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 }

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.