Anomalies – Part 1

You know you love ’em…

After my last three substantive posts, all based in consensus reality I am heartily sick of the real world. From  corrupt politicians in Canada (here’s another one with some really scathing general comments about the lot of them), through Global scandals on money laundering, through continuous evidence of war crimes in Syria I am fed up with most of humanity and its works. Except sailboats.

King’s Cup 2010

So I am going to go adventuring, at least mentally.

I have recently been reading a couple of interesting books on anomalies, one by John B. Alexander and another by Colm Kelleher. Both hold PhD degrees, Colonel Alexander’s in (I think) Public Policy and Administration (obtained from a reputable distance learning school) and Dr. Kelleher’s in Biochemistry from Trinity College Dublin. Both had long and distinguished mainstream careers, Colonel Alexander’s in the US Army where he enlisted as a Private, retired as a Colonel of Infantry in 1988 and commanded troops in Vietnam. As a staff Officer and Washington insider he created and ran an unofficial Interagency investigation into UFOs from the early 80s and his latest book recounts his views on that subject and other anomalous phenomenon.

After he retired from the Military he became (amongst other things) an investigator for the National Institute of Discovery Sciences  (NIDS) where he collaborated with Dr. Kelleher on various projects including work at the infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

After obtaining his PhD in biochemistry in 1983, Dr. Kelleher worked at the Ontario Cancer Institute, the Terry Fox Laboratory at the British Columbia Cancer Research Center in Vancouver and the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver. More recently, Dr. Kelleher served as Research Director for Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas and as administrator for one of its subsidiaries, Space Sciences, Inc.

Dr. Kelleher was team leader and project manager for the NIDS during its 8 years of operations until it closed in 2004.

Reading these books on anomalous phenomena has fired me up on the subject again.

One of the most influential books I have ever read was Robert Anton Wilson’s The New Inquisition. Wilson discusses various unexplained phenomena and makes the point that mainstream science does not like to consider anomalies – it can be career suicide and dissenting scientists are often hounded out of their learned societies. So called skeptics are often really debunkers who don’t let the evidence get in the way of their preconceived positions that such things don’t exist and therefore they can’t.

The 1968 Condon Report  on the US Air Force  Project Blue Book  investigation into UFOs is a very good example of that mind set. The summary of the Report (written by Prof Condon himself) basically ignored the substantial number of highly anomalous unexplained cases presented in the main body of the report.

So there was and still is a strong bias amongst ‘serious’ scientists and investigators against discussing these troublesome subjects.

However, as Dr. Kelleher, writing with journalist George Knapp in their excellent book on the NIDS Investigation of the Skinwalker Ranch points out:

“At its most basic level, science is supposed to represent the investigation of the unexplained, not the explanation of the uninvestigated. Yet few scientists are willing to risk the criticism of their peers (or the withdrawal of their research grants) if it means pursuing the subjects that are deemed by unofficial acclamation to be unworthy tabloid fodder, the rants of disturbed minds, or the folklore of drunken trailer park lowlifes.”

While I certainly admit to getting drunk now and again, I don’t live in a trailer park and I have a lifetimes experience as a scientifically trained investigator. I admit that various people in my life have considered me a lowlife. I leave it to my vast army of readers to decide.

So this post is going to provide some information about some of the anomalies I have had the personal privilege of encountering during my last 65 orbits around the sun. These include ghosts, UFOs, dowsing, spirit intrusions from another dimension, advice from advanced spirits via channelling, evidence of unknown earth history and a whole lot of shit that I don’t have names for. Yes, it is pretty much all anecdotal and except for the Sphinx anomaly I don’t have any real evidence that would hold up to peer review. But I am a trained observer with advanced degrees based in science and law and with more than 40 years experience as an investigator. So for what it is worth (and it is after all my blog), I am going to set down a few of my experiences with the unexplained.

Anyone who cares to read this post can tell me I am full of shit if they want. Well maybe that’s true, but I know what I saw, and consensus reality doesn’t always fit in the picture.

UFOs I have dealt with already. Ghosts – I only have one good personal experience of one and will save that for later. Spirits and channelling and such are a little sensitive for personal reasons (both  mine and others) and I need to be careful there so I think I will start with dowsing.

Dowsing

Back in first year Geology one of the most popular lectures of the year was Professor Fred Joliffe’s lecture on dowsing during which he thoroughly debunked it totally and demonstrated to all hundred or so first year intellectual sponges sitting in front of him that it was all a load of codswallop and didn’t work. A bit like an avuncular James Randi.

I took it aboard as gospel of course. I was learning to be a scientist and engineer after all!

About a decade later, a couple of years into my first career as a newly minted consulting geotechnical engineer, I was spending a lot of time sitting near drilling rigs while the crews bored holes in the ground, took samples and carried out testing for engineering design purposes. One balmy summer day in 1978 or 1979, I found myself watching a track mounted hollow-stem auger rig, not unlike the one in the image below, as it was unloaded and set up at a site in Mississauga, in the west of the Greater Toronto Metropolitan Area.

The drillers were setting up to take soil and rock samples along the alignment of a new storm sewer tunnel we were helping design and I was running the site investigation. I had been all over the extended site in previous days, locating proposed borehole locations every few hundred meters or so along the alignment and undertaking the necessary service clearances.

I had contacted all of the utility companies and located watermains, storm drains, electrical cables, gas lines, cable TV lines and so forth, made sure the borehole locations were clear of all (doesn’t do to drill a hole in a watermain) and had spray painted big red bullseyes on the ground where I wanted the holes.

At most places I was expecting to run into a couple of feet of soft soil, maybe old fill (the area had first been settled as farmland about a hundred and fifty years before – and we always had to watch out for Indian – oops, pardon me – First Nation artifacts), then glacial till, then limestone bedrock which we would core down past the invert of the planned storm sewer using a diamond drill core barrel for later lab examination.

This particular site was a dusty vacant lot adjacent to a local road and the hole was about 50 feet back from the road where I had parked my first (and last) ever new car (a flashy metallic green Toyota Corolla hatchback with an illegal radar detector and a comfortable cruising speed of 130 kph – but I digress) and where the transporter had unloaded the drill rig.

About 0930 hours I guess, the drill crew backed up the rig to my mark,  erected the mast and unloaded their drilling paraphernalia. I got my big clipboard out and started filling in my first drilling log sheet.

Then, just as we were set to go, the driller did something weird. He rummaged in an old tool box, came up with a piece of wire bent into an L-shape, held it loosely in his hand out in front of him and walked around the rig. I watched, quite mystified.

As he got level with the business end of the rig, the wire suddenly swung to one side. He stopped, backed up – the wire swung straight forward again. He walked forward and this time kept going as the wire swung sideways again and then straightened out. He walked around the other side of the rig and once more the wire deflected as he passed the spot on the other side in line with the bullseye on the ground.

He turned to me, “I cain’t drill here, thur’s sumfin’ down thur, yull hef ta move the hole”.

“What? How do you know?” I asked.

He gestured with the wire, shrugged, “Dowsing rod”.

The cocky young engineer (me) was having none of this nonsense, “There’s nothing there, I’ve cleared all the services.”

“Thur’s sumfin’ down thur,” he insisted, “y’ gotta move the hole”.

I went back to my car, got the service clearance file out of my briefcase and double checked that all had been properly signed off. All clear.

I went back to show him the checklist. He shrugged again, still insisting, “Thur’s sumfin’ down thur”.

He was missing the point, dowsing didn’t work, and besides, I was the boss. I thought for a minute and then, in a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead told him, “Drill”.

He wasn’t happy, “Yer fault effen we hit sumfin’ “.

I stood back to watch. He walked back to the rig, muttering, said something to his assistant who was, in time-honored driller’s helper fashion asleep in the cab from the previous evening’s beer. The helper jumped out with alacrity, and backed away from the rig. The driller rummaged in the cab and came up with some really heavy duty rubber gloves, pulled them on, then fired up the big diesel engine. He worked his levers, the hydraulic drill head pulled the auger stem off the ground and he gave it a quick spin and dropped it back onto the ground onto the middle of my bullseye.

“Ye sure?” He asked.

I had a momentary vision of the entire City of Mississauga being plunged into darkness and me being led into court in handcuffs. But I was young. WTF.

“Drill!” I said.  He used a stick to push the lever to engage the drive then backed away. The auger spun, the steel teeth bit into the ground and the auger head quickly disappeared into the dirt.

About 3 feet down, suddenly there was the gawdawful unmistakable shriek of steel-on steel and the ten-ton rig started shuddering and bouncing on its chassis. The driller leaped back in and shut it down, turned to me with a reproving glare. “Now ye believe me?”

I stared in amazement for a moment, then… “Teach me how to do that trick with the wire.”

And the rest of the morning passed at the expense of the taxpayers of the City of Mississauga while the driller and I played with his bent wire all over the site and his helper napped peacefully in the cab of the rig. I found it worked for me too (apparently it doesn’t for everybody). We located all of the services I had already marked and we even located a big watermain so distant from the hole I hadn’t bothered to mark it on the ground.

After lunch I picked another spot about twenty feet away, and after checking it with the dowsing rod we got back to work.

About three weeks later we were sinking some trial pits on the various sites and when I had the chance I got the backhoe operator to dig on top of whatever it was we had hit. Sure enough, he unearthed an old flattened steel drainage culvert that had been buried some time back, probably when whatever old farmhouse or barn or whatever which had been on the site was demolished.

Throughout the rest of my career as a geotechie I used the bent wire to check whatever ground I was about to dig up. It works on pipes, wires, buried things. It even works inside buildings where it will respond to cables and pipes both overhead and underground.

You can make a dowsing rod yourself by taking some wire snips to a coat hangar. Cut it and bend it into an L shape so you have about a one foot long length and about a five or six inch length on the short L. Hold it level and loosely in your hand by the short leg with the long leg pointed forward and walk over the suspect area. Go try it in the back garden or over the tile bed for your septic tank. I dare you.

I don’t have an explanation for it but it has never failed for me. I think it perhaps may have something to do with the human energy field reacting to subtle changes in the earth’s energy field due to disturbed ground or other discontinuities, but I don’t know. That’s the engineer in me talking rather than the scientist – who cares why it works as long as it works?

At one stage I thought about having a crack at Randi’s million dollar challenge, but then I read his conditions. I couldn’t do that although I am confident I could find the pipes within a foot or so at least, whether they had water in them or not. A lot of Randi’s critics reckoned he had rigged the deck.

BTW, there is a conventional (sort of) explanation for dowsing phenomena –  the ideomotor effect.

Unknown Earth History – the Age of the Sphinx

This is one I really got my teeth into back in the 90s. As set out in my UFO Post, I first started getting interested in this stuff in about ’92. By 1994 my interest had broadened to include various other phenomena – once you start into the weirdness it all kind of tends to lump together. You find yourself surfing from one interesting story to another, trying to keep an open mind while excluding the obvious  trash and not being so open minded that (in the words of my arch skeptic ex-brother in law) your brains fall out.

From UFOs to theories about ancient astronauts (cf. Von Daniken), I got into unknown earth history and stories about ancient civilizations we know nothing about. Atlantis of course, plus Mu and Lemuria, Edgar Cayce, the Tunguska event, (here’s my review of my friend Vladimir Rubtsov’s excellent book on the event BTW), trace radiation supposedly from 8000 year old nuclear explosions in Pakistan and so forth. All (except for Tunguska) pretty speculative if entertaining… and then I hit paydirt.

This from a post I wrote on Compuserve to an anomalies interest group in January 1995, immediately after I returned from a ‘New Age’ tour to Egypt. I’ve spiced it up with a few images:

“Some time ago I promised D___ M____ I would make some observations for him at the site of the Great Sphinx at Giza and I am posting them on the open forum because they may be of some general interest, in particular, as they support the view that the Sphinx is an artifact of an unknown, prehistoric civilization (or so it seems to me).

Firstly, some background:

The Great Sphinx is located on the edge of the Giza plateau, shockingly close to downtown Cairo, about 10 kilometers West of the Nile and perhaps 500 meters East of the Khafre pyramid (one of the two ‘Great’ pyramids). It is sited in a depression excavated on the edge of a bluff about 40 meters high which marks the edge of the Giza plateau. In 2500 BC the bluff was on the edge of a Canal brought in from the Nile.

The Sphinx is 21 meters high and 73 meters long and was carved out of native limestone in-situ and it sits in a ditch in the native bedrock.

Conventional Egyptology attributes the construction of the Sphinx to the king Khafre (Chephren), a Fourth Dynasty monarch (ie about 2700 BC), whose brother is credited with construction of the second ‘Great’ pyramid. The Sphinx, together with the ‘Great’ Pyramids of Khafre and Khufu (Cheops), is the only one remaining of the seven wonders of the ancient world which were exalted by the Greeks in the second century BC.

 When Napoleon’s expedition arrived in the late 18th Century, the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in the sand and the Temple of the Sphinx (sometimes referred to as the Temple of the Sun) adjacent to it was buried and invisible from the surface. Caviglia excavated it in 1816, but by 1853 it was buried up to its neck again (the prevailing April Khamsin winds blow sand into the hollow). Mariette excavated it again in 1853 but by 1888, it was buried again and was dug out by Mastero. By 1916, it was covered again, and was excavated by Baedecker and has been kept cleaned out ever since.

It is interesting to note that Thutmosis IV placed a stone tablet between it’s front paws in about 1400 BC, on which he recorded a vision wherein the Sphinx promised him the crown of all Egypt if he would see to removing the sand that was troubling it (he dug it out and subsequently became Pharoah).

There is another tablet in front of it erected by Ramses II in about 1200 BC, which indicates that it was uncovered during the intervening period, but when Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, although he made great play of the pyramids and the underground Temple, he did not so much as mention the Sphinx – ergo, it was probably buried. Just another giant head lying about on the sand.

Napoleon Expedition Drawing

 Obviously, when it is left alone, it quickly becomes covered in sand (and thus unsusceptible to wind-born or aeolian erosion).

Late 19th Early 20th C. Note Weathering Patterns and Large neck

 Over the past three-quarters of a Century, there has been considerable controversy regarding the age and origin of the Sphinx (and a number of the other important Egyptian monuments as well).

 The ‘unconventional’ views are exemplified by those put forward by the Alsatian philosopher R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz in the 1940s and more recently by John Anthony West.

To summarize, there is considerable evidence to indicate that the Sphinx and its attendant structures are very much older than the conventional view would admit. The most important of the physical evidence is the depth and character of the weathering patterns associated with the Sphinx and its enclosure. Work done in the 1990s by American geologist Dr. Robert Schoch of Boston University has essentially confirmed that the weathering patterns on the structures were caused by large quantities of flowing water over extended periods of time. Dr. Shoch’s work was presented at the Geological Society of America’s 1992 convention and essentially accepted, although there have been more recent attempts to debunk it.

 

Images courtesy of Dr. Shoch’s Website

 

Not Aeolian Weathering

The geologic record shows that the last time the region suffered any sort of large quantity of rainfall puts the age of the Sphinx at between 5,000 and 7,000 BC AS A MINIMUM.

Further, the depth of weathering of the rock at the base of the enclosure is considerably greater than that around the nearby pyramids – ergo, the base of the enclosure has been exposed for considerably longer than the plateau around the pyramids. Considering that we know this fabulous beast has spent most of it’s time over the last 5000 years covered over in sand (and thereby impervious to weathering) this is an interesting fact and tends to indicate a much earlier date than could normally be calculated using weathering effects. Although the arguments are too long and complex to relate here, the gist of them is that the Sphinx probably dates from before the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 BC, and may be much MUCH older.

On December 19th 1994, I had the opportunity to spend about an hour and a half crawling over and around the publicly accessible areas of the site, in bright sunshine and dry weather. I made the following notes and observations:

The blocks in the Temple of the Sun next to the Sphinx have granite facing blocks (Ashlars for all you Freemasons reading this) over the limestone. Some of the granite blocks are up to 25 tons. The granite was quarried at Aswan, some 700 kilometres upstream of Giza. The granite and limestone blocks in the Temple have been dressed and fitted together with an uncanny precision. In particular, in places, the granite blocks have the same slight rounding on corners, tight fit and ‘jigsaw’ appearance as the stones I have seen in many of the pre-Columbian monuments in South America, for example, Sacsaywayman and Macchu Picchu. The peculiar ‘jigsaw’ fit is remarkably similar to the South American stones. The visible limestone blocks range up to about 50 cubic metres, ie, perhaps 100 tons, and some of my sources list blocks of up to 200 tons. The blocks are buff coloured, fossiliferous, local limestone, perhaps somewhat silty and dolomitic to my rather rusty eye, exactly the same stone as that exposed in the ‘Great’ pyramids, however, even the blocks that were buried in sand in the Sphinx excavation are VERY much more heavily weathered than the similar limestone blocks exposed in the pyramids.

Typical weathering depths on relict joints in individual blocks of 20 cm or so – ie. the blocks have planar weathering depressions half a foot wide and a foot deep, whereas the ones at the pyramids appear fresh and virtually unweathered in comparison.

The weathering patterns on the side of the Sphinx depression are obviously water derived, not wind. Vertical and subvertical joints have been widened and weathered to considerable depth. Wind weathering does not produce that sort of vertically oriented pattern, and, in any event, the beast has been protected from wind weathering for most of recorded history through a cover of sand.

The reports on the geological investigation which identified the evidence for the Sphinx’s antiquity, note that the seismic geophysics that was done in the enclosure has identified cavities in the rock beneath the beast. While at the Sphinx, we were informed by our guide (a prominent ‘conventional’ Egyptologist), that the Egyptian Government is planning to excavate one of these cavities, beneath the left paw, sometime in 1995. I shall be looking for further information on that. Herodotus reported an underground temple, and of course we all know what Edgar Cayce said about the Sphinx.

Interestingly enough, in 1998 the Egyptians, under the direction of  Zahi Hawass (virtual ruler of the Giza Plateau since the 1980s and arch foe of ‘unconventional’ Egyptology) actually did open a number of cavities under the Sphinx, two of which were tunnels which led to large natural caverns and which had apparently been known and worked by the ancients.  Apparently they found no artifacts. Or at least did not report them if they did.

Anyone intrigued by this definite anomaly can read the full story (including geological details and refutations of ‘prosaic’ explanations here on Dr. Schoch’s website.

Dr. Schoch makes a convincing case that the head of the Sphinx was recarved in antiquity from some other effigy (hence the large and out-of-scale neck in the old pictures), perhaps a Lion – which would tie in with the location in the sky of the Constellation Leo up to about 7,900 BC.

Interlude – A Brief Reality Check

Before I get too much further into this subject it occurs to me I had better take a step back. I can hear some of my more skeptical readers like my Physics Prof brother starting to snort and gurgle at my outlandish claims.

Nonsense!!! Parallel realities?? Other dimensions??? Spooky action at a distance??? Balderdash!!! Can’t be, not possible!!!

Except… why that almost sounds like quantum mechanics?!?!

Indeed it does. It is perfectly all right for mainstream physicists to discuss quantum teleportation, instantaneous information transfer over the entire width of the known universe, the infinite number of parallel universes existing a millimeter away from us in some of the other of the 11 (or maybe 26) dimensions predicted by String Theory that we cannot see or detect.  This is the stuff of current cutting edge science and mainstream peer-reviewed journals.

That’s perfectly all right. Where they get upset is when some not-so-mainstream observer, like… Ahem… yours truly, puts forward the suggestion that what we see as ghosts, telekinesis, telepathy, UFOs, ascended spirits and other strange shit could be leaking over into our reality from the neighbouring ones (which they are happy to admit exist – at least in theory).  Well, fuck that, if the theory is right what about the reality?

This is one of the hypotheses put forward by Drs. Alexander and Kelleher to attempt to explain the undeniable and  (conventionally) unexplainable events that they documented at the Skinwalker Ranch. That’s good enough for me and with that in mind I will move on to some even weirder stuff in Part 2 of this Post – when I get around to finishing it and changing the names to protect the guilty.

Keep your eyes on the skies.