The Paranormal Detective

The Haunting of Old Louisville

2010-10-23T16:43:48Z

Living in Old Louisville Kentucky, the third largest preservation area in the United States, has been a new experience for me. At the time I moved here, sixteen years ago, the neighborhood was still in transition with a lot of rehabbing going on. Unfortunately the streets were not always clean and there were a lot of unsavory characters lurking about.

Mental Illness, Ridicule, and the Paranormal

2010-09-14T15:59:02Z

Recently I had a series of interactions that got me to thinking about the use of ridicule as a means of social control, and about the connections between paranormal experience and mental illness.

The first interaction was between me and a close friend. I was wondering aloud why some people are ‘shiny’ but not all ‘shiny’ people are good.

Every so often I perceive a certain quality of light coming off a person, especially around the eyes and face. I assume this is some kind of aura or some such thing.

I have been experiencing this for so long now that I have

Is There a Link Between Receiving Paranormal Art and Seeing a UFO?

2010-08-08T12:47:09Z

My experience with the paranormal has been a positive one. I began to notice signs of paranormal activity in my home in the month of April, 2010. One morning I found my name written in cobwebs on the bathroom wall. When I saw it I was amazed how any one could manipulate something that delicate.

Image, Imagination, and Magic

2010-06-07T12:49:09Z

Imagination gets a bad rap these days.

We expect artists and writers to be imaginative, but in other contexts we often see imagination as a mildly negative or slightly embarrassing faculty.

We might define imagination as “the capacity to make stuff up”, or even more pejoratively, “an object or idea that is false or deceptive,” as in “that’s just your imagination—it’s not real.”

Worse yet, we may even assign mental pathology to imagination if it is persistent, vivid, intense, or unsettling, as in “he has an over-active imagination” or “he must be hallucinating.”

The technical, more neutral meaning of imagination gets lost in all these reflexive attempts to confine imagination to the arts and to tamp it down everywhere else.

At root, imagination is simply a way of knowing the world through images—no more, no less.

Image and Danger

We live in an age that stresses the material aspect of reality.

In order for something to be considered ‘real’, we generally expect it to be comprised of matter. A collection of wood rods and planks that are connected in a way such that a human being can sit down on them is considered to be a ‘real’ chair.

An image of a chair, on the other hand is thought to refer back to the ‘real’ object in a secondhand sort of way. The image of the chair may be accurate to a greater or lesser degree, but no matter how expertly the image of the chair is rendered, we don’t consider it to be a real chair. We see the image as only a representation of a chair, a counterfeit.

This idea that images are once-removed from material reality and are at best merely representational is widely accepted, even though the assumption is clearly wrong on at least two counts:

1) Images are frequently self-contained and do not refer to any object outside themselves, and

2) An image can impart more information about a ‘real’ object that the material object itself ever could.

Dreams are one example of images that do not refer to actual objects yet can be experienced as vividly real. Dream images are packed with layers of complex symbolic associations, and are often fantastic and even impossible.

Abstract art is another example.

The physical canvas on which an abstract painting is created is not the art. The art is the image itself.

An artistic image does not necessarily correspond to anything in the ‘real’ world, and yet, in its capacity to evoke emotion, associations, and meaning, an abstract image such as might be found in a painting is experienced as vividly real—as real as any wooden chair, if not more so.

Both dreams and art contain an almost inexhaustible supply of bits of emotional and associative information—information that a ‘real’ wooden chair can never supply and doesn’t even try to supply—but this information is only made available when the person encountering the image responds creatively and emotionally, experiencing feelings, memories, and new ideas evoked by the art.

In other words, images require participation, not detachment. A person having a dream or viewing art doesn’t just objectively stand back and categorize the object he regards. That person encounters the image, interacts with it, takes it in, and responds emotionally, mentally, and sometimes even physically.

People are changed by art and by artistic imagery. The change may be almost imperceptible or it could be life-changing and huge, but an internal change does take place.

The difference between chairs and images then, is that a chair is a chair because we all decide that is what a chair will be, by consensus, and once a chair, it is always a chair. An image of a chair, on the other hand, provides highly idiosyncratic emotional and associative information through direct experience, and that direct experience changes the observer. You never know where the image of a chair might take you.

Fifty different physical chairs will always reduce to the single category ‘chair’ no matter how many different people look at them. You see a chair, that’s pretty much the end of it. On the other hand, a single painting of a chair is capable of producing as many idiosyncratic emotional and associative responses as the number of people who view that painting—a nearly infinite number of responses. What’s more, the very act of responding the the painting changes the person looking at it.

Because direct experience does not rely on detached observation, thought, or consensus (by definition experience is subjective and participatory, not objective and detached), direct experience lies outside the realm of science and reason.

Experience can never be proven. It is what it is. Two people standing in front of the same painting can have wildly different experiences of that painting, and neither can be shown to be right or wrong, correct or incorrect. Yet each person’s experience remains completely ‘real’. There is nothing illusory or hallucinatory about it. The painting itself is also real, not just the canvas and paint used to create it, but the image itself.

This plain fact undermines the widely held notion that science is the only legitimate way of knowing and that reality is always by necessity material.

Science and reason seek to reduce reality to single principles that can be manipulated and controlled, but in doing this, reality literally becomes smaller. Images take single principles and expand them to create infinite associations that change the person observing them. Imagination expands reality, but it also makes it harder to control—or at least, it makes the illusion of control harder to maintain.

Primary Imagination and Magic

The Romantic philosphers and poets divided imagination into two types: primary and secondary.

Secondary imagination was akin to daydreaming, making stuff up, putting together a nice scrapbook—what the Victorians used to call ‘fancy’. It always is initiated by the ego, the personality, the ‘I’.

Primary imagination on the other hand was what made reality feel real. Primary imagination was the force behind matter that infused images and things with emotion, spirit, and life, a way of seeing that came from beyond the seer. It precedes and includes the ego, is bigger than the ego and more powerful. It feels like both ‘I’ and ‘other’ all at once.

Sometimes primary imagination feels totally ‘other’.

Primary imagination is in some sense literally life itself, the fire of life, not as determined by theory or experiment but at the level of direct personal experience.

Living human beings don’t just move through a universe of dead matter in a detached way observing and thinking abstractly about ‘stuff’. (OK, they do—but it doesn’t feel that great. It’s not what we hope for.) Living human beings experience the world emotionally and associatively through memory, narrative, and meaning.

Meaning may be inconvenient, slippery, and mutable, but it’s also what makes life rich and worth experiencing. Images may be mesmerizing and uncontrollable, but they are also beautiful and deep.

Images that come from primary imagination circumvent the ego and present themselves as having a life of their own. Visions, ‘big’ dreams, symbols, religious icons—all of these are images that come from primary imagination, not a creative arts workshop. We don’t create them, they create us.

Why bring this up here?

So much of what gets lumped into the category of paranormal these days is really primary imagination at work, doing exactly what primary imagination always does and is supposed to do, but because that word ‘imagination’ now is sullied with the stain of being ‘not real, made up, hallucinatory’, most of paranormal literature wastes a lot of energy wrongly trying to prove the material reality of weird things.

It’s so wrongheaded and unnecessary.

Understood correctly, the deeply affecting images thrown up by primary imagination are actually more real than material objects—in the same way a work of art depicting a singular chair and evoking myriad creative responses is more deeply real than a pile of wood and nails lumped into a generic category.

The objects of primary imagination stand alone as valid objects without representation. They provide genuine information (and tons of it) about the world, the individual experiencing the world, and the ever-changing relationship between the two. It’s right and worthwhile to attend to this information.

When we waste our time trying to prove that such images have mass and weight we miss the point entirely.

Before the Age of Enlightenment, magic was the art of understanding the world through primary imagination and transforming self and others in the process.

The fact that this process is no longer understood or respected does not for one minute mean it isn’t real.

Science, Story and Deception

2010-05-18T19:31:01Z

I am currently making my way through an odd but fascinating little book written by 20th century philosopher Charles Fort.

I mean to use the info in this and Fort’s other two works in the biblography of a book I myself am working on about UFO experiences and epistemology (the philosophy of how we know stuff)—but the reading part of my project is turning out to be a lot more fun than I expected.

Fort’s treatise New Lands starts out with a seemingly endless list of examples of various faulty predictions made by famous astronomers, along with several incidents of ‘discovery’ that were nothing of the kind.

In each case, a specific astronomer makes some kind of prediction—let’s say about the return of a comet. (Fort lists tons of these.)

The comet does not show up on cue, not that year or the next. The reason for this error is then explained at length by the scientist who made the prediction, and more math is done, until the next wrong prediction, at which time the whole routine is repeated.

In the case of bogus astronomical discovery, Fort lists half a dozen similar examples of scientists who were credited with ‘discovering’ a specific heavenly body even though these same scientists either 1) couldn’t find that heavenly body, 2) misidentified it when they did find it, or 3) didn’t notice it even though they were looking right at it, or 4) didn’t know what such a body even was at the time they were mucking about.

The credit for discovery came later, alongside a long-winded, often effusively praising explanation of why the awkward scientific exploit (which wasn’t discovery while it was in progress) in retrospect should be considered to be an actual and of course important discovery.

Fort, who was no fan of science and spent much of his life studiously documenting its many failures and inanities, is also a really funny guy once you get used to his weird, slightly stuffy prose. After documenting pages and pages of footnoted examples of this kind of bumbling research, he remarks:

“I don’t know what the mind of an astronomer looks like—but I think of a fizzle with excuses revolving around it.”

Science Is Not a Truth Factory

Most people who are not scientists imagine that science is this pristine, true formula that, once applied correctly, yields nothing but good authoritative information about the world we live in, and lots of it.

In fact, science of any kind is a messy business, full of failures and fudging and dumb theories that turn out to even dumber than they sounded when they were first floated. (Google ‘phlogiston’ if you don’t believe me.)

Research is difficult and highly political to boot. Experiments are challenging to design and harder to replicate. Even when you are able to design a good experiment and someone else does replicate your results, you then come to the problem of interpretation, and it’s no small problem either.

One recent study revealed that an alarmingly large number of research projects were summarized in a way that completely misrepresented the experimental data and presented a conclusion opposite the one indicated by the research.

Worse still, some contemporary math geeks make a pretty good case that statistical analysis of scientific data (the final step that makes an experimental result ‘significant’ or the product of chance) is itself statistically more likely to produce a wrong result than an accurate one.

Is your head spinning yet?

The problem is that math is absolute, perfect, and lots of fun (for a certain sort of person) but the world is messy, surprising, and frequently uncooperative. Math takes place ‘inside’ the head, between a human being’s ears, but the world (supposedly) takes place ‘out there’, where stuff and matter is located.

Matching the math in one’s scientific head to the chaos in the world outside of it is NOT as straightforward a task as most laymen assume it is. This is not to say that the task is futile or worthless, but only that the noble attempt (which we call ‘science’) doesn’t produce pristine nuggets of pure truth in the same reliable way that Hershey manufactures chocolate bars.

Story as Scientific Duct Tape

In each of these Fortean jabs at astronomy, what happens is that some human being calling himself an astronomer engages in some methodology—usually involving mathematics—that at some point gives him the confidence to make a definitive statement about the world. Then the world makes a monkey out of him by proving him wrong. Then he redeems himself by placing his original factoid into the context of a story.

As it happens, story and science have a long-running dysfunctional relationship.

Simple observation (thanks, science!) tells us that science depends on story to keep itself patched together and looking presentable—kind of the same way important men depend on their wives to clean their suits, pick out their ties, shine their shoes, and wash their underwear.

The problem is, story is more than that. Story was not put on earth just to bleach the stains out of Science’s skivvies, thank you very much—though she might willingly do that for Science if Science didn’t take her for granted and run her down in public all the time when they’re out together with Science’s snooty self-important friends.

Or, Story might just tell Science to stuff it. It’s hard to say at this point.

The dysfunctional relationship between Story and Science got its start during the Age of Enlightenment and had more than a few good side effects initially. During in the 17th and 18th centuries the Catholic Church (which was also the government in most countries, or was at least inextricably tied to the government), was using Story to mash people into little piles of guilty subservient goo.

Along comes Science and says, “See here now you big bully—We can think for ourselves. We don’t need you at all. Piss off and take your big bad-tempered God along with you.”

Then the Ego emerged into the light of shining, transcendent Reason, ushering in a New Age.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Now Science behaves as if Story barely exists, all the while running her ragged just to maintain his public pretense of infallibility.

What This Has to Do with the Paranormal

Charles Fort was of the opinion that it’s hard if not impossible to make an authoritative statement about anything, because everything is in a state of flux—every single thing is always on its way to becoming some other thing. The nature of the universe is change, as in:

Don’t take it serious. It’s too mysterious.

He once famously quipped:

“I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”

When people discuss paranormal experiences, they almost always fall into trying to prove them scientifically, and failing that, they appeal to religion or philosophy for authority. No one thinks of Story, because story has been banished to the kitchen of human thought.

Girls tell stories.

Men speak authoritatively as scientists, priests, sages, or experts.

If you think I’ve overstating this, take a look at the English Department of any major university, count up the boys and girls, and then compare that count with the numbers in the science and philosophy departments.

Religion is not different: Much has been persuasively written on the patriarchal nature of the major religious traditions.

My point is not that knowledge is gendered but that authoritative ways of looking at the world are also used to divide and separate bodies. Authorities not only tend to conceal their own errors in order to maintain their authority, they also conceal valuable information contained in the experiential language of Story—the helpmate without whom they look darned foolish.

What if the main value of paranormal experiences is in the nature of the experience itself? In the story?

Experience is what it is, or what we say it is, if we are able to say. At the point that experience takes form as structured language, it becomes Story.

Consider this:

Ours is the only culture in the history of humankind that does not see the transformation of experience into story as essential and worthy of deep respect, preceding and guiding all other kinds of knowledge.

In most cultures, traditions of Story ground that culture in the created world and orient each person in it to matter in a way that is functional and correct. Such cultures can stay stable over thousands of years.

What is our biggest cultural problem today? Arguably it is ungrounded, runaway change.

Isn’t it ironic? By nailing knowledge to the wall for sake of creating toasters and security and absolutes, we are swamped with unwanted change, swamped with defunct toasters, swamped with swamp gas and weird tales and things seen in the skies.

I’m not saying Science is bad. I’m not saying Science has given us nothing. I’m not saying I want to see Creationism in schools or that global warming is Al Gore-generated commie propaganda. I’m not saying any of those things.

I’m just saying.

Tell the stories. Tell them well. To thine own self be true.

The world will sort out the rest.

Steve Andrews (A.K.A. Bard of Ely) Talks About Aliens

2010-05-02T11:19:38Z

Steve Andrews, also known as Bard of Ely, is a writer, journalist and poet; a musician and songwriter, and an avid gardener and naturalist.

The author of the rare book Herbs of the Northern Shaman, (one of the few of its kind in existence), Steve has also written for Permaculture and (with author C.J. Stone) for the magazine Prediction.

As the Bard of Ely, Steve has been written about in some depth by a variety of authors and appears in is in Fierce Dancing, The Last of the Hippies and Housing Benefit Hill by CJ Stone as well as Peter Finch’s Real Cardiff and Lionel Fanthorpe’s The World’s Most Mysterious People. Steve lives on the island of Tenerife, and was recently featured on Eye On Life editor Jerilee Wei’s page A Lovely Garden.

Steve is an expert on paranormal experience, UFOs, and alien visitations, and has written about them extensively in his work at Hub Pages. Recently Steve was kind and generous enough to grant me the following intervew on the topic of aliens, where they come from, and what they might be up to here on earth. His thoughtful, practical, and humane answers elevate the topic to the serious level of discussion it deserves—a rare event for sure.

Enjoy!:

1) Steve, you have written openly about your own experiences with the paranormal and with alien contact. Why do you think some people have these kinds of vivid experiences while others don’t? Do you think there is something unique about you that makes this sort of experience more likely or makes you more open to it?

I think there are two main reasons some people have these experiences and others don’t: Firstly, I think all little children are able to perceive beings that would be termed aliens, ghosts and spirits etc, but, and this is most important, they get it instilled into them that no such things exist apart from in stories. They are told it is all imagination or silly dreams, and that people who say they see such beings are mad.

I remember my mother used to tell me I had “too vivid an imagination,” as if this was something that was not necessarily good. When I went through a lot of strange experiences that I found out much later in life were possibly “hummadruz” – a “psychic training exercise” according to author Jenny Randles – my mum would tell me I was having “nightmares.” That didn’t make any sense to me because I was wide awake.
Please see: http://hubpages.com/hub/The-mysterious-phenomenon-known-as-hummadruz

As we grow up we are all exposed to various ways of being molded into the current system’s mainstream values and beliefs – how we think, react and behave is a product of how we are brought up and what we are taught. What we are instructed with does not make it true even if we come to accept it, or if millions of people believe it – as is the case with religious dogma. To various degrees this conditioning can break down or stay enforced.

Secondly, I believe there are very many beings on this planet who already knew what they were getting themselves involved in before they reincarnated, and that they may have had lives on other worlds before taking a bodily life here. This gets expressed in various ways - as “wanderers”, as “indigos” and basically comes down to anyone who feels they are not from this world, or that they have had past lives and have volunteered for this one. For example an individual who identifies as an indigo may feel certain they have lived on Atlantis in a past life or are from Orion or elsewhere.

Then, there is the idea of “old souls” that means that such beings may well have a greater ability to recall what they are doing here, and are more likely to experience “paranormal” incidents and having involvement in psychic matters. There is the idea of the “First wave” of indigos, which were beings who went ahead of the later arrivals.

Some people believe that we have all “volunteered” to be here right now to experience this, and maybe that is correct, but the majority of people have little or no awareness of this. We are all asleep and suffering amnesia to varying degrees.

2) Many psychics have had traumatic early lives that forced them to use their intuition more effectively. In a similar way, in the lore of the paranormal, many people first experience psychic phenomena after a major trauma or near death experience. Do you think trauma plays any role in alien abduction experiences or alien contact experiences?

I think near death experiences are a wake-up call to understanding that this meat body and nuts and bolts life is only a fraction of reality and life, no matter what a materialist scientist may say.

I know my very good friend King Arthur Pendragon had a near death experience in his youth that was an important moment in his awakening to an understanding of spiritual matters and helped shape him into becoming the fearless eco-warrior and leader of a Druid Order he is today.

A severe trauma can cause an altered sense of reality. This is where it is possible to perceive beings we might refer to as aliens or spirits. They are beings not in this dense physical reality, dimension or density.

I feel it is important here, to state that I believe a lot of what are called ETs or aliens, and the weird abduction experiences people have with them, are with “other-dimensional beings” or beings that are not tied to this dense physical one.

Sometimes people see other people they are close to before or after they die or are in a terrible accident, or get other psychic signs. When a friend of mine died, who used to cause light-bulbs to blow when he walked into a room when he was alive, bulbs went in my house before I got a message to tell me he had passed over. It was as if he was paying me a final call and knew I would recognize it was him blowing the bulbs out.

A shaman or neo-shaman can take an entheogenic substance and access other dimensional realities where the laws of how the world operates are not the same as this one and where they may well encounter beings, including Reptilians that David Icke talks about.

3) Sometimes I think that aliens may choose people who are least likely to be believed if they talk about their experiences (like trauma victims or psychics). This makes a kind of cold-blooded sense to me. What do you think aliens are looking for insofar as the people they choose to bother?

I think for a start that there are abduction experiences and “alien encounters” that may well be actually mind control by secret government military forces with the idea of it all getting blamed on aliens or not believed at all. There are real alien encounters and abductions as well, and I think the aliens are not so much as “choosing” individuals but “working” with ones they already had selected or had agreed to this before they incarnated.

4) So far I’m asking you questions that kind of assume only one kind of alien and one alien agenda. You’ve spoken about multiple alien species and multiple agendas in some of your writing. What are the most common aliens and what are they up to?

I think the situation is a lot more complex than most people would imagine. Some people find it hard to believe in any alien beings so for them to accept that there may well be many different races who are currently involved with this planet would be very difficult indeed. However, personally, I think that is the true nature of the situation and why it has been so hard to resolve, because there are many different types of ET and also inter-dimensional beings involved. As Andromedan contactee Alex Collier once said in an interview when describing the situation here: “It’s a mess.”

Sgt Clifford Stone, who was one of the Disclosure Project witnesses who were prepared to testify before congress, talks about 56 different types of alien beings known in an interview he gave.

5) What do you think about researchers like Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs who hypnotize subjects to get at alien abduction memories? Both of these guys take the alien agenda at face value—they think it’s a breeding experiment. What do you think?

I think hypnosis is a valuable tool but cannot always be trusted 100%. I think fake memories can surface and that a person who is hypnotized can be led by suggestions of the hypnotist or other stimuli to formulate an experience or response.

I was regressed for an HTV Wales broadcast for the series Weird Wales and some of what happened in the session I am sure was real but other stuff I have my doubts about. When the hypnotist took me to the age of eight, for example, I know that was real because I started talking about children I had long forgotten about, but when I was describing a past life as a Scandinavian lumberjack it was verging on the silly.

I remember watching myself in the video of the session afterwards and thinking of the Monty Python sketch with the “I’m a lumberjack” song. So what I am saying is that from my personal experience I think some of what is revealed by regression hypnosis can be relied on a the truth but not all of it.

With regard to the “breeding experiment” theories, I tend to believe that humans as we are now are a direct result of genetic manipulation by alien beings in the past, and possibly this has happened more than once. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were monitoring and making changes to the genetic make-up of people on this planet for purposes unknown to us.

Humans carry out selective breeding and genetic manipulation of many species of plants and animals, so there is no reason not to believe that far more advanced civilizations do likewise and include us as their subjects.

Alternative historian and author Michael Tsarion puts forward the idea that the origins of evil in the human race comes directly from genetic interference by alien beings that mixed their DNA with ours in an effort to create a slave race. Michael calls these beings the Nephilim, the beings which are described in the Bible as the “Sons of God” who went taking wives of the human women who gave birth to their children. In other words they created alien and human hybrids.

It is even more complicated than that though. Author Stewart Swerdlow describes the alien races who have been involved here in his books Blue Blood, True Blood: Conflict & Creation A Personal Story and in Montauk The Alien Connection. He gives details of the Abbenakki (a Reptilian race), the beings of Aldebaran, Antaries, Arcturus, the Lyreans (Atlans), the Draco, the Pleiadians, and those of Procyon, Rigel, Sirius A and Sirius B, the Tau Ceti race, the Vegans, the Zeta Reticuli I and Zeta Reticuli II, as well as beings known as the Bear, the Butterfly, the Praying Mantis and the EBE (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity).

Alex Collier’s contactee information given to him by the Andromedans has many parallels with much of what Swerdlow says concerning the Draco and Lyraens. The involvement of alien races with this planet and elsewhere in the universe is the subject matter of “Exopolitics” and is too complex for me to go into much further here. I advise people to research the videos and writings of Tsarion, Swerdlow and Collier to find out more.

6) I know you are pretty well versed in the conspiracy dimension of alien research. Do you think it possible that, as some have suggested, alien entities feed on fear and encourage this kind of energy for their own purposes? (Kind of like farming—growing fear to use in their culture, just like we generate electricity to heat our homes in ours.)

Yes, I subscribe to this idea which David Icke and others are putting forward. I feel that they are correct in saying that inter-dimensional beings, known as Reptilians, which are very likely to be the same entities known as demons, do feed on our fear, and take steps to cause as much of it as they can in the human world.

7) Why do you think aliens seem to be both a material and a nonmaterial at the same time?

I think that most of the beings that come here are able to be in this physical plane of existence or dimension and to move into other higher ones where they may live or use to travel via.
I think this is where I should point out that I don’t feel that the idea of physically travelling light years of space in “nuts and bolts” craft is what is happening at all, and that skeptics and non-believers who say it is impossible and doesn’t make sense that extraterrestrial beings would be doing this are correct.

How I see it is this way: that the universe is not solid but is made up of very many dimensions or frequencies and what we perceive as solid is not but is only our agreed upon perception. David Icke explains we have radio and TV channels all occupying the same space but we need a radio or TV receiver to tune them in.
Beings that understand this better are able to “materialize” and “dematerialize” themselves and their craft.

Tune into this frequency and this planet and locations on it and to tune out or switch frequencies.
I think if you understand the universe as made up this way it makes it much easier to understand what is going on. This world and the objects in it are not really solid like we perceive them, and any scientist would confirm that. Solid matter is an agreed-upon concept we use to live in a world made up of it.

8) If you could have any three questions about aliens answered for once and for all, what three questions would you choose?

That is a very difficult one to answer. I think the first question would be: Is it true that humans are the result of past genetic manipulation by aliens? Second question: If it is true, who were the alien races responsible? Third question: What should we be doing now, individually, and as the human race, to sort out the mess the world is in?

9) If you had to pick three books that talk about aliens fairly accurately, what three books would you choose?

Gods of Eden by William Bramley, Secrets of the UFO by Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert, and CoEvolution by Alec Newald, in which he describes what it was like being taken to another planet for 10 days.

10) What advice would you give to someone who is having anomalous experiences and is feeling disrespected or trivialized whenever they try to talk about them?

I know this is easier said than done but I would say to have no fear of what others think or say. We are only going to get the truth if enough people speak up and share their experiences and conclusions.

11) Is there anything you’d like to add or recommend?

It is a very vast subject but I feel I should recommend the following people:
Contactee Alex Collier – all his video interviews and talks are well worth watching to get an understanding of the bigger picture.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Alex-Collier-my-favourite-ET-contactee-is-back

Contactee and author of Blue Star Fulfilling Prophecy Miriam Delicado because she is currently organizing the “Great Gathering” and is working directly inspired by her contacts with Tall Blonde aliens. Miriam has been meeting with Hopi elders and the Mamos of the Kogi tribe too.
http://www.bluestarprophecy.com/

Contactee, artist and researcher Karen Lyster:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Karen-Lyster-O/670608092

The Project Camelot website, which I feel is probably the most comprehensive collection of interviews with whistle-blowers and movers and shakers in the worlds of conspiracies, ufology, alternative history and related matters online:
http://projectcamelotportal.com/

And my site here about UFOs in Tenerife: http://hubpages.com/hub/UFO-sightings-and-Tenerife

And finally, this one about the Greys: http://hubpages.com/hub/Who-or-what-are-the-Greys

Flash Fiction: Weird Tales for a Wired World

2010-04-17T20:00:51Z

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, pulp fiction publications like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories satisfied the public taste for lurid space opera, fantastic horror yarns, and wild adventure.

During that golden era, the short story or serialized novel sucked readers into buying a wide variety of hot rags and papers. Many of the most reknowned writers of modern science fiction, fantasy, and horror got their start writing for these very publications.

Today, these same authors, once mocked and scorned by the literati, are taught in college fiction classes and lauded in MFA programs. Classic covers and signed editions of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories have become hot collectibles. Lovecraftian fiction has spawned its own active sub-genre. Just as some people really wanna be Elvis, some cult writers now actively strive to be Howard.

Pulp has gone mainstream, or at least gained a degree of respectability it was not accorded by contemporaries.

Pulp fiction preceded and foreshadowed both comic books and genre sci fi, fantasy, and horror, but the form wasn’t really new, not even 100 years ago. During the last part of the 19th century

The Nain Rouge: Detroit’s Messenger of Doom

2010-04-09T13:37:03Z

Every March 21st, the citizens of Detroit hold a raucous ceremony to drive a paranormal sprite called the Nain Rouge out of the city. Loud music, boisterous partying, and wild parades make Detroit seem more like New Orleans for a few hours than the northern urban outpost it really is. People wear masks and outlandish hats and clothes, dance, sing, and get a little toasted.

With unemployment in Detroit topping 50% and huge tracts of the city abandoned, this year’s Nain Rouge event got more press than usual. Even Time Magazine covered it. But weirdly, lots of present-day Detroiters never even heard of the Nain Rouge and care about him even less.

Today, the Nain Rouge seems to be more of a creature of the Internet or the latest excuse for a street party than anything else (not that that is a bad thing!) But then, the city of Detroit definitely isn’t what it used to be.

Perhaps the serious work of the Nain Rouge in Detroit is done.

Who is the Nain Rouge?

The Nain Rouge is a lutin: a small malevolent dwarf similar to a sprite, pixie, fairy, goblin, elf, brownie, leprechaun, or imp. Almost every culture includes a folkloric version of magical ‘little people’, and all have either a mischievous or blatantly malevolent dimension. The lutin is the French version of this type of nature sprite.

Short and hairy with a bright red face,

The Vampire Zombie Quiz: How Undead Are You?

2010-04-03T22:07:54Z

Thanks to The Sixth Sense, everybody knows that ghosts don’t always realize they are dead. (Some helpful psychic usually has to clue them in, and by that time it’s way beyond too late. It does cheer up the psychic though—especially if there’s a TV show in it and maybe a movie deal.)

But did you know that the newly undead have many of the same issues? Vampires and zombies get only a fraction of the emotional support we offer ghosts.

It isn’t fair. But then, nobody ever said that un-death was going to be fair.

This quiz will help you figure out if you are 1)

Vampires: Modern Mystery Cult of Death & Desire

2010-03-08T15:53:28Z

With the recent popularity of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods, vampires are enjoying a contemporary resurgence in literature, film, and pop culture. In fact, when it comes to modern incarnations of magical creatures, vampires have been on the ascent ever since Nosferatu star Max Shreck thrilled and terrified flappers onscreen in 1922.

Max Schreck as Count Orlok 1922Today’s cinematic and fictional vampires are a lot hunkier than the sickly Shreck was made up to be, but the celebrity vampires of today all share an intense intimacy with desire and death. This intimacy is both timeless and central to the vampire mythology. The interesting question (to my mind, anyway) is: Given that sex is splashed all over everything these days in the form of advertising and product development, why now? Why are vampires suddenly so hot now?