The big news on October 13th was the rescue of the Chilean miners, which a lot of you are probably getting sick of hearing about by now.The story has been a bit oversold, though certainly not for the miners, who withstood almost unbearable conditions for weeks (thanks to corporate negligence) and their families. The symbols are all over the place here, not the least of which is the fact that these men were left for dead for 17 days.
Aug. 5 – Thirty-three men are trapped about 700 metres underground when part of the San Jose Mine in Chile collapses. Aug. 22 - Rescue workers hear tapping on a drill at a depth of 688 metres. The world learns the miners are alive when they tie a note to a drill saying in capitol letters: "All 33 of us are well inside the shelter."Then there's the whole story with the rescue apparatus, conveniently called "The Phoenix:"
The miners made the smooth ascent inside a capsule called Phoenix — 13 feet tall, barely wider than their shoulders and painted in the white, blue and red of the Chilean flag. It had a door that stuck occasionally, and some wheels had to be replaced, but it worked exactly as planned.Before the days of constant media barrage, this story would have become legendary, maybe even a Gordon Lightfoot song. All of the elements are there- that primal fear of being buried alive, being left for dead and then being resurrected and returned to the world. The men made it clear this was a spiritual ordeal for them, similar in theme (though certainly not in scope) to a Mystery initiation:
A letter sent by one of them said they would take a vow of silence, to never to fully reveal the details of their underground misery. To say there were 33 trapped in the mine is wrong, Ramirez said. There were 33 men -- and God.Even the BBC picked up on the mythic elements of this drama, calling up images of Hades with the headline: "Cauldron of emotions as miners are rescued," and references to "a labyrinth of riddles & mystery." And of course that 33 has gotten a lot of attention, introducing the lay world to the joys of Numerology:
"The 33 appears in everything, everything matches, it's a miracle," said Maria Segovia, sister of miner Dario Segovia. A number of devout Catholics have also pointed out that Jesus was 33 when he was crucified, according to popular belief.And these factoids popped up in my travels:
They were located on August 22, which is the 33rd week of the year. The rescue shaft was completed last Saturday morning after precisely 33 days of drilling & on the 66th day of the miners incarceration.Even the President of Chile got in on the act:
Pinera noted the "magic number 33," with reference to the number of miners trapped since August 5 at the San Jose copper mine under the Atacama Desert and to the date of the final rescue, October 13, 2010, which when written in numbers and added up also gives 33.The same page had this interesting juxtaposition:
• Race against time to rescue 33 Chilean miners • Colombian violence: 17 police, military officers, dead in two daysWell, probably like a lot of you I started think about Freemasons and weird rituals. But then I got to thinking how this was all being played out as a very religious - very Catholic, to be precise- Mystery play. I then got to thinking how nebulous symbols are and how dangerous it can be to draw conclusions on symbolism without taking into account the overall context of an event.
It was then I realized that the symbols we're seeing here had Christian meanings as well- 33 being the number of years Jesus was said to have walked the Earth, for instance and 13 being a reference to Christ and his Apostles.
Then there's the Phoenix, which was quite popular in the Early Church:
The Phoenix is a mythical creature said to build a nest when old, and set it on fire. It would then rise from the ashes in victory. Because of these myths (believed by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Orientals), the bird came to symbolize Christ.Church Father Clement of Alexandria is credited with being the first to appropriate this very ancient symbol:
Saint Clement was the first Christian writer to use the legend of the phoenix as an allegory of the Resurrection during the first century in his first letter to the Corinthians. It was used to symbolize resurrection and eventually to signify the Resurrection of Christ. Reference to the Phoenix in the Bible: The following reference to the Phoenix is in the Bible:Job 29:18, Then I thought, ‘I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days like the phoenix.’Again, in context this ties into the explicit Christian spirituality we're hearing come out of Chile:
During the time he was trapped inside the mine, Sepulveda said, he saw both good and evil.
"I was with God, and I was with the devil. They fought, and God won," he said. Sepulveda said he grabbed God's hand and never doubted that he would be rescued.So if this was meant to be some "Luciferian" ritual it was a particularly ineffective one.
Read this headline: "2 Chilean Miners Come to Jesus Christ While Trapped Underground."
But for Secret Sun readers there was no shortage of fascinating connections to pore through, not the least of which was NASA's involvement in the rescue. Which might explain this interesting chart, which uses some of the rockets obelisks that we've looked at to compare the depth of the shaft.
Fascinating choice of landmarks on the artist's part there.
Then there was the Phoenix itself, which as you can see from this graphic...
...is vaguely reminiscent of this rebirthing chamber. Well, to me at least. I can't help but think of an astronaut in reverse when looking at all of the gear that the miners had to wear either. Well, if the miner rescue was the day's triumph the prophesied V-style mass mothership landing (or Project Blue Beam lightshow) was the day's big washout. Try as the Twitter crowd might, you couldn't make what will surely be revealed to be a deliberate hoax on the part of some media-hungry Randiites into Independence Day.
All of this didn't happen in a vacuum- you remember this story:
A newly-published book by a retired NORAD officer predicts October 13, 2010 as the tentative date for a fleet of extraterrestrial vehicles to hover for hours over the earth's principal cities. Author says the event to be the first in a series intended to avert a planetary catastrophe resulting from increasing levels of carbon-dioxide in the earth's atmosphere dangerously approaching a "critical mass." The book Challenges of Change reports on the author’s years of communication with the Transcendors in a question and answer format intended to inform and challenge.The little balloon display didn't stop some like this poster on Facebook from declaring it all a dastardly victory for the Luciferians (sic) and their infernal Blue Beam machinery:
Blue Beam "yes" just throw a bit of Haarp in, and we can all start to think it is talking to us..! Just as they have planned. the return of the satan or the new christ?Thankfully we have real researchers like Richard Dolan to smash corny old USENET disinfo like "Project Blue Beam," as he did in his blog today, pointing out that the entire theory is completely unsupported by any evidence of any kind and was cooked up by a radical Fundamentalist French Canadian separatist:
Monast was strongly Christian in his outlook, was affiliated with a political movement that promoted French separatism in Canada...He shows no evidence of moving in the elite circles that presumably would have inside information about NASA or the United Nations. I have a difficult time of seeing how Monast got any true inside information. His writings show no evidence of actual investigation.Commenting on the distorting effects of the Internet echo chamber, Dolan writes:
Nearly all of the writing on Blue Beam today is derivative of Monast's writing. No one has offered anything original, except to downplay the Christian element of it and to mix in some new technologies, like HAARP, to make it sexier.
But even the connections to HAARP do nothing more than offer speculations. No research, nothing tangible. None of these sites offer anything resembling evidence to support the alleged existence of Blue Beam. I am not asking for proof, only evidence. And I see nothing.
Dolan further talks about Monsast's career and his heart attack but doesn't mention that the intel boys love theories like Project Blue Beam since it paints them as omnipotent wizards who command the very elements themselves- and accordingly must be feared, if not worshiped.
Dolan laments that he can't find the time to catalog the endless "mass landings" that have been prophesied over the past 60 years:
If I have the time, I would love to go back over the last ten or twenty years and make a list of all the predictions that have littered the field of UFOs and alternative culture in general.I'm not surprised by this turn of events, which is why I put up the Alien Dreaming post. If you want mystery and wonder in your life, you don't need the skies to open with barbaric gods or saucers- you need to do the hard work of retrofitting this crazy neural software locked inside our skulls and finally solving some of the mysteries those ancient visitors left in their wake.
UPDATE: Other local media picked up on the story. As always, my advice is to always be leery of UFO reports in the mainstream media, especially when they're given this kind of hype. I'm also seeing some older footage being pasted with new dates and slapped up on YouTube, which unfortunately is par for the course in this day and age.
Unfortunately, all too many people trade their mainstream media gullibility for so-called alternative media gullibility, perhaps not realizing that the same puppeteers might be behind the both.
As much as some authors might want to believe otherwise, we've seen just as many- if not more - examples of these retired military officers being used to perpetuate hoaxes than we do whistleblowers.
And it may well turn out that all of this is being pimped to prepare us for the ultimate hoax revelation, which in turn may well have something to do with the press conference on UFOs and nukes a couple weeks back.
UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long:
All those theories about Wednesday's mystery UFO sightings over Manhattan are about to go "pop." A Westchester elementary school believes the puzzling orbs floating over Chelsea were likely a bundle of balloons that escaped from an engagement party they held for a teacher. "UFO? They're crazy - those are our balloons!" said Angela Freeman, head of the Milestone School in Mount Vernon. "To me it was the most automatic thing. But it's all over YouTube." A parent was bringing about 40 iridescent pearl balloons to the school for language arts teacher Andrea Craparo when the wind spent a bunch away around 1 p.m. "They looked big and they were all together, so it looked like one UFO," said fourth-grader Nia Foster, 9.UPDATE: Richard Dolan weighs in again with "Facts Still Matter":
In order to be ready for any future difficulties, we need genuine information, not rumor. We need to be able to discern actual facts from groundless claims and general grandstanding. For any of these rumors, any of these endless series of predictions that clog our pages and cloud our cognition, we all have several solutions at our disposal.
The most important thing is to remember to ask some basic questions: What is the source of the claim? What is the nature of the evidence? Is it possible to fake the evidence? Does the purveyor of the information appear to have a particular axe to grind -- a particular viewpoint to promote? What is the structure of the argument? How strong is the logic? Are there any missing pieces to the argument? Are there any unstated assumptions that might be affecting the person’s viewpoint? Is there a prior history of such a claim being made? Are there any refutations out there, and if so how strong are the refutations? We all have the ability to ask these questions. As we ask them, again and again, we become better at answering them.A good researcher like Dolan will tell you that things can get much stranger and more interesting if you stick to good, old-fashioned research ground rules. It may take a little longer, but you'll end up with much better results.