Build It!

I mean, you'd help me build it—right? ...That place where you could go... Where answers ask the questions, and the questions don't blow smoke. Where everybody's interested and has no ax to grind... just folks concerned with clarity, if  tired flying blind? Where art is done for art's sake, just commercials for the soul -- where classics don't sell lunch meat, but will serve the truth up cold.

Exposing some unusual lies, admitting what we should despise, copping to the starry skies—a satisfaction in reprise!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? ...the stone work architecture, the streams and ponds—the shady spots... a site for our conjecture. A place to sit with back support. A spot to put your feet. Hot water from a tap that's free with air that's cool and sweet. And grass in leaves of different greens, an interwoven tapestry—splashed with reds that never fade... a painting of a rhapsody. 

A place to go—see different things, study stuff that "leaps and sings", watching close what "spreads its wings"—Imagination's wanton fling!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? . . . the stars would paint the skies, and their focus be *explicit* as they glimmer in disguise. Words take on new meaning—definitions are profound, what's heard is CD quality—somber bursts of ultra sound. And the humor is full bodied, and the laughter's not at you... Everyone's respectful—even Christians, Moslems, Jews. 

No sacred cows, or inhibitions—no phony, harmful prohibitions, examining our inquisitions—changing ~all~ the cold conditions!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? . . . the screens to show full motion, all the hardware that contains them, and the software smooth as lotion. Cameras have strange angles, and unusual fields of view to capture crystal empathy that could leave you unconfused. And a library for enjoyment with Teddy Sturgeon there on hand. Andrew Vachss will clean your clock, and then he'll help you understand. 

...Know truest love, without collusion, respect up front (it's no intrusion), examine every institution; improve, at length, your constitution!

I mean, you'd help us build it—right? ... the places by the falls in the mists of acquisition where we hear a lectern call. Where sunlight's dappled softly into shadows well perceived. Where we can talk, and eulogize the ignorance we cleave. Where space spins out unending, and the speculations call. We shan't be cheated from it; we shall laugh, and have it all! 

We'll sally forth for our detection , our senses sharpened for connections; we'll make (at once) those course corrections, choosing paths of BEST direction!

Odd Observation #12

Odd Observation #12
by Alfred Lehmberg

Outside visibility had been as terrible and opaque as a dirty milk-glass. Too, the suffocating humidity was oppressive and discouraging to an otherwise ready spirit. Indeed, I was reminded of Nipple-napper John Ashcroft's Justice Department during the catastrophic Bush administration. 

Moreover, all the effects of global warming were centered, seemingly, directly and most precisely on my exact geographic coordinates.  The bugs were held in magical abeyance by the Bounce rag; however, or I would have assuredly been driven indoors.  I'm thankful for the potential of an "indoors."

Still, they flew.

Oh admittedly, they didn't fly grandly, conclusively, or even brilliantly...  Still, they flew.

...And it's a taste ironic for me as, at the time and now. There was a lot of impassioned discussion about the end of UFOs.  

They were all going "away", going "out", or going "extinct." "Abductions were decreasing," some pontificated.  "Sightings were way down," others pronounced.  Really.

Forgetting for a moment that this got the CSICOPian Shermer/Sheaffer  skeptibunkies capering around gladly like frolicking nay-saying Net trolls, it really only aped some kind of sweaty bandwagon many seemed to be jumping on... in some "king-of-the-hill" attempt to be "first" and proclaiming some "new reality" regarding the death of UFOs?  Specious stuff and turgid nonsense then and now.  The "new reality" is not found; it is faced.

I saw it as chasing a "false plausible" in a ham-handed if  furtive attempt to appear cutting edge while avoiding the issue.  I saw it as playing into the hands of the transparently deceptive to assuage personal concerns regarding work thought done.  I saw it as pandering to the misleading, and embracing, too greedily, the decidedly flatulent ostensible.  I saw it as courting the readily sophistical, incorporating the duplicitous and so onerous captious, or being, at best, shallowly pretentious but at worst an 'evil' retrograde returning to a comforting past which never existed.  I saw it as denialist cowardice. 

Such as these favorably considers their falsehoods as right and true, and then conflate themselves with the absolute weakest of what's too easily or most conveniently presumable... the too taken for granted "conventional wisdom." They are the rigid misapplication of Occam's razor where the hypothesis must be, of needs, complicated. The are a poor man's Aristotle (reductionism) where a leavening of Plato (holism) was required.

Sightings were "down" friends and scabrous bunkies, not because UFOs were "going away," but because there were fewer people LOOKING for them those days!  People who might otherwise have been pondering the skies were, instead, only looking over worried shoulders for 'enemies', real AND imagined. They had no TIME for a puzzling enigma in the skies over their heads while staring down the barrel of a terrorist's gun!  All part of the master plan then (uneasily?) dismissed by Jerry Clark? 

Conscious or unconscious (and given less and less protection from already tolerated sociopaths by an at the time authoritarian Bush/Ashcroft administration) it was not a completely unreasonable proposal.  After all, it's only a relative few who inordinately gain as a result of our aggregate ignorance, after all.  Sociopaths ARE.  Psychopathy IS.  Conspiracy abounds. Discount these and the threats they busily precipitate at your peril!

Let me assure the interested reader that sightings were not down, then or now. "Abductions" were not decreasing in frequency, and the artless bunch over at archaic CSICOP had no hint of vindication what-so-ever.  Shermer and Robert Sheaffer  might have ceased their tiresome capering and returned to their reductionist think-cloaks, nineteenth century runes, and outdated CSICOPian Newtonics.  That's their beat.

The universe continues to resonate with a "quality" of life, undreamed by the whistling klasskurtxist*, as strange moving lights unsteadily traverse a steady starfield to MOCK the cast aspersions of those who would "wish" them away.  Rock the head back to a crisp night sky with a modicum of revealing patience and be rewarded with proof of the larger reality that will be there, eventually!  I say true.  I saw same.  Moreover, progressive humility and the avoidance of unwarranted hubris demands it.

These occurrences, that the mainstream will only trifle with, come in 'WAVES' that even a conflicted mainstream cannot ignore without blowing its cover, its facade or thin veneer of pretended rationality or open-mindedness.  

These waves are well referenced by Ruppelt, Hynek, and Vallee in decades of literature. They've been going on since time in memorial and are captured on non-faked film, recorded in credible historical ink, and chiseled into ancient and unyielding stone, "if you ken it."   These "waves" could be older than current DIRT!

The history of UFOs truly parallels our human history. Though it is decried, minimized, and derided by our suspicious social convention, the facts of their existence creep out around the edges of the coffin lid employed by garden variety CSIcopians (klasskurtxian*) employs to contain them. This should give us all more than mere pause to entertain a suspicion that some larger reality is being denied every one of us.  Something certainly is. Search a heart roundly despised and discounted by scurvy scientistics. 

UFOs are valid, it is our baseless and cowardly mainstream denial of them that is not.  Evidence of them abounds; verily, it gushes from founts.  It is photographic, historical, credibly anecdotal,  and very personal for many of us.  It's mathematical.  It flies in the face of the denial of it.  

Only the irrational fear of a knee-jerk reactionary, culturally conflicted, and philosophically myopic leadership would deny the patently obvious.  UFO's are real.  They exist and have existed since before the first human being banged one rock against the other.  We are not alone.  Everything else is a fantasy, ironically—a concoction, invention, or convenient illusion.

That's enough.  I remain watching our skies.  Read on.

*It's a word I coined. It's a mash-up of the names Philip Klass and Paul Kurtz: two CSI(COP) "heavyweights."  I'm attempting to put a name to aspects of their too hubristically anthropomorphic, unjustifiyably arrogant, and altogether cowardly philosophy.  Was that point too fine?

•  

"Klasskurtxian" is, I submit, a graceful co-mingling of Onomatopoeia and crystal self-definition, clattering concussively—if effortlessly—off the tongue and palate like a big porcelain urn of live poisonous snakes dropped in the CSI(COP) Commissary. It has a meaning easily determinable in context for just that reason, eh? 

A Star In Kansas (Part II of II)

PART II

Last time we put justified tears to rest, tried and failed to herd cats, established justifications, and were substantively lectured by people of unquestioned sincerity...

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We move on.

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Foundations laid the previous day, the next day's activity is a panoply of UFO subjecture wholly complementing the previous day's presentations, expanding the history further back then is generally known, and touching substantially on the theme of the OZUFO conference:  UFOs and Nukes.

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Butch Witkowski

First up—and right after breakfast too—embattled researcher Butch Witkowski, takes us for a walk on the dark side of the abduction phenomenon with a forensic presentation of, not "cattle" mutilation, mind you... but "human" mutilation.  Could the "other," apart from merely abducting we humans, be torturing, mutilating, and murdering us too?  The evidence seems inconclusive to this observer, but something produced the horrendous and stomach churning subjects of Witkowski's unsettling photographs, and the case he makes is not entirely dismissible.

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After a welcome break from Witkowski's punch-in-the-paranormal-gut that was his presentation—not for the squeamish—Rosemary Ellen Guiley served up more engaging and embraceable fare.  First a word about Ms. Guiley.

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Rosemary Ellen Guiley has written some 43 books, numerous papers, and is on the mastheads of several named initiatives aspiring to meld spirit and science in the name of equal time for both Plato and Aristotle, I submit.  A lovely woman such as she is, with her world class reputation and sought after schedule, could be expected to be aloof, standoffish... even arrogant and elitist.  Not so Ms. Guiley!  She was ever gracious and approachable, more a listener than a talker, and damned funny too.  Likable on all levels. Approachable at all times.  Appreciable in every regard. 

Guiley and Feschino share a table... 

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Regarding her current book, written along with her less than fortunate co-pilot on the venture: the increasingly infamous and now wholly discredited Philip Imbrogno, she explored how far back into our history the other, alien, or ET may go.  Islamic tradition parallels Christian tradition with regard to "fallen Angels," it seems.  UFOs, abductions, and close encounters abound in Textual Islam just as they do in the Bible.  Only, Islam seems to take a more balanced, informational, complete, and evocative position with regard to the reportage on their gods and angels.  This is as it pertains to angels "fallen," or otherwise.  To say that her presentation was compelling is to prosecute an understatement.  ...First-wash talk from a top drawer lady.

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Bryce Zabel

Following Guiley, Bryce Zabel returned to presage his writing partner and co-author, Richard Dolan, coming later, on the consequences of official disclosure of the outré  "other" as it pertains to the effects and affects of this "other" on human Government, Religion, Institution, and Agency (GRIA).  What will change and why?  How will GRIA change and where will these changes manifest most?  When will these changes be, not found, but faced? 

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Peter Robbins

After lunch, we regard Nuclear weapons and the UFOs—with the presumption of self-aware occupants—interested in them.  First in the breach is the always with-it and persuasive Peter Robbins to revisit the Rendalsham Forest Events: The Woodbridge and Bentwaters Base Incidents in England.  The update on current events and principals was more than interesting and of note, but special mention must be made of something else.

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Robbins extended what this writer took to be an Olive Branch to Colonel Charles Halt regarding some low-intensity conflict the Rendalsham principals had been enduring for some time and did so with humility and style.  When Col. Halt took the podium later on for his presentation he, again by this writer's estimation, accepted said Olive Branch with grace and aplomb and made a startling disclosure of his own. 

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Charles Halt

Halt reported that the enlisted men associated with the Rendalsham incident were put through a "stand-down" so bloody arduous in extremis that it involved unending debriefings of brain-washing intensity and psychotropic drugs!  That's the long and tall on this writer's take. He remarked further that it was a wonder that these brave men had any "there" there, left at all.  The question is begged: is this the way we treat brave volunteers who witness something inconvenient to a corrupt authority through no fault of their own?  I can work up little surprise if so.  Still, a startling disclosure!

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Robert Salas

Moving forward, Robert Salas took us all deep into the secret and hugely well-vetted world of the atomic Missileer, nuclear missiles, and astonishingly, effecting UFOs!  With illustration and lucid talk this Air Force veteran, retired master's engineer, and high school math/science teacher, does his society one more good turn!  
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See, he faced the ufological reality foursquare and, with no small courage, passed his experience on to the rest of us.  At the end of his presentation, I hurried backstage and told him that I was hugely impressed with his history of service and was officially bestowing upon him the "As Ufologically Sober As Stanton Friedman," award.  He had a hearty laugh and so did I... it was good, though.  He was that compelling and that convincing. This writer's read is that Salas tells the truth and nothing but.

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Colonel Charles Halt then took the mound! Number two man at Bentwaters Base in England during the infamous—and getting more so—UFO incident of 1980, he pitched a perfect game pertaining to his being on site, ground zero, for "first person testimony of the event" rights.  His story is important in the nukes & UFOs context because "everyone knows," nuclear weapons were being stored illegally at that facility in 1980!  Colonel Halt?  He fixes you with a stony expression and informs you that he is not at liberty to either confirm or deny. 

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The ranking witness to the event, he's on clear audio tape with his subordinates, a crack team of top notch Security Police—"guarding nuclear weapons," remember so, "crack" by necessity and design—as they chased close-counter, even physically touched, UFOs in the otherwise deserted forest.  This UFO was witnessed by civilian persons off the base too, reader.  This did not...as it is maintained ..."not happen"!

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The closing day of the Summit was "final history and likely implications," day.

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Feschino & Friedman

First up was my good friend, "Shoot Them Down" researcher and author Frank Feschino Jr.  His presentation regarding extant military "Shoot UFOs Down" orders, the biggest Flying Saucer Flap in US UFO history, and the whole 1952 "Summer Of Saucers"  affair... only culminated in the Flatwoods Monster situation, a presentation in itself... It is, again, the ETH so far up your nose you feel knees on your mustache as I alluded before. 

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There's a lot of military history in Feschino's 90-minute presentation, air, and ground, and just how is it that a whole battalion of infantry can be deployed to a remote area because a woman and six kids see an "owl" in the mountains?  Enthralling, to be sure, but this was not the "hit" of his presentation.

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The "hit" concerned the eight-foot square time-line-map documenting UFO activity in and around the State of West Virginia (http://tinyurl.com/3mkl4m6).  See, if the reader was informed that the furiously busy construction laboriously laid out reflected UFO activity, in and around the State, over the preceding decade, they would be impressed enough!  Though reader... ...the construction alluded to reflects only 21 HOURS worth of activity September 12, 1952... and the bulk of that in just 2 hours!  Be now properly impressed!

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Richard Dolan approaches, reader, cue the ominous music.  There's

Richard Dolan

no secret why Richard Dolan gets invited to conferences all over the planet.  Besides being a leg of my own personal Ufologically convincing "quadrature" or "Quad Riga," he has for many years (along with Feschino, Friedman, and the not attending Robert Hastings) been my ufological goto.  Dolan is the very portrait of the person one would think is needed to break the unsettling if inevitable news to the rest of us.  Still warmly approachable like the college professor/hero in a quality 1950s Science Fiction film, he's tall, fit, and hugely eloquent.

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Dolan envisions a breakaway civilization inside the civilization we know, if unknown to you and I.  This civilization within a civilization may avail themselves of wondrous technologies purloined from crashed saucers and strange deals with their builders, and, catbirds in catbird seats, it could be this secret civilization keeping official admission of such at bay.  Cogently opining on the inevitability of that "official admission" or disclosure, Dolan explores the affects and effects of the supposed secret civilization on its parent civilization.  Good stuff raising the hair on the back of one's neck to be sure—one has to face fear to mitigate fear, reader—but, still, not to be compared with Dolan "one on one."

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Dolan had me out for a beer, once, during a break in the evening program where he wolfed down a Veggie pizza... and he told me 'stuff' that made me dizzy... made me feel like he'd turned gravity down somehow, real light in the seat and "Twilight Zonie." One on one with Dolan is a memorable experience.  It wasn't the beer, folks.

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What 'stuff'? What you'd expect, on reflection. Big names undisclosed in dark, still smoke-filled rooms, discussing the unknowable, to us, but pedestrian to them like they live in another reality or dimension entirely... a select group of human beings availed of Technology so advanced it's real magic in a synthesis of mind and material... provoking "breakaway civilization" and facilitating a different "kind" of human, altogether. Shocking!

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Head swimming 'stuff'. Iterated justifications for why we are, at all, interested in this 'stuff', eh?  Dolan instructs that our interest is justified, brothers and sisters! Yea and verily!

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Steve Bassett

Closing... the reader can say what he wants about final speaker Steve Bassett.  That he is a belligerent bombast in the vein of a ufological Alex Jones.  That he's a UFO guy never seeming to get around to talking about UFOs.  That he hijacks conferences with talk about secret underground cities, FEMA concentration camps, suitcase and shipping container nukes used on the heartland of the US and seaports coast-borne... 

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Though, consider: it might be that he genuinely feels that an across the board disclosure, given the ufological reality outlined by most of the previous speakers, may be just the thing to preclude the use of those aforementioned nukes, those proposed concentration camps created in the wake of atomic blackmail, tens of thousands of children starving to death, presently, on this planet every day, oceans dying in turgid toxic filth... all this where we have an un-admitted wherewithal with regard to secret technology that could mitigate all these tragedies?  Yet, a result of reptilian sociopathy, our unelected leadership would deny the race of us these mitigating boons.  Well, this writer is provoked to a little belligerence of his own.  You go, and God's speed Mr. Bassett!

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John Leatham

Finishing up, let me congratulate, again, OZUFO Summit producer, Mr. Dan Lauing, a good man of sincere passion with the courage of honest conviction to say what he thinks needs to be said, able to provide a platform for others to express similar unsettling sentiments, and then making that so, compellingly, so.   Also, acknowledged here is John Leatham's wholly selfless quality value added.  OZUFO is not done without yourself, Sir.

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I look forward to the next substantive conference.  There is a new star in Kansas.

Space / Time & Surface Area

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Yeah, that’s right, I’m a liberal! But not in the way that you’d think. I’m not well aligned with the Dem's party line; it's Republicans needing good "shrinks."
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T rue, I began as a ‘knee jerk’ Republican, still, wrapped in a "gauze"—callous youth. I’d learned I'm expected to lean on the Bible for succor, and favor, God's truth...
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Well, that has been tried and rejected, as that "leadership" flies in big jets, they prey on the people like raptors still willful to cousin their "dinner," like pets.
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Still, I'd finished my job in the Army, and looking for something to do, I found inspiration in the stressed perspiration of the schooling I’d, finally, pursue.
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...Though it didn’t take long with "new" reading, and I shook that endeavor with teeth!  Much *truth* I’d been holding, and found so ennobling... ...Was specious... facile and weak.
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Grammar and High School were dodges I'd found, of shame so obscenely enshrined; they’d made it all pretty... what I found was a pity. They'd stretched and distorted! They'd lied!
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...The Crusades were an honest enterprise, then, to take *Holy* land, back, from its thieves? ...And, J. Edgar Hoover was not an abuser IN WAYS EVEN KNOWN? DISBELIEVED!
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It was a "pulp fiction", our rogue CIA, selling hard dope—ensuring class dregs? No policemen-caused "friction" in pre-staged "restrictions," so creating their "bad guys," instead?
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...Or, UFO’s would define who's weak minded? Our "environment" is at our command? "Manifest destiny" created no agony? The U.S. is faultless! Understand?

~

...So I worked, and I studied all day and at night, 

and I wept as I read startling pages, contrite. 

I drew from my texts, and their tracts... and those papers... 

I gleaned from strange pages amassed with a stapler...
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I’ve done it for years now... can never stop doing it. 

My mind is a sponge, and a muse is imbuing it. 

The methods, strange knowledge, and facts of the ages 

are found in a story spun out of these pages!

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Unlocked, and unfettered, now *free* from "disease," 

I find what was Holy... oft made-of-clay knees! 

I demand honest answers, and I brook no intolerance! 

Decried is a rich man’s convenient mal-competence!

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I find, late in life, with... a "learning which shatters"

... a liberal new ethic addressing what matters! 

It is critical, though tolerant in what it construes. 

It is, but of course... just my own Alien View.

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Please, let me proclaim this to all of my friends, 

who’ll agree with the best as regards "liberal ends"... 

...Unwashed and mal-learned? One’s "conservative obsessive." 

It's learning provoking the "liberal progressive."

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So, I've no apology and make no pretense 

to treat with respect the conveniently dense. 

Our systems degrade us with all disrespect, 

they lead us to breadlines and practice neglect. 

Solutions, of needs, fall to you... and to me. 

What's then required? It's voting BLUE, see!

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lehmberg2002@gmail.com

http://www.alienview.net/

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Odd Observation #11

I've gotten inquiries from folks wondering if I've been "seeing" anything, lately.  The short answer is, yes.
  

I've always said that all one has to do is go outside at night and rock the head back with just a smidgen of anticipating patience and a dash of rational open-mindedness.  There is stuff up there to see, good reader, and that stuff generally rocks the "established" world with the sting of reality's bee.  That's a good thing.  "Why" is difficult to describe except that it is the "kingdom at hand," inspired by an intuition harbored since childhood.

I was back from the west, finally, my now late Mother on the coat-tails of "for the better" on my leaving of her... (she would soon be living with me), and had been back for days... subsequently returned to soupy southern skies of lower Alabama and the lights that pass, flicker, and crawl teasingly within them, lights unheralded by NASA's J-PASS... Time passages...

Somebody knows, eh?

The morning of the second was especially clear and cool, disappointingly. A morning flight from Sacramento (to the south of Anderson) five hours and some change later, crowded the allotted time outside to watch our festooned sky.  ...But it should be no surprise, at this point, that they were there as well, three at once, flying in definite formation, the trail object playing catch-up to the left echelon of silent objects flying before it...

I first noticed them below and to the left of Polaris, about 40 degrees elevation, at 3:35 Central time traveling west to east.  All three lights were identical in color and brightness, about magnitude one, and were never closer than one degree (the objects in left echelon preceding) and never farther away from one another then three degrees (the object in trail, catching up).  The echelon traveled at a rate of 3 degrees a second and the trail object slightly faster.  The trail object was decidedly closing with the echelon.  

The impression was that these three silent objects were in one another's vicinity. I watched them until they were obscured in the tree-line to the northeast. The silence of their majestic passage was deliciously discomfiting.

About half the nights since I've been back from California (...my mother was ~painting~ again when I left!) ...have been either obscured with morning fog, concealed by overcast, or shrouded by storm clouds. On those remaining mornings with good visibility the gnats, flies, and mosquitoes, refreshed  by all the wet weather, would have their buggy headbanger's blood banquet in honor of my return... but I know the "secret" of the Bounce™ anti-static dryer cloth.  I could sense their woeful disappointment as they moved off sullenly to look for dogs, squirrels, and birds (…thanks, Mom).

The strange objects were there, of course, every time I had the ceiling and visibility required to detect them, and I'm provoked once again to wonder where they come from when I see them... where they go when I don't, and how many facockta satellites am I supposed to be able to see, on a day to day basis, anyway?  Officiality is not adding up with regard to a disingenuous implication of an erstwhile predictability for these sightings.  "Two plus two" becomes "3" or maybe "5"...

Many objects too, reader, of varying brightness, displaying colors of white through yellow to red, and moving at different speeds on different tracks (including due west!)... these graced the skies as I watched them... the prosaic non-prosaic.  God, but what are they?

I could go on about the magnitudes, elevations, and azimuths for all the sightings.  I could specify rates, specific times, and individual colors, but I think I've demonstrated my ability to count a measured bean (even an anomalous one!) in the previous years of these odd observations.  

There's no need for the reader to have to wade through all that.  Besides, my purpose here is to get the reader to go outside for awhile, themselves, ...measure their own rates, times and azimuths... so they can see for themselves what their conflicted mainstream would airily (and suspiciously!) deny.  The reader could have her own horizons vastly expanded as has happened with me and myriad persons I've encountered in my ufological trials.

There's a strange comfort in those expanded horizons that is hard to define, reader,  as I said before, but it's like you can look out on these silent, tiny, and purposeful orbs with a cool morning breeze on your face and be reassured (in as much as the hijacked mainstream won't own up to them) that there is something really there… beyond the confines (and outside of the box!) of that jealously conflicted mainstream.  Something... further... I don't know... but something that does not dance to a skewed mainstream's duplicitous tune. 

If that object can do that, stand solidly without the mainstream's (even grudging) support, perhaps each of us (who would want to) might find a way to do that, too.  Think of the strides we will be able to take as a species then!  And that's worth all the money you have.  That's worth all the money that anybody has.

I remain watching our skies. 

Read on!

A Star In Kansas (Part I of II)

Photo by Bryce Zabel

A Star In Kansas

by Alfred Lehmberg

PART I

Map Navigation, whether it be 3D in the air between unfamiliar strings of seemingly identical terrain features—where, by the way, legitimately offended persons shoot guns and missiles at you—or, on an equally unfamiliar two-dimensional ground fraught with Fast Food joints and fundamentalist churches firing slower, more "time-released" missiles... ...Maps have always been that proverbial royal pain.  

"Old map navigation" included frequent sick dreads provoked where you didn't know where you were, believing you missed a turn, and were too sparsely punctuated with little dopamine squirts provoked by locations joyfully confirmed. Not so, currently.  

Those days are passed.  Now it's all dopamine.

As I've written before, 21st Century technologies turn the aforementioned dreary roadway aggravations—dangerous back-tracks and their precipitated road-rages—into an opportunity to be enlightened from a comfortable chair in learned halls and erudite classrooms.  Verily, it's a little like driving down the road while able to watch movies and documentaries.

This is the contrarily enjoyed activity, reader, while an unending cascade of strangely presented sceneries slides passed in substantive synchronicity, a preparation for the destination and not something odious to be endured, necessarily, in its regard, you see?  It's the trip, not the destination. One has heard that before. The trip can be icing on the destination's cake.

That destination?  Kansas, friend, the bona fide beating heart in the American heartland, world breadbasket, and host to at least two of my "Best EVERs" for satisfaction's burgers or buffet brunch under 20 dollars.  The Beer would have been on the list, too, but I've lived in Germany where beer for breakfast is not entirely out of line, eh?  The beer just missed.

Specifically, I was in Lawrence, Kansas, home of Kansas University's fighting Jayhawks, and the town which put the threat and abject horror of nuclear war on the global map as a result of its participation in that world famous film, The Day After.  Lawrence had a decided hand in the break-up of the Soviet Union, I suspect, and serious arms reduction. 

It does seem odd that Lawrence keeps popping up on the frightening and even wild-assed paranormal screen via treatments the likes of the recently re-released Dark Skies, a first season episode of Supernatural, and another atomic melodrama called, Jericho. This only begins the list.

Enter conference producer Dan Lauing.  Lauing is an imposing figure, looking more like a Jayhawks fullback able to pull off deserving heads for hacky-sacks than what he ends up to actually be: one of the more deeply feeling human beings I've ever had the honor to make the acquaintance of, eh?  He's no pussy-willow, mind you, even with his heart worn decidedly on a sleeve.  A master stone-worker, he effortlessly top-kicks lasting projects to the tune of 85 men employed at a pop, so no shrinking violet or retiring willow, he.  He's got something well bagged and together, still... he can cry.

He cried when he met me at the Eldridge Hotel.  He cried when he opened the conference across the street at Freedom Hall.  He cried until the third day with many of the presenting persons he introduced.  No, he was by report not ordinarily so emotive, and no, he didn't blubber or wail or produce mucous like he might have, but his eyes would fill and there would come a quaver in his voice that necessitates a short stoppage, a turn away from the audience and a struggle to regain control.  Some critics smirk and sneer with no thought to what might produce these inconvenient and embarrassing tears.

I've given thought.  Those self-disclosing, inconvenient, and embarrassing tears are actually pretty laudable, eminently condonable, completely understandable, and altogether forgivable. 

See, Lauing is a historian of sorts, in addition to other substantive talents, and he is well aware of the whole... suitcase-nukes-sailed-surreptitiously-into-American-harbors-by-well-provoked-and-handily-facilitated-enemies, scenario, eh?  His home town, one remembers, put the horror of the nuclear holocaust on the map as I've already pointed out, and, indeed... this threat, complicated by documented UFOs demonstrating seeming input to the very disposition of those same nuclear weapons, is the running theme of his first annual OZUFO conference.

Consider, friend.  You put together regular travailed life with the burdens of producing that "first-time"—period—UFO conference.  Easier said than done.  

Entailed is the perceived attendant clutch of needy ufological cats (Conference participants) refusing to be remotely herded.  This ablates, always! 

Mix in some intimate knowledge of the dangers of nuclear power and their brother weapons of mass destruction, and then leaven all that with the breaking mainstream report that... radioactive 747s are arriving, presently, from Japan!  Your worst fears seemingly realized, reader, on the first day of your same-themed conference painstakingly produced for months... Well, that may produce some tears from the strongest man.  We will say no more regardingtears produced by Dan Lauing. 

Dan Lauing, a smart man, is additionally a good man of undeniable character with the courage of conviction to put his money where his conscience is.  That's all one really has to know about Dan Lauing.

Exorcising, first, the non-sequitur of most remaining negatives, there has additionally been some discussion with regard to the Lawrence, Kansas Oz Summit as "not enough about UFOs."  This is a comment valid on its face and forgivable given that a UFO conference really should lean in the direction of UFOs, sure.  That seems a no-brainer.  Only...

Believing something should be... a way the believer believes it should be... might preclude what something could be, to a degree; can you agree?  To believe the one is to disbelieve the other which might aspire to something even more pertinent.  See how limiting "belief" can prove to be? 

The conference still was about UFOs, actually, but not just the UFOs themselves. That's been done in extremis, and badly too. Lauing tried to reach a little further, even where grasp was exceeded.  Reach trains grasp, remember; I believe it's obvious.

No, their effect was explored.  Their consequence was investigated.  Their implications were considered.  Their history was examined.  Their abject and utter strangeness was regarded.  There's a lot more going on with UFOs than what one sees in the usual yellow pages, eh? 

Indeed, UFOs have an eclectic gravitas not only stranger than we know but stranger than we can know, you know?  All that bears more regard than it gets, sadly.  Still, novelty can only be wrested from the darkness exposed by the revealing light.  This conference aspired to be that revealing light.

For the attendee paying real attention? This conjecture was born out rather well in a manner acceptable where it wasn't objective and enlightening... where it wasn't specific, for my money... a wholly productive, ultimately useful, and decidedly unusual affair it proved to be, if you're paying attention.

See, there more to UFOs than merely UFOs.  There's the imposition of seeming UFO occupants on our fellow human beings heralded by Kim Carlsberg, for example, as they are made flesh in the stunning reproduction of their collected artwork and textual explications.  

Little on nuts and bolts of UFOs, agreed, but these corporeal craft strongly suggest "organized" occupancy. They suggest something so extant if enigmatically forsworn in day and night time skies. They would seem to have a decided and existential impact on all manner of persons Ms. Carlsberg beautifully iterates.  It is high strangeness compelling the compelled, who in turn illustrate it for the rest of us.  Thanks, Kim.

Indeed, the late John Mack, MD, Ph.D., Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard Chair, and open abduction researcher—in (a now dubious) public dismissed as a "naïve dreamer" missing the mark by the late artist Budd Hopkins—allowed as even a purely psychological explanation to the Abduction conundrum would be in itself a complete astonishment! Though, the altogether non-dissimilar "experiential" thread Mack had discovered vis a vis his research into perceived abductions (illustrating a not-bad-if-uncomfortable-enlightenment-over-the-necessarily-hell-borne-assignation of Jacobs/Hopkins, so to speak) was the rule, not the exception. Moreover, Macks books reflected the same sentiment.

The 'other' as potential, perhaps, to step up... not to be cast back to fiery pits of a jealous God's damnation!   Better, then, not worse... and?  Inevitable, anyway!  See what can be perceived paying a more non-predisposed attention?  

"Amour Mama, not cheap display!"  Joni Mitchell

Then there's Sam Maranto, my new favorite guy in the rough and tumble UFO mine-field.  Wife Julie will be left for a subsequent article I'm sure, although I will always remember her as bringing me, literally, to my knees...

Sam and Julie in repose!

But, back to Sam!  What an unpredicted seeming nexus for singular wit, aplomb under pressure, and a genuine monumental style. What a guy!

Sam puts UFOs in the street with the savvy manner of the inspirational union leader where that leader's seen "the man's" books and knows a serious recompense and redistribution is in sincere order with all deliberate speed! So it is with the man's UFO "books," eh? 

You know, books with inexplicably dismissive entrees on the likes of the Tinley Park Lights, a silent craft hovering ominously above the tidy burg on numerous occasions and witnessed by hundreds. Or, when they're not just hovering ominously, they're providing an obvious hazard to civil aviation when lurking over international airports like they did at O'Hare...  

Mr. Maranto underscores the unavoidable consequence to our social system, organs of authority: losing relevancy or credibility and earning only enmity for their stark betrayal of our trust in these UFO matters, et sig al.  These won't evade public wrath forever.

Frank n' Stan!

Next comes more support for existential UFOs—Roswell in Reasonable Redux.  No clueless groans, please.  First Stanton Friedman frames the problem set on Existential UFOs as only he can.  Something substantive happened at Roswell, for example, it was covered up by the authorities who re-substantiate evolved lies over and over again, periodically, in a manner as stunningly unimaginative as it is annoyingly stupid.  It's their running official theme, Mr. Friedman can handily show.

Bryce Zabel

Appearing then is Bryce Zabel, a crack creator of standout films and television series like the actually prescient Dark Skies.  He discussed how his very compelling series might be taken as kind of a disclosure lite, actually, an honest exploration of the societal truths and consequences of an imminent disclosure event.  This was presented while illustrating the mechanisms of that odious governmental military/industrial complex that, supporting the oldest technology and paradigms, evades and prevaricates presently from said disclosure.  Our protectors aren't protecting us, reader.  Their master is the strengthening and overweening corpocracy.

Colonel Marcel

Once Zabel concludes, you get to spin up on the apple-pie-down-home and real as it gets Jesse Marcel Junior, Army full bird Colonel, Medical Doctor, Army Flight Surgeon, and, just returned from active duty in Afganistan, a rated rotary-wing aviator.  

Marcel regales the listener as regards how he held flying saucer flotsam in his hands as a child...  Show me how this man, a hero in deed and accomplishment by all measures, can fabricate the story as a lying ruse and provide for the remotest dishonor to himself or others including family and friends.  Closing on Marcel, here was the ETH so far up the listener's nose one feels its knees pushing in top teeth!

Finally, Donald Schmitt fires forward like an impassioned Unitarian minister from behind the podium/pulpit to roll the congregation back entirely with his take on the Roswell affair as it evolves into the 21st Century with new witnesses, accounts, and discoveries.  Indeed, one could become a lesser expert on the Roswell issue just as a function of their attention on the persons making their presentations.  Sneers and smirks in Roswell's regard lose all force and confidence where the presentations dovetail so seamlessly into each other with such complementary mutual support.  ...Especially sincere given it is unplanned! 

Established, then, that first day:  a logical and legitimately rational framework for the existential reality of the UFO... pretty much covering my own evidentiary categories to include (1) the Historical text regarding UFOs, (2) Artistic Historical pieces pertaining to same, (3) quality Anecdotal via multiple witnesses and corroborated by radar, (4) vetted Photographic pieces from all but undisputed experts, (5) extant Physical Traces.

Next:  Unsettling Nuke fiddlers, perils of civilization break-way, and more embraceable affairs!

...Twyla Lehmberg Passes...

 ...Twyla Lehmberg Passes...

Twyla June Lehmberg (July 18, 1927 - May 19, 2006)

.,¸¸,.»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«*¥*»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«·.,¸¸,.

My Mom died this morning about 03:00 hours.
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This is something occurring with clocklike regularity for everyone over millions of years, is a prelude to being mowed down by the dark scythe ourselves, and in no way makes any of us special.
I only mark her passing here because I can, that at almost 80 years old herself she was enchanted by the internet, and that she was an award-winning artist of rare talent demanding some kind of lasting notice by someone at her passing.
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She was a hard worker who wanted to live correctly and passed without so much as hard feeling from any other human being on this planet, a trick becoming increasingly hard to perform as the world accelerates to its concrescence. She left a body of work that is too beautiful to be discarded and that will likely survive her by generations. Her work will always hang in someone's home I must very confidently proclaim.
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She passed easily, if painfully, from serious heart disease and lung problems, never complaining or cross, never contrary or contrite... ...never less than a good humor, and always looking for a way to laugh. She was a child at heart. She faced the future with courage, intelligence, and imagination right up to the end... as sick as she was.
She was a woman of the renaissance, an American original, and a great individual. She was a smart woman of courage. She will be truly missed.
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Send no flowers, please... she’d want that money to go to someone who needed it. Donate that money to a local hospice, instead.
...See you on the other side, Twyla.
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Sorry about this seeming non-sequitur... it had disappeared from 2006 somehow.  Blogger won't let me put it back where it was, and it will be on this site... so there you have it.