Foil Hat Ninja

“You can always tell when a man’s well-informed. His views are pretty much like yours.”—Bob Hope

 

This particular USO didn’t have anything to do with singing or comedy, although it did keep a lot of military personnel entertained, or at least occupied, for about a week. In this case, USO stands for unidentified submerged object, and they’re more common than you probably think. During the late 1960s, so many of them were seen going in and out of Lake Erie that some people thought that there must be a base down there. I haven’t gone down to check.

At about 11:20 pm on October 4, 1967, in the little fishing village of Shag Harbor on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, a handful of people watched as a bright orange light descended from the sky headed toward the waters of the harbor. As it got closer, many of them heard a whistling sound like a bomb falling, followed by a loud bang. Some witnesses said that they saw a bright flash when the object hit the water.

A number of people gathered near the water and watched as the glowing object floated roughly 900 feet offshore. Several of these witnesses called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to report the incident. Others called to report hearing the whistling sound followed by an explosion. Still others reported seeing an object with four or five yellow lights on it in the sky which seemed to be headed down toward the harbor. Almost everyone who saw it estimated it to be 50 to 60 feet in length. At this point, everyone involved thought that this was a plane crash.

After a few minutes of floating on the water, the glow began to dim and the object seemed to slip beneath the waves. Within half an hour, the RCMP had assembled an ad hoc rescue team consisting of several fishing boats that went out to search the area for bodies, debris and, hopefully, survivors. All that they found was a large patch of yellow foam floating in the area. When one of the fishermen tried to collect a sample of the stuff in a net, it slipped through the holes without leaving a trace. It soon dissipated and was completely gone. A Canadian Coast Guard cutter was dispatched to aid in the search and arrived within an hour. They also found nothing.

Probably the first people to see this thing were Air Canada Flight 305 pilots Captain Pierre Charbonneau and First Officer Robert Ralph. They were flying over Quebec just north of Vermont, about 200 miles west of Nova Scotia. Around 7:15 pm, they spotted what they described as a huge, rectangular (some accounts say round) orange object being trailed by a number of smaller lights like the tail of a kite. The object was matching their altitude and heading. At 7:19, there was an explosion near the object that left behind a round, white cloud that turned red, then violet, then blue. Two minutes later, there was a second explosion that left behind an orange cloud that then also turned blue. The lights tailing the larger object then broke their formation and begin swirling around this second cloud like a swarm of gnats. The main object flew into some regular clouds and disappeared. Both men filed reports on the incident, which is unusual in UFO sightings for pilots who want to keep their jobs, so they must have been pretty shaken up by what they had seen.

By the next day, it had been determined that no planes had gone missing the night before. All commercial, military and civilian aircraft were accounted for. Nobody could figure out what had crashed into the harbor, but some people were already mumbling about flying saucers and/or secret government projects.

Within the next few days, a lighthouse keeper recovered a badly burned and damaged metal cylinder about three feet long from the beach near the location of the crash. He wouldn’t say what was in the cylinder, which broadly hints that there was something inside of it, but given his nonchalant attitude about it in a filmed interview, I’m guessing that it wasn’t anything all that earthshaking. He probably doesn’t even know what it was. It was probably just some stuff. When he contacted the Canadian authorities about it, they directed him to turn it over to a United States Air Force officer who was flying up there to get it, so that’s what he did. Naturally, that was the end of that. It probably hasn’t been seen by anyone without a ridiculously high security clearance since.

Two days later, on October 6, the Canadian Navy sent a team of divers down to search the ocean floor at the sight of the crash. Reports of what they recovered vary. Some say that they found nothing. Others claim that they brought up metallic debris. Still others claim that what they recovered was brought up in bags, so there was no way of knowing what was in them. Years later, one of the divers told UFO investigators under the promise of anonymity that the reason that they waited two days to send divers down was that they knew by then that there would be nothing to find. Using sonar, the military had tracked the object and knew that it had moved approximately 30 miles up the coast and was sitting on the submarine magnetic detection grid just offshore of Shelburne, home of a top secret submarine detection base.

UFOs just love to screw with sensitive military installations, but parking right on top of their detection grid is like giving someone the finger in front of their grandma. That’s a reason to fight, except that when they’ve tried to throw down with these guys in the past it has frequently turned out badly for them. You could ask Air National Guard fighter pilot Tom Mantell about that if he had lived to talk about it.

In any case, the U.S. and Canadian navies weren’t going to take this lying down. They sent a flotilla of six or seven ships that anchored right over this thing, or things, because a second object had supposedly joined the first. Another unidentified diver who claims to have been sent down to have a look at this thing and take some pictures said that there were two objects down there and that he saw “creatures” who seemed to be trying to repair the first object. That’s more than a little vague, but that seems to be all that he was willing to say other than that these things were definitely not from this world. I’m certain that he violated national security by even saying that much. He may or may not have also added that he found the whole thing very disturbing and didn’t like to think about it even 30 years later. That may have been a different diver since it’s unclear how many of the divers involved may have talked to different investigators over the years and what each of them may have said since they all insist on anonymity. It may have been just one guy talking to everyone, but the evidence doesn’t point in that general direction. And anyone can claim that an “anonymous source” told them anything. In court they call that hearsay and your lawyer can object…not that I would know. It’s not like I’ve ever been arrested for lewd behavior or anything like that.

On October 11, coincidentally(?), a Russian submarine was detected nearby in violation of allied waters, and all the ships at Shelburne were sent to intercept it. The USOs took advantage of this opportunity to escape and would seem to have gone back into UFO mode. A few witnesses reported seeing two lights moving northwest through the sky that same night, and the whole thing was over.

Does any of that last part seem as strange to you as it does to me? Did they really need every last ship to chase off one sub that was doubtless just jerking their chain to see what they would do? That sort of thing happened all the time during the Cold War. I’m sure that our side did it too. They couldn’t leave a couple of ships behind to monitor two unknown craft that were sitting right on top of a military detection grid? I’m not a conspiracy-minded person. In fact, I tend to chuckle at those people, but something about the way all of this ended just doesn’t add up.

Some people think that the reason this case is so significant is because the Canadian government officially classified the object as “unidentified,” which governments rarely do. RCAF Squadron Leader William Bain told Halifax Chronicle-Herald reporter Ray MacLeod “We get hundreds of reports every week, but the Shag Harbor incident is one of the few where we may get something concrete on it.” As it turns out, they didn’t. Essentially, they admitted that it was a UFO. The term “UFO” and the words “unidentified flying object” appeared on some government documents that were later released to the public. Some people have interpreted this as the Canadian government admitting that an extraterrestrial craft from another planet splashed down in the Gulf of Maine. All that they actually said was that there was an object that was seen flying and that it remains unidentified. Don’t read too much into that. Some people are Olympic-class conclusion jumpers. The true significance of this case hinges on whether the anonymous sources are telling us the truth. I hope that they are. It’s a great story.

 

 

Happy World UFO Day!

 

 

 

Note: If you haven’t read Holographic Design, Through the Holographic Looking Glass, and The Abduction of Linda Cortile, the following will make absolutely no sense.

“The closer you get to the meaning, the sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming.”—Ronnie James Dio

 

Before we get into trying to make sense of all of the implications of the Linda Cortile abduction case and see if the computer simulation and/or holographic universe models can help, we should probably spend a moment addressing the believability aspect of the case. Some of it does read like a sci-fi/espionage novel with government agents chasing around after UFO abductees. So much so, in fact, that there are some who claim that science fiction is precisely what it is, and not even original sci-fi at that.

In 1989, a novel entitled Nighteyes by Garfield Reeves-Stevens was released. It also had to do with UFO abductees and government agents chasing after them. Some say that the Linda Cortile case so closely parallels this book that it was her blueprint for staging a massive hoax. As it turns out, I read this novel when it first came out, but that was a long time ago and all I really remember about it is who the “aliens” turn out to be. I do have to admit that Nighteyes and Witnessed do have a lot in common, but even so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole Linda Cortile case was made up. This certainly wouldn’t be the first time the phenomenon has mimicked what’s been written about it in fiction. (See John Keel’s “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers.” Also, the first known car to die in the presence of a UFO was in a work of fiction, but I can’t remember where I read that. I’m pretty sure it was in something by Jacques Vallee.)

Sean Meers and George Hansen are the primary champion of and detractor from this case respectively. Both are men willing to split hairs and interpret alleged facts in such a way as to support their side of the argument. This should not surprise us whenever two true believers from opposite camps square off against each other. Their accusations and allegations against each other and those on the other side are so long and exhaustive that I won’t even attempt to summarize them here. If you want to see Hansen’s rather lengthy prosecution of Budd Hopkins and Linda Cortile’s integrity, you can read it here. If you want to find more information about the Cortile case than you ever imagined existed, but especially a rebuttal of its resemblance to Nighteyes, go here.

I’ve personally never doubted Budd Hopkins’ honesty or sincerity… or his credulity. He seems to me to have taken everything at face value. He was absolutely convinced that these beings were aliens from another planet and had a decidedly negative view about their intentions and effects on those with whom they have contact. I was also never comfortable with his conducting hypnosis on some of his subjects himself, no matter how well trained he claimed to be and might have been.  Abduction researchers should not be hypnotizing alleged abductees. That is the epitome of a lack of objectivity on the part of the clinician and, in my opinion, casts doubt on the reliability of every one of his hypnosis subjects. That doesn’t make any or all of the information that he uncovered using hypnosis false, but it does make it easier for skeptics to dismiss, not that they wouldn’t dismiss it anyway. That said, I seriously doubt that he would ever willingly take part in anything that he suspected might be a hoax. His possible unwitting willingness to be deceived is another matter.

In any case, Hopkins does an excellent job at the end of his book of outlining just how vast a web of lies this case would have to be if it were a hoax. Not only would a dozen or so people connected to Linda Cortile have to be lying, but there were also a number of independent witnesses to the events who are in no way connected to her. When Hopkins raised the possibility of this being a scam to law enforcement people he knew, they all said that it just wasn’t feasible. Hoaxes this complicated and far flung involving this many people just don’t work. Somebody will screw up somewhere and bring the whole thing crashing down. Also, there’s the financial investment aspect. Linda and her husband are working class people without the resources to bankroll such an endeavor. And what did they have to gain? If their intent was to make a profit off of their lie, they failed miserably. Over two decades have passed and the movie has yet to made. It’s doubtful that they wanted publicity. The kind of attention alleged abductees tend to get isn’t the kind you would want. Linda never even gave Hopkins permission to use her real name, although it has been discovered and made public by debunkers, for no other reason than spite that I can see. Finally, there is the issue of the third man. Hopkins finally got to meet this man when a reporter friend arranged an interview with him in the VIP lounge at O’Hare in Chicago. Hopkins tagged along and brought with him an envelope stuffed with, among a few other things, video cassettes of Linda and Johnny discussing their experiences and a personal letter to this man from each of them. After the official interview, Hopkins and his friend left, but Hopkins went back to talk to him alone a little while later. When he got there, he found the man had opened the envelope and had read Johnny’s letter and was reading Linda’s. He claimed that he didn’t know this woman, but after a short conversation when Hopkins left, the man did not try to return the package to him. It seems to me that if anyone is lying, Hopkins would have to be the ringleader, and I have a hard time believing that.

Now that that’s out of the way…

So, if this all really happened, then we are dealing with “aliens” who can freeze time, levitate people through solid materials, arrange for people’s lives to intersect, “deactivate” people, co-opt their minds, and just generally bend the laws of physics as we understand them into balloon animals. Neat tricks if you can pull them off, and pretty easy to do if reality is a computer simulation. You just write it into the program. Mystery solved…for the most part. Why anyone running a simulation would want to do this could be discussed and debated endlessly.

In a holographic multiverse, these things require a little more analysis. The missing and sometimes frozen time aspect of the UFO phenomenon is a common one and maybe the easiest to account for from a holographic perspective. If time is a meaningless construct we have created for ourselves, there is no reason to believe that this would be so for a more advanced form of intelligence. If time is a finished product, as in my example of a novel, with all moments of time occurring simultaneously, each like a page in a book, maybe this intelligence can move through time as easily as we can thumb through the pages. Our reality has four dimensions that we are aware of: length, width, height and time. We can move freely through three of them, although up is a little more difficult what with gravity and all, but we move only one direction at a fixed rate through time (that’s not entirely true, but close enough for now). But if time is only a mental constraint, and only ours at that, then it should come as no great surprise to find that our concepts do not constrain more advanced intellects.

Freezing time for us while they move easily through it could be a form of the “outside of time” nature of the afterlife brought down to Earth. On the other hand, we don’t know for certain that Linda was actually physically taken from the pool dressing room that day. She would be far from being the first abductee to have had an out-of-body experience in relation to the UFO phenomenon. Others have reported being taken aback at seeing themselves from the outside during an abduction experience because they had no idea that their consciousness had separated from their body. Neither Richard nor Linda suggested that any of their meetings took place in an out-of-body state, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t. In fact, other than Linda’s story about being taken from the pool the first time she met “Mickey,” they both remembered their meetings as children as having been dreams, which is suggestive of an OBE experience.

The fact that Richard’s recall of their first meeting is as it having been a dream while Linda remembers it as having taken place in the midmorning is a time problem of another sort. Since 10 year old boys don’t tend to sleep late on the weekend, it’s unlikely that their time frames for their first meeting sync up. Maybe this is all just another temporal anomaly, but since Richard’s memory of this event is organic while Linda’s recollection only returned under hypnosis, I tend to trust Richard’s account more. In addition, all of Linda’s other “Mickey” memories were also recalled as dreams. Maybe Linda’s hypnotic recall was a mixture of dream images from her first meeting with Mickey and her family trip to the pool. Hypnosis is a poorly understood phenomenon, so who really knows?

Hopkins never addresses this apparent time discrepancy in his book. I don’t know if he never noticed it or if he hoped that no one else would. If it’s the latter, he seems to have gotten away with it until now. Even George Hansen didn’t catch that one.

Perhaps this being free from the constraints of time could also explain the incredible way in which this intelligence seems able to manipulate people’s lives and bring together such diverse people as a working class mom from New York, a federal agent, and a high ranking (probably) South American diplomat, at least two of them since childhood. The proximity of Richard and the third man to the events of November 30, 1989 and their involvement in it could be why Richard and Linda were brought together as children and the third man may have been present during one of Linda’s earlier abduction experiences. In a universe in which time is meaningless, what happened first, what happened next, etc., is of no consequence. It makes just as much sense to say that what happened in 1989 affects what happened in 1955 as it does to say that what happened yesterday affects what happens today. If a “timeless” intelligence saw a connection between three people in 1989, there’s nothing that would prevent them from enhancing that connection by bringing them together more intimately beginning back in 1955. That’s a concept that may be impossible for us to internalize at our present level of development, but it may well be the way things are. Feel free to take a moment to babble at this point.

If that’s just a bit too much for you to swallow, try this idea. Past-life hypnotic regression has yielded evidence that our lives are at least somewhat scripted in advance. Technically, this still falls somewhat under the holographic paradigm since it has to do with the survival of consciousness after death. Maybe these amazing coincidences occur because they were set up ahead of time. If that’s the case, then they cease to be amazing coincidences.

“Aliens” and their abductees passing through solid objects like walls, windows, etc. are so commonplace that it seems to happen in these experiences more often than not. However, this clearly violates the laws of physics, unless consciousness is the hidden variable that controls the laws of physics as Bohm’s theories suggest. If physicists can affect the results of subatomic experiments just by observing them (a concept that is not unique to Bohm’s theories alone), then beings in possession of a greater level of control over this might be able to bend or even break the laws of physics as they see fit. They may have taken mind over matter to a level we can barely conceive of. Or maybe they just have some really cool gizmos that do it for them.

Finally, we have these beings ability to “deactivate” or take over people’s minds. The abduction lore is full of stories of abductee’s partners either sleeping right through the abduction or being vaguely aware of it but inexplicably doing nothing. Sometimes people are taken from a moving car and all anyone else in the car remembers is seeing a light and maybe some missing time.* In this case, we primarily have the other members of Dan and Richard’s convoy that night who were not taken and were aware that something odd had happened, but they weren’t sure what. Also, there was Linda both working with the grays to collect sand samples and acting as their mouthpiece as the “Lady of the Sands,” neither of which she remembers doing voluntarily.

The most obvious possible answer is that these are both some form of involuntary hypnosis. There were other witnesses to this abduction who were not affected by any sort of mental control, so if the “deactivation” component has an area of affect, they must have been outside of it. Or it could be directed at certain individuals who might otherwise try to interfere with the abductors. In either case, you might be surprised to learn that this sort of technology already exists on Earth and has for decades. They’re called Directed Energy Weapons, and there’s a veritable plethora of things that they can do. There are stories about the inventor Marconi messing around with this type of technology back in the 1930s and accidentally killing a herd of his neighbor’s cows in one instance and stalling the engines of all the cars in the area in another. I don’t know if that’s true, but in any case, the technology needed to pull off this kind of mind control isn’t that exotic. What would be impressive is if these beings can do it with their minds, which Linda’s subconscious telepathic message to Dan and Richard and her immobilizing of Dan’s arms indicates. I guess if you’re around these beings enough, you pick up a few of their tricks whether you know it or not.

So that’s it for the weirdest UFO case I’ve ever heard of and some possible explanations for how it might have been done. The bigger question is: Why was it done? Why would these beings abduct a woman in front of a high ranking member of the diplomatic community and then also take him and his security team on a trip to the beach? The whole thing is absurd, but as many UFO/abduction investigators have pointed out, the whole phenomenon reeks of absurdity, and that may be the point. Bohm’s hidden realm of the implicate order that is controlled by consciousness, if it exists, appears to be the home of Jung’s collective unconscious, and the Trickster is alive and well. The absurdity and misdirection may be the whole point. We solve the mystery when we figure out what that point is…maybe. We might have to face the possibility that there is no point. We’re just being screwed with. Damn archons.

___________________________________________________________________

*In Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur points out an aspect of the abduction phenomenon that I had never noticed or seen mentioned anywhere else before. Almost all abductions occur either while the person is sleeping or driving/riding in a car. His theory as to why this is so is that in both cases people are in a state of altered consciousness. The sleeping part of this makes immediate sense; the driving part requires a little explaining. Harpur cites “highway hypnosis” as being the culprit. If you’ve ever experienced this, then you know that it deserves to be called an altered state of consciousness – a kind of mile marker-induced form of missing time. A song actually did this to me once. I was listening to Eric Johnson’s “Bristol Shore,” and as the song ended I found myself sitting at a red light a couple of miles from the last place I remember being. Lucky for me I stopped at the light or I might be telling people on the other side that Eric Johnson killed me.