BUFORA Conference 2012

 

 

Last Friday night, just before 11pm, a cluster of about 20 bright lights were seen crossing the sky over Great Britain and Ireland. In Scotland a number of people called the police thinking that they were witnessing a plane crash; luckily they weren't. The real cause of the fireballs was either meteorites or pieces of "space junk", an old satellite or spacecraft, burning up when they entered the Earth's atmosphere at very high cosmic speeds. If the objects survived their fall to the Earth's surface intact then they've probably fallen into the North Sea. It's likely that this spectacle might generate a few UFO reports too. If you want to make a UFO report for the first time, with no experience of the subject, and you go to Google and put in "UFO", one of the first hits you'll get is the website of BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association, see: http://www.bufora.org.uk/content/ For a long time now, I've been a believer in synchronicity and used the word "coincidence" less and less to explain the way separate events can be very apt in their timing. You see, the day after this celestial fireworks display, the BUFORA Conference began and I attended.

 

As regular HPANWO-readers will know, I'm financially much worse off than I used to be; I've not been able to do my usual tour of the conspiracy/paranormal conference circuit this year, however I remain in good spirits. Compared to others who have shared my fate, like Tony Farrell and Kevin Annett (See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/ben-emlyn-jones-live-at-ldidg.html), I've been very fortunate. I have a roof over my head and food on my table; what's more I've managed to break my addiction to materialism and consumerism that we're all conditioned to get hooked on, and I've realized that there's a spiritual dimension to life that you can't get sacked from! I also believe that the universe helps you along if you can keep a positive frame of mind, and as "luck" would have it several conferences have been organized this year that are cheap and easy to get too, so I've been able to join the other delegates there. One of these was the BUFORA Conference which took place in London; London is linked to Oxford by a very good coach service that runs almost 24-7. I was also offered accommodation at the home of two friends of mine from the Kent Freedom Movement who live in Shepherds Bush, see: http://kentfreedommovement.ning.com/. The venue was at the Holiday Inn near Kings Cross Station, a half-hour ride on the London Underground. The conference room was in the basement and made up for in comfort what it lacked in daylight. There were the usual book stalls in the foyer and a neat and clean auditorium. Considering that the subject of conversation included orbs, the patterns on the carpet were remarkably appropriate; "it's almost as if they knew we were going to be here" said one of the speakers. See the photoes below:

 

 

 

 

 

The hotel itself is modern and very grand, a bit too grand perhaps. There was nowhere we could purchase refreshments over the counter and when I asked if there was somewhere I could buy a cup of tea the receptionist said: "Go and sit in the bar and I'll send the waiter in to serve you." I did so and about five minutes later a very dapper man in a suit came in and said: "What would you like, Sir?" This 5-star service arrangement is all well and good if you enjoy that kind of thing, but when you've got a 15 minute break between speakers you just long to be able to just flip somebody 50 pence and have them hand you over a mug of tea straight away. I apologized to the waiter and told him I didn't have time. Then I did what I should have done to begin with: nipped out of the hotel to the greasy spoon across the road. This became the generally-accepted social gathering place for many of the delegates over the weekend.

 

The three letters "UFO" are a very good root for acronyms because they have two vowels with a consonant in the middle, hence the ease with which names like MUFON, BUFOG, CUFOS etc roll off the tongue. BUFORA is another, although it was originally BUFOA, the British UFO Association; the R for "research" was added in 1964 when the original group merged with another. The tall and learned-looking founder-president Lionel Beer (BUFORA link) opened the conference with a brief history of the organization. It began in September 1962 at a meeting in Kensington Central Library; this was exactly 50 years ago, so this one was a very special anniversary conference: the half-centenary, as you can see in the banner (Thanks to Matt Lyons, the BUFORA chairman for allowing HPANWO to illustrate this article with these official graphics). Their first Chairman was Nick Stephenson whose photo is below. As another speaker quipped: "It's 65 years since 1947 so modern UFOlogy is at a pensionable age." BUFORA immediately recruited a network of investigators and got stuck in to all the biggest and most promising British cases, the "Warminster Thing", the Lakenheath Incident, the famous 1979 House of Lords UFO debate and many others. BUFORA has a reputation for being a "pure" UFOlogical group, an aspect which I'll expand on more later, but it's had its fair share of sinister and underhand attention over the years, including an attempted infiltration by the Church of Scientology and the Aetherius Society. The latter are bat-excrement crazy, but pretty harmless; however the former are well-known to have a dark and violent side to them. When Lionel received threats he was understandably worried. In the early years he also had to contend with the rise of the far right and their own involvement with UFO's. BUFORA members were harassed by the sinister and mysterious people calling themselves "APEN- the Aerial Phenomenon Enquiry Network". This is believed by many to be a cover-organization for the National Front or one of the other BNP-like parties that were popular at the time. The Government were investigating those parties at the time and people showed up at BUFORA meetings whom Lionel swears were MI5 or Special Branch. I'm not sure, but I suspect that APEN was actually run by the Government itself, however they'd be foolish to let every department of MI5 and Special Branch in on that secret so I don't doubt that real agents from those outfits did attend Lionel's meetings as he said they did. I met a man from Germany at the conference who told me that UFOlogy is very unpopular in his native country because it has connotations with Neo-Nazism via its inevitable overlap with the conspiracy theory community. The German author Jan van Helsing is specifically named as a bridge between the two milieux. I've read one of van Helsing's books, paradoxically advertised under the title Don't Touch this Book!, and I could find nothing racist or fascist in it, but I do understand why the Germans are very sensitive about this subject because of their own tragic history. I myself am a part of this overlap, but I can honestly say that there are far fewer people in the conspiratorial world with racist and far rightist political views than most people think; and nothing justifies the hysterical and hateful abuse that David Icke has suffered at the hands of the "anti-fascist" movement, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2ypYcZ7qfw If anybody dares to accuse me of being a Neo-Nazi then the kindest thing I can say to them is... leave my vicinity... or words to that effect!

 

BUFORA also found itself hurled into Cold War politics, which, sadly, few people managed to escape in the 60's and 70's. A staffer from the Soviet Embassy joined and although Lionel approved his membership it lost the organization a part of its security certificate. More infiltrators turned up at meetings and asked political questions. Lionel thinks that these people were testing BUFORA to see where its political loyalties lay. He was also tested to see if he would swallow disinformation. Luckily the Association has a policy of being non-political which was a wise move in those days; and it still is, up to a point. BUFORA has long been affiliated with the magazine Flying Saucer Review, and since Gordon Creighton sadly went, as Lionel puts it, "to that great saucer in the sky" BUFORA has been given the substantial research archives of that oldest of UFO journals. Lionel has had his house raided by the police, has been arrested for photographing Bentwaters Base (This was before the Rendlesham Forest Incident), sat for five hours in the House of Lords public gallery, been thrown out of Morely College and had L Ron Hubbard threaten to drown him in the sea! The life of a UFO investigator is not without its hazards.
 

 

The next speaker was Heather Dixon (BUFORA link) She spoke clearly and professionally during her hour on stage, obviously she has experience of doing lectures. She is striking in appearance, disarmingly pretty and smartly-dressed with a head of well-groomed, lush blonde hair. She began by lamenting about how much of the information available to UFOlogists nowadays is false and misleading; I agree completely with that and have said as much myself, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/fake-alien-videos.html She then went on to explain how it is that people can make mistakes about what they see in the sky, how they might see something that they don't recognize and assume wrongly that it's inexplicable. Several times during her lecture she repeated: "More than 98% of all reported sightings have a mundane explanation" and this was a point reiterated by several other speakers. The list of things that can confuse the witness is enormous; 60% of reports can be explained as Chinese lanterns. I'm ashamed to say that I was taken in by them too; once but never again! There are other things such as laser light shining into the sky; although I think they've been banned because they can dazzle aircraft pilots and could even cause a plane crash. Astronomical objects are major culprits, like the planet Venus. I find it hard to believe that large numbers of people could be fooled that way, especially professional observers like pilots and policemen, but Heather says these do account for a large proportion of the reports received. She presented statistics of sightings and their analysis in the same way other speakers did. The International Space Station, birds, kites, balloons and satellites in space also cause people to pick up the phone and call. She also echoes Mark Pilkington, Nick Cook and others by claiming that the Government is quite pleased when people think they've seen spacecraft from another planet when they accidentally intrude on a top secret test of some new spy-plane. This may true in some cases, but it in no way accounts for the entire UFO phenomenon. And I also suspect that some kind of double-bluff may be in operation; the Government could be using aviation projects to launder their secret UFO research programmes, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/roswell-no-aliens-just-sound-waves.html She then went on to discuss what she calls "high strangeness". This is of course the title of a famous book by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, but Heather uses the term to mean close encounters and the abduction phenomenon. She made a lot of the same points Richard Wiseman does in his book Paranormality, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/paranormality-by-prof-richard-wiseman.html: hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of mind, sleep paralysis etc. During the Question and Answer session at the end I asked Heather: "Leaving aside the whole UFO subject and just concentrating on the 'high strangeness', can the explanations you've just given account for every single case you've ever investigated?" To her credit, Heather immediately replied: "No." She then told me about a man she knows in Northumberland whom she gives the pseudonym "Steve Robinson". She thinks he could be experiencing real alien contact. I enjoyed listening to Heather's address and she's quite right to make people aware that it's essential to eliminate all mundane explanations for UFO sightings before postulating the possibility of ET involvement, but I would have liked to have heard more about "Steve Robinson" and any other real cases she'd encountered. She only had a limited time to speak, I know, but I hope she'll maybe do a new speech next time where she squeezes the explicables down to 20 or 30 minutes and leaves the rest for the real ET research she's done. I'd make a similar observation about two other speakers, Jenny Randles and Vicente Juan Ballester-Olmos (See: http://www.nicap.org/bios/ballester-olmos.htm) Vicente Juan's statistics showed that on one occasion the number of unexplained sightings rose from its comfortable average of 2 or 5% to 40%; but he blames that on less cases being examined; and "unexplained" being the default category for a case not yet investigated. However, bear in mind that investigators have different viewpoints. One of the cases he quoted as "solved" was the Solway Firth Spaceman; however I think that there is need for a second opinion on his diagnosis, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/solway-firth-spaceman.html

 

Heather Dixon supports the policy BUFORA have towards the use of hypnosis to retrieve information from a witness. They're against it. She says hypnosis simply fuels and solidifies fantasy and can construct false memories. This is highly disputed and there are many other groups who endorse the use of hypnosis and rebut the misgivings Heather described. I recently interviewed Mary Rodwell on HPANWO Radio, see from 0.46.40: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-11-podcast-mary-rodwell.html. As she details in the interview, she think hypnosis is a good method of recovering lost recollections and explains why she refutes the theory that it generates falsified memory. The same goes for AMMACH, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/ammach-conference-2012.html.

 

Jenny Randles (See: http://www.ufoevidence.org/researchers/detail40.htm) is a living legend in the UFO community. She is one of the "Four Horsewomen" of Rendlesham Forest (Another of the Four, Dot Street, was a delegate at the conference. Brenda Butler was not there and Georgina Bruni has sadly passed away) If it hadn't been for those four eminent ladies the Rendlesham Forest Incident would never have become what it is today, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/rendlesham-forest-incident-30th.html It's unlikely anybody would have even heard about it. At best it would have emerged rather like the Roswell Incident did: the aging witnesses coming forward 30 or so years later, round about today, with wild stories but no documents, no photoes, no forensics, nothing. She's a former chief investigator with BUFORA. Jenny could not travel to the venue personally, so through the wonders of technology she spoke from her home in North Wales via a live Skype link (A lot of UFO enthusiasts seem to live in North Wales for some reason). Like several of the other speakers she once again reminded us that over 95% of all reported sightings are explicable in mundane terms, what she called "IFO's- Identified Flying Objects"; it began to sound a bit like a mantra to me. She thinks it's important to focus on IFO's for the same reason Heather Dixon does, however I once again found myself wondering if they're focusing on that a bit too much. Jenny plans to write a book on IFO's... a book!? Normally it's only Skeptics who write books like that (I analyze exactly what I mean by "Skeptics" as opposed to "sceptics" in this episode of HPANWO Radio, from 1.07.23: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/programme-5-podcast-skeptics.html) But Jenny is not a Skeptic, she has not completely rejected the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Perhaps we could call her and people like her an "IFOlogist". As a writer myself I know how much effort is required to write a book; it means giving up a year or more of your life to write, rewrite, revise, edit, submit, negotiate with publishers etc. Jenny is taking the line Heather did, the perceived necessity of constantly looking over your shoulder, to an even greater degree. Another observation Jenny made was that when people experience a UFO sighting, like in the case of the meteor shower the night before, you'll often find that they embellish the details of the sighting. For example if they see a few balls of fire trailing across the sky they'll then later on claim that they saw a structured craft with lights running along it, or that they heard a buzzing alien-like sound coming from it etc. This may sometimes be the case, but there are other incidents which indicate the exact opposite. The strange case of the "Avebury Carlos" is one. 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, hippies and pagans. The intention was to fool them and therefore show them up for being dupes. People did indeed report a UFO, but in a way the plan backfired because they reported pretty much what they saw. There were none of the embellishments and exaggerations that the hoaxers were banking on. It showed that even the so-called “most gullible members of society” have turned out to be much better witnesses than previously thought. Jenny Randles has recently been a focus of controversy because of her views on one of the most significant events in British UFOlogical history, the Berwyn Mountains Incident of 1974, the "Welsh Roswell" (This is an inaccurate nickname, in my view, because it does not involve a crash-retrieval. See here for my review of the book on the subject UFO Down by Andy Roberts: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/ufo-down-by-andy-roberts.html) This case has been massively played down by the mainstream media with facetious newspaper reports like this one: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3380291/The-RosWelsh-incident.html This article is not only making a mockery of the entire event in true tabloid style, with its comic-book illustration and the clumsy, Murdochian forced pun in the title; it contains errors that could so easily have been avoided that I can only conclude that they were "deliberately not avoided"; for example, the police searched the wrong mountain! However the dismissal of the magnitude of the Berwyn Mountains case comes from inside the UFO community too. To this day many UFOlogists maintain that this was the coinciding of an earthquake and bolide meteor, together with the "earthlights" phenomenon written about by Paul Devereux. Unfortunately Jenny is one of them; in fact she even claims to have seen an earthlight herself during a field trip to the Berwyn range. A good friend of mine is Richard Wright, who reviewed the 2011 BUFORA Conference for UFO Matrix magazine. He is both a UFO journalist and a geologist. He told me that Jenny must have seen something else that could not be an earthlight. The only way rocks can produce light is through friction, like rubbing two bits of flint together to produce a spark. What's more a massive amount of work has been done by many UFOlogists, especially Scott Felton and Richard D Hall, that proves that no other event in our sights right now deserves further study more than the Berwyn Mountains Incident. Richard has produced a feature-length documentary on the subject which I recommend, see: http://www.richplanet.net/dvd30.php In less than two years it will be the 40th anniversary; are we going to let it go past just shrugging it off as earthquakes and earthlights? Another conference speaker, Dave Newton (See BUFORA link) disappointed me by also repeating this line during his address on Sunday. There have been a few TV and radio reports about Berwyn like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNR2M0eYsEQ It features a number of UFOlogists being interviewed, however among the out-takes you should find Scott Felton as well. Why was his part not broadcast? A TV expert would say: "We had to cut it down to 45 minutes and simply didn't have room for him", but the way the other individuals, like Jenny, are given so much air time indicates that it is the nature of what was said that decided what this film's editors chose to broadcast, and what to exclude. This means that this programme is presenting Berwyn in a particular light. If therefore we have some kind of media cover-up in operation and this film is a piece of its propaganda then Jenny Randles is collaborating with it, whether she knows it or not. That would be a great shame given her vital contribution to UFO truth in the past.

 

During our Saturday lunch break I was walking though the merchandise area when I saw an elderly man wearing a neatly-pressed suit. He looked well built and his head was shaved, though he had a sparse beard, like a retired bouncer; but he also had an intensely jolly smile and bright eyes that looked youthful and full of joie-de-vivre. I went up and spoke to him. He had a calm, mellow and intelligent voice. It wasn't long before I recognized him as the Revd Lionel Fanthorpe (See: http://www.lionel-fanthorpe.com/) He has one of the most impressive CV's you could ever wish to see, in fact it's easier to think of something he hasn't done than something he has. He's a school teacher, a vicar, a motorbike expert, a journalist, a martial arts expert, a weightlifter, a wrestler, he's a member of MENSA, the society for people with high IQ's, and on top of all that he is president of ASSAP (See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/assap-seriously-strange-conference.html) I first heard of him many years ago when he presented the brilliant programme Fortean TV, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tec6O83LHWM Now aged 77 he's still going strong and has lost none of his charisma; in fact I've often described him as Britain's answer to Robert Anton Wilson. He did a presentation entitled Behind all Anomalous Reports. He made a list of all possible things UFO's are, and aliens from space was just one of them; the list was similar to what you'll find in Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel's AD book, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/exopolitics-leeds-2011.html 1: ET's, 2: interdimensional objects, 3: time travellers 4: ghosts 5: angels and demons 6: denizens of Atlantis or another unknown prehistoric Earth civilization; I'm sure we can think of more. There are two other possibilities that spring to my mind, 7: All of the above, 8: None of the above; something nobody has yet thought of! His speech was light-hearted yet informative, and I was enthralled by his story about how a man experienced an interdimensional slip while in the public toilets outside Norwich Cathedral! Another entertaining performance took place at the end of the Conference on Sunday and was carried out by my old friend Ross Hemsworth (See: http://www.rosshemsworth.com/) whom I was delighted to see again. Ross organized one of the best conferences I've ever been to in Glastonbury in 2008; unfortunately it was just a one-off, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/now-thats-weird-conference-2008.html In his lecture he describes a strange encounter he had with a telepathic being in Rendlesham Forest. The photo is copyrighted and so I can't post it, but the being appears as a smoky or misty shape above Ross' head. It has a humanoid face and what looks like huge ears or horns coming out of the side of its head. I hear that Ross and Lionel Fanthorpe are going to do a TV show together soon; I have a feeling those two will make a good double act. John Hanson (See: http://hauntedskies.blogspot.co.uk/) also gave a fascinating speech about his experiences in Rendlesham Forest, and he even brought with him some of the mysterious stones that appeared out of thin air and dropped to the ground in the forest. These are what are known as "apports", solid objects that seem to manifest out of nowhere, usually during Spiritualist seances. John allowed us to handle the stones and they looked and felt like ordinary stones to me, but John, like Ross, has had some really weird experiences in those woods and is willing to talk about them. He's also engaged in a monumental project to construct an encyclopaedia of Britain's UFO's. As you can see in the link above; it is going to run to many volumes.

 

The history of UFO's and their impact on human society is a theme picked up by several of the speakers John Spencer (See: http://www.amazon.co.uk/UFO-Encyclopedia-John-Spencer/dp/0747234949/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348524444&sr=1-1) made a speech entitled "A History of UFO's" in which he described how the UFO phenomenon has evolved alongside human society, set against the backdrops of World War II, the Cold War and the advent of the Space Age. It is clear that in fact UFO and alien encounters have not changed at all; it is our attitude towards them that has changed and it's changed because our world has changed. This leads to the question that often gets knocked back with curious frowns: Why do we call them "extraterrestrial"? The answer will often be seen as obvious: "Because they come from outer space of course!" But do they? How do we know that? Dave Newton and several other speakers echoed the thoughts of some other people I know, like Brian Allan, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-10-podcast-brian-allan.html The classic Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is the one which states that UFO's and aliens are flesh and blood creatures from some unknown Earth-like planet a long way out in space, which we could see with a telescope if we looked hard enough, and that they fly here in nuts and bolts spacecraft that are simply more sophisticated versions of our own rockets; this is really an assumption. There's little hard evidence that indicates that that is the case. If they're not little green men from Mars then what are they? I refer you to Lionel Fanthorpe's list.

 

Tony Eccles (See: http://anthonyeccles.wordpress.com/author/mistereetony/) has discovered that there are many similarities between alien encounters and religion, like Shamanism. This is a point not lost on people like Rick Strassman and Graham Hancock (See HPANWO Links column). Contactees have a lot in common with Spiritualist mediums and indigenous shamans of the Amazon who take psychoactive drugs to commune with their gods. Despite this Tony doesn't think that UFO's are a religion. There is no "UFO God" as such (although Steven Greer thinks there is, and it's him!). On the question of what UFO's are Clas Svahn (See: http://www.ufo.se/) has been studying a particular type of UFO: "ghost rockets". These date back to the 1930's and the first ever recorded aerial interception was deployed by the Swedish Army Air Corps in 1931 to try and examine them (Good 2009). They continue to be reported to this day. Unlike most UFO's these do bear a moderate resemblance to man-made aircraft or projectiles; they tend to be streamlined and have wings, fins and propulsion nozzles. They're also unique in being almost exclusively confined to a specific region of the world: Scandinavia. They often end their flights by dropping into lakes and Clas has even organized a diving expedition to one of the lakes where a ghost rocket has been reported to have landed. So far they haven't found anything, but the lake bed is covered in thick, deep mud so they'll need to go back with better scanning equipment. I hope he'll succeed because he's been chasing these stories since he was 16 years old. Geoff Falla (See: BUFORA link) has studied incidents in which people experience close encounters while driving along in their cars. These often start with the vehicle suddenly malfunctioning; the engine stops, the electrics cut out, the radio experiences interference etc. This is a very common feature of UFO incidents on the road and was what befell Richard Dreyfus' character in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The director of that movie, Stephen Spielberg, approached real UFOlogists to act as consultants. Geoff has gathered some interesting statistics that seem to indicate that certain regions of the globe are more afflicted by these kinds of events than others, and it's all to do with latitude and longitude.

 

Richard Conway (See BUFORA link) Did a presentation together with his father Stan Conway (Not billed) that was definitely one of my favourites of the Conference. Richard is the science adviser of BUFORA and shares a passionate interest of mine: Free Energy. I got the impression from the blurb that he was going to debunk the concept, but in fact he didn't. He is dubious only about those people who claim to have received the knowledge to build advanced scientific technology from "alien epiphanies". He met a lady in Turkey who built a lightweight ceramic radio-shield after an extraterrestrial being told her how to. I don't think it's prudent to dismiss the notion that people can be inspired this way; after all Tony Eccles showed us that ET contact experiences are very similar to other kinds of mystical states of mind; and that it's a well-known fact that some great marvels have been achieved through them. Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, was encouraged in his quest by visions and insights he gained on LSD trips. I hope Richard and Tony compared notes afterwards. Richard also takes seriously the issue of "Cold Fusion" that I myself have investigated, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/martin-fleischmann-dies.html and: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/freikraft.html and: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/cold-fusion-still-ongoing.html . Stan Conway gave an energetic talk about the progress of Zero Point Energy technology. Amazingly NASA have launched a serious project to research this and as you'll see in the links above, so has Dr Robert Duncan of the University of Minnesota. But as I say in those linked articles, these projects up till now have been very abortive. For some reason they start very well, but grind to a halt. Rumour has it that some "rich philanthropists" get involved who quietly and covertly scuttle the ship when nobody's looking. For this reason I'll be watching these new projects very carefully to see what happens. Richard talked about people he refers to as "tinkerers", these are laymen with an interest in science who carry out scientific work as a hobby. Among these he includes John Hutchison, John Searl, Edward Leedskalnin and Viktor Schauberger. He says that these people are often just "eccentrics" who have misled themselves into thinking they've made a scientific breakthrough, and when properly-trained scientists investigate they find out that there's nothing in them. However I've studied these individuals myself and I take them far more seriously (See for example: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/alternative-view-ii-part-4.html and: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/who-is-wilbert-smith.html) Most of these "tinkerers" come from the USA, and this is a country with a great tradition of garden shed, amateur inventors; people like Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers. People laughed at them once, but, as the Frank Sinatra song goes, who has the last laugh now?

 

 

I'm very glad I went to the BUFORA 2012 50th Anniversary Conference. I met some lovely people, caught up with some old friends and made some new ones. I had some great conversations with Matt Lyons, the chairman, the German man I mentioned and another man called Bill. I also met up with some old buddies, like Colin and Dave from Probe, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/uk-probe-conference-2010.html I also saw Mike Rutter whom I interviewed at a recent Probe conference, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbKiDPHpvbU Many thanks to all the organizers and speakers for their hard work in putting together this conference and for giving us this information on stage. I must confess it was not what I expected. I said at the beginning of this report that BUFORA was "pure"; I meant that it is purely for the scientific study of the phenomenon and doesn't embrace any of the conspiracy theories related to the subject. The Exopolitics movement, on the other hand, takes a diametrically opposed position on UFO's. For them, UFO science has already done its job and generated a conclusion: UFO's exist; now what do we do about that? One thing's for certain if you're campaigning for Disclosure: There is, by definition, a conspiracy involved. My own opinion, as regular HPANWO-readers know, is that the Exopolitics movement is correct. This doesn't mean that UFOlogy has no further purpose; it does. Just because I'm certain that UFO's exist doesn't mean that the scientific investigation of them should stop; on the contrary, it is an even more urgent mission now. Therefore there is still a role for organizations like BUFORA. My concern is that the denial that a conspiracy exists could lead to them easily falling foul of one, and, as I've detailed above, the Berwyn Mountains case could well be the first tripwire. Nick Pope defines Exopolitics as the "militant wing" of UFOlogy; I define it as a group of UFOlogists who have simply made up their minds.

 

If I met somebody right now with an emerging interest in UFO's who was thinking of going to a BUFORA event or joining BUFORA I would definitely say: "go ahead", however I would also advise them to also look into the other side of the story; go to Exopolitics events too, read UFO conspiratorial books. I know several people who feel very disillusioned by BUFORA; some have said so publicly like Richard D Hall and Simon Parkes. My own experience along with this conference comes from my submission of two sightings reports, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/my-ufo-sighting-281208.html I have no serious criticism of how they handled my reports other than it is slightly tinged with the "looking back over their shoulder" tendency that I went into above. The email I received in reply to my Chinese lantern sighting was longer than the one about the December 2008 sighting, even though the one in 2008 was far harder to explain. I'd be more interested in that one than the Chinese lanterns and want to write more about it! I get the feeling that BUFORA, like ASSAP, quite enjoys having one foot in the Skeptic movement and rather apes them. A major hero for the speakers who was repeatedly quoted was Carl Sagan; this was man who may have started out as amenable to the prospect, but did not take the idea of UFO's seriously in his mature career. He developed a reputation as a debunker and has won several posthumous Skeptic awards. BUFORA, and also ASSAP and the CFZ (See HPANWO Links column), occupy that strange demi-monde between the two worlds; on the bridge, being shot at from both sides. On the Skeptic-believer scale this conference was one notch up from the specialist Skeptic ones like James Randi's TAM or QED. I've actually been to TAM London; I like to hear all sides of the story: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/tam-london-2010.html

 

There will be no BUFORA Conference next year, but in 2014 they plan to hold an event in Glastonbury. It will be a single day only so that delegates have the chance to see all the other sights in the town during the weekend. If I can I will go along and I would recommend it to anybody else. I didn't notice it at the time, but there was a BBC reporter at the conference and this is his article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19702652

 

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-reply-from-bank.html

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/explosion-on-jupiter.html

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/kevin-annett-banned-from-britain.html

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-rain-of-yellow-balls.html

 

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And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/radcliffe-infirmary-site-in-oxford_7.html

 

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Lourdes

(Sorry I haven't written a main site article for a while. I've just been too busy with other things.)

I went to see Ian R Crane live in Birmingham a couple of months ago, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/shift-2-with-ian-r-crane.html As I explain in the article, the venue was opposite St Chads Cathedral and the sight of that place brought back some deeply unpleasant memories to me. It was all connected to a holiday I took in 1997. I went on a pilgrimage to the holy shrine at Lourdes. This was an experienced that marked a major turning point in my life. I've mentioned several times that I'm from a Roman Catholic family. My mother was a Dutchwoman from the county of Limburg in the south east of the Netherlands, which is the only Catholic province in a predominantly Protestant nation. (Also it's quite hilly, which makes it unique in the Netherlands in another way). When she married my dad he converted from his Bristol-Welsh Anglican roots. My mother's very orthodox upbringing combined with my dad's conversion must have caused some discussion among the newlyweds which led to them raising me and my brother in a fairly irreligious and liberal environment. My mother refused to have me baptized, much to her parents' consternation, but she wanted me to make up my own mind when I was old enough. For this I'm very grateful to her; I had my own daughter baptized and wish now that I hadn't. I chose of my own accord to be baptized Catholic when I was aged 17 and received my first Holy Communion at my family's local church in Oxford. However my Catholic beliefs were to be extinguished forever within a decade, and that pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1997 was a very big bucket of water thrown on the fire.

Lourdes is a small and a wannabe insignificant town in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains in southern France. It has a native population of just 15,000 but has to cater for over 5 million visitors per year, making it one of the world's most visited locations. In France only Paris has more tourists, and in the world only Mecca has more pilgrims. The reason for all this attention is that in February 1858 Bernadette Soubirous, the 14-year old daughter of a poor miller, claimed to have seen a "beautiful lady" whilst collecting firewood in a rocky grotto beside a nearby river. This "lady" was small, about three feet high, and was standing in a niche high up in the rock wall of the grotto. At first her parents didn't believe her, but when Bernadette went back to the grotto a few days later she saw the lady again. This time she had brought some holy water with her to throw at the apparition in case it was from the Devil, not God. It's important to realize while studying this case that the community she was growing up in was intensely religious. Everybody was a devout Catholic and any other worldview would have been unthinkable and incomprehensible. The next day Bernadette went to the grotto a third time and on this occasion the being spoke to her, in perfect Gascona, Bernadette's native language, that has been supplanted in Lourdes by French and today is extinct. The apparition asked her to return to the same spot every day for a fortnight. Bernadette did as she was asked and every afternoon knelt down to pray in front of the grotto carrying a candle and her rosary. Each day more and more people gathered to watch her. At first just the girl's family followed her, but within five days crowds of several hundred clustered on the riverbank and stood silently while the young girl prayed. Although only Bernadette could see the being, other people started to believe her and some already began wondering if Bernadette was seeing the Virgin Mary. The ninth appearance of the "lady" is the most interesting. The apparition instructed Bernadette to have a drink. The girl thought it meant the river and went over to the bank, but then the being pointed at the ground inside the grotto. Bernadette turned over a few stones and saw a puddle of damp mud. She began digging with her bare hands and soon water began to flow out of the ground. Bernadette had discovered the famous Lourdes Spring. A few weeks later some builders moved in and created a small brick tank to collect the water; today a huge network of pipes and taps are plumbed in leading to fountains, basins and the bathing pools. Three days after Bernadette dug up the spring a local woman washed herself in it and had her paralyzed arm instantly healed. The doctor who examined her could find no medical explanation for this; it was the first of the hundred or so "Lourdes Miracles" that have taken place over the years. On one occasion while Bernadette was kneeling and praying in the trance-like state that she always experienced in the presence of the "lady", the candle she was holding melted and the flame licked her hand, but on later examination her hand was found to be stained with soot, but completely unharmed.

By now the Church authorities had got involved. Bernadette's local priest, Father Peyramale, called the girl a liar and approached the local bishop for help. This was aggravated by the being's request, relayed by Bernadette, that they should come to the grotto in full procession and build a chapel there. The bishop ordered Peyramale to stay out of it. However the next day the bishop asked Bernadette to tell them who the lady was. Bernadette asked, but the lady didn't reply and "just bowed her head and smiled". It was only three days after that, after Bernadette repeatedly badgered the being with the same question, that it finally looked at her with a serious expression and said: "Que soy era l'Emaculada Concepciou", this is Gascona for "I am the Immaculate Conception". It seems there was a lot of political pressure both for and against Bernadette's actions within the church and local government that is hard to follow. At one point it is said that Bernadette's father was offered a "Golden Louis", the biggest denomination of currency at that time, which could have lifted the family out of poverty by "somebody" in exchange for Bernadette making a false confession, telling everybody that she'd lied. The full story can be studied in one of the many badly-translated guidebooks that the visitor can purchase from the numerous souvenir shops in Lourdes, but the most detailed account comes from Franz Werfel's so called "novel", The Song of Bernadette. This was published in 1942 and made into an Academy Award-winning film two years later. Werfel was not Catholic himself, nor was he French. He was a Sudetenlander German and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. He settled in Lourdes while he was on the run from the French "Collaborators" and met many elderly people who had known Bernadette as children and remembered her. He claims to have based the book on their testimony. The basic factual account of what happened was recorded by the Church and by local authorities, but much of the unwritten and underlying goings on, after over one and a half centuries, I think are open to interpretation and debate.

Nevertheless, since the days of Bernadette Soubirous' experience, Lourdes has become the second biggest pilgrimage destination in the world and in 1997 I was one of those pilgrims. My brief few years as a Christian-believer began at a time of my life I have trouble remembering. I do have "missing time" in my life, but not just a few hours; on and off, a number of years! The period between the ages of about 15 and 23 are full of these lacunae, in fact I occasionally meet up with people whom I met during those years who greet me and I don't recognize them. But for motives I can't recall today, at the age of 17 I decided to be baptized; I must have experienced a feeling of what Christians call "faith" a belief that the God of the Bible: Jehovah, Yahweh, what the Muslims call "Allah" and the Freemasons "Adonai", was real. The Birmingham Diocese, which includes Oxfordshire where I live, has organized a pilgrimage to Lourdes every year since the 1950's and over a thousand people travel there annually with the group. It's still going on today and the 2012 pilgrimage took place this June, see: http://www.birminghamlourdespilgrimage.com/ Here's an article in Catholic Today about the event, including photoes: http://www.catholic-today.co.uk/component/k2/item/152-lourdes-2012 . I recognize a few faces from these images, individuals who are clearly still involved today fifteen years later; I won't say which ones for reasons that will become clear. I joined the pilgrimage at South Mimms service station on the M25 just north of London and was immediately approached by a bouncy, grinning young man who introduced himself as Father Alfie, the chaplain of the Diocese's youth section. He was unlike any priest I'd ever seen, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt; only his loosely-fastened dog-collar identified him as a man-of-the-cloth. Alfie is not his real name; I will be giving false names to everybody I refer to on this pilgrimage, with the exception of Mike Stanley and Jo Boyce. We boarded the motorcade of coaches and headed off to Dover. One of the coaches was called a "jumbulance", a vehicle specially adapted for the disabled pilgrims. I'm very opposed to political correctness, but I do find using the word "sick" to describe them as somewhat demeaning. We crossed the English Channel on a ferry and then boarded a chartered train at Calais which took us overnight to Lourdes. The train was similarly adapted as the coach and the French railway service must be used to the massive visitor-load that Lourdes experiences. I was a bit emotionally overwhelmed to arrive at Lourdes, one of the many times I was emotionally overwhelmed during the time I spent there. The area around the grotto where Bernadette had her visitations has been converted into a holy sanctuary on a scale that matches the Vatican. The land around the grotto was bought by the Church in 1864 and pieces of the surrounding area were added over the years until it reached its present size of 126 acres. The Domain, as it is called, has a huge esplanade running in a straight line to the hill above the grotto. On the top of that is the Rosary Basilica, see the photo above, which is a beautiful sight. Leading off from these are numerous other Basilicas and chapels, all spotlessly clean and decorated with a grandeur I've never seen before or since. There's a Stations of the Cross route which has larger than life statues and a huge underground chamber called the Basilica of St Pius XI which has the most magnificent acoustics. When the organ is played there it made me quiver at the knees! Every evening there's a very moving torchlight procession that goes up and down the esplanade accompanied by music, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4reKbaO_50 When I look back now, I can see that the Church uses extreme sights and sounds, like those in the Domain to "shock-and-awe" its adherents in order to control them. The overwhelming feelings I had are probably shared by almost everybody who arrives there. Life on the pilgrimage was easy and slow and the eight days we were there felt like eight weeks. As a member of the youth section my duties were to be a "brandcardier", which is not that different from my ordinary working duties of being a Hospital Porter; so much so that it was almost like being on a "busman's holiday". My job was to transport the "sick" pilgrims from their hostel, which was a big, modern hospital-like building called L'Accueil de Notre Dame, to the places of worship in the Domain for mass each day. These masses were extraordinarily elaborate and took several hours. Up till them I'd only been used to the services at my local church and this was a new experience for me. In the afternoon and evening there'd be another outing, to the Stations of the Cross or a musical concert or other events. Then the brancardiers would all head for the local bistroes to have a few beers, usually accompanied by dancing and singing. I said above how the Catholic Church has become adept at using grand architecture, glorious music and elaborate spectacles to turn the heads of its congregation, but in recent years it's become quite good at the happy-clappy, guitar and tambourines, touchy-feely stuff too. In fact it's almost New Age in some of the things it does at Lourdes. Instrumental to this aspect were the musical duo Mike Stanley and Jo Boyce who attended the event every year. Despite completely lapsing since first meeting them I still think they're excellent and still enjoy their songs, which without the Christian-themed lyrics at times approach a Celtic and pagan naturalist sensibility, like Song for the Trinity and Bread of Life, see: http://www.cjmmusic.com/ (I see that Mike has come down with cancer. I'm sorry to hear that and I wish him a speedy recovery) Here they are on the BBC's Songs of Praise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLjM8IlrVrk .

It all sounds wonderful, doesn't it? And in some ways it was. It was deeply intense, joyous, carefree and very nicely ungrounded without being wantonly so; but it had a false and dark side to it. The pilgrims were governed by a pseudo-military structure. We all had uniforms, which as you can see from the photoes were a blue, branded T-shirt and a yellow neckerchief, and badges to identify our roles. We were run by a Chief Brancardier who in turn had a team of deputies who dispensed orders to foot-soldiers like me. The deputy who was head of my section was an obnoxious and two-faced little man called Martin. He took an instant and groundless dislike to me, as some people do, and took every opportunity he could to wield his authority against me. "Come on, Ben, chop-chop!" he once sneered at me very loudly in front of everybody when he decided I was pushing my antiquated voiture, a "sick" pilgrims' transporter handcart, a tad too slow. This made me feel very embarrassed, not least because one of the people watching was a small, dark-haired and dark-eyed young woman called Claire whom I'd become rather sweet on; in fact in the heady atmosphere of the location, I'd experienced with her what the French call a "coup de foudre". Martin picked up my attraction for Claire straight away and used to be especially unpleasant to me when she was around for that reason. I wasn't the only person he grated on; many others on the tour found him pompous and abrasive. And, as I said in the Ian R Crane article linked above, he misled me over the day of the St Chads mass. The fact that somebody like Martin could rise to a position of authority shows that there's a serious snake in the Lourdes garden. Of course people like that always float to the top in conventional organizations, which begs the question: how unconventional is Lourdes? However there's a silver lining to this cloud in that Martin was the biggest inspiration behind the character Trevor in my novel Rockall, which I began writing soon after coming home from the pilgrimage, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/rockall-chapter-1.html . My brother, who accompanied me on the pilgrimage, kept very quiet during the trip but afterwards I found out that he shared my cynicism, and, if anything, felt it even more strongly. As you can see from the link above about this year's pilgrimage, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in the same way it was back in Britain, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/lizard-in-city.html . While I was there we also had to watch a military parade because the "Perigrimage Militaire" was in progress. During that week Christianity is not the only religion worshipped there; as Dr Lawrence Britt said in 14 Signs of Fascism: "Soldiers and military service are glamourized and glorified". There are aspects of my pilgrimage to Lourdes that I've not mentioned here because I still find it too painful to write about, even after fifteen years. However I don't want people to get the idea it was all nasty; it wasn't. I very much enjoyed the friendships I made with the "sick" pilgrims I cared for and one day I took a few of them out to a bistro with one of the other deputy-chief brancardiers; not Martin, a nicer one whom I liked. We had one of the most enjoyable times out I've ever known and I'll never forget it. The "sick" men were all Irish and I still laugh when I remember them trying to explain to the French waiter that they wanted a "real Guinness". I also met an amazing man called Brother Brendan who was a Sacred Heart friar. But he was not your popular image of a monk at all! He used to like a drink, he smoked and he swore. I kept in touch with him for a while afterwards; he was great fun. So there were good times there as well as bad, but would I go back there again? No.

Bernadette Soubirous entered a convent when she was 22 years old. There, as Sister Bernadette of the Charity of Nevers, she worked as a nurse and used to produce works of embroidery. Never in the best of health, she died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 35. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933 and her feast day is April the 16th. When I look back at her experiences, now more scientifically-minded than I was back then, I wonder what the truth was behind what happened. I do not accept the Skeptics' dismissal of the Marian apparition at Lourdes as hallucination, hysteria, corruption and the various other straw-clutching cop-outs that the likes of Richard Dawkins wheel out; see here at 2.31: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=9002284641446868316 But at the same time, I wonder what would have happened if the entity Bernadette encountered had appeared in a place where there lived people of a different culture and mindset. You see, apart from Bernadette's statement that the being had said: "I am the Immaculate Conception" there is nothing else at all to identify it. In a society like the one Bernadette lived in I wonder if the appearance of a benign feminine entity, or "gynaeform phenomenon", would have been accepted as anything other than what it was. When Bernadette first saw it she wasn't sure; this is why she took the holy water the sprinkle on the apparition. She thought it might be the work of the Devil or a soul escaped from Purgatory. I no longer believe in the Immaculate Conception but I do accept that people experience very real encounters with non-physical beings. These come in all shapes and sizes, like aliens, ghosts, Djinn etc. They can be friendly, hostile or indifferent in personality. Sometimes, in areas where the people are secular or a different religion is predominant, entities are seen that also appear as a human female, just like at Lourdes. These entities are often very friendly, even loving. They may provide healing and spiritual inspiration. If one of these appeared in such a society, like modern Britain, and they do occasionally, they'd be described as an "angel" "she-elf" or "goddess". I don't wish to offend any Catholic devotees of Lourdes who are reading this article, but I feel I have to interpret Bernadette's experience, and its legacy, in terms of the culture it emerged in. I repeat: I do not for a moment suggest that Our Lady of Lourdes does not exist, only that she may not be what most people think she is. Bernadette describes the "beautiful lady" as being clad from head to foot in a white dress with a white headscarf; only a light sash around her waist was blue. All the other Marian images I've seen depict the mother of Jesus in bi-colour, usually with a white dress and blue headscarf or vice versa; occasionally you'll see another bi-colour clothing depicted, like brown or green. This is the image of her Bernadette would have been familiar with. The most unusual feature of the being was that she had two yellow flowers clasped between her toes; this is nothing like the popular image at all.

On the other hand I could be completely wrong, and it could be that the Blessed Virgin Mary does exist, but I doubt that very much, and there are many reasons for my doubt which are too big a subject for this article. One thing that I'm sure of is that Bernadette's encounter with this beautiful, loving being was completely real and it had an enormous impact on her life and many other people's lives, it was an influence for the better in most cases. I would never take that away from them. But I still think she should belong to nobody. The Vatican has claimed this entity as its own, given her a label and decided how the people who visit the place where she appeared should interpret her. I resent that deeply.

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Exopolitics ET Communications Conference 2012

(Apologies for not producing a HPANWO main site article for some time; I’ve been very busy; see the rest of the sites)

Exopolitics Great Britain is hosting two events this year. For the fourth time there will be the main Exopolitics Expo in August, but before then, on June the 30th, they held a one day Extraterrestrial Communication Conference which I attended.
Here’s my HPANWO TV reportage of the event: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/exopolitics-et-communication-conference.html
And here’s a HPANWO Radio show where I give a report on the conference, in the last 25 minutes or so: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/programme-3-podcast-kevin-annett-and.html

The last two Exopolitics Expoes were held in Leeds University and most of the delegates felt that the facilities were lacking. Universities out of term are pretty bleak places. Mind you the hospital shop next door did well! See here for my previous reviews of the 2010 and 2011 Expoes:
2010: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/2nd-annual-exopolitics-expo-leeds-2010.html
2011: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/exopolitics-leeds-2011.html
The base of operations has now shifted to the Static Gallery in Liverpool where catering is far better; in fact the venue itself has a very cheap and tasty food stall which most of the delegates used. From outside, the Static Gallery looks a bit like a builders’ yard, but when you get inside you’ll see that it is in fact a simple, elegant and very stylish conference centre. I’m familiar with it because it was the location for the 2009 Beyond Knowledge Conference which I attended. I remember it well because I was suffering from the effects of a double sprain at the time. My ankle and wrist were in bandages, and I was hobbling about the place painfully.

This conference was only a single day, but a lot was packed into it, as you’ll see if you watch the HPANWO TV reportage. The basic theme, meta-analysis and conclusion of these proceedings is that, astounding as it might seem, some people are being contacted and are communicating with intelligent entities from another world. That’s a remarkable claim to make, I know; but the evidence for it exists. The entities doing the communicating are extremely varied in nature; a huge number of different species have been positively identified. Some types are reported again and again in encounters by very different people who have had no contact with each other. The most common is the “Grey”, a short skinny humanoid with a smooth, featureless body, oversized head and large blank eyes. Also there are the “mantids”; huge, intelligent insectoid beings. Despite their fearsome appearance they are often friendly and compassionate. The phrase “blue doctors” was used to describe a creature seen by both a young girl in England and also the American novelist Whitley Strieber. These are squat dwarf-like beings with thick clothing and hairy skin. The Reptoids are similar in appearance to the Reptilians reported by David Icke and others, whom witnesses see shape-shifting in and out of human form. However there’s no reason to think that the two are the same thing. The “Nordics” are the most interesting; they appear almost exactly like humans apart from unnaturally pronounced features, usually bright blond hair and blue eyes. The eyes are often larger than normal and the bone structure unusual. In fact if you dressed a Nordic up in normal clothes and let him walk down a street people wouldn’t run screaming. They might just give him a double take and think: “He looks weird”. People from all over the world, Amazonian Indians to Australian sheep-farmers; African goat-herders to English bank managers; Chinese businessmen to Russian airline pilots, have all seen these very same creatures.

The aliens seem to have a wide variety of motives and intents. Some are deeply benevolent, loving and friendly; they often instil the witness with higher spiritual feelings. Sometimes they heal physical and psychological wounds. A person can have their lives changed for the better by encounters with these beings. Some are unpleasant, violent and cause the witness a lot of pain and injury, and even in the most extreme cases death. They have been known to sexually abuse and torture the humans they abduct against their will. Some seem neutrally detached; scientist-like, observing dispassionately. One thing that I often find is that witnesses tend to extrapolate their own ET experiences onto all of ET-dom. This is a mistake, as I explain in my HPANWO TV reportage in the section about Mike Oram. Aliens are enormously varied and behave in a wide variety of ways; there’s no reason to think, as Stephen Greer does, that just because you bump into a nasty ET it’s definitely a MILAB. This brings us onto another topic: Government interest and collaboration. MILABS, MILitary ABductions, do occur. Despite some claims to the contrary, they definitely can’t explain all cases of ET interaction, but they can a few. Sometimes witnesses report both ET’s and humans, in white coats or military uniforms, working together during encounters. It seems that even when governments are not colluding with the aliens they take an interest in those encountering ET’s independently. Contactees may find that their phone gets tapped and mysterious cars follow them along the roads etc.

What are these extraterrestrials that are communicating with us? I don’t know. That’s a question that needs answering! They may in reality be a blanket term for a wide variety of phenomena. I don’t think we know for certain that they’re flying here from other stars in spacecraft; there may be another explanation. I’m convinced though that the Skeptical theory: that’s it’s all in our heads, is palpably false. Millions of people all over the world are having experiences with these beings. There is a pile of evidence supporting that they are objectively real.

This was a great conference and thanks to everybody who was involved in organizing it; and to everybody else who attended. I’m looking forward to the Exopolitics Expo in August; expect another report from me.

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/kevin-annetts-historic-lawsuit.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/roger-hayes-arrested.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/men-who-made-us-fat.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/richard-wiseman-skeptocrat.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/exopolitics-et-communication-conference.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/revelation-by-bill-napier.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/bexleyheath-ufo-incident.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/making-dignity-statements-part-2.html

Latest HPANWO Radio shows: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/programme-3-podcast-kevin-annett-and.html
And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/programme-2-podcast.html
And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/programme-1-podcast.html

The Shift 2 with Ian R Crane

See HPANWO Links column for the website of Ian R Crane, including the Shift 2 pages. Here’s a direct link to the event I’m reviewing here: http://www.ianrcrane.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=350

 It’s been a while since I last went to an event with Ian R Crane (Or Ian Crane, as he used to be known as before he discovered that a Liverpool estate agent with that name was getting all his emails). This is mainly down to the financial problems I’ve been facing since I was booted out of Hospital Portering, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/ben-emlyn-jones-live-at-ldidg.html; and as a result I’ve been unable to attend any conferences so far this year. However if you listen to one of Ian’s shows you’ll often gain new insights into situations like mine. Old phrases like “Every cloud has a silvery lining” are very true, but there’s an explanation behind why they’re true that is even more silvery.

Although I preach about the fallacies and foolishness of prejudice, I’m afraid I’m not immune to them. One of my most serious flaws in this department is my dislike for the city of Birmingham. I tend to regard it as a grim, unattractive and Godforsaken place. Ustane and I sat on a train, drowsy from our early rise, staring out of the rain-splashed windows at the crumbling red brick walls and shattered glass windows of abandoned Victorian factories, modern freight containers stacked up like Lego blocks and ash-coloured canals lined by graffiti-daubed concrete piles. We left New Street Station and were surrounded by the bright lights and elaborate, animated billboards of the Bull Ring. This was once a traditionally classic market dating back to the Middle Ages, rather like Oxford’s Covered Market; but while the latter has been carefully preserved in its original form, the Bull Ring has been crushed under a gargantuan postmodern steel-and-glass cathedral to consumerism. The researcher Andy Thomas has often remarked how the only structures modern Western society builds that come close to matching the temples of the ancient civilizations or the cathedrals of Mediaeval Europe are shopping centres, banks and offices of business and commerce; buildings that have a purely materialistic function. So he’s effectively saying that according to our culture materialism and consumerism is God! The Bull Ring is a perfect example. (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/alternative-view-ii-part-1.html) I had been careful to bring my A to Z of Birmingham with me to Ustane’s house, but went and forgot to take it with me to Birmingham; not very helpful! But we soon found the venue with the help of a printout map from the Tourist Information Office (an institution I had not expected to find in Birmingham). The event was to take place in a Thistle Hotel, where Ian always seems to end up. Across the road from it was St Chad’s Cathedral and the sight of it gave me a nasty flashback. This is a story that really needs its own full-length article, which I plan to write, but to cut to the chase: Some years ago, in 1997 in fact, I went on a pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Lourdes in the south of France. I’ve mentioned before that I’m from a Catholic family and there was a time when I was fairly devout, before I “lapsed” and rejected all religion. The pilgrimage was something of an emotional rollercoaster, and it was not till long afterwards that I understood that it was mostly dips not rises. The management of the trip was very hierarchical and one of the “junior foreman” was a very unpleasant little man who took an instinctive and immediate dislike to me. After the end of the pilgrimage there was a mass held at St Chad’s Cathedral two weeks afterwards for the “brancardiers”, volunteers who helped look after the disabled pilgrims who came with us; I was one of them and wanted to attend. However the “junior foreman” told me that it was three weeks afterwards, not two; so I travelled all the way from Oxford to Birmingham and turned up at St Chad’s a week late. I sat on a bench outside for two and half hours waiting for the others to arrive, getting cold and miserable. As Ustane and I approached the cathedral I saw that the bench I’d sat on all these years ago was still there, and I felt my embarrassment and anger bite. Even after fifteen years it still recurs occasionally. However something remarkable happened a few minutes later that was a good prelude to the main theme of the event. Ian was playing quiet music on his speakers as the audience was arriving and one of the tracks was Song to the Trinity by Mike Stanley and Jo Boyce, a Christian pop duo who came on the pilgrimage with us, see: http://www.cjmmusic.com/. The song was a cover version with different lyrics, but the beautiful tune was unmistakable. Mike and Jo’s music was definitely one of the few rises on my Lourdes rollercoaster. I’ve got the CD at home, but I’ve not listened to it for over ten years; how come I suddenly heard it just minutes after my return to St Chad’s? Coincidence? Read on!
The room Ian had booked was a small and modest venue compared to his flamboyant past enterprises like AV, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/alternative-view-3-part-1.html. The room he’d hired was behind a small entrance leading off from the kitchen that looked like the door to a broom cupboard. Ustane and I were the first to arrive and we were surprised to see nobody at the desk by the door. Then we looked around to see Ian setting up the DVD stall. His short and compact frame moved energetically between a pile of cardboard boxes and the trestle table. We soon learned that the Shift 2 tour was entirely a one-man operation. Ian transports everything in his van, he sets it all up and puts it all away afterwards entirely by himself. This is hard work for him, but it keeps the ticket price down. In the neighbouring suite to our event was a much more lavish conference hosted by some charity or other. It was held in a large auditorium with a big stage display, a neat reception desk, a tea and coffee bar and all the trimmings, a bit like AV. Sure, it would have been a lot more comfortable if Ian had laid on such luxuries, but then it would have cost an awful lot more; it’s a simple equation. Shift 2 is very good value, when you consider it was seven hours long, almost as long as a live David Icke show. This is a format that I’ve not seen from Ian before. I’ve attended numerous events in which he does a one or two hour lecture, but never before an all-day workshop.

 A minute or two behind us, the other attendees arrived. I was very surprised not to meet anybody whom I recognized, as these events tend to be as much social get-togethers for the conspiratorially-aware community as lectures. However Ustane and I soon began conversations with the others and before long provisional friendships emerged in the accelerated and condensed way they tend to in the intensity of a conference. We spoke to a cheerful young woman named Leah and a man who had had a dream the night before that he saw the auditorium we were in, even though he’d never been there before. Once again, the theme of manifestation, premonition and synchronicity emerged, and it was to become curiouser and curiouser as Ian began his speech and revealed that the previous week when he’d spoken in Portsmouth one of the attendees had experienced something even weirder: He had been severely delayed for some reason which meant that by the time he left for Portsmouth to see Shift 2 he only had half an hour left before the start of the event, but unfortunately he lived seventy miles away and so he began driving there in frustration, consigning himself to having to miss the first half of the event. But somehow he made it on time! How? He has no idea. It seemed that he experienced something similar to the phenomenon of “missing time” that is often a symptom of alien abduction. In this case maybe no aliens were involved, but something else which I’ll come to later. I would like to have spoken to that man, so I must say I was kicking myself a bit because I’d originally planned to go to the Shift 2 event in Portsmouth, but had switched my booking to Birmingham.

Ian’s workshop was split into two parts; the first was to be about the material realm, the scientific and political research which is tangible and can be analyzed. Ian is a keen student and pundit of what he calls “deep geopolitics”. This means he has a similar relationship with Fleet Street as Richard Hoagland has with hairspray manufacturers; in fact Ian gets a copy of virtually every newspaper available delivered to his door regularly and spends hours sifting through every single one of them. This sounds like an unenviable job, but it does pay off because it’s remarkable what material sometimes escapes into the mainstream media through whoever or whatever is attempting to stop it, to whoever is willing to take the effort to pick it up. I get the impression this job has become easier for Ian because he told us that “They” are getting arrogant, and they’re being more honest and open about what they’re up to; they’re releasing more and more of their true actions and motives into the public domain. “They” refers to the people he calls “Those who consider themselves to be the rightful rulers of the planet”. I find this a bit of a mouthful, despite the fact that it was recently shortened from: “Those who consider themselves to be the rightful rulers of a global fiefdom”. And you can’t even form a nice, elegant acronym out of it: “TWCTTBTRROTP” or: “TWCTTBTRROAGF”? Nah! For this reason I will continue to use the word: “Illuminati”, even though Ian dislikes this term and never uses it himself. The reason he thinks that the media is being more outspoken and less deceptive is down to something he’s mentioned before: that they have to tell us what they’re up to on one level so that the onus (Apologies for using this Skepperism) is on us to work it out and react to it. If we don’t react then we give them a mandate to do more and to go further. Another reason is that they may believe, falsely perhaps, that they will be able to negate Karma by doing this. It also fits in well with the Social Darwinism that is a prominent feature in the philosophy of Satanism: That the blame for violence lies not with the perpetrator but the victim, if the victim is vulnerable and therefore makes it easy for the perpetrator to carry out their violence. According to the Illuminati, if we don’t retaliate when we are abused then we, like the rape-victim, are “asking for it”.
Ian asked us, as he often did in this very interactive workshop, whether we thought this year, 2012, would be just another year. Few if any of us raised our hands. He congratulated us, because this is the year that the Mayan Long Count calendar changes over, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/2012-rumours-of-our-deaths-have-been.html. And of course we’re now in the fifth year of the financial crisis, and he is convinced that this is a contrived event. Even the former head of Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith, is speaking out about the corrupt nature of his old company. The board of Goldman Sachs in private speak with open derision about the majority of their investors which they call “muppets”, while the important members who are destined for better fortune are called “players”; however I imagine one can become the other at a word from one of the board-members. (I wonder which James Randi is! See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/other-side-of-james-randi.html). The current financial domination of the world dates back to the signing of the act in 1913 which brought into being the Federal Reserve; luckily that act has a sunset clause and was always planned to expire after just ninety-nine years; well the Fed Act was signed on December the 21st of December 1913… so is there anybody else who still thinks 2012 is going to be just another year? There’s a video on YouTube of a stockbroker called Alessio Rastani speaking with really explosive candour that was later pulled by the BBC; here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA. Rastani himself has been discredited and demonized as a fraud and attention-seeker; a common tactic used against people telling the truth. Rastani is basically and frankly telling the viewer that the financial system is doomed, while the Government is trying to keep the public harnessed to the hopes of its recovery packages. Ian’s parents are in their eighties and Ian often tells them that they are the last generation of working class people in which the family can live off the single basic week income of the father. Today in a working-class family it is rare to find a situation in which both parents don't have to work every hour they can just to make ends meet. The Euro Crisis, together with the collapse of the US Dollar are the lead weights that will drown the world. Nigel Farage, one of the few politicians I’d trust to tell me the time of day, is willing to speak out in the European Parliament and expose this elephant in the room: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llDYLb7HoIk. Unfortunately, it’s a little-known fact that the EU Parliament is just an adversary body and has no legislative powers at all. The unelected EU President and his cabinet make all the decisions, even if every MEP votes against them. (Farage was involved in a light aircraft crash during his 2010 General Election campaign from which he luckily survived. I wonder if it was an accident.) Greece, as a nation, no longer exists, and is now wholly-owned collateral of the European Central Bank. Even its priceless antiquities have been sold to try and alleviate its horrific debts. It seems the crucial kingpin, as has been the case for the last few years, is Ireland, which is why Ian has been touring Ireland a lot lately with his friend Jim Corr, see: http://www.jimcorr.com/. On May the 31st the Irish people go to the polls in a referendum, just like they did with the Treaty of Lisbon; and so there is one more chance to scupper the EU agenda, but will the “NO” vote work this time? Are the Irish people awake enough to avoid the same trap they fell into over Lisbon?
Ian gave people a few tips on how to survive the coming economic meltdown. He recommends investing any capital you have into gold and other precious metals (an academic notion for me!) However, the most crucial issue has to be the basics of life; if the banks slam their doors and all the shops are shut where will we get food and water? Ian recommends keeping a cache of supplies: bottles of water, cans of food, toilet paper etc; enough to last a few weeks. I know on one level this makes sense, but I feel uncomfortable considering even this most soft brand of survivalism, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/billions-will-die-we-will-win.html. The problem I have is this: If you are the only person in your street who has such a cache your neighbours may well come knocking on your door asking for you to share some of it with them. Then of course you have to decide whether to do so or not, but it’s likely that these people at your door will be hungry, thirsty and very frightened; in this frame of mind they may not take “no” for an answer. Then you will be faced with another choice: whether or not to stop them by force; in which case we will have to arm ourselves. It could be either that or losing all your precious supplies. Ian doesn’t really address this question. The idea of turning a shotgun or bludgeon against people I normally talk over the fence with and let borrow my hedge-clippers repels me deeply. I think I’ll have to take my chances without the supplies.
Ian feels hope with how Iceland has addressed this question. This is the only country in Europe which is right now significantly recovering from the recession; this is because it didn’t make the same mistake that the other countries did: getting “cash injections” from the International Monetary Fund and therefore contracting their country away to them through debt. Iceland’s wisdom could come from the fact that they’ve been using the former “Economic Hitman” John Perkins as a consultant, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/dangerous-man-by-karen-sawyer.html. When he addressed the Women’s’ Institute, Ian said: “Men are fucking things up!” (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/emergency-swine-flu-meeting-with-ian.html) and maybe he’s right because Iceland is unique in being ruled by mostly female politicians and their Prime Minister is somebody called Johanna Sigurtharsdottir, Europe’s first openly homosexual head of government. So if you have any gay and lesbian friends, listen to what they have to say!
 Ian makes a lot of predictions about what is to come in the future; often he is right, not because he’s psychic, but because he understands how geopolitics works; he's "read the script", as he says. I’ve had a go at this myself and have a hit to my credit. A couple of years ago I said that Argentina would begin threatening the Falkland Islands again and was right, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/falklands-war-ii.html. Ian thinks a war with Iran is unlikely because Iran is simply too big and strong; its population of over sixty million are very supportive of their current ruler Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and will not tolerate a regime change there. Nevertheless it is suspicious that the USS Enterprise is currently deployed in the Gulf region. I refer in this case not to Captain Kirk’s fictional starship, but to the US Navy’s oldest aircraft carrier. She was commissioned long before the Star Trek TV series was ever broadcast and is on her last mission before being taken to the breakers yard. The thing is, Enterprise is nuclear-powered and so it will cost many times as much to dispose of her safely as it would a conventionally-powered vessel. However this cost could be alleviated if she could... meet with an “unfortunate accident” that caused her to sink at sea. At the same time if she were attacked, supposedly by an enemy, it would be a new 9/11 that would horrify and galvanize the public into supporting a new war; not necessarily against Iran, but against anybody else the Government blamed for the incident. And because Enterprise is such an old ship there would be little loss to the US Navy’s capabilities. There’s a direct parallel here between this hypothesis and Pearl Harbour. The ships sunk by the Japanese in the Pearl Harbour attack were the old fleet battleships which were very much symbols of American seapower in the eyes of the public. However anybody better-informed in naval strategy will admit that by 1941 the old big-gun battleship was very much an obsolete weapons platform. The decisive weapons in the Pacific War were actually the aircraft carrier and the submarine. The Japanese flew right over the Pearl Harbour Submarine Base and never touched it and all; the aircraft carriers were very conveniently out at sea at the time on manoeuvres.
 Ian has intensively analyzed how one of the biggest lies, Climate Change, is being used as the snowplough for a whole array of globalist and tyrannical regulations. Dr David Bellamy, who spoke at AV2 and 4, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/alternative-view-ii-part-1.html, was schmoozed by a group of Elitists, led by the Aga Khan, in an attempt to make him the “Professor Global Warming” in Britain; to his credit he refused. Interestingly Bellamy saw Tony Blair and the Conservative Party leader William Haig on another table and his host told him that the Elite were trying to decide which of them would become the UK’s next Prime Minister. Obviously Blair was the lucky one. Haig himself was photographed in “compromising positions” with a young man on his staff; perhaps there are other photos being held back that have kept Haig in the kennel on pain of them being sent to Ffion.
 On the 27th of July the 2012 London Olympics will begin and Ian thinks it’s very likely that some kind of false flag terrorist event will occur during the games; he prophesizes at the Closing Ceremony. I would have thought that for full effect and public awareness it would need to take place at the Opening Ceremony; after all, who bothers watching the Closing Ceremony? But there are important Occult elements to the date, the 12th of August and also Ian thinks some clues were left for us in the Closing Ceremony of the last Olympics, Beijing 2008. At the end of every Olympics Closing Ceremony there’s a scene that is themed on the city that will become the next Olympic host, and in this case it was of course London. The Olympic flag is handed over to representatives of the next nation in line. There is a video of it online at the time of writing, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QprSn_D31U0. But according to Ian, the video doesn’t last long before being taken down so I advise you to download it. In case you’re reading this when the link is dead I’ll describe it: A London bus drives along a road made up to look like a London street, with zebra crossings and traditional bus stops, a lollypop lady carries her pole on it. The bus drives up to the podium surrounded by dancers carrying thirteen umbrellas representing the thirteen victims of the Tavistock Square bus during the 7/7 attacks, and also 13 is a Satanic number. The bus door slides opens and a young girl is standing there, representing the Goddess. She steps out and is handed a football by the lollypop lady. Then she returns to the bus by walking on top of the dancers, representing the submission of the people to the Goddess. Then the bus’ top deck opens and falls apart looking exactly like the 7/7 bus did. The interior is covered in a material that looks like grass and the dancers cling to the grass: an almost perfect representation of the 7/7 scene. Then the singer Leona Lewis rises from the bus on the top of a pole, again a Goddess symbol. Then on another platform Jimmy Page, the rock star, who is also a devotee of Aleister Crowley and even used to own Crowley’s old home at Loch Ness, starts playing the song Whole Lotta Love by his old band Led Zeppelin and Leona Lewis sings it; in the background we see the Olympic flame. Ian thinks this represents the alchemical wedding between Satan and the Goddess and the Tavistock Square bombing is therefore a human sacrifice. Jimmy Page probably realizes this, but the other participants are in all likelihood ignorant of what they took part in. I’ve written a lot about the film-maker Roland Emmerich and the suspicious themes in his films, but there is a strange reference to London in his ignoble epic 2012, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/2012-rumours-of-our-deaths-have-been.html. In one scene, for no apparent reason, a map of the London Underground is shown. Here’s a video about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFHcOw9INj4. Again, this is an example of the Illuminati displaying their machinations in plain sight for us to see if we choose to. It seems that the Rockefeller Foundation has a contingency plan for a scenario in which 13,000 people die. Will the drill become truth, as with 9/11 and 7/7? The security for the upcoming Olympics will be the biggest police and domestic military operation that Britain has ever seen with more troops on the London streets than are in Afghanistan. There’s also going to be an aircraft carrier moored in the Thames, although I suspect that’s for show. What use would an aircraft carrier be against terrorists? It was rather like the tanks that used to be parked at Heathrow Airport; one doesn’t need to be “Stormin’ Norman” to understand that tanks are completely useless against terrorism. Ian thinks that we might be able to prevent false flag terrorist events by predicting them, as he may have done in 2006 in Chicago, see: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8090012349700692119. The question is: If we have predicted what’s planned to happen at the Olympics correctly, will that be enough to stop it now? For reasons Ian has revealed, the Illuminati are desperate to get the New World Order sewn up by the end of the year. They are years… nay decades, behind schedule. They’re getting desperate and Ian thinks they may be pushed into taking a chance this time.

 During our lunch break Ian asked us to get into groups and talk about the various examples of synchronicity that have happened in our lives. Ustane and I discuss these matters all the time and I’ve already explained how I experienced a remarkable one when I saw St Chad’s Cathedral. It turned out that everybody who I spoke to at Shift 2 had similar stories to tell. I find it strange how my last day-shift in Portering before I was suspended was filled with amazing events that make it impossible for me to dismiss it as coincidence. The problem is that it’s impossible to prove synchronicity, as I’ve explored in these HPANWO TV films. See: (Part 10) http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/assap-seriously-strange-conference.html and: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/its-just-coincidence.html. Nothing is so unlikely that you can say: "This can never happen", which is why Skeptics are so besotted with the concept of coincidence; on their level, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card that cannot fail. What I experienced could be coincidence, but it’s not. To understand why it's not though, we have to explore the nature of human consciousness as it emerges in the two hemispheres of the brain.

After lunch we reconvened for the last session of the event and in this part Ian delved deeper into the esoteric and spiritual aspects of his research. This is where the theme of synchronicity, premonition and manifestation, that had been underlying the whole day’s proceedings, was brought into the light. Ian gave us his own version of the synchronicity stories that we’d been sharing all day: One night many years ago he’d had a dream that the Lottery draw the next day would be the numbers of his date of birth, his wife’s date of birth, and their respective ages. When he woke up and told her, his wife instructed him to go and buy a ticket. Unfortunately Ian didn't take dreams seriously in those days and let the ticket slip his mind. The next day when the numbers were published in the papers he and his wife both blanched when they realized that those numbers did indeed come up! “Anyway, we were divorced eighteen months later.” said Ian. His wife is convinced to this day that Ian did buy a Lottery ticket and secreted the prize in an offshore account somewhere. Ian believes that the clue to unlocking the psychic and manifestational abilities of human consciousness lies in the workings of our brain. Our mammalian brain is divided into two halves, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. In an average right-handed male human their entire physical worldview, language, logic, our sense of the passing of time and individual waking conscious mind is operated by the left hemisphere, called the left-brain. In left-handed people this arrangement is slightly more complex, it is with women’s brains too, but is still very much centred on the left-brain. The right-brain is our source of intuition, emotion, timeless notion of existence, and where our subconscious and “super-conscious” mind dwells. Ian thinks that this is where we have our link to the soul and what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Of course the Conformist Illuminati-occupied world is left-brain dominated; this is why the only temples we build are shopping centres, as Andy Thomas said, see above. The psychologist Michael Gazzaniga puts it even more bluntly when he says: “The left-brain, don’t leave home without it.” Gazzaniga was involved in experiments where he severed the corpus callosum, the neural connection between the two halves of the brain, as an attempt to cure people’s epilepsy, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKloz2vwlc. Coincidentally… that word again… I have an early childhood memory of watching a much older TV documentary about this subject. While it’s certainly true that the left-brain is essential to our ability to function in this universe as effective organisms, what the Illuminati have done is make us what David Icke calls “left-brain prisoners”. In other words we become purely functional and soulless, biological machines; and that matches my own research and interpretation of our society completely. Fear is essentially a left-brain function because it requires an ability to envision the future and this is the dominion of the left-brain. Ian says it all boils down to sex, the fear of not getting laid! This is why there is so much envy and rivalry in attracting sexual partners; for women it’s based primarily around conventional good looks, for men it’s mostly connected to wealth and social status. Illuminati-occupied society is a fear production-line! TV programmes instil it in us from the moment we reach for the on-switch. Soap operas like EastEnders are particularly bad in this department, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/grimlys.html.
If the right-brain is the key to psychic and soul-awareness then these things are obviously a massive threat to Illuminati rule because the Loomies have worked so very desperately to shut it down. In fact the shutting down of the right-brain is their ultimate and central objective and all the other things, like 9/11, the UFO cover-up, the financial system etc, are merely auxiliary to the prime purpose and goal: keeping us left-brain prisoners. Their work begins at the moment of birth with newborn babies being given up to fifteen vaccines almost as soon as they first enter the world; of course a certain number don’t survive that experience, but the Loomies don’t care. The use of vaccines to control the masses was predicted by a very wise and clever man, Rudolf Steiner, long before vaccination was in common usage. The agenda carries on in school with left-brain indoctrination and feeding children bad food like MacDonalds and Monsanto’s GM range. Also “antidepressant” drugs like Ritalin; if this lasts until adulthood it becomes SSRI drugs like Prozac. I’ve already mentioned TV. Fluoride in the water plays a major role because, among other effects, fluoride calcifies the pineal gland. As people like Graham Hancock (See Links column) and Dr Rick Strassman have discovered, the pineal gland is essential to soul-connection, as Rene Descartes guessed… or maybe didn’t just guess… it was centuries ago. Mobile phones are a nasty way of changing the nature of the brain to one more compliant to Illuminati rule; as with vaccines it kills many of the unfortunates who are subjected to it, and the perpetrators are no more concerned. Chemtrails are also a part of this operation, but how this works I will come to later. It’s sad to note that Birmingham is the most heavily fluoridated city in Britain and maybe this is one of the reasons why I feel so uncomfortable there. As Ustane and I walked back to the railway station after the event we both noticed the way that everybody we passed in the street was walking very quickly; we kept having to step aside to let speed-marching pedestrians go ahead of us. The need to rush from one place to another, like fear, requires a sense of the passing of time and so is therefore a left-brain feature. Do the people of Birmingham have especially atrophied right-brains because of the extra fluoride they consume? The ultimate expression of the left-brain prisoner is what has become known as the Skeptic… with a K. Regular HPANWO-readers hardly need reminding about my interest in this subject, but just in case, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/london-skeptics-in-pub-141111.html. Skeptics have even categorized their attempt to explain away right-brain activity with a very sibilant acronym that will surely become a classic: the “RSME”, Religious, Spiritual and Mystical Experience.
 That’s the bad news. The good news is that we’re not helpless. We can fight back against these methods of shackling our right-brain with our own ways of liberating it. One of those is to avoid fluoride in water and toothpaste; hopefully we can do this while our pineal gland is still working and so prevent complete calcification. Minimize your use of mobile phones; Ian holds them up the left side of his head as a placebo! Don’t watch TV, or at least take everything you see on it with a pinch of salt. Refuse vaccinations for your child, and don’t let them be medicated with Ritalin or Junior Prozac. Another means that is not advisable except in a controlled environment is sleep deprivation. I remember seeing a news story just a few days before coming to Shift 2 about a Cornishman who’d just broken the record for the longest time without sleep: 11 days. He was interviewed at the end of it, looking pretty haggard, but still able to coherently answer the reporter’s questions. Ian told us about a friend of his in Cornwall called Tony Wright, who’d written a book called Left in the Dark about how he’d achieved right-brain awareness through staying awake for a few nights and not sleeping. I wondered if they were both the same person, and it turns out that they are; see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/6690485.stm. Sleep is something we specifically need for the left-brain, the right-brain never sleeps, which is why dreams come from the right-brain while the left-brain is kipping. Forcing the left-brain to shut down by starving it of sleep, while you’re still awake, is a good way of experiencing the right-brain’s consciousness. It is in this state of consciousness that we can fully harness the right-brain’s power, which is why then we are hit by things like synchronicity and premonitions and the ability to manifest the physical world around us. This happened to me once during a very busy period of work at my hospital. I did 5 double shifts in as many days and had a major incident during one of them. I remember going to the toilet at three AM and hearing voices calling my name in the cubicle, and when I turned on the tap on the washbasin I saw faces in the water smiling at me.
 Another method… which I really recommend you do not try at home… is to have a stroke in your left hemisphere. This is what happened to a neurologist called Jill Bolte Taylor, and although she was seriously ill, her life was in danger and she needed intensive hospital treatment as a result, the experience of the injury was an amazingly positive life-changing one, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU. The simplest and safest way to activate your right-brain and to disarm the attacks against it from Illuminati-controlled society is just to be aware of its presence and to trust it. This was the most important thing Ian taught us at Shift 2. I think that the right-brain gives us hints, a little dig in the ribs every now and again that is just its way of saying: “Don’t forget, I’m here.” The synchronicity and premonitions we discussed are a part of that. A time is coming when we may not need to use the arduous above activities because of changes going on in the universe around us, which is in turn affecting the sun and the Earth. This all ties in with the 2012 phenomenon that Ian also explored. A couple of years ago Ian took a trip to Peru to meet with a tribe of Indians called the Quero. These were a tribe that everybody had assumed were wiped out by the Conquistadors in the 16th Century, but in fact they just went underground, living mostly in secret settlements high in the Andes mountains and keeping away from the general population. For some reason they decided to go public in the early 1960’s and reemerged from their hiding place to the astonishment and delight of their fellow Peruvians. While he was in Peru Ian fell down the stairs and broke his leg; I remember seeing him still limping at the 2010 Glastonbury Symposium, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/ben-goes-on-tor.html. But this worked out for the best because he couldn’t go climbing with the rest of his group and so was free to wait at the bottom of the mountain and talk to the Quero Indians who found him there, in the true way that these incidents manifest themselves synchronistically. The Quero believe that in 2012 to 2013 the sun will go into a massive overdrive of activity that will cause it to bathe the Earth is solar flares. This will do terrible damage to electrical and electronic equipment that could take years to recover from; but, on the positive side, it could free us from the control of our right-brain by the Illuminati, so making their New World Order impossible. The legend the Quero speak of is shared by many indigenous tribes throughout the world. The Maori of New Zealand call it the “unveiling”, this is the literal translation of the Greek word apocalypse; not “end of the world”, but “unveiling”. It all fits into place! We can see now why the Illuminati agents in the Conquistadors were so desperate to commit their evil genocide on the American Indians, just like the Holy Inquisition did to witches in Europe during the thousand years previously. And that brings us onto the next interesting fact: The Vatican has just set up the first ever office of the Holy Inquisition anywhere in the world outside Rome… in the city of Lima in Peru, right on the doorstep of the Quero. Could the Chemtrails be an attempt to stop the positive effects of the solar flares reaching the Earth’s surface and so preserve Illuminati left-brain rule? I’m not sure; there are a lot of unanswered questions over Chemtrails and their true purpose, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/chemtrails-and-tomorrows-world.html. However Ian feels confident, as do I, that these attempts are futile and will fail. I’m glad I went to a Shift 2 event and I’d recommend them to everybody. Ian’s done a good job striving so hard not just to present them, but to do all the donkey-work as well. We left in high spirits. Both Ustane and I were inspired and filled with hope. Ian exudes a sense of optimism that cannot be found in any other researcher, even his runner-up David Icke. It was tiring to sit there for six hours taking in all that information and processing it in my brain… both hemispheres of it… , and my bottom was very sore afterwards, but I do resonate with what he was saying. I’ve noticed this in my own life since I was discharged from the Hospital Portering Service. Things have been working out for me very well, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/tv-guns-and-lawyers.html. Along with my housecleaning business I’ve been offered a job as a columnist in a new UFO/conspiracy magazine, of which I’ll post details as soon as they’re available. I’m also going to edit the magazine. Ironically if I were still in Portering I probably wouldn’t have the time. So now we know that clouds do indeed have silvery linings, and why they do.

 A good symptom of a spiritual awakening is when materialistic scientists like Michael Gazzaniga have fellow scholars who contradict his views; one of them in Iain McGilchrist, and it’s good to end an article with one of his speeches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbAJMi5el5I.

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/mystery-skin-disease-in-vietnam.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/ben-emlyn-jones-on-alternative-future.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/upcoming-interview-on-richplanet-tv.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/truth-is-in-there-yawn.html

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And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/appeal-hearing.html