After my long silence, during which nothing has gotten my attention to single out from the cacophony of everyday misguidedness that is running our country, I hope you'll take some time to look at this long post, all of which I think you'll find interesting. Now no skipping to the end, but, when you get there, some absolutely remarkable treats await you.

People in the crop circle world were excited about Peter Jennings doing a two-hour heavily promoted primetime show about UFOs o­n ABC last Thursday. We hoped this first serious report by a major TV network would open the door to the crop circles story. While the UFO situation must leave you speculating, the crop circle phenomenon would involve a leap to where the evidence undeniably points to not-us. And to way ahead of us.

Jennings presented some amount of what remains inexplicable, and did point to government disinformation o­n the subject, so to the uninitiated the show would have seemed objective. However, what was noteworthy wasn't what was included but what was excluded. The absence of John Mack, whom I've been writing about of late (On the Passing of a Great Man: JOHN MACK and Bending the Arc of the Universe Toward Justice ), was symptomatic of its glaring omissions. Mack, a Harvard professor and a Pulitzer Prize winner, as well as being more credentialed than any of the people who were presented was the world's leading authority o­n the abductee experience. He would have taken the show to a transcendent level.

Beyond the simplistic question, “Are UFO's (and crop circles) real or aren't they?,” and the UFO scare stuff of abductees o­n operating tables, which is what this program and others in less conspicuous venues have focused o­n, UFOs and crop circles give us food for thoughtful appraisal. Thanks mostly to Mack's work, I know that many abductees have had extraordinarily transformative experiences (see Mack's speech below), and we'd have been beneath the surface, where issues of consciousness reside, if we had been privy to those accounts. And, regarding the circles, there's knowledge to be gleaned from those who've delved into them deeply and have used the circles to produce such things as a stunning geometry textbook by a high school math teacher, a crop circle geometry course at the University of Manchester, new geometric theorems discovered in the circles by the head of Boston University's Astronomy Department, and, most spectacular of all, a new revelation recently discovered by a brilliant geometer of a progression of ever more sophisticated solutions to an ancient geometric puzzle that the circles offer up.

Some cogent commentaries have been written about the shortcomings of the Jennings special, which manipulated us to stay in curiosity rather than encouraging us to get ignited. So nothing new to report here — manipulation by the powers that be goes back to the 1940s, when the government first took action to marginalize thoughts of penetration by an otherness to kookland. Those who saw the program know about that government disinformation because it was, indeed, presented — perhaps as some of a few bones we got to make us think everything was meaty — but here are two pieces that will add greatly to anybody's skeletal smarts.

ON PETER JENNINGS UFO UNDOCUMENTARY

By Budd Hopkins

During the past year the Jennings producers interviewed me a number of times, and because I sensed what they had in mind, I made, as a preemptive strike, a number of careful, highly specific observations about the UFO abduction phenomenon. All of these crucial points — recorded by ABC o­n videotape — were designed to underline the physical reality of UFO abductions and to demonstrate the implausibility of current skeptical explanations.

To its shame, ABC suppressed ALL of these observations.

I knew, of course, that the skeptics' favorite explanation du jour is impossibly simple: abduction reports, they believe, are all due to misperceived “sleep paralysis.” Ranking as a distant second is another erroneous belief: abduction reports, they say, “ONLY emerge under hypnosis,” and since hypnosis is “totally unreliable,” all abduction reports must be discarded. In the light of these tediously familiar errors and misstatements, I made certain in my taped interviews to explain the following:

– In the first two decades of our research, ALL of the central abduction cases involved people who were outside their houses when they were taken. NONE were lying paralyzed in their bedrooms. They were driving cars, walking, fishing, hunting and even, in o­ne famous case, driving a tractor o­n a farm. “Sleep paralysis” as a blanket explanation of UFO abductions is therefore, ipso facto, a ludicrous non-starter. Nevertheless ALL of my insistent statements o­n this point were eliminated by the producers.

– Second, I indicated that there are many abduction reports involving two, three, six or more people who were taken simultaneously and whose highly detailed recollections are virtually identical. This fact alone eliminates not o­nly “sleep paralysis” but “fantasy-proneness” or any other idiosyncratic psychological aberrations as triggering causes. My descriptions of these many cases of multiple abductions were likewise completely suppressed by the producers.

– Third, I showed the interviewers many photos of, again, virtually identical scoop marks, consistent straight-line scars and ground landing traces at abduction sites, and other physical sequelae. ALL of these vivid photographic examples of physical evidence were suppressed by the producers.

– Fourth, I was not alone in making these points. My colleague Dr. David Jacobs was asked by ABC to carry out a hypnotic regression for the camera, but since the woman he chose had been abducted in the daytime while driving a car, the case did not fit ABC's “sleep paralysis” agenda and was thus not o­nly suppressed, but Dr. Jacobs's many hours of taped interviews were also scrapped.

– Fifth, I made it very clear that perhaps 30% of all the abduction reports collected by researchers are recalled WITHOUT THE AID OF HYPNOSIS, a fact which renders the issue of hypnosis moot. This point was also suppressed by the producers whose o­nly goal, it appeared, was to eliminate any data that contradicted their transparently false debunking hypotheses.

Despite my having presented — and reiterated — the points above, the producers chose to trot out o­n camera two debunking scientists (whose experiments with a mere handful of subjects have yet to be taken seriously by the psychological community) to buttress the untenable “sleep paralysis” theory, the false “no physical evidence” claim, and the demonstrably untrue “it's all hypnosis” assertion. The smug presentations of these two would-be experts were accompanied by the producers' lurid “reenactments” of “sleep paralysis” phenomena, complete with flashing lights and spooky music. The taped testimony of a serious mental health professional like Dr. John Mack was likewise suppressed, along with my statement that over the years eight psychiatrists and numerous other mental health professionals had come to me about their own UFO abductions. The producers' obvious goal was to conceal the fact that within the mental health community there are many professionals who look with amusement o­n the “sleep paralysis” theory, and who accept the physical reality of UFO abductions.

So what can o­ne say about such a deliberately dishonest presentation as the Peter Jennings “Seeing is Believing” take o­n abductions? Perhaps o­ne can o­nly shrug and ask, yet again, the incurious members of the press and the many blinkered, conservative scientists to pull their heads out of the sand and join us in our work. Whatever o­ne's personal attitude toward the UFO abduction phenomenon, science insists that an extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation. What ABC served up o­n Thursday night was, instead, an extraordinary whitewash and a brutal suppression of the evidence for what may well be the most portentous event in human history.

Peter Jennings and his staff should be ashamed.

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PETER JENNINGS AND UFOS: SPINNING AND DECEIVING

By Richard M. Dolan

Within the UFO community, this was the most anticipated media event in a long time, perhaps since the 50th anniversary of Roswell in 1997. Cable networks, such as the History Channel and SciFi Channel, have been getting into the mix with documentaries for some time, but the major networks have been silent. And whenever, occasionally, there was a treatment of the subject, it was to debunk.

So when it appeared that ABC was attempting to do something “serious,” a few people asked me what I thought would happen — especially since I have written previously that I absolutely did not believe that a major network would be able to handle this subject in a forthright manner.

To such readers, I predicted that ABC would not completely debunk UFOs, but it would not endorse them. I said under no circumstances would there be any hint of credence given to a conspiratorial angle, and that I would be shocked if any mention was made of deep black military technology or of claims that we are in possession of alien technology and bodies…

These predictions turned out to be true. Although I have to say I was surprised by the number of pre-Special commentators who seemed to think that this event could trigger some form of immanent disclosure…

The program essentially worked by building up something of a legitimate-looking case, a kind of “bringing out the best evidence” (which was not the best evidence), then puncturing the case with the help of spokespersons for the scientific community. I say spokespersons because many of them weren't scientists — you set up a straw man and then knock him down.

For about the first hour, the show provided a “pro-UFO” crescendo. We saw Art Bell and his wife discuss their UFO sighting, some Phoenix lights video, and (in my opinion) a very good handling of the Illinois “Cop” sighting of 2000. The space given to skeptics for most of that first hour was limited, although peppered into various places so you didn't forget about them.

The next segment provided some history, of a sort. For anyone who knows this material, this was extremely basic and low level…I understand that you have to walk before you can run, and it's not realistic to expect ABC to condense a topic with such complexity into a mere two hours. But what we had was sheer spin.

Jennings repeats the U.S. government position (a lie) that it is not in the business of investigating UFOs. Well, that essentially removes the military from this discussion.

But why, during the days of Project Blue Book, when the Air Force did have a public investigation of UFOs, did they dishonestly debunk so many reports? ABC showed that Blue Book was dishonest — that it was never a legitimate investigative effort. Here was an opportunity for honest journalism to attack some significant issues.

Instead, we “learn” that the orders to debunk UFO reports were in order to remove the threat of clogged communication channels caused by a hysterical public. Nothing to do with the objects themselves.

While the recounting of the 1968 Minot AFB UFO encounter was well done, the opportunity for asking some serious questions was ignored. Such as, what could that object have been? Or, what is the likelihood that this incident had repercussions within the military-intelligence community hierarchy that were beyond Blue Book?

That was essentially the first hour. The balloon was expanding, albeit in a conventional and sanitized manner. Still, for much of America, I would bet that even this was pretty strong stuff.

So, it was time to let some air out.

Thus we get the SETI people. We get to hear about Jill Tarter's UFO sighting, which was actually the moon (implying that all UFO sightings are conventional objects)…

Then we come to Roswell. Roswell is important because it has become the cornerstone of the “conspiracy” argument. In reality, an overwhelming argument for a UFO government conspiracy can be made without reference to Roswell, but never mind…

Jennings ceaselessly used the word “myth” to describe the Roswell crash of 1947. ABC pulled out all the stops, even seriously maligning the most persistent Roswell researcher of all, Stanton Friedman. He was given almost no air time, and was portrayed as a cheap “promoter” of the Roswell myth, like a modern day P. T. Barnum. This is absurd. Without recourse to anything but the official Air Force propaganda, Roswell was decreed by ABC to be an article of faith with no credible witnesses, and possessing “not a shred of evidence.” Roswell may or may not have been everything Friedman or other proponents have maintained, but the Air Force study is a deeply flawed undertaking that was accepted without reservation.

With a half hour to go, the special came to abductions…after a sympathetic treatment of Budd Hopkins, we get Harvard psychologists and … yes, sleep disorder paralysis. What was galling about this was the absence of the late John Mack, the other Harvard professor. Before Mack was killed last summer (some believe suspiciously) by a motorist o­n a lonely road late at night while in Britain, he had been interviewed for this special. Why was he left off? Inexcusable.

Abduction researchers will tell you that there is physicality to this experience in the form of odd and unexplainable body marks (scoops, triangular-patterned dot formations, etc.). While this is not proof of abductions, a dispassionate documentary would have dealt with this.

Finally, we reach the problems of space travel. Yes, the “distance” argument. “The aliens can't get here from there.” What was surprising was that ABC was so 19th century about all this. The speed of light barrier? C'mon. Fortunately, the inclusion of physicist Michio Kaku threw some cold water o­n this argument.

Essentially, the program came down to “he said vs. she said.” Wheels spinning while the vehicle moved nowhere.

What was notably absent were the political connections. No mention of Area 51 or S-4. No mention of black world technology. No mention of alien technology and bodies. No inclusion of Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell. For some time now, Dr. Mitchell has been saying publicly that elite sources have told him about alien bodies and technology. When a moon-walking astronaut makes such a statement, that is newsworthy.

Ultimately, by focusing o­n this as a matter of science and not of public policy or politics, the ABC special defanged a topic that is potentially explosive. For secrecy about UFOs is potentially the most destabilizing secret of all.

There were other subtle things going o­n. The depictions of Peter Davenport and Art Bell were especially interesting. Both were shot with lighting that accentuated their aloneness and provided an aura of eccentricity about them out there in the middle of nowhere, so to speak.

And what was going o­n with those commercials? Infomercials that sold products for losers, such as people who can't flip an egg, or need help organizing their teacups. These are what you expect to see o­n late night cable stations. The message is clear: people who watch UFO specials are morons.

Spin, spin, and more spin.

I do confess to wonder, however, why now? ABC could have left this topic alone. By broaching it, even in this tightly controlled manner, there is the possibility that more people will become interested in knowing more…The door may have opened just a crack, and it's always possible that events will take an unexpected turn. The special did not debunk UFOs, after all. At the end of it, as I see it, anyway, the phenomenon was still standing.

I don’t know how this will play out. My feeling is that it won't go any further, but I could be wrong. It is just possible that masses (that's us) may surprise the mighty. As a wise person said, “All revolutions are impossible until they happen. Then they're inevitable.”

And for those of you who want more John Mack — of whom I never can get enough because, in his brilliance and in his heartfulness he was poised o­n the pivot from the world's old idea to a new o­ne:

ESTABLISHING A NEW SCIENCE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
By Dr. John Mack
Florence, Italy
November 16, 2003

Thank you to the Gruppo Academico Scandicci GAUS and Paola Harris for inviting me to Florence for this conference.

What I'd like to do first is give an overview of the “so called abduction phenomena and lead into questions of how do we know or what are the ways of knowing when we are dealing with something this strange. I also will discuss the implications of this and phenomena like this for our world.

I am a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and I have a special interest in extraordinary experience. I'd like to discuss how our language shapes the experience. For instance, words like “abduction” and “alien” shape the conversation a certain way. The word “abduction” is off in two different ways: first, it implies that every person who has this encounter experience is taken against his or her will like an abduction in human terms; it also implies that each person who has an experience is physically taken, the whole body is taken up into a craft, which is also not true in all instances.

Another aspect of contact is transferring information to humans telepathically or showing us images. A lot of this information has had to do with what our species are doing that is destructive to our planet. It is as if what we are doing ecologically with the planet is creating some kind of larger problem in the galaxy. Also “the Experiencers” are given certain skills, certain capabilities that they were not given in their schooling. For instance, they may discover that they may have a great artistic ability that comes from this contact. Also they may have been given important mathematical and scientific knowledge that goes way beyond anything they learned in school and yet they are downloaded the most complicated mathematical formulas. And when the scientists and physicists recognize that there is truth coming from these individuals and sometimes more than the physicists themselves know, they recognize it as genuine. I have personally seen many examples of these things.

I'd also like to speak about the question of evidence: how do we know that this experience is true? How do we evaluate these reports and how do we determine truthfulness? For example, when I evaluate, I become clear that people of sound mind have no reason for making up this story. It is sure that they did not get it from the media because often they know more than the media. But there is something missing in what we have to evaluate or determine when a person tells us a story so bizarre, whether he/she is telling the truth and whether we should take them seriously. But as yet we have had no criteria to evaluate the truth of such encounters. So I am working o­n this and I'm just beginning to establish a Science of Human Experience.

Now in traditional science, when we observe certain phenomenon we bring some objectivity to what we have studied. But when you are trying to understand something so profound and important to a person, you can not stand back but you must enter into the consciousness of that person. So when the critics say, “What you are learning is too subjective,” here is the problem: if you are going to learn about something this profound, then the learning needs to be “intersubjective.”

So still there is the problem of discovering the truth. If I say it just feels like they are telling the truth, then this is not enough. So we have to start with the “holistic way of knowing.” This is close to what we know as intuitive knowing. It is like a knowing of the heart and a knowing of the spirit that has been part of traditional cultures for hundreds and thousands of years but has been lost in the west. I received some help in this matter from Vatican representative Monsignor Corrado Balducci who says, “We in the church take this UFO Encounter Phenomena very seriously and the reason for that is that there seem to be so many reliable witnesses. In the church, we have had centuries of having to evaluate miraculous reports by some kind of criteria and so they had to develop the notion of 'the reliable witness.'”

So I began to apply this idea of the reliable witness to these cases. How do we know who is a reliable witness? For my cases, it not o­nly had to do with the fact just that these people who were trustworthy reported something, but it had to do with the power of their communication that came across to me. I would experience with these people, when they would be reliving their experience, the most powerful vibration. I was in the presence of something awesome in its intensity. The experiencers themselves would give language to that. They would say something like, “Every cell in my body was vibrating!” When you are in the presence of that, it passes your judging mind and you feel it in your whole being.

Going back to “what is a reliable witness?”, it has to do with a resonance between the person who is reporting or sharing the experience and the clinician. It might be called “a direct knowing.” You just know with your whole being that this person is telling the truth. There are other examples of this “direct knowing” as demonstrated when the Tribunal that was hearing testimony of the torture in Bosnia questioned witnesses. The Judge said after hearing the testimony of a particular woman about how she was tortured, “I do not need any more testimony. I can just tell that it is not possible that she is not telling the truth. That is sufficient.”

Now everyone knows torture exists. That is accepted. But it is not accepted in our society that these UFO encounters exist. Therefore you need to have evidence of a pattern of similarities that is showing up in hundreds if not thousands of cases. o­ne of these experiencers is helping me out with this statement she made about witnesses: “When a witness speaks, all recognize that they have been in another realm. Sincerity and truth and power of spirit are just as measurable as inches and pounds but not in the same way.”

It is ironic that things like alien abduction encounters, UFOs, crop circles, and near-death experiences are called anomalies. In another words, in our culture what lies outside the realm of the cultural agreement about what is real is called anomalous. Therefore a huge amount of human experience is called anomalous. When I have discussed this with Native Americans, they say it is not an anomalous. We know about this. It is part of the human experience.

Establishing a new “worldview”

In the last minutes, I want to talk about the matter of a worldview and how it works. It has always been referred to as a paradigm and that has more of a scientific flavor. But I prefer to call it “worldview” because it refers to something bigger. A worldview is the way we organize reality. It is the way we believe things work. In a way it is like an instrument of navigation. Our worldview is what holds the human psyche together. What I came to realize with that Harvard Committee was that I was threatening the scientific medical worldview by which they were living. What has been the dominant worldview in our society could be called Newtonian/Cartesianism or anthropocentric humanism. It is a worldview that puts the human being at the top of the cosmic hierarchy of intelligence. The simplest term for this is scientific materialism. In this worldview, matter and energy form the primary reality and there is no larger intelligence in the cosmos. The principle method of study is objective reality, which separates the investigator from the matter that is being investigated.

Now in recent years this view, which has dominated our society, is failing. It is failing in every important element that the worldview is supposed to serve. First, there is a huge amount of phenomena which it can not explain nor deal with. There is no method of study for many things that we are talking about today. Secondly, it leads to terrible destructiveness because it treats the entire planet as simply physical resources to fight over by the most powerful and most important countries. Thirdly, scientific materialism does not give human beings any real satisfaction. It leaves us without spirit and it leaves us with an empty feeling because all it has to offer are more and more material things.

Now we have a new emerging worldview that is different. In this worldview, there is intelligence dwelling in the universe. The experience that happens to my clients is o­ne example and the beings that have come to my clients are another example. The crop formations are also evidence of this intelligence that is trying to communicate with us. Also it is a model of the universe and us which says that everything is connected with everything else, and we know that cutting edge physics is supporting this worldview. So it includes not o­nly new ways of knowing but it also involves a spiritual awakening.

This change which is happening around us is met with enmity and a great deal of resistance because there's a huge psychological, economic, and political investment in maintaining the old worldview.

I will give you o­ne example of the UFO resistance, because books being written which discuss this new paradigm are being called “new age, pseudoscientific, and psychocentric” in order to dismiss them as out of hand because some people who write such books do not hold themselves responsible to any scientific standards whatsoever.

I will conclude by speaking about the implications of this new worldview.

We see around us all kinds of forces which are supporting the emergence of this way of thinking. People around the planet are opening up to new ways of thinking. Groups, like the GAUS (GRUPPO ACADEMICO UFOLOGICO SCANDICCI), are committed to the new emerging paradigm. How would this planet be different if the emerging worldview became be the dominant worldview? We would be connected to all living beings, not just those around us, and with all nature and spirit, which would make it impossible for us to treat nature in such an exploitative way. For example, we would be able to identify with other peoples, other religions, and with all animals so we would not treat them just as products to consume. With this deeper reality, we could appreciate that we are connected to the divine, the creative principle which would be more fulfilling than the material focus that is so dominant today. So it would be like a global awakening of the heart instead of global exploitation.

I might add that “opening of the heart” has been a fundamental aspect of the alien encounter experience that I learned from my dealing with experiencers. Sometimes experiencers get information from these beings that we are not just a menace to the Earth but we are a menace to the galaxy.

In conclusion, as this emerging paradigm, this emerging worldview takes hold, we might become more responsible citizens of a galaxy instead of becoming the menace we appear to be!

John set foot in his first crop circle last summer. He was so profoundly affected that, even beyond the appreciation he expressed in his 1993 speech, he added this to his talk at the annual crop circle symposium last summer, where he was the guest speaker:

“By and large, you can't really nail down the UFO abduction phenomenon. But the crop matter, you can't deny that. There they are. They're there. It's the most dramatic, the most extraordinary crossover from the other dimension in the history of the human race as far as I can tell.”

After so much about human contraction and myopia, here are some treats from realms of just how awesome humans can be:

Russian Ice Festival: http://talk.buybelowcost.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/1686023/m/921106796

Amazing Hand Paintings: http://www.allotments4all.co.uk/yabbse/index.php/topic,6838.new.html

Chinese Watermelon Art/Sculpture: http://www.americade.info/melons.htm

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