Faded Discs collection available...for free!

I spend way too much time listening to podcasts, far too little time on posts here and else where.

But I especially have enjoyed listening to the bits and pieces of old flying saucer related audio clips that crop up from time to time on podcasts.  Some of the best was on the Over The Edge podcasts on KPFA when they were doing the Another UFO series, but there always seemed to be so much more out there than was available.

Audio was one of the major ways in which the flying saucer/UFO meme has spread, especially in the earlier years.  The amount of radio coverage that it received was significant, with much of the earlier broadcasting coming out on the major radio networks of the time.  Recordings were there from the beginning but they became harder and harder to come across.

Fortunately Wendy Connors and Roderick Dykes worked to collect much of this material before it faded away completed, and collated it into the Faded Discs series, which she began offering over the internet.

Unfortunately, by the time I became aware of this goldmine of audio material, her website was no longer up and there seemed to be no way of coming into this material.

Fortunately, travelling the backroads and searching through the cluttered old closets of the internet, a copy of one of the Faded Discs series came into my hands.  It was a collection of recordings of various contactees, some speeches at some of the flying saucer clubs that erupted in the 50s, some on various radio programs, including Long John Nebel.

Then I came across another of the multidisc series!  This one was on archive.org, a site dedicated to "building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public."  There are a number of other interesting audio recordings there as well, including speeches by John Keel and radio logs of phone calls to National UFO Reporting Center from 1974 to 1989.  (These may be part of a Faded Discs collection.) This was inspiring and led me to upload the Faded Disc collection of contactee material I'd come across, as well as a number of old Flying Saucer Magazines by Ray Palmer in PDF format.

Then this morning I was  listening to the Mysterious Universe podcast.  I told you I listen to too many podcasts, but it was in the car and it beats commercial radio all to heck and back again.  They started talking about how they'd been looking for the Faded Discs and their frustrations at being unable to find them anywhere.  Until now, when they'd come across a Faded Disc collection on archive.org!

So I got all puffed up and proud of my work in putting there, anxiously awaiting to hear they'd found my posting.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the contactee series I'd put up.

Fortunately, it was another that I'd been unaware of until now!  In fact, there is a wide variety of Faded Discs material now up on archive.org.

This is an absolutely invaluable addition to any serious student of the flying saucer/UFO meme, as well as to anyone with even a casual interest in the subject.  It is actually far more fascinating than most of the current web material out there, and listening to it gives a much closer to sense to what the phenomenon was like for those who were caught up in it in the heyday of the 50s and 60s. 

There seem to be 11 (or 12, including the Contactee disc I uploaded) of the Faded Discs now available on line.  The sheer amount of audio material collected by Connors and Dyke is astounding, and hopefully now it can find the audience it really deserves. 

A final word...

If you have any digital material of a historic nature, whether on this subject or others, considering sharing it on archive.org.  And if you find the material from Faded Discs valuable, consider contributing to archive.org. This is truly one of the most important and useful sites on the internet, fully deserving of all the support it can get!

Sky sounds, the Singing River and the Pascagoula Abduction

It seems that "sky sounds" are all the rage recently, at least in areas of the internet. Of course strange sounds of an inexplicable nature are nothing new, as accounts of the Taos Hum in the 90s and Britain's Bristol Hum of the 70s will attest.  "The Hum" even has it's own Wikipedia page, which is actually one of the better reference sources on the phenomena available.

It's not surprising that in our increasingly sound polluted world that there has been an increase in odd, unidentified noises.  I suspect, however, that the recent spate of interest is not unlike the contrail controversy.  Once contrails were brought to the attention of the borderline paranoid attention of conspiracy theorist, they seemed to be everywhere, because, of course, they are.  (The only widespread exception to the universality of contrails produced by high flying aircraft were the no-fly days after September 11, 2001, which actually provided a sudden opportunity for meteorologists to study their affect by their absence. I'm afraid the opportunity for an aurally pristine day won't similarly be presenting itself anytime in the near future.)

But I digress from my original intent, which is to bring up a correlation between an old, odd sound phenomena and the location of one of ufoology's more famous cases, the Pascagoula Abduction.  I won't go into the details of this 1973 case, which received fairly wide spread publicity and the requisite debunking.  Just look it up on Wikipedia (yes, it even has a rather lengthy page with references there), but when you do, pay attention to the odd sound Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker encountered on the banks of the Pascagoula River immediately prior to their life changing encounter.

The Pascagoula River has long also known by the moniker of The Singing River.  For centuries it has been associated with a musical quality sometimes referred to as resembling a swarm of bees.  Tradition attributes it to a number of Indian legends, and according the City of Pascagoula's website, a number of "scientific explanations have been offered for the phenomenon, but none have been proven."

But it does make one wonder if there isn't some sort of link between the phenomena preceding Pascagoula's singing and the 'abduction.'  It's especially intriguing if one postulate that the auditory phenomena might be triggered by electromagnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe, a triggering that might in turn kindle a more widespread psuedoictal experience recalled as an alien encounter.

Mirage Men film trailer

Mark Pilkington has written one of the best books on the manipulation of the UFO meta-meme as a tool used by intelligence agencies recently.  Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare and UFOs is a book that can (and should) be appreciated by skeptics and true believers alike, while seeming to be benignly neglected by both.  To malappropriate Fox Mulder, the truth is out there but it may not be where you're looking for it.

But a trailer for the film has come out that has certainly caught my imagination, and if the rest of the film is as good as this it has a lot of promise.

Breaking eggs to make...an omelet?

April 11, 2013

One of the day to day activities I engage to remain sane is a daily walk with my dogs.  We have a number of locations off the beaten path, where the dogs can run free and my mind can run free listening to a growing number of anomaly/paranormal related podcasts.

Several days after April Fools day we went along a route we hadn't been on in over a week.  The dogs brought my attention to a broken eggshell.  Not a small native bird egg which might have been washed out of its nest during the storms we'd had a few days before, but clearly a generic chicken egg shell.  Odd, out there  quite far from the road, but various bits of detritus from humanity show up there from time to time.

Walking a bit further along, we came across another broken eggshell.  Strange, but even stranger we came across another broken chicken eggshell, and then another, and then more and more.  There were at least two dozen of them scattered over several hundred yards of open ground, and probably even more.

What was going on here?  How had all these eggs showed up here, shortly after April Fools Day, truly anomalous from any previous experience walking back in these woods?  The human mind is a pattern seeking tool, always attempting to make sense of its world, placing phenomena within a familiar framework in order to deal with them.  Anomalies seem to cry out for an explanation.

I'm almost ashamed to admit that one possibility came to mind was some sort of Fortean fall, possibly even some eggs that had been sucked up during the recent storms, which had after all been of a fierce magnitude rarely seen around these drought stricken parts.  Listening to so many podcasts recently about similar strange happenings had indeed make this at least one possibility to consider. Another was the more obvious explanation that someone was eating eggs out there, but why so many?  Or had someone come across several dozen spoiled eggs and decided to throw them about, for reasons that were far from clear to a reasonable mind?

But other possibilities had to also be considered, and one finally came which has since stuck.  True, it had recently been April Fools day, but immediately prior to that was Easter.  A local tradition here in Central Texas involves cascarones, brightly dyed empty chicken eggs filled with confetti to be broken over the head of fellow celebrants during this holiday's celebrations.  They are sold by the dozens by the roadside in the days before Easter, along beside bizarrely misshapen pinatas meant to represent favorite childhood pop cultural icons. But cascarones are always characterized by their brilliant colors, while all these eggs were their natural white color, and there was no sign of confetti any around.

So what was going on here?  My mind has to have some sort of answer, especially when I can hardly ignore this odd assortment when I walk the dogs here.

Have you come across the answer yet?

No, not a localized deluge of shattered ovum, but rather the remnants of an cascarone fight!  The dye had washed off the shells and the confetti washed away with the recent rains.  Another anomaly debunked, although another attempt by an April Foolish mind.