Happisburgh, Norfolk: More than 15 minutes of fame

All but one of the photographs published here are my own. 

The lighthouse

Apart being a quiet & peaceful corner of Norfolk and well known for its a striking barber's pole of a lighthouse I never thought that Happisburgh had more notability than that. Happisburgh's apparent calm obscurity and that sense of it being no-where-ville was actually one good reason for the wife and I to have a couple of nights there in a caravan as a get-away from it all. I had never visited Happisburgh before and to my shame thought that it lacked notability. Well, I was wrong. Happisburgh sprung some surprises and in terms of its significance it punches well above its weight. 

The well-maintained village sign

Arriving on the North Walsham Road at what looked to me to be the centre of Happisburgh we found it marked by a colourful village sign which makes cryptic allusions to Happisburgh's early history. At this point one also finds a crossroads: The road to the left runs up to the church which with its high tower has dimensions disproportionate to the tiny size of Happisburgh. The church was largely rebuilt in the 15th century in the perpendicular style and this rebuild was probably financed by the wool trade, a trade that made Norfolk a wealthy place to be. The road to right is the high street: It boasts one tiny shop and a school. The high street eventually leads on to Whipwell street which in tum runs into Whipwell Green where legend has it that a well existed. This well is at the centre of a macabre ghost story which I heard told as a youngster, but it was news to me that Happisburgh was the location of this alleged haunting.

The Hill House Inn

Straight ahead at the crossroad is a hill which runs up to the Hill House Inn and then on to a derelict caravan site that was cleared of caravans some years ago because of coastal erosion (In fact the site has moved inland to the site where we were spending our two nights). Whilst dinning in the half-timbered interior of the ancient Inn the landlord told us that the grade 2 listed Inn had been given twenty years before it fell into the sea. It was criminal, he said, that those losing their homes to the sea were expected to pay for their demolition costs before they littered the beach. 

When Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Canon Doyle visited this part of the world it inspired two of his stories: The North Norfolk legend of Black Shuck was behind the story of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and at the Hill House Inn where he was fond of staying an inspiration came for the story of "The Dancing Men".  The Eastern Daily Press  tells us: 

Lying in a quiet Norfolk coastal village just a stone's throw from the sea, The [Hill House Hotel] was the perfect retreat for a famous writer who wanted to work in solitude. His writing desk was placed at the window, facing a bowling green and the sea, and the author was left in peace, with a maidservant on call to attend to him when he needed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle liked the hotel so much that he became a regular visitor, and as well as providing peace and quiet, the Hill House also provided inspiration - in the form of a curious hand-written script formed by stickmen that the landlord's son had written in the guest book. Conan Doyle was so taken with the code that while staying there in May 1903 he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story called The Adventure of the Dancing Men, rated by aficionados of the great detective as one of the best.

Doyle captures the atmosphere of this part of Norfolk in The Dancing Men where he writes:

...there was much around us to interest us, for we were passing through as singular a countryside as any in England, where a few scattered cottages represented the population of today, while on every hand enormous square towered churches bristled up from the flat green landscape and told of the glory and prosperity of old East Anglia. At last the violet rim of the German ocean [The North Sea] appeared over the green edge of the Norfolk coast and the driver pointed with his whip to two old brick and timber gables which projected  from a grove of trees. "That's Ridling Thorpe Manor" said he.

Happisburgh church: One of those enormous square towered 

churches Canon Doyle speaks of.

The North Sea eats away at Happisburgh's cliffs

Doyle's reference to Ridling Thorpe Manor reminds me of Happisburgh Manor whose enormous thatched roof and chimneys we glimpsed poking over a line of trees. I don't think I've ever seen a mansion that large with a thatched roof; but then it is a Victorian fancy and belongs to the world of the Victorian imagination and a romantic take on all things medieval. With its lower half hidden behind the copse its builders would be proud to know that it looked the epitome of mystique and could well serve as the romantic setting for a haunting period piece. But at about 200m from the sea it seems to have become a hot potato. 

File: -2008-07-04 Happisburgh Manor, Happisburgh, Norfolk.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The under populated isolation which is North Norfolk would have been strong in Doyle's day: By the 19th century the wealth and importance of Norwich and Norfolk had diminished considerably since the halcyon days of the Middle Ages as city & county lost out to the big industrial cities of the North. Also, although transport & communication had improved by Doyle's time it was still not advanced enough to rid North Norfolk of that sense of disconnection which can be felt even today. In Victorian days it was very much a slow backwater and its folk perhaps therefore more open to accepting the paranormal. I am sure it's significant that Doyle, who was fascinated by the paranormal, placed his other Norfolk inspired story in the wilds of isolated Dartmoor. Wild and isolated countryside seems to stimulate the imagination and enhance a sense of the numinous: Fred Hoyle and the Brontes may be further evidence of this rule of thumb.

A small erosion valley opens up in the soft cliffs of Happisburgh. 

The inevitable carving away of the glacial till cliffs of Happisburgh is slowly removing it from the map of Norfolk. But ironically it this very process which has put Happisburgh on the world map of paleontological fame. For underlying the till is a basement rock which been uncovered to reveal early hominin footprints. At nearly a million years old these are the oldest hominin footprints outside Africa. See here for more: Happisburgh footprints - Wikipedia . This is so long ago that the owners of these footprints would have seen a very different night-sky to the one I saw when I went out to look at the stars on our second night. In comparison with these time scales, it feels as though Happisburgh church was built only yesterday.  

A more recent manifestation of the hominin group

 treads Happisburgh's basement rock.  

From its ghost stories & legends, through Canon Doyle's dancing men, to those enigmatic ancient footprints, Happisburgh has plenty to pique the interest of the student of mystery. Take for example those early hominins: What did they look like? What did they think of the world in which they found themselves? Did they have a purely bestial secular mind set and simply take it all as necessarily granted and gave no further thought to it?* Or did they look up at the stars and wonder and attempt to make anthropic sense of those cosmic contingencies by integrating the enigmatic facts of life with religion? Did they have rituals and ritual sites? All the paleontologists find are the bare necessities of adaptive survival like flint tools and butchered bones. The kind of sacred sites we find associated with the neolithic and later ages have not been found in the Paleolithic; such sites seem to be a function of the wealth surplus of farming communities, an example being, of course, the monumentally huge structure that is Happisburgh church.

An air of intrigue & mystery hangs over Happisburgh which whets the appetite of the curious as did those strange dancing men fascinate Sherlock Holmes. 

Relevant Link:

Famous Sherlock Holmes manuscript by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written at Hill House Hotel in Dereham set to fetch $500,000 at ... | North Norfolk News

Footnote

* This sentence is based on the fact that our science in essence only describes the inherent organization of our experiences: In this sense we are no further forward in our understanding than Paleolithic races whose difference to ourselves was that they didn't have available those very powerful and general descriptive organizing principles (e.g. the laws of physics) that we have today, or a sense of sight and sound greatly magnified by the artifacts of technology. But essentially those principles are a means of description which in the final analysis rely on a kernel of brute contingent fact at which point descriptive explanation hits a logical barrier and can go no further.  See here: Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Of Stones, Stars, Circles, Status, Secrets, Sacredness, Mystique and Masons. Part I

Ancient Neolithic stones march off into the distance 

against the medieval backdrop of Avebury. 

The wife and I recently had a few days holiday in the City of Bath. On the way to Bath we decided to do a short sight seeing tour through Wiltshire. Among England's counties Wiltshire has an unrivaled mystique generated by its reputation for a fascinating mix of UFO sightings and corn circles. On top of this there are the numerous enigmatic ancient monuments, including legendary world heritage sites like Stonehenge and Avebury; in the minds of many these monuments are somehow bound up with those UFOs and corn circles. In previous years we have stopped at West Kennet long barrow, Avebury and even flown a kite with our off-spring on the summit of Silbury hill in the days when you could still climb it. But during those visits we never saw or felt anything of a strange nature,  unless it be the hippy who was soaking up the vibes as he sat in a rather modest looking  corn circle!

This time we decided to stop again at Avebury, a monument which is well worth several visits.  We arrived around 3 pm on a bright but overcast day, weather ideal for this kind of tourist stop.

Avebury: A chocolate box village scene vies with rough hewn stones for camera pixels

Avebury village goes back to medieval times but in comparison with the largely unknown culture which constructed the henge and stone circle during a period of some 500 years well over 4000 years ago, medieval Avebury feels very much like the familiar home culture one has been brought up with and thinks one understands. In any case the strange gnarled old stones of the circle look very anomalous set against the soft grass covered slopes and the chocolate box village. These stones look like alien monoliths dropped from the skies and don't blend in at all, anymore than, say, an electricity pylon or a wind turbine blends in with its idyllic backdrop.

In their day, however, the stones wouldn't have looked at all anomalous given the very different atmosphere and mood conveyed by the magnificent neolithic spectacle that was Avebury. Archaeology has revealed that the original earthworks would have provided a breath taking back drop of brilliant white chalk dazzling the eyes in the sun. Hints of this can be seen in the white tracks on the outer bank worn away by the feet of the many visitors who circumnavigate the site.  In their time the banks and the ditch would have been higher, deeper, steeper and all in gleaming white, bearing no comparison with the smooth green slopes of today.

It is well known that (by definition) henges have an inverted fortification structure. That is, the usual defensive bank and ditch, rather than pointing outwards, point inwards. This immediately suggests that the henge bank was a place of viewing for the rank and file who looked in on the activities inside the circle. In fact this video conjectures that Stanton Drew henge may have been a kind of theatre for blood sports. This is not a theory I have heard before but it is plausible and would explain the inward looking fortification effect; nothing could get out without a struggle; it would in effect be the ultimate ha-ha. However, it is difficult to imagine blood sports taking place in the smaller henge monuments, or at a very large henge enclosure like Avebury as much of the action would be too far away to see. But the general idea of a henge enclosing some kind of spectacle with an audience standing on the perimeter well separated from whatever went on within the circle could well have been the role of all henges.

The ritualistic and religious particulars of henges have, of course, been lost in the mists of time. (Unless some middle eastern traveller has left us a text somewhere). But there are some general conjectures about henges which seem at least plausible if not probable. These monuments must encapsulate the thinking and world view of the neolithic people who built them, a world view that today would probably strike us as otherworldly and supernatural. The environs of Avebury, with its avenues linking it to other monuments and the vicinity of West Kennet long barrow and Silbury hill, has prompted archaeologists to refer to the whole complex as a "Ritual landscape".  I imagine that the farming families on pilgrimage to this complex from their small thatched huts and farms would have been gob smacked by the huge artificial landscape, all garbed in brilliant white, that confronted them. Above all this landscape would have conferred a sense of power, status and mystique upon the aristocracy and/or priesthood which managed it. That power was real at least in the sense that they had enough control of the agrarian labour surplus in order to organise the building and maintenance of this ritual complex. Their power was also real in that their knowledge was genuine: It is clear from the connection that henges and stone circles have with their environment, especially the astronomical environment, that the builders did know something about how the world worked. Moreover, in an agrarian society where everyone's life was so obviously modulated by the beat of the seasons, seasons apparently driven by the configurations in the heavenly vault, this was significant knowledge. In as much as henges and their stones circles encapsulate information about the neolithic perspective on the world they not only look inwards but also outwards towards the cosmic context.

To the plebeians coming to this monument for the first time it must have seemed that its priesthood was surely in touch with the divine. The power of the site resided in the sense of spectacle, mystery and the sheer theatre of it all. A near equivalent in our own culture are the cathedrals of the middle ages which would have taken the breath away of the peasantry and be clear evidence of the aristocracy's and priest's right to rule. Also, I'm reminded of the Victorian Gothic revival and Pugin's attempt to revive the mystique of Catholic power through the sheer intimidating mystery of catholic rituals carried out in the context of lavishly reinterpreted pseudo Gothic churches.

But perhaps an even better modern analogy to the pilgrim's wonder at Avebury may be seen in the visitor to the huge circle of the Large Hadron Collider where we have engineering on an unprecedented scale. Like the circle at Avebury the LHC impresses by its sheer size lending gravitas and status to the techno-scientific elite who have built it, run it and understand it*. As with the neolithic circles the LHC looks both inward and outward by demonstrating that the builders certainly do know a lot about the workings of the cosmos at large. And like the fortified walls of Avebury the LHC has even had its rumour of being a container for potentially dangerous arcane power; there have been conjectures that it might have had the potential to generate a black hole or two, little gateways to unknown dimensions! All this only adds to the wow! effect and glory of its scientific priesthood as they wrestle with dark forces..... well, it would do if it were not for the fact that in these days of reactionary popularism and benighted fundamentalism the ivory tower establishment is less likely to get a blank cheque of kudos! They need to take note of this!

It might be old but engineering on a huge scale will always impress!

 For the priesthood of Avebury spectacle was the name of the game: The monumental level of construction, the dazzlingly white surfaces and the hint of them being responsible for the control of dangerous forces served to inflate the status of the priesthood in the minds of the plebeians. That priesthood need have done little but keep flashing their wares and imagination would have done the rest to keep up the mystique of power and fear of the unknown. Like a huge peacock's tail it doesn't necessarily have to serve any real purpose other than to say "We know this display impresses you!". In fact sometimes human beings can be caught in the act of outright deception in order to keep the mythology and mystique about themselves going. See for example the bazaar case of Bob Lazar where obfuscation, magic and mystery are an end in themselves.

***

In part II we go to the city of Bath where we will find another world of Stone's, stars, circles, status secrecy,  sacredness, mystique and masons. Another world of facades made to impress!

But there remains to tell of a curious ending to our visit at Avebury. We had just finished doing our tour of the circle and had entered the space in front of the National Trust museum when a low flying black helicopter passed over head! Knowing all those legendary associations of black helicopters with UFOs and corn circles I was absolutely gob-smacked! Moreover, even though I had been taking lots of pictures of Avebury I didn't quite have my camera at ready at that moment, just when I wanted it! Some people would say that's down to the camera imp who turns up and does his stuff whenever the strange makes a showing! I don't, of course, believe in black helicopter conspiracies but, I thought, what a fitting piece of symbolic synchronicity to end a day at Avebury! I was left chuckling over it for some time!

Footnote:

* As we know the construction of the LHC required a large number of specialists each very skilled in their particular specialism. It is an interesting question, then, as to the specialism break down at Avebury. The construction and running of the henge at Avebury would require manual skills, engineering skills, knowledge of the heavens and presumably priestly skills. Perhaps even ancillary tasks like catering and miscellaneous services were needed once the crowds converged on the site! An interesting exercise is to look for parallels between the specialisms needed at Avebury and the specialisms needed at the LHC!

NOTE: Link on New Grange: Quotes from the article:

One of the most tantalizing aspects of Newgrange is that it appears to be astronomically oriented: every year, on the morning of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, sunlight penetrates the passage and illuminates the floor of the chamber. As the sun rises higher, the beam widens within the chamber so that the whole room becomes dramatically illuminated. This event lasts for 17 minutes, beginning around 9 am.

“To the Neolithic culture of the Boyne Valley, the winter solstice marked the start of the New Year– a sign of nature’s rebirth and promising renewed life to crops, animals and humans. It may also have served as a powerful symbol of the inevitable victory of life over death, perhaps promising new life to the spirits of the dead,” said World Heritage Ireland.

The Paranormal Part 5: The Last Straw

Crop circles, Rabbit Holes and Time Loops - Rob Buckle

Crop Circle Truth, with Rob Buckle on Circlemakers

See also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krA-PYWZQPc 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=ofNNwsNCB0g

And the channels Zenrabbit1 and Zennrabbit on YouTube

The above videos are talks by crop circle researcher Rob Buckle. His interest is in human made crop circles – that’s right there really are human constructed crop circles out there and they are very impressive by the sound of it! However, as a result of his emphasis on the human aspect of this phenonmenon Buckle has earned the ire of the traditional circle researchers who have placed a huge stake in the “alien intelligence did it” hypothesis. Ironically it is these people, whose life’s work and businesses swing on this thesis, that have become the powerful crop circle establishment. As might be expected given the natural state of human affairs, this establishment via their well entrenched interests have backed themselves into a corner, unable to gracefully bow out. They have burnt their life boats and Buckle has not just rocked their ship, he has also pulled the bilge plug.

Evidently Buckle has some acquaintance with the circle of circle makers and can tell us which circles he knows for a fact to have been created by them. None of this is to say that Buckle himself doesn't have some rather exotic notions of his own: He appears not to rule out that some circles may have non-human origins, but he is more interested in the far more frequent human created circles and that is because of the strange lore and anecdotes that now surrounds the making of these prodigious works of art. In his talks Buckle relates some of the weird paranormal events that have haunted, yes,  haunted is the right word, the circle makers; for example, frightening tall shadowy figures appearing in fields at night, presences that have barred entry to fields, lights, orbs, UFOs and this is just for starters: Particularly intriguing are the circle makers who have had to abort their corn circle mission for various reasons and then found later that either their planned circles were executed by other (unknown) parties, or, if they got only half way through, finding that by the next day someone, or something, had completed them.  Watch the videos to hear more. Unfortunately most of the evidences Buckle offers are one-off anecdotes that cannot be tested by traditional hard science; in fact it is all too likely that such peculiar phenomena are far too anomalous and erratic to yield to test tube precipitating and spring extending science. But having said that let me mention that Buckle also shows a video of a scientist who attempted to distinguish between so-called “real” and “hoaxed” crop circles using his instrumentation only to find that these instruments showed just as strong readings in circles known to have human origins.

Some time ago during the nineties “corn circle” (as they were then called) craze I remember watching a TV program where a farmer said that his parents, who were farmers between the wars, would find the occasional (simple) crop circle in their fields. In those days they just shrugged their shoulders and got on with their work. Since seeing that program I’ve had the sneaky suspicion that although the recent highly sophisticated circles are likely to be the product of expert and well practiced crop artists there has been all along a background of simpler formations that are not a product of human agency. Buckle, in fact, confirms this opinion in the comment thread of his second video above:

The few that still have a question mark over them are usually small and simple, but with swirled lays, done in one movement. These type were more common in the early days, but now are very rare.

In these simpler designs the emphasis is on their faultless machine like execution. That suggests to me a very algorithmic type "intelligence" rather than the very general necessarily mistake prone* all-purpose intelligence of humans. Who knows, perhaps the mysterious agency behind these machine perfect circles is becoming jealous of human efforts which have put their rather simple formations into the shade and this may explain why crop circle hauntings have had the effect of frightening away some artists!

It is wrong to call the crop circle creators hoaxers or pranksters – they are true artists who love the adventure, creativeness and artistic high that their clandestine work gives them as they have pushed it to the very highest level of development. Also, in view of the hauntings perhaps there is the added frisson of a dangerous liaison with the supernatural. But with that must go a warning; they are outlaws beyond the protection of society and opening themselves up to who knows what. Hauntings have a disquieting way of attaching themselves to people if those people find themselves in a position where they can become “infected”. Therefore I would categorically advise against proactive attempts to make a connection with the otherworldly. On the web site of crop circle researcher Colin Andrews (who has similar views to Buckle) we can read of a case where an off duty policeman who spotted tall white entities in the vicinity of a crop circle near Silbury hill and tried to interact with them. Faced by this custodian of the law these beings legged it over a hill pretty fast, but that didn't stop the officer subsequently picking up a haunt: See here http://www.colinandrews.net/UFO-PoliceSergeant-SilburyHill.html:

After the experience the officer suffered what he called poltergeist experiences. Several electrical items began to malfunction and there were strange knocks at the front door. When the officer answered the door there would be no-one there. The officer felt he had brought something home with him, several days after the experience he said that he had felt a presence within his home. Sometimes, when walking out to the kitchen, he said he saw in his minds eye a brief flash of a towering black figure (approx 8ft)) standing before him (Much like the figures circle makers see - Ed). These types of experiences are quite common with experiencers.

The officer’s continuing experiences show that whatever the origin of these events, once they enter into someone's life they seem to have a continuing presence.

To me that’s the equivalent of the frightening health warning picture on the back of a cigarette packet; I don’t think we have an inbuilt fear of the numinous for nothing. Better to keep to passive research rather than proactive research – that is, don’t try to stimulate "occult systems" to produce test output by poking them – instead just sit back, watch and think.  The occult is looking to me as if it’s a breakdown of the coherent rationality of our world in favour of some kind of cognitive delirium with, perhaps, a Freudian diagnosis of crises  in Jung's collective unconscious partly explaining it's meaning. But who knows; that's just a guess! If a passive approach helps keep this at bay it can’t be bad.

Other posts in my paranormal series:

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/paranormal-part-2-warning-dont-watch.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/paranormal-part-3-westall-66-and.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-paranormal-part-4-monsters-from-id.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/identified-lying-object.html

Footnote:
* Due to a trial and error heuristic of "search, reject and select". Human minds necessarily use error feedback to learn.

Silbury Hill from West Kennet Long Barrow taken during one of my visits. I have never seen or felt anything odd! I suppose I ought to be pleased!

Addendum 03/02/2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-399136/Crop-circles-hit-spiritualists-suicide.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ross-well.html  

The Paranormal Part 4: Monsters from the Id

(See here for part 3)

I like to keep my eye on the paranormal, a subject that as far as I’m concerned also embraces UFOlogy. Some of the latest UFOlogical news can be found on Nick Pope’s web site. It was from his site that I got to hear about the Citizen’s Hearing on Disclosure held at the beginning of May of this year. The above YouTube Video contains ninety minutes of highlights. The idea behind this hearing was that in the absence of an official American Government hearing American Citizens, who as a rule think their government is always conspiring against them, would convene their own occasion using the format of a formal hearing. This format, I presume, was one way to give these proceedings an air of official gravitas, perhaps hoping that this might bring about a turning point in attitude. However, the fact remains UFO believers, in terms of official status, are in the main marginalized and establishment figures are too concerned with their reputations to get involved; moreover UFOlogy has a noticeable lunatic fringe. The subject of UFO disclosure only gets a small mention on Wiki and the hearing itself gets all of four sentences!

Nevertheless, as always, I was very interested in the hearing. I was particularly fascinated by the testimony of UK ex-transport police officer Gary Heseltine (Starts at 40 mins 30 secs). He gave a run-down of some of the sightings he had received from UK police officers. Heseltine entered these sightings into an official police database; for example in October 1978 three uniformed officers in Buckinghamshire saw a football field sized  UFO “suddenly and silently materialize in front of them in the blink of an eye”. After 5 minutes it dematerialized as suddenly and silently as it came. I don’t think this (de)materialization capability is an isolated case as I have heard other accounts where UFOs materialize or dematerialize “just like that”. Moreover, silence, or at least low levels of sound, is a theme with UFO sightings.

Interesting, yes, but then think about it: A huge “nuts and bolts” vehicle suddenly introduces itself into a volume in the atmosphere. What happens to the air molecules occupying that volume during the appearance and disappearance of the craft? How could this operation be carried out without producing shock waves? Where did the air molecules go to and come from as the vehicle respectively made its entrance and exit? How were these molecules removed and reintroduced without causing pressure disturbances in the atmosphere? Whatever we are dealing with here appears to be unable to control the photons of electromagnetic fields and yet at the same time shows supreme control over the particle fields of matter. Strange.

Either these "entities" are not subject to reality as we know it or they are playing around with our perception of it, if indeed there is a difference there. As I have said before I put this whole subject in the same category as the apparitional in general, a category which includes ghosts, channelling, alien animals, the Loch Ness monster, road ghosts, time regressions, past life regressions etc. In this domain of experience it is common for scenes to change abruptly, discontinuously, silently and often  be accompanied by the altered state of consciousness referred to as the Oz Effect (as are UFO experiences).

But if I’m right in classifying UFOs with the apparitional in general then I have rather committed myself to disbelieving those stories about governments possessing crashed UFOs and alien bodies; this would be a bit like claiming to have in one’s possession a coat left behind by a ghost! To be fair there are claimed physical traces in UFOlogy: e.g. photographic evidence, marks on the skin (cf. the stigmata marks), even marks on the ground (cf. the ghostly wet foot prints found by the Most haunted team near the Queen Mary’s swimming pool), but no evidence so compelling that it crosses over into conclusiveness. Even the so-called alien implants seem to be just homogeneous lumps of blended matter with little or no discernible structure that would mark them out conclusively as hi-tech artifacts. My own opinion is that every UFO related phenomenon has a corresponding counterpart in  the more general apparitional world – even the silent unidentified flying objects, which appear to mark out UFOlogy as a distinct subject, have a parallel in the accounts of phantom World War II aircraft seen to fly silently over the Derbyshire dales in England. As I have said before the quality of the observational protocols of UFOlogical interest are commensurate with the quality of the protocols from those who claim to have had a more general apparitional experience. Therefore if we are to take one set of protocols seriously we are obliged to take the other seriously. I would even go as far as to suggest that if we ever succeed in explaining one apparitional special case, like say, road ghosts, this will provide important keys for the explanation of apparitional experiences as a whole. In fact according to Janet and Colin Bord in their book “Alien Animals” [bca 1980] UFO sightings often go together with alien animal sightings.

Another aspect of UFOlogy that undermines the “little grey men from Zeta Reticuli” paradigm is the way some UFO stories develop over time to the point where they start to look like movie plots. Take the Rendlesham forest case with Colonel Halt and his trusty men Jim Penniston and John Burroughs. I’ll accept that I don’t think you could find any more honest and authentic sounding guys. Their claims to having seen a zig-zagging object, and not just a light, and even having the opportunity to touch the object as Jim Penniston claims, is inadequately explained by the light of the distant of Orfordness light house, or space junk returning to Earth. Either they are hoaxing us, or their experiences, at least on the level of perception, are genuine.

But it turns out that there happens to be another player in the Rendlesham story called Larry Warren. He says that on the night Halt and his team were in the woods he and another group of serviceman, a little separated from Halt’s group, not only observed a UFO but also the aliens themselves – small child sized translucent beings who hovered a little above the ground beside their vehicle (why have they got legs when they can hover?). Halt and his men were rather disconcerted about this bizarre account hinting that it cast doubt on the authenticity of the whole occasion, particularly as no one in Halt's team remembered Warren being party to the events. Further casting doubt on the reality of Warren’s claims is that he admits he was subjected to a perception bending debriefing by the military authorities.

But the story didn't need just Larry Warren for it to take an even more bizarre turn. Some years later during a history channel production Jim Penniston said that when he touched the UFO he received some sort of mental impression through his fingers, an impression which turned out to be the visualisation of a binary sequence. He wrote this binary code into a notebook:

Just like Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Jim Penniston's note book recording the alien binary code impressed into his consciousness

And guess what …the binary sequence translates using a common-or-garden ascii decode! Compared to the endeavours of the scientists of the Arecibo message that’s not exactly a sophisticated universal cosmic language! Cor blimmey mate, pull the other one it's got bells on! And just like all those otherworldly messages we've seen before, once “decoded” the Rendlesham message is at once unspecific, general and enigmatic; although some UFO  aficionado are saying that the Earth coordinates it contains locate significant historic sites. But then so what? What is that supposed mean? The enigma remains; it’s just an enigma pointing to other enigmas!

Part of the "message" decoded " using ascii; Really?

There is just enough here to keep us on the edge of our seats but that’s about all. We are actually being offered both too little and yet too much – too little to constitute solid and interpretable evidence and yet too much because it’s starting to look all rather silly and incoherent; in fact it’s very reminiscent of The Close Encounters plot of the 1977 film, screened just three years before Rendlesham. And that’s very interesting because after the 1993 film Fire in the Sky, which was loosely based on the Travis Walton alien abduction of 1975, subsequent alien abduction accounts had similarities with this film!  The final twist in the Rendlesham affair is that Jim Penniston is telling us that it wasn't aliens who contacted him with the binary message, but time travellers from our own future! I'm still waiting for someone to move the interpretation on to the simulation argument!

The eclectic and bizarre nature of paranormal/apparitional data means that it is very difficult to make sense of; no unifying rational scheme easily emerges. But perhaps, like our dreams, that it’s very nature; that is, that paranormal phenomenon cannot rise to the level of coherence that we see in the “physical” world where rationality is replete to the extent that  we feel we are interfacing with a matrix of noumena. If I believed that our world was pervaded by a rogue mental substrate(s) that can somehow splice its(their) workings into our everyday stream of experience then that’s where I would say these dreamlike apparitional sequences are coming from. This substrate, I’ll hazard, absorbs and stores our fears, dreams, aspirations, imaginings, demons and emotional content in particular. It then reflects them back to us in partially processed form as it vainly tries to put together a coherent package that integrates with our reality; it fails and consequently compromises the rationality of our world. This substrate is too schizophrenic to finally succeed in generating the meticulous coherence of the fully rational. When familiar epistemic methods are applied to this irrational ontology they breakdown and generate nonsense. Apparitional sequences are pastiches cobbled together in a more or less haphazard fashion.

How can you disclose when essentially you've got nothing intelligible and coherent to disclose? No surprise then that there is a cover up – what else can you do when, because the phenomenon itself is intrinsically irrational, you are basically in a position of utter, utter incomprehension?  You can't offer any hard evidence in the way of molecular artefacts because there aren't any; all you can offer are some weird and bizarre sightings and experiences at the risk of making you look like a kook. Who with a responsible job is going to jump first and risk their reputation?

Let me leave you with the words of J. Allen Hynek:

I am very much afraid that UFOs are related to certain psychic phenomena. And if I say “I am very much afraid”, this is because in our Centre at Evanston we are trying to study this problem from the angle of the physical sciences…..UFOs may be psychic phenomena and the ‘aliens’ may not come from outer space but from a ‘parallel reality’…..Certainly the phenomenon has psychic aspects….the fact is that there are psychic things; for instance, UFOs seem to materialize and dematerialize. There are people who’ve had UFO experiences who’ve claimed to have developed psychic ability. There have been reported cases of hearings [sic - healings?]in close encounters and there have been reported cases of precognition where people had foreknowledge or forewarning that they were going to see something…..whatever UFOs are they want to play games with us and lead us on a confusing chase. [The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters 2002. Pages 305 and 306]

This must be one of the creepiest sequences in all cinematography! In  "Forbidden Planet" a remark is passed in the film that the form of the monster from the id is a pastiche that appears to follow no rational scheme.  Says it all really!

Reference material

Wiki on the Rendlesham incident: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

UFO - The Rendlesham Forest Case - Part 1 of 6 – History Channel: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvq-RWWApO8

Rendlesham Forest: Jim Penniston and John Burroughs about the binary code: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvq-RWWApO8 

Cracking the Alien Code of the 1980 Rendelsham Forest Encounter:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMMOxHGWSvY 

Go here for some of the Binary codes received by Penniston: 
http://www.therendleshamforestincident.com/The_Decoded_Binary_Code.php 

You can try decoding it using this ascii decoder!:
 http://home.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/   

The Paranormal Part 3: Westall 66, Oz, and the Martian Canals.

 

The video above is a documentary about the 1966 Westall High School UFO incident in Melbourne. This sober production refrains from building imaginative speculations on the weird accounts that fuel UFOlogical interest; rather, it simply provides some space for people to express their memories. This low key approach leaves us with a set of startling core reminiscences unsullied by wild and fanciful interpretations. 

Is there any hope of accounting for these UFO narratives without recourse to the supernormal? In the video one reasonable shot at explaining the Westall 66 events in terms of normalcy is taken by a military expert: He thinks it significant that military personnel (possibly some being American personnel) appeared very quickly after the event; they would not  have appeared so quickly if they had been surprised by the appearance of some strange object. Therefore, in his opinion, it is likely that the object observed was some kind of military drone that had gone astray.

What did the Westall 66 children see?

Nice try, but I feel this explanation is not entirely satisfactory; it fails to do justice to what the school children (now adults, of course) claim they saw; it is difficult to believe that even school children could confuse a chugging drone with a highly maneuverable seamless and smooth disk shaped object. Moreover, if they saw a real object then it is conceivable that the appearance of military personal was a response to the radar tracking of this object.

I’m not particularly persuaded by the theory that UFO reports are the accounts of the visits of little green or grey men from some far flung part of the Galaxy. One of my reasons for not favoring this explanation, as I have said in part 2 of this series, is because the UFO anecdotes are no better (or worse) than the rumours and anecdotes about ghosts. Moreover, UFOlogy is of a piece with the paranormal field as a whole: Stories of alien abductions are in most cases extracted using hypnosis as are so-called past life regressions. These abductions are accompanied by the ”The Oz Effect”, an effect that also seems to have been reported in the famous Morberly-Jourdain incident. Arthur C Clark’s Mysterious World describes Morberly's and Jourdain's "Oz" experience thus: 

Did the two women perhaps share a sort of waking dream? A close reading of "An Adventure" suggests they did, for they repeatedly refer to an eerie, unreal atmosphere that seemed to pervade the park: ‘Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still' [p123 1987]

If one is to take the UFO protocols seriously one must also take seriously a whole Pandora’s box of bizarre paranormal protocols. They stand or fall as a whole. As I have already mooted in this series “waking dreams” may have something to do with the paranormal; perhaps some kind of change in the mode of consciousness is involved, something akin to Charles Bonnet syndrome, mingling dream life with the normal coherent mode of consciousness that we usually associate with waking life.

I’m left with the feeling, however, that so far we have no explanation that does justice to Westall 1966. The Fortean feel of the whole subject is difficult to dispel and I’m reminded of the Martian Canal phenomenon because it too has an occult air and has left some people wondering if there is something here that is neither easily explained nor dismissed. In his book on the history of Mars observation [The Planet Mars 1996] William Sheenan spends four or five chapters on the subject of the Martian Canals; not a disproportionate    passage given that the question of these canals dominated the subject of Mars observation for the best part of 30 years from around1880. On the nature of these apparent canals Sheenan says:

 I must admit that I have never seen a fully convincing explanation (p137)

In his book “Cosmos” [1981] Carl Sagan's comments on the subject of the Canals are particularly interesting: (p110)

In reading Lowell’s notebooks I have the distinct but uncomfortable feeling that he was observing something. But what? 

When Paul Fox of Cornell and I compared Lowell’s maps of Mars with the Mariner 9 orbital imagery – sometimes with a resolution a thousand times superior to that of Lowell’s Earth bound twenty-four-inch refracting telescope – we found virtually no correlation at all. It was not that Lowell’s eye had strung up disconnected fine detail on the Martian surface into illusory straight lines. There were no dark mottling or crater chains in the position of most of his canals. There were no features there at all. Then how could he have drawn the same canals year after year? How could other astronomers - some of whom said they had not examined Lowell’s maps closely until after their own observations - have drawn the same canals? 

 …I have the nagging suspicion that some essential feature of the Martian canal problem still remains undiscovered. Lowell always said that the regularity of the canals was an unmistakable sign that they were of intelligent origin. This is certainly true. The only unresolved question was which side of the telescope the intelligence was on. 

Joining the Dots; wrongly, this time!

Many good observers with high quality equipment failed to see the canals and this tends to suggest a subjective component to the Martian Canal experience. That there was something strange going on with human consciousness is perhaps hinted at by the experience of Giovanni Schiaparelli, one of the first observers to “see” the canals: William Sheenan quotes Schiaparelli as follows (p 87):

What strange confusion! What can all this mean? Evidently the planet has some fixed geographical details, similar to those of the Earth……Comes a certain moment, all this disappears to be replaced by grotesque polygonations and geminations which, evidently, seem to attach themselves to represent apparently the previous state, but it is a gross mask, and I say almost ridiculous.

I don’t hold out much hope that a definitive explanation of Westall 66 and many other peculiar paranormal anecdotes will ever come my way; after all, we are dealing with anomalies at the very heart of what makes coherent and rational science possible; namely, the observations of conscious cognition. However, these anecdotes do have some notable features in common; Viz: They hint at apparent changes in the mode of consciousness (the "Oz" effect), a dreamlike/Charles Bonnet type quality pervades these experiences and yet, inexplicably, they can be shared between observers - however, some people are more susceptible than others. We must also add that these reports leave outside observers (like Carl Sagan and myself) uneasy as to what is actually going on, because most difficult of all to account for is the claim that these events sometimes leave physical traces. (Like radar effects) 

As this series progresses I’m hoping to develop another common theme and that is the “Freudian” connection: Like dreams these experiences appear to have an oblique, encrypted if rather muddled connection with what is going on in our waking lives, personally and in society as a whole.

The first two parts of this series can be found here:

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/paranormal-part-2-warning-dont-watch.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html

The Paranormal Part 2: Warning: Don’t watch this at home

I Know What I Saw (2009) - Full Documentary (By James Fox)

The above youTube video by James Fox is probably the best collection of testimonies I have seen from ostensively reliable witnesses who claim to have come face to face with inexplicable (aerial) objects. I don’t advise watching this video if this kind of thing causes you deep disquiet; stick with what you do understand. In fact, even a seasoned Ufologist might “confront the subject with dread” (David Jacobs, The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters 2002 edition). The witnesses in the video are not the kind of people whose claimed sighting is woven into some weird and imaginative mythology, but instead their anecdotes stand out as stark and mysterious anomalies in their otherwise relatively humdrum existences. The people concerned often remain perturbed, frightened even, by what they think they have seen. The experiences, if not the phenomena themselves, are very real, too real for comfort, in fact.

However, I don’t myself rush to conclusions about little green or grey men. UFO sightings are of similar anecdotal quality to sightings of ghosts, alien animals, little people, road ghosts, the virgin Mary, angelic encounters, ghost aircraft, ghost vehicles, cattle mutilations, alien abductions and the whole gamut of the occult. In fact, general occult anecdotes imperceptibly blend into one another and into the UFO phenomenon and form a single body of inexplicable texts that do the rounds in our society. The very bizarre nature of all these texts makes one wonder if one is even thinking about them in the right way if one expects them to unravel into a rational narrative: Welcome to the world of waking dreams. The nearest I have myself come to such bizarre accounts is when my father suffered from Charles Bonnet syndrome as he started to go blind in old age (See Part 1 of this series). If we ever solve the problem of, say, ghosts then I suspect we would also have solved the problem of UFOs and vice versa. The whole gamut of occult texts is of a piece and we must cope with them as a whole. That we must never forget.

(The first part of this series can be seen here:
 http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html)

The Paranormal Part I: Noumena, Cognita, or Dreams?

What is reality?

Towards the end of his long life my father’s sight started to deteriorate. During this degeneration he suffered from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a hallucinatory condition common to the early stages of blindness. In my father’s case the hallucinations were largely of buildings that weren’t there. I was reminded of my father’s casual interest in architecture and the large number of postcards he had collected of the cities he had visited during wartime. In fact in one of his visions he saw the buildings surrounding his house in a state of destruction. Occasionally he also hallucinated people in and around the house and this rather spooked my mother for whom it was no doubt too reminiscent of a haunting for comfort.

As far as I am aware no one has a good theory on CBS; the best I’ve heard is that deprived of the bright and complex patterns of sensory input the visual cortex becomes sensitive to random perturbations and goes into a kind dream state. A particularly strange feature of CBS is that it often synthesizes its visions into the daily context; for example, illusory people will appear to be interacting with the physical surroundings. When sufferers of CBS report seeing people in their houses one cannot help but think that a more generalized version of CBS may throw light on the nature of ghosts and all sorts of occult events. Moreover, it is possible that CBS analogues may also apply to the sense of sound, smell and touch, not to mention a whole array of internalized intuitions that crop up now and then, such as the sense of somebody being present.

I’ve never got to the bottom of the positivist’s question of whether reality and perception are one and same or whether physical reality goes beyond the sum total of perceiving agents (Which according to Berkley includes God Himself) and is something other than perception, the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. But whatever the answer to that question we do know that as far as the solitary perceiving agent is concerned the world, the cosmos moreover, is effectively only what (s)he is conscious of. From the first person perspective reality is a mode of consciousness and therefore if there are sophisticated hallucinations that occur under an altered state of consciousness, then as far as the first person is concerned those perceptions are reality – of sorts. But having said that it seems that the visions experienced under altered states of conscious don’t usually follow the coherent, rational and strictly systematic logic we associate with the “really real” physical world; as science has shown us the logic of the really real is immaculately coherent, highly synchronized and faultlessly consistent. Without this coherence and consistency there would be no really real world with the touch and feel of physicality and solidity. The physical world passes the physical equivalent of a kind of Turing test for reality in as much as no matter what test you submit to it all but invariably it returns the observations that you would expect if that reality was really there. In contrast, however, the occult fails this test; for as soon as we move into altered states of conscious and the like, things get much less coherent and much more vague and anomalous: If a CBS vision appears, it usually fails to synchronise with the other senses, or if one looks again perhaps it has gone or changed. Like ghostly apparitions these visions lack a coherent integrity and integrateness with one’s wider experience. Both CBS and the occult fail the “Turing test” of reality. Like the actors who have mere bit parts in a play the actors of the occult make a brief appearance, but their character parts are not worked out in sufficient detail to have the multidimensional depth of presence we are used to in the physical world. Ergo, their attenuated reality is that much less instantiated.

I have never been witness to anything one that might call ghostly or paranormal. Even though I spent three years working (cleaning after hours, in fact) in one of England’s premier haunted houses , many times on dark winter evenings, I never heard, smelt or saw anything ghostly. However, from time to time stories and rumors did the rounds, but it always seemed to happen to other people; do people bring their ghosts with them? Sometimes I would stop and listen silently; absolutely nothing on all occasions – even the sense of a spooky ambiance was absent.

Anne Boleyn is, of course, Blickling’s celebrity ghost and there are some famous reports of encounters with female apparitions that are usually assumed to be Anne; although I have to say they are remarkably consonant with the generic grey lady reports that one hears of so often in haunted locations. In particular the stories of two encounters at Blickling are repeated time and again: One involves men delivering the Ditchley portrait of Anne’s’ mother, Elizabeth I, to the long gallery of the Hall. The delivery men were met by an old fashioned looking lady who signed for the portrait. But Blickling’s house steward was confounded when the men told him that the picture had already been signed for by a lady in the long gallery. The puzzled house steward examined the paperwork and found no signature on the dotted line. A search of the house yielded no sign of the spooky recipient of the portrait. Another story of an encounter with the lady of Blickling hall was provided by the butler to Lord Lothian, the last private owner of the hall. The butler approached a women dressed in grey standing by the lake, a lake a few yards far from the walls of the hall. She responded to the butler’s enquiry with “That for which I search is lost forever”. The butler looked away for a moment. He turned back only to find her gone.

Because of the similarities and analogies between the paranormal and the altered states of perception such as we see in Charles Bonnet syndrome and dream states, I have, as a kind of hobby, taken to using a sort of Freudian analysis to interpret ghost stories – looking on them as products of the imagination, and/or the Jungian deep collective mind which encodes meanings into stories, pictures and symbols. However, to call it “Freudian analysis” is really to put a respectable scientific gloss on a folk activity that has a lineage going at least as far back as Joseph’s interpretations of the dreams of Pharaoh ’s butler and baker.

My first foray into this area was with the famous lake-side sighting of Blicking Hall’s “Anne Boleyn”. Whatever the actual ontology behind this report, whether an hallucination or even an invented story, it nevertheless retains some highly symbolic elements that can be interpreted as a subliminal message of a modern malaise. The results of my “analysis” can be found toward the end of this blog post. Unfortunately information about the butler’s state of mind is not available to us, but I suspect if he did have some kind of hallucination it may also have connected with his circumstances in some way. I have a feeling, however, that these grey lady reports would come out of Blickling Hall whether Anne Boleyn’s visits were historical or not: What is crucial is that she is such a subliminally significant figure that even the rumour of her being connected with a place is enough to help trigger reports.

I call it “analysis” but frankly that term makes something which is very evanescent and insubstantial sound as though it is readily tractable to “hard science”. But then perhaps even history as a discipline would not want to make a claim to being analytical in the hard science sense. Equivocation is the name of the game. The past is one of those objects that is starting to pass out of the realm of “Turing testability” for physicality*. History cannot be tested at will, its evidence is often partial, and many of its practitioners have to accept that their theories may ultimately have no high standard of proof. Accordingly, Historians are not just people who can remember lots of facts, but they tap into a very wide experience of the human situation in order to interpret historical data with great feats of their imagination.

To embark on a creative task like interpreting the meaning of ghost reports one needs the free imagination of the artist and mythologist in order to join the dots with a grander imaginative narrative. As with the historian it too requires one to draw on one’s knowledge of the total human situation: history, psychology, religion, art, literature, ascetics, science, philosophy etc. What one ends up with is probably little more than conjecture, conjecture that perhaps shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But if that is all we have to got to go on then we must remember that epistemic beggars can’t be choosers.

However, as we shall see in the next part the quasi-Freudian/Jungian approach to the paranormal is far from original.

...to be continued...


Footnote: * The case of history is an indication that a negative on the "Turing test" for reality may be down to the object simply being epistemically inaccessible rather than it being intrinsically incoherent and fragmentary.