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This one is great. These dancers range in age from 65 to 96.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=AeyO5m0sM3E&NR=1

Uh, these people don’t mess around!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7N5OhNplEd4#!

I’ve been re-reading The Day After Roswell, Philip J Corso’s riveting account of the government’ coverup of Roswell – and everything else related to UFOs. It was published in 1997, became a  bestseller, and had a huge impact on the UFO field. Corso, after all, was a retired colonel, former Pentagon official, and a member of  Eisenhower’s National Security Council.

One of the chapters in Corso’s book is called “The Strategy.” It’s one of the best explanations we’ve found about how Roswell and everything that has transpired since then has been kept secretive for so long:

“Were you to search through every government document to find the declassified secrets of Roswell and the contact we maintained with the aliens who were visiting us before and have been doing so ever since, you would find code-named project after code-named project, each with its own file, security classification, military or government administration, oversight mechanism, some sort of budget, and even reports of highly classified documents. All of these projects were started to accomplish part of the same task: manage our ongoing relationship with the alien visitors  we discovered at Roswell. However, at each level, once the security had been breached for whatever reason – even by design – part of the secret was disclosed through declassification while the rest was dragged into a new classified project or moved to an existing one that had not been compromised.”

This stunning insight into how a government maintains secrets actually makes perfect sense. As a piece of one secret is uncovered, those in the know declassify the documents pertaining to that piece of the secret, then scramble to put the rest of the secret into a new little box with a new name and new classification. “For all the years after Roswell,” Corso wrote, “we weren’t just one step ahead of people wanting to know what really happened, we were a hundred steps ahead, a thousand, or even more. In fact, we never hid the truth from anybody, we just camouflaged it. It  was always there, people just didn’t know what to look for or recognize it for what it was when they found it. And they found it over and over again.”

Corso’s statements, of course, have been refuted by other experts.  John B. Alexander is one of those “experts.” In his book, UFOs: myths, conspiracies, and realities, he has a chapter called “The Corso Conudrum,” in which he details everything that’s wrong with Corso’s version of events. In fact, after the publication of Corso’s book, Alexander  wrote Corso a seven-page letter addressing the errors he’d found in the book. He includes it in an appendix in his book.

“…in The Day After Roswell,” Alexander wrote,  “Corso made many extraordinary claims, especially regarding the use of crashed UFO material in the development of American advanced technology. Unfortunately, none of those claims have been substantiated, and most are directly refuted by known facts.”

But skeptics and debunkers begin with an agenda and then attempt to prove they are right and everyone else is wrong.  But the facts seem to tell us that the official U.S. government MO for the last 65 years has been coverup, denial, and disinformation. If you doubt that the U.S. government has attempted to hide information or deceive the public about UFOs, drop by  a website called The Black Vault. Run by John Greenewald, Jr., The Black Vault includes more than 600,000 pages of declassified material released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

For a government with an official stance that UFOs do not exist, it’s staggering to see how often the topic appears in official documents. In 2009, the CIA released multiple documents after a request was filed with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The 65 pages that were released, says Greenewald, “prove the CIA is still collecting intelligence in regards to UFOs, and that material from just the past few years is considered a threat to our national security.”

One document from the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy labeled “UFO strategy” discusses efforts to curtail comments of UFO-related technology on so-called ‘open government blog’ sites created to attract ideas from the public. The UFO-related comments are categorized as fringe ideas and they were being removed from the main discussion. The staff members of the office discussed the irony of blocking UFO comments while promoting open public discussion. Even the New York Times had something to say about it.

“The New York Times, however, is reporting that while the Obama administration has asked the public for new ideas with the unveiling of an open-government website, the administration is considering steps to curtain free speech and discussion of the UFO issue on the prejudiced supposition that UFO subjects are somehow ‘fringe’ – the modern term for heresy, which was considered a crime against the church when Galileo published his findings in opposition to the conventional wisdom of his time.”

In browsing documents in The Black Vault, it quickly becomes obvious that the U.S. government is like a huge squid with so many tentacles that no single arm has the full information on UFOs, pretty much what Corso said in his book.  Each agency possesses bits and pieces of the puzzle and appears to be scrambling to uncover what the other agencies know – or don’t know. If that’s the case, and no one group holds all the information, how will disclosure ever happen?

But maybe  we’re reaching a tipping point in all this. A 2012 poll by the National Geographic Society  indicated that 36 percent of Americans – about 80 million people – believe that UFOs exist, 17 percent  don’t believe, and the rest are undecided.  The figure that is really intriguing is that 80 percent of the NGS survey believe the government is hiding information about UFOs. The current population of the U.S. stands at 314,826,000. Do the math.

Yet, even with the math, in the article about the NGS survey, a spokesman from the Skeptical Inquirer – Micheal Sherner – writes it all off as people like to believe in “weird things.”  Flippant. And not so different, really, from the way the government has handled things for all these decades. Hallucinations, weather balloons, the planet Venus. Uh-huh. Tell that to an abductee.

Recently, I have been thinking quite a bit about the nature of love. According to some spiritual experts, it’s the most powerful emotion in the known universe. It’s supposedly what you commit to when you get married, it’s what you feel when you have a child, and yes, it has allegedly been known to move mountains, although I haven’t yet found any scientific evidence of that. But here is what I have found. It is not strictly a human thing. It exists among dogs. It crosses species boundaries. It undoubtedly has a past life component.

Let’s start with the dogs. Maybe we’ll end there, too.

Three years ago, in November of 2009, we bought Noah, our golden retriever, from the South Florida Golden Retriever Rescue Center. He had spent most of his nine months in a crate, to be used as a stud. The people who owned him also owned his parents and when they ran into financial difficulties, they gave up all three dogs. So Noah, who was then called Presley, arrived at our home, he  was still groggy from his trip to the vet that morning where he was neutered. He wobbled into our kitchen with the woman from the rescue center, and instantly bonded with Rob. He was the same rich red color as our previous golden, Jessie, who had died a year earlier after her eleven-year run with our family.

From the start, Noah had issues. He was scared of everything and everyone, except for Rob, and later on, me.  One day, we went to the gym and left him for an hour in the house. When we returned, we discovered he had destroyed a couch cushion – I mean, he had decimated this sucker,  torn out the stuffing, reduced the cushion to history. We put him outside while we cleaned up the mess and seriously discussed returning him to the rescue organization.

But, we’re optimists. We kept him. And gradually, as he became more socialized through daily trips to the dog park and contact with humans who just wanted to love on him, he grew into the family. He still barked at our daughter, Megan, when she came home for visits,  but it seemed to be something about her exuberant energy that freaked him out – and her blond hair. Yes, I know they say that dogs don’t see in color, but I think a blonde haired woman had abused Noah in his previous home, perhaps with a newspaper. He used to be terrified of the newspaper, but Rob worked with him and now he bounds outside every morning to scoop it off the driveway and bring it inside. For a treat, of course.

After Megan graduated from college, she came home to live while she applied for jobs in her field and worked at various part-time jobs. In early September 2011,  she said, “Hey, Mom, let’s go look for a puppy. I would love to have a puppy.”

I am a total sucker for these words. My best animal companions have come from these random excursions. So Megan and I headed over to Big Dog Ranch and found a puppy that captured both of us.  They told us she was a border collie mixed with lab. Her DNA Internet test said she was  a Pomeranian mix. Never spend the $ for this test. Nika is obviously not a Pom. She’s  a Heinz 57, a Ketchup of border collie, lab, Australian cattle dog, Greyhound… whatever. For us, she is  the personification of unconditional love. She accepts you as you are, and your species doesn’t matter.

She also ended up with mange. It manifested itself at about four months, until Nika was as bald as a radish. Our wonderful vet prescribed Promeris and kept a close eye on her and now, at 16 months, she is mange free.

When Megan landed a Disney internship at Epcot working with dolphins, Nika stayed with us. She and Noah played together, ate together, slept together. Nine long and beautiful months. Then Megan’s internship ended in June 2012 and she started a dogwalking business and Nika moved to Orlando with Megan.

At least once a month, we visited Megan or she visited us or we met in Cassadaga and, of course we brought the dogs. Every time these two dogs were reunited, beautiful things happened. One time Megan pulled into a B&B near Cassadaga and Nika leaped out of the window of a moving car to get to Noah. Always, they seemed to pick up just where they had left off, just as we humans do, commiserating, planning, enjoying.

Megan and Nika were here for a week for Thanksgiving and both dogs were really in their element. After all, Obama had swept the election, the humans were optimistic, their lives were branching out in new directions, things were looking good. For Nika, who has become an urban apartment dog, it was a chance to go in and out whenever she wanted, For Noah, it was about Nika.

The relationship between these two is really indescribable. Both of the dogs accept our three cats – and vice versa. Cats aren’t the issue. The issue is separation.  Nika is clearly Megan’s dog, she is her human. But it’s equally clear that Nika loves her Noah and that Noah loves his Nika and…here we are. An impasse.

Love and its obstacles. And hey, it’s not like either of these dogs can act on whatever they’re feeling for each other. Both are neutered. This is some strange and wonderful soul connection, two dogs, three humans, and well, we’ll see. Nika mange free. Noah  is humanized.

Here’s Nika, navigating for Rob. Noah’s head is to the left of hers. If he could fit up here, too, he would be right next to her.

One day Raymond Moody, the famed psychiatrist who brought science to the near-death experience and wrote Life After Life, decided he needed a new place to live. He started looking for a larger house with some property in a rural setting. He would do his research and writing and he would have visitors for his unusual experiments involving mirrors. More on that in a bit.

He quickly found out that most of the houses in his area in Georgia were more expensive than he could afford. But he was told that if he looked across the border in Alabama 11 miles away,  he might have better luck. He soon found a beautiful Victorian house for sale set on two acres and went to the realtor’s office. The agent hesitated, as if he knew the house wasn’t quite right for Moody, then asked: “What are you really looking for?”

Although he liked the Victorian, what he really wanted was a Gristmill. He had wanted to live in a mill house since he was a young man and had visited one. “I had always kept that vision in my mind, and apparently I had it now because the realtor appeared to know I wanted something different from the Victorian house.”

The realtor nodded and said he would take him to one near where he lived. They drove through forest and fields, crossed an old wooden bridge and there was the gristmill on the edge of a broad, fast-flowing creek. It dated back to 1850. Moody fell in love with it, but the problem was that it wasn’t for sale.

The realtor knew the family and the grown children wanted the parents to move, but they were intent on staying. They’d lived there for decades. When he called he was told they weren’t interested in selling, but the couple said that he could show the house, anyhow.

When they arrived, Moody introduced himself to Mrs. Doerr. She replied, “Dr. Raymond Moody…Dr.Raymond Moody….are you the man who wrote that book?”

Before Moody could answer, she walked into the living room and pulled a book off the shelf. To his surprise, it wasn’t his book at all. Rather, it was a book by Dr. George Ritchie, a good freind to whom he’d dedicated Life After Life, and he had also written the foreword for Ritchie’s book. That was what the woman remembered.

“George Ritchie is one of our dear, dear firends,” she said. “I think this must be a sign.”

Moody in his autobiography, Paranormal, recalls. “The chances of finding a gristmill that someone was willing to sell was highly unlikely, but the idea that they would be connected to me in any way, let alone through my good friend George Ritchie, was beyond belief for me.”

Within a moon, he had moved into the home of his dreams. It was there that he set up his psychomanteum – a mirrored room where his patients would gaze while in a meditative state and many would make contact with deceased family members and friends.

This precognitive synchro on November 20 is from our friend Judi Hertling, whose synchros we have used in both of our books. It concerns a dream that appears to be about the conflict going on between Israel and Gaza.

Personally, I’ve never understood the inner dynamics of this conflict because it’s primarily a religious war. I never understood the crusades, either.  I’ve never understood any dispute about religion and land and walls and boundaries that lead to destruction and death.  Yet, the fundamental storyline, whether in the real world or fiction is invariably compelling, and prompts me to take a deeper look at what’s going on.

The U.S. supports Israel with aid and weapons. They have nukes. Israel’s history is here. It’s been ongoing as long as Roswell. From what I can see, this struggle, this battle, is profoundly archetypal and Jungian, so it isn’t surprising that it appears in the dreams of individuals thousands of miles removed from the conflict.

++

From Judi:

You and I have been emailing for a few years now, so you know through reading and posting my synchros, and also from what I’ve emailed about some of the dreams that I have had, that on occasion I connect with the Universe in some form. Usually my dreams are about answers that I need, synchros that follow, mystical, etc.

But this is a new one – even for me – and I only realized the significance of it a few minutes ago.

When Steve is away I don’t watch news – too depressing. However, tonight while eating supper I flipped on the tv and caught CNN and watched the horror unfolding in Gaza with the airstrike. They reported it being the 7th day of the airstrike and the possibility of it turning into a full scale war. That’s when the significance of the images hit me.

Flipping back through the pages of my dream journal, this is what I wrote on Thursday, October 27th:

Emotions – depressed a couple of days prior to this dream, feeling very sad and with an urge to flee. Feel very depressed and restless which is very unlike who I am. Not like me at all. Very, very strange!

Dream – not a happy dream, unlike anything I have dreamt before. Missiles raining from the sky. I’m with a group of people climbing over rubble trying to get around a tall building that is on fire. People are crying. There is the noise of explosions everywhere. They are coming from the sky. I’m pleading loudly to whatever Universal force will listen. “Please tell them to stop! Make them stop, before it’s too late.” I really didn’t like this dream at all.

I had interpreted my emotions to be due to the earthquake that we had a few days later. Now after seeing the images on CNN I’m beginning to wonder if it was a precognition of what was to come.

What do you think? Is the veil between the consciousness and the collective consciousness getting thinner as we approach Dec 21st. Are our dreams more significant now than ever before? I pay attention to what I dream and the messages I sometimes receive, but this one. I have no explanation for why I would dream this at this time. Let’s hope I never have another one.

In early September 1984, my agent at the time, Diane Cleaver, submitted my manuscript, In Shadow, to Chris Cox, an editor at Ballantine Books. It was the 24^th submission for the novel (there were a lot more publishers back then!). The murder mystery is set in Miami, concerns a designer drug that enhances psychic ability, and features a black and white cop.

On the morning of September 17, my agent called to tell me that Chris had made an offer on the book. “He watched the premiere last night of Miami Vice, Trish, and was struck by the similarities between the show and your novel – Miami, the black and white cops,  the whole feel of it.”

Leap ahead. It’s late 1985. In Shadow has been published.  The first season of Miami Vice is such a big hit that Ballantine decides to do a book called The Making of Miami Vice. It’s to be  a behind the scenes look at everything that goes into the show – the terrific music, stunts, pyrotechnics,  editing, scripts, shooting, car chases, fashions, the stars, concept, the look. Rob and I got hired to write the book.  I was always struck by the synchronicity of our landing this project – that Chris had bought In Shadow the Monday after Vice premiered, the similarities in characters (my cops aren’t flashy!), the locale.

We were told we would have access the set, the stars, the nuts and bolts behind the scenes. We would be flown out to LA to interview Michael Mann, the sound and editing crew, Jan Hammer (the music guy) and anyone else who would talk to us. There was just one little catch: they needed the manuscript in two to three months, so it could be rushed into production in time to hit the shelves around the same time that season three premiered.

In early 1986,  we made our first of several trips to the set of Miami Vice. It didn’t take long for the two stars – Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas – to decide they didn’t have time to do interviews. It meant we have to patch together their chapters from other interviews, from our own observations on the set, and from their  co-workers. We initially were going to make their chapters the first two in the book,  but when we learned they couldn’t be bothered, we moved their chapters farther down. Johnson/Crockett became chapter 9 and Tubbs/Thomas became chapter 13.

This project was great fun. Everyone we talked to was gracious and accommodating. Eddie Olmos invited us to his house for coffee and we sat out on the porch talking about karma and life. John Diehl invited us to his small apartment on Miami Beach, where we met his cat- Panzy – and discovered that one of Diehl’s passion was boxing. He was a regular guy who had lucked into a fortunate role. He knew it. But he missed his girlfriend, an actress in L.A. and said he felt restless after two seasons of Vice. He was ready to try other parts.

Michael Mann (who went on to make movies after Vice) was fascinating. We talked to him in his office in LA, a cave of a room with black walls and a large poster of the galaxy. We learned that Mann is a risk-taker, a gambler, and doesn’t believe in playing it safe. “Film-making isn’t like dealing blackjack, where you know that sooner or later  the odds will come up in your favor. It’s like a big crap game. You have to take risks to win. I’d rather take a risk and fall flat on my face than play it safe and grow stale.”

One of the most interesting interviews we did was with Bonnie Timmerman, the brilliant casting director for Vice. Like Mann, she’s a risk-taker. She wanted intriguing secondary characters in each episode and during the first two seasons, some of those extras included: Bruce Willis, Bianca Jagger, Leonard Cohen, Lee Iococa (former CEO of Chrysler) James Russo, Jose Santana (father of musician Carlos Santana), Ted Nugent, John Heard.

Then there was the music… Jan Hammer’s fabulous pieces, but also everyone from Eric Clapton to Joe Cocker to the Who to Bob Marley.

The intricate details of putting together even a single episode of Vice were staggering. And when we finally sat down to start writing, it took us days to go through our notes and listen to the interviews we’d recorded. But the book came out that fall, right on schedule.

It went out of print  around 1989, when the series ended. And as the Internet developed and Amazon came into being, we watched used copies of Miami Vice go up for sale for as high as $350. At one point, I even wrote to one of these used booksellers and asked who was paying that much for a paperback book. “Collectors,” he replied.

At any rate, it’s now in digital format through Crossroad Press,  with formatting for every kind of reader and a really cool cover by Crossroad’s illustrator, David Dodd. That neon flamingo really captures the Art Deco scene of Miami Beach in the 1980s. And Crossroad’s price for the book is a bargain: $3.99. Here’s the first chapter.