Hypnotic thinking...

I just got done reading Joe Montaldo's webpage regarding the Barney and Betty Hill UFO abduction case. Joe claims that the Hill case was actually an abduction by military personnel, rather than by the grays or other alien beings (see www.icar1.com/Betty---Barnie-Hill---Milabs.html). I can't conclude one way or the other about the validity of his argument without doing considerably more study (beginning by finishing Kathy's book, Captured). However something in Joe's argument very much caught my attention - his references to 'hypnotic thinking'.

Joe indicates that if 'hypnotic thinking' exists, it invalidates the usefulness of hypnotic regression as a means of accessing subconscious material. However, hypnotic thinking is very real, and yet hypnotic regression is also very useful - if we understand its limitations.

Unfortunately, regression does not leave the memory intact. In fact, as Ernst L. Rossi states in his book, Psychobiology of Mind Body Healing, 'every access is a reframe'. Put another way, memory is not 'read only,' as if one were playing back a tape or reading computer memory. During each access of a memory, the mind processes it. This makes regression an extremely useful healing tool, but less useful as a means of historical research.

Thus, to a certain extent Joe is right - because hypnotic thinking is different than our everyday critical thinking process, the material reviewed by hypnotic regression often cannot be taken literally. When in deep trance, the mind follows a different pattern of thought than our normal left-brained, beta-state reasoning. This phenomenon is what more than one hypnotherapy book author has referred to as 'trance logic.' It includes thought progression based upon symbolism, metaphor and association, rather than math and logic. It is the thought pattern of the dream, the symbolic processing of the deep subconscious.

In hypnotic trance, the mind can easily overlay different thought patterns, some of them being literal memories, with other symbolic aspects of the subconscious. We can think of the mind as accessing everything as a form of 'memory.' Thus I have often heard types of 'memory' referred to as 'biographical', 'metaphorical', and 'creative.' Often, the skill of the hypnotherapist can be vital when it comes to dealing with these. The hypnotherapist must remain alert for material that is symbolic but not literal.

During hypnotic regression, one can often distinguish creative or metaphorical material from biographical memory using multiple passes through an event. Typically, I have found that memories tend to remain stable during multiple passes through the event. Each retelling of the narrative will remain consistent with the previous pass, while developing additional detail. If this is not the case then perhaps it is more metaphorical or creative in nature. However, these are subjective rules of thumb and it is seldom absolutely clear which is the case. Yet these can provide a useful tool when reviewing events in the subconscious.

During any hypnotherapy session, clean regression is vital. Avoiding leading questions, keeping hypnotic navigation instructions very generic (e.g. 'please continue', 'what's happening now?', 'what else do you notice?', 'let's return to the beginning of the event', etc...), using very neutral wording; all of these can go a long way toward preventing contamination of biographical memories.

Ultimately, the most important task of the hypnotherapist is healing and even when a 'memory' is not biographical it may still be important. When processing material for healing purposes, metaphorical material can be extremely vital. The only thing to remember is that it can not be taken as literally true - any more than dreams can be taken literally.

In his article, Joe claims that the idea of 'hypnotic thinking' invalidates hypnotic regression as a tool for UFO investigation. On the contrary, rather than negating it, we now see this process with a much clearer perspective. We see that there are limits on how useful the subcnoscious can be as a repository of historical information. While hypnotic regression is still a very valid way of understanding past events, it is not the ultimate hidden-information retrieval system that researchers had once hoped for. Regression is useful, but only if we understand its limitations.

Notes from NGH 2010

A few brief notes on this year's annual National Guild of Hypnotists convention. This year's convention was excellent, by (almost) any standards. As usual, I learned alot. This is one of my key training opportunities, and where I update my CEUs for my hypnosis certification. And this year, just as in years past, the weekend was worth every penny.

The only thing that they didn't have at the convention was me as a speaker - no ego here, of course. :-)
I had put in to do a talk on working with UFO experiencers, which the guild powers-that-be didn't accept. Later on, one of the big wheels involved in the decision explained the rationale to me and suggested how next year it could be reworked. In spite of my dislike of conformance, I think he did have a point.

As usual, there was a wide variety of talks - some on marketing, some on the dynamics of the hypnosis session, some on various hypnotic techniques, several talks on spiritual hypnosis techniques, etc. Lots more to say on all of this later, but suffice it to say, it was a rewarding and useful weekend - and one additional speaker who could have made the weekend complete.

One thing I did do while I was there was recruit hypnotists to help with the MUFON abduction research effort. We are in the process of building a referral list of hypnotists, hypnotherapists, psychologists, MDs, etc. - people who can be available if needed, to work with close encounter experiencers. Any certified hypnotherapists who are interested are encouraged to contact me, as I am presently building up a collection of interested parties.

All for now. Lots more later (presumably...)

MUFON Conf Day 3 - New looks at old stuff

A few note from day 3 of the MUFON conference.

Today was basically an in-depth revisiting of alot of familiar topics.
Stanton Friedman's revisiting of the SETI, scientific community, and UFO community relationships - I thought this would be more of the same as Stan's talks tend tend to be rather similar - with new material mixed in with the old. I was pleasantly surprised in that this talk was entirely new material, very contemporary and very appropriate to many of the discussions we've had over the last several days. He looked at a lot of the comments recently made by Shostak, Hawking, Davies and other physicists, in the light of the UFO evidence. Unfortunately, I thought he took many of them considerably out of context.

Having met a number of the SETI community, I can vouch for the fact that the SETI community and the UFO community treat eachother with considerable contempt. Neither understands the other's viewpoints very well, and most statements cited by either are taken pretty much out of context. The best one was Steven Hawking's comments - very speculative - about how contact would not be too healthy - on the European/Native-Americal model. Contact didn't turn out too well for the Native Americans.

Given the talk by Richard Dolan, with was just as speculative as Hawking's comments, and seemed to have somewhat similar conclusions in some respects, I question how badly one can criticize Hawking's comments. In addition, I have heard people in just about every community make quoteable comments in relatively informal settings - in each case, it was not a formal presentation including supporting data. It was merely a creative mind waxing speculative. Enough on that...

Michael Schratt had some interesting stuff on deep black projects that I thought was really interesting. It strongly reinforced Ricard Dolan's talk last night, which speculated on a separate culture or civilization arising in the deep-black world. Given the information that Schratt has related, which is largely unclassified or declassified info - what else is there still deeply under wraps. The possibilities (and likelihoods) are mind boggling.

I didn't attend Kevin Randle's talk, but instead spent time batting the breeze with others in the MUFON community. One of the joys of these conferences is that you get face time with the folks you only talk with on-line, by e-mail, etc... I had some interesting conversations with several of what I would call, the next generation of UFO investigators - most of them are people in their 30's thru 50's. By UFO researcer standards, this is young... Also, these are the people who are comfortable with computers, who are bringing contemporary technology to UFO research that was sometimes stuck in the 1970s (at least in my view). So it was good to rub elbows with some of the folks who are making the UFO community buzz once again...

The next talk was by Linda Moulton Howe. She always has kewl stuff to say, and much of her talk this time was on new stuff in the Bentwaters case - the 1980 incursion of UFOs into the Bentwaters/Woodbridge military installations in the UK. She had some really interesting developments in the case, including more details on the team who went into the woods to chase the UFO that had been sighted by the guards at the East Gate. There is a lot to know about this case, and in later updates to this blog, I will probably need to add more info on that. In the mean time, just do a web search on 1980 Bentwaters UFO case and I think you will find some really interesting paydirt...

The biggest piece of the story, however, was the introduction of one of the people involved, the two men who confronted the object in the woods. Both had VERY close encounters, with one of them being missing for about 45 minutes, and having that period of missing time in his own memory. The other airman who had gone into the woods after the object, apparently touched a panel of lettering on the thing's side and ended up having a rather massive telepathic data dump into his mind. As a result, they both ended up with a world of grief from the military authorities, being extensively "debriefed" - a rather euphamisticc term. Lots more to say on this, though I have never actually followed the case very closely.

The final talk of the evening was by Nick Redfern, on crop circles. He has done some extensive research into the topic and has produced some surprising new (at least to me) info. One of them is that there appears to be contactee reports coming from the UK in recent years, associated with crop circles. A couple of cases he cited have involved typical UK suburbanites, usually walking thier dog or simiar, when confronted by a rather strange but human-looking being. The "alien" appears to be the typical "Nordic" with blonde hair, superb physique (and even a Scandanavian accent), also wearing the stereotypical "alien" coveralls. The alien provides a message to the unsuspecting person, also perhaps, doing a telepathic download, then vanishes. In one case, the person subsequently saw a UFO flying away, then nothing more.

Nick's talk also talked about the relationship between crop circles, geographically located mostlyu around the Wilshire region, a very ancient region with lots of stone circles, etc. He described how this is also a region with a lot of secret military installations, including at least one massive underground installation. He related one account about how the formation of a crop circle was observed in progress, right within the bounds of one of the ultra-secret installations. Both the fact that it was in restricted area, and that it was observed in progress, spontaneously forming in the material, itself, suggests that this is a very powerful phenomenon that cares little about human political restrictions.

The final part of the crop circle talk was on the hoaxers, or as they call themselves, circle makers - or even "artists." One circle maker apparently has a metaphysical background and it is sugggested that his circle making is a form of channeling - the hoaxing being yet another manifestation of the phenomenon itself. There was also an occult aspect to the crop circle scene - a number of pagan rituals that may have occurred after the crop circle was laid down - or may have had to do with the formation of the circles themselves. The upshot of all these aspects of the phenomenon is that the topic of crop circles is as complex as you can imagine - or more so.

By the end of a long day (I was up way too late the night before, and I'm sitting up wayyy too late right now, too, as I write this), most of us felt pretty fried. We spent the hour or two winding down, just socializing and joking with eachother - a pleasant evening that tells me that the community is quite comfortable with letting its hair down.

And now, it's time for this kid to bag it. Tomorrow begins at 9AM, followed by a long airplane flight home...

Day 2 - Notes on the busiuness day of the MUFON Conf

It's now Saturday, day three of the annual MUFON conerence. I was planning to write up my notes on day two last night, but I ended up spending more time at the bar, and getting to bed far latger than I had planned. So this is getting written up in the morning before I go to the first talk.

Friday was the business day at the annual MUFON conference. It is the day of the state directors' meeting, the board meeting, the members' reception, etc... And this year, I came away from the day with a lot of hope and excitement. MUFON is planning some pretty kewl stuff in the next year-plus.

One of them is the website - the next generation - they are putting into place. It is really user friendly (so I'm told), and has a lot of useful content. But the most important part of it is a component called MUFON Central. It is a revenue-generating subscription section of the site that allows content for research, a discussion forum, and lots of other things like that. I don't remember how much a subscription would cost but it looked to be extremely reasonable. It remided me of the subscriber features of unknowncountry.com, earthfiles.com, etc.

But what is most important is that the revenue it generates will go toward UFO research, the organization's ultimate goal. Research and education, regardless of what form it takes, all required $$$, and so a reasonable fee, with even a tiny percentage of subscription among those who visit the site - and MUFON.com is a very well viewed site - would provide an extremely good tool for funding our research.

Another thing I learned a bit more about is the various set of research programs that MUFON has in the works. Among them is a next set of efforts by the abduction research team. I have been nominally affiliated with them already, which hadn't yet amounted to much. But now, in talking with the leader of the group, it sounds like he has more of a "rapid deployment" model in mind in which experiencers contacting MUFON can be put in touch with resources inclduing MDs, psychologists and hypnotherapists, as well as the MUFON field investigation infrastructure.

As part of this rapid-deployment model, we need to have field investigators, physical and mental health professionals and certified hypnotherapists available in as many regions as possible. This is something I've found to be a crying need, having heaerd from so many experiencers located far and wide. So one little piece of homework for us in the next few months will be to begin putting together the network of hypnotherapists who are available to work with experiencers. I hope to see this mature into a very useful network of workers who can conduct both healing and research with the experiencer phenomenon, and those who are blessed/cursed with it's attention.

That evening, Richard Dolan did a talk on his new book, A.D., After Disclosure. I'm sure I will have a world to say about this later, but in short, his presentation was phenomenal. It was very, very speculative. But in my view it picked up nicely where Michael Lindemann's work left off. I cite Lindemann's work alot in The Cosmic Bridge, where he talks about the variables of contact. He is more focused on contact than on disclosure, but in Dolan's work, he combines the two in a number of speculative ways. Like Lindemann, Dolan is a futurist par excellence.

The one thing I think the disclosure community misses: the depths of the close encounter phenomenon. Having looked into abduction and individual contact experiences a wee bit, my own hypothesis is that both contact and disclosure will occur at the grass roots level, one experiencer at a time. For better or for worse, I believe that knowledge and acceptance of the visitor presence (whatever that really is - I don't think we understand it much at all) eventually will reach a critical mass, and disclosure will occur as the subconscious/metaconscious level. Only at some critical point will it merge into the daylight of human social consciousness.

Dolan had some interesting things to say about the "Breakaway Civilization" - a secret group or invisible empire that exists in parallel to our own, with higher technology, visitor contact, etc. How this would relate to a bottom-up contact/disclosure scenario, I have no idea. Do the two ideas contradict? I don't think so. But this is an area for a whole lot of work in the near future.

I hope to have beaucoup to say about this later. But now, off to day 3...

Notes on the MUFON conference - day 1

A few notes from day one of the MUFON conference, which involved the field investigation workshop. MUFON has done a great job of updating their field work procedures. They have put together a (relatively) new field investigator manual over the last few years, and yesterday saw a really good set of training materials on how to do investigation work, how to use the MUFON sighting and investigation database, etc.

What was missing was the thing that I most wanted to see, and that was the concluding workshop on working with UFO abductees. Budd Hopkins, the dean of abduction researchers (at least in my book) was to be the presenter. Unfortunately, Budd's health has not been that great recently, so they replaced his presentation with one by Marc D'antonio on astronomy topics for field investigators, including using satellite trackers, star/sky chart programs, etc.

One thing I noted this time, as in previous MUFON conferences is the two threads of thought - one being the focus on abduction, the implications of the UFO phenomenon and realted topics. The other is on the need for scientific rigor and skeptical inquiry. Much of the FI workshop focused on the latter topic - skeptical inquiry. The first one or two presenters actually (I thought) were a bit too conservative on that topic. One talk was on differentiating hoaxes, natural phenomena, etc., and did a good job of providing the latest in some of the UFO-like things out there - and there are a lot of them (mostly new RC hovering toys, etc.).

I thought that the first talk missed the distinction between identifying what could be a prosaic explanation for a UFO sighting, and what in fact, a UFO-->IFO actually was. It used the Mexicali UFO sightings in 2008 as an example, and plotted the geometry and the physics of the sighting, a ball of light seen from the town by multiple witnesses. They interviewed a host of people in the town who had seen the object and developed a pretty solid profile of what had been seen, when and by whom.

They then developed a hypothesis that it was actually power line corona seen from some distance away. In my view, the hypothesis was potentially quite sound. However, they never actually established that this was in fact the case - only that it could be the explanation. Thus, I believe that they never actually established the explanation, only a hypothesis for the explanation.

In my view this is one of the big dilemas of skeptical inquiry. It is quite possible to establish potential prosaic explanations for many sightings (but believe me, not all of them). However, to prove that that particular sighting was actually due to that explanation is nearly impossible to prove. Thus, at least in the more complex cases, the UFO never actually becomes an IFO, just a potential IFO. Most debunkers seem to ignore this distinction, and field investigators (some times including myself) have occasionally missed it as well.

UFO research seems to tread the limits of science. It is studying an apparently-intelligent phenomenon and in the process, seeking to separate the wheat from the chaff of sighting reports. As a result, many potential explanations for UFO sightings are found. However the difference is between hypothesis and scientific knowledge are vital to note. A hypothesis may be consistent with the data, but it is not yet proven that it is actually true. And in my view, this is where many of the IFO explanations of sightings stand today.


The other thread of thought is primarily that of abduction research. It is (arguably) much softer science (a loose term in itself), often dealing with social and statistical material. The picture is much fuzzier here than in the field investigation of UFO sightings, and often the ambiguity is downright frustrating. One talk was on several of the recent studies of experiencers - statistics comparing the mental makeup of experiencers with random controls from the general population. The results were fascinating.

Experiencers were no more fantasy prone than anyone else. However, they had far higher openness for parapsychological and paranormal events, more universal spiritual views and had also had more difficult life histories than the general population.

A lot more work needs to be done on this and it will probably provide a lot of work for statisticians. The data involved needs to be massive in order to develop an accurate profile of the CE4 phenomenon. But I believe we need to connect the dots on this mystery - it is probably one of the biggest mysteries and, according to some one of the biggest concerns, that humanity faces.

Just exactly how many experiencers are there? How do they relate to other phenomena such as the Indigo children, paranormal and parapsychologial experiences, etc...? The questions are legion and we have only scratched the surface of them.

Fortunately, it appears that a new wave of abduction research appears to be taking shape. So in the next few years, I believe some definitive data will begin to emerge on the (para)psychological mechanics of the phenomenon. It is a refreshing burst of new energy in the field, and I believe it is long overdue...

Ramblings about tree branches and tarballs

Today, as I write this, it is July 4th. It is Independence day in the USA, one of the nation's biggest days of festivities. For Gwyn and I, it has been a day of relaxation - that is, after we got done cleaning up after a minor disaster (very minor, in the grand scale of things).

Yesterday, late in the afternoon, Gwyn heard a noise from just outside the house. The weather was clear, but hot and muggy, no thunderstorm (yet). I was sitting in the very spot I am now, in our sun room plinking away on my laptop PC, writing this month's edition of The CE4 Corner. She called the noise to my attention and the two of us went outside to investigate. There, we saw a rather large branch from the maple tree over our house had broken off. It had fallen in the neighbor's driveway, barely missing his pickup truck. I guess that just as they were five years ago, the tree-felling spirits were kind to us.

Five years ago, during a big storm, we lost two of the four maples in our back yard when some horrendous straight-line winds uprooted them. One dropped squarely between the house and garage - it couldn't have been aimed any better - in such a way that it did not do significant damage. Now, today, the tree-felling spirits or random chance (use your own discernment), again dropped the branch only a few feet from our neighbor's truck. It could have been a fiasco, but it wasn't.

The collapsing branch fit right in. I have been thinking a fair abount about disaster, lately - ever since finishing the book Collapse, by Jared Diamond. The book explores the collapse of various civilizations such as the Maya, the Anasazi, Easter Island, the norse colonies on Greenland, etc. It also explores the long-term survival of civilizations such as Japan, Iceland, some long-lived societies in the south Pacific, etc., and asks what constitutes the difference between the two. And the biggest reason he offers is the societies' management of its resources.

Basically, Diamond lists five factors that determine whether a civilization will survive

1. Relations with the neighbors: Do the neighbors become enemies at the gates, or do they become trading partners, allies, etc...
2. Dependence upon trade with vital trading partners, such as Greenland depending upon imports of iron and wood from Scandanavia
3. Management of natural resources, such as land and fertility of the soil: Is the agriculture and land use of the society conducted sustainably, such that it can continue indefinitely?
4. Stable social instutions: Are the government and religious institutions of the society structured so as to provide a sustainable (and presumably, at least reasonably equitable) framework for the on-going life of the poeple.
5. Adaptabliity to change: Any civilization must be able to adapt to changes in the environment such as climate change, drought, etc. Such things DO happen, and for many civilizations, such as the Greenland norse and the Anasazi, they have brought about doom. Yet for others, such as Japan, Iceland and those long-lived island societies in the Pacific, the people and social institutions were able to adapt - and so those civilizations are still here.

He then applies these five factors to our present civilization.

1) How are our relations with our neighbors?

So far, western civilization has managed to eliminate any neighbors that might pose a threat to it. These have constituted rival civilizations during its earlier history, indigenous populations, etc. So in the short term, there would seem to be little military threat (unless you count the current tide of friction between the Christian and Islamic worlds).

Yet, the other side of the coin is how much a civilization learns from its neighbors - and in that we have probably fared rather poorly. From what I've observed, we westerners have not learned too much from the societies we have replaced. While we are now taking lessons from them - increasingly learning about shamanic spiritual practices and journeys, etc., it has taken a long time. Diamond describes how we have adopted a few of the ways of various eastern and indigenous cultures (mostly technologies - though can't think of any examples at the moment). Yet they remain a precious few.

We are a still a society based upon individualism - each person is considered to be separate from his/her neighbors, and thus does not form a common experience with them. Actions are (at least somewhat) separated from consequences and people are separated from spirit. These things are changing but not very fast. We have a lot of learning to do, myself included.

2) Dependence upon trade with outsiders

In our society now, there really are no outsiders, so we don't have much of an issue there. However, as we become more globalized, a danger exists that the transportation system could break down - fuel becomes too expensive, some problem with the technology, economic factors change, etc... Still, the issue is no where near as dicey as, say, the Greenland norse who were dependent upon imports for their very existence.

3) Management of resources

I am not very knowledgeable about agricultural issues, so I have very little to say about our land use policy, farming practices, etc. But I do know a fair amount (and only that) about energy use. This is already a widely discussed topic, so I don't think I need to say too much. Enough to say that our current energy use is unsustainable, yet we understand that enough that we are working to solve the issues. Whether we succeed or not is an open question, probably the most urgent question facing our civilization.

4) Stable social institutions

I believe that this is probably where our society is most vulnerable. In our society, those who make the decisions - such as CEOs and entrenched politicians - are largely removed from the consequence of those decisions. As I write this, the BP oil spill is reeking havoc with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. There could (and will) be much written about this disaster. In many ways, it is one of the classic engineering disasters of all time - technology at its limits, coupled with a decision making in which a conflict of interest is built into the system. In this case, the conflict of interest is the profit motive of the company - wanting to squeeze as much money from operations as they can while minimizing the cost of those operations. History is rife with examples of how this results in cutting corners - frequently on safety. And these decisions are made by managers who are rewarded for the short term gain of improved profits, often regardless of the resulting risk.

Other fiascos such as the credit and home mortgage crunch, the current recession, the ballooning budget deficit, etc... all point to similar structural conflicts of interest. Those in leadership are rewarded for results which are not optimal for the long term longevity of our civilization.

5) Adaptability to change

Is our society adaptable to fundamental changes such as climate shifts? Are we able to adjust to fundamental economic and technological shifts such as are inherent in 21st century world politics? I guess that remains to be seen. So far we have done OK, yet according to global warming forcasts, climate change is just beginning. We'll have a lot of tests before this is all done.

So how does this all relate to a falling tree branch? To me, the branch is symbolic. In this tree branch, the failure point has been present for many years. The danger was present yet we didn't know it. As I was chain-sawing the branch, I noted several major cracks in the branch - probably from the storm we had five years ago - that would have brought it down eventually. How many other aspects of life have similar potential failure points?

In this case, the consequence were minor. The branch missed our neighbor's car. It could have been much worse. Any number of things could have happened, yet very little did. We were lucky. How lucky? Was this the extent of the problem, or is this the tip of the iceberg? I guess a tree trimmer will have to tell us that in the near future.

Meanwhile, a many-orders-of-magnitude greater disaster continues to unfold. And like cracks in a tree branch, oil slicks and tar balls appear on beaches all over the Gulf of Mexico. Fish and birds are dying or fleeing to habitats where they have never been observed before, etc. Oil is being found in places along the Florida coast. And one of the biggest dangers apparently is that the spill could get into the gulf stream and be carried far and wide in the Atlantic. In short, there are myriad warning signs that an already bad catastrophe could get much worse.

Could this whole BP-oil-leak scenario bring about our downfall? I doubt it. Yet I wonder how many Mayan priests said that as another corn field dried up. Did any chieftanis on Easter Island say the same thing as the next tree was felled - perhaps the one that pushed their civilization past the tipping point and on to the glideslope to oblivion?

Like the tree branch in our driveway, could tarballs on a Florida beach be the sign of even bigger problems ahead? Or, like our branch dropping in just the right spot to cause minimum damage, will we get lucky and see consequences far less than the worst-case scenario? I guess only time will tell - that and a lot of hard work by folks who (we hope) know what they are doing.

The Impact of the Impact - Family, friends and close encounters

Draft of my new article in The CE4 Corner
================================

This week I've had a number of very interesting - and very heart wrenching - calls from experiencers out there in various parts of the USA. Several called me at rather odd hours, either late at night or early in the morning (at least early for me...). In either case, when my cell phone rings at that time of night I can tell it's important. Few people would call late at night unless they had a compelling reason to do so. In several cases, the reason was that the person was alone and scared. They had no idea who to turn to, and then somehow, they found my (or another CE4 researcher/worker's) contact info.

More than one person has described how the phenomenon has left them almost completely isolated. It has wrecked their family life, driving a wedge between them and their spouse, alienating (literally) parents, children, friends, etc. It has left them isolated to face the reality of their experiences alone and vulnerable. It once again drives home to me the impact of the encounter on the experiencer and the resulting impact on the lives of those closest to them. I call this the impact of the impact.

For a "typical" experiencer (if anybody could be called "typical"), somewhere out there in the human world, the biggest question becomes, who can they tell? Who will believe them? The CE4 experience shatters the concepts our society holds as being real -we live in a human-dominated world and a technological society. We associate with other humans in a particular culture (one we have been raised within, or have become acclimated to). Yet suddenly the experiencer finds him/herself becoming somewhat like an experimental animal, no loner at the top of the heap. In the realm of the visitors, humans appear not to hold all that high a standing. Thus, the homo-sapien-centric world we live in is suddenly turned upside down, and the experiencer is left with a powerful and often-traumatic experience. Some aspects of the CE4 event they may be able to remember. Other aspects of it just present as an intractable mystery - missing time, reality paradoxes, paranormal events, etc... And for many experiencers, there is no one they can tell.

One person, several years ago was scheduled for regression work for a series of encounters that had been bothering her for years. A few hours beforehand, she called me up, telling me she needed to cancel. Her fiance's mother had read something on a Christian website about how hypnosis was evil. On the same site, it talked about the demonic nature of the close encounter. As a result, her fiancee was suddenly opposed to her doing hypnotic work with me, or even to speak with me about his encounters. Much more could be said about this case, and indeed I have spoken about similar ones in previous articles. However, the key point here is that the experiencer was effectively cut off from any help. She couldn't share her account with anyone among her family and friends (all conservative Christian) without frightening them of possible diabolical influences, etc. Ultimately, her sharing with someone who would listen to her without judgement or jumping to conclusions (I believe that no one knows enough about the phenomenon to draw a conclusion) was truly the first step in the process of coming to terms with her encounters. (I have no idea whether she ended up marrying the man who was so opposed to her work with me - whichever way she went, I wish her the best).

Another experiencer called me from somewhere in Heartland USA, telling me that she had seen some strange lights in her backyard She had also experienced power failures, missing time, poltergeist activity, etc. Again, no one would listen to her; no one would believe her. Long-since divorced, she lived alone. Her children had moved on and she lived out in the boonies, having no neighbors. Thus she felt alone and exposed to whatever experience the phenomenon might bring her.

My first question to her was whether she felt physically threatened. (If this should be the case, I usually recommend the person call 911, even for something like a UFO encounter.) But now, she seemed to be OK for the moment, just confused about recent events - and, again, no one to share her experiences with. Thus, she bent my ear for hours, telling me of event after event...

Researchers have noted how the experience seems to propagate down family lines - usually, I find, down the maternal family line from mother to daughter. This was certainly true of this particular exeriencer, who told me about her mother being a healer, her grandmother a witch, etc...

Yet while even experiencing the unexplained themselves, many in the family are often in denial of the phenomenon. Thus, the experience seems to tear apart families at an alarming rate. Like most aspects of the experiencer phenomenon, there is very little data to make anything but a wild guess, but my guesstimate is that the divorce rate among experiencers is probably twice what it is in the general population. Thus, once again, the experiencer is isolated from her (most experieners I have heard from seem to be female) otherwise-supportive family and friends, leaving her alone to face the challenges of a shattered reality.

How can we help heal the pain that so many experiencers describe? Probably the best healing tool for the experiencer is the ear. Most of the time, the experiencer just needs someone to listen. The next healing tool is the shoulder - a place to cry, to let out the trauma and loneliness that come with a shattered reality. Finally, understanding and forgiveness can help - but only when the experiencer is ready (that's another story).

Meanwhile, finding others who have experienced the phenomenon first hand can be a great help - like minded souls with whom one can share their experiences.

Several times, experiencers have asked me to help them save their marriage or other close relationships. While there is little I can do for their marriage (I'm not a marriage & family counselor), perhaps better understanding of the phenomenon can help the spouse come to terms with their loved-ones experiences. Often both the experiencer and the spouse need to come to terms with the shattered reality of close encounters - a double challenge...

Thus, the close encounter affects all of society, not just those who experience it directly. For each experiencer, there is usually a family and/or a circle of friends. All of them feel the secondary impact of the encounters. It is the hidden effect of encounters I call the impact of the impact.

Six Sigma and Feeding Starving Children

This morning I had a rather unique (at least to me) experience. I got to get the feel of what it's like to work on a manufacturing fooor, while at the same time I was able to donate a few hours to Feed My Starving Childrenm (FMSC). Both were enlightening experiences.

FMSC packages a large amount of a special high-nutrition mixture of food specifically designed to bring severely malnourished young children back to health. It's vegetarian and contains natural grains (though not organic), in a balanced and high-calorie mixture that provides the right base to bring these kids back to health. I'm not enough of an expert in food science, but from what I know it seem like the process is sound and it feeds a lot of starving children very inexpensively.

Working on a project like this is very heartwarming. When I first woke up this morning, I was wondering why I had gotten myself into this. But then, an hour into it, I realized that it was a truly rewarding experience.

We ended up partitioning up jobs with Gwyn being part of a packaging station and I working in the warehouse area, providing the grain and the raw materials to the stations. It was fascinating to see how the process sorted itself out, as each person on the team tended to find the area they were best at. I found that I tended to work as a float-picking up the slack when one of the team members got behind, and as a runner-taking materials where they were needed. And as I did all of this, I got to see how each process worked: building cardboard shipping boxes, filling grain bins, taking grain bins out to the packaging stations, etc...

The number of manufacturing processes helped me get a real feeling for what manufacturing engineering is like. I found myself thinking in terms of process optimization, six-sigma and lean theory (lean takes on new meaning when we're talking about poverty and starvation), etc... It's tough being an engineer when doing things like this... :-)

I found that there were a number of ways that we could improve, plus ways that in a real manufacturing line, we could measure and optimize. If this were in the companies I have worked for over the last 30 years (mostly medical electronics), then these processes would all have had to be documented, validated, etc. Thus a whole group of engineers would be working them out, applying lean and six-sigma principles, etc. All of these to make the process go smoother.

For us, things seemed to fall into place. We were only there about three hours, but we managed to get enough food packaged and stacked on the shipping pallet to feed about 95 kids for a year. It was about $5000 worth of raw material, plus about 30 people * 3 hours each to package it. It felt great and, I realized, being a manufacturing runner is a lot of work. My heart really goes out to people on the production floor of any organization even remotely resembling what we did today.

So, at last I got to learn something about how another part of Corporate America works - the production floor and the warehouse - very different from the design and development engineering work I have done most of my career. It gave me a somewhat new perspective, and helped me understand how the various industrial models, such as Six-Sigma came into being. It also fed a lot of hungry little mouths. All in all, a rewarding and revealing morning's work...

The fun never ends...

Well, the fun never ends...

After we got back from the Black Hills, I set to work on my next task, updating my website. Normally, this isn't a big deal; just open Frontpage and make the change. However, there was one little hitch. My old computer died and I am now using Windows 7 (64 bit) on a new laptop. What I found was that Frontpage 2003 doesn't work (at least not very well) on Win7. No problem, I'l just upgrade to the Office 2009/2010 version, right?

Wrong...

It appears that Frontpage is no longer supported. In short, when it comes to Windows 7, there ain't none... So for the time being, my website remains unmaintained as I research - and finally switch over to - a new web software package. Since this is most likely very different from Frontpage - different file structures, templates, etc., it is very likely that in a few weeks my websites will look very different.

Actually, this is a probably a blessing in disguise. I have needed to do some big-time maintenance on my site for some time. I need to bring my site up to Web 2.0 standards, Add some additional features, etc. So it's time to do some major re-architecing.

In the mean time, I've had a few health adventures - nothing I'm going to go into here, save to say that it takes a lot of focus away from what has already stretched my focus a bit thin. It's nothing major, but in between the regular job, a business, updating my novel, etc., having a minor health surprise makes was simply not in the budget.

Where this all goes, I certainly can't predict. All I can say is that the fun never ends...

Another really wild week

It's been one helluva ride over the last week or two.
Most recently, I got away for a few days - spending some time out in the Black Hills, , getting away from the hustle and bustle of (mostly) the day job, plus rebuilding my computer, apps and data, etc.


To make a long story short, two weeks ago, my computer died, resulting in a whole lot of scrambling, rebuilding, etc. I still haven't gotten my website going. I talked a little bit about the 'festivities' of the last week or so in my last entry, so enough said... However, when I finally got back online, I found several rather annoyed e-mails from people, wondering why I hadn't written back to them.

A couple of the e-mails I received were rather pointed. So I wrote back apologizing for the delay, indicating that my computer had died. Believe me, people understand that. In our Internet Age, it's become one of those universal experiences - now it's just like taxes, car trouble, family emergencies, etc. - everybody experiences them and everybo0dy understands - once they know, that is...

Most of the messages in question were from experiencers - people who had contacted me earlier and with whom I had been dialoging when I went offline. I am continually amazed at the number of e-mails I get from people who have had anomaly experiences. As I read through them, if find a both a high-strangeness and an eerie sense of consistency among their messages. Among the most common things people describe are:
- Strange experiences they can't explain
- miussiung time
- sleep paralysis
- psychic experiences
- seeing/encountering anomalous beings
... and the list goes on...

Many describe the classic alien abduction experience - but many describe other types of encounters as well. As I describe in The Cosmic Bridge, there appears to be a core consistency - the classic Hopkins/Jacobs encounter, what I call the 'standard model'. But there also appear to be a lot of variations on a theme.

I'm just now starting to dig through messages from people who wrote or called while I was offline. It will be interesting to see whether what I find tomorrow will be consistent with info of the last few weeks.

In the process, I suspect that it will begin another really wild week...

At last, mostly, sort of...

(initially written last week, updated and posted on June 6 after returning from a week on the road)

====================================================

At last. I now have a working computer again - mostly...

At last, I now have my work restored - mostly...

And at last, I have again started to write again. - sort of...


My whole epic started about this time last week when I was starting to plink away on The Fifth Key. I got a Norton warning indicating that I needed to upgrade my antivirus - and my understanding is that there are presently several doozies of viruses out there. When I started to click on the OK key, I found a menu item prompting me to upgrade from my version 3 to version 4 - foir free. So I did - big mistake...


The install failed. So I tried to roll back to my old version.

That failed, too.

Finally, I uninstalled everything Norton-related and tried again - still no luck...

So finally I called the help line to Symantec. I got thru to one of their technicians, a wonderful lady in the Phillipines who walked me through another round of uninstalls.
Well - we finally got back to the point where all of the past Norton stuff had been removed. I then tried to re-install my old version of Norton 360. Again, no dice.

TO make a long story short, at that point my internet connection gave up the ghost. It turns out that several functions that live on that corner of the motherboard of my old laptop were becoming a bit spotty - my battery connection to name one. Well, I guess this included the ethernet connection, which finally died - right in the middle of the download.

End result, no more network connection. I now had a standalone PC which was rapidly fading into the sunset. So the rest of the next day was spent moving data off of the disk (fortunately, I had been reasonably faithful about backups) and listing out which apps I really cared about. Then it was time to go out laptop shopping.

Well, the rest is history. As I write this, pretty much everything is back up and running - with the exception of my website maintenance. Unfortunately, my site is a week or two out of date, and I noted several links don't work. Also unfortunately, Frontpage 2003 doesn't work very well on my new machine - so until I get Frontpage updated (or replaced) that will remain a bit of a headache. Guess what tomorrow's project is... :-)

Still, things are at last working again - mostly, anyway
...well, sort of...

Whispers and Warnings of Contact

Earlier this afternoon (Saturday 5/8/2010), I attended another fascinating Minnesota MUFON meeting. The topic this time was the Jim Sparks talk at the International UFO Congress in which he described some of his abduction experiences. He described a legion of events including the oft-described medical experiments, reproductive procedures, etc. But more than that, he described something which I feel is critically important in our day & age - messages for humanity. Specifically, he referred to warnings from the visitors to clean up (literally) our act and stop despoiling our world. Environmental issues being one of our present day's biggest (though often ignored) concerns.

Also in the news, comments from Steven Hawking have emerged in which he has stated that, if the aliens are out there, we should not try to contact them. He stated that it might turn out something like first contact between Europeans and natives in North America, which did not turn out so well for the North Americans. In short, we do not know the intentions of the aliens out there, so it is best to be cautious. Hawking's comments have, of course, stirred up a firestorm of protest. Many of the folks in the UFO community have decried his comments, especially those folks who are strong advocates for the disclosure of government-held knowledge regarding the ET presence on Earth.

To most of the disclosure community, ETs are assumed to be benevolent. Steven Greer (founder of CSETI and The Disclosure Project) has stated that any alien race who has survived this far in order to reach the stars will have moved beyond its belligerent stage. In short, he believes that they would be magnanimous, or at least, no-hostile. Similarly, James Deardorff in his article A possible extraterrestrial strategy for Earth, assumes that the cosmic civilization, whatever it is, would be at least somewhat benevolent and altruistic. But is this actually the case? At the same time, is Hawking right in saying that we need to be cautious about ET contact?

This week, Whitley Strieber published a new article in Whitley's Journal entitled The Dangers of Disclosure, in which he sounded warnings somewhat similar to those of Hawking - though in my view, considerably more credible. Why? Because he is among the community known (or if you are a skeptic, alleged) to have actually had contact. In his article, he states that full and complete disclosure and/or open contact with the visitors would be a dangerous thing. This is not because the visitors may be hostile (we don't know), but because of the effect that disclosure and contact would have on our collective psyche. Whitley is clear that he is hot referring to the panic scenarios of the the fabled Orson Wells War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938. Rather he is referring to what I have often heard described as the "shattered reality" of the experiencer (see Bryant and Seebach, Healing Shattered Reality).

Most experiencers describe going through a phase in which the rug is effectively pulled out from underneath their reality. At some point, they find themselves beginning to recall things our society has no way to understand. "Magical" technology, beings from another world, telepathic communication, these are just a few of the mind-bending aspects of the close encounter phenomenon - and each deals a body blow to the consensus reality in which the experiencer was raised.

Nearly every experiencer describes the mind-shattering fear that accompanies the onset of the close encounter experience. At the moment the visitors appear, paralysis and 'your-worst-nightmare' fear grips the experiencer's mind, body and soul. This experience seems to be characteristic of the onset of the visitor interaction - and according to at least one abductee, it is endemic to the experience.

Whitley has indicated on more than one occasion that fear is an innate element of the visitor interaction. Why? we don't know. But in his talk, Jim Sparks suggests that it is simply because of the difference in psyches and energies between the visitors (grays) and our own mental makeup. In short, the visitors are so different from us that we do not have a reference frame in which to comprehend them. Thus, the mind rebels against the experience, protecting the experiencer in the only way the primal unconscious knows - with fear.

I have found that through hypnotherapy and related healing work, it is quite possible for the experiencer to transcend the fear response. I have seen many accomplish this very task. By getting to the source of the fear response, either through hypnotic regression, hypnotic parts work or some other means, it is possible to find, release and heal the origin of the fear. This origin may end up being something inherent in our own lives, perhaps unrelated to the UFO/CE4 phenomenon. When healing of this fear response occurs, I have observed a sense of peace and resolution fill the experiencer. It is visible on their faces and it is a joy to behold. Suddenly there is a level playing field and the each can now interact with the phenomenon without seeing his/her self as a victim.

Now let's extrapolate this scenario to the level of our entire society. Precious few experiencers have come to terms with the idea of alien contact - and its reality in their lives. And beyond the experiencer community, few others in the world today even accept the idea of a real present-day alien existence, much less presence in our world. Thus, even though alien contact has become a prevailing idea in our collective folklore, any notion that it might be more than speculative science fiction is still not acceptable. While nearly all of us can comprehend and accept the possibility of finding simple single-cell organisms on Mars or Europa, to most of society, the idea of real, present-day alien visitation is still terrifying.

Thus, save for the fraction of a percent of all humans that are close encounter experiencers, I suspect that humans are not yet ready for contact. Many of us know that. I suspect the visitors know that and I suspect that some of those in the government also feel that way. In short, full disclosure of government-held UFO secrets and large-scale open contact would probably not be in our best interests at this time.

This is not to say that the cover-up should continue unabated, however. In his Journal entry, Whitley advocates a slow, steady process of scientific study and gradual disclosure. He suggests that NASA acknowledge the presence of unknowns in some of their video, that the FAA and the military acknowledge similar detections on radar. He also suggests that highly respected scientists begin to take the topic of anomaly (I use the term anomaly, rather than UFO) research seriously, accepting the existence of - and conducting valid scientific study of - physical evidence from UFO encounters. This includes analysis of ground traces, implants, etc. In addition, Whitley suggests a thorough medical study of experiencers, building a detailed and extensive portrait of their lives and their interaction with the phenomenon.

Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, says that the first stage of understanding any phenomenon is to characterize it's visible nature and behavior. when we acquire data on the phenomenon, what do we notice? What measurements or other data can we acquire about it? It is only with a clear understanding of what we already know that we can begin to hypothesize about what the phenomenon might be. I believe that we already have plenty of data with which to characterize the phenomenon. We can thus begin (or continue) to develop hypotheses about what the phenomenon is and why it is here. As with any valid scientific endeavor, the result of such conjecture must ultimately be testable predictions. What MUST we see for the hypothesis to be true. When we have done this, and when we have verified our hypotheses about the phenomenon, we may well be on the way to being ready for contact.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon is very busy in its own right. It is pursuing contact on its own - one person at a time, one abduction at a time. Nearly every experiencer I have met, in some way describes how they have evolved as a result of their contact experiences. Their perspective and their consciousness has shifted, opening as a result of their reality-shattering encounters with the unexplained. I suspect that at some point, this maturation will reach a critical mass; enough humans will become acclimated to the visitor presence to permit increasingly open appearances of the visitors. Then and only then will we be ready for contact - and only then will we be ready for full and complete disclosure of the full truth behind the UFO/CE4 phenomenon. Ultimately, I suspect that the phenomenon will disclose itself at its own pace, regardless of what governments do or want.

When will this take place? I certainly don't know. While I hear whispers of disclosure and impending contact, I tend to be quite skeptical of them. We hear these predictions nearly all the time and few if any predictions of disclosure have borne out - at least in the USA. What would be the consequences be of disclosure - and of contact? I believe they would be non-positive and probably unpredictable, and thus probably not a very good bet for our authorities in the present day.

So until our society matures enough to join the Cosmic Kindergarten (to quote Stanton Friedman), I believe that we will continue to hear both whispers and warnings of contact, yet the ambiguity, paradox and frustrationswill continue. Life in the world of Ufology will go on, occasionally punctuated by rumors of disclosure and by the whispers and warnings of contact.

Do I smell gunpowder? Notes on the book "Messages" by Stan Romanek (with J. Allan Danelek)

I just finished reading Stan Romanek's book, Messages (written with co-author J. Allan Danelek). In a word, I loved it. It was probably one of the cleanest, most concise and at the same time, most extensive narration of the abductee experience I have read. The book is written in a plain style, the narration of an ordinary person undergoing extraordinary experiences. And yet, the experiences that the book contains are anything but typical if for only one reason, the intensity of the message. In addition Romanek claims to have captured evidence - both material samples and photographs - from his experiences.

Like most experiencers I have met, Romanek's awareness of the phenomenon began with some key event - in his case, a significant UFO sighting. This began a cascade of experiences, explorations and mysteries. Eventually, after a number of hypnotic regressions, the scenario of this one person's interactions with the phenomenon took shape with increasing clarity.

Romanek's narrative generally follows his unfolding awareness of the phenomenon, beginning with the times before he had knowledge of the phenomenon. He describes himself as initially a skeptic, yet also indicates that he had experienced a number of childhood mysteries. Among these were his encounters with what he called, "The Pretty Lady." His description of this event sounds nearly identical to those of many other experiencers, describing human-looking beings appearing to them early in their lives. The beings often look angelic, yet have the large, dark slanting eyes - something which seems to suggest an "alien" nature.

Additionally, the "pretty lady" event occurred at the approximate time of a series of close UFO sightings around the Air Force base at Grand Forks North Dakota. Having personally investigated several sightings in that area, I can concur that this area has historically been a common location for high-strangeness encounters.

Romanek them moves ahead to his sightings in Colorado, especially those at Red Rocks, near Denver. Living in the Denver area at that time, he describes a trip to Red Rocks with the intent to shoot some home video. At that point he observed a craft hovering in plain sight, clearly intending for him to observe it. He took a considerable amount of video of the craft as it paced his van and appeared to react to his presence in several ways. In addition to what I can only describe as a game of "cat and mouse" between Romanek and the object, he described a feeling of electrical intensity [my term, CL]. Then the object sped away to be lost in the sky - but definitely not forgotten.

later, Romanek replayed the video and found that he had clearly captured the object on film. In addition, he describes how he subsequently developed electrical sensitivity; street lights would blink out and electronics would malfunction in his presence. This leads me to suspect that there was far more to the UFO event than a sighting and video-recording of a distant object as many experiencers have described the same thing.

Like most experiencers, Romanek describes feeling torn between worlds - the unknown and the known, the human and the extraordinary, etc. Events continued, intensifying in his life, until he finally decided to get to the bottom of things. He decided to pursue hypnosis as a means to discern what had happened to him 'behind the veil' [my term, CL]. During several sessions with Deborah Lindemann, a hypnotherapist in Fort Collins, Colorado, a classic account of UFO abduction emerged. In the course of several regressions, increasing detail emerged.

Classic among the events during the alien abduction experience is the receipt of a message or vision. Many experiencers describe apocalyptic warnings, along with a torrent of spiritual and/or scientific images cascading into their mind - and Romanek was no exception. One powerful aspect of Romanek's message was a series of equations and diagrams, which he produced during the regressions. They describe increasingly complex equations in physics - including aspects of electromagnetic theory, general relativity, nuclear chemistry, etc. Another aspect was the prediction of a coming apocalypse along with a planetary alignment, apparently intended to give the predicted date of the event - September of 2012.

Subsequently, Romanek had hypnotic work done with Dr. Leo Sprinkle, a former professor of psychology at the University of Wyoming. Romanek states that Dr. Sprinkle was more focused on UFO abduction work, whereas Deborah Lindemann did more general hypnotherapy work. Thus, Romanek felt that Sprinkle would be the ideal choice to continue his regression work.

Indeed, for whatever reason, the level of trance seems to be far deeper and the results were considerably different. While the events and the messages were similar to what emerged in earlier regressions, several additional phenomena occurred; among them was the channeling of the main entity itself. The result was an even deeper message. The entity, which they ultimately referred to as "Grandpa," stated that humanity is at a crossroads. We are being watched and guided - and judged. Additionally, there is a movement toward enlightenment among us and it is imperative that this movement take hold before it is too late.

The channeling experience, the messages, drawings, etc. - all of these actually emerge relatively frequently in hypnotic regression work with experiencers. I often hear new-age-sounding messages from experiencers - many of whom have no prior background or interest in such topics. Yet what makes Romanek's book unique is the intensity of the message, the claims of physical evidence and the degree of investigation.

Romanek claims that his experiences have corroboration, including physical evidence exceeding that of any case to date. He describes taking material with him from inside the UFO - material which was subsequently analyzed in scientific laboratories with profound results. He refers to this as his smoking gun. Is this true or not? I believe the jury is out. We have heard many of these claims before and few if any of them have survived the light of skepticism. Yet if true, it is indeed a smoking gun.

Several researchers have claimed that Romanek's book has some dubious aspects to it. I am not familiar with controversy(ies) surrounding it, but I was a bit skeptical of his claims. Synchronistically, while writing this article, I received an e-mail entitled "The Smoking Gun that Shoots Blanks" - indicating that the e-mail's authors see far less to the book than Romanek states.

I have only scratched the surface of this case in this article. The book goes into considerable detail about his interactions with the government, military harassment, encounters with apparent human-aliens and men in black, etc. It is a veritable cross-section of the UFO abduction experience. And ultimately, whether it is true or not, it gives an excellent glimpse into what it is like to be an abductee.

If the claims in the book bear out, the case might well be the smoking gun. There are all the right elements in it - a combination of details providing a cross section of the UFO/CE4 phenomenon. Furthermore it is similar to what many other abductees tell me. Thus, either the authors have done a whole lot of homework on the case, or the experiences are real. Are there bullets or blanks in the smoking gun? Whichever turns out to be true, my nose definitely detects the faint whiff of gunpowder in the air.

Notes from Mars and shifts in reality...

Greetings from Mars(con). It's early saturday afternoon and I'm sitting at my table at the MarsCon SF convention in Bloomington (Minneapolis), MN. Saturday is a bit slow - I think people are still a bit hung over from the evening before. The evening before (loosely defined) lasted until about 2 AM, and for several people I talked with today, until about 4.

I did my talk (similar to past years) on close encounters last night at about 11PM. It ran until midnight and actually finished on time. Most of the people in the talk had heard a similar talk in the past, but also, most of the people in the room were experiencers. So I hurried through the material in the talk and focused upon discussion among those in the room.

Several people there, I knew for years. One is actually in The Cosmic Bridge (part of an aggregate case where I describe screen memories of childhood encounters). A couple of other experiencers in the room, I knew had had encounters but I had not talked with them extensively. It turned out that most of the people in the room had had similar experiences, however. Of the four of us who hung on until about 2AM, two of them described some very interesting reality anomalies. Both described events comprising what I could only call a parallel reality.

In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk about a number of reality anomalies, including several involving Evelyn, the abductee in the northwestern Wisconsin experiencer case. In that case, she noted several cases in which the nature of her house - specifically the window opening outward were different from what the were in normal reality (in normal reality, the window doesn't open).

In our discussions last night, I learned a couple of similar accounts. In one case, the experiencer and her husband found upon arriving home that their house was different. Somehow, that night, the hot and cold water faucets were reversed. This lasted that night, then in the morning they found that they were back in normal order once more.

Another involved a case in which an experiencer described as a child, travelling on a field trip with a youth group. While there, he visited the home of an authoer whom he followed quite closely (details sketchy as I only learned this in passing at about 1AM). Later on in life, he again met the person and and in conversation referred to his visit many years before - the result being a mystified stare. Apparently, at least in this reality, there was no memory of the visit.

Curious, he checked back with the youth group he had been involved with. To his surprise, he found that there was no such trip in their records, or in anybody's memory. It was as if the trip had never happened, at least in this reality. Only he remembered it. This particular person described a number of other such anomalies in his family, a history of anomalous events and shifted reality.

I have heard a number of other descriptions of apparent parallel reality events, time shifts and other anomalous shifts in the personal experiences of events. In one such case, an experiencer and his girlfriend described driving back into Saint Paul from Wisconsin, suddenly finding themselves on a different (and strange-looking) highway. Thinking they were lost, they exited on the nearest exit. As they did, he noticed that the "world looked unfinished - like an unfinished stage set." He decided to turn around by going over the bridge and getting back on the freeway going the other direction. As he crossed the bridge, he found that the car conked out. His next memory is being back on I94, back on track as they were entring Saint Paul.

The UFO researcher Jenny Randles coined the term, 'Oz Factor' to describe such anomalous 'twilight-zone' effects. While in some cases, it seems to involve a 'quieting' of the surroudings - no frogs, crickets, wind in the trees, etc. - in other cases it appars to be a deeper shift in the reality of the experiencer's world itself.

What is going on here? Is there a plasticity to reality itself? Are the experiencers actually shifting into some form of parallel reality? Is there an overlay of realities present? Or is there another explanation - perhaps 'merely' perceptual in nature? I suspect that the answer to this question will tell us more about both the UFO/CE4 phenomenon and about the nature of reality, itself. My own belief is that we really understand far less than we think about the actual nature of reality. Furthermore, the anomalies associated with the UFO/CE4 phenomenon provide us with some 'in your face' clues about the answers the question. Like so many scientific breakthroughs, often the clues to the mystery are hidden in plain sight.

As I write this, another experiencer I talked with last night, stopped by the table and gave me more details on a sighting I had written up on the MUFON Case Management System a few years ago. It was another classic CE1 (at least I think it was a '1'), with the classic 'oz factor' silence. She also describes being very psychic and a deep psychic relationship with both her son and her daughter.

One of the reasons I do talks at SF cons like MarsCon is that many experiencers seem to gravitate toward SF as a way to handle the ubiquitous encounter influences in their life. And on this weekend I was certainly not disappointed.

An interesting experience while writing...

A few very brief notes as I watch the Olympics and waste a bit of time idly surfing on-line.
I spent the whole day plinking away on Children of the Stars - writing a lot of little pieces of the story: scenes and sideplots that will eventually weave into the main story.

An interesting thing happened as I was writing. One of the characters suddenly "decided" she was going to do something different. Suddenly as I was writing a piece of action drama, I found her doing something completely unanticipated. It was almost as if she had come up with the idea on her own. As I read back what I had written, I was "surprised" by how she had gotten through the particular challenge in the story.

Several experienced writers have told me that this happens, but I hadn't experienced it before now. It's an interesting experience.

In the last couple of days I've been getting into the story. Looking forward to getting into it tomorrow, too...

Twists and Turns, perspectives and a few days of hindsight

This week has started out rough. We have upcoming performance reviews at work (the day job). They say that in a well-run company, there should never be a surprise on your review. However, in our company, nearly everyone I know has had something appear on their review from somewhere out in left field. Many times, it's a surprise. But enough of that. And - oh yes - I almost forgot - they're going to have a layoff some time in late March - but still - keep up the good work...

I am also eagerly waiting to see whether my proposal to the National Guild of Hypnotists to teach a class at the 2010 convention has been accepted. That info is supposed to come back this week.
Furthermore, I have sent about a baker's dozen new query letters out to literary agents - the next round in my endeavor to get The Fifth Key published. So recent times have had a lot of things up in the air - lots of questions and lots of ways that the Universe has presented me with unknown future outcomes.

In many ways, the future is a roll of the dice - at least at the moment. So this week has been a true study in living in the present. It is one of those never-ending lessons about how important it is to focus on intentions, which you can control - rather than on outcomes, which you cannot.

Perspective is important, and nothing teaches that more than some of the events of the last few weeks. One of these is that a friend of our family recently learned that her cancer has returned. Another perspective changer is learning that at work, some folks in our building (possibly including me) are going to lose their jobs. All of these are simply reminders of how tenuous life can be. They reminds us that we are souls living a human existence and at any moment, that existence can change abruptly - or even come to an end.

Still another perspective shaker occurred when I received a set of e-mail diatribes against another UFO researcher - quite serious accusations. I know the researcher but am unfamiliar with the particulars of the case, so I won't go into detail on it . Yet I have found the whole matter to be disconcerting. Suffice it to say that it is another illustration of how tenuous our world can be. At any moment, something out of the blue can happen - something we don't expect - be it an interpersonal falling-out or something else.

On Saturday I attended a talk that I wish I had skipped. It was part of the regular MN MUFON meeting and at the time, I found myself feeling quite annoyed about it. To me the topic seemed (and still seems) like a waste of time. I wrote about this whole affair in an earlier post when I talked about the 'Moon Hoax' theory - that we didn't go to the moon, and all of the history of the Apollo project was faked.

The presentation supposedly showed that the radiation within the Van Allen radiation belts is too intense to permit human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit. I may talk about this presentation in more detail in a different post, but for now, suffice it to say that I found the whole argument bogus. Yet it was presented in an annoyingly credible way. Rather than the emperor having no clothes, in this case, a rather impressive set of clothes had no emperor within them. The talk was well done, presented professionally and made to look very credible - while all of the time, the content of that talk was worthless.

I have seen this same thing on a number of other occasions and it is really spooky how something completely off the wall can sound quite believable. This is how cults get going, how dictators like Hitler come to power, how scams succeed, and how world history has become checkered with economic, political and military fiascoes.

Both joys and disasters have dotted our past and our present - and certainly lay in our future. Some times things work out well; outcomes are positive. Yet at other times we see just how easily things can go wrong. If it is that easy to convince a significant segment of our population that events they lived through - Apollo 11, for example - never occurred, or that one particular ethnic group is responsible for all of the world's troubles, then the peril is real, indeed...

So once again, I am reminded how fragile life can be. It may be the day-to-day existence of each of us - threatened by job loss, sickness, or worse. It may be the fate of whole peoples and nations as seen in some current events. Or it may be the talk I attended on Saturday and the idea that some people actually believed it. In short, the twists and turns of the last few days, coupled with a few days of hindsight, have provided tremendous food for thought - and powerful lessons about perspective on life in an uncertain world.

Can we understand both sides?

Recently, I have had several experiencer clients describe events (apparently) involving military-related abduction encounters. While I certainly can't say that I understand the nature of their encounters, it does give me pause to think. What might be going on? We hear so much over the years about the cover-up, the shadow government, and how the powers-that-be know far more than they are letting on about the visitor phenomenon. So I often wonder, what are the motivations behind the actions of these human authorities? What drives them and what might their objectives be.

In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk about possible motivations of the Visitors described by so many UFO witnesses and encounter experiencers. From the perspective of the Visitors, humans are probably a wild card in our part of the cosmos. From their point of view:

• The biggest single human endeavor (by far) is war. We spend far more on killing eachother than we do on any other activity (except for sex).
• We have developed the capability to destroy an entire planet, deliberately or otherwise. At the moment this capability is limited to our own world, but one could imagine our massive nuclear arsenal - plus a few hundred years of development - applied to another world in the cosmos.
• We are probably within one to two hundred years of a working stardrive. As I point out in The Cosmic Bridge, little known advances in electrogravitics, gravity modification and zero-point physics suggest that we are near a breakthrough, perhaps enabling starflight far sooner than most of us imagine.

For the visitors, the spectre of a warlike humanity spilling out into the cosmos represents an urgent challenge - perhaps motivating a massive-but-stealthy intervention in the evolution of our world. Thus, from this point of view, the motivation of the visitors would be something like self-interest-driven benevolence - somehow 'civilizing' we 'barbarian' humans of this tiny blue world.

So what are the intentions of our visitors? If some such as Dr. Steven Greer are to be believed, all of the visitors are both civilized and benevolent. On the other hand, if Dr. David Jacobs is correct in his book, The Threat, the entire purpose of the alien abduction phenomenon is to eventually overtake Earth and somehow subjugate or replace humanity with a hybrid human-alien race. Most likely, in my view, the motivation(s) of whomever/whatever are visiting our world must be many. If there is one group of visitors, then there are most likely many of them; thus there are probably many motivations, some benevolent, others less so. Thus, we are confronted with unpredictable visitors with advanced technology far beyond our own.

There are many actions humans could take in response to the visitor presence. We could either join them - as suggested by some contactees and others with a positive view of the visitors. We can accept their teachings, assume they are benevolent and follow their lead, etc. Alternatively, we can resist them, somehow trying to maintain human sovereignty over our world using some form of either technological or spiritual/paranormal means. Indeed, there are many variations of each of these views, with far more variety than I have even begun to suggest here.

The history of our own world is replete with examples of how a lower technology civilization fares when faced with one of higher technology and military might. Suffice it to say that these lessons are most likely not lost upon our own planetary authorities. While the visitors might be worried about warlike humans spilling out into the galaxy, our own collective leaders may well be worried about less benevolent beings from the stars overtaking our own world. The spectre of visitors bringing to humanity the same fate that indigenous peoples all over the world have suffered at the hands of westerners probably brings nightmares to those in the know.

I often wonder what kind of debates must go on behind closed doors in the halls of power. Behind the walls of the pentagon, I can well imagine questions, debates and more; how are we to proceed against superior technology from beyond Earth. If even one of the accounts of military encounters with unexplained aerial objects are to be believed, then our military - and probably that of every other major power - has been confronted with capabilities far beyond its own.

The 1980 Bentwaters encounter, the numerous nuclear facility encounters in both the USA and the USSR punctuating the nuclear faceoff of the cold war are just a few examples of how the visitors seem to act at will in our airspace. In addition, several witnesses in Minnesota MUFON sighting/encounter cases, particularly several with military aviation experience, have described how UFOs played cat and mouse with our finest aviation technology - with the UFOs clearly having the edge. The message is clear - if it were to come to a military confrontation between one or more of the Earth militaries and our visitors, the visitors would be the winners. Thus, the obvious challenge to the Military leaders of Earth:

• Maintain the illusion of control over the human population of Earth in the face of visitors' extraordinary capabilities
• Enhance our own capability to the point where humans could credibly maintain their own sovereignty in the face of whoever might come here from out there. This would involve capturing and reverse-engineering alien technology, understanding alien physics, etc.
• Deal with whomever is visiting us while keeping the lid on overall contact between humans and the visitors - presumably to prevent cataclysmic destabilization of our own social (and power) structures.

In short, the question is how to somehow engage the visitors from the cosmos while preventing unpredictable damage to our own social fabric - the kind of damage experienced by the Aztecs, the Incas, the Chinese, and so many others peoples of the non-western world. While there is most likely a high degree of self-interest in maintaining the current structures of power in Earth society, I suspect that our various human authorities take their (self?)appointed responsibilities seriously - to protect and defend the sovereignty of our world - or more specifically, their particlar nation(s) and power structures within our world.

So meanwhile the visitors seem to be contacting us from the bottom up, one experiencer at a time. At the same time, our leaders (those overtly elected and perhaps others with their hands on more deeply hidden levers of power) seem to be trying to build our capability to assert our own sovereignty.

I am certainly not sympathetic with any usurpation of the democratic process, constitutional checks and balances, and/or individual human rights. We often hear allegations of these very problems as we learn more about the UFO coverup. There seem to be many excesses and miscues in this human effort. At the same time, we can also understand those who wish to see humanity expand our collective consciousness and join the Cosmic Community, embracing the very presence that so frightens our leaders. Yet, in light of our own history, I wonder if we can imagine the nightmares of those leaders, facing the possibility of humanity at the mercy of beings from out there.

In every issue there are two sides. In this case, while some embrace the presence of the visitors, others fear the effects of open contact and disclosure of the visitor presence. Who is right? Maybe both. I don't condone the alleged actions of the authorities (both the overt and the shadow governments), but maybe we can begin to understand why such might be occurring. I wonder if, given the prescedents of our own history and the vast disparity in capabilities between the visitors and ourselves, we can understand both sides of this complex question.

a few more glimpses of the extraordinary

The last few days, I've done a number of hypnosis sessions that turned out much differently than expected. In a number of cases, I hadn't planned for them to be close encounter regressions, but in several, they turned out to be just that. In all of these cases, I knew that the person was interested in UFOs, as that's the context in which they found and hired me. So it's entirely unsurprising that there would be CE4 material lurking underneath the surface. Yet in most cases, the person had little or no overt indication of CE4 activity.

In more than one such case over the last little while, quite plainly put, the person has turned out to be an extensive experiencer. They have had a lifetime of encounters buried beneath the surface of their awareness and appear to have been a focus of the phenomenon. In most cases, they were largely unaware of this.

In at least one case, the person involved had had only a couple of events in their life. In each case like this, it appears someone they knew was an experiencer and apparently, they were what I would call "collateral" experiencers.

In a third category, the person turned out to have seen entities, apparently doing something not involving the witness. In many cases like this, the witness tends to be at least somewhat of a psychic/sensitive, and thus, they may be able to see through the veil. I wonder if in cases like this, the witness was able to see the Visitors nearby, possibly a glimpse of someone else's encounter.

In each of these cases, of course, there is only the anecdotal account of the event. Most of these events happened many years ago and any potential evidence has long since been lost or degraded by time. In addition, the people involved were interested in UFOs and thus had had many years of exposure to material on abduction in the media. Yet in each case, I asked some of the 'check' questions which CE4 researchers keep in their hip pockets. And in each case, the person passed the test. If they were making it up, they did a damn good job of it.

Of course, the other possible hypothesis is more metaphysical; perhaps there is a field-consciousness or psychic group-think effect associated with any given group social group or thought movement. The more people think and feel in a similar way, the more the members experience this group mind-field, eventually resulting in a critical mass of like-minds linking together. The mind-field, in turn might reinforce the person's own consciousness, showing up as archetypal thoughts, metaphors, ideas, etc. And during hypnotic regression, perhaps they show up as experiences. This is one possible null hypothesis for the spate of abduction events, though it makes them no less real to the experiencer. In each case, fear can be just as deeply felt and in such cases healing is needed just as much as if the beings were physical aliens in physical spacecraft.

The Jungian paradigm simply makes them even more extraordinary. In fact, such a Jungian archetypal or mind-field effect might even be more interesting than a nuts-and-bolts alien presence. It would teach us far more about the reality of the world we live in. And further, it does not mean that the Visitors are not real - it only means that the effect of a critical mass of close encounters might just take a parapsychological life of its own.

On a related note, I recently read the book, The Alien Abduction Survival Guide by Michelle LaVigne-Wedel. The book has some very interesting points. However in it, she pretty much tends to 'side with' the aliens. The author describes how she actually consults with her alien 'teacher,' a being named Hatar - of which I was a bit skeptical. However in a larger sense, what she suggests tends to be a relatively healthy approach to the Visitor phenomenon. In short, it is one of acceptance and cooperation, forgiveness and healing. Many experiencers (though certainly not all) have found this to be a useful approach.

Though she does not specifically say so, Wedel appears to take the viewpoint that these are physical events, and they are largely benevolent. Even though they certainly don't seem very benevolent to experiencers at many times during their abductee 'careers,' in the end they are somehow 'for our own good'. This is definitely one school of thought, though there are many other points of view that are far less positive. When I read the reviews of her book on Amazon, I found that there were two distinct reviews - the 5-star reviews, very supportive, and the 1-star reviews, harshly critical of her ideas. In short, I think that nearly any viewpoint on the phenomenon will probably have a host of experiencers identifying with it.

Another thing Wedel describes is the different classes of experiencers - the collateral experiencers [my term, CL], the 'in and out' experiencers who have 'quick' medical procedures done than are returned to their homes, and the 'extensive' experiencers who are deeply involved in the phenomenon. These groupings do not include the contactees and other groups who are involved in the phenomenon in very different ways. For the moment, I'm only talking about abduction events. Still, the resemblance between what Wedel described, and what I noticed in the last several encounter narratives were striking. In these cases, the 'collateral' or 'single event' encounter, the 'quickie' and the 'extensive' experiences seemed to be quite clearly defined, pretty much as Wedel described.

In many cases, I think the literature is reinforcing what I have found, or vice-versa. Yet in other cases, what I have found is very different indeed. As I describe in The Cosmic Bridge, there are a large number of 'nonstandard' cases that don't seem to fit any mold, while there are others with varying degrees of conformance to what I call the 'standard model' of close encounters. And in the case of the events surfacing in the last few weeks, I think I have again seen this spectrum of conformity. Many appear to be closely conforming, falling into the categories I described above. Yet others, like the 'ten-tentacled creature from Andromeda' that I described in The Cosmic Bridge, some seem to fly in the face of the standard alien-abduction model.

Each case gives me pause for reflection. Each case is another data point, another pixel in our picture of the phenomenon. Like always, I find that picture confusing - lately perhaps more confusing than ever. Yet distinct, if shifting, patterns seem to emerge. Whether they are illusory clumps in what is really random data, or whether they truly represent a pattern, I think we still need to sort out. Still, the large number of people that appear to be remembering their encounters gives me encouragement.

Hypnotic regression will probably never tell us how the alien warp drive works, and it will probably never even tell us whether the events are physical, metaphysical or something else entirely. But I believe they will tell us increasingly more about the nature of the phenomenon that lurks in the shadows of our experience. Each encounter narrative brings us closer to some form of understanding, each providing us with a few more glimpses of the extraordinary.

An evening of synchronicity, apocalypse, and dog toys

The ending hours of a day in the life of - well, this week, I'm not sure what of...

In part, I have a strong impression of what a single parent feels like. While Gwyn is away for a few days, it's just me - and our two "wild" shelti-poo puppies. And I once again realize that whoever told me about dogs being high maintenance was truly spot-on.

Originally I had the fantasy that, while Gwyn was away visiting her mother for a few days, I would be free to get a bunch of writing done. No television, none of the general domestic background activity that keeps one's attention occupied throughout the evening; I envisioned several days of uninterrupted concentration as I (hopefully) begin a new stretch of creativity. I have slowly and grudgingly gotten going on Children of the Stars, having plugged away at it for several months. At times I feel like great progress has been made. Other times, well, the feeling is different. So I the last two evenings, I greatly looked forward to a few days of uninterrupted writing. Time to get to work and make some great literary progress.

Wrong....

As I write this, I have to pause to pick up a dog toy and throw it down the front hall. Libby (our smaller sheltie-poo) has dropped the small rag bone at my feet. She has been yipping for the last minute, as I have been hashing through the previous paragraph. This is her less than subtle way of demanding that I do my duty as a human and throw the toy so she can fetch it. Such "help" has been plentiful all evening - and as a result, I have gotten next to nothing done on Children of the Stars.

Excuse me for a moment, while I toss the dog toy again...

As I was driving home from work this evening - in the midle of a light snowfall and a resulting traffic jam - a fragment of an idea came to me. Possibly as a result of several crises, disasters, etc., throughout the world, many people I have talked to describe a feeling of impending apocalypse. I hve to remind myself that this sense is nothign new. We've been getting prophecies of doom for tha last several thousand years, and l'm sure this trend will only accelerate, at least until some time after 12/22/2012. However, the sword-of-Damoclese feeling is palpable, and I have to admit, I often feel the same feeling - something is about to happen - somewhere out there.

When I got home, I started to concentrate on the thought. Whether true or not it does make a fantastic scenario in Children of the Stars. As I was sitting there munching on some supper and starting to put my thoughts into words (at that point only mentally), I suddenly got an e-mail from the person who is one of the models for one of the characters in my novel series - the psychic in my previous book named Andrea. The basic idea - without giving too much away - is that Andrea senses something catastrophic in the near future. And sure enough, only an hour or two after the thought popped into my mind, I received an e-mail from my friend. In it, she said that she senses something major about to happen. She indicated that she had heard this from several other psychics as well. They say there are no coincidences. Hmmm.

What this means, I certainly don't know. Recent history has been replete with predictions of events that never came to pass. Whether the predictions were wrong, or whether they were merely relating an increased probability of such an event is a topic of great debate among parapsychologists. But suffice it to say that we've heard such predictions many times before, seldom with enough detail to be useful. So for now, the best we can do is to keep our eyes and ears open for confirmation or refutation of - well, of whatever we're being warned about.

Meanwhile, Libby is yipping at me again. It's time to throw the dog toy once more.

As I sit down and plink away on this article, the contrast strikes me as both amazing and amusing. Synchronicity, apocalypse and dog toys; what a wide spectrum of experiences in the span of a few minutes. What a diverse and fascinating world we live in? And so far, thank God, of the three, only the synchronicities and the dog toys have turned out to be real. Let's hope it stays that way...