Guest Articles

The Bloodline Tomb

Greg — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:15:29 +0000

The Rennes-le-Chateau Research website now have a large number of video clips from the upcoming documentary film Bloodline available for viewing. They give a good feel for the movie, with excerpts of interviews with key players and researchers, as well as visits to locations of interest.

Further to the topic of locations in the film, the producers of Bloodline have been kind enough to offer a pre-release exclusive from the film for Daily Grail readers: apparent confirmation from a Priory of Sion insider that the tomb discovery of 'Ben Hammott'/'The Tomb Man' (see attached picture) is genuine. Here's the entire release, with some of my own comments afterward:

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Priory of Sion confirms Hammott’s tomb: “One of three in the area”

Nicolas Haywood, representing the Priory of Sion, confirmed both by email and in phone conversations to the Bloodline producers, that Ben Hammott’s tomb is real and that it’s one of three tombs in the area near Rennes-Le-Chateau. He said that the three tombs each contain a shrouded corpse, and their locations form a triangle around a larger central ‘repository’, and that at least one the tombs contains a woman. He also said that there are items in all three tombs that come from this larger ‘repository’. He would not be drawn on any specifics about what was in this repository, but according to the producers, the inference was that it had been used to hold both Templar and Cathar relics, archives and treasure since it was first hidden there in the 13th century. ... Read More »

Richard Dawkins Comes to Call

Greg — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 06:16:30 +0000

Dr Rupert Sheldrake has given me permission to post his commentary on his 'involvement' with Richard Dawkins's recent documentary Enemies of Reason (Part 1 and Part 2 on Google Video). Given the one-sided judgements of the documentary, I think it is important to put forth Dr Sheldrake's account. It certainly shows that it's worth understanding *all* points of view before coming to a decision, considering the ability of television programs to shoot and edit things to their liking. My thanks to Rupert for allowing us to reproduce the article here on TDG:

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Richard Dawkins Comes to Call

By Dr Rupert Sheldrake

Richard Dawkins is a man with a mission – the eradication of religion and superstition, and their total replacement with science and reason. Channel 4 TV has repeatedly provided him with a pulpit. His two-part polemic in August 2007, called Enemies of Reason, was a sequel to his 2006 diatribe against religion, The Root of All Evil?

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that "this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was." She added, "We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry". So I agreed and we fixed a date.

I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, "But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs."

I agreed that we had a lot in common, "But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science." ... Read More »

Obituary - Richard Leigh

Greg — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:30:47 +0000

Richard Leigh, writer: born 16 August 1943; died London 21 November 2007

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is one of the most successful and controversial non-fiction books of recent times, having sold more than two million copies since its publication in 1982. Written by Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln, it tells the story of secret documents found during the late 19th century by Bérenger Saunière, a country priest at Rennes-le-Château, who subsequently became extremely wealthy. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – and its 1986 sequel, The Messianic Legacy – advanced the theory that Jesus did not die on the cross but instead went on to marry Mary Magdalene, have children and live in southern France. This knowledge, both books propose, was carried down the centuries by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion. Anthony Burgess, reviewing the book in The Observer in 1982, remarked: "It will seem to some a crackpot exercise, but these young men are no fools; they have learning, energy and enthusiasm tempered by scepticism."

Richard Leigh was born in New Jersey in 1943 to a British father and Austrian mother. After studying at Tufts University in Boston and the University of Chicago, he obtained his doctorate from Stony Brook University, New York. He arrived in London in 1974 having originally intended to write literary fiction. Instead, he encountered the Rennes-le-Château material for the first time and met Michael Baigent. ... Read More »

Skinwalkers: What Are They?

Greg — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 02:51:42 +0000

by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp
(http://www.huntfortheskinwalker.com)

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With skinwalkers becoming the subjects of popular books and recently, movies, it is fair to ask about their origins. In August 1996, a team of scientists arrived on a remote ranch in NE Utah to investigate a bizarre litany of phenomena; including unidentified flying objects, animal mutilations, paranormal and poltergeist occurrences that appeared to erupt almost on a nightly basis. The list went on and on. The first piece of information the team learned from local people was that the ranch lay "on the path of the skinwalker"”. Was the skinwalker responsible for the weird happenings on this ranch? What followed was a multi-year odyssey into the dark unknown as the science team tried to pursue, measure and photograph the elusive "skinwalker". The complete account of the unprecedented research project is published in the book Hunt for the Skinwalker (Amazon US and Amazon UK).

In the religion and cultural lore of Southwestern tribes, there are witches known as skinwalkers who can alter their shapes at will to assume the characteristics of certain animals. Most of the world’s cultures have their own shapeshifter legends. The best known is the werewolf, popularized by dozens of Hollywood movies. European legends as far back as the 1500’s tell stories about werewolves. (The modern psychiatric term for humans who believe they are wolves is lycanthropy.) The people of India have a were-tiger legend. Africans have stories of were-leopards and were-jackals. Egyptians tell of were-hyenas.

In the American Southwest, the Navajo, Hopi, Utes, and other tribes each have their own version of the skinwalker story, but basically they boil down to the same thing - a malevolent witch capable of transforming itself into a wolf, coyote, bear, bird, or any other animal. The witch might wear the hide or skin of the animal identity it wants to assume, and when the transformation is complete, the human witch inherits the speed, strength, or cunning of the animal whose shape it has taken.

"The Navajo skinwalkers use mind control to make their victims do things to hurt themselves and even end their lives," writes Doug Hickman, a New Mexico educator. "The skinwalker is a very powerful witch. They can run faster than a car and can jump mesa cliffs without any effort at all."

For the Navajo and other tribes of the southwest, the tales of skinwalkers are not mere legend. Just ask Michael Stuhff. A Nevada attorney, Stuhff is likely one of the few lawyers in the history of American jurisprudence to file legal papers against a Navajo witch. He has often represented Native Americans in his practice. He understands Indian law and has earned the trust of his Native American clients, in large part because he knows and respects tribal religious beliefs.

As a young attorney in the mid-70s, Stuhff worked in a legal aid program based near Genado Arizona. Many, if not most, of his clients were Navajo. His legal confrontation with a witch occurred in a dispute over child custody and financial support. His client, a Navajo woman who lived on the reservation with her son, was asking for full custody rights and back child support payments from her estranged husband, an Apache man. At one point during the legal wrangling, the husband got permission to take the son out for an evening, but didn't return the boy until the next day. The son later told his mother what had transpired that night.

According to the son, he spent the night with his father and a "medicine man." They built a fire atop a cliff and, for many hours, the medicine man performed ceremonies, songs, and incantations around the fire. As dawn broke, the three traveled into a wooded area near a cemetery, where they dug a hole. Into the hole, the medicine man deposited two dolls made of wood. One of the dolls was made of dark wood, the other of light wood. It was as if the two dolls were meant to represent the mother and her lawyer. Although Stuhff wasn't sure how seriously to take the news, he recognized that it certainly didn't sound good, so he sought out the advice of a Navajo professor at a nearby community college.

"He told me that the ceremony I had described was very powerful and very serious and that it meant that I was supposed to end up buried in that cemetery," Stuhff says. "He also said that a witch can perform this type of ceremony only four times in his life, because if he tries it more than that, the curse would come back on the witch himself. He also told me that if the intended victim found out about it, then the curse would come back onto the person who had requested it."

Stuhff thought about a way to let the husband know that he had found out about the ceremony, so he filed court papers that requested an injunction against the husband and the unknown medicine man, whom he described in the court documents as "John Doe, A Witch." The motion described in great detail the alleged ceremony. The opposing attorney appeared extremely upset by the motion, as did the husband and the presiding judge. The opposing lawyer argued to the court that the medicine man had performed "a blessing way ceremony," not a curse. But Stuhff knew that the judge, who was a Navajo, could distinguish between a blessing ceremony, which takes place in Navajo hogans (homes), and what was obviously a darker ceremony involving lookalike dolls that took place in the woods near a cemetery. The judge nodded in agreement when Stuhff responded. Before the judge could rule, Stuhff requested a recess so that the significance of his legal motion could sink in. The next day, the husband capitulated by agreeing to grant total custody to the mother and to pay all back child support. "I took it very seriously because he took it seriously," Stuhff says. "I learned early on that sometimes witches will do things themselves to assist the supernatural, and I knew what that might mean."

Whether or not Stuhff literally believes that witches have supernatural powers, he acknowledges that this belief is strongly held in the Navajo nation. Certain communities on the reservation had reputations as witchcraft strongholds, he says. It is also unknown whether the witch he faced was a skinwalker or not. "Not all witches are skinwalkers," he says, "but all skinwalkers are witches. And skinwalkers are at the top. They are a witch's witch, so to speak."

According to University of Nevada-Las Vegas anthropologist Dan Benyshek, who specializes in the study of Native Americans of the Southwest, "Skinwalkers are purely evil in intent. I'm no expert on it, but the general view is that skinwalkers do all sorts of terrible things - they make people sick, they commit murders. They are graverobbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into were-animals and can travel in supernatural ways."

Benyshek and other scientists do not necessarily endorse the legitimacy of the legends, but they recognize the importance of studying stories about skinwalkers because the power of the belief among Native Americans manifests itself in ways that are very real. "Oh, absolutely," Benyshek explains. "Anthropologists have conducted scientific investigations into the beliefs in Native American witchcraft because of the effects of such beliefs on human health."

Anthropologist David Zimmerman of the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department explains: "Skinwalkers are folks that possess knowledge of medicine, medicine both practical (heal the sick) and spiritual (maintain harmony), and they are both wrapped together in ways that are nearly impossible to untangle."

As Zimmerman suggests, the flip side of the skinwalker coin is the power of tribal medicine men. Among the Navajo, for instance, medicine men train over a period of many years to become full-fledged practitioners in the mystical rituals of the Dine' (Navajo) people. The U.S. Public Health Service now works side by side with Navajo medicine men because the results of this collaboration have been proven, time and again, in clinical studies. The medicine men have shown themselves to be effective in treating a range of ailments. "There has been a lot of serious research into medicine men and traditional healers," says Benyshek. "As healers, they are regarded as being very effective in some areas."

But there is a dark side to the learning of the medicine men. Witches follow some of the same training and obtain similar knowledge as their more benevolent colleagues, but they supplement both with their pursuit of the dark arts, or black magic. By Navajo law, a known witch has forfeited its status as a human and can be killed at will. The assumption is that a witch, by definition, is evil.

"Witchcraft was always an accepted, if not widely acknowledged part of Navajo culture," wrote journalist A. Lynn Allison. "And the killing of witches was historically as much accepted among the Navajo as among the Europeans." Allison has studied what she calls the "Navajo Witch Purge of 1878" and has written a book on the subject. In that year, more than 40 Navajo witches were killed or "purged" by tribe members because the Navajo had endured a horrendous forced march at the hands of the U.S. Army in which hundreds were starved, murdered, or left to die. At the end of the march, the Navajo were confined to a bleak reservation that left them destitute and starving. The gross injustice of their situation led them to conclude that witches might be responsible, so they purged their ranks of suspected witches as a means of restoring harmony and balance. Tribe members reportedly found a collection of witch artifacts wrapped in a copy of the Treaty of 1868 and "buried in the belly of a dead person." It was all the proof they needed to unleash their deadly purge.

"Unexplained sickness or death of tribal members or their livestock could arouse suspicion of witchcraft," wrote Allison in her book. "So could an unexplained reversal of fortune, good or bad." In the Navajo world, where witchcraft is important, where daily behavior is patterned to avoid it, prevent it, and cure it, there are as many words for its various forms as there are words for various kinds of snow among the Eskimos. If the woman thought he was adan'ti, she thought he had the power of sorcery-to convert himself into animal form, to fly, to perhaps become invisible. Very specific ideas. Where had she gotten them?

The Navajo people do not openly talk about skinwalkers, certainly not to outsiders. Author Tony Hillerman, who has lived for many years among the Navajo, used the skinwalker legend as the backdrop for one of his immensely popular detective novels, one that pitted his intrepid Navajo lawmen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn against the dark powers of witchcraft. The following excerpt is from Skinwalkers:

You think that if I confess that I witched your baby, then the baby will get well and pretty soon I will die," Chee said. "Is that right? Or if you kill me, then the witching will go away."

"You should confess," the woman said. "You should say you did it. Otherwise, I will kill you."

Hillerman has been harshly criticized by some Navajo for bringing unwanted attention to the subject of skinwalkers. "No one who has ever lived in the Navajo country would ever make light of this sinister situation," wrote one critic after Hillerman's book was produced as a movie that aired on PBS in 2003.

Anthropologist Zimmerman explains why so little information is available on skinwalkers: "Part of the reason you won't find a lot of information about skinwalkers in the literature is because it is a sensitive topic among the Dine. This is often referred to as proprietary information, meaning it belongs to the Dine' people and is not to be shared with the non-Dine'."

We know from personal experience that is it extremely difficult to get Native Americans to discuss skinwalkers, even in the most general terms. Practitioners of adishgash, or witchcraft, are considered to be a very real presence in the Navajo world. Few Navajo want to cross paths with naagloshii (or yee naaldooshi), otherwise known as a skinwalker. The cautious Navajo will not speak openly about skinwalkers, especially with strangers, because to do so might invite the attention of an evil witch. After all, a stranger who asks questions about skinwalkers just might be one himself, looking for his next victim.

"They curse people and cause great suffering and death," one Navajo writer explained. "At night, their eyes glow red like hot coals. It is said that if you see the face of a Naagloshii, they have to kill you. If you see one and know who it is, they will die. If you see them and you don't know them, they have to kill you to keep you from finding out who they are. They use a mixture that some call corpse powder, which they blow into your face. Your tongue turns black and you go into convulsions and you eventually die. They are known to use evil spirits in their ceremonies. The Dine' have learned ways to protect themselves against this evil and one has to always be on guard."

One story told on the Navajo reservation in Arizona concerns a woman who delivered newspapers in the early morning hours. She claims that, during her rounds, she heard a scratching on the passenger door of her vehicle. Her baby was in the car seat next to her. The door flung open and she saw the horrifying form of a creature she described as half-man, half-beast, with glowing red eyes and a gnarly arm that was reaching for her child. She fought it off, managed to pull the door closed, then pounded the gas pedal and sped off. To her horror, she says, the creature ran along with the car and continued to try to open the door. It stayed with her until she screeched up to an all-night convenience store. She ran inside, screaming and hysterical, but when the store employee dashed outside, the being had vanished. Outsiders may view the story skeptically, and any number of alternative explanations might be suggested, but it is taken seriously on the Navajo reservation.

Although skinwalkers are generally believed to prey only on Native Americans, there are recent reports from Anglos claiming they had encountered skinwalkers while driving on or near tribal lands. One New Mexico Highway Patrol officer told us that while patrolling a stretch of highway south of Gallup, New Mexico, he had had two separate encounters with a ghastly creature that seemingly attached itself to the door of his vehicle. During the first encounter, the veteran law enforcement officer said the unearthly being appeared to be wearing a ghostly mask as it kept pace with his patrol car. To his horror, he realized that the ghoulish specter wasn't attached to his door after all. Instead, he said, it was running alongside his vehicle as he cruised down the highway at a high rate of speed.

The officer said he had a nearly identical experience in the same area a few days later. He was shaken to his core by these encounters, but didn't realize that he would soon get some confirmation that what he had seen was real. While having coffee with a fellow highway patrolman not long after the second incident, the cop cautiously described his twin experiences. To his amazement, the second officer admitted having his own encounter with a white-masked ghoul, a being that appeared out of nowhere and then somehow kept pace with his cruiser as he sped across the desert. The first officer told us that he still patrols the same stretch of highway and that he is petrified every time he enters the area.

Once Caucasian family still speaks in hushed tones about its encounter with a skinwalker, even though it happened in 1983. While driving at night along Route 163 through the massive Navajo Reservation, the four members of the family felt that someone was following them. As their truck slowed down to round a sharp bend, the atmosphere changed, and time itself seemed to slow down. Then something leaped out of a roadside ditch at the vehicle.

"It was black and hairy and was eye level with the cab," one of the witnesses recalled. "Whatever this thing was, it wore a man's clothes. It had on a white and blue checked shirt and long pants. Its arms were raised over its head, almost touching the top of the cab. It looked like a hairy man or a hairy animal in man's clothing, but it didn't look like an ape or anything like that. Its eyes were yellow and its mouth was open."

The father described as a fearless man who had served two tours in Vietnam, turned completely white, the blood drained from his face. The hair on his neck and arms stood straight up, like a cat under duress, and noticeable goose bumps erupted from his skin. Although time seemed frozen during this bizarre interlude, the truck continued on its way, and the family was soon miles down the highway.

A few days later, at their home in Flagstaff, the family awoke to the sounds of loud drumming. As they peered out their windows, they saw the dark forms of three "men" outside their fence. The shadowy beings tried to climb the fence to enter the yard but seemed inexplicably unable to cross onto the property. Frustrated by their failed entry, the men began to chant in the darkness as the terrified family huddled inside the house.

The story leaves several questions unanswered. If the beings were skinwalkers, and if skinwalkers can assume animal form or even fly, it isn't clear why they couldn't scale a fence. It is also not known whether the family called the police about the attempted intrusion by strangers.

The daughter, Frances, says she contacted a friend, a Navajo woman who is knowledgeable about witchcraft. The woman visited the home, inspected the grounds, and offered her opinion that the intruders had been skinwalkers who were drawn by the family's "power" and that they had intended to take that power by whatever means necessary. She surmised that the intrusion failed because something was protecting the family, while admitting that it was all highly unusual since skinwalkers rarely bother non-Indians. The Navajo woman performed a blessing ceremony at the home. Whether the ceremony had any legitimacy or not, the family felt better for it and has had no similar experiences in the ensuing years.

This disturbing account is not offered as definitive proof of anything, particularly since we have not personally interviewed the witnesses. It is presented only as an illustration of the intense fear and unsettling descriptions that permeate skinwalker lore, and which are accepted at face value by the Native Americans for whom the skinwalker topic is not just a spooky children’s story.

So, exactly how and when did the skinwalker legend intersect with the Gorman ranch in northeastern Utah? Retired teacher and UFO researcher Junior Hicks says his friends in the Ute tribe believe the skinwalker presence in the Uinta Basin extends back at least 15 generations. The Utes, described by historians as a fierce and warlike people, were sometimes aligned with the Navajo against common enemies during the 1800's. But the alliance didn't last. When the Utes first acquired horses from the Spanish, they enthusiastically embraced the Spanish example by engaging in the slave trade. They reportedly abducted Navajos and other Indians and sold them in New Mexico slave markets. Later, during the American Civil War, some Ute bands took orders from Kit Carson in a military campaign against the Navajo. According to Hicks, the Utes believe the Navajo put a curse on their tribe in retribution for many perceived transgressions. And ever since that time, Hicks was told, the skinwalker has plagued the Ute people.

The ranch property has been declared as off-limits to tribal members because it lies in the path of the skinwalker. Even today, Utes refuse to set foot on what they see as accursed land. But the tribe doesn't necessarily believe that the skinwalker lives on the ranch. Hicks says the Utes told him that the skinwalker lives in a place called Dark Canyon, which is not far from the ranch. In the early 1980's, Hicks sought permission from tribal elders to explore the canyon. He's been told there are centuries-old petroglyphs in Dark Canyon, some of which depict the skinwalker. But the tribal council denied his request to explore the canyon. One member later confided to Hicks that the tribe denied the request because it did not want to disturb the skinwalker for fear that it might "create problems." The tribe's advice to Hicks: "Leave it alone."

Dan Banyshek suggests that some parts of this account don’t add up. He thinks it unlikely that the Navajo would enlist the assistance of a skinwalker to carry out their revenge on the Utes, no matter how much the tribe might want some payback on their enemy. "The skinwalkers are regarded as selfish, greedy, and untrustworthy," Banyshek says. "If the Navajo knew someone to be a skinwalker, they would probably kill him, not ask for his help with the Utes. Besides, even if he was asked, the skinwalker would be unlikely to help the Navajo get revenge, since his motives are entirely evil and self-serving. From the Navajo perspective, this story doesn't make sense."

But from the Ute perspective, it could ring true. "The Utes could very likely have concluded that the curse is real," explains Banyshek. "Different tribes or bands would often tell stories about the evil motives of other tribes they were in conflict with, about how another tribe was in league with witches, or how other tribes were cannibals. The Utes might tell themselves this story as a way to explain their own misfortunes."

Hicks told us that the Indians say they see them a lot. "When they go out camping," he says, "they sprinkle bark around their campsites and light it as protection against these things. But it's not just Indians. Whites see them, too." Like his Ute neighbors, Hicks sometimes uses the terms skinwalker and Sasquatch interchangeably. He says he's seen photographs of the telltale huge footprints often associated with Bigfoot, taken in the vicinity of the Gorman ranch. But whether it was a run-of-the-mill Sasquatch or a far more sinister skinwalker isn't always clear, even to those who accept he existence of both.

"There was an incident 16 years ago where a skinwalker was on a porch in Fort Duchesne," Hicks remembers. "They called the tribal police and tracked it east toward the river. They took some shots at it and thought they hit it because they found blood on the ground, but they never found a body."

We also conducted an interview with a Ute man who worked as a security officer for the tribe. He provided us with details about his own encounter with a Bigfoot or skinwalker. Brandon Ware (not his real name) received his police training at an academy associated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He says he was working the 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. shift, guarding a tribal building near a part of the reservation known as Little Chicago. Between midnight and 1:00 in the morning, Ware walked up to check on the building and noticed that the guard dogs inside were calm but intently staring through a window at something outside. They weren't barking, he said, just looking.

"I could see this big ol' round thing, you know, in the patio over there," Ware recalls, "and the hair started raising on my neck and I kinda got worried a little bit trying to figure out what things were. I stood there and watched it for a few minutes, then it came over the top and headed down the road. But I could smell it. Even after it was gone, you could smell it."

Ware says that when the creature realized it was being observed, it briefly looked over at Ware, then vaulted over a short wall that surrounded the patio area outside the building. He says it took off running toward the Little Chicago neighborhood, crashing into garbage cans as it moved past the homes, and generating a cacophony of loud barking by every dog in the immediate area. Ware says he then went into the building and telephoned another on-duty officer who was nearby. By the time Ware left the building, the other officer had pulled up in his patrol car.

Ware told the other officer to turn off his engine so they could listen to the hubbub that was still unfolding among the nearby homes. "We listened a little bit and we could hear it. Then we jumped in and took off. We headed down the hill to see if we could catch up to it."

The two officers didn't see the creature again that night, but had no trouble tracing its path through the cluster of homes because they were able to follow a noticeable trail of scattered garbage cans. "It must have gone straight on through, " Ware recalls. "We could see where cans - people usually tie up their cans - them were all off. I told the other officer, 'hey man, maybe it picked up them cans and was throwing them at those dogs'."

Ware provided us with further details about what he had seen. His initial impression was of something dark and round. But he says that when the creature stood erect to vault over the patio wall, it appeared to be "huge." Ware was carrying a large flashlight at the time of the encounter. He says he was using the flashlight just minutes before the encounter while checking the doors of the building, but when he tried to use it to illuminate the creature, the light wouldn't turn on. When the creature took off running down the hill, the flashlight clicked back on.

"He moved quick," he told us. "Whatever it was, it moved - I called him a 'he' - it could have been a she. It could have been whatever, but he moved quick going down through there. But it was kind of cool. It was neat. I never knew it...it was something I've never seen before. I've heard about them. I heard the old people talking about some of these things."

Just a few nights later, Ware got a chance for a second look. He and another officer, "Bob", were patrolling a back road that emerges at a spot known as Shorty's Hill. They emerged from the road to a pasture area that is punctuated by a large rock. "I don't know if it was the same guy or not," Ware says. "It was a big ol' black hairy thing hanging there, and when it turned around, it had big ol' eyes on him. It had big ol' red eyes on him about yeay big. We'd just passed it and I told Bob 'there he is,' and then he come to a screeching halt and we backed up. By the time we got out, it was gone."

Ware described the creature's eyes as being "coal red" and unusually large. He isn't sure whether the headlights of the patrol car might have affected his perception of the beast's eye color, but tends to doubt it. He has no doubt about the presence of the beast itself. "We got out there to go look and we had shotguns and pistols and everything. We were going to blow him away," Ware admits.

When pressed for his opinion of what he had seen, whether it might have been a Sasquatch or even a skinwalker, Ware's response seemed to draw a distinction between the two, but the distinction became blurry as the conversation progressed and Ware explained his understanding of tribal lore.

"Sasquatch, he's an old man, an old man that lives on a mountain," he explained. "He just comes in and looks at people and then he goes back out again. He just lives there all his life, never takes care of himself, and just smells real bad. Almost like, almost like that guy, like he is dirty, dirty human being smell is what it smelled like...a real deep, bad odor....It smelled like dirty bad underarms...The closer I got, the worse the smell got." Could the creature he saw have been a skinwalker?

"Nope," said Ware. "A skinwalker's smaller. A skinwalker is the size of humans, six foot and under. They don't come in most of the time to where the animals are at. They come in where people are at. They can come right here and you'd never know he was standing here looking at you in the middle of the night...they can take the shape of anything they want to take the shape of. Like I said, they're medicine."

Ware said that skinwalker sightings among the Utes are not uncommon. He told us of an encounter with two shapeshifters near the Gorman ranch. The figures he described are so unusual, so far outside our own concept of reality as to be almost comical, like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. One local who saw them in the road in Fort Duchesne described them as humans with dog heads smoking cigarettes. But Ware was perfectly serious in his description. He certainly did not bare his soul for comic effect and we have no interest in making light of his story. For him, and for many others, skinwalkers are as real as the morning sun or the evening moon. They are a part of everyday life, and they most certainly are integral to the story of the Gorman ranch.

Could the Utes have used the skinwalker curse as an all-encompassing explanation for their assorted tribal misfortunes, as Banyshek asks? Or are they relying on the legend as an umbrella explanation for the wide range of paranormal events that have been reported in the vicinity of their lands for generations - in particular, in the vicinity of the ranch?

If a skinwalker really is a shapeshifter, capable of mind control and other trickery, might it also have the ability to conjure up nightmarish visions of Bigfoot or UFOs? Could it steal and mutilate cattle, incinerate dogs, generate images of monsters , unknown creatures, or extinct species, and could it also frighten hapless residents with poltergeist-like activity? At the very least, the skinwalker legend might be a convenient way for the Utes to grasp a vast menu of otherwise inexplicable events, the same sort of events that might stymie and confuse a team of modern scientists.

One thing is sure, by summer 2007 it is obvious that the legend of skinwalkers is entering popular culture in ways not seen before.

For more information, see "Hunt for the Skinwalker" (Paraview Books), by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp (Amazon US and Amazon UK)

Proof in the Stars?

Greg — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 03:14:32 +0000

By Stanton T. Friedman

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It is not usually easy to validate claims made by UFO witnesses, and it is especially difficult in those cases in which an abduction seems to have taken place. The real complication occurs when hypnosis is used to investigate missing time in conjunction with the abduction.

In the case of the very well-known abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, many individual hypnosis sessions were conducted three years later by Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist with a long history of using medical hypnosis to recover repressed memories of traumatic experiences, especially those that occurred on the battlefield during World War II. Simon knew nothing about UFOs, yet felt it was his duty to elicit details from Betty and Barney under very deep hypnosis to try to determine what happened during their encounter with a strange space vehicle and eleven alien beings.

Following the pent up emotion released by the Hills while in their separate hypnotic states, Simon induced amnesia in each of them in order to prevent them from discussing what they were beginning to recall. This allowed for careful cross comparison between their distinct accounts.

One key validating revelation was Betty’s conversation with an alien about a three-dimensional model or map (probably a hologram) that was shown to her after she asked where they were from. There was a pattern of a dozen or so lights (stars) connected with three types of lines indicating heavy trade routes, light trade routes and occasional expeditions. Betty knew little of astronomy and was unable to explain where she was in the model. Simon instructed her to draw it after she indicated she could remember what it looked like. The drawing was subsequently included by John G. Fuller in his best-selling book, The Interrupted Journey.

At first there seemed to be no way to determine if the map had any meaning. After all, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has at least two hundred billion stars. Fortunately, a brilliant woman, Marjorie Fish, visited Betty to get more details about the map, in spite of fact that Fish was dubious about the Hills’ assertion that the alien beings were humanoid. Nonetheless, over a period of a few years and more interviews with Betty, Fish built about twenty-six different three-dimensional bead and fishing line models. Her goal was to find a 3-D pattern to match the two-dimensional pattern that Betty had drawn.

I had been favorably impressed by Betty and Barney when we met in Pittsburgh in 1968 and when I read The Interrupted Journey and Fuller’s Look Magazine articles about the Hills. My colleague, Coral Lorenzen, International Director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) - one of the two major UFO groups at the time - asked me as a scientist to assist Fish in communicating the results of her research. I agreed, and visited her during one of my lecture tours. I also helped her explain her work at a meeting at Adler Planetarium in Chicago and during a presentation at a Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium in Akron.

Believing Fish to be objective and credible, I published the first article about her work in Saga Magazine and later arranged to interview her and Betty for my documentary film, "UFOs ARE Real." I also convinced the editor of Astronomy Magazine, Terence Dickinson, to speak with her and to publish an article, "The Zeta Reticuli Incident," about her work. It ultimately received more response than any article Astronomy had ever published, before or since.

Also appearing in my documentary was a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, Dr. George Mitchell, who had been helpful to Fish in obtaining closely-held star catalogs. He used one of her large models as a teaching tool and testified as to her care and accuracy in constructing the models.

Through her detailed and careful research, she was eventually able to identify all the stars in the pattern, and found that all of the pattern stars were sun-like (notwithstanding that fewer than 5 percent of the stars within 55 light years of the Sun are sun-like). Some stars are too old, too new, too bright, too dim, or vary too much in the intensity of their energy production rate to be sun-like, or they have very close companion stars making it difficult to maintain stable planetary orbits in the vicinity. The pattern stars are also, amazingly enough, in a plane, like slices of pepperoni on a thin pizza rather than spread all about like raisins in a loaf of raisin bread. This makes travel between the stars much easier. The pattern is definitely not coincidental.

And most remarkably, Fish identified the base stars as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli in the southern sky constellation Reticulum, but only after much better data on the distances to nearby stars was obtained and used to rebuild the models. Nobody building a model before the Hill experience would have obtained the right identification. A unique twosome, Zeta 1 and 2 Reticuli are the closest pair of sun-like stars in our entire local neighborhood. They are only 1/8 of a light year apart from each other, only 39.2 light years away from earth and a billion years older than the sun. These two stars had never been highlighted as special before Fish’s discoveries. It makes sense that they would be the hub of the local neighborhood.

The cosmic perspective for intelligent inhabitants of a planet around Zeta 1 or 2 Reticuli would be very different than that for an Earthling, as the sun is thirty-five times farther away from the nearest star than the distance between Zeta 1 and Zeta 2. We Earthlings are out in the boondocks with no other star close by. However, from a planet orbiting around either of these stars, the other star is visible to the eye all day long, and planets around the other star would be directly observable. No inferences would be necessary. Even with our primitive equipment, at such a close distance we could determine, from the composition of the atmosphere around these planets, if biological activity were present.

Residents of Zeta 1 and 2 would have a much greater incentive to undertake interstellar travel than we have here on Earth. They would also have had much more time for the development of advanced travel technology with their billion year head start on us. Technological progress invariably comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way and we primitives have already determined methods for star travel.

The star map work done by Marjorie Fish was a crucial factor, along with others, in the general acceptance of the Hill story of abduction. Her work was also the target of debunkers and skeptics, including Carl Sagan, who misrepresented Fish’s methods and her results. These attacks along with many others on the Hill case, such as in the TV program, Cosmos, are discussed in detail in my book, co-authored by Betty’s niece, Kathleen Marden, Captured!: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction, The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience (Amazon US and UK).

They Think They Know

Greg — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:13:28 +0000

by Paul H. Smith

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Have I not told you that when you think you know something, that is a most perfect barrier against learning? - Frank Herbert (in God Emperor of Dune)

A few days ago when I first read the newspaper reports revealing that Britain’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) had researched psychic skills, I started scribbling on a table-thumping rant about how wrong-headed the research had been – not because it had been done at all (which I think is wonderful) but because of how poorly-conceived it had been, at least according to the newspapers. Before I published my rant far and wide, someone fortunately pointed me to the actual 168-page declassified report, where I could read a more detailed account of what the MoD had actually done. I discovered that the news stories were embarrassingly oversimplified and incomplete, and that the research was not as ill-advised as reporters had claimed. It was still flawed, which I discuss below – but the whole affair amounts to the latest example of society’s self-perpetuating ignorance of the nature of "psychic phenomena" in general and remote viewing in particular.

According to the news reports, back in 2002 researchers under contract to the MoD tried to recruit psychics who advertised on the Internet to be subjects in the study. When all of these people turned the offer down, the researchers selected a group of "novices" instead and after blindfolding them, tested their abilities by asking them to try to "see" what the photo was in various opaque, brown envelopes. The results? Twenty-eight percent of the subjects guessed "close" to what the photo in the envelope showed, and the rest were totally off the mark. The MoD researchers allegedly decided that ESP held no value for intelligence operations.

That’s what the news reports said, anyway. What really happened was this: The researchers tried to contact 12 people who claimed on the internet to be remote viewers. However, only six responded – and of those, "none showed any interest in participating," according to the official report (5 – numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the MoD report). But six others never responded. The report doesn’t specify how these remote viewers were contacted. Hence, we have no way of knowing whether the non-responsive six ever even received the inquiries, or why they didn’t respond.

This points up the first problem. These 12 people were approached because they had websites that “say publicly that [remote viewing] is an area of interest” for them (6). Unfortunately, that is far too lean a criterion, except perhaps for a first-cut screening. Recruiting remote viewers off the Internet just because their websites say they’re remote viewers is a surefire recipe for questionable success. That might be one useful means for identifying a pool of possible subjects, but you are bound to produce poor results unless you include some further screening mechanism for weeding out the wishful thinkers and fraudulent entrepreneurs from the smaller subset who actually have some ability or real experience. Fortunately, the Internet RVers themselves helped the MoD dodge that bullet by declining to participate.

So as a default option, the MoD researchers turned to the naive subjects – once again with no apparent provision for screening. Since evidence shows that nearly everyone has at least some "psychic" ability, using naive subjects is not necessarily a mistake. But one must expect that the results ultimately produced will be less robust because you have an uncontrolled, unscreened group of subjects who will provide responses of varying levels of quality. And that indeed appears to have been the outcome here. To be fair to the researchers, they seemed to have at least some awareness of this problem and suggested that, though they weren’t able to use "experienced remote viewers as sources," at least the "untrained RV subjects [established] a baseline which would demonstrate any capability of novices in the field." The future performance of experienced remote viewing subjects could then be compared against this baseline (8).

This is not a bad strategy – in fact it is just the approach my son used a few years ago in his successful 5th-grade science fair project. The idea was to test whether remote viewing training worked. I gave him access to a set of my basic-course remote viewing students before they had undergone any significant training, and he tested them against picture-targets in doubleblind remote viewing sessions. A couple of weeks later I was holding an intermediate remote viewing course, and he was able to test those students in the same way, with obvious results. The catch is, of course, that you actually have to repeat your experiment with the experienced viewers or your results are inconclusive. There is no indication that MoD followed up with
(certifiably) experienced viewers.

The biggest mistakes made by the MoD researchers, though, was in the experimental protocol itself. The subjects were blindfolded, then asked to report what the photos in the opaque brown envelopes were of. This was less than optimal for a number of reasons:

I’m flattered that MoD took as its guide the Coordinate Remote Viewing manual I wrote back in 1985-86 while assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency (though on page 107 the researchers mistakenly attribute authorship to Palyne Gaenir). Unfortunately, this manual was never intended to be used to guide experiments. Much good research by Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, and others in SRI-International’s consciousness research program established the context from which I and my colleagues were able to produce the manual. But the manual itself was intended and written in a way meant to help train viewers in applying practical remote viewing skills, rather than for research, for which it would make a fairly confusing guide.
The MoD study did not simulate the task the subjects would eventually be expected to perform if the results turned out satisfactory. (Presumably, the next step would have been operational intelligence collection – but identifying photos in envelopes has little relevance to real intelligence tasks.)
Included with each photo in its opaque envelope were questions such as "what is this place, where is this place, who is this person?" (8). This suggests that the subjects were expected to identify specifically what the photographs represented. Unfortunately, this task has rarely been done successfully by remote viewers or other psychics, skilled or not. Among the photos in the set were, for example, pictures of a knife, of Mother Theresa, of an "Asian inhabitant," of a petrol filling station, etc. These seems to be representative of the rest of the selected target pool. The task given to the subjects amounted to "guessing" what was in a given envelope (the report indicates that the subjects each performed an average of three of these remote viewing tasks during the course of the project).
Expecting subjects to identify what a photo in an opaque envelope is of – such as "It’s a picture of a knife," or "It’s Mother Theresa," is in most cases bound to fail. Hundreds of past experiments and thousands of hours of research have shown that ESP is a phenomenon facilitated by the right, non-verbal hemisphere of the brain. Competent remote viewing researchers know to expect responses that are descriptive in nature and, for most subjects, heavily dependent on sketching of patterns, shapes, and lines. "Naming" – that is, assigning identity labels to what the subject consciously "thinks" the target is, produces a very high error rate. An approach much more likely to bring success is to have the subject describe as accurately as possible the form and appearance of the target photo, and not try to "name" it.

Again, to give some credit to the researchers, in the evaluation phase they did resort to assessing whether sketching and verbalizations recorded on session transcripts bore any resemblance to the respective target photos. Of the total 18 trials, they judged that six times (28% of the sessions) novice viewers "may have accessed some feature of the target" (105-106) (how six of 18 works out to 28% is unclear). There are more bones to be picked about this part of the experimental design, but in the interest of space I’ll move on.
Though not all the novice viewers seem to have used a blindfold, most of them apparently did. Why blindfolds were involved is unclear, as they seem to have served no particular purpose. If the photos were in an opaque envelope, the blindfold was superfluous. More effective, anyway, would have been to put the target envelope in a separate room from the subject. From reading the session logs in the report, it seems to me that the blindfolds were probably more distracting than anything. But there is a further issue: Closing the eyes raises the alpha brain-wave level and encourages mental imagery. But you don’t want to encourage mental imagery in remote viewing, because the imagery is heavily laced with left-brain analytical constructs, which contribute significantly to mental noise, polluting the impressions the viewer is trying to receive.
Much of the effort, and probably the majority of the expense, went into obtaining equipment to measure the brain electrical activity of each of the viewers during the sessions he or she worked, then collecting and analyzing the data. This was done because "some experiments have suggested that there is a link between ELF EM [extremely low-frequency electromagnetic] radiation and the mechanism (undefined) that enables RV to take place" (6). It is puzzling where this idea came from. Extensive research at SRI and published in open sources had already shown that electromagnetic radiation could not account for remote viewing. Predictably, this part of the experiment produced no useful results.
Scientists doing scientific research are obliged to perform a literature search before engaging in their project, to make sure that lessons learned in the past are taken into account when conducting the proposed research. In this case some preliminary work was done, but it seems to have been almost exclusively confined to the Internet. As the researchers have no doubt by now discovered, that is a very uncertain source for a scientifically-solid literature review – especially back in 2002, when suitable references on the Internet were even more sparse than they are today. There is no evidence that any of the hard-copy literature was examined, such as books and scientific papers by Puthoff, Targ, Jahn and Dunne, May, Tart, Schwartz, and others. We can expect that the experimental protocol and procedures would have been much more robust had this material been taken into account.
There is one excuse we can make for the MoD researchers: Some good sources on remote viewing research and experimental design were at the time essentially unavailable to them, and in fact didn’t become readily accessible until 2004, when the CIA’s Star Gate Archive was finally fully declassified and released to the public (it was available, though in a limited form, in 2003). (On the other hand, since their study was classified, and since the UK and the US often share classified information, it’s reasonable to think that they may have obtained the files earlier, had they inquired.) And my own book, Reading the Enemy’s Mind (Amazon US and UK), which might have at least helped point them in some profitable directions and alerted them to some of the more obscure sources, wasn’t out until 2005 – though I had done much of the research for it by 2002, when the MoD study took place.

Further, the US military did years of research and practical trials in using remote viewing as an operational intelligence tool. People with extensive experience in this area could have been consulted in forming the experimental design for the MoD study – yet no effort appears to have been made to do that. If attempts were made to connect with, say, Joe McMoneagle, Ed May, or F. Holmes ('Skip') Atwater – or even Puthoff or Targ, there is no evidence of it. I have no recollection of having been contacted, and as far as I know no one else associated with IRVA
(the International Remote Viewing Association) was approached. (Of course, given that the MoD made it a secret project, it’s possible that a cover story was used that disguised the true nature and sponsor of the research, in which case none of us would know for sure whether or not we had been contacted.)

In the end, despite what attempts at review were done, whoever was responsible for this project seems to have had some preconceived notion as to what constituted remote viewing, which influenced the final protocol they forged ahead with. The MoD gets an A for good intentions, but a C-minus for execution (at least that’s not the "F" the media seem anxious to bestow). The MoD spokesman’s conclusion that remote viewing held "little value" for MoD’s mission is at best premature and at worst invalid.

Regrettably, media-instigated accusations of wasted government money are not the worst fall-out we can expect from this noble, if faulty effort. ESP, remote viewing, and various other so-called "psychic" modalities are real, and there is a modest but well-attested research base as evidence. However, society’s overall perception is just the opposite, and conclusions based on research such as this reinforces that false perception. This MoD "study" will now join the ill-advised conclusions of other supposedly-reliable, yet defective examinations of psychic behavior. Among these is the notorious review done in 1995 by the American Institutes for Research at the behest of the CIA which, after purposely ignoring 95% of the results produced over two decades by the US military and intelligence communities, concluded that remote viewing was useless.

The flawed MoD research project is, unfortunately, symptomatic of a much larger and more widely-spread problem, and that is the rampant misconceptions of the vast majority of the public and the media as to what ESP, remote viewing, etc. are all about. Nearly any program on television that portrays ESP gets at least some of the portrayal wrong.

Among common misconceptions is that ESP can foretell the future. The truth is that, while there are occasional documented instances of this, it is very rare that future events are successfully predicted by remote viewers or any other kind of psychic. This misperception has been associated with ESP and psychic behavior for so long it is virtually ineradicable. It persists thanks partly to the media’s and the public’s perpetual linking of the two, and partly to the fact that the occasional instances where the future may have been successfully predicted are reported but the many times that has failed are ignored or never mentioned.

There is also the misbelief that ESP is useful for discerning numbers or words. However, because of the heavy involvement of the non-verbal right brain-hemisphere in the process, numbers, words, names, and letters are in fact among the hardest things for a remote viewer or a psychic to perceive. There are occasional successes but, again, they are rare. Yet one of the most common demands a remote viewer hears is, "OK, if you’re psychic – why don’t you give me the winning lottery numbers?" or "Why don’t you remote view the name of Jon-Benet Ramsey’s killer?" When a viewer can’t produce this sort of information, the person demanding the results takes that as evidence that remote viewing is fake. (Indeed, one of the Amazing Randi’s earlier skeptical "tests" of ESP was to challenge psychics to read off a series of numbers kept locked in his safe. No one ever did it, so he concluded that was evidence that ESP didn’t exist.)

This amounts to a logical fallacy, of course. No knowledgeable and competent remote viewer will claim to be able to report numbers or names, nor reliably foretell the future (I specify "knowledgeable and competent" here, because there are those claiming to be remote viewers who are neither knowledgeable nor competent – they should not be counted as evidence against remote viewing). So for a challenger to require a viewer to do either one demonstrates the challenger’s ignorance of the process, not any shortcoming in the viewer or the remote viewing phenomenon. It would in fact be the logical equivalent of requiring a horse to fly, then deciding it wasn’t a horse because it failed the test.

It isn’t just critics that make such mistakes, however. The media and the general public have muddled notions about what it means to remote view, or to be psychic. I’ve done a fair number of on-air remote viewing demonstrations for media. For the demonstration to succeed, the production crew has to set up the correct experimental conditions, and I do my best to educate them in what they needed to do. In spite of that, in only one instance did the crew actually get it completely right. The rest of the time they mixed in some of their own assumptions about how it ought to be done, and the demonstration suffered to the degree they departed from protocol.

But it doesn’t stop there. What is feeding these wrong ideas are the stereotypes promoted by Hollywood and television, where psychics are depicted as discerning license plate numbers of getaway cars, or having clear visions of murderer’s faces – or "seeing" the full sequence of events in a crime. The audience doesn’t stop to consider that these enactments owe more to the producer’s need for visual drama and to wrap up the program in 45 minutes – plus time for commercials.

Unfortunately, many self-described intuitives and psychics themselves contribute to these false stereotypes. For better or worse the intuitive community – the popular world of psychics, intuitives, remote viewers, etc. – is unpoliced and unregulated. Anyone can claim to have intuitive "gifts," and many make such claims. Some of them really do have abilities and skills - some more, some less. But many others simply act the way they think psychics are supposed to, and this often just reinforces the same old stereotypes. Even the talented ones sometimes don the mantle of the popular image of a psychic, because that is what the public expects.

Scientists studying parapsychology, and legitimate intuitives and remote viewers have tried hard to distance themselves from the popular image of psychics. Unfortunately, the public, the media, the skeptics, and even many in the intuitive community itself have been unable to let go. Attempts to educate the public have been few and ineffective – for several reasons. One is that parapsychologists have had neither the insight, nor the resources, nor the access, nor – unfortunately, in most cases – even the will to mount the sort of public relations campaign that is necessary.

Another reason education has so-far failed is that there is immense resistance to change. The media has grown accustomed to treating ESP and its analogues as a source of entertainment. Usually any story involving psychics, remote viewing or other kinds of ESP, or even scientific parapsychology research, inevitably is treated as humorous or dubious. Few reporters or broadcasters will risk the ridicule that would come their way for treating the subject seriously. (As a current example, recent news reports on the closing of one of the few remaining parapsychology laboratories, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, nearly always contained some tongue-in-cheek remark about the reader "already knowing about" the news. What the reader already knew about was that threadbare joke would be trotted out yet one more time.)

The skeptical community encourages such attitudes. It is heavily invested in preserving the status quo, and fights any attempts to present parapsychology research in a favorable light, relying on ridicule and innuendo when logic and the facts aren’t on their side. Skeptics follow the same strategy that corporate tort lawyers take: Make it so excruciating for your opponents that they will give up on their attempts to oppose you, even if you are wrong and they are right. When skeptics can’t undermine well-attested parapsychology claims or experiments, they attack via the "giggle-factor," using ridicule as a substitute for rational argument – and then turn around and accuse their opponents of being irrational.

In consequence, the general public has only been allowed to form a caricature of what ESP, remote viewing, and other psychic phenomena are really like. This gives equally befuddled media hacks the go-ahead to build straw men at their leisure, which they can tear down and then boast that they have once again proved that there is nothing to ESP. It would be nice if they would take some time, step back, and make a serious attempt to understand and, perhaps, change their minds. But – of course – they think they already know.

Maj. Paul H. Smith, US Army (ret.) was a military remote viewer for seven years. He is author of Reading the Enemy’s Mind: Inside Star Gate – America’s Psychic Espionage Program (Tor/Forge 2005, chosen as the Book Bonus selection for Reader’s Digest, March 2006), and is president of the non-profit International Remote Viewing Association. His website is www.rviewer.com and that of the association is www.irva.org. Copyright 2007.

UFOs and the Zero Point Field

Greg — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:08:25 +0000

By Marie D. Jones, author of Psience: How New Discoveries in Quantum Physics and New Science May Explain the Existence of Paranormal Phenomena (Amazon US and UK).

---------------------

Most ufologists agree that alien spacecraft must be using a highly advanced technology or propulsion system to move them across vast distances in short periods of time. Quantum physics may hold the answer to how they are getting “here from there,” and that answer is the Zero Point Field(ZPF).

Paul Dirac theorized the existence of the ZPF in the early years of quantum mechanics. He suggested that space was filled with particles in negative energy states that exerted a measurable force. This force became known as the Casimir Effect, after the research of Dutch physicist Hendrik B.G. Casimir. The Casimir Effect occurs due to resonance of energy in the space between two objects, say two metal plates held closely together. Increase the distance between the plates, and the force or effect decreases.

Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Otto Stern were early ZPF researchers, and in 1916, Walther Nernst formally proposed that space was not empty as previously thought, but rather filled with this zero point electromagnetic radiation.

We now know that empty space is literally teeming with activity. Tiny electromagnetic fields fluctuate, even at near zero temperatures. Quantum physicists have discovered that there is a field of energy that permeates every inch of space, one so fundamental it is considered to be the source of all other forms of energy and matter.

Later research has shown that the ZPF is made up of particles that “pop” in and out of existence, creating a sort of foam of virtual particles, each with their own residual “jiggle” or minute rate of oscillation.

The most fascinating promise of the ZPF is its potential as an infinite source of energy, one that physicists like Hal Puthoff believe may one day propel space craft to distant parts of our universe. Ufologists believe alien civilizations far in advance of our own are already using the ZPF, harnessing the unlimited field of energy as they literally shoot across amazing distances.

Puthoff believes we are nowhere near understanding how to extract and large amounts of Zero Point Energy for such uses as heating our homes and fueling our cars and planes. Yet, research is going on now that may come up with viable ways to tap into this repository of ground energy states and virtual particles that, according to physicist Richard Feynman, could contain enough energy in just one single cubic meter of space to boil the world’s oceans.

That’s a lot of energy. And if the ZPF is indeed as infinite as space itself, the energy will never run out. Unlike fossil fuels, this field of energy will be constantly self-regenerating. In fact, Puthoff calls the ZPF a “self-regenerating grand ground state of the universe.”

Research into the ZPF also shows its ability to affect gravity, and the ZPF may possibly be the missing link in the quest to bring together the four fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

Because the energy in the ZPF is thought to be massive, even infinite, exceeding nuclear energy densities, just a tiny amount of Zero Point Energy could be turned into a whole lot of fuel. A 2004 article in Aviation Week and Space Technology entitled, “To The Stars”, stated that large aerospace companies and the U.S. Defense Department are launching research into the ZPF and its potential.

For our alien friends eager to visit our planet or just do a quick fly-by, the ZPF is like a superhighway of energy that might just be the preferred mode of fuel for civilizations that have already found extraction methods. Only time and a lot of cutting edge research will tell if we will one day be able to do the same.

MARIE D. JONES is the author of PSIence: How New Discoveries in Quantum Physics and New Science May Explain the Existence of Paranormal Phenomena, published by New Page Books, 2006.

Two Scientists Hunting the Skinwalker

Greg — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 13:32:32 +0000

by Colm Kelleher PhD
(http://www.huntfortheskinwalker.com)

With more than thirty years scientific research experience between us, he in physics and I in cell biology, we were confident that our Hunt for the Skinwalker would be successful. Although we were trained in the hard sciences, we thought we were resourceful and creative enough to shine a light on the dark weirdness that had become routine on this ranch. Our billionaire benefactor had purchased the 480 acre property less than a year previously and had spared no expense in setting it up as a laboratory of the paranormal. The previous owners, a god-fearing ranching family, had been driven from their home on this same ranch in August 1996 by a relentless onslaught of poltergeist activity, UFOs, cattle mutilations and paranormal mayhem. I was the team leader of a scientific “X-files mission” to find the explanation for this hostile presence.

On this particular night, armed with all the trappings of modern technological investigation, we were staking out a lonely spot on Skinwalker Ranch, hoping to encounter the mysterious. We were even hoping to capture the mysterious. Preferably on film.

It was darker than I ever remember. The only light was from the stars and from some very distant yard lights that you could see if you moved your head back and forth so the trees no longer blocked them. We were so far out in the boondocks that if anything went wrong, help would be a long time coming. It was close to midnight and still warm. No mosquitoes that night. Both of us were thankful. Sometimes around this time of the year, they can start swarming.

The two dogs we had brought along as biosensors were running around sampling the many wonderful smells that came with being in a high-density wild life area. Both were heelers. They were excellent and fearless ranch dogs that could fight a coyote or a wild dog to the death.

We had just arrived in Utah from Las Vegas and this was the first night of watching. We had received instructions on exactly where to stand that night. “Position yourselves exactly in front of the left hand window in the old homestead”, the Canadian investigator had advised. The week before he had shot some beautiful infrared film of a very eerie bright light that had appeared in the left hand window of the homestead. He was a seasoned investigator of things weird; very good at what he did. His infrared film was very compelling. There was only one frame exposed in a sequence of four. He claimed that he did not actually see the light when he was filming it. So we knew if we were going to see anything in this location, it probably was going to be transient. We were focused on the homestead about one hundred fifty feet directly in front of us.

We gazed around the small field. It was bordered by tall trees and this only heightened the claustrophobic atmosphere. Nothing moved. Even the dogs were silent. My colleague stood maybe ten feet to my right. He had the pair of night vision binoculars. Down on the other end of the property, about a mile away, stood two more intrepid investigators, also with a pair of the night vision binoculars. When you clicked them on everything became very clear, only in a bizarre shade of green.

With no warning it was abruptly there. No more than 75 yards to our left, a silent brightly lit sphere of bluish white light about the size of a basketball hovered. It moved slightly, as if swaying gently. The dogs seemed to be alert, they were right behind us. The object was not more than fifteen feet off the ground. It seemed to be bobbing and it was bright enough that I could see the grass lit up. It generated the bluish white incandescent light from within the sphere. There were no obstructions in our line of sight. The thing was definitely in the same small pasture as we were. I noticed a blanket of silence had descended. I could not hear any wild life sounds. We stared and, just as abruptly, it was gone. No more than a few seconds of deep silence had passed. The dogs still did not move.

Immediately, we flicked on the powerful beam of the Maxa-Beam. According to the promotional literature, one could read a newspaper at night from a mile away with the light of the Maxa-Beam. Shining it in somebody’s eyes would bleach their retinas, so we were always careful. It was favored by military and by law enforcement.
Nothing moved as the entire pasture was lit up in bright white light. Slowly we scanned the entire pasture. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. We walked over to the spot where the object had appeared and, just as suddenly, disappeared. The dogs stuck closely by our sides. They were not in the mood for playing anymore. We searched the area quickly for a few minutes but could find nothing. Slowly and warily we walked back to our original position.

My colleague was scanning the perimeters of the lush, tree-lined pasture with a pair of Generation III ITT night vision binoculars. In 1997, they were the top of the line. These particular binoculars were not the standard pair that just looked in the infrared. They actually amplified ambient light both in the visible and, to a large extent, in the infrared.

I was readying the manual camera with black and white infra-red film when he emitted a yelp or an exclamation. “Jesus,” he muttered. He was looking straight ahead through the night vision binoculars, directly at the tree line that was no more than two hundred feet in front of us. All of a sudden he said, “there is a huge black thing in the trees just in front of us and its moving north”. That got my attention. It also got the dogs’ attention. In the interim, both had taken up positions directly behind us, jammed into the back of our legs and gazing fixedly at the same point where my colleague was focusing. These killer dogs were acting the part. They made no sound.

I pointed my manual camera in the direction he was looking and began a series of long-exposure shots. This was definitely ramping up on the bizarre index. I was conscious if things escalated, hospital was a long way away. “It is big and I’m not sure if it is in the trees or behind the trees. It is blocking out the stars”, he said. I manually kept the shutter open and began counting out about twenty seconds between opening and closing the camera shutter. The camera was my own, probably forty years old and it was capable of taking some excellent shots. A lot of our experience had pointed away from using the high tech “idiot-proof” cameras, because too many coincidences had occurred when the cameras failed in some way at the crucial moment.

Every time I looked up at the tree line to see what my colleague was reporting, I could see nothing. But without the advantage of the amplification of the low level ambient light afforded by the night vision technology, I was looking for black against black background. I could see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I decided to focus only on my camera work.

“It’s still moving” he was muttering. All of a sudden he yelled. “Its got me”, “its saying: “we are watching you” he continued, his voice rising a couple of octaves. Then there was silence. I continued trying to take increasingly longer exposures to try to catch whatever he was talking about. Every time I looked up from my camera to see if I could see what was causing him such intense anxiety, I could see nothing except the dark shadows of the tree line directly in front of me. The feeling in the pasture was very spooky, a chilling desolate feeling. Then he said:”its getting smaller”. Then: “its gone”. He kept muttering “Jesus Christ” “Jesus Christ”. He repeated the same phrase over and over again. His voice betrayed that he was very freaked out.

I asked him what had happened. It was obvious that he was still shaken. “Something big was in the trees just in front of us, it blotted out all the stars through the binoculars,” he declared. “It took control of my mind”. “It told me it was watching us”. He sounded very confused and bewildered. This guy was a Ph.D level physicist. He had spent time on the famous NASA Voyager missions, when the celebrated remote Voyager probes had mapped the surfaces of Saturn and Jupiter for the first time in history. This guy was not prone to sudden nervous breakdowns. But now, he was almost babbling. He definitely had not met anything like this before in his academic career. As team leader, I was concerned.

We stayed in the area about another forty-five minutes. At one point he went inside the old homestead to check things out and almost instantly started hollering when he disturbed a sleeping bird as it flapped its wings suddenly in his face. I realized he was probably a lot more freaked out than he was admitting. So we began to pack up the equipment. It was time to call it a night.

We were silent as we trudged back the mile to the sleeping quarters. Both of us had seen the brightly lit ball of light. Only one of had had the weird experience after that. I began to wonder to myself, either all of the action had happened in the night vision, in the infra red, or else it had not really happened. The dogs had both reacted identically as if something very unusual was unfolding, I mused to myself. Why would they do that? And the dogs were both focused exactly on the position that he was referring to. Yet, I was not able to see anything.

Even sleeping in the same area as the menacing, unseen voice that had taken control of the physicist’s mind seem daunting, but we were all pretty exhausted. We had gone hunting the Skinwalker, but for a few brief moments, the hunters had become the hunted. Both of us had realized out there in the darkness, we were utterly powerless if the Skinwalker chose to attack us.

Where had the mysterious incandescent light come from? Was the light connected to the featureless black object that was only two hundred feet away? What had engaged in a “mind meld” with the physicist in such a threatening way? Had a dimensional hole opened on the ranch, through which these extraordinary manifestations had entered? Or, were they always around although invisible to us? I pondered these questions as sleep overcame me.

Adapted from "Hunt for the Skinwalker" (Paraview Books), by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp (Amazon US and Amazon UK)

A Reply to Michael Shermer, by Rupert Sheldrake

Greg — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:09:47 +0000

The following is an open letter from Rupert Sheldrake to Scientific American, in reply to the recent 'Skeptic' article by Michael Shermer which discussed Sheldrake's research. Feel free to email Sci-Am with your own thoughts on Shermer's column (more information on this topic can be found in my own essay 'The Shermer Sham', from December 2004).

In his attack on my work (“Rupert’s Resonance,” Scientific American, November), Michael Shermer asserted that “Skepticism is the default position because the burden of proof is on the believer, not the skeptic.” But who is the believer and who is the skeptic?

I am skeptical of people who believe they know what is possible and what is not. This belief leads to dogmatism, and to the dismissal of ideas and evidence that do not fit in. Genuine skepticism involves an attitude of open-minded enquiry into what we do not understand, and this is the approach I try to follow.

Shermer ridiculed the hypothesis of morphic resonance by claiming I proposed a “universal life force,” a concept I have never used. He also misrepresented the evidence for the sense of being stared at. Experiments showing that people can detect when they are being stared at from behind have been widely replicated, with results that an independent meta-analysis has shown to be highly significant, as summarized in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (June, 2005), to which Shermer referred. He tried to give the impression that the case rested on unsupervised tests by people using the experimental protocol on my web site (www.sheldrake.org), but this is not true. My own summary of the evidence and the independent meta-analysis by Dean Radin did not include the data from these unsupervised tests, but relied instead on the results of many thousands of trials already published in peer-reviewed journals.

Shermer also referred to data from a staring experiment by Colwell et al, of Middlesex University, London, which showed a significant positive effect that could not be explained in terms of sensory clues. He mentioned that Colwell et al. suggested that this effect might be attributable to non-random features of the randomization sequences used in their experiment, but he omitted to mention that their suggestion has already been refuted by thousands of trials with different randomization methods, including coin-tossing. The results were positive and highly significant statistically, whatever the randomization method.

Shermer’s partisan approach is like that of a politician trying to win an election. Readers of Scientific American would be better served by a fair and truthful presentation of the facts.

Rupert Sheldrake
London, England

Positive Thinking and Us, by Mitch Horowitz

Greg — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 06:09:11 +0000

Members of the Bush administration have repeatedly chided journalists for failing to focus on the positive aspects of America's role in Iraq. So it goes in many areas of life: Accentuate the positive, we hear, and all will be well in the end.

While this may make for an absurd approach to war reporting, the concept of positive thinking has deep roots in America. More than 150 years ago, the spiritual writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson gave very distant birth to this way of thought. Philosophy, Emerson wrote, "proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena...That law, when in the mind, is an idea."

By the early twentieth century, positive thought gained expression through a wide array of ministers and spiritual thinkers, who used Scripture and personal anecdote to extol its creative power. The mid-century metaphysician Neville Goddard captured the movement's soaring optimism: "It is not what you want that you attract; you attract what you believe to be true."

This theory of mental dynamics attained mass currency in Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 classic, The Power of Positive Thinking (which won an unlikely convert in Richard Nixon, who became lifelong friends with Peale thereafter). Today, it abounds in self-improvement books, seminars, and audio programs.

As a spiritual philosophy, positive thinking is a distinctly American phenomenon - can one imagine such an approach to life taking root, say, in the former Soviet republics? And it is perhaps more innate to American religious impulses than the punitive doctrine heard from many quarters of fundamentalism. But does it have a convincing place in the world today - that is, in a shrinking world in which the effects of wars and tsunamis can make its claims seem cruelly naïve at times?

The answer is a tentative yes.

Carl Jung made an interesting discovery when reviewing the results of laboratory studies intended to test for clairvoyant perception. He noted that test subjects scored more apparent "hits" on a deck of cards earlier in a session, before boredom or disinterest set in. "Enthusiasm, positive expectation, hope, and belief in the possibility of ESP," Jung wrote, "make for good results and seem to be the real conditions which determine whether there are going to be any results at all."

Yolanda King, Martin Luther King's eldest child, and herself a self-proclaimed adherent to the philosophy of positive thinking, conceded in a recent article that a glass-half-full approach might have seemed like "foolish optimism" in a childhood rocked by the violence of the civil rights era. But as the adult King and many others have discovered, there is a sense of wiggle room in life in which the private positivism of one's thoughts seems to outsource in ways that, at the very least, create a better Monday morning, if not a world more at peace.

One of the sleeper hit films of the last year, What the Bleep Do We Know?, offers the most recent, and one of the most compelling, expressions of this outlook. This film draws on ideas from quantum physics - such as the concept that our minds influence observable outcomes - to ask whether life merely reflects a person's point of view. The film goes further still, noting that quantum physicists have found that incredibly fast-moving particles veritably appear in two places at once. If multiple realities exist, at least on a minute scale, does this suggest that our focus determines what we actually experience?

The dictum to "think positive" has no place in Pentagon briefing rooms. But on a personal level, this way of thought presents us with deepening questions about the nature of reality. And it redirects our religious gaze where many feel it belongs: inwardly.

_________________________

A Mind-Over-Matter Reading List

The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes (Tarcher/Penguin)

Articulates the principles of creative thought in a more comprehensive manner than any book before or since.

The Neville Reader by Neville Goddard (DeVorss)

Collects several works by the mid-century metaphysician Neville Goddard - who wrote under the solitary penname Neville - including Resurrection, one of the most intellectually convincing tracts on affirmative thought.

Synchronicity by Carl Jung (Princeton)

Although he notes the phenomena only in passing, and indirectly at that, Jung lends the credence of his own intellect to the power that lies in enthusiasm and hopeful expectation.

The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Schinn (DeVorss)

Concise, simple, and moving - a perfect primer in 20th century positive thought.

The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity by Catherine Ponder (DeVorss)

A treasury of ideas and anecdotes on the mental dynamics of wealth creation. Pick and choose which points resonate with you. A good companion work is Eric Butterworth's Spiritual Economics.

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale (Fawcett)

Peale's work is not for everyone. His classic employs a more traditionally Christian tone than many of the books above, but it remains the best-known volume of the genre.

___________________________

Mitch Horowitz is the executive editor of the publisher Tarcher/Penguin in New York, and a frequent writer on spiritual themes. His website is: www.mitchhorowitz.com.