Saturday, May 16, 2015

Invisible and Silent, Synching Overhead


Well, it's been an interesting week here. 

I've been very busy which is why I've been out of the loop the past few days. But as per usual, I've also had the usual backlog of posts in the queue that I can't seem to get any traction on. It's not a question of inspiration, the majority of posts on this blog were half-formed ideas that sat stewing for some time until I could get a handle on them. It's just the writing process.


Then there are those posts that seem to be written for you, or are the result of a series of improbable events that beg to be sorted out and commented on. 

Thursday was a typical day for me, until my daughter called me down to the living room. "What's that?" she asked, with a semi-panicked tone in her voice. Well, "that" was a rather enormous wolf spider, sitting there on the wall. 

How the hell it got in the house was a mystery, but I was more concerned with getting it out of the house without harming it or you know, myself.


My daughter took the photo on her phone and she's quite a bit shorter than I am so there's quite a bit of obvious perspective distortion here. Suffice it to say the critter was a good four inches, toe to toe. 

It may not seem all that intimidating here in this low-rez cellphone pic but in person-- and in your frickin' living room-- it gave more the impression of this....


Anyhow, I used a trick with a glass bowl and a piece of paper to get the little fella safely out into the wild, where he looked a lot less intimidating. It got me thinking about the Alien movies and how they are based in our natural revulsion of insects and other arthropods, which in turn got me to thinking how alien the natural world often seems to us, which got me to thinking...well, you know.


As fate would have it the UK Independent featured a story on Thursday (and a story I didn't happen upon until after the episode with Wolfie) about Australia, which is well known for its epic spider problems. 

I couldn't help be struck by the connection with "angels" and the rest, since I've been doing a lot of research into the roiling subculture of "UFOs as fallen angels" theology, a movement that seems to be picking up steam as traditional Evangelicalism wanes. That would turn out to be more than an idle revery, when my son came home and showed me this video, that he taped at work on Thursday night...

Detail from video, courtesy of Mike Clelland


... of your classic, hovering lights-type sighting. As he told it, the lights appeared about 15 minutes before the end of his shift at a local recreation facility and simply hovered there, not moving (they comment on the lights lack of movement on the video). They had to leave the grounds but apparently the lights were still there when they left. (SEE POSTSCRIPT)

The wind was 4-8 mph N/NW so you figure if they were flares or balloons there would have been some visible movement at that apparent altitude (the wind today is only 5 mph and there's a lot of movement in the trees as I type), even at that short duration. You can see the heavy, low cloud cover so it's unlikely they were stars or satellites. My son said they were very large. I doubt any kind of aircraft would be flying that low in formation. 

And of course, these lights weren't flying...

The area they are hovering over is forest as best I can tell. This facility is on a mountain, so it's possible they are something like the Brown Mountain lights or the lights of Hessadalen, earthlights as it were. 

Then again for all I know they could be daemonic orbs, heralding the coming Apocalypse. I simply don't know.

Because the point here is that the synchronicity of it all is what grabs me, especially in light of the weird intruder earlier in the day. 

My belief is that lights in the sky are just lights in the sky until they tap into deeper streams of meaning. And the conjunction of the uninvited guest and these strange lights in the night certainly coincides with a deeper current of discovery that has been revealing itself through a strange accumulation of evidence (some of it kind of creepy) over the past year or so.

Another detail from video, 
showing lights below clouds

Additionally, my son is the same age (22) as I was during my own strange light sighting - (I call these UHLs rather than UFOs - unidentified hovering lights), though that event involved my older son.  But it should be noted that my own sighting also involved three lights, though in that case they were in motion. 

These intruders into mundane life reminded me how Synchronicity can impose itself even when you're occupied with other matters. It also got me to thinking how common these sightings have become, or at least our awareness of them. My son and his coworkers are caught up in this mystery now in some way, having had it intrude into the most mundane setting imaginable- their menial outdoor jobs.

It's funny, I was going to blog about the "Roswell Slides" debacle, but why drag myself through that mire? That whole Nuts-n-Bolts culture, with its codependent believers and debunkers, is so depressing, so exhausted. But it did get me to thinking why we so often see these episodes of evidence-manufacturing in the Nuts-n-Bolts world. 

It's because the actual evidence simply doesn't support their paradigm. As tiresome as I might find the Evangelicals' theology, they generally have a more interesting phenomenological conception of UFOs. 

Though maybe not as interesting as Alexander Leek's: "You noticed them and they noticed that you noticed them."

 POSTSCRIPT: TALE OF THE TAPE

Of course all we have to look at is a 25-second video of rather poor quality (and the upload here is especially poor, thanks to Blogger's recompression- my apologies) taken in low light. We're hearing this absurd mantra from the skeptics in response to evidence like this, "A UFO! Quick- grab the worst camera you can find!" This simply reveals the roots of the skeptic movement in the arts of rhetorical deception. 

Most people don't have access to "cameras" anymore- they use their cellphones. The cameras on phones are fine for taking selfies and candids, but pretty useless for filming stuff in the sky or at night and most certainly in the sky at night.


But I'll tell you a secret: taking decent pictures or video of flying objects you aren't expecting to encounter is next to impossible, even with a good camera. 

Case in point: A few years back I was bringing the kids home from school and three giant red tails swooped into the yard, right above our heads. I got the kids in the house, grabbed our very expensive digital camera, got it out of the bag, got the cap off, turned it on and waited for it to do its annoying bootup routine and ran back outside. 

By the time I did all that the fucking birds were halfway down the street. I tried taking a picture of them but the god-damned autofocus didn't know what it was supposed to zoom in on and by the time I got it turned off, I snapped that masterpiece there.

Skeptics know this full well but are intentionally poisoning the well by casting doubt on evidence they can't emotionally deal with by working up snappy taglines.  Of course, by this point they're really only speaking to each other. 

Sad.