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From: Daev Walsh - Blather <daev@blather.net>
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 22:24:55 +0100
Fwd Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 17:03:52 -0400
Subject: Blather: Unconventional Means II


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B  L  A  T  H  E  R

p a r a n o r m a l   p r o v o c a t e u r i s m

By Dave (daev) Walsh daev@blather.net
Web: http://www.blather.net
_______________________________________________________
May 11th 1999, Dublin, Ireland   Vol 2. No. 43
_______________________________________________________

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______________________________________________________
Unicorn Jones is the new band comprising David Banks, John Beck
and Dick Nolan. Check out their album *A Hundred Thousand
Million Stars* at http://www.unicornjones.com/
______________________________________________________

UNCONVENTIONAL MEANS II - THE SUNDAY


Having savoured the delights of Saturday night London, and after
crept into my bed with the sun well above the horizon, this
Blatherskite was in rag-order by the time he stumbled into the
Commonwealth Institute on Kensington's High St., a little too
late to barge-in and search for the thread of Jan Bondeson's 11
o'clock 'Basilisks, Vegetable Lambs, Stuffed Mermaids and Other
Monsters and Marvels from Old Natural History', or Daniel
Wojcik's 'From Spirit Photos to Apocalyptic Polaroids'. If we
hadn't been so tardy, we would have lurched into the latter,
familiar as we are already with vegetable lambs, and Bondeson's
*A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities* (I.B. Tauris, 1997, ISBN
1-86064-228-4), and intrigued by what Wojcik had to say...


Instead we managed to make it to see Ted Harrison's 'Pre Millennial
Tension' at 1200. Harrison - writer, TV producer and journalist - gave
forth on the symptoms of tension appearing in the months before the
(alleged) change of millennium. We say alleged, as Harrison, Robert
Anton Wilson, Arthur C. Clarke, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and
others (including this Blatherskite), seem to be sporting wry grins at
the current 'glitz and glamour' attitude leading up to January 1st
2000, guessing that if it weren't for the romanticism of fine round
numbers (ahem, '2000'), there's bugger all else to celebrate,
contentious as our current calendrics seem to be (and that isn't to
say that this writer *won't* be celebrating... like we need an
excuse).

As in Daniel Wojcik's talk in part I of 'UnConventional Means',
Harrison enjoys pointing out the daftness of it all, the coming about
of the belief in Messianic return, the disillusionment of prominent
Y2K consultants, their subsequent fleeing to rural bunkers, and
the fact that apparently 25 per cent of the United States population
believe that 'Jesus will return in their lifetime'. This millennial
tension - as opposed to millennium - is nothing new, we know - the Old
Testament documents as much. The current spate of it, is, relatively
speaking, nothing new either - Rev. Billy Graham was stirring it up
back in '73. This methodology appears to be rooted in getting one's
people on the edge of expectation, of imminent change.


Harrison has recently been to Jerusalem, and entertained us (at least
those of us with finely tuned cruel black humour) with tales of
'Jerusalem Syndrome', a psychological state suffered by many visitors
to the city, consisting of several steps:

Anxiousness of the Christian tourist to Jerusalem

Breaking away from main tour group

Purification - washing, ridding of worldly possessions...

The wearing of white robes

Singing

Preaching


Most sufferers recover after a week - for others it's not so simple...


Harrison reckons that, in a few years, we may see a new condition
appearing: 'Anti-Climax Syndrome' - a 21st Century version of the
Millerite 'Great Disappointment' of the 1840s - and again impacted by
constant 're-calculation' of the allegedly impending apocalypse. He
notes with dry amusement some of the millennialists who, in recent
times, flew to Jerusalem for the End of the World - but bought return
tickets. He also proposes a dip in Christian end-time tension after
2000, hitting a low in the second decade of the new millennium, and
rising again in time for 2033 - to 'celebrate' the crucifixion.

As for the Y2K bug problem - Harrison reckons that, in some ways,
millennial studies can tell us far more about the bug than knowledge
of computers. He is sceptical about massive disaster scenarios, but he
says that if his toaster isn't working on 01/01/02000, he'll eat his
words...


After lunch, and the Charles Fort Institute AGM, we were off to see
neuropsychologist Professor Sergio Della Sala of Aberdeen University
discussing 'Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions about the Mind
and Brain'. Della Sala has to be one of the most entertaining
speakers we have ever encountered - his university lectures must be a
howl, interspersed with comedy and trickery... at one point he walked
to the front of the stage asking the audience members to raise their
right hands... and say 'banana'. Like good students, we did so...
He clicked onto the next slide... which said something like 'At
approximately 2:15pm on Sunday 25th April 1999, several hundred people
in an auditorium in Kensington will say 'banana' for no apparent
reason...'

Della Sala isn't shy about criticising the pervasive myths abounding
about the mind - he carefully points out the differences between what
we actually 'know' about the brain, and what popular opinion and media
assumes we 'know'.

He went on to show some of the cognitive disorders that he has been
studying - using such test as 'the burning house' - conditions, where
for instance, a patient can only 'see' half of their 'visible'
universe - if shown, e.g. a cow, and told to draw it - *they will only
draw half the cow*...

Professor Sergio Della Sala
http://www.psyc.abdn.ac.uk/homedir/sergio/sergio.htm

With the tiniest of breaks, it was once more into the breach,
and on to Lyn Picknett and Clive Prince's - 'Masters of the
Millennium' - a a sharp criticism of the 'new egyptologists'
Hancock, Temple, Bauval and West. Picknett and Prince, authors
of *The Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?* and *The Templar
Revelation: Secret Guardian of the True Identity of Christ*,
sought to reveal the occult, ultra-right-wing roots of the
alternative Egyptology of Hancock, Temple, West and Bauval, by
tracing it back to French mathematician Schwaller de Lubicz,
who, as Picknett and Prince allege, was a known fascist and
racist, since venerated for his pyramid theories by the new
egyptologists. We won't even *attempt* to try and recreate the
picture drawn in the lecture, but suffice to say it referenced
Aleister Crowley's Cairo Working - i.e. *The Book of the Law*,
Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy's influence on Nazism, Edgar
Cayce's Atlantis beliefs, millennialist belief in hidden
Egyptian secrets which, when discovered, will prompt apocalyptic
change, corralling of circumstantial evidence to fit a given
hypothesis... All of this apparently leads the current popular
'understanding' of what 'Egypt is all about', thanks to the
proliferation and easy accessibility of the bestsellers on
Alternative Egyptology.

Egyptology is something that we at Blather tend to steer clear
of, as it's a vast and controversial minefield that we have
neither the time or conviction to devote our time too. However
this talk, even if relying heavily on circumstantial evidence
was a delight - Picknett and Prince weave a damn fine story...
stay tuned for their new book on the subject...

A dash upstairs saw those improbable peers, the celebrated Duke
of Mendoza and the honoured Count O'Blather, loitering at the
back of the hall for Ian Simmons' 'Proof of Everything'. Ian, a
biologist and contributing editor to *Fortean Times*, sought to
illustrate a model for the most advantageous use of the fragile
concept of 'proof'. He broke it down into three main areas:

Personal Proof
Legal Proof
Scientific Proof

This talk was arguably the most practically applicable of the
weekend, yet some audience members fell prey to Sunday afternoon
jitters and seemed displeased with the 'academic' content. Shame
on them - Simmons' knowledge, wit and charm are not to be
dismissed lightly. In fact, Ian has furnished us with a copy of
his talk, so that we may quote from it - saves us from mucking
up what we thought he said...

Personal proof, says he, is often confused with the other two -
"I believe this is true - you have to trust me that it is" -
akin to religious belief - or as Simmons puts it, 'Many UFO
reports, cryptozoological sightings, alien abductions and
psychic events are in the realm of personal proof, we have to
rely on the stories of the experiencers who believe it, but can
produce no corroboration from other people or physical traces of
the event'...'in essence, the evidence is the proof'.

Legal Proof - 'This collects the evidence, and tries to prove
something "beyond reasonable doubt" while it is more objective
than personal proof, it is still to some degree subjective. It
is designed to gather all the material evidence and personal
testimonies of people involved in an occurrence and to work out
from them a consensus of what took place under a particular set
of non-repeatable conditions. This does not mean something is
absolutely objectively true, just that the consensus of informed
opinion viewing the evidence thinks it is so.'

Scientific proof is different in that 'it is an objective method
which makes an attempt to pin something down in a way which is
testable and repeatable to anyone, with all the parameters
influencing a phenomenon understood so that it can be reproduced
at will. It works by proposing hypotheses which can be tested.
These must account for all observed phenomena, must have
predictable outcomes, must be able to generate further testable
predictions and must be disprovable.'

Questions? Flames?

 At 1700 hours, we prepared ourselves for the final talk of the
day, Peter Brookesmith's hilarious 'Flying Round Armageddon:
Ufology and the coming Apocalypse'. Brookesmith touched on areas
covered by both Harrison and Daniel Wojcik, but with his own
quintessential brand of acerbic wit - such as proposing Nick
Pope (who used to record UFO sightings for the British Ministry
of Defence) as the possible Antichrist.

Brookesmith, 'gun-toting lecher' and 'known' Mossad intelligence
officer, painted a picture of how ufological belief - beginning
as a 'solution' to doomed humanity, has achieved a more negative
millennial approach over the last fifty years, with the change
from the positivist UFO contactees of the 1950s, to the apparent
horrific abductions of the last couple of decades.

Brookesmith is quick to point out that if the Christian
'rapture' does occur - and they're all sucked up into heaven,
'The World Bigotry Index will drop like a rock.'...

And so - despite fond farewells, and gin expeditions with agents
Wojcik, Brookesmith and Barrett (with sundry members of ASSAP
and some lady doing a thesis on 19th century erotica), the
arguably last UnConvention of the Millennium achieved closure,
or something. There was naught left to do but gather the flock
together to search the public houses of Notting Hill...'Oh show
us the way to the next absinthe bar...oh don't ask why...'

Later on:

'I took another big swig of absinthe, and by the time we left
the Pharmacy, my heart was full of joy... I felt like a human
reincarnation of Spring Heel Jack... the Man on the Moon, and
just weird enough to be totally confident...'


Dave Walsh
11th May 1999

______________________________________________________
[Speakers we didn't see on the Sunday of UnCon: Jan Bondeson,
Daniel Wojcik, Michael Cremo, Jack Cohen, Lionel Fanthorpe, Tony
Healy, and the ASSAP results...any reader wishing to comment,
contact Blather...]


As for speakers we missed on Saturday, Paul Holloway has come up with
the goods:
______________________________________________________

Randles' talk comprised her own findings on precognition, and
experiments with the audience. The results of the experiments
were less than impressive, but as they were a part of a wider
experiment, we will have to wait until the results are published
in a future copy of FT before we can assess them properly.

Much of the material presented by Randles was taken from her
book 'Time Travel: Fact, Fiction and Possibility' (Blandford
1994, ISBN 0-7137-2404-8).

She observed that precognition often foresees the experiences of
the subject, who might see a news report in a dream rather than
the event itself.

This observation was also made by Dunne, in 'An Experiment With
Time' (A & C Black, 1927), which inspired Randles' experiments.
Dunne dreamed of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1902. He knew in
the dream that 4000 people died, and it was not until 15 years
later that he realised he had misread the total, which was in
fact 40,000. It would seem that his dream of the number of dead
was related to his future misreading of the newspaper headline.


Randles related another interesting tale: A woman had a dream of
making banana sandwiches, when a friend phoned to tell her that
her boyfriend had fallen off his motorcycle and was in hospital.
In the dream she incongruously replied "Oh yes!" and burst into
laughter. She told her friend and boyfriend about this dream,
and so, the next day, when her friend called her to tell her
that her boyfriend had fallen off his motorcycle and was in
hospital, she assumed he was joking, and responded, more
congruously in context, "Oh yes!" and burst into laughter. There
is a certain exquisite paradox contained within this tale.

Randles also mentioned the apparent relationship between the
accuracy of a precognition and the event's distance in time. The
further away in time the event foreseen, the less likely it will
transpire. This is interesting as it suggests some sort of
mathematical law in operation. Randles also mentioned the often
cited 'fact' that emotionally charged events are easier to
foresee than the mundane. She intends to set up a premonitions
'newsdesk' on the Internet, with the aim of using the increased
speed of communication we now enjoy to correlate premonitions,
and assess their predictive value. If this works we might have a
way of predicting or even avoiding disasters!

Paul Holloway
paul.holloway1@virgin.net
______________________________________________________

As Blather didn't get a chance to suss it out, Very Special
Agent K was checking out the 'Mind Machine':
______________________________________________________

The Mind Machine experiment was a touch screen monitor and video
experiment.

I approached it cautiously, flanked by my two snazzy companions,
the three of us were curious about the device advertised to
travel the world collecting psi data. It did not match the Star
Trek brain tube chamber we were expecting, rather it looked
rather benign on its sleek pedestal.

After pressing the invitation to begin, I was addressed by the
image of an earnest scientist in a video lab. Our Video Host
informed us that the experiment was going to travel around to
various populations and ask the same questions of each person
thus forming a database for psi-research. With that all too
brief explanation, I began the Test. First I had to select my
gender, then I was informed that the experiment would be trying
to predict the outcome of four coin tosses, how many guesses did
I think I would get correct. This caused me to blink a lot while
figuring out the implications of psychically guessing my psychic
abilities, and I was already off balance trying to figure out
what aspect of the video toss I was supposed to influence.
Luckily I got prodded by my companions or else I would have
stood there caught up in the maze of paradoxical logic thrashing
possibilities. I selected that I would get 2 out of 4 questions
correct, being hobbled back to statistics.

I was then shown a dual image of a British coin, heads and
tails, too quickly for my American brain to do anything more
then go 'Ah'. Then the Test really got weird. Surreal is an
understatement when describing the strange moment in which I was
watching a video clip of a coin flipping through the air, I had
selected tails, it landed heads. I wasn't really paying
attention to the toss, I was trying to figure out if I should be
influencing the video computer's selection of clips, or send my
little psi-abilities across the space-time-sex continuum and try
to influence the initial toss. Sigh, such a Luddite. Anyhow I
kept picking tails because I'm perverse and so succeeded in
getting one guess correctly. Thus rendering my initial guess of
two coin toss guesses wrong. But what I really wanted to know
was the premise of this experiment. Give me a live action toss
and I got the objective of influencing the coin's landing. But
this beastie seemed to have a whole lot more going on with it in
terms of variables. The aspect of time was strongly felt by all
three of us, the machine as our interface made me feel like Milo
with the eye dropper in the Phantom Tollbooth. So with that
weirdness behind we went into the ASSAP live experiments.

______________________________________________________

KUDOS
Congratulations to the folks of the Centre for Fortean Zoology
for having not one - but two run-ins with the police during the
UnCon weekend... all for having bald tires... Send all remoulds
to:

http://www.eclipse.co.uk/cfz/


Fortean Times
http://www.forteantimes.com


The Charles Fort Institute
http://www.forteana.org

Wild paraphrasing from
*Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*
Hunter S. Thompson

This issue (with photographs) is archived at:
http://www.blather.net/archives2/issue2no43.html

Unconventional Means 1
http://www.blather.net/archives2/issue2no42.html

______________________________________________________

IRELAND UFO-WATCH

Rumour has it that yet other prediction of Irish UFO activity
was made for tonight, May 11th by our favourite UFO group.
There's no *expected* astronomical phenomena of any significance
tonight, but doubtless those that look will see what they expect
to...
______________________________________________________
FATE Magazine: True Reports of the Strange and Unknown
Reporting on UFOs, psychic phenomena, ghosts and hauntings,
mystery animals, and other mystical experiences since 1948.
To subscribe, call 1-800-728-2730 (U.S.) or visit
http://www.fatemag.com
______________________________________________________

SPONSORSHIP:
While Blather will always remain free to the subscriber, we're
always willing to talk to interested parties with regard to
sponsorship.
Contact: daev@blather.net
_______________________________________________________

For the Blather archives, please go to:
http://www.blather.net/archives/index.html

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