Our Book-Of-The-Week is back and this issue’s selection is a personal favorite of mine. In the 1990s, when I was knee-deep in anomalous fringe-culture, I had come across the works of the nasally-voiced Terence McKenna through the psychedelic rave video Alien Dreamtime (by Ken Adams). I’d read an article or two by or about Terence but it was always something else to actually hear him speak. Years later I’d read this week’s Book-Of-The-Week selection, but I still remember coming across the trippy audio version of the book about he and his brothers adventures in the Amazon; where they were looking for the Spirit-Vine, Ayahuasca, but instead found the alien mushroom. It’s a fantastic tale and the audio version is filled with rain-forest noises and zany sound effects. Be sure to check out the links to digital scans of that book as well as streamable “Talking Book” versions.

As usual, we have a treasure trove of anomalousHEADLINES linked to articles of note from the past few weeks. Here in Austin, Texas we are in the midst of the annual Traffic-Jam known as SXSW. One of the few blessings during these Ides of March is the fact that it coincides with Spring Break, and so the incoming hordes are slightly off-set by the absent school aged kids and their parents clogging the roads. But there are always interesting things afoot during this “South By So What” season, and this year is no different. As a survivor of a mass shooting (The day madness went on parade – San Antonio Express / DANGER: Parade of Mother’s Intuition by SMiles Lewis) I’m very interested in seeing the latest documentary about Austin’s infamous 1966 UT Tower Shooting. It’s getting good reviews and the clips I’ve seen look very well-done and respectful. I’ve met at least one of the survivors featured in the film and he, like me and others, have grave concerns about the upcoming synchronicity of the… Texas campus carry law will take effect on 50th anniversary of Charles Whitman shooting at UT(MySanAntonio.com). You can hear me talk about the 1979 San Antonio shooting in this archive of the March 11th, 2008 episode of my PsiOp-Radio show… starts at about the 48-50 minute mark within the MP3 archive.

Also in our HEADLINES section … Satanic Panics and rumors of ritual child abuse. At last month’s public meeting there was a lot of talk about tales of elite parapolitical pedophile trafficking and abuse networks. Human trafficking and child abuse are things we KNOW occur. Allegations of SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) have rightly been characterized as failures of law enforcement through bad interviewing techniques used with the alleged child-victims and witch-hunt-like round-ups of the accused. Hundreds of convictions from the 1980s have been overturned and it does appear that many of these cases were not actual examples of abuse. Yet we know of far too many other cases where the abuse was real, was ritualized, was part of a network trafficking in children and young adults. Among the threads discussed during last month’s meeting was the infamous case of “The Finders” (What is the Finders Cult? – Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know – HowStuffWorks YouTube Video). In 2008 I interviewed Len Bracken, one of the few people to ever actually meet with and interview the head of “The Finders.” We spoke briefly about what he found; you can hear that interview at this link: Blue Rose Report interviews Len Bracken (mp3). Well Austin has its own historic case of an overturned SRA scenario and we’ve got links to theAustin Chronicle‘s multiple issues, articles and video covering the shattered lives of the falsely accused / wrongly convicted.

See also:

• Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children by Lloyd Demause, The Journal of Psychohistory, 21 (4) 1994
• 2016 Trauma and Dissociation Conference This Year’s Theme: “Perspectives on Trauma-Informed Care” – Ivory Garden / IGDID.org
• Survivorship’s Annual Conference – May 7 – 8, 2016, Oakland, CA – Survivorship.org
• S.M.A.R.T.  ritual abuse newsletter was founded in 1995 by Neil Brick. RitualAbuse.us
• ChildAbuseWiki.org
• Naming the Unspeakable: Non-State Torture – BornePress.com
• “Finders Keepers” by Dave McGowan, 2000
• “The Finders’ Keeper” by Kenn Thomas and Len Bracken, Steamshovel Press, Issue #16, 1998
• “Through a Glass, Very Darkly” by Gordon Witkin, Peter Cary and Ancel Martinez, U.S. News and World Report, December 27, 1993 – January 3, 1994
• Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control by Alison Miller, 2011
• The Boy in the Box by Whitley Strieber Friday, March 14, 2003

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In 1971 ethnobotanist McKenna (The Archaic Revival), his brother Dennis and three friends boated to a town in Amazonian Colombia, seeking a hallucinogenic plant that enables the Witoto tribe to talk to elf-like “little men.” In psychedelicized ravings interspersed with diary excerpts, McKenna records their experiences after ingesting mind-altering mushrooms and other psychoactive plants.

A flying saucer slowly flew over McKenna’s head; he calls it a “holographic mirage” of a future technology. Dennis had a revelation about a “psychofluid” that pervades the universe. McKenna flashes forward to Hawaii in 1975 where mantis-like creatures from hyperspace attack his lover, and flashes back to his tantric lovemaking in Tibet and to Indonesia where unrepentant Nazi scientists tried to recruit him in 1970. He posits the existence of a particle of time, the chronon, which conditions matter. A bizarre book.

See also… other spotlighted news & event links below!

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