MUST READ: A Season of Extremely High Strangeness is Upon Us – Part I
A SENSATIONAL NEW BOOK – SKINWALKERS AT THE PENTAGON – ANSWERS SOME QUESTIONS IN THE SPACE PEN CLUB BOOK ABOUT THE “SECRET” GOVERNMENT STUDY OF UFO’S FROM 2008-2010 REPORTED IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
BUT DOES IT ALSO FLOUNDER BY UNEQIVACALLY ASSOCIATING ALL UFO’s WITH ASSORTED PARANORMAL FREAKINESS, INCLUDING ORBS EXPERIENCED AT THE LEGENDARY SKINWALKER RANCH – AND LATER IN THE HOMES AND AMONG FAMILY MEMBERS OF INVESTIGATING GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL WHO WERE “INFECTED” AFTER VISITING THIS PERENNIALY SPOOKY UTAH DESTINATION?!
Two major events in the past few weeks have set the UFO world abuzz and elevated to the forefront new historical information and occasionally troubling new insights that might be gleaned from these recent high-water marks. Talk about your disturbances in the force!
One is a new book by well-known players in this field (investigative Las Vegas reporter George Knapp and author and researcher Dr. Colm Kelleher, PhD), plus one formerly unknown government insider (Department of Defense physicist Dr. Jim Lacatski, D. Eng.) that will be examined first. The second Biggie is a new congressional effort to once again create true “agency” and public visibility inside defense and intelligence agencies on reporting and analyzing UAP/UFO reports from the military and elsewhere by firmly establishing and funding a public-facing investigative office. That will be covered in a subsequent Chronicles post later next week, the least of which is the statement made this week by Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) who used the term "extraterrestially" in a discussion about the DIA report in June that could not account for 144 unidentified objects that were observed and analyzed over a period of time.
But first, the book.
SKINWALKERS AT THE PENTAGON: An Insider’s Account of the Secret Government Program by Knapp, Kelleher and Lacatski is being heralded as the sequel to Knapp’s and Kelleher’s HUNT FOR THE SKINWALKER: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah (published in 2007), which lays out the truly freaky and sometimes frightening things that transpired on a remote Utah ranch. Under the umbrella of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) organization founded and funded by Vegas billionaire entrepreneur and commercial space pioneer, Robert Bigelow, the scientific staff , using the latest scientific equipment, investigated the paranormal events in the terrain that the Indigenous people of the area, and the original “owners’ of that weird real estate, believed was haunted by a Skinwalker – a shapeshifting witch and true bogey man. Or woman. Or supernatural entity. (SPOILER: If you read it – and you should, esp. if you read the new book – you’ll quickly find that modern “science” is no match for the apparent limitless psychic strangeness that pervades the ranch and affects many of those who come in contact with it, including the deep strangeness that often follows.
Historically Important…. Metaphysically Crucial…. To Understanding?
While it does serve as a sequel, SKINWALKERS AT THE PENTAGON is more important historically, as it traces the origins of the 2008-2010 UAP/UFO study that later made world headlines in 2017 and subsequent years, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP), although it was frequently and regularly misidentified as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) – even by The New York Times. In Chapter 9 of THE SPACE PEN CLUB, “The Road to Disclosure, the Barriers to Truth,” I take some swipes at what was not reported – or what essential details went undefined -- in esteemed media like the Times and many other mainstream media outlets.
With more than a little snark spackled into that chapter, I challenged the ambiguity of statements like “The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.” And yet no identification of what they were was ever reported. I also questioned the again vague mention of “the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo [the former military intelligence officer who led the secret Pentagon study] and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” Elizondo, btw, just landed what is probably a very healthy book contract. Maybe he will reveal what’s in those high security warehouses in or around Vegas where this stuff resides.
Tubular Bells?! The Perplexing Contagion Cases and Other Highlights from the Book
My Chapter 9 also called into question the following sentence in the reporting about the secret UFO study, now a decade old: “Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.” And, if I’m reading this right from the new Skinwalker book, these accounts below are the answer to that claim. They are also the most disturbing and intriguing sections of the book.
Here are some highlights from the new book that deserve at least a first round of comment.
· SKINWALKERS AT THE PENTAGON identifies so many alleged malevolent high strangeness episodes -- sometimes described in graphic detail -- that the book often scores many Fear Factor points, without providing other perspectives that may counter or balance this narrative.
The less malevolent incidents are no less shocking: Within one hour of setting foot for the first time on the Skinwalker ranch property, Lacatski, the DOD physicist and one of the book’s three authors, sees “an unearthly technological device” that suddenly appears in the kitchen, then quickly vanishes. He later discovers Mike Oldfield's 1973 album cover for Tubular Bells and says the devise pretty much resembled this image! (A side note, Bells was used extensively in The Exorcist soundtrack).
· Juliett Witt, a Pentagon specialist with counterintelligence operations, visits the ranch and witnesses with Bigelow on her first night there an odd-formed creature, part pig, part beaver-like (the tail) that rushes by them while walking the ranch’s perimeter. But when she returns back east to her home a few days later, intense poltergeist activity ensues in her home, terrifying her housemate.
· Witt is not the only one to experience a woo-woo contagion-like effect after visiting the place. A senior aerospace engineer with the Navy, Jonathan Axelrod, apparently brings back to his family’s Virginia home some bad juju, too, after investigating the ranch, which includes flying orbs in their house and a wolfman-like creature in the yard!
· In Chapter 8 of Skinwalker, the daughter of Kenneth Arnold, who spotted UFO’s flying near Mt. Shasta in 1947 and described them as flying saucers, relates that a “ball of light” later appeared in the Arnold’s home. “A litany of paranormal events in his life” also occurred after his historical sighting.
But that chapter also goes on to recount a Bend, Oregon, incident in 2005 featuring blue orbs that affected a biotechnologist and his daughter as they were traveling in his car. Incredibly, one flies through the man’s body, and over the next two years he battles an aggressive cancer. The story continues to enumerate blue orb incidents back at the ranch, too. Which is curious, because I have personal experience with red orbs that seemed to have an immediate impact on me physically and mentally for 3-4 days after the initial incident. It’s described in fairly good detail in Chapter 3 of THE SPACE PEN CLUB. And a search or understanding of what they are/were continues for the length of my book – and even to this day.
But when I met briefly with Kelleher in 2001, he commented that his team had encountered red orbs at the ranch – NOT blue -- “that spooked the horses,” and casually mentioned that they were probably not benign. On his Facebook page in a series of posts, Winnipeg researcher, podcaster and author Grant Cameron has challenged whether orbs in general are all “bad” phenomena, pointing out that there are adequate accounts in the UFO literature where experiencers encountered similar orbs of light and the impacts were positive, beneficial, sometimes even healing.
A Bold, Dark Conclusion? You Decide
Based on the new book’s Appendix 1 about the AAWSAP, there are hundreds of reports, scientific white papers and other related data bases – including some reports from the MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) that offer views on UFOS, paranormal events at the ranch and elsewhere, plus papers on propulsion systems and the like. According to the trio’s work, in year two of the project, the “data Warehouse – built with the help of prominent UFO researcher and author Jacques Vallée -- contained tens of thousands of sightings and investigative reports on UAP events, including the NDS database, a Pilot Database amassed from hundreds of separate military and civilian pilots, the USAF Project Sign/Grudge/Blue Book Database, the Project Colares Database, the Canadian Release Database, the United Kingdom Release Database, and other databases.” Later, an historical Soviet/Russian database was incorporated into the record, which allegedly indicated how far advanced their UFO studies were compared to the U.S. Unless I missed it, there is scant reference to what material is/was warehoused in Vegas, either, although there is an alleged “Eyes Only” database referenced in the book that may contain this information.
Yet, with all this information, the report supposedly never really lands on conclusive or definitive answers as to who or what they are, where they are from, what do they want? Was this deliberate, one will wonder? Aside from the historical information about the study, much of the book is well, just spooky, spooky, spooky. Was that the point? To scare readers, government officials, policymakers?
Most troubling is the book’s bold, dark claim “that there many hundreds of close encounters cases” in the AAWSAP program run by Bigelow’s operation in its Data Warehouse “that described pathological effects as a result of UAP-human interaction.” The data in that warehouse “are fully consistent with the main thrust of the AAWSAP Final Report that there is a correlation between UAP activity and the threat to human well-being.” The book offers a seemingly contradictory caveat, however, that it’s “crucially important to distinguish here between a threat to human health and a threat to humans.” Well, that reasoning hits a wall IMHO: A threat to “human-well being” is still a threat to a human being, is it not? Then, this claim: We simply don’t understand “the intent” of the UAP, the authors say. Which is also debatable based on other, less ominous cases from around the world.
Nonetheless, this new book is going to be analyzed, demonized, denounced, celebrated, circulated, debated to death and discussed at length for a long time to come. Read it yourself and offer your own insights and opinions here on the blog. Or email me at spacepenclub@calumeteditions.com
Got orbs?
