“My Dream is a Code Waiting to Be Broken. Break the Code, Solve the Crime.” - FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper

In the small idyllic border town of Twin Peaks, Washington, tucked away in the forested mountains, a murder mystery unfolds involving the killing of the local high school prom queen, Laura Palmer. When a second high schooler, and potential victim of the same killer, crosses the State’s border, the FBI sends Special Agent Dale Cooper to investigate what we later find out, in the prequel, is one of FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole’s (played by David Lynch) “Blue Rose Cases.” And so begins the strange tale of mysterious communications and fantastic encounters that engulfs the town of Twin Peaks and the lives of all its quirky inhabitants, including its newest arrival, Special Agent Cooper.

The initial storyline would seem to be far removed from the world of UFOlogical secrets, but for the occasional paranormal manifestations, mysterious visions, and precognitive dreams of Cooper and certain townsfolk. In fact the acronym U.F.O. is only uttered once in the series and not at all in its subsequent prequel, Fire Walk With Me. It’s only in the second season, upon the return of Major Garland Briggs (after his abduction by a mysterious anomalous light accompanied by owls and a cloaked figure) and his mentioning of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, that Dale Cooper says the words, “Unidentified Flying Objects.” (And also when Sheriff Truman asks in a subsequent episode, “What was Wyndham Earle doing investigating UFOs?”) But besides these two overt references to UFOs there are many subtle, covert themes threaded into the fabric of the Twin Peaks story that can be used to inform the more casual viewer about the truly strange nature of UFOs and related paranormal (and even parapolitical) phenomena. It is these covert references and allusions upon which we will focus our explication of the series and its prequel in upcoming installments of this column. While an average TV watcher viewing Twin Peaks might be aware of the classic modern UFO myths of military retrieval of crashed flying saucers, governmental cover-up of recovered aliens and supposed underground bases, bedroom visitation abductions, and the human / alien hybridization stories, they are not likely to be aware of the deeper connections in the Twin Peaks milieu which speak to the nature of the UFO’s darker CryptoUfological reality; the secret coded side of UFOs and the paranormal.

(A mysterious shadowy Flying Triangle soars silently by in the background of Cooper’s Dream Vision within the Waiting Room of one of the Lodges)

Many people who are casually interested in the subject of UFOs have no idea that there are in fact a handful of competing schools of thought on the subject and that these off-shoot areas of research often do not revolve around the existence of identified extra-terrestrial craft. After the foundational phase of the “Modern UFO Era” inculcated the populace with myths of Close Encounters and Contacts with Flying Saucers, a new breed of researcher began expanding their perspectives by widening their knowledge base to encompass a variety of other seemingly related areas of inquiry. These arenas for research included parapsychology, shamanism, folklore, and other experimental and experiential modes of investigation. These new modes of looking at the broad spectrum of anomalous, Fortean (after researcher Charles Fort) mysteries often incorporated an understanding of deep-politics, and how parapolitical covert-operations and the ridicule factor are often used as a discrediting tool for social control and the mitigating of publicly perceived paradigms. In certain circles these alternative approaches have been branded as paranormal scientism, or as paranoid conspiracy theory, and are thus treated as being unscientific. And so we have a sort of CryptoUfology or ParaUfology; an unofficial ufological counter-culture of researchers looking into the deeper, hidden sides of UFOs and related paranormal phenomena.

Besides the overt references to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book and its investigation into sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects, the Twin Peaks TV series and movie prequel contain a handful of other immediately obvious UFO related themes:

• Blue Rose Cases: In the film Fire Walk With Me we are informed that the entire Twin Peaks series is a sort of X-File when a couple of FBI agents reveal that the investigation into the death of a prostitute Theresa Banks is … “one of [FBI Bureau Chief Gordon] Cole’s ‘Blue Rose Cases‘.” The details of the case are communicated to the agents in coded form through the strange theatrical undulations of Lil the Dancer.
• Codes and Communications from Beyond: There are a variety of parapsychological phenomena within the TV series and prequel, including Agent Cooper’s Dreams and Visions, Laura Palmer’s and her Mother’s ESP, Strange Lights, etc.
• Owls: “The Owls Are Not What They Seem” – The Giant in one of Cooper’s dream visions implies that these nocturnal predators stalking the woods around Twin Peaks might be something more. Are they Spirits? Familiars of the Beings who inhabit the Black and White Lodges? Or are they a sort of Screen Memory clouding the minds of those who have Close Encounters with them?
• Secret SETI: In the TV series it is revealed that Major Garland Briggs works for a SETI-like (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) Air Force deep space monitoring operation, but that they’ve turned the surveillance network towards the woods around Twin Peaks and have received signals from somewhere therein.
• Secret Societies: Within the first few episodes of the series we learn of a generational secret society, the Bookhouse Boys, that has protected the town from the evil in the woods. We later learn that the spirit beings terrorizing the townsfolk may have their origins in the mysterious White and Black Lodges whose doorway lay in the “Ghostwoods” surrounding Twin Peaks.

Beyond the solution to the mystery of “who killed Laura Palmer” Twin Peaks is about secrets, codes, and communications from beyond. Communication from other intelligences, from a serial killer, in paper notes, dreams, and visions. Many of these messages appear linked to the mysterious denizens of the Black Lodge and the White Lodge. The motivations of the various paranormal entities are often unclear; while some are obviously malicious and demonic, and some obviously angelic and benevolent, others are harder to pigeon-hole, yet still seem too intimately connected to the demonic to warrant a neutral interpretation. To do that we must begin to look behind the Red Curtains of Twin Peaks‘ deeper hidden details, as we have barely begun to scratch the surface of its Ufological underpinnings.

UFOs & The Black Lodge – A Blue Rose Report Primer

• ‘Fire Walk With Me’ and the Lost Language of Code by Jim Emerson
• Analysis of the Supernatural in Twin Peaks by Thane Plambeck
• Project Red Room: Physics of the Lodge via Twin Peaks Gazette
• Theories to Twin Peaks: The Blue Rose and The Ring
  
• Philip Coppins on Twin Peaks
• “Explanations” of Lodges, Blue Rose, Owls via Twin Peaks Studios
• Black Lodge, Blue Rose Cases and Bob in Twin Peaks Mythos at GlastonberryGrove.net

[The Blue Rose Report can be heard LIVE online every Wednesday night from 7-8pm on the Anomaly Radio Network: www.AnomalyRadio.com / www.BlueRoseReport.com]

“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs. Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” ~Charles Fort, Lo!

UFOlogists don’t like to talk about bigfoot. Cryptozoologists looking for sasquatch don’t like talking about ghosts. Ghost hunters won’t talk about UFOs. And conspiracy researchers are constantly lamenting, and rightfully so, being linked to all of the above by the media as a discrediting tactic. It’s a fair criticism (for those not wishing to taint there own activist chocolate with those other fringers’ peanut butter.)

A corollary criticism often follows that television shows and movies with wacky paranormal conspiracy subjects generally condition the public to associate those topics and issues with so much silly entertainment. And again, I generally agree with that sentiment.

But some TV shows and movies can make excellent touchstones for educating that same neophyte public about both the paranormal and parapolitical. And while our myth-making media do condition the public to pigeon-hole conspiracy claims and UFO sightings research into the molds sculpted in the image of X-Files “True Believers,” some examples from these pop-culture continuums can be turned back on themselves as vast repositories of referential material and launchpads for further exploration. These exemplary cult-classics can serve to educate instead of obfuscate. For there are many True Believers and they each have their own cliques, but there are also those watching all the various cliques – and those watchers aren’t all working for the NSA.

Anomalists and Forteans (after Charles Fort) tend to hover, UFO-like, around the liminal edges of fringe phenomena, like so many gnats around a mutilated cow. We strange phenomena informationalists gravitate toward an agnostic appreciation of these weird and wonderful worlds. We watch these fringe science landscapes that are often so surreal as to make obvious why, after all these decades, the realities of UFOs and covert-op conspiracy are still so impenetrable to the average workaday soul.

Beneath the agnostic Fortean’s gaze are a variety of sub-cultures and counter-cultures, each investigating a piece of the whole; measuring the circle beginning anywhere and everywhere. The “Military Industrial Entertainment Complex” grokked these potential market segments long ago and so it is that we have a voluminous cavalcade of phantasmagorical pop-culture iconography to use as a lens through which we can examine the many important strands within these tapestries.

Many a conspiracy researcher has blamed “shows like the X-Files” for being such a handy ridicule device for the mainstream media. As much effect as the X-Files had on popular culture of the time and since, it’s a different strange television series that I think runs truer to the bizarre nature of UFOs, consciousness, and the dark corrupt underbelly of human community that creates parapolitical conspiracy. That TV series is David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS and it beat the X-Files to the paranormal punch by a couple of years.

Through a Lynchian Lens, Darkly

I wasn’t even a David Lynch fan when I finally watched Twin Peaks a few years ago. I’d seen a couple of his works before but had only liked Blue Velvet, mostly for its strangeness. Of course I had wondered about the series’ popularity at the time, however the recaps at the beginning of each episode were incredibly abstract and impossible to grasp. As far as I knew, it was simply a soap opera about the murder of a small town’s highschool homecoming queen created by “that weird director David Lynch.” Years later a close coworker would implore me to watch it, explaining that it involved a lot of esoteric and UFO-like phenomena that I would find fascinating. But I still didn’t watch it. Only as I was getting to know the love of my life did I finally determine I was going to sit down and watch it from beginning to end with an eye towards the paranormal. I was not disappointed.

Here is a show oozing with occult intrigue and mythic significance. Lynch would tap into the seemingly unrelated realms of CSI style FBI investigation of a possible serial killer in an idyllic town, the Air Force’s UFO investigation called Project Bluebook, the occult war between the supernatural forces of the Black Lodge and White Lodge, the double crossing, drug dealing, prostituting, seedier side of a small community, the spiritual journey of a mystical FBI agent who uses a combination of Buddhism, dream analysis and divination techniques to fight crime and … did I mention the “Log Lady?”

These and many other magickal mysteries from the TV series Twin Peaks will be the first guideposts for our phenomenological exploration and criminal expose within this column. In our next installment we’ll dive deeply into the nitty gritty behind the creation of the series and the nature of Lynch’s vision and creative process, while paying special attention to the specific real world examples of paranormal research that back up the weird and wacky storyline of the Twin Peaks universe.

And we just might learn a little about Austin’s own darker underbelly, along the way.

[The Blue Rose Report can be heard LIVE online every Wednesday night from 7-8pm on the Anomaly Radio Network: www.AnomalyRadio.com / www.BlueRoseReport.com]

Continued in Part Two:

UFOs & The Black Lodge: Blue Rose Report Part 2.1 – CryptoUFOlogy