Welcome to The Mystical Underground

This past May we received an e-mail from a documentary film producer who had heard us on a radio show/podcast, Mysterious Universe. She wanted to interview us for a film her company was making on synchronicity. We made tentative arrangements for an interview in Miami later this year. We also mentioned our latest work, Aliens in the Backyard. That apparently prompted our contact, Katy, to send us an interesting follow up a few days ago. Here’s what she said:

“…So while we were filming our web series in San Francisco in July, we were having all these crazy syncs with owls and as I was filming I noticed this crazy Hopi Indian Mural showing a hybrid human, gray alien and then an owl in the tree. I read them as being the screen memories. Anyway, I walked over to the film crew and around that time we accidentally shot something that looks like a UFO. Check out the clip, would love to know what you think! It’s right at the beginning of the video, doesn’t last long, but given that it occurs in daylight,  and was seen only on the video, it’s intriguing.

And here’s a link to her music video.

 This summer in Florida is rainy, extremely hot, and as humid as a steam bath. The combination of elements tends to bring out some interesting critters and this summer, those critters have been large.

Tonight, I walked into Rob’s office to show him something, didn’t have my glasses on, and said, “Wow, you’ve got two frogs.”

Rob, who had his glasses on, said, “It’s a bat.”

By this time, I had retrieved my glasses and moved closer. “It’s a moth.”

He moved next to me. “Wow, you’re right.”

We couldn’t believe the size of this thing. We’ve never seen a moth this large around here. While it was resting against the windowpane, Rob got out  the tape measure. “A wingspan of seven inches,” he announced.

I stepped outside and snapped a couple of photos, then headed to Google to find out what sort of moth this sucker was and what the esoteric meaning might be.

After a bit of research, I believe it may be a Black Witch Moth, sometimes referred to as a bat moth. In Mexico and the Caribbean, they’re a symbol of death  – la mariposa de la muerte. The Mayans believed that if this moth enters the home of a sick person, the person will die. In other versions of the legend, this occurs only if the moth visits all four corners of the house. (By the way, its favorite haunt and food source is the acacia tree–yesterday’s topic here!)

This moth stayed outside on his window for hours. When Rob went to bed, it was still there, seemingly staring into the room. At this point, I wasn’t liking this esoteric interpretation very much. I continued Googling.

Like most esoteric symbols, this one has permutations. If the Black Witch Moth flies over your head – you lose your hair or you are cursed; in Hawaii, it’s believed to be the soul of a dead person who has dropped by for a final good-bye; and in Texas and the Bahamas, it’s believed that if the moth sticks around for awhile, you’ll win the lottery. However, in Jamaica, under the name duppy bat, the moth is seen as the embodiment of a lost soul or a soul not at rest. In Jamaican English, the word duppy is associated with malevolent spirits returning to inflict harm upon the living and bat refers to anything other than a bird that flies.

So, okay, this moth is on Rob’s office window and I’m reading about these interpretations, looking for some sort of time frame in its life cycle. I couldn’t find much at all for the Black Witch Moth, so I Googled its cousin, the White Witch Moth.  On this site, it looks as if three-to four weeks pass before the caterpillar becomes the transformed creature, the White Moth. So I’ll take that as the time frame.  I’ll also take the interp about winning the lottery!

What’s interesting about this appearance is that we recently had an altercation with our neighbor, a Jamaican man, about dogs. He keeps his underfed German Sheppard on a five-foot leash in his garage or tied up outside- in 90 degree-plus heat.  While our daughter, Megan, was visiting recently, her dog, Nika, raced along the fence in our backyard, barking at our neighbor’s dog, who barked back, of course, whenever he was tied up back there. One morning as our neighbor was jogging up the sidewalk in front of our house, Nika tore out the front door and chased him, barking ferociously. But she’s just hot air. Nika has never bitten anyone.

Yet, our neighbor claimed that Nika had bitten him. He dropped by minutes after the chase and demanded to know if Nika had had her rabies shots. Well, yes, she’s good for the next three years in that department. Then our neighbor – let’s call him Mick – shows us his leg and announces that he’s going to call Animal Care and Control on the dog.

Neither Rob nor I could see anything on his leg – no bite marks, no skin broken, nothing. And Rob slips into that Taurus area known as the Bull’s Rush. He gets pissed. This is so rare that I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen it manifest itself in 30 years.

But when you push his buttons, then clear the deck. He read Mick the riot act about how he treats his dog- it’s illegal in our county to keep a dog on a leash in the heat and that he’d better not call the animal control people because Rob  would report Mick for how he treats his dog. And just for your information, Mick, we also fed your underfed, scrawny orange tabby cat for years, treated its injuries, loved on it when you didn’t do any of the above.

Mick never called animal control.

Skip ahead to late July. Megan and Nika are visiting and one morning, Nika darts out the front door and races the length of Mick’s fence, barking at his dog, who goes nuts.  There’s never any face-to-face confrontation between the dogs. It’s just noise. But Mick’s head pops up over the fence and he starts yelling about our dogs and how he’s going to report us to the police and Rob marches over to the fence, his shouts as loud and abrasive as Mick’s. I quickly get Nika indoors.

Monday morning as Megan and I are packing up her car because she’s going back to Orlando, a cop car pulls into the driveway. Mick has made good on his promise. Really? I walk over to the cop, whom I’ve seen around here from time to time, and he goes through his spiel. Your neighbor…the dogs…some issues…

 “Our daughter’s dog darted out of the house, our dog followed, and they ran along the fence, barking at Mick’s dog, who barked back. How is this an issue?”

He stifles a smile. “I was obligated to investigate and talk to you because he called.”

Later that morning, at Rob’s instigation, he and Mick converse calmly over the fence that separates our properties. They shake hands. The rift is mended- sort of.  We’ll keep our distance and hope that Black Witch Moth means a lottery of some sort so that we can have a couple of acres of land between us and our nearest neighbor.

(Notice in the photo, a ceiling fan is visible to the right and below the moth and dangling from it is a dream catcher. Continue down to the bottom of the pic and you can see a slice of Rob’s head as he peers out.)

+++

For the fun of it, Rob decided to send the above to a couple of witches (or Wiccans, if they prefer) and see what they thought about the black witch moth. Happily, they both had positive things to say. Here’s from Connie C – mathmagick.

“I’ve seen them here more than once, and have had no negativity occur. I think its favorite food being the Acacia is very relevant, considering your blog post today about the Acacia Tree!

“More about the Acacia: In the Bible, God instructed Moses to build the Tabernacle of the Covenant from the Acacia tree, and also the Ark of the Covenant.

“So, I would consider this “visitation” by the black witch moth to be a highly spiritual, positive symbolic omen for you!”

A few minutes later, she added:

“P.S. I have a sense that the black witch moth and its connection to the magnificent symbolism of the Acacia Tree are important for you in some way relative to Immortaliity. Perhaps the visitation from a loved one who knew you’d be posting the Acacia wanted to drop by and say Hello!”

And from Jane Clifford – who has posted here as turbowitch:

“Very interesting & a bit spooky! My very first thought was  symbolic death/ rebirth, transformation & my first thoughts are usually the best. My second was there maybe a news of death but not I think so close as to be completely devastating . My third, when I read that it can symbolize winning the lottery, was I hope so, because there is a syncro here !

“This  week I learned a technique for healing finances, one that previously has only been available for corporations and they claimed their profits soared Now it has been offered to the public. So first I applied it to my eldest daughter’s finances ( married, 2 kids, struggling on one wage), then I applied it for the other kids, then I ran the technique for YOU & finally for others I know and care about or have healed.”

Interestingly, about the time Jane sent that comment, we received an e-mail from a TV producer who has expressed a strong interest in optioning Trish’s Tango Key books for a TV series. Our fingers are crossed.

 Late May through August  in South Florida mean that the Royal Poinciana trees  explode with blooms. The one in the photo above is inside the dog park where we take Noah – and Nika, when she visits – every afternoon.

For me, there is something utterly magical about these trees. I remember them as the acacia trees of my childhood, bursting in summer with reddish-orange blooms in our backyard in Maracaibo and along the river road in Caracas where we lived.  They trigger memories of my parents younger than I am now, of the Sundays when my parents, my younger sister and I and our dachshund, Cindy, would pile into an old station wagon and later, a VW bug, and drive to the outskirts of the city for a picnic.

There was a spot in an area called Monte Elena where we would stop for our picnic. It was filled with these trees and we usually parked under one of them. The dog would leap out, overjoyed to run around without a leash, and we would grab our cooler and set up our lunch at a picnic table.

I learned to drive the VW on this hilltop above the city, putting along initially in first gear, sometimes  forgetting to depress the foot clutch when I finally shifted into second or third. The road wasn’t paved, there wasn’t another soul around, so my dad apparently felt it was good place for me to practice driving.  Somewhere I have old black and white photos from these years, of the picnic table, my parents, my sister and I, and even of the acacia trees. Those times were invariably happy and magical  and whenever I see an acacia tree now, in full bloom, these early memories are triggered and I am flooded with a sense of well-being.

When we walked into the dog park this afternoon, I saw that the acacia tree at the far end of the park was even fuller and brighter with blooms than it had been yesterday. It lit up that end of the park, and our daughter’s dog, Nika, immediately tore toward it, racing full speed across the openness, just as our dachshund used to do. The memory had come full circle. I just stared after her, my mind racing, calculating the years between now and Monte Elena then. More than 50 years. 

At the time, my mother was probably in her late-forties, my dad not yet 50.  Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s lay many years in their future. Rob was a teenager in Minnesota. Megan wasn’t even on my radar, although I suspect that in the larger scheme of things, she had a life in the sixties, but not with either Rob or me.

I have been re-reading Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, and realize the acacia tree prompts me to ask the question that Jung asked himself countless times “What is your myth- the myth in which you live?” For him, that myth moved into levels so profound that it led him into a confrontation with his unconscious (his words) and into a kind of madness. It was during this period that he wrote and painted what eventually became The Red Book, a stunning collection of writings on alchemy, mythology, dreams, synchronicity, symbolism, the paranormal, and a collection of paintings that are epic in scope.

My personal myth is far simpler. And part of it is intertwined with acacia trees. So when I walk into the dog park every afternoon and see that gorgeous tree,  entire continents of memories burst open. And afterward, I run home and write. It’s not synchronicity, but synchronicity can certainly be triggered when the power of memory and creativity are intertwined.

 When Arizona sculptor and artist Lauren Raines was going through a divorce, she heard about a shamanic practitioner in Crownsville, Maryland, who had studied with Sandra Ingerman and was also an energy healer and herbalist. She was at a point in her life when she was “very open to anything,” and went to him for a soul retrieval.

This shamanic practice helps regain a soul that has become trapped, disconnected, or lost through some sort of trauma. Depending on the circumstances, a divorce can certainly qualify as a trauma.

“He was very business-like,  and without knowing anything about me, put on his drums tape and headset, had me lie down next to him, and we tranced together. At the end of the session he blew soul fragments back into my body, and we talked about what he ‘saw.’ We talked about cutting the cords from my ex-husband and my former community (I had moved away). He concluded the session by telling me: You’ll know it’s all over when you see a magenta flower that looks like a cosmos, and a terra cotta angel.

 Eight months later, Lauren crossed the country with her cat and all her possessions loaded into her van. She was determined to move back to Berkeley, California, and start a new life. She had decided she would sleep in her van if necessary until she found somewhere to live. “I began my adventure as soon as I arrived with a visit to a coffee house I last visited 20 years earlier. Almost immediately I was greeted by a long ago friend, Joji Yokoi, who recognized me, and bought me a cup of coffee, and offered me a place to stay. I didn’t have to spend a single night in my van. When I walked into his living room, there was a huge photograph of a magenta cosmos flower hanging above his fireplace!”

A few months after that, Lauren answered an ad for a roommate. “I walked into a house with an altar – and in the center was a terra cotta angel. Judy Foster was one of the founding members of Reclaiming and a colleague of my heroine, Starhawk, whose writings were the foundation of my MFA thesis more than a decade earlier. Needless to say, just like that, my new life began and I ended up working with the very people I most wanted to work with, never having had to even try! The shaman was right in his prediction.”

The shaman gave Lauren two very specific bits of information about markers that would signal her transition period was finished – the magenta cosmos flower and the terra cotta angel. How was he able to see something so precise, for a woman he had just met?

“Shamans are inspired visionaries who are able to access information through their invisible allies for the benefit of  themselves, their families, and their communities. This process is known as divination, and it is usually accomplished through ceremony and ritual,” wrote Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman in Awakening to the Spirit World.  “Through their relationship with these transpersonal forces, shamans are able to retrieve lost power and restore it to its original owners…”

So through the trance state that the shaman and Lauren entered together, he was able to retrieve power that Lauren had lost and was allowed to see the most probable path her future would take.

 A dining room table isn’t just a piece of furniture; it’s also associated with memories.

The year that Megan was born, Rob and I bought a new dining room table at some cool furniture store in Fort Lauderdale. The table was teak, with beautiful tile inlays. For the next twenty years, that table hosted mostly holiday dinners, some of them large, most of them small. And the rest of the time, we ate at the kitchen table.

Twenty years after we bought the table, it collapsed, almost as though it sensed it hadn’t been loved or used enough  to count. For the last four years, that space has sat vacant in our house. Rob has used it for yoga and meditation classes,  the cats sometimes wandered around in it, apparently wondering what had happened to the table.  

Then a friend told us she had a table she’d bought from her sister that was too large for her kitchen and were we interested?   The table was made of dark wood, had six chairs,  and she was selling it for $150 and her boyfriend could bring it over to our place.

So one afternoon between thunderstorms, the dining room table was delivered. The dark wood that we weren’t sure we liked at first kind of grew on us. Rob and I ate a couple of dinners at the table. It felt good. But it wasn’t truly initiated until this evening, when Megan had a going away party for her friend, Ross Berlin. They met in high school, went to the same college, and now Ross is moving out of state.

We’ve known Ross since he was 15 years old, a verbal, opinionated kid who could talk to you about mythology and politics as though he were a 40-year-old in disguise.  We think of him as Megan’s spiritual brother, the son we didn’t have. When Megan  did her internship at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo, she lived with Ross’s mother. When Ross was sick with some terrible virus, he bunked in our back bedroom and we fed him chicken noodle soup and antibiotics. It has been that kind of friendship.

Now Ross is headed to Oakland, California with his girlfriend, Megan, a dancer of Somalian descent, and will be building houses with Habitat for Humanity while Megan is obtaining her master’s degree from Berkeley in dance. The other couple at the dinner were Leandra, who is training to become a yoga instructor, and her boyfriend Steve, a fixture in Wellington polo who writes for the magazine his family owns – Polo Players.

 The other guest was Ashley, also a high school buddy of Megan’s and Ross’s,  who is now married to an Egyptian Muslim. She just went through her first Ramadan with no liquid or food ingested  between dawn and dusk – and got ill after the first day and said, That’s it. I can’t do this. “Me, neither,” her husband said, and that was that for them.  

At some point in all this discourse, I realized our new dining room table was being initiated in a way I hadn’t expected but welcomed completely. Our daughter had made salmon burgers for her friends, a going away party for Ross, and now our table  suddenly possessed its first memory.

Twenty years from now, Rob and I will be in our eighties, and everyone at this table  tonight will be in their forties. Tempus fugit, as my mother used to say. And as time flies, we build our memories, one moment at a time.

Sometimes I’ll read about or see a you tube account of a UFO sighting that strikes me as bogus. The following account does NOT have that same vibe. In reading through this story on the examiner, I’m impressed with the details, the length of time that passed, and how the witness  saw a whole Star Wars like scenario play out. Here’s the link for the report. The above photo is not one of the pics the man sent to the examiner. I didn’t find his photos that impressive. Then again, his pics were, I believe, taken with a cell phone.

This interview for Aliens in the Backyard is the first we’ve done through Skype that was also videotaped. That means you can’t be wearing your pajamas, you can’t look at your notes, you can’t be sipping from your bottle of water. Oddly, Rob has a triangle (light reflection) of light against his forehead. Ah, those trickster aliens!

If you’re a politician who lies, cheats, steals, starts wars without just cause, caters to the very bankers who caused the recession in 2007-2008, much can be forgiven. But in the U.S., if you’re involved in a sex scandal, your best bet is to resign and hope that you can make a comeback somewhere up the road. For Congressman Anthony Weiner, the dark trickster may make such a comeback difficult, if not impossible.

Weiner served as a Congressman of New York’s ninth congressional district from January 1999 to June of 2011. His politics were progressive, he appeared frequently on progressive cable shows to talk against Gitmo – the American off-shore prison for terrorists  – and George W. Bush, about the financial meltdown, the mortgage crisis, all of the talking points that are near and dear to the hearts of progressives. Then in 2011, the photo of a man’s “bulging, underwear-clad groin” (Wikipedia’s description) appeared on Weiner’s Twitter account.

From the onset, he denied that he’d posted it and said  his Twitter account had been hacked. But when more photos emerged showing Weiner bare-chested in his congressional office, he came clean. Yes, he had sexted with several women, but insisted he’d never met any of them, had never had sex with any of them. On June 23, 2011, Weiner resigned.

 Here are the synchros:

 Ø  His name:  Wee-ner.

 Ø  One of the women ‘involved’ with Weiner was deemed by her high school newspaper as “Most Likely to Be Involved in a Tabloid Scandal. At the time of the Weiner scandal, she was a 21-year-old college student in Washington state.

 Ø  Weiner’s wife at the time – and now – Huma Abedin, is a longtime aide to Hilary Clinton, whose husband was involved in a sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky.

 Ø  Weiner was “roasted” by late night shows and social media that included a familiar song from a popular advertisement that dated back to 1965, when Weiner was just a year old:

 I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
That is what I truly wish to be
cause if I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
everyone would be in love
oh everyone would be in love
everyone would be in love with me

 On May 21, 2013, through a You Tube video, Weiner announced that he would run for mayor of New York City in 2013.

On July 22, 2013, Weiner held a hasty press conference that is probably going to tank his political career. He admitted to sexting a 22-year-old woman, sending her sexually explicit photos of himself, and basically doing the same thing he’d done two years earlier, when his wife was pregnant with their son. When Weiner talked to this woman, his handle was Charles Danger.

 Honestly, can you hand late night comedians anything better than this?

Weiner’s press conference, with his wife at his side, struck me as a peculiar American schizophrenia when it comes to sex and politicians. He didn’t apologize – always a big no-no for Americans, and actually sounded irritated that he’d had to give a press conference to talk about any of this. His wife made a gracious – although uncomfortable speech – and talked about how she’d forgiven him.

Now go back a few years to Mark Sanford, who  was governor of South Carolina from 2002 to January 2011. But for a week in June 2009, his whereabouts were unknown to the public, his wife, and to the State Enforcement Division, which provided security for him. He was missing in action and  it became a nationwide news item. Before his disappearance, Sanford told his staff he would be hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Upon his return, that was his story, until a reporter intercepted him at Atlanta’s airport where he had arrived on a flight from Argentina. Within a few hours, Sanford held a news conference and admitted that he’d been unfaithful to his wife, that he’d spent a week in Argentina with his soul mate.

His admission ultimately led to censure. But he completed his term as governor , has since become engaged to his mistress, and recently won a congressional seat for South Carolina. Apparently, he was forgiven.

But it’s unlikely that Weiner will be forgiven. As one MSNBC commentator put it, Sanford can be forgiven because he is now engaged to his soul mate, the woman who was his mistress. True love prevails. Never mind that it broke up his marriage and nearly ruined his career. True love is true love, right?

The Weiner sexting scandal, on the other hand, was creepy and sleazy when it first happened two years ago and is even more so now. At the same time last summer that People Magazine did a very domestic happiness spread on Weiner and his wife and their newborn, he was sexting the 22-year-old woman,  who has since  given a tearful interview in which she apologized to Weiner’s wife.

What I find particularly sad about all of this is that when Weiner was in Congress, he voted for liberal agendas and pushed that agenda on cable new shows. He was well-spoken, passionate, had a sense of humor. Now? In his latest press conference, you could feel his underlying panic and sense the indignation of his massive ego: WTF, why should I have to be bothered about any of this?

The really curious thing is that it’s not as if Weiner’s wife is Gadzilla – she’s physically lovely. And she’s no mental midget – she’s one of Hilary Clinton’s aides. Granted, we don’t know anything about the emotional dynamics between the two, but based on what we do know, Anthony Weiner may qualify as a sexual predator.

If I were a Manhattan voter, would I want a guy like this as mayor? Nope. Too many distractions, too much  me me me,  and with so much scandal swirling around him, would the business of New Yorkers ever be addressed?

Then there are  the creepy, sleazy elements…

The world’s oldest calendar has been found in a field in Scotland, and could date back to 8,000 BC.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews were part of the team which analysed the Mesolithic monument originally excavated in Aberdeenshire by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004.

Their research is now published in the journal Internet Archaeology and sheds new light on the luni-solar device.

The team, led by Birmingham University, believes the “calendar” was created by hunter-gatherer societies and pre-dates the first formal time-measuring devices known to humanity, found in the Near East, by nearly 5,000 years.

The capacity to measure time is among the most important of human achievements and the issue of when time was ‘created’ by humankind is critical in understanding how society has developed.

Until now the first formal calendars appear to have been created in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago. But during this project the researchers discovered that a monument created in Aberdeenshire nearly 10,000 years ago appears to mimic the phases of the Moon in order to track lunar months over the course of a year.

The site, at Warren Field, Crathes, also aligns on the Midwinter Sunrise, providing an annual astronomic correction in order to maintain the link between the passage of time, indicated by the moon, the asynchronous solar year and the associated seasons.

Dr Richard Bates, Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Geosciences at the University of St Andrews, said: “St Andrews has an established reputation for remote sensing studies of early prehistoric sites in Scotland but the site at Warren Field is unique.

(By remote sensing, Bates means aerial photography, not remote viewing by psychics. To read about remote viewing of the ancient past, here’s an Army/CIA declassified report of work by Joe McMoneagle. The target is out of this world.)

“It provides exciting new evidence for the earlier Mesolithic in Scotland, demonstrating the sophistication of these early societies and revealing that 10,000 years ago hunter-gatherers constructed monuments that helped them track time.

“This is the earliest example of such a structure and there is no known comparable site in Britain or Europe for several thousands of years after the monument at Warren Field was constructed.”

Project leader Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, added: ‘The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East.

“In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself.”

The Warren Field site was first discovered as unusual crop marks spotted from the air by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

Dave Cowley, Aerial Survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said: “We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground.

“Warren Field stands out as something special, however. It is remarkable to think that our aerial survey may have helped to find the place where time itself was invented.”

Professor Clive Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester, who advised the team, said: “The site did not mark particular moonrises as the changing patterns of moonrise are far too complex – the argument is that it represents a combination of several different cycles which can be used to track time symbolically and practically.

“There are certainly hunter-gatherer societies who use the phase cycles of the moon to help synchronise different seasonal activities but it is remarkable that this could have been monumentalised at such an early period.”

From 2004-6 the National Trust for Scotland excavated the Warren Field pit alignment, which lies on its Crathes Castle Estate, in collaboration with Murray Archaeological Services. The Trust’s Archaeologist for Eastern Scotland, Dr Shannon Fraser, said: “This is a remarkable monument, which is so far unique in Britain. Our excavations revealed a fascinating glimpse into the cultural lives of people some 10,000 years ago – and now this latest discovery further enriches our understanding of their relationship with time and the heavens”.

Dr Christopher Gaffney, of the University of Bradford, added: “For pre-historic hunter-gatherer communities, knowing what food resources were available at different times of the year was crucial to survival.

“These communities relied on hunting migrating animals and the consequences of missing these events were potential starvation. They needed to carefully note the seasons to be prepared for when that food resource passed through, so from this perspective, our interpretation of this site as a seasonal calendar makes sense.”

* Time and a Place: A luni-solar ‘time reckoner’ from 8th millennium BC Scotland
Internet Archaeology, 15 July 2013 (https://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.34.1)

Statcounter is a free statistic counter that provides enormous amounts of information about who visits your site or blog. Among these bits of info are:  how long a visitor stays, the computer operation system, the ISP address, the physical location, the search term used and on which search engine,  the  ISP address, physical location, the date and length of the visit. I suspect that at some point in the future, Statcounter may be declared illegal because it provides so much information about your visitors.

Last year, after we began posting the stories about Charles Fontaine’s UFO encounters, we were shocked to discover visits from nearly every federal agency. These visits ranged from the FBI to the NSA to the Department of Defense, to the Navy Information Network (NINC), the FAA. Visits from the The IRS and the Social Security Administration were real puzzlers. The Canadian Royal Mounted Police spent a full eight hours on the blog, sifting through all nine posts and the comments.

In the last few days, we’ve had hits from the DOD, NINC – and, today, the Department of Homeland Security. This agency, which sort of sounds like Nazi Germany, was created by Bush in the wake of 9-11. By 2011, it employed nearly 250,000 employees and had a budget of nearly $100 billion.

Whoever this was at DHS used Google and entered the search term alien hybrid program,  which is, as of this writing, still listed as number 3 on Google. We posted this story on March 3, about a month after Aliens in the Backyard was published.

So my questions are twofold: are these spy agency hits from some bored employees who may have an interest in UFOs? Or is there a deliberate and focused effort to gather as much information as possible on UFOs, ETs etc. And if so, why? For a country that continually denies the existence of aliens, that debunks sightings and just about everything else associated with UFOs, why bother?

As John Mack, Harvard psychiatrist, abductee researcher and author noted: “For our own government and other governments around the world the abduction phenomenon presents a special problem. It is, after all, the business of government to protect its people, and for officials to acknowledge that strange beings from radar-defying craft can, in seeming defiance of laws of gravity and space/time itself, invade our homes and abduct our people creates particular problems.”

After the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of the government’s spying program, I am wondering if any of Snowden’s yet to be released documents deal with UFOs.  Will we ever know? Right now, Snowden is stuck in Moscow airport’s transit zone, unable to travel to any of the Central and South American countries that have offered asylum because those flights would have to traverse U.S. airspace. He has applied for temporary asylum in Russia – which has told him he can stay if he stops releasing his “damaging information.”

Granted, governments need to be able to protect their citizens. But does this mean the U.S. must continue to be the world’s cop? To engage in endless wars, to meddle in and manipulate the affairs of other countries? Does it mean drone surveillance of its own citizens? A security camera at every intersection? Does it mean we’ll never be told the truth about anything? Doesn’t Homeland Security have better things to do than skulk around blogs and websites that mention aliens  and abductions?

Well, maybe not. If these government guys  construe that aliens are a true threat to national security, then it makes sense they would scour blogs and websites for information. We assume the government knows more than we do about what’s going on with UFOs etc, but suppose they are basically clueless? Suppose they are relying on us – the people who write about, explore, and experience contact – to help them understand what’s actually going in?  Suppose they believe that we have pieces of the puzzle they need?

That sort of changes the discourse, doesn’t it?

So I’ve got a question and an invitation for you guys at the official levels: how about dropping by and leaving a comment? If you’ve got questions, ask. Someone somewhere will  probably be able and willing to answer it. We’re a friendly, inquisitive group; engage us.