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.

Read more »

Big news regarding evidence of evolution:

Fossil Discovery Is Heralded

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

Read more here: Fossil Discovery Is Heralded - WSJ.com

Dowsing Talks in Texas with Remote Viewer Paul Smith:

Folks–

Here’s a heads-up.  I will be giving a presentation on dowsing in two different locations this coming week.  The talk will be “The Remote Viewing/Dowsing Connection,”  And I will be giving it on the following days at the following locations:

AUSTIN
Austin Metal Detecting Club
Thursday, 14 May 2009, 7 PM.  Address:

Woodlawn Baptist Church
4600 Manchaca Blvd.
Austin, TX  78745

Website:  www.amdconline.com/Meetings.htm
______________________

HOUSTON
Lone Star Dowsers Dowsing Conference
Friday, 15 May 2009, 1:30 PM .  Address:

Days Hotel at 500 N. Sam Houston Parkway, Houston, Tx.  77060
Website:  www.dowsersmayconference.com

If you’re around, come on by!

Best wishes,

Paul
(Paul H. Smith)
www.rviewer.com

Austin Mufon 9/26/92 with Karla Turner Pt1

Part One

Central Texas UFO mini-Conference on September 26, 1992. Karla Turner was an exceptional researcher and experiencer of Alien Abductions. This is part 1 of 9 parts. - SMiles Lewis

The following was originally published in the Fall 1994 edition of E.L.F. INFESTED SPACES - Journal of Possible Paradigms:

TAKEN INTO THE FRINGE
RESEARCHER FOCUS: Dr. Karla Turner
by SMiles Lewis

My first exposure to abduction researcher/ experiencer Dr. Karla Turner was on September 26, 1992. She was speaking to an audience of approximately 200 people in Austin, Texas. The mini-conference also featured Ed Conroy and George Wingfield, and was organized by the local Austin MUFON chapter. I have seen very little from abduction researchers that I qualified as being of any significance, so Dr. Turner was a particularly unexpected surprise.

Austin MUFON » Flashback: Abduction Researcher Karla Turner

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)

Read more »

911 Truther Shoots Movement in Foot - Commits Pseudocide

by SMiles Lewis

As if the 911 Truth Movement weren’t weird and ridiculed enough already - now it goes and shoots itself in the foot … again.

How often do people come across a severed human head lying in the middle of the road? Apparently as often as someone might happen to tune-in and hear a radio-show co-host commit suicide live on the air. Or is it simply a matter of weirdness acting as a strange attractor for ever more weirdness? Whatever the explanation, I witnessed both within forty-eight hours of each other.

On Tuesday, January 6th at about 2:35 pm (Central Standard Time) I was tuning in to the webradio stream of upstart Austin alternative media outlet, Freedom Underground Radio. This is the new radio station “rising from the ashes of We The People Radio Network.” WFU Radio has been founded by a co-founder of WTPRN. (Full disclosure: WFURadio has recently started carrying the PsiOp Radio show which I co-host with Mack White.)

I was tuning in to James Fetzer’s show, The Real Deal. Now, I’m not a huge fan of his research nor a regular listener to his show. He had on someone whose name I recognized as having been on the show before as a co-host who has been active within the 911-TV-Fakery branch of the conspiracy community, Ace Baker. Apparently they had switched roles for this particular show with Ace interviewing Jim instead of the other way around.

Within moments of tuning in I had the thought, “Is this guy (Ace Baker) about to commit suicide?” And moments later he did. He was speaking of regret, longing and despair regarding his daughter and deceased parents, about the disrespect and outright attacks that others in the movement had heaped upon him. “I’m coming home,” he said before I heard the sound of a gunshot. The moments leading up to and those that followed that bang were some of the most awkward live radio I’ve ever experienced.

Fetzer was understandably more or less speechless and to his credit seemed to keep his head. He managed to call Baker’s wife and leave a voicemail begging her to check on Ace saying he was worried about him. This is especially amazing for Fetzer as we were later to learn that his own Mother had killed herself when he was only 11 years old and he says had told Ace about this previously.

Of course immediately, the possibility of a hoax was apparent, at least doubly so because of the involvement of someone involved in the “fakery” branch of 911 conspiracy theories who is also a sound engineer. But even contemplating the hoax possibility I was still feeling shocked and shaky - calling my friend Mack and posting online and within Jack Blood’s Deadline Live website chatroom.

Read more »

80 Years with a Blinking 3rd Eye - Free Austin Event

The name C.B. Scott Jones is both obscure to many a casual UFO buff yet widely known among “deep seekers” of the UFOlogical and Parapsychological communities. His work for Senator Claiborne Pell investigating paranormal phenomena and his briefing of President Clinton’s Science Adviser on behalf of Laurance Rockefeller are the stuff of legend - and yet they are fact. He is the founder of the Human Potential Foundation and the Center for Applied Anomalous Phenomena. He supported the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), served on the board and as President of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) and  served as board member for Atlantic University (a division of ARE, the Edgar Cayce organization the Association for Research and Enlightenment). He also helped with the TREAT II (Treatment and Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma) conference at Virginia Tech that brought together many in the UFO, alien abduction and paranormal research fields.

These and a lifetime of other anomalous experience make Cecil B. “Scott” Jones an extraordinary guest for the Austin Consciousness / Anomaly Community.

We hope you will join us in welcoming C.B. “Scott” Jones this coming Tuesday night:

Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 6:30 - 8:30 P.M.
Austin History Center, 810 Guadalupe St., Austin, TX
Free and open to the public.

Read More Here:

Free Austin Lecture: C.B. Scott Jones on UFO Disclosure - Austin, November 25th

Download the PDF Flyer: Lo Res / Hi Res

November 6th, 7th & 8th

In this workshop: Discover the unification of physics and metaphysics. Find the origins and inner workings of consciousness and reality,mind and matter. Understand who, what and why you are. Integrate your personal experience and present understanding within a larger scientific context. See how love, spirituality and quantum mechanics are derived as fundamental aspects of reality. Nuclear physicist Thomas Campbell helped get Bob Monroe’s laboratory for the study of consciousness up and running in the ’70s. Tom, the “TC (physicist) ”in Monroe’s book Far Journeys, has been a serious explorer of the frontier of reality, mind, consciousness, altered states and psychic phenomena for 35 years. He has steered his research toward discovering the outer boundaries, inner workings and causal dynamics of the larger reality system. He published his My Big TOE trilogy (my-big-toe.com) in 2003. It is a logic-based work of science representing the results and conclusions of his scientific exploration of the nature of existence.

Download the PDF Flyer: Lo Res / Hi Res

Thomas Campbell Workshop, Advance Tickets (non-INACS members) 11/08/08, Austin, Texas ($85)

Thomas Campbell Workshop, Advance Tickets (INACS members) 11/08/08, Austin, Texas ($60)

Thomas Campbell at I N A C S

Monday night was the most fun I’ve had since I saw Scott Horton debate and defeat war-monger Harvey Kushner.

Anyway … the reviews are in … below are some of the local media’s take on the event. Video to follow soon.

Read more »

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.