Not exactly rats, but...

UFO mavens are abandoning, in droves, UFO UpDates, that slovenly hovel where UFO geezers and close-minded. fascistic-like UFO aficionados have congregated for years, to hawk their mind-numbing hypotheses about flying saucers while stifling open discussion and intelligence.

A foul-stenching clique has arisen at UpDates, containing such one time UFO luminaries at Jerome Clark, Don Ledger, Bruce Maccabee, Kentaro Mori, among others.

But those luminary-lights have dimmed considerably in recent years, and what we’ve noted for some time now, about the UpDate list-master, Errol Bruce-Knapp and his minions, has finally come to awareness by slow-to-get-the-message UFO hobbyists.

Our friend Paul Kimball, at his blog – The Other Side of Truth – has relieved himself, once again, of UpDate visitations, because of how Bruce-Knapp closed the door on Carol Rainey, whose excoriation of Budd Hopkins’ abduction methodology brought opprobrium in spades, to Hopkins, Ms. Rainey herself, and advocates on both sides.

You can see Mr. Kimball’s rejoinder and reasons for abandoning UpDates about this matter by clicking here.

Brit UFO researcher and folklore expert David Clarke left UpDates several months ago, after suffering megalomaniacal attacks by Jerry Clark, who uses UpDates to showcase his past UFO acumen and lost-stature as a bona fide UFO writer/researcher.

Others have left because they were held at bay or bludgeoned by the likes of Bruce-Knapp’s lapdogs whom we know, first hand, to be a truth-bending, sociopathic personalities, jealous of thinkers who capture the UFO audience, while they lie fallow in the muck of their disgusting mind-sets and hatred of the truths that they pervert.

At any rate, UpDates is in its final decline, and will be out of business by the end of 2011.

We’ve told you so, and now persons with more street cred than us are doing so also.

Frankenstein's Monster and Roswell

Christopher Allen [CDA], a Roswell skeptic and the story’s most intellectual debunker, often points out that Roswell was dead almost immediately after it came to light in 1947.

And he’s right, of course.

The headline(s), touting a captured flying disk, moved from the front pages of newspapers to those newspapers’ morgues, within hours of the original outing.

Roswell’s flying saucer incident remained moribund for thirty years, until it was resurrected by a few opportunistic writers and UFO “researchers” – including Stanton Friedman, Charles Berlitz, William Moore, Kevin Randle, and a few others.

The story was dead until those mad men raised it from the grave in the late 1970s.

And ever since, the original story has been accreted or enhanced by a slew of UFO mavens, among them David Rudiak, a full-blown Roswell extraterrestrial supporter/believer.

Christopher Allen’s scenario of a dead story brought to life by men with an agenda to “prove” extraterrestrial visitors crashed near Roswell reminds this writer of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gothic tale Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.



In the Shelley story, as you know, a body is created by Dr. Frankenstein putting together a creature from dead body parts, some human, some not.

Frankenstein comes to loathe his creation, just as some UFO investigators [Kevin Randle?] have come to loathe their initial Roswell ET support.

But the creature – Roswell – lives on imbued with a life that isn’t easily snuffed out, no matter how hard intelligent people like CDA try to kill it.

The Roswell creature is composed of all kinds of mouldering additions, each with a history and one-time life, but none salient as a living, true experience, only alive now because of their creative addition to a form that was dead but is now alive by alchemical-like machinations.

Killing Roswell is as daunting as it is in the original story and every film or story that has followed Ms. Shelley’s 1818 tale.

Real Contactees?

A man, Wilbur J Wilkinson, provided this script, claiming it was from a race using the moon as a way-station for its people from the planet Maser.:



Here’s the almost unknown story as recounted by Jerome Clark in one of his books:

Hunrath and Wilkinson account

In the script above, nothing registers, except the word Enlil, which represents, in Sumerian “theology” the Lord of the Air and Lord of the Command (whose mother was Ki).

Yes, the story is goofy on the face of it, but the disappearance of the two men, like the mysterious disappearance of pilot Fredrick Valentich, is intriguing.

Valentich YouTube video

The contactee stories, while mostly fictional, should not be dismissed out of hand.

There may be a truth or a reality inside them, somewhere….

Crashed Roswell Flying Saucer(s)? Not so fast...

Paul Kimball has addressed the “crashed flying saucer” scenario of Roswell several times, most recently during a Kevin Smith radio show (Wednesday, 4/15/11) and at his blog, The Other Side of Truth.



Mr. Kimball’s thesis, if we understand him correctly, is that it seems unlikely that hypothetical extraterrestrial beings, able to traverse vast reaches of the Universe, time, or other dimensions would end up crashed on Earth (near Roswell) because of a mishap.

Kimball’s view makes sense, and counters the idea posed by Anthony Bragalia (here at this blog, just below) and ourselves (also here and elsewhere) that an unfortunate confluence of events brought down a flying disk that was recovered, perhaps, at or near Roswell.

Indeed, how could an interstellar ship escape all the dynamic vicissitudes of the Universe and then end up on the desert ground of New Mexico?



Mr. Bragalia presents a well-reasoned explanation in his blog posting (below), but his conjecture flies in the face of Mr. Kimball’s contrary assessment.

One can suggest that extraterrestrial beings may have come from a planet or world where such things as lightning, radar, or meteorological maelstroms do not exist and they encountered an environment that was totally foreign to them.

(This begs the question, of course, about their reconnoitering acumen or preliminary evaluation of Earth.)

Time travelers would know about Earth’s weather patterns or its radar facilities.



Inter-dimensional travelers, on the other hand, would not, and may come from a dimensional existence that has physics totally different from ours.



Visitors from galaxies far, far away would hardly make such frequent stops at Earth, letting all the other wonders of the Universe go unvisited, as we’ve argued elsewhere.

And if they should make Earth a continual stopping point, would they do so in craft so flimsy that crashes are an inevitability?



Mr. Kimball adopts the reasonable view, but does accept the possibility of a (Mac Tonnies) crypto-terrestrial crash.



We accept that something unusual happened near Roswell in 1947, something possibly extraterrestrial or, more reasonably (for us), something involving Earth’s military arm, such as a test flight gone wrong or a missile/balloon mishap that has become configured by a contrived extraterrestrial mythology, engineered by the likes of guys named Schmitt, Moore, Friedman, Randle, Berlitz, et al.



Either way, Paul Kimball’s assessment that a crash of an advanced extraterrestrial craft seems highly improbable, and unlikely goes to common sense which is in short supply amongst UFO aficionados

UFO and abduction antecedents: The Betty Hill account

That there are precedents for flying saucers and alien abduction-medical procedures is a given.

Here are three, from just before the 1940s onslaught of UFO events:


From 1908


From 1935


From the 1930s

How memory clasps on to such images is covered in the psychological literature as you know. For instance, items seen or experienced, as those above, reside in memory and are recalled when associative material is suggested. The problem in retrieval is that a confluence of memory alters or distorts the attempted retrieval item, and it is remembered with all the (similar) accoutrements that have surrounded it over the years. [Psychology Today, CRM Books, Del Mar, California, 1970, Page 347 ff.]

...memory seems to evolve over time. Items [are] not lost or recovered at random. Rather, material that was more foreign to the subject, or lacked sequence, or was
stated in unfamiliar terms, [is] more likely to be lost or changed substantially in both syntax and meaning. [The hippocampus and declarative memory: cognitive mechanisms and neural codes by Howard Eichenbaum, 2001]

and is never accurate:

According to much of the recent psychological literature on memory, Bartlett
should be credited with the insight that remembering can never be accurate
but is, instead, more or less of a distortion. [MISREMEMBERING BARTLETT: A STUDY IN SERIAL REPRODUCTION by James Ost and Alan Costall]

For example, here’s how we conjectured, early on at this blog (in the archived postings) Betty Hill’s “star map.”

We suggested that she recalled, under hypnosis, a map that hung in her place of employment. This is that map:



When she was hypnotized, she recalled and drew this now (infamous?) map:



Betty Hill grasped from her Long Term Memory, an image that meshed with the story she was endeavoring to relate.

Why the map at all? We surmise that Betty Hill has an associative attachment to the map, for some emotional reason, and brought it forward to assuage her feelings about what it represented.

Was Barney Hill in the service during WWII, or one of Betty Hill’s relatives? A father, a brother, an uncle, anyone with an emotional connection to Ms. Hill?

(We also suggest that Betty Hill saw the alien medical scenario above, which appeared in materials that she was said to read.)

This is all hypothetical cogitation on our part, but it is the kind of rumination that needs to be applied, more judiciously of course, to all UFO events, Roswell in particular.

This posting is an attempt to push (younger) bona fide researchers into a modus that gets the study of UFOs out of its laughable rut.

We can only hope that some will pursue the topic accordingly….

Ascensions and Levitations: A UFO Connection?

Outside the alien abduction scenario there is a history of “ascensions” (brought to the fore by the impending Easter season and the alleged ascension of Jesus after his resurrection).

Ascension means to ascend -- to go up, to heaven or somewhere above.



This has been a staple of religious and mythological storytelling since the beginning of history, and is part and parcel of many UFO reports (which we’ll cite below).

Some Biblical accounts:

Enoch was said to have been taken by God [Genesis 5:24] and Elias (Elijah) “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” via a fiery chariot and fiery horses [4 Kings 2:11].



Ezechiel (Ezekiel) was lifted up [Ezechiel 11:1] and Jesus “was taken up into heaven” [Mark 16:19], and “was carried up into heaven” [Luke 24:51].

In mythology, Heracles (Hercules), upon his death, a cloud passed over his body and bore it away, to Olympus.

Aeneas, a hero of Troy, after setting up a new home for the Trojans, was killed in battle, and was lifted up to heaven.



Diomedes, king of Argos, and one of the Epigoni -- the sons of the Seven against Thebes – was murdered by King Daunus, and divinely spirited away.

In Catholic legend, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was lifted, body and soul, upon her death to heaven.

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes many ascensions or levitations, ascribing them to acts of God.



Here is a list of some of the saints and persons so elevated:

St. Edmund, then Archbishop of Canterbury circa 1242.

St. Teresa of Avila in Madrid during 1680.

Sister Mary an Arabian Carmelite nun in Bethlehem circa 1700.

St. Adolphus Liguori in Foggia during 1777.

Father Suarez at Santa Cruz in Southern Argentina in1911.

But what spurred this posting, aside from the upcoming Ascension Holy Day, are two accounts that I stumbled across, which most of you may be familiar with…

The David Lang and Oliver Larch disappearances (from Wikipedia):

According to the stories surrounding him, on 23 September 1880, Lang, of Gallatin, Tennessee, was walking across the grounds of his farm to meet Judge August Peck who was approaching his farm in a horse and buggy, when Lang vanished mid-step and in full view of the judge, his wife Chanel and his two children, and the judge's brother-in-law. The ground around where Lang had been walking was searched in case he had fallen into a concealed hole, but no trace was found. The story further states that Lang's children later called out to him, and heard a disembodied voice calling as if from a great distance.

The story of David Lang was published in Fate magazine by journalist Stuart Palmer, who claimed that he had been told the story by Lang's daughter. However, no trace of David Lang nor his family (including his apparent daughter) was ever found in any records of that period, and the entire article was later determined to be a hoax likely inspired by the short story "The Difficulties of Crossing a Field" by Ambrose Bierce (1909), collected in his book Can Such Things Be? In 1999, the modern composer David Lang based an opera on Bierce's story. (The story has also become a popular urban legend).

The story of Oliver Larch (Sometime known as Lerch or Thomas) follows a similar pattern to that of David Lang. According to the narrative, Larch was on his way to collect water from a well one winter when he vanished, leaving nothing behind but a trail of footprints in the snow which terminated abruptly, and a series of terrible cries for help such as "Help, they've got me!" that appeared to come from above. Larch's story was later found to be a variation on "Charles Ashmore's Trail", published in 1893 by Ambrose Bierce. In some versions, Larch's story is set in late 19th century Indiana, in others, it is set in North Wales. One particular recurring variation was an Oliver Thomas of Rhayader, Radnorshire, mid-Wales with the date given as 1909.

For a skeptical clarification and implied hoax explanation, click here

In UFO lore, there are many UFO stories based upon ascending, all usually gathered within the abduction category, but not correctly, I think.



Betty And Barney Hill (1961)

Hickson/Parker (1973)

Carl Higdon (1974)

Travis Walton (1975)

Kelly Cahill (1993)

While UFOs do not factor in to most of these accounts, in the stories where they do, however, the descriptives of the ascensions, levitations, and upliftings to the crafts come close to that provided in the stories noted above.

Is there an interdimensional aspect to these events, theorized by M-Theory (string theory)?

Or are physical laws just suspended in some circumstances?

And are UFOs merely omens of dimensional shifts or some other physical quirk?

In Bruce Duensing’s ruminations at his blogs, there is an interconnectedness of all these things.

UFOs may only be one (tangential?) aspect of a reality that is intertwined with elements paranormal, prosaic, and transcendental – a reality too bizarre and complex to explain, no matter how hard we humans try.

Perhaps….

N.B. John Mack’s study of “abductees” indicated that “out-of-body” experiences were prominent in the accounts he monitored.

In the Lang and Larch stories, family members heard voices from above the spot where the men allegedly disappeared.

(In ancient times, sailors approaching an island near the mouth of the Ister River claimed to have heard the voice of Achilles, who had been slain much earlier.)

Thomas Aquinas, who had a transcendental experience that caused him to stop writing – what he saw made his efforts as so much straw in the wind – was said, by G. K. Chesterton, in a work on Aquinas, to have been seen to levitate while saying mass, near the end of his life.

UFOs: The Computer Model

UFOs, the truly unexplainable objects, may be computer rendered models or computers themselves.

A current New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik [New Yorker, Get Smart, April 4th, 2011, Page 70 ff.] deals with the question, “How smart are computers, really?”



But Mr. Gopnik’s piece deals with prosaic computers that are extant.

A better source for the idea that computers can be real in themselves, and create realities that are, for all intents and purposes, actual is:

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Premier issue, Volume 1 Issue 1, Winter 1992, Editors: Thomas B. Sheridan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and Thomas A. Furness, III Univ. of Washington, Seattle, Published in: Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, MIT Press Cambridge, MA,

Let us assume that what are seen in the skies, sometimes – not the mistaken Earthly aircraft or misperceived meteorological manifestations – may be images produced by computers, or computers themselves.

In the Bosco Nedelcovic revelations about the CIA/DoD contrived Villas Boas event, covered here, in this blog, in a very early posting and also in Nick Redfern’s Contactees, (Chapter 20), Nedelcovoc a CIA-AID operative relates that the military used holographic imagery to produce an alien ambiance in tests related to extraterrestrial encounter experimentation, of which the Boas case was one of several.



(Another CIA contrived event, according to Nedelcovic, was the Scoriton incident, also covered here in the archived postings.)

That the United States military used, allegedly, holographic imaging is not the point of this posting.



The reference is to indicate that computer generated imaging can be foisted upon the public or military, in airplanes (such as the B-29 or RB47 sightings mentioned here recently), and that such imagery manipulation may account for some sightings which have an inherent intangibility.



The argument that radar returns wouldn’t be affected by holography can be set aside as radar manipulation would be a concomitant ruse, either by the military or government agency, or by an advanced alien species, if you wish.

But then there is the proposition that what is seen in the skies and sometimes on the ground are actual computers, programmed to interact with humans or Hastings’ nuclear military installations, for instance, duplicating a physical presence without the actual probability of an interaction that would cause problems of an unexplainable kind, something less explainable than a sighting of an amorphous, disappearing UFO.

The Rendlesham incident would be such a contrivance.



But by whom or what exactly?

The UFOs are computers of a virtual kind, without mechanical substance, machines that “think” and act just as virtuality thinks and acts in computer gaming today, and early on in computer simulations created during World War II.

(Alan Turing is the progenitor of such computer modeling and programming.)



A source for what can be done with such virtuality can be found in Marvin Minsky’s
The Society of Mind [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1985/1986] and more pertinently in his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines or Perceptrons.



What we’re proposing here is that some UFO sightings may be virtual realities and some may actually involve computers (machines) of a quasi-tangible nature programmed to intersect and interact with humans.

The idea is not as farfetched as one might expect, if they see the gist of Gopnik’s piece in The New Yorker, or if they read the MIT papers we’ve loaded at our UFO web-site.

More will follow on this “hypothetical” thrust, you may be sure….but, meanwhile, for a truly brilliant exegesis of what computers may be capable of CLICK HERE

Folie à beaucoup: The Roswell Psychosis

Folie à beaucoup – communicated insanity, induced insanity…suggestibility plays a part…It happens that paranoid or paranoiac and rarely hypomanic patients not only can make those with whom they [associate] believe in the delusions, but they so infect them that [those contacted] continue to build on the delusions. [The Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Leland E. Hinsie, M.D. and Robert J. Campbell, M.D., Oxford University Press, London, 1970]

Roswell is an example of how a group of normal individuals can act in psychotic collusion, spurred by a bizarre incident that was instigated by one person, acting on a possible mercenary whim.

(The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme is a current example of the rampant psychology underlying what we see as the prime motivator for the Roswell incident.)

Mac Brazel is reported to have sought the way to gather a reward for discovering a flying disk, which was generated by his findings of some somewhat strange debris on the farm where he was foreman, debris from a balloon or some other aerial mishap.



The debris is a sidebar here. Whatever Mac Brazel found is irrelevant to our point. His “debris” caused him, perhaps, to try to obtain some needed money – he was a poor man by 1947 standards, as were many who farmed in the New Mexico area in which Roswell and Corona are located – from an offer of $3000 to anyone who could produce fragments of a flying disk.

(The source of that offer is not clear, and really has little to do with our hypothesis here. Brazel may have only wanted attention, or got caught up in a mild hysterical episode that afflicted the Proctor family with whom he was commiserating about the “stuff” he had found.)

Brazel’s foray into Roswell generated an interest by the Army base there, and Walter Haut, Jesse Marcel, Sr., and others were infected by the “flying disk” suggestion of Brazel or the media frenzy caused by the prior Arnold sighting and other flying saucer stories that were prevalent at the time.

Once the story was tamped down by saner voices (the Army’s Ramey and Blanchard) and news media lost interest, the people who were initially involved with the inadvertent scam went back to their humdrum lives; that is until Moore, Friedman, Berlitz, et al. resurrected the “incident” and cause an unrepression of the folie à beaucoup.



Once the floodgates of the original flying disk scam were reopened, coupled with suggestibilities by the UFO “researchers,” the Roswell myth was born and has spread as folies do to others who came into contact with the original Roswell witnesses or who come into contact with those – the UFO researchers -- who’ve met with the original participants in Brazel’s ultimately unproductive scam.

Dee Proctor has been a prime participant in the original Brazel instigated brouhaha, dissembling the story in a post 1947 folie à deux. And other alleged Roswell witnesses have engaged in the folie or started a new folie for reasons of nefarious kind.

Our point is that Mac Brazel started, for whatever reason(s), inadvertent or otherwise, a cascading series of events that developed (and continues) under the psychiatric sobriquet of a folie à beaucoup.

Roswell may only be that, a psychotic episode that resonates with persons today as psychologically significant as it did back in 1947.

The Braxton/Flatwoods Monster

Kevin Randle has been torturing visitors to his blog with a protracted take on his involvement with the so-called Braxton/Flatwoods "monster" incident from 1952.

Click here for a WORD document (from our archives) of Matt Mullins' succinct account of the story.