Paranormality by Prof. Richard Wiseman

A HPANWO book review of Paranormality by Professor Richard Wiseman.
Have you ever been in the frustrating position of knowing that something is true, but being unable to prove it to others who weren’t there? This is an almost endemic affliction for paranormal researchers of all kinds. Why? Why is it that if you want to invent a new light bulb or discover a new species of jellyfish all you have to do is get out there and do it; take the pictures, build the prototype, bring home the specimen and the breakthrough is made, yet when it comes to “weird stuff” something always gets in your way? We can speculate over the reason, but we cannot argue with the results: Inevitably the Skeptics will march out to tell us that what we experience and study simply does not exist. Professor Richard Wiseman is one of these people and in his new book Paranormality he tells us why.

I met Richard Wiseman very briefly at TAM London (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/tam-london-2010.html). He comes across as a likeable and approachable man. When he did his stage show he was genuinely funny with the abilities that many professional comedians have. In fact Wiseman has a background in show-business and, like many prominent Skeptics, originally trained as a stage magician. He became fascinated with how his own skills of illusionism worked on the human mind and so decided to enrol at University College London and do a psychology course. His path was set when he came across the work of Dr Susan Blackmore (MBA Gold), see: http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/index.htm . He saw her on TV one night on a programme about the Supernatural, something that she used to do all the time. Her line was that rather than look into whether the Supernatural was true, because as far as she was concerned it wasn’t, better to question why it was that people believe that it’s true. So, beginning with this premise, Wiseman embarked on that quest. It struck me as soon as I picked up the book that I have never awarded Wiseman the MBA (Background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/02/deathbed-mbas.html and: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/02/bbc-horizon-mba-city.html . Perhaps I should. But not just like that; The MBA has to be earned! We’ll see how he does.

Here’s Richard Wiseman’s website: http://www.richardwiseman.com/ and here is the website of his most recent book Paranormality: http://www.paranormalitybook.com/ . Wiseman has written several books, as you can see from his website above, and has appeared on TV several times, eg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7s6yklp80Q . There has been a huge increase in paranormal reports at the moment from all over the world and this has coincided with a far higher profile for the Paranormal in the media than it has enjoyed for many years; which is the cause or effect of the other is debateable, but I sense that Wiseman’s book is a rebuttal to that entire culture. The book is written in a lively and easy-going style and it’s packed full of games that the reader can play with themselves and others. In fact the book is so interactive that it’s almost a game in itself rather than a narrative, a bit like those role-playing multiple-choice adventure books that were popular in the 1980’s. At various places the reader is also given Internet links to videos and articles related to the content and the links also have QR tags. These are barcode-like graphics that can give you instant access to the correct page without typing on your keyboard if your mobile phone or computer is fitted with the QR scanner. I’m one of these fuddy-duddies who has somehow managed to get through his life with a phone that just makes calls, so that was out of the question for this particular reader. The author encourages us to try various experiments that are safe and cheap and can be done at home, and which demonstrate many of the ideas in the book. These are printed in grey boxes on the page to separate them from the main text. I was curious to have a go myself. I did, but I’ll come back to that later.

The book’s chapters each cover a particular segment of paranormal phenomena that Wiseman has worked with. The first deals with psychic mediums and as a regular attendee of a Spiritualist Church I was curious to hear his thoughts. As I said above, Wiseman starts with the spoken or unspoken premise that the Supernatural is unreal and so therefore mediums are not really communicating with dead people, but he did do an experiment with a British psychic called Patricia Putt who applied for James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge (See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/tam-london-2010.html and: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html) Randi got together wise Wiseman and Professor Chris French (MBA Gold) (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/chris-french-mba-gold.html) to test her. They did a double-blind experiment in which ten people unknown to Patricia would be brought into a laboratory dressed from head to toe in a black cowl and mask and made to sit in a chair with their back to her and keep completely motionless and silent while Patricia wrote out transcripts from “Spirit” for each one. Patricia agreed to the test conditions and the experiment began. The test subjects were then gathered together and asked which of the unnamed transcripts most matched themselves. If Patricia was really psychic then the subjects should have easily found their own transcript. They could not. Patricia cannot be a fraud, otherwise she’d never have agreed to do the test, but she might be what M Lamar Keene calls a “Shut Eye”, somebody who has fooled themselves into thinking they’re a genuine medium (See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/08/psychic-mafia-by-m-lamar-keene.html) The conclusion of the chapter goes: “For over a century researchers have tested the claims of mediums and psychics and found them wanting”. Is that so? Then my first question would be: Why did it take that long? Surely after a hundred years of failure they’d have given up. But they haven’t given up; nor does everybody agree that the results have all been a failure. What Wiseman didn’t mention in the book, and it’s quite possible that he doesn’t know, is that experiments like the one he did with Patricia Putt have been done before, sometimes under even more rigourous conditions. And that on some of these occasions different results have emerged. A good example comes from the work of Dr Gary Schwartz, see: http://www.drgaryschwartz.com/index.html . Here’s a radio interview with Gary: http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2011/03/RIR-110324.php in which he describes why he thinks that some mediums etc are real. “Gullible Gary”, as James (“the Jerk”) Randi calls him, has investigated the same subjects as Richard Wiseman and has come to a radically different conclusion. This is why I stress again and again that when you read a Skeptical book like Paranormality do remember that what you’re reading might not be the whole story and to accept only that one book’s word for it is possibly a path to being misled. (The same goes for Gary Schwartz’ books of course.) It’s vitally important to look to as many different sources as you can.

Wiseman has been working for many years with an anonymous source that he calls “Mr D”. Mr D is a successful practicing medium for the north of England. He speaks at Spiritualist Churches, does sittings, Tarot card readings, crystal balls, the works… only he’s not really psychic. Mr D had confessed to Wiseman that he is a very proficient illusionist who uses stage conjuring tricks to convince his clients that he really does have paranormal abilities, and he knows it. However it is an activity that has generated a healthy living for himself and so he’s unwilling to give it up. The book then gives the reader the basics of Cold Reading, the mind-game in which you can persuade a person that you know far more about them than you do: Flatter them with pronouncements from “Spirit” that says how nice they are etc. Give them lots of contradictory statements to choose from like: “You’re sometimes very outgoing and chatty, but you also like peace and solitude”. Keep it vague! The human mind will easily make meaning out of meaningless and random comments, so sound confident when you talk about anything and let the sitter’s brain pick out the message. Fish for information from the sitter and build upon each correct guess in stages; if you get it wrong, don’t worry! “So if you say the name “John” and the sitter shakes their head, simply backtrack and go: “Oh no not John… it’s more like Jean” and carry on till you get it right. According to Wiseman, if you learn the details of these psychological techniques you will be able to pass yourself off as a medium and do anything that mediums do. But can you really? Some mediums are a lot more specific in what they say. If you go along to a Spiritualist Church to find true and genuine clairvoyance you may have to visit a few times, but it is there. What’s more, according to other scientists in the same field as Wiseman, they’ve been tested properly and passed. At the end of Chapter 1 I was a bit disappointed that Richard Wiseman had not yet said anything that qualified him for an MBA. So I read on.

Chapter 2 explored the world of Out-of-Body Experiences- OBE’s and its related phenomenon, the Near-Death Experience- the NDE. It was experiencing one of these OBE’s that led Susan Blackmore to her interest in the Paranormal. She is not the first to wonder at these kinds of experiences and seek to gain scientific evidence of the existence of the soul beyond the body. An American researcher in the 19th Century called RA Watters developed an extraordinary instrument that consisted of a chamber filled with water-vapour and a highly-sensitive camera. He postulated that Spirit could interact with the water molecules in the vapour and send a message through altering the molecules by Brownian Motion. According to Wiseman, the photographs Watters took of strange shapes in the steam are still available, but are not very convincing today. I wonder if this is true because Gary Schwartz describes a very similar-sounding experiment that he did in his radio interview linked above. The question I’m sure you’re asking, or I certainly hope you’re asking, by now is: “If psychical researchers who say that the Supernatural is real are correct then why are books like Wiseman’s still saying that it’s not? Wouldn’t the Supernatural being real be big news? Why aren’t there books on the Paranormal in every scientist’s laboratory?” The answer is long and complicated and I’ll go into this in detail later. Anyway on page 66 we get an attempted MBA from the author when he accuses RA Watters of “wishful-thinking”. Hmm… close, but he’s not there yet!
In 1977 a claim was made that proof of NDE’s were true and it was announced in the psychic research community. What happened was a young Mexican migrant named Maria had a cardiac arrest in hospital and when she came round she told her caseworker Kimberly Clark that while she was hovering close to death she floated up out of her body and visited the nurses’ home nearby. She saw that somebody had placed a well-worn a shoe, a trainer, on one of the window sills. The caseworker who was named after a toilet-paper manufacturer went to the place indicated by Maria and saw that the trainer was indeed there, exactly where Maria said it had been and it matched her description of it. This story has been repeated in numerous “New Age” (says the author with a contemptuous air!) and alternative science books and journals and hailed as proof that the soul can travel outside the body. However Wiseman claims that it’s been debunked. This is because in 1996 three Skeptics from Canada, including Dr Barry Beyerstein who gave Our Dave such a hard time when he did his show in Vancouver, see here at 34.09: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2912878405399014351# , travelled to the hospital involved and interviewed Clark. They then placed a trainer of their own on the window sill and found that the location was much more accessible than Clark had claimed. This means that you don’t have to be out-of-your-body to see it; in fact the shoe on the sill was visible both from inside the room and from the grounds outside the nurses’ home. They then concluded, although it would be more accurate to say speculated, that Maria had probably just overheard somebody talking about the trainer while she was unconscious and incorporated it into her “imaginary spirit flight”. That sounds highly unlikely to me. I often listen to doctors talking while they’re looking after unconscious patients and they discuss all kinds of things. I wonder why Maria’s NDE didn’t therefore also feature a visit to the Doctor’s Mess and a relaxing pint of lager after a hard day’s work, the breasts of an attractive nurse at the Renal Unit, a trip to Florida with the Postgraduates Union, or a new Mercedes Benz in the showroom down the road. You see where this speculation leads us? The Case of the Spiritual Sneaker was never a strong one to begin with, but there’s no point trying to debunk it with an equally shaky piece of “Skepulation”. Experiences like Maria’s have been done under laboratory conditions and proved positive. However we must once again turn to old books for the details; because I’ve written before about how you can often find information in older books that is omitted from newer ones. A good example is with Harry Houdini, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/05/houdini-code.html . A few years ago I ordered two books from Time-Life called Psychic Voyages and Search for the Soul and I was very surprised that Paranormality doesn’t mention the work of investigators like Robert Monroe, an American businessman who became an expert Astral traveller and could leave his body at will. He founded an entire scientific institute to study the phenomena and did extensive and rigourous tests with a very professional attitude. Why doesn’t this book mention them? Then again, why should it? Psychic Voyages and Search for the Soul were limited edition titles published in the early 1990’s. How many people have read them? And if they have, how many remember them? Wiseman says on page 93 (again edging slightly towards an MBA!) “For decades a small number of devoted scientists attempted to prove that the soul can leave the body… The enterprise failed because you are a product of your brain and cannot exist outside your skull.” But from what I can see this is not certain at all; and Paranormality doesn’t explore the alternative explanation: that OBE’s and NDE’s are actually voyages by some non-physical part of ourselves beyond the normal confines of our everyday physical experience.
Wiseman then describes the method behind a do-it-yourself OBE. First we have to become good at visualization in our minds. Close your eyes and imagine the place you are now, but not as you would see it through your eyes, but as how it would look if you were looking down from above yourself. Can you visualize what the top of your head looks like, the table you’re sitting at, the carpet under your feet? Then find a very comfortable armchair and relax into it. Make sure there are no other people around or noises and smells that might disturb you. Unwind and let go limp each part of your body at a time until you are totally still and all your muscles are lax. Now, remember your visualization; close your eyes and see yourself standing in the room you’re in a few feet in front of the armchair. Wiseman reckons that within 30 to 40 minutes it should be possible to flip your own sense of location into the imaginary person standing in front of the chair. If you get really good at it you should be able to fly around at will anywhere you like. If you get scared, don’t worry; just wiggle your finger and the effect will be broken. I tried this once and it didn’t work, but the author suggests several other easier tests of “identity illusion” including one I tried involving setting up a double mirror and looking at the back of your own head. I followed the instructions and it did give me a very creepy and vertiginous feeling of not knowing quite where I was. Wiseman put this section in the book because he says that OBE’s can be generated so easily because the whole concept of being inside our bodies in the first place is an illusion. We see the world through our senses and feel our own body move, and this is where our brain generates a location for us in space to see ourselves. Take that sensory input away and this sense of space and location is lost and up for grabs. One thing he does not suggest because he’d consider it a waste of time, but I would definitely try, is that if you manage to master the OBE armchair trick get a friend to write something on a piece of paper and stick it on the top shelf of the kitchen, making sure you don’t know what was written there. Now when you get out of your body, float to that shelf and have a look at what’s written there. If you can read it correctly then congratulations! You’ve just proven Wiseman and Blackmore wrong. Mind you, that’s already been done according to some sources, sources the author does not include in the book. Despite all this however, Wiseman ends Chapter 2 still falling short of MBA-hood.

Chapter 3 deals with a very closely studied phenomenon: telekinesis. This where a person is able to move material objects without touching them or using any force known to science. Like most Skeppies, Wiseman focuses his attention on some of the least impressive examples of anything he’s criticising. Favourites are Uri Geller and Sylvia Browne. Wiseman begins with James Hydrick. This young man fooled the world into thinking he could make the pages of books turn by the power of his mind when in fact he was secretly blowing on them, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sblPQWKHOY , until he was exposed by James Randi here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlfMsZwr8rc . Eventually Hydrick made a full confession, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7yDLRib5CQ . Another well-known fake psychic who is so renowned that he’s almost beyond even mentioning is Uri Geller. In a way Wiseman and his fellow Skeptics ate justified in their pursuit of the second-raters because it’s usually the second-raters who become the most celebrated and successful. I see better clairvoyance in any Spiritualist Church every service than the likes of Sylvia Browne and Doris Stokes. The same goes for Telekinesis; there is a lot of research done in controlled conditions that shows people moving objects without touching them, not on a stage or TV studio, but in a laboratory. Why is that? The answer is a big subject, but for some reason the media authorities bring these mediocre sideshow mountebanks out of the obscurity they belong in and give them vast amounts of money and publicity until they become household names. I’m particularly interested in the connection between many of these folk and the Intelligence Agencies; see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/03/findhorn.html . But that area of research is way beyond the scope of Wiseman’s book. However he does stoop to teaching the reader how to do Uri Geller’s spoon-bending trick. At odd times in the book I found what were probably just typoes, dates that were wrong, spelling mistakes etc. But then I remembered that Wiseman is a shrink! I couldn’t help wondering if these were not typoes at all, but put in their deliberately to do something to our minds! For instance in the section on OBE’s in the questionnaire to judge how good you were at visualization the author includes the question: “Do you believe that stoats work too hard?” Later on he said that he just put that in a joke. But was it? Perhaps I’m now being paranoid; maybe it was just a joke. I can’t help it though; I have a natural distrust of psychologists. I’ve had some bad experiences with them in the past and psychology has painful connotations for me.
I started reading Chapter 4 with great expectations; it was called Talking to the Dead and I thought: “We’ve got to get an MBA here. Come on, Richard!” And sure enough HE DID IT!... MBA!... MBA!... MBA!... I do hereby, on behalf of the MBA Committee, decorate Professor Richard Wiseman with the Materialist Bravery Award- Bronze! Congratulations, Richard!... Anyway, on with the book. This chapter focuses on Spiritualism. According to the author this was an invention of two teenage girls, Kate and Margareta Fox of New York, in 1848. The girls and their parents moved into a new house and the girls soon began to play tricks on their parents visitors by secretly creating loud noises in the structure of the building. Everybody thought that the house was haunted and the girls were very amused and decided to see how far their prank could go. Much further than they expected, it seems! The witnesses began attempting to talk to the fake ghosts and Kate and Margareta played along by using a knock-once-for-yes-twice-for-no code that became a cliché. Soon the girls were performing on theatre stages to fee-paying audiences and making a lucrative profit. The first mediums had arrived, apparently, and the term “Spiritualism” was coined. But the pressure of fame and fortune got to them and they wished they’d never begun their prank. They decided to pull out before they dug themselves in any deeper and in 1888 made a mass-public confession in front of a huge audience and press conference. But it was too late. Spiritualism had become too popular and to quote the author on page 144: "The vast majority of Spiritualists were eager to cling on to the comforting thought that they might survive bodily death." And it is this statement that has finally earned Richard Wiseman his MBA. Why did he wait till page 144? Spiritualism only began to decline in the early 1920’s when radio and cinema came along to distract the public and today Spiritualism is just a shell of its former self, the few remaining churches run by a handful of old loyalists. The author then goes on to explain some of the tricks fake psychics, all psychics by his definition, use: Spirit trumpets, ectoplasm and spinning tables etc. When he comes to Ouija Boards another contradiction emerges between his story and that of other sources. Wiseman claims that the Ouija Board is a European invention produced in the late 19th Century during the heyday of Spiritualism, by the board game designer Waddingtons, the people who also brought us Cluedo, Subbuteo and Monopoly. Its name is a compound of the French word “oui” and the German “ja”, both of which mean “yes”. But other researchers say that the board has its origins in North Africa and its name is a mispronunciation of the town of Oujda in Morocco where it was used by Muslim diviners to talk to Spirit (Everard 2007). And in this conundrum lies Wiseman’s mistake. The theme of the entire chapter is that Spiritualism is purely and totally a product of the Fox sisters’ deception; the author portrays it as a virtual non-event before 1848. I couldn’t agree less! The concept of the soul, its journeys after physical death and the art of communicating with it, go back as far as can be traced through history. Archaeological evidence and the surviving modern day Shamanic cultures indicate that it was very likely to have been practiced in prehistoric times. This is common knowledge in non-European countries. How we Europeans so often fall into the delusion of seeing the whole world as merely shadows cast by Europe’s light! If we can get over that delusion, planet Earth and human history look very different. The notion of the Ouija Board being a European plaything bought on shelves alongside chess and Backgammon sets is symptomatic of that fallacy. The reason Spiritualism seemed such a novelty is because Europe’s indigenous Shamanic tradition was all but wiped out over a 2000 year period by the Illuminati-controlled Roman Empire and Christian churches (See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/01/boudica-and-perennial-holocaust.html). In the Middle East soul communication had a somewhat easier ride. As I say in this film: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/river-ghost.html Islam has a much healthier attitude to the Paranormal than Christianity, especially in areas dominated by Sufism (What we call “extremist Islamic terrorism” today is a fairly new thing, less than 300 years old) The Sufis, these great Muslim Gnostics, were the people most likely to have been using this soul communication method at Oujda that inspired some wily visiting wheeler-dealer to “invent” the Ouija Board. Spiritualism is not just a product of a pair of bored teenage girls and today’s psychics are not just old folk waiting near the front of the queue for their own turn to enter Spirit. Lots of young people are interested in it. Many of the less-famous Mediums are excellent; in fact one called Helen Duncan was imprisoned during World War II because she was passing on official secrets from the spirits of dead servicemen!
Between Chapters 4 and 5 there is an interlude where Wiseman tells a story which makes me wonder exactly what point he’s trying to make. He announces the segment as a testimony to the “extremes of human gullibility”. It concerns a house on the Isle of Man that was haunted by a talking mongoose! The entities name was “Gef” and he was discovered in the early 1930’s by the house’s residents, James and Margaret Irving and their daughter Voirrey. Gef used to hide behind the walls and only show his claws through gaps in the panelling, but he had a high-pitched squeaky voice and he talked a lot, reciting all kinds of pronouncements in perfect English. He became a media sensation and visitors streamed the Isle of Man to try and visit the house. I’d never heard of this event before and I was waiting for Wiseman to finish the story with Voirrey’s confession and lurid and gloating descriptions of the blushed faces of all the Gef-believers, but it never happened. The author relates that Gef simply one day vanished and Voirrey swears he was real and continued to do so until she died in 2005. So why did Wiseman even mention it? How does a case that was never exposed as a hoax illustrate the extremes of human gullibility? Perhaps it’s just that a talking mongoose sounds so strange compared to what is generally accepted as possible that this is a reason to dismiss it. It’s like with David Icke and the Queen being a lizard; critics of the theory don’t usually study the details of the idea at all, but instead just automatically reject it on the grounds of its apparent insanity in comparison to the existing notions of normality. This doesn’t sound very scientific to me and if he takes this line then Richard Wise-man is not living up to his name.
After being regaled with meaningless tales of talking mongooses (or is it mongeese?) the author delves into the world of ghost-hunting. I didn’t realize this, but Wiseman has been involved in hands-on ghosthunting missions, including one at one of the world’s most famous haunted houses, Hampton Court. Needless to say he reports no definitive supernatural activity. For him, ghosts are yet another example of the flaws in human psychology. He reckons that most ghosts are only seen just before or just after going to sleep and that they are an effect of peculiar altered states of consciousness that the perception of weird entities surrounding us can occur. In other words ghosts are related to the apparitions produced by sleep-paralysis. This is a sometimes very disturbing experience when you start to wake from your sleep, but the mechanism in your brain that paralyses your skeletal muscles is still active and so you are aware of your surroundings, and may even be able to see, but can’t move or speak. In this state people often describe how strange figures appear at their bedside and sometimes even touch them. This interaction can be deeply upsetting with the apparitions violently attacking and even sexually abusing the sufferer. Wiseman says that this at last reveals “the remarkable truth behind these apparitions”, a very bold and cocky assertion! But is it justified?
I’ve written before about my own encounters with ghosts, in fact I’m now making a series of films about them, starting with this one: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/ghosts-in-park.html . My own encounters with ghosts, or ghost-like phenomena to be exact, do not fit in with Wiseman’s explanation. It is true, however that on two occasions my sightings have been linked with sleep; for instance, the boy in my bedroom, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/bedroom-ghost.html . This case in unprovable and may very well be a hypnopompic experience; I have no way to deny that for sure. However the event in 2008 on a train is different, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html , I swear I had definitely not seen the photo Ustane showed me beforehand. Also I’ve seen ghostlike phenomena when I’ve been wide awake, see my Ghosts in the Park film above. Another key element was that I had an independent witness, Jenny. In fact I must be one of the few blokes who’s ever been dumped by his girlfriend because of a ghost!
The author then goes on to describe a couple of “Carlos” activities by Skeptical researchers. One did this dressing up as a ghost by draping his body in a white bedsheet and walking in circles around graveyards. What struck this researcher was that very few of the passers-by reacted to his presence, as if they had a cognitive dissonance that prevented them from seeing him. This gave him what he thought were amazing insights into the functions of the human cerebrum, although his study does not mention if any of these non-reactive members of the public burst into helpless laughter the moment they turned a corner, as I certainly would. The term “Carlos” relates to a famous hoax played by James Randi. He hired an actor, Jose Alvarez (Interestingly he’s the cousin of Willie Rodriguez of 9/11 Truth fame), to pretend to be a spiritual guru, see: http://www.skepdic.com/carlos.html the point being to prove how easy it is for a good actor and illusionist to hoodwink the public. However these plans can often backfire, as in the case of the “Avebury Carlos”. It showed that even the so-called “most gullible members of society” have turned out to be much better witnesses than Skeppers previously thought. A few years ago, some engineers built a fake UFO out of a model plane and flew it over Avebury, an ancient sacred site and a gathering place for mystics and pagans. The intention was to fool them and therefore show them up for being dupes in the same way Randi did with his own Carlos, but it didn’t work out quite as well as the hoaxers planned. The hippies at Avebury did indeed report seeing a UFO, but they reported pretty much what they saw, describing the craft accurately. There were none of the embellishments and exaggerations that the hoaxers were banking on.
I’m quite open to the idea that altered states of consciousness are involved in ghost sightings, but this does not automatically mean that they are just the figment of our imagination run wild. It interests me that people who “hallucinate” like this often hallucinate the same things, even if they’ve had no way of exchanging information. A good example is the twin alien abduction cases of Credo Mutwa and Antonio Villas Boas, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/08/alien-abduction-similarities.html . I’m getting very interested in research by people like Stanislav Grof, Rick Strassman and Graham Hancock, see: http://www.rickstrassman.com/ . Their hypothesis is revolutionary, that the brain’s perception of reality at any time is merely a “tuning” operation to a certain frequency, like the brain is a kind of radio receiver, “Channel Normal” as Graham Hancock calls it, and that ghostly and alien experiences are no less real than our everyday world, they’re just a “retuning” or “interference” on the signal. This is an extraordinary theory, but in the Shamanic cultures that I mentioned above this is not a surprise; in fact it’s the very thing they’ve been saying for thousands of years and tried desperately to tell us before the Inquisitor’s rack and the Conquistador’s sword cut them short.

The following chapter is all about mind control and talks of hypnosis and religious cults. This is probably the chapter I agree with the most. Wiseman warns us of the dangers of people like Jim Jones, a man who convinced hundreds of people to commit suicide. I’ve had my own experience of these organizations, although I didn’t know it at the time, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/04/jesus-christians-disclaimer.html . The question that has arisen on the HPANWO Forum (see Links column) is that could there ever be a Skeptic cult? Seeing as Skeptical organizations don’t try to isolate their members from other points of view then I’d probably say no, but this should still be an interesting discussion! What the “no” answer in this case reveals is that David Icke can also not be described as a cult. David is not a Jim Jones! This is because David also doesn’t attempt to withhold alternative viewpoints from his audience. So LunarOrbit, the HPANWO Forum member who described David as a “cult leader”, is totally wrong. The only criticism I have with Wiseman over this chapter is that he both overestimates and underestimates mind control where it’s convenient for his worldview. The overestimation is where he describes the famous case of a performing horse from the turn of the last century called Clever Hans. He got his name because he could apparently read the minds of his audience by tapping with his hooves numbers written secretly on pieces of paper. A scientist noticed that Hans’ owner who was on stage with him knew what numbers were written down even though Hans didn’t and realized that this test was not blinded as a proper scientific experiment should be. So he persuaded the owner to not look at the paper either. Immediately Hans’ mind-reading abilities dropped from 98% accurate prediction to zero. The adjudicator concluded that Hans’ owner was unknowingly instructing Hans with subconscious clues. But can these subconscious clues really make the difference between 98% and zero, especially when you're dealing with the added complications of communicating with an animal, not a fellow human?
The underestimation is that Wiseman describes how advertisers as well as stage magicians use this subtle mind control on their unsuspecting victims, but he doesn’t consider the possibility that governments might want to take advantage of this science. The book never once mentions MK Ultra or any other government mind control programme, when really I think it’s impossible to take seriously any written work about the subject unless it considers this angle. So despite agreeing with this chapter more than the others I still think it considerably lacks scope.


The last subject chapter is about prophesising the future though your dreams. Wiseman thinks this is a case of tossing a javelin into an orchard and being amazed at your aim when it hits an apple. He says we have so many dreams that it’s inevitable that of all the several billion people sleeping at any one time somebody somewhere is bound dream about a plane crash or terrorist attack etc that accurately matches one that subsequently takes place. This does not explain however, people like my mother who repeatedly and personally experienced prophetic dreams. For example she had nightmares before her brother and other close relatives died. When TWA 800 was reported crashed in 1996 I remember my mum had a dream the night before where she saw an airliner with red livery explode in mid-air. It was only later that it came out TWA 800 had exploded in the air and fell into Long Island Sound in many pieces. There’s also the strange case of the “Man Who Paints the Future”, see: http://vimeo.com/2315112 This programme features Randi investigating him. The accuracy of his art, especially the 9/11 and Concorde crash, seems beyond the realms of reasonable belief in coincidence.

At the end of the book the author outlines the themes of it in a conclusion section. Again he reiterates the underlying premise of the volume: There is really no such thing as the Supernatural or Paranormal. They exist only in human fantasy. The purpose of the book has been to reveal why these facets exist in human minds and societies. As you can see I have read the whole book and I challenge the initial premise so, although Wiseman might be right about how our minds make mistakes and see the Paranormal when it is not there, I do not agree with him that this means that this is what the Paranormal is, on every occasion. I’ve given my reasons why and it’s up to you, dear HPANWO-reader to decide whether you agree with me or Prof. Richard.
The author ends the book by saying how people look very disappointed when he says that there’s no evidence for the Supernatural being real. Is this because they feel that a world devoid of the Supernatural is a less enjoyable and interesting world? Wiseman is perfectly content with the idea that there is no such thing as the Paranormal. He thinks the world is interesting and enjoyable enough as it is. This is where very often people like me are polarized by our critics; I share Richard’s enjoyment and interest in the natural physical world. As Douglas Adams once said, as part of his Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy comedy book: “Surely a garden can be beautiful without imagining that there are pixies living at the bottom of it.” I get quite irritated when people say such things to me. Yes, a garden doesn’t need pixies to be beautiful, but just because I believe that there might be pixies living in it, does that mean I don’t appreciate its physical beauty in the same way they do? Of course it doesn’t!
Reading Paranormality was very interesting for me and I’m glad I did it. To begin with, I’m interested in Skeptics and what they think even though I’m not one myself; I go into more details here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/07/skeptic-in-pub-21808.html and here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/tam-london-2010.html . I recommend the book to anybody, Skeptic or Woo, who’s interested in the philosophy of science.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that the status of the Paranormal in our society: as something people are aware of, but have not quite accepted, a kind of fringe black sheep of the universe, is partly deliberate. I’ve found that people and organizations in power seem to have an almost instinctive and hypersensitive aversion to the Paranormal, or to be more precise, they have an aversion to the general public being aware of it. Why? The reasons might vary for different elements of the Paranormal; for instance with UFO’s there’s the Free Energy issue, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2009/09/freikraft.html . But what harm could it do if we knew that ghosts are real? Or that when we die we carry on living in another universal realm? Would us having this awareness, an ending of denial about it, impinge on the power of the Illuminati-occupied world, so much so that they’d take steps to keep it secret from us? In a word- yes. Why and how are big questions and this is an ongoing area of study for me. A clue is in what it would mean for us in psychological, cultural and sociological terms. Skeptics always speak of the neutrality of science how “everything falls before it”. They claim that discoveries like Homeopathy working or aliens being real would lead to a Nobel Prize etc and that nothing could or would stand in the way of such progress. But then why do Governments have huge organizations employing thousands of top psychologists to gauge public reaction on every new invention, discovery, idea, piece of language etc, and find out how it effects our relationship with them! Remember the Brookings Report of 1960 warned NASA about the reaction of the mass of humanity if it was announced that extraterrestrial intelligences exist. Little Green Men from Mars are small potatoes compared to some of the other subjects Paranormnal researchers talk about! I’ll end with the very succinct words from a character in my novel Rockall, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2009/02/rockall-chapter-1.html : “I’ve found, in my experience, that governments seem to have an almost knee-jerk aversion to all the things that you might describe as ‘paranormal’ or ‘out-of-the-ordinary.’ Things like ghosts or UFO’s, or events like this one, which rock the boat of conventional worldviews. They will attempt to deny, reject and suppress information on any phenomenon that could lead people to question the reality of the banal, three-up-two-down existence which we live in. I think they need us to be quiet, subservient and bored in order to rule us.”
One thing to remember, “Paranormal” is actually a bad word, for the Paranormal is as normal as breathing and eating. It’s a part of your life and mine and it has been an element to the human experience since we first became human. Exactly as the scientific maxim goes: Just because we don’t understand it yet doesn’t mean we never will!

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/popping-question.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/pharmawhores.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/alternative-voting.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/ive-got-banned-book.html

Latest HPANWO TV films (All new material!): http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/bullying_26.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/river-ghost.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/could-you-be-awarded-mba.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/bedroom-ghost.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/ghosts-in-park.html

Jesus Christians Disclaimer

Last year a film was released in which I appeared briefly called The Tyrant Within. It was a very well-made documentary about electronic implants and their dangers in a Big Brother State. See here for essential background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/09/my-interview-with-smaller-fish-films.html . I ended up being interviewed when I met the producers at the AV3 Conference in Bristol. They attended the speech by Greg Nikolettos, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/11/alternative-view-3-part-3.html . I’d seen them hanging around with Greg and assumed that they were part of his entourage; as it turned out this was definitely not the case! A little while later, a man and a woman called Alf and Sue came round to my house and conducted an interview for about an hour. They were very pleasant and cooperative people and we got on well. I was very glad to help them; and as you can see in the link above, I was fairly impressed with the result. However last week I had a phonecall from a friend I know through the Truth media who told me that she had to contact me urgently because she was so alarmed to see me in that film. “Do you know who those people are!?” she asked. It turns out that Alf and Sue belong to a very orthodox and evangelical Christian sect called The Jesus Christians. Here’s their website: http://www.jesus-teachings.com/ . There are only about two dozen of these people in the world, but they’ve managed to have quite an impact and generate a lot of controversy, including alleged kidnappings, donating kidneys for transplantation to strangers and advocating corporal punishment. They’ve been called a “cult” by the media. The film The Tyrant Within is part of a double-box DVD set and the second DVD is this one, Beyond Justice See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R29tIKWP7xw . At 2.14 in Part 2 we see the very same man who interviewed me, Alf, being flagellated by proxy for the Chinese Government for their abuse of Falun Gong practitioners. This presumably emulates Jesus’ experience when he was crucified for “the redemption of sins”.

It’s not my intention to dictate to you, the HPANWO-reader, what to think. If you support or sympathize with the ideas of these people, then that’s fine with me. All I want to say is that at the time I was interviewed for The Tyrant Within I was not aware I was taking part in a Jesus Christians production and, much as I like the film, I don’t feel comfortable with that knowledge. I am certainly not anything to do with the Jesus Chrstians and will not be participating in any of their future activities, no matter how much I applaud the film’s specific subject-matter. I’ve written to some of the other cast members about this subject and two have written back to tell me that they weren’t informed either.

(For those of you awaiting my review of Paranormality by Richard Wiseman, it is in the pipeline; but bear with me! I’m having a very busy week.)

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/pharmawhores.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/alternative-voting.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/ive-got-banned-book.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/submarine-shooting.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/bedroom-ghost.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/ghosts-in-park.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/ben-silver-leggings.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/bha-mba.html

St Theo's Day is Announced

(This photo is not an official publication of the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust nor any of its partners, clients or contractors)

St Theo time is here again! The party this year is, as always, on the closest Friday off I have to June the 1st, St Theo’s Day itself. I want to make this, the fourth St Theo’s Day event, the biggest ever. For this reason I’m going to advertise it more than before by printing more fliers and using HPANWO and Facebook. Here’s the basic text draft for this year’s flier:

St Theo 2011* “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

*St Theobald of Ruggerio was born in Piedmont in Italy in 1170 and became famous for carrying sick people into towns from the countryside for medical treatment. He is the Patron Saint of Hospital Porters and his feast day is June the 1st. Every year since 2008 the Porters at Oxford’s hospitals have met to celebrate St Theo and his legacy.

Come to the John Radcliffe Sports and Social Club, beside Arthur Sanctuary House, Friday May the 27th 7pm till late (Football match earlier from about 5pm) Free entertainment: All the way from Nottingham, a bellydance show by Ustane. EXCLUSIVE: Live Internet TV broadcast. Civilians welcome. For more information contact Ben in A&E.

Latest HPANWO Voice articles (All new material!): http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/ive-got-banned-book.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/submarine-shooting.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/expelled-no-intelligence-allowed.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/04/britcon-conference-stoke-on-trent.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/bha-mba.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/im-thinking-about-sex.html And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/get-job-you-lazy-scroungers.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-probe-conference-march-2011.html

UK Probe Conference March 2011

Dedicated to the loving memory of my Probe-Buddy Ian Wright. Rest in Peace, old friend.

I’ve returned from the UK Probe Conference March 2011. Ustane and I have had a wonderful time as always. It was wonderful to see all my Probe-Buddies again and I’ll look forward to seeing them again in October. As always many things were unchanged, but a lot of things were different. Many thanks to Jean and Sam, and all the speakers and delegates. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do a full-length written review of the conference, but I have done a HPANWO TV reportage again. I was wondering if I’d be able to do anything original. This my third Probe reportage and I didn’t want to repeat myself. As it happened I needn’t have worried! Here it is: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-probe-conference-march-2011.html

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/1984-at-number-39.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/liz-taylor-and-jose-arguelles-die.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/janet-street-porter-against-census.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-border-agency-not-just-borders.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-probe-conference-march-2011.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/but-they-aint-normal.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/walt-disneys-underworld.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/kevin-annett-liverpool-lecture-12311.html

Hospital Ghosts

See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/river-ghost.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html

I’ve had another peculiar experience that might come under the category of ghostly, in the same sense as the two background articles above. This happened at work, the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. I was on a Friday late shift, February the 18th, and it was about 6.30PM. I was tired because it had been a busy spell in the Accident & Emergency department and I was also slightly drowsy from a disturbed sleep the previous night. I entered the inpatient X-Ray reception area, which was closed at this hour, and sat down in one of the waiting chairs to relax for a moment. Then I saw behind the reception desk a sudden bright explosion of light, like a camera flash bulb going off. This was accompanied by a hissing, cracking sound. I jumped up and moved over to the desk, which you can see in the photo above. It looked normal; there was nothing I could see that explained what I’d just perceived. The following Monday I asked one of the receptionists who regularly man that desk if they’d noticed anything unusual there and they said no.

There are a lot of myths about ghosts. One is that they only appear at night. Not at all, ghosts can appear 24/7 and there are some very significant daylight sightings reported, including a famous encounter in a lift with a full-body, solid, speaking, dead President of Finland! Another contradiction to popular belief is that ghosts are not always identifiable as deceased people. Ghosts of living people are sometimes seen, known as “Doppelgangers” (I’ve got an interesting story to tell you about that in a moment, bear with me!). They often appear in completely unrecognizable forms or as amorphous clouds of vapour or blobs. Another falsehood is that ghosts are best sought after in graveyards; not true. One can certainly go ghost-hunting is cemeteries if you want, but these places are not the most likely place to be haunted. Ghost sightings seem to occur mostly in places linked to human suffering, especially people who’ve died by violent and/or painful deaths. Murder scenes are often reported as haunted, or houses where a depressed person committed suicide. Battlefields are another common ghost location; but from what I can gather, the absolute number 1 place to find ghosts is in hospitals. This is fortunate for me because I spend 40 hours every week inside one.

I think before I go on any further I should make it clear by what I mean when I write down the word “ghost”. This term has been used to describe what I reckon could be a number of very different phenomena. Ghosts also appear in the traditions of all cultures across the world. So what is a ghost? The popular conception is that on occasions when a person dies some remnant of their presence remains behind in this world, like a shadow, imprint or afterglow which causes the ghost effect. This might well be what some ghosts are, but not all of them fit into this category by any means. Ghosts sometimes simply appear as “recordings” of past events. A witness might be walking down a modern street in London and see a column of Roman soldiers march past. These soldiers will be oblivious to the surroundings of the witness. Some of these kinds of apparitions are “insies” rather than “outsies”, in which the witness will see the troops marching and look around to suddenly find themselves on an old Roman street with the buildings and people transformed. As with the “outsie” sighting, the people in the vision will usually not react to the presence of the witness, indicating that they can't see them. This kind of ghost is something very different. It’s as if the witness' mind flips into a state of consciousness where it can perceive events long past in the area its senses are observing. This might be what I experienced when I saw phantom horses in a local park near my home. This happened in January 1989. I was sitting in the rec of the park at about 6AM waiting to meet my then-girlfriend Jenny who used to go jogging in the early morning (Believe me nothing else would get me up at that time to go jogging on a cold winter’s morning!). Then I saw 3 horses walking calmly nose-to-tail out from the darkness behind me. They looked strange, kind of transparent like chalk engravings. They walked out of the park gates and off down a road. Jenny was walking up the road at the time and saw them too, but she was much more disturbed than I was and refused to talk about the incident. A week later she terminated our relationship. Another kind of ghost sighting is when one sees something that does not fit in with any known individual or occurrence in this world at all. This could be because they’re related to events of which no living person has any knowledge, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. Another kind of ghost is when a recognizable person appears in the exact same form as they did when alive, with a solid-looking body and normal voice. This is what took place with the sighting of the President of Finland. In this case the apparition looked exactly as he had when alive. He was able to speak in his usual voice and was capable of touching things, like the lift buttons… and yet he had died previously! (Janet and Colin Bord Modern Mysteries of The World). So we’re dealing with an entire syndrome of phenomena that might have little or no relation to each other. Ghosts are not all “dead people”.

The problem with ghost-like phenomena is that if you want to study them in a proper manner then it’s extremely difficult. Very few universities take the subject seriously. It’s regarded as a “fringe science” or even a pseudoscience. There are only a small number of academic institutions in the world who have departments which will pay for you to investigate ghosts. Even parapsychology faculties like the Arthur Koestler Unit in Edinburgh, which studied my mother for her precognitive abilities (See: http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/index.html), don’t really go there. A scientist may be unwilling to take on studies into ghosts because of the significant peer-pressure scientists live under. Mainstream scientists seem to have a very nasty streak in them towards other scientists who have unconventional ideas and interests. The late John Mack relates the emotional trauma he suffered when former friends and colleagues disowned him simply because he thought, and expressed the thought, that alien abductions were scientifically real. Therefore it’s privately-funded, amateur organizations and individuals who do most of the work in this field. In one sense those who reject ghost-hunting as a proper science have a point; this is because it’s so difficult to gather data from these phenomena. Most sightings are eyewitness testimony only. Occasionally, as in the case of my horses sighting, more than one person will see the same ghost, ruling out hallucination to most researchers. There are many films and photographs of ghostly activity but these are almost always denounced as fakes by academia; sadly in this day and age with Photoshop it’s hard to prove the academics wrong on that. One useful alternative is to record environmental changes with specialized instruments; you can purchase toolkits with these instruments from magazines like Paranormal, see: http://paranormalmagazine.co.uk/ , and any serious ghost-hunter would need one of these. (My friend Brian Allan, see the HPANWO Links column, now writes for this magazine) Sadly ghost investigation has been given a bad name recently by a number of very popular but highly sensationalistic TV shows that use stagecraft and fictionalization to produce bogus ghost phenomena. This has led to an explosion of “paranormal tourism” in which groups of young people visit haunted locations for entertainment purposes, often misleading the house’s residents into thinking that they are serious researchers, taking advantage of the lack of regulation in this practice. “Never be tempted to fake anything!” said another friend of mine, a well-known supernatural researcher, when I last spoke to him a few weeks ago. Some investigators do fake data, not because they never really experience genuine ghostly events, but in order to boost their profile after a run of unsuccessful studies. They justify it to themselves with platitudes like: “I’m only going to do it just this once. Just one little fake ghost to get my research grant; after that I’ll never fake anything again, I promise!” My friend said that we must never ever let ourselves fall into this trap; it’s simply not worth it. We must be totally honest in our conduct or else we’ll taint our own careers and ghost-investigation in general for years to come, with its existing rather shaky public image; researchers faking results is exactly what the debunkers love! Let’s not play into their hands. The frustration of this kind of research is what generates this dilemma because real evidence is so tenuous and exclusive. I also feel as if we’re being tantalized as well, because all the most striking events will inevitably occur when it’s not possible to prove them. I myself have seen, along with the horses, an image of Ustane’s father on a train, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html . I’ve been in a car that was paced by a cloud of sand-like substance, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-trip-to-haunted-house.html , I’ve seen a “cut-out” apparition by the River Thames, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/river-ghost.html and several other incidents... But it was when there was no way I could prove them! If there had been a way to prove them then maybe they wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. The great South African paranormal researcher Lyall Watson, who died in 2008, came up with a theory which he christened “The Cosmic Nanny”. He believed that there is some kind of overseer to all supernatural phenomena that doesn’t want humanity to ever know, with absolute certainty, that they are scientifically real. In his books Watson relates his frustration that many times a decisive piece of evidence goes missing or instruments fail at crucial moments. He always recommends posting such data in Special Delivery mail so that at least when it gets lost, as it invariably will, you can make a bit of cash in compensation! It's as if the phenomena themselves don't want to be proved. The cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes (See the Centre for Fortean Zoologogy in the HPANWO Links column) also relates what he calls “The Psychic Backlash”. He found that when he investigated ghostly incidents he was struck down by a run of serious misfortune: ill health, the death of both of his cats, the breaking down of his car and other things. I think Watson’s and Downes’ experiences are related.

Anyway, back to hospitals. I once saw an intriguing interview with an American doctor called Mitchell Gibson. The interview is no longer available online but here’s another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EvJs6VKPT8 . Dr Gibson, the black man in the photo above, was a doctor at a hospital in Philadelphia, but his psychic abilities allowed him to see the ghosts of patients who’d died wandering the corridors of the hospital. This led him into the field of the noetic sciences and spiritual research. Presumably if the patients’ ghosts were wandering the corridors of Gibson’s hospital then they must also wander the corridors of the John Radcliffe, only I usually can’t see them. Is there any way I could? Well to carry out an official ghost investigation I’d need permission from the hospital’s management and I doubt if they would entertain such an endeavour. The study would inevitably involve using the working areas of the hospital which are highly restricted. However there’s no reason why I can’t make efforts to discover ghostly goings on unofficially and privately during my periods on duty. I’ve written several times about electrosmog; mobile phone masts, HAARP etc. One of the theories connected to electrosmog is that it is designed by the Illuminati to suppress the increasing ability of humans to perceive things through the sixth sense as the energies of the world change as we approach December 2012. As I have said on many occasions, the Illuminati know that the Supernatural is real; they just don’t want us to know that. The theory is that the HAARP and mobile phone masts are how they maintain that secret. I’m not sure if I agree with that or not, but supposing it is true; how would we overcome this blindfolding of our spiritual eyes? It would be to go somewhere where there is no electrosmog. Unfortunately nowadays there is no place on the entire surface of the Earth which is not contaminated to some degree by electromagnetic poisoning; HAARP affects the entire world from its transmitters in the north polar regions of the planet. However, there are locations where electrosmog cannot reach. One is underground. It’s true that HAARP's ELF- Extremely Low Frequency, transmissions can penetrate a certain way into the ground and ocean, in fact one of its publically-acknowledged purposes is to communicate with submarines; however this is limited in the ocean to a few hundred feet and underground, which is many times denser, the range is probably much less. Underground is one possibility; in fact scientists searching for illusive subatomic particles have to set up laboratories down deep mines: to eliminate electronic noise, because nowhere else is radiologically pristine. The Homestake Experiment to detect neutrinos for the core of the sun was done in a deep gold mine for this reason. But a thought occurred to me just a few days ago that you don’t have to go underground to find somewhere where electrical noise can’t reach you. There are certain places that are “radio-shielded”; these are spaces surrounded by a layer of heavy metal, usually lead, to prevent radiation from passing through. Usually this is because the space contains a source of dangerous radiation that its users don’t want to get out, like a nuclear reactor or radiotherapy head, but when that source is switched off the interior of the space becomes a place where radiation from outside can’t get in, because the shielding is two-way. Luckily hospitals contain several such places: X-ray chambers. These have a thick layer of lead shielding built into the walls, ceiling and sometimes the floor in there are rooms beneath it. The doors are shielded too and I know because they’re extremely heavy to open and shut. I was trying to call one of my Brother or Sister Porters the other day in one of these chambers on the walkie-talkie radios we use to communicate and I couldn’t get a signal at all. I wonder if maybe I should keep an extra special eye out for incidents of high strangeness when I’m working in these areas. It’s a shame I can’t enter the radiotherapy chamber at the nearby Churchill Hospital as this has even thicker lead shielding because the radiation levels inside get much higher than those used in radiography. My hypothesis is that being in a radio-neutral environment will enhance a person’s psychic abilities. We’ll see what happens.

So far all the ghost stories at my hospital have occurred outside the X-ray rooms. There are several I’ve heard, but two in particular are very convincing. One took place in the A&E Department about two years ago. There’s a side ward to the department that’s called the EAU, Emergency Assessment Unit. This is where we keep patients who’ve been in A&E for long periods. One evening at about 7PM a nurse ran out of the area screaming with fear. She’d seen a ghostly apparition in there while looking after the patients. I came on duty at 10PM and a few people were still talking about it. The sighting had taken place at the same time that an attempted resuscitation was going on in the Resus room; could this be a Mitchell Gibson-type experience? The second significant incident occurred at night on a temporary corridor linking the main hospital the Trauma Unit. A nurse who serves in the West Wing Operating Theatres was walking along it when a humanoid phantom walked straight into the corridor through one wall and crossed perpendicularly out through the other wall. Understandably the witness fled the scene and reported her encounter to her colleagues. I’ve managed to track down the witness to the first event, but the second incident is still an ongoing study; I’ll keep you posted as much as possible.

I spoke above of how some people see ghosts of living people; well it has been reported that my own Doppelganger, a German word that literally means: “your walking double”, has been sighted. One of my Extremely Proud and Dignified Brother Porters told me that he saw a man in Oxford city centre who looked exactly like me, not just a slight resemblance; he actually looked just like me in every detail. There are a number of possibilities: maybe he actually saw the real me. No, I was definitely not in the area at the time this sighting took place. Also this person was dressed in a very smart suit and carrying a briefcase; anybody who knows me would never expect me to wear such a Conformist attire! It could of course be another person who looks just like me; they say everybody has a double, and indeed I’ve been compared in physiogmany to both William Hague and Al Murray- the Pub Landord. However my Brother Porter saw this person up close and swears that he was exactly like me; my Brother Porter almost went up and greeted the alleged Doppelganger. There are many disturbing urban legends associated with Doppelganger sightings, legends that inspire a plethora of horror films including the 1970 classic chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066053/ . One of the legends associated with a Doppelganger is that its presence is a portent of the individual’s own death. This doesn’t scare me one bit, as such omens like this tend to be dramatic hearsay and meaningless in the course of real events. I’m in good health right now and not planning to do anything dangerous so I’ve every reason to hope that I’ll be around for many years to come! Don’t worry.

I had another experience in 1996 that was very influential in my views on what some ghosts are. It was the depths of the night, what Roald Dahl called “the Witching Hour”. I awoke suddenly from a shallow sleep to find that there was a small boy kneeling on my bedroom floor a few feet from my bed. He wasn’t solid, in fact he was translucent in appearance like those horses; I described him at the time as looking as if he were made of smoke, but smoke which kept its shape. He was about 4 feet tall, the size of a 5 or 6 year old. He was kneeling up, facing the bed with his hands clasped in front of his face as if saying his prayers. I stared at him for a number of seconds, then he slowly levitated into the air and drifted away. He began to fade away, but as he did so he turned and looked at me and our eyes met. Then he vanished completely. As I’ve said above this experience is impossible to prove; it could be a hypnopompic effect, this is where dreams continue for a short time after you wake up, but it’s something that I’ve never seen before or since; what if it was real? I’ve come to the conclusion that some ghostly phenomena are actually “bleed-overs” of events from parallel universes. I’ve written about parallel universes before and even serious scientists are taking the idea seriously with their “M-Theory”, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7SDrj4Tjvk . This idea is also the background to the excellent and worryingly feasible horror movie The Mist, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/11/mist.html and also one of my favourite books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/02/northern-lights.html . What if two universes, with a similar physical makeup, ended up touching each other on their movement through the hyperspace medium? The result might be similar to those strange instances when your TV set (In the pre-digital era, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/digital-tv.html) goes out of tune and picks up two channels at the same time. You get an unearthly blend of two separate pictures and soundtracks on the same screen. Usually one is more distinct and the other is fuzzy and tenuous. Maybe this is what I saw in my bedroom in 1996. I wonder who the little boy was and what his world is like. Does it look very like ours or is it totally different? To me he appeared very and formless; made of smoke as I said, but perhaps that how I looked to him.

Finally, here’s an article and video about other hospital ghostly goings on. See: http://www.angelsghosts.com/hospital_ghost_stories
And: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMk3kh-URHQ

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/liz-taylor-and-jose-arguelles-die.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/janet-street-porter-against-census.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-border-agency-not-just-borders.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/back-umbrella-day.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/but-they-aint-normal.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/walt-disneys-underworld.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/kevin-annett-liverpool-lecture-12311.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/hunt-for-cm24_10.html

Findhorn

The official website of the Findhorn Foundation: http://www.findhorn.org/

I first heard about the Findhorn Community in 2002 when I was reading a magazine I used to subscribe to called Caduceus (See: http://www.caduceus.info/) It described it as an “alternative, spiritual community” and it was celebrating its 40th anniversary. It was only the following year when I read Fritz Springmeier’s Bloodlines of the Illuminati that I felt a frisson of curiosity; the book described the Findhorn Community as a sinister “Vatican of the New Age” where the Rosicrucian overlords who ran it sent out secret messages to all New Age institutions all over the world with instructions on how to brainwash people. However at the same time I saw a 3-part fly-on-the-wall TV documentary about the place which portrayed it as a very benign and easy-going institution. I recorded it onto VHS and watched the tape over and over again, enthralled by it and intuitively drawn to find out more. Among other aspects of the Community, the TV show followed a group of people involved in something called “Experience Week”. This is where the Community brings in guests, 12 at a time, to spend a week living the Findhorn life in a mixture of tuition, spiritual retreat and working alongside Findhorn residents in their jobs. I booked myself onto an Experience Week in May 2005.

The Findhorn Community was founded in 1962 at the seaside village of Findhorn in northeast Scotland by a couple who ran a hotel in the nearby town of Forres, assisted by a friend. One thing that was not revealed to me during my visit is that Peter and Eileen Caddy had an existing interest in the Occult and that Springmeier is correct when he says that Peter Caddy was a Rosicrucian. Eileen was the only surviving founder at the time I visited; in fact she died in December the following year. In Findhorn she is revered in a similar form as an Indian avatar. Eileen’s inspiration for the Findhorn Community began when she began telling people that she was hearing voices from “God”. These voices told her to tow her caravan to the remote and desolate dunes beside Findhorn and establish a home for people to develop spiritually. She set up a vegetable patch in the dunes and everybody thought she was crazy to try and grow vegetables on dry and barren sand dunes, but to their astonishment Eileen not only succeeded in growing them but the vegetables produced grew to record sizes and very high quality; they won multiple prizes in every vegetable competition going. Word spread and more and more people came to the area, members of the newly-emerging hippy movement, setting up their caravans beside Eileen’s. Soon they began to build houses and Eileen turned her old hotel on Cluny Hill into accommodation for them too. The Community continued to burgeon until it reached the size it is today: a population of over 3000 living mostly in a large “Ecovillage”. They have no formal credo, but practice all manner of spiritual and religious persuasions, emphasizing personal development rather than doctrine. They also practice ethical social and community structures, healthy living and environmentally-friendly farming and energy generation. They recycle everything they can and pollute as little as possible. All their electricity comes from a set of huge wind turbines, see photo below. Since my own Experience Week they’ve introduced their own local currency, the “Eko”. In this I wholeheartedly support them.

On arrival I registered and had an introductory meeting with the eleven other people whom I’d be sharing Experience Week with and our two “focalizers” a young Japanese woman named Mie and an older man called Ian who’d lived in the Community since the 1960’s. They began by explaining the basics of Findhorn life, like “attuning”. This is when a group of people stands in a circle before any meeting, or “sharing” (The Findhorn populace have a whole lexicon of their own terms for almost everything!), and holds hands to sense each other’s energies. We also agreed to keep any conversations we had with each other confidential, in the same sense as it’s done at my hospital. The next matter was the notion of what they call the “I-statement”. This is where we always say things only as they relate to ourselves; this makes perfect sense I thought, but later on I was to learn it wasn’t quite that simple. I was sharing a bedroom at the Cluny campus, the Caddys’ old hotel, with a short and cubbish Danish man called Gio. He immediately nicknamed me “the Big Bald Buddha” which I found completely inoffensive and quite amusing. At first I balked at the fact that there were no locks on the doors to the dormitories; I had to leave my camera and travelers’ cheques in there and I’d never done that in any hotel and not locked the door! But then I realized that this is a cipher of life in Findhorn: trusting others, an almost forgotten concept in today’s conventional society, has to be relearned at Findhorn and relearned fast, to our benefit. All buildings in Findhorn have a room known as a “Sanctuary”, a silent and comfortable room full of chairs and cushions that used for meditation, healing, singing and other intense spiritual functions. Meditation is a big part of life at the Community and the standard sessions were half an hour at 6AM, at breaktimes between work details and in the evening. Unlike Zen and other forms of meditation there is no actual instruction in the practice. We just “Sit quietly and be still” as Eileen Caddy used to say. Along with the meditation was the early morning choir known as “Taize Singing” in which the Findhorn folk would chant hymns, popular spiritual harmonies and Shamanic earthy music. I attended one of these events and it did feel magical. I spent 4 of the 7 mornings during Experience Week working. Yes, it was definitely a working holiday. We all sat in a circle and picked a card after meditating with our “Work Angels” and I picked out “Homecare”. This is what the Findhorners call housework and cleaning. This was one of the nicest things about the Community because I’m used to my hospital where domestics are subjected to humiliation and degradation. At Findhorn the “Homecare Haven” occupies a huge room on the first floor and instead of lowly uniforms the cleaners wear butterfly badges. I spent the morning hoovering the carpets and washing out the bathrooms. The Cluny campus, just like the Ecovillage, is spotless and beautiful. In the evenings I went to classes teaching various kinds of dancing, Biodanza and Four-Rhythms, and we played spiritual awakening games that involved such strange activities as pretending to be a baby being born and a certain animal, linking arms as if we were a sea snake and rippling and undulating; I had an amazing feeling, if you’ll excuse the cliché, of being one with everybody else in the snake. One afternoon we took a trip into the foothills a few miles from the Community and strolled round a beauty-spot called Randolph’s Leap. This was called a “nature-sharing” session. We were encouraged to be silent and keep to ourselves in this remote river valley. It was sublime, but I didn’t see any of the Elves, Pixies and even freshwater Mermaids that are wont to live there. I speak without sarcasm because I know many very serious people who claim to have encountered these very creatures. We also had a go at tree-hugging, another stereotypical hippie pursuit. I felt great fondness for the ancient oak and fir trees in the forest, but didn’t experience any particularly powerful resonance as I embraced and kissed their moss-covered, knarled bark. The Findhorn people are very much the kind of folk I like and identify with: gentle, deep-thinking people who talk to you even if they don’t know you, watch Teletubbies even if they’re 35 and who weep at the sight of a particularly lovely sunset. But there is also something very dysfunctional about them and I learned a lot about the New Age and how it fits in with the overall big Conspiracy during my week there.

As I said, Fritz Springmeier alludes to the Findhorn Community briefly in his book. I also met a man in an Inverness pub during my stay there who warned me not to let them “convert” me to anything. I think both he and Springmeier are going bit too far. Generally I’d say that Findhorn and its people are fairly harmless. Also there’s no evidence that I can find to directly link the Community to the New Age conspiracy in general, which I’ll describe in a moment; but there were elements of their personalities and culture which aid the New World Order agenda. One thing that struck me was that although they are very spiritual and that the central purpose of Findhorn is spiritual growth, that despite their use of wind turbines and organic food they’re very impractical people. I’m just like them in terms of my interest in the spiritual side of life, but they differ from me in that they will not consider the Conspiratorial areas that run alongside my spiritual research. I went into their bookshop in the Park and was amazed and very dismayed to find that there were no titles by David Icke, not even his “fluffy bunny” earlier books. They’re not the kind of people I felt I could discuss the 9/11 Conspiracy with, even though they’re very anti-war. I couldn’t raise the subject of GM crops and Monsanto even though they’re committed to organic food and farming. Every watt of electrical power they use comes from their wind turbines, but would they be interested in my research on the Free Energy Conspiracy? No. I was sitting at a table where two of my co-Experience Week-ers, an American couple, were discussing the recent US Presidential Election in which George W Bush had defeated John Kerry and they said: “It’s a great shame Kerry didn’t win. That election was so important!” I was dumbfounded at their naivete, especially since in other ways they were such a wise and insightful couple. I wanted to tell them that it didn’t matter a fiddler’s toss who won or lost that election because both candidates were in the Skull and Bones Society and members of the Bilderberg Group, but something held me back. I remember during our otherwise lovely afternoon at the Cullerne Gardens we were doing the silent attuning before work and were interrupted by the roar of a plane taking off from neighbouring RAF Kinloss airbase. After we finished the attuning Ian’s face took on a rhapsodic smile and he said: “Wasn’t it wonderful to listen to the sounds of nature! The birds, the wind in the trees… and, yes, the aircraft too; that’s a sound of nature as well.” I felt like laughing bitterly. The sound of a Nimrod revving up its jets for a reconnaissance tour over Afghanistan to hunt down a dead man with a beard is not my idea of a natural sound! This is the problem with Findhorn: they are spiritual, but spiritual in a very ungrounded and isolated way. I’ve seen a lot of this in the New Age. In a way it’s a reaction to Conformist society which is too grounded and spiritually atrophied; like so much else the solution to a problem tabled is often an attempt to become its opposite, a “cancelling out” exercise, rather than attempt to find a balance and negate the excess while preserving the positive elements of the situation. I’ve written before about how I think this is why Feminism is portrayed as the answer to Male Chauvinism, and black extremism is the answer to white extremism etc etc etc. This is a dangerous fallacy. The danger can be seen in the obsessive escapism of Findhorn. To use the example from the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism: they’ve found their Yin, but have cut off their Yang completely while with the rest of us it’s the opposite. We need our Yang as much as our Yin, without it we lose the ability to think rationally and take practical action to apply our spiritual lessons to the world we see and live in. One of my favourite comedy series on TV is Red Dwarf. (http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/news/index.cfm) This show is not only very funny, it explores many philosophical concepts. There’s one episode called Demons and Angels in which the show’s protagonists come across two copies of their own spacecraft; one has only Yang elements of the original and the other has only Yin elements. The Yin ship which they call “Highs” is a kind of spacefaring monastery in which the crew spend all day reading, acting out plays and reading poetry, however they are incapable of doing anything else. The Yang ship, the “Lows” are very practical indeed! They're brutal sadistic pirates who torture and try to murder the characters from the original ship. The “Lows” are clearly similar to the Conformist Illuminati-occupied world, although even more extreme; and the “Highs” are like Findhorn, or what Findhorn could be considered as in its most extreme form.

As part of the Experience Week activities we had a meeting… sorry, sharing with a lady called Mari Hollander who was the current director of the Community’s management body at the time, the Findhorn Foundation. I was surprised and disappointed to learn that despite its very alternative everyday activities the Findhorn Foundation is a fairly conventionally-run business. It is a charitable trust governed by a board of trustees including an aristocrat, Lady Diana Whitmore, and somebody with an OBE, decorated by the Queen! The 3000 plus residents are actually no more than employees, every bit as much as I am at the hospital. I had hoped and even assumed that Findhorn was some kind of workers’ cooperative (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/workers-cooperatives.html), but it is not. I asked Mari about this and she replied that the central goal of Findhorn was to nurture that “vital spark” in every person and that more down-to-Earth missions were not their department. This is frankly a complete admission of all the suspicions I’ve laid out here.

It was a long time ago, back in the 1950’s and early 60’s, that governments turned their beady eyes onto the emerging New Age movements. They commissioned the Tavistock Institute, Rand and Brookings Reporters and other psychological think-tanks to give them an assessment on how such a social phenomenon could be suppressed and the people brought back into mainstream churches, which they controlled of course. The verdict was: They couldn’t be. The New Age was unstoppable and would eventually equal, if not surpass, conventional religious beliefs. The only solution for the governments was to get inside it and transform it into something amenable to their control systems. This was the origin of organizations like the Lucis Trust, as Terry Boardman discusses here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/11/alternative-view-3-part-4.html . It involves such slippery individuals as George Thurman, Alice Bailey and Adreija Puharich. Puharich is particularly interesting because he brought to the living rooms of billions across the world, one of the most famous names in the New Age: Uri Geller. I’m afraid I’ve yet to see Geller perform a feat that any half-decent stage conjurer could do by slight-of-hand and illusion; prove me wrong on that one if you can! Yet Geller became synonymous with belief in the Paranormal for millions across the world. Puharich has an interesting background: He was an US Army officer at Fort Dettrick, headquarters of America’s biowarfare programme and later moved on to… Intelligence operations, as you might have already guessed! There are many similarities between Findhorn and another New Age bastion: The Brahma Kumaris Global Retreat Centres; see: http://www.bkwsu.org/ . This organization began in India about 80 years ago, but has its international headquarters at a converted stately home in Nunham Courtney, Oxfordshire; just a very short distance from where I live. I went through a phase in the 1990’s when I was very keen on their work and teachings and used to attend every event I could at the centre. Their Harcourt House headquarters was like Cluny, immaculately clean and exquisitely decorated and ordered. The staff all wore pure white suits and glided around the place like Tolkienian Elves, whispering sweetly to each other and the guests. This didn’t stop them discussing their mortgages and stocks and shares, as I overheard two of them doing in the canteen one day! I was very disillusioned that they sounded so conventional when “off-camera”. The lectures, group work and meetings were just like the ones at Findhorn, all love and light, films of dolphins, ding-a-ling music, to the point of it being really rather treacly. I think that even before I became Conspiratorially-aware I could sense that something was wrong. For instance, the courses there were very cheap and many were totally gratis. The house and massive garden must have cost a fortune to maintain, so the same question I asked of the Jehovah's Witnesses I asked of Brahma Kumaris: Where's their money coming from? See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/02/jehovahs-witnesses-and-mod.html . This intuitive splinter-in-the-mind worked its way in deeper when the people at the centre proudly boasted of their affiliations to the United Nations and the Lucis Trust. It’s no shock to see that the Findhorn website also publicizes its UN links. It was almost predictable that when I read Eileen Caddy’s obituary by the musician Mike Scott in December 2006’s Caduceus it gave the Findhorn founder her full title: Eileen Caddy MBE. Yes, she has been knighted by Her Reptileness in London (Although Eileen herself didn’t get her medal face-to-face; the Queen's Lord Lieutenant in Scotland delivered it to her). This is not to say that Eileen Caddy is a knowing manipulator or is involved directly with the Illuminati; in fact if you read her quotes there is some remarkable sweetness and wisdom there. She may very well be the gentle and helpful lady she appears to be. It’s just that her organization may well be assisting a government plan to actually misdirect and subvert the natural spirituality in all of us.

My Experience Week ended on a stressful and disturbing note. I was describing my overall impressions of my stay at Findhorn to the group in our last sharing and I used an idiomatic catchphrase like “…you know” or “It’s good for you”; suddenly Mie interrupted: “Ben, could you say ‘I’ please?” I was annoyed at being broken in my stride and said: “It’s just an expression”. “Nevertheless I would like to hear you say ‘I’.” said Mie. I complied and wished to this day I hadn’t. At least I gave them a piece of my mind in the feedback form; I said that: “Sometimes I felt that there was too much direction over language. I know we agreed to make I-statements, but I didn’t realize you meant it so literally.” There definitely is a tight control over language there; in fact I look back and can see the signs of thier own form of Political Correctness and George Orwell’s Newspeak. Control of language is essential to despotic regimes because by our speech runs our thought. Control a man’s tongue and you have his mind! The last person to speak in that session was a Portuguese lady called Carla (Not her real name). She was probably the person I’d become closest to of all the twelve I’d shared the long Findhorn Experience Week with. We had had some wonderful conversations and there was a very manifest amount of mutual attraction between us. Carla immediately started weeping profusely and told us a terrible story: Although she was from Portugal she was living in Brussels, Belgium. Her house was built on an energy vortex where a number of Leylines converge. This is a subject I don’t write very much about, but it is real and I do take it very seriously. Carla had chosen the house deliberately because of this and was carrying out Magickal rituals in her front room to pour positive healing energy into the Earth’s aetheric body. Recently she’d been brutally harassed by a very intimidating group of people. Her English became broken because she was so distraught, but there was no doubt that the people harassing her were Black Occultists trying to stop her Earth healing work. At one point she used the French word Macon, “Mason”! She said that she came home once to find “evil masks” left lying around her home. She started relating more information, but breaking down while speaking; her meaning was lost through her tears. We all tried to comfort her, but the others all had that New Age naivite, as I’d said and didn't really understand what was wrong. Ian and Mie just sat and watched, completely impassive. Later on, before we left, I tried to discuss it with her again, but she wasn’t willing; as if she regretted her outburst. Back home I emailed her. I wanted to keep in touch with her for personal reasons too, but I also asked her (very cryptically; you never know who’s reading your emails!) that she could trust me to help her with her problem at her house if she wanted and if she wanted to talk about it she should. She never replied and I’ve never heard from her since.

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-border-agency-not-just-borders.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/back-umbrella-day.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/3-ufo-stories-in-3-days.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/02/irish-general-election.html

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And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/hpanwo-tv-guide-to-your-census-form.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/oxford-snob-walls.html