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From Friday, June 30, through Sunday, July 2, an eclectic group of researchers, artists and philosophers met together in Fribourg, Switzerland, to discuss various perspectives on "phenomena," including UFOs, abduction claims, and crop circles. The program was titled "The Incident," and was part of the Belluard-Bollwerk International Arts Festival, which continues through July 15. Herewith, a sample of the discussion...
Crop circles took a severe beating. London-based artist Rod Dickinson announced that he was the author/creator of numerous large British formations since 1991, and that he knows the human makers of many other formations. He believes that most, if not all, of the elaborate pictograms since 1991 are of human origin. He staunchly defended the artistry and integrity of famous self-proclaimed circle-makers Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, whose revelations of fakery in September, 1991, made newspaper headlines worldwide.
Dickinson said he knew for sure that the celebrated Mandelbrot Set pictogram was human-made, and he suspects the Barbury Castle triangle pictogram -- probably the most famous of all -- was likewise made by a human artist, though he said the man he suspects in this case has not admitted doing the deed.
Dickinson said he has worked in all kinds of plant crops, including the brittle oilseed rape in which several new formations have been found this year, and which are widely thought to be "unhoaxable." He said that the circle making technique favored by Doug and Dave, utilizing a flat board, is fast but damages a lot of crop and thus appears fake. He favors using a variety of garden rollers and other implements which, he says, do a lot less damage and result in formations that are often deemed authentic by researchers. Dickinson said that well-known biophysicist W.C. Levengood, who has worked on techniques for authenticating crop circles by studying cellular changes in the plant stalks, had misdiagnosed a number of crop samples taken from circles made by Dickinson himself.
Oddly, Dickinson said he has seen strange lights in the sky over crop fields while he's making a pictogram. He showed a daylight photo of a field containing one of his own pictograms -- but the photo also showed a distinctly saucer-like object in the sky, which Dickinson says he did not see when shooting the photo, and which he cannot explain. He also says he's heard many people complain of headaches or light-headedness after entering circles he knows were human-made -- again, a phenomenon he cannot explain.
Dickinson said he believes there are authentically anomalous crop formations made by a force or presence he cannot identify. He said that the best candidates of this type are relatively simple circular formations, rather than the more elaborate pictograms.
I asked him why no one had ever been caught while making a crop formation. He said that actually someone had been caught once, but purely by accident when someone else just wandered into the field. He said it was very simple to avoid detection in the huge and remote crop fields at night.
I asked him if his form of "artistry" was illegal. Yes, it is, he assured me; but he didn't think of his work as vandalism, because the crop does keep growing and can be harvested. He said the real damage done in crop fields was from all the sight-seers and researchers who trample in after the formations are discovered.
Jacques Vallee, one of the world's foremost UFO researchers and a featured speaker at the conference, offered a different perspective on human-made crop circles. He first noted the findings of researchers such as W.C. Levengood regarding cellular changes in the plant stalks, changes which seem to be induced by high heat, possibly microwave radiation. He then noted that many impressive formations have been discovered in close proximity to highly restricted British military installations where, he said, various kinds of Star Wars weapon systems were being tested. He then said he had reliable information that some formations were actually the result of clandestine tests of laser-type devices over the crop fields. The devices emit a concentrated energy beam that can rapidly trace complext patterns on the ground, leaving the familiar pictograms in the crop which exhibit the kinds of cellular disruptions reported by Levengood. Vallee said he believes such tests were run in several recent years but might now be concluded. He offered no substantiation for these claims.
Rod Dickinson, among others, said he regarded Vallee's explanation as improbable.
In the abduction arena, a Dutch hypnotherapist named Hilda Musch -- who was not among the speakers but participated in conference discussions -- brought with her a notebook full of drawings made by several dozen of her clients. These drawings showed that abduction in Holland is experienced exactly as it is in the United States. The drawings, which I examined at length, showed all the familiar features of abduction, including the big-eyed "gray" alien beings, the examination procedure, levitation into a UFO, and numerous indications of hybrid children.
The drawings were so identical to "American-style" abduction that I asked how many of Hilda's clients spoke English. She said perhaps half did, but she believed that few if any had prior awareness of American abduction literature. She said that she herself was unaware of the abduction literature when she first began hearing the strange accounts from her clients. Today, she offers workshops for other therapists who are just starting to see such clients.
Hilda said that, although she does employ hypnosis in many case, most of her clients have at least partial recall of their experiences before undergoing hypnosis. All in all, her documentation strongly indicated that the "gray" alien type and "alien abduction" are as much Dutch phenomena as American.
Those wishing more information can reach Hilda Musch by regular mail (she does not have an email address) at: Ranonkelstraat 9, 9611 HE Sappemeer, Netherlands. Phone and fax: 05980-93427.
Featured conference speaker Terence McKenna, on the other hand, said he has a really hard time believing descriptions of the big-eyed "gray" aliens because they are nowhere near alien enough for his taste. He says he's seen aliens himself, and his are really weird.
McKenna, billed as "the intellectual voice of rave culture," is a philosopher, enthnobiologist and commentator on and for the Millennium. He admits to taking a wide assortment of "naturally occurring" hallucinogenic substances, among which his favorites are psilocybin and di-methyl tryptamine, or DMT. It is DMT, in particular, which affords an apparent doorway to a dimension where one can experience a form of alien intelligence McKenna refers to as "self-transforming machine elves." He's seen them quite often, he says. Moreover, he says that independent studies by a number of clinical researchers have shown an approximate 20 percent chance of seeing such "alien" creatures under DMT influence.
"I'm offering something everyone claims to want and no one can produce -- a reliable way of meeting aliens," McKenna said. He stressed that the effects of DMT, unlike other longer-lasting hallucinogens, last only about fifteen minutes. "If you heard there's a twenty percent chance you'll see UFOs if you fly right now to New Zealand, I bet quite a few of you would drop everything and just go," he said with trademark humor. "What I'm saying is, give me 15 minutes of your life and I'll give you a 20% chance of meeting aliens -- and the odds go up to maybe 40% if you increase the dose!" McKenna seemed genuinely perplexed that few UFO researchers ever seemed to take his offer seriously.
McKenna believes that the proliferation of UFO and alien encounter reports are indicative of the approach of "a transcendental object from beyond the end of history." In effect, he says, the future is breaking into the present. This inbreaking influence is emanating from something -- a "transcendental object" -- that will cause a complete disruption and transformation of reality as we know it.
McKenna has filled notebooks with mathematical calculations that show, he says, that the end of history occurs in the year 2012. He has developed a computer program that traces a "time-wave," a graph showing points in history where "novelty" disrupts the normal flow of events. McKenna says he trusts his "time-wave" computer program because it accurately predicts the past -- that is, it shows precise moments of great novelty which correspond to known upheavals of geological and evolutionary pre-history as well as human history, both ancient and modern. The time-wave's ability to model the past is, for McKenna, a good reason to consider how it models the future. And it shows that history as we know it simply ends in 2012 -- plunging, as it were, into total and incalculable novelty. With the end of history so close, McKenna says, it shouldn't be surprising that things are getting pretty weird.
McKenna says that the "time-wave" equations are actually alien artifacts that were given, or revealed, to him more than 20 years ago. He's now convinced that they explain why the Mayan calendar ends in the year 2012, and why a proliferation of prophets, seers, abductees and others are all predicting massive, unprecedented changes ahead.
"The Incident" produced few agreements and no solid conclusions among the assorted participants, except a general sentiment that such gatherings have great value and should happen more often -- and this one was just getting interesting when it ran out of time. I myself am extremely glad to have been present and will undoubtedly ponder the experience for a long time to come.
DALAI LAMA -- COMPUTERS COULD BE ALIVE
[CNI News thanks Jack Sarfatti for sending in the following, quoted from the
book "GENTLE BRIDGES: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of
Mind" by Jeremy Hayward and Francisco Varela (Shambala, 1992) pp. 152-153.]
DALAI LAMA: In terms of the actual substance of which computers are made, are they simply metal, plastic, circuits, and so forth?
VARELA: Yes, but this again brings up the idea of the pattern, not the substance but the pattern.
DALAI LAMA: It is very difficult to say that it's not a living being, that it doesn't have cognition, even from the Buddhist point of view. We maintain that there are certain types of births in which a preceding continuum of consciousness is the basis. The consciousness doesn't actually arise from the matter, but a continuum of consciousness might conceivably come into it.
HAYWARD: Does Your Holiness regard it as a definite criterion that there must be continuity with some prior consciousness? That whenever there is a cognition, there must have been a stream of cognition going back to beginningless time?
DALAI LAMA: There is no possibility for a new cognition, which has no relationship to a previous continuum, to arise at all. I can't totally rule out the possibility that, if all the external conditions and the karmic action were there, a stream of consciousness might actually enter into a computer.
HAYWARD: A stream of consciousness?
DALAI LAMA: Yes, that's right. [DALAI LAMA laughs.] There is a possibility that a scientist who is very much involved his whole life [with computers], then the next life . . . [he would be reborn in a computer], same process! [laughter] Then this machine which is half-human and half-machine has been reincarnated.
VARELA: You wouldn't rule it out then? You wouldn't say this is impossible?
DALAI LAMA: We can't rule it out.
ROSCH: So if there's a great yogi who is dying and he is standing in front of the best computer there is, could he project his subtle consciousness into the computer?
DALAI LAMA: If the physical basis of the computer acquires the potential or the ability to serve as a basis for a continuum of consciousness. I feel this question about computers will be resolved only by time. We just have to wait and see until it actually happens.
PATHOLOGIST SAYS SANTILLI "ALIEN" IS HUMAN
[ISCNI*Flash thanks British researcher George Wingfield for sending the
following report. As the controversy over the alleged "Roswell Film Footage"
continues, it becomes increasingly likely that the body or bodies involved in
the autopsy sequences are human, albeit perhaps exhibiting a rare genetic
deformity. In the following report, written by a leading British pathologist,
no medical explanation is given for the unusual features of the body, but the
opinion is that the body appears human.]
Report by Dr C.M. Milroy, MBChB, MD, MRCPath, DMJ
Senior Lecturer in Forensic Pathology
Department of Forensic Pathology
University of Sheffield
Dated 2nd June, 1995
At the request of the Merlin Group [Ray Santilli's company], I have reviewed a film which was claimed to show a post-mortem examination being carried out on an extraterrestrial being. The film was allegedly taken on a U.S. military base in 1947.
The film is in black and white. A full record of the autopsy was not present, as apparently only some reels of the film record were available. No sound was present.
The autopsy room was small and the examination was being conducted by people wearing full protective clothing. Beside the autopsy table was a tray of standard autopsy instruments.
The Body was human in appearance and appeared to be female but without secondary sexual characteristics -- no breast development or pubic hair was visible. The head was disproportionately large. No head hair was present.
The abdomen was distended. There was no evidence of decomposition. The overall external appearance was of a white adolescent female, estimated height 5 feet, tending towards a heavy build but not abnormally thin or fat. There were six digits to each hand and foot. The eyes appeared larger than normal and the globes were covered with a black material which was shown being removed.
There was an extensive and deep injury to the right thigh. This was not shown in very close up detail, but appeared to be burnt and charred down to deep tissues. No similar injury was present, although there was possible bruising down the left hand side of the body. Overall there was a general absence of injuries.
The body was opened with a Y shaped incision but the skin of the neck was not fully reflected. A close up of the knife being drawn against the skin was shown, with blood coming from the skin. This appeared to be an unusual amount of blood. The neck appeared to contain two cylinder structures either side anteriorly. These could have been muscles (sternomastoid muscles) but were odd in appearance, though they were not shown in close up.
The skin of the chest was shown reflected, and the central rib cage and sternum block removed. The chest was shown reflected, and central rib cage individually. There appeared to be a heart and two lungs, but when close up shots of the organs were shown they were always out of focus. The abdominal organs were not clearly seen, though it did not appear that the being was pregnant, an explanation that had been proposed for the distended abdomen.
The scalp was shown being reflected anteriorly, having been cut in a standard autopsy manner. The skull was then shown being sawn with a hand saw across the front of the skull, though the backward cuts and removal of the skull cap were not shown. What appeared to be the membranes covering the brain (dura) were shown being cut and removed. Although a close up shot of the brains was shown it was again out of focus. However the appearances were not those of a human brain.
Overall the appearances were those of a white adolescent female with a humanoid body. There were six digits to each hand and foot and the body shape was dysmorphic. No accurate determination could be made of organ structure because every close up shot was out of focus. The injuries present to the body were less than those expected in an aviation accident. No injuries to account for the death were shown.
Whilst the examination had features of a medically conducted examination, aspects suggested it was not conducted by an experienced autopsy pathologist, but rather by a surgeon.
Dr C.M. Milroy, MBChB, MD, MRCPath, DMJ
Senior Lecturer in Forensic Pathology
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WEIRD POLITICS -- UFOS AT THE BALLOT BOX
[ISCNI*Flash thanks BUFO CALVIN, our occasional "Columnist of the Weird," for
the following. Do you have a question about anything Weird? Bufo is the
answer man. You can contact him via email at BUFO.CALVIN@AWAITER.COM. Bufo
also maintains a phone message service called "Bufo's Weird World." For the
latest weirdness by phone, call (510) 432-8102.]
Japanese voters in the elections which are coming up in about two weeks will have the option to vote for the UFO party, whose basic tenet is that extraterrestrials exist (even though that may have little to do with the reality of UFOs). This isn't just a few people making a joke, like the candidacy of George Papoon several years ago (he ran on the basis that since he had been in an insane asylum and then was judged okay to be in society, he was the only candidate who could =prove= he wasn't crazy). It takes about $400,000 to register to be a legitimate candidate for office there.
It didn't cost nearly that much when Gabriel Green ran as "YOUR WRITE-IN SPACE AGE CANDIDATE" in 1960 (and 1972). Already head of the AMALGAMATED FLYING SAUCER CLUBS OF AMERICA, he campaigned with the slogan "AMERICA NEEDS A SPACE AGE PRESIDENT". He was not only in telepathic contact with aliens, but had met them in person. When he ran for the Senate in 1962 (from California), he got more than 100,000 votes.
Even the best-known candidates have brought up the UFO issue. Jimmy Carter, who had a sighting himself, said he would declassify UFO info when he became President. Although he made some moves in that direction in 1977 (a year after he won), it didn't happen. George Bush's campaign apparently made the mistake of ridiculing UFO believers. When Ross Perot was a real threat, one of Bush's top aides (I think it was Marlin Fitzwater) made fun of Perot's beliefs that he was being targeted, saying something along the the lines of "Some people believe conspiracy theories like other people believe UFO stories." Not that I'm saying there was a connection, but it was all downhill for Bush after that. If you check out the polls, the majority of people "believe" in UFOs. Perhaps it would be best not to "alienate" that voting block.
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