Thoughts on The Messengers by Mike Clelland

Before I start today’s post, I want to put a plug in for another of my favorite podcasts – Expanded Perspectives.  Being a Texas native myself, listening to Cam and Kyle each week helps me keep the Texas twang in reserve here in the land of the drawl.  This ‘cast covers a huge amount of ground ranging from ‘alternative’ history to Sasquatch into hauntings and on to UFO lore.  The hosts obviously love what they do and they are excellent storytellers to boot.  Highly recommended, please check out the podcast if you are so inclined.

I have had occasion, in the past week, to hear author Mike Clelland speak about his new book, The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee and I actually took enough interest to pick up the book and begin reading it.  I have not completed the text but I can tell you that this book is well written and fascinating from the very beginning, chock full of stories that will make the reader take a closer look at their concept of reality.

And that is exactly what a book of this sort should do.  Mr. Clelland understands that he does not know and understands that the strange things that are happening to him and to his percipients are mysterious, that, indeed, they are a mystery in the old sense of the word.  If one goes all the way back to the Greek root mystes, one finds that the word refers to an initiate, an individual who has undergone the rites of one of several sacred places, most notably Eleusis.

In much the same way, those who are undergoing these experiences are undergoing their own initiation.  Sometimes beginning in childhood, these individuals are moving from a life of the ordinary and materialistic into a life where the Otherworld can break into their consciousness and effect that reality at any time.

I often wonder what would happen if abductees were placed in a magical or shamanic training program when they began to have their experiences.  I cannot help but wonder if they would not quickly learn to turn the experience off when it was unwanted and move more deeply into it when they had the time and space to explore that mystery.  I suspect that some interesting developments in the abductee world would ensue.

Mr. Clelland states, in the interviews I have heard and in the book, that his experiences and those of others seem to be directed by a consciousness that is trying to get their attention.  I strongly suspect that he is correct and, like the oracles of old, some training would allow these folks to get in contact with whatever is trying to get their attention.

I would be remiss if I did not share my own owl experience at this point.  I was in my early 30’s so this was over 20 years ago but I remember the event clearly.   I was working security for a large bank operations center in Arizona and, on this night, I had drawn patrol duty so I was spending a lot of time walking the building and driving our golf cart over to an out building to check its perimeter.  During this time, I was very actively engaged in learning ceremonial magic, practicing various rituals regularly and reading a lot on the subject.

As I drove back from the out building, I turned onto the street behind the operations center and noted something on the street in the golf cart’s dim headlights.  It appeared to be a rag or piece of debris but I slowed, just to be cautious and, as I neared the object, it ruffled its wing feathers and then turned directly toward me.  The object was a small burrowing owl, common in that area, but the bird was not behaving normally at all.  It sat squarely in front of my golf cart and refused to move, staring at me with the intensity that only an owl can manage.  I am not sure how long we sat there but I remember thinking that this creature’s presence was a clear sign to me to keep exploring.

Now, I really do feel that this was a ‘real’ owl and not some sort of screen memory but this event has stayed with me just as my first encounter with my shamanic power animal has.  If you want to be truly amazed by the richness of owl encounters and lore as well as reading some incredible synchronicity narratives, Mr. Clelland’s book is a great place to start.

The Next Big (Bird) Thing

It really irritates me when I know that I have written something in the past and, because of all the blog posts I have written, I am unable to find that post. Not even sure what word to search for . . .

Ah well, such is life, I suppose. In any event, I recall that, at some point during the life of this blog, I heard a podcast where someone mentioned that it seemed as though paranormal episodes and sightings were down, as though the Otherside were taking a little break. Whoever I was listening to conjectured that whatever is responsible for paranormal activity in the broadest sense (everything from UFO’s to ghosts and monsters) was getting bored with us and that, maybe, activity was just petering out. My comment at the time was something along the line of there being no folkloric support for the Otherside walking away from humans and that I suspected that those powers were simply cooking up something new to “mess with us”.

Well, it seems that, rather than cooking up something new, the Otherworld has simply rotated its stock and suddenly, we are seeing an influx of sightings of what some call Thunderbirds and, better yet, living pterosaurs. Linda Godfrey, best known for her Dogman/Manwolf research, has commented on social media that she is getting more big bird sightings than anything else since the publication of her recent book, American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends and Sightings in North America and I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in winged creature sightings on Lon Strickler’s Phantoms and Monsters. Mr. Strickler has also been tracking sightings of a something that distinctly resembles a glowing, flying manta ray. He is not even sure whether he should call it a UFO or a cryptic. It seems that monster hunters are going to have to join the UFO community in keeping an eye on the sky.

Now, it is my usual custom on this blog to present a phenomenon and then try to offer a magical explanation for that phenomenon. There are some phenomena though that make this extremely difficult since said phenomena are manifesting in different ways and require multiple explanations. A good example of this is the cattle mutilation phenomenon. In my review of a recent book on those incidents, I stated flatly that no one magical explanation seemed to fit the facts in these cases and that the obvious imposition of human agencies into the events made interpretation fraught with peril. I see much the same thing with the recent wave of flying creatures and I return to my theory that certain agencies in the Otherworld are seeking to “mess with us”. By presenting us with multi-layered phenomena, these agencies are preventing human beings from coming up with any sort of universal field theory of the paranormal.

I will say this about some of the broad categories of winged creatures though:

1) Thunderbirds – I will define these as abnormally large birds (many times described as the size of a small airplane) that often seem to resemble raptors or very large crows or ravens. These creatures seem to be something that the Native people of this country recognize (much as they recognize Sasquatch) so, were I a field investigator, I would turn to the Native peoples for their thoughts on these giant birds. I will also note that everything that exists in our world or has existed still exists in the Other but the translation from one world to the next can result in interesting variations in size. Thus the stories of little people, just like ourselves only much tinier, and, perhaps, the sightings of giant birds in our world.

2) Pterosaurs – we have a fossil record of this creature but it is supposed to have been extinct for millions of years, in this world. Again, everything that exists in this world or has existed still exists in the Otherworld, including dinosaurs, saber toothed cats and even mammoths. Time has no meaning for the Otherside so, again, it is quite possible that specific window areas are intersecting with places in the Otherworld where these critters exist and, viola’, modern day pterosaur sightings. The TV show Primeval, with its anomalies, is, I suspect, not that far off the mark.

3) Winged humanoids – I rather suspect that these beings may be spirits who have manifested on this plane. Remember that it is quite possible for a being, if it can develop sufficient energy and skill, to manifest from the astral, through the etheric, where it takes on a form of sorts, and into our world. Given the general creepiness associated with most flying humanoid sightings, I would place these creatures in the strong and intelligent parasite realm and suspect that they are feeding off the emotional responses they engender.

I do not claim that any of these remarks are definitive. A thunderbird could be a manifesting spirit and a flying humanoid could be a failed evolutionary experiment from an alternate human time line. Any of these beings could be artificially created entities constructed by magicians on this plane or in the Otherworld.

I wonder, too, if some of the Powers That Be are not simply putting these things in our path to keep us from getting too complacent in our little scientific, materialist world view.

Book Review: Stalking the Herd

Stalking the Herd: Unraveling the Cattle Mutilation Mystery
Christopher O’Brien
Adventures Unlimited Press, 2014

I wish that I could smile and say that this was a great book and that you should read it because it was so interesting and full of fascinating facts. To make that statement would be to lie, however. The truth is that I found this book to be extremely difficult to read – not because the subject was not interesting but because it is downright horrifying – and the author, while relying a little too heavily on quoted material at times, has obviously poured body and soul into what was obviously a long, painstaking investigation. I want to express my admiration for Mr. O’Brien; it seems to me that there are not many people who would stay with a grim investigation of this kind for as long as he has nor spend as much time in side research as he has done. “Stalking the Herd” is a dense, encyclopedic treatment of one of the great mysteries of our time (and history, dating back to the time of James I, apparently).

For those who may not be aware, a cattle mutilation is a specific type of cattle death that is characterized by the bovine being found dead, without apparent cause, while having certain portions of its anatomy – lips, eyes, anal region and reproductive organs, udders, etc – removed with surgical precision. The crime scenes are generally bloodless and it is even sometimes the case that the bovine is found drained of blood. In almost all cases the mutilators leave no trace behind. Other than the probably false accusation of an Indian (from India) man in the early 1900’s, Mr. O’Brien could find no instance of anyone ever being arrested or convicted of a mutilation. One of the things that makes these cases very strange is that the perpetrators seem to be able to come and go at will without anyone the wiser.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am seldom without a theory, usually based on magical practice, for any phenomenon but I have to say, after reading “Stalking the Herd” that I am at a loss to propose any sort of comprehensive theory for this deeply complex and outlandishly trickster driven phenomenon.

In short summary, Mr. O’Brien begins the book by examining the relationship of humans to bovines throughout history and then takes us into historic accounts of mutilation cases from the 1600’s up to the landmark “Snippy the Horse” case, the mutilation in the San Luis Valley that garnered world wide attention and marked the beginning of modern “mute” history. The chapters that follow outline the unfolding mystery throughout the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and into the present time. Once he has laid out the mystery, the author then includes sections on high strangeness cases, ‘Mutes and the Media’ and a tour of the beef industry (which will leave one wishing to become a vegetarian) and cattle related diseases. Mr. O’Brien finishes with some thoughts on theories surrounding “mutes” and the promise of another book to analyze the data he has presented to us here.

This is not the sort of book that you will sit down and read cover to cover in a couple of days. It is a book that you will read a chapter at a time and, as you read, find yourself frequently wondering just how deep the rabbit hole goes. The “mute” phenomenon is mysterious enough on its own, despite the ill informed opinions of skepdebunkers who argue otherwise, but, when one adds the frequent intrusion of episodes of high strangeness into the mix, the mystery only deepens. UFO’s, mystery helicopters, the occasional Sasquatch and more all seem determined to make the mutilation mystery one that simply can not be put to rest. In order to even begin to get a grasp on the phenomenon, one needs to be able to accept that this is not an either/or phenomenon but rather a both/and phenomenon.

Amongst the many theories put forth for “mute” episodes:

1) Government or quasi-government monitoring of environmental factors which could range from above ground nuclear test radiation tests to the advent of prion related disease in cattle and other livestock.

2) Corporate interests trying to run small ranchers out of business so that their spreads could be incorporated into the corporate whole.

3) The extra-terrestrial hypothesis that states that ET’s are targeting cattle for “unknown purposes . . . related to some kind of genetic experimentation”

4) Exotic perpetrators – anything from beings living in the hollow earth to hostile “nature spirit elementals”

5) Occult activity, specifically, dark magic rituals that require blood sacrifice.

6) Unknown animals preying on cattle.

I will let you read the book to discover the pro’s and con’s to each of these ideas. Mr. O’Brien discusses extensively why no one theory can begin to explain the wide range of “mutes”. I will say that he does a terrific job of preventing the reader from throwing his or her hands into the air, giving up and putting it all down to aliens as too many writers on this subject do. I am in accord with the author when he says that ET’s would really have no reason to raid pastures when they could get all the genetic material they need with a visit to the local slaughter house.

If you have any interest at all in the cattle mutilation phenomenon and you want to become well educated as well as having an encyclopedic reference on the subject to refer back to, then I strongly encourage you to pick up this book. I think I have made it plain that the title is not for the faint of heart and be aware that some of the graphics are not pleasant. Nevertheless, I encourage you to support this fine researcher.

Getting out of the Box

I recently encountered this interesting addendum to a classic “UFO” case while perusing my news feeds. I found myself wondering why the site, which has a resident wizard who writes a column there, did not turn to that person when this information came up.

I have a great deal of admiration for Fortean and Paranormal field investigators. These folks spend their leisure time and hard earned money to seek out witnesses and try to document high strangeness in whatever way they can. They write up notes, record witness interviews, take videographic and photographic evidence, cast any prints etc. so that they are left with a mass of data about a sighting at the end of their field experience. If they collate enough of this data and find it unique, they will write an article or even a book and, at some point in their writing, speculate about the cause of the high strangeness they are documenting.

What puzzles me, given the strangeness that they work with regularly, is the unwillingness of most investigators to think a little outside the box in terms of determining causation. How many times have you heard of an investigator hooking up with someone who has experience and credentials in remote viewing, for example, to get their view on a case? I, as someone who thinks that boxes are for packing household goods, would be most interested in hearing what such a person had to say. Obviously, this information might be apropos or it might be way off base but it would be something additional for the investigator to think about.

While some investigators do not consult with remote viewers or other practitioners of ‘occult’ arts’ because they feel they already know the answers (Sasquatch are unknown bipedal apes, UFO’s are the vehicles of extraterrestrials), I believe that most investigators simply never think of such things. Despite their continued exposure to high strangeness, I feel that a lot of investigators have a subconscious (or perhaps fully conscious) desire to bring some ‘legitimacy’ to their field. As a result, these investigators tend to approach their cases using mundane tools and scientific instruments and avoid any hint of the ‘woo’ (psychics, magicians, witches, medicine people, etc). Basically, they are trying to document phenomenon that tend to be ethereal and hard to pin down using the tools of scientific materialism.

While the good old who, what, where, when, why and maybe how approach is certainly a good basis for beginning an investigation and documenting people’s perception of what happened, using some of the other tools in the arcane arsenal can and should be a recourse for the investigator who finds him or herself looking at something that does not appear to be a hoax, misidentification or hysterical incident. I will give an example from my own experience.

I had an opportunity, about three years ago, to work with a paranormal investigator who also happened to be a very “out of the box” thinker. As an experiment he asked me to do a series of etheric projections to sites that he gave me and to write up reports on what I saw while I was there.

Etheric projection is somewhat like the more familiar astral projection except that it operates in the “layer” of reality that immediately overlays the physical. It is more risky than astral projection since the etheric body is more “solid” than the astral and can bring damage back to the physical if the practitioner encounters something hostile. Also, the etheric projector, in order to maintain a cohesive projection has to move somewhat like a person in the physical world. Unlike astral projection, the traveller can not simply think of a place and be there but has to actually make his or her way there. I use Google Earth and a good map program to home in on the coordinates when I do this (although I can ‘fly’ in the etheric body which makes things a little easier).

On my first projection in this series, I followed the directions to a forested hill in the midst of flat farmland. Immediately upon arriving, I felt uncomfortable and kept looking at the sky. This discomfort was such that I actually took cover under the tree canopy. As I made my way into the denser brush, I had a feeling that I had disturbed something and caught a glimpse of what I took to be a Sasquatch making its way quickly away from me and then disappearing. I stayed in the cover of the trees for a period of time, aware of nature spirits around me wondering what the heck I was doing there, and waited to see if anything further would happen. Time passed and eventually I decided to return to my body as nothing else developed. I documented my findings and sent them to the investigator, wondering what that was all about.

The investigator in question got back to me shortly thereafter. It turns out that the coordinate area was known for UFO sightings (thus the discomfort from above). The area was also known for several hairy hominid sightings so the information about the Sasquatch did not surprise him either. Interestingly, he had not received any reports from the area in some time so the information I got came from an old trail.

I would be very interested in trying a projection into a fresh investigation site. I think it would be quite interesting to drop into the middle of a fresh Missing 411 case or something like the incident described in the case that I led off with. There are no certainties in this sort of work (I have had instance where I went to a place and got very little, almost as if they were blocked off) but I suspect that, given a chance to check out a site that had received a recent incursion, I might see/encounter all sorts of interesting things. Such a project though would definitely require an investigator who was willing to think outside the box and take whatever I could produce as just another piece of the puzzle.

Native Land and “Window” Areas

I have just finished reading Ryan Skinner’s book Skinwalker Ranch: No Trespassing. I am not really going to review the book; it is a collection of stories and reports put together in book form that outlines some of the activity on and around the area now known as the Skinwalker Ranch. While I would have appreciated a little heavier editorial hand, the reports speak for themselves and the reader can choose to believe what he or she reads or not. For those interested in this specific area, the book is not expensive and does contain some food for thought.

I have given my thoughts on why the Four Corners area is the site of so much high strangeness. As I noted in the referenced blog post, the Dine’ (Navajo) have a long tradition of ceremonies in that area but, reading through Mr. Skinner’s book, I was reminded that the Dine’ are not the only indigenous tribe in the area. There are also the deeply secretive Hopi as well as the Ute and Paiute. Each of these tribes has their own medicine ways and those ways have been enacted on this land for centuries. As I said before, no matter how good the magical hygiene of a group is, repeated magical working in a single place or places will tend to thin the veil between the worlds and produce episodes of high strangeness, especially amongst people who are already sensitive to the ‘vibration’ of that magic e.g. the tribal people who have come forward to report some of the events in Mr. Skinner’s book.

I theorize, too, based on my own experiences, that tribal lands serve as refuges for the creatures of the Otherworld. While modern America wallows in its soup of materialism and lack of belief in anything beyond the senses, the traditional indigenous folks of this land learn early on that there is more to be seen than what can be seen with the physical eyes alone. These peoples attempt to live and work in harmony with the spirits of their land rather than ignoring them. Even those native people who are not raised in the traditional manner are often exposed to the stories of their people at some point in growing up. It is no wonder then that the native lands are host to all manner of beings – both ‘good’ and disharmonic.

I have already talked about the presence of ‘interesting’ areas in the Superstition Mountains, a site that is holy to the Apache of that area. When I was younger and working for a non-profit health organization, I was asked to come speak to a group on one of the reservations in the Phoenix, AZ metro area. Quite frankly, I felt the energy shift as soon as I drove onto reservation land. I found my speaking site and gave my presentation then started the drive home. By this time, night had fallen and as I made my way carefully down the road, I spotted a small creature hopping along the side of the road. At first, I thought this was a rabbit but, as I got closer, I realized that I was looking at a miniature version of the Kokopelli image so popular in Arizona. To this day, I can not tell you whether I was seeing this being with my physical eyes or the eyes of spirit but, as I watched, it disappeared by simply fading from my view.

I have also had the privilege of living right on the border of one of the Seneca reservations in Western New York. We often bought gas for our vehicles on ‘the rez’ and, again, I noted a subtle change in the energy around me as I moved onto reservation land. During the great Celtic feast of Samhain, when the veil between the worlds is traditionally quite thin, I would sometimes drive through the forest of the area and look into the woods, just to see the variety of beings slipping through those trees, careful not to reveal too much of themselves but nonetheless there. While these experiences were noted more with spiritual senses, I still felt certain that, given the right circumstances, these beings might just pop up in front of someone with eyes to see.

Granted, my experiences do not a fact make. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. In my mind and my experience, however, native lands will always equate to areas where the veil between the worlds is, perhaps, just a little thinner than it is in other places. Given their long tradition of medicine workings and the belief that traditional native people place in those workings, I do not think this is surprising at all.

The Controllers – An Alternate Hypothesis of Alien Abduction

Back in the early days of this blog (February 2013, to be exact), I happened across a piece on the Mysterious Universe blog that gave me pause. I had just gotten done writing a set of pieces on a possible astral/etheric explanation of the alien abduction phenomenon when I encountered an article that made me consider the possibility that some of the abductions might be the result of mind control experiments being performed on unsuspecting and unwilling participants. In that blog, I referred to the performers of these experiments as ‘controllers’ and discussed the comments of one “Underseer” who had made some references and observations about mind control experiments in reference to the story of “Alison” told in the blog post.

Recently, I stumbled across the horrifying The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abduction by Martin Cannon as I was looking for research material on another subject. The essay appears to have been released in the early 90’s. While I do think that Mr. Cannon strays into the realm of the fanciful and, perhaps, even paranoid in some places in the text, overall, I think that even if we were to throw out 75% of what the author says, his hypothesis would still stand.

Westerners, and Americans in particular, have trouble believing that their governments misbehave. You have only to look at the horror and consternation that arises when the intelligence communities are caught doing ‘black bag’ work or, worse yet, being involved in assassinations or governmental overthrows to get a birds eye view of this phenomenon. There is a belief in America that our government should occupy the moral high ground and, when the CIA gets caught pulling off something like the Bay of Pigs (or trying to) or the NSA is discovered monitoring traffic that it has no business with, shock and dismay ensue.

There is a saying that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. While there are certain checks and balances inherent in most Western governments these days, when the issue of national security raises its head, all bets are off and the intelligence communities are the people tasked with gathering the information needed to be sure that borders stay secure. Given this mandate, plenty of financial resources and a penchant for developing alternative revenue streams when needed, these agencies can conceal just about anything and often do. After all, ‘national security’ is at risk, right?

The Controllers article makes, in my mind, a convincing case that the government of the United States (and other countries) has been involved in mind control experimentation of varying sorts since at least World War II with an eye toward using a person as a surveillance device, ‘programming’ people to act in a certain way given a specific cue, developing assassins from common folk (who could, again, be triggered by a certain cue), erasing the memory of a person, causing a person to have another personality which served as a spy, using sonics and microwave radiation to induce hypnotic states or to cause emotional reactions that might be used for crowd control. These are a few of the items mentioned in the article and I strongly encourage readers to look at it, even if they are not interested in the abduction phenomenon.

For those who are interested in abduction, though, and are not firmly ensconced in the “believer” camp which insists that these incidents are the result of space faring aliens taking an interest in the two legged, semi intelligent apes (their view, not mine) living on this planet, this article provides some extensive food for thought. Much, if not all, of the strangeness seen in abduction cases can be explained by the machinations of good old terra firma bound homo sapiens and their manipulations of the mind and perception. While I still believe that a significant number of these abduction scenarios involve Intruders from the Otherworld, after reading this essay, I am prepared to revise my estimates down in order to allow more room for Cannon’s hypothesis.

Again, I encourage a thorough reading of the referenced article since I can not possibly outline the complete contents of the essay in this blog. Suffice to say that Mr. Cannon’s article takes one on an extensive tour into the subject of implants and ‘stimoceivers’ – devices that can be implanted in the brain and used to stimulate certain areas of the brain as well as receive spoken instructions. Mr. Cannon then goes on to discuss the possibilities behind remote induction of hypnosis, brain wave entrainment, induced amnesia, screen memories, programming of ‘super spies’, bases for mind control research and much more. I repeat that I do not believe that every word of the article is gospel but, as I said earlier, if even 25% of this matter is true, then we have significant cause for concern. Mr. Cannon also does a very good job of relating his research back to the abduction cases, although he does have to take an extensive detour into the realm of mind control so that his hypothesis make sense.

I am not one to believe in conspiracy theories but I am also not one to turn a blind eye when a viable theory about a strange event is proposed. It makes sense that the US government (and others) would be interested in literally controlling the hearts and minds of certain individuals. We know, from materials that have leaked about projects such as MKULTRA, that such interest is fact. It is not a long step to accept that some of the information about this experimentation might be withheld in the interests of ‘national security’ and that the government needed a way to deal with the ‘disposal problem’ – what to do with the subjects of these experiments once the project was complete. If we are dealing with people who could possibly cause an individual to develop a separate identity that served as a spy, I find it plausible that these same people could cover their tracks with a ‘screen memory’ of abduction.

Thoughts on The Real Men in Black (Redfern)

A while back, I published this post on the Men in Black. In that post, I gave a brief overview of some of my thinking on the subject and put forward the seemingly wild conjecture that the MIB might actually be entities moving into our world to try to move us away from the clutches of the Intruders. As I noted in that article UFOlogy is not one of my primary areas of interest but I do find the MIB phenomenon interesting as a sort of modern day monster story so I picked up a copy of Nick Redfern’s book The Real Men in Black to glean more information.

As I have said in other articles, Mr. Redfern’s work sometimes passes into ‘what horrors have we yet to discover’ mode but the man is trying to make a living selling books. He has to appeal to a wider audience than just egg-headed folklore geeks like myself. Despite this tendency to the sensational and a habit of re-using cases throughout his many books, Mr. Redfern is my go-to person if I want a fairly wide ranging, informative, easy to read introduction to a topic. This author did not fail me with The Real Men in Black; the book is well researched and provides an extensive bibliography for anyone interested in exploring the subject more deeply. Be forewarned though . . . one of the points that Mr. Redfern makes repeatedly in this book is summed up in a quote from Fortean researcher Brad Steiger:

The Men in Black are real, and if you truly devote yourself to pursuing this, then one can become in great danger. We’re up against something that none of us can truly comprehend.

While I am not sure how dangerous the MIB are, it does seem that paying attention to them draws their attention to you and that attention can be distinctly creepy. Be aware of this and prepared to deal with it if you choose to research this topic in any depth.

About the book . . . it is divided into two sections. In the first part of the work, you will find a general overview of the history of the phenomenon with special attention paid to Albert Bender, Gray Barker and John Keel, the writers/researchers who brought forth the MIB myths as we have it today. Mr. Redfern then goes on to provide a sampling of cases from the seminal time period of the 50’s up to the present. In the second part of the book, Mr. Redfern brings forth the many theories about who the MIB’s are and where they come from. This section ranges from real life agents of government to over-enthusiatic members of UFO research groups on to the more sinister concepts such as demonic activity, tulpas/thought forms and/or time travelers from our distant future.

In the section on demonic intervention, Mr. Redfern speaks to what I think is the real point of the MIB mystery (setting aside the government agents for a moment). In this quote, the author has been speaking to Ray Boeche, an Anglican priest who has spent time studying the UFO and MIB phenomenon in depth:

Boeche cites the words of the late author/researcher Ivan Sanderson, whose influence on paranormal research still resonates nearly 40 years after his untimely passing. Sanderson asked: Are the Men in Black extraterrestrials, the descendants of extraterrestrials, or even the agents of extraterrestrials? Or, he wondered, do we need to allow for a totally new category of intelligent beings that are interacting with us? Boeche answers that “we must acknowledge a different category of being. We must awaken to the realization that we are caught in a web of deception, and that the web is closing in on us. We are being watched, probed, and manipulated by forces from outside our known physical universe. We are not alone, and we may not like it much when we find out what sort of company we have” (Boeche 1994).

While I put hellish demons fairly low on the list of possible Intruders, I think that Fr. Boeche is quite correct. There is too much of the UFO phenomenon and particularly abduction experiences that screams of Otherworld manipulation to ignore the thought that the Intruders have simply slipped into a guise that will make more sense and be deeply frightening to the modern homo sapiens.

The MIB could very well be entities from the Otherside as well, bent on keeping humans from the nasties that wish to prey on them but unfamiliar with the mechanics of moving through the etheric and into the physical. A being that was not comfortable with a physical form and not familiar with how to make it move would have all the hallmarks of an MIB – the form that is not quite right, awkward gait and posture, unawareness of social conventions, the feeling of the creeps that people get around them (human intuition recognizing something “other”), the hypnotic effect some MIB’s seem to have and their ability to disappear seemingly at will. In addition, a powerful entity from the Otherside might also interfere with electrical communication devices and, given that these beings seem to interact with humans only when they come through to warn someone off and have no social skills, what might be meant as a sincere warning to walk away from a dangerous situation could easily be taken as a threat or perhaps even voiced that way.

Again, I am not saying that my theory is the correct one. I would still be inclined to deal with an MIB as I would any Intruder unless I was absolutely convinced that I was correct. Still, in all that I have read about these beings, despite the horror they engender in some, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for them since they are so obviously out of step with what is going on around them..

Ultraterrestrials

I ran across The Vicar’s Lamp blog the other day. The Vicar is an occasional guest poster at Who Forted? and I have admired his thoughtful and magical approach to high strangeness. Reading his posts, one quickly has the impression of a strong intellect steeped in what some call the Hidden Wisdom.

Having said that, I have to disagree with the good Vicar to a degree on the contents of this post. The Vicar references renowned Fortean/UFOlogical authors John Keel, Mac Tonnies and Jaques Vallee in his post and refers to their concept of ultraterrestrials – beings who inhabit this planet, alongside human beings but not always visible to us, who have had a profound effect on the development of our species. What I do not think is true though is an idea expressed in this quote:

The Gray is a humanoid. It is a being from this world, evolved before us and living alongside of us with a possible common ancestor as the root. It built the great megalithic structures we cannot comprehend, and it is responsible for the frequent sightings of impossibilities in this world – the UFOs and USOs, the Bigfeet and Sea Monsters, the paranormal visions and manifestations. Some of these phenomena may be intentional manipulations or obfuscations.

I also take issue with the thought expressed here:

If we doubt the possibility of ultraterrestrials, we choose to ignore the vast and ever-growing body of information derived from contact with the weird and the unknown. We choose to overlook the long-standing factor so essential to the human experience – that very different, very superior creatures seem to interact with us every so often. We cannot get hard, physical evidence of these things with any reliability, for much the same reason that no ant court has managed to charge a human child with genocide and enter a magnifying glass into evidence. In the case of the Fae, the Others, the Air-Lords – we may call them everything and nothing – they are the masters of this, their planet. We are merely other creatures in the menagerie, as compelling to them as chimpanzees are to us – and likely also just as primitive and repulsive. Man is his own zookeeper.

I think that the Vicar, like many others who want to create a sort of unified field theory of the paranormal, has simply used too wide a brush in his thoughts here. Honestly, this surprised me, coming from a person versed in the magical arts. I would think that he would be familiar with the multiplicity of spirits in the magical pantheon and the propensity of some not only to manifest on this plane but also to directly and indirectly effect the lives of human beings. I would think too that he would be aware that these beings are of all different species and would not make the mistake of a non-mage by casting them all under one roof – whether that be called ultraterrestrials or some other name.

I’ve already dealt with the idea of a unified field theory of the paranormal in my thoughts in Guiley’s works on the Djinn so I am not going to repeat myself here. What I want to address in this post is the idea that humankind is simply an experiment by the overlords, that we are the chimpanzees in these being’s zoo.

Again, I am astonished to hear anyone conversant with the Hidden Wisdom even express such a thought. Every flavor of the esoteric that I have ever encountered, even the teachings of the Left Hand Path, includes the idea that human beings have That within them which is special. I have learned, in my own studies, that this special something is the Spark of the Divine which resides within each human being and that it is this Spark which constantly calls us to union with That from which the Spark derives, into a conscious life of co-creation with the Divine (however one sees that). Being the enslaved experiment of a “master race” would, I think, be rather counter-productive to the spiritual evolution of humanity that is taught by so many of the esoteric schools.

While I do agree that certain spiritual agencies appear to have interacted with humans over the course of history, and that those interactions may even have produced some of the megalithic wonders that we still see on the planet’s surface (Stonehenge and the pyramids, for example), I do not think that those interactions necessarily arose from the same source (ultraterrestrials, in this case). Rather, I see these interactions with the Other Side and the beings that manifest from there as a complex interplay of spirits who are able to make the trip from the astral into the etheric and then, for some, into a physical manifestation. As I have said before, many of these beings could care less about humans, some are concerned with our spiritual evolution and well being while others regard us as prey.

Yes, our relationships with those beings has shaped our history, in good ways and bad, but I am doubtful that there has been an over-arching “plot” to subjugate the human race or keep us as zoo animals. Such thinking arises from our own paranoia and failure to take a deep breath and allow ourselves to explore the Other Side rather than adhering to fundamentalist thought that tells us that such explorations are dangerous or that the Other Side and its denizens do not exist or that, because there seems to be evidence that some on that Side want to use us as cattle, this must be true for all spiritual forces.

As I have expressed before, humans tend to be bi-polar thinkers. A thing must be either this OR that. In order to deal with these issues, we must learn to back up and try to look at the whole picture – in this case, the whole history of human and Other interaction – before drawing conclusions.

Book Review: Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel

I noted recently that there is a new edition of Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel available from Anomalist books. Many people are familiar with John Keel through his most famous work, The Mothman Prophecies. I’ve given that book two readings since it is one of the classics of paranormal/cryptozoological lore and because I rather liked the flowing narrative style. I wish that I could say that I enjoyed Project Trojan Horse as much but such a statement would be untrue. Frankly, I found this book to be a mish mash; it seems to me that the author fell prey to the same sort of mental confusion that he so often ascribes to UFO contactees. This tome wanders like a drunk on a bender and the ideas in it, that appeal to so many paranormal authors, such as the concepts of “windows” and “ultra-terrestrials”, are derived from folkloric and/or magical sources that are available to any thinking person.

Now, I have to be honest and put forth this caveat: I am not a UFO researcher and, while I have some interest in the topic, it is not A List material for me. Keel is approaching his subject from a background of extensive research on UFO sightings and the people that UFO’s have contacted and I found the endless sighting and contact reports in the book tedious. My basic attitude was: alright, you have posited that X is the case and you have told me about Y person or persons to illustrate the point – move along. Unfortunately, Keel does not move along but, instead drags us through endless sighting reports of various UFO flaps throughout history. Historians of the UFO phenomenon might find this quite interesting but I did not.

Admittedly, Keel states early on that he is trying to take the broad view of the UFO phenomenon in order to make a strong argument for his hypothesis that UFO’s are not the craft of visitors from another planet. I normally admire this sort of wide spectrum approach but Keel fails to perform one vital function early in the book, he fails to tell us, in his introductory remarks, just what theory he is espousing. If this had been an academic paper, it would have been sent back to him for revision. It is not until almost the middle of the book that Keel finally posits the existence of so-called ultra-terrestrials, beings from an overlapping dimension or dimensions that are capable of interacting with our material world.

I think that with Operation Trojan Horse, Keel was trying to create a universal field theory for the paranormal. In my view, as I have said over and over in these pages, that is just not possible due to the diversity of beings on the Other Side. Keel prides himself, throughout the book, on being the hard nosed, skeptical reporter. That is fine; the paranormal can always use people who are willing to look at a thing from all sides. Unfortunately, once Keel had developed his theory of the ultra-terrestrials manipulating human history for mysterious reasons all their own, he went all in. Every single type of entity listed throughout folklore was an ultra-terrestrial. Angels, demons, the fey, everything – and they were all part of some grand plot that Keel posited came from “the source” (whatever that might be). Some of the entities were trying to educate human kind and others were trying to knock us off the path. Just as I stated regarding Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s, theory of the Djinn, this is a woefully simplistic view of what I refer to as the Other Side.

Technically, yes, all the beings that Keel refers to could fit into his definition of an ultra-terrestrial but any folklorist or magician will tell you that throwing all these beings into the same pot is like saying that all the people who live in my home town are guided by the mayor of that town and are conforming to his/her master plan. Anyone who has really studied these beings, either in the lore or by communicating with them, knows that each type of “ultra-terrestrial” is a very different critter and is interested in very different types of relationships with the human race. Some of the Other Side view humans as prey while others really are interested in the evolution of our species or in enhancing our connection to aspects of the natural world. As with most things, the beings of the Other Side range across a continuum from those who are inimical to humans to those who work actively with them.

Keel makes a great deal out of the fact that UFO contactees and mediums/channelers get similar types of information in their sessions. Of course they do. Keel obviously did not get to the parts in the Bible, which he quotes when it suits him, that speak of testing the spirits. He also did not do enough research into the “occult” to realize that magicians have known for a long time that there is a lot of “trash” out there on the astral and that, if you want to tune to a specific frequency, you have to send a specific signal and then test the spirit you have called to be certain it is what it says it is. In other words, proper spirit communication needs to happen after a zone ritual to protect space and with an invocation/evocation designed to attract a specific type of being. Even then, the magician is cautioned not to take the spirit’s words as law but to continually test what is given.

Looking at the contactees in Keel’s book, there is precious little testing of anything. All through Keel’s book, there is an undertone of paranoia. There are forces out there beyond our comprehension that are playing with us. They are extremely adaptable and tailor their presentation to suit their audience. They get people to buy into their rhetoric by making predictions that come true and having knowledge of their target and then setting the people up to look ridiculous or suggest to them schemes that make them cross the line into lawlessness. These beings seem to be able to produce either the illusion of solidity or to actually be able to manifest physically under certain conditions.

Yes, there are spirits “out there” that are quite capable of doing the sorts of things listed above. They feed on the fear, confusion and other afflictive emotions that they provoke in humans as well as the feelings of awe and near worship that they provoke in the uninformed. They are, however, only a small part of the vast population of the Other Side and, rather than provoking yet more fear, human beings need to realize that they do not have to have truck with these spirits if they do not want to. No is a powerful word and one that needs to be used more in spirit communication.

Mirage Men

Amongst the many feeds I follow to keep my finger on the pulse of the paranormal community, The Daily Grail is consistently one of the most intelligent and thoughtful. Recently, they published an article entitled A Fractured Hall of Mirrors which caught my attention. The piece is an in depth review of the new documentary film Mirage Men. I have not seen the movie – apparently it is making the rounds of film festivals – but after viewing the trailer and reading TDG’s comments, I felt that I might interject something into the commentary.

Greg Taylor with The Daily Grail ends his review with this recap:

Mirage Men is necessary viewing for anybody with an interest in either the topic of UFOs, or the role of government agencies in spying on and/or deceiving their own citizens. The former may be a specialised group, but the latter should include everyone. A highly recommended documentary – if your eyes weren’t already open, they will be after watching this film.

As I have admitted before, UFO’s are not my primary area of interest, although with the increasing prevalence of stories of “grays” and other supposed aliens invading people’s homes I find myself being drawn increasingly into the stories of this new iteration of the Intruders. In my view, the UFO phenomenon is just the latest face on a long series of invasions into our physical world by beings that I call the Intruders – those residents of the astral who are able to project through the etheric and manifest on our plane. While I am not of the opinion that humanity simply serves as a food source for these beings, it is certainly the case, again, in my opinion, that the Intruders have developed a number of different scenarios to put humans in a condition where they can feed off their emotional energies.

The Intruders are nothing if not persistent but their presence is always given away by the predominant emotions of fear or terror. Referring back to Mirage Men, we see what appears to be an orchestrated campaign by the U.S. government to introduce disinformation of varying sorts into UFO investigations. The central character in this melange of confusion seems to be Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard Doty. In fact, Doty apparently appears on camera and speaks freely about what he has done – a mystery that Mr. Taylor comments on: why would he be so free in his responses?.

According to Mr. Taylor, various theories are bandied about to explain the disinformation campaign:

Was the disinformation meant to distract investigators from secret government projects. If so, as Pilkington points out, why did they encourage Bennewitz when they could have just told him (as the patriotic citizen that he was) to cease and desist for the good of the country? Was it intended to discredit the investigators for some reason? Or perhaps it was a psychological study in how people react to certain information and events, perhaps it was intended originally for ‘real’ enemies like the Soviets during the Cold War, or maybe it was all an exercise in how supposedly secret information is transmitted and by whom.

Perhaps, though, it was none of the above. Let us suppose, for a moment, that we are in the top echelons of the government of the most powerful nation on earth. The United States of America is an economic powerhouse (especially during the time period in question) and has a huge standing military. Countries all over the world, even those that are ideologically opposed to the U.S., carefully monitor our domestic and foreign policy since decisions in those areas will have ramifications throughout the world. Those who run this country are acutely aware of all of the above and, in this era of the Cold War, are loathe to show any indecision or uncertainty that might be perceived as weakness. Remember, during the Cold War, our enemies were many and our perceived enemies or potential enemies were even more.

Now, introduce the wild card. The United States government becomes aware that this country and countries around the world are having unexplained visitations by aerial phenomenon that can not be identified. These “vehicles” seem to appear and disappear at will and easily evade even our most advanced fighter aircraft. To make matters worse, there are even reports of interaction between the “craft’s” occupants and human beings and the interactions seem to have a hostile character in many cases.

What do the government folk do? Go on the air and tell everyone that we have visitors but we do not know who they are, where they come from or what the hell they want? Such an action would be tantamount to the most powerful country in the world admitting that it was helpless to deal with these phenomenon and that was just not going to happen.

What to do then? Humans have a tendency toward bi-polar thinking, in my experience. If not this, then that. So, when the decision was made not to come forward and tell the public what was known, the opposite end of the spectrum was to muddy the waters with a disinformation campaign that not only befuddled those who were sincerely trying to investigate the phenomenon but also provided the public with some images that they could hang on to (little green men, basically). Humans have a tendency to denigrate and try to dis-empower that which they fear (see all the foofy angels and Tinker Bell fairies out there) so the little green men quickly became a way for people to laugh off the uneasiness that they felt when faced with witness statements on this phenomenon.

At the same time, of course, while one segment of the government was injecting these ideas about “aliens” into the public consciousness, the other section of this program was working hard to “debunk” UFO’s and their occupants in the holy name of Science. The net result? A smoke screen that persists to this day and that I feel the Intruders are using to good advantage to continue their predations on human kind.