Former Apollo Astronaut Al Worden on a British TV show Good Morning Britain when asked about aliens:
'We are the aliens...who came from somewhere else...if you don’t believe me, go get books on Ancient Sumerians.’
Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College:
In “The Invisible College” Vallee describes a San Francisco new age gathering where a man who calls himself Allen the Messiah is advertising “the everlasting gospel reveled to him by the saucers.”
“His information indicates that the Earth is, in fact, hollow with the Saucer People inside. “Do you really believe that?” Asks a friend of mine. “Certainly” he replies. “If you were going to make a planet, would you waste all that good dirt?”
Jacques Vallee writing in "The Invisible College" on extraterrestrial contacts:
It is true, in my opinion, that Geller and other silent contactees can produce phenomena that are inadequately explained in conventional terms. It is also undeniable that these phenomena do not constitute an end, but a means, for convincing both scientists and non-scientists of the opportunity for contact with a higher source of information and power. Here lies the danger, because historically, such messages have never revealed anything that was not already known within the intellectual grasp of man….(I)t has been consistently observed that messages produced by automatic writing could tap the knowledge, conscious or unconscious, of the participants….
(Vallee relates an unpublished case and states)
Nothing that is within the power of any one of the participants is beyond the power of the alleged entity.
A NEW TAKE ON THE GAIA THEORY
From an interview with David Perkins on one of my favorite podcasts, Conspirinormal. (Don’t let the name scare you, Adam Sayne has featured some of my most enlightening and sometimes challenging conversations on the web.) David Perkins, who is most well known for his research into cattle mutilations, presents an alternative to the crunchy granola conception of Gaia. Instead of limiting Gaia by picturing her as Mother Earth, Perkins’ expanded view appreciates Gaia’s “survival strategies” in the larger context of a space age mythology:
1:23:00 - And so I think one of our survival strategies is to get off the planet ultimately, and then Gaia, perhaps, this is totally speculative…its goal is to keep life teeming. And what life does is it fills up every nook and cranny that it can possibly fill up in our biosphere; from the most extremophile things that live in volcanic vents, to things that tardigrades that are living in our atmosphere. Things that nothing should be able to live (in). That life will fill up every single space available to it, that’s its nature. In our case, if we get hit by an asteroid, and now we consciously know this, we can lose every bit of DNA that’s been thrust forward on this planet, and it will be gone forever… So if you were thinking like Gaia, you’d better like prime these humans to get it’s act together to spread this DNA out…If Gaia is priming us to become a spacefaring civilization which it appears to me that it is, and in that case, we can see that things like UFO’s and mysterious mutilations, and the whole range of paranormal phenomena are basically keying us for that eventuality.
BTW that’s Adam and Serafiel’s 376th podcast!!! They’ll be hosting the 2021 Strange Realities conference again this year, October 15-17 with a streaming option. They pivoted seamlessly to streaming for last year’s conference when other larger conferences fumbled, so it’s worth checking out.
URI GELLER AND HYPNOTICALLY ENHANCED MEMORY
I lifted this quotation and can’t find the reference but it’s so interesting, I’ll post it without attribution while I track down the source:
During the same period as Project Stargate was active, Geller had been closely associated involved with another CIA-linked scientist, Dr. Andrija Puharich, who made a practice of placing Geller into hypnotic trance states as a method to further enhance his psychic abilities. During one such hypnosis session, Geller recalled an encounter from his youth with a “silvery mass of light” that made time stand still. The light identified itself with a name straight out of a James Bond movie: Spectra. Geller described Spectra as his “programmer.” Puharich came to believe that Geller was “specifically created to serve as an intermediary between a ‘divine’ intelligence and man,” and that his mission was to alert the world about an imminent mass landing of spaceships carrying a race of ETs called the Hoovas. In addition to channeling Spectra, Puharich and Geller claimed to have witnessed a wide range of paranormal activity, including mysterious messages that appeared on blank audio tapes, not to mention several UFO sightings, and the teleportation of objects.
In interviews, Geller claims to recall his childhood encounters with a landed craft but never mentioned that the information was “hypnotically enhanced.” Readers will know that I treat this material as “post with an asterisk” at best and sketchy at worst.
DANIEL SHEEHAN & THE NEW PARADIGM INSTITUTE
A most interesting email from the 2021 Laughlin UFO conference:
The New Paradigm Institute, in response to these “warnings”, will, therefore, combine its research and investigation of The UFO Phenomenon and The E.T. Presence with the investigation and development of means by which to STOP Global Climate Change by accelerating the process of establishing direct human communication with The Occupants of The UFOs TO HELP RAISE OUR HUMAN FAMILY’S LEVEL OF “CONSCIOUSNESS” TO A “NEW PARADIGM WORLDVIEW” that includes the eminent awareness, on the part of our human family, of the REALITY of the existence of an “other” highly-intelligent and highly-technologically-developed – but distinctly NON-‘human’ – sentient species, right here in our own Milky Way Galaxy the members of which have been trying, for decades – without inappropriately “intruding” into our human culture – to motivate us to STOP destroying the life-generating systems of our planet.
Treacherous Space Aliens? Forbes Article & Species-ism
Perusing the UFO/Alien articles that come across my new feed, I’ve been noticing this “back to the Fifties” trend of aliens as predators. This Forbes article uses the image of HBO mobster Tony Soprano along with a picture of a lion chasing its prey to illustrate the danger Earthlings face. University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward:
“...encounters with any sort of offworld intelligence calls for preparation and caution. I would imagine the same dictates of prey and predator exist over cosmic time and in any galaxy one might choose.”
And: “We should be terrified of finding another space-faring species. We should not be giving ourselves away but hide until we can fight successfully.”
Species-ism, purely stated: Seeing “how perversely cruel Homo sapiens can be to one other,” therefore any “aliens” we encounter must also “operate on opportunistic instinct.” That’s where materialism gets us. It’s no wonder that “they” — whoever they are and whatever form they take — hold us at arm’s length and merely observe from a safe distance whenever possible.
PRESENTED FOR YOUR PERUSAL: JEREMY VAENI ON HYPNOSIS & HYBRIDS
I am familiar with Jeremy Vaeni’s interviews on Whitley Strieber’s UNKNOWN COUNTRY website, and Streiber speaks highly of him, even interviewing him on the release of his new book “I Am to Tell You This and I Am to Tell You It is Fiction.” On his own website, Vaeni posted recently on the topic bound to ruffle some feathers in the UFO community - “Hybrids Aren’t Real: The Evidence We Missed.” I don’t agree with everything that Vaeni writes, but he and I are in agreement on one topic I have been railing about since Hellier Season 2 — Hypnosis.
I know of not one case where alien-human hybrids were introduced to abductees that didn’t stem from hypnotic recall. And hypnotic recall, you’ll recall, is not to be trusted. Say it with me, people: hypnosis is a tool of mesmerism used to alter behavior and create false memories, not retrieve real memories. Although some real memory may come up, so, too, does imagination masquerading as memory. This has been demonstrated in study after study.
(emphasis mine)
Don’t shoot the messenger, either of us. I’m just glad to know that others are calling BS where needed.
TimeLine Journeying
This is the new area of research: timelines, both past and future, and let’s include present in there as well.
Perhaps part of the answer lies in what Betty Andreasson told to the MUFON investigators while she was in hypnotic trance in 1977: That, to these beings –whatever they are, wherever they come from– “the future and the past are the same as today.”
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/04/strange-happenings-during-filming-of-ufo-documentary/
Collin Quinn Weighs in on ET's
I have leaned on some of my favorite stand up comics to distract me from the dumpster fire that 2020 has been. Occasionally, I find something that crosses over into my other fields of fascination, UFO’s and Extraterrestrial visitations. Collin Quinn has a unique take on this in his November 2020 HBO special, Collin Quinn & Friends Parking Lot Comedy Show:
“Either we end, (it’s) apocalyptic, or we get invaded by aliens. Which everyone’s always worried about…because aliens will come down and they’ll be this superior, these genius people and they’ll take us over and make us their slaves. Yeah, just as scary? What if they come and they’re dumb? What if aliens show up and they’re fans of ours? And they just came down ‘cause it was on their bucket list to visit Earth, and they’ve been watching us on YouTube. And they’re like 8 years behind, and they’re saying “Amaze-balls” and “Awesome sauce!”
Yeah, what if they come and they’re dumb, screen obsessed, and easily manipulated by their media consumption. You know, like us?
Bob Lazar Backstory and Hypnotically Enhanced Memory ?
According to a Dank Net YouTube posted on June 27, 2019, Bob Lazar underwent hypnosis to recover memories about his time at Area 51. This was done through George Knapp’s recommendation in August 1989.
Some details were unclear to Bob; what he did there, precise dates, almost like there was a mental block stopping him from recalling the events. Luckily for ‘good old George Knapp* he had a solution to this problem - hypnosis. In August of ‘89, after a successful hypnosis session, Bob was able to recall many specific details that were once hiding away in the dark reaches of his mind. Details of his briefing started to come forth. Bob was hired to replace another scientist that died in a small-yield nuclear blast while working on a UFO engine. The briefing also contained information on the spacecraft’s origins, and the beings who built it.
(*The narrator mockingly pronounces Knapp’s last name Kay-nap” throughout the video.)
Lately I have been actively questioning the use of hypnosis, especially the reliability of hypnotically enhanced memory. Dank Net seems to think the hypnosis session was as fake as the polygraph tests that followed, and what he’s dug up on Lazar casts doubt on his veracity. The mysterious death of his first wife; bigamy; marrying his 2nd wife twice under 2 different names; not one but TWO brothels. And all of this before the S4/Area 51 stuff. If Lazar is not the total fraud that Dank Net’s data makes him out to be, the fact that his recall of the “briefing” that forms the backbone of his whole story is enhanced through hypnosis adds a whole other layer of WTF to a case overwhelmed with WTF.
Mormons and Extraterrestrial contact? Who knew?
Someone on UFO Twitter (What else could it possibly be for?) asked which religion was the most ET friendly, and this was the best response. (Sorry Raelians!) Apparently Mitt Romney’s Mormons have an interesting approach to extra-terrestrial contact that is as refreshing as it is surprising. Kent Nielsen, in a post on what seems to be the official churchofjesuschrist.org website, addressed “People on Other Worlds” with a matter-of-fact attitude:
Age-old questions again come to the surface: Is our earth the only world in all of space that has intelligent inhabitants? Or is there life on other worlds—perhaps intelligent beings like ourselves or maybe even more intelligent than ourselves? Might they visit us?…
One of the most exciting things for many Latter-day Saint students to learn is that the Church, through revelation from God (who—have you ever thought of it in this light?—is our contact from outer space), teaches some of the answers to these questions. And we’ve had the answers for quite some time.
Let’s see some other religions step up and acknowledge that capital G-God is our contact from outer space. A discussion of the vastness of space follows, a primer on on looking up on a starry night that may possibly be an advantage in Utah’s wide open spaces, summing up with this:
Not only do we know about the existence of people on other worlds; Latter-day Saints know also that people from other worlds visit the earth! Earth has been receiving visitors from outer space for years, and these visitors have been leaving highly intelligent messages for our benefit. When we put this all in perspective, it becomes very exciting: intelligent beings from a higher culture have visited earth frequently. In fact, isn’t that a large part of the gospel message?
Most of the things that “Latter-day Saints know about outer space” is based on what Mormons attribute to the teachings that were given to the Prophet Joseph Smith by revelation, including some of the earlier writings of Moses quoted in the article, including:
“And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. …For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man;..
For anyone having difficulty accepting this, consider this from author Nielsen:
In the days of St. Augustine, 400 years after Christ, Christian scholars vigorously debated the possibility of people living on the other side of our world! Men debated whether such a land, virtually another world, actually existed, and if it did, whether it was inhabited by men of some form or other…Certainly it is no harder for the Lord to visit other worlds than it was for him to visit the Nephites on this continent after his resurrection. When speaking of other worlds, the Lord told Joseph Smith that “all these are kingdoms,” and he likened them to a field in which different servants labored, each of which he visited in turn;
Great point, Mr. Nielsen! As to what they might look like:
People “out there” are like people here, because we are all of the race of Gods.
Here is my favorite passage in this article:
Anyone interested in intelligent beings on other worlds ponders the obvious question: Could a person from outer space ever come to earth?
Any Latter-day Saint knows the answer. Of course visitors from outer space can come to earth! They’ve been doing it for six thousand years!
God and angels visited Adam. Visitations of God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ to the earth are recorded in the Old and New Testaments, as well as visitations by angels. The Book of Mormon has numerous accounts of visitations. The Father and the Son visited Joseph Smith in 1820. Space travel seems to be quite common!
The only possible response in Ufology is, “But of course!” And Mr. Nielsen (and by association, the Mormon church) seems comfortable with this answer. It gets better:
God continues to guide his prophets and his people by the revelations of the Spirit. That is nothing else but communication with other, more intelligent beings from another world.
Communication with other worlds is not a future possibility; it is a present fact!
... No one on earth should know more about outer space—and talk more about it—than Latter-day Saints.
I don’t know how much of this filters down to the rank and file Mormon on the street, but to have this article on the official Mormon Church website next to other articles like:
What to Consider When Choosing a Vacation Job
is eye-opening. This open-minded attitude is missing in most Ufological discussions online. And the point is made without ever using the words ”Extra-Terrestrial”, indicating more comfort with “visitors from outer space” or even the title, “people on other worlds.” Mind blown.
Here’s the link to the article:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/1971/04/people-on-other-worlds?lang=eng
Richard Dolan on the Skeptiko podcast with Alex Tsakiris
Richard Dolan is someone I’ll always listen to, even when I disagree with him. But his scholarly approach to the UFO phenomenon is appreciated in a field more known for yell-ers than studiers. So this came up in the Skeptiko podcast when they were talking about Rey Hernandes and his book “Beyond UFO’s”:
Maybe you can correct me and I have not spoken with Ray, so I’ll just say that, but, uh, that it was, it’s all self-reported experiences, and without any real investigation. You and I both have spoken with countless people, who have volunteered their experiences to me and they’ve told me their story, and I’ll just tell you, like on a personal level, a lot of those people seem very credible to me, and a lot of them do not seem credible to me. A lot of them do not seem credible to me. And a lot of them, frankly, seem mentally unstable and mentally ill. And this is something no one ever talks about but it is definitely a reality. The other thing is, a lot of it is very ideologically driven… new age ideology. A huge, from what I can gather, significant portion of the respondents of that survey, and I don’t know this but they seem to be from Southern California, maybe Sedona, very like New Age cultural centers. I know that’s not entirely true and I don’t know what the numbers are, but it strikes me as a very high percentage. So you’ve got a very strong ideological component already going into that where all of those people, probably almost every last one of them, will say ‘Yeah, our space brothers, or Galactic Federation are here to help us.’
I’m sure someone will weigh in with information about the data and whether it is skewed to “new age cultural centers” but credibility is a huge issue for me. I am now venturing into what is for me uncharted territory by taking seriously the accounts of people who report past lives in landscapes not in our present historical timeline, and also into non-human (or is it differently humanoid?) personalities. My criteria is interviewing practitioners who I know and respect so there is some vetting involved. I trust in my own instinct that someone I know and have traded sessions with, and who has done their homework in a healing or artistic profession, may be even more grounded than the person whose presentation I’m attending at a UFO conference. I preach discernment to such a degree that it kept me from exploring these areas in my past lives work I’m more concerned with the “strong (New Age) ideological component” Dolan refers to. But hearing him mention mental instability has made me proceed even more cautiously. I’ve walked out of a presentation at a prominent UFO conference by someone who exhibited signs of mental instability and possibly mental illness, even with an audience of rapt followers hanging n every word. So I have to trust my filter, even as I keep Dolan’s words in mind. Here’s the link to the podcast:
https://skeptiko.com/richard-dolan-ufo-disclosure-toothpaste-out-of-the-tube-438/
Notes from “ETs Among Us 3” and Hypnosis (Again!)
Nick Popein the documentary “ETs Among Us 3”:
To any skeptic who says, ‘Well, these are just stories, these are just accounts,’ hell, life is just stories, life is just accounts. The entire criminal justice system, for example, is based on eyewitness testimony. When did we stop thinking eye witness testimony was important? We put, and rightly so, a vast amount of stock in testimony. Why shouldn’t we do so when that testimony comes from someone who says they’ve seen a UFO or they’ve had an alien abduction experience?’
Maybe because too often, this is not eye witness testimony. In fact, way too often it’s the polar opposite: testimony that has been “recovered” from a hypnotic regression. From an excellent article in Psychology Today by Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D:
Problems with hypnotically enhanced memory include the possibility that a "recovered" memory is incomplete, inaccurate, or based on a leading suggestion. There also might be hypermnesia or confabulation—filling in the gaps with false material that supports the subject’s self-interest. Also, personal beliefs and prejudices can influence how an event was initially encoded and/or how the subject interpreted it during recall. More alarming is “memory hardening,” which occurs when a hypnotically induced false memory seems so real to the subject that he or she develops false confidence in its accuracy. It cannot be distinguished from genuine memories.
Today, the consensus among memory researchers is that memory is not recorded. Rather, it's constructed from many sources, such as experience, beliefs, and personal schemata. Therefore, hypnosis will not necessarily restore "forgotten" parts. Over the years, scientific support for the technique has eroded significantly, especially after many cases of hypnotically refreshed memory of "repressed" sexual abuse during the 1980s and 1990s were proven to be fabricated (Paterline, 2016)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201809/forensic-hypnosis-more-cons-pros
The US court system has dealt with these issues when it refers to “hypnotically refreshed memory”:
There are also problems associated with the two methods commonly employed, regression and suggestion. With regression, it is impossible for even a highly trained psychologist or psychiatrist to know when the patient is reliving an actual memory or confabulating. With suggestion, the problem lies in the patient's tending to accept the events suggested during hypnosis as actual facts. For instance, the patient will fill in any gaps in his or her memory with those suggested by the hypnotist. To further compound the problem, the patient may not be able to discriminate which of his or her memories occurred in hypnosis and which memories were from his or her previous normal waking state.
https://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/f2164baa-65fa-470a-90a3-56c600738108.pdf
I think we should take a fresh look at the whole topic of “hypnotically enhanced memory.” That phrase in itself is troubling. Since all roads lead back to Hellier Season 2 for me, I recognize that was an experiment done with a willing subject which still produced emotional trauma. How many more willing subjects of varying degrees of suggestibility, the main component of a successful hypnotic regression, have been traumatized by well-meaning but ideologically determined practitioners? And how much of our current data base on abductions and even contactees has been hypnotically enhanced or refreshed? For me, all cases of hypnotically enhanced memory have an asterisk after them until this subject is addressed.
Hellier, Hypnosis and Folie a Deux
I’ll admit to being (intellectually) triggered by the Hellier Season 2 episode where the team decided to use hypnosis to “induce” an abduction experience. Seeing filmed evidence of how easily a willing hypnotic subject can move into an emotionally upsetting experience opened my eyes to the possibility of how this could have happened in many of the cases that form the backbone of UFO and abduction research. In researching the use of hypnosis in the earliest case to reach a mass audience, that of Betty and Barney Hill, I came across the term that had caught my attention - Folie a Deux. The idea of a “shared madness” or the psychological concept that describes:
“the transference of delusional ideas from one 'primary' individual to one or more 'secondary' individuals (Lasègue & Falret, 1877.)”
I am on the record as a skeptic of using hypnosis to retrieve memories because of my work as a past lives practitioner and researcher, so watching this be accomplished in Hellier kicked my skepticism into high gear. Researching Folie a Deux only confirmed my suspicions.
“Even though folie a deux is an influence from the leader (primary), it also requires a lot from the secondary individual. Not only does it require them to be susceptible to the leaders influence, it requires them to essentially give themselves up as well. ..The secondary individual…must also be a more dependent person who is highly suggestable (sp?), compared to their leader who is more autonomous and dominant.”(Freeman, Cox, & Barnier, 2013).
What better description of the hypnotic process than that the client, the secondary individual, be highly suggestible; in fact, it is the main requirement for a successful hypnosis session. Just last week I heard the Mysterious Universe crew, Ben and Aaron (I’m not a barnacle, I’m a subscriber) mention that the subject of their next to last interview of 2019, film maker Patty Greer, had booked a session with a well known abduction researcher (OK, it was Mary Rodwell.) They said Patty went in to the session curious but left believing that she’d been abducted. That’s a classic case of “shared madness” or the transference of delusional ideas.
Jack Brewer in his excellent “The UFO Trail” blog examined the Betty and Barney Hill case in 2016. Without going into that case as he did, he describes a radio interview where a caller, hypnotherapist and social worker Donna Killeen, expressed her professional opinion of hypnosis being used for memory retrieval. Here is her emailed response after the show:
“My thoughts/opinion about hypnosis as a tool for memory include the following.
A. The process of hypnosis is often regarded as a truth serum type therapy. It is NOT.
B. While hypnosis can bring about a state of relaxation and focus to possibly aid in memory, hypnosis is not a particularly reliable method of memory retrieval.
C. Everything stated with hypnosis is not necessarily factual. Corroborating evidence is needed to establish facts.
D. Subjects can distort and misinterpret "memories" and confabulation can occur.
E. Subjects in the state of trance can be in a highly suggestible state creating a situation where an unskilled therapist might lead the subject potentially creating "false memories”.
(http://ufotrail.blogspot.com/2016/04/hypnotherapist-discusses-hill-case-and.html)
From another paper that figures prominently in internet searches for this subject :
(Transmitting delusional beliefs in a hypnotic model of folie à deux, Freeman, Luke P., Cox, Rochelle E,. Barniew, Amanda J.):
“Folie à deux is the transference of delusional ideas from one 'primary' individual to one or more 'secondary' individuals (Lasègue & Falret, 1877). However, it is difficult to investigate experimentally because often only one patient is identified as delusional. We investigated whether hypnosis could model the experiences of the secondary in this delusion. Our primary was a confederate, who displayed two delusional beliefs and attempted to transmit them to hypnotised subjects. We manipulated the status of the confederate so that they were portrayed as either "credible" or merely “interesting". Many high hypnotisable individuals adopted the confederate's beliefs and confabulated evidence in support of them.”
Milton Erickson adopted his confusion induction method of hypnosis precisely because it made the subject want to cooperate with the therapist. So it is not surprising that research has shown that highly hypnotizable subjects can adopt the beliefs of the person hypnotizing them. And I am giving credit to the well-meaning hypnotist who sincerely desires to help their patient who they believe has been abducted and is experiencing emotional difficulties as a result of their abduction experience. Imagine what a self-serving attention seeking therapist could do (no names, I’m in enough trouble already.)
For the record, I am not doubting the reality of abduction experience for some people who have had experiences outside of our physical world frame of reference. I firmly believe that we as a species interact with “the other” in sometimes confusing and upsetting ways. I also believe that hypnosis is a powerful technology for modifying behavior. But I have grave doubts about the use of hypnosis to retrieve memories, as Donna Killeen stated in the closing comments of her email to Jack Brewer:
Regression hypnosis is at the core of the alien abduction phenomenon.
Why am I so obsessed with this topic? Because regression hypnosis is also the most commonly used method of accessing past lives in mainstream awareness. At the risk of insulting some people I highly respect, I see hypnosis as a 19th century technology put to brilliant use for behavior modification in the 20th century. But we are 1/5 of the way though the 21st century. It is time to acknowledge our growth in collective consciousness and open ourselves to the realization that we do not have to give our Selves up, to be highly suggestible or surrender our individual Consciousness to access past life experiences and access the wisdom we can learn from our personal histories.
New "I Don't Know What to Make of This" file:
Somethings that come to me can only be approached as “I don’t know what to make of this, but it intrigues me.” A lot of Linda Moulton Howe’s material might fit into this category, but this one quote for “ETs Among Us 3” (great title) caught my attention and resonates with my own thoughts on this subject. Howe is describing a man who claims to have lived with an EBEN (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity) after discovering the being at a crash site as part of a government recovery team. If I haven’t lost you already, here is what she related:
‘We made you. We put you here, but you have to live it.’ And this man looked at me and said, ‘… what I’ve come to understand from this being that I’ve lived with and loved, the machinery of this universe is reincarnation, the recycling of souls. We treat the soul and recycling like mythology. These beings seem to be communicating that the most important part of our life as human beings was the soul and what happened at the moment of death.’
Interesting in the context of everything I know and have learned about processing this information from past lives. And more for this file, the intersection of what used to be science fiction and spirituality To be digested….
William S Burroughs on creating new worlds, UFO's, the arts, time and space
William S Burroughs pulls from a large cosmic area in this quotation:
There’s something out there. It may be far away in Space and Time, but remember – Time itself is a human invention, as are measurements.
Remember Betty and Barney Hill, the two people abducted by aliens in Exeter, New Hampshire? Well, the aliens noticed that Barry had false teeth… They asked about this, and Betty said, ‘Well, they’ve worn out. Age, you know. Length of time’. And the aliens said, ‘What is time? What is age?’ They had no concept of it. Time is both a human invention and a human affliction.
We are not setting out to explore static pre-existing data. We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new models of consciousness. As Brion Gysin [painter, poet, and Burroughs’ long-term friend and collaborator] said, When they get there in their trillion dollar aqualung they may find that artists are already there.
What you experience in dreams and out of body trips, what you glimpse in the works of writers and painters, is the promised land of Space.
CONTACT IN THE DESERT 2019 RECAP
Here’s the setup for the ultimate UFO conference experience - holding hands and chanting AUM with 100 complete strangers around a giant rock, actually THE Giant Rock, one of the most archetypal UFO locations in the California desert. That set the stage for my 2019 Contact in the Desert experience.
The Giant Rock tour plus a visit to the Integratron took place the day before the actual Friday to Sunday conference and was 90 minutes away from the Indian Wells, California resort where the conference has been based since moving from Joshua Tree. I’ve always wanted to see Giant Rock in Landers CA, where George Van Tassel is alleged to have communicated, first in meditation and later in person, with the space brothers. Another item on my bucket list is the Integratron, the domed structure composed of "wood, concrete, glass, and fibreglass, lacking even metal screws or nails" (according to Wikipedia so you know its true), designed as for "human cellular rejuvenation" but never completed and now used for sound healing sessions in its upper chamber. Those were sold out by the time I booked my ticket, but we were able to enter the lower area and experience the way the whole structure vibrates when music is played upstairs. Actually, its up a ladder after removing your shoes, indicating that Van Tassel had no idea it would be this popular. I will be going back for a “sound bath.”
The 2019 conference was attended by 4000 people and it seemed that crowded at times. The UFO conference experience is expensive (more on that later), immersive and exhausting. There are 5 or even 6 presentations going on at the same time, starting every 2 hours from 9 AM until 11 PM, with a maddeningly random schedule that forces you to make hard choices when 2 interesting presentations begin at the same time. So I saw Rey Hernandez but had to skip Peter Levenda's probably controversial talk on the Sekret Machines project and his work with Blink 182 guitarist Tom DeLonge. Whitley Stieber or Linda Moulton Howe? (I chose Strieber) Erich Von Daniken or Clifford Mahouty? I chose Mahouty, he was one of the people I planned to see. It got worse: Graham Hancock or Nick Pope or Mary Rodwell, I chose Hancock but that was a tough one. It seemed for every speaker I saw, I missed another. Maybe that's designed to get me back next year?
By Sunday I was dipping into multiple lectures, catching an hour here and walking across the complex, out of a freezing cold and dark auditorium into the desert sunshine before catching the last half of a 2nd lecture. Sometimes this was by design; I tried to sit through Laura Eisenhower’s lecture but only lasted 15 minutes, it was almost incomprehensible. Presenters like Eisenhower and Gaia star David Wilcock were rock stars playing the hits to their fan base, so no information was given to bring the newbies up to speed. When Wilcock talked about “The Alliance”, every in the room seemed to be nodding in agreement and I didn’t have a good enough internet connection to Google it. (Its Wilcock’s version of the group organized against the cab-, oh just Google it, its gets insane quickly.) But Wilcock was the star of this year’s conference, his 200+ Gaia episodes were the drawing card for many of the attendees, and discernment was not on the menu. I was sitting among the true believers - in Disclosure (imminent as always), in StarSeeds, in underground government bases. I was there to see Jacques Vallee and his was one of the least attended lectures, so the CITD organizers know what sells.
Actually, someone like myself could put together a schedule of interesting and not insane speakers to be enlightened by. Rey Hernandez, one of the co-founders of astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, or FREE. Less than an hour into his 1st talk, which featured lots of data and screens full of numbers logging the accounts of contactees, I saw this bit of info:
26% of contactees have received information about past lives as a result of their contact.
Immediately there is a link between my past lives research and the UFO contact phenomena, plus a quotable statistic that I'd never heard before. I was in the right place!
I saw Clifford Mahouty’s excellent talk framing the UFO in his experiences as a Zuni Pueblo elder. Whitley Strieber struggled through computer issues as did many of the presenters. Apparently there was a laptop in place in every room with the presentation pre-loaded and no one navigated this process without a hitch. Even a pro like Richard Dolan struggled with this system, while giving a dark and scary lecture on the way that Artificial Intelligence will be changing our lives in the very near future. The person I flew across the country to see, Jacques Vallee, gave a very professional field report on some contact cases that he personally investigated. Unfortunately, the first case he presented was about a guy who’s family saw a blue light descend on him in their field and was later found dead with his ear burnt off. So many people left at that point that Vallee joked about it from the podium. By the end of his talk there were only about 50 of us left, a sad statement on the imbalance between content and spectacle.
There were bright spots: I was pleasantly surprised to see so many women attending. Maybe it was due the number of female presenters, with major presentations and “workshops” (more on that in a moment) by Linda Moulton Howe, Mary Rodwell, Dr. Lynne Kitei, Maria Wheatley as well as crowd pleasers like Laura Eisenhower and Carolyn Cory. But it was effective and seeing many couples in attendance was a relief from the Star Trek convention nerd-fest I feared. Its also very positive for UFOlogy going forward.
The expensive part of the conference is: I paid $270 for my 3-day pass to all the lectures plus some of the evening events like sky watching and a classic movie on the lawn. I also paid $29 for the pre-conference Giant Rock tour. Every speaker gave a one hour and 45 minute presentation, and most of the big names also gave a “workshop” which was a 2nd talk, for anywhere from $29 for Clifford Mahouty (which bizarrely was scheduled at 7:45 AM on Sunday!) to $69 for David Wilcock’s workshop, highly attended I’m sure. Then on the Monday after the conference, an entire day of “intensives” were scheduled with 13 of the presenters giving a 3-hour lecture. It would have been very easy to double the price of the 3 day pass with workshops and intensives for the serious fans, and I’m sure many did.
It was an incredible experience. Would I go again next year? I’ve already received emails from Contact In The Desert 2020 informing me that they have booked the entire resort and conference center for next year. It was interesting sharing the resort with families on vacation and golfers mingling with the UFO crowd. It was almost too crowded at times, I missed a few lectures because I couldn’t get in to some of the smaller rooms, and the parking was a mess; my rental car was a 10-minute walk away that required crossing a 6 lane road. But whether I go again will probably depend on who they book. I’m sure many of the same rock star presenters will be there, as will many of their fans. Having seen Vallee and Strieber I don’t know what it will take to make me fly cross the country again. But who knows? CITD 2020 may be the first post-Disclosure conference, and that would give them lots to talk about.
Richard Doty WTF???
I’ve been searching for any information about Richard Doty’s appearance at the UFO MegaCon in Laughlin NV last month. And yes, “mega-con” and Doty in one sentence is ironic. But Doty said in a hallway interview that the Cash-Landrum sighting was, wait for it, a UFO retro-fitted with a nuclear propulsion system. Why? Because they couldn't get the factory installed “engine” to work. So like good Americans, they took it to a shade tree mechanic, probably an old guy who knew motors, and put in something to soup it up. Doty claimed they flew it all around Nevada with no problem, but when they were taking it to an Air Force base in Texas that they had problems. That is an award winning explanation for a UFO sighting, and this from a guy who uses the word “disinform”multiple times earlier in the interview. Doty describes how when people who reported things in the sky that the government knew was ours, they would send out teams to “disinform” people and make them think it was extraterrestrial when it was our own experimental craft. Hard to accept his plea of innocence in the Benowitz case after an admission of being a disinformation agent.
Check out the interview :
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7rES0rY7ah0&time_continue=1519
Artificial Intelligence Halloween nightmares
I enjoy getting emails from Janelle Shane who posts weirdness created by something called BigGAN, an Artificial Intelligence that generates algorithms. Just in time for Halloween, most of them look inspired by a David Lynch-ian salvia trip, but some are nightmarish and creepy beyond the uncanny valley. This below is the BigGAN algorithm generated version of a stopwatch; what is most disturbing is the script used instead of numbers.
Check out the rest at http://aiweirdness.com
BigCAN Algorithm Generated version of a stopwatch, or “how our computer overlords view timepieces”