Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Joe Nickell is a former magician who traded in his magic tricks decades ago in favor of the role of debunker of all that is paranormal. He’s associated with the Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal–CSICOP).

I call Nickell a debunker rather than a skeptic, because clearly he is driven by his belief in the non-existence of the paranormal and is incapable of admitting that some things are not so easily explained by a rational, reductionistic perspective.

Now in his book The Science of Ghosts, Nickell tells us that the only thing that so-called ghost hunters are detecting is themselves.  “If they go through a haunted house and stir up a lot of dust, they shouldn’t be surprised if they get a lot of orbs in their photographs,” he said in an interview last October.

He doesn’t have anything better to say about mediums and their connections with spirits. “The people who profess to be able to talk to the dead tend to be either fantasy-prone personalities, or charlatans, or possibly a bit of both,” Nickell declared. “They would be harmless if they didn’t mislead so many people.”

So it’s not surprising that Mr. Nickell and his colleagues at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry were quite perplexed by the results of a poll they sponsored that was aimed at comparing educational levels with the belief in ghosts. Their survey in 2006 found that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. Contrary to expectations, a poll of 439 college students found seniors and grad students were more likely than freshmen to believe in haunted houses, psychics, telepathy, channeling and other mysterious phenomena.

Oops! It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. But then, contrary to what the skeptics tell us is real – or rather what is not real – stands a sizable percentage of the American public.

Nearly half of Americans say they believe in ghosts, according to a 2012 HuffPost/YouGov poll. Of the 1,000 adults interviewed Dec. 17-18, the poll revealed 45 percent believe in ghosts, or that the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.

Those results nearly mirror a CBS News 2009 poll, which showed that “nearly half of Americans say they believe in ghosts, or that the dead can return in certain places and situations.” That poll also revealed that 78 percent of Americans believe in life after death.

The skeptics’ response to these polls? In a word, “Scary!”

The photo at the top is the famous ‘Brown Lady,’ a photo taken in 1936 at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. The one below is a photo I took behind the home of Joe and Nancy McMoneagle, south of Charlottesville, Virginia.

+++

HAPPY 24th BIRTHDAY, MEGAN!!!

The Biltmore Estate is touted as the largest privately owned home in America. Which is ironic since no one lives there–except the ghosts. The Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina exists as a museum to a way of life as lived by the Vanderbilt family near the turn of the twentieth century. While the house is immaculate and furnished with priceless antiques, it lacks all the modern conveniences that the Vanderbilts and the rest of us rely on today. But the ghosts don’t seem to mind.

We took a trip to Asheville several years ago, and were astonished by the immensity of the estate. It’s comparable to England’s Highclere Castle, better known as Downton Abbey, thanks to the popular PBS drama.  Built by George Washington Vanderbilt between 1889-1895, the Biltmore maintains such an aura of the past that you literally expect to see a coterie of servants attending to the needs of wealthy heirs who dine every evening in formal attire. Apparently, some people have seen just that.

We didn’t see any ghosts on our visit, but we might’ve smelled one! Like any museum, there is no smoking allowed in the house. Yet, as we worked our way from room to room and entered a library, we distinctly smelled cigar smoke. We looked around, but there was no one else in the room. We moved on to another room where Trish asked a guard about the smoke. He raised his head and sniffed.

“It’s one of the ghosts. We smell the cigar smoke from time to time,” he said in a matter-of-fact manner. It was clear he wasn’t joking.

L.A. Stewart, who works at the Biltmore, says that several times a day guests approaches her and ask about ghosts. She doesn’t hesitate to say that there are plenty of them. She should know. Not only does she works at the house, but she’s also an empath, which means she can sense ghosts or spirits, and she says she can also hear and see them. She also has written about her experiences on the Yahoo! Contributors Network.

“One of my first encounters with spirits on the Biltmore Estate occurred in a stairwell at the Welcome Center during the Christmas season of 2006. As I was coming up the second floor, I clearly heard a woman say, “Abigail!” in a strong voice. Turning quickly around, I realized there was no one in the stairwell with me, and there was nowhere anyone could have hidden without my seeing them.”

She asked her supervisor if there was anyone named Abigail working in the welcome center, and the answer was no. However, a year later, someone familiar with the history of the estate mentioned that there had been a house in the area of the welcome center, and a woman named Abigail had lived there.

Stewart has also seen her share of ghosts inside the house. She recalls one day looking into the staff dining room and seeing a woman in her forties or fifties sitting in a small straight-back chair. She was rocking back and forth, crying into the long kitchen apron she wore. The story about this ghost is that she is weeping over the death of a young man who had worked in the house before joining the army to fight in WWI. Her love and grief for the man is said to continue to this day, residual energy replaying like a video loop.

“I once had a chance encounter with a woman who turned out to have been Mr. Vanderbilt’s head housekeeper. As I was passing through the basement hallway one busy afternoon, she was going by the floral rooms. She was middle-aged, rather short in statue, but carried herself very stiff and erect. She walked quickly by, her hands folded in front of her black taffeta dress. Every pleat of her skirt was perfectly ironed. I could hear the material rustle as she passed. I had the feeling of a woman with great responsibilities, always giving the appearance of being very self-assured, yet a woman who was feeling the effects of age and pressures of her job.”

Another hot spot for ghostly activity is the banquet hall, where a mischievous spirit likes to trip employees on the same spot in front of the organ loft, even though the floor is level and free of any objects. “I have lost count how often I’ve been tripped there, and many other employees have said the same. Just the other day, I encountered a different spirit in the Hall. He was one of the butlers who served in the house when Mr. Vanderbilt was alive. He was rather tall, in his mid 30’s, and dressed in a black tux, white gloves and white ‘boiled’ shirt. (Boiling white shirts was a method cleaning them.) I was almost run over by him as he quickly came into the Banquet Hall. He was carrying a rather large silver tray and heading towards the Butler’s Pantry. I literally did a fast sidestep before realizing he was a spirit!”

Stewart notes that many lives have been tied to Biltmore Estate over its 115 plus years of ownership by George Vanderbilt and his descendants. “These employees laughed, cried, and shared the joys as well as sorrows with each other. They took great pride in their positions within one of America’s more prominent families, and the current employees feel that same way.”

L.A. should know. She met many of them,  past and present.

Here’s a UFO video that comes from a suburb of Montreal, called LaPrairie. It apparently was filmed sometime during June of this year. It takes more than three minutes before the object is clearly seen. Then it goes in and out of focus. At 6:21, it’s very clear for a couple of seconds. Besides the sighted object, the other anomaly in this film is that the Quebecois family is speaking English. Very convenient for non-French viewers.

The video appears on Unknown Country and was analyzed by a digital film expert, who thought it looked pretty good. The analyst also thought the comments heard were genuine. One possible non-alien explanation is that it might be a model quad helicopter with led lights. The analyst noted that it was visible for an extended period of time and others should have seen it. But there apparently were no other reports or videos of the object.

As usual, we are left to wonder.

Read the original source: https://www.unknowncountry.com/out-there/latest#ixzz2cYkva0xJ

 Precognition is one of the most intriguing paranormal abilities. The ability to see the future is probably a talent that most of us have, but when we experience it, our left brains often interfere and hurl up all sorts of arguments about why what we’re seeing can’t be so. These left-brain objections and arguments are usually rooted in our cultural and societal mass beliefs, which prove to be quite powerful and persuasive. Nonetheless, we can tune into the future, usually when our need and desire are great. What we do with the information depends on our particular beliefs.

And that intro brings me to Igno Swann. He’s probably most famous for being the co-creator – along with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff – of the remote viewing project at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. This project eventually became the U.S. government’s Stargate project – psychic spying. Swann also wrote several books about remote viewing and  psychic phenomena and this evening, I happened across one of them – The Nostradamus Factor: Accessing Your Innate Ability to See into the Future. We’ve owned this book for probably twenty years and as I paged through it, I realized I had never read it!

The premise is that any one of us can see the future- something that Swann didn’t understand until April 1988, when he was lecturing in Dermold, then in West Germany. He had been invited to give  a series of lectures about psi research.  He was billed as the famous American super psychic  who had astonished scientists since his first formal laboratory experiments in 1970 (at Stanford).

Other speakers were there, too,  some of them practicing psychics who were doing readings. The irony was that Swann didn’t do individual readings, and despite all his research into prophecy and prediction, didn’t provide any predictions about the future, either. He knew that many predictions turned out to be wrong and he felt he had a scientific reputation to protect.

After he gave the keynote address, he asked for questions from he audiene of several hundred people. The room was utterly silent. Finally,  an elderly woman asked Swann to give the group at least one prediction.  He was irritated about being put in this position and frantically sought a diplomatic way to get out of the situation.

 As his irritation escalated into anger, he heard  a rushing sound around him and had a sense of getting larger. “Then there was a clarity of some unfamiliar kind, which was somehow like liquid- and in this liquidness what seemed like a thousand pictures flashed through my consciousness. I had the distinct, lightninglike impression that most of the people in the audience already knew the future at some ‘place’ deep within them. And I knew their conscious minds were disconnected from this deep place.”

He felt he knew what they knew collectively, and an aspect of this “hidden knowledge” exploded into his consciousness. He blurted, “Okay, you want  prediction? Here’s a prediction. The Berlin Wall will come down in eighteen to twenty-four months.” The translator repeated the prediction twice. After an initial silence, the people in the audience  began to rise to their feet, clapping, and then the crowd, Swann, wrote, “became unglued.” People burst into tears, hugged each other,  and some people even rushed to the podium and hugged him.

Swan couldn’t understand why he’d blurted the prediction. After all,  at the time he gave this prediction, it looked as if the Berlin Wall would still be standing well into the  21^st century.  He felt his colleagues would believe he had lost his marbles. 

However, nineteen months later, the Berlin Wall came down practically overnight. Swann felt vindicated.  “I had one of the most rewarding experiences of my life…watching my prediction come true on real-time television right before my eyes.”

As he watched the wall coming down, he wondered if he could foresee other things. By the end of 1990, he had discovered the answer: yes. And that answer was one of the reasons he wrote Your Nostradamus Factor.

 Swann – like Targ and Puthoff, Colin Wilson, Terrence McKenna, Whitley Strieber, Dean Radin, Caroline Myss,  Mona Lisa Schultz, Lynn McTaggart, Jane Roberts, and many others – was a pioneer in consciousness research. He died in January 2013. His book is no longer in print. But there are so many astounding anecdotes in the book, that from time to time we’ll be posting some of them. Even though these stories are older, they are somehow perennial and have much to show us about how precognition – future seeing – can work for each of us.

+++

Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years for handing over 700,000 classified documents to Wikileaks that exposed  the inner workings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

George W Bush,  Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, the architects of war and torture, are still free. War crime chargers were never brought against them.

There’s so much wrong with this picture. Cheney, who was often referred to the Darth Vader of the Bush administration, was the worst of the bunch. Instead of being charged with war crimes, he got a new heart!  And it certainly wasn’t the heart of a Progressive. You can still see him from time to time on TV news, struggling to look tough but aware that he has become irrelevant.

Rumsfeld, Bush’s Secretary of defense, approved of “stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, exposing prisoners to extremes of heat and cold, and slamming them up against walls” at Guantanamo. No telling where he is, maybe working at a conservative think tan and pulling in two grand a day.

 John C Yoo,  an attorney  in Bush’s Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is the lawyer who claimed that waterboarding is legal. He now teaches law at Berkeley, one of the most liberal universities in the country. Sort of ironic, really.Trickster? I wouldn’t take a class from this guy.

Then there is W himself, a strange little man who used to emit weird chuckles at inopportune moments, the guy who called himself the Decider in Chief, a person of such diminished mental capacity that his brainy and corrupt cabinet members made decisions for him.  Occasionally, W comes out of hiding, emerges from whatever weird cocoon he is now inhabiting in the aftermath of his disastrous eight years as president. No one pays too much attention him. Not even his own Republican party.

 So Manning, now all of 25, gets 35 years in federal prison. Whistleblower Edward Snowden saw the proverbial writing on the wall and fled the U.S. for Hong Kong before he turned over a reported 700,000 documents that expose the extent of the NSA’s spying program on Americans. He has been granted temporary asylum in Russia, another irony that has the trickster’s fingerprints all over it. Russia isn’t a country we usually associate with freedom from persecution or human rights.

 Glenn Greenwald, a journalist for The Guardian UK, is the man who broke this story. He lives in Brazil, with his partner, David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen. Several days ago, Miranda was detained for nine hours at Heathrow Airport in London, and was questioned under a provision of the UK’s terrorism laws. He was passing through London on his way from Berlin to Brazil.

In Berlin, he was visiting Laura Poitras,  a documentary filmmaker, who has partnered with Greenwald on revealing the information in these documents. When Snowden initially contacted her, she was working on a documentary film about surveillance that included an interview with Julian Assange (to whom Bradley Manning sent documents), who revealed certain information to her.  

 Not only did UK detain Greenwald’s partner, Miranda, for nine hours, but they confiscated his computer, flash drives, all his electronic equipment.  Since that happened, it’s been revealed that The Guardian has been under constant pressure from UK officials to turn over the NSA documents they had. They refused to do so and eventually sent copies of their documents out of the UK and elected to destroy their own computers and hard drives.    

 The message in all this is clear: journalists, you’ve been put on notice. Here in the U.S., journalists are no longer protected by the first amendment. But as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, Journalists are not terrorists.

 Since the U.S.  tries to manipulate most of the rest of the world, these whistleblowers and their journalist buddies  won’t be safe wherever they flee. Except, well, maybe Russia. Or  Brazil. Or Bolivia? Maybe not. When it was rumored that Bolivia had extended asylum to Snowden, the plane of the Bolivian president, while flying over Europe, was diverted and searched. Snowden wasn’t on board. The president got home – and raised holy hell.

 But these days, you have to raise more than holy hell. You have to look back to history, to the Nixon/Watergate years, when journalists were still protected by the first amendment, and Woodward and Bernstein published their explosive findings that ultimately  brought down the administration of Richard Nixon. And then you have to ask yourself: was George Orwell right and just way off on his timing? Is  the kind of world in which I choose to live? If not, what can I do about it?

 There are some intriguing synchronicities connected with all of this. We covered the Snowden synchros here. And here.

 So here’s another synchro. Even though David Miranda is Brazilian, his last name means something in the U.S. The Miranda Rights. We’ve all heard it in cop shows:

 You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

It means that a suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights are protected; he or she can refuse to answer self-incriminating questions. And what’s at the very heart of the Snowden/Assange/Manning travesty? That in the aftermath of this massive release of government secrets, you – whistleblower, journalist or documentary filmmakers- better say nothing that might incriminate you. You had better be afraid – and mute about your government’s illegal activities against other countries – and against its own citizens.

This whole thing is sad commentary on a country like the U.S. that supposedly stands for freedom in all its forms and touts that PR rhetoric. The truth is that our politicians violate the most human tenets of the Bill of Rights.

What have we become? Who are we as a nation, a collective, a people?

 Back in 2005, I think it was, Rob, Megan and I walked into a restaurant in the Dominica Republic and ordered dinner. Laid back town, we were there for windsurfing. But a French couple approached us and the man looked at us and snapped, “Why did you vote for Bush not only once, but twice? How could you Americans do such a thing? Do you have any idea what the repercussions of eight years of Bush are going to be?”

 And I looked back at him and said, “We didn’t vote for him.” And yes, we understand the repercussions.  We are living them right now.

I’m not an organized person. Walk into my office and you’ll see an explosion of books, papers, storyboards, stuff. I usually know where everything is, but no one else would. But my head is organized when it comes to writing and my computer files make enough sense so that anyone could figure them out. So I knew we’d written about DMT before, but not in terms of its possible connection with NDEs, alien abductions, the paranormal, synchronicity.

+++

Between 1990 and 1995, Rick Strassman, a clinical psychiatrist, undertook the first new human studies with psychedelic drugs in the U.S. in over 20 years. His research involved DMT – N,N-dimethyltryptamine – which is produced naturally by the pineal gland in the brain.

 “One of my deepest motivations behind the DMT research was the search for a biological basis of spiritual experience,” he wrote in DMT: The Spirit Molecule.  He was led to the study of DMT through earlier research on the pineal gland as a “potential locus for spiritual experiences.” Much of what he had learned over the years made him wonder if the pineal gland produced DMT “during mystical states and other naturally occurring, psychedelic-like experiences.”

The study was conducted at the University of New Mexico, where Strassman was a professor. The 60 volunteers were administered a total of 400 doses of DMT.

This naturally occurring psychedelic compound  is widespread throughout the plant kingdom and occurs in small amounts in mammals, including humans.  Structurally, it’s analogous to the neurotransmitter serotonin, the hormone melatonin, and other psychedelic tryptamines. Indigenous Amazonian shamans ingest DMT during  ayahuasca ceremonies for healing and divination. Yet, no one really knows what DMT does or what its function is in humans.  DMT levels elevate while we’re sleeping, so perhaps dreaming is part of what DMT facilitates.

Strassman believes that elevated levels of DMT in the brain might help to usher the soul into the body at birth and out of the body at death and my be responsible for spontaneous mystical experiences and NDEs. Many of his volunteers experienced different worlds, some that were downright bizarre, others that were peaceful, and still others that were structurally different from our three-dimensional world.

These reports challenged Strassman’s worldview. “I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, or the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences.”

Some volunteers reported “reptilian” beings  with “an agenda.” There were reports of a space station that held entities – “androidlike creatures  that looked like a cross between crash dummies and the Empire troops from Star Wars, except they were living beings, not robots.” Another volunteer reported beings that were like clinic researchers that probed into his mind. Others reported on intrusive procedures  these beings performed on the volunteers.

“There were sort of long fiber-optic things that they were putting into my pupils,” said one volunteer.” Another reported  being in a place that felt like an alien laboratory, where beings “activated a sexual circuit and I was  and I was flushed with an amazing orgasmic energy.” Another volunteer reported that he’d received an implant in his forearm.

These reports prompted Strassman to take a closer look at alien abductions, a topic that hadn’t interested him before. So he started with the research of Harvard psychiatrist, author and abduction researcher John Mack. Strassman apparently saw enough parallels to propose that “the alien abduction experience is made possible by excessive brain levels of DMT. This may occur spontaneously through any of the previous described conditions that activate pineal MT formation. It also might take place when DMT levels rise from taking in the drug from the outside, as in our studies.”

Taking in the drug from the outside, as in… Do the entities, beings, aliens in abduction experiences somehow inject DMT into their abductees? If so, then according to Strassman’s findings, the DMT would facilitate the abduction in that the abductee would be able to move more easily between dimensions, levels of reality.

This proposition may not be as weird as it seems. Heightened levels of DMT may account for a lot of the high strangeness in UFO/alien encounters. It’s prevalent in advanced meditation and ritualized chanting, in psychic experiences, may be prevalent in NDEs, in both birth and death, and yes, it may have a lot to do with synchronicity.

 Hi, this is Noah. You know, the big reddish golden retriever that my humans sometimes write about. I’m now four and a half and old enough to write my own blog post. And I have plenty to say about dog day afternoons.

This term is one humans use to describe really hot summer days. And let me tell you, it’s been scorching hot in South Florida this summer – 95 degrees in the shade, the air so humid that when you draw it into your lungs it feels  as weighted as concrete. On some days, the heat index – what the air temp actually feels like – reaches 105. Since I wear a fur coat, that is very hot  and I am forced to find ways to mitigate it.

The first order of business is simple: drink a lot of water and cool off my paws by plunging into the pool that Cassie creates with a plain tarp in a square depression under a hose from which water flows.

Cassie is the human who owns two border collies – Kilt and Willow. Their breed of dog tends to be quite focused on a task  and at the dog park, that task is racing after and catching whatever the humans toss  their way. It’s usually a ball, but can also be a Frisbee.  Although I can run fast in short spurts, these two border collies are long distance Olympic runners. I don’t compete with them. But even Kilt and Willow are worn down by the heat and end up in the pool, where all of us eventually immerse our entire bodies. This is them – without me!

I’m a large dog – 111 pounds the last time I was weighed – and there’s hardly enough room for the border collies, Red the hound and Cody the husky, but we somehow manage. Here are Cody and Red in a hole they dug to keep cool – before they joined me in the pool.

Then there are some pups who join us – Gaucho, 5 months, who keeps stealing my large orange ball and tries to bury it in the deepest corner of the pool,  and some other nameless pups who bite my ears and lick my face.

It’s when the pups join me in the pool that I miss my Nika the most. She was just six weeks old when she joined our clan. She thought I was her big brother. She would bite my ears, leap up and try to box me with her little paws. When she slept, she curled up next to me, her paws draped over my legs. She lives with her human in another city now, but we visit frequently. I can always tell when she and her human are coming for a visit because my humans say things like, “Nika is coming to see you, Noah.” She and I had a wonderful week together in the Keys this summer.

With Nika gone, I’m forced to make new friends. That’s Zappo, king of the hill. He’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback,  younger than me, and definitely a more deft climber!

I like Cody and Red, too, and the border collies, of course. I have a certain fondness for Gaucho, whose owner was raised in Argentina (thus the name, okay?). I’m also sort of smitten with Fergie, the pup next door, a German short-haired pointer whose energy is infinite and who enjoys a good tug-of-war.

But you know what? None of them are true love like Nika and me.

My humans talk a lot about synchronicity – what it is, why it is, when it is, what it means. But for me, for most dogs, it’s really pretty simple. On these dog day afternoons, I just  surrender to the heat, to the cooling bliss of the pool, with the orange ball under my chin, and am thankful for what is. I shut my eyes for a moment, the heat pours over me, and I dream of the past, am fully rooted in the present, and embrace the future, whatever it may be. I’m in the flow – and that’s when it happens, where my inner and outer worlds come together in a meaningful way, without cause and affect.

I consider my day successful and happy when I can say, at every moment, Yes. Yes to all of it. That’s when I plunge my head underwater,  where the water is deepest, and grab my orange ball. Yes, I’m ready for another round with all my buddies chasing my ball.  Yes, yes, to mud puddles and chasing squirrels. Yes, I’m ready for my next visit with Nika, when she will jump out the car window to get to me before her human has even stopped her car. I understand that’s going to happen soon.

Yeah, it’s a dog day afternoon. I smell rain approaching from  the Everglades to the west, Gaucho has run off with my ball, Kilt has stolen my Frisbee, Cody is grumpy about his human being out of town. But there are so many scents that lure us, so many distractions that seduce us, so many squirrels to chase, so many tasks to fulfill, so much to love and enjoy, that I leap out of the pool, shake myself free of the water, and race out across the dog park, hoping a human will  hurl a ball or a Frisbee. Or both.

I am Noah. Welcome to my world.