Ascensions and Levitations: A UFO Connection?

Outside the alien abduction scenario there is a history of “ascensions” (brought to the fore by the impending Easter season and the alleged ascension of Jesus after his resurrection).

Ascension means to ascend -- to go up, to heaven or somewhere above.



This has been a staple of religious and mythological storytelling since the beginning of history, and is part and parcel of many UFO reports (which we’ll cite below).

Some Biblical accounts:

Enoch was said to have been taken by God [Genesis 5:24] and Elias (Elijah) “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” via a fiery chariot and fiery horses [4 Kings 2:11].



Ezechiel (Ezekiel) was lifted up [Ezechiel 11:1] and Jesus “was taken up into heaven” [Mark 16:19], and “was carried up into heaven” [Luke 24:51].

In mythology, Heracles (Hercules), upon his death, a cloud passed over his body and bore it away, to Olympus.

Aeneas, a hero of Troy, after setting up a new home for the Trojans, was killed in battle, and was lifted up to heaven.



Diomedes, king of Argos, and one of the Epigoni -- the sons of the Seven against Thebes – was murdered by King Daunus, and divinely spirited away.

In Catholic legend, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was lifted, body and soul, upon her death to heaven.

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes many ascensions or levitations, ascribing them to acts of God.



Here is a list of some of the saints and persons so elevated:

St. Edmund, then Archbishop of Canterbury circa 1242.

St. Teresa of Avila in Madrid during 1680.

Sister Mary an Arabian Carmelite nun in Bethlehem circa 1700.

St. Adolphus Liguori in Foggia during 1777.

Father Suarez at Santa Cruz in Southern Argentina in1911.

But what spurred this posting, aside from the upcoming Ascension Holy Day, are two accounts that I stumbled across, which most of you may be familiar with…

The David Lang and Oliver Larch disappearances (from Wikipedia):

According to the stories surrounding him, on 23 September 1880, Lang, of Gallatin, Tennessee, was walking across the grounds of his farm to meet Judge August Peck who was approaching his farm in a horse and buggy, when Lang vanished mid-step and in full view of the judge, his wife Chanel and his two children, and the judge's brother-in-law. The ground around where Lang had been walking was searched in case he had fallen into a concealed hole, but no trace was found. The story further states that Lang's children later called out to him, and heard a disembodied voice calling as if from a great distance.

The story of David Lang was published in Fate magazine by journalist Stuart Palmer, who claimed that he had been told the story by Lang's daughter. However, no trace of David Lang nor his family (including his apparent daughter) was ever found in any records of that period, and the entire article was later determined to be a hoax likely inspired by the short story "The Difficulties of Crossing a Field" by Ambrose Bierce (1909), collected in his book Can Such Things Be? In 1999, the modern composer David Lang based an opera on Bierce's story. (The story has also become a popular urban legend).

The story of Oliver Larch (Sometime known as Lerch or Thomas) follows a similar pattern to that of David Lang. According to the narrative, Larch was on his way to collect water from a well one winter when he vanished, leaving nothing behind but a trail of footprints in the snow which terminated abruptly, and a series of terrible cries for help such as "Help, they've got me!" that appeared to come from above. Larch's story was later found to be a variation on "Charles Ashmore's Trail", published in 1893 by Ambrose Bierce. In some versions, Larch's story is set in late 19th century Indiana, in others, it is set in North Wales. One particular recurring variation was an Oliver Thomas of Rhayader, Radnorshire, mid-Wales with the date given as 1909.

For a skeptical clarification and implied hoax explanation, click here

In UFO lore, there are many UFO stories based upon ascending, all usually gathered within the abduction category, but not correctly, I think.



Betty And Barney Hill (1961)

Hickson/Parker (1973)

Carl Higdon (1974)

Travis Walton (1975)

Kelly Cahill (1993)

While UFOs do not factor in to most of these accounts, in the stories where they do, however, the descriptives of the ascensions, levitations, and upliftings to the crafts come close to that provided in the stories noted above.

Is there an interdimensional aspect to these events, theorized by M-Theory (string theory)?

Or are physical laws just suspended in some circumstances?

And are UFOs merely omens of dimensional shifts or some other physical quirk?

In Bruce Duensing’s ruminations at his blogs, there is an interconnectedness of all these things.

UFOs may only be one (tangential?) aspect of a reality that is intertwined with elements paranormal, prosaic, and transcendental – a reality too bizarre and complex to explain, no matter how hard we humans try.

Perhaps….

N.B. John Mack’s study of “abductees” indicated that “out-of-body” experiences were prominent in the accounts he monitored.

In the Lang and Larch stories, family members heard voices from above the spot where the men allegedly disappeared.

(In ancient times, sailors approaching an island near the mouth of the Ister River claimed to have heard the voice of Achilles, who had been slain much earlier.)

Thomas Aquinas, who had a transcendental experience that caused him to stop writing – what he saw made his efforts as so much straw in the wind – was said, by G. K. Chesterton, in a work on Aquinas, to have been seen to levitate while saying mass, near the end of his life.

Where are the UFOs?

For all the concern that UFOs apparently had and have with the Earth's atom bomb testing and nuclear activities, they have remained far from the Japanese nuclear plant disaster.

Not one UFO spotted by anyone during the crisis.

That's strange, is it not?

UFOs: The Computer Model

UFOs, the truly unexplainable objects, may be computer rendered models or computers themselves.

A current New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik [New Yorker, Get Smart, April 4th, 2011, Page 70 ff.] deals with the question, “How smart are computers, really?”



But Mr. Gopnik’s piece deals with prosaic computers that are extant.

A better source for the idea that computers can be real in themselves, and create realities that are, for all intents and purposes, actual is:

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Premier issue, Volume 1 Issue 1, Winter 1992, Editors: Thomas B. Sheridan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and Thomas A. Furness, III Univ. of Washington, Seattle, Published in: Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, MIT Press Cambridge, MA,

Let us assume that what are seen in the skies, sometimes – not the mistaken Earthly aircraft or misperceived meteorological manifestations – may be images produced by computers, or computers themselves.

In the Bosco Nedelcovic revelations about the CIA/DoD contrived Villas Boas event, covered here, in this blog, in a very early posting and also in Nick Redfern’s Contactees, (Chapter 20), Nedelcovoc a CIA-AID operative relates that the military used holographic imagery to produce an alien ambiance in tests related to extraterrestrial encounter experimentation, of which the Boas case was one of several.



(Another CIA contrived event, according to Nedelcovic, was the Scoriton incident, also covered here in the archived postings.)

That the United States military used, allegedly, holographic imaging is not the point of this posting.



The reference is to indicate that computer generated imaging can be foisted upon the public or military, in airplanes (such as the B-29 or RB47 sightings mentioned here recently), and that such imagery manipulation may account for some sightings which have an inherent intangibility.



The argument that radar returns wouldn’t be affected by holography can be set aside as radar manipulation would be a concomitant ruse, either by the military or government agency, or by an advanced alien species, if you wish.

But then there is the proposition that what is seen in the skies and sometimes on the ground are actual computers, programmed to interact with humans or Hastings’ nuclear military installations, for instance, duplicating a physical presence without the actual probability of an interaction that would cause problems of an unexplainable kind, something less explainable than a sighting of an amorphous, disappearing UFO.

The Rendlesham incident would be such a contrivance.



But by whom or what exactly?

The UFOs are computers of a virtual kind, without mechanical substance, machines that “think” and act just as virtuality thinks and acts in computer gaming today, and early on in computer simulations created during World War II.

(Alan Turing is the progenitor of such computer modeling and programming.)



A source for what can be done with such virtuality can be found in Marvin Minsky’s
The Society of Mind [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1985/1986] and more pertinently in his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines or Perceptrons.



What we’re proposing here is that some UFO sightings may be virtual realities and some may actually involve computers (machines) of a quasi-tangible nature programmed to intersect and interact with humans.

The idea is not as farfetched as one might expect, if they see the gist of Gopnik’s piece in The New Yorker, or if they read the MIT papers we’ve loaded at our UFO web-site.

More will follow on this “hypothetical” thrust, you may be sure….but, meanwhile, for a truly brilliant exegesis of what computers may be capable of CLICK HERE

Ufology: A lack of nuance, culture, and/or refinement

While some UFO researchers are skilled at ferreting out minutiae and quantum-like details inside some UFO events, their work lacks nuance, refinement.

Context is an overview for them, as it is for most UFO bloggers and webmasters.

Subtlety is not the forte of “ufologists” or UFO mavens.

The grotesque grammatical assault on language and meaning is exampled by a plethora of UFO blogs and List-habitues which are eschewed by those with some semblance of sensibilities, but avidly followed by those who haven’t a clue about grammatical structure or the meaning or words nor a care for refinement of thought and online behavior.

UFO events and sightings have been and are treated cavalierly, even callously.

The nuance of sightings is sidelined and the sensationalist elements of UFO sightings and events are hyped and published with zeal.

The “bull in a China shop” behavior prevails and is the modus operandi of almost every UFO aficionado we’ve experienced over the years and in this blog’s comments all too often.

Commentary here, and at our other blogs, even from media persons, is usually shorn of mental discipline and good taste, to say nothing of the dearth of refined intellectualism.

Knowing a lot of smoldering aspects of UFO sightings, classic and newer, doesn’t make for research, sensate investigation, unique theorizing, nor an analogy for science.

And that’s been the problem and is the problem with the whole UFO shebang, since the beginning but worse now than ever before, as the lowest rabble have infiltrated the subject matter and absconded with it.

Fortunately, we’ve been able to control our environment, keeping out the riff-raff and ne’er do wells such as….well, you know….

We’ll continue to exploit our ability to keep this UFO bailiwick as cultured, as intellectual, as refined, as nuanced as we are able.

We hope that our regulars agree…..

A video review of Nick Redfern's Final Events

Author Joseph Farrell provides an 8 minute YouTube "review" of Nick Redfern's book, Final Events.

Nick Redfern's take on the Flatwoods incident of 1952

There can be few very people within the realms of cryptozoology and ufology that have never heard of the so-called Flatwoods Monster, or Braxton County Monster, of 1952 - a story that is told in-depth in Frank Feschino's 2004 book, The Braxton County Monster: the Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed.

And as Feschino notes in his book: "On the night of September 12, 1952, a shocked American public sought answers when strange unidentified objects were seen flying through the sky over Washington, DC, and the eastern United States..."

He continued: "One of the strange objects crash-landed on a rural hilltop in Flatwoods, West Virginia..." Feschino also noted that a group of schoolboys were witness to the descent of the device and, with two adults, "...headed off to look for the object. Soon a twelve-foot tall being from the downed craft terrified these innocent people."

So, what was the monstrous entity? A cryptid? An alien? Some form of definitively Fortean beast? Or something else? Over the years, a whole range of theories have surfaced, and, as with so many such cases, the debate continues.

Indeed, check out this link and you'll see that over at UFOMystic, good friend Greg Bishop has dug deep into this puzzle, and has addressed another angle - namely that relative to the involvement of Remotely-Piloted Vehicles of a definitively terrestrial nature.

And, on this latter point of the Machiavellian hand of officialdom possibly playing a role in the Flatwoods affair, I stumbled across something the other day that makes me wonder if it may well have some bearing on what was seen at Flatwoods.

Call me crazy (and doubtless some will!), but I think the following data - which is directly relative to the use of superstitions and paranormal entities and ideas in warfare - may well have a bearing on the diabolical beast of Flatwoods.

A couple of days ago, I obtained a copy of an April 14, 1950 RAND publication titled The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare, written by Jean M. Hungerford, for the the U.S. Air Force.

The 37-page document is a truly fascinating one and delves into some very strange areas. But, what really caught my eye, was a section of the document that quoted from a book titled Magic: Top Secret, which was written in 1949 by one Jasper Maskelyne, a fascinating character (as the name-link demonstrates) who was up his absolute neck in new and novel ways to fool the enemy.

Hungerford quotes the following from Maskelyne in her report, which concerns a truly alternative psychological warfare operation that occurred during the Second World War, and less than a decade before the Flatwoods Monster was seen:

"Our men...were able to use illusions of an amusing nature in the Italian mountains, especially when operating in small groups as advance patrols scouting out the way for our general moves forward. In one area, in particular, they used a device which was little more than a gigantic scarecrow, about twelve feet high, and able to stagger forward under its own power and emit frightful flashes and bangs. This thing scared several Italian Sicilian villages appearing in the dawn thumping its deafening way down their streets with great electric blue sparks jumping from it; and the inhabitants, who were mostly illiterate peasants, simply took to their heels for the next village, swearing that the Devil was marching ahead of the invading English."

Hungerford continued to quote from Maskelyne's book in her report: "Like all tales spread among uneducated folk (and helped, no doubt, by our agents), this story assumed almost unimaginable proportions. Villages on the route of our advance began to refuse sullenly to help the retreating Germans, and to take sabotage against them; and then, instead of waiting for our troops to arrive with food and congratulations of their help, the poor people fled, thus congesting the roads along which German motorized transport was struggling to retire. The German tankmen sometimes cut through the refugees and this inflamed feeling still more, and what began almost as a joke was soon a sharp weapon in our hands which punished the Germans severely, if indirectly, for several critical weeks."

There are a number of issues worth noting here. First, the height of the Flatwoods Monster and the British Army's devilish scarecrow were the same: 12-feet. In addition, the cover of Frank Feschino's book shows the Flatwoods Monster emitting lights. And the 12-foot scarecrow in Italy gave off "frightful flashes and bangs" and had "great electric blue sparks jumping from it."

Second, the RAND report that specifically refers to this Italian escapade - that Jasper Maskelyne described in his Magic: Top Secret book - was prepared for psychological warfare planners in the U.S. Air Force. And, in his book on the beast of Flatwoods, Feschino notes that the Air Force took careful interest in the Flatwoods affair and what was being reported on the affair by the media.

The RAND report was submitted to the Air Force in April 1950, and Flatwoods occurred in September 1952. Is it possible that in this two-year period USAF psychological warfare planners created their very own - albeit updated and modified - version of the British Army's 12-foot-tall flashing monster to try and gauge what its reaction might be when unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace?

There's also the settings, too: the British Army's operation was focused on little, isolated villages in Italy. And Flatwoods is a little, rural town in Braxton County, West Virginia that, even as late as 2000, had a population of less than 350.
Those who suspect the the Flatwoods Monster was some form of cryptozoological creature, Fortean entity, or alien being, may well scoff at my speculations and musings.

However, when we can say for sure that the British Army was using 12-foot, illuminated scarecrow-style critters for psychological warfare reasons in the Second World War, is it really a stretch to think that the USAF might have tried something similar in 1952 with their very own 12-foot-tall freak?

One final thing: the foreword to Frank Feschino's book was penned by acclaimed ufologist, Stanton T. Friedman, who wrote the book Top Secret Majic (with a "j"). This should not be confused with Jasper Maskelyne's Magic Top Secret (with a "g)!

Folie à beaucoup: The Roswell Psychosis

Folie à beaucoup – communicated insanity, induced insanity…suggestibility plays a part…It happens that paranoid or paranoiac and rarely hypomanic patients not only can make those with whom they [associate] believe in the delusions, but they so infect them that [those contacted] continue to build on the delusions. [The Psychiatric Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Leland E. Hinsie, M.D. and Robert J. Campbell, M.D., Oxford University Press, London, 1970]

Roswell is an example of how a group of normal individuals can act in psychotic collusion, spurred by a bizarre incident that was instigated by one person, acting on a possible mercenary whim.

(The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme is a current example of the rampant psychology underlying what we see as the prime motivator for the Roswell incident.)

Mac Brazel is reported to have sought the way to gather a reward for discovering a flying disk, which was generated by his findings of some somewhat strange debris on the farm where he was foreman, debris from a balloon or some other aerial mishap.



The debris is a sidebar here. Whatever Mac Brazel found is irrelevant to our point. His “debris” caused him, perhaps, to try to obtain some needed money – he was a poor man by 1947 standards, as were many who farmed in the New Mexico area in which Roswell and Corona are located – from an offer of $3000 to anyone who could produce fragments of a flying disk.

(The source of that offer is not clear, and really has little to do with our hypothesis here. Brazel may have only wanted attention, or got caught up in a mild hysterical episode that afflicted the Proctor family with whom he was commiserating about the “stuff” he had found.)

Brazel’s foray into Roswell generated an interest by the Army base there, and Walter Haut, Jesse Marcel, Sr., and others were infected by the “flying disk” suggestion of Brazel or the media frenzy caused by the prior Arnold sighting and other flying saucer stories that were prevalent at the time.

Once the story was tamped down by saner voices (the Army’s Ramey and Blanchard) and news media lost interest, the people who were initially involved with the inadvertent scam went back to their humdrum lives; that is until Moore, Friedman, Berlitz, et al. resurrected the “incident” and cause an unrepression of the folie à beaucoup.



Once the floodgates of the original flying disk scam were reopened, coupled with suggestibilities by the UFO “researchers,” the Roswell myth was born and has spread as folies do to others who came into contact with the original Roswell witnesses or who come into contact with those – the UFO researchers -- who’ve met with the original participants in Brazel’s ultimately unproductive scam.

Dee Proctor has been a prime participant in the original Brazel instigated brouhaha, dissembling the story in a post 1947 folie à deux. And other alleged Roswell witnesses have engaged in the folie or started a new folie for reasons of nefarious kind.

Our point is that Mac Brazel started, for whatever reason(s), inadvertent or otherwise, a cascading series of events that developed (and continues) under the psychiatric sobriquet of a folie à beaucoup.

Roswell may only be that, a psychotic episode that resonates with persons today as psychologically significant as it did back in 1947.

The Braxton/Flatwoods Monster

Kevin Randle has been torturing visitors to his blog with a protracted take on his involvement with the so-called Braxton/Flatwoods "monster" incident from 1952.

Click here for a WORD document (from our archives) of Matt Mullins' succinct account of the story.