New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Tag: paranormal

  • Psychic Pets? The Cat: Walker Between Worlds

    Psychic Pets? The Cat: Walker Between Worlds

    From New Dawn 154 (Jan-Feb 2016)

    Following publication of my Nexus article, “The Shared Evolution of Dolphins and Humans,”1 reader response, as much as my own growing interest in the subject, urged me to pursue it much further by writing a book-length investigation slated for release by Bear and Company in March. But my quest for answers about interspecies’ relationships with a creature apparently so much different than us opened up even stranger digressions mostly left out of my book Our Dolphin Ancestors. These bizarre accounts and insights are instead presented here, in the same venue where my inquiry began, because they merit, I believe, further consideration.

    Among them is a one-minute, forty-nine-second home movie taken at the Theater of the Sea, a marine animal park in Islamorada, Florida, USA.2 Since it was posted in May 2012, the film clip has attracted an audience of some seven million viewers (see video image above, more images are in the magazine). It shows two bottlenose dolphins, named Shiloh and Thunder, engaging Arthur, a common domestic cat, which, to all appearances, is thoroughly enchanted with them. There is much chummy inter-play between feline and cetaceans, as the former continuously paws and nuzzles the latters’ snouts. Shiloh and Thunder respond by repeatedly offering their sensitive rostrums for affection, and gently tap the cat on the top of its head – remarkably, given physical disparities between a thirty-three-centimeter-long, four-kilogram, water-hating cat and aquatic, four-meter, one hundred eighty-two-kilogram dolphins.

    One might expect Arthur to have been utterly horrified by mere sight of such beasts, while the dolphins, for their part, should have little or no interest in the tiny landlubber. Their gentle care in petting the cat’s head – something most cats do not tolerate by anyone – is astonishing. When they suddenly vanish, Arthur nervously paces back and forth, attentively searching the surface of the water for his absent friends. When they reappear, he rushes back across the gangplank to greet them again with undiminished affection.

    Yet, the animals were less curious about exploring two different species, than interested in greeting each other, as though resuming a former acquaintance. They seemed to recognise each other from the start. The cat knew at once that the dolphins were not only harmless, but exceptionally desirable companions, while Shiloh and Thunder quite obviously loved Arthur. It is inexplicable that these wildly divergent species should find the least commonality between themselves, much less such intimate rapport. Throughout their extraordinary encounter, eye contact was virtually unbroken. Given dolphins’ renowned telepathic abilities, as discussed in my forthcoming book – many cat-owners experience telepathic connections with their pets – thought transference appears to have been the medium that fashioned their instantly amiable relationship.

    But what kind of information passed between them? Certainly, not words, but perhaps some form of emotional knowing illustrated by mental imagery. Nor was the video-recorded meeting between house-cat and wild dolphins a freak incident. Such unlikely get-togethers have been observed by sailors over thousands of years of sea-faring, whenever their feline shipmates were visited by dolphins. Fundamentally different from each other as these animals might seem, both are notable for their curiosity, acute perception and quick awareness, which may comprise at least the basis for their anomalous commonality. In any case, Arthur’s loving relationship with Shiloh and Thunder suggests an empathic bond between these widely divergent species.

    PET Telepathy

    Such enigmatic connections are more commonly observed between felines and humans. A 2012 Anglo-American study of households in England and the United States found that “a third of cat owners claim that their pets respond to their thoughts and silent commands.” The sample study additionally showed that, on average, thirty percent of pet owners claimed their cats usually wait at a door or window a few minutes before their loved ones come home, even when arrival times vary or are never the same. Many cats are reported to know the identity of particular callers before the telephone rings. The wife of a University of California professor at Berkeley told how she always knows when he is calling, because their cat interrupts its sleep or whatever activity in which it is engaged, and rushes to the telephone: “When I pick it up,” she says, “the cat meows. If someone else calls, the cat does not react. It meowed even when my husband called home from Africa or South America.”3

    The About.com website relates that an American housewife and her friend “were standing in the bathroom, talking, and the cat was there, too. I happened to mention a recent story I heard from another lady friend about her cat – that her cat always drank from her bathtub’s dripping faucet. Up until then, my friend never saw her kitty drink from anything other than her bowl. The next day, her cat was found in the tub, drinking from the faucet!”4

    Sammy, the Norwegian Forest Cat

    It is quite one thing to read about the personal experiences of strangers and another to have one yourself. When he was younger, Sammy, our Norwegian Forest cat, sometimes amused my wife and me by leaping on a tree, scooting straight up, fifteen feet or more above the ground. When he got as high as he wanted to go, he looked around from his lofty vantage point, then descended like a lumberjack, tail-first, in spurts. But as he grew older, he withdrew these athletic performances from his normal routine. During one of our strolls across the yard on some spring afternoon, I recalled his tree-climbing days of the past, and wished he would attempt at least one more demonstration. The thought had no sooner crossed my mind than Sammy sprang from my side to a nearby walnut tree, scampering up the first three-quarters of its height, before executing his lumberjack descent.

    His unbidden, wholly appropriate response seemed a clear example of telepathy, although it was entirely one-sided. Henceforward, all my attempts at mentally commanding him to jump on another tree failed. He had other paranormal tricks up his sleeve, however. On a single occasion only, after sundown one summer evening, he suddenly and excitedly demanded that the front door be opened. He flew outside without pausing, as usual, at the threshold, dashed down the front steps, and shot around the eastern side of the house. By the time I caught up with him, he was staring fixedly at something on the sidewalk. In the shadows, I could make out what appeared to be a small pile of writhing humps.

    On closer inspection, they belonged to a little snake never seen there before or since. Previously, back in the house, all his normal, physical senses had been cut off from the outside world. He could have neither seen nor smelled the creature, and even his superb hearing ability would not have likely detected the smooth motion of a serpent gliding slowly across the sidewalk. Sceptics may dismiss such anecdotal episodes as unrevealing, but anyone who lives on intimate terms with an animal for an extended period can integrate such events into the broader context of the pet’s personality. While these incidents do not pass muster for strict up-holders of the scientific method, it nevertheless depends upon accurate observations. I can only conclude, therefore, that Sammy accessed a form of extrasensory perception to determine the presence and whereabouts of the snake, which was otherwise unknown to him.

    Can a Cat Know the Time?

    More remarkable than Sammy’s talents at remote viewing is his concept of time, as demonstrated during our outdoor excursions. He is very sensible about them, does not run off, stays fairly close to me and mostly out of mischief, so does not require a leash. If I take along some writing that needs work, listen to music on my ‘walkman’, or read, we could spend hours together ‘outside’, a word he certainly knows. More often, my time is limited, and our walks may go on for ten or twenty minutes, though we usually take several each day.

    It was at the outset of one of our first outdoor jaunts that I glanced at my watch, and made a mental note to myself: “We’ll go back inside the house at 2:30.” For the next half hour, Sammy went about his usual business of sniffing the air, chomping grass, urinating on a territorial bush, exploring a suspicious hole in the yard, making his customary inspection of the back patio, chasing a squirrel, stalking a mole, or observing bugs and birds from a favourite vantage-point. In the midst of these commonplace feline pursuits, he paused for a moment, while a puzzled expression came over his face, as though he were trying to remember something, then bolted up the front steps and demanded to be let in the door. My watch read precisely 2:30.

    What first seemed a trifling coincidence progressively grew into something more significant. Over the subsequent years of our friendship, we shared and continue to share – weather permitting – daily kitty walks, which may take place from early morning to dusk, but never at the same hour. Usually, I do not think of a definite minute when we should go back inside, and either of us concludes our walk in a normal fashion. Any potential visual clues from me – conscious or not – Sammy may pick up seem unlikely, due to the entirely random nature of these outings. Yet, he abruptly terminates about sixty-five per cent of his walks at the explicit instant I mentally programmed before we set out. For example, in three, consecutive walks I counted, he concluded each one at the appointed minute.

    Engaged as I am in my own activity during our walks, I usually forget about the specific time I predetermined for their conclusion. Even so, Sammy still returns to the house at that preordained moment, often to the exact second. Moreover, whenever I mentally willed him to come in from the outdoors, without having scheduled any prior cut-off, he never responded. What could a cat possibly know about time? Even if Sammy does indeed read my mind, the hour or minute I set inside my head to end our walk is surely far beyond the limits of his feline intellect to grasp. Yet, the timeliness of his behaviour is repeatedly – if not invariably – demonstrable. What it suggests is just as certainly outside our current ability to understand inter-species communication.

    [alert type=”info” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider a subscription to New Dawn magazine.[/alert]

    Morphic Resonance

    The famous British biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, proposes a broader basis than explanations for telepathy, although inclusive of extrasensory perception: “Natural systems, or morphic units, at all levels of complexity, are animated, organised, and coordinated by morphic fields, which contain an inherent memory. Natural systems inherit this collective memory from all previous things of their kind by a process called morphic resonance, with the result that patterns of development and behaviour become increasingly habitual through repetition.”5

    In other words, members of a particular group are linked by self-organising energy fields that contain a collective memory unique to themselves, and shape certain patterns of behaviour or adaptation. Applying his hypothesis to the animal kingdom, Sheldrake maintains that animals communicate telepathically among themselves and with us through emotional bonding. Hence, morphic fields are channels for extrasensory perception. But theoretical proposals are less capable of explaining how a common house cat born in the United States ten years ago is capable of regularly predicting the imminent death of his human companions with perfect accuracy.

    The Cat That Knows When Death Approaches

    While a kitten, Oscar was adopted from a local animal shelter to serve as a so-called ‘therapy cat’ at Providence, Rhode Island’s Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. He spends most his time in the facility’s third-floor, end-stage dementia section, a forty-one-bed unit for treating sufferers with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses. Most of the residents are terminally ill and generally unaware of their surroundings. Some months after Oscar settled in, staff members noticed that, like the doctors or nurses, he began making his own customary rounds, sniffing and observing patients, then curling up to sleep with certain convalescents. Those he slept with died within two hours of his arrival. He remains with an invalid until he or she passes away, then, post mortem, quietly leaves the room.

    “He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” observes David Dosa, a geriatrician, assistant professor at Rhode Island’s Brown University, and affiliate of Warren Alpert Medical School, both in Providence.6

    “It’s not that the cat is consistently there first,” says Dr. Joan Teno, who cares for Steere House residents and sees Oscar on a regular basis. “But the cat always does manage to make an appearance.”7

    Also, he is “not a cat that’s friendly to [living] people,” states Dr. Dosa. When, for example, an elderly woman with a walker passed him by during his rounds, Oscar “[let] out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that [said] ‘leave me alone’.”8

    He only shows consistent affection to terminally ill persons. In an early, typical instance, Oscar wrapped his body around the ice-cold calf of an old woman who had a serious blood clot in her leg, and stayed with her until she died. By the time Steere House staff members counted twelve persons in succession he had accurately prognosticated with impending death, his powers seemed to fail him. Having determined that another woman was about to die, an attending physician noticed that Oscar took no interest in the situation, and casually walked away. But the cat proved the doctor wrong, because she survived for another ten hours. Oscar dutifully returned to the patient, curling up in her lap and purring, until she died two hours later.

    According to Dr. Teno, “it always seems to be in the last two hours” that he makes his farewell visits.9 Since Oscar began his ministrations, he has correctly predicted an average of ten deaths per year, bringing his total number to more than one hundred. His accuracy persuaded Steere House directors to institute a unique protocol: when discovered sleeping with a patient, family members are notified of their loved one’s momentarily expected passing. Most of them do not object to a cat’s presence at the time of death, but on those rare occasions when relatives request Oscar’s removal from the room, he invariably shows his annoyance by pacing back and forth in front of the closed door and loudly meowing in protest.

    Dr. Dosa speculates that, “the cat might be picking up on specific odours surrounding death.”10 He is supported by Dr. Teno: “I think there are certain chemicals released when someone is dying, and he is smelling and sensing those.”11 Margie Scherk, a Vancouver, British Columbia veterinarian and president of the American Association of Feline Practitioners, suspects “he is smelling some chemical released just before dying” – ketones, bio-chemicals produced by decaying cells. “Cats can smell a lot of things we can’t.”12 While no one could disagree with her last statement, Scherk’s and her colleagues’ conclusions are not convincing.

    Although Oscar was one of six cats simultaneously delivered to Steere House in 2005, he alone comforts the dying in their last moments. Also, no other cat, anywhere, evidences such regularly attentive behaviour, so far as I have been able to determine. However, cats have long been known to ‘knead’ ailing or dying animals – feline and human – by slowly, rhythmically, gently pumping their front paws, back and forth, on a suffering creature, while purring with half-closed eyes in an apparent state of altered consciousness, an apparent effort at healing, somewhat like “the laying on of hands” practiced by spiritual healers. Since ketones are emitted by someone twenty-four hours, more or less, before expiring, they cannot be responsible for prompting Oscar, because he only visits the dying no sooner than one hundred twenty minutes prior to their deaths. More importantly, Scherk, et al, ignore the most important question posed by his actions: why does he perform them?

    The answer is obvious to observers unencumbered by materialism; namely, Oscar feels compassion for humans experiencing the last and probably greatest trauma of their lives, and voluntarily assists them in an otherwise lonely, difficult transition. He recognises a resident’s forthcoming demise in his or her diminishing aura, that metaphysical light source all living things emit until it declines with terminally ill health and is ultimately extinguished when the physical body ceases to function. While the accompanying release of ketones cannot account for Oscar’s fortuitous bedside manners, another set of bio-chemicals produced by a woman during pregnancy may at least partially explain why cats commonly become especially attentive and affectionate toward an expectant mother. They detect human female pheromones, which are similar to feline versions.

    Reverence for Cats in Ancient Egypt

    Ancient Egyptians knew less about pheromones but they observed the particular concern and care cats show human mothers-to-be. Bast, among the oldest-known deities in the Nile Valley, was venerated as the divine patroness of pregnant women. Worship of Bast dates as early as the Second Dynasty (circa 2890 BCE), although her cultic origins undoubtedly preceded Dynastic Civilisation in the mid-4th Millennium BCE. Translated as “She of the Ointment Jar,” her name was written with the hieroglyph for a container of protective ointments associated with the goddess. These receptacles, as well as her image, were usually made of a local stone Greek followers referred to, after Bast, as alabaster, a word that passed into our own language. An entire city – Busbastis – was founded in her honour.

    Busbastis, originally known in ancient Egypt as Per-Bast – “House of Bast” – was located on the Lower Nile. 20th century excavation of Bast’s temple there yielded in excess of three hundred thousand mummified cats. Previously, during 1888, a farmer accidentally uncovered seven hundred thousand in Beni Hasan, Middle Egypt. These million feline mummies testify to the high veneration with which the ancient Egyptians accorded the creature, which they protected with animal rights legislation. Killing a cat was a capital offense, punishable by death. Whenever a household cat passed away, mourning residents traditionally shaved their hair and eyebrows, as expressions of respect and grief. Not without cause. Nile Valley Civilisation owed its existence to cats, which saved storage granaries from rat infestation. Beyond any obvious, mundane boon they granted, however essential, cats – in the sacred personification of Bast – were regarded as walkers between worlds, this one and the next, natural emissaries to and from the Afterlife.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Cats & Otherworldly Encounters

    Something of that ancient conception is borne out in modern accounts around the world describing feline behaviour, as exampled in Oscar, that feline Angel of Death, described above. An American woman recounted how a cat joined her family in reacting to a spectral appearance: “This incident occurred during my junior year of high school, in 1972. During a particularly hot and muggy July evening, my parents, sister and I were seated in the living room watching television. The house was unbearably hot and the windows were open with screens in them. All of this was to no avail that evening. There was no air moving, and I was wearing a light t-shirt and shorts, trying to keep cool. The chair I was sitting in was next to the doorway and the upstairs hallway. The hallway in the house divided the living room from the kitchen and was enclosed on both sides with a large curtain at the bottom of the steps. I looked to my left toward the stairway, just as our cat started up. The cat was a calico and was very even tempered.

    “Just as the cat climbed the first step, an icy blast of air rushed down the stairs. The cat hissed loudly and froze. The hair on its back and tail stood straight out, and in its frozen position it resembled a pointer. Simultaneously with the cat’s behaviour, the cold breeze continued to build to the extent that the curtains were almost blowing straight out. In 1972, we had no air conditioning or any other device in the house that could have created the icy air that we now felt. None of us said anything. I felt goose bumps form on my arms and back, and the temperature in the living room perceptibly cooled. Fifteen to twenty seconds had passed with no diminishment of the icy air or relief for our poor cat.

    “I got up from the chair and cautiously peered up the stairway. The light at the top of the steps was on and nothing was visible. The cat was still frozen in mid-stride, and the breeze was almost heavy and very cool on the face. Out of the corner of my eye, it appeared that a very faint, gold-tinted light could be seen shimmering. Yet, when I looked directly at the light, nothing could be seen. I continued to look up the stairs for the next few seconds, but could not discern any apparent reason for the arctic air. I sensed something, but could not see it. Suddenly, as quickly as it had occurred, the breeze stopped. The cat shook itself as if it had just recovered from an injury. Her fur relaxed and she proceeded up the stairs and went into the left bedroom.

    “The topic of discussion the rest of the evening concerned what had just happened. My father revealed to me that when he was less than three years old, two of his older brothers had been playing cowboys and Indians between the kitchen and the living room of this house. The brothers in question were Buell and Boyd. Boyd, who was a year senior to Buell, was playing the Indian. Buell, in the kitchen, was playing as the cowboy. An old, .22 calibre tube rifle was being used by Buell. Boyd was using an old toy bow. The rifle in question had no firing pin and had been used in this game for years.

    “Horribly, unknown to anyone, their older brother Joe had been working on the rifle and had replaced the firing pin. He had loaded and fired the rifle the previous day. One lone shell had been left in the tube. My grandmother, Hazel, had been sitting in the living room forty-one years earlier in approximately the same place I had been. Boyd jumped out from hiding beside his mother. Buell dodged and brought the rifle to bear. He squeezed the trigger and a loud bang echoed in the house. Boyd took the round in his heart. He turned to his mother and said, ‘Mom, I’m shot’. With those words, he collapsed into her arms and died.

    “Could what I witnessed twenty-nine years ago have been the spirit of that small boy, my uncle, who died in that same house forty-one years prior? I never felt fear, as I gazed up those stairs, but am absolutely certain that what happened was outside of our normal world. And our cat sensed it, too.”13

    Petadviser, an authoritative website consulted by ailurophiles everywhere, carried the following subscriber’s report: “Once upon a time, very long ago, I was visiting my parents’ home, and they had gone out for the evening. I was alone in their very large house, and, sitting with me, was my wonderful great big ginger cat, Gatito. After a while, I felt I could hear the footsteps and voice of my grandmother, who lived about fifty miles from us. It sounded like she was walking all over the place and calling the name, ‘Bill… Bill’. Bill was my father, her son. Ordinarily, I would have felt I was hearing things, but Gatito’s fur puffed up all over the place, and he got into a stalking position, and became uneasy in the house.

    “Later, my mother came home, and, while I didn’t tell her I thought I heard Grandma (because she [the mother] was never a believer), I did say I thought I heard noises in parts of the house. She opened doors and walked around to see if everything was in place, and as she did that, Gatito crept along with her – belly to the ground and fur still puffed up all over. The following morning, we heard the news that Grandma had died. It never occurred to mother that I truly had heard Grandma, but my father was always sensitive, and when I told him the story, he truly did believe me, and was very much comforted.”14

    On The Catsite, a pet owner recounted how she and her cat, “Toes,” both simultaneously observed the apparition of Penny, an older cat that had recently died: “I was in the kitchen and saw Penny cross the living room and go down the hall to the back of the house. Toes watched her walk by and then took off after her. He came back and looked all over before complaining to me. All I could do was say, ‘I know. I saw her, too’.”15

    These accounts are more than anecdotal, since at least one of them was captured on video in 1999.16 A simple laptop with webcam had been set up on the floor of a hallway at the Norton Hall Care Home, in Worchester, England, after repeated complaints from residents and staff about an unknown cat. No one had ever observed the animal, which nonetheless made its presence known by repeatedly meowing late at night. After several weeks of unsuccessful attempts to lure the elusive creature by laying out food and catnip over night, the caretaker positioned his computer camera where the feline fugitive was most often heard, in an effort to at least identify it. The resulting video showed the transparent, ghostly image of an otherwise ordinary, black-and-white cat materialise in a doorway, then saunter down the hall, beyond the webcam.

    Among the elderly residents was Mrs. Martha Mildred Jones, a devoted ailurophile, who, earlier in life, ran a stray cat shelter for many years. In an instance of remarkable synchronicity, she died at the Care Home in her ninety-ninth year on the ninth day of September – the ninth month – in 1999. Traditionally, cats are supposed to have nine lives. In any case, the ghost cat of Norton Hall was neither seen nor heard again after Mrs. Jones passed away.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 154.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Footnotes

    1. Nexus, Vol. 21, No. 3, April-May 2014
    2. “Cat and Dolphins playing together,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynvewVe21Y
    3. Anna Lemind, www.learning-mind.com/do-animals-have-telepathic-abilities
    4. http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa021201a.htm
    5. David Pratt, “Rupert Sheldrake: A Theosofical Appraisal,”
    www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_sheldrake_3.htm
    7-11. Ibid.
    12. www.inquisitr.com/1967618/psychic-cat-patrols-nursing-home-
    offering-comfort-to-patients-in-their-dying-days/
    13. Anna Lemind, op. cit.
    14. www.petsadviser.com/behaviors/can-cats-see-ghosts/
    15. www.thecatsite.com/a/can-cats-see-ghosts
    16. “Ghost Cat,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3gvHfD6ojA

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • 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]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider a contribution to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    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.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • The Changing Face of Russian Psi Research

    The Changing Face of Russian Psi Research

    From New Dawn 104 (Sept-Oct 2007)

    Were the Soviets really experts in paranormal research? Were they, as some researchers claimed during the Cold War, light years ahead of the rest of the world in the field of parapsychology? If so, what kind of work are the Russians up to today?

    The mysterious case of Robert Toth may shed some light on the matter.

    The Toth Incident

    Robert C. Toth, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, was arrested and detained in Moscow on June 11, 1977. He had been given papers by a Soviet scientist named Valery G. Petukhov, who claimed to be Chief of the Laboratory of Bio-Physics at the State Control Institute of Medical and Biological Research. The papers supposedly disclosed ‘state secrets’ and Toth, of course, had obtained them illegally. He was arrested before he had a chance to examine them properly.

    The papers were supposed to offer proof of Petukhov’s grounding breaking scientific research in the field of parapsychology. When living cell undergo division, Toth had been told, they emit certain particles that can be “detected and measured.” These particles can “carry information,” and their function could “explain the basis for telepathy” and other phenomena of this nature.

    Toth claimed that seconds after he had been given the papers, a small car pulled up beside him, from out of which emerged five men, dressed as civilians. They threw him inside the vehicle, which then sped off. “Our car drove through red lights and down one-way streets the wrong way to a militia [police] station,” writes Toth. “My captors were firm and polite, offering me cigarettes… I was ushered into a room with an inspector who declined my requests to phone the US Embassy but said a Soviet Foreign Ministry official would be called.”

    Toth was detained for a period of several days. He was interrogated by police officers and KGB officials. A senior researcher of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Professor I.M. Mikhailov, was asked to provide expert testimony on the information Toth had been given by Petukhov. “This material is secret and shows the kind of work done in some scientific institutes of our state,” he declared.

    Suddenly told he was free to go, Toth caught the next flight back to America. The Toth incident hit newspapers all over the world, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. The story was quickly forgotten, however – at least by the public. “But,” writes the late Martin Ebon, “intelligence analysts understood that Toth had gotten into his hand, if only for a few moments, one of the tips of the enormous iceberg of top secret Soviet research into psychic powers of the human mind.”

    The Psi Warfare Gap

    Another possibility is that the Toth incident was a Soviet orchestrated conspiracy – a set up, in other words. Between 1969 and 1971, during the height of the Cold War, American intelligence sources discovered the Soviets had a deep interest in parapsychology, were researching the subject extensively, and that this research was being well-funded by the Soviet military and the KGB.

    In 1967, it was learned, the Soviets were spending an estimated US$500 million a year on parapsychological related research. The money was being used to fund fourteen separate research institutes. This naturally worried the Americans, who deduced a hostile intent behind the Soviet’s actions.

    As to why the Soviets were spending so much money on psi research, a brief explanation needs to be given. In the aftermath of World War II, Soviet authorities feared the prospect of becoming involved in yet another war – this time with the West – much in the same way that the US authorities were greatly concerned about a possible ‘communist takeover’ and nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

    Acting as an important catalyst for the Soviet ‘psychic boom’ was a story that appeared in the French periodical Constellation, entitled ‘Thought Transmission – Weapon of War’. The article, published in 1959, told of supposed telepathy experiments that were being conducted by the US military. The article claimed that the ‘receivers’ in the experiment, located onboard the submerged nuclear submarine Nautilus, had successfully managed to pick up telepathic transmissions from the ‘senders’ back on land.

    When the US Navy denied the story, the Soviets assumed they were lying, deciding to take it seriously. Not wanting to be left behind in the field of psi research, the Soviets took immediate action. The father of Soviet parapsychology, the physiologist Leonid L. Vasiliev, who, in 1923, had been ordered by Joseph Stalin to investigate telepathy, made the following remark in April 1960, while addressing a group of top Soviet scientists: “Today the American Navy is testing telepathy on their atomic submarines. Soviet scientists conducted a great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It’s urgent that we throw off our prejudices. We must again plunge into the exploration of this vital field.”

    One theory is that the Nautilus story was a clever piece of American disinformation, aimed to lead the Soviets astray, so that they would start to invest money and energy into a decided waste of time. “Whether telepathic communication experiments were ever carried out aboard the USS Nautilus is a topic that generates much doubt and dispute among paranormal enthusiasts,” explains W. Adam Mandelbaum in his book The Psychic Battlefield.

    Regarding the Toth incident, the parapsychologist Elmar R. Gruber has some interesting comments to offer: “The feeling remains that the Soviets were attempting to impart deliberate disinformation in their power game with the Americans… Did they intend to create the impression that they were far more advanced in this field than the Americans?”

    Intentional or not, the impression was certainly there, as proven by a now declassified 1972 Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, entitled ‘Controlled Offensive Techniques’. The report begins by stating that parapsychology in the Soviet Union is very different to that in West, the former being a “multi-disciplinary field consisting of the sciences of bionics, biophysics, psychophysics, psychology, physiology and neuropsychology.” The Soviets had named this field ‘psychotronics’. The nearest English equivalent to the word is mind (psycho) energy applications (-tronics).

    The report mentions that Soviet scientists had explored “detrimental effects of subliminal perception techniques,” which, using “telepathic means,” might be “targeted against the US or allied personnel in nuclear missile silos.” The report continues: “The potential applications of focusing mental influences on an enemy through hypnotic telepathy have surely occurred to the Soviets… Control and manipulation of the human consciousness must be considered a primary goal. Soviet knowledge in this field is superior to that of the United States.”

    Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain

    The year 1970 marked the publication of a now classic book on Soviet psychic research. Called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, it was written by two Western journalists, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder. During their stay in what was then the Soviet Union, Ostrander and Schroeder travelled far and wide, interviewing numerous scientists who were conducting groundbreaking research in the field of parapsychology.

    When Psychic Discoveries was first released, it caused quite a stir, sparking both public and government interest in ‘psychic warfare’. Had it never been written, the US government’s fear of ‘Soviet psychic mind control’ would probably not have reached the extreme that it did.

    Kirlian photography, dowsing, telepathy, eyeless sight, telekinesis, hypnosis – these are just some of the subjects that Ostrander and Schroeder investigated and wrote about. Their book showed that Soviet scientists had already managed to gain a practical understanding of how these types of phenomena were possible, while the rest of the world was lagging far behind.

    So what had the Soviets discovered about the unknown powers of the human mind? And how did they approach the study of this enigmatic subject?

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Experiments In Distance Influence

    Existing in the Soviet Union were two different types of parapsychology – one official, the other secret. The former was allowed to exist in public, while the latter was taking place at well-funded, top secret state-controlled research institutes, and was largely military-based. Parapsychologists who wanted to do research in non-military areas often had difficulty obtaining funding.

    To divert attention away from the real research they were doing, the Soviets had established, in Moscow, a military-based parapsychology centre called the Institute of Problems of Information Transmission. To help it look authentic, the Soviets made sure it was well-guarded at all times. As for the real research, that was being conducted in a remote region of western Siberia, near the pioneer town of Novosibirsk, in a massive research facility named Akademgorodok, ‘Science City’.

    Built after World War II, Science City was composed of around 40 scientific centres, and housed tens of thousands of scientists and their families. It was developed, says Martin Ebon, “with such single-mindedness that even the names of the streets and city squares reflect its nature. For example, one could take a bus down Thermophysics Street, get off at the corner of Calculators Street, and walk across the Institute of Hydrodynamics Square.”

    One of its scientific centres was called the Institute for Automation and Electrometry. Located here was the mysterious Special Department 8, where entry was not permitted unless one had access to a special code. Security was such that the code was changed on a weekly basis. For the sixty or so scientists employed at No. 8, their job was to investigate telepathy and distant influence, otherwise called ‘biocommunication’.

    For psi to be possible, thought Soviet scientists, there had to be an exchange of energy taking place. At No. 8, writes Ebon, “physicists sought to discover the nature of ‘psi particles’, the elusive elements that some Soviet scientists regarded as essential to the function of such psychic techniques as biocommunication and bioenergetics.”

    In one series of experiments, telepathic communication was tested among people. Experiments in telekinesis were also conducted. Some of the subjects used were Tibetan monks and Siberian shamans, who had been carefully selected by the KGB for their remarkable psychic abilities. The American journalist Jim Marrs says the KGB “laboriously screened more than a million people in an effort to locate ‘super naturals’, persons with the greatest amount of psychic power.”

    In another series of experiments – which were conducted at No. 8 before it was closed down in 1969 – August Stern, one of the scientists who worked there, and his colleagues tested the properties of biophotons, to see if they could account “for some inexplicable forms of communication.” Photons, by the way, are the smallest physical units of light, the quanta of electromagnetic radiation. Biophotons are a type of photon that radiate from living cells. In this experiment, bacteria was placed on two sides of a glass plate, “to see whether a fatal disease could be transmitted through the glass” with the help of biophotons. “There were also experiments with photon waves, in which frogs’ eyes were used as a more sensitive measuring instrument than a machine,” recalls Stern, who migrated to France in 1977.

    Due to the shutting down of No. 8, the photon communication experiments conducted by Stern and his colleagues were not fully realised. Several years later, however, three Soviet scientists attempted the same problem, achieving impressive results. Their names were Vlail Kanachevy, Simon Shchurin and Ludmilla Mikhailova. In their experiments, two groups of cells were used, one of which was contaminated with a virus, the other of which was not. They were placed adjacent to each other, but remained physically separate. When the two groups were isolated by quartz glass, which ultra-violet waves are able to penetrate, the non-contaminated cells suddenly became contaminated; they ‘caught the disease’, in other words. When regular glass was used, which ultra-violet waves cannot penetrate, this did not occur; the non-contaminated cells remained healthy.

    These results confirmed what many Soviet scientists in the field of bioenergetics had previously theorised – that living cells can ‘communicate’ with each other over distances, and in a non-chemical way. When the affected cells were attacked by the virus, says Shchurin, they “virtually cried out loud about the danger” and “their cry freely penetrated the barrier of quartz glass… Something highly improbable happened. These waves were not only perceived by the neighbouring cells, they also conveyed the sickness to the neighbouring cells.”

    The KGB Takes Control

    No later than 1970, the KGB had taken control of the country’s research in parapsychology. It should be mentioned, however, that the KGB was an integral part of everyday life in the Soviet Union, permeating society on all levels, so their influence on psi research was not exactly sinister.

    During the 1970s, more and more KGB-controlled parapsychology research institutes were established. Because the nature of Soviet psi research was becoming increasingly secret, many Western parapsychologists lost contact with their colleagues ‘behind the iron curtain’. In addition, rumours began to circulate about sinister ‘mind control’ experiments being conducted in clandestine Soviet labs, as well as the development of dangerous ‘psi weapons’ to be used against the West. As mentioned in Psychic Discoveries, a Czech engineer named Robert Pavlita claimed to have invented a ‘psychotronic generator’, which could apparently store, enhance and radiate ‘psychotronic’ energy.

    Also known as ‘bioplasmic’ energy, Soviet scientists claimed that this energy was behind all manner of psychic phenomena, that it filled and animated all living things, and could also be harnessed for healing purposes. Using a process called Kirlian photography, the ‘bioplasmic body’ – or aura – could allegedly be photographed. The Austrian-American scientist Dr. Wilhelm Reich called this energy ‘orgone’. He invented a device called an ‘orgone energy accumulator’, consisting of a box lined with alternating layers of organic and inorganic materials, which was apparently able to trap this energy.

    “A psychotronic generator can influence an individual or a whole crowd of people. It can affect a person’s psyche mentally and emotionally. It can affect memory and attention span. A psychotronic device can cause physical fatigue, disorientation, and alter a person’s behaviour,” asserts the Soviet biologist Edward Naumov. According to Ostrander and Schroeder, “certain generators can arouse fear, anxiety, anger, insomnia, depressions and suicidal thoughts and even lead to cerebral thrombosis.” The KGB, says Naumov, spent more than half a billion roubles on developing psychotronic technology.

    When it comes to alleged Soviet mind control technology, nothing can compare to the immensity of project ‘Woodpecker’. Apparently, using an array of giant transmitters, the Soviets began to beam extremely low frequency (ELF) modulated signals all over Western Europe, Australia, North America and the Middle East. These transmissions, claims Tim Rifat, were designed to “permanently rewire the neural networks in the brains of the entire Western population, thereby destroying their social cohesiveness…” The KGB, it is said, had copied the brain frequencies of pathological criminals, mental patients, clinically depressed people and socio-psychopaths, whose brain wave maps they had studied. It is these negative frequencies that were beamed down on the West – from the early 1980s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Assuming it was real, project Woodpecker appears to have been a tremendous success!

    Apparently, the Soviets were not the only ones who managed to create advanced ‘psi weapons’ and large scale ‘mind control’ devices; so had countries in the West – most notably the US. This technology was allegedly used against the Soviet Union, in an attempt to bring about its destruction.

    Soviet journalist Emil Bachurin claimed in Young Guard magazine that Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, spoke of several “psi weapons centres” in Canada, adding that “Canadian research must be surpassed.” The information was given to Bachurin by a KGB general. Other members of the Soviet intelligence community have mentioned the existence of advanced ‘psi weapons’ created by the West, even claiming that such devices have been used many times against civilian populations in the Soviet Union.

    Comments made by the late Aleksander Lebed, a distinguished General and popular politician, seem to support such charges. As mentioned in New Dawn No. 43, Lebed insisted that Western secret services had carried out a series of psychological operations (or PSYOPS) against the Soviet Union, involving “tech­nologies of psycho-semantic pro­gramming,” brainwashing and hypnosis. One such psychological operation, claimed Lebed, was the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, which had been artificially organised by the West.

    Modern Psi Research

    Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, some interesting psi experiments have been conducted in Russia, many of which involved animals and other living things. The Russians have long tried to develop biological ‘psi detectors’ – and so far they’ve been partially successful. Their theory is that psi is primarily a biological process, and that living systems react far more strongly to mental influence than do material systems. Researchers in the US have also attempted to develop psi detectors, or ‘thought switches’ – electronic devices that respond to mental intention.

    The eminent American parapsychologist Dean Radin has already managed to construct a prototype of such a device, which, he says, “incorporated a new type of physical detector, involving a matrix of random-number generators, and some advanced statistical and signal-processing techniques to detect the predicted psi-influence.” As Radin explains in his book The Conscious Universe, countless laboratory experiments have shown that random number generators – devices that produce a stream of random digits – can be influenced by a focused mind. These ‘electronic coin flippers’ are designed to operate in a truly random fashion, producing an equal number of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’. Due to the influence of consciousness, however, these devices begin to function in a more ordered way, producing statistically less probable results, such as more heads than tails, for instance.

    Georgi Gurtovoy, head of the Laboratory on Applying Isotopes in Ophthalmology in Moscow, and Alexander Parkhamov, a physicist, have done some interesting research on the distant influence of living systems that produce random fluctuations. Some of their instruments have been able to register micro-PK effects. They have also carried out anomalous distant influence experiments involving a species of fish called Gnathonemus petersii. These fish are known for their ability to emit pulsed electric signals, which they use to assist navigation in the darkness. Psychics were asked to slow down the rate of the fishes’ pulses – allegedly with much success.

    Also compelling are the experiments of Sergei Speransky, a toxicologist at the Institute of Hygiene in Novosibirsk. His findings seem to confirm the existence of ‘morphogenetic fields’, as proposed by the controversial British biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. In one experiment, a population of mice that had grown up together in the same cage were split into two groups. The mice in one group were fed as usual, while the mice in the other group were made to starve. Almost instantly, noticed Speransky, the non-starving mice began to consume much more food than before, as though trying to compensate for their ‘friends’. There appeared to be a telepathic link between the two groups. Had the non-starving mice picked up a signal from the starving mice, warning them that food was scarce and that they needed to increase food consumption and storage within their bodies?

    Out of the thirty experiments conducted, twenty-seven had a positive outcome. Speransky then carried out an additional series of experiments, so as to refine his methodology, varying weight, sex and other variables. Once again, the results were nothing less than astonishing. Speransky concluded that the “biological significance of the rapid increase in weight in mice which received signals about starvation from their ‘friends’ is clear: a danger of starvation has to give them an additional stimulus to be sated.”

    It’s interesting to note that the famous British biologist Sir Alister Hardy had formulated a similar theory to Speransky’s, stating that telepathic communication between animals might play a role in evolution and adaptation. Animal habits, he suggested, might be spread by “telepathic-like means.” He further suggested that a “psychic pool of existence” might operate among members of a species.

    This brings us back to the work of Sheldrake. He believes morphogenetic fields contain the information that is required to shape the form of living things, much in the same way that certain frequencies of sound ‘contain the information’ to create complex geometric patterns in sand. We are reminded here of the bioplasmic body, which, as mentioned in Psychic Discoveries, was thought by Soviet scientists to be “some kind of matrix, some kind of invisible organising pattern inherent in living things.” Morphogenetic fields also serve a social function, shaping behaviour on both an individual and group level.

    Furthermore, due to a process called ‘morphic resonance’, remarkable forms of ‘communication’ – not limited by space or time – are able to occur within a species. “The fields organising the activity of the nervous system are likewise inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective, instinctive memory,” writes Sheldrake. “Each individual both draws upon and contributes to the collective memory of the species. This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.”

    A Revolutionary New Approach

    When, in the 1920s, parapsychology was beginning to establish itself as a legitimate scientific field in the Soviet Union, Leonid Vasiliev greatly influenced the course of its development – more so, by far, than anyone else. In his highly influential books, articles and presentations, he continued to assert that the study of psi phenomena should be approached in a purely physiological manner, as he feared it would be exploited by proponents of “religious superstition.”

    Nowadays, parapsychology in Russia is undergoing a gradual yet fundamental transformation, thanks partly to a growing interest in transpersonal psychology. New approaches to psi research are being sought out, with an emphasis on Asian religious concepts. Scientists, moreover, are no longer so averse to ‘spiritual’ ideas. Ever since the end of the totalitarian communist regime, explains Gruber, “spirituality and religion, the pre-eminent features of the Russian soul, which were forced underground for so many decades, are again raising their claims to be the guiding principles in the understanding of man and his position in the world.”

    Russia’s leading expert on parapsychology, Alexander Dubrov, who is regarded as the spokesman for the modern approach to psi research, believes there is more to psychic phenomena than biology and neurophysiology. Psi phenomena, he says, is a quantum-mechanical process, and man is a ‘quantum subject’. Be that as it may, says Dubrov, the physical side of psi and the psychophysics of altered states of consciousness should also be taken into account, so as to gain a complete understanding of the matter.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 104.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    References

    Lucid Viewing – The Way Forward in Remote Viewing, How it all Started – In Russia, www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vision_remota/esp_visionremota_9a.htm

    Compare Martin Ebon, Amplified Mind Power Research in the Former Soviet Union, 1996-7, www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/Ebon1.html

    Deep Black Magic: Government Research into ESP and Mind Control, Ingo Swann on CIA/ESP Connection, 1995, www.mindspring.com/~txporter/iswann.htm

    Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist and Author, Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance – an Introduction, 2005, www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html

    Elmar R. Gruber, Psychic Wars: Parapsychology in Espionage – and Beyond (Blandford, UK, 1999)

    Jim Marrs, Psi Spies (AlienZoo Publishing, US, 2000)

    Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries (Marlowe & Company, USA, 1970

    Adam Mandelbaum, The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex (St. Martin’s Press, USA, 2000)

    Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (HarperCollins, USA, 1997)

    Tim Rifat, Remote Viewing – What is it, Who uses it and How to do it (Vision Paperbacks, UK, 2001)

    Holly DeNio Stephens, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Cornell University Press, 1997)

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Beyond the Five Senses: The Powers Latent in Humankind

    Beyond the Five Senses: The Powers Latent in Humankind

    From New Dawn 129 (Nov-Dec 2011)

    The traditional five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – are these the only ways to perceive the world, to gain information, to experience reality? In fact there are more than five senses, taking different forms, in various types of organisms, including humans. For instance, humans can also sense balance and acceleration, temperature, and pain due to nerve damage. There are other types of physiological receptors as well, some found in humans, some found in other organisms. To cite just a few examples, directional awareness based on Earth’s magnetic field occurs in birds and bacteria, various species of fishes as well as dolphins can detect electric fields, and for many types of fishes water pressure detection used to maintain buoyancy is critical.

    But is there something more than the sorts of physiological-based senses described in the last paragraph? The answer to this question is of profound importance, as it fundamentally divides the world into two philosophical and metaphysical camps.

    On the one hand we have the “physicalists-materialists” who believe there is nothing more to reality beyond matter and energy as construed by classical physics and western science more generally. This position devolves to a dogmatic scientism (sometimes referred to as naturalism1) that posits the so-called scientific method, involving empiricism, observations, and laboratory experiments (generally with a heavy emphasis on measurements), as the only way to gain knowledge.

    On the other hand, in sharp contrast to extreme scientism, are found a wide array of “ways of knowing.” These include a diverse range of experiences with equally diverse labels: religious insight, ecstasy, spiritual knowledge, meditative contemplation, divine illumination, aesthetic and symbolic revelation, visionary trances, out-of-body experiences, soul travelling, channelling of supernormal entities, and so forth.

    In sum, scientism is often contrasted with spirituality, religiosity, and the preternatural, supernatural, or supersensitive in all of their disparate forms. Another way of putting this is that scientism denies any inner or beyond this material world aspects, such as the concept of consciousness, that are divorced from or in addition to physical matter and energy as perceived either directly or indirectly (using appropriate instrumentation) via the five senses. Those following the dogmatism of scientism often make a sharp distinction between the objective and the subjective; based on my research, this is a false dichotomy that often blurs under close scrutiny.

    In terms of the mind-body problem, scientism essentially denies that consciousness is anything more than an epiphenomenon arising from physical-chemical processes taking place in the brain. The alternative extreme view is that consciousness exists outside of and beyond matter, and it is consciousness that in fact infuses the universe and makes matter manifest. Based on his understanding of modern physics, Amit Goswami (author of a standard textbook on quantum mechanics2) has written:

    “I propose that the universe exists as formless potentia in myriad possible branches in the transcendent domain and becomes manifest only when observed by conscious beings.”3

    It is not only from a quantum mechanical point of view that one can reach the conclusion that consciousness may be prior to matter. Erik Verlinde (Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam) developed a new theory of gravity based on the concept that the universe is essentially a holograph where the structure of space-time emerges from information.4 Elaborating on Verlinde’s work, I came to the following conclusion:

    “The most fundamental aspect of the universe… is information. Information can be equated with thought or mind or mental constructs independent of any material everyday conception…. The universe of mass and energy and forces, as we experience it on an everyday practical level, may have had its origin in a thought that inserted information into an otherwise blank (data free) holographic system…. Inserting more thoughts, more information, expands and changes the system…”5

    For me the bottom line is that not only can consciousness exist independent of matter, but consciousness – thought, information – is prior to matter in a most fundamental sense. This position is diametrically opposed to dogmatic scientism and opens, even demands, the acknowledgment that not only is there more to reality than can be perceived by the “five senses,” but in order to gain a complete picture and understanding of reality we must gain knowledge in ways that go well beyond the five senses, beyond the simplistic so-called scientific method. We need philosophical, religious, transcendent experiences and the genuine knowledge such experiences bring. Those who limit themselves to their material physiology can never aspire to understand the ultimate nature and meaning of the universe.

    This assertion that consciousness is beyond matter is not just an empty statement for me. We have latent powers to exercise, and such powers have been expressed in a variety of contexts through the ages. Various forms of paranormal and parapsychological experiences elicit and highlight these latent powers, most often expressed as telepathic interactions (direct mind-to-mind, direct consciousness-to-consciousness, connections) or psychokinetic interactions (consciousness directly affecting matter and energy).6

    Make no mistake; telepathy and psychokinesis are genuine.7 Remote viewing, which is essentially telepathy and clairvoyance8 dressed in modern terminology, has been successfully demonstrated over and over again under controlled laboratory conditions.9

    Indeed, telepathy may be the most fundamental way to connect directly with the universal consciousness, with the numinous, with the divine. What is silent prayer but telepathy put to action to communicate with one’s god?

    Numerous techniques can be used to cultivate and elicit paranormal experiences, experiences that scientism either dismisses or fails to take seriously, and these have been developed within many different religious and cultural contexts, from the rituals of tribal African societies to the yogis of the Indian subcontinent to Zen practitioners to classic shamanism to séances in all their diverse forms to western occult and esoteric studies.10 All, at their core, elicit different but complementary ways of gaining access to legitimate knowledge that is beyond the five senses.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 129.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Footnotes

    1. Alex Rosenberg, “Why I Am a Naturalist”, 17 September 2011, article posted at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/why-i-am-a-naturalist/?ref=opinion (Accessed 26 September 2011); Timothy Williamson, “What Is Naturalism?”, 4 September 2011, article posted at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/what-is-naturalism/ (Accessed 26 September 2011).

    2. Amit Goswami, Quantum Mechanics (second edition), New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

    3. Amit Goswami (with Richard E. Reed and Maggie Goswami), The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1993 [paper trade edition, 1995], 141, italics in the original.

    4. Erik Verlinde, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton”, paper dated 6 January 2010, 29 pages, available from http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1001/1001.0785v1.pdf (Accessed 28 July 2010).

    5. Robert M. Schoch, “Moving the Moai: Easter Island as a possible psychokinetic laboratory”, Darklore, vol. 5 (2010), pp. 134-155, 268-270 [endnotes]; quotation from page 145.

    6. It has not escaped my notice that some forms of paranormal and parapsychological phenomena may ultimately be explainable, or at least partially elucidated, by “conventional” physical and energetic systems, such as if for instance cases of telepathy (or some forms of telepathy) are electromagnetic phenomena in the extremely low frequency range. However, I am not convinced that all paranormal and parapsychological phenomena can be explained using a purely physicalist/materialist paradigm.

    7. The reality of these phenomena has been established despite the numerous charlatans who make fraudulent claims; as the saying goes, just because counterfeit money exists, that does not mean genuine currency does not exist. For evidence supporting the reality of paranormal and parapsychological phenomena, see: Robert M. Schoch, “Thoughts Have Wings”, New Dawn, January-February 2011, page 11; Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak, compilers and commentators, The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008; and references cited therein.

    8. “Clear vision,” or the reception of information about objects, persons, or events, whether in the past, present, or future, by other than normal sensory means.

    9. Paul H. Smith, “Remote Viewing: State of the Field”, Edgescience, Number 8, July-September 2011, 13-16.

    10. See for instance: P. G. Bowen, The Occult Way, London: Rider and Company, circa 1936; Ernesto de Martino, Primitive Magic: The Psychic Powers of Shamans and Sorcerers, Bridport, Dorset: Prism, 1972/1988/1999; Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism (two volumes), Volume I, Primitive Man, Volume II, Peoples of Antiquity, London: Rider and Company, 1931; S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935 [Reprinted: Berlin: Reinhold Schletzer Verlag, 1999.].

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Who’s Afraid of the Paranormal?

    Who’s Afraid of the Paranormal?

    From New Dawn Special Issue 10 (Dec 2009)

    It usually goes something like this: average family live peaceful existence in house. Then one day, objects mysteriously relocate. The dog barks at unseen intruders. The tap that usually streams hot water now vomits a liquid the colour of blood. Strange noises are heard in the middle of the night; on the bed, the billowing duvet outlines the shape of a body that no one can see. The youngest child becomes fluent in a previously dead ancient language before scribbling cryptic words such as REDRUM all over the walls (hint: read in front of a mirror). The mother turns hysterical, the husband tries to rationalise the unusual hubbub only to succumb to paranoia followed by the sudden acquisition of otherworldly powers, such as freezing objects with his breath and fingernails that turn into meat cleavers whenever he loses his cool.

    Modern paranormal movies have come a long way from the halcyon days of grainy black and white film noir when a good fright involved a poor choice of short cut through the cemetery at midnight. Latter-day blockbusters such as Paranormal Activity, The Sixth Sense and X-Men not only leverage the visual baggage we carry in our cultural psyche, they also rely on cutting-edge special effects to bring these myths to life and peel several more micro-layers of skin off our collective hides. Just like zombies, they come crawling into our homes, hell-bent on scaring the living daylights out of the living. And we can’t get enough of it.

    Modern society seems obsessed with the paranormal, and yet our comfort level with it is 50-50: we are at the same time curious and repelled by that which we cannot see. This dichotomy is due in part to how we perceive the world around us. Or to be more precise, how we don’t.

    The human eye is an apparatus whose function is severely restricted. While our visual cortex offers a generous spectrum that is 400-790 Terahertz wide, it is nevertheless a very narrow window through which we can see the Universe; insects, for example, can see well beyond us into the ultraviolet. Still, reality is far wider in scope, with gamma and X-rays, infrared, and microwaves and so on. No wonder we are afraid of the dark, there’s so much more of it around. And it takes up much more space than we sometimes dare imagine.

    It’s not just paranormal movies that have progressed over time; our relationship with the unseen has evolved as well. In its modern connotation the adjective ‘paranormal’ denotes events or phenomena that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. However, had you been alive 5,000 years ago the paranormal would have been considered very normal. It was a subtle, yet integral part of the whole universal prism: an agreeable lodger cohabiting the same condominium whom you saw by appointment.

    Even flying Tibetan monks and other extraordinary feats by avatars who transformed water into wine and raised the dead were once considered ordinary achievements by extraordinary people in control of their full co-creative power. Shaman once levitated colossal stones into massive stone circles using nothing more than their guided will-power which, scientifically-speaking, is a series of electromagnetic impulses. Somewhere along the line we lost that knowledge and ability, and it’s taken 2,000 years and Princeton’s P.E.A.R. laboratory to prove that a correctly-applied frequency does indeed levitate rock. So if ordinary people are capable of such ‘paranormal’ feats then these powers are within reach of anyone who wishes to master them.

    All that is needed is an unshakable belief that it can be done. And lots of practise. And there’s the rub: our curiosity in the paranormal exists today because we see in it a seed of truth, that welling within us lies the ability to create whatever we so wish. We are gods in our own fashion, and there are days in our lives when our will manifests in such a way that we believe it. But something happened that made us frightened of wielding this awesome power.

    When the Supernatural Became Scary

    You could say that humans lost confidence in themselves, and in time we began to see the spook in everyday things. From that point on the incredible turned into superstition. Take the much-maligned ‘cemetery’, a word whose Greek origin means ‘a place of sleep’. Sleep equates to rest, hardly cause for alarm. So, how did we become such a frightened species of carbon units? Our recent history provides us with a good excuse.

    Much of the shift from normal to paranormal happened during the Dark Ages. Famine, pestilence, plague, slaughter, pillage, barbarian invasion, social decline, cultural collapse – there are good reasons why this era is so aptly named. These were times when humanity seriously lost the plot. And stirring this concoction of doom was the new kid on the block, the Roman Catholic Church, whose intolerant attitude to anything outside the confines of its orthodox view was in full zeal by the 7th century.

    Following the first ecumenical council in Nicea in 325 CE, it was agreed by the bishops in attendance that only a select number of Christian gospels should be included in the official church canon. What was removed (or covered up) were such esoteric writings as the gospels of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene. In so doing the Church began its systematic dismantling of feminine power throughout the known world. The low point culminated with the burning of millions of women falsely accused of witchcraft. But we are getting ahead of our selves.

    Of importance to our discussion is the preoccupation by the Church fathers of all things evil. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of conflicting ‘barbarian’ hordes, all of Europe was awash in blood – literally. The emerging Church saw this time as an opportunity to flex its muscle upon a largely illiterate society, and fear would become its most useful tool. And what better way to bring people to the protective bosom of the Church by making evil the culprit in every situation. Evil brought the plague to your town, evil took your wife to hell; evil, not malaria, consumed your children, evil was the vermin behind your failed harvest.

    By the 11th century evil was the stranger skulking on every corner. And who better to personify this unseen danger than some misshapen character called the devil. With the Church pushing God as the supreme light, a mirror-character was required to personify everything that was outside orthodox scripture, or ‘good’. Let us remember that the success of any conflict has always been defined by who we chose to accept as the scapegoat, and in this grab for the control of human souls, ‘Lucifer’ became it.

    ‘Devil’ stems from the Greek diavolos, meaning “one who throws across.” So far, nothing too malicious or paranormal about that. But given the Church’s disposition towards pagans (whom the church also considered evil, even if pagan simply means “one who lives in the country”) it was not long before Pan, the pagan god of fecundity and nature, was retrofitted to become the horned, half-man half-fawn creature and the Church’s best recruitment officer. Thus, our irrational fear of the devil, the central protagonist in the land of the paranormal, is nothing more than a misplaced belief: fear of the very force that gives birth to everything in life, including ourselves: nature.

    The Origins of Our Irrational Fears

    Strictly speaking, to fear the paranormal is to fear the unknown, and in today’s societies that means the fear of evil. But what is evil? There are several schools of thought on this. The origin of the word comes from the old English yfel, whose roots are linked to eve, the primordial woman. Given the Church’s position on the divine feminine, the connection seems very plausible. After all, we have been brainwashed to believe that it was this luckless woman (whose Hebrew origin havva and hayya means ‘living’) took a bite of the apple of knowledge which led to her expulsion from Paradise, along with that of her husband Adam. Since then, all patriarchal societies have had a green light to blame, nay, persecute women for any ill that befalls them. So far this is in complete concordance with the patriarchal position of the Church.

    But wait. That apple: wasn’t it a serpent who whispered bons mots into Eve’s ear and made her partake of the forbidden fruit? And isn’t the serpent one of the many disguises worn by the devil?

    So we are made to believe. The devil, of course, also went on to inherit other roles such as the vampire bat, the goat, the rooster, flies, even the black pussycat. Yet despite the obvious brainwashing, our heart rate revs closer to red whenever we see the image of the goat superimposed on an inverted pentagram. This was yet another concoction by the Church. People have an equally irrational fear of snakes, quite possibly for the same reason (myself included, and yes, I was raised as a Catholic). If you doubt any of this, watch people on the street give a very, very wide berth to any passing black cat.

    Such associations, once ingrained in the subconscious, particularly by seemingly trustworthy political and religious offices, can take generations to overcome. Take for example the paranormal connotations surrounding the number 13. To this day many prominent buildings in the western world have no 13th floor – a supernatural feat in itself, when you think about it, because the 14th floor IS the 13th, the upper part of a building doesn’t float in mid-air!

    Collective fear of the number 13 is such that it even has its own adjective: paraskevidekatriaphobia. In America up to 21 million people are negatively affected by this number whenever it occurs on a Friday, costing the economy an estimated $800 million in lost revenue. It can be argued that such a mass belief inevitably becomes self-fulfilling, and yet in Holland accidents, fires and thefts occur at a lower rate on this day because people are generally more vigilant of the forces of evil.

    Thirteen’s drawing of the short straw can be traced back to two pivotal events in history. The first occurred on Friday, 13 October 1307. On this most infamous of days, orders from the Vatican enforced to exterminate the entire order of the Knights Templars. The original Templars – along with related Orders such as Cathars, Albigensians and Bogomils – pledged allegiance to the divine feminine, not to Rome. They served Isis, Mary Magdalene, and honoured the rising of Sirius, whom ancient societies equated with universal wisdom and truth.

    The second event goes back to the negation of the divine feminine in everyday life by an encroaching patriarchal society through such things as the superseding of the 13-month lunar calendar by the 12-month solar cycle. In ancient traditions, lunar is equated with feminine, due to the Moon’s influence on water and fertility cycles; and solar with masculine, due to its explosive ferocity. This change started as far back as 1300 BCE; it was further implemented by the Romans and later enforced by its secular arm at the Vatican.

    It only takes a small effort to understand how such concepts can alter our perception of reality, and yet to this day the association between things evil or paranormal and the 13th and/or Friday continue to be reaffirmed, albeit for commercial exploitation: films such as Resident Evil 5 and Friday the 13th were released on… you guessed it; not to mention one of my favourite albums, Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut LP. Even 2012 was released on Friday, 13 November 2009. While marketers see such associations as harmless fun, all it does is help reinforce and prolong an institutional belief system.

    Our Bonds With the Unseen Universe Were Severed

    Our relationship with the paranormal is to a large degree shaped by lingering superstition. Superstition is what remains after the underlying understanding behind a fact has been distorted or lost. Take the devil-serpent association: the serpent or dragon has forever been a symbolic representation of one of nature’s fundamental motions of energy, the meandering pathways of magnetism that slide along the Earth. These are the same energy pathways upon which sit countless sacred sites – the temples once designed to help you reconnect with the invisible world.

    In the old days you did not need a bishop to act as intermediary (and an unreliable one at that) to help you speak to God. You could do it all by yourself by visiting a pyramid or a stone circle. Back then it was perfectly acceptable to eat the apple of knowledge, because with total knowledge comes total understanding, and with understanding comes a lack of fear. And without fear all that you don’t see suddenly becomes your friend. As Jesus once taught, “Know Thyself.” But such self-awareness did not allow room for the rising class of religious middle men aiming to keep a safe distance between you and God. There’s a strange irony here, for in Latin, the origin of the word ‘religion’ is religio, which means ‘reconnecting’. Yet by painting a supreme creative force as external rather than internal, religion is designed to do the very opposite. And what lies beyond the physical and the rational belongs to God; and the rest, to some seemingly very unpleasant and ugly entities.

    Our symbiotic relationship with the paranormal has shifted over the course of time, and demonstrates how far, as a global society, we have shifted from total understanding to ignorance.

    It also makes for a gripping script. Mass consciousness evolves in periods of roughly 4,320 years. During each period humanity strives to have a collective experience. Between 6628-2308 BCE cultures such as those in Europe worked with the feminine principles of nature: cooperation, nurturing, the greater good of the tribe, and the implementation of a lunar-based culture.

    By working with the life-affirming laws of nature, people were more sensitive to the forces that surround and permeate the tangible world, and were thus far better attuned to its subtleties. They sourced locations rich in magnetism, where even the force of gravity is lessened. In harnessing these basic principles they forged a closer bond with the unseen universe. The payback for such a relationship was the maintaining for thousands of years of a society that flowed in perpetual rhythm with all life. Some native cultures, such as the Aborigines, to some extent, still maintain such abilities of psychic perception.

    Many of our ancestors’ shamanic experiences of the otherworld were carved in stone – from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Asian temple reliefs. Myths were constructed in which the acts of the gods would be memorialised for times to come, and many of their stories describe the physics of the universe. In the Rig Vedas there exist descriptions of nuclear processes now familiar to particle physicists.

    Several of the parables in the New Testament of the life of Jesus are paranormal events in themselves, and they are brimming with esoteric wisdom and hidden information. The story of the miraculous catch of precisely 153 fish which occurs in the last chapter of St. John can be deconstructed to reveal a geometric framework revealing the Kabalistic Tree of Life as well as numeric values of great cosmological significance.

    That great temples should be constructed at locations rich in magnetism became an extension of this relationship with the paranormal. The practise was also an insurance policy for later times: should people ever become too immersed in the physical world and lose the ability to see the subtle one, they at least know where to go to reconnect. To help communication with the invisible, names were ascribed to entities who provided humanity with specific things, such as agriculture, the arts, or weather forecasting. These would in time be honoured – not worshipped – as gods, and visiting a temple would be like attending a meeting with family, such was the close relationship with otherworldly forces. And because there was no need for competition, the relationship between worlds benefited everybody. Indeed, this was Paradise.

    The act of dying was regarded merely as a stage one goes through in the bigger scheme of things, a boat trip of the soul to ports on the sea of Infinity. As the Pyramid Texts assert, Egyptian temple culture stressed the importance of the conduct of the soul during its human incarnation, and the meticulous rites of passage afforded the deceased were a matter of great importance. Again, the cooperation with those paranormal forces called ‘gods’ was paramount in aiding the transfer of a bunch of molecules – the body and its soul – from one form and toward another. Death was the continuation of a great journey, not a destination. It was even cause for celebration.

    Around 2600 BCE things change dramatically. A sudden reversal of weather and an abrupt rise in sea-levels coincides with the next 4,320-year phase of human consciousness evolution. The feminine-cooperative experiment is slowly dismantled in favour of solar, masculine-driven power which has led us to experience the opposite properties of the divine feminine: control over cooperation, power of the few over the many, scarcity replaces abundance, fear trumps trust, knowledge slides into ignorance.

    Existing sacred sites are adapted from lunar to solar, and inevitably, the places of connection with the world of the unseen are corrupted; understanding is lost and slowly the whole-istic system disintegrates into superstition. By 1300 BCE the climate deteriorated further. By the time of the Aztec and Mayan cultures, unlike the former keepers of the temples, the view of the invisible universe held by the newly entrenched priestly caste had become so distorted that it neither understood the relationship with nor possessed the ability to control the gods. Of course, no one ever did, it always had been a relationship. Out of an irrational fear of the wrath of the spirits, the priests condemned thousands of people to be slaughtered in open ball-courts to appease the spirit world, who never had it in for humanity in the first place.

    The communicating cord with the invisible frayed, and the distance between god, good and hu-man, which the Church would eventually exploit, widened into an unbridgeable chasm. At this point humanity began to approach death with dread, and the gods of yesterday became the ghosts of today.

    You could not write a better paranormal movie script, only this one is scarier, considering the many millions who died in the fruitless pursuit of appeasement.

    It took until the late Victorian era for science – or a tiny band of enlightened scientists, at least – to engage with the bogey man. Just as Bram Stoker was putting the finishing touches to his canine-toothed protagonist, across the Irish Sea, in London, a group of gifted men of their day were busy inking an experiment that would prove the survival of the soul after death. The Society For Psychical Research was a brain trust of people such as William Crookes, who gave us the cathode ray tube, and Oliver Lodge, who, along with Tesla, gave us radio.

    Get the issue this article appears in

    Lodge’s fascination with life after death had begun whilst a member of the Ghost Club. Later he designed a posthumous experiment whereby he would communicate from the otherworld using an alpha-numerical code based on sound. While the experiment appears to have worked shortly after his death in 1940, his initials, along with those of all the past presidents of the Society For Psychical Research reappeared in the 1990s, encoded in a number of those otherworldly geometric shapes created by sound, the crop circles.

    Like the ancient Egyptians before, it appears these luminaries succeeded in proving that life is nothing more than a bunch of molecules and frequencies in a state of transition from one form into another.

    It could be that most of the life that exists beyond the veil is not so paranormal after all. Modern research into parapsychology and quantum states suggest that a substantial part of it is us reassembled in a super-human, superabundant state. And our concept of this invisible world whether in film or in the mind, is shaped by our relationship with those forces that lie but a whisper away from our breath.

    So whenever you next celebrate Helloween, sorry, Halloween remember that this celebration of accelerated tooth-decay once was borne of higher, less menacing ideals: originally the Celtic feast of Samhain, it was the time of tribute to the spirit world, to those who’d gone ahead to protect those in the physical world to survive the dark, cold months of winter. And in so doing, we rise safely out of the darkness and into the light each Spring.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 10.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.