Sorry I've been so scarce recently. I have to finish writing my dissertation this month (ok, by next week basically) and I'm teaching a new class which just started on Wednesday.
So I've had no time to blog. I've been keeping up on stuff for the Spooky Paradigm. I'm hoping around the turn of the month to have a day and just go through all of it. Until then, I apologize if you've been checking for new material.
On November 7, 2006, up to a dozen employees from United Airlines reported a UFO, without lights, was hovering over O'Hare Airport in Chicago. A multiple witness sighting by airline workers of a daylight disc at a major airport. Not surprisingly, this is getting a lot more press attention than a typical local news report about lights in the sky. I can't remember the last time I saw a UFO report in the Washington Post. Jeff Rense posts on his role in bringing this to the attention of the Chicago Tribune.
Pilot sightings of UFOs are not new, and continue to this day (as a report in the UK has recently shown). These are often considered the best cases by nuts and bolts ufologists, as they are by "reliable" eyewitnesses who are familiar with aerial phenomenon and aircraft.
I gotta admit, this is reminding somewhat, from a media perspective, of the Michigan sightings in 1966 that spawned the "swamp gas" meme, the Condon Report, and the closure of Blue Book (as discussed in my post on Gerald Ford, who brought federal attention to that case). We'll see if anything follows this and gains traction.
EDIT: MSNBC has an interesting skeptical take on the sighting. Interesting not for the explanations they suggest (though they are of interest to understanding the case) but rather for how the case is being handled by the media.
EDIT: Leaked video from a Chicago TV news show suggests that a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, John Hilkevitch. is trying to get his hands on a photograph of the object, taken by a pilot.
The New York Times has an article on a strange dog-like creature that was preying on sheep in Montana. The animal was shot and DNA testing has been done, but it still has not been classified yet as being feral or a dog-wolf hybrid.
Not exactly an ABC (Alien Big Cat), but here are some articles on that topic as well.
A large black cat sighted in Illinois
An article from UFO Digest exploring paranormal or ultraterrestrial aspects of ABCs.
Blurry video frame of a big cat from western England.
Linda Moulton Howe has an interview with Dr. Meldrum, previous discussed on this blog in this post. Dr. Meldrum clears up that his tenure is not in question. Here's one of the Meldrum stories from earlier in December.
I'm pretty sure that Howe's website drops articles into a subscriber only section after a bit, so visit soon. Though I could be wrong.
In other Bigfoot news, a supposed tooth has appeared from Kentucky, with photos, on Cryptomundo. From last month, a piece summarizing the sightings of Bigfoot coming out of eastern Texas, particularly it's Big Thicket (which I visited in 2004 during the Hurricane Ivan evacuation).
Some more end-of-the-year lists and essays
Greg Bishop has listed what he thinks are the 20 most important dates in UFO history.
Part 1
Part 2
These dates on a mix of cases, but also on developments in what composes the most high profile elements of ufo lore, especially those surrounding the government. As Greg Bishop notes, he is somewhat biased on this, being the author of Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth. I just got a copy of this book for Xmas, so I hope to be reading it in the near future. Anyway, his important dates list is
Not directly related to UFOs or other Spooky issues, New Scientist offers their list of some of the strangest and most amazing inventions of the year. Well, the invisible drone might have something to do with UFOs.
And Archaeology Magazine lists the top ten discoveries in archaeology in 2006. It's been a very good year.
Check out Loren Coleman's post on 1920s-era newspaper articles about expeditions to find dinosaurs in South America and Africa. Very cool illustrations. Though not so different from the artwork from a cryptozoological expedition to Gambia this year.
Let's not forget that Time Magazine put an alien on its cover nine years ago for the 50th anniversary of Roswell. Let alone what can be found on the History, Discovery, or Travel Channel on any given night.
Nothing too deep, just some cool imagery and a reminder of how pervasive the Spooky Paradigm can be.
EDIT: Cryptomundo has more, including larger pdfs of the images and text
I don't want to say much else about Gerald Ford and his legacy of pardoning the crimes of the Nixon Administration, or being the initial planting of what would become the Bush Administration.
But after his death, and on topic for the blog, let us not forget that when Gerald Ford was a Congressman from Michigan, he was the highest profile person publically interested in UFOs. As Frank Warren writes, Rep. Ford represented his constituents. And in 1966, his constituents were right in the middle of a major UFO flap. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, scientific advisor to Project Blue Book, coined the infamous phrase "swamp gas" to explain a multiple witness sighting in Michigan that year. As Warren writes, Ford was quite vociferous and aggressive in getting attention on this issue, playing off the notion that the Air Force was ridiculing the people of Michigan. Eventually, as Warren notes, Ford's efforts led to the University of Colorado report, better known as the Condon Report, and the closing of Project Blue Book and any official (though declassified documents have shown that at least some unofficial interest continued) federal interest in UFOs until investigations of the Roswell Incident in the 1990s.
Ford was one of several American presidents with experiences or interests in UFOs. I have just discovered that there is an entire website dedicated to the history of the White House and UFOs (I would note that not everything there has the same level of reliable documentation). More on Ford and UFOs can be read there. Jimmy Carter reported a UFO to NICAP in 1973 (the sighting was in 1969). The report can be read here. Ronald Reagan also had a UFO sighting, though he didn't report it other than as a story later. But he brought up the topic several times, and famously speculated at the UN that the USA and USSR would cooperate in the face of an alien threat. Bill Clinton didn't claim a UFO sighting, but he did have substantial interest in the topic. One of his aides (John Podesta) was fascinated with the topic, while Clinton tasked one of his lawyers (Webster Hubbell, as noted in his memoirs) to hunt out government information on UFOs and the JFK assassination, upon coming into power. And Clinton mentioned the topic more than a few times, though a great deal of rumor and lore about Clinton and UFOs grew exponentially with the net.
Not typically the stuff of history class.
UPDATE October 22, 2007: Dennis Kucinich, presidential candidate, in addition to having a ridiculously hot wife, has also had a UFO sighting.
Paranormal Review has a story on Dr. Brian Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1973. He has also for decades publically urged research in parapsychology. I can't say I am much for a lot of these ideas, but then I'm no physicist.
There is much more at Dr. Josephson's website
UPDATE: I'm leaving this up. But for some years now, I find I don't agree with what I once wrote. I've ultimately decided that the black triangles are a mix of misidentification and folklore, given credibility by the period of interest by American stealth designers in triangular craft. I think I came to this conclusion before the cratering of credibility regarding the book Night Siege, but that certainly didn't help matters.
By now, readers of this blog should be able to guess that I find the Spooky Paradigm interesting for a couple of reasons, but that I definitely put it in a cultural frame. In other words, I find it most interesting as a culture, a community, a movement, a worldview, something along those lines. I write about it here from that perspective.
But I can't say I don't have opinions and ideas about the ideas in the Paradigm. And the one mystery associated with UFOs, the one that I simply cannot explain to my own satisfaction, is that of the Triangles. These are also called the Black Triangles, though given that many sightings are at night, this may be a difficult call.
Anyway, UFOs have come in a lot of different shapes through the years, and still continue to do so. Trends in the appearance of reported UFOs can be interesting, but simple statements do mask the diversity, and the persistance of supposedly "out-dated" reports of disc or cigar-shaped UFOs. But one trend that has been remarked on from time to time is the growing popularity of triangle-shaped UFOs. I don't know if more Triangles are reported than in the past, but they do seem to be involved in more multiple or even mass witness cases.
There are numerous cases, but the four famous Triangle cases that define the others are the Hudson Valley sightings (1983 - 1985, see the book Night Siege in the sidebar for details, put back in print in 2002 after being difficult to obtain), the Belgian sightings (March 30, 1990), the Phoenix Lights (March 13, 1997), and the Illinois "Cop" Case (January 5, 2000 documented at a great page at the UFO Evidence website). In these cases, black triangles (sometimes smaller, but usually much larger and typically described with "football fields" as a unit of measure) are sighted moving low and slow. They have lights, often with a red light in the center of the ventral side of the triangle, and then brighter lights near the corners. But in a number of cases a rainbow of lights is described along one of the narrow edges of the triangle.
These sightings have attracted a great deal of attention for many reasons. Again, there are individual sightings of the Triangles. But the cases listed above were all multiple witness sightings (including mass witness sightings by hundreds of people) over populated areas. In the case of the Belgian sightings and the Illinois case, government officials were involved (Belgian fighter jets were scrambled, most of the Illinois witnesses were police officers from several departments) and photographs were taken (here is an example on Lieve Peten's site). Someone looking for a nuts-and-bolts UFO report couldn't do much better than the Triangles, except perhaps to get a piece of one or some clear and sustained daytime imagery of one, preferably from multiple sources to discount Photoshopping.
One problem immediately rears its head: the sightings are so good, they are too good. Yes the cases are famous spawning television documentaries and books and mainstream news reporting. But as I quoted in a previous entry in this blog " if a conspiracy theory turns out to be correct, it is quickly relabelled as investigative journalism"and this applies to the Triangles. Because they do have many of the characteristics of actual objects sighted by many people, including "credible" authorities, the reaction outside of the Spooky Paradigm is to admit the sightings may be of something real, but that it must be something exotic, but not too exotic.
Like experimental US military aircraft. This makes sense. The US was experimenting in the 1970s and on with black triangular aircraft as part of its stealth program. While none of the known US aircraft fly like the Triangles (in particular, slow or hovering low-altitude flight), perhaps the Triangles are something that hasn't been released to the public yet. Perhaps a stealth long-range transport ship. Perhaps using lighter-than-air, or even exotic antigravity technology. Perhaps the witnesses didn't understand exactly what they were seeing. This is the conclusion from a detailed study of the triangles by the National Institute for Discovery Science. (see also this page for various articles, maps, etc.). As with animal mutilations, they got interested in the Triangles as they seem to have more data to handle. Their conclusion was that the triangles may be experimental transport aircraft, and that they appear to cluster around airbases for transport and logistics (pdf here, jpg map here).
There are two problems with the experimental aircraft idea. The first is that ufologists can point to older cases of triangular sightings. Ok, but there does seem to be an upswing in sightings, and especially the impressive multi-witness sightings, starting around the time the Americans began building stealth craft and flying them out in Nevada at Groom Lake and other facilities (though these French sightings date to 1975-1976, when the F-117 was still a concept being worked out). Perhaps the earlier Triangles are not related to the post-1983 Triangles. There are only so many basic shapes thagt one could use to describe an unfamiliar object in the sky, and triangle is likely to come up. A rise in sightings of black triangular UFOs just at the time that the USAF starts flying secret black triangular planes is just a coincidence? Somewhat difficult to believe. So this I can live with.
What bothers me when I think about these reports is the time depth if this were a secret plane. It is a truism that secret planes typically stay secret for no more than a decade, and perhaps significantly less. This issue comes up with reports of the supposed Aurora, another mystery UFO of the stealth era. As discussed on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, Aurora is the label given to reports of a high-altitude, high-speed, sonic-boom generating triangular (hence why it is sometimes conflated with the low-altitude Black Triangles) aircraft. In both cases, sightings continued for a substantial period of time, but there is one major difference. Aurora sightings (and recording of sonic booms) are largely confined to the late 1980s and the early to mid 1990s. One could conceivably argue that Aurora was what so many think: a replacement for the SR-71 in the niche of the high-altitude high-speed reconaissance and potentially strike aircraft. Perhaps some prototypes were created and flown, but ultimately the project was cancelled, and the entire thing kept secret perhaps due to extravagant costs, spectacular failure, or scandalous corruption. Who knows, but this is a believable excuse for why the plane could have been in operation for half a decade and then disappeared behind National Security/Cover-Your-Ass.
But this explanation simply doesn't work for the Triangles. They have been sighted for more than two decades (here is a multi-witness sightings in Venezuela from last month) so far with no end in sight. And if they are advanced transport aircraft, there have been enough American wars and military actions that one would imagine they would have been used. And if they are so secret for decades, why fly them over populated areas, in some cases multiple times over the course of a year or more as in the Hudson Valley case?
Historian Richard Dolan wrote a good and more detailed essay similar to this one for the National Institute for Discovery Science, back in 2003. While I am sure I must have read this essay, I forgot about it until tonight. Yes, we agree on a number of points, and reach some similar conclusions. But where Dolan suggests a possible ET origin for some of the Triangles due to lack of disclosure as a military craft, I take his other suggestion as more likely. That the reports are indeed of structured non-ET craft, perhaps stealthy, perhaps for transport. But the continued secrecy points to a very different kind of relationship between whoever flies the craft, the federal government, and the American people. Or as Dolan puts it, a "shadow government." Such a craft would clearly have value in a war, say by rapidly deploying troops and equipment in difficult to reach places (such as Afghanistan in 2001, or Northern Iraq in 2003). But no such craft has emerged, nor have stories by soldiers of having ridden in or unloaded such craft.
If these obvious cases for using the Triangles didn't unveil them, then what are they being saved for? This is where, as Dolan notes, things start to get dark. Quiet craft able to deploy military or police forces, and being tested and flown around urban areas? Developed by someone in the US government but not used to fight its wars? This starts to lead to disturbing ideas to say the least.
And hence this post. The Triangles confound easy explanation as hoaxes or folklore. They seem to exist. They certainly sound like something a military would, and possibly could, create. And in fact they look at least something like recent creations for the US Air Force, though with major differences. Yet for decades they haven't been revealed as such, even when their use could have won wars or saved lives (imagine a black triangle descending on the Convention Center in New Orleans in September 2005, rescuing hundreds of the trapped and dehydrated people, continuously ferrying everyone out in the course of some hours). This might lead some to suggest a non-human explanation for what appear to be structured mechanical air craft, while it would lead others to think about a military or intelligence organization that has such aircraft, but is not beholden to the will of the people and their elected representatives.
Either option disturbs me.
EDIT: I'll add triangle sightings to this post when I come across them. Like this one in the UK on January 30, 2007.
EDIT: French Triangle Sightings from the 1970s. Most importantly, they were published in the 1970s, before the meme of the black triangle, and just before the first stealth prototypes were flying in Nevada.
EDIT: Black Triangle seen in British Colombia. News report on the sighting.
Animal mutilations, or "mutes," are an interesting part of the Spooky Paradigm. Much of the Paradigm is witness-based, relying on witnesses (especially the vaunted "credible witness"). By contrast and definition, mutilated animals are physical evidence, and the actual process of mutilation or the mutilators themselves are generally not witnessed, though there are some exceptions.
Mute reports are persistant in the Spooky literature and reports, though flaps are reported. Intriguingly, the two main periods of public interest have come when the reports are not associated with UFOs. The modern mute phenomenon is typically traced back to the case of "Snippy" in 1967. As ironic as it would be, the first "mute" wasn't named "Snippy" but Lady. Furthermore, while cattle would become the focus of the animal mutilation phenomenon, Lady was a horse. And for a phenomenon that would come to be defined by supposed repeated patterns of damage to the mandible, the eye, the ear, and the anus and genitalia, Lady was missing flesh from much of the head and neck, exposing the bone.
The inspiration for thinking about this phenomenon was the recent appearance of "Snippy's" bones on Ebay. (more on the story here) "Snippy" of course now has a website and a blog, and is even on MySpace. As the reports and sites mention, Lady/"Snippy" died in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. The valley has been at the center of the mute mystery for a long time, and is one of the premier examples of what is called a "window" in various fields of the Spooky Paradigm. As I will be discussing in some other posts, windows are areas with intense and long-term reports of the various phenomena of the Spooky Paradigm. In many cases, these reports are not limited to one kind of phenomenon, but cover many. For this reason, windows are of particular interest to those that do not favor solidly materialist explanations for these reports, but rather follow a more Fortean "everything in the same bag" style. The San Luis Valley produced Christopher O'Brien, who wrote about what he called (in a series of books), The Mysterious Valley ( O'Brien's website). His first book is valuable to a student of the Spooky Paradigm and its researchers because O'Brien discusses his principles, methods, and evolution as a Fortean investigator, and I highly recommend it. Like others I'll discuss in a future post, O'Brien purposely erases the lines drawn between different fields in the Spooky Paradigm, seeing many of them and others not yet defined at work in the San Luis Valley.
The wave of mutes that occurred after the "Snippy" case continued through the 1970s, peaking at the end of the decade and the beginning of the 1980s as government got involved in trying to solve the mystery. The urgency of calls for investigation came not only from economic concerns over lost animals, but also from the popular theory that the mutes were the work of Satanists (a boogeyman growing in popularity at this same time with the political and cultural growth of the fundamentalist Religious Right as a movement). As this explanation waned, UFOs became increasingly associated with the phenomenon, to the point that they are inextricably linked by the present. The Spooky name most associated with mutes is Linda Moulton Howe, who also does not easily subdivide the Paradigm into discrete parts.
This recent report by Howe demonstrates the intriguing element of mutilations: the physical evidence. Mute scenes can be photographed, bodies collected, samples taken, and tests run. A common complaint in the Paradigm is that these phenomena cannot be studied in the lab on a repeat, replicable, basis. But mutes can be studied in this fashion. It was for this reason that the National Institute for Discovery Science got interested in the topic. Numerous reports and articles on the topic can be found in the Institute's section on "Animal Pathology Research."
The history of the first mute wave is complex, and I cannot do justice to it here. But after some highly publicized findings, greatly disputed by "mute" researchers, that what were called mutilations were just predation and taphonomy and not the work of devil worshippers, much of the oomph disappeared. The exception being the the inclusion of mutes into the UFO scene. The mute phenomenon didn't go away, but it did center in a second great wave of interest in the 1990s. This time a culprit was suggested, and became the focus of the complex: the chupacabras. There is some evidence that the idea of the chupacabras predates this period, but out of Brazil and Puerto Rico the chupacabras spread as the first major Spooky legend of the internet age, as well as something of a minor icon some associated with the growing cultural latino cultural influence in the United States. Much debate swirled around the appearance and nature of the goatsucking chupa, but at its core the legend was still about dead animals with strange physical marks. But any similarity between the chupa wave and the earlier mutes was largely lost between pop culture play with the icon and focus on sightings of the creature.
The repeated identification of alleged chupas as dogs with mange didn't help matters. But I think this phenomenon helps us understand mutes and UFOs a bit better. UFOs became associated with mutes not at the height of popular interest/concern, but rather after fears of Satanists had largely been dismissed. When their nature became less certain/worrisome rather than clearer, mutes were more easily associated with UFOs and firmly entered the Spooky Paradigm, one of mystery that skates alongside the mainstream. BioFort discusses this issue, in a parallel fashion but referring to the chupacabras, in an article on the cryptosemantics of cryptozoology. The Spooky identity in many ways rests on mystery and inexplicability. Anomalies. Fort's "The Damned." As BBC's Mike Rudin puts it, if a conspiracy theory turns out to be correct, it is quickly relabelled as investigative journalism.
