ANOMALY Magazine Welcome’s Brian Worsham!

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I would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena without having guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without being hanged for it. — Wilhelm Reich, father of the concept of orgone energy and inventor of the orgone accumulator

Wikipedia

Wilhelm Reich Museum

Watching the ARGonauts Play

If you’ve followed the Elfis Network from the beginning then you know of my early interest in Alternate Reality Gaming and their potential for “mucking up the works” for paranormal and parapolitical researchers. You may also know that my interests were rekindled in 2007 by the provocative hypotheses of blogger DreamsEnd, who speculated that the mysterious suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were some kind of sophisticated art hoax or viral marketing / alternate reality game. After a very rough period of defending his theories online, blogger DreamsEnd temporarily pulled up shop, taking down his websites. My own re-investigations into ARGland dwindled and I too went back to my normal para activities…

That is until I became aware of a new blog that was following many of the threads explored by DreamsEnd; KadesKorner. Here was another blogger (with a writing style nearly identical to that found at DreamsEnd) writing about many of the themes and topics we’d been exploring during the Theremicity period: Andy Kaufman, Election Fraud, Andy Stephenson, false identities, the Franklin Coverup, the Octopus and PROMIS, Middle East parapolitics and … Theresa Duncan and ARGs! And through “Kade” I learned of a new ARG to watch out for; what has come to be called TGATT or The Great And The Terrible aka I’m Sorry. But before getting off into the I’m Sorry mindfu…, er um, ARG, let’s take a peek at some of the more interesting ARGs and Viral Marketing campaigns that have been bleeding through their alternate ARGiverse realities into our own.

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Proposed Police Programs Put Your Privacy at Stake

Austin’s police chief proposes a policy of mandatory blood withdrawals for drunk driving suspects who refuse a breathalyzer test.

Now the chief favors video surveillance across the city, new requirements for DNA samples for detainees, and police checkpoints, making everyone a suspect.

Is this the end of privacy as we know it?

Join a Public Forum, March 30th.

Panelists include: Art Acevedo - Austin Chief of Police, Deborah Russell - American Civil Liberties Union, Karen Housewright - Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Mike Martinez - Austin City Council, John Bush - Texans for Accountable Government.

Austin City Hall

301 W. 2nd Street, Austin, Texas 78701

Forum Begins at 6pm in Council Chambers

Parking available in garage under City Hall.

Sponsored by Texans for Accountable Government

For more information, call (318) 617-8292

www.TagTexas.org / www.StopVampireCops.wordpress.com

Every Tuesday over at Anomaly Television is “Science & Technology Tuesday” when I and my friend Floyd Anderson post the latest videos related to those topics. Well last Monday night Brave New Bookstore featured an important speaker (whose radio show I sometimes carry at Anomaly Radio). Dr. Katherine Albrecht is the leading expert in America fighting for your and my freedom from rampant surveillance society, prison planet, techno tracking and taxation. She was just here in Central Texas to fight the new MANDATORY pet-chipping happening just down the road in San Marcos. I went to the bookstore event hoping to catch her lecture, show my support and maybe even finally meet her face to face. However, the event was so successful that I took one look around, saw no place to sit (it was standing room only and there were a LOT of people standing), turned around and left. I’m not phobic of crowds but I just couldn’t deal with standing around for the next two hours after a long day of work. But thankfully, my friend Floyd Anderson was undeterred and managed to get video of the entire event. As Katherine begins her lecture she estimates there were about 200 people crammed into Brave New Bookstore. Wow! Thank each and every one of you that showed up. Anyway, check out the entire lecture available over at Anomaly Television dot com.

- SMiles Lewis

Part One

Katherine Albrecht speaks on microchips at Brave New Books in Austin, Texas along with Randall Mock, Lisa Marie Coppoletta, Judith McGeary, and Sheila Dean.

Watch all the videos here at Anomaly TeleVision » Blog Archive » Dr. Katherine Albrecht Speaks on Microchips at Brave New Books 3/2/2009

Respectability. Reputation. Legitimacy.

For those researching strange phenomenon, establishing and maintaining a good reputation, a measure of respect, and the legitimacy of their studies is always an uphill battle. Mainstream journalist and pundits usually scoff, when they bother to pay attention at all. Hoaxers and scam artists garner big notice in the press. But researchers who are respected in their particular cloistered field, and who have called a hoax a hoax from the outset, are relegated to a footnote in the mainstream news reports. That is, they are relegated to a footnote if they are lucky enough to be noticed at all.

In the world of conspiracy theory, ufology, cryptozoology, and fringe science, your damned when you speak out, and damned when you don’t.

So, given all of this, what does respectability even mean to these fields? Enthusiasm and interest ebbs and flows, as it does for anything, and people choose to construct a world-view that best suits them. If that means that all bigfoot reports are hoaxes so that they aren’t afraid to go into the woods at night, or that ghosts are real because nothing else explains the creepy feeling they get in the third floor guest room where Uncle Jim died, then that is what people choose to believe.

With incidents like the recent pseudocide of 9-11 Truther Ace Baker, blogged on here by SMiles Lewis, and the Georgia bigfoot body hoax pulled off by a police officer and former prison guard (professions comprised of individuals normally accepted as paramounts of honesty and respectability) in August of last year, it seems valid that we pause and ask ourselves some questions.

How important is reputation in these fields? Jacques Vallee is educated, well written and spoken, not prone to jumping to conclusions, and yet he would be lumped in with the “saucer nuts” by most mainstream journalists. The same could be said for hominid researchers such as Jeff Meldrum, who like Vallee has an academic reputation to maintain outside of his personal studies.  Yet while the Meldrums and Vallees of this world suffer under the derision and constant scrutiny of colleagues and the media, or keep their private pursuits to themselves; known hucksters and hoaxers like Tom Biscardi continue to benefit from the flippant attitude toward the subjects and lack of background research undertaken by various local media outlets. Biscardi is a known and proven hoaxer, yet he can pull into any small town and have the cameras on his crew in a matter of hours.

Perhaps, as guest blogger Oliver Hallen muses in the post below concerning UFO reports by police officers in the UK, respect and reputation are concepts as culturally and contextually loaded, and therefore as ephemeral, as the UFOs and beasties we endeavor to understand.

(The views expressed by Oliver Hallen are his own and do not reflect the opinions or views of AnomalyMagazine.com, its editorial staff, or myself. — Jeremy D. Wells)

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I found this item about those crazy Raelians on Huffington Post thanks to Chez Pazienza over at Deus Ex Malcontent.

For those not familiar with the Raelians, they are a saucer cult founded by French race car test-driver turned spiritual guru Claude Vorilhon. The Raelian ideology is the standard ancient astronaut world seeding theory, with heaping dollops of late 60s and early 70s free love, and generically spiritual “war is bad” platitudes. They have been in the news most recently for their support of, and claim that they had succeeded in, human cloning. Vorilhon, who currently goes by the name Rael and claims to be the son of an earthly mother of an extraterrestrial father, founded his religion after an alleged close encounter in 1973 where he met his father and learned the truth behind our creation myths.

That all may be true. Or it could be that after failing as a pop-singer (under the name Claude Celler) and as a race car driver, and with his youth fading as quickly as his car in his competitors’ rear-view mirrors, Vorilhon decided the only sure fire way to continue getting laid by a different woman every night was to start a free love cult.

The truth is for more devoted seekers than me to puzzle out.

But for now, enjoy the links. Pull out your old UFO paperbacks and look in the index for anything on Vorilhon and Rael. Enjoy your holiday. And try not to be too upset at the lost opportunity for deliciously comic irony that could have been found in a group celebrating the season when we remember the virgin birth of the Prince of Peace, with a World Peace Orgy.

Merry Christmas. Happy Chanukah. Festive Festivus. Happy New Year.

Some time ago I bought Kenn Thomas’ PARAPOLITICS book and discovered that I’d become a published photographer … though uncredited. It was a still picture of John Judge from a video I’d shot at the COPA conf in Dallas in 2002 (below).

Yesterday I heard part of Alex Jones’ interview with JFK researcher Bob Groden.

And what do I discover at InfoWars.com today … they used my still shot from that same 2002 COPA conference.

“Alex talks with Robert J. Groden, author, photographer, and JFK assassination expert. Groden’s books include JFK: The Case for Conspiracy, The Killing of a President: The Complete Photographic Record of the JFK Assassination, and The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Photographic Record. Alex also discusses the issues of the day and takes your calls.”

You can find out more about that interview here and there is a free mp3 archive of the interview available online as well. 

I’m sure it won’t be there much longer since they undoubtedly have new guests lined up for today, Friday. But what the heck. I’ve grabbed it with a screen capture for posterity.

And at least they sweetened the pic with some color tweaks.

- SMiles Lewis

Professional (though uncredited) Photographer.

That last post about Sarah Palin’s involvement with Pastor Thomas Muthee got a lot of us talking about witchcraft, the ongoing belief in, and fear of, witches in various parts of the world, and the consequences of mob rule and even legislating faith and morality. I’ve recently been reading “Passport to Magonia” and I’m sure the various writings of Jacques Vallee, no doubt, could place this in a greater historical context than I could hope to do in a simple blog post. The fact remains though, that occurrences that most of us would attribute to happenstance, coincidence, or, if it were something truly spectacular, maybe even to UFOnauts or extra-dimensionals, are still interpreted as witchcraft by others (and not just in far off, exotic locales like Kenya, although reports from Africa are more common, either because the media ignores such claims in the US press, relegates them to the “strange news” queue, or because social pressures keep more people from discussing their beliefs openly).

At some point in the future, I may even tell you about some of my own family’s stories regarding contact with malignant spirits they attributed to witchcraft (for instance my late grandmother Bailey always attributed misplaced objects in the home to “those little imps”, a clear ideological descendant of the brownies, boggarts, and house sprites her Scots and Irish ancestors would have believed in), but for now, we’ve got witchcraft links.  Below you will find several links to news stories discussing witchcraft in these various forms.

On the political front we have Palin blessed to be free from witchcraft.

In the cultural differences department, we’ve got African albinos persecuted as witches and witchcraft rumors sparking a soccer riot.

We’ve got a little of both, a smattering of xenophobia, and that legislation of faith and morality we discussed, with a witch trial in Saudi Arabia.

Finally we come full circle, and back to our concerns about separation of church and state, and legislating faith (an issue that concerns me, too, as that rare beast, a progressive, liberal Christian) with this commentary on, and video of, Pastor Thomas Muthee praying for Sarah Palin to help tear down the barriers that separate church and state. (Also embedded below.)

I’ve been labeled a politico in the past. I’ve been villified by readers who labeled me a “Godless liberal” and a “conservative fundamentalist mouthpiece”, for the same article on the seperation of church and state. I was even fired from my first newspaper job for writing anti-pollution editorials. With Anomaly Magazine though I’ve tried to stay away from politics, leaving that territory on this site to my more political and conspiracy minded compatriots. (A notable exception being my last post, on the arrests of protesters at the RNC in Minneapolis, because there are some impositions on our liberties that just can not go ignored.)

I don’t expect to be making any partisan pleas anytime soon. But a recent article from the TimesOnline , tying Palin’s success in her bid for the governorship of Alaska with the prayers of an African Witch Hunter, seems to dovetail too nicely with our format here at Anomaly Magazine to ignore. According to that article, Palin was impressed not with Pastor Muthee’s humility and deference to the Holy Spirit, but his ”powerful” demand that God “make a way” for Palin to succeed in her bid for the Governor’s seat. And it isn’t just God that Pastor Muthee is forceful with, but anyone he deems an enemy of his faith.  This includes people he labels as witches. As noted in the TimeOnline article: 

According to accounts of the witchhunt circulated on evangelical websites such as Prayer Links Ministries, after Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople became suspicious and began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.

And here you thought that only “radical anarchist organizers” (btw, isn’t “anarchist organizer” a bit of an oxymoron?) needed to fear having their doors kicked in under a McCain/Palin administration.