BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#14)

 

Chapter 13

A Trace of Memory

 

A serious, too-much ignored, aspect of paranormal investigation is the (mis)use of regressive hypnosis. While I have no interest in naming those who have used–continue to use–this profoundly potent “therapy,” I feel remiss in having not mentioned it during the writing of this blog, which will in 2014 see print publication.

To narrow the beam of my intent, I will address the use of hypnosis in cases of so-called alien abduction. Nowhere else have the authoritative tools of psychotherapy been so recklessly employed (“authoritative” being the key term). Hypnosis is without doubt a useful method in more mundane pursuits, such as in forensic psychology and its value in solving crimes wherein victims’ memory is blurred by trauma. I don’t claim to know the source of “alien” abductions, and will dispense with the quotes. It is unarguable that something’s happening, but there exist accounts dating back to the Sumerian genesis of the written word. Abductions are nothing new, but this reality, in post-post modern times, has been hijacked by swindlers, mongers of the fast buck, and even well-meaning paranormal investigators.

The late, lamented, John A. Keel (author of OPERATION TROJAN HORSE, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, and many others) used hypnosis in some of his more confounding cases. I don’t know if Keel was the first paranormal investigator to do so, but I’m fairly certain. Keel was a gifted magician, something that’s always nipped at me, but I don’t think he used this to deceive anyone. He was genuinely haunted, and disturbed personally, by the so-called Mothman events in Point Pleasant, West Viriginia during 1966-1967. Much of what follows I owe to my friend Doug Skinner (at http://www.johnkeel.com), Keel’s best friend for the last decade or so of his life. Prior to my education in the operations and trade-craft of intelligence agencies, I viewed the Mothman/UFO/Men-in-Black events as genuinely across-the-board paranormal. I was wrong.

While the actual entity sightings–over 100 reports in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and elsewhere–are hard to gauge, they at least were given by people with no vested interest in talking about them. These accounts, best documented in Keel’s THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MYSTERIOUS BEINGS, chronicle not only the bare facts, but their effect. I fear Keel’s editors took more than their share of editorial license (“Dammit, Keel–we can’t publish this…it’s crazy!).

They had, of course, no problem with under-paying Keel, who’d done the heavy-lifting and suffered for it. But they did publish the core facts, as given. Who can claim knowledge of what such experience does to witnesses’ lives? And it matters not one jot if any were hoaxes–the people there were hammered by genuine terror and its lacerating echo through their lives. If even 1% of the 100 or so (many undoubtedly–as with UFO sightings–went unreported) were real, that ought to tell us something.

Keel, knowing the power of hypnosis, however was not prepared for what happened during some sessions with witnesses. From FATE, September 2007: “Several contactees (people who thought they had met the flying-saucer occupants) had emerged and I was hypnotizing them and studying them carefully. I found these people had two levels of memory. The first level, the surface level, recalled under hypnosis a fascinating adventure, usually of being taken aboard a wonderful flying saucer. But the hidden level, which was difficult to get at and usually took several hypnotic sessions before it could be reached, rejected the false memory (confabulation) and painted a different picture. Most of these contactees had been transported to a van or house where they were subjected to brain-washing techniques and injected with an unknown substance. Then they were given a confabulation to remember and were released. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t find out who was doing this. The whole contactee syndrome was a fraud, but the contactees were innocent victims. Why was anyone going to all the trouble to create these contactees? Many people in West Virginia told me of seeing strange, unmarked vans cruising the back roads at night.”

One cannot help wonder, after learning more, why the Point Pleasant events and all they entail occurred during a particularly toxic period in Cold War tension. Keel, in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, gives the barest hint of this. Later investigations (most from Andy Colvin who, say what you will, has unearthed telling–even shocking–information) opened a smudged window onto what very well, at least in part, might have been a sub-project in the CIA’s infamous MK-ULTRA campaign to figure methods of complete control of the human mind.

A 1977 congressional hearing blew the doors off MK-ULTRA, to a point. Briefly: experimental use of drugs, deception, disinformation, and even torture against American citizens in the guise of national security. The bulk of these files were destroyed, due to “a burgeoning paper problem.” One wonders what nefarious operations will remain forever unacknowledged. Point Pleasant, with its proximity to Washington, D.C., and the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping concern in Green Bank, West Virginia, and nearby Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio (possible test-point for classified aircraft) might have served as the optimal test-ground for psychological black-ops.

As noted by the late Jim Keith, and by Colvin, the Mothman events might have started with genuine paranormal chaos, but was noticed and exploited by those with an interest in testing new trade-craft hidden behind–perhaps mimicking–the unprecedented anomalies, perhaps with an eye toward using them against foreign threats. As insane and paranoid as this might sound, keep in mind that the possibility of nuclear attack against America was utmost in the minds of those tasked to protect us.

As Keel noted in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, UFOs could be observed nearly every night after 8:00PM in Point Pleasant. They always approached from the south and moved north. The vehicles were described, mostly but not always, as the classic “flying saucer,” with fierce, prismatic lighting, and silent. Was military technology of the time capable of such a display? Yes.  Some of these might even have been low-observable dirigibles–blimps. This would account for their hovering, and silence. It is a stretch, but not much. This cannot explain the more bizarre reports of spontaneous trance, transient voice phenomena (often heard through television and telephone), and of course the entity sightings.

I think Keel was aware of more than he would–or could–share with readers. He was a driven, culturally sophisticated (read his 1957 study, JADOO, if in doubt) intellectual, yet humble and able to meet and converse with people from all walks of life. I have visited Point Pleasant many times, broken bread with those still living who were afflicted and otherwise affected not only by the paranormal events, but who lost loved ones on the Silver Bridge collapse of 15 December 1967–13 months after the first Mothman sighting. All speak highly of Mr. Keel and his gentle, considerate concern. A far cry from some recent investigators and their manipulative, narcissistic posturings.

However unsatisfying, I leave you with the words of John Alva Keel: “The situation is infinitely more complex than any of these interesting but simplistic explanations. If UFOs are real, and if they are extraterrestrial, then all of the patterns indicate they are totally hostile. If this is the case, then the proper government procedure would be to set up a false PR front to deal with the random reports and lull the public while a secret agency made a real effort to cope with the problem. If they are not real but are only part of the wild, wild world of psychic phenomena and chimeras, then there is nothing that can be done and no amount of investigating can be expected to be fruitful. So it is a no-win dilemma for the civilian saucer sleuth with a straitjacket as the reward.”

 

BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#13)

 

Chapter 12

Invasion of the Saucermen

 

The literature (I use the term guardedly) of UFO/Paranormal phenomena, thanks to the explosive growth of e-publishing, is piling up at a heretofore unheard of pace. Too, I’m not sure why I continue to separate “UFO” from “paranormal,” as these are aspects of a chaotic continuum tunneling through mundane existence since time immemorial.

 

This, of course, is anathema to believers in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis–one of which I am not whom (or, in the priceless wit of Winston Churchill: “Include me out.”). While I lack the sort of ego required to absolutely refuse the idea of physical beings coming here from Otherwhere, I cannot locate irrefutable evidence for this–it might be happening. I don’t know. Many others do, and they are welcome to their comforting belief. Denying them is akin to declaring: “Fuck what you people different from me think–you have no right!”

 

The day I sink that low may the ink in my uni-ball Vision boil. Regarding the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, consider me an agnostic.

 

After reading what follows, you might very well think otherwise, but I urge you to leaven your thoughts with heaps of hope and a dash of doubt–considering at once the messy chaos of everyday survival threatening to burst your living-room TV with plasma of a different order: the horror of blood.

 

If I gather “reality” only from media, I must believe the only reason I’m sitting here in relative calm, trees hissing in windy dark, is because someone has let me live. Is this the genuine state of affairs? Like anything, I cannot know. We are not driven by jobs, science, and logic, but by imagination, desire, and fantasy. Stressful existence opens a vacuum behind our lives that must be filled–as true for us as it was for ancient ancestors formulating law, control, and the algebra of religion. Given rare access to suppressed art and sculpture of those times, one would witness the craving for other worlds, often filled–if not sated–by sexual congress and other indulgence, akin to our own lacerating anguish for escape.

 

We don’t know what we are, where we came from, or where we’re going. Presently we have no way of magically–or even mechanically–detaching ourselves from the assumed curse of “everydayness.” But something fills–or is attempting to fill–that vacuum of misery.

 

Hence the not-too-subtle invasion of the nameless.

 

Written accounts of anomalous phenomena have changed since the late 1950s to 1960s, shockingly ignored my modern anthropology and psychologists of all stripes. After 1968 or thereabouts, reports of gnome-like, diminutive entities fizzled. The ’70s into the ’80s gave us terror and gloom-filled tales of “Grays.” Such reports did not exist until books written by certain authors were published–and then exploded into global culture. True, Grays were spoken of–however rarely–in some early occult works. But the period of especially the 1950s is rich with bizarre, surreal encounters. Thousands of sighting-, and landing-reports, in France and Italy. I cite incidents (a small sampling) over several days.

 

“20 OCTOBER 1954: PARRAVICINO d’ERBA, ITALY.

Renzo Pugina, 37, had just put his car in the garage when he saw a strange being covered with a “scaly” luminous suit, about [3 feet] tall, standing near a tree. The creature aimed the beam from a sort of flashlight at him, and he felt paralyzed, until a motion he made when clenching his fist on the garage keys seemed to free him. He attacked the intruder, who rose and fled with a soft whirring sound. An oily spot was found at the site.”

 

“23 OCTOBER 1954: SAINT-HILAIRE-des-LOGES, FRANCE.

Mrs. Boeuf was coming out of her farmhouse when she saw a luminous disk in the sky and called her family. When everyone saw the object come closer, they locked all doors and spent a sleepless night. They did not observe the object’s departure.”

 

“24 OCTOBER 1954: LES EGOTS, FRANCE.

Near Sainte Catherine, a child saw a man emerge from a strange craft. He was ‘dressed in red, his clothes looked like iron. He walked with his legs stiff, had long hair and a hairy face. His eyes were large, like those of the cows.’”

 

“26 OCTOBER 1954: LA MADIERE, FRANCE.

Aime Boussard, 47, a farmer, was suddenly confronted with an individual of normal height…wearing a sort of diving suit with a pale-green light on either side of the helmet. The individual aimed at the witness the beam of two blue lights, and he was thrown backward. No craft was observed.”

 

To present-day readers such accounts sound absurd, even ridiculous. Consider, though, that these reports come from rural areas whose residents were unfamiliar with UFOs, but not with natural phenomena. As noted, most prominently, by Jacques Vallee (who provided these reports), the UFO occupants behave in America like science-fictional monsters (i.e. Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster, Hopkinsville, Kentucky “goblins,” the Grays, etc.). European accounts give us entities more mischievous and surreal, while the South American reports are often violent and terrifying (resulting, apparently, in more than a few deaths by boxy, refrigerator-like craft attacking hunters with pulsed microwave beams causing laser-like wounds and lingering effects of sleeplessness, extreme thirst, followed by complete failure of major organs).

 

The phenomenon does appear to assume aspects already present in the collective unconscious of whatever region it invades, rendering the so-called Extraterrestrial Hypothesis unlikely.

 

Whatever the UFO phenomenon represents, it is stranger far, and more complex by many levels, than any simple expedient involving beings from “another world.”

 

Reading the above ought to tell anyone that the phenomenon is escalating in violence, however scattered and seemingly isolated. I could be wrong, of course, but I do not think any arm of military or corporate intelligence possesses the secret of anti-gravity and stealth. I hope I am correct in this assumption. Better the devil we know.

 

The biggest problem is how most “investigators” treat their findings, unable (or unwilling) to see the unknown as anything but extraterrestrial. Humankind is the result of literally millions of evolutionary steps–unlikely to occur in exactly the same order anywhere else in the universe. Outside entities would not have two legs, two arms, nor breathe our air and (occasionally) speak our language. When they do, in nearly all accounts on record, their utterances are uniformly absurd, merely poetic, or deceptive–akin to “spirit” voices. Again and again, though present at these seemingly miraculous manifestations, we learn nothing beyond the “reality” that whatever we are, we are not alone.

BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#12)

Chapter 11

Breaking Down the Men in Black

Things need to be said, regarding the so-called men-in-black. Don’t let the hyphens fool you–just good grammar.
What you really want to know is this: are men-in-black “real”?
Of course. As absurd as 99% of UFO reports, our (usually) well-dressed operatives represent a system of denial as old as written history. Even the Bible warns us to be careful of how we treat unexpected guests, for we may be taking in “angels.”
How can we know?
We can’t.
But the too-knowing men-in-black seem to have our number, often without our even reporting a UFO sighting. How can this be?
Nearly anyone going to the trouble of reading this has read accounts–bizarre, menacing, even helpful–of strange men (and women) showing up when least expected (but who would expect such visits?).
I’m not here to reinforce anyone’s belief in a myth, rumor, or dream. People have been threatened, to this day, by scary, even outright threatening, official-looking individuals who “know too much.”
In fact, what really sucks is that these very same agents are well aware of the substantial men-in-black lore built over decades. I have spent probably more time than necessary reading the extant accounts, and theorizing based on the work of brave souls such as John Keel and Jim Keith (both “late,” Keith dying at 50 in what most–myself included–view as suspicious circumstances). After all, Keith wrote the book to end all books on the MIB: CASEBOOK ON THE MEN IN BLACK. Two years later, he took a fall at the annual Burning Man festival and broke a knee.
In the hospital for minor surgery, Keith confided to a friend that he feared–if put under–he might not emerge alive. He was right.
Within three years of his death, Keith’s publisher, Ron Bonds, choked to death in a favorite restaurant. Not long after, one of Keith’s ex-girlfriends was found dead, half-naked beside railroad tracks.
I don’t know about you, but Keel died a natural–however painful–death. Jim Keith did not. The official cause of death was “blunt-force trauma”–impossible. Is this possible? Of course. Probable any surgeon would fail to notice this? (Where’s House when we need him?) Not really–shit happens.
Here’s what you don’t know about Jim Keith.
We owe much of THE X-FILES and the MEN IN BLACK entertainment to his beyond-brave inquiries. Jim was the best pain in the ass ever, willing to confront anyone. And he did. A writer’s writer, unafraid to question the endless bullshitters of so-called ufology.
My opinion: he died for it.
This was a man who did the nearly unthinkable in seeking out and questioning the official report of the “suicide” of journalist Danny Casolaro, found dead in a West Virginia hotel room. In a nut, Casolaro was tracking solid data that told him advanced software was being used in a “back-door” manner by the U.S. government to spy on foreign financial transactions. Keith somehow managed to use recovered notes from Casolaro to write (with friend Kenn Thomas) THE OCTOPUS: SECRET GOVERNMENT AND THE DEATH OF DANNY CASOLARO–which may have been his undoing.
Some, well before Keith’s untimely end, labeled him paranoid and reactionary. I do not agree.
There are those who think U.S. government used this software to collapse foreign economies. Here is where I part ways with UFO buffs. Keith might have been on to something genuinely serious. His self-funded research might have ended him. Keith, among many other suppositions, was one of the first to theorize that men in black acted so weird in order to shatter the credibility of UFO witnesses.
If true, a disturbing fact.
Why do most men (and women) in black behave as if they can’t breathe, ask moronic questions (“What is your time?”), and otherwise harass those wintesses to “the unknown”?
Answer: anyone reporting black-dressed, menacing yet ridiculous “agents” is bound to be viewed as nuts, and/or lying, by local police or even government investigators. So it has been since at least 1945.
Presently, of course, thanks to old-school hoaxers like West Virginia’s Gray Barker, whose THEY KNEW TOO MUCH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS (1956) possibly started the whole MIB mythos, we are left with chaos. Men in black were reported in Dallas threatening those who stood near the JFK hit. Sounds like a lot of money spent simply to discredit honest witnesses, right?
MIB are reported even today.
In 2010, an Ohio man reported seeing a triangular vehicle hovering over his home. However, before the actual report, our witness said that “two black-suited men, like a fashion commercial, knocked on my door and told me it was in my best interests to let them in…they asked to see my driver’s license, and wanted to know if I was on any medication, ‘that might cause hallucinations.’”
Our man was smart. He pulled a handgun, and summoned local police.
One MIB, gun in his face, said: “They’ll think you’re a nut. Forget it.”
Apparently stupid, or fearless, the two fashion-plates climbed into their black SUV and drove off.
Whatever game has been played since WWII is still alive and unwell.
The message?
Close your eyes and shut your mouth. We’re real.

BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#11)

 

Chapter 10

Drone in Love With You

 

You may have noticed the escalation of UFO sightings between 2010 and present day. I certainly have, and spend several hours each week watching news.

   I give no great credence to Internet material, but it does provide literally hundreds of hours, on any given week, of cell phone footage. It’s too late to complain, so I merely pay attention, as though personally taking time to stand outdoors with my (nonexistent) Blackberry. Let’s get something out of the way. I hate cell phones, even though I had the chance to be among the first, in 1993, to own one. My then-employer settled for my keeping a “beeper” at my side, in case some black-clad terrorist decided to attack our aggressively bland company.

   Personal angst aside, I do understand I ought to be grateful that most of you possess cell phones. I am grateful. Why? Because some of you, between texting what you ate for lunch, are capturing anomalous aerial objects. All I can say is “wow.” You’re getting some stuff people in the 20th century would have killed for, had they the technology.

   The real problem rears its head, as it must, when said technology is mishandled. As you know, we have some talented bastards out there, devious and empty-headed. A terrible combination. The same type who have punked UFO investigators, journalists, and even military charges (who mostly hate even having to take UFOs seriously). Google “UFO photos” and you’ll find thousands, some so good you might reach into the photo and brush your fingers across silvery metal, or even the tight-fitting suits of UFO occupants.

   I’ve seen these. So have you. But seeing definitely is not–I hope–believing.

   Fact: a photograph of a genuine UFO proves nothing. Visuals are visuals–nothing more. These can never tell us where the object originated, who’s in charge, or what intent our visitors might have. Period.

   As Metallica says, sad but true.

   Hence this post.

   I have seen video of strange aerial objects. 90% of these must be drones, because they’re seen hovering over military bases, banks, reservoirs, power plants, schools, and large cities. They cannot be extraterrestrial vehicles, because these would have no need whatsoever even to penetrate our atmosphere. As noted by Jacques Vallee, a human-manufactured satellite the size of a beer-keg could gather in two hours enough data to inform its makers of every important activity on Earth, with no landings. Vallee wrote this decades ago. Now we have personnel living on orbiting space stations.

   I am not aware of even a single report from these platforms claiming to have seen UFOs entering our atmosphere, though there are accounts of space-borne anomalies. These are genuinely weird, if accurately given, but almost always end up explained away by NASA.
I think NASA has many images hidden from public scrutiny. I’ve reviewed most of those supposedly gathered from the lunar surface. Many, undoubtedly, are nothing more than terrestrial wreckage; but not all. Some things cannot be hidden, but that doesn’t mean their origin is extraterrestrial. Silvery cones, disks, stitch-like tracks exist. Several resemble domes which, if real, must be hundreds of miles in diameter. As an amateur astronomer since 1978, I have seen every surface feature of our moon, including some of the aforementioned anomalies. They exist. What they might represent, I cannot say, but certainly they are very provocative.

Drones are now a fact, used most prominently against those in league with terrorist agendas. I recall buying a magazine several months after 9/11 featuring photos of “early” drones, one of which obviously was a prototype for the Predator so ubiquitous in present-day media. Military technology, from all accounts, is 15 years ahead of publicly-displayed artifacts. Example: the F-117 Stealth fighter was on the drawing boards–so to speak–in the early 1970s, and “outed” by a single photograph in the late 80s. This vehicle was often reported, during test-flights in Nevada, as a UFO. Hard to believe, but I have witnessed a daylight flyover of the Stealth, and can easily see it, in darkness, taken as a UFO–regardless of its fairly loud engines. The B-2 bomber, basically a flying wing, was a strange sight, but noisy. Viewed at night, you wouldn’t long mistake it for a UFO.

Which brings us to the subject of the so-called black triangle UFO, so prominent during the Hudson Valley, New York UFO flap of roughly 1984 to 1987–but apparently still active.
So much has been written about what this object might be, or might not be, any chance of objectivity is lost. While I have no intention of replaying the events, I will recount the basics. Hundreds of people in the Hudson Valley, about one hour north of New York City, reported seeing a (usually) gigantic triangular craft with green, red, and white lights at each point. Some claimed to have stood directly under this craft, and saw a red plasma-like light. All reports on record–save a very few–mention the craft as being silent. This, at the very least, ought to flag the object(s) as a dirigible.

You may have seen on TV the famous video-footage shot by one Hudson Valley resident. Clearly, we can see a dark triangular form dimly illuminated by lights at each point, heading east with little more than a subdued humming. As my late father remarked, “That humming should tell us something.” I know what it tells me. The UFO, no matter its size, very probably was a dirigible–a blimp. What else, of tremendous size, could move so leisurely, even hover? It’s often reported, too often, in UFO sightings, that the craft was “as big as a football field.” Have you ever stood beneath a blimp? I have. Growing up near Cleveland, Ohio, I often saw the Goodyear blimp (based in Akron, some 30 miles south) as it nosed toward Cleveland to provide news-coverage of sporting events in the stadium there. Once, around 1968, the blimp had engine trouble, and came near to ground at the abandoned airfield across the road from my house. Every boy in the neighborhood dropped whatever they were doing and ran over to see this rare spectacle–myself among them. My point: I would not have known the blimp–as long as a football field–even was there, had one of my pals not telephoned me.

In darkness, no one would have seen it.

I cannot be certain this explains the Hudson Valley sightings, but I’m pretty sure it does. I have a book from 2001 stating that dirigibles might be used to transport troops.
But I know that doesn’t explain away what was seen in the Hudson Valley, and–to present day–many other places. Triangular UFOs have been reported as long ago as the 1960s. Were these early drones?

As late as the 1980s, many UFO reports might have been solved by inserting “drone” for “UFO.” But no model, in the public eye, existed for this. Our present world is absolutely alien to that of the 1980s, for good or ill.

In my guise as a writer of short fiction and novels, I often try to imagine how someone from the 1960s–or 1970s–might react were he transported to our time. My guess: total shock. Not at anything as trivial as clothing (though that would stand out), but at the pace of our ordinary lives. The unfortunate traveler would more than likely end up sick by the end of his or her first day in our manic, media-controlled run, where nothing is actually real, even daily news, spun-out and topped by some other disaster within the hour. Christ, I can barely handle it.

People are seeing many odd things in the skies these days, similar to the UFO waves of 1952, 1966, 1973, 1984, etc. These days are nothing at all like those.

I would estimate that out of every 100 UFO sightings, 95% can be explained by drones employed by military, government, law enforcement, and obscure or even covert institutional and corporate concerns. Let’s face it, most of these can afford the hyper-thread, massive parallel-processing computers necessary to drive their water-cooled data-farms.
The most radical, hard-edge drones are no larger than a dragonfly. Expensive? Yes. Out of the question?

No.

NEW WORLD DISORDER

This post exceeds and includes, for good or ill, Black Light.  As mentioned in my Introduction some months ago, I have no ax to grind, no particular agenda in sharing my perspectives on UFO phenomena and related matter.  I’m fairly certain, to the extent anyone well-informed  can be, that I harbor no desire, fantasy, or commercial interest in “proving” the reality of the unknown.

The unknown doesn’t need me, you, or anyone in order to manifest itself.  Simply put, it does–has always done–what it “wants.”  Already I’m in trouble with the very words I’ve used to describe my plight.  I am blessed (or cursed) with the capacity to see perspectives outside of mine.  I warn you, in the spirit of argument, discourse, call it what you will, that I intend here to state my thoughts and–worse–feelings on matters uncanny and dark, assumed and manipulative.  I can however assure you that I’m not here to waste your time, poke wise at your beliefs, or rain black rumors.  I’ve heard enough of that–so have you. As much as I claim to be objective, I am not. No one is. Objectivity, like perfection, is not a human attribute.  Even the most psychopathic (Hannibal Lecter, for example; someone we’ve seen in pop culture) “freak” cannot be so.  That’s how he/she became disturbed.  Caged forever in one catastrophic trauma.  No matter their social mask, they cannot ever escape the emotional horror that put them there.

So it is, much less (I hope) that the spectrum of UFO experience manifests.  I began seriously thinking, like most, that UFOs were craft from another world.  Then I “escalated” after reading the European (despised by many Americans) accounts into pondering whether the entire phenomenon might not be some incredibly hard to grasp branch of Jungian theory.  I.E., projection of archetypes from the collective human unconscious.  You have heard this well before me, but it almost makes “sense.”

This theory (which remains such) is abstract, hard to grasp, and disturbing.  Even the rare accounts involving authoritative scrutiny leave us with the idea that what is seen might very well originate in us.  This does not indicate psychosis (though it has) in witnesses. One of my favorite (because so dead-pan) reports took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, on March 20, 1967.  ”At 10:45 PM [approximately], a man and his daughter saw two lights that they thought were landing lights on an aircraft, but they came to ground level, flew straight toward the car, and suddenly vanished. At the same time, five figures appeared about [10 feet] away.  They had narrow, pointed noses, mouths and eyes like slits, blond hair, rough skin, and were dressed in loose ‘hunter-like’ clothes. Witnesses drove away as fast as they could.”

This account is chronicled in Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, as many of you probably know. The book documents 100 years of so-called close encounters, from 1868 through 1968.  I do not claim to know what the UFO phenomenon represents, but Vallee’s painstaking research tells us–without doubt–that whatever is going on has been doing so well before human technology could fake it.

One more Vallee report might very well convince us that something Other genuinely exists.  This, perhaps more than all in Magonia, haunts me more by absence than the surreal terror of certainty.  ”Chrysville, Pennsylvania, 1933.  A man observed a faint violet light in a field between this town and Morrestown.  Walking to it, he found an ovoid object [9 feet] in diameter and [6 feet] thick with a circular opening similar to a vault door. Pushing it, he found the room full of violet light and observed many instruments, no occupant. Smell of ammonia.”

1933. The date of this tells me something–I wish I knew what.  This is why Vallee’s book is so important.  Some guy seeing a light, and walking toward it.  The account sounds like bad 1950s science fiction, but it wasn’t.  The culture for that would not exist for two decades.  No “model” haunted anyone’s head–flying saucers and “ovoids” did not yet manifest in popular–or any–culture.  The man reported what he had seen.  And smelled.  Wish I could have been there….

Such is the poetic strangeness of Passport to Magonia.  Those today who criticize it are missing the point.  No one in present time–to my knowledge–has reported “entity” sightings even close to what Vallee so precisely garnered.  This is why I cannot completely drown Jung’s collective unconscious theory of projection.  Why did the old-school entities resemble fairies, tiny hunters, and even monsters, dreamlike but real to the witnesses?  Though such encounters sound to me fascinating, they did not positively affect those who claimed to have seen them.  In fact (akin to the so-called Mothman sightings between 1966-1967), those who spoke to investigators (and it must be admitted that some of these had their own agendas) did not want their names made public.  Hence, they weren’t seeking “fame,” especially in the most dated accounts.

In closing, I’ll admit I don’t have an answer.  But I take the “old” sightings seriously.  American–or any other–technology simply could not have faked or hoaxed anything even approaching the level of high-strangeness we see in the early accounts.

To me, and me alone, this indicates that whatever UFO phenomena represents, is far more complex and enigmatic than any popular theory involving “grays” or other assumed extraterrestrial presence.  This is, admittedly, a very difficult path to walk.

But I’d rather walk with dreams, despite the cost, than walk alone in a world without meaning. 

 

BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#10)

Chapter 9

ROSWELL R.I.P.

At 54, I have read probably as much about the so-called Roswell Incident as anyone.  It’s hard to ignore, not only because of what it might mean, but why America (indeed, the world) is so obsessed with the matter.

   Here’s the thing: something crashed near Roswell.  What that thing was, no one can (or will) say.  In fact, about all one can say about the matter is that there was a coming-to-ground of something.  True, it’s easy to ask: what can anyone possibly add to the extant literature?  This is not a yes-or-no topic, i.e. did something actually fall?  It did.  What came after is fraught with misinformation, disinformation, mythology, wish-fulfillment, insanity, and someone’s uncle’s direct involvement with a nameless nurse.

   I am honor-bound to admit that I respect the considerable research (no names…you know them) carried out, often without compensation of any kind, by individuals tougher far than me.  Sometimes I think Roswell has become, if not exceeded, the penultimate mystery, akin to that offered by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln in their Holy Blood, Holy Grail, wherein the authors make their case for our knowledge of Christ being incomplete.  I was raised to believe and respect Catholicism which, in my huffing, grudging way, I’ve come to agree to disagree with.

   What’s that mean?  It means I think Christ was actually a flesh-and-blood being, thus no stranger to pain and the simple facts of life.  Was he divine?  With all due respect to Sister Bonaventa (who smacked my hand with a ruler for breaking a clock), I can’t claim an answer.  Frankly, I’ve learned more from independent study than anything she taught.  I wouldn’t be surprised, were she still among us lucky few, if she ran down the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and phoned their parents, as she did mine.  No good deed goes unpunished–especially that of asking simple questions.

You see, that’s how it goes with believers.  Tuck in your white shirt, leave questions at the door with your chewing gum.  Speaking only from experience, what I learned from catechism is this: Question us and suffer….

So it goes with Roswell.  Investigators smarter far than me have done so.  I question their motives.  I am not above wanting to know what happened.  Who is?  While I cannot for the life of me recall who said this, here it is:  [paraphrasing]: If an extraterrestrial vehicle came to ground on American soil, this would not have been kept secret.  In 1947 there simply was no mechanism for the “black-ops” we see now in every exploitative movie and TV show.   Check history, and you will see that there were secret codes, covert operations, etc.  Compared to present day, these were primitive.  Had something absolutely incomprehensible dropped from the sky, whatever arm of military intelligence charged with recovery would have shouted for assistance from whoever they could find.  No effort would have been made to hide this.  Slow down and think about it.  Had the craft been Soviet, Chinese, etc., it would have been covered up.  The fact that it seems to have been should stand out.  Whatever crashed near Roswell was/is something no one wants to talk about.

Why is that?  Investigator Martin Cannon (wherever you are) wrote that the device might have been one of the first “drones.”  Tasked to deliver biological/chemical hell on America’s enemies.  Where better to test this mini-apocalypse than in the vast New Mexican desert?  The U.S. was test-firing V-2 rockets from Germany.  Why wouldn’t they, since these represented the state-of the-art in blowing shit up?  Cannon goes on to say that if what crashed near Roswell was some balloon-supported deliverer of toxins, it might be responsible for the many mysterious deaths that occurred in the state in 1947.  If indeed this is what happened, lawsuits might exist to present-day.  This would explain some hard-to-trace tales of locals being menaced at gunpoint to turn over fragments from the crash-site.  It is well known that government tests involving the dispersal of toxins over populated (San Francisco, the Pennsylvania Turnpike) areas were carried out, with no thought to consequences.

I’m not the first to ask: what could be so scary that, in order to cover its existence, would be called a “flying disk”?  Something so dangerous–and secret–that to admit failure and public exposure resulting in lethalities might involve massive lawsuits up to present-day?  This is why I view Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base so vital to this piece.

In short, the book chronicles what most already know.  The vast region was–and is–host to test-flights of classified aircraft.   This is where the U-2 spy-plane, and the F-117 Nighthawk  (Stealth) were born.  The Area-51 mythology claims that recovered UFOs are “reverse-engineered” in order to create superior battle-space aircraft.  I doubt this, because enough evidence exists to point toward agents of disinformation charged with sustaining the UFO mythology.  Not only hidden from foreign powers, but from the American public in unavoidable overflights of classified vehicles, some of which employed exotic propulsion-systems and looked nothing like conventional aircraft.  Indeed, some of these are reported as triangular, or saucer-shaped.  It is not my place, or desire, to say this is wrong.  We live in an explosive world.  Those tasked with our defense must keep certain aspects of their operations secret.  I get this.  Those sneaking around Area-51 and other “secret” bases are buying in to the “reversed-UFO” mythology for good or ill.  Ask youself this elementary question:  If the United States actually has in their possession “alien” craft, why are these not being used against so-called “primitive” enemies like the Taliban?   Let’s face it, our enemies have cell phones.  Were we using exotic aircraft, they would be the first to photograph them and tell the world of our evil deception.  The fact that this is not happening says more than any rumor about Area-51 ever will.

Last, author Jacobsen claims to have nailed the truth about Roswell.  Upon reading this, I didn’t know whether to call anyone who might listen, or simply shut the hell up.  This claim alone shows how much even serious (as I thought I was) investigators grab the hook of Roswell.  Jacobsen claims to have interviewed several very old-school Area-51 alumni, who told her that what crashed at Roswell was indeed a disc-shaped craft, and bore occupants with over-size craniums and huge black eyes–akin to the “grays” in modern lore.  These turned out to be genetically-mutilated teenagers crafted by the Russians in order to terrify America, to be taken as “aliens.”  Jacobsen says, according to her aged sources, that Russia had anti-grav technology and put these “kids” inside.  Replete with Russian Cyrillic alphabet visible inside the craft.  Why?  The idea was to frighten American forces with aliens.  Why include obvious Russian symbology?  The idea, supposedly, is that the American military could not admit penetration of airspace by Soviet enemies.  None of this makes sense.  Why be obvious–even if American forces could not admit as much–about Russian origin?

Mirrors reflecting mirrors.  Somebody isn’t talking.  Whoever they are (were), they’re hiding something huge.  And it is not, as much as we might want to believe, evidence of extraterrestrial presence.  The truth, whatever that might be, probably is shocking, and more full of guilt and shame than anyone will ever admit.

BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#9)

Chapter 8

Where Art Meets Mysticism

For anyone following these posts, I apologize for not writing.  Life has a bad habit of not caring whether we write or, indeed, whether we do anything.

     I hope it’s obvious that The Night Run is at once personal and also an attempt to share matters some may be intersted in reading.  I would be a fool to claim otherwise.  What I’m attempting is a sort of deconstruction of so-called paranormal phenomena.  No, I am not the first to possess such “ambition.”  Hardly.  I may however be one of the last, in a world with no attention-span.

     So it goes.

     I have noticed that, for some reason, the wisdom of Carl Jung is dismissed by many earning their bread in the same field.  I don’t know why this is, but it hurts, for I think that Jung was on to something.  Perhaps his arrow came too close to striking the target of what it means to be human.  Many of his critics seem to overlook the workman-like precision Jung employed.  The difficult, sheer repetitiveness necessary to establish testable results.  Yet Jung carried out the heavy-lifting no one else, at the time, was willing to do.

     What does this mean?  Jung discovered, through thousands of sessions, that there exists an undeniable continuum in the dream-lives of all people–regardless of background, income, or race.  He pursued this to his death in 1961.  Jung’s Man and His Symbols was the last work undertaken by a man who wanted general readers to understand that the imaginative life must be taken seriously in its own right, as the most distinctive characteristic of human beings.  Beyond any doubt, Jung was the first authoritative figure even to consider paranormal phenomena.

     His work has since been beaten down, mostly by those promoting “external” (i.e. demons, ghosts, extraterrestrials) influence as an explanation for anomalous events.  I must admit he may have been wrong–but not completely.  Jung himself experienced a number of uncanny, even agressive, “weird” happenings.  The most well-known being his meeting with Freud, during which poltergeist activity splintered one of Jung’s bookshelves.  Talk about synchronicity.  That incident alone ought to establish that we have much to do with “paranormal” frights.  Jung himself remained unsure, but knew there must be a connection, that the spectrum of our consciousness was more powerful than previously known.

     If only he’d had another decade, he may very well have figured the paranormal.  Sadly, his research failed to withstand the occult pop-culture of the 1960s.  Or did it really fail?  I urge you to read Jung.  He didn’t fail, because he set others on the same path.  Here is where Jung’s extensive work pays off.  Undoubtedly others were pursuing the “unconscious” line as being in charge of the paranormal.  One aspect of this always leaves me asking: why?  In recordings of so-called spiritual mediums, what stands out are the messages from the “dead.”  Across the board, these are absurd, even boringly repetitive, yet believed as proof of life after death.  If the “ghosts” knew so much, why did they repeat the same ridiculous dialogue (as they do still)?

     Could it be these voices came from the human collective unconscious?  This would explain how “they” know certain facts, yet get unnecessarily confused.  Jung knew this was far more interesting than ”ghosts,” but few wanted to accept it.  Given present-day access to the literature of so-called seances, anyone can read transcripts and see that “spirits” often repeated themselves with unvarying predictibility.  When asked “Is there a God?”, the response often was, “Do you want there to be” or “If there were, wouldn’t I tell you?”  Never an absolute answer.  Hard as it may be to accept, this continues today.  But TV producers don’t want that.

     Fact:  the voices are real.  Fact: they are predictable.  This hasn’t changed, nor is it likely to do so.  The entire tradition of exploitation (unchanged for hundreds of years) is too strong, banking on simple human sadness and pain.  To the “medium” or “channeler” it’s all the same.  An easy income.  The few authentic “voices” that come through make no sense, and terrify the receivers.  You don’t need me to recall TV shows wherein “ghost-hunters” claim to have captured voices.  “I died in the war,” etc.  I have heard these.  So have you.  But what are they, really?  Any specific request comes back nonsensical.  So it has always been.

       Those who know of this are not out there to exploit (well, a few probably are).  And those who do know one thing:  we are haunted by memory alone.

     Here is where art meets mysticism.  Charlatans back off.  This is one more aspect Jung (and his students, most prominently Aniela Jaffe) noticed.  There will always be a fascination with the unknown, but Jung died convinced most of this comes from us.  I think he was on the right track which, to my way of thinking, only exults the profundity of humankind.  I would like to have the answers.  Who wouldn’t?

       It wasn’t until I read Man and His Symbols that I felt Jung had nailed the essential question:  why do paranormal events carry such absurd weight?

     I am honor-bound to say that if your knowledge of “the paranormal” comes from TV and the movies and novels, well, you’re on the wrong track.  The reality–such as it is–has nothing to do with these.  Paranormal events are both more disturbing, and mundane, than most will ever know.  But we live in a world addicted to sensationalism and vapid drama.  No screen-writer wants the “facts.”  Simply, they are boring.  Such is the reality of paranormal phenomena.

     Though it has taken a long time for me to get here, I couldn’t fairly have done so without relating the previous material.  Reading Jung, and how he connects abstract art (Pollock, Miro, etc.) to mysticism began as quite a stretch.  Not for long.  What I most admire about Jung and his students is that not one claimed to have “the answer,” but he must have known how close they came.

     For instance, there is in Jung’s last book a photograph of a Jackson Pollock painting.  You may think you don’t know Pollock, but you do.  He started the “spatter put paint anywhere and call it art” argument.  Non-representational.  Different from early work, Pollock’s famous paintings are chaotic, seeming throwing colors anywhere in layers, as though done by a child.  The truth is that Pollock was working from his own unconscious, beyond intellect.  Jung’s book gives us a photograph of a metal vibrating plate where soundwaves are visible.  They precisely resemble a Pollock.  How did he know this?  Answer: he didn’t.  It just turned out that way.

     Here is where the line between paranormal and creativity meet.  That it exists at all is profound.  I’m not the first to notice resemblances between reported UFO entities, or occupants (no one uses these terms today), and figures displayed in both abstract and surreal paintings.  On the other hand, maybe I am.  Only Jacques Vallee has noted the “poetic” strangeness of some reports.  But you will not find such reports coming from America or England.  What does that tell us?

     I know what this tells me.  There must be, for lack of a better term, a connection between human consciousness (meaning dreams, fears, hopes, etc.) and how UFO entities manifest themselves.  It took all of one hour for me to read Vallee’s Passport to Magonia (which lists UFO landing reports from 1868 to 1968) to conclude that these things appeared in accordance to the “accepted” culture of the times.  Witnesses described robot-like humanoids, often faceless, who, when they spoke at all, said absurd things:  “What is your time?”, and “We only want to take you to a different place,” and countless more nonsense.

     There are descriptions of beings “wrapped in plastic, with green glowing eyes.”  Anything one might imagine.  Again, I am not the first to notice this, but genuine beings “from another planet” would not breathe our air and walk on two legs.  The odds against this are too extreme even to consider.  Many witnesses spoke of the entities: “They seemed disoriented, like ghosts.  They didn’t walk well.”

     The “faceless” aspect is most reported in the late 1950s through much of the 1960s.  A period that saw many abstract painters giving us mysterious figures seemingly in charge of gray, bleak landscapes.  A brief search of “surrealism” on Google will easily conjure many examples of such forms from Dali, Miro, de Chirico, etc.  I noticed this, in ignorance, on record-album art from electronic musicians such as Klaus Schulze, Gong, Hawkwind and others.

     My point is that these images, unnoticed by most, existed in underground scenarios.  Whether the UFO entities inspired this or vice versa really doesn’t matter.  The real question is why.

     My un-humble answer:  these faceless figures represent a collective spiritual despair, a fear of the individual being submerged in the mindless masses.  I cannot claim I want this to explain every weird event, every UFO-occupant, because that is not enough.  But it takes me back to Carl Jung and his idea that we create our gods, and ghosts, for good or ill.

STILL OUT HERE…

Yes, still out here trying to make sense out of recent so-called UFO activity.  Some of these reports are bogus–but not all.  Be back soon.

BEYOND BLACK LIGHT: WHY THE HELL NOT?

This post is not connected to my book-in-progress.  It is, however, connected to you, assuming you consider yourself human.

Some day I might very well regret writing this, but not today.  I’m certain what I’m about to say is neither original nor unknown.   What I do know is that there appears to be a “sanction” against printed books.  Really?  Yeah.  For what it’s worth, you’ll never slide that one past me.  While I am aware that many, many people possess electronic devices (Kindle, etc.) that seem to “replace” printed books, I know the old hard text isn’t going anywhere.

I do feel honor-bound, though, to at least see the “argument” from both sides.  I should, in theory, be okay that people want to read at all.  Sure, I get that.  Let’s face it, if you can’t, or won’t, read you’re lost.  History is out of your league.  Even recent news, however trivial, is quite “up to” whoever tells you what’s real.  Immediately you’re lost, if relying on CNN or FOX or whoever.  Sure, they’re telling you what’s going on.  You, though, make the mistake of not questioning where this data originates.  Well, said-data originates from the fastest person to report it.  This doesn’t make the info accurate–simply one reporter’s take.  If you woke up to news telling of an earthquake you didn’t feel, would you believe it?  I wouldn’t.  If I didn’t feel it, it didn’t happen to me.

Pretty much all there is, right?  Except that people living near or on the east coast of America claimed to have felt an earth-tremor, in 2011, they could not have experienced.  True, there was a quake, but it was limited.  I know, because I somehow managed to sleep through it.  Yet people in far-flung Rhode Island claimed to have felt the tremor, when they could not have.

Before you even think about letter-bombing me, take into consideration where your information came from.  The quake was felt in Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, southwest Pennsylvania, Maryland, and even our sacred Washington, D.C.  That’s about it.  Though it was not a large tremor, it certainly was large enough to alarm anyone who felt it.  I recall one that hit northeast Ohio in the late 80s.  Probably the first ever known since history was recorded.  I was asleep, and suddenly aware some fool was shaking my bed.  My framed letter from author Peter Straub rattled against the wall.  I’ll tell you, you never saw a guy shoot out of bed like I did that day.  Living in a suburb of Cleveland, I immediately went to the nearest window looking for a mushroom cloud.  That’s how big it felt.  I thought we were done.  Fifteen minutes later, on TV, I was informed we had just sustained a 4.5 quake, pretty damned heavy for a region unused to earthquakes.

My point?  Gosh, I’m sure I have one.  And if I do, it is this:  chill out, dawg.  Wait an hour or so.  Back in the 80s, had one of my neighbors run over to say we’d been nuked, I might have believed that person.  Today, with Twitter, that could never happen.  Why?  Because a nuclear attack’s electronic magnetic pulse would kill it.  Your car (unless it came from the 1970s) would not start.  That’s when you would know you’re fucked.

Feel an earthquake?  Car won’t start?  Kiss your ass goodbye, pretty much.

Ah hell, I’m just messin’ with ya!  Aren’t I?

BLACK LIGHT: PERSPECTIVES ON MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA (#8)

Chapter 7

How Much Is Too Much?

As much as I’d like to pretend that I’m some Fearless Researcher In Search of the Truth, well, I’m not.

   There are of course those who came before, such as John Keel, Jacques Vallee (to use obvious examples), who were genuinely threatened by parties unknown.  Keel was put upon by the IRS, whose agent Keel physically ejected from his messy apartment.  If only I’d been there. . . .

   Right.  And what would I have done?  That’s easy.  “John,” I would’ve whispered, “tell me what to do.”

   Keel probably would’ve said: “God, you’re useless.  Just zip your lip.”

   He’d have been right.  It’s easy to dismiss the efforts of UFO/Paranormal investigators (meaning those who actually sought and met with witnesses to the unknown) from earlier days.  Why?  I don’t know.  The world was different, at least in America, and people were allowed to express anger in a way we can barely imagine.  Try doing that now at any job interview.  They’ll call the heat on you.

   We all have our special shelf—or shelves—laden with books we vow to forever keep.  What we often forget is what their authors were subjected to in a world seething with Communist paranoia.  I’ll go further.  The FBI made no bones that they were curious indeed about certain writers.  Especially anyone like Ginsberg, Burroughs, etc.  The Beat writers. Those who were not writing about anomalous phenomena.  Let’s face it, the feds were worried about the Beats introducing youth culture to drugs and free-thinking (even though the feds, whether he knew it or not,  used Timothy Leary and others in order to turn on  precious American youths to LSD).

   Apparently the U.S. government had not read Aldous (Brave New World) Huxley’s thoughts on mescaline (a compound derived from peyote cactus).  No, we had to tell them.  Sure as hell they listened, because early into the 1950s MK-ULTRA (dare I speak of it) came up with a list of compounds, many known for centuries to South American shaman and others, capable of putting human consciousness into a very precarious, vulnerable state.

   Much later, Terrance McKenna and brother Dennis traveled to South America and partook of a handful of alkaloids (hallucinogens), and tripped their asses off.  In the same way Keel, Vallee and others flipped the intellectual bird at Authority, so did the McKennas.  Bear with me.

   You may have read of more recent experiments with the hallucinogen DMT and its apparent ability to reproduce the so-called alien abduction experience.  I have not taken DMT, but will admit to “experimenting” with LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms.  Good.  Now the NSA knows that.  I don’t care, since they know all else, and I no longer partake of these substances.  Having one’s ass scared shitless ensures this, thank you.

   What I find fascinating is this.  Beyond film-maker Ken Russell creating the mind-blowing (to this day) Altered States (please seek out the book—his first!—by Paddy Chayefsy), is that there exists the ability to reproduce this same effect electronically.  Or, more accurately, by way of electromagnetic technology.  This does not require “implants,” simply a brief-case sized generator of certain signals.  This is not secret.  Until you try and describe it to your friends.  Then, of course, you are what our British friends call a “nutter.”

   Yes, I am afraid to tell you that I ingested (ground up in vanilla ice-cream) seeds of the simple Morning Glory.  At the age of 42, you’d think I would’ve known better, but I didn’t.  What resulted was an absolute nightmare I somehow felt ego-bound enough to write down: “Gazing out window into back yard . . . in the pine trees between our house  and neighbor… horrible cob-webbed figures laughing . . .rat faces with snapping teeth and dead white eyes.”

    All I’m saying is (in the words of Aleister Crowley), do what thou will.  Just don’t do it.  One thing the McKennas left out of their very scientific study was (if you’ve watched Altered States) is that encountering the primal self = encountering primal terror.  Take it from me:  you’re better served by reading about it.

   I mean this.  I don’t give a damn what your job is, you are not prepared to be stripped down to an animal-like terror.

   If there are covert groups using these substances against us, and why would they, given the new quantum possibilities, we are powerless.  What really bothers me is why?  The primal experience of confronting the Other has been among us for thousands of years.  Whether the Other originates from without or within, it does seem to be real.  It has genuine affect, what we would call telepathy, precognition, telekinesis.  It’s hard to nail down whether something you read in a book from 1975 about a Brazilian shaman tossing stones across a field, using his mind, is real or what we want to be real.

   I’m not bigoted enough to say it isn’t.  But I do think our natural, vegetable world might very well send out chemical messengers, and, terrifying as they might be, point toward human evolution for those who can bear it.