It was hard to miss the ads for Arcturus Books in the early days, when I took my first steps into the pool of ufology. Overwhelmed with information as I was, I never thought to contact them or get a copy of their catalogue: magazines, ‘zines, newsletters and bulletin board postings (remember the long-gone days of BBS?) provided a dizzying mix of information where abduction claims, tales of underground bases and straight-out conspiracy theory shared the cramped pages like passengers on a subway train during rush hour.
It was much later that Joan Jeffers – a devoted Pennsylvanian researcher of UFO and related phenomena – told me to get a hold of Bob Girard, saying he could find any book or periodical I might remember from the early days of sauceriana, or even material from other countries. Oddly enough, I was sort of in touch with Bob already. His former partner, the late Ron Bonds, had set up Illuminet Press expressing an interest in publishing my translation of Salvador Freixedo’s “Visionaries, mystics and contactees”, a great introduction to the Spanish Jesuit’s vast body of work on the paranormal. Bob’s wife Monica provided the cover art for the project, so when I picked up the phone to call Arcturus, no introduction was really necessary.
I spoke for hours with Bob that first time. What I’d been told was true – he knew all the corners, light and dark, of the paranormal community, current and past – and an encyclopedic recollection of old books. We spoke at length about his own work, “Futureman”, a dystopic view on the ultimate fate of humankind if the age of abductions proved true. Disturbing reading, but written in a most insightful style.
So it was that Bob helped me rebuild my collection of UFO books, which had been lost over the course of years, some lost over the course of international moves and others forsaken as new interests commanded my attention. Getting into “new” materials was never difficult thanks to Bob’s reviews, which made the Arcturus Books catalogue a joy to read – probably more so than a number of newsstand offerings available at the moment! Some descriptions are etched in my mind, like an old samizdat whose cover “depicted a hayseed peeing into a pond with a flying saucer hovering overhead” – I’m paraphrasing here, but I still smile at the laughter the description caused in me at the time.
Some reviews were at the other end of the spectrum: scathing indictments of the subject matter and sometimes the author. Words that could either make you want to order the book to see if such an assessment was warranted, or enough to make one turn the page and hope for better.
1993 saw the birth of my first newsletter on “UFOs in Latin America and Spain” and Bob Girard was pleased to add it to Arcturus’s offerings, cautioning me not to charge too much for it, since “mystics never have any money”. The price point must’ve been right, as SAMIZDAT (as it was called) became a strong seller for Arcturus over a time frame of five years. When I announced that I the little newsletter was folding (its news stories rendered stale by the Internet), I told him I intended to come back with a new idea. “Whatever you do, make sure it’s good!” he said, and INEXPLICATA came out within months, available in print format for many years before the same situation – the immediacy offered by electronic sources – forced it to migrate to the web, where it has remained since 2003.
We didn’t see eye to eye on everything, though. The Chupacabras Diaries, my initial offering on Puerto Rico’s paranormal predator, didn’t really meet his approval. Bob thought the correct approach to take should have been a dismissive one. He particularly disliked a chapter bearing the title “It’s In the Trees- It’s Coming!” – a homage to Jacques Torneur’s The Night of the Demon (1957). Now you’re part of the problem, I believe he said. However, he gladly accepted my self-published copies of TCD and sold them through Arcturus to a world that was only just starting to hear about the creature’s exploits, way before it became a media phenomenon.
When people ask me where I obtained my knowledge of book publishing, having never worked in the industry, I always say it was thanks to those long telephone sessions with Bob Girard. The ins and outs of the publishing world were as familiar to him as the dark corridors of the paranormal. A good and knowledgeable friend who richly deserves to be remembered as a 20th century Renaissance man.
Book of the Week: Hot Corn – Life Scenes in New York Illustrated
by Solon Robinson (1854)
This is one of the rare old books from our Robert C. Girard Collection. To my knowledge, it has nothing to do with anomalies research and is just an example of his rare book collecting. The book is one of the oldest in our collection and appears to be a first edition. While it may not contain any paranormal folk tales it seems that it was a notable literary contribution in its day, despite much criticism…
“The book is a collection of stories set in New York City’s impoverished Five Points neighborhood, and first appeared in the New York Tribune in 1853.
One of stories was that of Little Katy, a hot corn seller on the street, who is beaten to death by her alcoholic mother who needs Katy’s income to support her drinking, after Katy’s corn supply is stolen.
Though it garnered some positive press for promoting morality, especially in religious newspapers (for example, the Christian Secretary of Hartford, Connecticut said “The Hot Corn stories are eloquent appeals in favor of temperance and virtue”), the book (and stage adaptations) were also the subject of much scorn by critics. The New York Herald faulted the book for “giving minute descriptions of life in fashionable houses of ill-fame, and entering into the details of seduction, licentiousness and debauchery, with a gusto, ill concealed by the pretence of morality.” The Southern Literary Messenger excoriated the book, proclaiming that “to say that the man who deliberately writes and prints such perilous and damnable stuff deserves a place in the penitentiary, is feebly to express our notion of the enormity of his offence.”
Author Henry James wrote in his autobiography he was prevented from reading Hot Corn as a child; a copy was given to his father with the admonishment that it wasn’t proper for children to read. James wrote that “so great became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right for others, it was only to be wrong for me….. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of “Hot Corn” revealed to me …” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow took his sons to see one of the plays in April 1854 and called it “wretched stuff.” – Wikipedia.org
Check out some more links about this book, or read digital copies of it at the links below:
In Memorium…
As we mentioned in last week’s newsletter, much of our efforts at preserving the legacies of various Anomalist / Fortean seekers is necessarily the result of their passage from the world of the living into the great beyond. Some contributors to the eternal search for knowledge and truth aren’t necessarily considered “researchers” per se, but they have made significant contributions through their writing nonetheless. Therefore, in honor of such visionaries and writers on the human condition and the philosophy of existence, we remember two recently departed souls for your consideration…
Umberto Eco – (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016)
“…was an Italian novelist, essayist, literary critic, philosopher and semiotician. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum) and L’isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller. – Wikipedia.org
“A passage from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum succinctly captures the warp and the weave, the want and the wish, the way in which we work towards belief and understanding. The wise occultist Dr. Agliè, commenting on a fictional work called The Secret Language of the Pyramids, explains how the author measured the Great Pyramid of Cheops and determined that esoteric knowledge was encoded in its dimensions, proceeding to do the same with a newspaper kiosk in downtown Paris. Eco’s conspiracy enthusiasts are disconcerted, assuming that Agliè consequently rejects all numerologies out of hand. Agliè protests, “On the contrary, I believe firmly. I believe the universe is a great symphony of numerical correspondences, I believe that numbers and their symbolism provide a path to special knowledge. But if the world, below and above, is a system of correspondences where tout se tient, it’s natural for the kiosk and pyramid, both works of man, to reproduce in their structure, unconsciously, the harmonies of the cosmos. The so-called pyramidologists discover with their incredibly torturous methods a straightforward truth, a truth far more ancient, and one already known. It is the logic of research and discovery that is tortuous, because it is the logic of science. Whereas the logic of knowledge needs no discovery, because it knows already. Why must it demonstrate that which could not be otherwise? If there is a secret, it is much more profound. These authors of yours simply remain on the surface”.“
“…was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960. Immediately successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Though Lee had only published this single book, in 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature. Additionally, Lee received numerous honorary degrees, though she declined to speak on those occasions. She was also known for assisting her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. The novel was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
Another novel, Go Set a Watchman, was written in the mid-1950s and controversially published in July 2015 as a “sequel”, though it was later confirmed to be To Kill a Mockingbird’s first draft.” – Wikipedia.org
Monthly discussion on the latest news and research into the fields of inquiry covered within our anomalous collections including: UFOs and Ufology, Consciousness, Parapsychology, Fortean and Paranormal Phenomena, Cryptozoology, Parapolitics and Conspiracy, Human Potential … and MORE!
The Anomaly Archives holds monthly meetings (usually) on the Fourth Saturday of each month. Contact SMiles Lewis or Mark Muecke via email for updates. The meetings are FREE (Donations Welcomed!) and held from 1-3pm at the INACS / Anomaly Archives headquarters located in North West Austin. (Map)
February 15th, 2016 – Synchronicities abound and seem to play an important role in the study of anomalous phenomena. Or do they? The difference between coincidence and synchronicity is simply the presence of meaningfulness in the eye of the beholder. Even esteemed UFO researcher has talked about this as far back as in his 1979 book Messengers of Deception and more recently during his 2011 presentation at the Ted-X Talks in Brussels called “A Theory of Everything (Else)”. This lecture was about Vallee’s desire to work towards a “physics of information” that might explain the many synchronistic aspects of UFO encounters and related paranormal phenomena.
So do these data points below suggest a meaningful coincidence to you?
Scalia’s death occurred nearly 10 years to the day that his fellow hunting partner, Dick Cheney, accidentally shot “well-connected Republican attorney” and downtown Austin property owner Harry M. Whittington in the face… while quail hunting.
Austin Attorney Harry Whittington
(With Frost Bank Owl over his shoulder)
That same week in February 2006, one of Harry Whittington’s downtown Austin properties had been accidentally set on fire, for the second time that year. A property which just happened to house Austin’s most legit terrestrial alternative radio station, the then largely left / libertarian leaning KOOP Radio 91.7 FM station; the fire forcing it off air for 17 days. A third fire, two years later at its new location, was set by a former station volunteer who was convicted of arson and set free after being sentenced to ten years imprisonment but serving 120 days at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville.
Inevitable pop-culture sync references to the Cheney / Whittington / Scalia shooting include a May 2007 episode of Family Guy (season 5, episode 18) called “Meet the Quagmires” in which a history altering time-travel plot reveals a timeline in which “the Dick Cheney hunting accident” involved “the ‘Chairman of Halliburton’ accidentally shot and killed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, political campaign advisor Karl Rove, and conservative media consultant Tucker Carlson.” (Video)
Meanwhile, Piers Morgan joked about the “Most Dangerous Game” theme with Scalia in a 2012 interview (Video) and cartoonist Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune drew a strip featuring rocket-launcher-toting hunting-buddies Dick & Antonin. Scalia says he is bringing the “beer” but Cheney hears “deer” and shoots.
So, is there any there there? Is there any information in that data? Or is this all just the bizarrely normal yet weird ebb and flow of space-time events in post-911 surreality? Is it meanginful, is it SynchroMystic, or is it just randomness? You decide!!
Be Sure To Check Out The Latest Book-Of-The-Week
Plus News Headlines & Event Info below…
Book of the Week: The Marfa Lights: Being a collection of first-hand accounts by people who have seen the lights close-up or in unusual circumstances, and related material by Judith M Brueske (1989)
Judith Brueske says, “The ‘Marfa Lights of west Texas have been called many names over the years, such as ghost lights, weird lights, mystery lights, or Chinati lights. The favorite place from which to view the lights is a widened shoulder on Highway 90 about nine miles east of Marfa…at this ‘official Marfa Lights viewing site’. The lights are most often reported as rather distant bright lights distinguishable from ranch lights and automobile headlights on Highway 67 (between Marfa and Presidio, to the south) primarily by their aberrant movements.”
– Wikipedia
Flashback 2008: Radar expert laments media apathy “Bound for Crawford … FAA radar hits profile the flight path of a mysterious object for more than an hour as it cruised toward President Bush’s home in Texas” by Billy Cox
Monthly discussion on the latest news and research into the fields of inquiry covered within our anomalous collections including: UFOs and Ufology, Consciousness, Parapsychology, Fortean and Paranormal Phenomena, Cryptozoology, Parapolitics and Conspiracy, Human Potential … and MORE!
The Anomaly Archives holds monthly meetings (usually) on the Fourth Saturday of each month. Contact SMiles Lewis or Mark Muecke via email for updates. The meetings are FREE (Donations Welcomed!) and held from 1-3pm at the INACS / Anomaly Archives headquarters located in North West Austin. (Map)
February 8th, 2016 – Sadly, most archival work comes about as the result of the passing of other fellow seekers. This weekly newsletter will necessarily be regularly filled by news of the passing of various people of note in the wide variety of anomalous fields of inquiry covered by the Anomaly Archives. In our first weekly issue we noted the passing of Starman David Bowie. This week we pay homage to former astronaut, and founder of IONS (the Institute Of Noetic Science), Edgar Mitchell. The local Austin chapter of IONS is where many of our organization’s board members originally met and the larger organization has been a point of inspiration for us over the years. After some recent changes to the local group, a new meetup has formed called ACE – Austin Consciousness Explorers.
Book of the Week: In Advance of the Landing Folk Concepts of Outer Space by Douglas Curran
“Douglas Curran has rediscovered the New World – with its own religion and a tribe of credulous believers no less brave than the Cree or the Wampanoag. A not-ready-for-prime-time cult that makes up in fervor what it lacks in style. One that seems to worship equally Ray Walston and Stephen Hawking.” Chris Carter, creator of “The X-Files”www.DougCurranPhotos.com
Check out some more links about this book, including the documentary adaptation.
The X Files’ Mitch Pileggi at Zach Theatre. What conspiracy brought the actor back to Austin, Zach, and FBI assistant director Walter Skinner all at the same time? By Robert Faires, Feb. 5, 2016
See MORE X-Files links and these other Tracy Twyman articles at our online archives and below…
Last week’s episode of the X-Files was about Nicholas de Vere
Tracy Twyman “…was once associated publicly with a now-deceased writer named Nicholas de Vere (the full-length name he gave himself was “Prince Nicholas de Vere von Drakenberg”). He claimed to be the head of a secret society with an ancient lineage called “the Dragon Court,” and said that he himself was the foremost scion of a royal bloodline going back to praeterhuman creatures that pre-dated the Garden of Eden. He had a lengthy genealogy for himself drawn up that connected his lineage to virtually every important person in history, including biblical and mythological figures as well. De Vere seriously purported that his lineage made him super-human, a member of the “Dragon race,” and he would accept applications to his order from other people with lineage stemming from royal bloodlines that he claimed were part of the Dragon family. I was actually asked to join and even, for a time, lead the “Dragon Court,” and helped Nicholas de Vere to publish his first book explaining his claims: The Dragon Legacy. He had many fanatical followers who believed his claims, and I admit, I helped to promote them.”
Expand Your Mind Through Dreaming: How To Work With Liminal Dream States, Part One
This is Part 1 of a 6-part live interactive webinar that is being produced and broadcast by Evolver Learning Lab.
Wednesday, February 10th, 6:30 to 9:00 PM
INACS @ 12593 Research Blvd Ste 302, Austin, TX (MAP) Please RSVP via Meetup.com
Monthly discussion on the latest news and research into the fields of inquiry covered within our anomalous collections including: UFOs and Ufology, Consciousness, Parapsychology, Fortean and Paranormal Phenomena, Cryptozoology, Parapolitics and Conspiracy, Human Potential … and MORE!
The Anomaly Archives holds monthly meetings (usually) on the Fourth Saturday of each month. Contact SMiles Lewis or Mark Muecke via email for updates. The meetings are FREE (Donations Welcomed!) and held from 1-3pm at the INACS / Anomaly Archives headquarters located in North West Austin. (Map)
February 2nd, 2016 – Welcome back to our new weekly email newsletter from the Anomaly Archives / Scientific Anomaly Institute in Austin, Texas. We’re highlighting recent anomalous news, upcoming events, as well as books, magazines, and researchers of note.
Book of the Week: The Manna-Machine
This book from 1978 is one of many in our collection of Ancient Astronaut Theory books. The whimsical cover features an artist’s recreation of the alleged “device” given to the Israelites (by God?) and which allegedly sustained them during their forty year journey in the Sinai Desert.
“Featured in Season One of Ancient Aliens … Sassoon and Dale’s theory posits that a machine drew in moisture from the air and through some technological means was powered by a nuclear reactor (aka the Ark of the Covenant, a topic for another day). The machine then allegedly created some sort of algae-based food.” – AncientAliensDebunked.com
Scientists discover that our brain waves can be sent by electrical fields
“…it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions or diffusion.” …According to the researchers, this is evidence that the propagation mechanism for the activity is consistent with the electrical field.
“The results indicate that electric fields (ephaptic effects) are capable of mediating propagation of self-regenerating neural waves,” they write. …
If their findings, which are reported in The Journal of Neuroscience, can be expounded in further studies, it could help us to better understand how brain waves are associated with things like memory, epilepsy, and healthy physiology.
Saturday, July 26th, 2014 – Free Event – Donations Welcomed! Doors open at 6:30 pm – Lecture begins promptly at 7 pm CST.
Rob Riggs (Texas) is a twenty-five year veteran journalist, has authored the non-fiction book In the Big Thicket, and has contributed to another non-fiction book, Weird Texas (Sterling Press, 2005). He was a featured writer at the annual Texas Book Festival and has also done several television and radio appearances.
The Anomaly Archives is proud to present for our fellow Austinites, Texas Bigfoot Researcher Rob Riggs. Rob is an anomaly within the cryptozoological world of bigfoot research. He leans away from the simple “blood and guts” interpretation of bigfoot as simply an elusive and undiscovered hominid of America’s wild-places. He tries to account for the stranger aspects of tales of encounters with the mysterious creatures by exploring the possible relevance of parapsychological research. He’s very well read across a wide range of related paranormal fields of study and has applied these far-flung areas of inquiry to the enigma of bigfoot. He believes the keys to unlocking the mystery likely involve a deeper understanding of aboriginal Native American cultures and their views on the psychic abilities of the creatures. He also feels that there may be clues to understanding these creatures through explorations of shape-shifting shamans, altered states of consciousness, and the mysterious energies associated with luminous ball-of-light phenomena known as Ghost Lights, which occur in both the dry desert West Texas region of Marfa to the humid swamp lands surrounding Bragg Road that runs through the Big Thicket in East Texas.
I first met Rob shortly after the 2001 publication of his fantastic book, In The Big Thicket: On The Trail of the Wild Man. In late 2002 I participated in an extensive interview with him that was published in two parts within the Austin Para Times news-magazine, and I was lucky to see him speak at a few bigfoot conferences and to accompany him (and another East Texas bigfoot researcher, Chester Moore Jr.) on an overnight investigation along a remote stretch of the Sabine river that was accessible only by boat.
We hope you will join us Saturday night, July 26th for Rob’s presentation.
In the meantime, we hope you’ll enjoy the following excerpts from my past commentaries on Rob Riggs and the Texas Bigfoot Research scene.
– SMiles Lewis
From my interview in WEIRD Magazine, March 2010…
Most people don’t think of Texas when they hear about bigfoot but I’ve said for years that any big discovery about these elusive creatures is very likely going to come from research done here in Texas. Our big state has a long history of bigfoot sightings with a wide variety of regional names associated with these creatures including Wild Man, Hairy Man, Swamp Ape / Skunk Ape, Wooly Booger, to name just a few. The Piney Woods of East Texas’ Big Thicket have apparently played home to a number of such human / bigfoot encounters as documented in Rob Riggs’ excellent book In the Big Thicket: On the Trail of the Wildman.
Texas has one of the best organized bigfoot investigation groups in the country: The TBRC – Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy is a non-profit outfit doing some of the best ongoing instrumented cryptozoology field research not just in Texas’ Big Thicket but also into the forests that spread from here into Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. They also have one of the best annual bigfoot conferences in the country, previously held in Jefferson and most recently in Tyler. In fact for a time, Texas was home to two annual bigfoot events, one put on by the TBRC and one hosted by another fantastic Texas bigfoot hunter named Chester Moore Jr., called the Southern Crypto Conference.
The Anomaly Archives has a sizable section of books and videos devoted to Cryptozoology and the hunt for bigfoot, Sasquatch and Yeti.
I realize that many people find it very difficult to believe in bigfoot, but consider this: legendary primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall even thinks there is good evidence for the existence of an undiscovered North American primate…
Dr. Goodall: Well now, you’ll be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist. Ira Flatow: You are? Dr. Goodall: Yeah. I’ve talked to so many Native Americans who all describe the same sounds, two who have seen them. I’ve probably got about, oh, thirty books that have come from different parts of the world, from China from, from all over the place, and there was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper just last week which says that British scientists have found what they believed to be a yeti hair and that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal. National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday – 9/27/02
Folks should check out the recent film released in 2008, Wild Man of the Navidad. It’s a nicely done retro horror movie based on stories of bigfoot-like wild people from the Navidad region northwest of Victoria. And let’s not forget the Hairy Man Road legends in Round Rock which now has its own yearly festival.
In June 2005, Rob Riggs helped sponsor the Texas Ghost Lights Conference with the Anomaly Archives. This phenomenal event featured such renowned researchers as Paul Devereux, Nick Redfern, and James Bunnell. Rob Riggs also presented and I MC’d the event. The day after this 6 hour conference we all went on a trip to Bragg Road in the heart of the Big Thicket. The photo below was taken by Nick Redfern during our trip to East Texas. In it, I appear to be imitating the lumbering gate of bigfoot’s most famous representative, “Patty,” from the Patterson Gimlin film footage.
“Preparing to investigate the Big Thicket in 2005 (on the left) SMiles Lewis and (on the right) Paul Devereux (Nick Redfern)” [Photo from Monsters of Texas by Ken Gerhard & Nick Redfern]
In The Big Thicket: On the Trail of the Wild Man – Exploring Nature’s Mysterious Dimension by Rob Riggs.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to go on my first Bigfoot Expedition with a couple of friends who are part of the cutting edge community of Texas bigfoot researchers. Rob Riggs and I teamed up with our expedition leader, Chester Moore, Jr. Chester hosts the annual Southern Crypto Conference in Conroe, Texas (see the Events section for info on this exciting conference happening in two weeks) and is a leading light in the hunt for cryptozoological critters around the State. Chester Moore, Junior and Senior, had staked out the likely stomping grounds of a family of bigfoot critters at a spot on the Sabine river accessible only by boat. Recent activity found by their investigations led them to believe we would find plenty of evidence for the existence of one of nature’s most elusive lost mammals. Though we didn’t ever see any bigfoot in the flesh, we did see a number of signs of their presence, including tracks that were cast by the Chesters.
But that’s one of the biggest mysteries about the possible existence of bigfoot – where is the flesh and blood? In fact, just as in UFOlogy where you have two main camps of belief, one described as the Nuts-And-Bolts camp and another that could be categorized as the Paranormal or MultiDimensional camp, so too in Bigfoot oriented CryptoZoology where there exists a Blood-And-Guts camp and a MultiDimensional camp. The Chesters are a very open-minded bunch of “Blood-And-Gutters;” while entertaining the ideas espoused by Rob Riggs, they still think we are dealing exclusively with an as yet formally accepted North American Hominid and has even founded the American Primate Conservation Alliance. Personally, I feel completely convinced by the incredibly respectable efforts of Chester Moore as well as the other Texas Bigfoot Researchers. I fully expect the next biggest Bigfoot discovery to come from East Texas. That said, I have always been equally drawn towards the more inclusive Anomalist approach to Bigfoot research. And Rob Riggs has written a powerful tome exploring these more multidimensional possibilities inherent in an understanding of the larger Bigfoot phenomena as it relates to those recurring Spook Lights (aka Ghost Lights) that seem to haunt the same regions as the strange Wild Man.
Rob Riggs’ book is titled In the Big Thicket, and though there is little in that title to give it away, this book covers the gamut of Fortean / Anomaly subjects. With East Texas’ Big Thicket as the locus and launching point Rob explores the subjects of Ghost Lights (BOLs or Balls Of Light said to “haunt” specific locales), Bigfoot and related legendary humanoids (like those from the book’s subtitle, On the Trail of the Wild Man). PLUS Rob covers the connections between strange electromagnetic effects and their implications for non-local consciousness and the paranormal powers it can manifest.
Rob Riggs expertly weaves together these seemingly disparate subjects relating personal accounts that are as much travelogue as journalistic investigation. In fact Rob’s background in radio and newspaper journalism facilitate his skillful ability to present his ideas in a straightforward and naturally flowing manner. This chronicling of his own encounters with luminous phenomena in the Big Thicket and elsewhere are presented alongside the experiences of other witnesses to the weird.
Rob’s conclusion combine the research of many fine investigators of these mysteries, however, his ideas about the ultimate nature of the phenomena are very unique. He suspects that the ghost lights might not only appear to be intelligent creatures with a connection to the wild man, bigfoot, and other lycanthrope type shape-shifters, but that that they are in fact the luminous disembodied consciousnesses of advanced human shamans like those in the folk traditions of voodoo, cajun folktales and the Haitian Society of “Flying Men” researched by Douchan Girsi.
Wild ideas indeed. But Rob invokes the cherished research of such famous (and some infamous) luminaries as earth lights researchers Paul Devereux and David Clarke, tectonic strain theorist Michael Persinger, Fortean and Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, ParaCryptozUfologist Ted Holiday, guerilla ontologist Robert Anton Wilson, writer Jacques Bergier, journalist John Keel, contact artist Paul Laffoley, Cycles of Heaven author Guy Lyon Playfair, Douchan Girsi – author of Faces in the Smoke, and of course ufologist Jacques Vallee.
Some other researchers whose ideas fit into all this quite well, include Jenny Randles, Albert Budden and Dr. Greg Little. All three of these researchers have written multiple volumes explicating the intricate connections between these Spook Light phenomena and strange encounters with anomalous entities. While none of them goes so far as to suggest that the lights represent the wandering consciousness of yogis or shamans, each of them postulate that the lights interface with human consciousness in some way and that there may in fact be an Overmind such as the collective unconscious or indeed the Archetypes themselves from that same Jungian realm, at work in these multiple mysteries.
Anomaly Archives presents Robert Powell on UFOs & Govt
Saturday, March 29th, 2014
Free Event – Donations Welcomed!
Robert Powell has been the Director of Research at MUFON since 2007 and is also the head of MUFON’s Science Review Board. He is an active Field Investigator in the state of Texas having completed over 120 investigations and is a MUFON Star Team member. He is one of two authors of the detailed radar/witness report on the Stephenville Lights. Robert is also a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the National Space Society, and the Académie d’Ufologie. Robert is active with FOIA requests to various government organizations to obtain information on historical cases and is a co-author of a book published in July 2012: UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. Robert currently resides in Austin, Texas.
Robert has a BS in Chemistry and is a former collegiate debater. He has 28 years in engineering management in the semiconductor industry from 1978 to 2006. While working at Advanced Micro Devices he has taken numerous internal courses related to device physics, design of experiments, and statistical analysis. He helped Advanced Micro Devices develop its first flash memory technology that is used in today’s flash cards for cameras, PCs, video cameras, and other products. His experience includes managing a state-of-the-art chemistry laboratory and managing a Research and Development group that worked on nanotechnology using atomic force microscopes, near-field optical microscopy, and other techniques. Robert is also a co-holder of four patents related to nanotechnology.
Talk Synopsis: UFOs & Government: The Historical and Changing Role of Government over Time
Governments have been concerned about UFO sighting reports since WWII, but historians have never made a concerted attempt to understand their often contradictory responses to the phenomenon. How could something of such potential technological and national security consequence have left no visible trace in the history books? Whether it’s a conspiracy or not, the subject has been marginalized to such an extent that it’s as if the military never acted with alarm on the heels of a UFO sighting, as if the intelligence community never took up the issue behind closed doors, as if government research and development efforts never attempted to duplicate the phenomenon. But they have. Robert Powell will discuss how governments, especially the U.S. government, have dealt with the UFO phenomenon and will provide a hypothesis as to why the phenomenon took its roots during WWII.
Welcome to 2013. The Anomaly Archives won’t be holding a regular meeting this month but we wanted to let you know about an interesting event happening downtown, Saturday, January 26th. Here’s your chance to tour Austin’s Museum of the Weird, listen to cryptozoologists Lyle Blackburn, Nick Redfern, Ken Gerhard, & Dave Coleman, dine at the Chupacabra Cantina, watch the Creature From Black Lake, and have drinks at the Jackalope Bar. All in one afternoon / evening! But reserve your spot early, seating is limited!
Come join Cryptomundo and The Museum of the Weird, www.MuseumOfTheWeird.com, for an afternoon and evening of fun and frivolity.
Nick Redfern: Wildman! The Monstrous and Mysterious Saga of the British Bigfoot, Monster Diary: On the Road in Search of Strange and Sinister Creatures, The World’s Weirdest Places, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter, Monsters of Texas
Ken Gerhard: Big Bird! Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters, Monsters of Texas
“It’s always a pleasure to return to Austin, which in some weird way was definitely the epicenter of my literary career, such as it’s been.”
On Thursday, September 6th, I had the pleasure of finally seeing William Gibson in-the-flesh. Despite his being sick with a cold (he offered to infect any attendees with it who might’ve had such a Cronenbergian desire) Gibson read an interesting piece from his new book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and regaled the audience with his observations on a few subjects including fashion.
It’s weird, really weird reading any of this stuff because I never read any of it before. I never read it to an audience. These were written for magazine publication. The weirdest of these, I think, the one that is most mysterious to me is an essay called Dead Man Sings that I wrote in 1998 for ASAP, which is a Forbes magazine giveaway or something. … they got in touch with me and said ‘we’d like you to write something’ and I said ‘what’ and they said ‘it doesn’t matter … [write] what you feel like.’ I’d never really gotten that before … so I really took it to heart and I sat down and sort of channeled this thing I’m about to read you and with no idea where it was coming from or really what it was about. I realized, when I was going through all these pieces, this is the one I’ve gone back to more in my writing and as sometimes happens, I think that this thing which I wrote without understanding – I wrote it in a weird kind of trance – because it didn’t matter and it had given me permission to say whatever I wanted to say, which I had never had before in non-fiction. … So this thing just came out, what I’m about to read to you, and its probably the one thing in this book that I discovered more in, over the years, since I wrote it, I suspect in some way its been the program for a lot of the fiction I’ve written since.
The essay Dead Man Sings (published as “Dead Man Speaks“ apparently) that Gibson read for us that evening is certainly evocative of much of what makes Gibson’s writings so telling and important. They grapple with the effects of technology on our culture and our experiencing of memory and history. It reminded me of a video I’d recently seen of him (filmed many years ago inside a moving car) in which he reflects on one of the details he mentioned in the essay, that is the invention of the sound recording and that period of time when there were still humans (backwoods Appalachian Americans in his example) who were being recorded for the first time and the fundamental difference (to his hears) of those recordings to everything since.
We live in, have lived through, a strange time. I know this because when I was a child the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded. I know this because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was once no rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black and white, and did not run as the living run. Because the world’s attic was still untidy. Because there were old men in the mountain valleys of my Virginia childhood who remembered a time before recorded music.
After the reading (and towards the end of his face-time with us and before beginning the autographing line) there was an opening for me to ask him a question that had been on my mind for a while… But before I asked the question I wanted to show my sincere feelings for the words he’d written a couple of years ago when he posted the following to his twitter feed:
“Very sad to learn of the death of @mactonnies. Whip-smart young Fortean surrealist dudes are too thin on the ground to begin with.” twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/5096995349
As I began expressing my thanks the look on his face gave me the impression that he hadn’t understood what I was saying – perhaps it was just the idea of someone thanking him for a “tweet” (let alone one from three years ago) that struck him as odd. Once I’d shifted my comment to a question he gave a not surprising to me reply which I’m happy to add to the public record:
SMiles Lewis: I’d like to thank you for your 2009 tweet which consisted of kind words on the passing of Mac Tonnies. There’s things in your book Pattern Recognition and other books that make me ask this question: Are you now or have you ever been a Fortean?
William Gibson: Oh, I’m totally a Fortean! I’ve been a Fortean since I was… actually I’d have to find out. I’ve been a Fortean ever since Ace Books republished Charles Fort’s three great weird philosophical books about strange shit that he’d found in old old newspapers. And I continue to be … That’s Charles Fort for those of you who don’t know him. If you wanna have a really strange experience go find The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort which was published in the 1920s and has two sequels. It’s kind of the mother of all X-Files stuff.
The Government’s Top Secret Pursuit of Mystical Relics, Ancient Astronauts, and Lost Civilizations
Austin, Texas – Saturday, September 29th, 7-9pm CST
ACSL – Austin Center for Spiritual Living at
5555 North Lamar, Suite D-117
The Pyramids and the Pentagon is a detailed study of how and why government agencies have, for decades, taken a clandestine and profound interest in numerous archeological, historical, and religious puzzles. Focusing primarily upon the classified work of the U.S. Government, The Pyramids and the Pentagon invites you to take a wild ride into the fog-shrouded past. It’s a ride that incorporates highlights such as:
The CIA’s top-secret files on Noah’s Ark
U.S. Army documents positing that the Egyptian Pyramids were constructed via levitation
Disturbing military encounters with Middle Eastern djinns
Claims of nuclear warfare in ancient India
Links between the Face on Mars and the pharaohs
And many more
Nick Redfern’s The Pyramids and the Pentagon clearly and provocatively demonstrates that deep and dark conspiracies exist within the shadowy world of officialdom–conspiracies that have the ability to rock the foundations of civilization, religion, and history to their very core. The strange and amazing secrets of the past are just a heavily guarded government vault away.
Another recent book by Nick Redfern: “The NASA Conspiracies”
Please join us in welcoming Nick back to Austin and the Anomaly Archives for an exciting discussion about his latest book on The Government’s Top Secret Pursuit of Mystical Relics, Ancient Astronauts, and Lost Civilizations.
More information about the Scientific Anomaly Institute is available here:
