Ascensions and Levitations: A UFO Connection?

Outside the alien abduction scenario there is a history of “ascensions” (brought to the fore by the impending Easter season and the alleged ascension of Jesus after his resurrection).

Ascension means to ascend -- to go up, to heaven or somewhere above.



This has been a staple of religious and mythological storytelling since the beginning of history, and is part and parcel of many UFO reports (which we’ll cite below).

Some Biblical accounts:

Enoch was said to have been taken by God [Genesis 5:24] and Elias (Elijah) “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” via a fiery chariot and fiery horses [4 Kings 2:11].



Ezechiel (Ezekiel) was lifted up [Ezechiel 11:1] and Jesus “was taken up into heaven” [Mark 16:19], and “was carried up into heaven” [Luke 24:51].

In mythology, Heracles (Hercules), upon his death, a cloud passed over his body and bore it away, to Olympus.

Aeneas, a hero of Troy, after setting up a new home for the Trojans, was killed in battle, and was lifted up to heaven.



Diomedes, king of Argos, and one of the Epigoni -- the sons of the Seven against Thebes – was murdered by King Daunus, and divinely spirited away.

In Catholic legend, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was lifted, body and soul, upon her death to heaven.

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes many ascensions or levitations, ascribing them to acts of God.



Here is a list of some of the saints and persons so elevated:

St. Edmund, then Archbishop of Canterbury circa 1242.

St. Teresa of Avila in Madrid during 1680.

Sister Mary an Arabian Carmelite nun in Bethlehem circa 1700.

St. Adolphus Liguori in Foggia during 1777.

Father Suarez at Santa Cruz in Southern Argentina in1911.

But what spurred this posting, aside from the upcoming Ascension Holy Day, are two accounts that I stumbled across, which most of you may be familiar with…

The David Lang and Oliver Larch disappearances (from Wikipedia):

According to the stories surrounding him, on 23 September 1880, Lang, of Gallatin, Tennessee, was walking across the grounds of his farm to meet Judge August Peck who was approaching his farm in a horse and buggy, when Lang vanished mid-step and in full view of the judge, his wife Chanel and his two children, and the judge's brother-in-law. The ground around where Lang had been walking was searched in case he had fallen into a concealed hole, but no trace was found. The story further states that Lang's children later called out to him, and heard a disembodied voice calling as if from a great distance.

The story of David Lang was published in Fate magazine by journalist Stuart Palmer, who claimed that he had been told the story by Lang's daughter. However, no trace of David Lang nor his family (including his apparent daughter) was ever found in any records of that period, and the entire article was later determined to be a hoax likely inspired by the short story "The Difficulties of Crossing a Field" by Ambrose Bierce (1909), collected in his book Can Such Things Be? In 1999, the modern composer David Lang based an opera on Bierce's story. (The story has also become a popular urban legend).

The story of Oliver Larch (Sometime known as Lerch or Thomas) follows a similar pattern to that of David Lang. According to the narrative, Larch was on his way to collect water from a well one winter when he vanished, leaving nothing behind but a trail of footprints in the snow which terminated abruptly, and a series of terrible cries for help such as "Help, they've got me!" that appeared to come from above. Larch's story was later found to be a variation on "Charles Ashmore's Trail", published in 1893 by Ambrose Bierce. In some versions, Larch's story is set in late 19th century Indiana, in others, it is set in North Wales. One particular recurring variation was an Oliver Thomas of Rhayader, Radnorshire, mid-Wales with the date given as 1909.

For a skeptical clarification and implied hoax explanation, click here

In UFO lore, there are many UFO stories based upon ascending, all usually gathered within the abduction category, but not correctly, I think.



Betty And Barney Hill (1961)

Hickson/Parker (1973)

Carl Higdon (1974)

Travis Walton (1975)

Kelly Cahill (1993)

While UFOs do not factor in to most of these accounts, in the stories where they do, however, the descriptives of the ascensions, levitations, and upliftings to the crafts come close to that provided in the stories noted above.

Is there an interdimensional aspect to these events, theorized by M-Theory (string theory)?

Or are physical laws just suspended in some circumstances?

And are UFOs merely omens of dimensional shifts or some other physical quirk?

In Bruce Duensing’s ruminations at his blogs, there is an interconnectedness of all these things.

UFOs may only be one (tangential?) aspect of a reality that is intertwined with elements paranormal, prosaic, and transcendental – a reality too bizarre and complex to explain, no matter how hard we humans try.

Perhaps….

N.B. John Mack’s study of “abductees” indicated that “out-of-body” experiences were prominent in the accounts he monitored.

In the Lang and Larch stories, family members heard voices from above the spot where the men allegedly disappeared.

(In ancient times, sailors approaching an island near the mouth of the Ister River claimed to have heard the voice of Achilles, who had been slain much earlier.)

Thomas Aquinas, who had a transcendental experience that caused him to stop writing – what he saw made his efforts as so much straw in the wind – was said, by G. K. Chesterton, in a work on Aquinas, to have been seen to levitate while saying mass, near the end of his life.

UFOs: The Computer Model

UFOs, the truly unexplainable objects, may be computer rendered models or computers themselves.

A current New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik [New Yorker, Get Smart, April 4th, 2011, Page 70 ff.] deals with the question, “How smart are computers, really?”



But Mr. Gopnik’s piece deals with prosaic computers that are extant.

A better source for the idea that computers can be real in themselves, and create realities that are, for all intents and purposes, actual is:

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Premier issue, Volume 1 Issue 1, Winter 1992, Editors: Thomas B. Sheridan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and Thomas A. Furness, III Univ. of Washington, Seattle, Published in: Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, MIT Press Cambridge, MA,

Let us assume that what are seen in the skies, sometimes – not the mistaken Earthly aircraft or misperceived meteorological manifestations – may be images produced by computers, or computers themselves.

In the Bosco Nedelcovic revelations about the CIA/DoD contrived Villas Boas event, covered here, in this blog, in a very early posting and also in Nick Redfern’s Contactees, (Chapter 20), Nedelcovoc a CIA-AID operative relates that the military used holographic imagery to produce an alien ambiance in tests related to extraterrestrial encounter experimentation, of which the Boas case was one of several.



(Another CIA contrived event, according to Nedelcovic, was the Scoriton incident, also covered here in the archived postings.)

That the United States military used, allegedly, holographic imaging is not the point of this posting.



The reference is to indicate that computer generated imaging can be foisted upon the public or military, in airplanes (such as the B-29 or RB47 sightings mentioned here recently), and that such imagery manipulation may account for some sightings which have an inherent intangibility.



The argument that radar returns wouldn’t be affected by holography can be set aside as radar manipulation would be a concomitant ruse, either by the military or government agency, or by an advanced alien species, if you wish.

But then there is the proposition that what is seen in the skies and sometimes on the ground are actual computers, programmed to interact with humans or Hastings’ nuclear military installations, for instance, duplicating a physical presence without the actual probability of an interaction that would cause problems of an unexplainable kind, something less explainable than a sighting of an amorphous, disappearing UFO.

The Rendlesham incident would be such a contrivance.



But by whom or what exactly?

The UFOs are computers of a virtual kind, without mechanical substance, machines that “think” and act just as virtuality thinks and acts in computer gaming today, and early on in computer simulations created during World War II.

(Alan Turing is the progenitor of such computer modeling and programming.)



A source for what can be done with such virtuality can be found in Marvin Minsky’s
The Society of Mind [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1985/1986] and more pertinently in his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines or Perceptrons.



What we’re proposing here is that some UFO sightings may be virtual realities and some may actually involve computers (machines) of a quasi-tangible nature programmed to intersect and interact with humans.

The idea is not as farfetched as one might expect, if they see the gist of Gopnik’s piece in The New Yorker, or if they read the MIT papers we’ve loaded at our UFO web-site.

More will follow on this “hypothetical” thrust, you may be sure….but, meanwhile, for a truly brilliant exegesis of what computers may be capable of CLICK HERE

Folie à beaucoup: The Roswell Psychosis

Folie à beaucoup – communicated insanity, induced insanity…suggestibility plays a part…It happens that paranoid or paranoiac and rarely hypomanic patients not only can make those with whom they [associate] believe in the delusions, but they so infect them that [those contacted] continue to build on the delusions. [The Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Leland E. Hinsie, M.D. and Robert J. Campbell, M.D., Oxford University Press, London, 1970]

Roswell is an example of how a group of normal individuals can act in psychotic collusion, spurred by a bizarre incident that was instigated by one person, acting on a possible mercenary whim.

(The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme is a current example of the rampant psychology underlying what we see as the prime motivator for the Roswell incident.)

Mac Brazel is reported to have sought the way to gather a reward for discovering a flying disk, which was generated by his findings of some somewhat strange debris on the farm where he was foreman, debris from a balloon or some other aerial mishap.



The debris is a sidebar here. Whatever Mac Brazel found is irrelevant to our point. His “debris” caused him, perhaps, to try to obtain some needed money – he was a poor man by 1947 standards, as were many who farmed in the New Mexico area in which Roswell and Corona are located – from an offer of $3000 to anyone who could produce fragments of a flying disk.

(The source of that offer is not clear, and really has little to do with our hypothesis here. Brazel may have only wanted attention, or got caught up in a mild hysterical episode that afflicted the Proctor family with whom he was commiserating about the “stuff” he had found.)

Brazel’s foray into Roswell generated an interest by the Army base there, and Walter Haut, Jesse Marcel, Sr., and others were infected by the “flying disk” suggestion of Brazel or the media frenzy caused by the prior Arnold sighting and other flying saucer stories that were prevalent at the time.

Once the story was tamped down by saner voices (the Army’s Ramey and Blanchard) and news media lost interest, the people who were initially involved with the inadvertent scam went back to their humdrum lives; that is until Moore, Friedman, Berlitz, et al. resurrected the “incident” and cause an unrepression of the folie à beaucoup.



Once the floodgates of the original flying disk scam were reopened, coupled with suggestibilities by the UFO “researchers,” the Roswell myth was born and has spread as folies do to others who came into contact with the original Roswell witnesses or who come into contact with those – the UFO researchers -- who’ve met with the original participants in Brazel’s ultimately unproductive scam.

Dee Proctor has been a prime participant in the original Brazel instigated brouhaha, dissembling the story in a post 1947 folie à deux. And other alleged Roswell witnesses have engaged in the folie or started a new folie for reasons of nefarious kind.

Our point is that Mac Brazel started, for whatever reason(s), inadvertent or otherwise, a cascading series of events that developed (and continues) under the psychiatric sobriquet of a folie à beaucoup.

Roswell may only be that, a psychotic episode that resonates with persons today as psychologically significant as it did back in 1947.

A List of Best UFO Sightings?

While we’ve ragged on Paul Kimball for his filmed list of the best UFO sightings ever, we came across a list by former flying saucer “expert” William Spaulding, who provided his take on some top UFO sightings and events for The People’s Almanac’s The Book of Lists #2 by author Irving Wallace and family [William Morrow and Company, NY, 1980, Page 417 ff.].

His first offering was the McMinnville/Trent photos which we deem as bogus.



His next sighting was the 1952 Nash-Fortenberry Pan-Am encounter, over Norfolk, Virginia.



The third listing was the 1952 Washington D.C. incidents.



The fourth episode was the Ralph Mayher [sic] film of 1952.



Fifth was (another) 1952 radar/visual sighting of a USAF B-29 training crew over the Gulf of Mexico



Six on Spaulding’s list was the Kimball/Sparks B-47 incident, so there is some consensus that the sighting was and is significant.



Seventh in Spaulding list of eight is a November 1957 on the outskirts of Levelland, Texas where witnesses had encounters with a large UFO.



And eighth on Spaulding’s list was the 1976 Iranian encounter.



We won’t elaborate on Spaulding’s list, as we see lists as entertainment rather than edifying information.

But we note that Kimball and Sparks are not the only UFO aficionados to see the RB-47 event as a significant UFO encounter.

Again, the RB-47 sighting is interesting, but so are dozens of other sightings, including the B-29 sighting (number five, above) which has as many or more technical accoutrements as the RB-47 incident.

UFO hobbyists, each, have their favorite UFO sightings or stories – mine include the 1966 Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sightings; the infamous “swamp gas” sightings.

But have any of these classic sightings given us a clue to the UFO enigma? Nope. So listing them is a futile, silly endeavor, that passes for research for some “ufologists” but they are fun to read, right?

UFOs, String Theory, Quantum Gravity

Physics has become as discombobulated and goofy as “ufology.”

String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins [Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, 2010] presents a pithy overview of string theory and quantum physics; an overview that shows just how crazy the study of physics has become, and how physicists have resorted to mathematics as a kind of abracadabra to help them find an answer to the mysteries of the Universe that discombobulate them.



Ufology, that faux research sobriquet use by UFO hobbyists to provide cachet for their irrational attempts to uncover the nature of UFOs, is loopier than string theory, but is also encumbered by overt pathological participants whereas physicists keep their pathology suppressed, masking it with calculus and other mathematical formulae.

Physicists are trying to discover the reality of the Universe.



Ufologists once tried to uncover the mystery of flying saucers and then generic UFOs, but have since devolved into a babbling clique of pseudo-researchers who are so flummoxed by the enigma they once hoped to explain that they are now babblers of nonsense that borders on total insanity.

The UFO phenomenon is not amenable to mathematics, it seems – but who has tried to use math to provide a theoretical paradigm?



Moreover, UFOs have attracted crazies of all types, while physics (quantum, string, and classical) attracts brilliant loonies who see beyond the prosaic and mundane to theoretical models of the Universe that may provide profound truths of our existence.

The study of UFOs takes us nowhere and thus far has only provided babbling of a pathological kind. (See Alfred Lehmberg’s ditherings for example.)

One holds out hope for a rational denouement in the realm of physics (string theory notwithstanding).

But in the realm of UFOs? One should keep their distance, remaining aloof and disconnected, if only to remain compos mentis.

The Best UFO Case, Ever???

Our friend, film-maker Paul Kimball, along with once prominent UFO researcher Brad Sparks consider a UFO incident from 1957 to be the very best incident to offer proof of UFOs.

It is the so-called RB47 bomber confrontation, as it were, with a UFO in July 1957.

Here’s Mr. Kimball’s essay on the incident, from his film, Best Evidence:



While Mr. Kimball is seemingly obsessed with this UFO sighting, we find it evidentiarily boring.

A plane was followed by a UFO, which was seen by some members of the crew, spotted on radar, and apparently interacted with the plane’s radar.

The Air Force, as is its wont, said the crew was tailed by and taken in by another aircraft in the area, as noted in Mr. Kimball’s film.

The Air Force was obviously maliciously stupid as usual, but the sighting is hardly the theochristic UFO event that Messieurs Kimball and Sparks think it is.

It doesn’t come near to explaining what a UFO is, nor does it provide overt clues that lead to a possible explanation. It is merely a well-witnessed sighting of a strange thing in the sky.

We would hope that Mr. Kimball gets over his obsession with this beleaguered sighting, and apply his noteworthy UFO acumen to sightings and incidents that resonate in more meaningful ways.

RB47 is just another sighting of an anomaly that requires more scrutiny than that provided by the details inherent in this admittedly intriguing, but ultimately soporific case.

The Mystery of Aliens [Part 2]

Our earlier assessments about the gods and heroes of old differing from the extraterrestrial aliens of the flying saucer/UFO (modern) era needs to be supplemented apparently, as it has flummoxed some visitors to our blog(s).

Our premise, if there is one, is that the gods/heroes of ancient times were barely different from the humans who observed and recorded their visitations; whereas the alien beings of flying saucer lore (mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, aside from the alleged Space Brothers of the “contactee” tales) were either dwarfish or grotesque.





Moreover, we accept some ancient texts as (almost) literal…



And we find some accounts, as in The Old Testament of the Holy Bible [Confraternity-Douay Version] to be very intriguing (and human-like); e.g., Exodus 4:24

The Mayan Popul Vuh [Translated by Dennis Tedlock, Touchstone Books, NY, 1985/1996] is a source for extant renderings of the original Popul Vuh which dates, reliably from about 1550 A.D., but represents ancient oral and written texts of the early Mayans going back at least 1000 years.



The text contains creation stories similar to that found in The Hebrew/Christian Bible in Genesis.

And the gods, described therein, while adorned with animal parts and recounted as having grotesque accoutrements, were essentially human-like in appearance. [Page 145
ff.]



The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains descriptive similar to that in the Popul Vuh and precedes the Mayan book by several thousand years.



Most readers here are familiar with (or should be) the Egyptian iconography and the association with the ancient alien theory of Erich von Daniken at al.

Again, the gods of Egypt, while often adorned with animal parts, remain human-like in action and appearance, especially after the theological thrust of Akhenaton [circa 1354 B.C.]



From the text:

Åmen-Ra…president [sic] of all the gods, beautiful god, beloved one….the gods adore him…The gods love the smell of Him…the gods cast themselves down at his feet…the gods acclaim him, and he stretcheth out his hand to him that loveth him. [Page 108, The Book of the Dead, University Books, Secaucus, NJ, 1960].

Nothing pungent, odorous, or ugly there.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead can be traced back to the 12th Century with antecedents attributable to the 8th Century [after Christ].



The gods of Tibetan lore were described therein thusly:

Blessed Vajrasattva-Aksobhya will appear before you….His body is blue in colour, he holds a five-pointed vajra in his hand and sits on an elephant throne, embracing his consort Buddha-Locana, He is accompanied by the two male bodhisattvas…the two female bodhisattvas…[Page 43, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala Books, Berkeley, 1975].



Nothing grotesque or dwarfish there.

Then there is lacunae where the gods (and their minions) disappear, until the Christ incarnation and the appearance of Mohammed’s Allah [6th Century A.D.] and perhaps the appearance of Jesus to Jeanne d’Arc in the 1400s [A.D.] and possibly the visitation of god’s mother Mary at Lourdes [1858] and Fatima [1917].

Finally we have the visitation of weird, little beings outside or near flying saucers, a few years before the ubiquitous arrival of little gray beings of an almost benign nature.



Again, we pose the query, why such a dichotomy in nature, physically mostly and somewhat in behavior?

The early descriptions allow for a divine patina to the ancient “visitors” while the modern visitors hardly come of as divine in any way – pasty, wan, and frail or so grotesque that they invite revulsion rather than the glorification like that by those who provided ancient accounts.

Why?

Quantum and String Theories for Dummies?

Wiley Publishing Company has two books, in its Dummies series, about quantum mechanics and/or string theory:

Quantum Physics for Dummies by Steven Holzner [2009, 321 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



String Theory for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones with Daniel Robbins [2010, 366 pages, $19.99, Wiley Publishing, NJ]



Holzner’s book is, as far as we can determine, geared to college students or advanced high schoolers who are adept at mathematics of an advanced kind (Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus particularly).

Jones and Robbins provide an overview of quantum physics and string theory without a total immersion (as Holzner insists) in mathematics.

If you’re looking for a cogent assessment of string theory, which is in a category rightfully called a quantum field theory, get the Jones/Robbins book.

If you are a math genius – and we accent “genius” – Holzner’s book will satisfy. It won’t enlighten you about quantum mechanics in a philosophical way but it can lead you through the abstruse mathematics of quantum theorizing.

Holzner’s book, in our estimation, is not a Dummies book, per se. It’s a tome on rarified mathematics, which science and physicists use to remain arcane and aloof.

Jones with Robbins, on the other hand, empathize with readers who want to know more about quantum and string theory and provide a door to understanding both.

We’ll be presenting material from the Jones book upcoming.

As for the Holzner book, we’ll leave that for those who think science is furthered by use of mathematics rather than clear statements of logic and hypothesizing, in plain English.

The Mystery of Aliens

Ancient Astronaut theorists posit the idea that the messengers and gods of old were extraterrestrial visitors, which is not necessarily a faulty supposition, considering the circumstantial “evidence” presented to bolster the hypothesis.



The visitors were not gray with large, almond-shaped eyes as they are rendered today by descriptives.



In mythology and religious-oriented works, the visitors of old were manifested by an aura that bespoke something otherworldly but not grotesque.



Those visitors often mated with human beings, as recounted in the Genesis account of the Hebrew Bible [6:1]:

...The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took themselves wives from whomever they chose. God said, ’My spirit will not continue to judge man forever, since he is nothing but flesh. His days shall be 120 years’. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also later. The sons of God had come to the daughters of man and had fathered them. They were the mightiest ones who ever existed, men of renown.



And they also appear in the Greek myths, as Gods, whose dalliances produced such Greek Heroes as Achilles and Heracles.



And Merlin, the great wizard of the Arthurian legends, was said to have been fathered by an Incubus. [Bulfinch]



In the 1950s, flying saucer “occupants’ – as reported by observers – were usually grotesque or small, bizarre creatures, akin to the little people folklore of the British Isles.



In the 1960s, those visitors morphed into the so-called “grays” which evolved out of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction saga.



There is a dispute, extant, about what Betty Hill really described, at first, about her “abductors” – mostly having to do with their noses. But the “creatures” she allegedly encountered eventually came into being as the ubiquitous UFO people pictured when UFO occupants are discussed:



The question posed is this…

What happened between 5,000 years ago when the Sumerians pictured their “gods” and the modern era when UFO beings are described? [Intelligent Life in the Universe, Shklovskii/Sagan, Delta, 1966]



That is, why has the intruders’ physiognomy changed?

Yes, we accept the reality behind the myths and Biblical renditions of gods (or messengers from above).

We also think that some relatively recent observations of creatures nearby, what some call, UFOs or, better, flying saucers, are true also, whether created as an illusion or actually as perceived.



(The alien abduction phenomenon, which remains controversial and not proven, has been, in one form or another, around since the beginning of oral and written history, as anyone familiar with mythology and religious texts knows.)

There is a mystery in all this, one that is connected in all its aspects by the similarities in the visitations.

The difference lies in how the “visitors” appeared, not in how they acted, but what they looked like.



Are there, or were there, two different classes of beings – some actually gods (or imagined as such) and some actually extraterrestrials (or imagined as such)?

It’s a mystery, either way…..

(And yes, we’ve covered this before, in 2007)