Dog Days Part I -The New World V

Sirius is one of the most perplexing aspects of the occult I have yet encountered. It is by all accounts hugely significant yet rarely mentioned by many of the occult and mythological authors I have read. 33rd degree Freemason Manly P. Hall gives it only a single sentence mention in his invaluable The Secret Teachings of All Ages, simply stating:

"The Dog Star, Sirius, or Sothis, was sacred to the Egyptians because it presaged the annual inundations of the Nile."
(pg. 288)

Hall doesn't even go that far in either The Secret Destiny of America or America's Assignment with Destiny. Eliphas Levi can't be bothered with it in his pompous The History of Magic. Scottish Rite 'founder' and 33rd degree Mason Albert Pike drops several vague hints concerning the mammoth importance of Sirius to the ancient Mysteries in his copious Morals and Dogmas, linking it to the five-pointed star so prominent in Masonry. He states:

"To find in the BLAZING STAR of five points an allusion to the Divine Providence, is also fanciful; and to make it commemorative of the Star that is said to have guided the Magi, is to give it a meaning comparatively modern. Originally it represented SIRIUS, or the Dog-star, the forerunner of the inundation of the Nile; the God ANUBIS, companion of Isis in her search for the body of OSIRIS, her brother and husband. Then it became the image of HORUS, the son of OSIRIS, himself symbolized also by the Sun, the author of the Seasons, and the God of Time; Son of Isis, who was the universal nature, himself the primitive matter, inexhaustible source of Life, spark of uncreated fire, universal seed of all beings. It was HERMES also, the Master of Learning, whose name in Greek is that of the God Mercury. It became the sacred and potent sign or character of the Magi, the PENTALPHA, and the significant emblem of Liberty and Freedom, blazing with a steady radiance amid the weltering elements of good and evil of Revolutions, and promising serene skies and fertile seasons to the nations, after the storms of change and tumult."
(pg. 15)

Keep this in mind dear readers, as we shall address several prominent instances of five-pointed stars a bit further down.

Anyway, back to the references, or lack therefore of, to Sirius that I've encountered. The mammoth Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrandt seemingly has no mention of Sirius at all, be it a solo entry, or under such related topics as dog, Isis, star (despite covering the five-pointed star' and the 'blazing star' of Freemasonry under said entry) or Anubis (who is strangely MIA). Edith Hamilton kindly mentions Sirius in the index of her Mythology book, stating it is 'the Dog Star who follows Orion', but not giving Sirius its own section in the actual text. Frazer goes about as far Hall in The Golden Bough, noting:

"And to Isis in her later character of patroness of mariners the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her beautiful epithet of Stella Maris, 'Star of the Sea', which she is adored by temptest-tossed sailors. The  attributes of  a marine deity my have been bestowed on Isis by the sea-faring Greeks of Alexandria. They are  quite foreign to her original character and to the habits of the Egyptians, who had no love of the sea. On this hypothesis Sirius, the bright star of Isis, which on July mornings rises from the glassy waves of the eastern Mediterranean, a harbinger of halcyon weather to mariners, was the true Stella Maris, 'the Star of the Sea'."
(pg. 389)

As many of you may have surmised, I am opting to write on Sirius now as the Dog Days of Summer, which the star has always been linked with, began at some point in this past month of July. Royal Astronomical Society fellow Robert Temple writes of the 'Dog Days':

"Throughout Latin literature there are many references to 'the Dog Days' which followed the heliacal rising of Sirius in the summer. These hot, parched days were thought by that time to derive some of their ferocity and dryness from the 'searing' of Sirius. Traditions arose of Sirius being 'red' because it was in fact red at its heliacal rising, just as any other body at the horizon is red. When making rhetorical allusions to the Dog Days, the Latins would often speak of Sirius being red at the time, which it was."
(The Sirius Mystery, pg.86)

I had meant to publish this article on July 23rd, for reasons that shall be addressed a bit further down, but destiny had other plans. My computer crashed on July 22nd, the day of the terrible Norwegian shootings. My girlfriend's health, which has been poor of late, would take another turn for the worse beginning on the 23rd, the day in which we embarked upon a vacation together for the first time. On that same day entertainer Amy Winehouse bought the farm, joining the infamous '27 Forever Club' (whose first member was cursed bluesman Robert Johnson, whom I've written on here).

My good friend and VISUP partner in our Fortean investigations, Stopha (whose dream logs can be viewed here), would begin having bizarre dreams of himself as a fish, or some other kind of amphibious being, around this time as well (the significance of this for those that haven't read The Sirius Mystery will be addressed further down). Last week an old friend of mine committed suicide (RIP Tim) while Manos' private life has remained interesting, to say the least. Meanwhile global instability continues to spiral on, whether it be the debt 'crisis' in Europe or America, unrest in the Middle East and Africa, or simply sweltering heat in the the American South. In Antiquity, the Dog Days of Summer were believed to be a time of evil, marked by burning temperatures and tempers, and general chaos. So far they are certainly living up to their reputation from Recluse's point of view.

A perplexing aspect of Sirius and the Dog Days is that, by all accounts being a major holiday in many of the great cultures of Antiquity (Egypt, Greece, Roman), there is so much debate as to when the Dog Days actually began. Researcher David Ovason believed that Sirius and the mythology surrounding it were instrumental in the founding of the United States. As many of you are aware, more than a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Freemasons, who incorporated much of the ancient mythology surrounding Sirius into their own rituals. Thus, Ovason argues for a July 3rd start to the Dog Days, which would closely link it with our Independence Day, to further this connection.

"The Mason who first signed the Declaration of Independence would have been aware of the particular significance of July 4, as a cosmic event. The day was the second in the so-called dog days, which, according to some American almanacs, began on July 3. Their traditional knowledge is no longer recalled with the same intensity as in the 19th century, but the majority of almanacs and planetary tables used then in both England and America all marked July 3 as the beginning of this important period.

"The term 'dog days' is usually traced back to the Greek-derived canicular days, relating to the helical rising of the fixed star Sirius. However, historians are usually more inclined to trace the word back to the ancient Egyptian calendrical system, where its rising with the Sun was held to be of profound spiritual importance... This connection with the dog star Sirius is so important that we must assume that whichever Mason elected this date for laying the foundation stone which was to form the spiritual hub of the city knew exactly what he was doing."
(The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, pg. 139)

Robert Anton Wilson would strongly disagree with this dating. Wilson is primarily responsible for bringing the 23 enigma to public attention. Wilson in turn partly became obsessed with the number 23 after supposedly receiving telepathic messages from an alien race based upon Sirius after performing a Crowley-inspired ritual on July 22, 1973. The next morning he found a peculiar message in his 'magickal diary' stating "Sirius is very important." This led Wilson to doing some research.

"The Skeptic went to town and browsed in the public library. Imagine my state of mind when I discovered that this very day, July 23, when I had received the message 'Sirius is very important,' is the day when, according to Egyptian tradition, the occult link (through hyperspace?) is most powerful between Earth and Sirius.

"Celebrations of the Dog Star, Sirius, beginning on July 23, are the origin of the expression 'dog days,' meaning the days from July 23 to September 8, when the last rituals to Sirius were performed."
(The Cosmic Trigger Volume I, pg. 87)

I'm inclined to believe Wilson, but then Wikipedia offers yet more dates:

"In Ancient Rome, the Dog Days extended from July 24 through August 24 (or, alternatively July 23-August 23). In many European cultures (German, French, Italian) this period is still said to be the time of the Dog Days. 

"The Old Farmer's Almanac lists the traditional timing of the Dog Days as the 40 days beginning July 3 and ending August 11, coinciding with the ancient heliacal (at sunrise) rising of the Dog Star, Sirius. These are the days of the year when rainfall is at its lowest levels. 

"According to The Book of Common Prayer (1552), the "Dog Daies" begin on July 6 and end on August 17. But this edition of the Book of Common Prayer (The 2nd book of Edward VI) was never extensively used and never adopted by the Convocation of the Church of England. 

"In the lectionary of the 1611 edition of the Authorized Version of the Bible, commonly called the King James Bible, the Dog Days begin on July 6 and end on September 5. Note how this roughly corresponds to the July 4 to Labor day (in the United States) span of secular holidays. 

"In the lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer 1559 shows "Naonae. Dog days begin" with the readings for the 7th day of July. The end of the dog days is noted as the 18th of August. But this is noted as a misprint^[2] and the readings for the 5th day of September have "Naonae. Dog days end". This corresponds with the lectionary in the Bible. The 1559 edition of the Book of Common Prayer would have provided the official liturgical calendar for Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and years following. So the dogs days were at least officially noted in the new world. A recent edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer makes no mention of the dog days in the corresponding place."

So dear reader, the Dog Days could begin anywhere from July 3rd to July 24th. I am again inclined to go with the July 23rd date, however, as it seems the most common dating. Sirius has another striking connection to the number 23 as well:

"Sirius is 23 times as luminous as our own Sun, and even though its distance from the Earth of eight and a half light-years dims this luminosity, it is still the brightest star in the sky."
(The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, David Ovason, pg. 5) 

This is most interesting, especially considering the occult belief in Sirius as a kind of hidden sun. This brings us back to the five-pointed, blazing star of Freemasonry Pike described above. According to David Ovason the five-pointed star of Masonry was adopted from a Egyptian symbol called sba. Of this symbol, he writes:

"The sba hieroglyphic was a five-pointed star, within the center of which was an encircled dot, somewhat like the modern sigil for the Sun. So far as the ancient Egyptians were concerned, this was a symbol of a higher spirituality..."
(ibid, pg. 242)

Ovason goes on to assert that the Masonic five-pointed star, adopted from the Egyptian sba and symbolizing Sirius, was used as the model for the five-pointed star of the American flag:

"...in 1818, the American Congress had determined that the symbol of a five-pointed star should be adopted to represent every state joining the Union. They decreed that, as each new state joined, a new star should be added to the 13 state stars already on the flag. Thus the stars would increase in number, as symbol of this growing fellowship, while 13 red and white stripes, which had represented the original 13 states, would remain as symbol of the original union of states. The proposal was made by the Mason senator Benjamin Latrobe and was merely extending the heraldic use of stars of the Seal of the United States, as had been determined by a committee directed by Benjamin Franklin, in 1782. According to Franklin's committee, there was to be a surrounding of '13 stars, forming constellation, argent, on an azure field.' Latrobe's suggestion was adopted, and stars began to appear upon the flag in ever-increasing numbers...

"We have already looked at the significance of Sirius in the astrological tradition, and observed that it still carries some of its early Egyptian associations. These associations are even more deeply expressed in the Masonic view of the star..."
(ibid, pgs. 243-245)

Self-described 'revisionist historian' Michael A. Hoffman II writes of the five-pointed star and Sirius:

"The symbol (or, alchemically, sigil) of the armed enforcers of the Code of Hammurabi, which was the law of the empire of Babylon, the successor to Sumer, was the five-pointed star, or pentagram. The distinguishing characteristic of the Babylonian law code was that 'the laws were not the same for the rich and the poor.'

"This star also happens to be the symbol of the armed enforcers of modern America's laws, and it was also the symbol of the enforcers of the Communist regime in Russia. Is it an accident that both the army of the Soviet Union and the policemen of America wear the secret symbol of Sirius?"
(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, pg. 30)

So the stars upon our flag and the badges of our friendly neighborhood policeman are symbolic of the star Sirius... Maybe even the Declaration of Independence itself was signed on the beginning of the Dog Days. All of this is most striking, but there is an even more bizarre connection I have found concerning the geographic locations of certain structures. This, like many traditions associated with Sirius, dates back to ancient Egypt.

"The helical rising of Sirius was so important to the ancient Egyptians... that gigantic temples were constructed with their main aisles oriented precisely towards the spot on the horizon where Sirius would appear on the expected morning. The light of Sirius would be channelled along the corridor (due to the precise orientation) to flood the altar in the inner sanctum as if a pin-pointed spotlight had been switched on. This blast of light focused from a single star was possible because of the orientation being so incredibly precise and because the temple, the light of one star focused solely on the altar must have made quite an impact on those present. In this way was the presence of the star made manifest with its temple. One such temple to the star Sirius was the temple of Isis at Denderah in Egypt."
(The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, pg. 85)

Ruins at Denderah

Sirius seemingly played a similar role in the astrological charts of several buildings within our nation's capital, especially the Washington Monument, of which the cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848.

"The extraordinary truth is that the very existence of the Washington Monument is intimately linked with the Egyptian star Sirius, the Sihor that the ancients represented in their sacred hieroglyphics as an obelisk-like form as well as a star...

 "... At the founding of the Washington Monument in 1848, the Sun was in 12.45 Cancer -and thus only 46 minutes from exact conjunction. Now, we must not forget that in the course of a day the Sun moves one degree in the zodiak. This means that, in the course of that day, when the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid, the Sun would have passed over Sirius."
(The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, David Ovason, pgs. 137-138) 

Of course, there may be a much older monument in North America dedicated to the observing of Sirius.

"According to the astronomer John A. Eddy, the rock circle located near Lovell, Wyoming, known as the Big Horn Medicine Wheel is aligned with the rising of Sirius."
(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Michael A. Hoffman, pg. 29)

Fortean researcher William Grimstad elaborates:

"Astronomer John A. Eddy of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, has theorized that the Medicine Wheel could have been used as an observatory to pinpoint the summer solstice. Eddy has found that the center cairn and one of those on the outer rim line up perfectly with the rising sun, while another rim cairn aligns with the setting sun on Midsummer day. Other cairns on the rim, he finds, line up with the stars Aldebaran, Sirius, and Rigel around solstice."
(Weird America, pg. 247)

Observing the start of the Dog Days is only scratching the surface of what some religious centers in Antiquity were designed for. More curious were the oracle centers, of chief importance to the religious life of the inhabitants of the Middle East and Mediterranean.

"These centres in the Middle East seem at a casual glance to be dotted around apparently at random. However, there is actually a pattern in their distibution which we will find bears some relation to our subject, and which indicates a highly advanced science of geography and related disciplines in the ancient world. Examination of the oracle centres will be seen to have a connection with the ship Argo and will help us to fill in some of the missing background to the entire system of the ancient religious mysteries. The oracle centres were the main places where religion was practiced in the ancient world."
(The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, pg. 161)

Ruins of the Oracle at Delphi

Temple goes on to elaborate on this 'pattern of distibutation,' stating:

 "I believe that the Egyptians laid out a 'geodetic octave' commencing at 1º north of Behdet (to emphasize its separateness from Egypt) and culminating at Dodona. For Dodona is precisely 8º north of Behdet in latitude, and the related oracle centre of Delphi is exactly 7º in latitude north of Behdet...

"I have arrived at this sequence for a geodetic oracle octaves:

8. Dodona
7. Delphi (with its famous omphalos, a stone navel)
6. Delos, the famous shrine of Apollo, once an oracle centre (also with an omphalos
5. Kythera (Cythera), a site on the north-east coast; or Thera (Santorini)
4. Omphalos (Thenae) near Knossos on Crete (on the Plan of Omphaleion)
3. Undiscovered site on Southern or South-western coast of Cyprus? (Paphos?) (Cape Gata?)
2. Lake Triton (or Tritonis) in Libya
1. El Marj (Barce or Barca)

The ones which I have identified are spaced apart by one degree of latitude from each other in sequence and are integral degrees of latitude from Behdet, which we shall see was the geodetic centre of the ancient world... and was also a pre-dynastic capital of Egypt."
(ibid, pg. 171)

The bands of latitude which Temple's 'oracle octaves' run through stretch from 31º30' N to 39º30' N. Several ancient stone complexes in North America also fall upon these 'oracle octaves.' Consider the stone structures scattered around southern Colorado at Apisha River Canyon:

"These Apishapa sites lie at about 37º30', and hence would be in line with the Greek cult sites of Delos and Miletus, which were sacred to the moon and the goddess Artemis..."

(Weird America, William Grimstad, pg. 48)

Another stone structure which Grimstad notes is located in West Virginia and known as the Mount Carbon Stone Walls:

"Most local experts who have studied the site admit the possibility of ritualistic or ceremonial significance to the builders. Since this area is located at about 38 degrees, 10 minutes north latitude, I have wondered about possible links to Old World cult centers on the same parallels."
(ibid, pg. 240)

Ruins of Mt. Carbon's stone walls

I've written a bit more on Mt. Carbon in the first entry of my 'New World' series, for those curious.

It is here I shall sign off for the time being. Next week we shall consider just exactly why the star Sirius has been the focus of so many cults and fringe religious sects over the years.

The Hitchhiker Vanishes

The vanishing hitchhiker is one of those urban legends that appears the world over and has so since at least the 19th century. Author Patrick Harpur elaborates:

"Twenty-five years ago it was well known locally where I lived that a stretch of the London to Guildford road was haunted by a ghost. A fellow I knew knew a fellow whose uncle picked up a young girl hitchhiking on this stretch of road -only to find that she had vanished from the car. I didn't know then what I know now, namely that this is a tale which is repeated all over the world, with only slight variations...

"In other variants of the story the girl is a woman. Sometimes she leaves some 'physical evidence' behind in the car -a book, purse, sweater, scarf, etc. which subsequently identifies her as a dead person. She can be a girl to whom someone gives a lift home from a club or dance. She asks to be dropped at the cemetery and is never seen again. A popular American variant makes the girl a nun who cryptically predicts some event such as the end of a war before disappearing. In these versions she is sometimes Christianized, no longer a ghost but an angel. Sometimes she is a man, particularly (for some reason) if the driver is a woman."
(Daimonic Reality, pgs. 109-110)

My home state of West Virginia has several variations on this tale, complete with names. The following tale occurs in 1933 during the Great Depression and involves a traveling salesman named Hank Collier who is attempting to navigate the back roads of the WV during a heavy rain when he encounters a certain someone:

"Late one afternoon, Hank was making his way along a rutted dirt road when he saw a young woman ahead waving at him. She was bundled in a heavy coat, and he could barely make out her pretty features as the rain washed across his windshield. But Hank was a gentleman, and he could not pass by the woman without offering to help her. Stopping the car in the middle of the road so that he would not get mired down, he rolled down his window and offered the young woman a ride. She promptly accepted it...

"For a man in Hank's line of work, detours were a hindrance. Delays cost him both time and gas, but what he minded most about detours was getting lost. The young woman beside him chatted amiably while he drove. He asked her if she knew how to get around the washed-out bridge, and she gladly volunteered to direct him. She told him her name was Ida Crawford, and she lived in a house not far away. She quickly routed him around the washed-out bridge and down yet another old road that led them back to the highway. Once they were on a paved highway again, it did not take long for her to direct him to her home. It was growing dark by the time he pulled into her driveway, so Hank said a quick good-bye and hurried on his way. He paid little attention to the young woman as she got out and ran toward the house."
(Haunted West Virginia, Patty Wilson, pgs. 58-59)

Ole Hank stops at a grocery store a few miles down the road where the inevitable group of old timers set him straight on the events that just unfolded:

"The old man eyed his friends sharply before he began his story, and someone pushed a chair in Hank's direction. Hank grabbed the back of the chair but did not sit down. He felt as though he were pinned to the floor.

"The old man rubbed his chin as if choosing his words carefully. 'Well, Ida Crawford grew up around here about twenty-five years ago. She was a pretty little thing just like you described her, with long blonde hair, big brown eyes, and a smile that just made you want to smile right back. She used to drive around in a little buggy that her pap had made her. It was about this time of year when she had her accident. Just like this year, the spring melt and the spring rains came at the same time, and all the creeks and streams were flooded. Ida was on her way home from visiting a friend when she came to that bridge was under so much stress. She drove her little buggy out on the middle of the bridge, and then the bridge collapsed. They found part of the carriage downstream, but no one ever did find Ida's body. A couple years went by, and then a young fella came through here and told a story just like yours. He said that he had been driving along the road during a flood, and Ida flagged him down. He offered her a ride and she showed him the detour that she showed you today. He took her home, too, only to find out later that she'd been dead a couple of years.

"'There was one other fella after that whom Ida also helped. Anytime that bridge washes out, she seems to keep a sharp eye out for folks who might get hurt on it. Son, you are the third fellow that Ida has saved from that washed-out bridge."
(ibid, pg. 60)

In shock, Hank heads back to the house where he dropped Ida at. He finds that it is abandoned and has been for some time, with not so much as a squatter within. It's interesting to note that the appearances of Ira Crawford are tied to the seasons (the spring rains) as have been numerous Fortean events. After a quick Google search I was able to find no mention of Miss Crawford. I'm sure that there are other accounts of this haunting as well as investigations, but the names probably varies as a suitable spirit is found to justify the notion of a 'ghost.'

So, is this vanishing hitchhiker simply an urban legend? Patrick Harpur does not take such a simplistic view.

"The strange ambiguous nature of the folk tales as not-quite-fact, yet not-exactly-fiction is admirably encapsulated in the 'friend-of-a-friend' convention which distances us from the alleged event, but not too remotely. It expresses the in-between nature of the tales -which sometimes turn out to be even trickier than we thought. For instance, just as we can definitely say that the 'Vanishing Hitchhiker' is too widespread (it appears in many different cultures) to be 'true' and, moreover, is certainly very old (it appears in the nineteenth century, where a horse and cart replace the car)...

"We cannot know whether the Vanishing Hitchhiker motif began with some apparitional event such as this, or whether such an event occurred because it somehow crystallized out of a current fiction, a 'vanity,' or 'legend hanging in the air.' We cannot know the truth as to whether folklore is fact or fiction because the truth does not lie in this distinction, but elsewhere. Like the daimonic reality itself, 'folklore is never literally true, but it may always be fundamentally true.' It eschews 'either-or' distinctions and embraces the 'both-and.' It spans the gap between fact and fiction, just as daimons span this world and some other. Unlike myths which relate the archetypal deeds and patterns of a divine world, only touching upon our world where the humans are already semi-divine heroes, folklore's protagonists are ordinary humans who encounter daimonic persons or events..."
(Daimoic Reality, pg. 112-113)

It's possible the origins of the Vanishing Hitchhiker tale are even older than what Harpur is implying. Since as far back as antiquity peoples have attached supernatural elements to travelers, in some cases believing that they are their gods in disguise and taking great pains to treat them well along the road.

But not all cases of the Vanishing Hitchhiker are lacking in earthly origins... In some cases there have been well documented deaths surrounding such an apparition. Such a case also appears in West Virginia, near the small town of Logan. But before we address the murder of Mamie Thurman, we must also address the especially bloody history of this region of West Virginia in which these events unfolded.

Logan is located in the southwestern region of the WV, in what is known as the Metro Area. It is here we find a bloody history indeed. It all began with Chief Cornstalk, a Shawnee leader in the mid-18th century who became entangled in the American Revolution along with the rest of his people. The Shawnee wished to side with the English, but Chief Cornstalk attempted to negotiate with the colonists at Fort Randolph. There Cornstalk, along with his son and another chief, Red Hawk, were taken hostage and held for several months. Eventually a soldier was found scalped outside the fort and the other soldiers, bent on revenge, went after Cornstalk and his companions. As the Chief lay dying he supposedly placed a curse upon the lands and its peoples.

Some of the most brutal campaigns of the Revolutionary War as well as the numerous Indian Wars the proceeded and followed the Revolution were conducted in this region of West Virginia. A century later and a bit further south, along the West Virginia/Kentucky border, the infamous Hatfield/McCoy feud would be played out:

"...On January 7, 1865, young Harmon McCoy -discharged from the locally unpopular Union Army on Christmas Eve, 1864 due to war wounds -had been murdered in his hiding place by men loyal to the Confederate Hatfields.

"Then, in 1878, Randolph McCoy, while visiting a Kentucky Hatfield, spotted what he believed was one of his pigs. McCoy accused Hatfield of stealing his pig, and the two went to court. A key witness testified that the pig was, indeed, property of the Hatfields, and they won the case. The witness was slain by the McCoys a few months later. Tensions rose.

"In the spring of 1880, Johnson Hatfield met Roseanna McCoy at a party at the home of one of the Kentucky Hatfields. They immediately eloped, Roseanna being taken to the Hatfield home in West Virginia. Their romance was doomed to failure, however, as everyone opposed it from both sides of the Tug River...

"The spring elections of 1882... were the scene of another hideous murder. Roseanna McCoy's brother -Tolbert, Pharmer and Bud -stabbed Ellison Hatfield twenty-six times and then shot him in the back. No one knows why. The three brothers were then themselves murdered only a few days later: executed, while tied to bushes, to the sound of their mother's screams.

"And on it went, claiming a total of thirteen lives and numerous beatings, burnings, woundings, and other damage across the border between the two states. Finally, Kentucky officials under command of Frank Philips invaded West Virginia in 1888 and captured nine Hatfields, bringing them back to stand trial. Several Hatfields had attacked the McCoy home, burning it to the ground after killing two McCoys they found there on New Year's Day, 1888. Eventually, the nine prisoners were brought back to Kentucky, stood trial, and some received the death penalty. The feud was officially over."
(Sinister Forces Book One, Peter Levenda, pgs. 105-106)

As an interesting side note, as the Hatfield/McCoy feud was unfolding along the Kentucky/West Virginia border another tragedy was unfolding in border town of Ashland, Kentucky. Generally referred to as the Ashland Tragedy, it involved the brutal murders of three local teens on December 23rd, 1881 in which they were torn apart with axes. The circus that followed, in which three men -William Neal, Ellis Craft, and George Ellis -were accused of the brutal murders was another fine display of frontier justice. Ellis himself was ultimately lynched in Ashland after receiving a mere life sentence. State militia was called on several occasions to ensure the safety of the prisoners, which nearly resulted in full scale pitched battles with the locals on several occasions. Needless to say, much debate still rages over the actual guilt of Neal, Craft, and Ellis as well as the shocking brutality of the killings of the Gibbons teens near the winter solstice.

Ashland remains a cursed spot to this day -Charles Manson himself was born in Ashland while another notorious serial killer, Bobby Joe Long, was born directly across the river in Kenova, West Virginia.

A Hatfield would sit on the jury of one of the accused Ashland killers. The Hatfield name would continue to play a major role in this area of the country into the next century as well. The significant Hatfield was Sid Hatfield, the Police Chief of Matewan, West Virginia. Sid was not apparently related to the infamous Hatfield clan but that didn't stop him of boasting of a relation.

Matewan was a mining town largely controlled by the Stone Mountain Coal Corporation. In the early 1920s it became a battle ground for the growing labor movement. To this end, the notorious Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency (who had been involved in the Ludlow Massacre) were dispatched to bring the miners back in line. Sid Hatfield sided with the miners and led the opposition against Baldwin-Felts. Things came to a head on May 19th, 1920, when 13 heavily armed Baldwin-Felts detectives (including Albert and Lee Felts) headed into town. They were met by about 50 miners under the command of Hatfield. The Battle of Matewan ended up being pretty one sided -the miners easily won, leaving seven detectives dead, including both Felt brothers.

Hatfield was eventually charged with murder and then acquitted in Welch, West Virginia. Afterwards he was assassinated on the courthouse steps by a Baldwin-Felts undercover agent named C.E. Lively. Lively was himself acquitted after claiming self-defense in the shooting of the unarmed Hatfield.

These events ultimately led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection in US history outside of the Civil War in which 10,000 to 15,000 miners went to war with an assortment of local and state police, and eventually the US Army itself. It also marks the only time the US Air Force has ever (officially) fired on US citizens. The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of those incidents of history that has largely been ignored by mainstream historians for obvious reasons. A full account of the conflict is well beyond the scope of this article, but hopefully I can return to this topic at a later date. For now, I can only send you toward the Wikipedia entry for more information.

Naturally this area of the country became entangled in one of the most bizarre sequences of Fortean events in this nation's history. The events unfolded at Point Pleasant, a town near the site where Chief Cornstalk was murdered. The origins of Point Pleasant stretch back to George Washington himself, who first encountered the site in 1770.

"On October 24th, 1770, Washington had camped out at a more obvious choice for a house, on a broad terrace at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River, a place already hallowed by the ruins a large ancient Indian settlement. His descendants made use of it during the nineteenth century, calling it point Pleasant. It had been his chief experimental station in western colonization, where potatoes, turnips, and corn were raised amid the two thousand peach trees he caused to be planted."
(Hidden Cities, Roger Kennedy, pg. 103)

Given how much attention Point Pleasant has drawn over the years from Fortean researchers, I find it rather remarkable that the mysterious Indian ruins there as well as involvement of the Freemason Washington in the town's founding, along with the continued involvement of his family there, have largely been neglected. Regardless, the true landmark of Point Pleasant is undoubtedly the legendary Mothman, which began to appear there in 1966.

"The basic outline of the story is that, on November 15, 1966, a strange creature was sighted about ten miles north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It was seen at night, was about six-seven feet tall, with what appeared to be wings folded against its back. It seemed to be male, and the most startling diameter, six inches apart on its face. It was clearly not completely human, according to the eye witnesses..., but walked upright like a man. Thus was the legend of the Mothman born.

"Accompanying the sightings of Mothman were strange electrical disturbances, such as bizarre patterns on television sets, phones ringing with either no one at the other end or a kind of strange buzzing sound, plus weird warbles on police radios, etc. The thing actually seemed to fly, and in at least one instance was known to have chased a car full of people, and in another a Red Cross bloodmobile filled with whole blood on its way to Huntington... The sightings began to take place quite regularly all up and down the mound-ridden stretch of the Ohio River -from Marietta, Parkersburg and points south -but centered on the town of Point Pleasant.

"Exactly thirteen months later, to the day, the sightings abruptly stopped. Everyone in Point pleasant remembers the date -December 15th, 1967 -because that is also the date of the Silver Bride disaster, the worst bridge disaster in American history. The bridge, spanning the Ohio River between West Virginia and Ohio, was full of cars and trucks at rush hour, people buying Christmas presents or going to and from company Christmas parties or just trying to get home. At 5:04 P.M. the bridge collapsed, causing vehicles and the people inside them to plummet to the icy river below. Forty-six people died, more than sixty vehicles were lost to the river. Two persons were never found.

"And the mothman was seen no more after that day."
(Sinister Forces Book One, Peter Levenda, pgs. 89-90) 

I must say, I find the recurrence of the number 13 in this area of West Virginia especially interesting -13 people were killed in the Hatfield/McCoy feud, 13 Baldwin-Felts agents were involved in the Battle of Matewan, and the Mothman graced Point Pleasant for 13 months. All of this occurred around a region of the country filled with ancient Indian mounds, of which I have written much more on here as well as the peculiar history of West Virginia.

And now, at long last, we return to the Vanishing Hitchhiker.

For the final portion of this rambling diatribe we turn our attention to Logan, West Virginia, another community within the Metro Area that happens to be located roughly between Matewan and Blair and little over a hundred miles south of Point Pleasant and 80 some miles south of Ashland, KY. It was here in 1932 that the ghastly murder of Mamie Thurman occurred.

"Mamie was the wife of local patrolman Jack Thurman. She was a thirty-one-year-old dark-haired beauty with a sense of style. She was active in her church, had a lot of friends, and seemed to know many prominent businesspeople. Everyone was stunned when a young deaf-mute named Garland Davis found Mamie's body on a local mountain. Davis was picking berries on June 22 when he came upon her body on the side of Trace Mountain. She was a gruesome sight. Clad in a dark blue polka-dot dress, she still wore one shoe, and the other lay nearby. Her throat was slit from ear to ear, her neck was broken, she had a severe crack in her skull, and she had been shot twice at close range with a .38-caliber gun on the left side of her head. Someone had obviously wanted Mamie Thurman dead.

"The police arrested a prominent local banker and political figure named Harry Robinson and his African American handyman, Clarence Stephenson. Soon the whole town was in an uproar, and rumors circulated that Robinson and Mamie had been having an affair...

"...On the day of Mamie's funeral, the state police executed a search of the Robinson home. In the basement, they found a small bundle of bloody rags and several bloody spots on the floor that had been quickly wiped up. Attempts had been made to hide what appeared to have been a bloody mess. They also found a razor and a small hole in the wall that looked like a bullet hole. Later a chemist determined that the blood found on the rags and in the basement was human blood, but blood analysis was not yet allowed in courtroom testimony, so the jury never heard it...

"Harry Robinson finally testified during his indictment hearing that he had been carrying on an affair with Mamie Thurman for more than two years. He stated that they often conducted the affair at an area club called the Key Club, where many prominent men and their secret lady friends met. Robinson went on to further besmirch Mamie's reputation, saying that he had been given a list of sixteen names of men with whom she had recurring affairs. He said that he had continued to have an affair with Mamie despite the fact that she had refused to give up the other men."
(Haunted West Virginia, Patty Wilson, pgs. 28-30)

Robinson was later acquitted while the black handyman, Clarence Stephenson, eventually took the fall for Thurman's murder. Needless to say, many have questioned this out come. More information on the Thurman murder can be found here.

While the secret society in this story, the Key Club, is typically dismissed as nothing more than a gentleman's club, the date and fashion of Mamie's death indicate that the Masons, or a like organization, was behind the Key Club. Supposedly one of the penalties for revealing the secrets of Freemasonry is to have one's throat slit, as well as having your tongue pulled out and having your body buried by the sea at low tide.

Mamie kept her tongue, but it's difficult to say what became of her body as its been missing for some time.

"Mortuary and cemetery records validate that she originally was interred at the Logan Memorial Park Cemetery in McConnell. The same funeral parlor also has record of payment to disinter Mamie years later and move her body to Crawfordsville, Kentucky, where her family came from. But there is no record of her ever being reburied anywhere in, around, or near Crawfordsville. Today no one knows what happened to her body."
(ibid, pg. 31)

Apparently the sum of money paid to acquire Mamie's body from the Logan Cemetery was quite considerable -a $1000 -and paid by a local business man. It's also interesting to note that her death occurred on June 21st, which in some cultures is considered to be Midsummer's Night Eve. The typical date is June 23rd, but the summer solstice can occur anywhere between June 20th till the 23rd. According to this link, the summer solstice occurred on June 21st in 1932.

So to recap, we have a woman seemingly murdered in quasi-Masonic fashion by powerful business peoples involved in some kind of secret society during the summer solstice. It's a rather apt symbol for this region of the country, if nothing else... But something tells me the rituals here, as in most other events that occurred around here, go far deeper. And of course, some kind of entity would have to mark this bloody rite. And what better than that of the Vanishing Hitchhiker?

"It would seem that Mamie was unhappy with how the courts handled her death as well. It wasn't long after the case was considered closed that stories started to surface about ghostly sightings and weird happenings on the mountain. People claimed to see the figure of a woman in a polka-dot dress walking along the road near where Mamie's body was so callously discarded. Others tell a tale that sounds like an old urban legend, of drivers offering a lift to a woman who appeared to want a ride to town, only to have her disappear before leaving the mountain. Bus drivers who traveled the route from Holden to a town on the other side of the mountain claimed to pick up a woman in a remote stretch of the road late at night, but when they arrived at the town her seat was always empty."
(Ghost Stories of the Appalachians, Susan Smitten, pg. 189)

Is this wraith some kind of fragment of Mamie Thurman? Or is this Vanishing Hitchhiker simply a marker of the bloody deeds performed in this area of West Virginia? I am not a big believer in 'ghosts' as I outlined in a prior article on macrobes. I suspect this ghost is more a projection/manifestation of the horror and ritual this area endured, not unlike some of the paranormal sightings we have witnessed thus far during the North African/Arabic protests.

Mind's Eye Part II

Yes I know the secrets of the iron and mind

They're trinity acts, a mineral fire

Yes I know the secrets of the circuitry mind

It's a flaming wonder telepath

-"Flaming Telepaths," Blue Oyster Cult

Remote viewing is one of those topics that's difficult for certain types of conspiracists because of its supernatural nature and the rather extensive evidence of its existence accumulated by reputable scientists in world renowned labs. Given the types of characters one encounters in the remote viewing field one can't help but feel as if they're being led down a path of disinformation that will inevitably make their research sound ridiculous. Yet the occult and its various aspects pop up time and time again when researching the Cryptocracy and with the occult comes the mystical. Things would be so much easier if the mystical aspects could simply be dismissed as a smokescreen, yet the massive sums of money the US intelligence community alone has invested in various fringe topics makes this explanation unlikely. Anyone that's read Jacques Vallee's accounts of various state-sanctioned UFO hoaxes will know that an effective hoax can be accomplished for far, far less money that was spent on remote viewing, or any number of other fringe topics programs such as Phoenix and MK-ULTRA tackled.

So, if we cannot dismiss remote viewing as a hoax, then we must consider its effectiveness as to understand why the Cryptocracy became so interested with it in the second half of the 20th century. Researcher Michael Talbot states of the SRI remote viewing program:

"In their remote viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute, Puthoff and Targ found that, in addition to being able to psychically describe remote locations that experimenters were visiting in the present, test subjects could also describe locations experimenters would be visiting in the future, before the locations had even been decided upon...

"Puthoff and Targ's precognitive remote-viewing findings have been duplicated by numerous laboratories around the world, including Jahn and Dunne's research facility at Princeton. Indeed, in 334 formal trials Jahn and Dunne found that volunteers were able to come up with accurate precognitive information 62 percent of the time."
(The Holographic Universe, pgs. 205-206)

Personally I find the 62% more startling that the ability to see the future. This would imply that a majority of humanity would have some kind of psychic ability, which was exactly the conclusion that SRI researchers came to after a time. The ability was latent in all of us and in theory anyone could be taught it, but certain individuals possessed far greater psychic ability than the average person.

"The SRI researchers were somewhat evangelical on the subject of remote viewing; they believed that remote-viewing ability was like musical ability: everyone had it to some degree...

"...running medical, neurological, and psychological profiles of their remote viewers, looking for attributes that stood out. So far, about all they had found was that artistic talent, visual-spatial intelligence, and creativity all tended to be associated with high remote-viewing scores."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 14-15)

A person's susceptibility to hypnosis has also historically been a strong indication of strong psychic abilities:

"Dabblers in hypnosis quickly discovered that people who were very good at 'prenatural' skills like clairvoyants, psychokinesis, and even a kind of shamanic healing ability. Many of the talented 'somnambules' and 'clairvoyantes' were as celebrated as today's big-name psychics. By the 1840s hypnosis-related psi abilities were so common that they had become a sort of parlor trick."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pg. 143)

Many of the remote viewers recruited into Grill Flame were idea hypnotic subjects. As an interesting side note, the CIA heavily invested in hypnosis as part of their MK-ULTRA program in an attempt to create the perfect assassin, or 'Manchurian Candidate.':

"While hypnosis sounds tame by comparison, it actually had great potential as an intelligence weapon when wielded by the right hand and on the right subject. Much of what has been written on the applicability of hypnosis to a Manchurian Candidate scenario is fundamentally flawed: many investigators claim that since a hypnotized subject will not do anything to which he or she morally objects, hypnosis is therefore useless. They ignore the obvious implication that fully twenty percent of the human population is capable of 'going under' without too much difficulty, and that many of these potential subjects would not find murder, rape, theft, deceit, etc., morally objectionable, particularly if the command was given by a recognized authority figure.
(Sinister Forces, Peter Levenda, pg. 318)

Many people firmly believe that a hypnotized subject could in no way be persuaded to kill or harm another human being if they find it morally objective, yet the CIA conducted experiments on this belief under the direction of Morse Allen in the 1950s and found the opposite to be true. But I digress.

Anyway, the remote viewers had some truly remarkable success under Grill Flame. Much has already been written on this topic across the Internet, so I shall only give one example of the practical applications of remote viewing in the field. One of the most celebrated success of remote viewing, which managed to draw the praises of then-President Jimmy Carter, was the recovery of a highly classified Soviet plane in Zaire (now the Congo) in the late 1970s which the CIA was led to via coordinates given to them from an SRI remote-viewer:

"... eventually Graff's office was able to match Fran Bryan's sketch to a specific spot along a particular river. The coordinates of the spot were quickly cabled to the station chief in Zaire...

"Shortly thereafter, the CIA's team found the main intact section of the downed plane. It was in the river Graff's office had indicated, within three miles of the given coordinates.

"...Turner mentioned the role the psychics had played. Carter didn't seem to mind at all. He knew about the SRI program from National Security Council staffer Jack Stewart, and Congressman Charlie Rose. He seemed to approve of the idea."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 218-219)

An obvious question becomes, if remote viewing was as real and common as various researchers would have us believe, then why was it not more widely used? After all, it was much cheaper to have an individual lay in a darkened room and attempt to locate a crashed airplane via his mind's eye rather than, say, launching a satellite for the same purposes.

Well, remote viewing data was notoriously unreliable. At times it could appear remarkably accurate, and at other times be totally off. Researchers began to chalk this discrepancy up to the mental baggage of the remote viewers themselves than their actual ability. Apparently the biggest challenge to a remote viewer when spying an object, place, person, etc., is blocking out the 'noise' of their own minds so that the signal can come through. As such, SRI considered remote viewing as a kind of subliminal perception:

"Subliminal perception was so called because it described perception that took place below ('sub-') the 'limen,' the lower threshold of consciousness. All mental activities -the remembering of a face, the tasting of chocolate, the hearing of distant thunder, the fearing of tomorrow -had to have a certain strength and duration to rise above the liminal threshold and produce conscious perception...

"... SRI began to notice now that remote-viewing data resembled the kinds of data generated by test subjects who had been exposed to subliminal stimuli. They did freehand, autonomous sketches that they often were unable to label accurately. They reported very rough sense perceptions and emotions such as 'red' or 'makes me sa.' They gave out error-prone high-level descriptions... as their minds desperatley tried to amke analtical sense of the subliminally faint stimulus.

"... remote viewing was largely a form of subliminal perception. How psi information came into the brain in the first place wastill unknown, but it seemed to come in tenuously, in fragments, as if the remote viewer were continually being transported to his target, alighting there for the briefiest of moments, and then being hauled back again. It began to seem that the remote-viewing faculty was like any other sensory faculty -taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing -only much, much weaker, unable in ordinary circumstances to make it across the liminal threshold. This implied that, short of some revolution in our understanding of the mind and our ability to manipulate it, remote-viewing perception would always be extremely noise-prone for most people. There was really no way to get rid of the noise; one could only try to recognize it and seperate it from the signal."

(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnab, pg. 239-240)

The previous statement also provides a compelling explanation for how the bulk of humanity could have latent psychic ability, yet be totally unaware. Many of us probably experience some type of psychic phenomenon within our psyche regularly, yet cannot distinguish between it and our own unconsciousness. It's only when we experience a sensation such as deja vu, the feeling that an event has already happened before, that we're ever so briefly aware that something entered our consciousness from without. This is consistent with Jung's theory of the collective unconsciousness, which holds that our deeper unconsciousness is universal and something that all humans share. I've written on this topic before, which can be viewed here.

And now that I've given a brief overview of the remote viewing phenomenon, I'd like to delve into the truly bizarre incidents and synchronicities, some of which tie into themes that are already running through this blog.

The first aspect I would like to tackle is the location of the two main compartments of Grill Flame, one at SRI in California, the other at Fort Meade in Maryland.

We'll start with the later. Fort Meade is located near what I believe is a 'window area' that encompasses parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and virtually all of West Virginia. I've written of the odd happenings in this region before here, but to briefly recap: Strange happenings, rituals, and structures have found their way here since before the arrival of Europeans: The area around southern Ohio and northern West Virginia is littered with Indian mounds and bizarre religious structures. In the modern era numerous suspect government facilities such as Sugar Grove (an NSA communications facility in West Virginia which Pat Price remote viewed famously in the 1970s), Langley (the Virginia home of the CIA), Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (home of the infamous Hangar 18 were legend has it the Roswell wreckage was brought), etc., have been built all around this region. Some of the nation's most notorious serial killers such as Charles Manson, Henry Lee Lucas, and Bobby Joe Long, were born in this area (SRI's home in California is also an appealing area for serial killers as well, a contrast I discussed in the second half of a Charles Manson article). For years this region has experienced countless instances of Fortean events from the Mothman, to UFOs sightings, and even phantom clippers.

Needless to say, this region of the country has a long history of attracting the bizarre. The Fort Meade remote viewers would be no different. In an isolated area of Virginia, within the Blue Ridge Parkway, is a place known as the Monroe Institute which would go on to serve a major role in the training of the Fort Meade remote viewers. The Monroe Institute is yet another one of these human potential centers, this one specializing in out-of-body experiences through a technique known as 'Hemi-Synch', which used extreme sound frequencies to alter human brainwaves. Monroe was discovered by 'Skip' Atwater, the longtime leader of the Fort Meade RV unit. He immediately became a big fan after experiencing a sensation of levitation after his first session at Monroe. Soon other military personnel were being sent there.

"Atwater became a regular visitor to the institute, as did Joe McMoneagle, and Colonel John Alexander, and even Major General Stubblebine. They began sharing Hemi-Synch tapes with others at INSCOM or in Grill Flame, to help them cool down before remote-viewing sessions, or to cure insomnia or jet lag."
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pg. 296)

Eventually all Fort Meade remote viewers were required to attend the Monroe Institute as a part of their training. Several of them opted to stay, buying land in Blue Ridge near the Institute after retiring from the military.

Now we move onto SRI, which has attracted more than it's fair share of questionable characters over the years. The Stanford Research Institute of course has a cozy relationship with the military-industrial complex, having been a major recipient of DARPA largess for years. In the late in 1960s it employed the notorious intelligence asset and LSD guru Captain Al 'Trips' Hubbard as a 'security officer.'

"Hubbard accepted the offer of a $100 per day consultant's fee, and from then on he was officially employed as a security officer for SRI. 'His services to us,' explained Harmon, 'consisted in gathering various sorts of data regarding student unrest, drug abuse, drug use at school and universities, causes and nature of radical activities, and similar matters, some of a classified nature.'"
(Acid Dreams, Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, pgs. 198-199)

The Captain was of course perfect for this job as he had been instrumental in spreading LSD through the universities in the 1950s and early 1960s. More on this topic can be read here.

After the beginning of the SRI remote viewing program the institute attracted Nine disciple Andrija Puharich and his medium, Uri Geller, who would become one of the most famous test subjects of SRI. More on that below.

First, I want to address one of the oddest synchs I've come across while researching the SRI. This one occurred at the nearby Stanford University, which SRI was founded by, and affiliated with, until 1971.

"On October 12, 1974, the birthday of Aleister Crowley, student Arliss Perry was brutally murdered and left on display in the Stanford Memorial Church on the campus of Stanford University, nestled in the shadows of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Perry was left lying on her back, with her head toward the altar and her legs spread wide. She was nude from the waist down and an altar candle protruded from her vagina; another altar candle was wedged between her exposed breasts. Her jeans had been neatly arranged in an inverted V-shape and placed across her splayed legs, forming the Masonic symbol of the compass and the square. Five years earlier, the very same symbol had been left carved into the stomach of Manson victim Leno LaBianca, as the 'W' in the word 'War.' The prime suspect in the still-unsolved murder of Perry is a man named Bill Mentzer, who knew Charles Manson and at least one of his victims: Abigail Folger. In fact, Mentzer reportedly had lunch with Folger just a few days before her death. He later was connected to David 'Son of Sam' Berkowitz as well and still later was convicted of the Cotton Club murder of aspiring film producer Roy Radin."
(Programmed to Kill, David McGowan, pgs. 136-137)

Incidentally this horrendous murder took place around the same time Uri Geller was conducting his infamous experiments with the nearby Livermore National Laboratory, which more will be written of below. I'll just point out that shortly before and after the SRI remote viewer experiments were begun (a period stretching from 1967 to 1973) Northern California, especially the area around Santa Cruz, was experiencing a rash of serial murders.

"To briefly recap, no fewer than six serial killers/mass murderers -Charles Manson, Stanley Baker, Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, John Lindley Frazier, and the Zodiak -were all spawned from the Santa Cruz/San Francisco metropolitan area in a span of just over four years, at a time when 'serial killers' were a rare enough phenomenon that they hadn't yet acquired a name."
(Programmed to Kill, David McGowan, pg. 136)

I'm not sure what to make of these synchs entirely. But if the theories of researchers such as McGowan are true and these 'serial murders' were a domestic extension of the CIA's Vietnam era Phoenix Program, then SRI as a major defense researcher would likely be involved in the program in some capacity. Perhaps brutally murdering a woman on the campus of SRI's original patron in the midst of some of its most bizarre remote viewing experiments was some kind of statement... Though I have no idea of what it may be.

Nevertheless, I find it interesting that there is an overlap between these two seemingly separate, and unrelated events, especially when one considers the Macrobes. One thing virtually all remote viewers seem to agree upon is that strange things are drawn to you when in that mental state.

"Dames and some of the others often talked about the phenomenology of the Matrix, the strange things that happen there. They liked to say, for instance, that remote viewing was like switching on a beacon within the Matrix. It attracted strange things, the way a porch light attracts bugs on a hot summer night. They all knew the story of what happened to Gene Kincaid, one afternoon back in 1987. Kincaid had been in one of the RV rooms, running Angela Dellafiora against a target... She was going through her routine, murmuring impressions from down in her zone, when suddenly Kincaid looked up and saw his dead father, standing there in the RV room, looking at him."
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pg. 354)

'Aliens' were another target several remote viewers became obsessed with:

"Remote viewers themselves seemed just as captivated by the subject. And when they targeted UFOs in their remote viewing, strange things could happen. One of the strangest things was that they almost never failed to detect the UFO."
(ibid, PG. 356)

Indeed, their accuracy seemed to increase the stranger the target.

"This area of remote-viewing phenomenology would always remain confusing, but at least in some cases, the characteristics of a target that made it 'RV-friendly' were obvious: If a target had some religious or supernatural or paranormal significance, or was otherwise tinged with strangeness, remote viewers seemed to home in on it relatively rapidly."
(ibid, pg. 357)

Nothing, however, can top the Livermore incidents as far as paranormal events go in terms of remote viewing. The Livermore experiments concerned Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, who at the time claimed to be channeling the Grand Ennead, nine gods from ancient Egypt who were in fact extraterrestrials. I have already chronicled the story of the Nine, which can be read in detail here.

In late 1974 Livermore National Laboratory became interested in testing Geller's famed psychic ability, as well as the whole remote viewing phenomenon in general. The results were nothing short of extraordinary. Not the actual experiments with Geller mind you, which were generally underwhelming, but what happened as a result of these experiments.

"One day in the lab, several embers of the Livermore group  were monitoring  Geller during a metal-bending session. They recorded him with audiotape, filmed him with videotape, and photographed him with a variety of still cameras, including one that was sensitive to thermal infrared radiation.

"After the  experiment they developed  all the film and saw something strange. The infrared camera had captured what seemed o be diffuse patches of radiation on the upper part of one of he laboratory walls. It was as if someone had briefly shone two large heat sources, either from inside the lab or outside pointing in. The patches grew in intensity for few frames, then over the  next few frames diminished to nothing.

"The Livermore Group were understandably puzzled over this, but it was only the beginning of the strangeness that would soon consume them. When they checked the audiotape they had made during the experiment, they found amid everything else a distinctive, metallic-sounding voice, unheard during the actual experiment but now clearly audible, if mostly unintelligible...

"In the days and weeks that followed, they began to feel that they were collectively possessed by some kind of tormenting, teasing, hallucination-inducing spirit. They all would be in a laboratory together, setting up some experiment, or one of the fellows and his wife and children would be at home, just sitting around, when suddenly there in the middle of the room would be a weird, hovering, almost comically stereotypical image of a flying saucer. It was always about eight inches across, in a gray, fuzzy monochrome, as if it were some kind of hologram...

"On the other hand, the flying saucer wasn't the only form the Livermore visions took. There were sometimes animals -fantastic animals from the ecstatic lore of shamans -such as the large raven-like birds that were seen traipsing through the yards of several members of the group...

"Then there was the very strange business of the metallic voice on the audiotape. Among the few intelligible words it pronounced were two or three Kennett recognized as the code name of a very closely held government project...

"The situation at Livermore eventually resolved itself, after Russo complained about a telephone call from the strange metallic voice. The voice demanded that the Livermore group cease its research activities with Geller. The group did, and within a month, the bizarre apparitions faded away.

"One of the last apparitions sprang itself upon a Livermore physicist named Don Curtis and his wife. They were sitting in their living room one evening, soberly, uneventfully, not talking about Geller or the paranormal when suddenly there was this...arm... hovering holographically in the middle of the room.

"The arm was clothed as if it belonged to a man wearing a plain grey suit. There was no bloody stump where it should have connected with a shoulder. It merely faded into clear space. But at the end of the arm where a hand should have been, there was no hand, only a hook. The hooked arm twisted around a few seconds in front of Curtis and his wife, and then disappeared."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 164-168)

Later several researchers working on the Livermore project related the arm story to Kennett, the CIA man, in a hotel room. Just as they were finishing up an account of the arm the men were startled by a loud knocking on the hotel door. Kennett got up to answer. On the other side he found an old man in a plain grey suit who apologized, stating he had the wrong room. As the old man walked away Kennett noted he was missing an arm.

There's one final synch I want to note. That's the unusually high fatality rate amongst remote viewers. In a prior article I wrote that addressed Rick Strassman's DMT research in part I noted that many test subjects, as well as others associated with experiments, seemed to experience an unusually high rate of health problems, or other tragedies, after being exposed to a higher state of consciousness. The same seems to be true of the remote viewers:

"...many of them had seemed to die before their time. Had they been living too far out on the shamanic edge of things? Did the act of remote viewing, or even being near a remote viewer, produce some kind of hazardous effect on the human nervous system, or immune system?.. There were Pat Price and Jackie Keith, who both died of heart attacks. (Alex Thomas would later die of a heart attack too.) Rob Cowart and Hartleigh Trent had developed serious cases of cancer; Cowart had been severely disabled and Trent had died. Cancer was currently gnawing at Jim Salyer and Hella Hammid, neither of whom would live through the decade. Even the lab secretary at SRI, young and attractive Martha Thompson, was about to die from melanoma."
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pg. 325)

A more solid synch with the Strassman DMT experiments is cancer. Several of Strassman's test subjects developed cancer while experimenting with DMT, as did Strassman's then wife while he was conducting the experiments. At this point I will also remind the readers of the mysterious British WWII-era proto-remote viewer 'Anne' who we met in Part I of this series and who also suffered from disabling health problems.

It would seem that these altered states are not without their risks.