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.

Re-reviewing the Podcasts


After months of ignoring this blagh,  it seems appropriate to weigh in again.

The field of fortean falderal continues to go on, but at times the weight of it seems hardly worth noting.  The non-fortean world demands a significant amount of attention and draws away the focus. 

Looking back on previous entries, one of the more interesting ones was on the podcasts which helped draw me back into this field.  Some of them have, to my way of thinking, begun to fade into the background in my consciousness, often for different reasons.

Paratopia is one that has fallen off my radar for a pretty straightforward reason---it's become a pay site.  I can't fault someone for wanting to make a buck on what can be a time consuming, as well as nominally costly preoccupation.  But unless I'm getting something of a regular, clear value, it's hard to justify putting out yet more bucks (hey, I have to pay for my internet access too!) and, every bit as importantly, the time.  One thing my daddy used to tell me was that the most valuable thing I own is my time, and I shouldn't let someone else waste it.  I'm perfectly capable of doing that on my own.

RedIceRadio  has the same suffered on my listening list for similar reasons.  They do still offer some interesting subjects, though I'm sad to see that some of their most interesting back podcasts are now only available to paying subscribers.  And quite frankly, lots of the subjects are taking on some rather bizarre elements that a little too out there even for my eclectic ear, i.e. hollow earth, pre-Columbian colonization of North America, the war on vitamins and nutrition.

One podcast which was of recurring interest was Gene Steinberg's The Paracast.  I really did enjoy this one, especially once he took on his co-host Chris O'Brien.  I'd still be listening to it, and at times still do with interesting enough guests.  Their lengthy back catalog is actually worth wading through and all in all I still would probably suggest it to anyone wanting to delve more into the arcane field of ufoology with a host who has been working in it long enough to give it some real perspective.  But alas, they taken to being a sponsored site.  Some ads I can deal with, others are so insulting to one's intelligence (or at least mine) that I just can't stomach them anymore.  Gun enthusiasts are one thing, apocalyptic ads selling products to get you through the impending collapse of civilization are interesting enough, but I drew the line at the recurring ad that kept telling me about how silica was the precursor of calcium in metabolism smacked a little too much of alchemical transformation of the elements for me. 

I still have a very soft spot in me for Binall of America.  I even still listen to it occassionally, and wholeheartedly recommend it's back catalog to a newbie just getting into the field of ufoology or a hardened old sceptic who'd just like to hear some intriguing interviews with some of the luminaries of this all-too-often not-so-bright subject.  But of late, some of the guest he's chose just really don't do it for me, though I'll grant that he has gone through some of the more interesting guests already.  And I hope, Tim, (can I call you Tim?  I feel like I know you on a first hand basis after listening to you for so long), that you won't take it the wrong way if I say that you are starting to come across as more gullible than open-minded at times. 

PsiOpRadio is one podcast that has become a regular for me, and SMiles Lewis and Mack White are even more enjoyable now that they've dropped those horrendous commercials from their podcast.  I can now listen to them without having to listen to Alex Jones trying to sell me seeds that will be worth more than gold once the government has driven society into a bad Mad Max movie.  A big plus for me is that they are Austin based, as am I, and they do a review of news stories that I wouldn't catch otherwise, sometimes for a good reason.  They don't have guests on as often as they used to, but when they do, they are generally of a pretty high caliber. 

One podcast did fall off the radar all together after a monster hack attack, yet has come back even better than ever.  RadioMisterioso is still a podcast that has this listener's unreserved recommendation.  Greg Bishop has a degree of open minded scepticism that is not only a breath of fresh air but inspiring as well.  I've even managed to put aside a prejudice against the ghost hunter fad that has been running rampant through the paranormal podcast field with some his recent interviews. Listen in, and while you're at it, make sure to get a copy of his book, Project Beta, which is one of the best books on the UFO phenomena to come out of the past decade.  Seriously, even if you don't beleive in UFOs or are a hard core skeptic, this is one book that is still worth reading.  The true beleiver in little grey men and government wars with UFOs in hidden underground tunnels in Dulce should definitely read it, though they might not find it quite as satisfying.

How I Almost Became a True Believer

I can’t really remember when I first became fascinated with the concepts of UFOs and flying saucers, but it is firmly embedded with images of the library branch where I read everything I could on the subject. This was back in the early ‘60s so it was almost exclusively nuts and bolts related, though by this time there was also a healthy dose of contactee material sprinkled in. Okay, healthy may not be the right analogy, but it was certainly a heady mix, especially when supplemented by the very real fact that we were also travelling into outer space at the time, reinforced by a steady ongoing diet of rockets and space suits in the press.

This fascination with flying saucers didn’t go unnoticed by my family. My siblings came to me all excited and told me that there was one outside, an excitement which was contagious and sparked me to come running out to finally see the visitors from beyond for myself. What I found there was their hilarious derision and laughter at my credulity, as well as healthy respect for the very real human capacity for deceit in the pursuit of a hoax, as well as an appreciation for a degree of skepticism about the claims of nonbelievers.

I cut my teeth on the Condon Report when it was published, which I took to imply that although there is much going on in the sky which can be misinterpreted, which when sifted through leaves a residual amount of strange phenomena which is still beyond our current understanding. Eric von Daniken was all the rage in high school, but following through in studying the cultural, anthropological and archaeological backdrop he was drawing made clear the height of the conclusions he was jumping to and supplied an Occam’s razor which cut like butter through most of his conclusions.

But it was the whole Bill Moore and Aquarius affair that put the subject to bed for me for almost three decades. With so many conflicting theories and what was clear even then as massive amounts of disinformation the field of ufology was becoming so muddied I put aside the subject. Oddly enough it this same affair which has sparked renewed interest in the whole field of ufoology (thanks to Jim Moseley for that oh so perfect term!) when Greg Bishop’s Project Beta added some much needed perspective on that truly bizarre episode. For me it closed one window but opened up a door onto what the late Robert Anton Wilson called maybe logic, that blessed state of being able to consider everything while believing in nothing.

It was in that same period that another formative event occurred, which has not only helped me understand the nature of becoming a true believer, but the emotional commitment and psychological burden such a belief system entails.

It must have been well over thirty years ago, walking back from a friend’s apartment on a road alongside Saint Edwards in Austin, one with an incredible panoramic overview of the city. It was late at night when I notice a light in the sky approaching from the west. It grew closer and brighter, and as it became clear that it was a series of moving lights. Coming ever closer it began to resolve itself as a series of colored lights that seemed to be moving horizontally beneath a solid surface.

I began to get quite excited about this, visualizing it in my minds eyes as lights rotating around the bottom of a classic disc shaped flying saucer. The implications of this were beginning to reshape my sense of what this implied, that the world would change for me as I went from being someone who had always had an interest in the subject to becoming a full blown believer, one of many of what was sure to be a widely viewed phenomena that would perhaps not only precipitate a major flap but mark the beginning of a mass landing. There was an emotional excitement of anticipation mixed with fear mixed with wonder, a waterfall of feelings running over me, drowning out whatever doubt the inner skeptic could muster because there it was before my very eyes. My whole world view was changing right there and then, some inner element of my psyche welcoming it as a childhood dream finally come true.

And still it grew closer, the lights and their apparent rotation clearer. At one point, however, it became clear to me what was really going on. I could now hear the drone of a small private plane's engine drone, and see that it was pulling behind it a lighted advertising banner with still unclear words scrolling across it.

And so my world changed again. It was, and remains clear to me now, that I have to be careful about allowing my preconceptions and residual belief systems guide my perceptions into seeing what I want to or expect to see. That much is clear, and it applies every bit as much when reading or hearing about the anomalous experiences of others.

But there is another, more frightening aspect to this experience. If that plane had turned sooner, before I'd been able to make out what it really was, I would now be one of those poor fools who run around trying to tell everyone about the UFO I saw, wondering why no else had reported it (or why the sighting was being suppressed) and getting sucked into the bizarrely puzzling world of a true believer in visitors from another world. That is scary.

But it has also helped guide my views on the UFO phenomena. Over the past couple of years I've returned to a fascination with that phenomena, though I feel compelled to say without the true believer's psychological baggage. But high strangeness has an attraction all its own, if for no other reason that as a social and cultural phenomena that may even have distinct applications by the military as a tool of misinformation in psychological operations.

One very clear example of this is covered in Greg Bishop's book, Project Beta, which has implications well beyond Kirkland Air Force Base using intelligence officers to feed a believer’s investigations of covert operations there, leading not only to his mental disintegration but feeding the UFO community a new mythology of underground bases at Dulce Mesa well away from the air base in Albequerque to divert attention. Another recent addition to the field is the fascinating Mirage Men, by Mark Pilkington, which is one of the most delightful, readable, and enjoyable accounts of the military's involvement in attempting to understand as well as manipulate the public's focus on unknown aerial encounters and belief in aliens over the past 63 years. And H.P. Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake, about as well documented a book on MK-ULTRA as can be found, makes clear the degree to which government will go to hide its motives and methods, especially during the early days of the Cold War when its paranoia reached a degree that was not only pathological but bordering on the sociopathic.

But make no mistake about it, there is every bit as much paranoia and as many attempts to guide public opinion by true believers as well. What it is that the true believers believe in spans as wide a gap as the diehard skeptics on one side and the wide-eye New Age Naïf’s, Nazi nut-and-bolters, extraterrestrial exponents, ultraterrestrial underlords, transdimensional time travelers, abduction victimologists and far more evolving even as the anomalies emerge.

There is a cultural meme associated with this phenomena that is continually morphing and endlessly fascinating. The cost of admission to this freak show is minimal, but one must be endlessly cautious once inside the tent to remain part of the audience, for it is not always clear where the sawdust ends and the stage begins.

Jacques Vallee in BoingBoing

Dr. Jacques Vallee is one the finest and most well respected researchers on UFOs, and his body of work is not only prolific but captures the evolution of his thought on the subject quite succinctly. Starting with his early observation of an unidentified object as an astronomer and the cover-up of that sighting by the bureaucrats above him, his viewpoints evolved from a nuts and bolts viewpoint (Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space – A Scientific Appraisa(1965)l and Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma(1966)) through to his exposition of the similarities of the phenomena with other anomalistic phenomena throughout written history in Passport to Magonia: From Foklore to Flying Saucers(1969). His take on the subject is often at variance to that of the general public and usually well ahead of it; hence his books The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influences on the Human Race (1975) and Mesengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (1979). But after a trilogy published from 1988 to 1991 (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Confrontations – A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact and Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception) he published little on UFOs and began to focus more his work as a venture capitalist. He worked with DARA in the early development of what was to become the internet, and recently has begun to reemerge as a iconic figure in the ongoing history of the scientific study of anomalous phenomena.

Crop Circles, Part Deux: Alien Glyphs, Human Myths, Blogging BlissJacques Vallee at 8:47 PM April 8, 2010 http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/08/crop-circles-part-de.html

In Search of Alien Glyphs (or are they microwave blasters?)
Jacques Vallee at 11:12 AM March 23, 2010
http://boingboing.net/2010/03/23/in-search-of-alien-g.html#previouspost


 Of Flattened Flora and Expulsion Cavities: The crop circle controversy continuesJacques Vallee at 11:21 AM April 28, 2010 http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/28/of-flattened-flora-a.html


 Crop circles themes on ufologie.net, with a particularly nice collection of pictures, including obviously fake, poorly executed circles and exquisitely beautiful patterns and links to wide variety of web articles http://www.ufologie.net/htm/cropthemes.htm

Links from comments section are quite interestingSand Art: A New Kind of Land ArtExquisitely beautiful, reminiscent of crop circles and hauntingly ephemeralhttp://theswedishbed.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/sand-art-a-new-kind-of-land-art/

BLT Research Team, Inc.PURPOSE:     The BLT Research Team Inc.'s primary focus is crop circle research - the discovery, scientific documentation and evaluation of physical changes induced in plants, soils and other materials at crop circle sites by the energy (or energy system) responsible for creating them and to determine, if possible, from these data the specific nature and source of these energies. Secondly, our intent is to publish these research results in peer-reviewed scientific journals and to disseminate this information to the general public through lectures, mainstream articles and the internethttp://www.bltresearch.com/

Crop Circles: Artworks or Alien Signs?National Geographic article, unfortunately lacking photographshttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0801_020801_cropcircles.html


 The Field Guide: The Art, History and Philosophy of Crop Circle Making, by Rob Irving and John Lundberg, from the publisher of Strange Attractor Journalhttp://strangeattractor.co.uk/fieldguide/
And the authors website, Circlemakers.orghttp://www.circlemakers.org/index.html

How Crop Circles Work, on HowStuffWorks.com, well researched and pretty well balancedhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/crop-circle.htm

There are two interesting things about crop circles from the viewpoint of The Anomaly Agnostic; the need for people to hoax others, in the sense of making crop circles and crowing about it afterward, and the need of people to believe in other explanations in spite of the clear evidence of hoaxers operating in the field.

Chris O'Brien and His Suggested Rules of Investigation

Enough of those pesky dowing rod bomb detectors, since I've been divining that this isn't really where this blog was supposed to be going.  After all, fraud, waste and sheer incompetence on the part of governments isn't exactly an anomaly, and I have no doubt about it's existence.

So what's on the bookshelf that I can exert some sort of armchair expertise over? 

Well, one subject that's sure to be brought up is the work that Chris O'Brien did in the San Luis Valley and encapsulated in his trilogy of books on the subject.  I'm slogging through first of these, The Mysterious Valley, and have to admit that I'm really enjoying it!  His experiences have that high strangeness that attracts my Inner Fortean Child, and his experiences investigating some truly odd experiences in the SLV seem to have grounded him in a most admirable fashion.

For instance, he opens the book with his "Suggested Rules of Investigation", which seem to be words to the wise to anyone looking into anomalistic phenomena.  I quote these at length (as well as in italics), and will beg his forgiveness later, acting in the spirit that it is easier to ask for forgivenss than permission.

• Rule #1  Controversial subjects generate polarized responses.
• Rule #2  Record or write down everything as soon as possible, no matter how inconsequential or inconsequential it might seem at the time.
• Rule #3  Always credit your sources and respect requests for anonymity.
• Rule #4  Always be ready for anything, anytime.  Look for coincidences when investigating claims of the unusual.  Often, there may be a synchronistic element at work.
• Rule #5  It is impossible to be too objective when scientifically investigating claims of the unusual.
• Rule #6  Always assume there is a mundane exlanation until proven extraordinary.
• Rule #7  Appearances can be deceiving.  There may be more happening than meets the eye.
• Rule #8  If you publicize claims of the unusual, choose your words wisely, for your "spin" may have tremendous influence.
• Rule #9  Media coverage of the unusual, becasue of its sensational nature, is often inaccurate and cannot be accepted as totally accurate by the investigator.
•  Rule # 10  The human mind, when faced with the unknown, revert to basic primal symbols to rationalize its experience.
•  Rule # 11  When investigating claims of the unusal, one cannot reach conclusions based on intuition alone.
•  Rule #12  There is a possibility that the (sub)culture itself may cocreate manifestations of  unexplained, individually perceived phenomena.  
•  Rule # 13  We must be extremely careful not to perpetrate our own beliefs, suspicions, or actual experiences into the minds of those who desperately want to have a "special" event happen in their lives.

In The Mysterious Valley, O'Brien does an excellent job of not only setting up the story of how he came to the San Luis Valley but how he became a prime investigators of unusual phenomena there, which include unexplained lights in the skies, mystery helicopters, livestock mutilation, unusual sonic phenomena, and weirdest of all, bizarre range wars which may have been attempting to monopolize on all the uneasiness such experiences can have on a rural population.