The Kingman Saucer and a Contactee

Back in 1973, a man named Arthur Stansel – using the alias of Fritz Werner – provided the respected UFO researcher Ray Fowler with an extraordinary and controversial affidavit concerning nothing less than an alleged crashed UFO event in Kingman, Arizona two decades earlier. It went like this…

“I, Fritz Werner, do solemnly swear that during a special assignment with the U.S. Air Force, on May 21, 1953, I assisted in the investigation of a crashed unknown object in the vicinity of Kingman, Arizona. The object was constructed of an unfamiliar metal which resembled brushed aluminum. It had impacted twenty inches into the sand without any sign of structural damage. It was oval and about 30 feet in diameter. An entranceway hatch had been vertically lowered and opened.”

Stansel/Werner continued: “It was about 3-1/2 feet high and 1-1/2 feet wide. I was able to talk briefly with someone on the team who did look inside only briefly. He saw two swivel seats, an oval cabin, and a lot of instruments and displays. A tent pitched near the object sheltered the dead remains of the only occupant of the craft. It was about 4 feet tall, dark brown complexion and had 2 eyes, 2 nostrils, 2 ears, and a small round mouth. It was clothed in a silvery, metallic suit and wore a skullcap of the same type material. It wore no face covering or helmet. I certify that the above statement is true by affixing my signature to this document this day of June 7, 1973.”

Well, as fascinating as all the above undeniably is, it’s a fact that the Kingman affair is one that is absolutely steeped in controversy and debate, and which has led some to accept the case as valid and has caused others to dismiss it all as nothing more than outrageous fantasy. And appropriately for such a controversial story, there is an intriguing aspect of the Kingman affair that is hardly ever discussed, and of which many within Ufology are completely unaware. And here it is, in all its strange glory…

Beyond any shadow of doubt, the number of people who can claim aliens wrecked their marriages is infinitely small. But, such claims have been made – the most memorable being that of construction-worker Truman Bethurum. His idea of a close encounter was very different to those of other UFO witnesses: his alleged 1952 liaisons – atop Nevada’s Mormon Mesa – with Space Captain Aura Rhanes, a supposed citizen of the planet Clarion, ultimately led his outraged wife to file for divorce!

Mormon Mesa is a 1,893 foot high summit which dominates Nevada’s Moapa Valley. Between the mesa and its two, near-identical neighbors, are two huge chasms created by the Muddy and Virgin Rivers that carved the mesa eons ago. Visually stunning, both then and now, Mormon Mesa was about to become a veritable hotbed of alien activity – specifically when, in the mid-to-late part of 1952, Bethurum began working in the area. …

via The Kingman Saucer and a Contactee | Mysterious Universe.

Gamers are better at lucid dreaming?

If you’re not in the least interested in the improving of the self, you might not know what a lucid dream is. A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming and can alter the flow of the whole dream scenario. If you have at least once, during a nightmare, become conscious of the fact that you are indeed just dreaming and could wake up from the torment, you might very well be on the path of becoming a very effective lucid dreamer. Conscious or lucid dreaming is said to be very beneficial to self-confidence, creativity and skill building, because you have a whole sandbox universe inside your head where you can experiment with anything that you can think of. Slavador Dali is probably the best example of what the creative mind can bring after sessions of lucid dreaming, but William Blake or composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner are also rumored to have explored the world of dreams in detail.

The technique of inducing lucid dreaming is still something of a mystery. While in the olden days Opium was believed to be the perfect vehicle for such tasks, nowadays, through meditation and willpower, it is believed that anyone can reach conscious dreaming.

… Statistically, gamers have less nightmares, because they can easily reverse the threats in their dreams and become the threatening presence to the entities they encounter while sleeping. The moment they understand they are dreaming, they’re turning the whole universe into a self-imagined level in which goals and probably even achievement become obvious.

via Gamers are better at lucid dreaming | Ana Todor Blog Journey | lucid dreaming.

[According to] Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada … “If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.”

…  The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.

A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.

The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness. …

With regard to nightmares…

Gackenbach conducted a 2008 study with 35 males and 63 females, and used independent assessments that coded threat levels in after-dream reports. She found that gamers experienced less or even reversed threat simulation (in which the dreamer became the threatening presence), with fewer aggression dreams overall.

In other words, a scary nightmare scenario turned into something “fun” for a gamer.

“What happens with gamers is that something inexplicable happens,” Gackenbach explained. “They don’t run away, they turn and fight back. They’re more aggressive than the norms.”

Levels of aggression in gamer dreams also included hyper-violence not unlike that of an R-rated movie, as opposed to a non-gamer PG-13 dream.

“If you look at the actual overall amount of aggression, gamers have less aggression in dreams,” Gackenbach said. “But when they’re aggressive, oh boy, they go off the top.” ….

via LiveScience

I’m definitely not a video game player, but I’d also say that I don’t have nightmares. Once every 6 months or so I’ll have some horror type things happen in my dreams (car accidents, burned bodies, etc.), but I never actually feel fear in my dreams… I guess because I know it is just a dream.

Archaeologists Stumble Upon ‘Vampire’ Skeleton in Bulgaria

The discovery was made near the Saint Nicholas Wonderworker monastery in Sozopol. Photo by dariknews.bg

Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered a buried man with an iron stick in his chest in the Black Sea town of Sozopol.

The man, who was buried over 700 years ago, was stabbed multiple times in the chest and the stomach, as his contemporaries feared that he would raise from the dead as a vampire, National History Museum director Bozhidar Dimitrov has told local media.

Experts believe that the man may have been an intellectual and perhaps a medic, as such individuals often raised suspicions in the Middle Ages.

The man’s grave was discovered near the apse of a church, which suggests that he was an aristocrat.

According to archaeologists, this is the first time a “vampire” burial has been discovered in Sozopol.

Over 100 buried people whose corpses were stabbed to prevent them from becoming vampires have been discovered across Bulgaria over the years, according to Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the Bulgarian National History Museum. …

via Bulgaria: Archaeologists Stumble Upon ‘Vampire’ Skeleton in Bulgaria – Novinite.com – Sofia News Agency.

Do Plants Think?

Scientist Daniel Chamovitz unveils the surprising world of plants that see, feel, smell—and remember

How aware are plants? This is the central question behind a fascinating new book, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. A plant, he argues, can see, smell and feel. It can mount a defense when under siege, and warn its neighbors of trouble on the way. A plant can even be said to have a memory. But does this mean that plants think — or that one can speak of a “neuroscience” of the flower? Chamovitz answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. …

It had been known for decades that plants use light not only for photosynthesis, but also as a signal that changes the way plants grow. In my research I discovered a unique group of genes necessary for a plant to determine if it’s in the light or in the dark. When we reported our findings, it appeared these genes were unique to the plant kingdom, which fit well with my desire to avoid any thing touching on human biology. But much to my surprise and against all of my plans, I later discovered that this same group of genes is also part of the human DNA.

This led to the obvious question as to what these seemingly “plant-specific” genes do in people.  Many years later, we now know that these same genes are important in animals for the timing of cell division, the axonal growth of neurons, and the proper functioning of the immune system.

But most amazingly, these genes also regulate responses to light in animals! While we don’t change our form in response to light as plants do, we are affected by lab at the level of our internal clock. Our internal circadian clocks keep us on a 24 hour rhythm, which is why when we travel half way around the world we experience jet lag. But this clock can be reset by light. A few years ago I showed, in collaboration with Justin Blau at NYU, that mutant fruit flies that were missing some of these genes lost the ability to respond to light. In other words, if we changed their clocks, they remained in jetlag.

This led me to realize that the genetic difference between plants and animals is not as significant as I had once naively believed. So while not actively researching this field, I began to question the parallels between plant and human biology even as my own research evolved from studying plant responses to light to leukemia in fruit flies. …

There is no doubt that plants respond to cues from other plants. For example, if a maple tree is attacked by bugs, it releases a pheromone into the air that is picked up by the neighboring trees. This induces the receiving trees to start making chemicals that will help it fight off the impending bug attack. So on the face of it, this is definitely communication. …

Plants definitely have several different forms of memory, just like people do. They have short term memory, immune memory and even transgenerational memory! …

For example a Venus Fly Trap needs to have two of the hairs on its leaves touched by a bug in order to shut, so it remembers that the first one has been touched. But this only lasts about 20 seconds, and then it forgets. Wheat seedlings remember that they’ve gone through winter before they start to flower and make seeds. And some stressed plants give rise to progeny that are more resistant to the same stress, a type of transgenerational memory that’s also been recently shown also in animals. While the short term memory in the venus fly trap is electricity-based, much like neural activity, the longer term memories are based in epigenetics — changes in gene activity that don’t require alterations in the DNA code, as mutations do, which are still passed down from parent to offspring. …

Would you say, then, that plants “think”?
No I wouldn’t, but maybe that’s where I’m still limited in my own thinking! To me thinking and information processing are two different constructs. I have to be careful here since this is really bordering on the philosophical, but I think purposeful thinking necessitates a highly developed brain and autonoetic, or at least noetic, consciousness. Plants exhibit elements of anoetic consciousness which doesn’t include, in my understanding, the ability to think.  Just as a plant can’t suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also don’t think that it thinks.  …

Do you see any analogy between what plants do and what the human brain does? Can there be a neuroscience of plants, minus the neurons?
First off, and at the risk of offending some of my closest friends, I think the term plant neurobiology is as ridiculous as say, human floral biology. Plants do not have neuron just as humans don’t have flowers!

But you don’t need neurons in order to have cell to cell communication and information storage and processing.  Even in animals, not all information is processed or stored only in the brain. The brain is dominant in higher-order processing in more complex animals, but not in simple ones.  Different parts of the plant communicate with each other, exchanging information on cellular, physiological and environmental states. For example root growth is dependent on a hormonal signal that’s generated in the tips of shoots and transported to the growing roots, while shoot development is partially dependent on a signal that’s generated in the roots. Leaves send signals to the tip of the shoot telling them to start making flowers.  In this way, if you really want to do some major hand waving, the entire plant is analogous to the brain. ….

But while plants don’t have neurons, plants both produce and are affected by neuroactive chemicals! For example, the glutamate receptor is a neuroreceptor in the human brain necessary for memory formation and learning. While plants don’t have neurons, they do have glutamate receptors and what’s fascinating is that the same drugs that inhibit the human glutamate receptor also affect plants. From studying these proteins in plants, scientists have learned how glutamate receptors mediate communication from cell to cell. So maybe the question should be posed to a neurobiologist if there could be a botany of humans, minus the flowers!

Darwin, one of the great plant researchers, proposed what has become known as the “root-brain” hypothesis. Darwin proposed that the tip of the root, the part that we call the meristem, acts like the brain does in lower animals, receiving sensory input and directing movement. Several modern-day research groups are following up on this line of research. …

via Do Plants Think?: Scientific American.

Swimming underwater is faster than swimming on the surface

It is a misconception that the higher you are in the water, the faster you can swim. On the contrary, the highest speeds are reached by swimming completely submerged, because this allows for more efficient transfer of momentum to the water (which creates forward thrust according to Newton’s third law), and because less energy is wasted splashing water.
- Hans Starnberg, Department of Physics Gothenburg University Sweden

Turbulence at the surface of the water increases drag and slows swimmers down. Trained swimmers know that swimming underwater is faster than swimming at the surface.

In all the different types of competition stroke, from Olympic level down to club level and at all distances, the number of underwater strokes is strictly limited (especially at the turn) for this very reason. Competitors are disqualified and records annulled if they break the rules.
- Kevin Dixon-jackson, Eccles Lancashire

Evidence:

Hill Taylor stunned the crowd at a university event by completing the 50m backstroke in an astonishing 23.1 seconds – almost a second faster than the world record.

Venus transit a reminder of solar system’s size

venus crossing the sun

Filtering the sun’s light to a minuscule fraction of its true power allowed sky-gazers around the world to watch a silhouetted Venus travel across Earth’s closest star, an extremely rare spectacle that served as a reminder of how tiny our planet really is.

After all, the next transit is 105 years away — likely beyond all of our lifetimes but just another dinky speck in the timeline of the universe.

“I’m sad to see Venus go,” electrical engineer Andrew Cooper of the W.M. Keck Observatory told viewers watching a webcast of the transit’s final moments as seen from the nearly 14,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island.

From Maui to Mumbai, Mexico to Norway, much of the world watched the 6-hour, 40-minute celestial showcase through special telescopes, live streams on the Internet or with the naked eye through cheap cardboard glasses. …

via SunTimes