UFO UpDates Mailing List
From: Peregrine Mendoza <101653.2205@CompuServe.COM>
Date: 09 Feb 97 21:19:37 EST
Fwd Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 00:39:46 -0500
Subject: Peter Brookesmith on Tectonic Strain Theory
The Duke of Mendoza presents his compliments to all,
and refers to the threads 'Electrically Induced Hallucinations'
and "TST" (too many messages to quote them all - sorry).
Those complaining about the work of Michael Persinger, and
Steven John who has been speculating about it, may like to
take a gander at the following excerpt from the forthcoming
book by Paul Devereux and the Spooky Dook, which answers
some of Steven John's queries and fills in some significant
omissions from the story Chris Rutowski has been telling.
Paul Devereux should be joining the List soon (AOL willing,
tee hee), and can fill in much more.
(Sue Blackmore, by the way, had a 6-month ME-type illness last
winter and has been recovering slowly since. This may explain
her lack of communicativeness. Or the Royal Mule could...
COPYRIGHT remains with the authors, BTW, but I at least have a
pretty liberal attitude to fair use. For the really juicy, new
exclusive stuff and amazing pictures, you'll have to buy the
book. But here we go with some pertinent history...
BEGIN EXTRACT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Growing Towards the Light
Charles Fort was among the first to make the observation that strange
"meteors" appeared somewhat coincidentally with earthquakes and
tremors. The "first ufologist" had already made a connection between
lights in the sky and tectonic activity.
It had to wait until the end of the 1960s for ufologists to take the
next obvious step and link UFOs with geological fault lines, those
areas of tectonic weakness in the Earth's crust. ...John Keel
associated the appearance of unusual lights with areas of faulting
and magnetic anomaly, as well as with the occurrence of earthquakes,
but it was perhaps the French researcher, Ferdinand Lagarde, who most
tightly focused in on the UFO-fault connection. In a 1968 article, he
presented an initial survey of the French part of the 1954 UFO wave,
in which he found that 37 per cent of reported UFO sightings occurred
on or in the immediate vicinity of faults, and that 80 per cent of
the sighting localities were associated with faults. To counter the
argument that "anywhere" can be correlated with faulting, Lagarde
compared communes with faults in the same areas:only 3.6 per cent of
these fell on faults (or 10.8 per cent if margins of 2.5km were
allowed for the faults). Later research showed a 40 percent
correlation between reported UFO incidence and fault lines.
"UFO sightings occur by preference on geological faults," Lagarde
concluded. "It seems as though faults, as such, are not merely the
external aspect of an irregularity in the Earth's crust, but are also
the scenes of delicate phenomena - piezo-electrical, or electrical,
or magnetic, and at times perhaps of gravimetric variation or
discontinuity."
Although the lights-fault connection was a low-profile topic within
ufology for several years, it gradually began to emerge from the
shadows. In 1975, Paul Devereux and Andrew York published a two-part
article called "Portrait of a Fault Area" in a Fortean journal. In
this they surveyed their home county of Leicestershire in the English
midlands, geographically and geologically mapping in great detail the
occurrences of a wide range of recorded strange phenomena and events
over a number of centuries. Both meteorological anomalies ("strange
lightning", "balls of fire") and reported UFOs (lights in the sky,
disks, spheres and cigar-shaped aerial objects) in the data were
found to have had their greatest incidence over the tectonically-
active parts of the county. Although this was a relatively crude
study, it did suggest that the influences causing the appearance of
exceptional meteorological events appeared to be at least partially
shared by the phenomena termed "UFOs".
In 1977, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist and geologist at
Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, together with Gyslaine
Lafreniere, published Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events in
which they described a similar study of the entire area of the United
States. While this did not allow for the same kind of detail and
individual accuracy obtained by the Devereux-York study, it used more
sophisticated analytical methods. Their results indicated that
reported UFO phenomena did tend to cluster in areas, supporting
Keel's notion of "windows". They also found a correlation between the
higher levels of reported UFO activity and the locations of
earthquake epicentres. Persinger and Lafreniere concluded that "the
data consistently point towards seismic-related sources". They argued
that "the existence of man upon a thin shell beneath which mammoth
forces constantly operate, cannot be over-emphasized".
Persinger and Lafreniere saw the interaction between stellar and
planetary influences and the Earth's own processes as possibly
providing the energy "motor" that could generate light phenomena.
While this interaction would affect the whole planet, Persinger and
Lafreniere reasoned that it would result in outbreaks of lights and
other unusual phenomena only in those locations where geological
stresses were in a state of tension - primed to be triggered, so to
speak. (Tectonic stress waxes and wanes in many places on the Earth's
crust every day, producing many small, often imperceptible tremors
which only occasionally escalate into major earthquakes.) These
researchers visualised fields of forces operating evenly and quietly
over very large geographical regions which could become focused at
any given time in a few small areas of particular geological
resistance or instability such as fault lines, ore bodies or mineral
deposits, stubborn rock outcrops, hills, mountains, volcanoes and so
on. They likened this to the energies in the atmosphere being equally
capable of producing a gentle breeze over a wide area or a localised
ferocity like a tornado.
It had long been noted that unusual lights are often seen around
physical projections within an active region. These include features
such as mountain peaks and ridges, isolated buildings and church
towers or spires, prominent rock outcrops, and transmission towers.
Such features are charge collectors, so this obviously supported the
assumption of there being an electromagnetic dimension to the lights.
Seeking a specific mechanism for the production of anomalous lights,
Persinger and Lafreniere opted for a modification of the piezo-
electrical effect, which is the term given to the production of
electricity in crystals subjected to pressure. They felt that stress
accumulating in a seismic area, perhaps over weeks or months, could
produce an "electric column" from a few feet to thousands of yards
across. The high electric field in such a column could in certain
circumstances ionise the air creating glowing shapes. The column
would move as the band of stress followed a fault or other line of
weakness in the ground. Consequently, any glowing ionised shapes in
the column would seem to be moving freely through the air.
This was the first outing of what has come to be known as the
Tectonic Strain Theory, or TST.
In the decades following this work, Persinger, individually and with
associates, has maintained a steady stream of research papers
exploring the TST explanation in numerous locales within North
America as well as in other countries, and he has also studied the
possible clinical effects on the human mind and body of close
proximity to anomalous light phenomena (see following chapter). The
TST has also gradually been updated and refined. Now, for example,
piezo-electricity has been joined by other possible mechanisms such
as emissions of radon and other gases, and chemoluminescence. Another
refinement has been associating the incidence of light phenomena not
so much with numbers of quake epicentres, but with the intensity of
such tectonic activity.
The idea of a "strain field" crossing areas of increasing tectonic
stress being the primary cause of light phenomena has stood up well
to subsequent analyses, but it is now thought to be possible that
there may also be more physical candidates such as underground water
moving through fault systems. It is also now recognized that even
given the presence of a strain field, extra "triggers" may also be
implicated in the occurrence of intense outbreaks of light phenomena.
Such triggers could include lunar tides, the passage of air masses
and geomagnetic storms - all of which have caused earthquakes. The
passage of the moon around our planet, for instance, causes a focal
strain field to travel across the Earth's surface at around 1000 km
per hour. Passing through a tectonically primed region, this could
well set off a spate of luminosities.
In 1985, Persinger presented some evidence to support the observation
that variations in the Earth's magnetic field would seem to be
associated with the appearance of light phenomena, but only in
regions where tectonic stress and strain were increasing. In 1990,
Persinger put forward further evidence to show that increased global
seismicity could be successfully linked with worldwide UFO waves.
In the course of the 1980s another important researcher into light
phenomena made his appearance - John Derr, a leading U.S. geologist
who by then had already been pressing for scientific acceptance of
earthquake lights for a decade. In 1986, he joined with Persinger to
study a wave of lights that had been reported throughout the 1970s in
the Yakima Indian Reservation, Washington State, and especially
between 1973-1974. Firewardens positioned in their lookout posts
within the reservation saw red-orange and yellow-orange lightballs
floating over various locations, such as Goat Rocks. These were quite
large, though "ping-pong balls" of light were also seen bounding
along Toppenish Ridge and Satus Peak within the reservation. Columns
and flares of lights were seen in addition, as were white lights with
smaller, multi-coloured lights apparently connected to them. Some
lights were complex forms, and some displayed luminous protrusions or
"horns". Over the years during which these remarkable sights were
observed, there were also unusual meteorological effects such as
glowing clouds that fluctuated in brightness. The firewardens
organised themselves, and photographs were taken of the lights and
triangulated observations using radios were made.
The Yakima analysis by Derr and Persinger showed that 78 percent of
the reported phenomena were lights seen in the night sky. They were
seen most often in the vicinity of the ridges that cut across the
reservation - each riddled with faulting - and with Satus Peak, the
general area of a surface rupture and one of the stronger earthquakes
in the region during the 13 years covered by the study. Successive
reporting of lights occurred in the seven months preceding the
biggest earthquake of the studied period, in June-July 1975. Regional
seismic activity also increased during the times in 1972 and 1976
when most sightings were reported. The investigators took the
opportunity to seek evidence for a stress field moving across the
area. From June 1976 to March 1977 they noted 21 earthquake-light
phenomena cycles, eight of which occurred in the time intervals
between quakes located north and south of the sightings, and two more
occurred on the days when there were north-south shifts in
epicentres. This strongly indicated a moving 'band' of stress within
the local geology.
In addition to increasing the evidence for an association between
outbreaks of lights and earthquake activity (Derr was able to make
informal predictions to colleagues of an earthquake around Tennant
Creek, Australia, in 1988, for instance, because of the earlier
appearance of light phenomena in the district), Derr also made an
important discovery regarding the role of liquids moving over or
inserted into the Earth's crust near window areas. The liquids could
be in the form of flooded rivers carrying much greater volumes of
water than usual, the result of civil engineering enterprises such as
the creation of new dams and reservoirs, or the high-pressure
injection of water or waste liquids into the bedrock. The extra
weight of water on the surface can add pressure to the underlying
geology, as well as penetrate faults and fissures. Forced injection
can cause cracks in rocks to increase and spread, thus shifting
internal pressures, in addition to lubricating the surfaces of rocks
meeting at a fault, so allowing them to slide more easily over each
other.
The first case where this connection came to light was an outbreak of
UFO sightings in the Uintah Basin in north-east Utah, around the
towns of Vernal, Roosevelt and Duchesne, between 1966 and 1968. The
main type of phenomenon observed was a large globe of light one
witness described as having the golden-amber colour of the harvest
moon. It was rarely fully spherical, however, usually appearing as a
sort of hemisphere with a flattened bottom. "Rocket" and "cigar"
forms were also reported, along with infrequent sightings of
metallic-looking disks. Many of the phenomena were observed by
multiple witnesses, and some people reported hearing whistling and
humming sounds on close encounter. Derr eventually discovered that
the injection of waste liquids into the crust had been going on
coincident with this wave. This had not been noticed for some time
because the the injection work had taken place across the nearby
state line in Colorado.
In a 1990 paper, Derr and Persinger recorded that the forced
injection of waste liquids into the bedrock at Derby, Colorado,
triggered some 1500 small earthquakes, and a large increase of
reported light phenomena within 100 km of the injection site. Derr
and Persinger noted that some process within the Earth's crust,
whether a strain field or whatever, diffused away from the site at a
rate of 50-100 km per month to distances as far as 300 km.
Subsequently, Derr has made numerous other observations of a similar
kind. For instance, an analysis of an "epidemic" of light reports in
southern Manitoba in 1975 showed a correlation with a strong
earthquake in Minnesota near the source of the Red River (which flows
into Manitoba). Derr and Persinger were able to show matching
patterns between the numbers of reported light phenomena and the
varying volume of the Red River.
Nature Lends a Hand
But it wasn't just this kind of analytical research of earlier cases
of light phenomena that moved the light hunters' case along.
Circumstances allowed two contemporary field studies of localised
outbreaks of lights to be conducted. The first took place around
Piedmont in south-west Missouri. The appearance of strange lights of
various colours in the early months of 1973 coincided with TV and
electrical interference in the area. Lights were seen not only in the
sky, but also sitting in fields, hovering near transmitter towers,
and even passing beneath the surface of a reservoir. Dr Harley D.
Rutledge, a physics professor at Southeast Missouri State University,
led field expeditions to the "flap" area, and they took numerous
photographs of light phenomena and made useful first-hand
observations.
The second situation developed in the remote valley of Hessdalen, in
a mineral-rich area famed for its mining of copper and other metals,
about 70 miles south-east of Trondheim in Norway. For a few years
after November, 1981, Hessdalen hosted one of the most remarkable
outbreaks of light phenomena ever reported. People living in the
isolated farms that straggle through the valley saw lights spring
into visibility near rooftops, or hover just above the ground.
Mainly, however, lights were seen just below the summits and ridges
of the surrounding mountains. The shapes of the light phenomena
included spheres, "bullet" forms with pointed end downwards, and
inverted "Christmas tree" shapes. Colours were predominanlty white
and yellow-white, though other colours were also reported,
particularly small, flashing red lights on the top or bottom of
larger white forms. Strong, localised white orblue flashes in the sky
were also observed.
In March, 1982, Norway's leading UFO group, UFO-Norge, became
interested, as did the Norwegian defence department, who sent two air
force officers to study the situation. (They discovered that people
in Hessdalen had been seeing strange lights on and off since 1944.)
By the summer of 1983, hundreds of reports of strange lights had been
made by the inhabitants of Hessdalen. There were also complaints of
curious underground sounds like rumbling trains. The situation had
become so intense that Norwegian and Swedish UFO groups combined
their resources to form Project Hessdalen. Field operations got under
way on 21 January, and ended on 26 February, 1984. During this period
a continuous presence of monitors was maintained in the valley, along
with a range of instrumentation, including radar, a magnetometer, a
spectrum-analyser, geiger counters, and a variety of photographic
equipment, including cameras with diffusion filters that could image
the spectrum coming from a light source, allowing analysis to
determine what elements were present. The project personnel had to
work in difficult conditions, with temperatures as low as minus 30
degrees Celsius. The headquarters of the effort was a trailer
caravan, high on a ridge, equipped with electrical power.
Project Hessdalen succeeded in taking many photographs of strange
lights, and they also obtained a number of radar readings that were
not " radar angels". In one baffling case, project personnel were
watching a bright light cross the sky while the radar received an
echo back from it only once every second sweep of the radar beam, yet
it gave a steady appearance to the naked eye. A seismograph used for
just a part of the field operation had its largest readings
coinciding with peaks in sightings, but the cause of the earth
tremors were not local to Hessdalen. The magnetometer showed changes
in the Earth's field in apparent relationship with about 40 percent
of perceived lights. The geiger counters gave no unusual readings,
though that could have been due to their distance from any lights.
Project Hessdalen conducted further fieldwork in the winters of 1985
and 1986, but it became apparent that the peak of the wave had passed
between 1982 and 1984. J. Allen Hynek visited the site in 1985, and
was impressed with what he learned about the phenomena there.
The Hessdalen phenomenon had massively raised the profile of the
whole issue of mystery lightforms.
Earth Lights Arrive
In 1982, coincident with the onslaught of lights at Hessdalen, Earth
Lights, the first book devoted solely to the phenomenon, was
published by Paul Devereux. He made an attempt at summarising and
clearly identifying what until then had been a somewhat formless,
unfocused area of enquiry. He provided the phenomena with the name
"earth lights" specifically to identify them as being something other
than extraterrestrial. The book reinforced the tectonic connection
with the lights by presenting work the author had carried out with
geochemist Paul McCartney exploring detailed associations between
light phenomena, epicentres and faulting in Great Britain. Even the
great UK centre for UFO sightings, Warminster, was shown to lie
directly on an isolated fault line, and nearby Cley Hill, frequently
the source of orange fireballs, was immediately adjacent to two
faults.
The following year, Devereux, McCartney and chemist Don Robin brought
earth lights to the attention of a broader public through the pages
of New Scientist, where they also discussed possible mechanisms
within rock that could produce lights, such as piezo-electricity,
triboluminescence (light produced by frictional forces), and
thermoluminescence (the production of light by heating).
An important addition to the earth lights literature appeared in 1985
in the form of Spooklights - A British Survey, by David Clarke and
Granville Oldroyd. Among numerous British earth lights haunts
superbly documented by these authors was Burton Dassett, a now lonely
church on top of an isolated group of hills set in the plain south of
Warwick. It was the focus of an intense outbreak of light phenomena
in 1922 and 1923. Reporters from the major local newspapers, as well
as local people, saw many displays of mysterious lights, nicknamed
"the ghost". The reporter from the Birmingham Post, with other
onlookers, saw a "steady and vivid" light travelling a few feet above
the ground. "Its radiance was such that the sky was faintly
illuminated for several miles," he wrote.
Clarke and Oldroyd discovered that the church sits directly on the
Burton Dassett fault, and that the mysterious light briefly
reappeared on the night of 25 January, 1924. That very night, there
was a powerful earth tremor in Hereford, a county to the west. This
obviously suggests a general tectonic connection of some kind with
the Burton Dassett light. The local Leamington Chronicle made just
such an asssumption. "Simultaneous with the appearance of the 'ghost'
of south Warwickshire comes the report of an earth tremor in the West
of England," it noted.
In 1989, Devereux's Earth Lights Revelation appeared, a sequel to his
first book, in which a much more comprehensive and updated scope of
the subject was presented. The book also gave full information on a
study by Devereux and McCartney of an "earth lights zone" between
Barmouth and Harlech in north-west Wales which had been active in the
early years of the century.
Because good, contemporary reports had been made of these Welsh
lights, Devereux and McCartney found that by conducting thorough map
and field research, the locations of quite a number could be mapped
with great precision. These detailed positions were then matched with
recent geological research in the region, and it was found that the
lights followed the course of a major local feature, the deep-rooted
Mochras Fault, like beads on a thread. Some of the lights had emerged
from the ground directly on the Mochras Fault, and nearly all
occurred within a hundred yards or so of that or associated faulting.
Indeed, the incidence level increased with proximity to the faulting.
(To check if this was a random pattern or not, the investigators
conducted a similar study of the St Bride's Bay area of south-west
Wales, the focus of a UFO wave in 1977. The results were virtually
identical to those obtained around Barmouth.)
The Barmouth-Harlech lights outbreak occurred in the midst of a
period of unsusual seismicity: between 1892 and 1906 there were
several earthquakes in various parts of Wales. In October, 1904, for
example, immediately prior to the onset of the Barmouth wave, there
was a quake at nearby Bedgellert.
Barmouth and Harlech are also adjacent to the Lleyn Peninsula, one of
Britain's most active seismic areas, and epicentre in July, 1984, of
an earthquake registering 5.5 on the Richter scale. This event
brought the lights back briefly to the Barmouth area - the evening
before the quake, a resident saw a brilliant white light "the size of
a small car" float in from the sea and land just beyond the brow of a
grassy dune on the beach. When he rushed over to examine the "landing
spot" there was nothing to be seen.
The 1980s saw the assembly of a wide range of research into the
history of earth lights in early and non-Western cultures. It became
abundantly clear that people had come up with explanations for the
lights that suited their own cultures and times (see Chapter 1). What
is particularly interesting is that throughout old Europe it was
thought that veins of copper or other minerals are present where
balls of light emerge from the ground. Although such beliefs were
dismissed as mere superstition by the mining texts of the eighteenth
century, the "Age of Reason", it is a fact that prospecting by means
of studying light phenomena was conducted at Bere Alston, an
important copper and arsenic mine in Devon, England, until the
beginning of the twentieth century. This means that the skills
involved in observing earth lights probably died out in the Western
world only within the last couple of generations.
In the Laboratory
As well as field research, historical documentation, statistical
analyses, and theory-building, there have also been some laboratory
experiments. In 1986, Brian Brady and Glen Rowell of the U.S. Bureau
of Mines fractured cores of granite, which has a high quartz content
allowing piezo-electric effects, and basalt, containing no piezo-
electric crystals. Their fracturing was performed in various gases
(air, argon, helium), in a vacuum, and even underwater. Brady and
Rowell used a spectroscope linked to image intensifiers to capture
the spectra of any fleeting lights that might be produced as the
cores broke up. The results were most instructive. Both the granite
and the basalt cores produced tiny lights. This challenged the theory
that peizo-electricity could be the mechanism producing lights in the
landscape. But the biggest surprise was that the spectra of the
lights showed no trace of any elements from the rocks, only from the
surrounding gas or liquid. Analysis of the spectra of rocks fractured
in a vacuum showed only the gases in air (it is impossible to create
a perfect vacuum on Earth). The experimenters concluded that "an
exolectron excitation of the ambient atmosphere is the mechanism
responsible for the light emissions observed under rock fracture".
But though there were speculations about the radio fields produced by
fracturing rock forming energy 'bottles' to hold the light emissions
in spherical and other forms, there was (and still is) no
satisfactory way of explaining how earth lights could travel freely
in space and maintain specific, defined shapes.
There was another unexpected discovery resulting from the
experiments. The energy produced by the cores fractured under water
made the liquid glow and both atomic and molecular hydrogen was
produced. It was realised by the experimenters that such "molecular
dissociation" might initiate chemical reactions "of geological and
biological interest". John Derr interpreted this as meaning that this
process had "implications for biogenesis", or the origins of life.
Did earth lights trigger the creation of organic life in the primeval
muds of our planet? Are they, in a sense, ancestor lights?
[...]
No one knows what earth lights actually consist of. Some form of
plasma (ionized gas) is assumed, but not a great deal is known about
plasmas in any case, and some particularly baffling properties are
seemingly possessed by the lights. According to recurring accounts,
earth lights seem to be going "on" and "off" very rapidly, they can
send their light in one direction only, and they can appear to have
mass one moment yet seem weightless at another. The lights seem to
hover on the very extremity of physical existence - here one moment,
gone the next. Devereux has suggested that they may be macro-quantal
events, displaying on our level of perception characteristics that
owe something to the fluctuating probability field of the primal,
subnuclear quantum sea out of which all energy and matter arise. Hal
Puthoff has a suspicion that earth lights may be powered by zero-
point energy. David Fryberger is developing a theory which has the
lights resulting from a hitherto unknown particle he calls the
"vorton", more exotic even than gluons, quarks and the other
subatomic entities postulated by nuclear physics.
----------------------------------------------END EXTRACT
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