lisa Roy's Fairy with Lightball is one of my favorite fantasy paintings. It is an image which gives a visual to one of the oldest hypotheses, that these lights are part of Faery, but the enigmatic interaction between Tinkerbelle's Sister and the BOL gives you no answer to its meaning. That seems just about right for our understanding of these things.

In my files I have a fair stack of BOL cases where the BOL seems to be either "pursuing", "stalking", "curious", or "teasing." In short, a whole pile of such things seeming to show some response to the human witness, and therefore intelligent involvement. But where does that lead us? The pun here would be to say that just as the traditional Will-o-the-wisp "fairy-led" the unsuspecting into danger, so we too are in imminent danger of getting lost. I agree. Deep waters. But the old folklore concept of being fairy-led by these manifestations doesn't have to be false. Weirdly, it can still stand as a defensible concept. {Due to the evidence of all the folkloric creature "close encounter" incidents which exist.}

We have discussed on this blog the book by Mark Fox which utilized the collected reports of British biologist Alister Hardy, on manifestations of lightforms which witnesses associated with "spiritual" happenings in their lives. For those who have read the book [or even the summary in this blog], the numbers of these lightform experiences are pretty impressive.

Well, no one is saying that the Yakima Lights are about Spiritual experiences, BUT what Fox' book does tell us is that such light forms "show up" in a lot of different scenarios. ALL of these in Fox' book must be credited as having an "intelligence element" about them. So.... lightforms linked with some dimension of intelligence seems widespread, even if for widely different reasons.

JAH: Well, darn it Mike!! What's going on!!?

Sorry Allen, you almost started this by getting David Akers to go out there. I can't help it if you caused a Pandora's Box to open up.

JAH: BUT, BUT, BUT I want to know who's behind The Curtain!!!!

Allen!!! Get yourself together!!! We don't know!!! All we can say is that it's not some old faker.

It could be Faery or it could be Advanced Non-terrestrial Technology.

It could be our old meddling "friend", The Trickster..... or God Forbid, it could be something far worse.

I'm starting to get a little nervous about opening the Door. What's Back or Down There?

Is it something utterly alien to our reality, based far down in the mechanisms of the multidimensions of the multiverse?

Or is it a Crack in the World which might allow almost anything through? They do call it Dragonline, afterall.

Even though I've gone Far Out Proctor with that list of hypothetical visions, I refuse to go All-The-Way-Fool and settle on one. There are SOME that I irrationally LIKE more than others, though. I like ET-style technology for things which seem like nuts-and-bolts tech. I still believe that this is what the core UFO phenomenon is. But I also like the concept of the para-reality of the Folkloric World Alongside. I could relish a reality where Faery, including Faery BOLs and paranormal Bigfoot et al, crossed into our dull old world when given the opportunity --- opportunities perhaps made more frequent by a fragile shifting Earth. ... or many other things like ore deposits, the combination of certain human mental states and actions, matters of the powerful spiritual occasions, etc. Persinger doesn't come close to encompassing what goes on out there. Keelian Ultraterrestrial comments upon analysis don't either as they have no substance. What the Hell does "ultraterrestrial" even mean? But ET-civilization has meaning, and so do the widespread spiritual traditions of our ancestors. I can work with those two models, and they've done good service for me.

Am I right about this anomalistic hard-to-solidify world? No way I'm saying Yes to that. I'll keep the other ideas in mind. But when I walk Out Proctor, I feel like I'm taking one fork towards ET or the other fork towards Faery. But, whereas Out Proctor is merely my jocular way of phrasing the Land of High Strangeness, I'm beginning to think that Yakima MAY BE THE REAL OUT PROCTOR.

I need to get back closer to comfortable reality ... maybe read a relaxation book about travel.

Dammmm! Here's that red-orange light again!!


Peace, folks. { little vacation coming up }