Pimp My Scooter

Man gave names to all the animals - Bob Dylan

I'm sorry I haven't time for a proper post today, but I feel compelled to draw your attention to The New Yorker's excerpts from the 1996 novel The Apprentice. Paedophilia, incest, bestiality: welcome to the inner life of Scooter Libby.

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And

He asked if they should fuck the deer.

(The answer, it would seem, is yes.)

Is it just another dirty book? There's no harm - or not much - in that. Hell, I wrote a book myself that could be charitably described as one, though bears coupling with children didn't occur to me. How about just another disgraced Republican's dirty book? There are plenty of those as well. But this is the long-time Chief Advisor of a man long-linked to covert-sanctioned ritual abuse and trauma-based mind control, prominent features of which are paedophilia and bestiality, writing a fictional account of child sexual slavery and rape by a domesticated bear that could have been lifted straight out of survivor literature.

The New Yorker plays it for laughs - there go those wacky Republicans, writing about weird sex again - but even if this is fiction, it's not just fiction for America's "Family Values" Fascists, is it? There's Bill Bennett's alleged dominatrix, John Bolton's crimes of passion, George HW Bush's much whispered "problem," and far too many examples of "conservative" politicians found with their pants down around young children for them to be "momentary lapses of moral judgement." This can't be answered with "mistakes were made." This is systemic pathology.

It isn't a bad thing to write about sex, even poorly. Or even to write about bad sex. But neither is it wrong to observe patterns of pervision linked to patterns of force, and to ask just what is it that's going on here.

The Top of My Head

For what’s left of our religion I lift my voice and pray:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
shine on the truth some day - Leonard Cohen

When the US Declaration of Independence was signed on the second Dog Day of the summer of 1776, the Sun was conjunct Sirius, a star of unrivalled significance to ancient Egyptian mystery religions, esoteric Freemasonry and New Age UFO cults. (Remember Alice Bailey's teaching that the ancient mysteries were received from the "Great White Lodge on Sirius," and that initiation into Earthly orders such as Freemasonry is merely preparatory for "admission into the greater Lodge on Sirius.") In 1846, the date for the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was chosen to again coincide with the passage of the Sun over Sirius, this time while the Moon was in Virgo. Its dedication ceremony saw Sirius rise over the Capitol building, as Jupiter auspiciously assumed the Moon's position, thus evoking the motto of the Seal of the United States, "Favor our daring undertaking": Audacibus annue coeptis, Virgil's invocation to Jupiter, the God. Regarding the great obelisk, David Ovason writes in The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capitol that it is a "mystery, involved in some of the deeper mysteries of Masonic symbolism." It "represents, from almost every viewing point in the city...a triangle hovering against the skies."

"We are touching upon mysteries which are so extraordinary that they seem to be beyond belief," Ovason adds. "Yet one need only look to the skies, and the records of stellar events, to realize that they are absolutely true."

It shouldn't need to be said, but it seems that everything must be said these days: the existence of mysteries is not necessarily an evil. Mysteries themselves merely evidence things hidden, occulted from general sight, and suggest there are supra-mundane forces to the world that show their hand to us, the uninitiates, in riddles. The architects and heirs of America's mysteries don't always shy from claiming their credit. The forward to Ovason's "fascinating and well-researched" study of Washington's secret fetish for Egypt's Old Kingdom, and perhaps things older, is provided by C Fred Kleinknecht, 33rd degree Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council, 33rd degree (Mother Council of the World), Southern Jurisdiction, USA.

"I'm seeing something that was always hidden," says Jeffrey Beaumont, early in Blue Velvet. "I'm in the middle of a mystery and it's all secret." Let's be honest, like Jeffrey: there can be a thrilling novelty to the process of discovery, even if we don't discover what the secret is, but merely that there is a secret. Even, sometimes, once we learn the secret, and find it nauseates and dizzies us. (Amusement rides, too, are about disorientation. Some get their kicks instead from metaphysical and parapolitical scares.) It was only later, when the mystery was recognized as not a vicarious amusement but a threat to life and sense of self, that it stopped being a thrill.

How do we recognize mystery's power? I think it's something like how Emily Dickinson recognized poetry:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Felt the top of your head come off lately? There's a poetry to this mystery we're in. That's not to say it's a thing of beauty; merely that there's an authorship, a manicured landscape of meaning. An intelligence at work. Materialists and coincidentalists who lack the semiotic skillset will see neither signs nor patterns; just random moments strung together by our imaginations. But C Fred Kleinknecht says, "As above, so below."

Edgar Cayce, America's "sleeping prophet," was a Christian and Freemason whose entranced alter claimed to have been a high priest of Egypt named "Ra Ta." Ra Ta predicted an American Golden Age based upon the principals of Freemasonry, linked to the projected opening of a hypothesized "Hall of Records" beneath the Sphynx at the end of the 20th Century. Cayce seems to have been a better psychic diagnostician than he was a prophet, but his influence had a long reach. Cayce advised Woodrow Wilson - two biographers claim he was summoned to Washington to advise on the creation of the League of Nations - the meeting arranged by head of the Secret Service, Colonel Edmond Starling. Sterling came from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and Cayce was born on a farm just outside Hopkinsville and resided in the town until a young adult.

(Does Hopkinsville ring another bell of American weirdness? The "Hopkinsville Incident"of August 21, 1955: a farmhouse, just outside the Kentucky town, besieged by shining, seemingly nickel-plated mischevious entities. Is there a connection? Maybe, though maybe no more than America is a weird place, and some American places are weirder than others.)

What do we do about the poetics of mystery? Sometimes we construct our own. At least that's how I understand the self-discrediting work of Tom Flocco, Sherman Skolnick and others. Flocco's recent "exclusive" fantasies - Barbara Olson arrested! French intelligence kill Israeli terrorists in NYC subway! Bush orders Fitzgerald fired! - is "conspiracy theory" as poetry slam: associative narratives to compete with the official stories, all of them wholly unhinged from reality. Such writers are not disinfo agents so much as they are fabulists, and no matter how often they are proven wrong they will still find a readership, because they promise emotionally satisfying resolution. As in a fable, all loose ends are tied. And like a fable, it all happens without our intervention. All we need do is watch it unfold, though only in our minds.

Poetry can help us understand our situation, if we don't, as Flocco appears to have done, mistake it for our situation. I can't speak for Emily Dickinson, but one poem that took the top of my head clean off this year was the film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City.

Dominating the city's religious and political life are two brothers, a Cardinal and a Senator. The family is respected, and protected, acting above the secular and divine laws they administer. The Roark dynasty harbours serial killers, paedophiles, cannibals. The marginalized characters who challenge their authority doom themselves by doing so, though they leave small victories that survive them. Is this America? No, just something like it. Maybe more than Frank Miller knows. Maybe not as much as I think.

"What the hell do you know?" Cannibal Cardinal Roark asks Marv, the monster of vengence. Marv replies, "I know it's pretty damn weird to eat people." In the end, the esoteric meaning - the consumption of souls - is irrelevant. It is simply pretty damn weird. And wrong.

As Senator Roark tells the good cop Hartigan, as Hartigan lies in hospital, wounded and framed for having protected a young girl from Roark's predatory son:

Power doesn't come from a gun, or a badge. Power comes from lies. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain’t true you got ‘em by the balls.

There’s what, maybe, 500 people in this hospital? I could pump you full of bullets right now and I wouldn’t even be arrested. Everyone would lie for me. Everyone who counts. Otherwise all their own lies, everything that runs Sin City, it all comes tumblin’ down like a pack of cards.

Those who know things go deeper, weirder and darker than Scooter Libby know the cards haven't tumbled yet. Those who don't have yet to see the deck.

Into the black

Out of the blue and into the black
They give you this, but you pay for that - Neil Young

Just three intimations that the world is not the world.

An update on the killing of Pamela Vitale, wife of attorney Daniel Horowitz who had been defending Susan Polk in the murder of her husband Felix, whom she had accused of mind control and Satanic Ritual Abuse.

Sixteen-year old suspect Scott Dyleski shared a home in the Lafayette hills made out of recycled materials and straw-bales with his mother, Esther Fielding, and two other families. Fielding is a New Age healer. Thanks to Steve Huff and "hmm," her commercial website can be found here.

There was speculation in the comments to the original post that Dyleski was himself mind controlled. For what it's worth - and who can tell what that is? - let's note that one of the treatments his mother offers is non-invasive removal of "Government and Alien Implants":

Of course this sounds like something from the X-Files, but we know they exist. We have put our belief systems aside when it comes to viewing inside the body and what it reveals. Implants, which are easily inserted through injections or inoculations, are used by our "secret" government to track or program its citizens. Then there are the Grey aliens--they place non-earthly implant material in selected humans who have either been abducted or are being tracked....

Our group has worked in removing implants through the use of Orion remote viewing techniques. By using a command, our clients have felt a difference when the implants were easily and quickly removed.

As for the "some kind of gothic signature" carved into Vitale's back, it has subsequently been described as a "double-crossed "T" or a "Cross of Lorraine."

From Boyd Rice's study of the esoteric meaning of the Cross of Lorraine, in The Vessel of God:

Interestingly, the Cross of Lorraine bears an uncanny resemblance to the sigil of Baphomet employed by British Magus Aleister Crowley, and the meaning of the two symbols would appear to be virtually synonymous. Baphomet is, after all, the penultimate hermetic symbol, whether depicted by Crowley in the form of a cross, or by Eliphas Levi as a goat-headed hermaphrodite. And the sigil used by Crowley was also employed by ancient alchemists as a device whose meaning was literally "very poisonous." In fact, the symbol was commonly affixed to containers of toxic substances in Europe as recently as the mid-twentieth century. To the alchemists, of course, the symbol and its very meaning had far more esoteric connotations. To them, poison represented an agent of transformation, a vehicle for the reconciliation of opposites. And there is an alchemical myth about a poison which for most men is extremely deadly, while for the elect it confers mastership and absolute power. Echoes of this idea recur as a motif in various aspects of the Grail lore. It would seem that the alchemists accorded this symbol very much the same meaning attributed it by Crowley, which in turn echoes what the Cross of Lorraine embodied for Rene d'Anjou. It is little known, but the Cross of Lorraine was also the official emblem of the Knights Templar.

Though they are more frequently associated with the symbol of the red equilateral cross, their true symbol first and foremost was the Cross of Lorraine, and many Templars awaiting death at the stake pursuant to the Friday the 13th persecutions drew the emblem on the walls of their cells. There is still a degree in certain rites of Freemasonry called the Knights Templar, whose symbol is the Cross of Lorraine....

Meanwhile, Susan Polk has expressed concern that the seizure of two computers from the Horowitz residence could compromise her defense, as they held files containing her statements and a history of the case. Polk asks, "Does the prosecution have the right to see, in advance, the entire plan, essentially, of the defense?"

Mysterious animal deaths and mutilations proliferate, though the incidents are usually considered only locally and in singularity, rather than as pointillist details on a broader canvas. Whenever such stories make the news, it's always time for the jokes about aliens and Satanists, as though the incidents were only silly rumour, and the livestock were just playing dead.

The Colorado town of Calhan is baffled by two mass deaths taking the lives of 22 horses, nearly five years to the day after 24 cattle were found dead in Roswell, New Mexico following a visit by Dick Cheney. "Foul play is not suspected," though in the first group of deaths, "the animals were riddled with puncture wounds that authorities initially thought were bullet holes but were later determined to be from an unknown source."

In Dartmoor, England, it's sheep:

Occult fear as sheep slaughtered

A DARTMOOR farmer who found six of his sheep with their necks broken and their eyeballs removed believes occultists could be responsible.

Four of the dead animals had been laid out in a square, while the other two were discovered near stones apparently arranged to make a pagan symbol.

Last January saw a similar incident, just a mile away:

Dead sheep found in "occult star"

Police in Devon are investigating after seven sheep were found dead arranged in an unusual pattern on Dartmoor.

The sheep were found on Sampford Spiney on Dartmoor with their necks broken and their bodies in a pattern sometimes associated with the occult.

The pattern was similar to the shape of a star, or heptagram, a mystical symbol commonly used in occult ceremonies.

Initial thoughts here, too, were of a lightning strike, until the star pattern was recognized. "It's scared some people and worried them, me included, being this close to home," said farmer Chris Cole.

Last August, the carcasses of 15 headless and bloodless kangaroos were discovered in the suburbs of Melbourne. (A good study of this case by Linda Moulton Howe can be read here.) And so on.

Back in Calhan:

...many were around when a spate of unsolved cattle mutilations occurred in the 1970s and again in the early 1990s, and they’re willing to entertain the notion — maybe with a little tongue in cheek — that cults, creeps and 'black helicopter' people might be to blame. "There’s strange stuff going on," Terry Ashcraft said Monday while doing some business at the Pikes Peak Co-op in Calhan.

And then there's this remarkable story in Bellaciao, developing the Michael Ledeen ties to the Niger forgery discussed here a year ago last August and again last July, which traces the caper back as early as January 2001:

At night, between the first and second of the January 2001, a mysterious thief came to the embassy of Niger in Rome and into the residence of the counselor in charge. It turned out that some letterhead and seals (see photocopy) were missing. A second dossier on Niger-Iraq trade soon came into [SISMI asset Rocco] Martino’s hands, one that included references to uranium trafficking. Martino claims he got it from embassy personnel and that he thought it was authentic.

January 2001. That is, nine months before 9/11, it would seem the Niger forgery was already in motion.

It's always reasonable to suggest we ought to come down to Earth. But I think when we do, it'll be an awfully hard landing. And we may not even recognize the place.

There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.
Hey hey, my my....

The Left, the Right, and the Wrong

You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view. - Bob Dylan

Last July 27, the US State Department very thoughtfully posted a resource tool for journalists and media consumers entitled "How to Identify Misinformation." Though "there are no exact rules" to tell whether a story is true or false, the State Department offers clues. First among them, "Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory?"

Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations.

The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories.

To demonstrate a pattern of falsity, the "counter-misinformation team" provides links to just three of the "many conspiracy theory websites which contain a great deal of unreliable information": Rense.com, Joe Vialls and Conspiracy Planet.

Rense.com boasts that the State Department ranks it "number one," but I find that unwarranted in light of the pattern the State Department establishes in its attempt to discredit the critical study of High Crimes.

Consider its solitary example of 9/11 conspiracy theory: Thierry Meyssan's Pentagon cruise missile. I've written numerous times here what I think of the supposition that something other than Flight 11 hit the Pentagon. Regardless of what any of us think, it remains the most divisive wedge issue and energy sink for 9/11 activists. Of course the State Department would draw attention to it, to the neglect of all others. No mention of insider trading, squelched investigations and coincident wargames. The "counter-misinformation team" is trying to proscribe counter-information by accentuating the preposterous. Meyssan's work becomes, in a sense, "approved" conspiracy theory, because it's the only one to receive official recognition. Not only in this State Department publication, but in virtually every mainstream treatment of alternative appraisals of 9/11 the "no plane" theory still takes pride of place. (A similar process is occurring with respect to reports of Katrina "conspiracy theory," in which soft rumours of the levees being blown take precedence over hard analysis of the intentional withholding of aid.)

Two of the three sites singled out by the State Department are, rightly or wrongly, widely perceived as containing anti-semitic bias. Rense.com's enthusiastic support of Ernst Zundel, and its linking to revisionist accounts of his "heroic struggle," may be made in the spirit of idealized libertarianism, but Zundel is a Nazi, and his kampf is not my own. The late Joe Vialls did some very commendable work, particularly his series on the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman murders, but he also tended to see Jews under the bed an awful lot ("Kosher Kerry Cons Christian America", for one mild instance).

What the State Department is doing by holding up these sites - one, Vialls, rather obscure - as exemplars of "conspiracy theory," is to administer a poison pill to contrary analysis. To the poor journalist or media consumer taking cues from the "counter-misinformation team," it will appear as though conspiracy theory has an essential core of anti-semitism. But there's maybe more going on than that.

In the first part of my interview with ritual abuse-mind control survivor Kathleen Sullivan, she made the following observation:

Another interesting factor is that most of the more outspoken disinfo agents present together at conferences that either pander to “conspiracy theorists” and/or to the sector that is pro-Aryan and/or “Patriot.” Not all people in the Patriot movement are pro-Aryan. However, I have learned that most of the mind-control disinfo agents are, privately if not publicly, avowed racists. This would seem to be a rather odd connection, if one did not know that many Aryan organizations and cell groups use “trauma-based mind control” on their members, to ensure their submission and compliance.

I find this fascinating. Sullivan says that the occult-intelligence perpetrators of ritual abuse belong to the Aryan networks, as do those who have claimed leadership of its exposure. This is one of those things that threw me for a cognitive loop when I began discovering this material, which nearly tempted me to pretend the evidence for it didn't exist. (Another one was that many of the self-styled champions of mind control survivors become their lovers and handlers.) These characters, like Fritz Springmeier, Mark Phillips and Ted Gunderson, are either drawn from or pander to the extreme right: the militias, the White Nationalists, and the "Patriot" communities. (Linda Blood, author of The New Satanists, had a WTF? moment in the mid-90s at a ritual and cult abuse conference, to the delight of debunker Evan Harrington: "Blood, who spoke later in the day, protested that she was 'unhappy to be following someone [Marqui] who is pushing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' which she said was anti-Semitic trash. Blood's protest deeply angered some and bewildered others, while about four of Blood's friends clapped in support.")

The conspiratocracy nurtures a false opposition on the far right, to cause gentler hearts across the spectrum to turn away in disgust from inquiring after darker secrets, and perhaps also to provide cover to a pool of low-level functionaries.

And it's no exaggeration to say Nazis are throwing their thought-bombs at us, attempting to make their cause respectable and infiltrate our side and - worse - our minds. On the "White Nationalist" board Stormfront, a recent post from "Free Zundel Now" spoke of success spreading a "stealth article" calling for Bush's impeachment on "forums that ordinarily won't take our kind of subject matter." "Free Zundel Now" tried it on the RI board, and the Nazi spamming was exposed.

From Stormfront's "Celtic Nation," advice on infiltration:

...you have to speak a language they will hear, and speak to what they will hear, and as you said, point out racial realities. The constant drone of Jew bashing will start to turn people off. It does make WN's look like kooks and conspiracy theorists, and hearkens people back to nutty stereotypes of Col. Klink from Hogan's Heroes, and paranoid conspiracy theorists who are mentally off-center.

When I discuss Israel and the Jews, I try to talk of the evils of the state of Israel, and if they are ready for it, introduce more. The fact is that most of what we struggle against is the big picture - the superstructures in place by the Jews in power.

Sometimes Israel means Israel, sometimes Zionist means Zionist. But sometimes it means something else. We need to know this, we need to become sensitive to the sometimes encrypted message, if we are to meet and defeat the true enemy. Because in every instance, Nazi means Nazi.

If you go out in the woods

Your father's gone a-hunting
He's deep in the forest so wild
And he cannot take his wife with him
He cannot take his child - Leonard Cohen

Near Cisco Grove, California on the night of September 5, 1964 Donald Schrum, a 27-year old employee of a local missile production plant became separated from his two bow-and-arrow hunting companions. As dusk approached he took shelter in a tree, lashing himself to a branch with his belt. After settling in, Schrum - identified only as "Mr S" in the files of the US Air Force's Project Blue Book - saw three objects in the darkening sky, a rotating and protruding light afixed to each that emitted "cooing" noises. Mr S thought they were rescue helicopters, searching for him, so he climbed down the tree and set signal fires. It was then, he realized they were not helicopters.

They were three somethings, [I can find no description of the appearance, other than "strange looking" and "different than anything he'd seen before"], shining beams of bright white lights, and they were circling his location. As he watched them descend, from beneath two of them, two smaller objects were delivered to the ground. Soon after he lost sight of them, he heard a loud crashing in the underbrush, and frightened, climbed to the lower branches of a tall pine tree.

Dr J Allen Hynek picks up the story, in The Hynek UFO Report:

He thereupon witnessed two humanlike individuals approaching his signal fires. They were garbed in silbery collarless suits, had unusual protruding eyes, and communicated to one another via an unintelligible cooing noise. According to Mr S., they were trying to dislodge him from his tree position when a third "alien," described by Mr S. as a "robot," appeared on the scene. Mr S. fired some arrows at the "robot" but failed to distract or divert any of the strange individuals. [Another account reports that when he finally hit the robot, "there was an arc flash and the robot was knocked backwards."] Then he tried lighting parts of his clothing on fire and throwing it at them to frighten them away. The individuals had violent reactions, and at the same time their craft began to ascend upwards, emitting a vapor which caused him to black out.

Schrum regained consciousness in the early dawn, found his companions and told them what had happened. Later, he told his father-in-law, who persuaded him to talk to authorities. Hynek mentions that the Air Force report notes "Mr S" appeared "stable and consistent in telling his story," though it explained the alleged sighting as "psychological." The Air Force kept the tape of Schrum's narrative, as well as one of the arrows he had fired at the robot.

Hynek adds:

The story of a bow-and-arrow hunter, held at bay high in a tree, setting flame to parts of his clothing and tossing them down onto the heads of his assailants until he was half-naked, passing out because of strange fumes emitted by "aliens," is certainly hard to believe, unless one considers it within the framework of the whole parade of stories similar to it.

It's a story that belongs to traditional folklore: the hunter who wanders off into strange woods and experiences enchantment. To our degraded understanding, enchantment sounds cute and quaint and precious, when it can be as frightening as a fairy tale.

Hynek's book was published in 1977 and I read his account of the Schrum case for the first time last Thursday, and what it most recalled for me was the "chupa" flap of the early 1980s, centered upon the small, remote town of Parnarama in northern Brazil. Jacques Vallee researched the cases, travelling to Parnarama to interview witnesses and survivors (at least five people were said to have died from close encounters), and the results were published in his 1990 book Confrontations.

(By the way, last Spring, Jeremy of Fantastic Planet wrote a terrific piece entitled Ultradimensional Terror and You which used the chupas as a springboard into an exploration of the Twin Peaks mythology as a "ready-made semiotic set within which to discuss the possibility of ultradimensional entities invading our 'Reality' and essentially having their way with us.")

Vallee writes that the chupas were usually described as small "boxlike UFOs equipped with powerful light beams" which flew over "the wooded areas and the river valleys at night. All of the victims in Parnarama were deer hunters who had climbed into trees during the night, as is frequently the case in that part of Brazil." Unless someone in Parnarama had gotten hold of The Hynek UFO Report, and the people conspired to punk Vallee and others, I find that an interesting fact.

In most cases, the chupas flew above the treetops and shone their beams toward the earth. They were said to make a humming sound, "like a refrigerator or a transformer," and did not appear large enough to contain a human pilot.

From Confrontations:

The hunting technique used in the region is unique: the hunters climb ten to fifteen feet into the trees, then spend the night in a hammock waiting for deer or other game. They take a flashlight with them to spot the animals.

A theory among local people is that the chupas are attracted by the flashlights, come over the hammocks, and strike the victims with their concentrated beam. However, I found little consistency in the descriptions of the beam itself. One witness compared it to an electric arc. On an interview tape another witness said he remembered a "bad smell" like an electrical odor (ozone)? and saw a blinding light, with pulsating colors inside....

Several people reported being exposed to the chupas in late 1982 as they were lying in their tree hammocks.... They had lost their previous vitality. A 43-year old man who "used to be afraid of nothing" now lives in constant fear. He is "scared of things that are not part of my experience."

After being struck by a chupa beam, victim Dionizio General "came rolling down the hill. For the following three days he was insane with teror; then he died." Another, Abel Boro, screamed as the light engulfed him. A friend ran to the Boro house to get his family, but Abel was dead, his body white, by the time they arrived. (It might be presumed that the isolated locals would leap to the explanation that chupas were spirits of the woods, but Vallee notes a local rumour that chupas were "American prototypes" stealing their blood.)

What are some points of congruity between the Schrum incident and the "chupas," and what might they suggest?

• The victims were hunters who bedded down in tall trees
  
• Schrum's UFOs and the chupas behaved as though drawn by fire and flashlight
• They emitted strong beams of light and similar sounds (a "cooing" and a "humming")
• Their actions appear intended to terrorize, even to death
  
• The extraterrestrial hypothesis again offers the least satisfying explanation

Think of the apparent futility of Schrum's whatevers, shaking the tree all night with the apparent purpose of dislodging him. Apparent. Because like the Hopkinsville monsters, who beseiged a farm house all night long but never threatened to enter, if they'd really wanted him out of that tree, they could have had him. But they weren't trying. Not really. Like the Flatwoods Monster, and "Mothman," and others, it just meant to say "Boo." Like Fungus the Bogeyman, their job is to give us a good scare. (Though, as the chupas tell us, if they scare us to death that's our problem.) Why? I like how Jeremy put it: fear is "the porterhouse steak of garmonbozia," and garmonbozia is Twin Peaks-speak for the the intense human emotions upon which vampiric entities feast.

One more hunter's story, this from Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality.

Carl Higdon, a 40-year old mechanic, was hunting elk in Wyoming's Medicine Bow National Park on October 25, 1974, when he decided to try a part of the woods little explored by hunters. Higdon came upon a group of five elk, and put his gun to his shoulder and fired.

Harpur writes:

Something strange happened. The sound of the shot was curiously muffled and the bullet seemed to travel so slowly that Carl was able to watch it in flight. It fell to earth some 15 to 20 meters in front of him. It was completely crushed. Amazed, Carl picked up the bullet and put it in his pocket. Then, turning at the sound of a branch cracking, he saw a very tall man standing about 20 meters away in the shade of a birch. This man, or whatever he was, had yellow skin, bristling straw-colored hair, and was wearing a black costume.

He approached Carl and said, surprisingly, "How you doin'?" - to which Carl replied: "Pretty good." "Are you hungry" asked the stranger. "Yeah. A little," said Carl. The man tossed him a package containing four pills, telling him to take one, which would last him for four days. Carl did take one, whereupon the man asked if Carl would like to go with him. "I guess," said Carl, and for the first time he saw a transparent illuminated "cubicle."

Carl embarked, noticing two other figures clad in black and five elk in a cage. They travelled to what the stranger called his "planet," but Carl was not allowed to leave the vehicle. Returning to the forest, Carl was dropped out of the cubicle onto rocky ground, near an unknown cow trail. He followed it, and came to a truck stuck in the mud, and used its CB radio to call for help. It turned out to be his own pick-up, which he had not recognized. When police arrived they found him "distraught, red-eyed, tearful, and (like the medieval near-death visionary, Alberic, who could not remember his mother) unable even to recognize his wife, who had come with them. He could only repeat the story of the pills and the men in black."

A wild tale, and like all such tales, impossible to verify. Yet his bullet was in his pocket where he'd placed it, folded like a glove. And to ask But was it real? is likely to miss the point. Fungus the Bogeyman returned to a home and family after a good night's scare. To what, and to whom, do these entities return? Does the yellow man in the black uniform ever say "Honey, I'm home?" Are there factories assembling the bizarre and ungainly robots of Schrum's and many others accounts? Why is there so little standardization of craft, and why are there so many different kinds of entities? Religion and occult lore have more to say in this regard than exopolitics, because these things are manifesting themselves for us.

Higdon might not have been terrorized, but he was drained, left a blubbering mess, like so many who encounter the Other. The Otherworld, too, has those who play good cop/bad cop. So long as they feed.

By the way, Professor Pan has an excellent post on the attempted manipulation of UFO manifestations, including a fascinating anecdote of his own apparent summoning.

Shadows and Fog

Just then a bolt of lightning struck the courthouse out of shape,
And while everybody knelt to pray the drifter did escape. - Bob Dylan

It's always interesting to watch what happens when the proudly incredulous bump up against intransigent darkness. Ponchatoula is one recent example; Jeff Gannon, whoever he is, may be another, if only for his incidental disinternment of Craig Spence. What is it that happens? Perhaps retreat to the rolled eyes of ridicule; perhaps stammering doubt about mechanistic models of humanity, the universe and everything. At this point, unless intellectual humility kicks in, the marshmallowing effect of consensus ignorance will swell like emergency airbags to fill the latest void left by shattered presumptions, and people go on as though the weird had never disturbed their world.

You may have read recently about the unsolved murder of Pamela Vitale, wife of attorney Daniel Horowitz. Thanks to starroute, I learned an interesting backstory that darkens the picture further.

From "Lawyers, Murder, Hit Men and the Devil":

Horowitz is currently defending Susan Polk, who stabbed her husband, famous psychologist Felix Polk, 15 times in their mansion...just 5 miles from where Horowitz discovered his slain wife.

Susan Polk's defense included tales of ritual abuse, Satanic cults and narcotics. Her 70-year-old husband was a cocaine-crazed lunatic who hypnotized his wife and children to make them obey his "sinister orders."

Polk alleges her late husband coerced her into a sexual relationship at the age of 16, shortly after he became her psychologist, and that it continued "under the guise of therapy" until she was 22. Interestingly, the San Francisco Chronicle further notes:

In 1987, Susan Polk claimed her then-18-month-old son was providing lurid details about suffering ritual abuse at day care. "The terror in our son's eyes is too profound," she told The Chronicle at the time, "and the details he has given about the blood...and about the screaming -- it's too much not to believe."

A mistrial has been declared in the Polk case and the jurors dismissed. "Polk, who will remain in custody, was crying in the courtroom when the mistrial was declared."

We need to exercise intellectual humility ourselves, and recognize the caution that admitting the reality of a criminal occult underground with a long reach and friends in high places does not mean it is always the guilty party. (Similarly, Professor Pan introduces a complex case from Lancaster, Pennsylvania: "Trances, satanic abuse - now a trial.") The Horowitz mystery may have another, and entirely mundane, solution, but as so often with charges of ritual abuse, evidence and leads suggesting the same are dismissed out of hand because of the presumption that no such thing exists. Susan Polk's allegations of ritual abuse at her son's day care and at the hands of her husband are more likely to be regarded in an American courtroom as evidence of a delusional state than as authentic leads to be pursued in the solution of a crime. (For instance, an hypothesis: was Vitale murdered as a message to Horowitz from a cult that does not welcome exposure?) So criminals evade justice, or cop to a lesser offense - think of Franklin's Larry King, who served time for fraud but not for child prostitution and ritual abuse - because their grotesque crimes challenge belief to the degree that they are assumed to be the product of mental illness, rather than, perhaps, its cause.

The world isn't black and white, but thinking it is would be a step up for those who never admit the legitimacy of ritual abuse claims and for those who can see nothing but the Goat of Mendes. There are a lot of colours out there, but we need to wreck the shadow and fog machines to see them. Until then, black and white is better than all black, or all white.

Update:

A 16-year-old boy who lives near homicide victim Pamela Vitale, the 52-year-old wife of well-known defense attorney Daniel Horowitz, has been arrested in connection with the killing in a remote part of Lafayette, two sources close to the investigation told The Chronicle this morning. Scott Dyleski was arrested Wednesday night at a relative's house on a warrant alleging murder and will be charged as an adult, one of the sources said. Investigators believe he killed Vitale by striking her 39 times in the head with a piece of crown molding, then carved some kind of gothic signature into her back, that source said.


More about the suspect, from Associated Press, with thanks to starroute:

"He was really gothic, always wore a long, dark jacket," said Kevin Etheridge, 16. "He'd hang out with a few kids, but he was pretty quiet, pretty much to himself."

Another student remembered him drawing a pentagram on the ground with chalk in junior high school and dancing around it with other students.

"He told people the book that he was carrying and reading from was the book of Satan," Keith Kingon said.

A man at the house where the suspect lived declined to comment Thursday as goats and chickens wandered around the property. A potbelly stove, a bathtub and dozens of baseballs littered the yard.

Something in between

Looks like freedom but it feels like death
It's something in between, I guess
It's closing time - Leonard Cohen

This may be the day. Not the day, but still one of some hope. So why don't I feel it?

Wayne Madsen reports that there is informed anticipation that the Plame indictments may finally be handed down today. Patrick Fitzgerald's spokesman Randall Samborn has said that any announcement would be made from Washington, and not Chicago. The Grand Jury will be sitting Wednesday, and its mandate's expiration of Oct 28 has nearly arrived and is unlikely to be extended. Even if the indictments don't come today, they are coming: Fitzgerald will not be issuing a final report, which was considered an option if he did not mean to call out officials on their crimes.

If that wasn't enough, Tom DeLay should be booked in a Texas jail this week on money laundering charges, the Abramoff investigation "has the Republican political establishment holding its breath," Dick Cheney's principal Deputy National Security Adviser John Hannah has been cooperating with Fitzgerald (which should also trouble the sleep of John Bolton and Michael Ledeen), and "government officials and advisers" have even sent up the balloon that Cheney might resign and be replaced with Condoleeza Rice.

Under the dispensation of the New Normal, this should finally mean something like good news. But we need something more than something like, and this won't be enough.

Last week, Madsen wrote that "the main stream media is just beginning to take notice that a 'Watergate-level event' is about to occur in Washington." Now here's my problem with that: so what? The United States already had its Watergate-level event, called Watergate, and it brought nothing more promising than a false dawn.

This is how I concluded the June post "What Is Watergate?":

If the deeper truths of Watergate lead past the White House to the CIA, then Nixon himself is a victim, and not just of his own animus. And that muddies the morality tale. McCord got to play flawed hero during the Senate Hearings, and his and Hunt's CIA pedigree were not explored by legislators and journalists smelling the blood of an unpopular president. Former intelligence briefer Bob Woodward obligingly led the investigation away from the intelligence community, as did "Deep Throat," whether or not he really was the FBI's Mark Felt.

Nixon's cover-up - spurred by the fear that Hunt's arrest could lead to the reopening of the "Bay of Pigs thing" (his euphemism for the Kennedy assassination) - helped close the case that the story began and ended at his office.

Certainly no innocent, but not exactly guilty as charged, either. Nixon was himself, at last, a patsy.

To those for whom "Bush knew" is not inexact shorthand, but rather the kerygma of "9/11 Truth," a Fitzgerald decapitation strike upon the Vice President's office will be as good as it gets. And Cheney should be taken down for something, for everything, even if just by shrapnel from an indictment fired at Scooter Libby. But seeing him "step aside" rather than hauled away would be nothing like good news. Rice would be positioned for '08 (as America's realpolitik determined that only Nixon could go to China, so only the Republicans can nominate the first black and female presidential candidate). And Cheney would likely continue on in an "unofficial" capacity, from one undisclosed location or another, to advance the dark agenda with even less accountability than he now has.

We know it, but let's recall it as the tension between reality and myth are ratcheted up: public office has only a nominal correlation with influence and the exercise of power. Again, it's the China model brought home to America. Deng Xiaoping officially retired in 1989, but he ran the backrooms of Chinese power until his death in 1997. Even when Deng held office it was never the highest office, yet he was known to be the de facto ruler of party and state. (When was the last time, say, Henry Kissinger was a public official?)

Might Bush and his team be played for patsies by the spooks seeming to wear, in this light, the white hats? It must be awfully tempting; they've done worse before to sitting presidents. But there is institutional guilt in Washington that predates the late addendum of this administration which took office only because it was most in accord with the decadent and criminalized power structures.

John Dean once said there was a cancer on the White House. It can appear now as if the cancer is the White House, and all America needs is a good Bushectomy. That's a start. But the cancer is metastastic, and it didn't begin at the top five years ago. Whoever's indicted and for what, it's just a start. 9/11 wasn't the brainchild of Karl Rove, it just played one on TV. The covert networks of intelligence, drugs, arms and terror had been in place long before - even during Democratic administrations, for all the good that did - and the pattern of opening doors for Atta and friends while looking the other way was well established before November, 2000. Bush can be blamed for much, but there is much that remains beyond the reach of nominal leaders, even if they are wicked.

I don't mean to be the wet blanket here. I just want to suggest that the prize is more than a few heads on a plate, or even an entire White House. It must be, if it's to mean anything more than another false dawn.

It's all in your mind

The National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul
To the old folks home and the college - Bob Dylan

Susan Clancy has it all figured out.

The postdoctoral fellow in Harvard's Psychology Department has been getting some press, and even some Larry King face-time, on account of the pending release of her book Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. As the title suggests, she had it figured out long before she began her study.

Even by the measure of such literature, Clancy's findings are dismayingly shallow. Abductions, she says, are nothing more than episodes of sleep paralysis, that tired old war horse of reflexive debunkers alongside Venus and swamp gas. ("It's a little bit like a hiccup in the brain," explains her advisor Richard McNally. "It's harmless.") But her conclusions are beside the point of her work. Actually, as far as she's concerned, the entire subject of abduction is beside the point.

Where Clancy's interest really lies is false memory. Her earlier work discredited repressed memory in childhood sexual abuse, for which one letter-writer called her a "friend of pedophiles everywhere."

She turned to abduction research in order to field test her theories of false memory because she already presumed abduction memories to be false. Or, as Associated Press rhetorically asks, "Wouldn't it be easier to test her theories if she could be certain that her subjects' memories were not real?"

Here she is at her desk, a copy of Satanic Panic at her right and what looks like a Kissinger-in-the-box at her left:



Whether it's UFOs and entity encounters or ritual abuse and mind control - or, more often than not, both - the trustees of convention prefer to keep things abstract and well-tended with ridicule. Because once the conversation descends from the conceptual to the specific, and once people stop dreading the laughter, one nagging exception is enough to make their worldview buckle. Or, as abduction researcher and academic David Jacobs says, "all debunkers make one or more of the following mistakes: They ignore the data, they distort the data or they don't know the data."

Clancy's prejudgement recalls the curious blindspots in When Prophecy Fails to unexplained acts of even purely human agency.

The book is a study of a UFO contact cult by three sociologists of the University of Minnesota, published in 1956. Dorothy Martin (called "Marion Keech") was a Chicago housewife who in 1953 began practicing spirirtualism, and a year later started receiving messages from what claimed to be extraterrestial beings from the planet "Clarion," whom she called the "Guardians." A group formed about her, the most prominent members of which were former missionaries Dr Charles and Lillian Laughead ("Thomas and Daisy Armstrong"). Martin's circle was given an apocalyptic jolt by the warning she received on August 27, 1954 which told of catastrophic Earth changes to strike that December 21, submerging the east coast of the United States and much of Western Europe. It was at this time the group was infiltrated by the academics, to document the responses of the true believers when the prophecies failed to deliver.

In The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince write that the story of the minor cult "may seem an all too familiar tale of people obsessed with a false, quasireligious belief built up around a deluded channeller. That is certainly how the team from Minnesota University treated it. Another aspect of the story suggests something else was going on - that the event were indeed being manipulated by outside forces":

Dorothy Martin sometimes returned to her locked home to find letters from "Clarion" left inside, and she would receive telephone calls direct from the Guardians when the sociologists were present, which at least indicates that they were not figments of her imagination. As a climax, when the group gathered at Dorothy's house on 18 December to await the coming cataclysm three days later, she received a long call from the leader fo the Guardians, a being called Sananda, after which five young men arrived at the house, the leader of whom claimed to be Sananda himself. The group went into another room with Laughead for half an hour, followed by an hour with Dorothy Martin (from which she emerged very emotional and moved). Then the five mystery callers left. Again, all this was witnessed by the researchers.

These were real events, so it is difficult to reconcile them with the Minnesota team's conclusion that it was all a collective delusion, although clearly there was scope for other interpretations, such as mistaken identity, or more probably, a hoax. Yet if the latter, it was very carefully and painstakingly organised: the letters, telephone calls and the visit all served to reinforce the group's belief in the prophecies received by automatic writing. Obviously, another group of people existed beyond the immediate circle of true believers and were orchestrating both the events and the phenomenon of escalating belief. Why?

(There's a very curious postscript here. Following the break-up of the cult the Laugheads travelled to Mexico where, pursuing their spiritualist interests, began working with a young man who claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials. Here they met Andrija Puharich and Arthur Young, who were on an expedition with Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos to locate ancient artifacts using his paranormal ability. It was three years after Puharich and Young had first made contact with the Nine. Soon after the team returned to the United States Puharich received a letter from Dr Loughead that referred to the Nine, named the correct date for their first contact through Dr DG Vinod and supplied other date seeming to corroborate that the Nine had found another channel and, again, Puharich.)

Debunkers such as Clancy show a fundamentalist's need for absolutes: authentic memories are never repressed, recovered memories are always false, ritual abuse never occurs, and there are no such things as "aliens." That's four things. Since when were fundametalists right about four things?


Another thing that isn't just in your mind: Forty year old Captain Ken Masters, the senior British military police investigator in Iraq has been found dead in Basra, alledgedly a suicide. "He had been responsible for the investigation of all in-theatre serious incidents," said the Ministry of Defense, "plus investigations conducted by the General Police Duties element of the Theatre Investigation Group." In-theatre incidents don't get more serious than this one, in Basra just a few weeks ago. Undoubtedly the stress was just too much to bear....

Phantoms, Daemons and Finders

They got mystery written all over their forehead
They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young - Bob Dylan

Phantom Clowns

The first week of May, 1981, Daniel O'Connell, the Investigative Counselor of the Boston Public School Board, alerted the district's principals that "it has been brought to the attention of the police department and the district office that adults dressed as clowns have been bothering children to and from school. Please advise all students that they must stay away from strangers, especially ones dressed as clowns."

Several days later, in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 5, two clowns using candy as lures tried to entice children into their black van parked near Lawrence Elementary School. According to Loren Coleman in Mysterious America, police had a good description of the vehicle: it was an old model with ladders on the side, a broken front headlight and was missing its hubcaps. The following day the Boston police, "responding to persistent complaints, warned that men in clown suits were harassing elementary children." One, driving a black van, was seen to be dressed as a clown only from the waist up; from the waist down he was naked.

"By May 8th," writes Coleman, "reports of clown men in vans harassing children had come in from East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Canton, Randolph, and other cities near Boston.... 50 miles south, in Providence, RI, reports of clown men disturbring children were coming to the attention of psychiatric social workers counseling the city's youth."

Encounters with "evil clowns" proliferated quickly westward. Pittsburg children began reporting being pestered by two men dressed as clowns driving a van. Mid-May, frightened Kansas school kids told of a clown who had chased them home and threatened them to get in his van. On the afternoon of May 22, in Kansas City, Missouri, chased a "knife-wielding clown in a yellow van that had been reported at six different elementary schools":

Earlier in the day, at 8:30, a mother had watched a yellow van approach her children as they walked to a school bus stop. The van stopped and someone inside spoke to her two girls who then screamed and fled; the vehicle sped away. The children told their mother that a man dressed as a clown and carrying a knife had ordered them inside. By noon the police had received dozens of similar reports - of a clown in a yellow van. The calls did not taper off until five o'clock that afternoon.

Coleman quotes LaTanya Johnson, a then-sixth grade student at Fairfax Elementary School, who told the Kansas City Star of her sighting of the clown:

He was by the fence and ran down through the big yard when some of the kids ran over there. He ran toward a yellow van. He was dressed in a black shirt with a devil on the front. He had two candy canes down each side of his pants. The pants were black too, I think; I don't remember much about his face.

That Spring, scared children in Nebraska, and in Colorado, and elsewhere, spoke of being menaced by knife-wielding clowns who ordered them to get in their vans. No suspect was apprehended, and perhaps most significantly, no child was abducted. Frustrated police departments began backtracking, and discounting the allegations. Besides, most of the witnesses were young children - how much could their word be trusted? As the sightings petered out, and as children were merely terrified and not missing, "group hysteria" was floated as an explaination, and eagerly seized upon by most. But Coleman makes a significant observation that suggests something else was going on:

The story of the phantom clowns went unnoticed on a national scale until I began getting a hint we were in the midst of a major flap of a new phenomenon. Slowly, after contacting fellow researchers by phone and mail, I discovered the phantom clown enigma went beyond Boston, Kansas City, and Omaha. Indeed, the reports filtering into me demonstrated that a far reaching mystery was developing. In the individual cities, the local media were not aware they were living through a series of puzzling events that were occurring nationwide.

Phantom Social Workers

In the early months of 1990 a similar pattern played out in England, though instead of clown costumes, they came disguised as social workers.

Patrick Harpur writes in Daimonic Reality:

Reports poured in to the police, describing "health workers" or "social workers" who called to examine or take away children, but who hurriedly left when the householder became suspicious. The visitors were mostly one or two women, but sometimes a woman and a man. The women were typically in their late twenties or early thirties, heavily made up, smartly dressed and of medium height. They carried clipboards and, often, identification cards. "They looked professional," said one witness. "Like doctors." Few of them had local accents. Some even telephoned in advance to make appointments.

Twenty-three separate police forces combined to launch Operation Childcare, dedicated to tracking down the bogus social workers. By May, the incidents were so widespread that police feared that up to four organized gangs were involved. (On 6 May there were three separate incidents in Nantwich, Cheshire, alone.) They were thought to be gangs of pedophiles. But clearly there were signs that the matter was far from straightforward: the pedophile theory was weakened by the involvement of so many women, who are rarely implicated in pedophilia (except in cases of alleged satanic ritual abuse.)

By early August, 251 incidents had been reported. As with the "Phantom Clowns," no child was abducted, no suspect was apprehended, and dispirited police began to talk of "social panic."

We'll make you cry wolf

In their respective studies of the clown and social worker flaps, both Coleman and Harpur use them to draw similar conclusions regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse. To Coleman, the allegations belong to the realms of the Fortean and folkloric; Harpur, that they are the product of the daimonic imagination. Harpur goes so far as to suggest that the "social workers" were themselves daimons: tricksters perpetrating practical jokes on the merely human and, like the so-called Men in Black, not doing any real harm.

I agree with much of what Harpur says about hidden and non-human agencies, but I think he's well off the mark here. And I think it's because he, like Coleman, and so many, deny a priori the mundane realities of ritual abuse, and naturally therefore make no allowance for the complicity of elements of both US and UK state apparatus in the perpetuation and cover-up of occult crime. Harpur even notes that the involvement of women was unusual in matters of suggested pedophilia, except in cases of alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse. But because such things don't really happen in Harpur's world, then he needs to invoke an otherworldly explanation for the bogus social workers. Sometimes, as I've suggested many times, we need to go there, but we needn't go there this time.

So what was going on? Coleman writes that "something quite unusual was happening in America in the Spring of 1981." One unusual thing was the dawning general awareness of Satanic Ritual Abuse and its possible links to institutions and individuals of authority. Perhaps a "clown op" was run to discredit the testimony of children ("a black shirt with a devil on the front," said LaTanya Johnson), and to lead the public towards discounting even more nightmarish mysteries.

In Britain in November 1989, just two months before the first incident of a phantom social worker, genuine social workers had removed 17 children from their homes on the grounds that they were being sexually abused in satanic ritual. Perhaps another "op" was run to vilify those who meant to protect children and to sow distrust, demonizing them in the public imagination as abductors themselves.

Maybe, it's about putting on a wolf costume to scare little children. Maybe, it's about making them cry wolf. For the next time.

"No further information will be available"

The Finders provided one of those next times, as documented by a US Customs Service report:

On Thursday, 2/5/87, the duty agent, SS/A [deleted], received a call from SS/A [deleted], USCS, Tallahassee, Florida. SS/A [deleted] was seeking assistance in contacting an appropriate local police agency to coordinate a child abuse investigation in with the Tallahassee Police Department.... U.S. Customs was contacted because the police officers involved suspected the adults of being involved in child pornography and knew the Customs Service to have a network of child pornography investigators, and of the existence of the Child Pornography and Protection Unit. SS/A [deleted] stated the two adults were well dressed white males. They had custody of six white children (boys and girls), ages three to six years. The children were observed to be poorly dressed, bruised, dirty, and behaving like wild animals in a public park in Tallahassee. The police were notified by a concerned citizen and all eight persons were taken into custody. The subjects were living out of a white 1979 Dodge van, Virginia license no. XHW 557. Upon being taken into custody, the adult white males refused to cooperate, one of whom produced a "business" card with a name on one side and a statement on the other. The statement indicated that the bearer knew his constitutional rights to remain silent and that he intended to do so. Upon interviewing the children, the police officers found that they could not adequately identify themselves or their custodians. Further, they stated that they were enroute to Mexico to attend a school for "smart kids." SS/A [deleted] was further advised the children were unaware of the function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets, and that the children had stated they were not allowed to live indoors and were only given food as a reward.

...

The photographs were nudes, believed to be of members of the Finders. There were numerous photos of children, some nude, at least one of which was a photo of a child "on display" and appearing to accent the child's genitals. I was only able to examine a very small amount of the photos at this time. However, one of the officers presented me with a photo album for my review. The album contained a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a "blood ritual." The ritual centered around the execution of at least two goats. The photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat's "womb" and the "baby goats" inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat's head to one of the children. Further inspection of the premises disclosed numerous files relating to activities of the organization in different parts of the world. Locations I observed are as follows: London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica, and "Europe." There was also a file identified as "Palestinian." Other files were identified by member name or "project" name. The projects appearing to be operated for commercial purposes under front names for the Finders. There was one file entitled "Pentagon Break-In," and others referring to members operating in foreign countries. Not observed by me but related by an MPD officer were intelligence files on private families not related to the Finders.

…

During the course of the search warrants, numerous documents were discovered which appeared to be concerned with international trafficking in children, high tech transfer to the United Kingdom, and international transfer of currency. PAGE 2 OF 2 DETAILS OF INVESTIGATION: On March 31, 1987, I contacted Detective [deleted] of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). I was to meet with Detective [deleted] to review the documents seized pursuant to two search warrants executed in January, 1987. The meeting was to take place on April 2 or 3, 1987. On April 2, 1987, I arrived at MPD at approximately 9:00 a.m. Detective [deleted] was not available. I spoke to a third party who was willing to discuss the case with me on a strictly "off the record" basis. I was advised that all the passport data had been turned over to the State Department for their investigation. The State Department in turn, advised the MPD that all travel and use of the passports by the holders of the passports was within the law and no action would be taken. This included travel to Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam from the late 1950s to mid 1970s. The individual further advised me of circumstances which indicated the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.

Perhaps they might as well have been phantoms. Spooks, even.

"Birth pangs of a new order"

Fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, I don't mean to scare ya -
Wasn't this written somewhere? - Public Enemy

Here we are again, waiting for the end of the world. If only all they would do was wait, it might not come so soon.

CNN gave fundamentalist cleric Pat Robertson time over the weekend to suggest, with relish, that the greater frequency and intensity of natural disasters we are witnessing are the "birth pangs of a new order": the divine reformatting of the world. Naturally he put a gleeful spin on the Last Days, because he doesn't expect them to be his last. It signals, rather, the "blessed hope" of a "wonderful" new era. "Robertson neglected to mention that the Bible also says that in the End Times, "many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many."

If we should no expect better from Robertson, how about from a senior physicist of the Stanford Research Institute? Some thoughts from Dr Lambert Dolphin on the "coming cosmic shakedown":

Our generation has seen movies and television specials depicting a nuclear war, showing collisions by an asteroid or comet from outer space, or a threat to the world by an escaped dealy virus. We are accustomed to fictional accounts of alien invasions, and most of us are intrigued by the X-Files. Military experts believe a great third world war in the Middle East is now unavoidable. World population is soaring out of control and violence is on the increase everywhere.

The Biblical record allows for all of these possibilities--and worse. Anyone who has been through a major earthquake will testify that it is a terrifying experience to have the ground beneath one's feet give way leaving no place to stand and no way to stand. What will it be like on That Day, "The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord" when the sky will also fall on men's heads, so to speak, when invisible kingdoms in the unseen world around us come crashing down at the same time the cities of the world are reduced to rubble? This will not be just a horrendous "natural" disaster--behind it all will be an angry God who will at long last settle accounts and set all things right on earth. (Note 2)

Jerusalem was, is now and always will be the capital city of Israel designated by God from long ages ago. It will also be the world capital from which Jesus Christ will rule all the nations.

Dolphin led two of SRI's expeditions to the Giza plateau in the mid-70s, the primary purpose of which was to search for hidden chambers beneath the Sphinx.

He left SRI in 1987 after 31 years to devote his energies to "Bible teaching," but also to expedite the rebuilding of the Third Temple in Jerusalem, which by any account should hasten the end of the world. In "Geophysics and the Temple Mount" he describes his initiation into the work, and isn't shy about voicing his antipathy towards Arabs and Muslims:

On a trip to Israel in 1982 to meet Stanley [Goldfoot of the Jerusalem Temple Foundation] and [physicist Dr.] Asher [Kaufman] in person, I ran into writer and Bible teacher Don Stewart. I saw that Don's experience in Israel and his knowledge of the Bible would be an immediate asset in planning a research expedition to Israel. Don also introduced me to Pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel and Costa Mesa, and to Chuck Missler, a well-known captain-of-industry living in Southern California. These godly men along with Carl Gallivan, a close friend and Silicon valley entrepreneur, soon agreed to provide financial assistance so my SRI team could investigate the usefulness of our newly developed geophysical methods in Israel. We especially wanted to "look into" the Temple Mount with our new state-of-the-art high-tech instruments.

...

Our work around the country for nearly six weeks caused us to be fairly visible to the archaeological community, to the government - and to the Arabs.... Even though the rabbinical tunnel is entirely on Jewish land under Jewish control and we had been officially invited by Rabbi Getz to perform a legitimate scientific study, because the Moslems objected we had been discretely blocked in our efforts. But, we had learned another practical lesson about life in modern Israel: the Moslems seemingly have veto power over what goes on in the tunnel as well as the Temple Mount.

Diagnosing Dolphin's millennial fever - "Earth's long-awaited golden age may be a mere seven years away from us" - it's easy to forget who he is and what he represents. During this controversial expedition, The Jerusalem Post accurately described him as head of a "key section of the world's most massive research conglomerate, the Stanford Research Institute, a $200-million-a-year concern whose main clients are the U.S. government and corporations like Bechtel."

It's not just the fundamentalists and their hollowed-out fellow travellers who have the thirst for blood up to the bridle. It's also the globalists, the shepherding wolves of the "new order" which won't bring Jesus, but a rough-hewn facsimile to mollify the surviving sheep. Maitreya, the Nine, the "space brothers" - it's in beta testing for the post-apocalyptic product launch.

Henry Kissinger's notorious National Security Study Memorandum 200 on the "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests" suggests massive population reduction has been close to the heart of US strategic concerns for more than 30 years. That the policy is in accordance with the broad strokes of the Book of Revelations makes happy sympatico for the conspiracrats, who mean to play God in this final act and turn every calamity to their advantage.

The sense that time is getting short has spread far beyond those inclined to watch for signs. Even secular non-Christians, for whom the term should be nonsense, are asking whether George Bush is the Antichrist. Even Al Gore describes America as having entered "an alternate universe" of strange discourse. For those who would cull the herd, the stranger the better, because strangeness is often mistaken for acts of God.

"Before the apex stone is fitted"

"It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating the new order of the ages." - Vice President Henry Wallace, 1934

A brief follow-up to Friday's post. Ever heard of Changing Images of Man?

The report was issued by Stanford Research Institute in 1973, having been commissioned by the US Department of Education five years earlier, and its influence has far outstripped its limited circulation. Its one brush with a general readership came in 1982, when Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press republished it as "one of the 1,000 most important works of modern times," though at this writing even used copies are unavailable at any price through Amazon.

The report found that "Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that...the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era."

Co-editor and principal contributor was Willis H Harman, the late Stanford futurist, professor of Engineering Economic Systems and president of Edgar Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Science (which has been used as cover for some of the CIA's esoterica, such as remote viewing). Harman believed humanity is embarking on a period of "global mind change," and that people could reorder the world "by deliberately changing their internal image of reality."

Harman based his book Global Mind Change upon the Stanford report. In this interview, apparently from the mid-90s, he elaborates on his thoughts on shifting worldviews and our "remarkable point in history":

Whether its psychic phenomena, mystical experiences, communications with the dead...whatever it is, you're implying that reality is different from the way they taught you in school. Sooner or later we're going to say "Well if all of that's so, then our emphases in business and economics have to be different, as well as our emphases in politics, education and healthcare."

How to anticipate and capitalize upon the revolution in worldviews in the dawning post-industrial era is the question Harman's SRI team set to answer. In The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince quote the following passage from Changing Images of Man, perhaps the most important book almost no one has read, which suggests how this may be accomplished:

Of special interest to the Western world is that Freemasonry tradition which played such a significant role in the birth of the United States of America, attested to by the symbolism of the Great Seal.... Thus this has the potentiality of reactivating the American symbols, reinterpreting the work ethic, supporting the basic concepts of a free-enterprise democratic society, and providing new meaning for the technological-industrial thrust.

Symbols and myth are not the accents of a society, they are its engines. Something to think about before they run us over.

The Colour out of Space

I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt. - HP Lovecraft

This is only a test

At 5:05 on November 22, 1977, regular television programming in southern England was interrupted by a voice claiming to be that of "Grahama," representative of the "Ashtar Galactic Command," bearing the usual "space brother" boilerplate of coming in peace to save us from ouselves at the dawn of a New Age. It was quickly dismissed as a hoax, but an extremely complicated one to execute. Though the The Sunday Times the following December 4 surmised it was accomplished by students using just "£80 worth of equipment powered by an ordinary car battery," no one ever claimed responsibility, and independent investigations found that the message must have cut into at least five transmitters simultaneously, and it evaded detection by monitoring equipment which did not even register an interruption, "suggesting it was achieved in some way that bypassed our electrical system."

This was actually the second message from Grahama. A month earlier, he had said pointedly that "We conveyed to Sir John Whitmore and to Dr. Puharich that we would interfere on your radio and television communication systems to relay when the civilisations are coming close to landing on your planet Earth. It is now in motion. We wish you to know that we love you."

That "Grahama" would single out the aristocratic former racing champion Whitmore and parapsychologist and MKULTRA researcher Andrija Puharich suggests this was no simple hoax: both men were deeply involved with a decades'-long channelled communication with entities representing a universal hierarchy sometimes called the "70 Brotherhoods of the Great White Brotherhood." The entities governing our reality identified themselves the Nine.

Another link to Whitmore and Puharich was British author Stuart Holyroyd's recently published Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth, which the two had commissioned as an account of their work with the Nine. In the book, Holroyd wrote that the Nine intended to “interrupt television and radio transmissions during the period 18th to 22nd November.”

Regarding the television interruptions, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince write in The Stargate Conspiracy that, "as usual, there were only two options considered: either the whole thing was genuine and extraterrestrials had really spoken to the southern English through their television sets; or it was hoax, just done for a laugh. The idea that such a message could be easily contrived by, for example, an intelligence agency that would have the necessary technical skills has never, to our knowledge, even been considered."

This seems a bizarre oversight given the circumstantial connections to Whitmore and Puharich, and especially the latter's service in Army Intelligence and later as a CIA contractor researching the induction of altered states of consciousness. (Whitmore, incidentally, is now also Britain's "number one business coach," training top executives from companies such as Barclays, Lloyds, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Rolls Royce.) Uri Geller, for a time one of the Nine's channellers, told Picknett and Prince that "the CIA brought Puharich in to come and get me out of Israel," and in his essay In the Thick of It, physicist Jack Sarfatti writes that "Puharich was Geller's case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore."

Andrija Puharich and Sir John Whitmore


The Deep Space Nine

The "Council of Nine" have been delivering curiously consistent messages through a succession of mediums to influential patrons with names like DuPont, Astor and Bronfman since the early 1950s, and nearly always in the shadow of military intelligence. Until his death in 1995 Puharich made his home in that shadow, researching shamanic pharmacology and electronic mind control.

Initial contact was made during a sitting of Puharich's CIA cut-out "Round Table Foundation" on New Year's Eve, 1952, at precisely 9 p.m., when the entities disclosed themselves through the tranceivership of Dr DG Vinod as the "Nine Principles or Forces."

In the early 1970s, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was a regular at the sessions of channeller Phylis Schlemmer to whom the Nine had revealed themselves through the manifestation of a spirit guide called "Tom." Schlemmer initially assumed Tom must be her grandfather Thomas, who died when she was a child. In September 1974 Roddenberry asked Tom the question, "To whom am I talking? Do you have a name?" Tom's reply, through the entranced Schlemmer, as quoted by Picknett and Price:

As you know, I am the spokesman for the Nine. But I also have another position, which I have with you in the project. I will try to give you names so you can understand in what you work and who we are. I may not pronounce who I am in a manner which you would understand because of the problem in the Being's [i.e., Schlemmer] brain, but I will explain so that the Doctor [Puharich] perhaps will understand. I am Tom, but I am also Harmarchis, I am also Harenkur, I am also known as Tum and I am known as Atum.

It took 22 years, and Gene Roddenberry, for the Nine to reveal themselves as The Nine, the Great Ennead of ancient Egypt: Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set and Nepthys. Their message amounts to, We're back, and now it's personal.

(How much the Nine may have influenced Roddenberry is unknown. His involvement began several years after the original Star Trek series was cancelled, but a character named Vinod pops up in an episode of Deep Space Nine entitled "Paradise.")

In 1954, with Puharich back in uniform and stationed at the US Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, a young Dutch sculptor named Harry Stone was being tested at the Round Table for his psychometric powers. Handed an Egyptian pendant that had belonged to the mother of Akenaten, he fell into a trance, began uttering strange words and drawing hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper. In English he spoke of a drug that would open a gateway to the gods, and of entering an underground hall where a statue of a dog-headed man came to life. Puharich was sent the drawings and a transcription of Stone's words, who took them to another Army doctor at Edgewood who, write Picknett and Prince, "just happened to be an expert in extremely rare and archaic forms of hieroglyphs", and to Puharich's surprise confirmed their authenticity. Stone had identified himself as Rahotep, and named his wife as Nefert, and mentioned the Pharoah Khufu.

Puharich was then astonished to discover that a man named Rahotep, married to Nefert, was known from Egyptian history, and likely lived under the reign of Khufu. Most significantly, Rahotep had been the High Priest of Heliopolis, the center of worship for the Nine, the Great Ennead.

The "gateway to the gods" proved a sacred mushroom. On one occasion when Puharich himself was hypnotizing Stone a Round Table trustee, Alice Bouverie, also fell into a trance and stated the mushroom was the kind now known as amanita muscaria, and said a specimen could be found not far from the house. It was. In one of Stone's trances, writes Colin Wilson in Mysteries, "Rahotep demanded a mushroom and then, in the presence of Puharich and Aldous Huxley, applied it ritualistically to his tongue and the top of his head. When Stone woke up five minutes later, he was able to perform an ESP test with a 100% score and describe accurately what lay on the other side of a brick wall."

"Tom" plays the race card

The Nine claim that something has gone wrong with humanity's "programming," and so the Old Gods of Egypt, whose home is Sirius, are returning to reboot us. Humanity is supposedly the product of genetically-manipulated colonizers, whose first civilization arose in Tibet in 32,400 BC, but apparently not all humanity.

According to the Nine, there was one indigineous race already on the Earth - the black. According to "Tom," the seeding of Earth by the Gods was an experment to see how "the originals [the black races] would evolve in comparison with those that colonized." The Nine say Hey, there's nothing wrong with that, but the teaching remains that it's only the non-black peoples of the Earth who have the divine programming. Also interestingly, the Nine have good things to say about most major American religions, including and especially Mormonism, and are quite fond of the teachings of Lucis Trust founder Alice Bailey, but singles out Islam for rebuke. "Tom" says Islam has been influenced by "the Fallen one," and in his book The Keys of Enoch, channeller of the Nine James Hurtak calls Muslims the "Children of Darkness."

Any of this sound familiar? Perhaps its inversion might.

Remember the Prophet Yahweh? His cosmology is eerily similar to that of the Nine, yet stood on its head. His God Yahweh is also, like Tom/Atum, a spaceman, but the starseed is the black race. Both the Prophet Yahweh and the Nine's channellers have proclaimed the immanence of mass landings, and great devastation for those who refuse the lordship of the old-is-new gods. Both hear voices, have delivered failed prophecies, and have a strong suggestion of military mind control about them. Both play the race card. And now, after the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans, America is playing with a deck full of race cards.

I don't know what's going on with the Nine, but a credulous reading of the story suggests a Freemasonic eschaton and the return of the original White Lodge from Sirius. If this isn't happening, then sinister forces - after all, Peter Levenda subtitled the first volume of his Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft "The Nine" - are conspiring to make it appear so, and it has been going on for over 50 years. Generations of leaders and scientists have risen to prominence under its influence. Dick Farley, former director of program development for the Human Potential Foundation, writes that the Nine maintain a "working network of physicists and psychics, intelligence operatives and powerful billionaires, who are less concerned about their 'source' and its weirdness than they are about having every advantage and new data edge in what they believe is a battle for Earth itself." Jack Sarfatti, who received mysterious, mechanical-voiced phone calls from an alleged UFO of the future in 1952, the same year the Nine first spoke through Dr Vinod, adds "the fact remains...that a bunch of apparently California New Age flakes into UFOs and psychic phenomena, including myself, had made their way into the highest levels of the American ruling class and the Soviet Union and today run the Gorbachev Foundation."

Whatever the Nine are playing, and whatever is playing the Nine, it's been a long game.