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Former UFO debunker now says there were two crashes at Roswell…

I don’t think we’ve ever written about Roswell on our blog, even though we’ve put up quite a few UFO-related stories. It’s probably because Roswell is so well known. It’s also a case where many of the long-time UFO researchers say the story has been conflated into something they say it never was – the crash of an alien craft. Meanwhile, if there’s any case that the public knows about, it’s Roswell and there’s widespread belief that something very mysterious happened there.

Now comes Lt. Col. Richard French, a retired air force pilot, who says there was not one crash, but two near Roswell in 1947. He claims the first UFO was hit with an electronic pulse-type weapon. All the controls failed and it crashed. The second crash was that of a similar alien vessel that was on a rescue mission for the first one.

The problem with the story is that the type of weapons described didn’t exist at the time. Or did they, and we didn’t know?

The strange synchro here relates to an MIB story that appeared in Operation Trojan Horse, a 1970 UFO book by John Keel. A woman in Owatonna, Minnesota, who had a UFO experience accompanied by a number of paranormal incidents, was approached by a mysterious stranger, who called himself Major Richard French. He was wearing crisp new clothes, not a uniform. She was told not to talk it to anyone about her experience.

Was it the same person? If so, then French’s story about being a debunker takes on more veracity, and with it the scenario about Roswell.

Yeah, a nerdy chart for art today…but with a purpose.

We hear it over and over again. Obama is a socialist. He’s redistributing the wealth. So after four years, how’s that redistribution working out?

Ah, well, actually wealth has continued to be redistributed upward. More and more middle class people are falling out of the middle class as the rich become richer and richer. Imagine being so rich that you could put $300 million into a political campaign to get one of your fellow fat cats into power.

Why would a person do something like that? The simple answer: fear. It seems conservatives are hard-wired for fear. Here are a few headlines:

Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds | Psychology Today

Obama ‘fear’ drives social conservatives

Study: Conservatives have larger ‘fear center’ in brain 

Conservatives fear the future, so they’re lying about the Chevy Volt

Sociopaths Prey on Conservative’s Fears — Tea Party for the Crazy

It goes on and on. Story after story. Even blogging conservatives say it’s true. Here’s one.

“FEAR: I’ll agree that conservatives think through fear. I prefer to call it cautious. It’s not the party who does it to us, we are all like this. Is that bad? We’re hard-wired differently Rob, in the brain…it’s not something we choose necessarily. Liberals just drift along expecting everything’s gonna be alright, caution to the wind. Then when bad things happen who do they run to save their sorry behinds?”

In spite of admitting to the fear factor, it still comes down to liberals being wimps, needing conservatives to bail them out. I must have my liberal blinders on too tightly, because I don’t see that as anything near reality. Maybe she’s thinking of Bush starting two wars after 9-11. That really worked out.

So when the conservative mind-set see charts like the one above, they are not put at ease. It just means the liberals – those people with conscience, empathy, and compassion for the poor and the most vulnerable in society- are going to take it all away. Yet, conservatives tend to claim the high ground on morality. How does that work? It seems their compassion ends at the point of birth and they dismiss nearly half of the U.S population as moochers.

If you want to see how well the super wealthy have done over the past three decades, take a look here.

– Rob

When was the last time you were in a record store? It even sounds sort of strange, doesn’t it?  Have you been into a video store recently?  In our area, there isn’t a record store in sight, but there’s still a small Blockbuster a few miles from the house. We rarely use it because we subscribe to Netflix which, for a reasonable price, mails a couple of DVDs a month right to our house.

Wikipedia has an extensive list of retailers who have gone bust recently, some who couldn’t make it because of the faltering economy, others who were overcome by developing technology.  Will bookstores follow suit and go the way of the Dodo bird?

When Borders Books went belly up last year, it followed in the tracks of some of my favorite stores –  Circuit City, Linens N Things, and Hollywood Video. Borders was a 40-year-old chain that popularized the big bookstore concept, and when it went bust, it left a lot of publishers holding the bag and ultimately left one main player in the bookstore chain game: Barnes and Noble.  For writers, this means that if your book doesn’t get picked up by B&N – there’s only so much space shelf, after all – it impacts your sales.

Recently, there was an interesting story about a 70-year-old writer, Kate Alcott, who wrote a novel called The Dressmaker.  The book was submitted to publishers by her agent,  and was rejected about a dozen times, with references to the less than stellar sales of her previous book, which Bookscan dutifully reported.   This outfit, Bookscan,  is no writer’s friend. Because of Alcott’s Bookscan stats, her agent suggested submitting The Dressmaker to publishers under a pseudonym.  And because the pseudonymous author had no Bookscan history, no sales history, it sold for  high five figures.

For quite a while, Alcott kept up the pretense with her publisher about her fake name, her fake life; her editor thought she was the fictional writer Alcott had created. Eventually, of course, the truth came out, it usually does, and friends who have read the novel love it.

My point here, I think, is that writing, which is usually associated with the arts, is big business. It’s Capitalism with some a giant C. The publishing industry, bookstores, and movie spinoffs on novels: they all begin with writers. Writers are the storytellers, the ones who used to be the oral historians, the ones who sat around campfires  in the stone age, who performed for royalty during the Renaissance,  who sit in front of computers now.

Yet, writers are often the last to know what’s going on. What’s the print run for my current book? Why is my cover awful? What’s the publisher doing for my book?  What do I need to do? The exception here is simple: the bestsellers that makes the NY Times list.  You know their names, they don’t change much: King, Koontz, Roberts, Collins, Rowling… A roll call of the rich, the famous, and the best storytellers around.  But all of them started at the bottom.

I can’t imagine a world without physical bookstores, can’t imagine not walking into such a place and smelling the books, touching them, picking them up.  But I think the day is coming and that it’s coming fast, when bookstores become extinct.  Just as record stores are a memory for me now, I suspect bookstores will be such a memory not so far into the future. Maybe only libraries will have actual physical books. Digital books save a lot of trees,  you get them instantly. And more and more people are buying Kindle, Nooks, iPads, and bookstores and publishers are scrambling to catch up to…well, whatever this is.

Paradigm shift, anyone?

We couldn’t resist. Here’s Henri the cat, again, en route to the vet.

Darbster’s is the name of a little vegan restaurant that we first heard about at the dog park. Strangely enough, hearing about it there is  fitting; it’s named after the owners’ dog and all dogs are welcome.

We first went there a month ago, for lunch, and sat on the outside deck that overlooked a canal. Naturally, we took Noah, our golden retriever. Our table was the only one without an umbrella and it was uncomfortably hot. We decided our next visit would be in the evening, when it would be cooler.

So this evening we head over there with Noah and all the tables on the outside deck were taken.  I went into the covered area to ask a waitress if we could bring Noah inside.“Of course! Dogs are welcome anywhere in the restaurant!”

As I  return to the porch to tell Rob, I’m surprised to see him talking to our old friend, Bess De Farber, who lives five hours north of us. She’s with her new partner, Glen, and the two  are here for relaxation and fun for Labor Day weekend. The four of us head inside for dinner together.  Here’s where the synchros started happening.

Our only other time at this restaurant, which isn’t near our house, we ran into a woman who had taken Rob’s last meditation class, and hadn’t  seen her since. We met Bess years ago when she attended Rob’s yoga classes. So, for such a tiny restaurant, which seats less than 50 and is a thirty-minute drive from our house,  what are the odds that we would run into someone we know both times we’ve been to this place?

Bess’s daughter, Cassandra, was one of Megan’s teachers in high school, attended the same college that Megan did – New College, in Sarasota. It turns out that Glen’s son, Morgan, also attended New College.  The school only has about 800 students and is considered the honor college in Florida’s public university system. Again what are the odds?

While we’re sitting there over dinner, talking about the synchronicity of our kids having attended New College, Bess suddenly mentions a jam she found called Robert Is Here. Rob and I look at each other, both of us thinking the same thing: is she referring to the Robert Is Here story in  7 Secrets of Synchronicity? 

This story was one of the first we posted on our blog in February 2009. The gist of it is that we were staying at my agent’s home in the keys and two friends had joined us – both of them named Robert: Robert from Minneapolis, whom we call Rabbit and Robert from Stuart, whom we call Tacayo. Rob opened the fridge to look for some jelly for our English muffins – and found a jar of jam called, Robert Is Here. Well, yes, universe. There were three Roberts.

It turns out that Bess is interested in reading our synchro book, but hasn’t had a chance yet. So she wasn’t referring to anything in the book. She had found the jam somewhere and was using it in creative ways with vegan recipes.

She also told us how the jam got it’s name. When Robert was young, his parents who owned a fruit and vegetable farm in Homestead, Florida sent the boy out to the corner with a box of fruit. He stayed for a few hours, but no one stopped. So the next day his mother decided to make him a sign. Oddly enough, instead of fruit for sale, it read: Robert is Here. Eventually, that became the name of Robert’s own fruit and veggie stand, and the brand name on his home-made jelly.

So, it looks as if Darbster’s is some sort of synchro magnet and the food is fantastic, the prices reasonable. I think we’ll be returning soon!