Phenomena Magazine - March 2014 - Issue 59

MANAGING EDITORIAL

CONTENTS

Hello and welcome to our March 2014 issue. As you may have heard, the mainstream news channels have been flooded in regards the missing flight MH370 and due to regular changing stories as to what exactly happened to the jet, the conspiracies theories have been plentiful. I have received a lot of e‐mail this month about this incident, people claiming the most ridiculous things. So… I thought it might be a good idea to put an article together in regards what the mainstream news channels have said and provide some details in regards the alleged conspir‐ acy and even the strange and weird conclusions some people have come up with. Though its looking rather grim with little chance of discovering the passengers and crew safe and well, we hope they are… Also in this issue, some fascinating ideas from Steve Myers in regards how the Egyptian pyramids may have been built. A personal favourite of mine.

Its been a bit of a crazy month with all the lectures I’ve been doing. Neil McDonald of Megalithic Tours once again put a fantastic event together with some great speakers. One of which was our good friend Dan Monroe a.k.a (Dan The Man ‐ from Planet X Radio) It was great to see him and catch up. Also, Sam Wright pulled another amazing conference out of his hat. I was lucky enough to see Brian Allan’s lecture on UFOs. It was a well presented and thoroughly researched topic that touched on alternative theories to many UFO sightings and incidents, suggesting the use of secret government exotic aircraft. An amazing talk well worth seeing. A trip to Truthjuice Liverpool was also executed. Myself and Prophetic Seer Steve Johnson took to the stand. A truly amazing individual that not only blew me away but also those he presented his lecture to. A few more lectures planned throughout April including Birmingham UFO Group on April 17th and The UFO Truth Magazine Conference in August. Details of both can be found in this issue… Enjoy!

Page 2: How the Pyramids were Built.

The year 2012, with its unfulfilled end time prophesies, has come and gone. Yet one undeniable change 2012 ushered in has been the ac‐ celerated interest in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Even with all the recent discoveries centered on this ancient wonder, the Great Pyra‐ mid is still shrouded in more controversy then it has ever been. Steve Myers investigates how the pyramids could have been built.

Page 9: Synchronicity.

Two weeks after reading The First Book of Revelations, by David Wood. The postman delivered my morning mail. One of the letters

was a bank statement. I opened it and started to check the figures. I EDITORIAL was astounded to see that someone had paid £666 into the account.

The author had forewarned that this could happen after reading it.

Well as you can see we are now sending out the magazine slightly differently, but only to ensure that EVERYONE receives their copy, (and hopefully forwards it along to their friends and Mike Oram explains more odd synchronicities. asks them to do the same), Anyway, that out of the way, you might recall a couple of months back I wrote an editorial about the phenomenon of synchronicity and what had happened to

me twice in two days, well, it happened again. For no good reason I picked up and started re‐ Page 15: Missing: Malaysia Flight MH370. reading a book from my collection called ‘The Hidden Science of Lost Civilisations’, which is written by a American researcher called David Wilcock. The following day I received a review The mainstream news over the last couple of weeks has been a buzz book that I had not even requested written by the same author, and the title? ‘The Synchronic‐ ity Key’! You just could not make it up and it’s a sure sign that the Cosmic Joker is alive and well in regards the missing flight MH370. Radar readings and regular al‐ and communicating with me in his own peculiar fashion.

terations in the story have sparked rumours of a conspiracy. Some Oh, and BTW, the review is in this edition of the mag. One more thing and its important: this edition of Phenomena is probably the last time that we will send out the magazine as an attachment, it takes too long to do and also we know believe the aircraft landed a secret base, some believe it was de‐ that some of you do not receive it because your ISP will not allow large files like that. After this issue we will still stroyed in mid flight, some believe the aircraft slipped through a compile and distribute the magazine, but this time we will send you a link and you can download it for yourselves.

This means that more of you will have access to it. The only thing we ask is, as always, PLEASE forward the link to any wormhole or was abducted by aliens. Steve Mera takes a closer look. of your friends you think might like to share in the magazine. We are currently getting approx 1.5 million downloads per year and we would like to beat that. Also, don’t forget that we love to hear about your paranormal and UFO

encounters, so send them in to either Steve or myself.

Page 19: The Oxford Castle Visit.

Managing Editor Contact: Steve Mera ‐ Trying to contact ghosts in a haunted castle is a little like covering s_mera@yahoo.com yourself in BBQ sauce and walking into a cannibal village.” My friend

Editor Contact: Brian Allan ‐ Ben is a little concerned about tonight’s paranormal investigation. I Paratec7@aol.com can’t blame him ‐ this is my second ghost hunt and after the first solo

Spanish Editor Contact: Dario Fernandez‐ attempt I have enlisted my burliest weight‐lifting friend for morale info@e‐nigmas.com.ar support. Aaron Millar investigates Oxford Castle.

Page 25: Earth Language.

PHENOMENA MAGAZINE HEAD OFFICE 17, Redburn Road, Baguley, There can be no doubt as to the significance of Europe’s ancient Wythenshawe, Manchester, M23 1AH, constructions on the human imagination, the singular atmosphere United Kingdom. Tel: 07866 685835 greeting visitors to each standing stone, burial chamber or earthwork WWW.PHENOMENAMAGAZINE.CO.UK stirring emotions and spurring thought about our distant ancestors WWW.PHENOMENAMAGAZINE.ES

and their civilizations. Stephen Wakefield investigates some the the

ancient sites around the country.

The PM Team: Sotiris at STRANGE‐ FILES.ME, Danial Verdon at UREI, Randy at UFOSTORE.COM, Dario Fernandez at e Page 33: Dr. Barry Taff: A Veteran of the Psychic Wars. ‐nigmas / portal de lo paranormal. Tim Dr. Barry Taff has been on the forefront of the academic study of at UFOTV, Main Distribution Steve Mera psychic phenomena for decades and has long documented the con‐ & Brian Allan, Reporter Jackie Heighway nection between psi events and UFOs. His own psychic experiences & Reporter / Photographer Rodney Howarth. began in childhood, and he has no doubt of the reality of some form

of coupling between human consciousness and a field of energy that

we do not as yet understand. Sean Casteel explains…

THIS MONTHS CONTRIBUTORS Steve Mera, Brian Allan, Dario Fanandez, PHENOMENA MAGAZINE SPANISH EDITION NOW AVAILABLE AT

Neil McDonald, Steve Myers, Aaron Millar, Mike Oram, Stephen Wakefield, Sean Casteel, DAHBOO77 & Alexandra Klausner.

Also Featured:

Latest paranormal news from around the World... Book and dvd reviews. Events and Conferences throughout the uk, Astronomical news, Advertisements and much more.

DISCLAIMER

WWW.PHENOMENAMAGAZINE.ES

Due to MAPIT protocols, personal or group promotion will not always be accepted. All submitted articles to Phenomena Magazine Phenomena Magazine would love to hear your views and opinions, please let us have must be 'Original Work'. MAPIT / Phenomena Magazine are not responsible for articles that your feedback. Also, If you have an interesting article, we would love to hear from you. appear in the magazine which do not belong to Please contact: the individuals submitting them. MAPIT / Phenomena Magazine do everything in their Phenomena Magazine Managing Editor Steve Mera: power to credit individuals work and images. If s_mera@yahoo.com you are aware of any material featured in Phenomena Magazine that is not credited or Phenomena Magazine Editor Brian Allan: correctly, then please inform us as soon as Paratec7@aol.com possible. The MAPIT Copyright covers only articles wriiten by MAPIT investigators, con‐

struction and group logos found throughout Phenomena Magazine: UK Version: the magazine. The views and opinions ex‐ pressed in any of the articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of MAPIT or Phenomena Magazine: Spanish Version: Phenomena Magazine.

WWW.PHENOMENAMAGAZINE.CO.UK

WWW.PHENOMENAMAGAZINE.ES

Phenomena Magazine is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution Non‐ Commercial No Derivatives ‘Free License’.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by‐nc‐nd/3.0

Page 1 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

How the Pyramids were Built

By Steven Myers

The year 2012, with its unfulfilled end time prophesies, has come and gone. Yet one undeniable change 2012 ushered in has been the accelerated interest in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Even with all the recent discoveries and research centered on this ancient wonder, the Great Pyramid is still shrouded in more controversy then it has ever been. Every aspect of this structure is under heated debate including how it was built, why it was built, when it was built, and who built it. This controversy is caused pri‐ marily because the science of Egyptology has failed miserably in adequately explaining and demonstrating the pivotal technical requirements of how this ancient structure was created. Egyptology has also failed to offer a convincing explanation for why the Great Pyramid exists.

Although Egyptology is considered a science it does not engage in the scientific method in regards to the technical requirements needed to build a stone pyramid the height of 45 stories. The idea that a ramp was used to build the Great Pyramid is simply a hope‐ ful notion offered by a science that cannot prove its ideas with demonstrative evidence.

Egyptology has never moved a heavy stone around the corner of a spiral ramp. Egyptol‐ ogy has never created a precision cut casing stone. Egyptology has never moved a pay‐ load the weight of the heaviest stones found in the Great Pyramid even one inch. Accord‐ ing to Egyptologists, peasants and other laborers could accomplish these and other important construction procedures on a daily basis yet for Egyptologists these tasks are an impossibility! That in itself is very telling evidence in regards to the validity of their stories.

There are many competing alternative theo‐ ries of how and why the Great Pyramid was built. This article focus on one direction of research which concentrates on the techni‐ cal requirements necessary to build this monument. This alternative theory de‐ scribes in detail how the stones were moved and set in place to build mankind’s greatest ancient wonder.

This alternative explanation of how the Great Pyramid was built is consistent with the direct physical evidence and gives glory and honor to the ancient geniuses who built their masterpiece of construction. This al‐ ternative explanation was first proposed by Edward Kunkel in his landmark book, Phar‐ aoh’s Pump. This direction of research Kunkel pioneered has been further devel‐ oped and expanded in the book, Lost Tech‐ nologies of the Great Pyramid. So put aside all preconceived notions about the Great Pyramid and allow yourself the opportunity to become familiar with how the Great Pyra‐ mid was really built!

This abbreviated explanation will highlight the major steps in constructing the Great Pyramid. The first activities on the Giza plateau was to prepare the bedrock by mak‐ ing it extremely flat under the location where the first layer of casing stones will be placed. The outcropping of stone in the center of the construction site was not re‐ moved. A wall was built around the building site. Portions of this wall existed up until the 18 century. Early drawings of the Great Pyramid often depict this wall.

Water was supplied to the construction site at the Giza plateau from the ancient Lake Moeris. The Original Builders also con‐ structed a series of water locks from the Nile river to the wall around the building site on the Giza plateau. A water lock is simply a section of a canal that has doors on pivots.

Water locks allow barges to move between a lower section of a canal and a higher sec‐ tion of a canal. These water locks were simi‐ lar to those used in the Erie Canal. Water supplied to the Giza plateau was allowed to

fill the water locks and the area impounded by the wall around the building site.

Figure 1: A water lock was built into the wall of casing stones. This allowed barges to travel from the water impounded by the wall around the Great Pyramid up into the water impounded by the first layer of casing stones. Casing stones on barges for the second level were brought from the Nile river up through the water locks between the Nile river and the building site. Then the barges travel up into the pond impounded by the first layer of casing stones. This pond is waist deep. The barge moving into the pond is located where the next higher water lock will be built.

Excavation of the subterranean chamber and associated passages cut into the bed‐ rock were also activities which were com‐ pleted before the Great Pyramid was as‐ sembled. These passages were built as planed and served a purpose. These cut‐ tings deep beneath where the Great Pyra‐ mid will soon be built functioned as a huge water pump! Some modern‐day research‐ ers have suggested this massive subterra‐ nean water pump is similar to a hydraulic ram water pump. The reality is the

The Pyramids The Egyptian pyramids are ancient pyramid‐ shaped masonry structures located in Egypt. There are 138 pyramids discovered in Egypt as of 2008.

Most were alleg‐ edly built as tombs for the country's Pharaohs and their consorts during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods.

The earliest known Egyptian pyramids are found at Saqqara, northwest of Memphis. The earliest among these is the Pyra‐ mid of Djoser (allegedly con‐ structed 2630 BCE –2611 BCE) which was built during the third dynasty.

This pyramid and its surrounding complex were allegedly designed by the architect Imhotep, and are generally consid‐ ered to be the world's oldest monumental structures con‐ structed of dressed masonry.

Wikipedia

Page 2 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

How the Pyramids were Built

By Steven Myers

The Pyramids

The most famous Egyptian pyramids are those found at Giza, on the out‐ skirts of Cairo.

Several of the Giza pyramids are counted among the largest struc‐ tures ever built.

The Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is the largest Egyp‐ tian pyramid. It is the only one of the Seven Won‐ ders of the An‐ cient World still in existence.

The shape of Egyptian pyramids is thought to represent the primordial mound from which the Egyptians believed the earth was created. The shape of a pyra‐ mid is thought to be representative of the descending rays of the sun, and most pyra‐ mids were faced with polished, highly reflective white limestone, in order to give them a brilliant appearance when viewed from a distance. Pyramids were often also named in ways that referred to solar lumines‐ cence.

subterranean water pump is more sophisti‐ cated and efficient than any modern hydrau‐ lic ram water pump.

The output of this water pump is up through the passage in the mound the Great Pyramid was built over. This water pump supplied water for the construction process and for the water locks. The detailed and fascinat‐ ing explanation of how this water pump operated will require its own article. All of these preparations allowed the Original Builder’s systematic construction procedure to began.

The next step of the construction process was simple and straightforward. The preci‐ sion cut paving stones on barges were brought up the water locks from the Nile river and set in place on the bedrock. The paving stones provided an extremely precise foundation for the first layer of casing stones. Next, the first layer of casing stones that will be placed on the paving stones were brought from the Nile river on barges up to the building site using the water locks.

The first level of casing stones were set in place on top of the paving stones and bonded together watertight making what looked like a square wall. Built into the cas‐ ing stones was a water lock. Now that the first layer of casing stones have been set in place and bonded together the next step of this fascinating construction procedure was about to begin.

waist deep. Workers can wade in the pond walking on the rough cut stones that have already been set in place.

The area impounded by the first layer of casing stones was filled with water using the subterranean water pump. Filling the area impounded by the first layer of casing stones created a square pond on the Giza plateau.

This square pond was higher than the pond impounded by the wall around the building site. The water lock built into the first layer of casing stones allowed barges loaded with additional stones to be brought from the Nile river up the series of water locks and into the pond impounded by the casing stones. The next stones brought up were the second layer of casing stones. These stones were brought up and set in place on top of the first layer of casing stones. While the watertight bonding agent was allowed to cure on the second layer of casing stones the rough cut interior stones for the first level of the Great Pyramid were brought up on barges from the Nile. These rough cut stones on barges were moved up into the pond impounded by the first layer of casing stones. As soon as all of the rough cut inte‐ rior stones for the first level of the Great Pyramid were moved off the barges and set in place into the pond then the first layer of the Great Pyramid was completed!

The next step of the construction process was to construct a water lock in the second layer of casing stones. This water lock was built so that stone laden barges were able to travel up the first water lock built into the first layer of casing stones and then directly into the second water lock built into the second layer of casing stones. These two water locks, built to work in series, is called a flight of water locks.

The pond is only waist deep. Workers can walk in the pond standing on the rough cut stones that have already been set in place.

Now it was time to add additional water into the area impounded by the second layer of casing stones using the subterra‐ nean water pump. This caused the water level of the pond to rise almost to the height of the top of the second layer of casing stones. The flight of water locks allow stones on barges to travel up through both water locks in series and into the pond impounded by the second layer of casing stones. At this time the third layer of casing stones for the next higher level were brought up and set in place. As the bonding agent cured on the third layer of casing stones the second layer of rough cut interior stones on barges were brought up the water locks. These stone laden barges were moved up into the pond and then moved to where the stone will be placed. Workers then moved the stone off the barge and lowered it directly into the pond and placed it where it will stay for eternity. When the process of moving the second layer of rough cut interior stones from the barges and into the pond was finished then the second layer of the Great Pyramid was completed!

Wikipedia

Figure 2: From a bird’s eye view the second layer of the Great Pyramid is nearing com‐ pletion. The second water lock built into the casing stones allows stones on barges to enter the pond where construction takes place. The barge just entering the pond is where the third water lock will be built. The pond is being filled in with the second layer of rough cut interior stones. The third layer of casing stones has been set in place and the bonding agent between these stones is curing. Water to keep the pound full is sup‐ plied by the subterranean water pump. It’s output is up through the passage in the mound in the center of the construction site.

This water kept the pond full and supplied water for the water locks. The pond is only

Page 3 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Figure 3: The Great Pyramid was built level by level. Water locks were incorporated into the casing stones. These water locks are like rectangular boxes which are built into the wall of casing stones Each water lock “box” is resting on top of casing stones on a lower level. The flight of water locks allow stones on barges to be easily moved up into the pond where the construction occurred.

Figure 4: This cutaway view shows the process the rough cut interior stones were moved from a barge and into the pond.

The large boat is a stylized depiction of the two so‐called solar barges or sun boats found on the Giza Plateau. (A) Workers walk to the front of the boat crane and a rope is attached to the rough cut interior stone. (B) Workers walk to the back of the boat which causes the boat to pivot

How the Pyramids were Built

By Steven Myers

thereby raising the 2 1/2 ton stone off of the barge. (C) After the empty barge is moved out of the way the floating boat crane is positioned by workers in the waist deep pond so that the stone is directly above its final resting place. Then the workers on the boat crane walked towards the bow which causes the boat crane to pivot in the water.

This causes the rough cut interior stone to be lowered into the pond and placed at its final destination.

This systematic process continued level by level. The casing stones for the next higher level were set in place and bonded together watertight. Next, the rough cut interior stones for the level under construction were set in place. There are two reasons why the casing stones for the next higher level were set in place before the rough cut interior stones were set in place for the level under construction. The first reason for this order of construction is it allowed time for the bonding agent between the casing stones to cure which created a watertight seal be‐ tween the joints. The other reason is if the rough cut interior stones were set in place filling the pond with rough cut stones the barges loaded with the next level of casing stones would not be able to move through the pond because the pond would be filled with rough cut stones.

The use of water locks is efficient, fast and powerful. When built, the Erie Canal was 4.5 feet deep yet the barges had a capacity to carry 70 tons of payload. In two years the Erie Canal moved more tonnage in freight than the weight of the Great Pyramid. Re‐ search indicates a barge with stone would easily travel from the Nile river to the build‐ ing site in a very short time. With barges in each water lock a barge with one or more stones would have been delivered to the pond at a rate of every few minutes. Using water locks this process continued 24 hours a day. The use of water locks is rather sim‐ ple but quite sophisticated. It is also consis‐ tent with the direct physical evidence. The joints between the casing stones are water tight, not to keep the Egyptian rain out or the Pharaoh’s soul from symbolically leaking out, but to keep water in during the con‐ struction process.

This systematic construction procedure con‐ tinued as the Great Pyramid rose higher and higher. The Great Pyramid was built level by level. Each level was finished then the level above it was finished. As construction pro‐ gressed, the pond on top of the Great Pyra‐ mid became smaller and smaller while the series of water locks on the north face grew longer and longer. But as construction pro‐ gressed the speed of construction appeared faster and faster because each level was progressivity smaller which required less material to finish as construction continued.

The pond always stayed about waist deep as this fascinating and systematic construction process progressed.

Water locks are generally placed in pairs allowing the movement of vessels in both directions of a canal at the same time. This is true in the Panama Canal, the Saint Law‐ rence Seaway and most other canals using water locks. Extensive research conducted at the Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation (www.thepump.org) supports the conten‐ tion that there was only one flight of water locks. In other words, water locks were only used to move stones on barges up to the pond where the assembly was taking place.

This greatly simplified the construction proc‐ ess and greatly improved water efficiency.

The question this elicits is what was done with the empty barges that were up on the pond after the stones were removed. De‐ tailed analysis indicates the empty barges were moved over the casing stone wall and then lowered by rope to the pond im‐ pounded by the wall surrounding the Great Pyramid construction site. Then the empty barges were moved down the causeway and back into the Nile river. This provided a fast and efficient method of returning the empty barges to the Nile river.

The Pyramids

Figure 5: (A) The barge with casing stone is moved between two stone supports. The casing stone protrudes past the sides of the barge. (B) Then water is allowed to enter the barge which lowers it. This causes the casing stone to come to rest on the two support stones. The barge is still floating between the supports but it is riding very low in the water. That is why it is hard to see in the center panel. (C) Then the par‐ tially flooded barge is moved from between the two supports. The unloaded barge with water in it is moved to the edge of the pond.

The use of water locks and barges was a powerful and extremely versatile method of moving heavy payloads. Stone laden barges were able to easily transport their payloads right to where they will be placed. Special‐ ized barges and systematic procedures were used to move the stones off of barges and place the stones at their final destina‐ tion.

The Great Pyramid consists of three basic sizes of stones. The vast majority of the Great Pyramid is composed of rough cut interior stones which weigh about 2 1/2 tons. The casing stones vary in size but do not exceed the weight of approximately 16 tons. The Great Pyramid also contains a few dozen massive stones weighing in at fifty to seventy tons each. These basic sizes of stones dictated different methods to move the stones from barges to their final resting place.

The relatively small 2 1/2 ton rough cut interior stones were moved from the barges using boats called sun ships. These boats were utilized as floating cranes.

Workers walked towards the front of the ship which lowered the bow. A rough cut interior stone was attached to a rope con‐ nected to the high prow of the floating crane. Then the workers walked to the back of the boat which lifted the stone from the barge. Workers, wading in the waist deep pond, moved the empty barge out of the way while other workers guided the floating sun ship acting as a floating crane to the proper location. Then the workers on the sun ship walked towards the front of

While it is gener‐ ally agreed that pyramids were burial monu‐ ments, there is continued dis‐ agreement on the particular theo‐ logical principles that might have given rise to them.

One suggestion is that they were designed as a type of "resurrection machine."

The Egyptians believed the dark area of the night sky around which the stars appear to revolve was the physical gateway into the heavens.

One of the narrow shafts that ex‐ tends from the main burial cham‐ ber through the entire body of the Great Pyramid points directly towards the center of this part of the sky. This suggests the pyramid may have been designed to serve as a means to magically launch the de‐ ceased pharaoh's soul directly into the abode of the gods.

All Egyptian pyra‐ mids were built on the west bank of the Nile, which as the site of the setting sun was associated with the realm of the dead in Egyptian mythology.

Wikipedia

Page 4 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

How the Pyramids were Built

By Steven Myers

The Pyramids

Giza is the location of the Pyramid of Khufu (also known as the "Great Pyramid" and the "Pyramid of Cheops"); the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre (or Kephren); the relatively modest‐ sized Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinus), along with a number of smaller satellite edifices known as "Queen's pyra‐ mids"; and the Great Sphinx.

Of the three, only Khafre's pyramid retains part of its original polished limestone casing, near its apex. This pyramid appears larger than the adjacent Khufu pyramid by virtue of its more ele‐ vated location, and the steeper angle of inclina‐ tion of its con‐ struction – it is, in fact, smaller in both height and volume.

The Giza Necropo‐ lis has been a popular tourist destination since antiquity, and was popularised in Hellenistic times when the Great Pyramid was listed

by Antipater of Sidon as one of the Seven Won‐ ders of the World.

Today it is the only one of those wonders still in existence.

Wikipedia

the floating crane lowering the stone down directly into the pond to its final resting place. This process was fast, powerful, and extremely accurate in moving the rough cut interior stones.

The casing stones, some as large as 16 tons, were also on barges which traveled from the Nile river up to the building site and onto the pond impounded by casing stones. The massive size of casing stones meant that they were not simply pulled up a mega‐ramp and then set in place using brute force. To move and place these stones with extreme precision, with a bonding agent between the joints, and with no handling scars cannot be done using manpower alone. It is not possi‐ ble for ancient people and it is impossible for Egyptologists. Neither group possessed back muscles with adequate strength.

Larger stones such as the casing stones re‐ quired a different procedure to set them in their final resting place. The Original Build‐ ers used very specialized methods to move the casing stones. They were brilliant in manipulating barges and used buoyancy to quickly move and place millions of tons of stones. Their methods were ingenious and sophisticated.

When a casing stone was on a barge it pro‐ truded beyond each side of the barge. The barge loaded with a casing stone moved between two stone supports in the pond.

Water would then be allowed to enter the barge which would lower the barge into the pond. This would cause the casing stone to come to rest on the two supports. The barge which is not completely full of water is moved to the side of the pond. The water in the barge is then siphoned out of the barge over the side of the pond. This fast, effi‐ cient, and powerful system is how a large casing stone was moved off of the barge.

This process took only minutes to complete.

Figure 6: Water is removed from the barge by siphoning it out over the edge of the waist deep pond. The siphon hose is full of water and the upper end is inserted into the barge. The lower end of the siphon hose has a valve which is operated using linkage.

Page 5 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

When the valve is opened water is quickly and easily removed from the barge.

At that point a specialized barge was at‐ tached to the casing stone. The barge was already partially filled with water making it float low in the pond. When this specialized barge was attached to the casing stone, water was siphoned out of the barge and over the side of the pond. This raised the barge and caused the casing stone to be lifted off the two supports. Then workers wading in the waist deep pond directed the specialized barge and casing stone to the edge of the pond. Effortlessly the workers position the barge so that the casing stone is just above its final resting place on top of the wall which impounded the waist deep pond. So far, the process did not require any of the workers to have big back muscles.

The next step was to move the stone from the barge to its final resting place. First a large mound of bonding agent was applied on top of the wall where the casing stone will soon be placed as well as to the vertical surface of the previously placed casing stone. This will result in a water tight seal in all the casing stone joints. The next step was accomplished by allowing water to en‐ ter the specialized barge causing the barge to slowly lower into the pond. When this happens the casing stone is lowered onto the top of the mound of bonding agent. This thick mound of bonding agent allowed time for the workers to quickly remove the ropes and rigging holding the casing stone to the specialized barge.

As the casing stone settled on the mound of bonding material, workers used other types of specialized barges to quickly maneuver the heavy casing stone the last few inches to its final resting place. The exact details of this final maneuvering process is explained in the book, Lost Technologies of the Great Pyramid. This fast and efficient method would have taken only minutes to set and place each of the large precision cut casing stones.

This fast and systematic process continued level by level until the pond became smaller and smaller. During construction of the upper portion of the Great Pyramid the pond would have been too small for the sun ships acting as floating cranes. In that there are smaller boat pits on the Giza Plateau it is reasonable to contend smaller boat cranes were also used in the final stages of con‐ struction. Ultimately the capstone (if there was one) was moved on a barge up the wa‐ ter locks to its final resting place crowning mankind’s first wonder of the ancient world.

But with the capstone in place the con‐ struction process was not completed.

Figure 7: While the casing stone rested on the supports it was attached to a special‐ ized barge. The specialized barge was already partially filled with water which caused it to float low in the water. A sleeve is placed on the sharp front edge of the casing stone as well as on the top edge.

This allowed the casing stone to be secured to the barge with ropes without damaging the casing stone or the ropes. Water was siphoned out from the specialized barge and over the wall. This caused the special‐ ized barge to rise thereby lifting the casing stone off of the supports. The specialized barge has two compartments. One com‐ partment in the front the other in the rear of the barge. The compartment in the rear is filled with water as ballast to counterbal‐ ance the weight of the casing stone. The process is reversed when the casing stones is placed on top of the wall of casing stones.

Next the flight of water locks which were built into the casing stones were no longer needed and were removed. Starting from the top the water locks were removed one by one and replaced with rough fill and a smooth covering to match the casing stones. When the water locks were re‐ moved this ancient wonder had the stark, ultramodern, utilitarian, unadorned exte‐ rior we all envision it had when the casing stones were still in place.

How fascinating it is that this description of the construction process is similar to what Herodotus wrote. He said that the Great Pyramid was built level by level using ma‐ chines with short wooden planks. The doors on water locks are made of short wooden planks. Herodotus also wrote that the Great Pyramid was built from the bot‐ tom up but finished from the top down.

The Great Pyramid was built from the bot‐ tom up and removing the water locks from

How the Pyramids were Built

By Steven Myers

the top down is consistent with the writings of Herodotus.

Also this explanation is consistent with many of the construction methods Sir Flinders Petrie felt were used to build the Great Pyra‐ mid. Sir Flinders Petrie felt the following construction methods were used to build the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid was built level by level including the casing stones. The casing stones were finished on all six sides before they were set in place.

The casing stones were set in place from the inside. The casing stones for each level were set in place before the interior stones for that level were set in place. All of these construction methods are consistent with this explanation. The use of water locks and barges is what makes it all possible!

This description of how the Great Pyramid was built is very abbreviated and will proba‐ bly elicit a number of questions. How were the largest stones moved and set in place?

Barges capable of carrying a 70 ton stone would seemingly required rather large water locks. How did the subterranean water pump function to move water up on the pond as the construction process contin‐ ued? The most important question is why did the Original Builders create their master‐ piece of engineering called the Great Pyra‐ mid? The answers to these questions will be addressed in subsequent articles as well as in my two books about the Great Pyramid.

Also there is a free video series available to watch with detailed computer generated animations showing the processes used to build the Great Pyramid. The web link for that video series is: www.thepump.org.

The Great Pyramid was built by geniuses who used a fast, systematic, efficient, and powerful construction process to create their wonder of the world! This ancient building with its extreme precision and enig‐ matic passages and chambers is evidence that the Original Builders use various forms of high technologies which are now lost to modern mankind.

It is the contention of this author that to redevelop these ancient high technologies of the Great Pyramid would help our modern but very troubled world.

Steve Myers is an author, independent re‐ searcher, lecturer and frequent guest on radio talk shows explaining this fascinating understanding of the Great Pyramid. He is also founder of the nonprofit organization called the Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation (www.thepump.org) dedicated to under‐ standing how and why the Great Pyramid was built. His books, Lost Technologies of the Great Pyramid and The Great Pyramid Prosperity Machine are available in both soft cover and Kindle EBook formats.

Contact information: Web site: www.thepump.org Phone 541‐396‐5249 Email: info@thepump.org

The Great Pyramid Prosperity Machine reveals the reason why the Great Pyramid was built!

Discarding the un‐ workable explana‐ tions offered by Egyptology, Steven Myers provides a detailed and com‐ pelling explanation

of the original purpose of this ancient highly technical wonder. Prosperity was why the Great Pyramid was built! But more than just describing the ancient high technology of the Great Pyramid, Steven Myers advocates that the Great Pyramid can help people now in our modern but troubled world. He contends that the technology used in the infrastructure we call the Great Pyramid must be redeveloped in our modern Age to improve our lives, create a cleaner environ‐ ment, break our addition to oil and usher in a new era of unsurpassed prosperity.

Transcending the fables and misin‐ formation of mod‐ ern Egyptology, this book provides a detailed descrip‐ tion of how the Great Pyramid was really built! New discoveries of lost technologies used to build this mas‐ sive wonder are the focus of this book! Steven Myers ex‐ plains what really happened as the Great Pyramid was built. He describes the fasci‐ nating and unique building process from the initial surveying, all the way to the placement of the capstone! This book also examines modern Egyptology's unprovable explanations of how the Great Pyramid was built...

The Pyramids There have been many hypotheses about the Egyp‐ tian pyramid construction techniques. These techniques seem to have developed over time; later pyramids were not built the same way as earlier ones. Most of the construction hypotheses are based on the idea that huge stones were carved with copper chisels from stone quar‐ ries, and these blocks were then dragged and lifted into position.

In addition to the many unresolved arguments about the construction techniques, there have been dis‐ agreements as to the kind of work‐ force used. Some even believe Extraterrestrials assisted in their construction. The debate contin‐ ues…

Wikipedia

Page 6 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

DVD REVIEW Phenomena Magazine regularly receives DVDs and provides reviews. After which we promote and advertise them within the magazine, Facebook pages and of course on our websites. If you have a DVD you would like to be reviewed and advertised, simply contact Phenomena Magazine via our website or send your DVD title direct to Phenomena Magazine Head Office.

ANCIENT ALIENS ‐ SEASON 1 & 2 WHAT IF LIFE ON EARTH BEGAN IN OUTER SPACE. Is it possible that intelligent life forms visited Earth thousands of years ago, bringing with them technology that drastically af‐ fected the course of history and our own development? Originally presented in Erich von Daniken s 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods, the theory of ancient aliens rocked our accepted notions of mankind s natural evolution. From the age of dinosaurs to ancient Egypt, from early cave drawings to continued mass sightings in the United States, each episode in this series gives historic depth to the questions, speculations, provocative controversies, first‐hand accounts and grounded theories surrounding an age‐ old debate: did intelligent forms from outer space visit Earth thousands of years ago? Do they visit us now? Ancient Aliens launches expeditions to seek out and evaluate the original evidence, concentrating on discoveries from the past 30 years. It is a balanced investigation into a theory some believe cannot be true, but many agree cannot be ignored. Together for the first time all 15 fascinating episodes of seasons 1 and 2. Produced with the exclusive co‐operation of von Daniken himself.

Gold trinkets were found in an area covering Central America and coastal areas of South America, estimated to belong to a period

Title: Ancient Aliens: between 500 and 800 CE, but since they are made from gold, accurate dating is impossible and based essentially on stratigraphy Season 1 & 2 which may be deceptive. However, we can safely say that these gold objects are more than 1000 years old.

Format: DVD & Blue Ray Distributor: History Channel The ruins of Puma Punku are one of four structures in the ancient city of Tiahuanaco. The others three structures are; The Aka‐ Price: £18.28 DVD: pana Pyramid, the Kalasasaya Platform, and the Subterranean Temple. Even with modern day technology and information, these Amazon.co.uk, Amount of discs: 6 structures defy logic, and confound those who seek to solve the mysteries that lie within them. The ruins of Puma Punku are said Region 2 to be the most fascinating, and most confusing of all.

Length: 945 minutes

Also available is season 2, 3, 4 and 5 of Ancient Aliens. Currently television stations are showing season 6 and season 7 is currently in the making.

March 1 ‐ New Moon. The Moon will be directly between the Earth and the Sun and will not be visi‐ ble from Earth. This phase occurs at 08:00 UTC. This is the best time of the month to observe faint objects such as galaxies and star clusters because there is no moonlight to interfere.

March 16 ‐ Full Moon. The Moon will be directly opposite the Earth from the Sun and will be fully illuminated as seen from Earth. This phase occurs at 17:08 UTC. This full moon was known by early Native American tribes as the Full Worm Moon because this was the time of year when the ground would begin to soften and the earthworms would reappear. This moon has also been known as the Full Crow Moon, the Full Crust Moon, and the Full Sap Moon.

March 20 ‐ March Equinox. The March equinox occurs at 16:57 UTC. The Sun will shine directly on the equator and there will be nearly equal amounts of day and night throughout the world. This is also the first day of spring (vernal equinox) in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of fall (autumnal equinox) in the Southern Hemisphere.

March 30 ‐ New Moon. The Moon will be directly between the Earth and the Sun and will not be visible from Earth. This phase occurs at 18:45 UTC. This is the best time of the month to observe faint objects such as galaxies and star clusters because there is no moonlight to interfere.

17th April 2014 - Steve Johnson & Stephen Mera Lecture - Precognition and Premonition: The Evidence Time: 7.30-11.30pm Price: ÂŁ5.00 members ÂŁ5.50 non-members Hot Shots Snooker Club, 100 Crosswells Road, Oldbury, Birmingham B688HH

http://bufog.blogspot.co.uk/

Synchronicity

By Mike Oram

What is synchronicity? Wikipedia states: “Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s.

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality.

Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and unconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.”

Page 9 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Synchronicity

By Mike Oram

Coincidence! Again from Wikipedia: “A coinci‐ dence is an event notable for its occurring in conjunction with other conditions, e.g. another event. As such, a coincidence occurs when some‐ thing uncanny, accidental and unexpected hap‐ pens under conditions named, but not under a defined relationship. When there are no condi‐ tions named, the event is just that single entity.

The word is derived from the Latin cum ‐ ("with", "together") and incidere (a composed verb from "in" and "cadere": "to fall on", "to happen").”

Serendipity. The Cambridge Dictionary defines this as: “the lucky tendency to find interesting or valuable things by chance” Synchronicity runs throughout our lives and sometimes with the most amazing results. How many times have we heard someone say, “Wow! What a coinci‐ dence!”? Synchronicity seems to abound in Ufol‐ ogy and it is not just me that has noticed this rather odd phenomenon. Researching over many decades, I have come upon many others who have studied this subject and say the same thing.

I will now give you some examples of synchronic‐ ity or coincidence that have happened in my own life and leave it to you, the reader, to make up your own mind as to what is in play here.

In 1983 I left Warminster, in Wiltshire, to work in the Lake District in the North‐West of England. I worked for two years at a healing sanctuary on the shores of Coniston Water. Healing took place through an altered state of consciousness. By‐ passing the lower mind and talking to the deeper self quite often took the person back to a previ‐ ous life, to a time where the problem first took hold. An impingement that was carried through from the past and into the present personality, which ‐ if not dealt with ‐ would continue to trou‐ ble the soul as it travelled the long and winding road back to the Source. It was an amazing tool for healing, which impressed me so much that I left Warminster to learn more.

I stayed for two years and then moved south to Cambridge, where I worked for one of the uni‐ versities, excavating a Bronze Age Settlement out on the Fens. Finding clay pots and flint arrow‐ heads that were made 4000 years ago felt almost mystical. I would stand and look back to try and imagine what it was like for people surviving in such an inhospitable place. I’m sure the mind is quite capable of seeing into the past and bypass‐ ing the illusion of time. The energy must still be there, locked away in the ethers.

A fantastic story waiting to be told of a time when people were recovering from the retreated ice flows as the sea levels rose and created the fresh‐water wetlands.

This was in 1985 and, on my way home one late afternoon, I stopped to browse in a local book‐ shop. A book, recently published, jumped out at me. “Read ME. Read ME!” it was shouting. I picked it up and flicked through the pages. Gen‐ isis: The First Book of Revelations, by David Wood. I spent the evening reading the book and found it quite absorbing. It mentioned, several times, about the number 666 and somewhere in the book, David Wood said that through his re‐ search for the book he found that 666 became active in his own life and may well play a part in the life of any reader. Two weeks after reading the book the postman delivered my morning mail. One of the letters was an account state‐ ment from my bank. I opened it and started to check the figures. I was astounded to see that someone had paid £666 into the account. My account, back then, was not very healthy, and £666 seemed like a gift from heaven and I started to think about all the things I could do with the money. I then had a struggle with my conscience. A part of my mind was telling me that it was not my money and another part was trying to convince me that the bank could afford it. In the end I thought I would wait a couple of weeks and see what happened. In the meantime, I telephoned a friend of mine and told him about the coincidence. He purchased the book himself and then informed me that David Wood was giving a lecture in London near his home. He said he would go along and hopefully get a chance to tell him my story. He telephoned again a few days later to tell me he had been to the talk and had spoken to David. Also, when he purchased his ticket, the number of the ticket was 666!

Just over four weeks passed by and I thought to myself that if I had heard nothing by the next day, rightly or wrongly, I would accept it as a gift from above to help me through this rather lean period and would go into town and take the money out of my account. The postman came early the next day and, to my amazement, there was a letter from the bank saying that a mistake had been made and they were adjusting my ac‐ count and deducting the £666. The ‘coincidence’ of this timing was the amazing thing in this in‐ stance ‐ and I wished that I had withdrawn the money earlier! Two weeks later I received an‐ other statement and was startled to see that

once again £666 had been paid into my ac‐ count. This time I thought to myself that I would only wait a couple of days and then take the money out. The morning of the second day I received another letter informing me that there was a mistake and the £666 was going to be deducted! Was this a coincidence? It had never happened before or has it since. The book informed me that something of that na‐ ture might happen and it did. The amount was exactly £666 both times. No odd pennies, ex‐ actly £666.

Shortly after this I moved back to the Lake Dis‐ trict and started a small, local Theosophical Society branch. I agreed to be the Treasurer and duly opened an account. I opened the ac‐ count with £10 and at the first meeting we collected another £4.84. The next day I went to the main branch and paid the £4.84 into my account. Outside the bank I checked the bank book to make sure that the transaction had gone through okay and was shocked to see that £666 had been entered into my account. I sim‐ ply did not understand how this could have been done. It was a cash transaction.

Again, one part of my mind was saying that as it was a cash transaction could they really trace where it had gone wrong? Another part of my mind was reminding me that I was a member of the Theosophical Society and we stood for Truth above all else,, and it would be an enor‐ mous failing not to go back to counter and sort this out. Also, the lady cashier may well have been in trouble if her books did not balance at the end of the day. I returned to the counter and showed her the erroneous amount in the bank book. She was as shocked as I was and could not understand how this could have hap‐ pened. She said that they would have worked it out eventually but it would have been difficult and she was so pleased that I had returned and pointed this out to her.

Was this a coincidence? As I wrote above, the book informed me that something might hap‐ pen and it did – again! It was exactly £666. No odd pennies, exactly £666 and yet I had paid in £4.84!

Rolling the clock forward to 2008: it was late summer and I was recovering from an injury that nearly caused me the loss of my legs, and I had a strong impression to go for a walk by the river. As soon as I stepped outside the front door I had an overwhelming image and feeling in my mind that I would find a £10 note. In‐ stead of viewing the trees and river and other things of interest my eyes were glued to the ground. I walked by the river, crossed over the bridge, walked along the far side and crossed back at the next bridge to go through the allot‐ ments and then back home. Leaving the river behind, I took one of the side streets that went over the old canal, and shortly after that I would turn left and make my way through the Page 10 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Synchronicity

By Mike Oram

allotments. I looked ahead and saw the small humped‐back bridge that straddled the old canal.

I thought to myself that once I was over the bridge there would not be much chance of find‐ ing a ten‐pound note. As I reached the top of the bridge, there lying on the ground was a £5 note.

Okay, it was not a £10 note as I had thought it would be, but a £5 note is pretty close.

Was this a coincidence? Perhaps my mind, work‐ ing outside of time and space, had seen what was going to happen and fed this into my brain.

Maybe the conditions were right for this to hap‐ pen, as obviously things like this do not occur all the time. Or maybe, like a good dowser using his rods whose mind, acting outside of time and space, can detect water from a distance and even tell the quality of that water, the depth of that water from ground level and even the flow rate, my mind picked up the presence of the note.

In February of this year (2011), I travelled to Lon‐ don to go to for one of my regular hospital ap‐ pointments. By 1pm I was outside the hospital with the rest of the day to myself. I decided to catch a bus and go to Camden Market, as my train back to the North was not until 6.30pm. The buses in London are very frequent and I waited no more then five minutes. I arrived in Camden around 3pm, after first having had some lunch. I looked in a couple of charity shops en route to the market, but then had an overwhelming feel‐ ing to catch another bus and go to Hampstead Heath. I thought about how much time I had left before getting back to Euston and wondered if it was worth it. However, this feeling was so strong that I found myself jumping on the next bus that went to the Heath. I arrived at the Heath about 4pm with very little time to do much at all and wondered why I had made this eccentric detour.

Before going any further, I must mention that when I got off the train at Euston, just after 10am, I had a strong impulse about finding an‐ other £10 note. As soon as I stepped off the train and onto the platform, this feeling hit me with such a force that I immediately walked with my head down, looking at the platform floor for the £10 note but to no avail. However, the feeling never left me and was there on and off during the course of the day.

One year before this event, I had travelled down to Euston on this regular trip and this time Fran, my partner, decided to come with me.

Page 11 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

After the appointment at the hospital we took the bus to Hampstead Heath. We walked onto the Heath and passed the first pond. We arrived at the second pond and Fran had kept back some of her sandwich to feed the ducks. She had her spectacles hanging around her neck on a cord.

She gave a big swing of her arm to throw the bread to the ducks, and her arm caught the cord and the glasses went sailing through the air and landed in the water.

We were trying to see where they had landed, when two excited dogs went splashing into the pond and stirred the up the mud. We waited for twenty minutes after the dogs had gone for the mud to settle, to see if we could see the glasses.

They were triple focus and had cost £300. A po‐ lice car arrived and Fran walked over to ask them for help. They managed to hold back their laugh‐ ter, as they obviously saw the funny side of things, and told her that the water fell away very quickly indeed and was quite deep and they were not allowed to venture in. Luckily, Fran’s specta‐ cles were insured and the insurers accepted her rather odd, but true, story and they were re‐ placed.

I mention the above because I had a strong feel‐ ing to go back to the Heath and to the pond, just out of interest and to see if I could, by any re‐ mote chance, see the glasses. I still, however, had this overwhelming feeling about finding a £10 note. I walked onto the Heath with my head down and headed for the pond. As I approached the second pond, I was scouting the ground very carefully and when I reached the spot where the glasses had been lost, heavily camouflaged with old brown leaves, and rolled up, was a £10 note.

At first I thought it was a leaf and even on closer inspection it still looked like a leaf. However, because of the overwhelming urge I still had about finding a £10 note, I looked even closer and eventually picked it up to just check and, sure enough, it was a £10 note!

Was this a coincidence? What forces are at play here and for what reason? Finding a £10 note is not life‐changing, so what is such an event tell‐ ing me? Is it the same force that tells me to leave my house at a certain time and look up into the sky or to suddenly look out the window because of a strong sensation, and outside will be a hovering UFO? What is the purpose of this?

I have just tied together a few of the odd syn‐ chronistic events that have happened in my life and I’m sure all you readers will recognise simi‐ lar patterns that have happened in your life. In fact, I think coincidences happen so often that we just take most of them for granted. It may even be a coincidence that I have decided to write this article today!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mike Oram is the author of:

Does It Rain in Other Dimensions?

The Zen of Ben by Mike Oram & John Pickering

Welcome to Neil McDonald's Megalithic Tours.

"Ten Years on the Road" 'Join our small friendly groups on specialist tours to ancient, mystical and historical sites in Britain, Ireland, France, Spain and Malta'. Now in our 10th year, Neil’s specialist tours visit many of the most popular Ancient, Mystical and Historical sites. The smaller size of our groups means that we can also reach the more remote, little known sites that Neil has discovered over many years of experience.

Neil has a fascination with pre‐history and the activities of our ancient ances‐ tors, the so called 'Early Stone Builders'. His interests include all aspects of history and he has been taking tour groups around our many and varied sites for some years. Neil has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Excess Baggage’, Edge Media TV's, 'Now That's Weird', Glastonbury Radio’s 'Mysterious West’ and BBC Radio Lancashire.

We visit most areas of Britain from Cornwall to Orkney and Shetland. Our European destinations include; Carnac in Northern France, the Malta Tem‐ ples, and the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage in Spain. In the South of France’s Cathar Country we look into the mysteries of Sauniere and Rennes‐ le‐Château, the knights Templar, the Priory of Sion and the Cathars.

If your group would like a private tailor‐made tour, planned to your require‐ ments, we will build you an itinerary from our range of tours. Please contact us for details. International Visitors ‐ from the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and elsewhere overseas are always welcome at Megalithic Tours. If you have a group Neil would be pleased to create an itinerary for you. Tours from our 'Tours Page' can be mixed and matched to cover part or all of your stay in the UK.

Megalithic Tour Groups ‐ are small, friendly and welcoming. Quite a number come along on their own and others with friends or partners. Many of our travellers enjoy the social side of the tours and value the opportunity to get to know like minded people during the day, over dinner or later in the bar.

Some like to keep their own council of course and that is respected, but many have made lasting friendships and come back many times. One of our regular travellers recently told me that "we always have great fun, it's like coming back to see old friends".

NEIL MCDONALD’S BOOKS: AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.CO.UK Neil McDonald provides some critical informa‐ tion in regards some amazing sites through‐ out the UK and Isle of Man. All books under £10.00 at Amazon UK. Well worth grabbing a copy or two.

Check out Megalithic Tours ‐ Mysterious Earth Conference 2014 below...

Not to be missed!

March 29th 2014 ‐ Lake District South & Coast ‐ 5 Places Left ‐ 1 Day event.

April 4th 2014 ‐ Mystical Isle of Man ‐ 5 Places Left ‐ 4 Day event.

For further tour details and general information please contact us. We will respond to your enquiry as July 25th 2014 ‐ Crop Circle Quest Weekend ‐ 4 Day quickly as possible. To book a tour event. please download our printable book‐ ings form or contact Neil on; August 1st 2014 ‐ Stonehenge, Avebury & Glastonbury ‐ 7 Places left ‐ 4 Day event.

Phone ‐ 01772 728181 or 07799 061991

April 12th 2014 ‐ Vale of Eden Day ‐ 1 Day event.

August 9th 2014 ‐ Mysterious Anglesey ‐ 2 Day event.

April 18th 2014 ‐ Mysterious North Wales & Anglesey ‐ 4 Day event.

August 17th 2014 ‐ Ireland the Emerald Isle ‐ 7 Day event.

Email ‐ neil@megalithictours.com

April 26th 2014 ‐ Derbyshire Henges & Stone Circles ‐ 1 Day event.

August 29th 2014 ‐ Santiago de Compostela Pilgrimage ‐ 11 Day event.

Or Write To: Neil McDonald, Mega‐ lithic Tours, 50 Cottam Avenue, Ingol, Preston, Lancashire. PR2 3XH

May 4th 2014 ‐ Mystical Cornwall ‐ Only 4 Places Left ‐ 7 Day event

September 13th 2014 ‐ North Wales Weekend ‐ 2 Day event.

May 18th 2014 ‐ Northern France & the Stones of Car‐ nac ‐ 5 Places Left ‐ 7 Day event.

September 20th 2014 ‐ Scottish West Coast Highlands & Islands ‐ 8 Day event.

May 31st 2014 ‐ Yorkshire's Amazing Megaliths ‐ 7 Places Left ‐ 2 Day event.

October 4th 2014 ‐ Celestial Cyprus ‐ NEW ‐ 7 Day event.

June 7th 2014 ‐ Piel Isle & Furness Abbey ‐ 7 Places Left ‐ 1 Day event.

October 26th 2014 ‐ Pendle Witch Halloween Day Tour ‐ 1 Day event.

June 14th 2014 ‐ Cathar Tour 1. ‐TOUR FULL ‐ 10 Day event.

November 2nd 2014 ‐ Magical Malta ‐ 8 Day event.

June 28th 2014 ‐ Cathar Tour 2. ‐ Only 5 places left ‐ 10 Day event.

FULL DETAILS OF EACH TOUR CAN BE FOUND ON THE MEGALYTHIC TOURS WEBSITE.

AMAZING! BOOK YOUR TICKETS NOW!

FEATURING STEVE MERA & STEVE JOHNSON ON APRIL 6TH 2014

Missing! Malaysia Flight 370

By Steve Mera & Relative News Items

WHAT FIRST STARTED OUT AS A DELAYED FLIGHT HAS NOW BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL AVIATION MYSTERY. WHERE IS MALAYSIA FLIGHT 370 AND ITS 239 PASSENGERS AND CREW?

HAS IT BEEN HIJACKED BY TERRORISTS?

WAS THE PLANE SOMEHOW DESTROYED IN MID AIR?

HAS THE AIRCRAFT GONE DOWN AT SEA DUE TO PILOT ERROR?

OR… AS SOME HAVE SPECULATED… ARE UFOs RESPONSIBLE?

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: how the search has unfolded, day by day…

The hunt for the missing Boeing 777, and its 239 passengers and crew, has taken many twists and turns. Here, we publish a day by day account of the informa‐ tion that has emerged about the plane’s final hours, confirmed locations – and theories about its fate. When Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens on a clear night on Saturday 8th March 2014, no one could explain how the Boeing 777 had seemingly vanished. Ten days later, there is still more confusion and misinformation than solid evidence, and the aircraft with 239 people on board is still missing. Just hours after the 12.40am flight disappeared the Malaysia Airlines chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said the plane was still in contact with air traffic controllers about two hours into the flight, pinning the last contact at about 2.40am [all times local], at a point 120 nautical miles off the east coast of Malaysia. But FlightAware, a flight‐tracking website, showed the plane climbing to 10,700 metres (35,000ft) before disappearing from records at 1am, about 20 minutes after it took off. At 1am, the plane was scheduled to enter Vietnamese air space while flying between Malaysia and Ho Chi Minh City and did not. No distress signal was issued.

Twelve hours after the plane vanished, search and rescue teams from Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam began looking for debris or wreckage off Vietnam. China and the Philippines soon sent their own ships and aircraft to help. A few hours later, a Vietnamese admiral told media the aircraft could have crashed in Vietnam‐ ese waters near an island – with reports of a giant oil slick and column of smoke emerging. Soon, questions over whether terrorism was involved began circulating after an Italian and an Austrian came forward to say they had not flown on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, despite being listed in the flight’s manifest.

Teams from the US began aiding the search. Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, said terrorism was a possibility as authorities began in‐ vestigating reports that as many as four people on board MH370 may have been using stolen passports.

Later that day, a Japan‐bound pilot from another Boeing 777 claimed to have made contact with MH370 at 1.30am, minutes before it disap‐ peared, saying he had asked the aircraft if it had entered Vietnamese airspace, but received only static and mumbling in return.

Vietnam claimed to have found more debris, while the Malaysian transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, told reporters the aircraft may have turned back Page 15 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Missing! Malaysia Flight 370

By Steve Mera & Relative News Items

towards Malaysia. Later that day it emerged that the Italian and Austrian men believed to be on board the flight had had their passports stolen in Thailand within the past two years, prompting fears that the men using their passports were terrorists.

Malaysia’s aviation chief, Aharuddin Abdul Rahman, stoked fears of a terrorist plot when he said five passengers had checked in but never boarded the flight. Authorities denied Vietnamese reports that debris had been found, with the oil slick believed to belong to the plane revealed to be from a ship, while the “life raft” spotted off the coast of Vietnam turned out to be a moss‐covered cable reel.

CCTV footage of the two men travelling on stolen European pass‐ ports prompted Malaysian officials to describe them as resem‐ bling the black Italian striker Mario Balotelli. Najib demanded a review of Kuala Lumpur’s security measures.

Malaysia Airlines said the pilots may have tried to turn the plane back towards Malaysia as the country widened its search and provided more teams. In a bizarre twist, Malaysia’s air force chief Tan Sri Rodzali Daud said the plane had been detected at 2.40am near Pulau Perak, an island in the Malacca strait – indicating the plane had indeed flown back and was accounted for a whole hour later after it initially disappeared. He would later deny this claim.

Earlier fears of terrorism were slightly assuaged as Interpol said more information had emerged about the men who travelled on stolen passports that indi‐ cated terrorism was less likely. Interpol named the two as Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19, and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29, both from Iran. Re‐ ports suggested they were asylum seekers rather than terrorists.

Rodzali said the last radar signal from the missing aircraft was received 200 miles north‐west of Penang at 2.15am on Saturday – a third potential last sighting. This would put the last signal at 45 minutes after authorities had initially said they lost contact. However, Daud said the data had not been received in real time, so it could have belonged to another aircraft. “I’m not saying this is MH370. We are still cor‐ roborating this,” he told a press conference. “There is a possibility of the aircraft making a comeback.

It remains as a possibility … It is very difficult to say for sure it is the aircraft.” Unconfirmed reports also emerged of Malaysian fishermen spotting what looked like a life raft with the word “Boarding” on it floating off the east coast of Malaysia, although it is believed to have sunk when authorities attempted to bring it back to shore, while the Beijing News claimed that a dead body was seen in the Malacca strait wearing a life vest.

Sources “familiar with the details” of the missing Boeing 777 told the Wall Street Journal that US investigators believed the plane had flown for a total of five hours, indicating it have been di‐ verted “with the intention of using it later for another purpose”.

The theory was apparently based on data from the Boeing’s engines, manufactured by the British company Rolls‐Royce, sent to the ground. However, Malay‐ sian officials denied that the engines transmitted any data past 1.07am. Malaysian authorities also said the plane was again caught on radar at 2.30am – this was later denied – and on military radar at 2.15am near the Malacca strait, indicating the plane had turned away from its flight path towards Beijing.

With almost a week gone, a new theory emerged: a report based on radar‐trafficking suggesting MH370 may have flown deliberately off course towards the Andaman Islands after it last made contact with air traffic control. Sources told Reuters the flight path of an unidentified aircraft investigators believed to be MH370 was following a route with specific navigational waypoints, suggesting someone with aviation training was at the helm. On the same day came reports that the aircraft’s two communications sys‐ tems were shut down, with “manual intervention” the probable cause. According to two US officials who spoke to ABC News, the 777’s data reporting system was shut down at 1.07am, while the trans‐ ponder – which sends back information to civilian radar regarding performance, location and altitude – was turned off at 1.21am. At a press conference late on Friday afternoon, Hishammuddin, Malaysia’s acting transport minister, said authorities were investigating the possibility that the plane’s communica‐ tions systems had been deliberately shut down and said there were “four or five possibilities”. Hisham‐ muddin confirmed that MH370’s “whole passenger manifest”, including crew, was being looked into and added: “If investigation requires searching the pilots’ homes, it will be done.”

SATURDAY: In perhaps the most dramatic twist to the story so far Najib confirmed that the plane’s com‐ munications systems had been deliberately turned off and that the jet had seemingly flown on for an‐ other six hours after contact was lost. Addressing a press conference Malaysia’s prime minister said that while the transponder and Acars data system were turned off early in the flight, the plane Page 16 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Missing! Malaysia Flight 370

By Steve Mera & Relative News Items

communicated with satellite seven hours after it took off. The satellite communication could only determine that the plane took one of two huge flight corri‐ dors following its last confirmed location at 2.15am a week before over the Malacca strait – south from Indonesia towards the Indian Ocean; or north from Thailand towards central Asia. “These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Najib said, saying attention was being fo‐ cused on potential motives for those among the crew or passengers. Malaysian police began searching the home of the plane’s 53‐year‐old captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Malaysian investigators said the last voice communication from MH370 – a brief message to ground controllers saying “All right, good night” – came after the first set of communication systems was dis‐ abled. This placed yet more focus on the potential actions of Zaharie and his 27‐year‐old co‐pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, with their families interviewed. There were now 25 countries helping with the vast search, including Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia, with special assistance regarding satellite data from the US, China and France.

Monday: Malaysia said it believed the final spoken words from the plane came from Fariq, the co‐pilot, not his colleague or an intruder on the flight deck. However, they appeared to backtrack from their ear‐ lier belief that the words were spoken after communications devices were deliberately switched off.

The voice communication came at 1.19am, two minutes before the plane’s transponder was seemingly turned off. While the last signal from the Acars data communication system came earlier, at 1.07am, it was not due to transmit again until 30 minutes later, Hishammuddin, the interim transport minister, told reporters, meaning that could have seemingly been turned off at any point before 1.37am. Despite increased focus on the potential actions of the pilot and co‐pilot, no possible motive or connection to extremist beliefs had emerged, with friends and family describing them as moderate and balanced.

Tuesday: In yet another indication that someone with a high degree of knowledge about airliners was behind MH370’s change of course, the New York Times said the initial westward turn by the plane came about not through use of the manual controls but after a flight computer was reprogrammed, most likely by someone in the cockpit. Quoting unnamed US officials, the paper said such an operation would have to be carried out by someone with considerable knowl‐ edge of such systems. At yet another press briefing, Hishammuddin said the search for the plane had “entered a new phase” of international co‐operation, with other countries taking on an increased role. The entire search area, he said, was now 2.24m square nautical miles. With no definite news about what might have happened to the plane and the people on board, the father of one Chinese passenger told reporters he and other relatives were considering staging a hunger strike to push for more answers.

The following days: Now suggestions that there may have been a fire on board the aircraft is just another theory circulating the news channels. Also the possi‐ ble discovery of an aircraft wreckage being located in the South Indian Ocean and rumours of a possible suicide by the aircrafts pilot. The world is searching for an aircraft, an aircraft that might just join the list of strange mysteries, alongside Flight 19 and many many other… ‘We hope and pray that is not the case’…

So… Your probably thinking… Where does the UFO stuff come into this. It pretty much started with a couple of videos on Youtube from DAHBOO77 claiming that a UFO was spotted on radar at the time flight MH370 disappeared and that the following radar footage 24 hours later had mysteriously altered sparking a conspiracy theory. Below you can see the radar readings and an apparent UFO.

In the radar reading on Chart 1 you can clearly see flight MH370 on its normal trajectory and also an unidentified radar signature that on occasion changed to the signature of an aircraft. However when monitoring the unknown objects flight, it appeared to move faster than known civilian aircraft speeds and at one point seemed to be stationary for a while. The second radar reading a day later shown a completely different version, showing no UFO and flight MH370 mak‐ ing some unusual turns in flight. There are a number of further videos posted by DAHBOO77 I would suggest you taking a look at. Here are the two Youtube links to the two radar readings above:…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JpbZZKqxy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZtz‐HVy6c These posted videos on Youtube certain seemed to have stirred up the conspiracy believers… Though I do agree that the whole incident has been a bit of a media circus and that there does seem to have been different stories being presented each day. One cannot help think… something doesn’t ring true...

Page 17 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Missing! Malaysia Flight 370

By Steve Mera & Relative News Items

Now for the real weird stuff! Circulating throughout internet websites, Youtube and Facebook is a few statements from none other than David Boyle, owner of the Exhibition of the Universe situated in Blackpool, UK and known lecturer of the profound. David, considered as a rather outspoken gentleman had this to say…

David claims to have obtained information from an E.T. Channeller claiming that Flight MH370 had some issues and apparently was going down when the air‐ craft was suddenly rescued by Ashtar Command using their huge 3000ft long cylindrical spacecraft referred to at the Sky Dreadnaut. All passengers and crew along with their luggage was beamed off the aircraft. Passengers were informed of the E.T. intent so use them as willing hostages in hope of forcing world peace and the dismantling of all nuclear weapons. Apparently the passengers were all well and happy to assist the E.Ts. The Malaysian 777 was also rescued and taken to the hollow earth entrance in Antartica. Details of David’s talks in regards this matter can be found on his website at: http://exhibitionoftheuniverse.com The two videoed lectures can be found at the following links...

http://exhibitionoftheuniverse.com/2‐disclosure‐of‐ets‐and‐malaysian‐airlines‐flight‐mh370/ http://exhibitionoftheuniverse.com/probe‐international‐ufo‐conference‐22‐march‐2014/ As you can imagine… A number of people have remarked on the ill timing and shameless ap‐ proach to this delicate incident. After all, families are still grieving for their lost loves ones.

Though David may not be on his own in regards his belief in E.Ts abducting the aircraft, passen‐ gers and crew, many others keep their thoughts to themselves demonstrating tact and respect.

As for myself, I really do not know what to believe. I just hope that the families prayers are heard.

Truth News International also beefed up the conspiracy theory with a small news item about suspected terrorists of flight MH370. They remarked upon the released photographs to the media of two suspect passengers, which later sources announced that neither had known connections with terrorism and that the two passengers using stolen passports were not considered to be a threat to the flight. Below you can see released camera footage of these two passengers.

Note that the media camera still shows the two passengers with the same lower portion, ie, same legs, feet, flooring etc. Though most would simply believe a simple camera still error, some will certainly read into this suspecting fake photography etc…

Here are just a few of the outlandish remarks people have made in regards the where about’s of flight MH370.

1. The Airliner passed through a portal that teleported them to the Moon. Such portals are either referred to as a natural phenomena that governments of the world are aware of and keep secret, or the portals are manufactured by extraterrestrials and are used com‐ monly for transportation highways from one location to another.

2. That the American government have purposely hijacked the aircraft and have used high tech equip‐ ment to fool radar coverage of the aircraft and that the aircraft secretly landed at an air force base and immediately placed in a huge warehouse acting as a faraday cage so to instantly block all forms of commu‐ nication. The pilot had no choice but to follow their orders.

3. All passengers, crew and their luggage were beamed off the airliner by E.Ts who went on to relo‐ cate the aircraft to Antartica in a hope to bring world peace.

The theories go on and on… More recently, the discovery of possible aircraft wreckage in the South Indian Ocean has led to the belief that the ill fated flight MH370 crashed in mid ocean and that that captain may have carried out this action as a planned suicide. Whatever happened there still are more questions than answers. How did flight MH370 manage to suddenly drop in altitude to zero feet just before disappearing, yet continued to fly, make several trajectory adjustments and travel in a different direction for hundreds of miles without being picked up on radar? It has been confirmed that the aircraft transponder can be turned off by the pilots, but a radar signature would certainly remain.

Whatever happened to flight MH370 remains unknown along with the missing passengers and crew. If the whole event was planned as part of a terrorist act, then no one has yet come forward claiming that they were responsible or asking for their demands to be met. If there is a masterplan at work here then I’m sure this will just be the first phase of the event and more startling news will follow. If it was just a simple act by a pilot bent on suicide then I’m sure many questions will need to be asked. In the meantime, I guess the only thing you can do… is watch this space!

Page 18 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

The Oxford Castle Visit

By Aaron Millar

“Trying to contact ghosts in a haunted castle is a little like covering yourself in BBQ sauce and walking into a cannibal village.” My friend Ben is a little concerned about tonight’s paranormal investigation. I can’t blame him ‐ this is my second ghost hunt and after the first solo attempt I have enlisted my burliest weight‐lifting friend for morale support. Not that physical prowess will be much defence against the spirit world and we both know it, that’s why I’ve also signed us up with a professional team who run regular ghost hunts up and down the country and promise expert investigators, free use of a range of paranormal equipment and most importantly a real, hoax free experience. As we approach Oxford Castle – a place brimming with ghostly goings on ‐ I wonder with more then a little mild trepidation, if Ben’s analogy is indeed accurate...

Page 19 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

The Oxford Castle Visit

By Aaron Millar

Built by the Normans in 1071, Oxford Castle was used as a prison for more then 700 years and houses many a tale of suffering and torture within its stone walls. During the English Civil War as many as sixty people were locked in the confined space of St Georges Tower 24hrs a day, beaten and shackled to the wall, deprived of food and water and left to rot in their own filth. One of the most famous residents was Mary Blandy ‐ hanged in the grounds of the castle in 1752 for murdering her father –numerous reports claim to have witnessed her ghost still walking the castle mound today. And then of course there is the ‘Oxford Castle Curse’, called the ‘Black Assize’ of 1577 it was said that Rowland Jenkes having had both ears cut off pronounced a curse on the court housed at Oxford Castle and within a few weeks a mysterious plague hit the city, killing hundreds.

Next door to the tower the story doesn’t get much brighter, used as a prison until as late as 1996 and still housing many of the original stone‐wall cells, the building reeks with claustrophobic menace. But it is down in the 900year old crypt, that things become decidedly creepy. First built in 1074 these underground catacombs originally formed part of the castle church and were largely used to house the freshly dead. Inside the air is always dark and always cold and the low stone arched ceilings press down with the weight of many souls. It is also down here that our evening will begin, but first we need some tips from the pros.

Our host for the evening, Wayne – a friendly thirty‐something chap brimming with unabashed pre‐hunt excitement – tells us how to get the most out of our night.

“In this group of people tonight there are going to be hardened skeptics, there are going to be people who completely believe and then there’s going to be a bunch of people sitting somewhere on the fence. Wherever you are on that continuum we need you to – excuse the pun – keep your spirits up.

You’ll get back what you put in. Imagine we’re light bulbs and the spirits are moths, the brighter your light – your energy ‐ the more the spirits are going to be attracted to you.”

Free for guests to use are various pieces of high‐tech equipment such as EMF metres and K2’s which apparently register changes in the electro‐magnetic field that might indicate the presence of something otherworldly. But one of the oldest pieces of kit is also one of the most effective. “Dousing rods.”

Wayne tells us “Two bent bits of metal. People go off looking for water with these and that’s exactly what they’re for – water companies still use dousing rods today. But when we’re doing paranormal investigations the theory be‐ hind them is that, being conductive, you’re going to be throwing your energy through them and be connecting and interacting with the energy around you ‐ which is hopefully spirit energy in these kind of environments.”

On Wayne’s instruction we begin by asking the rods to show us different positions that indicate yes and no, so that we can use them later to ask the spirits questions. Wayne explains the same concept is at work in glass move‐ ment, table‐tipping and even Ouija Boards –“You put your energy into the

object, touching the glass or table lightly but not making it move, and then ask spirits to come forward and create physical movements that you can use to communicate with them.” Ben and I look at each other, grinning widely – BBQ sauce or not, we were ready to talk to the other side.

But then we hadn’t factored on the crypt. Once we were inside and all lights were extinguished Wayne began by asking us form a large circle skirting the perimeter of the space. “I’m going to ask you to hold hands because if you then start to experience things like being touched you know all the hands are accounted for.” He then proceeded to play some decidedly scary Gregorian chanting from an I‐Pod in the corner of the room – “Often when you play music of a certain type” He explains “It draws spirits forward because they have a connection with that type of music.” Hollow voices echoed through the dark recesses of the crypt, low bell tones seemed to hang for an eternity in the stagnant air. “Whichever spirits are fans of that” Ben whispers in my ear, “I don’t fancy meeting tonight.”

After the music had finished, medium Bill Nicholson moved to the centre of the circle ‐ “I’ve got a sense of something not right, like I’m going insane. I’ve got sorcery I’ve got black arts, straight away. I know you say this place is a crypt but there was something else here as well. There was something not right down here.” My eyes flit over the swirling blackness, unable to focus.

When I turn to Ben I can see nothing despite him being only an arms length away. I have the impression someone is in between us. “I’ve also got a man in spirit come towards me” Bill continues, “He says his name is Jacob. He says it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, I was here but I didn’t do it.” We’re in‐ structed to break the circle and hold our hands out in front of us “Jacob if you’re there” Bill says “can you reach out and touch one of our hands”. In the pitch darkness not even fingertips are visible, shapes move around in the shadows. “Oh God, do we have to” the voice of the woman next to me whis‐ pers, she hasn’t let go of my hand and I’m glad for it.

Later I am taken upstairs to the abandoned prison wing of the castle and led down a long stone‐arched corridor; torchlight picking up faded black steel doors with etched white cell numbers in close proximity either side. Wayne scrapes open the last cell door ‐ “Right 10 minutes in here on your own, no lights” he says with uncontained excitement. This is my ‘lone vigil’ – my op‐ portunity to have some one‐to‐one time with the spirits. As the door slams shut behind me only the moonlight from a tiny crescent window illuminates the claustrophobia of the space. Earlier in the evening Medium Bill had picked up the spirit of a small boy called Seth in this cell. “I feel real sadness in here.” He had told us, “Whatever he was locked up for it was for some‐ thing really pathetic.”

In the corner a dark wood wardrobe had been left creaking ajar and an old heating pipe reverberates intermittent hollow bangs like the echo of some coded prison message system. The normal groans of an old building I tell myself, but then I remember something else Wayne said ‐ “Your rational mind is going to kick in – but it’s not always the case – sometimes you’re Page 20 20 Page

Phenomena Magazine: November 2013 - Issue 55: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

The Oxford Castle Visit

By Aaron Millar

irrational mind and your gut feeling is there for a reason. Whilst we want to debunk an idea, we equally so don’t write it off.” So I pluck up the courage to look closer to where the sounds are coming from, something is inside the wardrobe but I can’t see what it is. As I lean further still, whispering assur‐ ances to Seth in internal monologue, I see bones. A skeleton hangs there on display. The pipe bangs again, and I jump to the back of the room, slamming my fists on the door to be let out.

Afterwards co‐host Matt – a self confessed ghost junkie – leads a small group of us to the second floor and a tiny padded cubicle used to house the most violent criminals, including kidnap and murderer Donald Nealson ‐ the notori‐ ous ‘Black Panther’. We sit cross‐legged on the floor, spreading a Ouija board before us. Despite the emotional intensity of our surroundings and a growing vehemence in our proclamations the glass remained resolutely inert.

Undeterred Matt decided to get out a ‘Ghost Box’ explaining that – “It scans all the radio frequencies and picks up a form of static. The theory is that any spirit that’s with us – it can use that static to convert the EMF into words.”

Sadly, however, all we managed to get was a lot of white noise and random snippets of Oxford’s cheesiest late night radio. But then suddenly, just as we were packing up to leave disappointed, we heard six footsteps in the corridor that disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. “That’s got to be flesh and blood,” Matt says, standing up to check outside the cell door, but the build‐ ing was empty and we never heard the sound again.

Later, in St Georges Tower, a small group of us knelt beside a small wooden table touching our hands lightly upon its surface. Wayne places an EMF me‐ ter beside us ‐ “If you walk up to an electric socket this green light will change to a constant flat red.” He explains, “But because we’ve not got any electrical interference up here, what we’ll do is ask for a spirit to draw closer to us and physically touch it themselves and see if we can get it to flicker red.” Despite Wayne’s best efforts the lights on the K2 remained green, however it wasn’t Page 21 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

long before something else entirely unexpected began to happen. The table beneath our fingers began to rumble. Within minutes it was shaking steadily, and then tilting on two legs, rocking slowly back and forth and sliding across the floor. Even in the dark I could see Wayne’s huge smile ‐“No matter how much I do this, I’m still like a kid in a sweet shop when it starts to happen.”

And perhaps that’s also the point. Not everything was convincing and there’s always explanations for what did occur, as Wayne readily concedes – “You can never 100 percent say whether a paranormal experience is real because you just don’t know. There’s always an element of possible suggestion and I know it’s possible to make a glass move without you intending to because of slight unconscious muscle movements. Equally I’ve got to put myself now in the firm believer category because I can’t write off a lot of what I’ve experi‐ enced.”

As I turn to Ben at the end of the night, grinning as he grabs some dousing rods and a Ouija board and shouts for me to climb with him to the top of the tower, I think I get what a ghost tour is all about. As Wayne says “We don’t understand everything about the planet. There are things that we don’t yet know. In the same way it hasn’t been proven that there are spirits it hasn’t been disproven either.” And that exploration of the unknown is something rare and precious and exciting. “It’s like being a kid again,” Wayne says, and BBQ sauce or not, I have to agree.

Aaron Millar is a freelance writer with an interest in all things that bend the mind and expand the world we live in. You can tweet him at #AaronMWriter, his blog is on...

www.thebluedotperspective.com Page 20 Phenomena Magazine: November 2013 - Issue 55: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Other Books

Title: Dragon‐ flame: Authors: Lawren Leo Publisher: New Page Books ISBN‐13:978‐1‐ 60163‐310‐1 Price: $15.99 Can. $18.50)

The revelation of a new and powerful philosophical system is the rare treasure to be discovered in the new book, Dragon‐ flame: Tap Into Your Reservoir of Power Using Talismans, Manifestation, and Visuali‐ zation. By Lawren Leo, a noted expert on esoteric philosophy and the practice of magickal arts, the book develops a unique‐ formula for achieving spiritual transforma‐ tion and manifesting one’s desires. Anyone interested in the Holy Grail, the Philoso‐ pher’s Stone, The Secret and the law of attraction (and who isn’t?) will be drawn to Dragonflame for the insightful meditations and visualizations, the exercises and the rituals. In an understandable and reader‐ friendly way, detailed instructions are tailored to beginners and to advanced practitioners of the magickal arts, so that both achieve metaphysical tr ansformation.

The fascinating exercises are motivational, written with the intent of empowerment.

Based on a new and entirely unique for‐ mula, Dragonflame teaches readers to:

BOOK REVIEWS Phenomena Magazine regularly receive books from publishers and authors, and provide a review of the material, promote and advertise them within the magazine, Facebook pages and of course on our websites. If you would like to have your book reviewed and advertised, simply contact Phenomena Magazine via our website or send your book direct to Phenomena Magazine Head Office.

HAUNTED SKIES ‐ VOLUME 8 ‐ (1980) This is number eight in a series of books about the long running phenomenon of UFO’s and Ufology and if the rest in the series match the same impeccable standards as this one, then they are a lasting and fitting tribute to the people who wrote them. This volume, which includes a swathe of sightings across the entire UK, is focussed on the year 1980 which was when the subject of Ufology was still very much in the ascendant. One thing that did delight your reviewer was the clear implication that the authors regard Ufology as more than just a ‘nuts and bolts’ affair, something that would gladden the heart of the late Gordon Creighton of the redoubtable Flying Saucer Review (FSR). At more than 500 pages this is indeed a lavishly illustrated, well documented and meaty tome that covers a whole gamut of encounters, but the one that resonated most with this reviewer is what is perhaps one of the best authenticated sightings ever, anywhere, anytime, and that is the famous Rendlesham Forest encounter. This iconic sighting took place over two nights and was witnessed by American airmen from the nearby joint RAF/USAF airbase and fortuitously most of them are still with us to give their version of what was seen, something that the book uses to its advantage. As with many seminal en‐ counters these accounts have not altered or been embellished in any way and still carry the stamp of Title: Haunted Skies Volume 8 authenticity about them. While not the only subject matter discussed, at circa 200 pages it does take up a fair bit of room, but given the near‐unique nature of the sighting that is not an issue here. I can (1980) Authors: John Hanson, Dawn only congratulate John, Dawn and Brenda for continuing with what is for them clearly a labour of love and can only marvel at their tenacity in providing such an accurate, painstaking, detailed and im‐ Holloway & Brenda Butler mensely readable account of a still ongoing phenomenon that still puzzles and infuriates in equal Publisher: Haunted Skies amounts.

Publishing ISBN: 978‐0‐9574944‐1‐1 HAUNTED HIGH WYCOMBE Price: None Stated

Create talismans with which to control personal power. Find and manifest deepest dreams and desires. Discover new paths for magick and spiritual development. Make magick work in a karmically correct fashion.

(PM—An interesting read).

This romp around the night side of High Wycombe is very entertaining indeed, this is mainly due to the engaging and involving manner in which the author, Eddie Brazil, writes.

The author, who has also co‐authored a definitive account of the famous and reputedly much haunted Borley Rectory, informs us from the outset that he has had first hand experience of the ‘other side’ since he was a child in South London. This involved phantom footsteps (his grandmother

heard them as well) plus doors spontaneously opening as well.

Title: The Power From this rather unnerving beginning the author developed an abiding interest in the paranormal and of Auras started to investigate and the paranormal in all its guises. These include pubs, hotels, manor houses Author : Susan Shumsky, DD and other old building; he also found that local woods and open spaces such as Tyler’s Green and Publisher: New Pugh’s Wood also had their share of spectres.

Page Books

ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐ This especially true of Pugh’s Wood where a wartime case of a double child murder seems to have 60163‐289‐0 left it cursed by the spirits of the children. The killer was a twenty six year old gunner, later hanged at

List Price: $16.99 Oxford Castle. Perhaps we should retain capital punishment for child murder, who knows, it might Title: Haunted High Wycombe (Can. $19.50) serve as an effective deterrent for this heinous crime: These last two parts of the book are particu‐ Author: Eddie Brazil larly effective and absorbing.

By the prominent author, teacher, and Publisher: The History Press

media spokesperson, Susan Shumsky, D.D., ISBN: 978‐0‐75249145‐5 The Power of Auras: Tap In to Your Energy The book also mentions Sir Francis Dashwood and the notorious Hellfire Club where he and his gang Price: £9.99 Field for Clarity, Peace of Mind, and Well‐ of aristocratic roués boozed, womanised and frolicked in a labyrinth of tunnels. Fortunately the au‐ Being, is one of the most in‐depth and thor does not disappoint and Sir Francis is also well represented. A first class piece of writing and well

interactive guides to auras ever written. A worth a place on the bookshelf of any ghost hunter.

pioneer in the field of personal develop‐ ment , Shumsky brings together more than four decades of research, laying out proven tools and new techniques for mastering, through the study of auras, a wide variety of disciplines such as sense perception, spiritual healing, intuitive knowledge, meditation, prayer, visualization and much more. A new, enhanced edition of a bestsel‐ ler, with a foreword contributed by Dannion Brinkley, The Power of Auras offers self‐ sufficiency and inner strength to readers, and avaluable handbook for those in the holistic health field who use Shumsky’s unique methods in their practices. The perfect defense against the avalanche of external influences in this new millennium that are draining and depleting our ener‐ gies, this new book shows us how to cleanse, strengthen and expand our auras to experience greater energy, love, and happiness with the simple and effective methods developed by this adored teacher.

Augmented with 75 illustrations and spe‐ cific reader practices in each chapter, The Power of Auras is loaded with ways to heal and expand one’s energy fields through intuitive dowsing, color, sound, breathing, movement, meditation, affirmation, and visualization. (PM Intriguing).

THE SYNCHRONICITY KEY

Title: The Synchronicity Key Author: David Wilcock Publisher: Souvenir Press ISBN: 978‐0‐25864‐253‐9 Price: £16.00

This rather weight tome from David Wilcock is the natural follow up to ‘The Hidden Science of Lost Civilisations’ and it makes a truly fascinating (if slightly unfocussed) read.

What the author is saying is not dissimilar from a valid point made by other researchers over the years, and that is that everything is somehow interconnected to everything else, he calls this ‘The Law of One’, and also that the universe is in a way sentient and given the right condition it can communi‐ cate with us. This reviewer knows at first hand that this to be the case and has seen truly astonishing examples of synchronicity occur, sometimes on a daily basis.

However the remarkably explicit ‘Law of One’ appears to originate from channelled sources and therefore should be viewed in that light. The author also sees fit to introduce the Illuminati and the NWO into the mix and I’m not sure if that necessarily helps or not, but it does widen the appeal of the book, which, to be fair, at every stage is nothing if not immaculately researched. Another idea floated in the book is that the stuff of life, i.e. DNA, may have been formed by the action of gravity.

This is the first time I have seen that idea, but it seems to be a reasonable hypothesis and it certainly resonates with the other notion of the anthropic universe, or that the universe seems to have been specifically designed to create life wherever it could. Ah, but why and by what, and the author sets out his ideas about that too. Overall this is a thought provoking and stimulating read and although you might not agree with everything the author says its well worth the ticket price, go and buy it!.

BOOK REVIEWS Phenomena Magazine regularly receive books from publishers and authors, and provide a review of the material, promote and advertise them within the magazine, Facebook pages and of course on our websites. If you would like to have your book reviewed and advertised, simply contact Phenomena Magazine via our website or send your book direct to Phenomena Magazine Head Office.

UFOs CAUGHT ON FILM This is a book that does exactly what it says on the cover and presents a well produced sequential set of pictures that just about defines the UFO genre through the images taken of these most enigmatic craft. What the author does not do, however, is say whether they are all genuine or not. The book opens with the earliest photographic image taken of UFOs and continues on through the 1950’s right up to the present. Strangely enough, what does not appear in the pages are the photographs attrib‐ uted to George Adamski and given his reputation that is probably no bad thing. The same applies to Billy Meier’s ‘Plaedian Beamships’ which are also conspicuous by their absence, probably for the same reasons. That said, there is nothing for Bonnybridge either. Other than that all the classic im‐ ages are here, everything from the McMinnville sighting, the Lubbock Lights, right on to such absolute classics as the Belgian Triangles. There is also one that is very close to your reviewer’s heart; the un‐ derside of an apparent UFO taken by Phil Trevis near the BP Refinery at Grangemouth, Scotland. I interviewed Phil and visited the site and I am in no doubt that the guy is 100% genuine and he photo‐ graphed something genuinely anomalous that is clearly a construct of some kind: but what? Ah… there’s the rub. One from 2010 taken at Aceojeja in Tenerife shows another construct of some kind. It is clearly not a bird and not an insect either as the debunkers would have it, but a structured craft of some kind, although whether or not it is non‐terrestrial is quite another matter. The last shot was taken in Texas and shows two craft set against storm clouds. Again these do not seem to have been rigged or faked. This book is worth every penny of the cover price and should serve as an excellent work or reference for any Ufologist requiring a ready work of reference.

There are many books on the market ex‐ plaining, detailing, defining, and analyzing shamanism while explaining how a person can become a shamanic practitioner. How‐ ever, the “person” is always assumed to be an adult. Shamanism for Teenagers, Young Adults and The Young At Heart is the first book of its kind. It is a "how to" begin a shamanic practice written for teenagers.

After explaining how to begin, the author leads the reader through a series of jour‐ neys, each one widening the scope of knowledge. Each journey is carefully se‐ lected to give the reader the knowledge that this type of journey exists and can be used in many circumstances.

Title: UFOs Caught on Film Author: B. J. Booth Publisher: David & Charles ISBN: 9‐781‐4463‐0169‐2 Price: £12.99

UFOs

Title: UFOs Author: Leslie Kean Publisher: Crown Publishing Group ISBN‐13: 978‐0307717085

Price; £8.58 ‐ Amazon UK

An Air Force major is ordered to approach a brilliant UFO in his Phantom jet over Tehran. He repeat‐ edly attempts to engage and fire on unusual objects heading right toward his aircraft, but his missile control is locked and disabled. Witnessed from the ground, this dogfight becomes the subject of a secret report by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency. In Belgium, an Air Force colonel investigates a series of widespread sightings of unidentified triangular objects, and he sends F‐16s to attempt a closer look. Many hundreds of eyewitnesses, including on‐duty police officers, file reports, and a spectacular photograph of an unidentifiable craft is retrieved and analysed. Here at home, a retired chief of the FAA’s Accidents and Investigations Division reveals the agency’s response to a thirty‐ minute encounter between an aircraft and a gigantic UFO over Alaska, which occurred during his watch and is documented on radar. Now all three of these distinguished men have written breathtak‐ ing, firsthand accounts about these extraordinary incidents. They are joined by Air Force generals and a host of high‐level sources—including Fife Symington III, former governor of Arizona, and Nick Pope, former head of the British Defence Ministry’s UFO Investigative Unit—who have agreed to write their own detailed, personal stories about UFO encounters and investigations for the first time. They are coming forward now because of Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter who has spent the last ten years studying the still unexplained UFO phenomenon. Kean reviewed hundreds of government docu‐ ments, aviation reports, radar data, and case studies with corroborating physical evidence. She care‐ fully examined scientifically analyzed photographs and interviewed dozens of high‐level officials and aviation witnesses from around the world. With the support of former White House chief of staff John Podesta, Kean draws on her research to separate fact from fiction and to lift the veil on decades of U.S. government misinformation.

OPERATION TROJAN HORSE OUR SKIES ARE FILLED WITH TROJAN HORSES....

"The real UFO story must encompass all of the many manifestations being observed. It is a story of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations; of an invisible world that surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us; of prophets and prophecies, and gods and demons. It is a world of illusion and hallucination where the unreal seems very real, and where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter‐forces that are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension."

John A. Keel (March 25, 1930 ‐ July 3, 2009) was an American journalist and influential UFOlogist best known as the author of "The Mothman Prophecies." In the 1950s, he spent time in Egypt, India, and the Himalayas investigating snake charming cults, the Indian rope trick, and the legendary Yeti, an adventure that culminated in the publication of his first book, "Jadoo."

In the mid‐1960s, he took up investigating UFOs and assorted forteana and published his first knock‐ out UFO book, "UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse," in 1970. The book shredded the then trendy nuts‐and ‐bolts extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs in favor of one that linked UFOs to a variety of paranormal and supernatural phenomena that have taken place throughout history.

Keel was one of the first to note that the UFO phenomenon appears in different disguises‐and that one could not begin to decipher this great mystery without first taking into account its many and varied deliberate deceptions. Other than a few corrections, this Anomalist Books edition essentially follows the original 1970 edition of "UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse."

Other Books

Title: Shamanism for Teenagers, Young Adults & The Young At Heart Author: Robert Levy Publishers: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 978‐1‐78279 ‐449‐3 Price: £ 9.99

Title: Operation Trojan Horse Author: John A. Keel Publisher: Anomalist Books ISBN‐13: 978‐1938398032 Price: £11:99

Robert Levy began climbing the shamanic mountain in 1995 and has worked with many western shamans as well as indige‐ nous shamans Ipupiara Makunaiman from the Ure‐e‐wau‐wau tribe of Brazil and his wife, Peruvian shaman Claicha Toscano. His shamanic practice included shamanic heal‐ ing, Reiki healings, both traditional and shamanic, cleansings, and shamanic coun‐ seling. He currently lives with his wife in Aventura Florida. (PM ‐ An interesting book with some historical information about the use of Shamanism).

Title: Starting a Spiritual Business ‐ Inspiration, Case Studies and Ad‐ vice.

Author: Charlotte Anne Edwards Publishers: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 978‐1‐ 78099‐710‐0 Price: £ 11.99

The ultimate savvy spiritualist's 'business bible', Starting a Spiritual Business will put you on the path to living your dream. Pre‐ senting case studies, lashings of inspiration and business advice, Starting a Spiritual Business will have you grasp the bull by the horns and give you the courage you need to accomplish your true purpose: starting a spiritual business and setting up your own practice. Reiki, Angelic Healing, Medium‐ ship? Or something else? Which healing therapy will you choose, and how will you help people? This book is not only a guide and inspiration, but also offers solid practi‐ cal advice on starting up, including finding funding, managing your finances and mar‐ keting your business. Former Deputy and Senior Editor, Charlotte is a freelancer and author who specialises in Mind, Body Spirit topics. She has two degrees and is presently working her way through two fascinating distance‐learning courses on religion, and physics. She lives in Kent, UK. (PM‐Though there are quite a large number of books available on Spiritualism, not many actually give advice. Now… I’m not sure if I fully believe the process of spiritualism, but the book did keep my interest, though I did come across subjects I had read about in similar books. Not really my cup of tea, but you may want it in your collection if your into this type of stuff. All in all, I considered the book average and nothing in it to help it stand out of the crowd).

Earth Language

By Stephen Wakefield

There can be no doubt as to the significance of Europe’s ancient constructions on the human imagination, the singular atmosphere greeting visitors to each standing stone, burial chamber or earthwork stirring emotions and spurring thought about our distant ancestors and their civilizations. It must, though, be their venerable age, the striking link they serve between today and, seemingly, the dawn of mankind, which is most conducive.

These monuments surround us, speak to us in hushed tones of the distant past, and as such serve as fuel for all manner of speculation, from dormant natural energies to geologic gateways for extraterrestrials.

Certainly the disputes, debates and scholarly arguments that have continued over their origins and purpose are the clearest indicator of their collective worth and importance to us, if only in firing the senses...

Page 25 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Earth Language

By Stephen Wakefield

Almost beyond our capabilities is the power to grasp the chronology involved in our development as a species. Human beings were in existence some half a million years ago in the West of Europe alone, and from 80,000 years ago it seems they were ritually disposing of their dead. While this does not directly suggest religious beliefs and practice, it does indicate either belief in an exis‐ tence beyond physicality, or at the very least a perceived need to honour those deceased.

Within the Palaeolithic era these early ceremonial acts were carried out with apparent regularity, and early forms of art were being expressed. France and Spain enjoyed symbolic art possibly as long as 25,000 years ago (South‐West France’s Pech Merle, a subterranean treasure trove of basic pattern work, animal drawings and apparent human figures), while Britain was enduring one of

Given the time scale involved, it is a suitably complex web of information; nonetheless, with the various types of burial across Europe, cave art and figu‐ rines (most popular being the ‘Venus’ images of the fruitful mother) from Russia, France, Austria and elsewhere, the development in human creativity during this period are fundamental not just as a clear starting‐point for some form of civilisation, but also as an arcane and tantalising draw for our intrinsic curiosity.

The Neolithic age is only slightly less obscured by the mists of time, though just as many questions remain. Whereas the Mesolithic era had offered albeit fascinating displays of paintings in Altameira, Spain, and nearby stretches of Europe, Neolithic man made a more striking progression from his Palaeolithic forebears and constructed sizeable tombs, barrows and earthwork enclosures as resting places for the dead. Various types of tomb have been identified in the British Isles alone, with cairns (a heap of stones with clearly marked sum‐ mit), long barrows (a tumulus with underground passage) and more simple passage graves all existing within relatively close proximity.

A variety of detail is apparent within tombs of the Neolithic era, but it is the burgeoning use of circular forms that is the most notable development here.

Whether this preferred shape denotes a symbolic reflection of sun and moon and therefore religious observance remains open to debate.

Just as possible is its practical use for gatherings, allowing individuals to best survey one another in a large group, though this option is far less appealing.

Tombs of a circular construction can be found in Scotland, Cornwall, the Ork‐ ney’s and at numerous other sites. Variation is as apparent in the contents that each site bears as it is in the location of these sites, some producing care‐ fully placed individuals, others groups of bodies and occasional animal re‐ mains.

Circles were no more apparent than with the henge’s that began to be formed across Europe, the best known being Stonehenge and Avebury, Wilt‐ shire. These sites have been continually studied and appraised, being central to even the most outlandish suppositions, but remain no less mysterious for the effort. Viewing the remains today, we cannot help but consider their im‐ port through our twenty‐first century perceptions of life. We read into the actions of their creators processes natural to ourselves, and superimpose instincts that we hold about our existence onto them, in the hope that those instincts are inherent within the species and thus serve as a link. Context is frequently the greatest barrier in understanding the abstract and that is pre‐ cisely what these ancient, haunting sites are – a physical representation of man’s earliest experiences, made abstract through long‐lost knowledge.

Folklore Spins its Web

Stories and the verbal transfer of knowledge were vital to the Celtic way of life, with reports from Roman sources suggesting that vast amounts of infor‐ mation were memorised rather than documented due to the sacred nature thereof. Though in time this would jeopardise much that was passed on, par‐ ticularly as Romanisation and Christianisation altered irreversibly the spiritual face of Britain, it did ensure an immediacy and energy to poems, tales and rites that would establish a long‐developing folklore tradition across the coun‐ try. It is no surprise that each location of prehistoric engineering was granted a colourful mythology, that the woods, knolls and copses became the heart‐ land of the imagination.

A famous (and highly contentious) account of Stonehenge dates from the twelfth century, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.

The text chronicled how Merlin the magician had transported every stone to

Page 26 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Earth Language

By Stephen Wakefield

Salisbury Plain through his magical art, after unknown giants had first used their magic to send them from Africa to Ireland.

Cornwall’s Cheesewring is another such site of magic. This strangely tilting pile of rocks was said to be the dwelling place of a Druid who offered an inex‐ haustible golden cup to weary travellers. When one knight grew angry at fail‐ ing to drain the cup of its libation, he rode away with it and was promptly buried by a fall of rocks nearby. Confirmation was found for some in the nine‐ teenth century when a golden cup dated c.1500 B.C. was uncovered at a nearby cairn, ‘King Arthur’s Grave’. Though the Cheesewring’s formation is said to be natural rather than man‐made, its magical heritage is no less im‐ pressive than Stonehenge, both speaking as they do of benevolent conjura‐ tion and enigmatic wisdom.

Smaller, more isolated sites were also considered as special, including those believed to propagate fertility or cure illnesses. The holed stone of Men‐an‐ Tol in Cornwall had children passed through it suffering from rickets and seek‐ ing good health, while County Antrim’s Holestone in Doagh saw young cou‐ ples clasping hands through its small hole as a blessing for their marriage. And Boroughbridge, Yorkshire’s ‘Devil’s Arrows’ were said to have been caused by the Devil’s foiled attempt to obliterate the town of Aldborough from nearby Hove Hill. The impressive stone arrows stand up to 22.5 feet high and create an alignment of 570 feet.

Glastonbury Tor, purported by some to have been a site of sun worship due to the ascending spirals which top the site, was beautifully tied in to the Ar‐ thurian legend. Arthur’s remains were said to have been discovered at the nearby Abbey in the twelfth century, actually inside a hollowed out tree trunk, beside his wife Guinevere. From Arthur’s time it has been suggested that the castle that originally stood atop the Tor was the final resting place of the sun king, and that it would be from there that his triumphant return would be enacted.

Home to all manner of fairies, the Tor was said to have witnessed their disper‐ sal at the hand of Saint Collen, who had warned locals as to the true, devilish nature of the beasts before answering the call of ‘King Gwyn’ and showering the assembly with holy water. The ‘true religion’, then, was the victor – yet the fantastic stories continued as ever. The holy wells that can be found across the country (over 1000 in England alone according to Janet & Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain) were believed to be medicinal and entertain cures and curses, while the impressive hill figures (the creation of which spans cen‐ turies) adorning Cerne Abbas, Windover Hill in Sussex and Uffington, Berk‐ shire, were acknowledged at various times as fertility symbol, primitive dowser and ancient homage to Saint George respectively.

Where scientific studies apply their rigours to these sites, folklore and alle‐ gory are stripped of any worth, discarded. Even in a spiritual quest to uncover the true purpose of the monuments, the stories of kings, wizards, devilry and healing can be easily swept aside, but they do prove the timeless quality that the landscape around us has on our collective psychology.

Page 27 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Essentially, these sites stir something deep within us and however they are interpreted, we are fascinated as much by the land as by our place within it.

Cosmic Alignments

In the 18th century Dr. William Stukeley carefully studied the Stonehenge and Avebury sites in an attempt to understand their original construct and pur‐ pose. Horrified witness to random attacks on stones at the latter site by locals seeking building materials, the doctor would have been aggrieved all the more in later years, when Avebury had gained importance as a religious envi‐ ronment. Other locals, disturbed by such apparent heresy against the Chris‐ tian faith, took to annually demolishing stones and obliterating Avebury’s grandeur.

Stukeley overcame the iconoclasm, however, and made careful drawings even as parts of the site were reduced to rubble. He identified two avenues of stones stretching out from the great circle, each a mile and a half long. Stuke‐ ley recognised in his plan a symbol utilised in Egypt and other ancient lands, that of the Solar Serpent, and with it the insinuation of cosmic alignments that would so appeal to later generations. The meaning of the symbol, per‐ taining to the highest form of creative being and sacred inner truth, can in no way have escaped the doctor’s attention at the time, as these faculties would have been fully stimulated for such a vision to present itself in the first in‐ stance.

The Ley Men Cometh

The ‘revelation’ apparent in William Stukeley’s vision at Avebury is no less true of Alfred Watkins’ vision in 1921 as he visited the village of Blackwardine, Herefordshire and a glance at his map revealed to him in a flash of inspiration the straight line that seemed to align its hilltops and ancient ruins. His imagi‐ nation took hold and the vision intensified to become a complex network of lines made up of all ancient earthworks, creating one huge and intentional system. These lines had, he suggested, been created by ‘dodmen’ using staffs alike those of the chalk ‘Long Man of Wilmington’, Sussex, and connected locations including crossroads, notches in earth ridges and fords.

1921’s Early British Trackways and 1925’s The Old Straight Track both laid his case out with no real sense of hyperbole or sensationalism. Somewhat ironi‐ cally, given the responses to his work here and the more outlandish directions his theory of leys would be taken following it, Watkins’ own summation as to a purpose was rather sedentary. Leys (a term he etymologically traced to suggest ‘church place’ or ‘enclosure’) were ‘…wanted to go long distances to the salt supply spots. Utility was the primary object. Later on, magic, religion, and superstition blended with the system’. Primarily a practical solution to communal, everyday needs, the lines he saw had only taken on a religious significance as the years saw a developing superstition grow alongside them.

A researcher fundamental in the 1970’s re‐emergence of ley research was Paul Devereux, who took over editorship of The Ley Hunter journal in 1976. A determined effort to catalogue and review the country’s ley lines soon dis‐ missed the popular ‘St. Michael’s Line’ as more of a corridor than a line, yet championed the Devil’s Arrows lines, two leys passing through the trio of 30‐ ton monoliths.

Earth Language

By Stephen Wakefield

One pierces the central ‘arrow’ and runs for eleven miles; the other crosses two arrows and runs five miles to Hutton Moor henge. Particularly striking here is that all sites on these lines are of prehistoric origin, negating the need to defend a mixture of tumuli, barrows and churches. It was the apparent strength of the few leys like this one that heartened the apologists and fuelled their continuing endeavours.

Of course the thousands of years continued to take their toll alongside the critics. Not only did the land rapidly alter in the name of technology and com‐ merce, it proved impossible to isolate many leys without having to suggest that medieval churches had largely been built on existing religious sites (a known practise of the Christian conversion in Britain, yet in some cases diffi‐ cult to prove), or that natural formations had taken on ritual importance ex‐ actly because they were sited on a ley. The evidence could only go so far, absolute proof all but impossible to gain.

Earth Energy

There is scientific proof that certain energies run within the earth, though the limits of their affect on the planet remain contentious. Magnetism, measured in units like the gauss, is today much weaker a force on the planet’s surface than it was thousands of years ago, and it has been concluded that a 5% de‐ cay has occurred over the last 150 years alone. NASA studies in the 1970’s read variations strongest at the poles and covering the globe, all less than 1 unit of gauss. Gauging what links exist between earth magnetism and the ley lines is impossible, particularly as many modern studies have continued to interpret the trackways on a celestial rather than geologic basis.

Considering the country by the former approach, Katherine Maltwood had rediscovered the Elizabethan magician John Dee’s Glastonbury Zodiac in 1929. With the Arthurian grail quest as her inspiration, she traced the jour‐ neys around Glastonbury and nearby sites only to discover that ancient monuments charted patterns which mirrored the signs of the zodiac, such as Aquarius which here took the form of the life‐giving Phoenix, spanning the Tor and Chalice Well. Critics pointed out the vagueness of several symbols, the lack of markings on the ground to delineate between them, the unex‐ plained rejection of certain stars over others in the alignments, but the zodiac was considered true by many who simply had the vision to see it. As with much else discussed, empiricism was seen only to lead so far in this manner of quest which by its very nature requires instinct, faith and imagination.

Prof. Alexander Thom had meanwhile managed to overturn the belief that prehistoric man was no more than a brute by establishing his use of geome‐ try, knowledge of the moon’s shifting orbit and application of the ‘megalithic yard’ (2.72 feet) in his two works Megalithic Sites in Britain and Megalithic Lunar Observatories. The results, which further stirred scientific dissent, were impressively carried out using the sites of Britain and others such as Carnac, and helped to establish a more discerning approach to ley hunting in the 1970’s.

Paul Devereux was a major figure in terms of refining the study of leys, working first and foremost to prove their credible exis‐ tence before considering the even more factious issue of what purpose lie behind them. Indeed, what Prof. Thom had set in motion, Devereux persisted with as a means of legitimising the study of ley lines.

The investigations, which had ruled out several popular lines as inaccurate, resulted in 1979’s The Ley Hunter’s Companion, where Devereux and Ian Thomson con‐ cluded that shorter lines with an ideal mini‐ mum of five sites along them were the most accurate and more acceptable.

Devereux and fellow investigator Bob Forrest continued to stringently analyse the leys and found that several maintained alignments which exceeded

statistical chance, notably those lines found at the Devil’s Arrows, more so due to the prehistoric origins that each site on them shared.

Paul Devereux himself has since collected a wealth of information indicating that lines crossing church sites are actually running through their graveyards, a system which indicates to him a network of ‘spirit lines’ that anthropological studies support. He cites worldwide accounts of funerary processions only taking straight routes to ceremonies and shamans travelling as the crow flies during trance states. Numerous stories suggest that the only means of way‐ laying a haunting ghost or vampire is to bury the corpse at a crossroads, as no amount of rivers or mountains can match a confusing set of straight paths.

Should this concept be correct, it raises the possibility that medieval man was seeking or expecting regular commune with the deceased.

Another direction that studies took, and this at the height of 1970’s interest rather than in its aftermath, was particularly captivating. It also took the most criticism, not least from the revisionists trying to rectify a semblance of credi‐ bility with modern science. Understanding the ley lines as marks of a very real earth energy, this approach required the greatest degree of personal involve‐ ment and to its followers was/is as fascinating as it could be dangerous.

Dowsing itself is as enigmatic as the sites it works on, first being mentioned in a 1430 German work on mining. Other texts from the seventeenth century onward suggest its use in the more traditional form of water divining, but shed no further light on the origins of the practise.

By the twentieth century dowsers had begun to use a new tool instead of always relying on forms of rod (the multi‐ functional pendulum), were utilising their self‐taught skill in a variety of new ways and even had a new name for their art, radiesthesia, which denoted the dowsers’ ability to sensate forms of radiation. That dowsers are also able to use their skill working with just a map suggests that the radiation involved is as yet unknown to man, but the name remains just.

Guy Underwood has long been an eloquent speaker on the energies which dowsers trace in the earth. For him and a good many others, they trace pat‐ terns carved by ancient priests who fully understood and actualised the pow‐ ers of nature. All manner of affairs, whether spiritual or terrestrial, were thus managed, and these paths most commonly concentrate at sites of ancient monuments and earthworks.

Where Underwood’s ‘geodetic lines’ focused primarily on underground streams of energy, Tom Graves and others went on to consider the ‘overground’ sites like standing stones that so often knitted the energies to‐ gether. For the dowsers themselves, tapping into the energies at these sites could prove physically calamitous, particularly when their ability allowed them to tap into the ‘seventh band’ of energy (the apex of seven spirals which are said to issue from the base of the stones, upward and outward). Head‐ aches, nausea and temporary paralysis are all recorded following these ex‐ periments by ‘sensitives’ at prehistoric sites, and link to cases whereupon people living in the proximity of disrupted energy lines have suffered exces‐ sive physical and emotional hardship. Examples have included breakdowns, persistent illness, cancer, sometimes a general train of unflagging bad luck.

This, not the dowsing, is what Paul Devereux and others have an especial problem with, the belief in a powerful network of energy running through the country, able to affect people when the streams are obstructed or blocked by construction, motorway development, etc. These cases have been recorded, however, and often dowsers have identified trouble spots or ‘black streams’ and worked to neutralise the negative energy at play. Yet again any kind of proof is impossible to record, but the ramifications for believers when applied to today’s rapidly expanding residential areas, motorways and runways, is somewhat disquieting.

On a national scale in twenty‐first century Britain, healing the land may not be a viable option, but in individual cases dowsers have managed to disperse the black streams with carefully positioned iron rods or similar markers, applying Page 28 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Earth Language

By Stephen Wakefield

a form of ‘geomantic salve’ to the spots in question. Combating the increasing disharmony required an ‘earth acupuncture’ which Tom Graves fully sup‐ ported in ‘Needles of Stone’, suggesting the role that human intuition could play in healing sites. Graves accepted in his work the subjectivity involved, stating that the causes of seventh‐band projection may well be in the casu‐ alty’s mind, yet insists that with such genuine physical results the energy causing them cannot be dismissed as non‐existent simply because we do not yet know how to quantify it. Likewise he suggests that the monuments them‐ selves may have been positioned due to an equally immeasurable sense of intuition on the part of their builders, and must not be misinterpreted as ran‐ dom because of it.

Accounts that the sites are guarded by elementals or beasts specific to them also falls into the self‐projection category. Visions and invocations that have stirred certain forces all hint at internal responses of perception onto the stones and earthworks, but again must be considered as much from the emo‐ tional or psychological result as from tangible experience; one may be likely to experience a vision if he or she already believes in the forces, but any such occurrence can just as easily be said to stem from the individual’s sensitivity to genuine phenomena as a figment of their imagination.

Ghost sightings and the proliferation of UFO visitations or ethereal lightshows at these sites follow suit. Entirely personal and beyond any means we have to measure, these events are something of a catch 22 – their happening may well focus on ancient sites or energy lines, yet the beliefs that lead observers to these esoteric conclusions can be said to have fuelled the experience in the first place. What remains is a range of extrasensory phenomena which seem heightened by and frequently in the vicinity of humankind’s oldest surviving constructions. Regardless the scorn poured on many theories expounded, the influence they exert on the human mind continues, thousands of years on, unabated.

spaces, processional routes for spirits or a living source of tappable energy, the land as we understand it is a precious source of life and knowledge. Even in the instance that we through this speculation have given the earth its power, then so be it – these sites have become ritual grounds and great sources of inspiration, therefore they are precious to us.

A Lost Knowledge?

Stone circles, man‐made mounds and tombs have long spoken to humankind of its earliest days. With more built as the ages passed, art, ritual and myth only served to enhance their importance to us, establishing a tantalising web through which to appreciate them. Any truth was lost long before the beliefs began to formulate, all since only coming as close to re‐establishing that lost knowledge as each individual felt that it did. Every age has a sense that its time is a degradation, losing precious ground in terms of mind and spirit. The justification for such a philosophy aside, these sites have always stimulated belief that secrets which might be our salvation are still around us, awaiting rediscovery. From the chaos of existence we perceive a system, all the more beguiling because there are no means to formalise it, there is no rule to de‐ fine it by.

As important trading routes, water lines, networks of empowering sacred

The inescapable problem remains that if these sites were spiritually significant sources of power, they likely were built with much the same approach as many researchers in the field have used to interpret them. Intuition and imagination would not create an easily proved system, nor would it necessar‐ ily make sense. Equally, studies into these sites cannot make wholly rational sense, as more than logic is required to garner a purpose from the sometimes irrational and spiritually focused human mind. Revelation is needed.

For all the difficulties this abstraction raises, it is nonetheless incredibly uplift‐ ing that the very cause of the problem, the intuitive mind and its quest to advance, is the clearest link between the monument makers and us. Statisti‐ cal proof may be a long time coming, if we can ever find a means to achieve it, but as it was with the generations that created such wonders, it is with the quest itself. The questions are as salient as the answers we might find, and what better stimulus to our higher reasoning and insight than these ancient treasures of the earth...

Page 29 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

FURTHER DETAILS AT

www.cropcirclesandmore.com/ tour/england14uk.html

Mystery of crop circle revealed: It was a publicity stunt by tech company.

Complicated crop circle appeared in Salinas Valley, California, last week. Anonymous YouTube video claimed to show the markings being discovered by two friends after they saw green flashing lights in a field. The CEO of tech company Nvidia Corporation admitted the stunt Sunday. Nvidia Corporation marketers created the marking to promote a new computer chip. Believers claimed the markings were made by extra‐terrestrial life. A mysterious 'crop circle' that appeared in a California barley field a week ago has been explained: it was a publicity stunt for a tech company.

Nvidia Corporation, a company that makes chips for computers and smart phones, owned up to the stunt at a press conference in Las Vegas. CEO Jen‐Hsun Huang said he had given his marketing department a small budget and a mission to promote the com‐ pany's new Tegra K1 chip. The marketing department delivered, with the 'crop circle' and accompanying YouTube video garnering widespread attention.

The crop circle near Chualar, California, contained a stylized image of a computer chip and the number '192' in Braille. On Sunday, the company announced the Tegra K1, a new chip for tablets and smartphones that contains 192 computing 'cores,' or mini‐ computers, for graphics applications. In the new Tegra K1, the graphics component based on its "Kepler" design, used in high‐ end PCs. The chip would makes for a tablet more powerful than an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game console, while consuming one‐ twentieth the power. 'We've bridged the gap ‐ we've brought mobile computing to the same level as desktop computing,' Huang said. The 192 cores in the new chip compare to Nvidia's previous flagship, the Tegra 4, with 72 graphics cores. Huang demonstrated near photo‐realistic simulations of environments and human faces, run on the new chip. He said Epic Games will adapt the next version of its Unreal Engine, the basis for many popular games, so that it will work on the chip. He didn't announce when the chip would be available or any gadget makers that were adopting it.

The giant markings caused believers to claim that aliens had landed in Salinas Valley, while crop circle experts were quick to claim that the shape, which resembles a computer chip, was a hoax. An anonymous video surfaced on YouTube that claimed to show the first discovery of the circle, after two friends noticed flashing lights in a field and got out of their car to investigate. The first pictures of the markings were taken by photographer Julie Belanger of the 111th Aerial Photography Squadron who flew over the site near Chualar, ten miles south of Salinas. Berlanger told KSBW: 'It was beautiful. Quite beautiful... I believe it's possible that aliens exist, but I don't know if they would bother making a crop circle to give us a message.' The YouTube video claimed to show two men finding the markings after they witnessed green flashing lights next to the road.

Flying saucer or out‐of‐focus seagull pooping?

Slides in Snowden's latest leak are fake UFO images used to deliberately spread misinfor‐ mation, claims expert.

The latest official document to be linked by Edward Snowden is a presentation created by the British spy agency GCHQ. The presentation is called The Art Of Deception and includes three slides showing what appear to be UFOs. Leading UFO expert Nigel Watson has said that skeptics have already dismissed the images as fake. He believes spies are given the images along with guidelines on how to spread misinformation via the inter‐ net.

Such deception can be used to help coverup more mundane terrestrial activities like testing secret aircraft or military exercises, he said. A set of slides purporting to show UFOs are part of the latest batch of government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The slides belong to a Powerpoint presentation created by the British spy agency GCHQ (Government Communications Head‐ quarters). Three of the slides depict alien spaceships, but they’ve been dismissed by one UFO expert as fakes. ‘The presentation fea‐ tures three UFO pictures, on slides 35 to 37,’ Nigel Watson, author of Haynes UFO Investiga‐ tions Manual, told Yahoo News.

‘The first is a black and white picture of a UFO over Redbud, Illinois, taken on 23 April 1950, the second a screenshot of a UFO video by Arturo Robles Gil filmed in Mexico and the third was taken on 01 August 2011 by a holidaymaker at Black Head, Trenarren near St. Austell, Cornwall.

(To the left: Nigel Watson). 'They have been explained respec‐ tively by skeptics as a hub cap thrown in the air, a deflated Mylar balloon and an out‐of‐focus seagull taking a poo.’ In fact Watson believes the document is really proof of government attempts at mind control and the slides are part of guidelines for spies on how to spread misinformation via the internet. ‘The main evi‐ dence for the cover‐up of UFO reports and manipulation of UFO beliefs, as revealed by the documents released by Edward Snowden, is contained in a Powerpoint presentation called, The Art Of Deception: Training For A New Generation Of Online Cov‐ ert Operations. ‘This was produced by the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), British secret intelligence agency and features fifty slides related to using the internet for psychological operations (psy‐ops). 'It was produced by a unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) for presentations to the US, National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies.’

The footage showed the men leaving their car and climbing over the fence into the field. While the green lights flickered few more times the cameraman focused on the flattened plants. At one point one of the friends said: 'Dude, are you seeing this? Dude, this is a crop circle.' After walking in the field for a couple of min‐ utes the men appeared the panic and run back to their vehicle. 'A friend and I were driving on Chualar Canyon Road south of Salinas, California before sunrise, and THIS happened,' the YouTube user known only as Cannot Say commented on the video. 'Needless to say, pretty wild, but we slipped away and it's too good not to share. Created this account since I don't want this tied to me. Still not sure what to make of it.' Many people were not convinced that the markings were proof of an alien visitation.

The Monterey Herald reported that the site was being protected by security guards on Monday, but they would not name the client they were working for. Jeffrey Wilson of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers Association also told the paper that there were several signs that the circles were made by human rather than extra‐terrestrial life. Wilson pointed out that the marking was too well aligned with the road, the center of the circle resembled braille and that the YouTube video could have been a form of viral marketing. 'My guess is that ... it is commissioned work for an advertisement,' Wilson explained to the Herald. 'Or a commis‐ sioned work for a production company making a documentary on crop circles or for some kind of film...'

Page 31 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Watson believes that governments know that supposed UFOs can be used to control the minds of citizens, so the fact that Snowden leaked these slides could be a big blow to the agen‐ cies that use the presentation to train spies.

‘Government agencies are still aware of the power of the belief in UFOs, and that they are willing to use the internet to exploit these beliefs,’ said Watson. ‘Such deception can be used as a means of covering‐up more mundane terrestrial activities (like the testing of secret aircraft or military exercises) or to under‐ mine the credibility of ufologists. ‘The overall point of the presentation is to discuss how the internet and modern media can be used to discredit people and to spread deception. 'Unfortunately, there is no ex‐ planatory text with the UFO pictures, so we can only speculate about what point they were being used to make...’

Dr. Roger Leir, researcher of alleged alien im‐ Who you gonna call? Ghost hunters called into 'haunted' store after CCTV plants, dies. caught glass spontaneously flying off table of its own accord.

By Alexandra Klausner.

Footage from the Ellacoya Country Store in Gilford shows a glass cake tray top being mysteriously thrown from the table and shattering onto the ground. The Mail Online spoke to an employee at the store who said that those who work there hear strange sounds and whistling with no apparent source. The tenant upstairs hears noises coming from the store after all the employees have gone home. The store was once someone's home residence. Don't believe in ghosts? A spooky surveillance video from a store in Gilford, New Hampshire has even skeptics reconsidering their opinion of the supernatural.

Footage from the Ellacoya Country Store in Gilford shows a glass cake tray top being mysteriously thrown from the table and shattering on the ground after store employee Heidi Boyd leaves the room. Upon hearing the noise, Heidi rushes back inside to see what the rau‐ cous was and is terrified to discover that a glass object managed to propel itself from the table and into a scat‐ tered pile of sharp glass shards. Store owner Steve Buzzota told WMUR that while objects haven't traveled by them‐ selves before to his knowledge, custom‐ ers and employees have sensed a ghostly presence and have even 'felt their shoulders being pulled. 'The video was first shared on the Ellacoya Barn & Grille Facebook page which is con‐ nected to the store, with the tag line, 'Haunted much?'

Since then, skeptics have questioned the validity of the tape. Some say they think that the glass was yanked from a string out the window. As a WMUR reporter pointed out however, the win‐ dow doesn't open. The Mail Online called the store to inquire about the event and other ghostly happenings.

What employees and neighbors experi‐ enced was more chilling tales of the bizarre. Employee Nicole Brandt was not at the Ellacoya Country Store at the time that they glass shattered but she said that strange sounds occur from time to time with no apparent source.

She said that when she works at the deli counter cutting meat, she hears people entering the room but when she turns around to greet customers no one is there. 'You can't see who's up front,' she said. 'It sounds like someone's there and no one's there.' She also said that someone could hear whistling sometimes. She said that the restaurant connected to the house was originally a barn but that the store was once a per‐ son's residence. She doesn't know first‐ hand who lived in the home. The tenant upstairs from the store chimed in and said he heard strange noises. He said that after the store is closed and every‐ one has left the vicinity, he starts hear‐ ing noises downstairs as if someone were there. He can hear what sounds like someone or something coming from up the stairs walking down to the seemingly vacated room.

Watch the video at: http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article‐ 2586868/What‐ghost‐come‐ Surveillance‐footage‐New‐Hampshire‐store‐glass‐object‐FLYING‐table‐breaking‐ground.html

Dr. Roger K. Leir has died, according to a March 15 post at the late podiatrist and ufologist's website, 'Alien Scalpel'. The Southern California researcher and author was widely known throughout the UFO community for his surgical removal and study of what some believed to be alien implants from the bodies of alleged alien abductees. Preliminary reports suggest Leir passed away while awaiting foot surgery related to a 2010 car accident that occurred while returning home from the International MUFON Symposium. He apparently battled a long and unspecified illness as indicated in posts on 'Alien Scalpel', including an April, 2012 post concerning calls for donations and a June, 2012 post about a tribute and fundraiser.

Leir's controversial work was well supported by many, yet strongly criticized by others. He claimed the retrieved alleged implants demonstrated extraordinary qualities, consisted of amazing material and baffled prestigious laboratories. Others were significantly less impressed, such as Ryan Dube of 'Top Secret Writers'. In an April, 2012 piece, Dube acknowledged some points that added support to Leir's body of work, yet also found it assumptive to conclude the objects in question were extraterres‐ trial in nature, even if they actually had the qualities as claimed.

He also called into question the medical validity of conducting such surgical procedures. Writer/researcher Robert Sheaffer drew similar conclusions. Sheaffer attended the 2012 tribute and fundraiser, and subsequently published a related post at his blog, 'Bad UFOs'. He cited a number of aspects of the proceedings and assertions commonly presented by Leir and associates that were extremely difficult to accept without substantially more docu‐ mentation and review. Such assertions included claims of an alien implant that would scrupulously avoid surgical removal and abilities to scan potential alien abductees in order to identify implants, among others.

(Left—Suspected Alien Implants). The post today at 'Alien Scalpel' described Leir as a great family man that will be missed. Those wishing to post condo‐ lences and make financial donations may do so at the website...

Page 32 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Dr. Barry Taff: A Veteran of the Psychic Wars

By Sean Casteel

Dr. Barry Taff has been on the forefront of the academic study of psychic phenomena for decades and has long documented the connection between psi events and UFOs. His own psychic experiences began in childhood, and he has no doubt of the reality of some form of coupling between human consciousness and a field of energy that we do not as yet understand. Taff spoke on March 9, 2013, at a meeting of the Close Encounter Research Organization, which earlier this year added the word “international� to its name and is seeking to branch out worldwide in the dissemination of UFO and alien abduction information. The meeting was held in Thousand Oaks, California, a city located just north of Los Angeles.

Page 33 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Dr. Barry Taff: A Veteran of the Psychic Wars

By Sean Casteel

Dr. Barry Taff is the author of the book “Aliens Above, Ghosts Below.” The website for CERO International is at www.cerointernational.com Sean Casteel has a website at www.seancasteel.com He opened his lecture by reciting part of a poem by T.S. Elliot that he felt eloquently expressed the fluid nature of time and the human mind: “Time present and time past,” the poem reads, in part, “Are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, Remaining a perpetual possibility.” Taff moved on to declare, “There is no paranormal. It’s normal.” He said that long‐term memories are not stored in our brains, they’re kept in a remote source outside of us, which relates to the T.S. Elliot poem and his grappling with the nature of memory and time. From there, he began to recount his own history of psychic experiences, beginning with an incident that happened when he was ten years old. In grade school, a young girl approached him and he asked her what the weird bag was that she was wearing. He didn’t know at that age that such a bag was used after a colostomy. The young girl screamed and told the principal, who called Taff into his office and asked if he had looked under the girl’s dress or sneaked into the girls’ bathroom. Taff told the principal he had x‐ray vision and pointed out that he could see that the principal had unhealed keloid scar tissue himself. The principal then called his parents, and they said, “Don’t ask.” Taff joked that if he had a dollar for every one of his psychic experi‐ ences, he would be a whole lot wealthier.

As a child, he predicted the assassination of John Kennedy to his parents a couple of years before the event. His parents insisted on making a bet in the belief that young Taff would be proven wrong. They didn’t speak to him for ten days, he said, after the prediction came true. In 1968, he was visiting a girlfriend at her house when he decided he wanted some iced tea, which his girlfriend didn’t keep around. At that same moment, Taff’s father saw him enter the house, go to the refrigerator and drink iced tea from the pitcher.

But he had never left his girlfriend’s house. It was difficult to photograph Taff as a child, he said, and once, when he and a colleague were visiting a TV show producer, a photograph was taken of him and his colleague in which the other person showed up perfectly but where he had been standing the photo showed only a flash of light. With this strange history behind him, Taff be‐ came a researcher of psychic phenomena in an academic setting, eventually earning a doctorate in psychophysiology with a minor in biomedical engineer‐ ing from UCLA in 1975. From 1970 to 1987, he was involved in the study of remote viewing. “What we saw blew us away,” he said.

When using the techniques of remote viewing, according to Taff, both past and future information are available, and it is possible to see information from a great distance. The evidence suggests that our brain, consciousness and space‐time work in the same way. As part of the testing of remote view‐ ing, Taff and his associates were given remote viewing “targets” and when they reported what they saw, they provided information on Trident subma‐ rines. The tape recordings made of the remote viewing experiments were later confiscated by representatives of an unnamed intelligence agency be‐ cause of the classified details contained therein. Taff and his group later per‐ formed additional work for intelligence agencies with mixed results.

“Unfortunately”, he said, “when understanding the implications of remote viewing and the nature of time, one is forced to conclude that there is no such thing as free will”. He offered a story by way of example. In college, he was working with a girl in the psych lab when he had a dream of her going home and being involved in a car accident. In the dream, he saw a driver he thought was himself, so he broke off the relationship in the hope that he could change the future. The girl got involved with another man, and he was the driver in the accident that occurred. Nothing could alter the fulfillment of the precognitive dream, and thus the will of the participants was not free.

“I’ve lost a lot of friends and colleagues because of my work in this field,” Taff lamented, because they were frightened or put off by what he said or things that occurred in his presence.

His work on a case that became the novel “The Entity” brought him some degree of fame when, in August 1974, he and some of his colleagues in para‐ psychology met a woman who said her house was haunted and that she had been repeatedly raped by ghosts. Taff wrote a big “P” on her report form, meaning he considered it a psychiatric case. Then the woman’s neighbours

started seeing things. A skillet flew out of a cupboard. The bedroom felt like it was refrigerated, but it wasn’t. There was an odor of decaying matter. A green light double the size of Taff’s fist appeared and slowly turned into the form of an upper torso. When it disappeared, two of his assistants passed out.

The team later sealed off the rooms to prevent any light from coming in and prepared a grid on the walls so they could pinpoint any strange things that happened. They shot hundreds of frames of film that showed nothing un‐ usual, but everyone saw things in the room during the filming. The team members wrote down their observations before conferring together and found that their stories matched when they discussed them. Based on this Taff helped write the eventual novel “The Entity,” saying that not everything in the book actually happened. He appears as the slightly fictionalized char‐ acter “Gene Kraft.” A movie starring Barbara Hershey and Ron Silver was released in 1983. A capsule recounting of the plot is included in “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide” that reads, in part, “A woman is raped repeatedly by a giant, invisible mass. Her psychiatrist thinks it’s all in the mind until para‐ psychologists set a trap for the critter.”

There is an article posted on Taff’s website at http://barrytaff.net entitled “The Psi‐UFO Connection: What On Earth Is Going On?” In it, Taff writes of a rather fascinating yet obscure relationship between paranormal experiences and UFO encounters. “Why is it that many CE‐III’s and IV’s have paranormal fallout following the event?” he asks. “Why is it that certain people who have frequent paranormal experiences are more likely to experience a UFO encounter?” He goes on to say that it is obviously not scientifically valid to try to explain one phenomenon by recourse to the other, but there is a “longitudinal continuity” between the two kinds of events that may one day help to explain them both.

In his lecture to CERO International, he offered the case history of Judy, an‐ other woman with whom he was romantically involved. There is a more detailed version of the story in the aforementioned article on his website. “I met a beautiful girl on Valentine’s Day (1977) while investigating a case in the mid‐Wilshire district of Los Angeles,” Taff writes. “This girl was so physi‐ cally stunning to me that it was impossible to stop staring at her.” The case he was investigating was a very weak one and no follow up work was done.

But he and Judy ended up in a very intense relationship. As time passed, there were repeated episodes of RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho‐ Kinesis) activity culminating in “a large glowing sphere of light emerging from the lumbar region of her back” while Taff was giving her a massage.

The clocks in Judy’s condo would all frequently “desynchronize” and run at different speeds.

“All of this paranormal activity was kind of an added bonus to being in a relationship with her,” Taff writes. “At least I thought it was. Boy, was I wrong.” He said that they both felt it was a perfect relationship and that Page 34 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

Dr. Barry Taff: A Veteran of the Psychic Wars

By Sean Casteel

Dr. Barry Taff is the author of the book “Aliens Above, Ghosts Below.” The website for CERO International is at www.cerointernational.com Sean Casteel has a website at www.seancasteel.com Judy turned out to be a gifted psychic who also worked with the psi training groups at the UCLA lab as well as on missing persons cases. Taff expected that he and Judy would be engaged within six months, but “fate had some‐ thing else in mind.” He began to have repeated precognitive dreams in which he was given the message that their romance would end on July 22, 1977.

The reasons for the split were never provided in the dreams. He never told Judy about the dreams because she might misinterpret what he said as ex‐ pressing a desire to leave her. The dreams stopped, and his happiness was restored. When July 22 came around, he had almost forgotten the dreams entirely. He awoke to find Judy beside him in bed, sobbing and shivering un‐ der the covers. She asked him why he hadn’t helped her the previous night.

When he asked her what she meant, she told him that she “had awakened to find the room brilliantly lit, but the lights were not on. She was levitated up out of the bed, eventually finding herself in a round, metallic‐walled room where she was strapped to a metallic table around her wrists, neck, ankles and abdomen. There were tiny men who had skin like a snake or reptile and a face without ears or noses, with large black eyes, who were poking and prod‐ ding her everywhere, especially her vagina and rectum.

Judy could hear the little men speaking though their lipless mouths that were not moving. “They kept saying that they weren’t going to hurt her, even though that’s exactly what they were doing. The next thing she remembered was waking up in bed with me soundly sleeping next to her.” Taff says that he asked her if she knew anything about UFO abductions, which she did not.

Although she was very interested in the paranormal, UFOs held no interest for her. He finally coaxed her out from beneath the covers and was shocked to find that Judy had bruises at her neck, waist, wrists, abdomen and ankles – consistent with her claim that she had been restrained on the metallic table.

And she was bleeding from every orifice, bearing out her story that she had been poked and prodded in those same locations. Judy subsequently had a complete breakdown, “becoming almost totally delusional with overt signs of dissociation. She never sought any help from anyone and she never, even marginally, recovered. She became a religious zealot, but of a very unusual type. Needless to say, our relationship ended on that day, just as my dream had predicted. From occasional contact with her over the subsequent years, she claims to have been re‐abducted many times. It’s one thing to lose a po‐ tential mate, but not to something like this.” At the CERO International lec‐ ture, Taff touched on another case that he also writes about in the same online article. He received a phone call in the mid‐1970s from a local televi‐ sion network executive who complained about poltergeist activity in his home. Over time, he reported occasional luminous anomalies, disembodied voices, banging noises and problems with electrical items in the house. Both the executive and his family seemed “quite grounded, normal, stable and well‐adjusted.” Eventually the man’s calls ceased. Then one night, while the man and his wife were on a road trip in northern California, they saw what they thought was a small, burning plane about to crash into the hills to their right.

(Above: Dr. Barry Taff stood next to the CERO International poster).

Page 35 Phenomena Magazine: March 2014 - Issue 59: www.phenomenamagazine.co.uk

“They drove up to where they assumed the plane had crashed,” Taff writes, “and after rounding a bend, they ran into a very unexpected and terrifying sight. Sitting on the ground in front of them was a classic flying saucer, maybe 30 to 50 feet in diameter. And if that wasn’t difficult to enough to absorb, there were several diminutive humanoids in tight‐fitting flight suits moving around the area surrounding the saucer, as if looking for something.

The beings were about four feet tall with grayish‐brown skin, large, black almond‐shaped eyes with no apparent nose or outer ears. Classic grays in every respect.”

(Above: Dr. Barry Taff with Yvonne Smith).

Suddenly, several of the humanoids became aware of the man and his wife sitting in their car observing the scene. One of the creatures pointed a tubu‐ lar‐shaped object that emitted a bright light at the couple. The next thing the pair remembered was being back on the highway many miles away and sev‐ eral hours later. After experiencing this classic abduction scenario, the two began to have disturbing dreams about their missing time, most of which they were reluctant to discuss with anyone. They sought psychological coun‐ seling but were assumed by mental health workers to have both had a psy‐ chotic break, for which medication was recommended. The abduction ex‐ perience was little known in the mid‐1970s, so this response from the men‐ tal health community is not surprising. The man and his wife began to ex‐ perience strong emotional mood swings, indicative of dramatically altered personalities. They eventually divorced, with the husband becoming particu‐ larly volatile and erratic, which led to his leaving his lucrative job in television in a newfound state of anxiety, anger and bitterness.

What had begun as poltergeist activity had progressed to an alien UFO ab‐ duction and left great misery in its wake. “We’re dealing with something far more advanced than we are,” Taff added during his lecture, “and technology that is like magic to us.” But change is not the goal in physical science, he said, pointing to the fact that hardly anyone in mainstream science takes these issues seriously. There exists an inverse correlation between belief and whether new ideas will work, he said. What the scientists say won’t work will and what they say will work won’t. Imagine what would happen if a vehicle was unveiled tomorrow that used an entirely new form of energy. We need what Taff called “a change in the way we perceive normality.”

UFOs are the most classified information the government has, he continued.

Add gray aliens to the mix of our own racial and ethnic problems, and one can imagine the results. We should not fear an alien invasion so much as the problems we’ve created for ourselves. Both psychic phenomena and UFO contact involve an energy of a type we don’t understand, Taff said toward the end of his lecture. Most people are not sensitive to it and can live a long time without ever having any experiences with it. Others are sensitive to it.

“It’s there,” Taff said. “It’s real. We are always a (central) part of the equa‐ tion...”