On
Friday, July 10 and Saturday, July 11, I attended the Lake Area Paragon
conference in Long Prairie, Minnesota. It appealed to me because it was close
to home and wouldn’t cause any additional health problems that have been
plaguing me in the last few months.
Lorna
Hunter was the organizer and host of the conference and did everything in her
power to make sure that we, who were on the program, didn’t have to worry about
anything, except maybe where to find ice cream late at night (there was a Dairy
Queen about 100 yards away).
For
the Friday night program, Hunter gave us a review of some of the more
interesting Minnesota UFO cases, especially those around the Long Prairie area.
One of them is known as the Tin Can case and was reported on October 23, 1965,
by James F. Townsend who was just 19 at the time. According to the
documentation available in the Project Blue Book files, which isn’t always the
most objective source, this is the story:
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Project Blue Book description on the Project Card.
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Project Blue Book description of the sighting.
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Saturday
began with Adrian Lee talking about his research into the paranormal and the
weird things that he’d seen. While it was all interesting, the still
photographs that seemed to show some sort of apparitions could have been the
result of various strange occurrences caused by the lighting, the camera or a
combination of both. The videos, especially where he had set up three houses of
cards, one beside the other to see what would happen were much more interesting.
One of those houses flew apart as if hit by an invisible hand while the others
remained intact and unmoving. As I say, it was an interesting bit of video.
After
lunch Jerry Clark was up with his explanation of “Experience Anomalies.” He
described it as such:
I call them
“experience anomalies,” or the secondary phenomenon as opposed to the core
phenomenon. They sometimes (though not always) have a parasitic – one might say
parodic – relationship to a core anomalous event. The anomalous event takes
place in the world and can be empirically demonstrated, or potentially
demonstrated. Its experiential correlate borrows its imagery from the anomalous
event but is ontologically unrelated to it. Experience anomalies are
open-ended. Nearly anything can be “seen,” though cultural traditions and
expectations play a large, in some ways determining, role in shaping their particular
content. In experience, individuals perceive supernatural or at least unlikely
entities like fairies, merbeings, angels, the Blessed Virgin Mary, gods,
monsters, space people, and phantom airship crews.
These are not
hallucinations as hallucinations are ordinarily defined. These encounters,
which at times occur collectively, are profoundly mysterious and their cause or
stimulus is unknown. Yet, to all available appearances, earnest witnesses and
clear viewing conditions that enhance confidence in the anomalousness of the
observation do not translate into anything that transcends memory and
testimony. We lack a vocabulary with which to conduct a useful discussion of
such matters. Perhaps “visionary” comes closest, even if it is merely
descriptive and not, as some presume, explanatory. It is as if, indeed, a
supernatural landscape has briefly overlaid the physical landscape. The
ufologist Jenny Randles calls this the “Oz Factor,” defining it as the
sensation sometimes reported by UFO witnesses of “being transported temporarily
from our world into another, where reality is but slightly different.”
He did provide information or ideas on how to
precede in an investigation of these anomalies, suggesting that the search in
not for authenticity or inauthenticity, but in what the witness had
experienced. He said:
Where
experience anomalies are concerned, the focus of investigations and debates
ought to be on causes, not on the specific content of the occurrences in
question. It is surely futile by now to argue that all anomalous experiences
must bow to conventional explanations; yet it is also unwise to extrapolate too
broadly from such experiences – which may well not mean what they appear to
mean – in order to concoct, with no other justification than a witness’ story,
an extraordinary phenomenological context in which the reported phenomenon is
said to make sense.
Anomalies of
the deepest strangeness dwell between the daylight of science and reason and
the dark night of dreams and superstition. You may have “seen” one, but it does
not necessarily follow that the anomaly lives on in the world after it has
briefly occupied your vision and scared the hell out of you. We may experience
unbelievable things, but paradoxically, all that may signify is that they can
be experienced. You can “observe” a fairy or a merbeing or something equally
outlandish, but however resonant the experience may be to you, the rest of us
cannot infer from your testimony that such creatures are “real.” To the
contrary, to all available evidence and virtually none to the contrary, they
are not. And that is all we can be assured of, because all we have done here is
to remove one explanation from consideration – that such things exist at
event-level reality – while failing to put another in its place.
Still, the
concept of experience anomalies relieves us of the false demands of literalism.
We no longer have to argue for the authenticity or inauthenticity of the
described phenomena. Not that a profound enigma does not remain – a mystery of
imagination, culture, perception, consciousness, being, and more – a mystery so
impenetrable that it eludes vocabulary itself, our very sense of the assumed
relationship of event to experience. Happily, though, it removes from us the
most onerous burden of all. We can now believe our informants without having to
believe their explanations.
This
might not explain Clark’s “Unified Theory” adequately, but gives an idea on a
method of investigation that might be more productive than others. The original
theory was published as “Experience Anomalies” in Fortean Times 243 (2008) on pages 42-47 for those interested in
reading the whole report.
My
presentation was the last and concerned the theory that the modern era of UFO
sightings didn’t begin with Kenneth Arnold, but started during the Second World
War when many were concerned with the Foo Fighters, and after the war with the
Scandinavian Ghost Rockets. Arnold sort of marked the middle of the beginning
of all this, and I have published the whole idea in Government UFO Files.
The
last of the presentations was the panel discussion and while I had been asked
by some about the Roswell Slides, none of that had been discussed completely
until the panel. When Lorna Hunter and I discussed my presentation before the
conference, she suggested that we wait until the panel to talk about the
slides. I fear it took 20 to 25 minutes
to outline the problems with the case, and to explain how this fiasco could
happen. I made it clear that while there was enough blame to go around, the
majority of the fault fell on Adam Dew and Joe Beason as the owners of the
slides. They would have had a high quality picture and as soon as better
quality scans were offered, the placard was read and the identity of the body
revealed.
This
isn’t to say that the others were blameless. There were plenty of red flags for
those who would have opened their eyes. As I said during the discussion in
Minnesota, Tom Carey had told me that it wasn’t a mummy because they had looked
at more than 500 pictures of mummies. I think he was looking for that specific
mummy rather than an examination of the characteristics of mummies, especially
those from the desert Southwest which should have given him and the others a
clue as to the identity of the being in the picture.
I
was also interested to learn that the slides had not been a topic of discussion
in Roswell during their annual festival. There had been a scheduled second big reveal,
but when the placard was so easily read by so many different people, it seems
that those sponsoring the festival just didn’t want to get drawn into the
controversy, or I should say that is my guess. They probably figured that the
wisest move was to say nothing about it and hope that the slides didn’t harm
the Roswell case or Roswell research. Whatever the motives, we obviously said
more about them in Minnesota than was said in New Mexico and I would note that
there was a lot of interest in the case and how it had unraveled so quickly.
For
those interested in the whole tale, there are plenty of articles about that on
this blog up to and including letters from Tom Carey and Don Schmitt and what
some of the experts are saying today.
Although
the conference sort of officially ended with the final panel, around 5:30 or
6:00 on Saturday evening, that didn’t mean there wasn’t more to be done. Adrian
Lee lead a well-attended tour of Long Prairie’s haunted sites. This is
something of an annual event, the tour as opposed to the paranormal conference,
and those who took the opportunity were provided with some interesting
paranormal facts.
