Living Dinosaurs!

As a kid I was extremely fascinated by Dinosaurs and read voraciously on the topic. Every book on the topic I could find I would read. At one point I even thought I would grow up to be a Paleontologist when I was older so that I could spend everyday with these wonderfully fascinating beasts. As with many of my childhood ambitions, my dream of being a paleontologist was abandoned when I found out how terribly boring their day-to-day lives were, and as I discovered the wild and crazy world of Fortean phenomena.

Imagine my surprise when I found that these two seemingly disparate passions found an interesting intersection in the form of modern sightings of living dinosaurs! The current scientific theories suggest that the demise of the dinosaurs began some 65 million years ago, give a take a few years for stragglers to completely die out. This allowed our ancestors, the mammals, to gain a foothold on the planet and for humans to eventually arrive on the scene (thanks to the intervention of the Annunaki of course wink, wink).  

Since when has science ever had the final answer on anything? After all, prior to 1938 it was generally believed that the Coelacanth, a close relative to the lungfish, had been extent since the Cretaceous period. This turned out to not quite be the case as fisherman began collecting very-much alive specimens of the species. Who’s to say that some other dinosaurs also didn’t survive the decimation of their fellows and continued flourishing to this very day (aside from conventional wisdom, but who needs that?)

With this in mind I offer to you dear reader the following tales and accounts of interactions with giant terrible lizards who certainly should not be roaming around any longer. As always draw your own conclusions as to the validity of the reports. For myself, I will take these people by their word until sufficient evidence comes in to the contrary. 

Mokele-mbembe

Perhaps the most (in)famous of all living dinosaurs is Mokele-Mbembe which translates as "one who stops the flow of rivers" in the language of the people of the Congo river basin. Mokele is a favorite dinosaur of my wife and many others for that matter. Sightings of the creature have been reported in Western sources for a few hundred years. Mokele makes his home in the Congo River basin of Africa traditionally in Lake Tele. Local tradition holds that Mokele is an herbivore which seems to prefer shallow waters. The creature most clearly resembles a Sauropod.  

Some sightings:

One of the earlier “modern” accounts comes from just over 100 years ago. Commissioned by the German government, which had a colony in the area of the Congo, Capt. Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz came in the area to do a survey of the land. His writings report the following.

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth. The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and applelike fruits. At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food. The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby. But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty

The above was reported by Jerome Clark in his Unexplained! 2nd edition, which as I’ve pointed out previously on this blog has a newly printed 3rd edition.

Expedition after expedition has been mounted to find this creature over time, all clearly unsuccessful. The thing that allows this creature to remain a possibility is the fact that this area is home to the second largest rainforest in the world. This is all to say that it’s not terribly unlikely that a small population of sauropods could have survived to this day. 

Pterosaurs

Relatively large-winged reptiles which took the skies some time in the late Jurassic Period. Some of them had wingspans upwards of 16 ft or more, with one of the largest being Hatzegopteryx thambema(having 33-36 ft). Like other dinosaurs, the Pterosaurs died out near the end of the Cretaceous period, or did they?

Writing for paranormal.about.com, Stephen Wagner relates the following accounts of people that claimed to have seen the Pterosaur very much alive.

January, 1976, Harlingen, Texas - Jackie Davis (14) and Tracey Lawson (11) reported seeing a "bird" on the ground that stood five feet tall, was dark in color with a bald head and a face like a gorilla's with a sharp, six-inch-long beak. A subsequent investigation by their parents uncovered tracks that had three toes and were eight inches across.

February, 1976, San Antonio, Texas - Three elementary school teachers saw what they described as a pterodactyl swooping low over their cars as they drove. They said its wingspan was between 15 and 20 feet. One of the teachers commented that it glided through the air on huge, bony wings - like a bat's.

September, 1982, Los Fresnos, Texas - An ambulance driver named James Thompson was stopped while driving on Highway 100 by his sighting of a "large birdlike object" flying low over the area. He described it as black or grayish with a rough texture, but no feathers. It had a five- to six-foot wingspan, a hump on the back of its head, and almost no neck at all. After consulting some books to identify the creature, he decided it most looked like a pterosaur.

These stories are anecdotal to the extreme of course, but as always I’m not sure what more we have to go on besides the stories. The accounts are interesting to say the least, but who knows how much validity there is to them.

Loch Ness ‘Monster’

Plesiosaurs first arrived on the scene, the scene being Earth’s oceans of course, some 205 million years ago during the the Triassic period. They officially lived until about 66 million years ago going extinct about the same time as all of their reptile brethren did. Except that one of them didn’t get the extinction memo and has shown up a number of times over the years in a lake in Scotland. The earliest “sighting” allegedly happened to a Saint Columba in the 6th century, who used his god powers to keep the beast at bay. The modern version of Nessie begins in 1933 with the following account by a George Spicer and his wife who claim to have seen  a creature which they described as “having a large body (about 1.2 metres (3 ft 11 in) high and 7.6 metres (25 ft) long), and long, narrow neck, slightly thicker than an elephant's trunk and as long as the 10–12-foot (3–4 m) width of the road; the neck had undulations in it. They saw no limbs, possibly because of a dip in the road obscuring the animal's lower portion” (Wikipedia).

1934 brought us the so called “Surgeon’s Photograph” (shown above) which was purportedly captured by Robert Kenneth Wilson and was later to be published in the Daily Mail on April 21, 1934. The good doctor claimed to have taken the picture after sighting the creature in the Loch, although the photo is generally believed to be a hoax.

As with Mokele, many expeditions have been mounted to capture on film Nessie and all have proven fruitless. The reason for this may be that Nessie isn’t as corporeal as one may assume. A blogger over at the aptly named LOCH NESS MONSTER blogspot page discusses the author, Ted Holiday’s more interesting explanation for the Loch Ness Monster posited in his 1979 work The Goblin Universe.

The blogger writes:

This theory essentially borrowed from the obscure work of a Professor Harold Burr in positing that Nessie was a three dimensional form which could be formed and held by something Burr called Life Fields which were electrical in nature and had some organic organising properties.

Burr proposed this as a biological principle but Holiday took it further in suggesting that a mind could control the process and cause unexpected forms to materialise. Indeed, he proposed a universal mind akin to God as the controller of these phenomemon though the discussion also included the human mind and the collective subconciousness of the entire human race.

I don’t have much more to say on the topic of Nessie, the creature is so iconic at this point I’m not too sure what I could add that hasn’t already been said. Although I do wish to point the reader towards something Greg Taylor wrote up about a Nick Redfern article for the Dark Lore Vol 2 anthology entitled “"What Lies Beneath"

Burrunjor

We come now to our final stop on today’s tour of “living dinosaurs” and what better place to wrap it up than with the ‘king’ himself? At some point during the Cretaceous period our friend the Tyrannosaurus Rex arrived on the scene instilling in all creatures living at the time mixed feelings. On the one hand, T. Rex was one of the largest land carnivores ever known to have lived. On the other, their arms were almost comically tiny. I digress. T. Rex were known to have roamed of much of what is now North America and, as with most of our other friends we’ve spoken about today,  to have gone extinct around 65 million years ago. Or perhaps not? Blogger Peter James Theiss, relates the following accounts on his Dinoplaza blog about sightings of a creature in Australia called the Burrunjor. This creature, by all accounts, sounds strikingly like our friend the T. Rex. Here are some of the accounts Theiss shares:

In 1922, north of Cloncurry, stock men saw a "big lizard monster" that was bipedal and moved its tail from side to side when walking.

In 1950, in the Burketown region, two reptile tracks were sighted by ranchers.

Back in 1950, cattlemen lost stock to some mysterious beast that left the mutilated, half-eaten remains of cows and bulls in its wake over a wide area, stretching between the border country and Burketown.  At first the cattlemen suspected crocodiles, but, Charles Waterman, a cattleman, described a "fearsome", mottled 20 foot tall beast carrying a cow in its jaws that bounded out of sight as he hid behind a bush.

Searchers on horseback found huge reptilian tracks of some bipedal-walking beast.  They followed these three-toed tracks with their cattle dogs through some rough jungle terrain until they entered swampland beyond which was more dense scrub.

However, it was at this point that the cattle dogs became uneasy and ran off.  The horses were also uneasy and obviously did not want to cross the swamp.  While most of the cattlemen decided their animals knew best, two men set off on foot with their carbines.

The story goes that they soon came across further tracks in an open area beyond the swamp.  While his mate searched about, the other man briefly spotted the dark form of an enormous creature, perhaps 30 ft. in height, further off in dense timber.  The men left the scene in haste.

Be sure to head over to Theiss’ blog in order to read more of the accounts that he shares. What is going on here? Is there some kind of Dinosaur living in Australia? We all know that the country has all sorts of bizarre and kooky animals, maybe living dinosaurs are just another part of the fauna of the land?

Conclusions?

One of the biggest criticisms of the continued existence of our friends the Pterosaurs, Mokele-Mbembe, T-Rex or Burrunjor, and the Loch Ness Monster are the locations where they are sighted don’t necessarily have a lot of good hiding places for them. Mokele could, at least in theory, hide in the rain forest, Pterosaurs? Not so much. After all, most of them are sighted in the Midwest of the United States. There aren't too many places for a giant flying creature to hide. Honestly the same can be said of the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, Loch Ness is actually quite large and deep. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a big enough population of creatures living in the Loch to sustain a Plesiosaur or family of them. Of course this is working under the assumption that these are actual physical creatures and not phantoms from another time. Which, seeing as this is the world of the Fortean, who can say they aren't?

For all we know these creatures could be slipping temporarily from their own time and invading ours. And really, is this any crazier than their existing currently living dinosaurs? That’s all for now dear readers, be sure to check back in on Monday for more from the strange world of the Fortean!

Contactee Thoughts

I finally picked up Nick Redfern's Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction as of Friday and have already jumped right into reading it. This book got me thinking and so I started looking into the Conctactee movement at my usual sources. I thought I would share with you all some of the more interesting things that I've come across so far. I'm still hoping that a recent article I had written for a magazine will be published because it also deals with the Contactee issue, albeit from a slightly different perspective, but until then this post will have to tide you over. I still maintain an open mind about the Contactee movement as I'm not always sure what to make of it. I don't think the answer is as clear-cut as some would suggest. Namely that all of their accounts are hoaxes that were put on by the Contactees themselves simply for profit. At the same time I don't know if they had as many, or as vivid, contacts as they claim. Regardless I will share with you all the items that I've come across in my research and leave it up to you to decide what you think of the Contactees.

Space Brother Contactees YouTube Documentary

This hour-long documentary mostly focuses on Howard Menger's contacts with the space people. Missing from the documentary is the fact that in the 1960's Menger appeared on Long John Nebels radio show (as a bit of background Long John Nebel was the Art Bell of the 50's and 60's who interviewed the majority of the mover's and shaker's of the Fortean/UFO fields of the day) apparently recanted his account and claimed that he was apart of some kind of Army test to gauge the publics reaction to the idea of alien contact. It's an interesting documentary that I would recommend especially if you've never heard of Menger and actually, for that matter, if you have heard of him you may not have actually heard from him like you can in this video.

As a final piece of the Menger case I wised to share with you is this blog post from Outsider Music expert Mr. Fab, entitled Authentic Music From Another Planet. It contains a link for you to download music that Menger claimed he was directed to play by the contactees. In other words this was music that was channeled through Menger by his Space Brothers.

Emmanuel Swedenborg – 18th century contactee and theologian

Born in 1683 Emmanuel Swedenborg was a scientist, philosopher, theologian, and early Alien Conctatee. In many ways Swedenborg was far ahead of his time; he had many theories about the neuron, the cerebral cortex, and the nervous system. In addition to his fascination with anatomy, Swedenborg spent some of his time diagramming and designing a variety of “flying machines”. Among some of his other accomplishments, found at this site, there are:

Swedonborg's Flying Machine

In the next two years of his life (1716-1718), Emanuel published a scientific periodical titled 'Daedalus Hyperboreus'. The periodical held record of mechanical and mathematical inventions and discoveries. In this journal, he also mentioned about a flying machine, which he had earlier referred to in his letter to Eric. Around this time, Emanuel was also enobled, along with his siblings, by Queen Ulrika Eleonora and their surname changed to Swedenborg. Emanuel's scientific inventions include a dry dock of new design, a machine for working salt springs and a system for moving large boats overland.

 

In the field of biology, Swedenborg stressed on the importance of cerebral cortex. Apart from these, he drew feasible sketches of futuristic machines, including an airplane, a submarine, a steam engine, an air gun and a slow-combustion stove. Emanuel Swedenborg was offered the position of a professor in mathematics at Uppsala University, in 1724. However, he declined the offer, because he dealt with geometry, chemistry and metallurgy mainly, not maths.

In 1758 Swedenborg published Life on Other Planets which detailed the civilizations and peoples that could be found living on Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and the moon. At this point many would likely be pointing out that we now know that those places do not have any life on them. But according to Swedenborg the planets are inhabited by spirits on other dimensions. Cop out? Maybe. But then again, who knows? If you would like to know more about Swedenborg and all of his miscellaneous works and theories you should check out the following links:

The, at this point almost obligatory, ATS thread on the topic.

The Swedenborg Project

Wiki article

Gabriel Green Presidential Candidate and Contactee

Finally the last contactee that I wanted to take a look at is one of the more obscure ones out there. Strange considering the man ran for US President in both 1960 and 1972 as a write-in candidate representing the Flying Saucer Party. Beyond that rather unique aspect of his story, Green was pretty much a run-of-the-mill Contactee. He alleged that in 1957 he met a crew of Space Brothers from the planet Korender which orbited a star in the Alpha Centuri system. He was also in contact with his Korendians via telepathy. You can follow this link here to hear Green being interviewed about his decision to run for President. The same year that Green was contacted by the Space Brothers, he founded the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, Inc. Green only published one book which was entitled Let's Face Facts about Flying Saucers. Finding info on Green isn't really easy. If you want to read more about him the best source that I've been able to come across so far is his Wiki article.

That's about all I've come across so far that really stuck out in my mind. The Contactee movement is a very interesting aspect of the overall history of Ufology. It's hard to say whether the Contactees were liars, hucksters, or hoaxes. Perhaps, we could take them at their word. It's entirely possible that they had the encounters that they claimed to have had. As with anything else in the Fortean world the answers are never a simple matter of black or white. It's mostly a gray area. (No pun intended!).

Demonic UFOs

Alternatives to the ETH are always really interesting to me. If you've read this blog at any time in the past you are likely aware of the fact that I'm always looking into different explanations for the origins of the UFO and its occupants. The Cryptoterrestrials as proposed by Mac Tonnies, Jacques Vallee's theory of UFOs as some form of psychosocial control, and John Keel's Ultraterrestrials are all different avenues that I have looked into and spent a lot of time reading about. I've dedicated an equal amount of time blogging and writing about each of these alternatives in the past as well. However there is one area that I've only done a little bit of reading and research into; the idea that occupants of UFOs are demonic in the Judeo-Christian sense. The reason for this is that I really find the theory a bit too limiting and it feels a little like some confirmation bias is going on. 

Still in the interest of fairness, and to not exclude any idea, I began to read a recent thread on ATS that delved into this topic. And with a title like Secular Researcher's Findings that UFO Activity is not Extraterrestrial in Origin, how could I resist? Likewise in the offline world I had a bit of synchronicity with this topic which I will go into a little latter in the post. But first let's get to thread from ATS. In the interest of fairness I feel that I should state upfront that I definitely do not agree with the posters conclusions. I feel that he's grasping at too many disparate pieces in order to tie his theory together and don't personally accept this theory. However I am bringing the information to you attention because I don't think there is anything wrong with entertaining an idea. And I figure you should never shut your self off to any avenue.

The poster went through a lot of work in order to gather together the information necessary to formulate their thesis that the UFO phenomena and Alien Abductions are merely demonic deceptions meant to present a new gospel and cause people to turn away from the Judeo-Christian faith. They came to that conclusion based on couple of things; people that experience the UFO phenomena, especially Alien Abductees, typically end up experiencing psychic phenomena, many early UFO researchers, such as Jacques Vallee and John Keel, had come to the conclusion that the answer to the UFO was not the Extraterrestrial, and finally that the galaxy is just too large for the prospect of interstellar travel to be anything more than just a pipe dream. With these things in mind, the poster ultimately states the following as their final assessment of the situation;

The Facts of what we know to be true:
1. Aliens are inter-dimensional/Spiritual beings.
2. They do not use interstellar travel.
3. They are malevolent.
4. Their aim is to deceive man-kind.
5. The film industry is helping to prepare us for a "grand deception".
6. "Alien Abductions" stop in the name and authority of Jesus Christ
7. "Alien Abductions" match the abilities of fallen angels as described in the Bible.
8. "Aliens" bring primarily deceptive anti-biblical messages, as is reported by abductees and contactees.

Conclusion:

"extraterrestrials" are intentionally evangelizing people to an alternate spirituality(new age)and are demonic in origin.

I will let that information stand on it's own. Again I don't believe that this is what is going on. I do recommend that you check out the thread for yourself because there is some great debate that is going on back and forth from both sides of the argument. I appreciate that this poster is willing to acknowledge that UFOs seem to encompass many paranormal events, but I don't agree with the conclusions that he reaches. Interestingly enough he is not the first person to reach this kind of conclusion. Writing in his 2010 book, Final Events and The Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife, Nick Redfern tells the story of a group comrpised of Government officials called the Collins Elite that eventually reached the same conclusion. 

The group studied the phenomena by interviewing UFO witnesses and alien abductees, the Collins Elite would eventually leave the ETH behind completely in favor of a very dark, and demonic view of the phenomena. In a very short summary the group believed that the UFO was just the latest way for this dark demonic force to deceive our species for the purpose of gaining access to our souls so that the demonic enemies could quite literally harvest some kind of unknown energy from it for purposes that were unknown and not well understood. 

I would definitely recommend reading Final Events in order to get the whole story on this strange group and the even stranger conclusions that they came to. Once again I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion that the Collins Elite came to about the provenance of the UFO, but for argument sake we don't really know enough yet in order to rule anything out completely. Many in the Collins Elite felt that perhaps we were being farmed in some fashion and I can't help but to be reminded of Charles Fort classic quote: “The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property.”

Ah yes one last thing before I leave you; I had mentioned that I had a somewhat synchronistic incident involving this whole 'Aliens=Demons' meme this past week. This past weekend my girlfriend and I were at our local Books-A-Million and as is typical for me I headed over to the 'New Age/Paranormal' section to kill some time. The first book that I happened to pick up was Phil Imbrogno's Ultraterrestrial Contact  which, despite the controversy from last year, I still intend to read. As I was thumbing through, looking at the chapter headings, I found a tiny little square piece of paper which someone had stuck in the book.

Intrigued by what sort of person would put one of these in a book, I decided to visit the website from the paper on my phone. Unfortunately my phone had a really bad signal and so the website was taking a while to load. As I waited for it to come up I wondered if any other books contained a similar paper or if I had some how grabbed the “lucky” one. I checked something like 15 or 20 books but only found similar papers in four of the books. There were three variations of the message on them. The books I found them in were interesting, because personally I don't know if I would of picked the same ones had I been intending to spread this kind of message. I found them in two Zecharia Sitchin books, There Were Giants on the Earth and TheWars of Gods and Men, and the last one was in Jim Keith's Casebook on the Men in Black (which I reviewed here). In any event they all lead to the same website http://www.delusionresistanc.org.

Delusion Resistance is run by a former MUFON investigator named David Ruffino. You can read all about him at the site. As I said I had a very synchronistic feeling when I saw these papers because I was thinking about the ATS thread, trying to write this blog post and just generally gathering my thoughts together. And what should happen but I come upon these papers. It may not mean much to others, but it certainly struck me as interesting. That's all for now, again I recommend that you head over and read the thread and draw your own conclusions. Don't let what I or anyone say influence what you decide or conclude. Also be sure to check out Nick Redfern's Final Events as it's a very fascinating read about the Collins Elite. You can listen to Greg Bishop's interview with Nick Redfern on this topic here. Until next time I will leave you with a quote that I feel is relevant to this topic.

"The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon..."

-John Keel