Digging To The Core, Two.

Back for round two quicker than I thought --- things fell into place faster, and I had unexpected energy.

So, ready or not here are 15 more. These are from the 1952-1953 era.

Once again, at least in my opinion, the cases speak for themselves. Powerfully almost over-the-top credible witnesses, in almost every illustrated case multiple witnesses, even occasionally from different locations. Dr. Hynek used to try to tell people that far from the UFO phenomenon presenting no good cases, it rather had an "embarrassment of riches." People, it seemed to me, never could understand what he was talking about. That is because people had little to no familiarity with these sorts of cases which you and I are looking at here. [and it would be even more assuring to you if you were reading the original documentation from which these thumbnails come.]

Criminal persons like Donald Menzel insisted on misdirecting attention by focussing on single cases, and then fogging the situation by making up preposterous "explanations" which even scientists couldn't credit, and which required the ignoring of significant elements of the testimonies. Nevertheless the strategy worked. Why? because nobody but a few like Hynek had the testimonies to read, and simultaneously were genuine explorers rather than intellectual game-playing trolls. People tended to read about just one case, and there was a Menzel or a Klass taking liberties with it and confusing each in its turn.

But, some might say about the above 15: these aren't very spectacular. Why should we believe that they're something special. Well, the best people in the world to view them were viewing them, and THEY thought they were impossibly mysterious. AND they thought them to be flying technology. AND they thought them far beyond what we could do. AND they thought sharp-angled turns, excessively rapid circling, descent and disappearance into very high altitude, were pretty astounding. All that without any visible propulsion mechanism.

One wonders, really, what exactly we have to complain about.

One can choose to stand with Donald Menzel, he who in desperation told Captain Nash that he thought that Nash and Fortenberry must have seen the lighted tips of cigarettes they were smoking {they weren't smoking, need I say} or, if not that, lightning bugs trapped inside their cockpit window. No one can convince me that Menzel was not a Criminal against Truth and genuine scientific exploration.

I rather choose to stand with Nash, Kelly Johnson, Colonels Donald Blakeslee and Curtis Low [the Chitose/Misawa case], Charles Moore, Joe Kaliszewski and the General Mills balloonists, and on and on. I like everything about their "company" more than Menzel or Klass --- especially their clear, clean forward seeing.

.... and, yes, once again, having indulged myself in these grand old "bulletproof" cases, I feel unusually relieved of the lead weight of having to listen to the interfering noise created by these debunkers over the years... and free to run in the wind without garbage sticking to my feet like flypaper.

Next set? When I can't say. It will be when I'm feeling good with free time. Till then, peace friends. Don't let the anti-science "scientism believers" debunk you down.

Digging To The Core

I haven't been able to post anything recently so here's a little something at least. {my project to scan my files is now essentially over; approximately 6-7 full filing cabinets worth of resources scanned and about 11+ weeks work. Also, health intrudes in the form, I think, of an inner ear something-or-other causing much lightheadedness and feeling of low energy --- blood pressure, thankfully is OK}.

Due to the scanning project, somewhere around three thousand UFO case files having been passing through the field of vision over these 11 weeks and good and bad ideas come from that experience. The bad one is that the project has created a mess which now must be dealt with. The good one is that maybe it's time to make a pass at filtering out the gold from the dross, at least a little bit better.

So, I've started to assess the "three thousand" --- just the beginning. I'm going to begin with the Objects-at-a-distance category [what Hynek called "Daylight Disks", causing all sorts of borderline confusion, and what I label "Distant Objects" or "D" cases in my system. I've winnowed through my D-file and picked out around 50 cases, which I will ultimately present briefly.

But I need you to be patient as these take time to thumbnail-catalog, as you will see in the first group below. I'd also like your help. You, upon perusing these, might think: That one's not very good. If so, tell me why { please don't tell me why I'M not very good, I know all about that already. Let's stick with the cases. } Also, when I'm finished with a category, and your own favorite case isn't in there, tell me about it and why you like it. Maybe we can together winnow ever finer.

So, now, a few initial "D" cases. Just the thumbnails without much other comment by me. I realize that this is not much stimulation for comment yet, but I'm just trying to get started on what seems to be a long road.

.... and there are 15 to start. Here are a few "immodest"? statements:

The dates here are 1947-1952 [more '52 will come] and yet, in my immodest opinion, the "game" as to whether UFOs exist or not is already over. Each one of these cases is, to my eye when reading the full documents, "bulletproof" at least as to whether the observers were terrific, and their reports indicated strong reasons to believe that they were not experiencing conventional phenomena, either natural or artificial.

Secondly, there's a awful lot of peculiar messing around our balloon launches. The "itch" constantly affects me that the agency behind the UFO phenomenon WANTED in these early years to show itself to the very categories of people [pilots, missile engineers, plane designers, experimental balloon researchers] who would know with certainty that what they were watching was not these common things so familiar to them. It is as if "they" are establishing their reality, without giving up too much.

Thirdly, and this is just me being purely subjective: when I read these cases, I "feel clean." All the crud associated with the years of accumulating weirdness and nasty individuals and wasted interactions with people consciously or unconsciously bent on messing up the research and the thinking processes which could have some chance of moving forward a bit, all goes away. There, full in the light of day, are the UFOs, magnificently and clearly mysterious.

Well, sorry about that last "loss of cold objectivity", but it is real anyway.

I'll try to get another cluster of these "D" cases thumbnailed as soon as I have time and energy, and maybe we can experience more "clean clear marvels."

Till then, peace, folks.

Glimpses of Forbidden Worlds

This is a post about many things --- things that are real, strongly evidentially real, yet are lesser and lesser acknowledged. I post about this because I believe that our "culture" is seriously screwing up... and I have no idea how the trend will be stopped.

Regular readers of the blog will recognize some of the material which follows. So be it. I need it to illustrate the point of all this.

The time is early morning in Houston, Texas. A big man, a very big physical man, is driving in his truck to his work as a hazardous materials containment specialist at Bayer Industries. Into his mind comes a vision: cars wrecked ... police cars angled into the median's greenspace ... ambulance at the scene ... witnesses stopped. But nothing is there. Several minutes up the road, there is the scene. It arrays itself just as he has seen it earlier. He has "clairvoy'd" the situation.

This becomes common for him. Not everyday, but often enough. Other rarer instances of clairvoyance happen. It doesn't frighten him [except for the one instance when he awoke to a vision of his wife's business burning down], but usually amuses him.

Who is this strange guy?

He's one of my brothers. A very strong man who nevertheless has psychic sensitivities [giving the lie to certain caricatures].A past weight-lifting champion who now [as an elite hobby] is an assistant coach for the USA Olympic Weightlifting Team. ... and one of the people that I know the best in the world, and trust his telling of the truth completely.

The bottomline is: Clairvoyance is real.


Once upon a time, back in 1870s Wisconsin all the years through the 1920s of this century, an old woman would sit in her bedroom and, occasionally, late at night, be drawn to the window. There emerging from the woods that edged the farm would be a lighted carriage with glowing horses. It would race across the meadow and disappear. In the morning the old lady would announce that someone the family knew had died that night. ... and she, "Old Sutka", would be correct.

Who was this strange lady?

She was my great aunt. Here she is seated posing for a rare "four generations" photo of the Kessler clan. One of her nieces used to keep a few of the old gypsy ways and read the tea leaves for her kids for good clean party fun. No one of course paid much attention to that. But years later, a phonecall rang at the WWII bomb-making facility where her daughter's husband worked. She informed them that she was going to get on the bus and head straight away for West Virginia [a place she'd never been]. Why?? her daughter and son-in-law asked incredulously. "Because you're pregnant, and I'm coming to help out." This was a fact that they'd assiduously kept from her in fear that she'd do exactly that.

Who was this strange person?

... my beloved Grandma. Maybe she brought the Gypsy way of seeing around corners to our family.

The bottomline: Clairvoyance is real. Clairvoyance is real. Clairvoyance is real.

And please don't insult the Swords Family by trying to debunk it. {especially if the Big Boy is present]



It's 1958 in the summertime, and two brothers are listening to the radio. Some guy has called into the big 60,000 Watter up river and is telling everyone downstream about the UFO he is watching. The listeners find it thrilling to be hearing this in real time, and go out to look. But nothing's there. Still the guy is nearly twenty miles away, so what the heck. Listening a while more, the UFO seems to turn. This time the brothers walk to the end room of the house and look out the window ... and there it is.

The neat domed disk floated across the window flashing its lights though slits in its rotating dome in color sequence, just as the radio witness had stated. The brothers watched it proceed and then they turned and raced outside, scrambling down the hillsides to get a second view. And there it was again, meandering away framed by the Big Dipper constellation.

Who were these strange people?

... they would be me [far left above] and my brother [fourth from left.] Needless to say, I can't get any closer to this claim. 

The time is 1966. There's a big UFO wave going on, but the three teenage girls don't know it. They've driven up into the hills to allow one of the girls to make a raid on her hopeful boyfriend, perhaps clarifying some intentions. The other two girls stayed in the car to wait loyally for their friend. They were listening to a powerful Chicago station to pass the time. 

Then the radio began breaking up. they heard a whirring sort of sound. The sound seemed directly above the car, and the countryside suddenly lit up. They felt as if their hair was standing up, and perhaps even felt lifted a bit. Straining to see outside, all that could be seen was a very bright circle of light, as the humming grew louder and louder. The girls crouched down and began crying. Time passed without sense of doing so, and the third girlfriend came back to the car, totally unaware that anything had happened. The next day the two girls who had the experience met and made a pact to tell nobody about it. 

And who were these strange people? 

Well, one of them is my sister-in-law. She is a fine and mature woman whose only "flaw" is that she's willing to believe in these sorts of things. Knowing that her brother-in-law is a UFO expert, she treated her own encounter with sacred diligence as she wrote it up for me in detail. 

The Bottomline is: UFOs are real. You can decide to debate what KIND of real they are, but you have to start at least from that platform. AND there's no ignoring the strangeness of them and copping out with simple mundanities, this is a serious complex mystery. 

It's the 1880s. In Wisconsin "Old Sutka" is seeing visions of the White Coach and Horses as persons pass away. 700 miles away, in the upper Ohio River Valley, a legendary doctor named Ackerman is trying to prevent them from doing so. He sees much success and he sees much death. For his large family he builds one of the first classic "row houses" in Old Wheeling. Over the decades it survives and becomes a National Historic Home.

In the 1990s, residents move in who, for the first time in many years want to aggressively restore the home. They do. It receives honors on the Historical Registry. The entire neighborhood begins to improve, drawn by the magnet of the wonderful structure. 

Inside its walls other, more private wonders are occurring. Locked doors are opening and closing. Television sets are activating in the middle of the night. The husband of the house, a no-nonsense Mr. Fix-it type, is irritated by this nonsense. Nothing that he does, however, puts a stop to it. Thankfully, the "intrusions" are benign and infrequent. 

They are sometimes, however, startling. 

Two ladies, mother and daughter-in-law, are seated in the kitchen following a luncheon meal, and enjoying themselves over coffee. A moderately loud rattling disturbs them. They look about for the source. It happens again. They now see that the "culprit" is a pottery container of kitchen utensils parked on a shelf to the rear of their big iron stove. It rattles again, and they see it clearly now. 

From its utensil group, a single device raises out of the container and spirals forward into the kitchen. As it loops in the air, it carries forward 6-8 horizontal feet, and arcs down clattering onto the floor. The mother is boggled, but the daughter-in-law has become so used to things like this that she just says: well, you've got our attention. Anything you want to say? But there the activity stopped. 

Hmmm.... who were these strange people?

Well, they would be my brother [top left] and my sister-in-law [bottom right], and my Mom [in the center]. Crazed mad fools all.

The bottomline: poltergeist effects are real. The issue cannot be their unreality. The issue is their cause. AND it must be a serious analysis. These events are markedly strange. To assume some simplistic bonehead wave-off of an "explanation" is intellectually crippled if not downright dishonest... and it is certainly insulting.

In that same house, there are occasions when a "figure" seems to pass briefly out of rooms, or across doorways, or stand darkly in a corner before disappearing. These are brief typically and therefore evidentially dangerous. But with one person this is different.

From the beginnings of her visiting the house to be with her grandma [who she loves with a dearness that I've never seen before in a child], this little person has told the house residents of her meetings with an "imaginary playmate" named "Kenny." These meetings used to occur quite regularly, but now that she is grown, only infrequently. She would describe Kenny very vividly, down to the early twentieth century clothing worn.

Because of the "other" phenomena, the grandmother, my sister-in-law, naturally went on the hunt to find a historical Kenny associated with the place. Nothing. No "Kenny" was registered anywhere. It was just one more mystery.

Then something changed the game. And old Ackerman relative was located and was happy to answer questions about the old house and its occupants. Well into the conversation the topic of a "Kenny" was brought up. The family member was surprised. She said: that there was no one named Kenny in the family, but, for reasons that she didn't know, one of the young boys was always called "Kenny", and that would be why one could find no record of such a person.

Back at the house, old pictures were dug through to find one with the boy involved. Showing the picture to the young girl, she pointed at his portrait among the family group and said: That's Kenny!!

The bottomline: strange things... strange VERY difficult to explain things... can occasionally happen in environments that we humans occupy. "Apparitions" even, perhaps interactive ones, may be occasionally occurring. NO ONE in that family knew of any Kenny to create a cheat. But "Kenny" was real anyway.

The little girl is the one in the darker dress with my Mom's left arm around her. She is a remarkable child. She lives more EXACTLY in the moment of The Now more than anyone I've ever experienced. Unlike the rest of us, who usually have some sort of "intellectual stiff-arm" giving us some distance from raw reality, she does not. Make of it what you will.



It's the latter 20th and early 21st centuries, and in Proctor, WV {yes, some of you will be delighted to know that there really IS an "Out Proctor" of sorts} an extremely organized person is going about her duties selecting clothing for the day's work. She is organized on these matters almost to a compulsive extent --- it is perhaps one of her rare faults. She's a registered nurse, and in that profession a certain organized discipline counts.

But this day it "turns" on her. An article of clothing is missing. It should be EXACTLY here. But no. The hunt is on. Everything is turned over and over, Each hanger in the closet is separated and inspected ... many times. Laundry room and machines are investigated, multiple times. A husband is accused of sloppy chaos production, which he stoutly denies saying that it's more than his life is worth to mess up her clothes closet.

This goes on for days. Then, days later, the migrant piece of clothing is there PRECISELY where it should have been all along --- a spot thoroughly inspected dozens of times in the interim.

This has happened to her MANY times in her life, and she notices because of who she is and how she arranges her life "just so" in these regards.

So, yes, who is this strange person?

That would be my youngest sister [above Mom to the right]. My other sister has this phenomenon too, but not nearly as much.

It's just a couple of years ago when a fellow went to the doctor's for a quarterly appointment. He made sure that his pockets were properly full of wallet, watch, keys, Cursillo Cross --- the four things he always carried, and always stored on a corner of the sink top in the kitchen. It was open and handy and hard to miss, so, since there was no one else living in the house [and he had no one to displease with such minor clutter], it was efficient.

The appointment was over and he unloaded his pockets. The watch was gone. He almost tore his clothes apart looking --- several times. It was lost. At the doctor's, in his friend's car, dropped somehow in the street or sidewalk? For several days he continued to search those pockets and stare at the empty spot on the sink top. The nearby microwave was removed. Nothing there of course. After a week he decided that he needed a pocket watch and bought a new [cheap] one. It would do. He kept it with him three days.

Then, the following morning, the old watch was sitting on the sink top in the open space beside his wallet, keys, and Cursillo Cross --- AND the new watch as well! Steeled to such matters by other known weirdness, he just laughed.

And who was this strange character?

That would be me.

Bottomline: weird as it is, and so much so that one REALLY wants to deny its reality, these events, which I in total ignorance label "Trickster Events", happen. Why? I'm buffaloed. The hypotheses are all decidedly Out Proctor but the phenomenon is solidly in our midst.



So.... what else is "out there"?

I suspect a very great deal indeed.

These are two of my best friends and most spiritual. On the right is Father Mike Howell, who witnessed a Spinning Sun phenomenon while taking [under some protest] a vacation to Medjugorge which he felt was a waste of time. {he did it because a priest friend wanted badly to go, and really wanted the company --- almost as a Joke of the Universe, Mike saw the phenomenon and his friend couldn't}.

On the left is Richard Dailey, a deeply spiritual Catholic, who nevertheless has had a Native American Spirit Guide attached to his family for many decades. Richard has had so many interactions with this entity that it's more like casual conversation at this point than anything else. The main thing for me is that it shows that highly organized religion beliefs [such as Catholicism] need not conflict with assists from other routes to spirituality.

When my father died, just after his funeral, a magnificent buck deer walked a bee-line across yard and street and uphill into our yard and stared into our living room window for the most awesome time at us as we gathered in silence there. It then turned and walked the precise route away beyond the neighbor's house across the road. {Mom's art, by the way, above --- although she was not drawing this exact scene}. 

Dad used to say, in times of family stress: "It's OK, gang." And we always rallied because of his strength. Here, it seemed, he did it one last time.

Many years later, outside the nursing home where Mom passed away at 3am, four of us got out of the car and were presented with two calm deer looking at us then walking away. ... in an urban streetway. 

This is not the "can't get around it" type of experience that the previous mentions above have been... but when one opens to a wider Universe pointed to by those other phenomena, a leading hypothesis for Dad's and Mom's deer becomes quite acceptable. 

I and my family have been blessed, and I mean that word blessed, by many wonderful things [I haven't even repeated the mind-stunning "Helen Lane" encounter --- see earlier on the blog] which serve to keep our minds and souls open and delighted by the Universe we are given to inhabit. Why is that?

One acceptable theory would be that we are just lucky. And that might be all that there is to it. But it could also be that this family doesn't have any impregnable barriers to open-mindedly considering such possibilities. And in a way that itself is remarkable to me, because these people, my siblings, are the most "alpha" personalities piled together that I've ever seen in any family group. Powerful strong successful people full of ideas and happy to let you know about them. [often awkward socially by the way, but we've learned to appreciate one another despite rolling our eyes.] How did such personalities survive modernism and its catastrophic restrictive materialism? 

This is the great man. Dad, my blessed Dad. Here was the brilliant brain --- most overall intelligent person I've ever met, and I've met a bunch of them --- who despite that, refused to lose his youthful explorative curiosity. The man who would pray in the living room after a hard day's work, and would drop it immediately whenever one of his kids came running in with a question. I am almost certain that I will never meet someone so intelligent and spiritual at the same time. 

This is the basis for our family's curiosity and rejection of the irrational unscientific stance of the debunking without study or cause. If he had lived longer, he would have just laughed at the foolishness of some of the people I've had to interact with. He wouldn't have spent much time with them --- speaking to such people is like speaking to a closed door, a complete waste of energy. But he would have explored alongside me, and, oh, that would have been the greatest of times. 

All of this is about the future of our world --- no kidding, that's what I believe. Catherine Crowe, one of my new-found heroes, saw this clearly far back two hundred years ago. She saw the Enlightenment for what it was --- both creator and destroyer. It was creating "light" but doing so in only a restricted illuminated space. It was sort of like a magnificent Drunk and The Lamp Post --- inspecting minutely the only area that was already illuminated while ignoring the vast scope of reality. It became so dominant that it began to define reality as only what it could see with its kind of eyes. Catherine saw it extinguishing vast areas of the real. She wrote her great protest, The Nightside of Nature, to try to wake us up. 

The Dilbert cartoon points to a result of this which is bad enough, the refusal to acknowledge many aspects of reality truly experienced and fascinating to say the least. Horrible as it is, this is just one step in the process. 

Some may view this as funny. I don't think so. When the entirety of the spiritual is reduced to mockery and derision, there is little left.

Enjoy the future.

I've one last thing to say to the debunkers. I really don't get your motivation [I realize that I am speaking to almost, though not quite, no one who reads this blog, but I can't help but "complete the thought" here.]    But whatever your motivation is, do me a favor --- in fact do the entire world the greatest favor you can grant: JUST SHUT UP.

Fine, piss on individual events if you must. But get off the broadbrush smirking dismissal of entire categories of experience. You seem, some of you, to believe that you doing some kind of service to humanity --- others seem just perverted trolls.

... and for me and my family's sure knowledge of many of these things: JUST SHUT UP.


To the rest of you good folks: bless you and may you "stay-in-touch" with a wider world [as Obi-wan Kenobi might say].

Without apologies, sincerely yours, The Professor.

Abduction and Hypnosis: a Letter from the Past.

I have reservations about this post.

I've had a copy of the following letter for a few years, don't know how many other folks have read it, and don't know whether it's published anywhere. It makes a strong statement about alleged UFO abductions of a certain type.

This will be controversial. I've not put it on the blog before now because I know that it will irritate colleagues, even some friends of mine. We all, every day, make these sorts of decisions: what to say and what to leave alone. I'm going to try to say very little myself and just let the letter writer speak.

This is, as you will see, a person who has earned an opinion.

The following is merely a full transcript of this letter, written to Ted Bloecher in 1977. The author was writing him to mention a case involving a husband and wife in Connecticut, which Ted was interested in learning more about.

"Dear Ted,

Here is a case, if you're interested - complete with everything. I would put it in the contactee-type but Gail had hypnosis with Jim Harder last year and as a result told of being taken from bedroom on board a ufo when she was about 12 or 13 years old. She became a contactee. The interesting thing is recently her husband joined her and he believes he is one also.

Apparently they use self-hypnosis and believe that they are receiving earth-shattering information about ufos - their term, complete with descriptions of aliens, messages, and he is somewhat upset for she reads his mind, and always knows what he is doing, although innocent.

They had contacts with one investigator, who, after a while was walking around with a Bible under his arm, and muttering about the devil. However in the past, a high rate of ufo sightings occurred behind their home - and they have seen numerous ones, including landed ones.

I have never met them personally, but have talked for fairly long periods of time via phone. They are looking for reassurance that they are not crazy - of course, they are not. But they have done damage to themselves - how many I have worked with! A person has a fairly good sighting, and somehow he gets trapped into thinking he is a contactee - he is connected with ufos in some way, so his friends make all kinds of suggestions - meditation, self-hypnosis - and the person goes on to drag out of his own mind all kinds of weird, nonsensical thinkings which he begins to believe. It takes two to three years of actively working with this type of person to get them back on their feet - to trace back every thought and how it originated. At the moment I do not have the time; also distance involved to work with them by phone would be too expensive. Unfortunately, thousands are brain-washing themselves thru readings contacts and in some areas attendance at training sessions to put themselves in this unhappy situation. While others are making them, I am curing them. But I can not come out and tell them what is happening to them - they must learn to realize this themselves, and to pinpoint some basic need which is being satisfied by this, a real human need of being special in some way. The same kind of situation happened with Marianne, but fortunately she is cured now, and I was able to protect her from investigation until we had this success. We do not have this type of situation in NH. Maybe because people who have close contact, get in touch with me. 

It would be appreciated if you could contact them -- is it ok for me to give them your address?

Sincerely,

Betty Hill."

I'm going to say the minimum that I can shut myself up to say, and let this simmer.

1). Betty Hill had earned her opinion, particularly by 1977;

2). She uses the term "contactee" in her own broadly-conceived way [again, remember that this is 1977]. She includes any UFO encounter claimant who believes that these very close interactions are occurring to them all the time or "regularly." Whether "pleasantly informational" or just repetitively intrusive, she is concerned about people talking themselves into WAY more than what has actually happened to them;

3). Elsewhere, I have read Betty taking to task not only the self-hypnotizers [or even trusters in hypnogogic state imagery or dream memories], but particularly the, for her, abusers of bad and shallow unprofessional hypnosis techniques, who in her view were producing false beliefs in people who had certain personal and to-be-taken-seriously needs ... but which were not truly UFO related.

Historically, Betty did not know that she was talking to a Ted Bloecher who would take her views quite seriously [as he did everything which had any sense to it], but who also would find his flexibility of thought gradually eroded by the arrival in his research life [in a little over a year] of a UFO experiencer who would become the leading abductions hypnotist of all time.

I am probably in trouble with a lot of people now [if they meditate on the theoretical and actual consequences if Betty's views are correct], but ... well, I'm old and can try to just drift off into the sunset  on this subject. For some colleagues, it might clarify a little more why I have been an appreciator of cases like Betty and Barney's, or Buff Ledge [and a few others] without being a fan of the mass of modern abduction/regular contact claims.

Sorry, fellas.

Peace ... I mean it.

I SEE YOU: YOU SEE ME

Something quick, folks.

I have been trying to at least list the UFO cases which have piled up in, well, piles around here [i.e. outside the relatively organized and useful cabinet files], and naturally stumble upon intriguing cases here and there. This one I have to share.

1968, Miraflores in Lima, Peru. A wife and Mom, who happened to own a well-to-do optical equipment store [telescopes and the like] was doing something that she and her two kids regularly enjoyed --- star-gazing through one of the family scopes. 

She, by eyeball, spotted a bright red object just at the star Rigel in the constellation of Orion. Swinging the telescope over that way, she saw a round red light with a white center. But that was the least of it.

The object went right over [i.e. in the line of sight] Rigel, occluding it. It then proceeded on a straight line to Orion's Belt made the appropriate turn, and occluded each of the belt stars in their turn. It then angled again to cruise in a straight line to Betelgeuse, and occluded that star as well. It then took off "north" towards Gemini, where it was lost. 

Thoroughly amazed, the lady and her children continued to scan the sky for it. About 15-20 minutes later, it suddenly appeared again right at Rigel as it had done before. This time it made a straight line through the Belt aimed at Betelgeuse, and occluded it. It then reversed course coming back directly towards Rigel, and, yes, occluding it again. This time it went away to the south. 

Twenty-five to thirty minutes later, the object manifested a Rigel again. This time it disappeared to the west without further ceremony. 

The witness, and her family, were personal friends of Richard Greenwell, the famous [now deceased] cryptozoologist, but maybe better UFO researcher from the middle APRO research days. I knew Richard somewhat, considered him a friend, published in his journal, and in my opinion, he was a pretty good investigator. Due to that, my confidence in this case is high. 

But what is really the "message" here? This lady and her sons were almost certainly the only persons on the face of our planet who could have seen these occlusions of Orion stars as the UFO flew its path. They were in their way amateur astronomers, and this UFO put on a special astronomy show JUST FOR THEM. 

"I SEE YOU; YOU SEE ME." 

This is pretty "personal". What does it mean? Why was it done? {readers of the blog know that I have about two dozen pretty good cases of this sort of what I call "astro-alignments".} 

Whatever it is, it is fascinating and creepy at the same time. Whatever agency flies these things knows EXACTLY where you are even at modest distances. If the "astronomy incident for the astronomers" thing is real, that agency may also know WHO you are. 

..... pause for meditation.

Till next time, folks, enjoy being in somebody else's "reality show." 

Just a Piece of "Practical" News

Folks, this is only a "notice" of something that all of us who have spent serious time researching these anomalies {and who have collected files} need to consider. I know most everyone knows this, but if my experience with my personal friends holds true, we don't really do anything about it. This is, of course, the concern over preservation of the phenomenological elements of the subjects {the data}, and the human-involvement elements of the subjects {the history}, plus the related issue of making these piles of information more widely available to responsible scholars today and in the future.

When I was "young" {say only 65... ha!}, I thought about this, and dismissed the thought-process after about 30 seconds. Now that I am closing in on 74, that process lingers. And so I've begun to do something concrete about this. I'm going to briefly describe this {also concretely} in the hopes of "inspiring" many of you to begin to plan AND DO something about your own materials, without boring everyone to death reading this.

The above picture is my scanning project in action. There's not much to it. There's a great tabletop scanner which whizzes material through itself in astounding fashion and high-quality results, and a computer to send the data to. There are stacks of files, upon the fronts of each are their labels {to be typed onto the "data bundles" the scanner creates.} All the "bundles" for one category are stored in a "cabinet" {i.e. dedicated folder} labeled for that category.

Data-bundles {individual hardcopy files} show up then {stacked here on the left} and will ultimately be stowed in the proper Cabinet {the folders at the bottom right}. Cabinets created so far include all the major Hynek-like case categories plus several more specific phenomenological or historical holdings {the one "in process" on the screen is the McDonald collection as it exists in my files in Kalamazoo.}

Ten Gbs going on fifteen.... Once a cabinet is {temporarily, you can always add to it} complete, it gets transferred {actually just "copied"; of course the original copy stays on your computer} to a flashdrive. I'll probably make a few sets of these. The theory is that these resource holders would be {over time and with serious thought} distributed to trusted researchers around the world, and thus produce widening ripples of availability and persistence into the future. The data would be preserved and potentially in the hands of those who mattered and who respected it. What happens to the "hardcopy" is something which no one, honestly, has an answer to ... but my nerves rest easier knowing that a flock of electronic libraries full of packed cabinets will be out there.

Although this is real work, {no one should think that it's going to be really quick --- there are actions that each file should have done to it pre-scanning, like destapling, maybe rending and pasting up outsized paper documents, getting a proper label written on each folder for some "assistant" who might be helping you with the scanning, etc.}, it's not back-breaking and can be done on the pace you desire. Unpacking your filing cabinets CAN stress your space, however. I do it because I think that it's a duty that I have --- good old Catholic guilt strikes again. But I think that all of us with files should be doing this.

One further thing should go on: I'm lucky in that I have so many good and "invested" friends so that once I get this sort of thing done, I have a natural {and somewhat deep} initial audience to distribute the material to. I intuit that everyone might not be so fortunate. We need a method for people to inform other responsible people about what they have and if they're ready to share it. I don't know how to pull that off. I have friends whom I believe might be willing to help in that facilitation, but I personally am really busy with my own stuff {and other life projects, before it's too late}. With encouragement, I'd probably agree to participate as an associate facilitator of such information selective-sharing, just, as usual, due to Catholic guilt. Anything of this nature would probably involve several members of The UFO History Group.

Anyway ... the future of Anomalies Research is Out There, or should be, if we are to be a healthy explorative civilization. Each of us has some responsibility towards that, methinks. Contribute not only to the Present but also to the Future if you can.

Peace, friends.

What Do UFOs Do?

"What do UFOs do?"

Whereas we might give that limited question an honest try, we must admit that it will be unlikely that we'll come to clarity on WHY they do it. Some of us have been quite frustrated about that, even leading to retirement from the field of UFO research with bad feelings. I'm not.

Researching this mystery has been some of the greatest fun. In a way, it's nice that it hasn't resolved quickly. In most ways the "fun" of it would be gone. I'll happily take it either way: all-knowledge-revealed-tomorrow or go-to-the-grave-not-having-it-all. UFOs, fascinating as they are, are peripheral to our lives [or should be], as we can wake up each morning and live and love and be good members of society whether they're around or not. It is my opinion that even those people who think that they are having a more intense experience with these things still have the choice as to how they're going to live their waking lives.

So, rightly or wrongly, my view is that UFOs have been "spice" in my existence but not the meat and potatoes of it. But how does one stay interested in any intense or at least ongoing way if THE Answers don't come? Well... I think that answers DO come, just not final ones. ALL the truths about human foolishness [the poor way we handle the subject] can come and this embeds within it profound knowledge about ourselves and our individual and organizational flaws. I've learned more about humans and academia and the military through UFO Studies than any classroom or "normal" life experience.

But we also have learned things, little fragments of things, about the phenomenon itself. We haven't spent decades learning nothing.

To learn these fragments we must immerse ourselves in the phenomenology --- the cases, and LOTS of them. I continue to be stunned as to how many persons [even those who define themselves as "UFOlogists"] have minimalist familiarity with the incidents which should make up the foundation of their opinions. Due to this, I have [and this is hard to say without sounding like an overinflated ass] almost no respect for the vast number of persons, academics, or UFO commentators when they open their mouths to give us the "benefit" of their unearned conclusions. STUDY THE CASES DAMMIT!!

But enough of that. Raving doesn't help. What I'd really like to do today is to explore a little more into the case files and just see if anything can be seen today. Maybe some little thing slightly new will arise; maybe just a slightly different thought; maybe nothing at all except a bit of fun in wonderland.

What do UFOs do?

If you and I were sitting alongside Colonel George Garrett at the USAF Pentagon Collections desks in the late 1940s, and the military and civilian sightings were trickling in, we would almost assuredly come to the same tentative conclusion that he did: these things were aerial technology of a very advanced sort, but they don't have any particularly noticeable agenda. They seem to be involved with overflights, but why? They don't get particularly close to anything, and when they do, it could be seen as just accidents of coincidence --- i.e. we and they only happened to be in the same general area at the same time. One might entertain the idea that these things were not much interested in us "personally" at all.

That, of course, changed. Maybe it was always changed, but the dominant feeling about the phenomenon seemed "distant." When this seemed to change however, it still didn't take on the up-close-and-personal flavor until the bizarre wildness of the 1954 European and South American waves, which were difficult to credit if you were a distrustful American. The USA up-close-and-personal seemed to wait until the 1957 "electromagnetic interference" wave. Even there, for the most part, the feeling was that these encounters could just as easily been accidents of paths crossings rather than deliberate. But maybe we should have looked more closely.

What should we have been looking for and chronicling? How might the UFOnauts have decided to become more interpersonal? How could they have become more "directed", and DID they?

With the benefit of hindsight, one might deride oneself with the viewpoint that the UFOs had already done this en masse during WWII in both theatres of war. The foo fighters seemed definitely "interested." Incident after incident they paced our planes. They didn't seem to want to interfere with anything, but pace they did. This happened so often that no statistician could claim random behavior or coincidental placement. Of course we civilians weren't privy to the extent of the foo fighter phenomenon, and the military refused to release information [they still to a degree refuse], and so it's hard to complain about John Q Public not seeing this about UFOs, but we can be free to question the military's obtuseness in not focussing on it later.

Still this military density points the way to our conversation: what, without blunt overt landings in DC, might the UFOs do without getting too spectacular?

UFOs could show interest in several ways --- my imagination isn't good enough to spell out a long list, but here are a few behaviors. A). the UFOs could engage in some forms of appearance which were/are obvious displays for the "benefit" of individuals or groups. As UFO research has matured, several sorts of these display behaviors have been noted and described. I'm personally proud of the "astro-alignment" form of directed display --- sorry for the ego-trip but can't help being human. These sorts of displays could be interpreted as being somehow for the benefit of the audience displayed to, even if we cannot figure out what that benefit is.

B). the UFOs could engage in forms of responsive behavior --- Father Gill's waving UFOnauts, UFOs which return light flashes, or which engage in motions coincidental to actions taken by us humans. There are many other such cases showing seemingly responsive behavior. This sort of thing could too be interpreted as for the benefit of the observer, again even though we might not be able to define the nature of that benefit.

C). the UFOs might engage in some sort of persistent motion or presence apparently keyed upon an individual or group or even a structural form, while we are watching. This behavior is messier. It could be labeled "monitoring", or maybe "curiosity", or it might be labeled simply "pursuit" without any further human interpretation, or it might be labeled as some form of "stalking." It is in that latter designation that one would "turn a corner" as far as interpreting the actions of the UFOs. At this point, the behavior seems to shed the "for our benefit" aura, and transform into "for THEIR benefit."

Do UFOs "stalk?"

I'm going to delay my feeble analysis of that question for just a minute to look at "monitor", "curiosity", and "pursuit" because maybe that will be useful in deciding whether we should put the emotional "stalking" adjective into these affairs.

Do UFOs "monitor?" Well, I believe that such a descriptor is legitimate. The foo fighters seem more like "monitors" than anything else to me. The disturbingly regular flyovers of places like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos/White Sands seem the same. In 1952, a disk-shaped object parked itself over the Douglas Aircraft facility in Santa Monica, CA resulting in the establishment of a private in-house study group of elite aerotech engineers wanting to research UFOs. During the 1950s, at two different time periods, a gold-metallic globe appeared about monthly in the same part of the sky in sight of the Goldstone Tracking Station near Banning, CA. I can't help saying "monitoring", when I read such cases. Certainly they occasionally are acting in SOME sort of intentional behavior.

Do UFOs show "curious" behaviors? My sister-in-law's best friend had a father who worked the nightshift at the aluminum refining plant at ORMET, OH. He was on break when he saw a structured UFO turn out of the region of the hills to the north and begin to fly precisely down the center of the Ohio River, When it got to the dock area of the plant, it turned sharply to its right and flew over his head into the plant area. It slowly dived down, as if to get a better look at the buildings, and cruised through. After getting to the end of plant property, it rose back to its original height, turned north into the mountains, and went its way. "Curious?" Seems so to me.

In the lower diagram above, non-military pilots were flying over Pasadena, CA airspace when three red-orange disks cruised by, then broke off their flight path to make a rapid circle-and-a-half around the plane. they then shot off on another path. Was this "curiosity", or just showing off what they could do? They didn't try to intimidate the pilots, just "fly rings around them."

The well-known and extremely odd case from Logrono, Spain leaves us straining to interpret the action as anything other than curiosity. In the encounter a smallish bright BOL entered the seminary student's window and noiselessly floated across the bedroom. When it got opposite the audiotape deck, it emitted a coherent beam of light which entered the slot of the recorder [where one would normally place a tape.] Shortly the beam was retracted [this thing acted like the cases of "solid light"; it even seemed to "bump" an object once upon touching it] , the BOL moved about the room a short while more and then left by the window as it had entered. Although the witness himself was terrified, that doesn't seem to have been the intent of this "intrusion." Still, this whole beam-in-the-recorder business seems absurd in the bigger picture, so what the actual intent was remains obscure.

I'm going to shortshrift the "responsive" category --- there are many cases, some sort-of-distant objects, some not-right-on-top-of-you close encounters [there seems to be a "civilized distance" wherein these responding UFOs act generally] in which the UFO seems [usually clearly] to react to something that the humans do --- most often flashing lights at it, or turning lights off. As to the agenda here, one might only say that the operators of the UFO are affirming the reality of their presence to the witnesses. These responses are almost always extremely simple and not long-lived before the UFO goes its way.

So let's get to the question of pursuit and "stalking." Do UFOs "stalk" humans?

This is a question that I can't in honesty answer. The reason for that is, as we've hinted earlier, the concept "stalk" has a large interpretive emotional element to it, which resides in the heads of the purported stalker and the alleged stalkee. We only have the person experiencing the possible stalk to talk to. ... not the ideal situation.

Still, let's stumble on. I have about eighty case files which might be considered relevant to the issue of stalking. Whether any of them seem more "curious" or "simple pursuit" vs "stalking" [I'm using stalking now as a concept containing some negative impact on the witness --- deliberate frightening, deliberate intrusion into their secure space, deliberate maneuvering the witness into doing something that they don't want to do], you and I will have to guess for ourselves.

In my opinion, the majority of these cases could easily be interpreted as simple pursuit or curiosity. But not all.

Here are a few reasons [from the files] that one might defend the theory that some encounters have an "unfriendly" nature:

A). There are a handful of cases where the UFO not only "dogs" the car or plane but penetrates the driver's area or the cockpit with either a beam or an engulfing light;
B). There are about the same number or more cases where the UFO seems clearly to take over the control of the car, or, in the famous Coyne Helicopter case, the helicopter, for a time before releasing it;
C). In several instances the UFO/BOL not only dogs the automobile but continues in an apparent menacing proximity wherein the occupants are screaming and driving recklessly, and in the case of two different cycling encounters, are driven off the road;
D). In several walking encounters, young women are terrorized by BOLs or objects, and in a few cases these objects will park themselves right over the heads of the concerned observers.

Perhaps "strong-minded" observers could take these sorts of actions in stride, but these witnesses were usually terrified by them.

Why would knowing if these events were deliberately "negative" be important? I have my own theoretical context wherein I try to see if I can understand what's going on, as some of you know. For widely cast reasons, I think that it is a reasonable viewing point to think that very advanced civilizations will be of one of three types. There will be civilizations which have come to the conclusion that there are important moral considerations to living life, a Spirit, a God, a Moral Demand. Or, there will be civilizations which have come to the exact opposite conclusion: no Spirituality, no God, an Amoral Condition regarding "others." Or, there will be civilizations which are still open to the Big Questions of Existence, and take a "anxious to still learn" attitude.

I've described elsewhere how each of these three types of civilizations would have almost no incentives to interfere with newly discovered planet's cultural development. One would not as it would be an immoral violation of freedom. Another would not as the only thing we might offer them would be our "novelty" upon which they could stealthily vicariously prey. And the third would also wish to keep our novelty pure [not imitative] in the hopes of learning from our fresh path.

But these three attitudes seem to me to differ slightly in terms of what behaviors might be on their agenda. The Moral Civilization would rarely if ever become overt even to an individual. Particularly they would not "stalk." The Searcher Civilization {number three in the above paragraph} would only very gingerly tinker with the lives of people in a society which they wished to remain freshly on its own path. But the Vicarious Predator Civilization might well choose to be crudely interactive with individuals, while keeping the culture as a whole blissfully going its own "original" ways.

If UFOs actually "stalk", that could be a sign that at least the Vicarious Predator Civilization is around.

Still, that is far far from being a conclusive thing. Some encounters seem benign. Some seem just delightful. {The drawing about is the array which showed itself to a lady returning from one nearby New Mexico city to her home, and the Array kept its distance AHEAD of her all the way down the road to her neighborhood.} A BOL in Paxson, AK seemed to move so as to save a State Trooper's life. Other encounters have been more openly playful. Maybe the "playful" or beautiful ones are courtesy of the other civilization types, or maybe the vicarious thrill seekers like all the emotions.

There could be lots more said about this, and lots more researched. For me, at least at this moment, I think that we are lucky: whoever's "out there" watching, they don't want to be doing too much messing around --- almost none with "cultural development" and not a lot even individually in any great percentages. Maybe that restraint is self-imposed; maybe it is imposed by the other two super-civilization types.

Either way, or some other way I can't crystallize, the UFO phenomenon doesn't seem THAT scary.

Peace and gentle dreams, folks.