Conspirators, Visitors and Vapors - a look at "chemtrails" and UFOencounters

Ever since the Paradigm Symposium in Saint Paul over a month ago, I've been thinking about this - what is real and what is not. In recent weeks, several things have provided some more bumps, twists and turns in that road.

During the symposium, I got into quite a public argument with PD Meyers, the skeptic who spoke there. One question I asked him when he offered his opinion on alien abduction (actually, I prefer the term close encounters) was "How many experiencers have you talked with?" His response was that he was familiar with David Jacobs work and that Jacobs had worked with thousands. My response was "Yes, but how many have YOU worked with?" His answer was "Two."

Meyers had apparently formed an opinion on a phenomenon based upon what I take to be a very cursory examination of the evidence. While I believe we don't know what the reality is behind close encounters, I do believe they are very real. Yet he largely appears to dismiss them as sleep paralysis, false memories impalnted by "evil hypnotists" and other such explain-away devices. To me, this whitewashes the whole phenomenon - there is something going on and we dare not overlook it.

Now let's look at another claimed phenomenon. That is "chemtrails." Are these real or are they simply an artifact of runaway belief, misidentification of an ordinary phenomenon and toxic memes. To me, the latter is most likely the case. Yet every argument I would make here is almost identical to the argument that PD meyers, Carl Sagan, Kevin Randle and other skeptics of alien abduction would make about close encounters. The structure and logic of the arguments are the same - you simply plug in different nouns. For one phenomenon I am an advocate (at least that it is unknown or non-understood) while for another I am quite a skeptic.

I have had a number of on-line go-rounds with chemtrail believers. I have challenged them at every turn to provide actual evidence showing a causal link of aircraft contrails to toxic chemical fallout - whatever that may be. So far, I have been pointed to a couple of YouTube videos on chemtrails, both advocacy films heavily laden with claims, and light on proof. 

In addition, I have followed the whole "chemtrails" idea from its inception, some time in the mid 1990s. it arose at about the same time as Richard Brodie's book "Virus of the Mind." This book discusses the idea of memes, ideas and beliefs that propogate through a population like viruses. Brody develops the the idea that they can be treated in a nearly identical way to biological viruses. We can treat the propogation of toxic memes in a way nearly identical to any viral epidemic.

Early on, I heard the statement that the toxic-contrail meme - that persistent contrauils were the result of deliberate chemical spraying by a conspiratorial agency - can be thought of as an unintentional test of Brodie's ideas. At first the meme began as a small scale conspiracy theory, then took on a life of its own and spread rapidly over the internet. [For a site tracking history of the chemtrail meme, see http://contrailscience.com/a-brief-history-of-chemtrails/.] The idea is intriguing. It brings up the idea that the fabric of society forms a defacto laboratory for an experiment testing the "toxic meme" model.

What made me question the whole "chemtrail" meme even further was when I was talking with someone during the break at a Minnesota MUFON meeting, back in the spring of 1999. One person at this particular meeting (his actual residence was in Washington state, I think), got up and told the story of how his whole family had been sickened by toxic spraying from the heavily chemtrail-laden skies over his part of the country. 

At that time, Minnesota MUFON was meeting at the Roseville community center, and on this nice day, we had stepped out into the parking lot. Suddenly, as I was talking with him, he looked up and said, "there's one spraying now." I looked up to see what looked like a commercial jet flying high overhead, leaving a short contrail behind. To me, it was indistinguishable from any other contrail. But to him, it was just one more example of how the "New World Order" is trying to - well, to do whatever they're doing - by spraying "something" in the atmosphere overhead.

I had just finished hypnotherapy certification training about six months prior, and had studied Brodie's work as part of my studies. This struck me as a powerful example of belief-driven illness - well, maybe...

In addition, I have been interested in meteorology most of my life, and have studied it as a hobby for many years. One thing I have noted is that how at the leading edge of warm fronts - about a day ahead of a weather change - a steadily thickening layer of cirrus clouds appears. During this time, contrails will be very prevalent as aircraft fly through the supercritical air of the high troposphere. It's part of the physics of the atmosphere and it's occurred ever since jet aircraft have been in our skies. Still, in our times, aircraft are much more prevalent and fly consitently at ciurrus-forming altitudes. Thus, we see more contrails. Many of the "absoute proof" pictures I've seen in recent months look to me like exactly this - contrails forming within the supercritical air high above a weather front. 

I've watched as over the space of a half-day, cirrus clouds have formed, large volumes of persistent contrails have crossed the skies, cirrus clouds have thickened into cirro-stratus clouds, and eventually into the cloud banks of an approaching warm front. Where some would see toxic spraying, I see a weather change, the physics of condensation in supercritical air. Yet conversely, where I look at alien abduction cases and see an extraordinary phenomenon intruding in peoples' lives, others see merely awareness during sleep paralysis. The analogy between controversies is extensive and detailed. The parallels are thought-provoking.

To be fair, I certainly cannot say that there is NO toxic spraying, NO artificial geo-engineering by spraying something in the air overhead, NO New World Order, etc. It is impossible to prove a negative. What if any just one of these ideas turns out to be true true? The implications are astounding. Yet the whole chemtrail question periodically forces me to step back and look once again at the UFO question. On the chemtrail phenomeon, am I actually being one of those people that I most complain about in the UFO controversy? How can I be an advocate of one phenomenon (UFOs and close encounters), while being a skeptic on the other? (Note: I try to remain very conservative on what I actually believe about the UFO and close encounter phenomenon - merely advocating that it presents us with significant unexplained mysteries. For the most part I try to avoid explanatory beliefs.)

To me, the whole dynamic on controversial phenomena is interesting indeed - belief, skepticism, investigation, eveidence, advocacy and proof. And in both cases above, the different perspectives force me to be both more open minded and more discerning. It helps me understand each side a little better. It also reminds me of how rigorously researchers of any phenomenon need to conduct investigations, and how standards of proof need to apply across the board - distinguishing between conspirators, visitors and vapors?

Challenges and Changes, Marriages and Mercury in Retrograde

This week was rough, by any standards, not so much for me as for a whole lot of people out there I have heard from. At least three friends of mine are considering ending their marriages. Several other people I know from the healer and hypnosis communities also recently bent my ear, telling me they were at that same point in their lives. Two other friends of mine just finalized their divorces in the last week or so.  It feels like all around me, long stable marriages are crumbling to dust. I can only wonder - what's going on?

Meanwhile, key individuals in a couple of other areas of life have hit the rocks as a result of emergencies in life. It especially begins to look like one activity may be on the verge of ending - the Intuitive Forum is run by Valerie Lis and Katherine Harwig, with Katherine being a key element as she channels the light collective. Unfortunately, she is facing some powerful challenges with illness in her family and thus has had to back off. So we really don't know where the forum is going. Will it be around after December? I don't know. 

At the forum this evening, several people in the audience asked questions about personal issues related to present-day stresses. In addition, I asked about the number of failing (or recently failed) marriages I see all around me. The answers were revealing, and seemed to reasonate with what I have been feeling. (Note: use your own discernment on the actuall process of channeling, etc. I am giving it the benefit of the doubt here, but I can certainlyunderstand anyone being skeptical of the process. All I can say is that the answers from the LC do seem to be uncannily accurate.)

Comments from the LC were roughly that we just went through a "graduation" called 2012. One can think of what was prior to that as being training and that following graduation, the journey really begins. And with the start of a journey is the start of instability, challenge and change. For many, old baggage is being laid by the wayside. As the new journey starts, the old one is left behind. And often, that includes old relationships.

In many other ways, life has been challenging, too. Two other friends of mine who were about to go great guns into the healing world, suddenly announced that instead, they were going to take day jobs. And in that same vein, I have felt very insecure about my own business. While my client load has steadily grown, so have the challenges associated with the business. Clients have come to me with increasingly difficult challenges. 

I have also found that technology aspects of my business - namely getting my self-hypnosis storefront upgraded - have met with some surprisingly interesting problems. Just today, I bought the domain name "www.thehypnosisstoreonline.com". When I tried to get that working with my existing storefront, I ran into a lot of problems. I also wrote on Facebook about the issues I had had trying to get a version control system going for my own software development, as well as for documents, etc. I keep wondering - why is this so complicated? Does it really need to be that way?

Several friends of mine - well versed in astrology - have told me that that's a symptom of Mercury in retrograde. I have to laugh as I think - yeah right. I think we can explain everything we're seeing as being due to Mercury in retrograde. But sometimes it seems to be stuck there.

Mercury is symbolic of communications and related technology. Marriages, business relationships, internet technology, all of these fall into this field. So maybe there is something to it. While I have always been somewhat skeptical of the scientific background behind astrology, the synchronicity is powerful. And as I - and just about everyone I know - go through challenges and life changes, the correspondence seems uncanny. 

According to the LC channelings this evening, the pace of change is accelerating. Like a balloon blowing up, it is approaching a critical (popping) point - maybe it's been there for a while now. Whatever the case, the winds of change are showing up in a lot of peoples' lives. Especially in peoples' marriages, there has been increasingly more turmoil, challenges and changes.

Moments of discernment

This is a draft of my November/December 2013 article for The CE4 Corner

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In nearly 20 years as a UFO investigator and over 15 years as a hypnotherapist, I've seen and heard a fair amount of interesting stuff. Some of it makes a lot of sense, while some of it is (at least to me) pure nonsense. I have seen claims taken at face value and many corresponding belief systems manifest in peoples' minds - sometimes uncritically. Most of all, I've seen the need to keep our critical thinking hat on. Especially, there are times when we need to question everything we are supposedly taught - key  critical moments of discernment.

One example of a moment where a lot of discernment was in order, I discussed in a posting within my blog, The Cosmic Bridge. While at a civic health fair, presenting information on hypnosis, a woman confronted me, telling me that my hypnosis work was evil - against her Christian faith. Unfortunately, she skittered off before I could ask her more about what she had said. I can only surmise that her beliefs about hypnosis were heavily influenced by some religious fundamentalist preacher, and she had uncritically accepted those claims.

Then, a few days later, I had a different view of discernment. At the Paradigm symposium in Saint Paul in mid-October, I heard an arch-skeptic speak. The Paradigm symposium had speakers on many fascinating topics from (very) ancient archaeology to the paranormal, to UFOs, etc. - and this time, the conference organizer decided that having a skeptic (more like an  arch-debunker) speak would make things even more interesting. The organizer was right.

The skeptic was a professor of genetics and biology. He gave a coherent, well-reasoned and thoroughly thought out talk. He presented an argument about how most of the material we had examined in the symposium the previous few days was untrue. To state it (overly) simply, aliens were not involved in any of our ancient constructions. Alien abduction does not exist. UFOs cannot be extraterrestrial, and are undoubtedly simply misidentified prosaic phenomena. Interstellar travel is impossible due to the laws of physics (as we currently understand them). There was no alien intervention in human evolution. I think you get the picture.

During the post-talk, I challenged him on some of his claims about alien abduction. And at one point, I think I backed him into a corner. He claimed that there was no evidence - a statement of absolute negative. I asked him to prove that. How did he know that there was NO evidence? He immediately assumed that I meant there was something hidden within some government coverup (maybe there is, or maybe not) and then said something else very interesting. When he hears about such conspiracy theories, he "loses interest." Does losing interest mean that something is invalid, or does it simply mean he is no longer interested in it (for reasons other than scientific). I leave that question to the reader...

But the biggest lesson in his talk was not whether or not alien abduction exists, how the pyramids were built, or any other such specific question. To me, the real question is how we decide what to believe - and conversely, what to reject as false. In this case, the speaker's claims amounted to a belief that our present body of knowledge is sufficiently advanced to "know" certain phenomena cannot (and therefore do not) occur. It is a belief at least as unsubstantiated by evidence as that which it opposes. In my view, there is no more evidence that there are no aliens present on Earth (and could not be any), than there is of present-day alien contact.

Switching gears - a few days later, I got into a discussion on line about toxic contrails. The person of on the other end of the dialog was totally sold on the idea that some conspiratorial organization is spraying toxic chemicals all over the globe. As we chatted on line, his ideas became increasingly far-fetched and vitriolic. His words indicated he was increasingly certain, increasingly dug in to his position.  

I asked the person for details of his chemtrail observation. Instead of any kind of objective description of the circumstances, aircraft, weather, etc., I got a lecture on how "they" are doing this to control the population, geoengineering in the face of global warming, etc. The person had an elaborate scenario built up involving secret government agencies, the New World Order, etc.

He noted how, following spraying the clouds thickened, the weather turned rainy, etc. But what was he actually describing? Perhaps he was describing an ordinary contrail left behind by a commercial jet flying through a region of supercritical air ahead of a cold front. In such weather conditions, contrails frequently persist, mixing with cirrus clouds as they thicken ahead of the approaching weather front. 

I have heard many people say that the difference between normal contrails and so-called chemtrails is that the latter will persist in the atmosphere, while the former will disperse almost immediately. So, returning to the scenario of the approaching cold front, the presence of cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere would thus indicate this persistence condition was present. 

Rather than a chemical spraying plot, could he have been observing a cold front, with the clouds thickening as a result? While yes, there were persistent contrails, might they be the result of an approaching weather system, rather than of a sinister New-World-Order conspiracy?

For me, it was an interesting switch of roles. Now I was the skeptic and the other person was the believer. Yet it did a lot to broaden my own perspective. My own skeptical view of chemtrail claims leads me to better understand the point of view of skeptics on UFOs and alien abduction. Yet in all cases, we need to be mindful of just what the evidence says, and doesn't say, about what does and does not exist

To be fair, I can't actually say that there are NO chemtrail conspiracies. One can't prove a negative. Furthermore, not being privy to meteorological or geoengineering inner circles, I don't actually know much about the details behind the controversy. I can only challenge the reporter to be aware of the weather conditions, consider all possible explanations, etc.

We can almost imagine that taking a typical lead edge of a cold front to be evidence of a massive ego-engineering campaign is the equivalent of seeing the planet Venus (a bright star) in the evening sky and concluding that the alien mother ship is about to land. It is a jumping-to-conclusions based upon an already formed belief. It is a lack of discernment - just like the skeptic at the Paradigm Symposium who announced that aliens would not look anything like us (i.e. having two arms and two legs) - and that there was no (valid) evidence for UFOs.

Runaway belief (both positive and negative) reminds us of the need for discernment when working with metaphysical topics, anomaly investigations, etc. For both the skeptic and the believer, events sometimes bring us a teachable moment. They teach those of us in the anomaly community to be ever mindful of the BS lurking just around the corner. What we thought we knew is sometimes wrong. 

These are the unexpected moments of discernment that keep us on our toes

The Christian and the Hypnotist

In one way or another, everyday brings us a lesson in life. The great teacher of the universe tries daily to open our eyes with some event or situation. Life confronts us with challenge, mystery, something interesting or maybe just an important but everyday detail for us to note. Such lessons would seem obvious to all of us - and indeed they are. But then again - Sometimes there are those cases that fall between the cracks of life, hiding in the shadows in ways that make it unclear - what did I just hear? Is it true? Or is it otherwise - and if so, why did the person want me to believe it?

During a recent health fair, I had an information table set up about hypnotherapy. People streamed by, picking up my literature, asking me all kinds of questions, etc. Then suddenly, a woman  challenged me, telling me that hypnosis was evil. It against her faith. I tried to ask her more about what she meant. However, she quickly shied away and wouldn't engage me in conversation. It was clear she was afraid. Far less clear was the reason why. Perhaps she feared that as a hypnotist, I might beguile her, trick her into believing something false, instead of the true faith. But, since she wouldn't talk with me, I will never know.

I assume she was Christian. I can only surmise that she had learned something (untrue) about hypnosis - probably from a conservative preacher who instilled fear in her about its dangers. In reality, I have many Christian clients. I am Christian myself, as are most of my clients , at least to some degree. Yet I sometimes hear from conservative Christians about how hypnosis is dangerous, how it lays you open to - well, whatever. And my question is - what exactly is that "whatever?"

I've been told that hypnosis can corrupt the soul. By doing hypnosis, I am laying the client open to beguiling by - who? By Satan? By me? I have to ask any person who believes that, why? Who told them that? And who is that person to them? Are Christians forbidden to think for themselves? Are we forbidden from using our own minds?

Anyone, whether they are Christian or non-Christian alike, has probably read a good novel. Have you ever found yourself getting into the story, identifying with the main character(s)? Have you ever shed a tear in a sad movie? Have you ever gotten so deeply into something (like a hobby) that you lost track of time? If so, then you were hypnotized.

Last I checked, even the most conservative Christian has experienced this. And yet, I would bet money that no demon possessed them as a result. In spite of their in-the-groove moment, their faith is intact - or maybe even stronger than it was before.

In addition, we live a certain percentage of our daily lives in hypnosis. Any time you have a daydream, you are in a spontaneous state of self-hypnosis. Each pass through the roughly 90-minute cycle of consciousness called the ultradian rhythm, the mind passes through a few moments of spontaneous hypnosis. Anytime you have an "aha" moment, you are in a momentary state of spontaneous hypnosis that allows your creative subconscious to come through.

In reality, hypnosis is nothing more than selective focus and the momentary suspension of disbelief - allowing yourself to get into the moment, to go with the flow.

We live much of our lives in a degree of light hypnosis, focusing on an idea and suspending our disbelief. As a result, we live nearly the entire day in a light state of trance. Indeed, the belief that hypnosis is evil is in itself, a trance. The foremost person to meet that description was probably the very person lecturing me about how hypnosis was evil. She had suspended her own disbelief and allowed some person to convince her that this process was somehow evil.

I often hear statements about how hypnosis is all about control - that the client is somehow surrendering control to the hypnotist. (I hear this from other religions besides Christianity. I often hear if from Islamic, Vedic, Buddhist believers, etc.) However, I have found that while I'm doing hypnotherapy work with someone, their discernment is quite intact. In fact, I have experienced at least one moment when something I said accidentally annoyed a person who was already in trance. In the particular case, she was quickly assured that I had no intent to offend her beliefs. Yet as a useful side effect, she also had a far greater understanding about how one's her own discernment remains intact while in hypnosis.

Back to the wellness fair - even though the woman confronting me was afraid of being controlled or beguiled by some hypnotist (me?), I was not the one she needed to beware of. In fact, as a follower of whatever teacher she was quoting, she was far more subject to manipulation by this person than she ever would be from someone like me. For her, the controller was the preacher who who she believed when he told her she should not trust the gift of the human mind that is hypnosis. Her suspension of disbelief allowed her to be inadvertently hypnotized, giving him direct access to her subconscious.

In almost everything we hear, we need to use at least some degree of discernment. There is a lot of garbage out there, and each of us needs to carefully choose what it is we wish to believe. In this case, the woman allowed herself to be beguiled into believing that I was a danger to her. In fact she was hypnotized, and was far more suggestible as a result of her beliefs in the the message of this preacher.

Inadvertently, she was playing out a chapter in her daily, unconscious trance journey. The more she denied hypnosis, the deeper she was into hypnosis and the more control she was ceding to the preacher. It was another round in her own private drama of The Christian and the Hypnotist.