A Confluence of Coincidences or Something Significant?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

We are, admittedly, smitten with the 1964 Socorro UFO sighting by Lonnie Zamora.



The reasons for our “obsession” are many, as noted here, at this blog (and others) over the past few years.

But one reason centers on the knowledge that other, similar, almost identical UFO sightings took place on the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting [4/24/1964] or in the same time-frame.

For instance, a day after Officer Zamora’s episode, witness Orlando Gallegos saw an object, in La Madera, New Mexico [a few hundred miles north of Socorro] that was virtually identical to the Socorro craft.



And Gary Wilcox, in Newark Valley, New York, on April 24th, 1964, the same day as Officer Zamora’s sighting, reported a strange encounter with an egg-shaped craft that was accompanied by two “beings” (like those seen by Zamora), dressed in white, metallic coveralls.



Farmer Wilcox, who couldn’t have known about Lonnie Zamora’s encounter – Wilcox’s incident took place at 10 a.m. in the morning; Zamora’s incident took place about 6:50 p.m.

While Lonnie Zamora had no interaction with the two beings he spotted and Gallegos saw no beings during his sighting, Wilcox had a “conversation” with the intruders on his land; they said they were from Mars, and had “spoken to people before.”

Details of the Wilcox sighting can be read HERE and you will find our May 2011 note about the Wilcox sighting HERE

What is revelatory for me, is that it is strangely coincidental that such similar sightings took place around or on the same date, with timings that don’t allow confabulation.

Anthony Bragalia and Frank Stalter discount the Socorro sighting as a bona fide UFO incident, claiming the sighting was prompted by a raft of New Mexico Institute Technology students, out to embarrass Officer Zamora ostensibly because he “harassed” them. Bragalia also dismisses the Gallegos’ sighting as there were implications, by the police at the scene, that the smell of alcohol was present.

But how do Stalter and Bragalia explain the Wilcox sighting?

And how do we slide our Hughes lunar-lander prototype into the Wilcox scenario?

The problem with the Bragalia/Stalter conjecture – although circumstantially replete – and our Hughes Aircraft hypothesis lies in the distance between Newark Valley, New York and Socorro, New Mexico, the only concrete connection being the “New” sobriquet for the states.

(Of course, one can make a claim that the “New” in New York and New Mexico has meaning, paranormally, but that for another time.)

My point is that the prank explanation for Socorro and the Hughes testing hypothesis are tangential (and errant) when one takes into account the strange Wilcox tale, and also, somewhat, the Gallegos sighting.

Something bizarre happened in late April 1964, something that hasn’t been duplicated since.

Of course a lack of recidivism works against Socorro, La Madera, and the Newark valley incidents being relevant to the UFO phenomenon, in toto, but such similar incidents can provide a clue, as transient as hat clue may be, to what UFOs are or were.

That said (or, rather, written), the three sightings noted here allow us to downplay or even dismiss the prank theory for Socorro, along with our Hughes prototype conjecture….if we are being ufologically objective.

RR

Quirky 1947: Roswell, Rhodes, Arnold, and Solar Flares?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Looking for a perturbation in the “force” for 1947, I stumbled upon an internet item by The Wanderling at the site of Anna Jones that states the Roswell “crash” was caused by solar flares:

Click HERE for that site and “article.”

It seems to me that solar flares are as good of an explanation as any for the 1947 upshot in flying saucer incidents, actual and fraudulent.



But it is only one explanation for the epidemic of flying saucer sightings and hoaxes.

What I am proposing is that the electrically charged bursts from the Sun caused some persons to conflate their observations of mundane things in the sky for concrete objects of an esoteric kind.

This is what happened to Kenneth Arnold; he saw a flight of pelicans, a flight of prototypical Navy jets, or a mirage and thought it was a bevy of “saucer skipping aircraft.”



The Maury Island episode was either a product of a misperception or the creation of addled minds that were afflicted by the 1947 solar flare anomaly. I prefer the latter.



William Rhodes (or Rhoades) either saw and photographed a strange object in the sky over his Phoenix house in 1947 or he contrived a photo because he was made mentally disturbed by the influx of electrical impulses caused by the excessive solar flare activity of 1947.



Ah, you scoff, but here are two passages on the affect of sun spots and solar flares on the mental capacity of humans:

International Journal of Biometeorology
Volume 43, Number 1, 31-37, DOI: 10.1007/s004840050113
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The effects of extra-low-frequency atmospheric pressure oscillations on human mental activity
A. A. Delyukov and L. Didyk

Slight atmospheric pressure oscillations (APO) in the extra-low-frequency range below 0.1 Hz, which frequently occur naturally, can influence human mental activity. This phenomenon has been observed in experiments with a group of 12 healthy volunteers exposed to experimentally created APO with amplitudes 30–50 Pa in the frequency band 0.011–0.17 Hz. Exposure of the subjects to APO for 15–30 min caused significant changes in attention and short-term memory functions, performance rate, and mental processing flexibility. The character of the response depended on the APO frequency and coherence. Periodic APO promoted purposeful mental activity, accompanied by an increase in breath-holding duration and a slower heart rate. On the other hand, quasi-chaotic APO, similar to the natural perturbations of atmospheric pressure, disrupted mental activity. These observations suggest that APO could be partly responsible for meteorosensitivity in humans.

Chaotic solar cycles modulate the incidence and severity of mental illness
George E Davis Jr.a, , , Walter E Lowellb, 1,

Purchase a Augusta Mental Health Institute, Hospital Street, P.O. Box 724, Augusta, ME 04332, USA
b State of Maine, Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services, Augusta, ME 04332, USA

Received 18 August 2003; Accepted 10 November 2003. Available online 21 January 2004.
------------------------------
Abstract:

This paper hypothesizes that the intensity of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) from the Sun predisposes humans to polygenic mutation fostering major mental illness (MMI) and other disorders of neurodevelopment. In addition, the variation in the intensity of this radiation acts to stress immune systems, possibly mediated by cytokines, resulting in variable clinical expressions of mental illness and autoimmune disorders. Organisms can adapt to chronic high-intensity UVR by producing melanin and by retaining various pigments. We found that 28% of 11-year solar cycles produce particularly severe solar flares during which UVR is 300% more intense and hence more damaging than normal. Out of a total of six severe cycles in the past 250 years, four have occurred in the past 55 years, possibly explaining the apparent increase in the incidence of MMI in recent decades. UVR is 10 times more mutagenic than ionizing radiation to nuclear DNA, and especially damaging to mitochondrial DNA. However, variable light as manifested by seasons stresses adaptability to UVR, possibly through an immune mechanism. We show that the region of the Earth having the most UVR, relative to the most variation in that light, is at 54±~10° (N or S) latitude. Therefore, the most potential damage from sunlight occurs between the Equator and the Poles, not at the Equator itself. The human brain, our most important organ of adaptability, must be able to survive environmental variation, with successful matching to the environment resulting in adaptation. Unsuccessful adaptation to UVR (and possibly other types of radiation) results in mutation, which can produce neuro-chemical abnormalities manifested by MMI. We postulate that the combination of intensity and variation in UVR serves as a global modulator of MMI.

Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Medical Hypotheses
Volume 62, Issue 2, February 2004, Pages 207-214
-------------------------
As for Roswell, it seems that something happened near that town in 1947, something not other-worldly necessarily, but something concrete – a military accident of some kind – or a confluence of mental disturbances caused by solar flare activity, mental disturbances that caused some Roswellians to act out and act upon the mental constructs and aberrations that were created by solar flare activity supported by the backdrop of an almost prosaic accident of some kind.



That is, some Roswell witness, overly stimulated by solar flare activity, ended up doing things and experiencing things that were not real in any objective sense. That, along with the mass hysteria or “group hallucinatory” possibilities, can account for the extrapolation that is now known as The Roswell Incident – a mythical meme based wholly on aberrant mental configurations and disturbances, underscored by a military incident that had nothing to do with an extraterrestrial intrusion or crashed flying disk.

One can take the data of solar flare activity for 1947 and other time-frames to see if solar flares or sun-busts might account for other hallucinated UFO episodes: The Hill abduction, the Pascagoula event, or the Travis Walton kidnapping.



Also, intrusions of hoaxed materials or confabulated videos, photographs, and stories might be traced to an influx of solar flare activity during the time such contrivances are conceived.

Two recommended reports/books on solar flares and two papers on solar flares:





Click here for Paper One – a PDF

Click here for Paper Two – also a PDF

RR

Early Airships that are now called UFOs

Photos of airships, from the turn of the 20th century and 1915, indicate flying machines that were mistaken in some quarters, by some people, for other-worldly craft or advanced human-created aircraft.


Here are some German Zeppelins that show the kind of light rays that Anthony Bragalia found in his research of the 1966 Wanaque UFO sightings. (Everything old is new again, apparently.)

And sights of balloons, such as this one, guarding the English coastline, surely provoked awe among the general population of Britain, causing speculation that the flying contraptions were something other than what they really were.

The human imagination has a tendency to run away with itself. as a mechanism against the reality and/or boredom of everyday life.

Such fevered imaginings may also account for many flying saucer sightings of the late 1940s and 1950s, and some even today, rooted in the need for people to be part of something beyond the routine of daily living.

UFO researchers would do well to separate the wheat from the chaff; that is, they (ufologists, to use that coined epithet) have to search out truly unique UFO events, those that represent something more than a light in the sky.

We'll concentrate more and more, here, on sightings, new and old, that speak to something truly unusual, including those sightings that appear to be induced by psychopathology or hallucinatory elements. (Such bizarre sightings have been eschewed, pretty much, by some early flying saucer/UFO investigators, such as the eminent Donald Keyhoe and the NICAP crowd, while others, such as John Keel and Brad Steiger, got sidetracked by paranormal aspects of sightings that had nothing to do with the UFO sightings themselves, but were merely appurtanances that their personalities were attraced to or attracted.)

RR

The Parallels Between Jesus Christ and Roswell

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.



Just as there were niggardly references to Jesus of Nazareth, after his death, there were niggardly references to Roswell after that 1947 incident (as noted in my post showing the 1967 LOOK issue, Flying Saucers and in a comment from Christopher Allen).

No substantive account about Jesus appeared or is extant earlier than the Gospel of Mark, about thirty years after Jesus’ death, allegedly “helped” by The Holy Spirit



No substantive account of the Roswell episode appeared earlier than the 1980 book, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, covertly helped by Stanton Friedman.



Subsequent books or “gospels” about Jesus, centering on his meaning and mission, culminating in his death and resurrection, appeared later, 60 A.D. to 300 A.D., (with the sojourns of St. Paul, peripheral to Jesus life, showing up around 50 A.D).

These gospels derive from witness accounts, not first-hand information from Jesus or those in his circle.



Many books subsequent to the Berlitz/Moore work have appeared, all offering synopses of the Roswell event, culled from newspapers archives and alleged witness accounts, but no first-hand accounts of a flying disk crash.



Christianity eventually became, with the help of Roman Emperor Constantine, the prevailing religion in the West.



Roswell became, with the help of Stanton Friedman, the template for ufology’s extraterrestrial believers.



While the divinity of Jesus and his alleged miracles and resurrection have been grist for theologians, religious lay persons, and atheists (or agnostics), the supposed crash landing of a flying disk, piloted by extraterrestrial entities, in Roswell, has similarly become fodder for UFO’s ET believers and skeptics (or debunkers, as the UFO fanatics put it).

Jesus of Nazareth has generated more controversy and writings than any other religious oriented subject.

Roswell, in the UFO context, has generated more controversy and writings than any other flying saucer event.

Persons claiming to be Christians have provided a myriad of experiences related to the Jesus phenomenon.



Persons claiming to be Roswell witnesses or friends of same have provided myriad accounts tying them to the Roswell incident.



Both kinds of witnesses engage intellectual or superficial scrutiny by others, with fervant debate deciding nothing that can be substantiated by fact or empirical proof: Jesus remains an enigma for many, believers and non-believers alike; Roswell, remains an enigma, generally, for believers and skeptics too.

The Jesus story has an alleged artifact from his death/resurrection: The Shroud of Turin.



Roswell has artifacts from the alleged crash: misperceived debris.



Both Jesus and Roswell have produced a mythos, a mythology of significant proportions.

Neither is related to the other, but they do resonate as historical “fables” or historical realities.

The Jesus story appears to be transcendent but Roswell appears to be preternatural also.



Sociologists can work with the elements of both to determine the human interactions that provide the integration suggested here.

Jesus’ influence is much greater than Roswell, surely, but Roswell does mimic the vicissitudes that brought the Jesus movement to prominence, even if Roswell is a sociological canard.

But wait, the Jesus thrust has been just as fraught with fraud, falsity, or fallacious human interactions – the difference being that Roswell takes us nowhere theologically or philosophically relevant.

RR

The Socorro/Rendlesham UFO symbols deciphered?

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

The United States Air Force and Ray Stanford tried to corrupt Lonnie Zamora’s Socorro sighting of 1964 by interposing the idea that Officer Zamora’s original description and drawing of the symbol he spotted on the egg-shaped craft was a substitution for the real symbol – to snooker any other alleged UFO observer who might try to report that he or she saw a similar symbol.

That is, the Air Force is said to have created the (well-known) Zamora symbol here:


Stylized

As a substitute for the real symbol here:



However, in the earliest reports of the Socorro incident, Officer Zamora described and drew the well-known and highly publicized symbol thusly:


This from the Hynek/Blue Book notes


This from the 1967 LOOK account

We believe the Air Force suggestion, abetted by Ray Stanford, was a diversionary effort – or disinformation tactic as ufologists like to say – to prevent interested parties from discovering the real source of the Zamora craft. (See Hughes reference below.)

Anthony Bragalia insists that the Socorro incident was a prank, created and carried out by students at the New Mexico Institute of Technology, and he’s mustered considerable circumstantial evidence for his hypothesis.

Part of his conjecture states that Zamora’s UFO was a construct, partially composed of paper, used at NMIT, from The International Paper Company, whose logo is this:



An Indiana University engineer has related that he read a piece in a still unlocated – we looked for it, seriously – magazine [circa 1968] about a paper company’s publicity-oriented hot-air balloon trek that descended in Socorro and was mistaken as Lonnie Zamora’s UFO. (The engineer’s contention has been excoriated but not totally refuted by a gaggle of ufologists, mostly residing at UFO UpDates.)

Here’s the logo of a paper company that possibly sponsored a balloon trip across country in 1964:



The RRRGroup has contended that Zamora’s UFO was a Hughes Aircraft/ToolCo Moon/Mars lander prototype, manufactured and tested under the auspices of the CIA.

Leon Davidson did a creative reworking of the Zamora drawing, showing how it displayed a convoluted and tricky reworking of the CIA sobriquet. (His paper is online here, via a previous posting.)

Matthew Gilleece did an evaluation for us a while back, and provided a logo from Hughes Toolco that is strikingly similar to Zamora’s drawing:



And during our Hughes interpretations we used Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook [McGraw Hill Book Company, NY, 1972] to find symbols that look like Zamora’s drawing.

We found these mathematical and computing symbols, which Hughes’ engineers might have used on their prototype design or which can be seen as part of the Air Force instigated design:















Then we come to the 1980 Rendlesham incident(s), which provided a symbol, from one of the military witnesses:



We think that the Rendlesham UFO was a military prototype, which also used mathematical symbology as part of its designated creation:


Trigonometrical Point 1st order [Dreyfuss, Pages 95/186]

(The displacement of the black circle has meaning, and a cryptography expert should have at it.)

For us, the determination of the Zamora insignia’s creation or origin and that of the Rendlesham symbol will provide the source of UFOs witnessed, Earthly in our view – or unearthly maybe, as many die-hard ET believers have it.

RR

"Roswell" noted in 1967

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

LOOK published this special edition, Flying Saucers, in 1967:


On Page 24 is this photo from the series taken in Roswell in 1947:


The blurb (enlarged here) refers to an alleged crash of balloon(s), mistaken for a flying saucer:


While Fort Worth, Texas is given as the site of the "mistaken" crash, rather than Roswell (or Corona) in New Mexico, the photo, shared with LOOK staffers, shows that someone knew about the Roswell incident in 1967, 10+ years earlier than the 1978 resurrection by Stanton Friedman.

Why the mistake in locale? Who provided the photo? Why a reference to the Navy?

Questions that Roswell researchers might follow up on...

RR

UFOs: The Wrong Psychological Aftermath

A sighting of an unusual object or light in the sky provokes, or should, an emotional/psychological reaction that is not too far outside the normal parameters of
reactive behavior to a strange event.

But a reaction should be distinctly different from normal reactive states.

And the aftermath of an alleged UFO abduction has to be characterized by behavior that doesn’t belie the inherent elements of a terrifying or totally bizarre episode.

However, UFO sightings or UFO abductions do not evoke reactions, generally, that bespeak a completely unique or affective set of circumstances; that is, sighters and abductees, after their observation or alleged abduction, do not demonstrate behavior that falls within what psychology defines for the aftermath of events like an abduction (UFO related or not) or the observation of something anomalistic.

Seeing something in the sky (or on the ground) that is totally foreign to one’s normal experiences and frames of reference can evoke euphoria (depending upon the mind-set of the observer) or questioning of one’s senses, or provoke an astute querying. Sometimes fear is prominent (again, depending upon the sighter’s mind-set).

An alleged UFO abduction is another matter altogether. Such an episode, which is akin to a criminal kidnapping, should result in psychological and/or social behavior, after the fact, that mimics what is commonly referred to, currently, as post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But I know of no abduction account that provides a litany of behavior that duplicates or even approximates the post-traumatic stress etiologies.

One can find the kind of after-behavior that is missing in UFO encounters in the 9/11 event(s).

A UFO sighting is nearly, in this day and age, a prosaic event for most people; humans on this planet have seen or read about stranger things than an odd light in the night sky or a weird aircraft.

Nonetheless, the observation of either should provoke a response that is something more than ho-hum. Generally, it doesn’t, which tells me that people have become inured to UFO sightings.

Abduction accounts, not so much.

Those professing that they were taken by alien entities -- extraterrestrial or otherworldly beings – end up, afterwards, talking about their experience as if it were just an unusual occurrence during their daily routines.

Under hypnosis, recollection of their alleged sojourn often invites behavior, while “asleep,” that appears to suggest a terrible or horrifying experience.

Hypnosis, long denied as a viable mechanism for finding information from the unconscious (even among psychoanalytics), presents a number of problems which strike at the heart of the material(s) recalled by the person hypnotized; i.e., confluence and juxtaposition of things read, seen, heard, over the life-time of the hypnotic, such as Sci-FI films or stories or radio and television shows in which persons are kidnapped, by humans or alien beings.

In one of my high-school’s assemblies, during the 1950s, an hypnotist mentioned to some students he had onstage, as part of his act, while they were “under,” that they were seeing a flying saucer. Panic ensued, the students getting up from their chairs, and running, helter-skelter around and off the stage. It was a moment of seer pandemonium, which took a while to be quelled. That was a reaction to flying saucers at the outset of the modern era of sightings, and is what one should have expected then, and somewhat now.

That aside, persons who’ve seen a UFO and those who have supposedly been taken against their will by entities of a anomalistic kind, generally resume their day-to-day existence, while some go so far as to try an exploit their experience, without any hint of the vicissitudes that would normally occur after such a traumatic event as that of a kidnapping, especially one involving the particulars included in the retellings, under hypnosis or not, that are proffered.

A UFO sightings should provide a “wow factor” for the sighter. It doesn’t any more.

An abduction experience should cause the abductee to suffer a smattering of traumatic symptoms, lasting long after their alleged experience. That doesn’t happen.

This lack of psychological repercussions is what did in the so-called contactees; none showed indications of trauma – rather they displayed psychopathic delusions that were not related to their alleged contact by beings from other worlds.

Abductees today, resume their lives, as if nothing untoward or totally bizarre afflicted them.

Yes, something happened to some who recount abduction experiences, but if what they say they experienced is true, their after-behavior belies that experience. The human mind can’t repress, forever, an event as traumatizing as that of an alien abduction, as it is remembered by the abductee.

In the psychological or even the psychoanalytic literature, where sexual elements are stressed, one can find the raft of symptoms that a UFO sighter or a UFO abductee should display after their encounter.

That few show such symptoms puts a question mark over their accounts.

(And this lack of a psychological aftermath is what mars such UFO events as Roswell, where for thirty years, the alleged crash of a flying disk lay dormant, until resurrected by ufologists with a penchant for infusing apparent witnesses to the Roswell episode with details and remembrances that were not based in actual circumstances. But that for another time….)

RR

Rex Heflin's inspiration for his UFO photos?

Paul Villa was an alleged flying saucer contactee, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who provided a slew of crisp (faked) UFO photos in the 1960s:







These two photos were taken in 1963/64 by Mr. Villa, a mechanic.





Did Rex Heflin see these photos and tried to duplicate them in 1965?





RR