Everyday Spirituality

LIFE .....................................  again.

POT-POURRI: Pyramids, Monks, and Reality Chunks.

Aimlessly wandering through the forest today. I have just about dissipated the 80 boxes of "stuff" which came up from Wheeling finally, and the house and SITU garage and basement research areas are almost presentable to somebody "normal". Of course I know that I wouldn't have to spruce it up for any of YOU folks. You obviously like a "little" abnormality or you wouldn't be here.

With the better part of the "work" done, there came a brief releasing of breath, and a chance to think about posting something. This post is a mixture of things, which, though I guess we're supposed to think that "everything's connected", I'll leave the synthesis, if any, to you. I'm going to blunder about these:

a]. Shensi Pyramids;
b]. A claim of spectacular Buddhist monk psi;
and c]. everyone's favorite new word, "jottles".

The pictures above are the reason for topic "a". I was putting away a near-final SITU Chaos Box when a decaying plastic package containing these photos emerged. Thankfully, for a change, they were labeled on the back. But not when they were taken. They were defaced, and I've tried to clean them up so you can enjoy looking at them more.

Here are the words which went with each photo:
1). "Tsin Che Huang-ti pyramid. Length: 350m; height: 48m; volume: 1,900,000 cubic meters. Chensi Province."
2). "Han Yuan-ti pyramid. Valley of the River Wei"
3). "The Nan-Ling. Pyramid of Emperor Wu.
     "The Ngan-Ling. Pyramid of Emperor Hu-wei.
       150-200m in length; 20m high."
4). "The Marshal's pyramid."
5). "Han Tchao-ti pyramid. 73 BC" [backside actually had a different way of denoting the "before Christ era".]
6). "The Marshal's pyramid".

Well, that's what there was. SITU never used any of these pictures, but did address the mysterious Chinese pyramids very early [1973] in its publication of PURSUIT. The photograph that they DID use they claimed a member got from a book published in 1902, entitled Through Hidden Shensi by Francis H. Nichols. This reference seems almost unknown to people who are commenting upon the Shensi pyramids on the internet, which is a curiosity in itself. Wikipedia, for instance, knows nothing about this and references something about ten years later for earliest "western" knowledge of these structures. And I looked at a half dozen special interest sites, and none of them reference it either. A bit odd....

The PURSUIT article went on to talk of the "famous" US military pilot overflight in 1947, the report of which brought the subject of these pyramids "out of the closet" finally. The pilot, Colonel Maurice Sheahan, photographed a pyramid from the air and this was published.

Apparently this is that photo. This 1947 pyramid is manicured on the sides with a noticeably flat top. None of the mysterious photos from the Chaos Box look quite that way. The answer?: MANY pyramids scattered all about Shensi. Somehow, the photo above and the story by the American pilot got molded into a belief that the pyramid shown was a structure so great that it dwarfed the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The statement widely circulated that the Shensi pyramid was 1000 feet high, whereas the Great Pyramid only 470. However big the photo'd Shensi pyramid really was/is, none of the pictures that I just uncovered claim to show pyramids greater than about 150 feet. Arguments began about the size of this thing resulting in dataless baloney and name-calling.

Regardless of the debate about size [another utterly pointless human brouhaha], it's at least certain that the pre-Christian era Chinese emperors piled up great pyramidal mounds of earth for some reason, did this lots of times, and oriented all of them very close to true North-South-East-West lines. The Egyptians did this, too, and in their case we know that they were pointing their "exit shafts" towards the Polar stars, so that Pharaoh's soul could launch upwards into the realm of the "Undying Heavens" {The Star region which never set}, and there remain in Paradise Immortal. Did the Chinese Emperors share the thought?

Well, modern folks at least are trying to turn the "mystery" of the giant "White Pyramid" [there has gotten to be an added claim that the really big one has a glorious shining white top section], into a great variety of what seem largely to be their own reveries untrammeled by facts. One of these ideas is that the Great White Pyramid contains a veritable treasurehouse of ancient Chinese wealth. Another is that it is a great depository of secrets, and there seems to even be a newly minted "brotherhood of the White Pyramid" set up to keep the rest of us out. [wherever the thing is].

Now for a little added disclosure: when I first came across the SITU pyramid pictures, my first thought wasn't particularly about any mysteries associated with them, but instead of being reminded of reading "somewhere" of a guy who slogged across central China during one of their interminable wars, and "discovered" the location of the pyramids by accident. He then went on to a much more fascinating experience, which I will tell of in a moment. But I couldn't remember where I'd read this, and all my files were empty. Then it dawned on me that I "knew" one person who would have been panting with excitement about such things. Can you guess?

Wait for it..........

george hunt williamson.

Yep, good old Georgie. The article that I sought was right in his files. Like I just said, I'll get to the details of what really interested me in a moment, but GHW was on the hunt of big things himself. The map above [somehow GHW got hold of an old military operations map; the guy was amazing] shows George's plot of his interpretation of the trip that the writer, Fred Meyer Schroder, took in 1912. The markings are Williamson's. George deduced that Schroder came down the road [dark dashed line] entering the map top-middle and continued south and west with a line of pyramids on his left. GHW might actually be correct about this. Here GHW felt that Schroder "discovered" a whole array of pyramids seemingly kept secret even from most of the authorities.

Why was Williamson interested? He felt that these pyramids were "linked" somehow with the pyramids in Egypt, and that they somehow pointed the way to powers. He corresponded enthusiastically about this with New Zealand UFOlogist and generally far-out thinker, Bruce Cathie. Both of them believed that the Earth was dotted with some sort of regular grids, which ancient magicians or sensitives could detect and utilize somehow by building structures at key points. Cathie "calculated" that the prime pyramid of Shensi [the one marked "1" on the map] was precisely paralleled in one one his grids with the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Georgie was enamored of the whole lay-out, as he saw the pyramids in the form of the constellation Draco the Dragon, symbolizing the Earth's Dragonline power {the Chinese have their dragonline, feng-shui, concept rather than our ley line concept}. Both GHW and Cathie were now assured that they were on the path to greatness and proceeded to locate the site where Adamski met the Spaceman in the desert on one of Cathie's grid points. [NOT kidding].

Well, how much better can it get? Ivan Sanderson may have paid some attention to this, as he was migrating to a concept of a "dodecadated globe" to "explain" places like The Bermuda Triangle and the rest of his "Vile Vortices".

I hate to be a stick in the mud, but I believe that none of that grid-drawing makes any sense whatever. What I DO think makes at least partial sense is the adventure of Fred Meyer Schroder, who trekked past those pyramids in 1912.

Schroder was an original character who reveled in living a full throttle life. In 1912 he and a partner were making a good living operating caravans mainly between the Mongolian capital of Urga [Ulan Bator] and the Great Wall trading terminuses. They went into the Chinese interior carrying cigarettes and other items of vice, and bringing illegal guns back to Urga for the Mongolian rebels. At this moment, the revolution was particularly hot, and Schroder and his buddy were in danger from the Chinese military. Their Mongol friends brought them a surprising message that they were being sent for by the local high holy man. This lama told them that the Chinese military would crush them all, unless one thing happened. That one thing was that "the red god" would send a direct message to the monks around the Urga region to rise up as one force and fight. This was the name of the Tashi Lama of Kumbum Monastery, the second most revered holyman after only the Dalai Lama. Schroder and his friend were to journey to the monastery of the Red God and inform him of this need.

This was asking a journey of over 2000 miles, but in a way there was little choice. Schroder's partner stayed behind to help with the fighting, and Schroder went more or less south to pick up an influential lama to accompany him the bulk of the trip. It was during the mainly westerly part of the journey that Schroder saw the Shensi pyramids. All that element of the adventure seemed to make good reading sense to me. The travelers made greater than fifty miles per day mounted and enjoying no military interruptions, and with the lama along, good welcomings. Plus, the pyramids seem accurately placed and described. So far so good.

They get to Kumbum monastery and the Red God asked to see Schroder immediately. Schroder explained the reason for his journey. The Red God listened in friendly fashion, but did not then agree to do what was asked. There were regular meetings for two weeks more. During this time it was as if the high lama was getting to know Schroder at a depth he wanted to. It was then that the thing happened, or was alleged to have happened, that interested me. The Red God decided to show Schroder how the monastery got its information about how things were going in Mongolia.

Schroder says that he was taken by the Tashi Lama to a very quiet room, which seemed to be an environment for maintaining an altered state of consciousness via meditation. Young monks [over twenty in number] sat on prayer rugs in a semi-circle and had the appearance of dozing off. Other monks sat or stood by quietly watching the "dozers". When one of the monks would rouse, a watcher would hurry over to him with a cup of tea. The roused monk would drink avidly, then tell the onlookers "where he'd been" and what was the news he brought from there.

This room was, therefore, what we might today call a location for maintaining a dream-like altered state of consciousness for "remote viewing", or at least that's what I believe my friend Hal Puthoff would call it. The difference between what Hal tried to accomplish with remote viewers like Pat Price, Hella Hammid, and Ingo Swann was that the Tashi Lama [unlike the CIA] considered this "actionable intelligence". And the high lama DID act, agreeing that the information received by this method from the Urga area indicated that his support for the revolution there could produce success.

So ....... did this happen? We westerners have only Schroder's word for it. But the rest of his narrative also had "unbelievable {for the time}" wonders in it [the pyramids], and that part proved true. And we have had for many years the knowledge that Buddhist meditators claim at the highest levels to be able to achieve the "siddhis", or a set of paranormal abilities which include "distant knowing". And we have Hal's work, which says that even we undisciplined westerners can do it some of the time. Buddhist meditation seems to be a sort of "mental technology" for achieving {at great patient commitment} some of these potentials. Maybe Schroder was privileged to witness a "psychic information center" inside the Kumbum Monastery.

Now.... how to put all this remote viewing and pyramid mysteries together in true George Hunt Williamson style?

Whoops!! No way. You're not going to sucker me in on THAT one!!

Thankfully, George passed before the Martian pyramids stuff arose. Would he ever have gone bonkers on that!

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And now for something completely different.... yeh, I know, GHW would have found a connection with this too......

My [and our] good friend, Jerry Clark, sent me a piece of a contribution to a monograph by a parapsychologist named Mary Rose Barrington on her concept of "jottles". She says JOTTs or "Just One of Those Things". The idea is actually a bit useful, as it does not really embed within the word a model of the envisioned theoretical reason for JOTTs. It has gotten several persons talking about it, including a whole panel at the British Society for Psychical Research. Barrington is trying to describe in general terms the far-more-common-than-realized-or-admitted phenomenon of puzzling disappearances and re-appearances of everyday objects. When such happens, it's "just one of those things".

The table above lists Barrington's types of JOTTs or as they are coming to be called "jottles".

I had, and described here on the blog, a mind-boggler jottle [for me, anyway], when my watch went missing, and several days later AFTER I HAD PURCHASED A NEW ONE, it "reappeared" exactly in the wide-open corner of the kitchen cabinet-top where it was supposed to be all along. I have a VERY organized sister to whom these things happen disturbingly regularly. These are classic "comebacks" in the types listed above. My UFO buddy, Robert Powell, did us all one better with a "trade-in" wherein a pair of scissors was replaced by a non-identical pair, and later the original scissors "returned" alongside the new interloper!.

{ I probably shouldn't have included this along with the other material above, but I thought if I don't slot this in now, I'll likely forget, so here it is. I wanted to share the concept and the following two stories}.

I believe that Robert's jottle is better that Manfred's, but Grosse's tale is genuinely Out Proctor.

Barrington seems to lean towards an idea that quantum fluctuations in an unruly Universe must have something to do with this, and who knows? But I still prefer, as the Old Religion did, the concept of the paranormal entity who has been messing around with us from Time Immemorial. Heck, he/she/it can use quantum fluctuations like a Maxwellian Daemon.

Peace and joy, folks.... and may all your jottles be amusing ones.

Everyday Spirituality: Consciousness and Nature.

{normal caveat: this is not an ordinary entry for this site; no evaluation of anomalies are presented this day}.

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To start with something far less beautiful than the painting above:

I was looking out of my bathroom window into the back yard, when I saw a very large and very ugly white "rat" crawling through the wildflowers that cover the ground. It wasn't a rat of course, but a female opossum . Shortly, waddling purposively after, came a much larger male opossum, who obviously did not share my opinions of her beauty. Across the whole back lawn she went and then took a right turn towards the house.

I altered my viewing point to watch. She was quite ragged looking and he quite nicely kempt [for an opossum]. He looked like he could serve as a cute dumb-looking pet if you could ignore the rat-tail, but she was horrid. He disagreed. She would walk about, while he patiently crept several feet behind. If he'd get too close, she'd let him know, tooth and snarl. He was bigger but fighting was not what he had in mind.

But fight he ultimately did, because along came another male opossum to gaze lecherously at the Belle of the Ball. When the second fellow aggressed a bit, the first suitor violently attacked and routed him, while she looked on with interest. She returned then to her own grooming, and he to his patient hopeful state. I left them to their ways...............

We can anthropomorphize all we want, but the opossums were operating on rather low "animal instincts". He is, by almost any definition, stalking her. She, however, seems at her level of instinct, a fairly willing stalkee. She bides her time, and at some moment, she chooses. Then, it is my understanding, he walks away and she deals with the results. It is obvious that part of our own brain is opossum.

The birds are less spectacular and overt about this, but most of them [after mama makes the eggs] are the same way. Some guys hang around; some don't. We love the Cardinals because they stay together and share the parenting duty for the long haul. And we like the Robins, because while she is making eggs, he sits in the nearby tree while she feeds on the ground, and instantly routs any other Robin who comes into her feeding area.

Though we have Opossums, Robins, and Cardinals in us, there is something else which tries to raise us up, and do more genuine caring than just procreating the species. On my walk that day, I came across a middle-aged couple. They had stayed together far past procreating time. They'd dealt with their "opossum" and gotten on to something greater, something MORE conscious, something higher. They worked together side-by-side at their landscaping, and happily smiled and said hello to this stranger, myself. Along the path of my walk, there were, at two different times, WMU coeds jogging along, their ponytails flying. My own opossum was instinctively interested in all that, but my real conscious thought was: how good for them; free to choose their own paths, their personal growth, the quality of their lives. My backyard opossums, even my cardinals, would never have thought that.

But, while the instinctive individual may not manifest such consciousness, I wonder if Nature Herself does not do so. This second part of this entry comes from an experience of the singing of the coyotes, sent to SITU. The correspondent wrote:

".... we were living in an old adobe house .... A very old mesquite tree had grown up and through the living room ceiling, its branches covering most of the roof. Wonderful setting, on the edge of the desert, beyond which ran the Papago Hills.

" It must have been the July full Moon of the year 1949. A lovely night. I had dropped into a calm wholesome sleep. Suddenly ... I was awakened by a strange chanting, half-gay, half heart-rending sound, a chant out of eerie tales.

"I crept out of bed .... once on the terrace, I was held motionless because what I saw seemed unreal. Then I bumped my toe on a lawnchair and knew I was not dreaming.

"Out in the middle of the desert, the full Moon illuminated a large circle of golden sand in the strip between the arroyo and the foothills of Tumacacori, Arizona. All around the circle there were some ten-to-twenty coyotes --- I did not count them. At first they sat just inside the moonlight, howling low and soft at the Moon, their heads held high.

" Then their moan became an intense off-beat chant. By twos, by threes and fours, crossing each other, circling one another, they literally danced. As if the Master of the Ballet had drawn the most precise yet fantastic, chaste yet erotic, square dance that might have been danced at the Court of Louis XV.

" I was spellbound. My body writhed in sorrow and stretched in joy in turn, as I watched what seemed to be an endless .. grave ..  lilting ..  betrothal dance.

"And then a cloud darkened the Moon. The coyotes hurled their bodies to and fro with their usual dismal cries. .... and disappeared."

.... sometimes it seems, Nature has more to say.

And those times are Magick.

The area of the correspondent is one one several traditional Native American areas which have a legend of the Spirit who [like Prometheus of the Greeks] did humanity the great service of stealing Fire from the gods. In the Navaho myth, the thief is Coyote; the thieved are the Moon and the Wind.

Maybe some rare days, Old Coyote still likes to dance and sing and manifest beyond your average opossum.

Peace and Wonder, folks.

Hidden Case: After I tell you then three of us will know.

Been sloughing through the "trash paper" {mostly} boxes here at the thankful end of the unsorted SITU mess. Occasionally something worth saving surfaces. Only rarely will that be some kind of encounter incident, but here is one I found yesterday.

This is a UFO incident from the Korean War theatre in November of 1952, near Wonson. A member of SITU was talking to an old friend who had been a captain in the Air Force in the Korean War, piloting Douglas B-26 light bombers. He told her of a UFO encounter, or "something", that happened while on a mission, and she felt that it was interesting enough for him to write it down and send it to Bob Warth. I don't believe that it ever saw print in PURSUIT, but this wouldn't be surprising, given the utter chaos in some of the {non}filing of the era. I checked Blue Book, UFO-DNA, NICAP, and my astounding case reference listing from Hal Haglund, and it was in none of those things. So, even if it has snuck past me in PURSUIT, it's still a rare unknown bird.

As the blogpost title says: it will just be you, me, and the other guy who will know of this..... secrets.... yep, all this power of the unknown just for us............. SNAP OUT OF IT, YOU CLOWN!!!..... ooops, sorry ..... on to the case.

Our informant is piloting his B-26 on a mission to knock out elements of the enemy's supply lines [things like suddenly appearing railroad spurs even], when their attention was taken by an actual fake train with smokepots blowing as if an engine was going somewhere. Our guys in the plane realized that this was a phony, and probably a diversion of some kind in order to get them to waste munitions. While puzzling over whether there was anything anywhere to be seen to shoot at or bomb, a "white light" suddenly showed up 150 feet to the rear of the plane. This light simply stuck in there following them. It was shaped like a thin pear or a fat upright bowling ten-pin. [ look at the {brilliant, eh what?!} pictorial rendition above as "Stage 1"].

Our reporter, as Captain/pilot, decided to make a 270-degree turn and "attack" the intruder. {Stage 2}. As he was doing so, the "Ten-pin" began to move away to the south [they had been both flying due east]. The captain decided not only to chase, but ordered his gunners to get ready to fire. These guns were not able to be controlled by the pilot's position, and could be operated only by the radio operator, who served as the gunner. In a pinch, the navigator/bombadier could also fire the guns.

The Ten-pin changed form into a narrow strip of redlight, and began to pull away [the pilot thought that in the glare of this red light he could just make out a discoid form surrounding the strip]. He ordered the gunner to fire. Nothing happened. He said that this was not mechanical malfunction, because when he looked at the gunner and the navigator, they "were blanked out in such a way that they could neither talk nor respond in any way". They stayed in this blank frozen state for about two minutes, during which time the UFO successfully outdistanced the possibility of successful firing of the guns. When they clicked back in to reality, the pilot got them to fire several rounds, but without apparent effect.

All that was odd enough, but after the mission time period was completed and the plane landed, he could not get his gunner and navigator to remember anything from the two blank minutes of the flight.

Well now.... what are we to make of that?

We can't make much more of it than what it is, of course, but at least we can add some context. Our pilot informer seems to know what he's talking about, for one thing. A subtle hint of that is that people might say: Hah! Those planes were called A-26s not B-26s! Well yeh, but, during the Korean War only, the Douglas A-26 WAS known as the B-26; our guy is exactly right.

Also, troubles with "odd things" following our planes were somewhat common in that exact region at that exact time period. The above pages from Blue Book refer us to one such case. This was an incident, also Korean theatre November 1952, wherein a T-6 pilot saw a silvery round object to his left and turned his plane towards it. The object seemed to show curiosity or mimicry, and turned towards him, whereupon they did a little circling around dance in the sky. Perhaps the object tired of the dance, because after two full turns it decided to shoot off at high speed leaving the T-6 pilot gaping.

The investigating officer said this: "There previously have been a number of unidentified sightings in the CT and DT grid areas of Korea. Of these, at least five sightings have tentatively been identified as enemy balloons. Vectoring an aircraft on a free balloon is actually difficult, and false impressions of rapid movement can easily be made".

Well, OK Sir, but there is another possibility isn't there? That is the possibility that when the pilots say that the objects fly away from them in straight lines at tremendous speeds, they actually mean it AND IT'S TRUE. In both our cases, the UFO does exactly that: a burst of straight line speed which leaves the aircraft behind.

Secrets. that's us! "WE GOT THE POWER!"

Hah! Have some fun, folks.

GLASSBORO, NJ UFO Event {?} 9/4/1964: What a Mess!

How to fall into a morass: I'm sitting here with low energy, low incentive to really "get at" anything, but don't want to completely "old man" the day and just take a nap. Solution? I think that I'll just do something semi-mindless, not quite the boredom of simple filing, but close. Why not grab a bunch of case files, go through them sort-of-rapidly, and log whether they're any good or not? Great plan. I gather up 50 or so of the "CE2-everything else" files [my designator for CE2s which are not primarily landing marks/traces, nor electromagnetic affects, not physiological effects, but have something pretty physical about them nevertheless --- most of these are claimed crashes, leftover debris, angelhair et al, mass displacement like the lifting of something, etc.]

So, I'm merrily about 25-30 cases into it when up comes a file with an FSR article claiming "little white spheroids" left in piles in two cases. Really? One case is the famous Mother-of-All-Solid-Light-Cases from Trancas, Argentina, and the other is Glassboro, NJ September 4, 1964. Trancas I know a great deal about and it has become controversial. I knew really nothing about Glassboro. That, for good or ill, has changed. The Glassboro part of the FSR article was written by a Frenchman, Jean Bastide, about whom I know little. Bastide describes a meeting of two kids with hippie-like "Nordic-style" persons who lead them to a landing site {no craft there} where golfball sized powder balls are found. These balls "shrunk" over time, but were so cold to the touch that a policeman had to drop the thing immediately upon his investigation the following day. Hmmmm..... sounds pretty unlikely, but what's this all about?

So I made the mistake of reading the available source material {It took about four hours to beat the bushes to accumulate it}. At first reading, the case looks like this:

a]. kids report meeting with two guys who show them a landing site claim;
b]. kids tell Dad, who is a NICAP member, and he and they go out there the next day;
c]. Dad's fired up; gets local police out there by afternoon;
d]. Police are interested; get group out there in evening to measure site, which turns out to be a centerhole, three podmarks at distance, and eleven diskmarks surrounding the centerhole; some claims regarding metal fragments, fused sand, burnt surface, broken treelimbs are made.

e]. word gets out and tourists pour in trampling most of area;
f]. local USAF notified after trampling; they send six persons down; NICAP investigator and other UFO-interested people arrive within day of Air Force;
g]. USAF debunks; UFOlogists don't; samples allegedly being tested; two other sightings in area reported;
h]. high school kids get on the case and do a science project on it; declare it anomalous;
i].young college kid tries to sell local paper a story of how he hoaxed whole thing;
j]. police not amused; kid taken to court; pleads guilty; fined; case closed;
k]. civilian study comes in, claiming kid could not have produced tree damages;
l]. UFOlogists split on case: negative to lukewarm to positive;
m]. long time later Berthold Schwarz interviews Dad of kids; writes it up with new divergent details;
n]. Bastide reads Schwarz and buys new details and thus the FSR article;
o]. confusion reigns as to what really is documented etc.

Ouch!! What the heck is going on? Well, ready or not, I'm going to pound at this thing a little.

  The above picture is of the three local patrolmen assigned to measure "the scene of the crime" on the evening of the 5th, almost exactly 24 hours after the two kids were shown the site by the mysterious never-identified two older guys. These policemen might be the three names we know: Chief Everett Watson, Patrolman Robert Toughill, and Patrolman John Schulde of Glassboro PD. Watson came out to the site earlier with Ward Campbell, the father of the two kids, and after his initial inspection got his team to survey the situation. Their information, measurements, mapping are the only {literally} untrampled data that we have as to the ground effects. You can see the size of the center hole pretty clearly in this photo. Although NOT clear enough for US to be sure, this hole was described as a perfect circle of about 28" in diameter with relatively smooth conical sides extending 18' deep to a floor slightly less in diameter. Around this hole is a raised donut of earth about 5" high and also quite regular.  Some blackening of the sandy/clay soil can be seen scattered over the light surface, as if ejected from the middle.

Above: two slightly closer-in photos of the center hole. {I darkened the top one to try to get the detail a little clearer}. The police felt that there was evidence that sand had been fused inside the "crater", and that there were puzzling fragments of metal in there as well. Some samples of both substances were collected, both by the police and Mr. Campbell.

Patrolman Schulde made this map of his survey of the area. As you can see, situated around the center hole were eleven disk-like marks [Schulde says that these are "in the raised mound"] which stand out due to having a burnt appearance. Further away are the three "podmarks" These are at distances not quite regular, as you can read [of course, functional pod=landing devices would rarely encounter the ground at precision linear distances as their adjustment to the terrain is precisely why they are used]. Schulde says that the pod holes are about eight inches deep and formed by "depressing" the grassy area beneath. That thought needs some reflection when evaluating the hoax hypothesis.

All of that was done without any interference from public, civilian ufo, or military intrusion, since no one else knew yet. It was subsequently found that a nearby resident, Mrs. Freda DuFala, had seen a red glowing "moon" in that area on the evening of the fourth, and upon hearing of the case reported her sighting. There was another sighting in the area on the 5th, by a Mrs. Trautz. A third report was made by two girls about a sighting on the 7th. And, the press published the incident on the 6th, and spectators began, literally, trampling in on the evening of the 6th. By the 8th, about an estimated 4000 persons had visited the area.

On the 9th, the Associated Press calls McGuire AFB to inform them what's happening. McGuire sends six men down to Glassboro, a major, a captain, three sergeants, and a geology professor from Southern Connecticut College, Dr. Robert L. Brown. This is the same Robert L. Brown who was involved in that strange business of the odd spacefall in Hartford, CT, which passed through Fred Whipple's hands into the possession of T Townsend Brown, and somehow involved the NSA and anti-gravity theories. {we posted several entries on this strange affair much earlier on the blog}. Who knows what conspiracies one may wish to spin out of that. The military from McGuire were out of the base's Ground, Air Safety, and Disaster Control Office.

Once there, they went out to the site with police escort twice on the 10th. They took samples and copies of the police report. Samples were sent to Wright-Patterson for analysis, as was the report, parts of which ended up in the BlueBook microfilm. They also "discovered" bubblegum wrappers and the remains of firecrackers at the site, along with footprints of people in sneakers. Now why they thought these things significant after four days of thousands of sightseers, I'll leave for readers to speculate upon. We can only say that Robert L. Brown returned to the police station the following day to assert that "unofficially" the case was a hoax for precisely these reasons. Stranger yet, the Air Force spokesperson said that they had sent samples including "fused sand" to Wright-Patterson, apparently seeing no disconnect between supposed teen hoaxers and generating temperature to fuse the sand to a glass. Patrolman Robert Toughill, upon hearing the hoax claim, skeptically asked how then did "they" do it?

NICAP got wind of the case on the 10th and their local guy, chiropractic doctor John Pagano, went to the site on the 11th. Pagano is the same NICAP investigator who did the work on phase two of the Wanaque phenomenon as we've blogged earlier. Pagano interviewed Chief Watson, land owner Frank Sergi [who had accompanied Watson and Ward Campbell on the second earliest site visit], and Campbell himself. Sergi said that he was greatly impressed with the "perfect formation of the conical crater, AND ITS GLAZED APPEARANCE". [caps are mine]. This seemed to ensure the "fused sand" aspect of this. As Campbell was a NICAP member himself, he and Pagano went to the site for a hands-on investigation --- it's possible that that is who the people are pictured above. Chief Watson supplied Pagano/NICAP with copies of the photos of the police report, and Pagano learned of Mrs. DuFala's sighting of a red glowing object that same evening. Damages to some surrounding tree limbs were noted, and Pagano's report to NICAP was highly positive about the case.

Coincidental with the NICAP investigation was that of Alphonse Zulli. Also hearing of the case on the 10th, Zulli was very interested. And he had an unusual skill. Zulli was an expert on trees and the health and damages sustained by vegetation. He and two other people got in their car and drove to Glassboro on the 11th. They spent the whole day "in the field". Upon arriving at the scene, the three tree experts took a few ground photos {such as that at top}, but realized that the ground trampling made most investigation there fruitless. The standing trees however were above that tourist action and spoke their own story.

One of the first things that they noticed was that leaves hung charred off limbs 40 feet off the ground. A climber harvested some of these specimens and two things were found, either by immediate inspection [selective charring of some leaves rather than others] or labwork [no signs of tree disease nor insect damage]. In places tree bark was selectively charred and occasionally looked to have been blown off. No drying nor other exposure in the lab made healthy leaves turn the way these charred leaves appeared. One small pine seedling seemed to have been forcefully uprooted and the soil blown from the roots. The most damaged tree, a sassafras, had been forced partially out of the ground, its roots "sprung" from the soil. Inspecting these roots, these men estimated that about the strength of ten men [or machine equivalent] would have been necessary to haul away at this tree to spring the roots.

All of these discoveries were in their area of expertise. Getting away from that, they blew it by thinking that they'd perhaps found a fourth podmark --- this mark was later found to be an error or a hoaxed addition by someone. Back in their wheelhouse, however, they were able to measure the canopy area of the charred leaves, and estimate that it was about 30 feet in circular diameter. Zulli and associates of course hypothesized that a heated object of about 30-foot diameter had risen through this canopy causing the burn marks. NICAP saw their report ultimately, and, of course, liked it. Doubtless the Air Force did not.

Then something really unusual: high school science kids got involved ... and impressively. They, being local highschoolers, had heard about the brouhaha early in the game, but decided to wait until the crowds cleared to do their own investigation. This, they admitted, upon getting to the site on the 12th and seeing the crowd damage, was a mistake. Still, their effort was beyond admirable.

To begin with, there were lots of indications upon close unhurried inspection, to do disciplined measurements, and their survey seems to be the best that anyone took. Even the Air Force wanted a copy of their report and included the map above in their file. The kids had no hang-ups, calling the numbers as they saw them, even if they showed that there were no absolute symmetries in the array. But the most impressive thing about these kids is that they refused to stop thinking until the thinking trail dried up. They got the local soil records and compared the observations of the holes with the expected known pattern. They sampled the site in relationship with this known soil geology. They got expert geological opinion upon what they were seeing. They stated uncontrovertibly that their soil tests and observations conflicted directly with the statements by the USAF consultant Robert L. Brown. They were polite, but it amounted to: Brown was wrong. {Brown had stated that the hole contained Potassium Nitrate, a constituent of gunpowder, and therefore some hoaxer had just blown it open. The kids' nitrate tests were negative at several layers of the hole, and the only nitrate which showed was surface soil elsewhere}.

They also went at the tree phenomenon. They researched the Sassafras tree {The Air Force didn't even know what the tree was, stating it was an oak}. They consulted an expert botanist in the species and he gave them specific data for the forces needed to break such a tree in the manner it was. The estimation was a 1500 pound concentrated force load. They also noticed something no others had: one foot from the main hole's edge was a patch of moss. This moss has NO SINGED AREAS at all. Thus, whatever caused the other charring in the case was highly controlled and directional.

When they had finished their report, everyone else, Air Force, NICAP, Zulli even, should have bowed their heads in shame. THIS WAS REALLY APPLYING SCIENCE TO A CASE. Oh, and one last thing: the kids noticed that the podmarks were pressed downwards into the soil by a smooth powerful force which had a slightly rounded bottom. Roots of the surface plants had not been sheared off, but were pressed against the sides of the inner walls as the pressure came down. "Digging" these holes DID NOT happen.

Well, BRAVO --- every adult should have been kicked off the planet for their lack of performance.

So all seems going well, you say? Wrong again.....

The Air Force put out its opinion "officially" on September 30th. It said that the hole was crudely dug [false], that nitrate had been found in the center hole showing gunpowder was used [false], and that the metal fragments sent to them were nothing more than tinfoil folded up [who knows? but one wonders how Chief Watson et al were so thrilled by folded up tinfoil to suggest the USAF look into that]. The top record card shows the Air Force official conclusion of "HOAX".

All those reasons were wrong, but then the USAF lucked out. ... and the case takes a ridiculous right angle turn. Some young college clown, pictured above middle at his trial, now tried to sell a story [anonymously] to a local newspaper as to how he'd fooled everybody and faked the whole affair. He and one or two buddies had been the men who told the two kids of the UFO landing and showed them the site. They'd dug out the holes, placed a burning gob of gunpowder hanging over the center hole to produce charring and blackening of the soil, and then scattered Radium Dioxide around to make the site radioactive to clinch the UFO deal. .... great. Nothing like a complete jerk to sully a case.

Lloyd Mallan heard about this character [the local police pressured the newspaper into giving his name up and he was prosecuted for a misdemeanor], and immediately bailed on the case, writing it up as a caution to UFOlogists about clever hoaxing. Moseley and Saucer News, of course, bailed. NICAP didn't bail, but didn't peep too loudly as you can see from their mini-protest above. Dick Hall became scared of the case and didn't use it in his publications. Gordon Lore did, but barely mentions it.

IF the UFO community would have taken the original policework, the work of Zulli, and particularly that of the highschool kids into serious consideration, they would easily see that our young college idiot has A LOT of explaining to do. MUCH of his claim is obviously at odds with the facts [as another aspect: no radioactivity was measured by anybody including the Air Force]. The plant science stuff particularly gives his tale real troubles. But if HE is the hoax himself, then why would he do it?

He told the judge that he saw an opportunity to make some money the easy way for college. Well, interesting. I actually buy that. But with two add-ons: having a "plan" which includes a faked landing site, and a hope that it would grow into a local sensation allowing publication-for-profit a month or more later, is quite the stretch of my imagination. Secondly, his two anonymous friends were going to share this windfall profit? BIG BUCKS, I guess, from the local newspaper. AND --- his profit motive works just as well for a guy sitting around listening to a hullaballoo that he had nothing to do with, presenting the same opportunity.

It's tough for me to get behind this character without a lot more convincing of how he could pull it off.

So... just when I'm getting slightly comfortable with a possible understanding of this case, along comes the too-often incredible Dr. Berthold Schwarz. He rolls into a MUFON symposium in 1974 and says some pretty weird things. He says that in all the publications about Glassboro "to my knowledge some odd features were omitted". Really? And he goes on to say that the young kids didn't meet regular young men but long-haired, blonde, tall, thin, beautifully-faced men {we're in Adamski Nordic ET land here} who walked barefoot on surfaces containing gravel and broken glass. ... sheez, really?

And, there at the landing site were piles of whitish powder rolled up into golfball sized spheres. When these spheres were picked up 24 hours later by a policeman, they had to be dropped quickly for they were too cold to hold. ... good grief, I wonder how the oft-interviewed patrolmen forgot to mention THAT?

AND... it gets worse ... Schwarz knows these things because several years after the events, he, for reasons unstated, decided to look up Mr. Ward Campbell, the father of the original kids, and have a heart-to-heart about this case. Campbell then told him of blonde men and persistently cold golfballs. And one more thing: Campbell said that he had been stalked by someone. Someone would call him in his hotel rooms when he was on business travels, and quizzed about his "interests" in UFOs. This stranger would know things about him that no one should have known. Campbell was "flabbergasted and frightened". John Keel's MIBs strike again {Schwarz was, by the way a friendly associate of Keel}.

Good grief!! NOW what have I got?

Is this case a college goon's hoax? Is it a semi-normal landing trace case? Is it a Keelian Disneyland-of-the-gods case? I lean where you already know I lean. The college goon's thing doesn't match facts. The USAF's beliefs even worse. The Schwarz thing isn't in good contact with anything else in the resources. Can I subscribe it to Schwarz just being nuts?, or the Campbell guy gradually going nuts with too many UFOs to cope with?

And, on the good ole landing trace theory.... well, I don't even have a UFO.

Yeh... YOU did it, didn't you?

Peace, my friends.

Pot-Pourri: Just a Disorganized Jumble

This post is characterized by mediocrity. Mental energy is low here in Kzoo at the moment, and the infinitely-creative person, I am not. "Pace" for the blog is a bit slow [this thing averages around 80+ posts per year, and we're only at about 25 a third of the way through --- maybe there is something to Old Age]. But let's try something, and maybe there will be a light or a wonder here and there.

Grinding my way down through the last Sanderson/SITU chaotic boxes [this grind is one big reason for low energy], occasionally something pops up. One such recent popping was a handful of nine UFO case reports not seen by me, and maybe not seen by hardly any living human being for all I know. They were single report investigation sheets sent to Ivan Sanderson by John Lutz. I have a vague memory of Mr. Lutz being an active investigator in the 60s and/or 70s, but to my knowledge never knew him. He seems to have organized something called the "Odyssey Investigations Club of Baltimore", and they were doing field investigations there in the early 70s.

Here's an example of a case sheet {I've blocked the witnesses' names, as that is appropriate courtesy if one has no clear go-ahead to publicize personal information}. The "violet" writing on the sheet is my own; my quick reminder of how to ultimately folder and file the case, and whether any intirguing information is included herein. This particular case is what Hynek would have called a "daylight disk", even though it's not daylight, or a "nocturnal light", even though it's not a light. This was Allen's main classification error, and such things, day or night, should just be called "lights" or "objects". This particular "object" has decent "Credibility" in that it has two witnesses and a well-balanced interviewer, and interesting "strangeness" in that the yo-yo-shaped thing stuck around a good time, hovered, had associated lighting, AND THEN VANISHED AS IF SOMEONE TURNED OFF A LIGHT BULB.

Pretty good case, actually. The others are: one LITS; one BOLs [this could be meteoric fireball break-up]; 4 more "objects"{ one has non-inertial motion and a searchlight beam shining to ground; another blinks out when a plane approaches, but comes back on when it leaves}; and two cases hovering just at the 500-foot distance edge of what we call "close encounters". One of the near CEs seems to show non-inertial motion, and the other is a nice "double soupbowl" with portholes.

All-in-all, a nice double handful of cases from the Baltimore area between September 1971 and March 1972. One wonders: how many handfuls of investigated cases happened, were written up/ logged, and slipped into the obscurity of the complicated gloaming never to reach any UFO researcher or analyst? Hynek always worried about the 90% of UFO cases which were never reported by the observers. There is probably another significant cut out of the "10%" which WERE reported which never saw the eyes of the serious UFO community.

But, pot-pourri it is today, so onto to something else .... maybe.

I was sitting around like a wimp feeling sorry for myself [all grind and no play], and decided to buy myself a couple of presents. This is an immoral act on my part, I admit, but I'm weak, and I wrote two big checks to charities to try to make up for it. One of the presents was a short run of The FOLK-LORE Journal of the British Folklore Society way back in 1883. They were, romantically, the very first seven volumes, 1883-1889. As you see in the picture, some misguided English librarian decided to discard these treasures, but some saintly old curiosity bookseller rescued them. To him I am very grateful.

So, let's pick up Volume one, 1883. There seem to be many things of interest in here, and I've not read the whole volume "by a long chalk" as the earlier Brits would say. But one article initially caught my imagination, so that I did. The article, "Kelpie Stories", by Reverend W. Gregor. The tales were surprising to me the non-expert. All the Kelpies pictured in them were horses {Predominantly} or wrinkled old men. None were Loch Ness type creatures despite modern people using "water kelpie" as a possible paranormal solution to the Nessie mess. The horses DID frequent the waters or return to them at the end of the tales, and the alternate shape of the wrinkled man gives them shape-shifting possibilities, but I expected to see some hint of a more Nessie like manifestation {like Mhorag was said to manifest at Loch Morar in the 1880s}.

Also, gremlins are at work here in Kzoo: I swear that I read a kelpie tale of the 1800s wherein the "horse" was completely helpful, even kind... BUT when I re-read the volume one tales, no such episode was there. Hmmmm..... I DID mess briefly about in one or two others of these volumes, so....

Anyway, this incident was a little more like a reality encounter so {from memory} here it is. A family had gotten down to its last shreds of food and for some reason hadn't replenished { maybe waiting for tradable crop or money from somewhere --- I don't remember if the reason was stated}. With wife and children essentially starving, the father was finally ready for his last moment trip, got the old horse out of the barn, and began the long walk to the place where he could purchase the necessary meal. This supply was very heavy, and the horse was vital.

The man goes into the building to purchase the meal. The horse, no longer seeing him, is confused, acts upon instincts, turns about and walks back home. The man emerges later with the meal sacks, can't find the horse anywhere, knows he can't get these supplies to his wife and kids, and breaks down crying.

After his sobbing lessens a bit, he looks up to see a fine horse standing nearby. It is fully accoutered to carry his load. The man walks over to it, and the horse affectionately nuzzles him. no owner ever appears. After a while, the man loads the meal sacks on the uncomplaining horse, and, uneventfully, they walk home. The man unloads his vital food supplies to the delight of his family and returns outside to the noble helper horse.

It is gone. The man hears it splashing in the nearby lake never to be seen again.

This tale interests me. It is much more an encounter tale than a moral story [although you can write anything in there that you want to}. There is a simple slice-of-life aspect about this that the other kelpie stories didn't have, emphasizing as they did killing humans in lochs or rivers by treacherous drownings, or attempts to "keep" women, or knocking people on the head "just for the fun of it". So... who knows?

By other present was a 1901 copy of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I'd recently seen the modern movie of this theme [bears almost zero connection to Verne's novel] and had seen the older James Mason/ Pat Boone simple/joyful/low special effects version as well.

In the modern version, there was a major plot feature that claimed that there were people who were "Vernians". These were allegedly people who believed that Verne wrote his book from actual knowledge. My first impression of that was"yeh, right", but then I remembered George Hunt Williamson, and he is exactly the sort of person incapable of distinguishing fiction from fact [remember our long excursion with GHW trying to locate Shangri-La]. If one GHW existed there must be thousands. But Vernians....?

Well, I'm about 100 pages in and it's great fun. Professor Hardwigg [not Lindenbrook] has taken inspiration from the "legendary" Icelandic scholar, Arne Saknussem, and followed his lead to an Icelandic volcano, whereupon a passage far downwards is discovered. I'll not bore you with the difficulty that putting this shaft right on the mid-Atlantic rift causes.

But Vernians....?

Vernians it appears must believe that Arne Saknussem really existed and really knew about this Icelandic passage, and somehow Verne got hold of the secret. That was when a memory gong went off. Someone DID believe that. He was a writer who published in Ivan's PURSUIT. The guy's name was Lorenzoni. In 1980 he published a short thing trying to rationalize how Saknussem could have existed, despite everyone else saying that no evidence for such a person was known. He, through arcane sources, said that someone named Gerard Heym was the leading source for Saknussem's existence and that he had told Serge Hutin that Saknussem was a prominent scientist/alchemist of the 16th century, who fell upon bad times with the protestant church and was hung in Copenhagen while all his works were publicly burned in 1573.

Well.... quite the story. Sort of like The Bermuda Triangle where all the evidence disappears. Lorenzoni then informed SITUs readers that somehow some of this information was preserved in Iceland and was used as the basis for a rare 1723 book published in France, anonymously, entitled Relation D'un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde. It is from this book that Verne, allegedly, may have gotten "real" knowledge. Actually the above work was written by Charles T. Garnier in 1721, and published in one of several volumes under the general title of Voyages Imaginaires, Songes, Visions et Roman Cabalistiques.

Hmmm.... THAT I think was just a nice sidetrip for me on the path exploring mysteries. I can't honestly find any data to encourage the hypothesis that Arne Saknussem existed, nor that Jules Verne knew about "inside" information --- ouch! Terrible pun. I'll have to be content just to read Verne.... and that's plenty good enough.

Last in this smorgasbord: sitting outside for prayer time this morning, I saw one of the neighbors' dogs being let out of the house "to do the necessary". The dog was SO HAPPY just to run a while... just to be joyfully alive. Then shortly came the master's call and the opening of the door back inside.

The little dog went unprotestingly back... back to safety... back to warmth ... back to company and food and no fear.

We're like that little dog. If we're lucky, we let our minds run free and joyfully "outside the restricting box"... a little. Then we run back inside --- to the normal, the safe, the undebated constellation of accepted beliefs.

I have a friend who comes over regularly, running free outside his box, and wants to talk about [mainly UFOs} anomalies. But the "box" is always right there nearby. It's the fear of being fooled. When a new thought or possibility arises, he is immediately thinking of all the ways it cannot be true. He runs back inside. Occasionally we see folks even here on the Big Study who are like that --- "no fool I" --- running back to the constricting box.

We always need to critique and analyze, and when things don't add up {like Arne Saknussem}, put the failed idea to the side. But we need to do something counter-culture even more. Before the criticisms, before the absolutisms, before even the nit-picking, we need to give the ideas some air. We need, without being the fool, to try to see how something just MIGHT BE TRUE afterall. Novel ideas are fragile. They cannot survive blind aggressive assault. They must be given space. They must be allowed to fly joyfully.

It is in the Language of the Birds.

.... and who knows? In that "dark and scary" world of new thinking, YOU might even receive a Bolt of Lightning.

Peace and Joy ... spend some time outside your box.