New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Author: Paul V Young

  • The Mystery of Flight MH370: Looking for Clues in All the Wrong Places

    The Mystery of Flight MH370: Looking for Clues in All the Wrong Places

    From New Dawn 150 (May-June 2015)

    The following article appeared in New Dawn 150 (May-June 2015). For an up to date look at the continuing mystery surrounding Flight MH370 see Paul Young’s story in New Dawn 161 (Mar-Apr).

    As we marked the first anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 on 8 March 2015, the mystery has demonstrably deepened over time. The lack of substantial news over the past year spawned much speculation – some of it over-imaginative, some of it plausible.

    If we are willing to disengage from officialdom’s misinformation, we can follow some credible suggestions that lead us into that twilight zone where quantum physics has settled in as an uneasy neighbour alongside the paranormal.

    Some observers, including former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad1 and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, have accused the Malaysian government of holding back “missing bits of information.”2 If we are to believe that an aircraft over 60 metres long, with an equally wide wingspan and weighing more than 250 tonnes, can vanish with no-one knowing where it is, then concerns about the alleged spying capabilities of the major powers may be overstated.

    Of particular interest is the plane’s last known position (LKP). In all possible scenarios, from crashing into the sea to being shot down by military fire, from cyber-hijacking to paranormal interference, the real indications are that the incident took place between Malaysia and Vietnam, above where the Gulf of Thailand meets the South China Sea. Witnesses who say they observed an event in MH370’s last recorded neighbourhood have been discredited and testimonials ignored. Australia has taken on the role of sheriff, perhaps at the behest of the USA, in drawing the scent away from the actual geographical vanishing point to the Indian Ocean, where over fourteen months of exploration has yielded nothing.

    In re-examining the puzzle, there are some insights to be gained from comparing it to the loss of Air Asia Flight QZ8501 between Christmas 2014 and New Year. Unlike MH370, QZ8501 was not a Boeing, but an Airbus A320. But like the 777, this Airbus has fly-by-wire (FBW) flight controls, rendering it vulnerable to takeover by remote control. In fact, the Airbus A320 was the first commercial aircraft to be equipped with such a system. This leaves open the possibility that either or both could have been subject to cyber-hijack by a military power or terrorist group, or by an intelligence beyond our normal perception and comprehension.

    In both cases the planes deviated from their intended course and neither sent a distress signal. The Air Asia flight, according to its black box, was climbing at an extraordinarily rapid rate of 6,000 feet per minute, something it was not designed to do and would not be attempted by a responsible commercial pilot. Could it have been under remote control? In the case of MH370 we don’t have recorded information from the time of its disappearance, but we are asked to accept that the missing aircraft deviated way off its intended path, undetected by the widely respected Royal Malaysian Air Force, flown for another six hours and then ditched into the Indian Ocean, with all on board lost.

    The Official Line: Ditching Into the Ocean

    Having commenced at the LKP in the South China Sea, the search was diverted after just a few days and before any substantial progress could have been made, first to the Southern Indian Ocean, then to the North-West, based on information from British satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat. Their assessment was based on hourly ‘pings’ allegedly picked up from the plane, using the vague mathematical variability of the ‘Doppler Effect’ method, never before applied to such an investigation. An article by Ari Schulman in The Atlantic challenged the correctness of their calculations, stating:

    Its analysis has become the canonical text of the Flight 370 search. It’s the bit of data from which all other judgments flow – from the conclusive announcement by Malaysia’s prime minister that the plane has been lost with no survivors, to the black-box search area, to the high confidence in the acoustic signals.… The biggest risk to the investigation now is that authorities continue to assume they’ve finally found the area where the plane went down, while failing to explore other possibilities simply because they don’t fit with a mathematical analysis that may not even hold up.3

    Similar doubts have been expressed by Radiometrics CEO Mike Exner, as well as scientific writers Duncan Steel and Jeff Wise.

    At the helm of the most expensive airplane search in history, under Australia’s leadership, is Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) commissioner Martin Dolan. He is allegedly a discredited civil servant whose integrity was called into doubt by the Australian Senate inquiry into the ATSB’s handling of a Pel-Air crash investigation in 2009. The ATSB has itself been found seriously wanting by a peer review of their procedures in producing that report, by the Transport Safety Board of Canada.4 Has this whole operation been set up to fail? If so, Australia may not be privy to the conspiracy.

    There are two popular lines of thought warranting attention, both involving the USA. One is that the plane was subjected to cyber-jacking and ended up at a US military base. The other is that it was shot down.

    Shot Down or Cyber-jacked: Blaming the USA

    Author Nigel Cawthorne, in a book released very soon after the incident, covered almost every conceivable angle, including that the plane might have been shot down accidentally during a US-Thai military exercise and hushed up.5 Marc Dugain, former chief executive of Proteus Airlines, added to the shoot-down theory by suggesting it might not have been accidental, but that the plane had been cyber-jacked and was to be crashed into a US military base, so it had to be terminated. Fuel for this theory was added when eyewitnesses in the Maldives claimed to have seen a low flying, large airplane above their islands early in the morning of 8 March. A further theory arose claiming the plane had been taken over by remote control and landed at a US military base on Diego Garcia. Even allowing for means and opportunity, there is no clear motive and no claims regarding hostages have emerged.

    The argument against a shoot-down is the same as that of a crash: where is the flotsam and jetsam? From South East Asia across to the Maldives there are densely populated lands, major shipping channels and countless fishing vessels. For not one piece of debris to have shown up defies belief.

    The Other-Worldly Spectre

    Several UFO reports coincide with the time and location of the missing MH370 aircraft. The International Business Times – quoting two different sources (UFO Blogger & Forbidden Knowledge TV’s Alexandra Bruce) – reported on 23 April 2014:

    Malaysia’s air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said military radar detected a UFO in an area in the northern Malacca Strait at 2:15 a.m. local time on Saturday about an hour after the plane vanished from air traffic control screens.… The radar playback depicts dozens of planes in flight over the region at the time. The first peculiarity is seen in the lower left of the screen. A round object appears in the vicinity of Flight 370 (and amid several others), which the radar does not automatically ‘read’ as an airplane. Suddenly, this round object takes the form of a ‘plane’ on the radar screen and accelerates at a rate of speed that must be at least five times the speed of the surrounding planes, heading eastward, over the South China Sea – and just as suddenly the object stops and appears to hover in place.6

    However it does not bring any conclusion to the matter to simply say that a UFO ‘took’ the aircraft. Why take it and where is it?

    The Human Factor

    From the angle of human intervention who, other than the pilot, could take control of a Boeing 777 mid-flight? On board MH370 were twenty employees of Freescale Semiconductor, an American company described as an “Electronic Warfare and Military Radar firm.” A theory that “Jacob Rothschild” wanted four joint patent holders eliminated doesn’t hold much water, as their names are not on the passenger manifest and the patent itself was not significant enough to drive anyone to murder 239 innocent people. But of those twenty on board, Freescale’s spokesman Mitch Haws said: “These were all people with a lot of experience and technical background and they were very important people.” According to International Business Times, Freescale’s newly patented invention was in fact the world’s smallest microcontroller called the Kinesis KL02, described as “the most potent next-generation war weaponry.” They add that it is for use in remote controlled or automatically programmed devices and is “significant in making plausible the Pentagon’s ultimate dream of a human-controlled robotic warrior.”7

    So we know Freescale is interested in remote control technology. What about ‘invisibility cloaking?’ According to Bibliotecapleyades.net, “Avoiding radar via ‘cloaking technology’ has long been one of the objectives of the defence industry and Freescale has been active (in) developing chips for military radar. Last June (2013) it announced it was creating a team of specialists dedicated to producing ‘radio frequency power products’ for the defence industry.”8 On its website, Freescale RF says, “These RF power standard products meet the requirements for applications such as avionics, HF through L- and S-Band radar, communications, missile guidance, electronic warfare, and identification, friend or foe (IFF).”9

    Could there have been an experiment of sorts, being carried out in conjunction with Freescale, whose biggest client is the US military, together with Boeing, whose biggest client is also the US military, to hide the plane with an invisibility cloak – a seemingly innocent test that went bizarrely wrong? Unlike in 1943 when the US navy was alleged to have carried out the infamous Philadelphia experiment using enlisted seamen, these days ‘cloak of invisibility’ prototypes such as the Rochester Cloak10 are said to be well advanced and already in use. But as routine as authorities might deem these developments to be, there are scientists who remain obsessed with the goal of uniting electromagnetism and gravity into a single field to produce invisibility, in line with Einstein’s Unified Field Theory. Beforeitsnews.com points out that this is the type of technology Freescale Semiconductor develops, and “it is conceivable that the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 plane is ‘cloaked,’ hiding with hi-tech electronic warfare weaponry that exists and is used.”11

    Is it realistic to conceive the possibility that MH370 slipped into a parallel world or different physical dimensional frequency, not by accident but perhaps aided by UFO(s) that were sighted in the area? By joining the dots, the following is one scenario. As the narrative is conjecture, passenger’s names have not been used.

    A Modern-day Philadelphia Experiment?

    Approaching midnight on 7 March 2014, 227 passengers are boarding a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 in Kuala Lumpur for a routine flight to Beijing. Ten are in business class and, among the rest in economy is a corporate group of twenty who work for the American company Freescale Semiconductor. All are Malaysian and Chinese nationals. These twenty are seated in two clusters in the foremost economy cabin which houses rows 11 to 26, with the arrangement of two seats to the left designated A and C, two seats J and K to the right, with five marked D to H in the centre, separated by aisles either side.12 One group of Freescale employees settle in their assigned A and C seats to the left while over to the right, the four pairs of J & K seats in rows 16 to 19 are occupied by senior Freescale staff. All are seated right above the wings. The plane lifts off at 41 minutes past midnight and ascends in good flying conditions. As it passes 10,000 feet the pilot announces that personal electronic devices may now be switched on. Three of the senior Freescale personnel in the right-hand J/K seats anxiously activate their laptops, embarking on a covert mission destined to chalk up a technological milestone.

    The loyal workers have been convinced by their American employers that the ever advancing surveillance techniques used by Beijing are dangerous and herald a new kind of cold war between the two real superpowers on the world stage today: China and the USA. China’s ‘feather in the cap’ is its new Gaofen-1 eye-in-the-sky satellite which it put into use in December 2013. Washington intends to demonstrate to Beijing that it is a giant step ahead in the spying game. They’ve been assured that the cloak of invisibility they are about to deploy around the aircraft is completely safe and no-one on board need even know it is happening. Once the Chinese realise the plane has entered their airspace undetected, they will be embarrassed and, of course, neither side will want to announce it publicly. Being a civilian aircraft should assure there is no military backlash.

    At 1:19am they see that co-pilot, First Officer Hamid, has just signed off from Malaysian air traffic control and has not yet handed over to Vietnamese control. The time is perfect. They are at 35,000 feet over the sea, in a black spot between cell-phone masts and can no longer be seen from land, not that anyone will be looking at this time of morning. Freescale Passenger 1 (FP1), from his window seat at the right-side of the plane, uses his laptop to remotely turn off the transponder, then the satellite phone system installed in business class, then disables the ACARS system located below deck, which had sent its last signal at 1:07. With his tasks completed in just two minutes, he makes the prearranged hand gesture to FP2, seated directly behind him. FP2 notes that the plane is now on autopilot but he is ready, at the push of a button, to take control away from the cockpit, should the crew attempt to manually alter course or altitude before the mission is accomplished. He in turn signals FP3, seated behind him, that all is well and going according to plan.

    There is no time to lose and FP3 immediately activates the sequence which, although programmed to take effect in under a minute, is the culmination of many years of development. Tonight they are making history, surrounding a Boeing 777 wide-body aircraft with a magnetic field, producing a cloak of invisibility. It is about to become undetectable to radar, satellite GPS, visual search and contact by radio or mobile phone. Once they are inside Chinese airspace, their triumphant demonstration completed, they will remove the cloak and hand control back to the flight crew. What they haven’t been told is that the physicists back home have resolved to complete what Einstein could not – his Unified Field Theory. Seventy years have passed since the disastrous Philadelphia Experiment and the scientists are sure they have it right this time. Not only is the plane to become invisible, but to actually dematerialise, just for a while, from our physical space-time dimension.

    Out of the blue comes an unexpected reaction, something not anticipated in their many hours of rigorous simulator training. An almost blinding light envelopes the plane, accompanied by loud, low pitched hum. This lasts only a moment and, as the light fades, the plane remains sheathed in a green glowing fog. There is complete quiet. Not only do those on board maintain a stunned silence but, eerily, there is no engine noise. Then the alarming realisation dawns that they are motionless, they are neither ascending nor descending, not going forward or sideways. It is as if time and space have somehow stood still. At that very moment, as far as the outside world is concerned, the plane no longer exists – not just invisible, but actually vanished.

    Into Thin Air

    Where did the aircraft go and why hasn’t it returned as it was supposed to? The popular on-line forum Project Avalon posts many varied theories, including that of a multiverse whereby other realities overlap and connect with ours. Many psychics have expressed opinions such as ‘Lynn,’ who has stated repeatedly on her Psychic Focus Blogsite that she sees the plane entering ‘another reality’ in a parallel world and landing on a beach along an area of jungle, watched over by tribal people.13 Another site, Prout Scandinavia, offers a précis of Lynn’s lengthy material as follows:

    What looks like a clear day turns into dark, gloomy surrounding. Looks like discharges of static electricity coming off the plane. People are trying to stand and grab something above their heads? Lot of turbulence. Oxygen masks start to fall. Loud thundering sound, people are grabbing their ears. Then… it feels like the plane is floating into a different layer, dimension or into “cloaking” energy; ETs cloaking the plane? It lands mainly intact in a cove on jungle island with a large snow-capped mountain, around the Andaman Islands? Asian man held up 2 fingers, then 3 and lastly 7, location where they are?

    Captain Zaharie Shah, pilot: There was a real struggle to maintain control during this moment of turbulence. Then everything goes calm, he lifts his hands off the controls in complete astonishment. He is just looking at the wheel and it is moving by itself. There is a silence over the whole plane. A flood of emotions came over him, fear, confusion, intrigue; he couldn’t make sense of it. He didn’t land the plane, it landed itself??? To some extent he is still in shock, and he replays that situation in his mind, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Fariq Abdul Hamid, copilot is in the cockpit, they hit some turbulence. He is holding on tightly to the controls as if they had to turn off or assist the auto steering to manage though this rough patch in the air. Then I see him with this very strange look on his face as if something took the plane over.14

    Just how fantastic or absurd is this speculation on parallel worlds? On 3 November 2014 it was reported that an Australian team at the Centre of Quantum Dynamics in Griffith University, under the title “Many Interacting Worlds,” proposed that stable parallel worlds exist and it is possible to test for their existence. It deviates from standard quantum theory, firstly in that it suggests electrons do behave like particles, not waves or clouds; secondly, that there must be a finite number of realities, not infinite as suggested before; thirdly, that no new universes are ever created – instead many worlds have existed, side-by-side, since the beginning of time.

    In the new picture proposed by the Griffith team, tests show

    the electrons being fired at the slits are particles after all – tiny little spheres just as Newton would have imagined them. In our world the electron might pass through the bottom slit. But in a parallel world the electron passes through the top slit. As the two ghostly twins travel towards the detectors (one in our world, one in a parallel world), their paths could overlap. But according to the theory, a newly proposed repulsive force stops the electrons coming too close to one another. In effect, the electron in our world “collides” with its ghostly twin, like billiard balls knocking together as they roll across a pool table.15

    If parallel worlds exist, then they have always been there and possibly account for many of the mysterious disappearances of ships and planes in the past. Various spots around the world known as ‘Vile Vortices’ include the Bermuda and Devil’s Triangles, and the volumes of unexplained events are legendary. It is only now that we have reached the stage that our technology can test and enter these worlds – but can it yet be done safely?

    Get the issue this article appears in

    “Someone Knows”

    If scientists engaged in such a test, they presumably did so with best intentions – after all, they would have wanted this to be a well-documented success. It could be, however, that while experiments conducted inside a laboratory indicated they could maintain complete control and guarantee safety, a 250 tonne airliner at 35,000 feet may have behaved differently to the predicted model. Who else besides Freescale would have been in on it? Arguably Boeing and the US military; possibly Rolls Royce and some personnel at Malaysia Airlines; probably neither China nor Vietnam would know, just as it is unlikely the Australian government is privy to what happened. Australia may be acting in good faith, serving the wishes of overseas governments as they have done in various conflicts and exercises over the past century.

    On 29 January 2015, the Malaysian government officially declared the plane to be lost in an accident with no survivors. But even though this statement was intended to allow the airline to start paying compensation, many of the victims’ families are having none of it. As reported by The Straits Times after the announcement:

    Many desperate MH370 relatives have continued to insist that the plane may have landed safely somewhere, and Malaysian authorities and the airline had until now refrained from drawing firm conclusions about its fate. But Thursday’s announcement essentially declared that the plane had crashed somewhere after its disappearance last March 8.… Ms Sarah Bajc, whose partner, Mr Philip Wood, was on board the plane, was one of several relatives who poured scorn on the announcement. “I think they are lying,” she said. “It could very well be that the plane crashed. But there is no evidence, and until there is evidence we just can’t believe them,” she said, referring to the Malaysian government and flag carrier. “It is impossible to bring any closure until we have proof.” Many relatives accuse the Malaysian government and its flag carrier of a chaotic and bungled response to the plane’s initial diversion, which allowed the jet to disappear, and a subsequent cover-up.16

    Emirates Airlines’ Sir Tim Clark says:

    Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something. We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite ‘handshake’, which I question as well.

    Sir Tim said it was the total disappearance of the plane that ignited his suspicions and called for better transparency in the investigation. “I’m totally dissatisfied with what has been coming out of all of this,” he said. In remarks likely to further incite conspiracy theories, Sir Tim added: “We need to know who was on the plane in the detail that obviously some people do know.”17 So the suspicion lingers that someone knows something and is not speaking. Could it be to avoid causing public panic, or could it be out of embarrassment of a scientific experiment gone horrendously wrong?

    What, if anything, did the sighting of a UFO at the time have to do with it? Going back as far as WWII there were allegations that both the Nazis and the USA had technological assistance from aliens. Even Werner von Braun, one of the fathers of rocket-science, famously said, “We had help.” If there was an experiment being conducted, was it in conjunction with other-worldly parties? And if MH370 entered a parallel dimension, how would you locate it? In a paper posted on 3108.info by Walter Vetcsh, he claims there are regular interdimensional flights known to the US government. He also asserts that both electricity and magnetic fields (which would include ‘cloaks’) are visible in the fourth dimension and techniques exist to view them through a filter, using the blue-violet dye known as dicyanin.18

    As with all other possible scenarios, the essential point is that you have to be looking in the right place.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 150.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnOWKrGVTwI
    2. www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/flight-mh370/58037/mh370-conspiracy-theories-what-happened-to-missing-plane
    3. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/why-the-official-explanation-of-mh370s-demise-doesnt-hold-up/361826/
    4. http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2015/01/18/mh370-is-it-time-to-investigate-the-investigators/
    5. Flight MH370 The Mystery by Nigel Cawthorne, John Blake Publishing, 2014, 245
    6. http://au.ibtimes.com/mh370-radar-detected-ufo-jet-goes-missing-malaysian-air-force-head-reportedly-confirms-sightings
    7. http://au.ibtimes.com/mh370-how-fatal-chip-rothschild-reportedly-acquired-1337851
    8. www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_rothschild46.htm
    9. www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/taxonomy.jsp?code=RF-AEROSPACE-DEFENSE-TRANSISTORS&cof=0&am=0
    10. www.rochester.edu/newscenter/watch-rochester-cloak-uses-ordinary-lenses-to-hide-objects-across-continuous-range-of-angles-70592/
    11. http://sputniknews.com/voiceofrussia/news/2014_03_31/MH370-kept-hidden-at-top-secret-US-military-base-media-reports-8550/
    12. Information about passengers and seating plans are from New York Daily News: www.nydailynews.com/news/world/names-faces-aboard-malaysia-airlines-flight-370-article-1.1739217 & NST site: http://cached.newslookup.com/cached.php?ref_id=433&siteid=2354&id=5907624&t=1398947340
    13. http://psychicfocus.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/malaysia-airline-mh370.html
    14. http://proutscandinavia.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/psychics-know-where-malaysia-plane-370.html
    15. https://cosmosmagazine.com/physical-sciences/can-we-test-parallel-worlds
    16. www.straitstimes.com/news/asia/south-east-asia/story/relatives-fume-malaysia-declares-mh370-accident-no-survivors-2015012
    17. www.apfn.org/apfn/370.htm
    18. Occult Practices of the United States (OPUS) 2014 by Walter C Vetch on 3108.info

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Mystique of the Manor: Australia’s Occult Centre Revealed

    The Mystique of the Manor: Australia’s Occult Centre Revealed

    From New Dawn 152 (Sept-Oct 2015)

    Pilgrims have been drawn to the other-worldly auras of hallowed sites, both natural and man-made, all around the globe since antiquity. One such sanctuary sits right in the heart of Sydney and, although it has slipped from prominence today, it played a significant role in Australia’s spiritual and esoteric history.

    While its narrative has primarily been expressed through the descriptions of the characters who have occupied it, the magnetism of the building and the ground it stands on are worthy of examination in their own right. Today it has become less visibly conspicuous, surrounded as it is by so many other grand dwellings. However, a century ago the world was a different place and it was quite the topic of conversation in Sydney society.

    The late nineteenth century saw a surge of spiritual and metaphysical pursuits in the Western world, springing from Europe and Britain and streaming into the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. While the British Victorian era is generally associated with industrial and scientific advances, not to mention Darwinism, many Victorians (including the Queen herself) embraced Spiritualism, séances and other forms of mysticism. At what is now considered the birth of the New Age movement, independent thinkers in England freed themselves from centuries of religious dogma and placed their faith in the powers of ESP, experimenting in telepathy and clairvoyance. Many enthusiastically explored new branches of knowledge with exotic names like mesmerism, electro-biology and crystal-gazing.

    On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans felt no sense of conflict in having a Ouija board on their desk alongside the Bible. Spiritualism seemed quite compatible with Christianity inasmuch as it provided reassurance on the existence of souls and the afterlife. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (HPB) was the daughter of a White Russian princess and had been involved in the Spiritualist movement early on.1 On moving to the USA she befriended Henry Steel Olcott and together they founded the Theosophical Society (TS) in 1875. In the early twentieth century, as Americans were becoming fascinated with psychic phenomena, Harvey Spencer Lewis was initiated into a Rosicrucian order during a visit to France, thereby enabling him to establish the order known as AMORC on his return to the USA.

    Australia was not impervious to the ground-swell of New Age beliefs and Sydney became a focal point for their proponents – some of them more colourful than saintly – along with their mystical doctrines, which concocted a curious blend of Christianity with the occult. The popularity of Spiritualism soared, counting among its adherents such notables as Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and the newly arrived American architect Walter Burley Griffin. A hundred years ago, while James Wedgwood was founding the Liberal Catholic Church (LCC) back in Britain, his friend Charles Webster Leadbeater had already decided to settle in Sydney and would, in the succeeding years, establish the Australian headquarters of both the LCC and Theosophy, together with various other societies, at Mosman in Sydney. A number of theosophists first rented, then purchased under trust deed, the capacious 55-room mansion and its grounds at Clifton Gardens that was to be known as The Manor.

    Gateway to Heaven or Simply a Grand Old Mansion?

    While The Manor became the focal point for Theosophy and associated societies almost a century ago, it had originally been built by wealthy businessman William Bakewell and was known to the locals as ‘Bakewell’s Folly’. He purchased six building blocks of what is now prime real estate at Clifton Gardens. The entire district of Mosman is rich with Aboriginal heritage, with over a hundred known sites found across the municipality, particularly along the foreshore area. After the North Shore population of several thousand original inhabitants witnessed the arrival of the first British colonisers, their numbers were decimated by the smallpox epidemic of 1789.

    Was this grand and mysterious building at Mosman, which had been described by a TS member almost eight decades ago as a “specially selected Centre of the power of the Masters of the Wisdom,”2 really a kind of cosmic portal and, if so, should it be revered as a sacred site today? Perhaps we should consider the possibility that an other-worldly force guided even William Bakewell from the outset when he selected the location for his construction. Quoting Nicholas Van Gelder:

    He began with a simple purpose: to build an eight-room house. What passed through his mind over the next 8 years is not known. Suffice that by 1913 the house had become a rambling 55-room mansion with many rooms lined with copper. Perhaps he foresaw the days when the Australian security service could listen in on conversations by using laser or microwave devices.3

    The fact that most rooms have pressed metal ceilings, as well as copper lined walls, is claimed by some occultists to serve the purpose of conserving magnetism. Following his death in 1917, William’s family declined to live there and the house stood vacant for five years, until it was acquired by TS members.

    In 1922 the imposing building would become home to a commune of fifty-plus people. As explained by Theosophy Forward on their website:

    It was Theosophist Lucius Van Gelder who had the idea for an experimental community to make life more “reasonable, cheaper, and more useful” for the families and individuals concerned.… Leadbeater, who became the focus for the community, invited Van Gelder to assume the task of managing it; and the residence became known as “The Manor”…. A trust was formed, whose purposes were “the formation of a spiritual centre where people may be trained in religious matters and the formation of a community based on Theosophical ideals.” The appointment of trustees was placed in the hands of Annie Besant, then the International President of the Theosophical Society, and her successors.4

    According to the authoritative booklet The Manor: A Short History5, The Manor became an important centre for the Society and was regarded as a great “occult forcing-house.” Curuppumullage Jinarājadāsa (known simply as Raja), the Theosophical Society’s international vice-president, asserted that Leadbeater was directed to the house by command of the King of Shamballa, and promptly settled in it, declaring, “In June 1922, the Great White Brotherhood established in the City of Sydney an occult Centre, charged directly from Shamballa.” “Thus was born the notion that The Manor was the occult nexus for the Southern Hemisphere.” And writer C.V. Williams added: “In 1922 Theosophist families began to move in with him (Leadbeater), feeling secure in the idea that they were close to heaven.”

    What marks The Manor as a keystone in Australia’s alternative spiritual heritage is that it served as a passageway, like the neck of an hourglass, by which so many doctrines and societies were funnelled into this country, before being disseminated throughout the land. The sheer number of activities including Theosophy, Co-Freemasonry, the LCC and other less well-known societal offshoots anchored to this geographical location at Mosman, poses the question: was it, and is it still, an occult centre of power? Had it always been, as the commune’s founders believed, a kind of heavenly gateway, or did it really derive its power from the “égrégore”6 of its human participants?

    The following are some of the principal known organisations, alongside their commonly used acronyms:

    TS         The Theosophical Society
    OSE      Order of the Star in the East
    LCC      The Liberal Catholic Church
    ES         The Esoteric Section; also The Eastern School
    Co-M   Co-Masonry

    According to a biographical study of Charles Webster Leadbeater (CWL) by Gregory Tillett:

    The arrangement of a weekly schedule posed no small difficulty, since it involved regular meetings of the TS, both those for members only and those open to the public, and of the OSE, together with the ES and Co-Masonry, and now the Liberal-Catholic Church. The considerable overlap between the TS, the LCC and Co-Masonry can be seen from examining lists of Co-Masonic Lodge officers around this time: the officers of Sydney Lodge No.404 in 1918 included Mr and Mrs Kollerstrom, Leadbeater, Hazel, and L.W. Burt, all of them (as they were by then being described) TS, ES, OSE, LCC and Co-M.7

    Gregory Tillett adds, in a book co-written with Nevill Drury:

    Another ceremonial movement which he (CWL) established, the Egyptian Rite of Ancient Freemasonry, also meets there (The Manor); in this rite Leadbeater hoped to bring together the angels of Freemasonry and of the Church, and it was regarded as “the most powerful occult rite in the world.”8

    One newspaper article reports that, in the 1920s,

    The Manor had its own theatre company performing Shakespearean plays on the gently sloping lawns. Painters, writers and poets congregated in its meeting rooms to discuss modernism, materialism and the importance of patriotism in nation building. There were Greek garden fetes, fairy dances, light operas and musicals.9

    In keeping with the times, TS launched radio station 2GB in 1926, using The Manor and two outlying cottages on the property. The initials GB stood for sixteenth century philosopher Giordano Bruno, whom they believed was a former incarnation of Annie Besant. The station is still a household name in Sydney radio ninety years on. Alfred Edward ‘A.E.’ Bennett (not to be confused with Frank Bennett) was appointed general manager and the first broadcast took place on Armistice Day, 1926. Bennett wrote, “The intention is to conduct the station on ideal principles and solely with the object of uplifting our Australian people.”10 Raja, however, was concerned this sacred ground was being disturbed by the psychically enervating signals emanating from the antennae.

    A Hidden Fraternity

    What unseen guiding hand drew this array of key personalities together and why at this particular location? Was the torch being lit for an ‘Antipodean Utopia’ and, if so, did the flame fizzle out, or does it continue to flicker away from the public eye in preparation of a new Golden Age? Those confraternities we dub ‘secret societies’ always have twin facets: the overt aspect, consisting of their beliefs and philosophies, which these days can be readily researched in books and online; then their practical agenda which forms the basis of their secrecy – the initiation rites, rituals and techniques that are intended to raise consciousness, quicken one’s psychic abilities and ultimately allow communion with higher intelligence, sometimes including ‘invisible Masters’.

    Who are these ‘Masters’ that are said to have appeared to, and spoken with, the likes of Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Alice Bailey and Charles Leadbeater? They are called by various names, including The Ascended Masters, The Great White Brotherhood, The Elder Brothers or The Secret College. They form a Hierarchy, which Phillip Lindsay defines as a “Group of spiritual beings on the inner planes of the solar system who are the intelligent forces of nature and who control the evolutionary processes. Divided into twelve hierarchies. The Occult Hierarchy or Masters of Wisdom, of which disciples and initiates are a reflection.”11 They exist on subtle planes known as the Etheric or the Astral, transparent to normal physical sight. In addition to Masters there are angelic, devic and elemental entities.

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    Also known as Mahatmas, the Masters of Ancient Wisdom are those who once lived as human beings. The enlightened ones who most often imparted their teachings to Theosophists and other occultists from the late nineteenth century are identified as Morya, Kuthumi (or Koot Hoomi), Djwal Kul (usually just known by the initials DK), and Count Saint Germain – although there are many more. While many of these Masters dwell on a non-physical plane, some do take corporeal form and they often attach themselves to specific earthly retreats, the most well-known being in and around the Himalayas.

    Author Edmund Harold states:

    There are momentous periods in our evolution, times when we recommence the age-old search for self-purpose. At such times we re-acquire awareness of the existence of a spiritual hierarchy, one that is represented by highly evolved beings. These are known as The Great White Brotherhood, or the Brotherhood of the Light.12

    The voices of the masters have been silent at The Manor for a long time, but perhaps another one of these ‘times’ approaches again.

    The Pioneering Spirit

    The modern Theosophical movement first reached Australia in 1879 when Gilbert Elliot of Melbourne joined the TS. By 1891 when Henry Steel Olcott, as the Society’s international president, came for a brief tour, there were enough branches to form what was called “a Section.” While in Sydney, Olcott also chartered the Sydney Lodge. The Australian Section was given a further boost in 1894 when Annie Besant, a persuasive orator, arrived to give a series of lectures on Theosophical topics. In 1905 Charles Leadbeater toured the country to wide acclaim and then, three years later, membership skyrocketed on Besant’s return.

    The LCC and the Co-Freemasonry movement that developed alongside the TS in Sydney can be traced to one man: James Ingall Wedgwood (JIW). In 1915 Wedgwood, who first met Leadbeater in 1906, arrived in Sydney. As a gay clergyman, JIW suffered an ongoing inner turmoil between “the angel and the beast within” – a dilemma that haunts some clerics to this day. He swung between alternating extremes of spiritual fervour and the temptations of the flesh. Eminent British Theosophist E.L. Gardner said of him privately, “JIW was a ‘dual’ – at times skilled, able and impressive. Then, a bout of sensualism of the worst grade, sexual perversion.”13

    In 1909 Leadbeater identified the 14 year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti as a vehicle for the coming World Teacher, the Bodhisattva Maitreya, by way of clairvoyant perception of his aura. From then on Krishnamurti was groomed by both CWL and Annie Besant, eventually coming to Sydney in 1925. He did not stay at The Manor, but lived at a nearby house in Mosman with his brother, Nitya, with whom he was very close. The OSE’s raison d’être was to prepare the way for the arrival of this new messiah. With this advent in mind, CWL and Besant guided the construction of the ambitiously conceived Star Amphitheatre at nearby Balmoral Beach.14

    Built in ancient Greek style and completed in 1924, the Amphitheatre had seating accommodation for 2,500 people and was intended as a venue for lectures by the expected World Teacher, embodied by Krishnamurti. Just as The Manor earned the reputation of being a folly, surely the Amphitheatre is to be remembered as an extravagance – perhaps even an eccentric one at that. Stories circulated that it was located for the best view of the expected ‘second coming’ that would see “Jesus Christ come through the Heads of Sydney Harbour.”15 Clearly this never eventuated and, a quarter of a century later, the Star Amphitheatre was demolished. These days a rather ordinary looking apartment block stands on the site.

    In the same year The Manor was first occupied by TS members, Krishnamurti and Nitya travelled from Sydney to Ojai in California, where they experienced a new sense of freedom accompanied by a fresh perspective on worldly matters. A big upheaval for Krishnamurti came when he was asked to attend a function in India marking the golden anniversary of TS in 1925, while his brother stayed in Ojai. Nitya had been in poor health, but George Arundale (more about him shortly) had assured Krishna that he would not die, promising that the Masters would protect him. But Nitya did die, causing Krishnamurti’s dedication to the TS to wane, until finally in 1929 he dissolved the Order of the Star in the East (OSE) and stated he was not going to be the new messiah, with the famous words, “The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.” He did not renounce public life, however, continuing on his own path with the Krishnamurti Foundation. His mentors at the TS felt sadly let down and distanced themselves from him over the years.

    The Momentum of The Arundale Years

    George Sydney Arundale joined the TS in England during 1895 and, seven years later, followed Annie Besant to India where he became principal of her Central Hindu College. Life there revolved around Krishnamurti, who had become Besant’s adopted son. Arundale instituted the OSE in Europe and also took on the role as regional bishop for LCC in India. Soon after, he claimed himself to be clairvoyant and then, late in 1925, began openly expressing doubts about Krishnamurti’s intended role as the earthly vehicle for Maitreya. This caused a slight rift with Besant, after which he transferred to Sydney to join Charles Leadbeater at Mosman.

    He launched himself so enthusiastically into the affairs of The Manor that the ensuing period is remembered as ‘The Arundale Years’. In quick succession he became general secretary, chairman of 2GB, editor of the Australian Theosophist, and co-editor of the Australian Star News. An able preacher and experienced publicist, he competently formulated political commentary and supported advanced causes, from a Theosophical angle. Together with his wife Shrimati Rukmini Devi, a well-known Indian dancer, he stayed at The Manor until 1931. It seems George Arundale’s assessment of Krishnamurti was correct and in fact the 1930s was the last great decade for the TS at The Manor.

    Attention Wanes

    The defection of Krishnamurti along with the deaths of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater led to a period of decline for the TS in the 1930s, from which it never fully recovered. It appears the Society, like many temporal vehicles on this material plane, carried at its nucleus the elements of its own decline. Author Nicholas Van Gelder portrays the Esoteric Section as the cause of the eventual downturn in the fortunes of the TS, although today’s Manorites deny there has ever been a schism in Theosophical ranks. HPB formed the ES as an inner group back in 1888, consisting of students who were members of the Society, but separate from it and controlled solely by her. Unfortunately it came to be seen by some non-members as an elitist group. It remains a separate entity today.

    Perhaps the reason that a number of the groups that put down roots at The Manor failed to endure is that Charles Webster Leadbeater held no clear vision for their future nurturing and growth. As noted by author Frank Joseph, he “departed for Australia, settling in Sydney in 1914, where he felt particularly called to fulfil some as yet ill-defined mission (italics added). His instinct was correct, judging from the profound public success he enjoyed there.”16 CWL left Australia for India in 1929, to take over the leadership of the TS from Annie Besant, whose health was failing. He returned to Sydney for short periods but died during a stopover in Perth in 1934.

    James Wedgwood left Australia and in the late 1920s resumed his activities with the TS in Holland, allegedly with increasingly frequent visions and meetings with masters, angels, archangels and denizens of the higher realms. He would eventually return to England in poor health and battling dementia, dying in 1951 after a heavy fall.

    George Arundale ended up returning to India where he died in 1945. The ‘Arundale Years’ had helped stabilise the TS and perhaps presented a more acceptable, scandal-free image to the Australian public.

    There is a conviction held by organisations and individuals concerned with esotericism that Australia has a special role to play in the dawn of a new Golden Age. In a series of lectures delivered in Sydney in August 1915, CWL had proclaimed “Australia and New Zealand as the home of a new sub-race.” He detected in Australia “children and young people of a distinctly new type.” A new antipodean human type characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis.17 This is consistent with the New Age concept of ‘Indigo Children’. In the last years of his life, CWL claimed to have been instructed by the ‘World Mother’ to establish a ministry for her worship, including an apostolic succession to be passed on through women and for the foundation of a feminine religion to parallel the masculine-dominated Christianity. To date this has not made any public appearance, but the tradition is said to be perpetuated within Theosophical circles privately.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Guarding its Secrets and its Grandeur, A Century On

    Today, as one approaches The Manor from the road above, its sprawling grandeur first reveals itself by way of the dormers and gables of the red tiled roof, including the impressive 18-metre long studio perched atop the eastern wing. Most first-time visitors can’t resist trying to count the host of chimney pots that crown it. The very ground that The Manor stands on exudes a palpable magnetism and benign spiritual presence. One does not have to be psychic to experience the peaceful calm emanating from the mansion’s walls, and it is not hard to see why many have claimed to feel closer to the divine here.

    Whether or not Australia fulfils its secret occult destiny and hosts a new Golden Age remains to be seen. So long as the Manorites maintain the high energy levels through their esoteric rites, this site will remain sacred and, should the Masters decide the time is right to publicise their messages once again and guide the populace, surely this will be the prime spot for their transmission.

    This article’s graphics are viewable in the print or digital version of New Dawn 152.

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    Footnotes

    1. It should be noted that Madame Blavatsky (and Theosophy) rejected Spiritualism, however: “By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement; although defending the genuine existence of Spiritualist phenomena, she argued against the mainstream Spiritualist idea that the entities contacted were the spirits of the dead.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky)
    2. ‘The Manor Family: Australia’s oldest urban commune’ by Bill Metcalf, JRAHS Vol 100, 9
    3. ‘The Manor: A Short History’ by Nicolas Van Gelder, Theosophical History Occasional Papers, Vol XIV, 1
    4. www.theosophyforward.com/theosophical-encyclopedia/521-manor-the
    5. Nicolas Van Gelder, 14-15
    6. An egregore is a ‘group thought form’ or ‘collective group mind.’ See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
    7. ‘Charles Webster Leadbeater 1854-1934: A Biographical Study’ by Gregory John Tillett, http://leadbeater.org/tillettcwlchap17.htm
    8. Other Temples Other Gods by Nevill Drury & Gregory Tillett, Hodder & Stoughton, 1982, 32-33
    9. ‘Age of reason’ by John Zubrzycki, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend supplement, 29 Nov 2014
    10. Nicolas Van Gelder, 24
    11. Masters of the Seven Rays by Phillip Lindsay, Apollo Publishing, 2000, 119
    12. The Ascended Masters of The Great White Brotherhood by Edmund Harold, Grail Publications, 2002, 13
    13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._I._Wedgwood
    14. “Mary Rocke, a retired doctor, member of the Theosophical Society, secretary and physician to Leadbeater, purchased three adjacent blocks of land sloping from Wyargine Street, Balmoral to the beach. With a loan of 4,000 pounds and the rest of the cost raised by selling subscription seats, the Star Amphitheatre was built on this site.” (www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/file_download/1865/The-Star-Amphitheatre-Balmoral.pdf)
    15. “Leadbeater, Charles” by Garry Wotherspoon, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/leadbeater_charles
    16. ‘C.W. Leadbeater: Saint or Sinner?’ by Frank Joseph, New Dawn 96 (May-June 2006)
    17. ‘Esoteric Australia’ by Mehmet Sabeheddin, New Dawn Special Issue 3

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