Fiery Serpent

Serpent Mound is an impressive and massive earth sculpture of a snake biting an oval, possibly eating an egg or biting the world.  Located in Adams County, Ohio, it has been a place of controversy since it was discovered. The effigy is built on the top of a high ground referred to as a plateau by the timid. Even the early scientist in previous centuries knew it wasn't formed by the forces that shaped the rest of the Midwest. They refereed to it as a “Crypto-geologic Uplift”.   A long winded term meaning “We don't know what happened.”

The controversy was a result of the conservative scientists' determination to attribute it to vulcanism when there was no evidence of volcanic activity in the region. They couldn't accept the idea that rocks can fall from the sky , and this had to be a very big rock.

Serpent mound has been constructed on the center uplift of a very large meteor creator. It is estimated to be less than 320 million years old.

The age of the mound itself is a little contested. Originally it was believed to have been constructed by the Adena culture (We don't know what they really called themselves.) at about 1000 to 100 years BCE or about as long as 3000 years ago. Recently, improved radiocarbon dating of two samples of wood charcoal taken from undisturbed parts of Serpent Mound both yielded a date of ca. A.D.1070, about 2000 years more recent than previously believed. This makes it likely that it was built by the Fort Ancient culture. Both of these culture have been linked to the Mounds at Anderson, Indiana.

The image however, is hard to deny. An effigy that has been described as a fiery serpent taking a bite out of the Earth is sitting on top of a place where an object that would have been seen by ancient peoples as a fiery serpent did take a bite out of the Earth. Of course it did this over 300 million years before the effigy was built.

Is it possible that a precolumbian genius watched the streaks of meteors in the sky, occasionally saw them impact, and made the connection with the landscape surrounding Serpent Mound? This seems more likely than other explanations.

If you have the opportunity to visit Serpent Mound its worth the trip.  Directions can be found easily on the internet.

So, Why do They Look Like Us?

Reported abductees and contactees have consistently reported only a handful of alien types. The Reptilians, the insect like Mantis variety, the Nordics who look so much like us that they would not be noticed on the streets of Oslo, and the classic Grays. All of these have the same basic configuration that they share with us. Each has two arms and two legs. The head is placed on a moveable neck at top. Each has two eyes offering binocular vision that are placed on the head close to the brain. There are other similarities. Why should they resemble us so closely?

Skeptics point out that any being that evolved on another planet, or another dimension would have had an entirely different evolutionary history than us. They should then look entirely different from us sharing no characteristics at all. Certainly Science Fiction never had this problem. H. G. Wells began the tradition of truly alien appearance in The War of the Worlds. He described his aliens as about the size of a bear with an array of tentacles and a strange V shaped mouth. No arms or legs. More recent movie and TV Science Fiction has only deviated from this concept when cost and the need for actor recognition forced them to resort to makeup.

But reported genuine aliens continue to have the same basic configuration as ourselves. Why?

Evolution.

The basic process of evolution is random, the reconfiguring of genes and modifiers in the DNA molecule. The execution of the process is not random any more that the path of a drop of water is random after it falls as rain. The drop makes its way through aquifers, rivulet, streams, creeks and rivers to return to the ocean without any direction at all. Evolution creates species that fill niches, predators, herbivores, insect eaters, fliers and so on. Those which work survive and reproduce. Those which don't work, do not survive.

We see this every day. Occasionally a negative trait is introduced and medicine has to work to assure the survival of the individual. We call these genetic disorders. They have names like Huntington’s disease and Cystic Fibrosis.

The successful niches are filled by millions of species adapted to them. The shark comes in a variety of forms but each is so perfectly evolved as an aquatic hunters that they have remained in their current form for millions of years.

The Wolf is a mammal predator found over much of the world. It's a perfect hunter. But one continent it did not evolve on was Australia. There the niche filled by the wolf in North America, Asia, and Europe was filled by an entirely different creature, The Tasmanian Wolf. This predator isn't even a mammal like the wolf. Its a marsupial. Its appearance however is strikingly like a wolf. It has four legs for long distance running and rapid sprints to chase down prey, a highly developed olfactory sense, eyes and ears set high on the head that can be focused on a target. Its appearance is strikingly canine but it isn't even remotely related. It gains its appearance and characteristics from the predator niche it fills.

A sentient being fills a niche too. If it is to survive before it finally develops a technology to dominate its world it must stand upright to see potential predators, it must have hands to manipulate its environment, It must have binocular vision and have those eyes close to the brain to reduce time from vision to understanding. This list goes on. The basic upright form of humanity is as far as we know the best configuration for a sentient being and seems to have no evolutionary requirement except for the niche it fills.

The Troodon is a small bird like dinosaur from the Cretaceous period. In 1982 Dale Russell, curator of vertebrate fossils at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa decided to theorize what this dinosaur might look like if the killer asteroid had not hit and it had been allowed to evolve into a sentient being. What he came up with looks strikingly like the lizard beings and a little like the Grays yet Russell used only evolutionary logic and had no interest in UFOs whatever. He extrapolated a being that fills a niche, presently occupied by us, and then conjectured how it must look.

It should not therefore come as a surprise that upright bipedal beings are being reported aboard space craft. They are probably more common than we imagine.

Black Triangles

In April I've had two frustrating reports pf black triangles. All reports of black triangles are frustrating but in both of these cases the witness has filed an extensive report with detailed description of the object and related events including in one case mentioning additional witnesses, then makes themselves unavailable for interview. Without an interview it is impossible to validate a sighting.

These two are interesting in that both were sighted in the Bloomington/Bedford area just south of Indianapolis in mid April of this year within days of each other. Could this be the same object?

The most interesting Case was near SR 67 and SR 37.. It was seen by an entire family.

Almost all sightings of black triangles are frustrating in that they just sightings. A person looks up and there it is, big, dark, and triangular in shape. Often the object is lighted at the corners with red and white lights. Most sightings are at night and details are usually hidden by the darkness. Then the triangle fly's away leaving the witness stunned and often frightened. Certainly some of these are common aircraft. On approach to an airport a huge jet with its flaps deployed can appear to almost float in slow motion. But many of these sightings by their appearance and flight characteristics are clearly not of known aircraft.

in recent years there have been dozens of black triangle sightings. Explanations range from extraterrestrial craft to Air Force stealth aircraft. I don't like the latter explanation because the triangles are reported to be silent, capable of hovering and capable of suddenly accelerating TO unbelievable speeds. I know of no technology that would make that possible.

(The picture is a generic black triangle from files.)

A MUFON Central Indiana Chapter

Yesterday was the second meeting of the newly formed Central Indiana Chapter of MUFON. I began to realized about three years ago that I had to start one for a simple reason. There are only a little more than a dozen field investigators in Indiana and there is only one in central Indiana, me. I didn't think it would be difficult to recruit new investigators from the potential members of the chapter. People who join MUFON almost always join because they want to take part in the mission of MUFON, to solve the great mystery of UFOs. And several of the people who have attended both meetings have expressed interest in passing the field investigators test.

Becoming a field investigator isn't difficult. The hardest part for most people seems to be buying the Field Investigators Manual available from the MUFON web site, now $50 plus shipping . The field investigators test can be taken at home with an open book and can take as long as you like or be challenged as many times as you need. If an investigator candidate did pretty well in high school general science, he or she will do well. If the candidate really enjoyed the physics classes it will be a breeze.

I plan to do presentations on subjects in the manual at each meeting. Other field investigators will also instruct. I also plan to take small groups on actual field investigators. The problem with this is that most UFO reports are sightings of flybys. A phone call interview is sufficient and the price of gas tends to restrict us to what is sufficient.


Right now I have six pending cases and three more sitting on the back burner. I have three witnesses to interview. A little help would be nice.

Information on the time and location of each meeting is published on the Indiana MUFON web site. The next one is in June.

Breakthrough in Quantum Communications

Last April I wrote about quantum communications and how it could be used by extraterrestrials and eventually by us. Quantum communications is not merely faster than light, it is instantaneous across any distance. A link to that post is here. You can also find it under older posts.


http://ufosinindiana.blogspot.com/2010/04/quantum-communications-between-stars.html

There has been a major breakthrough in this area! Here is a link to that story.

http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=10057

You may have to copy and paste it into your browser.

The Philidelphia Navy Yard and Vanishing Ships

Since I was very young I have been deeply interested in mysteries. I discovered the Philadelphia Experiment when I was about seventeen. I had found in my local branch library a copy of Uninvited Visitors by Ivan T. Sanderson. The last chapter is about the Philadelphia Experiment And describes the story in pretty complete detail.

In case you are unfamiliar with this story, and I suspect you are not, in 1943 an experiment is supposed to have been conducted by the United States Navy to render a warship invisible. The ship was the USS Eldridge DE-173, a destroyer escort which was stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard at the time. According to the story a large amount of strange electronic gear was installed on the ship. It was then taken out to sea where the equipment was tuned on. The vessel then reportedly did vanish and reappeared. After that things apparently got out of control. The ship developed a tendency to vanish on its own. When it reappeared crewmen would materialize half in and half out of bulkheads decks and ship's superstructure. On one occasion the ship was reported to disappear from its birth in Philadelphia, appear in a birth in New York then returned to the first birth entirely on it's own.

The story was used as the basis for a rather good science fiction movie in 1984, rewritten as fact by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore in 1995 and has been the subject of a number of documentaries.

I've always had trouble believing this story.

First of all I know something about invisibility. There are ways of rendering an object invisible. One is to use gravity. If you can generate a gravitational field powerful enough, light will bend around it and the object generating the field will be invisible. A black hole does this very well. Our own sun however, though it is vastly larger than the Earth, can only distort the position of stars visible on its periphery. This method is a bit impractical. Another way is to create a cloak covered with computer controlled video receptors and imagers. Images on one side of the cloaked object would be repeated on the other side, hiding the object. This was used in a science fictional sense in the James Bond film Die Another Day. Finally there is the much more feasible concept of optically warping light around the object using meta-materials or prisms made of calcite. This has been done on a small scale but depends on polarized light and so far only works on certain frequencies of light..

None of these has any chance in the near future of making a warship vanish using present day science and the Philadelphia Experiment supposedly occurred 69 years ago.

It also should be noted that the Navy has had the ability to make a warship vanish for over two hundred years. Submarines submerge.

Still I remained interested in the story until I had a conversation with the great science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp. de Camp was something of a hero of mine. One of the first books I owned, read, and remember the name of he author of was All About Rockets and Jets by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. This was a primer on rocket and jet propulsion and I must have read it at about eight years old.

In 1979 I decided that Indianapolis needed a science fiction convention. I discovered “cons” that year. The first Indianapolis con, InConJunction I, was held in 1981 and has continued every year ever since.

One year we were privileged to have as our guest of honor Mr. de Camp.

L. Sprague de Camp is considered to be one of the great luminaries of the field. He is author to far more books than can be mentioned here. One of his SF greats is Lest Darkness Fall. He wrote a great deal of fantasy and was listed as technical adviser on the Conan movies. He also wrote a great deal of nonfiction including The Ancient Engineers and interestingly The Evolution of Naval Weapons, US Government Textbook 1947.


When I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. de Camp at length I learned that he had been part of a team working for the Navy in 1944 to dream up and create new, cutting edge technology. The team was thee men, Lt. Commander L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov. Their lab was in The Philadelphia Navy Yard, one year after the legendary experiment was supposed to have taken place.

Of course I asked him about it. If anything like this had happened he would have been in exactly the right position to have heard about it. He hadn't. In fact he was adamant that nothing like this ever occurred. There was, he said, an ongoing process to degauss ships to demagnetize their hulls. This was the first time I'd heard of this. The process was to make the ship unattractive to magnetic mines. Someone had said it would make it invisible to them. In a speech to the convention later that weekend he mentioned it and refereed to Charles Berlitz as “The inventor of the Bermuda Triangle.” He also mentioned this in his autobiography, Time and Chance.

I didn't get a chance to have Sprague autograph All About Rockets and Jets. It had been read to disintegration many years before.

Since then the incident has been extensively investigated. No evidence at all, tangible or otherwise, other than that given initially by Carlos Allende who first mentioned it in an annotated copy of Jessup's The Case for the UFO has surfaced. Strange when you consider the large numbers of eye witness testimony to the events of the Roswell incident in 1947.

I cannot accept this as anything other than an entertaining legend.

On November 7 2010 at 6pm a student at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) was walking down Michigan Street on campus when he looked up and saw a fantastic object. He was too astonished to think of taking a photo, something he chastised himself for in his initial report to MUFON, but he did make the drawing reproduced above.

Since the sighting was in Indianapolis I drew the case. The witness did not want to meet with me but agreed to talk over the phone. Like many witnesses he initially believed that his report to MUFON would be the end of it and did not realize that we try to follow up and investigate every case. Our purpose is not to simply catalog cases but to investigate as deeply as we can and gather as much information as possible to solve the UFO mystery.

We do not want to disturb people's lives which in this case became an issue.

He described the object as silent and huge, the apparent size of 15 to 17 full moons. The underside had radiating spokes or vanes similar to the underside of a mushroom. There were several red lights both on the periphery and in the center and the apparent front of the craft or object was described as silver.

Since submitting his report the witness has become very reticent to be associated with a UFO sighting. He wishes to remain anonymous and adamantly refused to allow me to record my interview with him. The stated reason for this reluctance is his intention to enter a field of science as a career and he is worried about he potential discrimination. He is presently studying the sciences at IUPUI where the sighting took place.

The witness seems credible and very intelligent. There seems to be no obvious motive for perpetrating a hoax. No other witnesses could be contacted. There were no other reported sightings of the object.

Indianapolis International Airport and Indianapolis Air Traffic Control were of no help.

The witness did not exhibit any evidence that might indicate abduction. He was strikingly aware of the time during and after the sighting and is certain he can account for every second.

One unusual detail is the reaction of other people near the witness during the sighting. He refers to one person who saw the object and at least one other who should have. (I was not given information that would have allowed me to contact them.) Each either ignored or completely disregarded the object. Only the witness regarded the object as unusual. In fact highly unusual as illustrated by the description and illustration included in his report. Why then did the others consider it not worth a second look? I am personally familiar with this particular area of Indianapolis. It is near Indianapolis International Airport and it's glide paths. Jumbo jets fly overhead low and slow, almost constantly, on their landing approach. They frequently appear enormous and are considered by the people in the area as ordinary as cars on the street. Blimps are not as frequent but not unusual Indianapolis is a major sports venue and blimps can appear at any time. This might account for others in the area to simply not pay sufficient attention. People in the city also never seem to look up.

It must also be considered that if you accept the concept of alien abductions in urban areas then you must ask why the alien vessels aren’t seen far more often over cities. Is some agency at work concealing them or perhaps influencing potential observers to not see them?

In regards to this sighting I believe there are three possibilities:

1. The witness mistook a conventional aircraft for an unconventional one. I consider this to be unlikely in light of the witnesses intelligence, science background, and familiarity with the area.
2. This is a hoax. I find no credible reason to suspect this.
3. This is a real sighting of an unknown craft.